John said, "You should be used to a life of crime by now," and walked through the kitchen into the hallway. "What are there, three or four rooms?"
"Three, not counting the kitchen," I said. I came into thedark little hallway and put my hand on a doorknob. "The boy's bedroom would have been here," I said, and opened the door.
The narrow rectangle of Fee's old bedroom matched mine exactly. There was a narrow bed with a dark green army surplus blanket and a single wooden chair. A small chest of drawers, stained so dark it was almost black, stood against the wall. At the far end, a narrow window exposed a moving layer of fog. I stepped inside, and my heart shrank. John knelt to look under the bed. "Cooties." A frieze of stick figures, round suns with rays, and cartoon houses all interconnected by a road map of scribbled lines, covered the walls to the level of my waist. The light blue paint above the graffiti had turned dingy and mottled.
"This Fee kid got away with a lot of crap," John said.
"The tenants did this," I said. I went to the bed and pulled down the blanket. There were no sheets, just an ancient buttoned mattress covered in dirty stripes.
John gave me a curious look and began opening the drawers. "Nothing," he said. "Where would he stash the boxes?"
I shook my head and escaped the bedroom. The three windows at the front of the living room were identical to those in my old house, and the whole long rectangular room brought me back to childhood as surely as the bedroom. An air of leftover misery and rage seemed to intensify the musty air. I knew this room—I had written it.
I had placed two tables in front of the windows—the place where our davenport had stood—and there they were, more ornate than I had imagined, but the same height, and of the same dark wood. A telephone sat on the table to the left, beside a worn overstuffed chair—Bob Bandolier's throne. The long couch I had described stood against the far wall, green, not yellow, but with the same curved arms I had described.
And yet, I thought, it was more unlike than like the room I had imagined. I had thought that Bob Bandolier would provide his family with devotional pictures, the Sermon on the Mount or the Feeding of the Multitude, but there were no reproductions or chromographs on the walls, only wallpaper. I had imagined a small shelf of books with the Bible and paperback Westerns and mysteries, but the only shelves in the living room were shallow, glass, and rimmed with black metal piping—once they had held china figurines. A high-backed brocade chair with rolled arms stood beside the telephone table, and another matching chair without arms faced into the room from beside the other, empty table. His and hers.
"It's like a—like a museum of 1945," John said, turning to me with an incredulous smile.
"That's what it is," I said.
I sat down on the chaise and looked sideways. Through a window in the unadorned wall, I could just about make out the side of the Belknap house. Through a matching window in her own living room, Hannah had seen the adult Fee sitting just where I was now. John was looking behind the chairs and beneath the couch. Fee came at night and used only a flashlight, so he had never noticed the grease spots on the brocade chairs or the rim of grime along the edges of the couch cushions.
John opened the door opposite that into the common entry. I stood up and followed him into the bedroom where Anna Bandolier had died of starvation and neglect.
A rusty black stain wavered down the middle of the bare mattress on the double bed. John looked under the bed, and I opened Bob Bandolier's walnut clothing press. Two wire hangers hung from a metal rail, and a third lay deep in forty-year-old dust on the bottom of the press. "The drawers," John said, and we both opened one of the big drawers on either side of the little mirrored vanity table against the wall. Mine was empty. John pushed.his drawer closed and looked at me with both impatience and exasperation.
"Okay," he said. "Where are they?"
"After Bob Bandolier got rid of the Sunchanas, there were no more upstairs tenants. So he might have put the boxes there." Then I remembered something else. "And there's a basement, where they used to do the washing."
"I'll look upstairs." He brushed the dust off his knees and gave me another tight-mouthed look. "Let's get out of here as soon as we can. I don't trust this fog."
I could almost see little Fee Bandolier standing on the side of the bed on a cold night in November of 1950, holding onto his dying mother's arm while his father lay unconscious on the floor, surrounded by empty beer bottles.
"All right?" John asked.
I nodded, and he left the bedroom. I turned my back on the boy and walked out through the mists and vapors that emanated from everything I thought about him and went back through the living room toward the kitchen.
As in my old house, the basement door was next to the stove. I went down the wooden steps in the dark, letting my eyes adjust.
A long wooden workbench stood across the gray concrete floor from the bottom of the stairs. Against the wall above the back of the bench hung a row of coffee cans and jam jars filled with nails and screws. Soon I made out the shapes of boxes beneath the bench, and I exhaled with mingled relief and triumph and went to the bench and bent down and pulled the nearest box toward me.
It was about the size of a case of whiskey, and the top of the box had been folded, not taped, shut. I wrestled with the interlocking cardboard panels before all four of them sprang free at once, revealing a layer of dark fabric. Fee had wrapped his notes in cloth after seeing what the rats had done to them in the Green Woman. I grabbed a loose handful of cloth and pulled up. The cloth came out of the box without resistance. Sleeves flopped out of the bundle. It was a suit jacket. I dropped it on the floor and put my hands back into the box. This time I pulled out the trousers to the suit. Beneath the trousers, carelessly folded, were two more suits, one dark blue, the other dark gray. I stuffed the first suit back into the box, pushed it back under the workbench, and pulled another carton toward me. When I got the top open, I found a pile of white shirts with Arrow labels. They were grimy from the dust sifting down from the workbench and stiff with starch.
The next box held three more suits folded onto a layer of wrinkled boxer shorts and balled-up undershirts, the next a jumble of black shoes, and the final one at least a hundred wide, late-forties neckties tangled together like snakes. My knees creaked when I stood up.
Fee Bandolier had expelled the Dumkys, cleaned up what was important to him, and turned the lock on the door, sealing the past inside a bell jar.
A wide gray spiderweb hung between the wringer of the old washing machine and the slanting ledge of the small rectangular basement window in the wall behind it. I walked slowly down the length of the basement. A black bicycle the size of a Shetland pony leaned against the wall. I turned toward the bulky furnace in the center of the basement, seeing another row of boxes in the darkness. I moved forward, and the row of boxes mutated into the long rectangular dish of a coaster wagon. I pushed it with my foot, and it rolled backward on squeaking wheels, dragging its wooden handle with it. When it moved, I saw another box hidden between the coaster and the furnace.
"There," I said, and bent down to get my hands on it. Wisps and tatters of old spiderwebs hung from the box. It had been moved recently. I braced my muscles and jerked the box off the ground. It was nearly weightless. Whatever it contained was not hundreds of handwritten pages. I carried the box around the furnace toward the foot of the stairs and heard John walking across the kitchen floor.