Auggggh-R0000! Auggggh-R000000!
He stood behind one of the trees, wondering what could possibly happen next, wondering what to do next. He stood there expecting lights to start going on all up and down the street.
In fact only one light did go on, at the side of a house just opposite where Louis stood in the shadows. A moment later a hoarse voice cried, “Shut up, Fred!”
Auggggh-R000000! Fred responded.
“Shut him up, Scanlon, or I’m calling the police!” someone yelled from the side of the street Louis was on, making him jump, making him realize just how false the illusion of emptiness and desertion was. There were people all around him, hundreds of eyes, and that dog was attacking sleep, his only friend. Goddam you, Fred, he thought. Oh, goddam you.
Fred began another chorus; he got well into the Auggggh, but before he could do more than get started on a good solid R000000, there was a hard whacking sound followed by a series of low whimpers and yips.
Silence followed by the faint slam of a door. The light at the side of Fred’s house stayed on for a moment, then clicked off.
Louis felt strongly inclined to stay in the shadows, to wait; surely it would be better to wait until the ruckus had died down. But time was getting away from him.
He crossed the street with his bundle and walked back down to the Civic, seeing no one at all. Fred held his peace. He clutched his bundle in one hand, got his keys, opened the hatchback.
Gage would not fit.
Louis tried the bundle vertically, then horizontally, then diagonally. The Civic’s back compartment was too small. He could have bent and crushed the bundle in there—Gage would not have minded—but Louis could simply not bring himself to do it.
Come on, come on, come on, let’s get out of here, let’s not push it any further.
But lie stood, nonplussed, out of ideas, the bundle containing his son’s corpse in his arms. Then he heard the sound of an approaching car, and without really thinking at all, he took the bundle around to the passenger side, opened the door, and slipped the bundle into the seat.
He shut the door, ran around to the rear of the Civic, and slammed the hatchback. The car went right through the intersection, and Louis heard the whoop of drunken voices. He got behind the wheel, started his car, and was reaching for the headlight switch when a horrible thought struck him. What if Gage were facing backward, sitting there with those joints at knee and hip bending the wrong way, his sunken eyes looking toward the rear window instead of out through the windshield?
It doesn’t matter, his mind responded with a shrill fury born of exhaustion. Will you get that through your head? it just doesn’t matter!
But it does. it does matter. It’s Gage in there, not a bundle of towels!
He reached over and gently began to press his hands against the canvas tarpaulin, feeling for the contours underneath. He looked like a blind man trying to determine what a specific object might be. At last he came upon a protuberance that could only be Gage’s nose—facing in the right direction.
Only then could he bring himself to put the Civic in gear and start the twenty-five minute drive back to Ludlow.
52
At one o’clock that morning, Jud Crandall’s telephone rang, shrilling in the empty house, starting him awake. In his doze he was dreaming, and in the dream he was twenty-three again, sitting on a bench in the B & A coupling shed with George Chapin and René Michaud, the three of them passing around a bottle of Georgia Charger whiskey—jumped-up moonshine with a revenue stamp on it—while outside a nor’easter blew its randy shriek over the world, silencing all that moved, including the rolling stock of the B & A railroad. So they sat and drank around the potbellied Defiant, watching the red glow of the coals shift and change behind the cloudy isinglass, casting diamond-shaped flame shadows across the floor, telling the stories which men hold inside for years like the junk treasures boys store under their beds, the stories they store up for nights such as this. Like the glow of the Defiant, these were dark stories with a glow of red at the center of each and the wind to wrap them around. He was twenty-three, and
Norma was very much alive (although in bed now, he had no doubt; she would not expect him home this wild night), and René Michaud was telling a story about a Jew peddler in Bucksport who— That was when the phone began to ring and he jerked up in his
chair, wincing at the stiffness in his neck, feeling a sour heaviness drop into him like a stone—it was, he thought, all those years between twenty-three and eighty-three, all sixty of them, dropping into him at once. And on the heels of that thought: You been sleepin, boyo. That’s no way to run this railroad. . . not tonight.
He got up, holding himself straight against the stiffness that had also settled into his back, and crossed to the phone.
It was Rachel.
“Jud? Has he come home?”
“No,” Jud said. “Rachel, where are you? You sound closer.”
“I am closer,” Rachel said. And although she did sound closer somehow, there was a distant humming on the wire. It was the sound of the wind, somewhere between here and wherever she was. The wind was high tonight. That sound that always made Jud think of dead voices, sighing in chorus, maybe singing something just a little too far away to be made out. “I’m at the rest area at Biddeford on the Maine Turnpike.”
“Biddeford!”
“I couldn’t stay in Chicago. It was getting to me, too whatever it was that got Ellie, it was getting me too. And you feel it. It’s in your voice.”
“Ayuh.” He picked a Chesterfield out of his pack and slipped it into the corner of his mouth. He popped a wooden match alight and watched it flicker as his hand trembled. His hands hadn’t
trembled—not before this nightmare had commenced anyway.
Outside, he heard that dark wind gust. It took the house in its hand and shook it.
Power’s growing. I can feel it.
Dim terror in his old bones. It was like spun glass, fine and fragile.
“Jud, please tell me what’s going on!”
He supposed she had a right to know—a need to know. And he supposed he would tell her. Eventually he would tell her the whole story. He would show her the chain that had been forged link by link. Norma’s heart attack, the death of the cat, Louis’s question—
has anyone ever buried a person up there?—Cage’s death. . . and God alone knew what further link Louis might be forging right now. Eventually he would tell her. But not over the phone.
“Rachel, how come you to be on the turnpike instead of in a plane?”
She explained how she had missed her connecting flight at Boston.
“I got an Avis car, but I’m not making the time I thought I would. I got a little bit lost corning from Logan to the turnpike, and I’ve only got into Maine. I don’t think I can get there until dawn. But Jud. . . please. Please tell me what’s happening. I’m so scared, and I don’t even know why.”
“Rachel, listen to me,” Jud said, “you drive on up to Portland and lay over, do you hear me? Check into a motel there and get some—
”
“Jud, I can’t do th—.”
“—and get some sleep. Feel no fret, Rachel. Something may be happening here tonight, or something may not. If something is—if it’s what I think—then you wouldn’t want to be here anyway. I can
take care of it, I think. I better be able to take care of it because what’s happening is my fault. If nothing’s happening, then you get here this afternoon, and that will be fine. I imagine Louis will be real glad to see you.”
“I couldn’t sleep tonight, Jud.”
“Yes,” he said, reflecting that he had believed the same thing—
hell, Peter had probably believed the same thing on the night Jesus had been taken into custody. Sleeping on sentry duty. “Yes, you can. Rachel, if you doze off behind the wheel of that damn rent-a-car and go off the road and get yourself killed, what’s going to happen to Louis then? And Ellie?”
“Tell me what’s going on! If you tell me that, Jud, maybe I’ll take your advice. But I have to know!”
“When you get to Ludlow, I want you to come here,” Jud said.
“Not over to your house. Come here first. I’ll tell you everything I know, Rachel. And I am watching for Louis.”
“Tell me,” she said.