waiting.
“Come on,” he said softly to the hidden watcher in the woods.
He was ready. Ready for hell or heaven or eternal nothingness,
whatever came.
He wasn’t afraid of dying.
What frightened him was the how of dying. What he might have to
endure. What might be done to him in the final minutes or hours of his
life. What he might see.
On the morning of June twenty-first, as he was eating breakfast and
listening to the world news on the radio, he looked up and saw a
squirrel at the window in the north wall of the kitchen. It was
perched on the window stool, gazing through the glass at him. Very
still. Intense. As the raccoons had been.
He watched it for a while, then concentrated on his breakfast again.
Each time he looked up, it was on duty.
After he washed the dishes, he went to the window, crouched, and came
face-to-face with the squirrel. Only the pane of glass was between
them. The animal seemed unfazed by this close inspection.
He snapped one fingernail against the glass directly in front of its
face.
The squirrel didn’t flinch.
He rose, twisted the thumb-turn latch, and started to lift the lower
half of the double-hung window.
The squirrel leaped down from the stool and fled to the side yard,
where it turned and regarded him intently once more.
He closed and locked the window and went out to sit on the front
porch.
Two squirrels were already out there on the grass, waiting for him.
When Eduardo sat in the hickory rocking chair, one of the small beasts
remained in the grass, but the other climbed to the top porch step and
kept a watch on him from that angle.
That night, abed in his barricaded room again, seeking sleep, he heard
squirrels scampering on the roof. Small claws scratching at the
shingles.
When he finally slept, he dreamed of rodents.
The following day, June twenty-second, the squirrels remained with
him.
At windows. In the yard. On the porches. When he went for a walk,
they trailed him at a distance.
The twenty-third was the same, but on the morning of the twenty-fourth,
he found a dead squirrel on the back porch. Clots of blood in its
ears. Dried blood in its nostrils. Eyes protruding from the
sockets.
He found two more squirrels in the yard and a fourth on the front-porch
steps, all in the same condition.
They had survived control longer than the raccoons.
Apparently the traveler was learning.
Eduardo considered calling Dr. Potter. Instead, he gathered up the
four bodies and carried them to the center of the eastern meadow. He
dropped them in the grass, where scavengers could find and deal with
them.
He thought, also, of the imagined child in the faraway ranch who might
have been watching the Cherokee’s headlights on the way back from the
vet’s two weeks earlier. He told himself that he owed it to that
child–or to other children, who really existed–to tell Potter the
whole story. He should try to involve the authorities in the matter as
well, even though getting anyone to believe him would be a frustrating
and humiliating ordeal.
Maybe it was the beer he still drank from morning until bedtime, but he
could no longer summon the sense of community he had felt that night.
He’d spent his whole life avoiding people. He couldn’t suddenly find
it within himself to embrace them.
Besides, everything had changed for him when he’d come home and found
the evidence of the intruder: the crumbling clumps of soil, the dead
beetles, the earthworm, the scrap of blue cloth caught in the frame of
the oven door. He was waiting in dread for the next move in that part
of the game, yet refusing to speculate about it, instantly blocking
every forbidden thought that started to rise in his tortured mind.
When that fearful confrontation occurred, at last, he could not
possibly share it with strangers. The horror was too personal, for him
alone to witness and endure.
He still maintained the diary of these events, and in that yellow
tablet he wrote about the squirrels. He hadn’t the will or the energy