Читать книгу Echoes - Roger Arthur Smith - Страница 12

Three

For hours after the slender man left, the man who belonged to the sounds Dubykky, the boy-creature practiced words with the crow, Jurgen. In the course of it, he discovered in himself a new state of mind, which desired the bird to remain close, required it even. So most of all he practiced his new self-sounds, Junior. He pointed at himself, widened his mouth as Dubykky had taught, and spoke “Junior” over and over. Now perched on the shoe tip of the boy’s right foot, the bird paid strict attention. When he finally said, “Junior,” in return, the boy switched to a new instruction. He pointed at Jurgen and began to repeat, still smiling, “You are Jurgen.” Eventually the crow repeated the phrase exactly.

Too exactly. Junior sensed something wrong. He checked the book, thought over what Dubykky had taught him, and realized that he had used the wrong words. He should have taught the bird to say, “I am Jurgen.” But if he, who was called Junior, said that, it would also be incorrect. “I am Jurgen” and “You are Jurgen” meant different things. It would be like teaching the crow to say, “I am Junior.” That would be equally wrong for the crow to repeat because Jurgen was Jurgen, not Junior. Thinking further, Junior considered saying, “I am Junior, and you are Jurgen.” But if the crow learned to say that, it would be twice wrong. Possibly he should instruct, “I am Jurgen, and you are Junior.” But the boy couldn’t say that. It was not correct that he was Jurgen. He sat wordlessly a long while, puzzled.

An idea came to him from nowhere. He recognized it as an idea because it fit the description of ideas that Dubykky had given him. Junior pointed at himself and smiled. “Junior,” he said, and the crow said so too. Then Junior pointed at the bird, smiling, and said, “Jurgen.” “Jurgen,” agreed the crow. Junior dropped his hand, relaxed the smile from his face, waited a minute, never taking his eyes off the bird, and then pointed once again without smiling or speaking. After a lengthy pause, the crow said in a diffident rasp, “Jurgen.” Junior pointed at himself. “Junior,” said the bird with a shade more assurance. “I am” and “you are” turned out not to be necessary, despite the examples given by the book and Dubykky. It was confusing that language contained unnecessary words.

Nevertheless, an agreeable satisfaction spread through Junior and with it a strengthened will. The boy liked the bird, wanted him near, wanted to hear him speak, and was glad that Dubykky had left him. He understood that Jurgen, Junior, and Dubykky fit the idea name, although in different ways. There was no similar agreeable sensation attached to the name Junior, no sensation at all in fact, yet there was to Jurgen. And the name Dubykky? Junior repeated it, pondering. He found he wanted to be in Dubykky’s presence again even though the name evoked a different sensation, a mixture of agreeableness and something else. Something that suggested Dubykky would not stand next to him and speak to him as did Jurgen. More than that, there was something that hinted Junior should not want him to. A basic difference divided Jurgen and Dubykky, besides shape.

Junior paged through the book considering the different animals in it and the words describing them—fat, clever, white, bold-faced, dreary, gay, sweet—until he came to a page showing an angular, black bat:

Bat, Bat,

Come under my hat,

And I’ll give you a slice of bacon.

And when I bake

I’ll give you a cake

If I am not mistaken.

The bat reminded him of Jurgen. It was smiling happily as it hovered over the head of a boy doffing a high-crowned cap and holding a rasher. At that point Junior perceived a truth entirely on his own, a truth that Dubykky had not discussed, and the power of it pierced Junior. It made his whole body vibrate. The truth was that Junior liked to have a bird; Dubykky liked to have a bird; and Dubykky had given him the bird, and the bird was happy on his shoulder. Dubykky had given him the bird to like, which is to say, passed on the agreeable sensations of having a bird and having a happy bird. That put Dubykky in a perspective. It was as if the man were still nearby, albeit not physically. Junior liked having something to like from the man who had liked it. Junior concluded that Dubykky liked him, and so he felt likewise.

Next the sound sequence Matthew Gans sprang to mind, which the book lady had assigned him. Dubykky had used it. Junior sensed that it too was a name. What sensation did its sounds carry? He let his mind wrap around Matthew Gans, drift among the sounds, pry them apart to feel out each, rearrange them, and then steep in them, while staring fixedly at Jurgen, who fell asleep in the silence. The sounds did evoke something. It lurked at the very edge of his mind as in a haze, and what there was of it did not seem agreeable. Not Dubykky-like. Definitely not Jurgen-like. Nor were the names Gosse, Gonzales, and Garrison.

When morning was well advanced, Junior decided that he and Jurgen should find food and water. These things he understood even before Dubykky had explained. Junior’s body was now asking for nutrition. As for the crow, he answered Junior’s inquiry about food with “Junior!” From that, the boy surmised that the crow was like him. Hungry. Dubykky had taught him to use his breathing to find food and water. He was to breathe in through his nose. If his body liked an odor, Junior could eat or drink from its source. With Jurgen on his left shoulder, Junior left the shack and walked away from the dirt road and through the sagebrush flats, stopping occasionally to inhale deeply. The day was warm but not hot. Light gusts blew by from time to time, causing Jurgen to tighten his claws on Junior’s shoulder, which produced a mixture of prickling and tickling that the boy found, on balance, agreeable.

“I like Jurgen,” he declared.

The crow cocked his head and answered, “Hickory dickory dock!”

The Hawthorne dump lay just a mile away from the shack over a long slow rise and down a steep slope into a wide ravine. It was one of the innumerable ravines in Nevada, the primordial relicts of deluges, windstorms, and the relentless shifting of sand and rock. Junior paused at the top of the slope and inspected the dump. A gravel road led to it from town and stopped at a turnaround. Along its edge rose hillocks of garbage. Even a hundred yards away the stench was strong. Junior didn’t mind. One smell was much the same to him as another, providing that he didn’t put the source of some into his mouth. Off one side of the turnaround in a small clearing of its own was parked an old shepherd’s trailer. Painted white with blue trim, both colors faded, the trailer had a rounded roof and flat ends, at each of which was a small curtained window. Another window, even tinier, was on the narrow door at the right-hand end. At the other end a rusty stovepipe stuck up.

An old man was sitting on his usual chair by the door in a little parallelogram of shade. His arm resting on a folding card table, he did not move. His chin was on his chest. He wore dark glasses.

Junior waited a full five minutes for the man to move. In that time, Jurgen roused himself, ruffling his neck feathers. He murmured a polite caw to Junior, spread his wings, and glided to the ground. Two adult crows were nearby, standing in the shadow of a large sagebrush and pecking listlessly at the carcass of a lizard. Jurgen hop-walked over to them, squeaking obligingly, but they were unfamiliar and not welcoming. He stopped five feet away and cawed, hoping for an invitation. They ignored him. Jurgen was not discouraged. He was experienced enough to expect strange crows to respond from a limited repertoire: chase him away, flap around him to play, settle next to him to caw in his ear, or let him join them. Eventually. They would not ignore him for long.

As for the old man, his name was Hans Berger, and he was the watchman at the garbage dump. Mineral County paid him by the week to check for fires and illegal ejecta, such as goods, especially munitions cases, from the navy base.

The county commission wanted to charge a fee to leave garbage at the dump, but even though collecting it would mean a little more in wages for him, Berger was against it. He dreaded contact with people. At fifty-five he looked seventy. Wizened with yellowish gray hair and a long head, he wore a pointed beard of the same hue. It added to his aura of elderly peculiarity. That put people off, kept them away. Which was fine with him. It reduced the chances that they would ask about his thick accent.

Explaining! He always shook his head at the idea. How should he explain? He had sunk to nothing more than a junkyard denizen and wanted nothing from others.

Berger was not asleep. On the contrary, he was fully aware of the boy on the ridge and watched him from under his eyebrows, just over the rims of his Wehrmacht-issue smoked glasses. “Go away,” he said quietly, to himself. The boy, thankfully, was too far away to hear. Berger’s accent, his rich Bavarian consonants, tended to attract children. That, he did not want in the least.

He detested children, especially the boys. They taunted him, calling him Hamburger from a safe distance. Die kleine Scheissen! They knew they could stand just ten feet away, and he would be powerless to catch them and give them the beating they deserved.

Taunt him! Feldwebel Hans Berger, tank commander during Germany’s glorious drive for Moscow, until the disaster at the Kursk salient. Then fleeing on foot among infantry, his tank having lost its track to a mine, a piece of Soviet shrapnel slashed open his knee to the bone. For two days he crawled along the muddy ground, hiding in every stinking hole he could find to evade the Soviet advanced guard as his roughly bandaged wound festered. Finally, a German counterattack brought paratrooper units close enough for him to find help. He was bundled off to the rear for medical treatment and then on to Warsaw for surgery. But it had been bungled or it was too late or the damage was just too great. It left him crippled. Now his leg was stiff as a crutch, a crutch he could not set aside. Or throw at the little monsters.

While he was recovering from the leg surgery, the Germans retreated, and conditions became hectic, nearly chaotic, for the splendid Wehrmacht. Berger took advantage. He deserted, hitching rides to Danzig and then to Rostock and across to Denmark under forged orders. He lighted in Sweden for the duration of the war and then took a berth as a cook on a cargo ship. He deserted it in Maracaibo. Every change of country, every painful movement along the way, was driven by his overwhelming fear of the Russians. Get away, as far as possible—that was his destination. And as far as possible, physically and politically, meant the United States. Well, he had finally made it, only to be called a hamburger by ignorant, undisciplined American brats.

The boy waited a long time without moving. Berger also did not move. Perhaps this one he would lure close and catch. Then he would work out his vengeance against them all at one time. He would wait to see.

With no discernible trigger, the boy was suddenly descending the slope in modest strides that left long projectile-shaped footsteps behind him and sent small fans of dirt sliding before. At the bottom he stopped just outside the turnaround and drew in a deep breath. Looking sidelong in the direction of Berger’s trailer, the boy veered and continued, although not straight for the trailer. Instead, he headed for the shack that stood to one side.

This is a first, Berger thought disgustedly. Now one is to go so far as to steal my food! The shack held the icebox where Hans stored his perishables, mostly meat. He curled his fingers around the long-handled, three-prong pitchfork that was propped next to him against the trailer. It was his only weapon, but it would be enough. No one would blame him for protecting his property, even if a boy was hurt by it. Or perhaps not just hurt. The boy had wild hair, coarse features, and cheap clothing. A poverty child, Hans saw. Someone no parent cared much for, if there even were parents. Probably unloved, cast off, feral. Hans could focus half a lifetime of disappointment, pain, and abuse from others on this one unneeded boy. Who would ever know?

The intensity of Hans’s desire for blood vengeance made his heart thump. A long-dormant warmth came to his face. So strong, so profoundly vicious was the desire that it took Hans aback. He was surprised to find himself already on his feet, using the pitchfork, tines upward, as a staff, and on course to head off the boy. Hans had to struggle with dizziness to remain aware of what he was doing. It was almost as if the boy were drawing him, compelling him to his vengeance.

Junior halted in the middle of the turnaround. The old man approached, dragging one leg over the dirt, jabbing the pitchfork handle in the ground and pulling himself forward. His face was twisted in an odd way. Junior had no experience in reading human expressions. A normal person, however, would have recognized the conflict in the old man’s face, two overwhelming emotions battling for supremacy: utter hatred and terrified shame. To Junior the old man seemed merely mistaken. He was not the one destined for Junior. The old man had done nothing to attract him.

Junior held up his hand at the old man, reciting from the book, “Better to starve free than be a fat slave.” The man stiffened in place. He blinked as if coming fully awake from a dream. Neither budged.

On the ridge above the dump Jurgen was finally invited to peck at the dead lizard, although little was left but bone. The strangers hopped backwards to let him in, and he approached ducking his head in thanks. But the strangers did not stick around. With a parting squawk each, they took to the air. Watching them go, Jurgen felt abandoned, and when he looked around for Junior, the boy was not in sight. Jurgen, never wholly alone in his life before, was suddenly forlorn. For a moment he spread his wingtips to the ground and shivered, bleating and rolling his eyes at the sky. Then he pulled himself together at last and tucked in his wings. He hop-flew to the top of the steep slope, casting his eyes over the smoking knolls and dales of the dump.

There in the clearing below was Junior. Jurgen recognized the brown hair sticking up from Junior’s head like a dark crest. At the same time Jurgen sensed trouble. Another figure was poised near Junior, holding a stick with three sharp points. Between Junior and this other one there was palpable tension. It frightened Jurgen as keenly as had the loneliness. Gathering all his strength, he stepped, bounded up, and flapped as the earth sloped away, then glided downward in a sweeping 270-degree arc. The heads below faced upward.

Berger spied the shadow as it slid by the boy and looked up to see the crow itself swing around, rear back flaring its wings, and land on the boy’s shoulder. For a second it looked remarkably like a symbol from his past, the black Nazi eagle. He squeezed his eyes shut, then peered between the lashes. Everything was too bright.

Off. Garish. Spooky. The light, the tousled, ill-featured child before him, the bird. Hans had never seen a crow land on a human, except on a corpse to tear out flesh. This one alighted, ruffled, settled in as if it belonged. It was all too schaurig. Seltsam. Hans struggled for English: infernal.

The boy said, “He is Jurgen.”

The crow emitted a two-part squawk-caw that sounded so like the name Jurgen that Hans nearly fumbled the pitchfork while taking a half step backwards.

“Heigh-ho, hi-ding-do,” said the boy, beaming hideously at the bird.

“Junior,” the bird replied.

To the old man the boy said, “I am Junior.”

Hans was now thoroughly fuddled and alarmed. Though there was no overt threat from the boy, or even a hint of taunting, he felt the urge to run. Run in any way that he could manage, however painful and perilous. But at the height of this panic, just when he was about to give in to it, the boy’s stomach gurgled loudly, protractedly, like the very last water in a bathtub as the drain sucks it down.

Hans relaxed.

The orphan was hungry. Of course he was! That was why he had come to the dump. That was why he was on his way to break into the shack. Scavenging. A empty-headed orphan, a gleaner at his dump. Han’s intense hatred and shame abruptly dissipated, although not the encounter’s surreal mood.

Hesitantly, Hans beckoned to the boy with his free hand. He pointed at his card table. “I have food, child,” he said.

Junior recognized the change and supposed that it meant the old man understood now. Junior had not come for him. So when the old man pointed to the table, Junior complied and went there to sit. Talking nearly constantly, producing long strings of incomprehensible words, the old man left Junior and entered the shed. He reappeared with a small white package in his hand. He unwrapped it to reveal a length of sausage. This he took into his trailer. When he came out again, he had the sausage cut up on a tin plate along with a piece of buttered bread. He set the plate on the table as well as a glass of tepid tea. Then he hobbled around the side of the trailer and came back with a packing crate, which he set down across from Junior and sat on.

Junior watched all these movements impassively. When the old man, who called himself Hans, urged him to eat the food, Junior picked up a piece of sausage, which was firm and cool and slippery with grease, and offered it to Jurgen. Jurgen took it in his beak but held it there while Junior ate. The old man, still uttering harsh words, such as Krieg and Flüchtling, followed his every move, helplessly fascinated. When Junior finished the food, Jurgen glided to the ground, dropped his sausage chunk, put a claw on it, and set to tearing it into bite-size bits. These he consumed, trilling delightedly. With another flurry of activity, the old man assembled a second plate of sausage and bread for Junior and set a piece of sausage on the ground near Jurgen. In the course of it, Junior heard in English about Germany, Russia, Sweden, explosions, dead people, snowbound landscapes, ships, trains, the mountains of Mexico, the seamy wharves of San Francisco, and the pitilessness of Americans who learned of the old man’s background.

Junior understood little and cared not at all. Still, he perceived that there was something deeply unpleasant in the man, something the man did not want to remember but could not stop himself from talking about.

The boy wished Dubykky were there to explain. The old man’s evil seemed but a wisp. Hardly anything. It bothered no one but himself. So why the fussing?

When at last the old man paused to catch his breath, the boy smiled at him and said, “One story is good until another is told.”

To Hans the smile seemed hideous, veritably demonic. The words seemed a goodbye. He had done his best to placate this strange apparition of a boy with food, then with the one precious offering he had left in life, a confession. Although his degradation and sin had come out fast and hard and dry, at long last it was out. The boy, however, seemed mysteriously unmoved. Why? Was there nothing he could do for expiation?

Hans suddenly felt panicky again. The inexplicably bright sunlight intensified. It penetrated his body like a drumbeat.

Pounding-blinding.

His body seized up so he could not move. He struggled with himself, but his muscles would not obey. He couldn’t even close his eyes, still fixed on the smiling boy. “You are death,” he tried to say. Though all that came out were strangled sounds, the boy shook his head no as if he had heard clearly.

“Tisha. Tisha. We all fall down,” the boy mumbled around the sausage in his mouth.

A horrible pressure built in Berger’s head, as though it were inflating. Larger, larger, and impossibly larger it felt. He struggled again to move and couldn’t. He could not raise a hand to protect his left ear from the siren sound that had begun skirling there: no modulation, just a keening that steadily rose in pitch and volume until he felt he would burst.

He didn’t, though. Instead there came a sharp, short, steely twang, and the pressure disappeared. The drumroll of sunlight faded away. The perimeter of his vision shrank until only the boy’s face remained visible, a blurry round image. Fog blanched it, then obscured it, and finally conquered it. Junior watched the life go out of the old man’s eyes. All the bad memories, all the fear and resentment, went with it. Slowly the body slumped, as if some final defeat had ended Berger’s most cherished hopes. He toppled sideways when his good leg buckled. The impact with the ground did not even disturb the dirt.

It was no affair of Junior’s. He called to Jurgen. When the crow resumed his shoulder perch, they walked away from the body and the faded trailer and the smoldering dump. The sky gathered plump, white clouds.

MILDRED TIMED HER ARRIVAL PRECISELY. Matt Gans, Senior, was just stepping up to the cash register at the Five and Dime, a spool of medical tape in his hand, when she emerged from the toy aisle. He could not help but see her. At first he seemed unable to place her. They hadn’t been in each other’s company since Christmastime, after all, but then he did, made a lopsided grin, and waved. In return Mildred smiled broadly and dipped one shoulder just a little, an inch and no more, as she had seen pretty actresses do in the movies about the same time that they batted their eyes. As for that, Will Dubykky had absolutely forbidden it. He was vehement: eye fluttering was obvious, silly, ostentatious, affected, juvenile, and repulsive. In a word, cheap. Maybe so. She had discovered, anyway, that she didn’t need to bat, whatever the movies showed. It was enough for her to smile at a man. Such an attractive man! Matt Gans looked like a movie star, like Dana Andrews, except broader in the chest. When her smile inspired his grin to widen into a full show-the-teeth smile, she liked what she saw very much. It was the sort of smile that caused something in the pit of her stomach to warm up and her hips to feel agreeably loose.

Not all smiles, or all men, had that effect. The man whom Will had introduced to her last week, Cledge, the one invited to dinner the coming evening, had not produced such a sensation. Invited, she groused to herself parenthetically, by Will and her mother. Further, she could not imagine Cledge producing a deep sensation in her, however brilliant his smile or animated his eyes. Matt Gans was the handsomer. Definitely. An alluring man. Mildred’s mind unexpectedly produced the image of the other Matt Gans, the junior, the boy. How the boy could come from the man was impossible to perceive. Mildred thought of Misty Gans then and couldn’t derive the boy’s features from her clearly, either. She was a good-looking woman. Good-looking but somewhat sour and severe the only times Mildred had caught sight of her. Not really the woman to have a hold on a handsome man like Matt. Matty. Nice sounding. She might someday call him that.

But that odd boy—maybe he was not the son of Matt Gans. Maybe only Misty’s child. A love child. The delicious odor of hidden scandal, of marital betrayal and infelicity, made Mildred grin wickedly, but only inside. On the outside, her smile broadened, because if Matt was not exactly free, he might be free-able.

“Hi,” she said in the bright drawl that Will always frowned at. “Remember me from the Callahans’ Christmas party? Mildred Warden.” She held out her hand, fingers loose and on a downward bias. When he took the hand in his, she squared her shoulders and breathed in deep. Her breasts were not very big (more’s the pity, that) but big enough to cause men to glance down willy-nilly and then look glad that they did.

He shook her hand delicately, replying, “Callahans’ Christmas? Was that the name of the party?”

Mildred’s laugh was tinkling, although the remark struck her as peculiar rather than funny. He released her hand, and she held it across her tummy, grasping her other arm halfway between elbow and wrist. She dropped her eyes demurely and said, “Was it your son who was in my library last Saturday?” As she intended, that required her explaining exactly what her library was and where.

When she finished, Gans knitted his brows, puzzled. “My boys were at the track meet with Lowry High School.” After Mildred told him of making out a brand-new library card for a Matthew Gans, age six, his face showed nothing but amazement. There was no mistaking the sincerity.

He told her, “Can’t be. My youngest is eight. To think that another Gans family lives here in tiny Hawthorne! I had no idea.”

The “tiny” put Mildred off a little bit. Hawthorne was not that small. It was bigger than Yerington, Fallon, Fernley, and Winnemucca. Nearly the size of Ely. She was prepared to tell him so, yet didn’t. Telling off a man about facts introduced the wrong tone.

Anyhow, Mildred did not get the chance. The door to the Five and Dime swung open, its bell clanged, and Will Dubykky walked through. Mildred’s heart sank. Caught again. He came directly to them, greeting Gans politely. The two shook hands, and Mildred noted that they both shook firmly. There was nothing delicate about Matt Gans when dealing with another male. He was manly.

“What are you up to, Milly?” Dubykky asked. His manner was cordial, not a hint of censure in the tone, but Mildred recognized the look in his eye and was embarrassed. He read her so easily.

“Shopping,” she answered. The pout in her voice was obvious even to her. She was tempted to add, “for feminine napkins,” but decided not to. The moment to be naughty had passed. It would only sound vulgar. Besides, however Matt Gans might react to the risqué, Will was impossible to provoke. Gans paid for his tape, nodded goodbye, and left them at the counter.

“Milly, Milly,” began Dubykky and paused, squinting one eye. “Fifteen years older, married, three children—is there anything else you require before accepting that a man is not right for you?”

She folded her arms and pouted openly. The clerk behind the cash register, the widow Eschenbaugh, put her hand to her mouth, pretending to hide a smile. (The hag!) Mildred thrust her chin forward and walked away.

“See you at six,” Dubykky called behind her. “Don’t forget about the rocks.”

Really, why she ever, sometimes, bothered to think of William Dubykky as a possibility! He only liked to ruin her fun, which he did with an accuracy and persistence that almost seemed supernatural. For a husband he would never do.

As for Dubykky, watching her walk away and, despite sulking, sway her hips sultrily, he reflected on the time, the one brief time, when out of deep aggravation he had actually considered marrying her as the least troublesome measure. It would satisfy his debt to the family. He could watch her behavior and protect her directly. Their first meeting, Mildred’s dreadfully coquettish behavior, had goaded him into an overreaction.

It happened in 1953 when he was fresh out of military service. He realized he was facing a unique challenge as soon as the front door opened on the Warden house and he introduced himself.

“Ma’am,” he started when Gladys stood before him. Then he faltered. The words he had rehearsed suddenly seemed stilted, vapid—My name is Will Dubykky, an army buddy of your husband. I’m setting up law practice in town and thought I’d look you up. If there’s any way I can be of help, just ask. For Victor’s sake. Here’s my card.

Gladys had smiled wanly at his silence. Then behind her Mildred appeared, and her budding beauty took him by surprise, even though Victor Warden had shown him a photograph of his wife and daughter. She might have passed for a teenage Audrey Hepburn, almost. Mildred’s face was a tad longer, her upper lip more bowed, and her eyes dulled with daydreams, but she was no less winsome.

“Ma’am,” he said again, “Victor sent me. I’m Will Dubykky, and he was the best friend I ever had.”

“Oh, my Victor,” Gladys breathed. Her eyes rounded, brimming with tears.

Weepiness left Dubykky cold, but what happened next provoked an unaccustomed emotion, and powerful: astonished distaste. Mildred stepped forward, pointed her shoulder at him, peered over it, tucked one knee behind the other, and purred, “Hello there, William.” The worse part was how long she took pronouncing his name. It was but a foretaste of his dealings with silly Milly Warden.

Gladys offered her hand shyly and invited him in. He went reluctantly, yet during the ensuing, often uncomfortable hour his initial reaction to Mildred evolved. There was enough of her father in her that he felt a twinge of affection. At the same time her simpering and posing exasperated him.

“I owe this to Victor,” he sighed to himself once he was outside the house again, free of lugubrious Gladys and flirty Mildred. But marry Milly, or worse, Gladys? The prospect made him shudder. He would watch over them, nothing more.

Now seven years later, though he had grown used to being a member of the family, standing in the Five and Dime, he repeated to himself wearily, “I owe this to Victor.”

He had done what he could. Mildred, who was bright, had matured. Some. But not without taxing his patience so much that sometimes it seemed bankrupt. He would not have put up with her had not his fondness deepened and the distaste at her silliness turned to worry about her future.

More than that, he could not regret his obligation to Gladys and Mildred because it arose from his own decision. Disregarding his accustomed solitary life, he had befriended Victor. Even though his duty to evil forbade attachments, he enjoyed the friendship. He could not abandon it by ignoring Victor’s last request.

It amounted to the biggest of the changes to have come upon him. A complex of fondness, friendship, and loyalty. Why would such sentiments master him, a factotum of evil? Now, after centuries and centuries? He did not know. He had come to recognize one thing, however: that very same evil made friendship with Victor tempting. It made being Mildred’s protector a compulsion.

He stepped up to the store’s wide display window, but not to watch Milly walking away. To check on Gans. Something about the man troubled him. Gans was just a little too smooth, too sharp-eyed. That on its own meant nothing. Yet if Gans was lurking outside to spy on Milly, that did mean something.

Gans was nowhere in sight, but Dubykky felt no less troubled. The image of Junior sitting in the hovel came to mind. Dubykky’s misgivings intensified.

DUBYKKY ARRIVED EARLY for dinner at the Warden house, which lay only two blocks away from his own. Under his arm was a picture frame wrapped in brown paper. Gladys eyed it warily as she let him in. Her house was full of Dubykky’s odd gifts. She wasn’t at all sure she wanted another. But she changed her attitude after he laid it on the living room coffee table and unwrapped it. She even forgot about the headache that had been tormenting her all afternoon.

“Oh, Will,” she breathed, entranced. “It’s beautiful.” Then, “What are they?”

Dubykky explained. The mahogany frame contained four rows of rock slices, each highly polished. Some were agates; others were ores, like malachite and cinnabar. The rows were arranged by colors: shades of red, blue/purple, green, and yellow/gold. There was a neatly hand-lettered label beneath each gleaming piece.

On the way home from work, Dubykky had stopped off at Pastor’s Rock and Mineral. Ralph Pastor owed him for past legal work, most of it involving deserted prospecting claims that he wanted to take over. Dubykky convinced him to satisfy part of the debt by handing over one of the most striking displays in his shop, which Pastor had made himself. He was a capable artist, if a poor businessman. It was Mildred who was supposed, by Dubykky’s order, to arrange for rock art to be on hand in the living room, but Mildred was Mildred, flighty and forgetful. Dubykky decided at the last minute not to leave the task to her.

When Mildred glided in and beheld the rock display, she was as full of praise as her mother. She ran a forefinger over each one, pronouncing the name underneath it. Suddenly she straightened and said, “Oh! I was supposed to bring rocks too, wasn’t I, Will!” She hustled from the room.

When she returned, it was with a big, knowing smile on her face. She was carrying a thick encyclopedia volume on top of a black frame. “I’ll bet you thought I forgot, but I didn’t. Remember after we talked to Mr. Gans, the high school shop teacher? You said—I must say, you weren’t very nice to me about it. It was just a casual encounter, and he was so pleasant.”

“Mr. Gans?” cut in Gladys. “You were talking to Mr. Gans?”

Mildred nodded enthusiastically. “A very manly sort of man.”

Gladys agreed, “I’ve seen him at the market. He looks like that movie star. What’s his name …?”

“Dana Andrews?” suggested Mildred.

“No, the other one.”

Dubykky, long used to the ricocheting conversations of Gladys and Mildred and well aware they might continue indefinitely, interrupted by asking Mildred what was in her hands.

“I told you I didn’t forget!” She lifted one shoulder, turned her chin over it, lowered her eyelids, and smiled knowingly again. Then she set down her burden beside the frame of mineral samples. “Here’s the Britannica volume with the article on minerals. I can read about each one of the ones here. And—” She lifted the volume and set it aside on the coffee table. “Voilá!” she exclaimed. Under the book was not, as Dubykky expected, another rock display but a collection of small arrowheads arrayed point outward in three concentric circles.

“Close,” he said. He had, after all, simply asked her to get some interesting rocks.

Mildred tossed her head at him. “They’re so perfect!”

Too perfect, Dubykky suspected but didn’t say so. He asked where Mildred had found them. When she answered that it had been at Boudreau’s Gifts and Desert Antiques, his suspicions were settled. But it didn’t matter. That Mildred had even remembered something he’d asked of her was a positive sign. And the collection of arrowheads, even if counterfeit, would serve the purpose well enough, he supposed. He looked forward to watching Cledge react to it.

While Gladys sat in the easy chair, picked up the heating pad, stuffed it behind her neck, and resumed her headache, Dubykky and Mildred took down a landscape painting from the wall and replaced it with the rock slices. Both she and her mother gave simultaneous advice to ensure that the frame hung level. Dubykky then cast around for another spot on the wall to hang the arrowheads. He reached for a prewar photograph portrait of Victor Warden, as approximately the same size.

“No, not Daddy!” cried Mildred, affronted.

At the same time her mother cried, “No, not Victor!”

“Oh, Will, how could you?”

Dubykky, his back to them, didn’t know which had spoken, they sounded so much alike when complaining, but it didn’t matter. He sighed to himself. Victor Warden’s features were ever fresh in his memory. Only nine years had gone by since Victor’s death. His lamentable but necessary death. And here he was, smiling mildly out of the frame just as he had habitually smiled in life. It was such a waste that Victor had to go. Mildred’s face was so much like her father’s that they were nearly interchangeable, except for Victor’s pencil mustache and Mildred’s thick, wavy brown hair, which was like Gladys’s. Victor’s was as matte-black as coal. And whereas Mildred was constantly mimicking the expressions of actresses, to Dubykky’s disgust, Victor’s face had always been mild and pleasant.

Victor Warden, his friend and victim. How Dubykky regretted having to kill him.

The doorbell jolted Dubykky from the reverie. There was a hesitation while Mildred looked to Gladys as head of the household to answer the door, but her mother pressed a hand to her temple and grimaced gingerly. So Mildred went instead. Dubykky removed a framed crochet of Home Sweet Home and hung the arrowheads. The ceiling light reflected from them in oily bronze glimmers.

To Milton Cledge, when he was welcomed by Mildred into the Warden home, it was as if he were entering a television program. First of all, everyone was so darned photogenic. Mildred’s beauty dazzled him.

She had on an airy blue-and-white dress of thick, wavy horizontal stripes and blue high heels, both of which served to give her figure animation. Gladys, by contrast, was sedentary and dressed in a nondescript rose dress but also possessed elegant, fragile good looks. His senior law partner, Cledge realized, fit the tableau as well, even dressed in his workaday gray three-piece suit and dark gray tie. It was a funny thing to Cledge that out of Dubykky’s presence he could never recall precisely what the man looked like, and even in his presence Dubykky did not draw attention to himself. Yet, here with these two attractive women, his dark hair and darker eyes, his slightly sallow complexion, and his slender, straight posture made him seem mysteriously aristocratic, or perhaps aristocratically mysterious. Cledge had no experience with either dark mysteries or aristocracy.

Gladys smiled wanly, apologized for not feeling well, and still sitting, offered him a limp hand to shake. Cledge astonished himself then. Maybe it was Mildred’s bedazzling effect. Or maybe, in front of her and Dubykky, he felt on stage in a way, as if whatever he did right then would set the tone for the evening. In any case, he wasn’t the type for witticisms or the offhand pretty remark. Yet out it tumbled.

He said to Gladys, smiling, “I’m feeling overcome, too, just being among such lovely people in such a lovely setting.”

Everyone beamed back at him, Gladys proudly, Mildred interestedly, and Dubykky with amusement. To underscore his appreciation, particularly of the room’s collection of assorted Queen Anne-style furnishings, Cledge turned in a slow circle. His eyes passed over the large frame of rock slices and bounced back. He stepped closer to study them.

“Pretty, aren’t they,” said Mildred. Her regard, however, went to Dubykky. Her expression told him she was about to be jealous of Cledge’s interest in the pretty rocks instead of her arrowheads, and this fretted him a little. Mildred could be fractious if she felt upstaged.

“Magnificent,” Cledge agreed, to which Mildred shrugged. He studied the collection minutely.

It gave Mildred the opportunity to glance covertly at the Britannica article. She said, a little artificially, “Don’t you just love malachite? Who’d believe that two copper atoms, three carbon dioxide molecules, and a hydroxide could create such brilliant hues of green? And that jasper! It’s like a picture of the earth’s rock strata itself!”

Cledge gave her a strange glance, while Dubykky walked to his side.

“Mildred can’t help herself,” he explained. “She’s a librarian through and through.”

Mildred’s face was beginning to darken at that when Cledge, still gazing at the rocks, exclaimed, “And one with exceptional taste. What an amazing lapis lazuli!”

Behind Cledge’s back Mildred stuck out her tongue at Dubykky, then said, “Do you like arrowheads? We have a collection of those, too.”

Cledge betrayed no especial interest in arrowheads and only reluctantly let Mildred lead him away from the rocks. But when he saw them up close, he sucked in his breath and breathed out a slow “ah.” He said, “They’re so perfect.”

It sounded forced to Dubykky, but not to Mildred. And it struck home. She was capable of many gradations of smile—part of her armamentarium of calculated expressions—but only one that wasn’t calculated. It was her innocent, unselfconscious smile of pleasure, and on the rare occasions it broke loose (unlike the others, it was never planned), it infused all who saw it with a pleasure as genuine and intense as hers. It burst out now, brilliantly. Cledge, turning toward her, caught the full force of it. He was dumbstruck.

Well, one down, thought Dubykky, watching Cledge. Now for Mildred.

Gladys, her headache again forgotten, broke the brief silence. “Milly,” she said. “Check on the meatloaf, won’t you. I’ll get the salad together. And Will, shame on you. Offer Mr. Cledge a drink. What do you like, Mr. Cledge?”

“Above all, I’d like you to call me Milt, and I’d welcome a scotch and water,” he answered a little breathlessly.

Gladys, pleased, followed her daughter through the narrow passageway into the kitchen-dining room. Cledge lowered himself into an easy chair a bit unsteadily. Dubykky reached behind and flipped closed the Britannica, then went to the liquor cabinet and poured out a stiff measure of Cutty Sark and a drop of water. He handed the glass to Cledge, who took a sip at once. When he looked back up at Dubykky, his eyes were wide and watery.

“Good,” he croaked.

Gladys was only a passable cook. Mildred was talented. Completely uninterested in food for its own sake, Dubykky never inquired about her methods. He knew from experience that the most talented cooks were somehow touched by evil, as Mildred was. Yet he recognized full well how proud she was of her skill. For this reason, he expressly asked her to make meatloaf. Hers was universally admired. Its effect on Cledge nearly equaled the effect of her smile. What’s more, Dubykky saw Mildred seeing its effect on Cledge. But it got better.

“Very tasty, dear,” Gladys said, as a matter of course. Like Dubykky, she was apathetic about food so long as it didn’t make her ill.

“Tasty?” Cledge replied in a tone of astonishment. “Why, this is far and away the best meatloaf I’ve ever had. This is the Supreme Court of meat loaf!”

Gladys was displeased at being overspoken at her own table, which Mildred noted gleefully. She noted with yet more pleasure that Milt Cledge was too occupied by the meatloaf to pay any attention to her mother. He was a man who truly appreciated how well she cooked. At that, she experienced a deep warmth spread through her, different from the warmth that handsome Matt Gans caused, higher up in her body and not so exciting, but still enjoyable.

So. A start for Mildred, Dubykky thought.

But as he knew that any compliment given or hinted from one man automatically brought to her mind some other man, whose appearance or past courtesy would divert her into making comparisons, Dubykky carefully steered the conversation to focus her strictly on Cledge. At the same time, he ensured that Cledge did not begin talking shop. Not that the law bored Gladys and Mildred so much as that they did not understand it and often expressed outrage at aspects of legal procedure that were simply a matter of course for lawyers. Dubykky did not want to fill the evening with the explanations necessary to make them see Cledge’s profession in the same light that he did. That would be dull.

So they spoke of minerals, locations for finding them, local mines like the Lucky Boy, incidents related to local mines, the Nevada Paiute, Washoe, and Shoshone, arrowheads, antique weapons, Boudreau’s store, Hawthorne merchants in general, people who can be encountered in the shops—from gnarled prospectors to fresh-faced sailors—the atomic proving grounds, the local danger of war with the Soviet Union because the proving grounds and Nellis Air Force Base near Las Vegas were sure to be prime targets, not to mention Hawthorne itself because it lay smack beside the Babbitt naval ammunition depot, and, because the core material of atomic weapons—uranium—was to be found in Nevada, back to minerals.

All participated, although primarily Cledge and Mildred. Cledge’s views on topics tended to be settled, definite, whereas Mildred’s, however vehemently expressed, were contingent on appearances. When the presidential race came up, as a tangent to atomic warfare, from the field of candidates, Republican or Democrat, Mildred immediately picked out John F. Kennedy as her choice.

A handsome man had to be a good leader. She could not be talked out of that view, though Cledge tried. He was a Lyndon Johnson man.

Dubykky only had to toss in an observation or fact now and then to keep the talk lively and away from unsuitable topics—unsuitable in that they might start a rupture. The closest it came to that occurred when Mildred, flush with satisfaction in herself, suggested to Cledge that he might be more comfortable with his tie removed. It was a thin, solid royal-blue tie over a stark white shirt and gave the unfortunate impression that his head was a balloon on a string. Dubykky agreed he would look more comfortable with it off but said nothing. The suggestion made Cledge blush, endearing in itself, but Mildred did not like to be balked. Cledge looked meaningfully to Dubykky, who was also wearing a tie, but he declined to take the hint and offer support. Mildred frowned. Gladys’s interest in the conversation, not very great until then, freshened.

Sensing that he had upset Mildred, Cledge asked the table in general about the photo portrait of a man that he had noticed on the living room wall. The man, he averred, bore a striking resemblance to Mildred. Was he a brother? Gladys perked up even more.

“That is Victor Warden, my husband and Mildred’s father,” she said to Cledge in a pedantic tone. Her husband was the dearest topic in the world to her. She never tired of speaking of him. “He died in that awful war in Korea while serving in the army with Will. That’s how we know Will.” She expanded on Victor’s background and virtues.

While Cledge assumed a small, fixed approximation of a smile and Mildred looked down at her hands, folded in her lap, and Gladys prosed on, Dubykky let his mind wander into the past: to Victor’s death, then back further to their first meeting in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and to what he knew of Victor’s early life.

In fact, he knew a lot more than Gladys. Even the dinner reminded him of that fact, starting with the table service. The plates, silver-rimmed and gleaming white, though now smeared with food, were Japanese-made china, which Dubykky had brought home and presented to Gladys soon after he met them. He claimed it was a set that Warden had already bought for them. That was a white lie. Likewise the silver cutlery and candlesticks, all bought at a PX in Japan. A way to ingratiate himself. A way to assuage his regret. Regret not just because he was responsible for Warden’s death but also because what he knew of the man could not be shared.

Mildred got up to get dessert, a rice pudding, while Gladys reflected on the mystery of her husband’s background. Victor, she told Cledge sadly, had never been specific about his family or childhood home. Really, it never concerned her enough to press him about until it was too late. Now it added piquancy to her nostalgia. Her eyes grew moist.

She didn’t know because her husband had little to tell, and even then, he understood little about the context of his first days. Dubykky had turned up a few facts through his own research, as well as some probabilities. But even those small, available histories were dismal.

Victor Warden was the product of multiple lynchings.

Based on what Warden told Dubykky, the lynchings occurred sometime late in World War I or shortly thereafter somewhere in the Deep South. From old news stories and magazine articles, almost all from northern periodicals, Dubykky identified three clusters of lynchings, of which one seemed most probably related to Warden. But the paucity of specific information and Warden’s ignorance of the circumstances made it impossible to pin down for sure.

Even in outline, the sequence of events was unspeakably foul. A white woman complained to her brother that a black man had molested her. The brother had the man arrested and put in a small-town jail. Then he got drunk. The drink stoked his rage. He gathered friends and went to the jail. The lawman stood aside while the mob beat the black man, who was then dragged by his feet from his cell into the street. A noose was displayed to the gathering crowd. The brother tied a rope to the prisoner’s feet, intending to hitch the opposite end to a horse’s halter so the prisoner could be dragged to a suitable tree outside the town, when a second mob arrived to stop the lynching.