Dusk and Other Stories (12 page)

Wandering around as the afternoon ended Reemstma finally caught sight of Kit Walker. She acted a little strange. She didn’t seem to recognize him at first. There was a grass stain on the back of her white skirt.

“Oh, hello,” she said.

“I was looking for you.”

“Would you do me a favor?” she said. “Would you mind getting me a drink? My husband seems to be ignoring me.”

Though Reemstma did not see it, someone else was ignoring her, too. It was Hilmo, standing some way off. They had taken care to come back to the pavilion separately. Friends who would soon be parting were talking in small groups, their faces shadowy against the water that glistened behind them. Reemstma returned with some wine in a plastic glass.

“Here you are. Is anything wrong?”

“Thank you. No, why? You know, you’re very nice,” she said. She had noticed something over his shoulder. “Oh, dear.”

“What?”

“Nothing. It looks like we’re going.”

“Do you have to?” he managed to say.

“Rick’s over by the door. You know him, he hates to be kept waiting.”

“I was hoping we could talk.”

He turned. Walker was standing outside in the sunlight. He was wearing an aloha shirt and tan slacks. He seemed somewhat aloof. Reemstma was envious of him.

“We have to drive back to Belvoir tonight,” she said.

“I guess it’s a long way.”

“It was very nice meeting you,” she said.

She left the drink untouched on the corner of the table. Reemstma watched her make her way across the floor. She was not like the others, he thought. He saw them walking to their car. Did she have children? he found himself wondering. Did she really find him interesting?

In the hour before twilight, at six in the evening, he heard the noise and looked out. Crossing the area toward them was the unconquerable schoolboy, long-legged as a crane, the ex-infantry officer now with a small, well-rounded paunch, waving both arms.

Dunning was bellowing from a window, “Hooknose!”

“Look who I’ve got!” Klingbeil called back.

He was with Devereaux, the tormented scholar. Their arms were around each other’s shoulders. They were crossing together, grinning, friends since cadet days, friends for life. They started up the stairs.

“Hooknose!” Dunning shouted.

Klingbeil threw open his arms in mocking joy.

He was the son of an army officer. As a boy he had sailed on the Matson Line and gone back and forth across the country. He told stories of seduction in the lower berth. My son, my son, she was moaning. He was irredeemable, he had the common touch, his men adored him. Promoted slowly, he had gotten out and become a land developer. He drove a green Cadillac famous in Tampa. He was a king of poker games, drinking, late nights.

She had probably not meant it, Reemstma was thinking. His experience had taught him that. He was not susceptible to lies.

“Oh,” wives would say, “of course. I think I’ve heard my husband talk about you.”

“I don’t know your husband,” Reemstma would say.

A moment of alarm.

“Of course, you do. Aren’t you in the same class?”

He could hear them downstairs.

“
Der Schiff ist kaputt!
” they were shouting.
“Der Schiff ist kaputt!”

A
KHNILO

It was late August. In the harbor the boats lay still, not the slightest stirring of their masts, not the softest clink of a sheave. The restaurants had long since closed. An occasional car, headlights glaring, came over the bridge from North Haven or turned down Main Street, past the lighted telephone booths with their smashed receivers. On the highway the discotheques were emptying. It was after three.

In the darkness Fenn awakened. He thought he had heard something, a slight sound, like the creak of a spring, the one on the screen door in the kitchen. He lay there in the heat. His wife was sleeping quietly. He waited. The house was unlocked though there had been many robberies and worse nearer the city. He heard a faint thump. He did not move. Several minutes passed. Without making a sound he got up and went carefully to the narrow doorway where some stairs descended to the kitchen. He stood there. Silence. Another thump and a moan. It was Birdman falling to a different place on the floor.

Outside, the trees were like black reflections. The stars were hidden. The only galaxies were the insect voices that filled the night. He stared from the open window. He was still not sure if he had heard anything. The leaves of the immense beech that overhung the rear porch were close enough to touch. For what seemed a long time he examined the shadowy area around the trunk. The stillness of everything made him feel visible but also strangely receptive. His eyes drifted from one thing to another behind the house, the pale Corinthian columns of the arbor next door, the mysterious hedge, the garage with its rotting sills. Nothing.

Eddie Fenn was a carpenter though he’d gone to Dartmouth and majored in history. Most of the time he worked alone. He was thirty-four. He had thinning hair and a shy smile. Not much to say. There was something quenched in him. When he was younger it was believed to be some sort of talent, but he had never really set out in life, he had stayed close to shore. His wife, who was tall and nearsighted, was from Connecticut. Her father had been a banker.
Of Greenwich and Havana
the announcement in the papers had said—he’d managed the branch of a New York bank there when she was a child. That was in the days when Havana was a legend and millionaires committed suicide after smoking a last cigar.

Years had passed. Fenn gazed out at the night. It seemed he was the only listener to an infinite sea of cries. Its vastness awed him. He thought of all that lay concealed behind it, the desperate acts, the desires, the fatal surprises. That afternoon he had seen a robin picking at something near the edge of the grass, seizing it, throwing it in the air, seizing it again: a toad, its small, stunned legs fanned out. The bird threw it again. In ravenous burrows the blind shrews hunted ceaselessly, the pointed tongues of reptiles were testing the air, there was the crunch of abdomens, the passivity of the trapped, the soft throes of mating. His daughters were asleep down the hall. Nothing is safe except for an hour.

As he stood there the sound seemed to change, he did not know how. It seemed to separate as if permitting something to come forth
from it, something glittering and remote. He tried to identify what he was hearing as gradually the cricket, cicada, no, it was something else, something feverish and strange, became more clear. The more intently he listened, the more elusive it was. He was afraid to move for fear of losing it. He heard the soft call of an owl. The darkness of the trees which was absolute seemed to loosen, and through it that single, shrill note.

Unseen the night had opened. The sky was revealing itself, the stars shining faintly. The town was sleeping, abandoned sidewalks, silent lawns. Far off among some pines was the gable of a barn. It was coming from there. He still could not identify it. He needed to be closer, to go downstairs and out the door, but that way he might lose it, it might become silent, aware.

He had a disturbing thought, he was unable to dislodge it: it
was
aware. Quivering there, repeating and repeating itself above the rest, it seemed to be coming only to him. The rhythm was not constant. It hurried, hesitated, went on. It was less and less an instinctive cry and more a kind of signal, a code, not anything he had heard before, not a collection of long and short impulses but something more intricate, in a way almost like speech. The idea frightened him. The words, if that was what they were, were piercing and thin but the awareness of them made him tremble as if they were the combination to a vault.

Beneath the window lay the roof of the porch. It sloped gently. He stood there, perfectly still, as if lost in thought. His heart was rattling. The roof seemed wide as a street. He would have to go out on it hoping he was unseen, moving silently, without abruptness, pausing to see if there was a change in the sound to which he was now acutely sensitive. The darkness would not protect him. He would be entering a night of countless networks, shifting eyes. He was not sure if he should do it, if he dared. A drop of sweat broke free and ran quickly down his bare side. Tirelessly the call continued. His hands were trembling.

Unfastening the screen, he lowered it carefully and leaned it
against the house. He was moving quietly, like a serpent, across the faded green roofing. He looked down. The ground seemed distant. He would have to hang from the roof and drop, light as a spider. The peak of the barn was still visible. He was moving toward the lodestar, he could feel it. It was almost as if he were falling. The act was dizzying, irreversible. It was taking him where nothing he possessed would protect him, taking him barefoot, alone.

As he dropped to the ground, Fenn felt a thrill go through him. He was going to be redeemed. His life had not turned out as he expected but he still thought of himself as special, as belonging to no one. In fact he thought of failure as romantic. It had almost been his goal. He carved birds, or he had. The tools and partially shaped blocks of wood were on a table in the basement. He had, at one time, almost become a naturalist. Something in him, his silence, his willingness to be apart, was adapted to that. Instead he began to build furniture with a friend who had some money, but the business failed. He was drinking. One morning he woke up lying by the car in the worn ruts of the driveway, the old woman who lived across the street warning away her dog. He went inside before his children saw him. He was very close, the doctor told him frankly, to being an alcoholic. The words astonished him. That was long ago. His family had saved him, but not without cost.

He paused. The earth was firm and dry. He went toward the hedge and across the neighbor’s driveway. The tone that was transfixing him was clearer. Following it he passed behind houses he hardly recognized from the back, through neglected yards where cans and rubbish were hidden in dark grass, past empty sheds he had never seen. The ground began to slope gently down, he was nearing the barn. He could hear the voice,
his
voice, pouring overhead. It was coming from somewhere in the ghostly wooden triangle rising like the face of a distant mountain brought unexpectedly close by a turn of the road. He moved toward it slowly, with the fear of an explorer. Above him he could hear the thin stream trilling. Terrified by its closeness he stood still.

At first, he later remembered, it meant nothing, it was too glistening, too pure. It kept pouring out, more and more insane. He could not identify, he could never repeat, he could not even describe the sound. It had enlarged, it was pushing everything else aside. He stopped trying to comprehend it and instead allowed it to run through him, to invade him like a chant. Slowly, like a pattern that changes its appearance as one stares at it and begins to shift into another dimension, inexplicably the sound altered and exposed its real core. He began to recognize it. It
was
words. They had no meaning, no antecedents, but they were unmistakably a language, the first ever heard from an order vaster and more dense than our own. Above, in the whitish surface, desperate, calling, was the nameless pioneer.

In a kind of ecstasy he moved closer. Instantly he realized it was wrong. The sound hesitated. He closed his eyes in anguish but too late, it faltered and then stopped. He felt stupid, shamed. He stepped back a little, helplessly. All about him the voices clattered. The night was filled with them. He turned this way and that hoping to find it, but the thing he had heard was gone.

It was late. The first pale cast had come to the sky. He was standing near the barn with the fragments of a dream one must struggle to remember: four words, distinct and inimitable, that he had made out. Protecting them, concentrating on them with all his strength, he began to carry them back. The cries of the insects seemed louder. He was afraid something would happen, a dog would bark, a light go on in a bedroom and he would be distracted, he would lose his hold. He had to get back without seeing anything, without hearing anything, without thinking. He was repeating the words to himself as he went, his lips moving steadily. He hardly dared breathe. He could see the house. It had turned gray. The windows were dark. He had to get to it. The sound of the night creatures seemed to swell in torment and rage, but he was beyond that. He was escaping. He had gone an immense distance, he was coming to the hedge. The porch was not far away. He stood on the railing, the
eave of the roof within reach. The rain gutter was firm, he pulled himself up. The crumbling green asphalt was warm beneath his feet. One leg over the sill, then the other. He was safe. He stepped back from the window instinctively. He had done it. Outside, the light seemed faint and historic. A spectral dawn began to come through the trees.

Suddenly he heard the floor creak. Someone was there, a figure in the soft light drained of color. It was his wife, he was stunned by the image of her holding a cotton robe about her, her face made plain by sleep. He made a gesture as if to warn her off.

“What is it? What’s wrong?” she whispered.

He backed away making vague movements with his hands. His head was sideways, like a horse. He was moving backward. One eye was on her.

“What is it?” she said, alarmed. “What happened?”

No, he pleaded, shaking his head. A word had dropped away. No, no. It was fluttering apart like something in the sea. He was reaching blindly for it.

Her arm went around him. He pulled away abruptly. He closed his eyes.

“Darling, what is it?” He was troubled, she knew. He had never really gotten over his difficulty. He often woke at night, she would find him sitting in the kitchen, his face looking tired and old. “Come to bed,” she invited.

His eyes were closed tightly. His hands were over his ears.

“Are you all right?” she said.

Beneath her devotion it was dissolving, the words were spilling away. He began to turn around frantically.