“Oh yeah, she likes movies.And music, and just laughing her ass off.
She’s an amazing girl.And sexy, don’t you think? Not that I would ever do anything, but God, she is so fucking hot, those big eyes and those little spindly wrists and always wearing just enough perfume to let you know she knows exactly what you’re thinking.”He claps Daniel on the back.
”All right, buddy, go back in there and do your business, I’m out ofhere.”
“Me, too.”
“Yeah?What about your magazines?”
“Just looking.”
“I didn’t mean to bust you, Danny.Feel free.Our age, a nice jerk-off helps keep the lid on.Though I could never, not with a black lady.It just doesn’t do it for me.”
“I’ll call you tonight, then,”Daniel says.
”Okay, good.I really need to talk to you.”
“Is everything okay, Derek?”
Derek looks at him as ifhe were insane.“Ofcourse not,”he says, and then laughs.Daniel stands there and watches Derek get into his cruiser and drive away.He gets into his own car and drives into Leyden, through the rain that is now just beginning to include a few intermittent streaks ofsnow, loose skeins ofwhite woven into the gray ofthe day.
Daniel arrives at his office building, swings around back, where there is parking for tenants and clients only.The first thing he sees is a green Volvo station wagon, with the license plateWDC785.
Iris.
What’s she doing here?It’s unlikely she is doing business at Software Solutions, and the financial planner is inAustria for the month.She must be here to see the child psychologist, Warren Maltby, an exceptionally small man, with tar-black hair.The thought ofIris up there, with Nelson or without him, strikes Daniel with sudden force.What could the trouble be?Were they taking him to a shrink because he supposedly hit a kid at day care? Daniel sensed that Nelson is one ofthe teachers’favorites—with his clean cubby, princely table manners, perfect diction, and star-tling beauty.Ruby has actually enjoyed a rise in status since becoming Nelson’s best friend.Like the homecoming queen on the arm ofthe school’s football hero.
By now he has wandered over to Iris’sVolvo and peers into it.The baby seat is strapped into an otherwise empty and immaculate backseat.
The family dog, an elderlyAustralian shepherd named Scarecrow, sleeps deeply in the way back, her eyelids trembling while she dreams.Daniel raps a knuckle against the side window and Scarecrow opens one red-dened eye.“Hi, Crow,”he says, currying the dog’s favor.Then he looks into the front ofthe car.In the passenger seat is a stack ofbooks with li-brary markings on their spines.On top ofthe books is a spiral notebook, opened to a page ofher handwriting, black flowing letters, old-fashioned in their shapeliness.Through the glare and his reflection, he reads,Harlem Ren.economic engine B.intell.repudiate Marx 19% unem.extend.fam“A safety net made not of government giveaways and fashioned by would-be social engi-neers, but consisting of a weave of family structure, rural communalism and Chris-tianity.”And then he opens the door and picks up the notebook.He riffles through the pages like a spy, and then, miraculously, and terribly, he sees, on an otherwise blank page, his initials.DE,written small, in the center ofthe page, the exact center, with a circle drawn around them.His heart accelerates as ifhe has suddenly sprouted wings and begun to fly.
But he doesn’t have a chance to obsess, not just then.He turns around to see her walking across the parking lot.She is alone, not a hun-dred feet away.It’s always so startling to see her, like spotting a celebrity.
She seems to float toward him.
“I thought your lights were on,”he says, dropping her notebook and swinging the door shut.It closes with a sturdy Swedish finality that he hopes will prevent her from asking any questions.
“You’re all dressed up,”she says.
Daniel touches the knot ofhis tie.“I was in court.”
“Did you win?”
“That’s the thing about court, you rarely win and you rarely lose.”
“I once thought I was going to be a lawyer,”Iris says.“My dad always said I should be one, but just because I argued over everything, you know that way slightly spoiled kids do.I thought I could talk him into anything.”
The thought ofher as a child both stuns and provokes Daniel, imagining her that way, in that distant world.
She senses his mind is elsewhere and moves her face a little closer to his.
”Is that why you wanted to be a lawyer?”she asks.
”I never argued with my parents, I was too afraid ofthem.I thought they’d fire me.”
“I like to think ofpeople when they were little kids.You must have been one ofthose heartbreaking little kids, with a serious face and se-cretive, really secretive.The kind ofkid that a mother sort ofhas to spy on to figure out what’s really going on.”Distress courses across her eyes, like speeded-up film ofclouds moving through the sky.Daniel guesses she is thinking about Nelson.
“That was fun Friday night,”she says.Her voice rises with what seems like forced gaiety.
“My office is here,”Daniel says, gesturing toward the building.
”I know,”says Iris.She opens her oversized purse and pokes around for her car keys, finds them.“I knocked on your door on my way out.”
“You did?”
“I guess you were down here.”
“Yes, I was.”A little more explanation seems called for.“I’m on my way to see a client…butIstarted looking at the snow.Early for snow, isn’t it?”
She gets into her car, turns on the engine.The windshield wipers cut protractors into the fuzzy coating ofsnow.While Daniel watches her Volvo backing up, he thinks:She knocked on my door.
[4]
They reached the top of the small hill they’d been climbing, but the sight lines were no better than below.The only sky they could see was directly above them, gray, going black.
“What do you think?”said Daniel. “I think we’re lost,”Hampton said, shaking his head. “Next they’ll be sending a search party after us,”Daniel said.He noticed some-
thing on the ground and peered more closely at it.A dead coyote like a flat gray shadow.Sometimes at night, he and Kate could hear coyotes in the distance, a pack whipping themselves up into a frenzy of howls and yips, but this desiccated pelt, eyeless, tongueless, was the closest he had come to actually seeing one.He won-dered what had killed it.
“What do you have there?”Hampton asked. “The animal formerly known as coyote,”Daniel said. Breaking off a low, bare branch from a dead hemlock, Daniel poked the coyote’s
remains.Curious, Hampton stood next to him, frowning.A puff of colorless dust rose up.The world seemed inhospitable—but, of course, it wasn’t:they were just in the part of it that wasn’t made for them.Here, it was for deer, foxes, raccoons, birds and mice and hard-shelled insects, fish, toads, sloths, maggots.Hampton stepped back and covered his mouth and nose with his hand, as if breathing in the little puff that had arisen from the coyote would imperil him.Iris had often bemoaned her hus-band’s fastidiousness, his loathing of mess, his fear of germs.He had turned their
water heater up and now the water came out scalding, hot enough to kill most household bacteria.There were pump-and-squirt bottles of antibacterial soap next to every sink in the house;if Iris had a cold, Hampton slept in the guest room, and if Nelson had so much as a sniffle, Hampton would eschew kissing the little boy good night, he would literally shake hands with him instead and then, within min-utes, he’d be squirting that bright emerald-green soap into his palm, scrubbing up a lather, and then rinsing in steaming water.
Ferguson Richmond watches the rain from the front ofhis immense, crumbling house, reclined on an old cane chair, with his work boots propped up on the porch railing.He comes from a long line ofprivileged men and there is nothing he can do to obscure that fact, though it seems he is engaged in a perpetual project ofself-effacement.He is careless about his appearance.He barbers his own hair, ekes out twenty shaves from his disposable razor, and wears large black-framed glasses from the hardware store, which are held together with electrical tape.Today, he is dressed like a garage mechanic, in grease-stained khaki trousers and a shapeless green shirt that had once belonged to aTexaco attendant named Oscar.In a family ofoversized men and strapping women—large-headed people, with broad, bullying shoulders—Richmond is the runt.He is five feet eight inches, with skinny legs and delicate hands, and he is steadfastly uninterested in all sports and games.He neither boxes, nor climbs, nor kayaks, nor shoots;his passions are for strong coffee and old farm machinery.All the same, there is something confident and au-thoritative in his manner.His light blue eyes have that arrogant flicker that comes from a genetic memory ofluxury and power;they are rooms that had been emptied and scrubbed after a legendary party.