Wonder is a sudden surprise of the soul which makes it tend to consider attentively those objects which seem to it rare and extraordinary.
The room does not offer much else; he finds a cigar box packed with silver dollars and a very ugly pair of gold cufflinks tucked in the back of a file cabinet. This he takes along with a brand-new eraser — only because of its newness. That night he sleeps heavily, as if drugged, the coin beneath his pillow.
When he awakes his head chimes; yes, he awakens with a “chiming in the belfry,” as he thinks of it, attempting to make light. He is pretty certain no one else walks around submerged as he is in such a clatter. When he enters the kitchen he finds a note; Billy has a dinner plan involving a plateau de fromages, a thing he recalls from frequent summer visits to France back when he was married—such a mistake that was! — to a woman who did not travel well, who could not manage her wine, and who loathed cheese. Once, served lamb kidney, she shrieked! A woman who could not stomach the sound of foreign languages, but who had been beautiful, built like a boy with the thighs of a boy and the sweetest bottom! All this Billy had revealed the night previous as once again they sat together on the screen porch, the crickets sounding all around them, the locusts and the occasional owl, the air fragrant with the smells of freshly mowed grass and carried by the soft breeze of a deepening spring. The screen porch was divine, waiting for Charter as he wished, his eyes wandering his domain. With the sweetest bottom. . but when she laughed, oh. . when she laughed! I came to hear the mule, the jackal, the raven. .
Billy. Already Charter cares for Billy. In the first days he thought of him as the “Old Boy,” the “Old Fag,” but now it’s Billy, wistful, generous, trusting (!), clueless (thank god!), dependable — already he knows this — Billy. The note—Off on a cheese run! — left on the counter.
Charter makes himself toast. His head clear, his heart calm. He is focused yet somehow relaxed; there is a new ease to his body, his entire manner. Billy has noticed this and is pleased to see Charter fits in his clothes, moves with a certain grace. He has provided Charter with shirts, beautiful shirts from years before when, full of hope, he took his wife to Normandy, the Val de Loire. They have been carefully washed, ironed, and folded by his vanished wife. A new pair of khakis has shown up in a locker in the gym and Charter has spent some of his pilfered cash on undershirts and socks. A bottle of Old Spice.
He has been thinking that he should ask Goldie’s Rod how to do card tricks. He must do a better job entertaining his host tonight. Billy, a linguist with a special fascination for Romance languages, French above all. A language! Charter considers. Plucked as it were from the birds. Not only their voices, but their tracks in wet sand, the shapes of their beaks, the markings on their bellies and backs; a language painted on bark that looks like bird tracks (the birth of cuneiform? The tracks of bird feet on the wet mud by the riverside?); a people who cry out to one another like herons. . yes! He must make this island he is inventing really shine. He climbs the stairs to his study.
Asthma. Asthma in the glass! A grain of sugar in his eye. Today she is leaping around like a colt from the floor to her bed, bed to floor, floor to bed, then dashing through the house. Her feet are bare and her spare cotton dress billows like petals around her small frame. When he hears the front door slam he gets up to find and follow her. But when he hits the Circle she is simply in the front yard beside the beetle log, poking at it with a twig.
“So where are they, Brightfellow?” she asks.
“They live eventful lives.”
“They’re beetles, Brightfellow. They live in a log!”
As she speaks, Charter relishes the proximity to her skin, her little ears, her impossible eyelashes, a vague smell of piss, of violets. He thinks she is oblivious to her beauty, which is like a flame. He thinks, This is what angers Blackie. This flame. He says:
“There’s a labyrinth under that log.”
“No there isn’t.”
“There’s a treasure at its farthest end.” She looks up at him eagerly, expecting a story.
“Every lost ring, every lost earring, every lost button, each and every time a stone falls from Blackie’s sapphire brooch—”
“How do you know—”
“Because I see her wearing it sometimes when she walks over to Goldie’s for cocktails.”
Asthma snorts.
“Every time a pearl necklace comes undone and a pearl rolls under the piano—”
“They find it!”
“They find it and carry it between their teeth to their Queen.”
“Brightfellow.” Asthma furrows her brow and, folding her arms across her chest, says: “Beetles don’t have teeth. And she’s not a queen. She’s a Papesse. Don’t you remember anything?”
“A Papesse. Exactly. She sits in her chamber bedded down in one of your lost mittens, surrounded by all the things that we have lost.”
“How boring is that?”
“That’s not the end of it.” Asthma frowns and looks at him with a certain ferocity. She has a restless mind, and sometimes he wonders if he has met his match. “She craves far better,” he tells her. Asthma nods and moves closer. He notices how the sweet bones of her fingers come together as she hugs her knees.
“There’s a beetle. A green one. Named ‘The Finder.’”
“Because finders keepers!” Asthma approves. “He’s the one who finds this stuff!”
“Yes. He uses it for barter. The Papesse has no interest in Blackie’s fake sapphires.”
“They’re not fake!”
Charter raises an eyebrow knowingly and looks at her with amusement.
“How do you know they are FAKE?”
“Hush,” he says. “Asthma — I have my ways.” He continues: “The Papesse has no interest in silver dollars or wedding rings inscribed with the word Forever.”
“Beetles can’t read. But what does she want? Tell me.” She pokes Charter hard in the thigh with her finger. “Come on, Brightfellow.”
“She wants a certain key.”
But before he can say more, Goldie appears, wheeling toward them in platinum sandals, Pea Pod in tow, and they are formally introduced (Asthma’s words), and Asthma is being told to play with Pea Pod in her room for an hour or so because Goldie simply must get to town.
“I’ll look after them,” he says. “I’ll take them birding.” And he flashes his binoculars.
His pulse quickens as the three of them set off together into the woods behind Asthma’s house and into the little cemetery.
“Look, Brightfellow!” Asthma leads him to a spot behind a familiar pink granite gravestone, one that has in the past provided him many long hours of concealment. “I buried a mole here. Don’t tell Blackie. She says it’s. . I’m. . macabre.” Turning, she points to an upstairs window. “I can see the exact spot where I buried it from my bedroom. It had fangs!” Charter shudders. They are standing just a foot away from one of his best vantage points in the gravestone’s shadow.
And then she takes his hand.
“Brightfellow,” she says. “Tell us about the key.”
“I don’t want to hear about a silly old key!” Pea Pod whines. He notices how her eyes don’t quite match up, her expression somehow skewed, but he cannot put his finger on what it is that troubles him. Only eight years old, he thinks, and the child is already coming undone at the seams.