When you turned this way the world changed quite a bit in just one block of gritty sidewalk. Proceeding a second block in this direction would have brought them to an alien country, whose horrified inhabitants would boot a Skid Row bum right out of their taverns. But Feathers had no intention of going that far. One block was just right. The corner tavern on the borderland would let him in, if he had a companion who looked as if he could put down some money on the bar. And here the leeches were not likely to dare to follow.
In the doorway of the borderland tavern they were met by cooled air, the smells of stale beer and staler pizza. This atmosphere had a certain degree of class. It bore no noticeable traces of bad wine or old vomit. The people already in the bar, none of them with their clothes torn or their flies gaping, looked up coldly at Feathers when he entered. But he had judged correctly, they weren’t quite ready to throw him out on sight when he came in with someone better dressed.
“How about some food?” His soft-voiced benefactor, helping him get settled in a booth, was becoming solicitous. Maybe he was queer. It was a long, long time now since Feathers had felt the need to worry that anyone would approach him in that way. He doubted that was it.
The two of them sat facing each other in a dim plastic booth, and drinks, drinks, were on the way at last. The bar in this tavern had arranged on it the trimmings for serving food: paper napkins, mustard, salt and pepper, sharp pointed little plastic picks. A sign on the wall said SANDWICHES.
“I’m a reporter.”
“Like shit you are.”
“Oh?” Fierce insult appeared to have provoked no more than gentle amusement. “What am I, then?”
“How come you picked me to talk to? Buy drinks for?”
“There’s something about you. Something interesting.”
Wine was set before Feathers, a small portion of a wine-dark sea bounded in a glass. Plunging in shielded one from all else.
The coffee-colored hands on the other side of the narrow table cupped a clear glass, holding what could be gin and ice cubes. Or maybe it was vodka. “We could go somewhere else if you’d rather. I have a car not too far away. I know a party where you’d be welcome. They have a lot of drinks just sitting there waiting. You know what good wine is like?”
“Ah.”
A second glass of wine replaced the first, which had been drained. And now sandwiches were being carried to the table too.
“Won’t you eat something?”
On close inspection the plastic points turned out not to be honest simple toothpicks at all, but pink miniature swords. One of them had been skewering an olive in the black man’s drink. Good God. Feathers stared helpless, hypnotized. His host had eaten the olive and was holding the pink sword right against the clear liquid in the glass, sparking an explosion in Feathers’ brain of ancient memories…
… and present knock-out drops…
Oh God no. His reaching fingers could no longer find the wine.
FIVE
It was about three on a hot Friday afternoon when Simon Hill and Margie Hilbert arrived in Frenchman’s Bend in Simon’s five-year-old car. For Simon, the drive out from Chicago had also been a trip back into memory, back into time. It had been enjoyable in spots, but mainly—he wasn’t sure why—it had been disturbing.
“Frenchman’s Bend,” he said now, slowing in anticipation on the two-lane concrete highway, almost roofed by the arches of overhanging trees. “I bet they still don’t even have a population figure on the sign.”
Margie in the right front seat was looking past Simon and across the broad expanse of the Sauk, which was high for summer. She had been quietly admiring the scenery since they had crossed the river at Blackhawk, now almost twenty miles upstream behind them. “Si, you say you know these people who own this place we’re going to?”
“Yeah. Sort of. Actually we’re distant cousins. We’ve been out of touch.”
“Not only that, you don’t like them, do you?”
He grunted.
“I get the impression that you’re even out to get back at them for something.”
Simon didn’t answer.
“It’s just that if I’m going to wind up in the middle of something, I’d like to know what’s going on. We’re supposed to spend a whole weekend there.”
“I guess I wouldn’t count on doing that.” He kept expecting to see the recognizably final bend in the highway, and it kept being just a little farther on than he had thought. Now he glanced at Margie, who was still waiting for a real answer, and had to admit that she had a point. The trouble was, he didn’t know what answer would be the truth. “Well,” he said, “it’s a long story. Would you believe, I won’t know how I feel about these people until I see them again? Right now the feelings are not too good. But…”
“You were just a kid when you saw them last, huh? What kind of a fight did you have? Was it one of these family things about money?”
“No. My branch of the family was never in line for any of that anyway.” He drove for a little while in silence. “I was fifteen years old. Saul was maybe twelve. Vivian was about a year older than me, I guess. I had my first affair with her. She’s the Miss Littlewood that old Gregory mentioned. Actually…”
“Yeah?”
“Actually I’m not sure what role old Gregory played. I have some confused memories about him.” He glanced at Margie; she wasn’t understanding this; well, that was the point, he had never been able to sort it out himself.
Margie, practical as usual, was thinking ahead to other matters. “You think the old guy was just conning us about there being entertainment people in the group for the weekend?”
“I don’t know. I just don’t know.”
The last bend before Frenchman’s was here at last. The highway curved sharply, under graceful arches of tree limbs. On the right a hill rose up, too steep for farming or even grazing, heavily wooded; on the left, a gently sloping bank only a few yards wide fell to the broad surface of the Sauk. This part of the highway was threatened with flooding fairly often in the spring. Just ahead, the bank going down to the river widened somewhat, and a few old buildings came into view, still half concealed by the summer growth that lined both sides of the highway.
“This is it,” said Simon. “I was wrong about the population sign. They don’t even have one any more.” There was, at the moment, no other traffic in sight to worry about. He pulled left across the single oncoming lane and onto a clay-and-gravel shoulder that blended into a broad stub of road or driveway serving the three or four buildings that made up this side of the hamlet. A couple of other cars, unfamiliar to Simon, were parked here; no people were in sight. He braked to a gentle halt in the shade of a huge old elm, familiar once he saw it again, but till this moment forgotten. The elm was the biggest healthy specimen he could remember seeing anywhere, having somehow survived the Dutch disease that had all but exterminated its species in these parts a few decades back.
Like all the towns along this part of the river, Frenchman’s Bend straddled the highway. Four buildings, including sheds, on the side toward the river, maybe twice that many on the other. In his first look around at the place, Simon could not see that anything at all had changed in fifteen years.
He got out of the car, listening to cicadas drone, looking around some more. The stub of road that he had parked on continued to the edge of the low bluff on which the houses stood, then plunged down through a broad cut in the bluff to the shoreline just a few feet below. The bluffs along this side of the river were considerably lower than those lining the opposite bank, several hundred yards away. Over there the land rose abruptly from the shoreline well over a hundred feet, a height exaggerated by the tallness of the trees atop the bluffs; all that could be seen of the far shore was a continuous soft leafy mass.