Now the farmer was preening himself, about to deliver his bombshell. Stringy cords stood out in his neck; his bat ears went a deeper shade of red. "Well hell, I saw him, didn't I?" His mouth dropped comically, and he surveyed each of them in turn.
"Him," his wife said in ironic counterpoint behind him.
"Shit, woman, what else?" Scales thumped the table. "Get that coffee ready and stop interrupting." He turned back to the three men. "As big as me! Bigger! Starin' at me! Damnedest thing you ever saw!" Enjoying his moment, he spread his arms. "Right outside!
Just a little further than that away from me. How's them apples?"
"Did you recognize him?" Hardesty asked.
"Didn't see him that well. Now I'll tell you how it was." He was moving around the kitchen, unable to contain himself, and Ricky was reminded of an old perception, that "Our Vergil" wrote poetry because he was too volatile to believe he was not capable of it. "I was in here last night, late. Couldn't sleep, never could."
"Never could," echoed his wife.
Screeches, thumps came from overhead. "Forget the coffee and get on upstairs, straighten 'em out," Scales said. He paused while she left the room. Soon another voice joined the cacophony above; then the noises ceased.
"Like I said. I was in here, readin' through a couple-two-three equipment and seed catalogues. Then! I hears something from out near the barn. Prowler! Damn! I jumps up and looks out the window. Seen it was snowin'. Uh oh, work to do tomorrow, I says to myself. Then I seen him. By the barn. Well, between the barn and the house."
"What did he look like?" Hardesty said, still not taking notes.
"Couldn't tell! Too dark!" Now his voice had soared from alto to soprano. "Just saw him there, starin'!"
"You saw him in the dark?" Sears asked in a bored voice. "Were your yard lights on?"
"Mr. Lawyer, you gotta be kidding, with electric bills the way they are. No, but I saw him and I knew he was big."
"Now, how did you know that, Elmer?" asked Hardesty. Mrs. Scales was coming down the uncarpeted stairs-thump thump thump, hard shoes hitting the wooden risers. Ricky sneezed. A child began to whistle, and abruptly ceased as the footsteps paused.
"Because I saw his eyes! Didn't I? Just starin' out at me! About six feet above the ground."
"You just saw his eyes?" asked Hardesty, incredulous.
"What the hell did this guy's eyes do, Elmer, shine in the dark?"
"You said it," Elmer replied.
Ricky jerked his head to look at Elmer, who regarded them all with evident satisfaction, and then without meaning to, looked across the table at Sears. He had gone tense and immobile at Hardesty's last question, trying to let nothing show on his face, and on Sears's round face he saw the same intention. Sears too. It means something to him too.
"Now I expect you to get him, Walt, and you two lawyers of mine to sue his ass from here to summer," Elmer said conclusively. "Excuse my language, honey." His wife was coming into the little kitchen again, and she nodded at his apology, acknowledging its rectitude by tapping it with her chin as it went by, before taking the percolator off the burner.
"Did you see anything last night, Mrs. Scales?" Hardesty asked.
Ricky saw a similar recognition in Sears's eyes and knew that he had given himself away.
"All I saw was a scared husband," she said. "I suppose that's the part he left out."
Elmer cleared his throat; his Adam's apple bobbed. "Well. It looked funny."
"Yes," Sears said. "I think we know all we need to know. Now if you'll excuse us, Mr. Hawthorne and I must be getting back to town."
"You'll drink your coffee first, Mr. James," said Mrs. Scales, putting a steaming plastic cup down before him on the tabletop. "If you're going to sue some monster's ass from here to summer you'll need your strength."
Ricky forced himself to smile, but Walt Hardesty guffawed.
Outside, Hardesty, back in the protective coloration of his Texas Ranger outfit, bent over to speak softly through the three-inch crack Sears had opened in the window. "Are you two going back into town? Could we meet somewhere to have a word or two?"
"Is it important?"
"Might be, might not. I'd like to talk to you, though."
"Right We'll go straight to your office."
Hardesty's gloved hand went to his chin and caressed it. "I'd rather not talk about this in front of the other boys."
Ricky sat with his hands on the wheel, his alert face turned to Hardesty, but his mind held only one thought: Its starting. Its starting and we don't even know what it is.
"What do you suggest, Walt?" asked Sears.
"I suggest a sub rosa stop someplace where we can have a quiet talk. Ah, do you know Humphrey's Place, just inside the town limits on the Seven Mile Road?"
"I believe I've seen it."
"I sorta use their back room as an office when I've got confidential business. What say we meet there?"
"If you insist," Sears said, not bothering to consult Ricky.
They followed Hardesty's car back to town, going a little faster than they had on the way out. The recognition between them-that each knew the frightening thing Elmer Scales had seen-made speech impossible. When Sears finally spoke, it was on an apparently neutral topic. "Hardesty's an incompetent fool. 'Confidential business.' His only confidential business is with a bottle of Jim Beam."
"Well, now we know what he does in the afternoons." Ricky turned off the highway onto the Seven Mile Road. The tavern, the only building in sight, was a gray collection of angles and points two hundred yards down on the right.
"Indeed. He blots up free liquor in Humphrey Stalladge's back room. He'd be better off in a shoe factory in Endicott."
"What do you think this conversation will be about?"
"We'll know all too soon. Here's our rendezvous."
Hardesty was already standing beside his car in the big, now nearly empty parking lot. Humphrey's Place, in fact no more than an ordinary roadside tavern, had a long peaked and gabled facade with two large black windows: in one of these neon spelled out its name; in the other Utica Club flashed on and off. Ricky pulled in beside the sheriff's car, and the two lawyers got out into the cold wind.
"Just follow me," Hardesty said on a rising curve of intonation, his voice inflated with false bonhomie. After looking at one another with shared discomfort, they went up the concrete steps after him. Ricky sneezed twice, hard, the moment he was inside the tavern.
Omar Norris, one of the town's small population of full-time drinkers, was seated on a stool at the bar, looking at them in amazement; plump Humphrey Stalladge moved between the booths, dusting ashtrays. "Walt!" he called, and then nodded at Ricky and Sears. Hardesty's bearing had changed: within the bar, he was taller, more seigniorial, and his physical attitude to the two older men behind him somehow suggested that they had come to the place for his advice. Then Stalladge glanced more closely at Ricky and said, "Mr. Hawthorne, isn't it?" and smiled and said, "Well," and Ricky knew that Stella had been in here at one time or another.
"Back room okay?" Hardesty asked.
"Always is, for you." Stalladge waved toward a door marked Private, tucked in a corner beside the long bar, and watched the three men across the dusty floor. Omar Norris, still astonished, watched them, Hardesty striding like a G-man, Ricky conspicuous only in his sober neatness, Sears an imposing presence similar to (it only now came to Ricky) Orson Welles. "You're in good company today, Walt," Stalladge called behind their backs, and Sears made one of his disgusted noises deep in his throat-as much at that as at the negligent wave of his gloved hand with which Hardesty acknowledged the remark. Hardesty, princely, opened the door.