But evidence of what? I asked myself. How do I know a crime’s been committed? Maybe nothing unusual or disastrous had happened to anyone—not to Dora, not to A., not to Chub Blount, not even to me—and maybe the chief and his assistant had not even been at A.’s house in the first place but had been out on Blue Job Road this snowy morning on some other and wholly unrelated police business. Quickly, I ran down the bits of evidence — the three bulletholes in the car window, the strange circumstances of the car’s presence and A.’s absence, with all the doors of the house locked, the gate closed, and even though yesterday had been a Sunday, week’s end, the absence of any freshly tossed out trash at the edge of the field in front. Yes, it’s true, I thought. It’s true. The evidence points with equal force to numerous conclusions, and many of the conclusions do not constitute crimes or disaster or even anything especially unusual whether in A.’s life or Dora’s or Chub’s, or my own. As I slowed the car to make the turn at the church onto Blue Job Road, I finally admitted to myself that, yes, I may have made the whole thing up. I may have imagined everything.
But then, as soon as I was on Blue Job Road, I started to laugh at myself, not out loud, but with a low, ironic giggle. An hour before I had been wondering seriously if the whole thing, this very thing I was now afraid I had imagined, had been engineered by A. I felt light-headed, almost giddy. This was self-mockery taken to the edge of hysteria.
By then the snow had covered the road sufficiently to obliterate any trace of its surface, and I was only able to keep to it by following the high banks of old, ice-hard snow on either side. The windshield wipers clacked back and forth, cutting a pair of half-moons for me to peer through. In a few seconds I entered the short stretch of the road where the conifers grow to the very edge of the road, their branches interlacing between them and across the road above me, making a rough, dark tunnel and it seemed suddenly that it was no longer snowing and a great arching space had opened around me. The woods here, most Scotch pine and dark spruce, grew scruffily into the shaggy wall of an outdoor cathedral, and I remembered then that it was there, just yesterday afternoon, that I had looked hopefully for the figure of Rochelle, as if she were a sister or daughter whose recent death I still mourned and had not yet accepted as real, whose familiar form and hair and green, hooded loden coat my eyes still habitually searched for.
Then, as quickly, I was out of the wood and into the snowstorm again, peering anxiously through half-moons, aiming the car rather than driving it, for the road was slightly slippery under my tires. I passed several battered house trailers and tarpaper-covered shacks, the homes of A.’s neighbors, barely glimpsing them through the falling snow, noticing only that, covered with the layer of fresh snow, the buildings and the cluttered yards looked cleaner, more orderly, as if the snow could tend to them more capably, more energetically, than could the inhabitants.
A few seconds more, and I slowed the car and turned onto the lane that led to A.’s house. I glanced over at the large, hummocky field in front of the house and saw that it, too, had been transformed by the fastidious care of the falling snow, had been made over to look more like a natural, cleared meadow in winter than an open dump, a private trash receptacle.
When I drew up to the gate and prepared to stop so that I could get out and open it, I saw, with surprise, that the gate was wide open already. Hadn’t I remembered to close it the day before? It was enough of a habit that I didn’t have to think consciously of it in order to close it after passing through, therefore I couldn’t be sure. Was this “evidence” of anything — that the gate, normally closed, was now invitingly wide open? I looked up the long driveway to the house and garage. Everything was as I had seen it yesterday afternoon — A.’s Chrysler parked facing the closed garage door, the house darkened and apparently empty, the large expanse of smooth, freshly whitened yard encircling the house from the fence down in front to the woods in back, and beyond those woods, the rising shape of the mountain. No, except for the new pelt of snow and the open gate, everything was the same. Everything.
Very slowly, the snow creaking under my tires, I drove up to A.’s car and parked directly behind it. Then I got out of my car and walked around to the window at the driver’s side of the Chrysler. There they were, the three bulletholes connected by a network of tiny cracks, like spider webs. I touched each of the holes with my finger. One of them unexpectedly crumbled at the edges from the pressure, and my finger poked into the cold interior space of the car, startling me. Frightened by something nameless, I quickly withdrew my finger and nervously yanked on my gloves.
It was totally silent, windless, the snow falling straight down, as if being drawn to the ground by the ground itself in some guilty need to hide itself. I left the car and checked the garage door, which was locked. Then I crossed the yard to the front door, determined that it was locked, went up to the side porch and yanked on that door too. Leaning close to the glass to block out my reflection with my shadow, I peered into the kitchen. It was dark inside, but when my eyes had grown used to the darkness, I could see the outlines of the stove, sink, refrigerator, and the small, wooden table and single stool A. had built to replace the Formica-topped table and chairs he had once owned with Dora and that now lay beneath a foot or more of old snow in the field in front, the chromium legs rusting, padding from the seats spilling from rips torn one afternoon last April by high-powered rifle slugs. I could see the calendar on the wall near the telephone. Below the four-color photograph of an oil burner was the sheet for the month of February, for the year 1975—just as it should be. Yet somehow I was surprised. Somehow I had expected to see some other year, some other month. The house seemed to have been deserted long, long ago.
Slowly, I stepped down from the porch and took a few steps into the yard. The only sound was the constant rattle of my own voice inside my own head. The snow was still softly falling, and I couldn’t see clearly more than a few feet in front of me. There was nothing left for me to check, I thought, except the footprints, and that was quite impossible now. Everything was buried under several inches of soft, fresh snow, so that the only footprints I could see were my own. They dribbled along behind me, tiny, crumbling craters slowly filling with new snow. I knew that in a few minutes even these, my own tracks, would disappear. And that would be the end of the “evidence.” Any further pursuit of A. would have to be based solely on abstract reasoning, speculation, empty theory. Or else I simply would have to guess at his whereabouts, randomly placing him here and there, then rushing to seek him here and there, and if he was not to be found at either place, to guess again. I did not want that. No man wants to believe that his life has finally gotten so out of his control that he either must theorize about it or else be forced to guess at its nature. He’d rather believe in magic, fetish objects, totems, dreams. This is how a real life becomes a fiction, I thought, dismayed.
Suddenly, as if remembering a scene from a dream, I remembered driving through the cathedral-like woods on my way over this morning and how, for a few hundred yards, where the branches of the trees wove themselves together overhead, the snow had seemed almost not to be falling. If there had been old tracks on that ground, I thought, footprints laid down beside the road yesterday or the day before, anytime back to the last heavy snowfall, then they would still be visible. Like the faces of type in a printer’s matrix, they could be returned to after the type itself had been destroyed and read again. With a matrix, yesterday’s or last week’s newspaper could as well be today’s or tomorrow’s.