“What’s impossible, Miles? Maybe I did it. Maybe you did, or Duane. Paul’s all right as long as he stays inside and keeps out of trouble.” He pushed himself off the couch and went into the kitchen. I heard an explosive bubbling sound and realized that he was gargling. When he came back into the living room his blue uniform shirt was unbuttoned, revealing a sleeveless undershirt straining over his immense belly. “You want some sleep, Miles. Take care you don’t run off the road on your way home. It was a nice evening. We know each other better. Now scat.”
Through the huge magnifying lenses, Tuta Sunderson’s eyes looked like goggling fish. Sulky, she forced her hands into the pockets of her gray cardigan. For the three days following my late-night conversation with Polar Bears, she had sullenly arrived every morning, noisily tramped around the kitchen, wordlessly cooked my breakfast, and then busied herself cleaning the kitchen and the bathroom while I experimented with the placement of the furniture. The old bamboo and fabric couch went against the far wall, to the left of the small shelves. The glass-fronted case (I remembered it holding Bibles and novels by Lloyd C. Douglas) faced into the room from the short wall by the porch door; the only thing resembling an easy chair sat on the other side of that door; but the other chairs and small tables seemed too numerous, impossible to place — a spindly-legged table with a magazine rack? A cane-backed chair? I was not sure I could even remember them in the room, much less where they had been situated. Perhaps a half dozen other small articles of furniture presented the same problem. Tuta Sunderson could not help.
“It wasn’t always the same way. There is no right way.”
“Just think. Try to remember.”
“I think that little table there went sort of alongside that couch.” She was humoring me, half-reluctantly.
“Here?” I moved it under the shelves.
“No. Out more.”
I pulled it forward.
“If I was Duane, I’d have your head examined. He spent pretty near his whole rebate on that nice furniture. When he told my boy about it, Red went down and got some real nice bargains for me, too.”
“Duane can move this stuff back downstairs when I leave. That table doesn’t look right.”
“Looks good enough to me.”
“Because you don’t understand.”
“I reckon there’s lots I don’t understand. You’ll never get your writing done if you do this all day long.”
“Why don’t you change my sheets or something? If you can’t help me, at least you could get out of my way.”
Her face seemed to fill with water, like a sack.
“I reckon you left all your good manners in New York, Miles.” With that, she visibly gave up on me for the moment, and turned toward the window. “How long before that little car of yours gonna be ready from the filling station?”
“I’ll try them in a few days.”
“Then will you be leaving the valley?” She cocked her head, watching something on the road.
“No. Polar Bears wants me to stay. He must be bored with his usual company.”
“You and Galen pretty close?”
“We’re like brothers.”
“He never invited anyone to his house before. Galen keeps himself to himself. He’s a smart man. Guess you had a ride in his police car. Folks in Arden told Red.”
I moved a chair to a spot beside the oil heater, then moved it nearer the bedroom door. “You seem to have cars on the brain today.”
“Maybe because I just saw someone stop and put something in your mailbox. Not the mailman, It was a different car. Why don’t you go out there where it’s warm and see what you got?”
“Now you tell me,” I said, and went toward the porch. I stepped outside into the sunlight. For the past two days, Tuta Sanderson had taken to wearing a sweater while she worked, in part to irritate me with the anomaly of a cardigan in hot summer weather, in part because the farmhouse was genuinely cold and damp: it was as if a breeze came slicing down from the woods to pitch camp in the house. Behind me I could hear her saying, just loudly enough for me to hear, “Some more of your fan mail.”
Which, in the event, was what it turned out to be: fan mail. It was a single sheet of cheap lined paper torn from a school exercise book, and printed on it was BASTERD YOURE IN OUR SIGHTS. Yes, a familiar image from the movies; I could almost feel the cross-hairs centering on my chest. I looked down the road, saw the nothing I expected to see, and then leaned forward with my arms on the mailbox, making my breathing regular. Twice in the past two days I had received silent telephone calls, bringing me down from my new project to a noise of muffled breathing on which I could smell onions, cheese, beer. Tuta Sunderson said people all talk, and I could guess that there were rumors of the Polish girl’s disappearance. Tuta’s attitude itself, more abrasive since my “suicide attempt,” showed that she had attended to these whispers: she had just thrown back to me my remark about Red’s manners.
As I walked back toward the farmhouse I could see her mooning at me through the window. I slammed the porch door, and she scuttled over to the cupboards and pretended to dust the shelves.
“I don’t suppose you recognized the car?”
Her flabby upper arms wobbled; her rump bobbed in sympathetic motion. “It wasn’t from the valley. I know all the cars hereabouts.” She peeked at me over her fat shoulder, dying to know what I had found in the mailbox.
“What color was it?”
“It was all dust. I couldn’t see.”
“You know, Mrs. Sunderson,” I said, putting it very slowly so she would not miss a word, “if it was your son or any of his friends that came in here that night and turned on the gas, they were attempting murder. The law takes a hard line on that sort of thing.”
Furious, baffled, she turned around. “My boy’s no sneak!”
“Is that what you’d call it?”
She whirled around again and began to dust the dishes so vigorously that they rattled. After a moment she permitted herself to speak, though not to face me. “People say something else happened. They say Galen Hovre is going to get him soon. They say he sits down there in his office knowing a lot more than he tells.” Then another wall-eyed peek at me. “And they say Paul Kant is starving himself in his mother’s house. So if it happens again people will know he was inside and didn’t do it.”
“What a field day they’re having,” I said. “What fun they’re all having. I envy them.”
She shook her head maddeningly, and I would gladly have gone on in that vein, but the telephone rang. She glanced at it and then at me, telling me she would not answer it.
I put the sheet of paper down on the table and picked up the receiver. “Hello.” Silence, breathing, the smells of onions and beer. I do not know if these were truly the odors of my caller, or if they were only those I expected from someone who made anonymous telephone calls. Tuta Sunderson pounced on the sheet of paper.
“You miserable boor,” I said into the mouthpiece. “You have pigshit where you should have an imagination.”
My caller hung up; I laughed at that and at the expression on Tuta Sunderson’s face. She put down the misspelled note. She was shocked. I laughed again, tasting something black and sour at the back of my throat.
When I heard the porch door slam I waited until I saw her toiling up the road, the lumpy cardigan over one arm and the handbag jigging on its strap. After a long while she moved out of the frame of vision the window gave me, struggling in the sunlight like a white beetle. I put down my pencil and closed the journal. Standing on the cool porch, I looked up toward the woods — all was still, as if life stopped when the sun was so high. Sound told me that it did not: out of sight down the road, Duane’s tractor put-putted from the far field, birds said things to one another. I went down the rutted drive, crossed the road, and jumped the ditch,