I nodded.
“I’ll be hearing from you, Miles. I’ll be hearing from you. We’re both gonna get what we want.”
After I soaked for an hour in a hot bath, letting the pain seep away into the steam, I sat upstairs and wrote for several hours — until I saw that it had begun to get dark. I heard Duane shouting at his daughter. His voice rose and fell, monotonously, angrily, insisting on some inaudible point. Both Duane’s voice and the oncoming of dark made it impossible to work any longer. To spend another night in the farmhouse was almost impossible: I could still see her, sitting in the chair at the foot of my bed, looking blankly, even dully, at me, as if what I were seeing were only a waxen model of her face and body, a shell a millimeter thick behind which lay spinning stars and gases. I put down the pencil, grabbed a jacket from my plundered closet and went downstairs and outside.
The night was beginning. The dark shapes of clouds drifted beneath an immense sky. Above them hung a moon nearly washed of color. A single arrow of cool breeze seemed to come straight toward the house from high in the black woods. I shuddered, and climbed into the battered Volkswagen.
At first I thought of simply driving around the county roads until I was too tired to go further and then sleep the rest of the night in the car; then I thought I might go to Freebo’s and speed oblivion by purchasing it. Oblivion could scarcely cost more than ten dollars, and it was the best buy in Arden. I rattled onto 93, and turned the car toward town. But what sort of reception could I expect in Freebo’s? By this time, everybody would know about the medical examiner’s report. I would be a ghastly pariah. Or an inhuman thing to be hunted down. At that point the car went dead. I cursed Hank Speltz. I did not even begin to have the mechanical competence to fix whatever the boy had done. I pictured driving back to New York at a steady rate of thirty-five miles an hour. I’d need another mechanic, which meant that I would have to commit most of the money remaining in my account. Then I thought of the waxen face concealing stars and gases, and knew that I would be lucky ever to get back to New York.
That night I made an appeal to compassion, a second appeal to violence.
Finally I got the car started again.
As I sped down one of the Arden back streets I saw a familiar shape passing a lighted picture window, and I cut over to the curb and jumped out of the car before the motor was dead. I ran on the black asphalt in the middle of the road and crossed his lawn. I pressed Bertilsson’s bell.
When he opened his door I saw surprise alter his features. His face was as much a mask as hers. He ignored his wife’s calls of “Who is it? Who is it?” behind him.
“Well,” he said, grinning at me. “Come for my blessing? Or did you have something to confess?”
“I want you to take me in. I want you to protect me.”
His wife’s face appeared over his shoulder, at some hidden opening in their house, a corner or a door. She began to march forward.
“We’ve heard the distressing details of the Michalski girl’s death,” he said. “You have a nice sense of humor, Miles, coming here.”
I said, “Please take me in. I need your help.”
“I rather think my help is reserved for those who know how to use it.”
“I’m in danger. In danger of my life.”
His wife’s face glared at me now from over his shoulder. “What does he want? Tell him to go away.”
“I rather think he’s going to ask to be put up for the night.”
“Don’t you have a duty?” I asked.
“I have a duty to all Christians,” he said. “You are not a Christian. You are an abomination.”
“Tell him to go away.”
“I’m begging you.”
Mrs. Bertilsson’s head jerked upward, her face cold and hard. “You were too sick to take our advice when we saw you in town, and we’re under no obligation to help you now. Are you asking us to let you stay here?”
“Just for a night.”
“Do you think I could sleep with you in my house? Close the door, Elmer.”
“Wait—”
“An abomination.” He slammed the door. A second later I saw the drapes meeting; in the middle of the window.
Helpless. Helpless to help, helpless to be helped. This is the story of a man who couldn’t get arrested.
I drove to Main and stopped the car in the middle of the empty street. I honked the horn once, then twice. For a moment I rested my forehead on the rim of the steering wheel. Then I opened the door. I could hear the buzz of a neon sign, the momentary beating of wings far overhead. I stood beside the car. Nothing around me moved, nothing demonstrated life. All of the shops were dark; on either side of the street, cars pointed their noses at the curb like sleeping cattle. I shouted. Not even an echo answered. Even the two bars seemed deserted, although illuminated beer signs sparkled in their windows. I walked down the middle of the street toward Freebo’s. I felt drifting blue gather around me.
A stone the size of a potato was caught in the grid of a drain by the curbside. It might have been one they had thrown at me. I tugged it out and hefted it in my hand. Then I hurled it at Freebo’s long rectangular window. I remembered throwing glasses at the wall of my apartment, back in the passionate days of my marriage. There was an appalling noise, and glass shivered down onto the sidewalk.
And then everything was as it had been. I was still on the empty street; the shops were still light; no one was shouting, no one was running toward me. The only noise was the buzzing of the sign. I owed Freebo about fifty dollars, but I would never be able to pay him. I could smell dust and grass, the odors blown in on the wind from the fields. I imagined men inside the bar, backed away from the windows, holding their breath until I left. Inside with the scarred tables and the jukebox and the flashing beer signs, all waiting for me to leave. The last of the last chances.
On the morning of the twenty-first I woke up in the back seat of the car. I had been permitted to survive the night. Shouts, angry yells from Duane’s house up the path. His problems with his daughter seemed terrifically remote, someone’s else’s problem in someone else’s world. I leaned over the carseat and pulled the door release, pushed the seat forward, and got out. My back ached; I had a sharp, persistent pain behind my eyes. When I looked at my watch I saw that it was thirteen hours to dark: I would not run from it. I could not. The day, my last, was hot and cloudless. Sixty feet away, the chestnut mare leaned its head over the fence of the side field and regarded me with silky eyes. The air was very still, A big horsefly, greenly iridescent, began to bustle across the top of the car, concentrating on the bird droppings. Everything about me seemed a part of Alison’s coming, clues, sections of a puzzle which would lock into place before midnight.
I thought: if I get back into this car and try to drive off, she will stop me. Leaves and branches would block the windshield, vines would trap the accelerator. My visual sense of this was too powerful — for an instant I saw the homely interior of the VW choked with a struggling profusion of foliage, and I gagged on the spermy odor of sap — and I snatched my hand away from the top of the car.
I did not see how I could endure the tension of the intervening hours. Where would I be when she came?
With the desperate foolhardiness of a soldier who knows that the battle will come whether or not he is prepared for it, I decided what I would do at nightfall. Really, there was only one place for me to be when it happened. I had waited twenty years for it, and I knew where I would go to await the final moment, where I had to go, had to be when the noise of rushing wind came and the woods opened to release her for my own violent release. There were no more last chances.