He balanced the ladder and climbed it with painstaking care, fingertips almost prehensile against the brick, a dizzy fear of heights knotted in the pit of his stomach, freshets of nervous perspiration starting from seemingly every pore.
The top. His breath whistling in his throat, he locked his hands over the lip of the chimney, feeling a heady rush of relief in a world of intangibles. Here was something a man could cling to. A rock in all this tumult. He shifted his weight, leant out over space, reaching with his right hand for the antenna, his left clinging to the top of the chimney. Then the century-old mortar gave and the brick came away in his hand, the ladder kicking out beneath him, Binder hitting the roof hard and fighting to keep consciousness, everything a dervish of movement washed in red haze. Hitting the slate on his back then and rolling, fingers clawing for purchase at the very air, grasping the antenna wire desperately and feeling it tauten momentarily and come away from the antenna with a rush of relief in his hands and his descent accelerate, heard the antenna crash to the roof somewhere above him, the elements skirting against the roof. He was grasping at the slate, tearing at it with his nails, after what seemed like hours slowing his descent and ending near the eave, every muscle of his body taut and the fingers of both hands hooked over the rough edges of a tier of slate. His head and his fingertips hurt. The world looked filtered through a red miasma of fear and anger at his own stupidity. He could feel blood soaking through the hair on his right temple, see it trickle down the index and second finger on his left hand.
David? She was calling him from somewhere below him, out of sight beneath the eaves.
He lay with his face against the roof, unmindful of the hot slate burning his cheek.
David. David.
He closed his eyes. What?
Something happened to the picture, she said.
No shit, Binder said to himself. He didn’t say anything aloud.
The TV was showing a fairly plain picture then it all went away and there was nothing but snow. It’s not even talking.
Did it show me going ass over kneecaps off a ladder before it all went away? he asked her.
What?
Nothing.
Are you all right, David?
Yes. I’m all right.
He guessed he was. He got up slowly, still holding on with his hands. The world turned like a stone-drunk carousel. He looked at his fingertips. The nails were bleeding. He felt for a handkerchief but didn’t have one, remembered tossing the shirt off the roof. He wiped the blood off his temple with his forearm, a slick smear of bright scarlet.
He ascended the roof once more, unwired the antenna pole, and knotted the lead wire around the leg of the antenna. He began to pay out wire, lowering the antenna toward the eave of the roof.
Get out of the way, Corrie. I’m lowering it down.
What?
Just get out of the way.
The antenna tipped over the side. He braced his knees against the ridge of the roof to absorb the onset of gravity, let the wire slide through his palms until he felt the antenna settle onto solid ground. He threw the wire and it slithered away, vaguely serpentine, and vanished. He wiped the blood out of his eyes again and sat for a moment breathing hard, trying to get his bearings. He felt vague and dislocated. He hungered for the normality of fifteen minutes ago with an urgency that bordered on panic.
Naked to the waist with a white cloth tied around his longish hair, he looked vaguely like a refugee from the sixties, aging flower child disenfranchised and purposeless in 1980. He climbed the steep embankment the house seemed shored up against and through the sedge toward a flat knoll with the antenna balanced across a shoulder, reeling out line as he went.
She watched from the back porch, fretfully solicitous. A touch of concern in her voice when she called. David, it doesn’t matter about the TV, really, can’t you just let it go?
No, he said. If you want to see The Tonight Show then you’ll damn well see it. Just keep the wire unreeling.
He followed a rockchoked red gully, looking over the rim of the hot metallic sky, past the worn, faded timber of the sedge. He clambered out of the gully, hoping the reel of wire he’d bought would be enough, skirting last year’s cornfield. Binder wondered vaguely who had tended it, guessed the land had been rented on shares. Yet it might have been years old. The stalks were tilted and bleached to a delicate silvergray, seemed composed of some material of awesome complexity. The thin, paperlike blades hung sere and still in the windless day.
He leaned the antenna pole against a shelf of limestone protruding from the red clay and stepped up, then leapt involuntarily backward, suddenly aware of swift movement, coppercolored and nearliquid. A snake big as his forearm flowed across the smooth limestone, its skin rippling. The snake turned, halfcoiled, and for a moment Binder was staring into its deadlooking eyes, the head flattened and poised.
He looked about for a weapon, a rock small enough to throw. Go on, goddamn you, he said. I didn’t set out to kill you. You never did anything to me. The snake watched him hypnotically, eyes like shards chipped off black glass, old and evil and implacable. He had a momentary vision of Corrie’s tanned leg striding through the sedge, a movement too swift for the eye to follow, twin drops of scarlet beading on her calf. He slowly took up the aluminum antenna pole, smashed the end of it onto the snake’s head, its four-foot length instantaneously constricting into a writhing mass of flesh, convulsing in silent agony.
He raised the pole. The snake’s mouth was open, the jaws unhinged, the fangs delicate hypodermics like sharp-curved fish bones. He lowered it deliberately, smeared the snake’s head across the stone. He leant, watching the snake for movement, the pole poised, pale pinkish stains on the white rock. The snake was very still.
He felt watched. He turned. Some faint noise, perhaps a whisper of wind in the dry cornstalks. A black dog watched him stoically from the edge of the cornfield. An enormous dog, high-shouldered and lean, standing cold and still as ice. He felt lost in the raw beast. The oversized, erect ears looked like a photograph he’d seen of jackals or wild African hunting dogs, the muzzle long and snoutlike, slightly open. He could see quite clearly the row of teeth and the red-looking tongue bisected dark by a shadow. Get, he told it uncertainly. Get the fuck away from here. Nothing. He looked about for a stone or a stick and saw horrified out of the tail of his eye the dog vanish. It seemed to step abruptly sidewise and become for an instant the right half of a black dog, Binder whirling to see it vanish completely, not as if it were fading out but simply stepping behind something. But there was nothing to step behind. Through the gone half of the dog he could see the motionless corn blades, the rampant growth of morning glories, the crowlike convolutions of the parched earth contrasted against the corporeal and inarguably real-looking shorthaired half of the dog. In an instant, an eyesblink, it was gone too.
He came closer. He studied the spot intently, leant for a moment openmouthed and foolish, halfcomic in profound scrutiny of the fissured clay.
He went on up the slope with the antenna and hurriedly set it up, hooking the leadwire to it abstractedly and occasionally glancing back over his shoulder at the cornfield. He lashed the pole to a fencepost with a length of wire, angled the antenna toward where he guessed Nashville was.
The cornfield seemed darker toward its center. Light entered at the rows’ end, ran like liquid down the middles, getting shallower and shallower. There seemed at the convergence of the rows some mass of shadows light could not defray. He clipped the wire with the sidecutters and pocketed them and started toward the cornfield. He stopped at the spot the dog had been. He stepped into the field a few feet, the cornblades whispering against his jeans. Then he turned and went back to the house.