It would be something, he thought then, walking into your house one night and finding a couple of nuts there, standing in the kitchen with big lead pipes, or pistols.
He turned up the dirt road that wound up Crow Mountain to his house. The lights were all off at the Shaffer place. Walt’s jeep was parked by the mailbox as usual, under the limbs of the beech tree, in case it should rain. The green and white plastic lawn furniture sat as always in the bare dirt yard among metal toy trucks and plastic blocks and pieces of dolls. The thought of their oldest girl, Mary Jean, passed briefly through his mind. He would see her bringing in eggs in a wire basket sometimes as he was driving past. She would wave, and he would wave back. She looked Polish, like her mother. Light brown hair, thick ankles. Somebody’d told him she had a cedar chest full of things for her marriage. Be too late pretty soon. She was getting close to her thirties now.
At Sylvester’s there were no lights in front but the flicker of the television. Sylvester would be sitting with his shoes off and no shirt on, his wife ironing in the barren back room. The kids would be sitting around more or less naked, invisible as the overstuffed chairs they sat in in the darkened room, or invisible except for their eyes and their dirty underwear. That was the last house for more than two miles, as the road went — the last house on this side of the mountain except for his own and the Ritchie place, abandoned now for ten years and gone to ruin.
The headlights jiggled out and he leaned forward. They came on again.
Then he remembered the man he’d met down in Slater, at Bittner’s. He couldn’t say at first why the trifling memory made him uneasy, or why he should happen to remember it at all — except, maybe, that the man’s disappearing somehow fit with the general uneasiness he’d been feeling ever since that car full of kids had come barreling straight at him.
Bittner had been sitting ritched back on two legs of his red wooden chair, squarely facing his open front door, a little ways back from it, where he could look out into the street. George had been in town for a couple of errands at Salway’s, and he’d decided to drop by the old man’s shop on the chance he had stumbled onto something he didn’t know the worth of. When he went in the old man said, “Odd do,” as usual, lifting his eyebrows, looking over his glasses, and George nodded, standing in the doorway a moment, getting his eyes adjusted to the darkness and clutter — rickety tables, fairgrounds-glass vases, clocks, feather dusters, crocks, baskets, chairs, firedogs, scuttles, bird cages, pictures in ornately machine-carved broken frames, maple spindles, chests of drawers, hundreds of dusty, disintegrating books (The Ladies’ Repository—Volume 24, Ideal Suggestion, Elsie Venner). He started along the nearer wall of bookshelves, not reading the titles or even looking at particular books, gazing vaguely, like a hunter taking in acres at once, waiting for a good binding to separate itself from the surrounding trash. When he was halfway down the aisle, Bittner said, “Here’s the man you should talk to. He must have a spinning wheel or two.” He turned and saw that the old man was not talking to him but to another man, standing in the darkest part of the room, reaching down into one of the bins of odds and ends. The man looked around, not slowly, but somehow too cautiously, and George knew the man was blind. “How do you do?” the man said. He had dark glasses on and a touring cap. In one hand he held a pair of carved ivory chopsticks, in the other, his cane. George nodded, realizing only later that a nod did no good.
Bittner said, “George is a collector. I don’t know what-all he’s got.”
“You don’t say,” the man said. He wasn’t from the Catskills. Vermont, maybe.
“He’s got old records, magazines, stamps, I don’t know what-all.”
“I’m not really much of a collector,” George said.
Bittner said, waving, “Boot-jacks, arrowheads, antique furniture, picture frames, china, paperweights—”
Again, thoughtfully, the blind man said, “You don’t say.” He came toward him down the aisle, smiling vaguely, moving the cane almost casually back and forth across the aisle like a witching rod. When he was within three feet of George he knew it, and held out his hand. “My name’s Glore,” he said. They shook hands. “George Loomis,” George said. The man’s skin was pale and flaccid, as if he’d spent years in the darkest corners of junk stores. “Do you really collect antique paperweights?” he said.
George said, “I’ve got a few. Nothing valuable.” After a moment he added, “A couple of them were family things, and I happened to run across some more that looked good with them. I don’t really collect.”
Bittner laughed scornfully, behind him. “What he means is, he ain’t letting anything go. Regular miser. He-he-he!”
The blind man’s interest was sharper now. He inclined his head very slightly, his left hand groping out toward the bookshelf. He said, “I’d be interested to see your things some time.”
“Anytime you say,” George said, not as heartily as he might have. He liked nothing better than showing off his things, but Bittner was right, he was a miser.
The blind man said, “Where do you live?”
George told him, and the man listened carefully, as if taking it down in his mind. When he had it, he said, “You expect to be home this afternoon?”
“I expect so,” George said.
That was the last he’d seen of the man. When he’d asked Bittner about him, later, Bittner said he didn’t know who the man was. “Glore,” George said, and Bittner remembered that that was the name he’d said, yes, but that was all he knew. He’d come into town in an old Lincoln, Bittner remembered then. A young black-headed fellow driving for him. They’d come and they’d gone. “That’s business,” Bittner said. George had nodded, thinking.
He wondered now, for the first time, if Glore had really been blind. He put the thought out of his mind at once, sensibly, but he still felt jumpy. He carried the idea of the murder on Nickel Mountain like a weight on his chest, that and the teasing contrast of Callie and Henry waving in the warmth of the yellow porchlight, behind him, ahead of him a carload of teen-agers burning toward him, brainless and deadly.
He’d come to his own driveway now. He could look down to his left and see the whole valley, the willows and the creek cutting through the middle, and directly below him the gleaming rails of the New York Central tracks curving onto the trestle. He let go of the wheel to grab the gearshift and shift down to second, then caught hold of the wheel again. He pulled up past the overgrown lawn in front — his headlights sweeping across the weeds and treetrunks — and turned sharply at the fence and backed into the shed. When he switched the ignition off the stillness dropped around him like a trap. He’d noticed the same thing once before, tonight, when he’d first come out of the Soames’ house onto the porch. Callie had noticed it too and had said, “It’s quiet tonight. Must be rain coming.”
The headlights — staring ahead and a little upward, because of the pitch of the shed’s dirt floor — made the weeds around the hand-crank gas pump look pocked-gray as old bone. Every line of the American-wire fence stood out, unnaturally distinct, like the chipping sign on the pump: Warning. Contains Lead. Far beyond the fence the headlights eerily lighted just the top of the gambrel peak of the haybarn roof.
He turned out the lights, got out of the truck, and slammed the door behind him. It was then he knew, with a certainty that made him go cold as ice, that somebody was watching from the house.