“You were talking to him? Where did he go?”
“He went-well, he just kind of went.”
Susan frowned. “Neil,” she said, “you’re sure you’re not-”
He stared at her. “Not what? Not nuts? Not ready for the funny farm?”
“Neil, you mustn’t think that I-”
“Susan, he was there!” Neil shouted. “He was right there, right there by that patch of grass! I talked to him!”
She let go of his hands. He stood by the fence and watched her as she walked back across the yard to the house, with her head lowered. She climbed up the steps to the veranda, went into the kitchen door, and closed it behind her. He banged his fist against the fence railing in frustration. Of all the damned, stupid, ridiculous things. He needed help and reassurance more than he ever had in his whole life, and everybody, including his wife, thought he was turning into a raving lunatic. He looked back at the grass where the man had been standing, and he felt confused, frightened, and helpless. Almost as helpless as the day that the jack had slipped, and Jim had reached out his hand toward him and begged for some miraculous salvation which Neil just didn’t have the power to give him.
Neil climbed over the fence and trudged back to the house. In the kitchen, Susan was sitting at the table scraping carrots. The tears were running down her cheeks into the salad.
Neil put his arm around her. He said, “Susan?”
There was a moment when she tried to be strong, but then she burst into tears and clung to him, and for a long time they held each other close, her hot cheek wet against his; he was almost moved to tears himself..
At last she looked up at him, flushed and unhappy, her eyelashes stuck together with crying.
She said, “I don’t know what to do. It’s all so frightening.”
He shrugged, “I know. I don’t know what to do either. But I’m doing whatever I can.”
She swallowed, and then she said, “You won’t mind me asking this, will you? I know it sounds awful, but I have to ask it.”
“Go right ahead.”
“Well,” she said uncertainly, “you’re not-you’re not going mad are you? You don’t have madness in your family?”
He couldn’t help smiling. “Not that I know of. I think my grandfather used to fly Chinese kites out on the point, and got himself a name for being quite an eccentric, but real madness …”
“Not even way back? I couldn’t bear it if Toby-” He squeezed her close. “Listen, I’m not going mad, and neither is Toby, and neither is anyone else. We just have one of those weird situations that nobody quite understands. It’s like flying saucers, Doctor Crowder told me, or ghosts. All we have to do is find out what it is, and when we know, we’ll be fine.”
Susan dabbed at her eyes with her apron. “I’m sorry. I guess it’s been a strain, that’s all. I was sitting there thinking that you must have had a mad cousin in your dun and distant past, and that you and Toby were paying the price for it. I’m real sorry, Neil. I mean it.”
Neil kissed her. “I’m glad you came straight out and asked. If I’d have been you, I would have been thinking the same thing. I’m happy to say, though, that there hasn’t been anybody in my family’s illustrious history who-”
He paused. She stopped in the middle of drying her tears and looked up at him. He gave her a quick, uncertain smile.
“What were you saving?” she asked him. He shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. It seems ridiculous. I guess I’m allowing this thing to get under my skin.”
“You mustn’t, honey,” she said gently. “We’ll work it out somehow.”
“Sure,” he told her, but he didn’t feel very convinced. “Now, I’d better get upstairs and finish off that wardrobe.”
“Do you really have to?” she asked him. “It seems such a pity, just breaking it up for the sake of it”
“Would you sleep with it in the room?” asked Neil. “Would you let Toby sleep with it in the room?”
“I guess not. But Doctor Crowder may have been right. It could have been Toby’s window banging.”
“So you think I’m imagining things, too?”
“Honey, I don’t. I believe what you say. I heard the noises myself. It’s just that, well, a wooden man? It could have been a freak kind of reflection, you know. A trick of the light.”
Neil walked across to the other side of the kitchen, and stared for two or three minutes out of the window. He could see the grass waving on the opposite side of the fence, the grass where the man in the long white duster coat had been standing.
Perhaps, after all, the man was nothing more than an optical illusion. Dave Conway hadn’t seen him in the bay, and Susan hadn’t seen him outside the yard. Perhaps he only existed inside Nell’s mind. And Toby’s, too, of course.
Neil said, “I think I’m going to go out for a few hours. I need to turn this thing over, get it straight in my head.”
Susan came over and put her arms around him. “I love you,” she said in a soft voice.
“I know,” he told her.
“What are you going to do about the wardrobe?” she asked.
“I’ll break it up when I get back. We’ll have a bonfire in the yard. Maybe we can bake some potatoes. It’s about time we tried to have ourselves a little fun.”
“You won’t be long, will you?”
He checked his watch. “It’s eleven-thirty now. I’ll be back in time to pick up Toby from school.”
He gave her a light kiss on the forehead, and then he took the pickup keys from their hook by the door, and left the house without another word. Susan watched him go.
When the dust from the truck had drifted away, she went through to the living room and called her mother on the telephone. She had a feeling that what she had just felt was the first tremor of some kind of earthquake, and that before long she was going to need all the help she could find.
The phone rang and rang but her mother didn’t answer. She hoped that wasn’t a bad omen.
Neil drove through to Santa Rosa, over the winding rural road that took him through Sebastopol, and out onto 101 by the Shell gas station. Inland, it was sunny and hot, and he drove with what he always called his two-fifty ah- conditioning (two windows open at fifty miles an hour). He was sweating, and his shirt stuck to the vinyl seat, but he scarcely noticed the temperature. He turned left on 101 and headed north.
On the pickup’s radio, Warren Zevon was singing Werewolves of London. He wasn’t listening. He was looking for the turnoff to Petrified Forest Road, which would lead him over the redwood-forested Sonoma mountains to Calistoga.
He almost missed it, and when he jammed on his brakes and signaled a right, a lumber truck blared its five-tone horns at him, and the driver leaned over to mouth some unheard obscenity.
Along the twisting, climbing highway, it was peaceful and deserted. The pickup labored on the grades, but now Neil had made up his mind what he was going to do, he didn’t feel the same desperate urgency. Through the forests of pines and cottonwoods, madrona, and red-barked manzanita, he climbed into the clear fragrant mountain air.
The Petrified Forest itself was just below the brim of the mountains that sloped down to the town of Calistoga. Neil had always promised Toby that he would take him there to see the giant petrified redwoods, but it was one of those trips that they’d never gotten around to taking. He drove past the wooden gates of the entrance with his pickup blowing out blue smoke.
In Calistoga’s main street, a sleepy one-horse thoroughfare at the head of Napa Valley, Neil parked the pickup in the shade of an old flat-fronted hotel building and climbed out. It was way up in the high eighties, and he wiped his forehead on his shirt sleeve. Beyond the main street, there were only the dark-green, forested mountains, and the air was heavy with the scent of the trees. The sky was cloudless and inky blue.