“Why do you walk at night, Father?”
“I like to hear the music outside.”
“Do you want them to kill you, Father?”
“Why do you ask that?”
“What is going to happen?”
“I’m going to run them out of town, son, every last miserable son of a bitch.”
“Let’s go around to the garden, Father. You can hear the music there.”
“Go change the record, son. The needle is stuck in the groove.”
“Yes sir.”
The engineer woke listening. Something had happened. There was not a sound, but the silence was not an ordinary silence. It was the silence of a time afterwards. It had been violated earlier. His heart beat a strong steady alarm. He opened his eyes. A square of moonlight lay across his knees.
A shot had been fired. Had he dreamed it? Yes. But why was the night portentous? The silence reverberated with insult. There was something abroad.
Nor had it come from Sutter’s room. He waited and listened twenty minutes without moving. Then he dressed and went outside into the moonlight.
The golf links was as pale as lake water. To the south Juno’s temple hung low in the sky like a great fiery star. The shrubbery, now grown tall as trees, cast inky shadows which seemed to walk in the moonlight.
For a long time he gazed at the temple. What was it? It alone was not refracted and transformed by the prism of dreams and memory. But now he remembered. It was fiery old Canopus, the great red star of the south which once a year reared up and hung low in the sky over the cottonfields and canebrakes.
Turning at last, he walked quickly to the Trav-L-Aire, got his flashlight from the glove compartment, cut directly across the courtyard and entered the back door of the castle; through the dark pantry and into the front hall, where he rounded the newel abruptly and went up the stairs. To the second and then the third floor as if he knew exactly where he was, though he had only once visited the second floor and not once been above it. Around again and up a final closeted flight of narrow wooden steps and into the attic. It was a vast unfinished place with walks of lumber laid over the joists. He prowled through the waists and caverns of the attic ribbed in the old heart pine of the 1920’s. The lumber was still warm and fragrant from the afternoon sun. He shone the flashlight into every nook and cranny.
When he heard the sound behind him, he slid the switch of the flashlight and stepped four feet to the side (out of the line of fire?) and waited.
“Bill?”
A wall switch snapped on, lighting a row of bulbs in the peak of the roof. The girl, hugging her wrap with both arms, moved close to him and peered into his face. Her lips, scrubbed clean of lipstick, were slightly puffed and showed the violet color of blood.
“Are you all right?”
“Yes.”
“I saw you outside.”
He didn’t answer.
“What are you looking for?”
“I heard something.”
“You heard something up here from the garage?”
“I didn’t know where it came from. I thought it might be from the attic.”
“Why?”
“Is there a room up here?”
“A room?”
“A room closed off from the rest of the attic?”
“No. This is all.”
He said nothing.
“You don’t know where you are, do you?”
“Where I am?”
“Where are you?”
“I know.” He did know now but he didn’t mind her thinking he didn’t. She was better, more herself, when he was afflicted.
“You were sleepwalking, I think.”
“It’s possible.”
“Come on. I’ll take you back.”
“You don’t have to.”
“I know I don’t.”
He made her stay in the pantry. She was sweet and loving and not at all antic. It is strange, he thought as he stood in his own and Jamie’s room a few minutes later: we are well when we are afflicted and afflicted when we are well. I can lie with her only if she tends my wounds.
“Was there a shot?” he asked her as he left.
She had shaken her head but smiled, signifying she liked him better for being mistaken.
The square of moonlight had moved onto Jamie’s face. Arms folded, the engineer leaned against his bed and gazed down at the youth. The eye sockets were pools of darkness. Despite the strong black line of the brow, the nose and mouth were smudged and not wholly formed. He reminded the engineer of the graduates of Horace Mann, their faces quick and puddingish and acned, whose gift was the smart boy’s knack of catching on, of hearkening: yes, I see. If Jamie could live, it was easy to imagine him for the next forty years engrossed and therefore dispensed and so at the end of the forty years still quick and puddingish and childlike. They were the lucky ones. Yet in one sense it didn’t make much difference, even to Jamie, whether he lived or died — if one left out of it what he might “do” in the forty years, that is, add to “science.” The difference between me and him, he reflected, is that I could not permit myself to be so diverted (but diverted from what?). How can one take seriously the Theory of Large Numbers, living in this queer not-new not-old place haunted by the goddess Juno and the spirit of the great Bobby Jones? But it was more than that. Something is going to happen, he suddenly perceived that he knew all along. He shivered. It is for me to wait. Waiting is the thing. Wait and watch.
Jamie’s eyes seemed to open in their deep sockets. But they gazed back at him, not with their usual beamish expression, casting about for recondite areas of agreement in the space between them, but mockingly: ah, you deceive yourself, Jamie seemed to say. But when the engineer, smiling and puzzled, leaned closer, he saw that the eyes had not opened.
A bar of yellow light fell across the room. A figure was outlined in the doorway of the kitchenette. It beckoned to him.
It was Rita.
As soon as he was inside the tiny room, she closed the door and whispered: “Is Jamie asleep?”
“Yes.”
Sutter stood gazing into the sink. The sink was dusty and still had a paper sticker in the basin.
“We want you to settle a little point,” said Rita.
Sutter nodded. The engineer sniffed. The kitchenette had the close expired air of impasse. Now as if they were relieved by the diversion, its occupants turned toward him with a mild, unspecified interest.
“I want to know whether you are still prepared to go somewhere with Jamie,” Rita said.
The engineer rubbed his forehead. “What time is it?” he asked no one in particular. Was this the true flavor of hatred, he wondered, this used, almost comfortable malice sustained between them, with its faint sexual reek? They turned as fondly to him as spent lovers greeting a strange child.
“Two thirty,” said Sutter.
“What about it, Bill?” asked Rita crisply.
“What? Oh, Jamie,” he repeated, aware that Sutter watched him. “Why, yes. But you knew all along that I would go with him. Why do you ask?”
“I have reason to believe that Jamie is getting restless and that he may ask Sutter to go off somewhere with him. I think this is too much to ask of Sutter.”
He stole a glance at Sutter, but the latter’s expression was still fond and inattentive.
“You are very much in demand, Bill,” said he at last. “Jimmy wants you, not me.”
“Then what’s the difficulty?” asked the bemused engineer, feeling their apathy steal into his bones.
“The difficulty,” said Sutter, “is that Rita wants to make sure Jimmy doesn’t go anywhere with me.”
“Why not?”
“That’s a good question, isn’t it, Rita,” said Sutter, but still not quite looking at her (couldn’t they stand the sight of each other?). “Why don’t you want Jimmy to go with me?”