The house when he found it was guarded by two stone lions but theirs was a fallen grandeur. Their whitewashed flesh peeled away in great slashes of plaster and they watched this transgressor with a blind ferocity, their eyes impacted with grime. Winer passed between them down a worn path of faded brick leached into the earth to the wooden doorsteps. The house was a nondescript white frame needing a coat of paint. A knocker mounted in a gargoyle’s face hinted the same dubious parentage as the stone lions. He knocked and waited.
He had turned away to go when the door opened.
“Yes?”
He approached the door. He was facing a young woman a few years older than himself. She stood waiting, smoothed a wing of brown hair back from her brow. She had a plain, honest face, her eyes were a soft brown, he thought the way a fawn’s eyes must look: there was a curious quality of vulnerability about them, as if they ever sought out the thing that would hurt her.
“I was just looking for Sheriff Bellwether.”
“I’m sorry, he’s not here right now. Is there any way I could help you?”
“Do you know here he is?”
“He left for Franklin early this morning to see Judge Larkin. I’m not sure when he’ll be back.”
“Well.”
“Will you come in? Is it something important you wanted to see him about?”
“I just wanted to see him a minute.”
Something he was not aware of in his face touched her, for she stood aside and opened the door wider. “Come on in,” she said. “I was just about to have a cup of coffee. Would you care for a cup?”
“I need to be getting on,” Winer said but he stepped into the room. She brought him black, steaming coffee in a thin china cup and he drank it sitting awkwardly on the edge of the sofa. He looked about the austere room. There was a makeshift quality about it but it was very clean. A young Bellwether tinted pink watched from a gilt oval frame on the wall, an overseas cap tilted rakishly over his right eyebrow. The woman looked up from her sewing and Winer was watching her.
“Did he say what he wanted to see Franklin judge about?”
“I’m sorry, he didn’t.” She smiled. “My husband keeps his business to himself.”
He set the halfful cup aside. “Thank you for the coffee,” he said. “I’ll be getting on.”
“He’ll be back after a while. You could leave a message with me. I’ll see he gets it.”
“No,” Winer said, getting up. “I’ll leave it somewhere else.”
She looked at him strangely with her tremulous brown eyes and he knew she’d misunderstood him. “It’s just something I can’t talk about,” he said. “Thank you for the coffee.” He turned and went on out the door. She made to call to him but thought better of it.
He went down the walk to the edge of the street and paused by the blind lions. He rested a moment on a stone shoulder so cold it might have been cast from ice. Displaced beast from climes to the north, strange twilit sunless worlds.
An old grief that should have long ago been allayed by time abruptly twisted in him like a knife. A grief ten years gone, by now the debris of time should have buried it. Ten years. Ten years who knew where and all the spoken words of denunciation. A bitter redemption touched him, a sense of faith fulfilled, but there was no satisfaction in being right, he would gladly have been proven wrong could events be altered. He turned with blurred vision and went on up the street. She watched from a window. When he was out of sight the curtain fell to.
Along about midmorning a taxicab arrived at Hardin’s. It stopped in the yard, idling white puffs of exhaust into the cold air, and Jiminiz got out. He moved stiffly as if his joints did not function properly. His face was swollen and discolored. He slammed the door to and stood studying the unsmoking chimney of the house bemusedly. The driver got out as well. The driver was a wizened, ferretfaced man with quick black eyes that darted uneasily about the yard. He wore a leather changepurse on his belt and he made change for the bill Jiminiz gave him. He got back into the idling car and turned it and went back the way he had come.
Jiminiz went around back to the long beerjoint and was there only a minute or two before he came back and mounted the porch. He knocked at the front door, waited. He leaned against the doorjamb smoking and when knocking harder brought no response he turned the knob and went in.
Directly he came back out. He went across the yard again to the rear and paused by the litter of papers and cans on the earth studying the frozen ground. Something seemed to catch his eye, for he leaned forward hands on knees then straightened and went toward the pit and vanished into the bracken.
He was running awkwardly when he came out of the brush. He ran on to the hardpan of the road and slowed to a fast walk. A hundred feet or so down the road he halted and stood still and seemed to be listening to some far-off sound. He looked down the red road. He looked back toward the bleak, still house and studied the slatecolored sky. Nameless winter birds foraged the ruined garden and watched him with hard agate eyes. They took wing and flew patternlessly above him. He went back to the house and went in leaving the door ajar. He came out carrying a nickleplated pistol in his right hand and a cigarbox in his left. He paused a moment on the stoop. He pocketed the pistol and opened the cigar box. It was full of money. He began to count it, leafing hurriedly through it, then he gave it up and went back onto the road. This time he didn’t look back.
The day drew on. It had not warmed as the day progressed nor had the frost melted. The sun grew more remote and obscure. At its zenith it was no more than an orb of heatless light above the glade. A bank of pale clouds arose in the west and ascended the heavens and beyond them the sky looked dark and threatening. A wind arose. It teased such dead leaves as remained on the trees and sang eerily in the loose tin on the barn. The stallion whinnied from the barnlot and came pacing down the length of barbed-wire fence, its hooves ringing on mire frozen hard as stone. The day grew darker yet. The sun vanished. The wind carried chill on its knife edge and a few pellets of sleet rattled on the tin like birdshot. The sleet fell and lay unmelting in the stony whorls of ice, a wind from the pit blew scraps of paper like dirty snow.
When Winer came he came walking. He came the shortcut across the field and down the branch to the house. He crossed the yard without caution as if he were impervious now to anything the world could do to him. He crossed the porch and pounded on the door and waited. Knocked again. He paused and stood uncertainly. Leaned to a curtained window and shading his eyes peered in, saw only his sepia reflection in opaque glass.
He turned, a gangling figure graceless in the stiff wind. He went down the steps and echoing Jiminiz’s movements or moving in patterns preordained he went around the house and through the strewn garbage and pounded on the back door. No one came. He stood before the raw wood honkytonk with its red brick grouped in banded bundles awaiting a mason who’d never come and he tried the door but it was locked. He walked back to where the Packard was always parked and ran a hand through his wild hair like a cartoon figure miming perplexity and leaned to the frozen ground as if he might divine how long the car had been gone and its destination.
He climbed back onto the porch and tried the door. It opened. He peered into the cloistered dark but some old restraint engendered by his upbringing stayed him from trespass and he pulled the door to with a curious air of finality.
He sat on the stoop a time though he did not expect anyone to return. The sleet had not ceased and it had begun to spit snow. He sat wrapping his knees with his arms and it began to snow harder, the snow intensifying first the border of the far field and obscuring the treeline with a curtain of billowing white. He seemed ill at ease and uncertain as to where he should be and what he should be doing and at length the cold brought him off the steps and into the yard. He went off into the snow turning up his collar against the wind.