He approached the opening with caution, stepping across the juryrigged fence and peering down. There was nothing to see. He could hear the keening, but now it seemed to be issuing out of the earth itself, sad and murmurous voices of the damned pleabargaining for their souls. A cold updraft off subterranean waters came like breath from an ancient tomb, and he dreamed inkblack rivers coursing in the stone veins of the earth where chunks of ice black as obsidian clocked through the dark and where whatever arcane creatures lived there were unsighted and at the mercy of the current. He dropped a stone, and it rolled off the sides as it went, fainter and fainter, then nothing, and it went unremarked by the voices that went on and on in their haunting onenote timbre Somewhere he could hear the bells of animals and he studied the poor excuse for a fence then rearranged it as best he could and went toward the narrow arch of stone. He paused and then looked all about and knelt onto the earth. There was a flat circular stone at the floor of the arch, and he pried it free and scratched out a hole in the earth. He took out the tin of pictures and placed them in the cavity and covered them with the stone. He rose and passed through the arch and the hill began to descend and through the trees he could see tended land and a wooden farmhouse leached gray by the weathers.
The house had a shake roof darkening from melting frost and a tall brick chimney whose shadow was told palely in white hoarfrost on the gable opposing. As he watched the house an old man came out and went with a shuffling hobble toward the barn. He watched awhile and saw nothing further, and after a time he eased down through the shadowed morning trees to the house.
By good daylight Bookbinder had fed and watered the goats and turned them into the lot to graze. There were a nanny and her kids missing, and Bookbinder figured to slip down the hollow and find them. These years Bookbinder moved with care and caution. Arthritis had seized his eighty-year-old knees, and on the steeper hillsides he looked not unlike some gaunt puppet jerked along by an inept or careless puppeteer who’d lost interest in him.
There had been predawn cold and a rime of frost, but the sun when it smoked over the horizon burned it away and aftera while the day warmed. A golden haze like Indian summer hung in the air and the old man could feel sweat beginning under the chambray shirt he wore.
He went farther than he’d planned hunting the goats and after a while he crossed out on a roadbed so densely packed by traffic nothing would yet grow there. Idly he followed the road. The sun had ascended and warmed and sweat darkened the back of his shirt between his sharp shoulder blades. He stopped once and with a big Case pocketknife cut himself a walking stick and then he went hobbling on. After fifty yards or so more the roadway ascended, and he could see all there was left of the El Patio Club beerjoint. He went on up an embankment through sere tilted weeds, then the weeds fell away and there was the old parking lot of cracked paving and the four stucco walls still blackened by ancient smoke beyond a row of Lombardy poplars planted like a curious harp of the winds. Past the walls halflost in saplings two privies still faintly marked His and Hers.
The parking lot was encysted with ancient bottlecaps, arcane and extinct brands of beer like words in a foreign language. He hunkered on the crumbling paving and took out a pipe homecarved from briar root and stuffed the bowl with roughcut tobacco. He struck a match on a thumbnail and lit the pipe. He studied the El Patio through the shifting blue smoke.
All so long ago. The old man from his house used to hear the cries of revelry. Love or what passed for it in these regions, old rivalries brought to fruition. The music from their dances, like dispatches from a world he’d forsaken or it him. Cars coming and going at all hours of the night, fullthroated mufflers breaking on the switchback, motors opening up onthe stretch like racehorses getting their second wind. Laughter sharp and brittle as broken glass used to drift down through the trees. Laughter from women now old as he was, or dead, twenty-five forever and ever.
She came easing into the room with her slippers in her hand. The room dark, all the light there was moonlight, oblique and deceptive through the windowglass. When he spoke, he startled her so she dropped a shoe, then she recovered and her hands were at her hair, taking it down.
I thought I told you to stay away from that place.
Well. Maybe you did. I forget just now.
He could smell whiskey in the room. I meant what I said.
It doesn’t matter anyhow. Nobody gets to say what anybody else can do or can’t do. Nobody owns anybody else. They turned the slaves loose a long time ago.
Then she’d come in later and she’d come in later and one night she didn’t come in at all. Like some wild thing he’d tamed and chanced letting loose and lost a little at a time. He awoke stiff and sore in the rocking chair. As cold and bleak a dawn as he’d ever known washing the windows. He never saw her again. She was a page torn from a calendar, a year folded neatly and laid aside in some place you never look. Her name on his tongue was dry as ashes, bitter as quinine.
He knocked the pipe out and stood up and approached the building. A blackened and unshapen ruin. It was here she’dtaken up with Hankins. Here Hankins had sat on the last day of his life drinking boilermakers and getting up his nerve to come up the hollow and get the bedstead or kill him. He hadn’t known it but he was getting up his nerve to die.
He turned away. Old memories had lost the sting of pain and it was the loss of feeling he mourned more than anything else. It was all so long ago and might have been something that happened to somebody else, might have been some old story in a yellowed newspaper.
He went back down into the woods from the other side of the parking lot. There was a footpath here the old man had worn himself down through the years and he followed it through the woods directly opposing the way he’d followed it a lifetime ago in the dead of a Sunday night, leant slightly with the weight of a five-gallon bucket of kerosene, midnight visitor bearing the gift of fire.
He didn’t find the goats that morning and he decided to go out again after dinner. When he got back to the house it was approaching midmorning and there was a thin young man sitting on the edge of his porch idly drawing patterns in the dirt between his feet with a riflestock.
Hidy, the boy said.
The old man hadn’t been surprised in a lot of years and finding company on his front porch didn’t surprise him now.
How do, the old man said. Warmin up some, ain’t it?
Aren’t you Mr. Bookbinder?
I’m Hollis Bookbinder. I ain’t never been Mistered too much. Who might you be?
My name’s Tyler. I heard your goatbells in the night. You got a lot of them?
They’s several. I don’t know exactly how many. Ain’t run acensus on em lately. They a right smart of company.
You seen a man named Granville Sutter come through here?
No. Was I supposed to of?
I don’t know. I just wondered.
Was you huntin him?
No. I’m pretty sure he’s hunting me, though. Do you know him?
I know him well enough to stay wide of him. That’s a right nice rifle you got there.
Thanks. My granddaddy gave it to me.
Winchester lever action with that octagon barrel. You don’t see many of em, but what you do generally shoots true.
The old man had climbed the porch steps, and now he opened the screendoor. I ain’t had the rest of my mornin coffee. How about you?