The phone rang. As he picked it up, he hoped it wasn’t Elizabeth. It was Denham White. “How you doing, sport?”
“Okay, I guess. The place is nice, Denham. You made it sound like the pits.”
“It’ll do, I guess. You’ll have to lay in some firewood. It can get chilly at night up there.”
“Funny you should mention that.” He told his brother-in-law about the arrival of the wood. “Who are your friends?”
“Beats me. Nobody ever gave me anything up there. I never had much truck with the locals. Weird bunch. They know how to make a buck out of the summer folks, believe me.”
Howell knew how aloof Denham could be with people he considered his social inferiors. He was perfectly capable of not knowing who his neighbors were.
“You meet old man Sutherland, yet?” Denham asked.
“Yeah, right off the bat. Something of a shit, I’d say. He seemed to take an instant dislike to me.”
Denham laughed. “Keen judge of character, Mr. Sutherland. Now, listen, John, I’ve got to go on living with the guy, so don’t piss him off if you can help it, okay? Just stay out of his way.”
“I’m out of everybody’s way up here. You seen Elizabeth?”
“We had dinner last night. She’s okay; in the middle of getting out the Christmas catalogue; that’ll keep her busy for a few weeks.”
“Listen, Denham, something strange happened here last night.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. I… uh, woke up in the middle of a thunderstorm, and there was a girl in the living room.”
“Some people have all the luck.”
“No, listen. It was a young girl, a kid, really. Maybe eleven or twelve.” Howell told Denham everything he could remember. He didn’t mention the shotgun.
Denham didn’t say anything for a moment. “John,” he managed, finally, “how much did you have to drink last night?”
“Well,” Howell replied sheepishly, “I had some wine with dinner and a couple of bourbons, I guess.”
“I guess you had a lot more than a couple, the way you’re talking. Look, why don’t you try to lay off the sauce completely while you’re up there? I expect the work would go a lot faster without bad dreams and hangovers.”
“Yeah, all right, Denham. I don’t need any lectures.” Howell couldn’t think of anything else to say.
“Take care, sport, and work hard. Lurton Pitts is used to getting good value for his money.”
They hung up. Howell wondered again who Mama was. Then he had it. It must have been the sheriff, Bo Scully, who sent the wood. He was the only person besides Benny Pope who knew he needed it. Not a bad fellow, Bo Scully. He’d have to buy him a bottle, or something. Maybe Scully would have some idea who the girl was, too.
It rained for four days. Howell ranged about the cabin like a caged cat. He got up late, ate canned and frozen food, read everything he had brought with him, drank too much, got to bed late, and dreamed a dream, always the same dream. Then, when morning came, it was gone. He could not recapture it, but he didn’t think the girl was in it.
He unpacked Pitts’s vaunted word processor and played with it. Howell had never been much for following directions, but after a day or two of snarling at the thing, he had it up and running. After poring through the manual and going through the drills of commands over and over, he began to get the feeling the machine was training him. By the fourth day, all was in readiness. The machine sat, waiting, just as his typewriter had before it. A box of continuous-form paper was fed into the printer; a stack of floppy diskettes waited to record his output; the twelve boxes of recording tape waited next to the tape recorder. Howell threaded the first tape into the machine and pressed a button. The voice of Lurton Pitts came at him just the way Pitts himself had from behind his desk. “Chapter One,” Pitts boomed out. “How I Found God.”
Howell stopped the machine and buried his face in his hands. “Oh, shit,” he muttered. It was the first time in his working life that he had not been able to convince himself that what he was doing was worthwhile, the first time he had tried to write something just for the money. He didn’t like it. He didn’t know if he could do it. He felt the weight of the old depression, the one that came with feeling useless, burnt out. It lay upon him like some heavy, stinking garment whenever he was unexpectedly faced with the prospect that he might really be used up, worthless to anyone.
It held his shoulders slumped, his hands pinned to the arms of his chair; it made him immobile for long minutes, caused nausea to eat at him and sap his energy.
He sat that way for a few moments, and then he felt a sudden warmth. He looked up to see the desk dappled with sunlight. The rain had stopped, and he could see patches of blue between the scudding clouds. His depression lightened a bit; he pushed back from the desk and walked over to the piano. He pushed the pedals, but got no response; he played a few blues chords, wincing at the sour sound. He jumped about a foot as a loud knock came on the door.
Howell leapt to his feet. There had been no visitor to the cabin except the man who had brought the wood, not even any mail. He would be happy to see absolutely anybody. He walked across the room to the door and opened it. A man and a dog stood on the porch, both wet. The man took off his hat to reveal a shock of perfectly white hair; his skin was a bright pink. Howell knew that behind his dark glasses there would be pink eyes; he was an albino. “Good morning to you,” the man said. There was something strangely, strikingly familiar about him, but Howell didn’t know any albinos. And there was something peculiar about the dog. He sat patiently next to his master, panting, his eyes closed. “I’ve come about the piano,” the man said, looking out across the lake. He didn’t seem to want to look at Howell.
“The piano?”
“Don’t you need a piano tuned?” the man asked, still not looking at Howell.
Howell noticed a leather case at the man’s feet. “You’re a piano tuner?”
“That’s right.” The man stood, waiting.
Howell stood, gaping at the man. He had been thinking about asking around for a piano tuner in the town, but he hadn’t done anything about it. Or had he? Had he been that drunk in the afternoons? “Oh,” he said, recovering, “come on in.”
The man picked up his case and stepped into the room, stubbing his toe lightly on the sill. The dog, got up, walked straight past him a few feet, bumped head-on into the sofa, retreated, turned right, knocked over a small pedestal table, reached the hearth, sniffing, flopped down in front of the fire, fell over onto his side, then turned on his back, all four feet in the air, and emitted a long sigh. He seemed to be instantly asleep. Howell stared at him. The dog was blind.
“Didn’t do any damage, did he?” the man asked.
“No,” Howell replied, righting the table.
“Riley will remember where things are. Where’s the piano?”
“Right over there,” Howell replied, pointing. The man didn’t move. Suddenly, Howell realized that he, too, was blind. “Oh, sorry, straight ahead.” He took the man’s elbow, guided him across the room, and placed his hand on the piano.
The albino shucked off his raincoat, put his hat on the piano, sat down, and ran loudly up a C scale with both hands. “Whew! I didn’t come a moment too soon, did I?”
Howell laughed. “No, I guess you didn’t. The player mechanism isn’t working, either. Can you do anything about that?”
The man slid back the doors that covered the player roll and felt around with his hands. “Look behind the piano,” he said.
Howell looked between the piano and the wall and saw an electrical cord. He squeezed his hand behind the instrument and plugged it in. Instantly, the ghost of George Gershwin began to play a wildly-out-of-tune “Strike Up the Band”. The albino switched the piano off. “Fixed that in a hurry, didn’t we? That’ll be two hundred dollars.” He laughed.