“You got a thing for her?”
Blush. “I don’t know about that.”
“Well then, put it another way. Does she have a thing for you?”
“Well, she’s said a few things, when she called. She’s a very fine-looking woman.”
“So . . . what are you going to do about it?”
“I could ask her out here. I could do that, couldn’t I? She’s kind of said she’d like to come up here.”
“You’re both adults. I’d say go for it.”
Chad nodded, and blushed, and nodded again.
The telephone in Shadow’s apartment was silent and dead. He thought about getting it connected, but could think of no one he wanted to call. Late one night he picked it up and listened, and was convinced that he could hear a wind blowing and a distant conversation between a group of people talking in voices too low to properly make out. He said, “Hello?” and “Who’s there?” but there was no reply, only a sudden silence and then the faraway sound of laughter, so faint he was not certain he was not imagining it.
Shadow made more journeys with Wednesday in the weeks that followed.
He waited in the kitchen of a Rhode Island cottage, and listened while Wednesday sat in a darkened bedroom and argued with a woman who would not get out of bed, nor would she let Wednesday or Shadow look at her face. In the refrigerator was a plastic bag filled with crickets, and another filled with the corpses of baby mice.
In a rock club in Seattle, Shadow watched Wednesday shout his greeting, over the noise of the band, to a young woman with short red hair and blue-spiral tattoos. That talk must have gone well, for Wednesday came away from it grinning delightedly.
Five days later Shadow was waiting in the rental when Wednesday walked, scowling, from the lobby of an office building in Dallas. Wednesday slammed the car door when he got in, and sat there in silence, his face red with rage. He said, “Drive.” Then he said, “Fucking Albanians. Like anybody cares.”
Three days after that they flew to Boulder, where they had a pleasant lunch with five young Japanese women. It was a meal of pleasantries and politeness, and Shadow walked away from it unsure of whether anything had been agreed to or decided. Wednesday, though, seemed happy enough.
Shadow had begun to look forward to returning to Lakeside. There was a peace there, and a welcome, that he appreciated.
Each morning when he was not traveling he would drive across the bridge to the town square. He would buy two pasties at Mabel’s; he would eat one pasty then and there, and drink a coffee. If someone had left a newspaper out he would read it, although he was never interested enough in the news to purchase a newspaper himself.
He would pocket the second pasty, wrapped in its paper bag, and eat it for his lunch.
He was reading USA Today one morning when Mabel said, “Hey, Mike. Where you going today?”
The sky was pale blue. The morning mist had left the trees covered with hoarfrost. “I don’t know,” said Shadow. “Maybe I’ll walk the wilderness trail again.”
She refilled his coffee. “You ever gone east on County Q? It’s kind of pretty out thataway. That’s the little road that starts acrost from the carpet store on Twentieth Avenue.”
“No. Never have.”
“Well,” she said, “it’s kind of pretty.”
It was extremely pretty. Shadow parked his car at the edge of town, and walked along the side of the road, a winding, country road that curled around the hills to the east of the town. Each of the hills was covered with leafless maple trees, bone-white birches, dark firs and pines.
At one point a small dark cat kept pace with him beside the road. It was the color of dirt, with white forepaws. He walked over to it. It did not run away.
“Hey cat,” said Shadow, unselfconsciously.
The cat put its head on one side, looked up at him with emerald eyes. Then it hissed—not at him, but at something over on the side of the road, something he could not see.
“Easy,” said Shadow. The cat stalked away across the road, and vanished into a field of old unharvested corn.
Around the next bend in the road Shadow came upon a tiny graveyard. The headstones were weathered, although several of them had sprays of fresh flowers resting against them. There was no wall about the graveyard, and no fence, only low mulberry trees, planted at the margins, bent over with ice and age. Shadow stepped over the piled-up ice and slush at the side of the road. There were two stone gateposts marking the entry to the graveyard, although there was no gate between them. He walked into the graveyard between the two posts.
He wandered around the graveyard, looking at the headstones. There were no inscriptions later than 1969. He brushed the snow from a solid-looking granite angel, and he leaned against it.
He took the paper bag from his pocket, and removed the pasty from it. He broke off the top: it breathed a faint wisp of steam into the wintry air. It smelled really good, too. He bit into it.