Black House

15

BY EVENING, the temperature has dropped fifteen degrees as a minor cold front pushes through our little patch of the Coulee Country. There are no thunderstorms, but as the sky tinges toward violet, the fog arrives. It's born out of the river and rises up the inclined ramp of Chase Street, first obscuring the gutters, then the sidewalks, then blurring the buildings themselves. It cannot completely hide them, as the fogs of spring and winter sometimes do, but the blurring is somehow worse: it steals colors and softens shapes. The fog makes the ordinary look alien. And there's the smell, the ancient, seagully odor that works deep into your nose and awakens the back part of your brain, the part that is perfectly capable of believing in monsters when the sight lines shorten and the heart is uneasy.

On Sumner Street, Debbi Anderson is still working dispatch. Arnold "the Mad Hungarian" Hrabowski has been sent home without his badge ¡ª in fact, suspended ¡ª and feels he must ask his wife a few pointed questions (his belief that he already knows the answers makes him even more heartsick). Debbi is now standing at the window, a cup of coffee in her hand and a puckery little frown on her face.

"Don't like this," she says to Bobby Dulac, who is glumly and silently writing reports. "It reminds me of the Hammer pictures I used to watch on TV back when I was in junior high. "

"Hammer pictures?" Bobby asks, looking up.

"Horror pictures," she says, looking out into the deepening fog. "A lot of them were about Dracula. Also Jack the Ripper. "

"I don't want to hear nothing about Jack the Ripper," Bobby says. "You mind me, Debster. " And resumes writing.

In the parking lot of the 7-Eleven, Mr. Rajan Patel stands beside his telephone (still crisscrossed by yellow police tape, and when it will be all right again for using, this Mr. Patel could not be telling us). He looks toward downtown, which now seems to rise from a vast bowl of cream. The buildings on Chase Street descend into this bowl. Those at Chase's lowest point are visible only from the second story up.

"If he is down there," Mr. Patel says softly, and to no one but himself, "tonight he will be doing whatever he wants. "

He crosses his arms over his chest and shivers.

Dale Gilbertson is at home, for a wonder. He plans to have a sit-down dinner with his wife and child even if the world ends because of it. He comes out of his den (where he has spent twenty minutes talking with WSP officer Jeff Black, a conversation in which he has had to exercise all his discipline to keep from shouting), and sees his wife standing at the window and looking out. Her posture is almost exactly the same as Debbi Anderson's, only she's got a glass of wine in her hand instead of a cup of coffee. The puckery little frown is identical.

"River fog," Sarah says dismally. "Isn't that ducky. If he's out there ¡ª "

Dale points at her. "Don't say it. Don't even think it. "

But he knows that neither of them can help thinking about it. The streets of French Landing ¡ª the foggy streets of French Landing ¡ª will be deserted right now: no one shopping in the stores, no one idling along the sidewalks, no one in the parks. Especially no children. The parents will be keeping them in. Even on Nailhouse Row, where good parenting is the exception rather than the rule, the parents will be keeping their kids inside.

"I won't say it," she allows. "That much I can do. "

"What's for dinner?"

"How does chicken pot pie sound?"

Ordinarily such a hot dish on a July evening would strike him as an awful choice, but tonight, with the fog coming in, it sounds like just the thing. He steps up behind her, gives her a brief squeeze, and says, "Great. And earlier would be better. "

She turns, disappointed. "Going back in?"

"I shouldn't have to, not with Brown and Black rolling the ball ¡ª "

"Those pricks," she says. "I never liked them. "

Dale smiles. He knows that the former Sarah Asbury has never cared much for the way he earns his living, and this makes her furious loyalty all the more touching. And tonight it feels vital, as well. It's been the most painful day of his career in law enforcement, ending with the suspension of Arnold Hrabowski. Arnie, Dale knows, believes he will be back on duty before long. And the shitty truth is that Arnie may be right. Based on the way things are going, Dale may need even such an exquisite example of ineptitude as the Mad Hungarian.

"Anyway, I shouldn't have to go back in, but . . . "

"You have a feeling. "

"I do. "

"Good or bad?" She has come to respect her husband's intuitions, not in the least because of Dale's intense desire to see Jack Sawyer settled close enough to reach with seven keystrokes instead of eleven. Tonight that looks to her like ¡ª pardon the pun ¡ª a pretty good call.

"Both," Dale says, and then, without explaining or giving Sarah a chance to question further: "Where's Dave?"

"At the kitchen table with his crayons. "

At six, young David Gilbertson is enjoying a violent love affair with Crayolas, has gone through two boxes since school let out. Dale and Sarah's strong hope, expressed even to each other only at night, lying side by side before sleep, is that they may be raising a real artist. The next Norman Rockwell, Sarah said once. Dale ¡ª who helped Jack Sawyer hang his strange and wonderful pictures ¡ª has higher hopes for the boy. Too high to express, really, even in the marriage bed after the lights are out.

With his own glass of wine in hand, Dale ambles out to the kitchen. "What you drawing, Dave? What ¡ª "

He stops. The crayons have been abandoned. The picture ¡ª a half-finished drawing of what might be either a flying saucer or perhaps just a round coffee table ¡ª has also been abandoned.

The back door is open.

Looking out at the whiteness that hides David's swing and jungle gym, Dale feels a terrible fear leap up his throat, choking him. All at once he can smell Irma Freneau again, that terrible smell of raw spoiled meat. Any sense that his family lives in a protected, magic circle ¡ª it may happen to others, but it can never, never happen to us ¡ª is gone now. What has replaced it is stark certainty: David is gone. The Fisherman has enticed him out of the house and spirited him away into the fog. Dale can see the grin on the Fisherman's face. He can see the gloved hand ¡ª it's yellow ¡ª covering his son's mouth but not the bulging, terrified child's eyes.

Into the fog and out of the known world.

David.

He moves forward across the kitchen on legs that feel boneless as well as nerveless. He puts his wineglass down on the table, the stem landing a-tilt on a crayon, not noticing when it spills and covers David's half-finished drawing with something that looks horribly like venous blood. He's out the door, and although he means to yell, his voice comes out in a weak and almost strengthless sigh: "David? . . . Dave?"

For a moment that seems to last a thousand years, there is nothing. Then he hears the soft thud of running feet on damp grass. Blue jeans and a red-striped rugby shirt materialize out of the thickening soup. A moment later he sees his son's dear, grinning face and mop of yellow hair.

"Dad! Daddy! I was swinging in the fog! It was like being in a cloud!" Dale snatches him up. There is a bad, blinding impulse to slap the kid across the face, to hurt him for scaring his father so. It passes as quickly as it came. He kisses David instead.

"I know," he says. "That must have been fun, but it's time to come in now. "

"Why, Daddy?"

"Because sometimes little boys get lost in the fog," he says, looking out into the white yard. He can see the patio table, but it is only a ghost; he wouldn't know what he was looking at if he hadn't seen it a thousand times. He kisses his son again. "Sometimes little boys get lost," he repeats.

Oh, we could check in with any number of friends, both old and new. Jack and Fred Marshall have returned from Arden (neither suggested stopping at Gertie's Kitchen in Centralia when they passed it), and both are now in their otherwise deserted h

ouses. For the balance of the ride back to French Landing, Fred never once let go of his son's baseball cap, and he has a hand on it even now, as he eats a microwaved TV dinner in his too empty living room and watches Action News Five.

Tonight's news is mostly about Irma Freneau, of course. Fred picks up the remote when they switch from shaky-cam footage of Ed's Eats to a taped report from the Holiday Trailer Park. The cameraman has focused on one shabby trailer in particular. A few flowers, brave but doomed, straggle in the dust by the stoop, which consists of three boards laid across two cement blocks. "Here, on the outskirts of French Landing, Irma Freneau's grieving mother is in seclusion," says the on-scene correspondent. "One can only imagine this single mother's feelings tonight. " The reporter is prettier than Wendell Green but exudes much the same aura of glittering, unhealthy excitement.

Fred hits the OFF button on the remote and growls, "Why can't you leave the poor woman alone?" He looks down at his chipped beef on toast, but he has lost his appetite.

Slowly, he raises Tyler's hat and puts it on his own head. It doesn't fit, and Fred for a moment thinks of letting out the plastic band at the back. The idea shocks him. Suppose that was all it took to kill his son? That one simple, deadly modification? The idea strikes him as both ridiculous and utterly inarguable. He supposes that if this keeps up, he'll soon be as mad as his wife . . . or Sawyer. Trusting Sawyer is as crazy as thinking he might kill his son by changing the size of the boy's hat . . . and yet he believes in both things. He picks up his fork and begins to eat again, Ty's Brewers cap sitting on his head like Spanky's beanie in an old Our Gang one-reeler.

Beezer St. Pierre is sitting on his sofa in his underwear, a book open on his lap (it is, in fact, a book of William Blake's poems) but unread. Bear Girl's asleep in the other room, and he's fighting the urge to bop on down to the Sand Bar and score some crank, his old vice, untouched for going on five years now. Since Amy died, he fights this urge every single day, and lately he wins only by reminding himself that he won't be able to find the Fisherman ¡ª and punish him as he deserves to be punished ¡ª if he's fucked up on devil dust.

Henry Leyden is in his studio with a huge pair of Akai headphones on his head, listening to Warren Vach¨

, John Bunch, and Phil Flanigan dreamboat their way through "I Remember April. " He can smell the fog even through the walls, and to him it smells like the air at Ed's Eats. Like bad death, in other words. He's wondering how Jack made out in good old Ward D at French County Lutheran. And he's thinking about his wife, who lately (especially since the record hop at Maxton's, although he doesn't consciously realize this) seems closer than ever. And unquiet.

Yes indeed, all sorts of friends are available for our inspection, but at least one seems to have dropped out of sight. Charles Burnside isn't in the common room at Maxton's (where an old episode of Family Ties is currently running on the ancient color TV bolted to the wall), nor in the dining hall, where snacks are available in the early evening, nor in his own room, where the sheets are currently clean (but where the air still smells vaguely of old shit). What about the bathroom? Nope. Thorvald Thorvaldson has stopped in to have a pee and a handwash, but otherwise the place is empty. One oddity: there's a fuzzy slipper lying on its side in one of the stalls. With its bright black and yellow stripes, it looks like the corpse of a huge dead bumblebee. And yes, it's the stall second from the left. Burny's favorite.

Should we look for him? Maybe we should. Maybe not knowing exactly where that rascal is makes us uneasy. Let us slip through the fog, then, silent as a dream, down to lower Chase Street. Here is the Nelson Hotel, its ground floor now submerged in river fog, the ocher stripe marking high water of that ancient flood no more than a whisper of color in the fading light. On one side of it is Wisconsin Shoe, now closed for the day. On the other is Lucky's Tavern, where an old woman with bowlegs (her name is Bertha Van Dusen, if you care) is currently bent over with her hands planted on her large knees, yarking a bellyful of Kingsland Old-Time Lager into the gutter. She makes sounds like a bad driver grinding a manual transmission. In the doorway of the Nelson Hotel itself sits a patient old mongrel, who will wait until Bertha has gone back into the tavern, then slink over to eat the half-digested cocktail franks floating in the beer. From Lucky's comes the tired, twanging voice of the late Dick Curless, Ole Country One-Eye, singing about those Hainesville Woods, where there's a tombstone every mile.

The dog gives a single disinterested growl as we pass him and slip into the Nelson's lobby, where moth-eaten heads ¡ª a wolf, a bear, an elk, and an ancient half-bald bison with a single glass eye ¡ª look at empty sofas, empty chairs, the elevator that hasn't worked since 1994 or so, and the empty registration desk. (Morty Fine, the clerk, is in the office with his feet propped up on an empty file-cabinet drawer, reading People and picking his nose. ) The lobby of the Nelson Hotel always smells of the river ¡ª it's in the pores of the place ¡ª but this evening the smell is heavier than usual. It's a smell that makes us think of bad ideas, blown investments, forged checks, deteriorating health, stolen office supplies, unpaid alimony, empty promises, skin tumors, lost ambition, abandoned sample cases filled with cheap novelties, dead hope, dead skin, and fallen arches. This is the kind of place you don't come to unless you've been here before and all your other options are pretty much foreclosed. It's a place where men who left their families two decades before now lie on narrow beds with pee-stained mattresses, coughing and smoking cigarettes. The scuzzy old lounge (where scuzzy old Hoover Dalrymple once held court and knocked heads most every Friday and Saturday night) has been closed by unanimous vote of the town council since early June, when Dale Gilbertson scandalized the local political elite by showing them a video of three traveling strippers who billed themselves as the Anal University Trio, performing a synchronized cucumber routine on the tiny stage (FLPD cameraman: Officer Tom Lund, let's give him a hand), but the Nelson's residents still have only to go next door to get a beer; it's convenient. You pay by the week at the Nelson. You can keep a hot plate in your room, but only by permission and after the cord has been inspected. You can die on a fixed income at the Nelson, and the last sound you hear could well be the creaking of bedsprings over your head as some other helpless old loser jacks off.

Let us rise up the first flight, past the old canvas firehose in its glass box. Turn right at the second-floor landing (past the pay phone with its yellowing OUT OF ORDER sign) and continue to rise. When we reach the third floor, the smell of river fog is joined by the smell of chicken soup warming on someone's hot plate (the cord duly approved either by Morty Fine or George Smith, the day manager).

The smell is coming from 307. If we slip through the keyhole (there have never been keycards at the Nelson and never will be), we'll be in the presence of Andrew Railsback, seventy, balding, scrawny, good-humored. He once sold vacuum cleaners for Electrolux and appliances for Sylvania, but those days are behind him now. These are his golden years.

A candidate for Maxton's, we might think, but Andy Railsback knows that place, and places like it. Not for him, thanks. He's sociable enough, but he doesn't want people telling him when to go to bed, when to get up, and when he can have a little nip of Early Times. He has friends in Maxton's, visits them often, and has from time to time met the sparkling, shallow, predatory eye of our pal Chipper. He has thought on more than one such occasion that Mr. Maxton looks like the sort of fellow who would happily turn the corpses of his graduates into soap if he thought he could turn a buck on it.

No, for Andy Railsback, the third floor of the Nelson Hotel is good enough. He has his hot plate; he has his bottle of hooch; he's got four packs of Bicycles and plays big-picture solitaire on nights when the sandman loses his way.

This evening he has made three Lipton Cup-A-Soups, thinking he'll invite Irving Throneberry in for a bowl and a chat. Maybe afterward they'll go next door to Lucky's and grab a beer. He checks the soup, sees it has attained a nice simmer, sniffs the fragrant steam,

and nods. He also has saltines, which go well with soup. He leaves the room to make his way upstairs and knock on Irv's door, but what he sees in the hallway stops him cold.

It's an old man in a shapeless blue robe, walking away from him with suspicious quickness. Beneath the hem of the robe, the stranger's legs are as white as a carp's belly and marked with blue snarls of varicose veins. On his left foot is a fuzzy black-and-yellow slipper. His right foot is bare. Although our new friend can't tell for sure ¡ª not with the guy's back to him ¡ª he doesn't look like anyone Andy knows.

Also, he's trying doorknobs as he wends his way along the main third-floor hall. He gives each one a single hard, quick shake. Like a turnkey. Or a thief. A fucking thief.

Yeah. Although the man is obviously old ¡ª older than Andy, it looks like ¡ª and dressed as if for bed, the idea of thievery resonates in Andy's mind with queer certainty. Even the one bare foot, arguing that the fellow probably didn't come in off the street, has no power over this strong intuition.

Andy opens his mouth to call out ¡ª something like Can I help you? or Looking for someone? ¡ª and then changes his mind. He just has this feeling about the guy. It has to do with the fleet way the stranger scurries along as he tries the knobs, but that's not all of it. Not all of it by any means. It's a feeling of darkness and danger. There are pockets in the geezer's robe, Andy can see them, and there might be a weapon in one of them. Thieves don't always have weapons, but . . .

The old guy turns the corner and is gone. Andy stands where he is, considering. If he had a phone in his room, he might call downstairs and alert Morty Fine, but he doesn't. So, what to do?

After a brief interior debate, he tiptoes down the hall to the corner and peeps around. Here is a cul-de-sac with three doors: 312, 313, and, at the very end, 314, the only room in that little appendix which is currently occupied. The man in 314 has been there since the spring, but almost all Andy knows about him is his name: George Potter. Andy has asked both Irv and Hoover Dalrymple about Potter, but Hoover doesn't know jack-shit and Irv has learned only a little more.

"You must," Andy objected ¡ª this conversation took place in late May or early June, around the time the Buckhead Lounge downstairs went dark. "I seen you in Lucky's with him, havin' a beer. "

Irv had lifted one bushy eyebrow in that cynical way of his. "Seen me havin' a beer with him. What are you?" he'd rasped. "My fuckin' wife?"

"I'm just saying. You drink a beer with a man, you have a little conversation ¡ª "

"Usually, maybe. Not with him. I sat down, bought a pitcher, and mostly got the dubious pleasure of listenin' to myself think. I say, 'What do you think about the Brewers this year?' and he says, 'They'll suck, same as last year. I can get the Cubs at night on my rah-dio ¡ª ' "

"That the way he said it? Rah-dio?"

"Well, it ain't the way I say it, is it? You ever heard me say rah-dio? I say radio, same as any normal person. You want to hear this or not?"

"Don't sound like there's much to hear. "

"You got that right, buddy. He says, 'I can get the Cubs at night on my rah-dio, and that's enough for me. I always went to Wrigley with my dad when I was a kid. ' So I found out he was from Chi, but otherwise, bupkes. "

The first thought to pop into Andy's mind upon glimpsing the fucking thief in the third-floor corridor had been Potter, but Mr. George I-Keep-to-Myself Potter is a tall drink of water, maybe six-four, still with a pretty good head of salt-and-pepper hair. Mr. One-Slipper was shorter than that, hunched over like a toad. (A poison toad, at that is the thought that immediately rises in Andy's mind. )

He's in there, Andy thinks. Fucking thief's in Potter's room, maybe going through Potter's drawers, looking for a little stash. Fifty or sixty rolled up in the toe of a sock, like I used to do. Or stealing Potter's radio. His fucking rah-dio.

Well, and what was that to him? You passed Potter in the hallway, gave him a civil good morning or good afternoon, and what you got back was an uncivil grunt. Bupkes, in other words. You saw him in Lucky's, he was drinking alone, far side of the jukebox. Andy guessed you could sit down with him and he'd split a pitcher with you ¡ª Irv's little t¨ºte-¨¤-t¨ºte with the man proved that much ¡ª but what good was that without a little chin-jaw to go along with it? Why should he, Andrew Railsback, risk the wrath of some poison toad in a bathrobe for the sake of an old grump who wouldn't give you a yes, no, or maybe?

Well . . .

Because this is his home, cheesy as it might be, that's why. Because when you saw some crazy old one-slipper fuck in search of loose cash or the easily lifted rah-dio, you didn't just turn your back and shuffle away. Because the bad feeling he got from the scurrying old elf (the bad vibe, his grandchildren would have said) was probably nothing but a case of the chickenshits. Because ¡ª

Suddenly Andy Railsback has an intuition that, while not a direct hit, is at least adjacent to the truth. Suppose it is a guy from off the street? Suppose it's one of the old guys from Maxton Elder Care? It's not that far away, and he knows for a fact that from time to time an old feller (or old gal) will get mixed up in his (or her) head and wander off the reservation. Under ordinary circumstances that person would be spotted and hauled back long before getting this far downtown ¡ª kind of hard to miss on the street in an institutional robe and single slipper ¡ª but this evening the fog has come in and the streets are all but deserted.

Look at you, Andy berates himself. Scared half to death of a feller that's probably got ten years on you and peanut butter for brains. Wandered in here past the empty desk ¡ª not a chance in the goddamn world Fine's out front; he'll be in back reading a magazine or a stroke book ¡ª and now he's looking for his room back at Maxton's, trying every knob on the goddamn corridor, no more idea of where he is than a squirrel on a freeway ramp. Potter's probably having a beer next door (this, at least, turns out to be true) and left his door unlocked (this, we may be assured, is not).

And although he's still frightened, Andy comes all the way around the corner and walks slowly toward the open door. His heart is beating fast, because half his mind is still convinced the old man is maybe dangerous. There was, after all, that bad feeling he got just from looking at the stranger's back ¡ª

But he goes. God help him, he does.

"Mister?" he calls when he reaches the open door. "Hey, mister, I think you got the wrong room. That's Mr. Potter's room. Don't you ¡ª "

He stops. No sense talking, because the room is empty. How is that possible?

Andy steps back and tries the knobs of 312 and 313. Both locked up tight, as he knew they would be. With that ascertained, he steps into George Potter's room and has a good look around ¡ª curiosity killed the cat, satisfaction brought him back. Potter's digs are a little larger than his, but otherwise not much different: it's a box with a high ceiling (they made places a man could stand up in back in the old days, you had to say that much for them). The single bed is sagging in the middle but neatly made. On the night table is a bottle of pills (these turn out to be an anti-depressant called Zoloft) and a single framed picture of a woman. Andy thinks she took a pretty good whopping with the ugly stick, but Potter must see her differently. He has, after all, put the picture in a place where it's the first thing he looks at in the morning and the last thing he sees at night.

"Potter?" Andy asks. "Anyone? Hello?"