Keeping to the far side of the gravel road, he walked the length of the yard. A dog was running loose, circling the barn in silence. Before it could spot him, he turned and cut down along the fence line north of the house. When he reached the back of their garden he found a little path worn into the woods. In the open, the late moon had given plenty of light, but once in the woods Glen had to flick the slider up on the flashlight and swing the beam to and fro across the tangle of night-black foliage to see where he was going.
Within thirty yards he knew it was pointless. If Edgar were holed up in the woods, Glen would never walk up on him with a flashlight. Maybe if he was sound asleep with a fire blazing. But why would he do that if he planned to come back the next day? Why not just walk in, save himself the trouble? And even supposing he was in those woods, the Sawtelle place was, what, ninety acres, a hundred? Glen could search for a week in broad daylight and never find him.
He turned and retraced his route. When he reached the road again, he stood looking at the house. Either he’s in that barn, Glen thought, or he’s miles from here. And there was no way of getting into the barn without the dogs raising Cain. It wasn’t going to work.
He crunched along the gravel toward the squad car. Something told him he shouldn’t drive past the Sawtelle place, having already taken so much trouble to avoid it. With the headlights off, he pulled another three-point turn and headed toward Mellen. Maybe he would patrol a few more back roads on the way home.
The moon was bright. The underbrush leaned into the road, green and hypnotic as it flowed past the high beams; red-lanterned eyes looked back from the tangle just often enough to break the pattern, keep him alert. Only after his breath came easier did he realize he’d been panting. To stop, he forced himself to sigh.
When he reached the blacktop, the cruiser picked up enough speed to level out the potholes and float along through the night. Tendrils of fog drifted palely across the road, condensing on the windshield like a kind of dream writing that he let accumulate and then erased with a swipe of the wiper blades. All of that put him at ease. After a while he couldn’t help but glance into his rearview mirror.
With great earnestness, almost bashfully, Glen let himself ask his question, out loud, one last time.
Edgar
HE TRACKED THE MORNING KENNEL ROUTINE BY SOUND FROM his hiding place, high in the mow. The August sun beat against the barn roof and the atmosphere near the rafters squeezed beads of sweat from his skin. To pass the time, he counted the points of the roofing nails hammered through the new planking and thought how in days past he had instead counted bright pinholes through the roofing boards. Light seeped around the edges of the mow door, filling the space with a dilute, perpetual dawn. By midmorning his mother had worked the two pups, then the six-month-olds and the yearlings, and rotated back to the pups. Edgar could close his eyes and hear her cajoling them in a low, even voice, see her crazywalk the little ones, ask for retrieves of the others, always testing, proofing, asking what it meant and didn’t mean to stay, watch, recall, follow. He drifted into a half-sleep suffused by those sounds, as if he himself had grown to envelop the mow and the barn and the yard. There was the slap of the porch door as Claude went inside. The twinning ring of the telephones both below and in the kitchen. The jays bickering among the ripening apples. A car idling along the road, gravel crunching under its tires as it passed the tree line by the garden.
Near noon there was a restrained clomp of feet on the mow steps, but he didn’t fully wake until the vestibule door had already swung open. He flattened himself into the hollow in the bales, sweat streaming from his face. There was a long silence. Then the door closed and there were descending footsteps. Below, the sliding gates banged shut to lock out the dogs while Claude cleaned the pens. Edgar sat up and drank from the coffee can, resisting his body’s plea to pour the water over his face. After a while he crawled to where the roofing boards converged with the walls in the corner and rose on his knees and released a stream of urine and watched it disappear into the straw.
When he could no longer endure the heat and cramped quarters, he clambered down the staggered cliff of bales through strata of cooling air, his legs trembling for fear of making noise and from being broiled so long. As soon as he touched the floor, he sank onto a bale. In the rafters above, like a great trapped beast, he could feel the heat he had escaped, waiting for him, and he sucked gulps of the cool, habitable air into his lungs and let his blood cool and the sweat dry on his skin. But before a minute had passed, he grew convinced that he had betrayed his presence somehow, that Claude must be standing below, looking at the ceiling and listening.
Just until sunset, he told himself.
He drew a slick forearm across his face and climbed back into the furnace.
IN THE AFTERNOON THE vestibule door opened and Claude walked into the open space at the front of the mow.
“Edgar?” he said, softly. Then, after a long pause, “Edgar?”
Edgar pressed himself into the hollow in the bales and held his breath. When the pounding in his head was too much to bear, he allowed himself an exhalation so measured he thought he might suffocate. There were footsteps on straw. A tremor shook the stack of bales. Something heavy thumped to the floor. The bales shook again, and there was another thump. For one protracted moment Edgar was sure Claude had begun tearing down the monolith of straw to get at him.
The shaking and thumping continued in a steady rhythm. Though there was barely enough room between the bales and the rafters, Edgar wormed his way forward. Claude was working by the long western wall, his head five or six feet below Edgar’s. He wore a pair of canvas work gloves and he was dragging out bale after bale and letting them tumble to the floor. It wasn’t easy-the bales were stacked one pair lengthwise over another crosswise so that no column could shear away. He’d already opened a semicircular cavity, deeper at the bottom than at the top, and his shirt was dark with sweat halfway down his back. Edgar could hear him gasping in the heat. When thirty or forty bales lay on the floor, he stopped and pulled the gloves off his hands and picked up a hammer from the floor and knelt in the cavity he’d created, half concealed from Edgar. There was the screech of a nail pulled from dry wood and a board clattering. Claude leaned back and rubbed his hands together as if reconsidering, then fetched his work gloves and put them on and shot his fingers together to seat them.
The thought crossed Edgar’s mind to pitch a bale down. Forty or fifty pounds of densely packed straw, dropped from that height, could knock Claude flat. But what would that accomplish? He wouldn’t stay down. Besides, Claude was already glancing uneasily toward the vestibule door; in such cramped quarters, long before Edgar could wrestle a bale to the edge and tip it over, Claude would hear and look up.
Then Claude was backing away from the bales. He set something small and glinting on the floor. A bottle, an old-time bottle, with a crude blob of glass for a stopper and a ribbon around the neck with black markings. Claude stood looking at it, as mesmerized as Edgar. Then he moved the bottle against the mow wall with a gloved hand and thrashed up a pile of loose straw to cover it. He began to restack the bales. Edgar retreated. Shortly, there were footsteps on the mow floor, the click of the vestibule door latch, and more footsteps on the stairs. Edgar waited for the sound of Claude’s boots on the driveway, but all he heard was his mother’s voice as she encouraged the pups in the yard. He elbowed forward. Claude hadn’t bothered to wrestle the topmost bales into place. Near the floor, the stacks bulged from the otherwise neat stair step of yellow. Where Claude had momentarily covered the bottle in straw, Edgar now saw only a stretch of bare planking.