He thought about what would happen. Once Edgar was groggy he would carry the boy to his car. He couldn’t weigh more than one-twenty. Glen could sprint across the field carrying that much. And when Edgar came awake again, they would be traveling down some back road.

Faintly, he saw the gray silhouette of a figure wading through the hay, halfway between the road and the woods farther back. A dog accompanied the figure. They paused at the birches. Glen grabbed the tin of ether and scrambled down the embankment and crossed the road, keeping his gaze fixed on the two of them. There wasn’t really any doubt about who it was, but he had to be careful now. He waited to see whether a light would go on in the barn, or whether the Impala might suddenly roar to life. The figure disappeared into the darkness behind the barn. There came a brief volley of barks, then silence.

It wasn’t until Glen reached around to get the whiskey flask out of his back pocket that he remembered he’d laid it aside at the top of the embankment. The ether tin was too squat to fit in his pocket. He looked at the beer bottle in his hand. He drained it in a gulp and punctured the little mushroom cap on the ether and tipped the vessels together. Vapor curled down the side of the bottle, spilling over his fingers in silvery waves before dissipating into the night air. When he was done he stuffed a corner of the rag into the bottle and waved the arrangement under his nose. His nostrils didn’t even tingle. And if a little ether leaked, he wasn’t worried. It took a lot of anything to affect Ox Papineau. Every once in a great while, his size worked in his favor.

He tucked the beer bottle into his back pocket and checked his watch.

If that porch light didn’t come on in the next five minutes, Glen told himself, Edgar Sawtelle was going for a ride.

Edgar

THEY CAME UP ALONG THE SOUTH FENCE AND CROSSED THE shallow swells of the field, with Essay, for once, content to stay near his side. The dry hay stroked his legs as he walked. A whippoorwill whistled from the woods. In the distance another sadly replied. They stopped at the birches and watched the yard. The truck was parked beside the milk house; the Impala, in the turnout by the porch. The yard light cast a yellow glow against the squat obelisk of the barn, leaving the back double doors in shadow. He saw no stripe of light glowing between or beneath the doors. Most important of all, the porch light was dark. Claude was in the house, then.

When they reached the barn, he paused and turned the latch on the back door and eased it open. Inside was darkness and the musky scent of the dogs intensified by enclosure and heat. Two dogs bayed a greeting, but before they could continue, he and Essay stepped inside. He switched on the aisle lights and walked along the runs, quieting the dogs, and when he finished, he went to the run where Finch and Pout stood and opened the door and let Essay glide in. She nosed her littermates and turned back. Edgar squatted in front of the pen door.

Last time, he signed. Just a little while longer.

He fetched a bucket from the workshop and carried it down the aisle, working from the front doors to the back, upending it and boosting himself up and unscrewing the light bulbs, all but the one nearest the back door, licking his fingers against their quick heat. The act familiar from those nights when his mother was housebound with pneumonia and he’d slept on the makeshift bed of bales. As he worked his way down the aisle, he planned where to search. There was no point looking in the mow. Claude hadn’t thought the bottle was safe there; he wouldn’t have put it back. It could be in the workshop or the medicine room or behind some loose board. It could also be in the Impala, but he doubted that. Nothing important would be in the Impala, not after Essay had appeared with a key. Seeing Claude rub his hands together and don gloves before touching the bottle made him think it wouldn’t be in the house, either-he wouldn’t have it nearer himself than absolutely necessary. But Edgar felt equally certain Claude wouldn’t have thrown the bottle and its contents away. He could have done that months ago, but something in the way he’d handled it spoke of enthrallment as well as fear.

Edgar began with the medicine room. Half a dozen enameled white cabinets hung on the far wall. Only two contained medicine; the others held stacks of towels and scales and odds and ends rarely used. He sorted through each cabinet, opening the doors and peering in and lifting out the contents and replacing them before moving on, forcing himself to go slowly and look twice, despite his impulse to rush. He didn’t want to doubt himself and have to check again. When he finished with the cabinets, he rifled the drawers beneath the counter, discovering as he went that he could run his hands through each drawer’s contents without removing things and yet be certain that nothing as big as the bottle had been missed.

It wasn’t there. At least not in the obvious places. To search for nooks and loose boards, he needed a flashlight. He walked to the workshop. Then he realized the flashlight was still in the mow, where he’d left it. He mounted the steps and, working almost entirely by feel, climbed the bales. The filament of the flashlight glowed like an ember when he pushed the switch, then darkened. He located a fresh set of batteries in the many-drawered chest on the workshop’s far wall.

He walked back to the medicine room, engrossed in the problem of how to reach the boards between the ceiling beams. He could tap each one to see if it was loose. He could get the stepladder from the milk house or maybe stand on the floor and use a rake handle. He noticed, absently, the dogs all standing by their doors, worked up again by his running around. But they stayed quiet, as he had asked. After all, it wasn’t so unusual for him to be working late at night in the barn. They would calm down soon enough.

He turned the corner into the medicine room, still in reverie. There was just time to register a whiff of something aromatic. From the corner of his eye he saw a figure standing off to the side. Then the barn whirled around him. A hand as big and solid as a steak pressed a wet cloth over his face. Instantly, his eyes began to water. He choked and then, despite himself, inhaled. It was as if someone had immersed his face in rotting flowers.

The odor was unmistakable.

Prestone. Ether.

The flashlight clattered to the floor. He dug the fingers of both his hands into the hand covering his face, but the wrist and arm holding it in place were thick and cable-muscled and he couldn’t budge them, not even a fraction of an inch. The owner of the hand didn’t attempt to move. He just stood and held the cloth against Edgar’s face while he flailed.

“Just wait,” the man said. “This’ll only take a minute.”

It was no surprise to hear Glen Papineau’s voice. Only Glen had hands that big. Edgar gave up trying to pull the cloth away from his face and began instead to swing his fists backward, to no avail. Glen simply wrapped another arm around Edgar’s chest and pinned his arms; in one of his hands he held a beer bottle with his thumb over the top.

Edgar held his breath, counted the racing beats of his heart.

“The longer you wait, the bigger your breath,” Glen said, and tightened the pressure over his face. He was right, of course. After a time-an impossibly short time-Edgar began to suffocate, and he drew another breath of the nauseating stuff. And then, because his lungs were still burning, he needed to do it again, and again.

Everything grew quiet. They stood for a while and he heard only the huff of his own breath. He grew drowsy-just the way he’d imagined people might if they stared at the pocket watch he’d gotten for Christmas when he was little. Only the pocket watch hadn’t worked, and this did, and it was the rhythm of his breathing and not the swinging of the fob. A detachment came over him, even drowning, as he was, in flowers. He stopped struggling. He began to float some distance from his body, just an inch or two above himself at first. The smell of ether slowly diminished. After a certain point he didn’t float any farther away.