Claude

HE SAT WITH HIS BACK TO THE WORKSHOP DOOR, WAITING and counting, watching Edgar lying in front of him. A vortex of smoke was rushing upward into the dark rectangle overhead. There had been one terrible moment when he’d thought, it isn’t working, but he’d been mistaken. Instead of advancing on Claude, the boy had used the pitchfork to open the hay hatch. After he fell, he’d lain looking into the mow and working his hands over his chest in a stream of sign that Claude could not hope to read. That had gone on for a long time. Then, as if Edgar had come to some sort of decision, he draped one hand atop his chest, laid the other on the floor beside his leg, and hadn’t moved since.

Claude thought of that rain-soaked alley in Pusan-what it had been like watching the old man drop the tip of his sharpened reed onto the crippled dog’s withers-how gentle the motion-how the dog had paused from its lapping at the crock of soup and looked up and crumpled. There had been only an instant’s delay. It seemed as if the contents of the bottle never acted the same way twice. Perhaps, over time, it had lost potency. Perhaps it drew on something different in each person. He would have liked to go back now and ask the old man to explain it. The bottle sat across the room, at the base of the workbench. He had to fight the desire to scramble over and twist the glass stopper into place-to seal it up again, at least for as long as he was confined to the same room with it. Only his dread of nearing the stuff stopped him. And if he touched it again, he couldn’t be certain he would leave it behind.

He debated whether he should carry Edgar’s body out. He could sling the boy over his shoulders in a fireman’s carry and stagger into the yard. That way would be better for Trudy, he thought, and he would have done as she asked. Or he could tell Trudy the boy had grown confused and wandered into the smoky center of the barn, and though he’d searched and searched, he’d finally been driven out by the smoke, certain that Edgar must have emerged from the back doors. That was better-but only if it looked as if he had searched for a very long time-as long as humanly possible. Dangerously long. He forced himself to sit one minute more. He concentrated on stopping the jitter in his knees. It cost him nothing to wait, besides breathing a little smoke and having to look at the boy lying there. Claude could not fix his gaze on Edgar for long without a tremor rising from his insides, but that was foolish. If anything, the boy looked peaceful.

Then, from the mow, came a sound. A groan that rose in pitch to a squeal like shearing tin. Claude looked up. There was no change in the character of the smoke, and no flames glowed through the open hatch, but suddenly it felt dangerous to be in that barn for even a second longer. The boy had been right about one thing-opening the hatch had cleared much of the smoke from the workshop. But, Claude was deciding right then, it had been a less-than-great idea for other reasons, and the more he thought about it, the less desire he had to stay in the barn. Black, fluid smoke from under the door had begun to creep around either side of him.

Standing brought on a wave of dizziness. He stepped back from the door, taking care to avoid the boy’s body. Standing hands to knees, he gasped breaths of the clear air. Then he twisted the knob on the workshop door. It was as if he’d swept aside a dam. The acrid smoke that poured in tore at his throat, forcing him back into the corner. He knelt and coughed and when he looked up again the smoke was rushing toward the open hay hatch. Not rising, rushing. And for the first time he saw the interior of the mow glowing orange through that curtain of gray.

And brightening.

He scrambled into the kennel aisle, hands on the floor. The atmosphere roiled in barrels around him. He was at the double doors, poised to step through, when something made him pause and drag the back of his knuckles across his tearing eyes. Precisely where the smoke belched into the light of the hooded lamp outside the doors stood the figure of a man. As Claude watched, the figure tattered and disappeared. Claude closed his eyes. When he opened them again, the figure had returned, not so much engulfed in the smoke as made of it. Through it, Claude saw the papers Edgar had retrieved, scattered across the grass of the lawn.

Glen, was his first thought. But Glen’s voice echoed from out in the yard. And even at a glance, Claude recognized his brother’s form.

This was hypoxia, hallucination, smoke rapture-what happened to oxygen-starved divers. He knelt and pressed his face against the cement floor to suck clear air into his lungs. As he stood again, the last ceiling light in the aisle winked out. Outside, the hooded lamp above the doors cast its light just long enough for Claude to see clearly that it was Gar, beyond any doubt.

And then it was dark. He stood for a moment trying to force himself forward, but in the end he turned to face the interior of the barn. Another pair of doors waited on the far end. He could traverse the length of the kennel and gain the clear summer night air that way-a few seconds’ travel, if he hurried.

He navigated along in the darkness, imagining the arrangement of kennel runs on either side of him, the long straight aisle, the door to the whelping room ahead, the beams of the mow passing above one by one. He didn’t break into a run until the timbers began to shriek far overhead, a twisting scream this time that made him sure the entire structure must be ready to collapse. And yet, that couldn’t be happening. He’d barely seen a flame.

He stared up at the sound. Through a gap in the smoke, a thin pair of orange lines. Heat on his face.

He had taken only a step or two in full flight when an imageless blaze of white blossomed and dissipated before him. Then he was sitting on the cement. It took a moment for the pain to register, to understand he’d run into one of the posts lining the aisle. He reached out, felt it, sooty and warm, though he couldn’t see it. His throat burned as if he’d swallowed acid. When he clambered to his feet, a coughing fit nearly drove him to the floor all over again.

The collision had turned him around. At first he couldn’t tell which way he’d been heading. Over the sound of the timbers he thought he heard his name being called.

“What was that?” he shouted. “Who is it?”

But there was no reply-just his own voice, returning flatly through the smoke. He shouted again. Something about the shape of the echo gave him his bearings. To his left he made out a dim rectangle of light through the smoke. A doorway, but front or back? He turned away from it and began to walk, hands outstretched, moving in the straightest line he could.

His fingertips touched wood, then a hinge, then the wire of a pen door. He stepped back and corrected to the right. He had only to follow the perfectly straight line of the aisle to find the back doors. It should have been simple. He took another step into the blackness. Time and again his hands pressed against wire where there should have been open air. The aisle seemed to veer left, but when he moved left, it veered right, as though the sound in his ears was not the breaking strain of burning wood, but the agony of those great beams twisting.

At last a wind began to pass along the aisle, dragging smoke across his face like a streamer of hot silk. Now he had reason to panic, but to his surprise the sensation was exquisite, as if he had longed for it all his life. He stopped. Then even the sound of the timbers quieted and there was just the hollow roar of wind. He stood in the darkness, eyes closed, letting the smoke caress him. Then he lifted his hands and twined his fingers into the warm wire mesh he knew he would find waiting.