He took a big swallow of beer. “Now I ask you, does that make sense?”

Edgar shook his head. The fact was, it didn’t make sense to him. He loved ordinary things, ordinary days, ordinary work. Even as Henry spoke he felt a pang over the routine of the kennel-and if that couldn’t be called ordinary, what could? Besides, while Henry didn’t strike him as being highly unusual, he didn’t see any reason that should be an offense. Or for that matter, what it would even mean to be called ordinary.

“Darn right, it doesn’t,” Henry declared in a sudden burst of indignation. Then he wilted. “She had a point, though. What exactly have I done out of the ordinary? Every day I go down to the central office, and at the end of every day I come home. I have a house like everyone else. I plant a crop in a field and harvest it every fall. I have a car on blocks that I tinker with. I like to fish. What isn’t ordinary about that?”

Is she ordinary? Edgar wrote.

Henry looked at Edgar as if he hadn’t considered the question before.

“Well, I guess you might not pick Belva out of the crowd walking down the street. But she’s pretty unusual once you get to know her. For instance, one of her eyes is blue, the other one is brown, so that puts her out of the ordinary right there. Also, she’s an atheist. She says if there was a God, both her eyes would be the same color. Myself, I believe in God, but I just don’t want to lose an entire morning at church. I figure God doesn’t care whether you worship in the church or on your drive to work. Belva says that doesn’t count as being either an atheist or a believer; that’s just lazy.”

Do you believe in ghosts?

“Wouldn’t surprise me,” Henry said, as if this confirmed his darkest suspicions. But he wanted to talk about Belva; it was as though he could picture her right then, in front of them.

“You should see her ankles-gorgeous, delicate ankles, ankles like the ones on statues. We were engaged for two years.” He heaved a sigh. “She’s dating some guy at the bank.”

Hasn’t anything out of the ordinary happened to you?

“Not that I know of,” Henry said. Actually, he moaned this. Then he snapped his fingers. “No, wait. You want to know the most unusual thing that ever happened to me? One time last year I went to the supermarket. Middle of the day, hardly anyone there. I’m going down the aisles, buying milk and soup and potatoes, and I remember I need bread. So I go to the bread aisle. There’s loaves and loaves of bread sitting on the shelves at the far end of the aisle. I start pushing my cart toward the bread. And what do you think happens?”

Edgar shrugged.

“That’s right, you don’t know,” he said. “Because it’s not ordinary. What happens is, before I reach the end of the aisle, one of the loaves sort of unsquashes itself and falls to the floor. Nobody touched it, it just stretched itself out like an accordion and there it went. Plop. I pick up the loaf and put it back on the shelf. Then I push on over to the condiments. Now, here’s the unordinary part: I’m heading to checkout, and I turn down the bread aisle again. And what do I hear from behind me?”

He gave Edgar a significant look.

What? Edgar signed, though he probably could have guessed.

“Plop!” Henry said. “That’s right. I turned around and there was the very same loaf of bread lying on the floor.”

What did you do?

“I’m not an idiot. I bought it, of course. I put my regular brand back.”

Was it better?

“Same difference,” Henry said, shrugging. “I switched back the next week.” He took a long swallow of beer. “So there you have it. That’s the peak. The apex. The apogee. That’s the exotic life that Belva turned down.”

That doesn’t happen to everybody, Edgar wrote.

Henry shrugged. “It would be great to see a UFO, but I don’t think that’s going to happen.”

Then the piano music began to skip and Henry walked inside to fix the record. Baboo went to the door and watched through the screen. Baboo, it seemed, had come to some sort of decision about Henry-Edgar had been noticing it all night. When Henry was seated again, Baboo stood next to him, eye to eye, and waited until Henry discovered that he needed to be scratched under the chin or on the top of the head or across his back just in front of his tail. Even sober, Henry might not have been aware of how deftly Baboo placed Henry’s hand where he wanted to be scratched.

Henry leaned his head back against the house and, after a time, fell asleep, mumbling. Edgar and the dogs were left looking into the summer night. The music reminded Edgar of New Year’s Eve, so long past, when he had danced with his mother; how his father had cut in, how the two them had swayed by the lights of the Christmas tree; how he had stolen curds to give to these same dogs to celebrate. Back then, he’d hardly known them, he thought.

Then the piano music ended and Henry jerked awake. “Now suppose I joined the navy,” he said, vehemently replying to some argument in his dreams. “I sail off somewhere. Burma. After a while I stop being ordinary. Okay. But how’s Belva gonna know? That’s the problem. I have to stop being ordinary right here in Lute.” He leaned forward and looked blearily at Edgar. Then he must have understood what had happened, because he stood and heaved a dramatic yawn. “Okay,” he said. “That’s it. I’m done.”

Edgar and the dogs followed Henry into the house. Henry might have been amused to find them sleeping on the porch one morning, but he didn’t want to try the man’s patience. When he came into the living room the dogs had already curled up on the throw rug. He turned off the light on the end table and hung his arm off the sofa and laid a hand on Tinder. In the dark, he thought about the old man in the shed. He checked the blanket to make sure it wasn’t wrapped around his legs. In all their days of running through the Chequamegon, he had never once forgotten to look down the legs of his pants for spiders, but his first night indoors he’d been flummoxed by a blanket.

Something had changed, he realized. Settled there on the couch, he felt none of the previous night’s trapped sensation, and he thought that part of him had decided to trust Henry, that this was a place they could sleep through the night in peace. Perhaps that had happened only a few minutes before. Perhaps when he was watching Baboo.

Then the counting part of his mind began its litany: Three days in one place. Beginning of August. How much faster would they have to move once Tinder healed? How much longer could they stay? How far could they get before it turned cold? How far away could they get at all? Finally, Edgar eased himself off the sofa, nudging one of the dogs over, and he arranged himself, amidst a chorus of sighs and groans, so that he was touching them all.

Please, he told himself, half warning, half prayer. Don’t get used to this.

Engine No. 6615

FOR SIX DAYS EDGAR HAD BEEN WORKING IN HENRY’S SHED. Mornings he washed and dressed Tinder’s foot. The bandages were no longer stained from weeping, but if Edgar worked too hard at cleaning the wound, the wash water turned pink. Despite Edgar’s attempts to keep Tinder in quiet down-stays, whenever Essay and Baboo wrestled in the yard, Tinder hobbled along, his foot clubbed by a graying sock. Sometimes he yelped and rolled, but he quickly hopped up again. Evenings, they listened to scratchy library records Henry brought home, music composed by Russian generals: Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Shostakovich. During dinner Henry swore at the crossword while Edgar read the liner notes. Afterward, Edgar tended to Tinder’s foot and taught Henry sign.

Henry had departed on Saturday midmorning with a list of errands to run. He expected to return by early afternoon, he said, though with his luck, it could be evening and the day would be shot. After he left, Edgar stood in the shed deciding what to tackle first. The walls had been stripped of rusted tools and saw blades. The disintegrating wagon was half excavated. As Edgar wrestled with an oval wall mirror, miraculously unbroken, he felt the tingle of evaporating sweat on his neck, the sign that the old farmer had appeared in the shed’s farthest recesses.