He rubbed his eyes and his dry cheekbones; he smoothed down his mustache. “It was a year ago last night.” Then he heard what he had been saying. “No, of course not. There’s no connection, I mean.”
“Come back to bed and tell me what’s wrong, baby.”
“Oh, I’m okay,” he said, but returned to the bed. When he was lifting the blankets to get back in, Stella said, “You’re not okay, baby. You must have had a terrible dream. Do you want to tell me about it?”
“It doesn’t make much sense.”
“Tell me anyhow.” She began to caress his back and shoulders, and he twisted to look down at her head on the dark blue pillow. As Sears had said, Stella was a beauty: she had been a beauty when he met her, and apparently she would be a beauty when she died. It was not a plump chocolate-box prettiness, but a matter of strong cheekbones, straight facial planes and definite black eyebrows. Stella’s hair had gone an uncompromising gray when she was in her early thirties, and she had refused to dye it, seeing long before anyone else what a sexual asset an abundant head of gray hair would be when combined with a youthful face: now she still had the abundant gray hair, and her face was not much less youthful. It would be more truthful to say that her face had never been precisely youthful, nor would it ever truly be old: in fact with every year, up nearly to fifty, she had come more completely into her beauty, and then had pitched camp there. She was ten years younger than Ricky, but on good days she still looked only a blink over forty.
“Tell me, Ricky,” she said. “What the hell is going on?”
So he began to tell her his dream, and he saw concern, horror, love and fear cross her elegant face. She continued to rub his back, and then moved her hand to his chest. “Baby,” she said when he was through, “do you really have dreams like that every night?”
“No,” he said, looking at her face and seeing beneath the superficial emotions of the moment the self-absorption and amusement which were always present in Stella and which were always joined, “that was the worst one.” Then, smiling a little because he saw where she was going with all this rubbing, he said, “That was the champ.”
“You’ve been very tense lately.” She lifted his hand and touched it to her lips.
“I know.”
“Do all of you have these bad dreams?”
“All who?”
“The Chowder Society.” She placed his hand on her cheek.
“I think so.”
“Well,” she said, and sat up and, crossing her arms elbows-out before her, began to work her nightdress over her head, “don’t you old fools think you ought to do something about it?” The nightdress went off, and she tossed her head to flip her hair back into place. Their two children had left her breasts sagging and her nipples large and brown, but Stella’s body had aged only a little more than her face.
“We don’t know what to do,” he confessed.
“Well, I know what to do,” she said and went back down on the bed and opened her arms. If Ricky had ever wished that he had remained a bachelor like Sears, he did not wish it this morning.
“You old sexpot,” Stella said when they were done, “you would have given this up a long time ago if it hadn’t been for me. What a loss that would have been. If it weren’t for me you’d be too dignified to ever take your clothes off.”
“That’s not true.”
“Oh? What would you do, then? Chase after little girls like Lewis Benedikt?”
“Lewis doesn’t chase after little girls.”
“Girls in their twenties, then.”
“No. I wouldn’t.”
“There. I’m right. You wouldn’t have any sex life at all, like your precious partner Sears.” She folded back the sheets and blankets on her side of the bed, and got out. “I’ll shower first,” she said. Stella demanded a long time by herself in the bathroom every morning. She put on her long white-gray robe and looked as if she were about to tell someone to sack Troy. “But I’ll tell you what you should do. You should call Sears right now and tell him about that awful dream. You won’t get anywhere if you won’t at least talk about it. If I know you and Sears, you two can go for weeks at a time without saying anything personal to each other. That’s dreadful. What in the world do you talk about, anyhow?”
“Talk about?” Ricky asked, a little taken aback. “We talk about law.”
“Oh, law,” Stella said, and marched off toward the bathroom.
When she returned nearly thirty minutes later he was sitting up in bed looking confused. The pouches beneath his eyes were larger than usual. “The paper isn’t here yet,” he said. “I went downstairs and looked.”
“Of course it isn’t here,” Stella said, dropping a towel and a box of tissues on the bed, and turned away again to go into the dressing room. “What time do you think it is?”
“What time? Why, what time is it? My watch is on the table.”
“It’s just past seven.”
“Seven?” They normally did not get up until eight, and Ricky usually dawdled around the house until nine-thirty before leaving for the office on Wheat Row. Though neither he nor Sears admitted it, there was no longer much work for them; old clients dropped in from time to time, there were a few complicated lawsuits which looked to drag on through the next decade, there was always a will or two or a tax problem to clarify, but they could have stayed home two days of every week without anybody noticing. Alone in his part of the office suite, Ricky lately had been rereading Donald Wanderley’s second book, trying unsuccessfully to persuade himself that he wanted its author in Milburn. “What are we doing up?”
“You woke us up with your screaming, if I have to remind you,” Stella called from the dressing room. “You were having problems with a monster that was trying to eat you, remember?”
“Um,” Ricky said. “I thought it looked dark outside.”
“Don’t be evasive,” Stella called, and in another minute or two was back beside the bed, fully dressed. “When you start to scream in your sleep, it’s time to start taking whatever is happening to you seriously. I know you won’t go to a doctor—”
“I won’t go to a head doctor, anyhow,” Ricky said. “My mind is in good working order.”
“So I said. But since you won’t consider that, you should at least talk to Sears about it. I don’t like to see you eating yourself up.” With that, she left for the downstairs.
Ricky lay back, considering. It had been, as he said to Stella, the worst of the nightmares. Simply thinking about it now was unsettling—simply having Stella go down the stairs was, at some level, unsettling. The dream had been extraordinarily vivid, with the detail and texture of wakefulness. He remembered the faces of his friends, bereft poor corpses, abandoned of life. That had been horrid: it had been somehow immoral, and the shock to his morality even more than the horror had made him open his mouth and scream. Maybe Stella was right. Without knowing how he would bring up the subject with Sears, he nevertheless picked up the receiver of the bedside phone. After Sears’s phone had rung once, Ricky realized that he was acting very much out of character and that he didn’t have the faintest idea why Stella thought Sears James would have anything worthwhile to say. But by then it was too late, and Sears had picked up the phone and said hello.
“It’s Ricky, Sears.”
Evidently it was the morning for demonstrating inconsistency of character; nothing less like Sears than his response could be imagined. “Ricky, thank God,” he said. “You must have ESP. I was just going to call you. Can you come by and pick me up in five minutes?”
“Give me fifteen minutes,” Ricky said. “What happened?” And then, thinking of his dream, “Did anybody die?”
“Why do you ask that?” Sears said in a different, sharper voice.
“No reason. I’ll tell you later. I take it we’re not going to Wheat Row.”
“No. I just had a call from our Vergil. He wants us out there—he wants to sue everybody in sight. Step on it, will you?”
“Elmer wants us both at his farm? What happened?”
Sears was impatient. “Something earthshaking, apparently. Pull the plug out, Ricky.”
Lewis’s property had included both woods and pasture along with the stone farmhouse he had cherished from the moment he had seen it. It was like a fortress with shutters, a huge building constructed at the start of the century by a rich gentleman farmer who liked the look of the castles in the illustrated novels by Sir Walter Scott admired by his wife. Lewis neither knew nor cared about Sir Walter, but years of living in a hotel had left him with a need for the sense of a multitude of rooms about him. He would have had claustrophobia in a cottage. When he had decided to sell his hotel to the chain which had been offering increasing amounts of money for it over the six preceding years, he had enough money left after taxes to buy the only house in or near Milburn which would truly have satisfied him, and enough to furnish it as he wished. The paneling, guns and pikestaffs did not always please his female guests. (Stella Hawthorne, who had spent three adventurous afternoons at Lewis’s farm shortly after his return, had said she’d never been had in an officers’ mess before.) He’d sold the pasture land as soon as he could, but kept the woods because he liked the idea of owning them.
Jogging through them, he always saw something new which quickened his sense of life: one day a pocket of snowdrops and monkshoods in a hollow beside the stream, the next a red-winged blackbird as big as a cat peering wild-eyed at him from the branches of a maple. But today he was not looking, he was simply running along the snowy path, wishing that whatever was going on would stop. Maybe this young Wanderley could set things right again: judging by his book, he had been to a few dark places himself. Maybe John was right, and Edward’s nephew would at least be able to figure out what was happening to the four of them. It could not just be guilt, after all this time. The Eva Galli business had happened so long ago that it had concerned five different men in a different country: if you looked at the land and compared it to what it was in the twenties, you’d never think it was the same place. Even his woods were second growth, though he liked to pretend that they were not.
Lewis, running, liked to think of the huge climax forest that had once blanketed nearly all of North America: a vast belt of trees and vegetation, silent wealth through which moved only himself and Indians. And a few spirits. Yes, in an endless vault of forest you could believe in spirits. Indian mythology was full of them—they suited the landscape. But now, in a world of Burger Kings and Piggly Wiggly supermarkets and Pitch ‘n Putt golf courses, all the old tyrannical ghosts must have been crowded out.
They aren’t crowded out yet, Lewis. Not yet.
It was like another voice speaking in his mind. Like hell they aren’t, he said to himself, passing one hand over his face.
Not here. Not yet.
Shit. He was spooking himself. He was still affected by that damned dream. Maybe it was time they really talked about these dreams to one another—described them. Now suppose they all had the same dream. What would that mean? Lewis’s mind could not go so far. Well, it would mean something: and at least talking about it would help. He thought he had scared himself awake, this morning. His foot came down into slush, and he clearly saw the final image of his dream: the two men withdrawing their hoods to show their wasted faces.
Not yet.
God damn. He came to a halt, exactly halfway on his run, and wiped his forehead on the sleeve of the running jacket. He wished he had already completed the run and were back inside his kitchen, brewing up coffee or smelling bacon frying in the pan. You’re tougher than this, you old buzzard, he counseled himself, you’ve had to be, ever since Linda killed herself. He leaned for a moment on the fence at the end of the path, where it circled back into the trees, and looked aimlessly out over the field he had sold. Now it was lightly covered with snow, a bumpy expanse from which hard light momentarily bounced and sang. All that too would have been forest. Where the dark things hid.
Oh hell. Well, if they old, they weren’t anywhere in sight now. The air was leaden and empty, and you could see nearly all the way across the dip in the valley to where the trucks on Route 17 steamed on toward Binghamton and Elmira, or the other way toward Newburgh or Poughkeepsie. Only for a moment, the woods at his back made him feel uneasy. He turned around; saw only the path twisting back into the trees; heard only an angry squirrel complain that he was going to have a hungry winter.
Pal, we’ve all had hungry winters. He was thinking of the season after Linda had died. Nothing puts off guests like a public suicide. And is there a Mrs. Benedikt? Oh yes, that’s her bleeding all over the patio— you know, the one with the funny bend in her neck. They had cleared off one by one, leaving him with a deteriorating two-million-dollar asset and no cash inflow. He’d had to let three-fourths of the staff go, and paid the rest out of his own pocket. It had been three years before business had returned, and six years before he had paid his debts.
Suddenly, what he wanted was not coffee and bacon, but a bottle of O’Keefe’s beer. A gallon of it. His throat was dry and his chest ached.
Yes, we’ve all had hungry winters, pal. A gallon of O’Keefe’s? He could have swallowed a barrel. Remembering Linda’s senseless, inexplicable death made him yearn for drunkenness.
It was time to get back. Shaken by memory—Linda’s face had come back to him with utter clarity, claiming him through the nine years since that moment—he turned from the fence and inhaled deeply. Running, not a gallon of ale, was his therapy now. The path through the mile and a half of woods seemed narrower, darker.
Your problem, Lewis, is that you’re yellow.
It was the nightmare that had brought back the memories. Sears and John, in those cerements of the grave, with those lifeless faces. Why not Ricky? If the other two living members of the Chowder Society, why not the third?
He was sweating even before he started the run back.
The return path took a long angle off to the left before turning back in the direction of the farmhouse: normally this loafing misdirection was Lewis’s favorite part of his morning run. The woods closed in almost immediately, and by the time you had gone fifteen paces you forgot all about the open field at your back. More than any other part of the path, it looked here like the original climax forest: thick oaks and girlish birches fought for root space, tall ferns crowded toward the path. Today he ran it with as little pleasure in it as it was possible for him to feel. All those trees, their number and thickness, were obscurely threatening: running away from the house was like running away from safety. Going over the powdery snow in white air, he pushed himself hard toward the cut back home.
When the sensation first hit him, he ignored it, vowing not to allow himself to be whammied any more than he was already. What had come into his mind was that someone was standing back at the beginning of the return path, just where the first trees stood. He knew that no one could be there: it was impossible that anyone had walked across the field without his noticing. But the sensation persisted; it would not be argued away. His watcher’s eyes seemed to follow him, going deeper into the crowded trees. A squadron of crows left the branches of an oak just ahead of him. Normally this would have delighted Lewis, but this time he jumped at their racket and almost fell.
Then the sensation shifted, and became more intense. The person back there was coming after him, staring at him with huge eyes. Frantic, despising himself, Lewis pelted for home without daring to look back. He could feel the eyes watching him until he reached the walkway leading across his back garden from the edge of the woods to his kitchen door.
He ran down the path, his chest raggedly hauling in air, twisted the doorknob, and jumped inside. He slammed the door behind him and went immediately to the window beside it. The path was empty and the only footprints were his. Still Lewis was frightened, looking out to the near edge of his woods. For a moment a traitorous synapse in his brain told him: maybe you should sell out and move into town. But there were no footprints. Nobody could possibly be out there, keeping out of sight in the shelter of the trees—he wouldn’t be scared out of the house he needed, forced by his own weakness to trade his splendid comfortable isolation for a crowded discomfort. To this decision, made in a cold kitchen on the first day of snowfall, he would hold.
Lewis put a kettle on the stove, got his coffee pitcher off a shelf, filled the grinder with Blue Mountain beans and held the switch down until they were powder. Oh hell. He opened the refrigerator, took out a bottle of O’Keefe’s and after snapping off the cap drank most of it without tasting or swallowing. As the beer hit his stomach, a two-sided thought surprised him. I wish Edward was still alive: I wish John hadn’t pushed so hard for his godawful party.