SIGN LANGUAGE

Friday

The 727 turned to the southwest and vanished into the thunderheads of midsummer. Most of his life, he thought, was captive in that thin shell. And as he turned from the window to face the crowded lobby two thoughts occurred. Or rather, one sharp picture and a hideous thought superimposed. There was a bare field, just off a runway—punctuated by curious lights in cages, white-topped fence posts—and a looming huge fragment of a tail section. This, he knew, was one of those lasting TV images, from the Dallas crash of a few years ago. But the second thing was the unpleasant thought; I’m alone.

Halfway across the carpeted area, Charles turned around and walked back to the glass and waited and watched an identical American Airlines plane rise and bank to the south and vanish. He worried after all those strangers and their families.

Back in the traffic, the car radio on, he wondered what he would do for the next three days. And finally, out of the city, the sun setting beyond the green hills north of Nashville, he still hadn’t come up with any answers. Though, unwillingly, he acknowledged a second unpleasant thought: He didn’t miss them at all. Not Annie or the girls. But of course not, you jackass. He looked at his watch quickly, always a too careful driver. They’ve only been gone an hour now. Soon they’ll be there and he’d still have two hours to drive before he reached the quiet town and empty house.

Some of the guys at work had suggested driving up to St. Louis for a ball game, but Charles had turned down that and all other invitations until someone had nudged him and winked. The secretaries had pursed their lips.

“Batching this weekend, huh? Take-out pizza and beer.”

“Sink full of dirty dishes I bet.”

Now he wished he’d gone. He hadn’t been to a major-league game in years.

A half hour from home he stopped for gas. And, at the register, he turned to the attraction of flashing lights and gaudy, homemade signs over the deli counter. He bought the big basket of fried chicken livers and potato wedges, a Hostess fried apple pie, and root beer.

But out on the road again, the villages and river bridges becoming familiar, he was ashamed of himself. He glanced down at his soft belly and measured its distance from the wheel by turning his hand sideways. Still four fingers away, though he sucked in more deeply than ever. This isn’t good, he thought, and swerved off the road, scattering rocks against a roadside dumpster. He ate exactly four more of the greasy livers and hurled the sack and the fizzing A&W can into the overflowing container.

He hadn’t driven on the highway after dark in years, and his eyes ached. He cursed other drivers who didn’t dim their lights until the last minute and who seemed too close to his side of the road. He thought about all sorts of things, his mind the usual collage of odds and ends. He remembered a movie about a man who went above the Arctic Circle to study wolves; set down alone in the beauty of places where there are no people at all. Different from those Sierra Club calendars of such places. In the movie there was only the man surrounded by wild hearts and shallow, interpreting breaths.

It was almost eleven when Charles came into town. He’d promised Paul he’d come by no matter the hour for one of his famous Manhattans. But instead he drove slowly past their house on Oakridge and smiled guiltily because he saw all of them in front of the opened bay window, their backs to the street, playing some video game. The blue light of TV showed in most of the houses behind drapes and blinds.

He parked behind the pickup. Two vehicles in the driveway and one driver. But he didn’t get out immediately, pick up the evening paper, unlock the doors, turn off the porch light Annie’d left on for him. Instead he watched the moths circle the yellow bulb, his mind busy with all the usual tangle, his breath a little shallow. He felt the tightness in his chest which often awakened him, worried him, worried him even more because he hadn’t told anyone. Though he was sure it was anxiety, stress from work. His stiff penis pushed at his khaki pants. His breathing reminding him of the moment Molly, the oldest, was born.

After a while he picked up the paper and unlocked the door. But inside, he decided to leave the porch light on. Afraid of the dark? he thought. “Nothing’ll get you, you know.” He spoke and smiled at what he told the kids when they all came home after a Disney movie or Wendy’s.

He walked through all the rooms pulling down windows and closing blinds and curtains. In the girls’ room he got on his hands and knees and dislodged a startlingly real doll baby from between the bunk-bed rails and the wall. This was Susan’s, the four-year-old’s, favorite place to stash things. In the dimness under the bed he confronted a row of carefully arranged animals and dolls. Tigers and bears and the incongruously small Ken and Barbie.

At midnight he shut off the local radio station’s classical hour and sat at the kitchen table, his eyes rummaging over familiar things, many of them almost-decrepit wedding gifts. Last week he’d tried rewiring the sixteen-year-old toaster that gladly accepted bread and instantly, in some electrical supernova, produced squares of charcoal. But now there was the new one with the latest options, extra-wide slots for bagels, in the ritzy patina of brushed stainless steel.

Charles listened for a moment to the buzz of his thoughts and heard his concern for aging faucets, failed cabinet locks, proposals due at work, the muddled melody of something by Brahms.

He thought about how he hadn’t been this alone in years. He simply couldn’t remember when. He recalled from nowhere the picture of a girl named Brandy sitting astride him, her small breasts jiggling in the firelight. From a camping trip in college. He’d considered camping and canoeing a passion then. But now he thought about how elaborate and purposeful it all was. Choosing this item over that. Being superior and particular. The now-embarrassing extolling of nature’s virtues. And he’d never gone anywhere alone. There was no solitude, communion, whatever those hip phrases had been. He’d sawed off his toothbrush handle to save space. He’d exaggerated his Cherokee ancestry. There was seduction in tents and canoe bottoms. He saw his own bare ass pumping away, the silver canoe drifting between banks solid with pines and French mulberry.

He wanted something to happen now. He pushed the everyday thoughts away. His life right now was not taken up with his wife, the girls, the office, his blood pressure, taxes, his mother’s failing health. For a moment he remembered he’d promised he’d phone her after Annie and the girls left for his brother-in-law’s wedding in Miami. Then he snagged himself on Annie’s promise to call in the morning before the rehearsal.

“I’m hoping a woman won’t answer,” she’d laughed. He saw her long, bony face. They rarely kissed, though they made love often and ferociously. She turned her ass up now and he came at her from behind, their only contact the wetness of groin and buttocks.

Charles took a long, hot bath until his toes and fingers wrinkled. He kept adding the precious steaming water until it was completely gone. He washed his legs and feet; he never got below his knees when he showered. He dozed off in the water and came back in a chill, his watch on the top of the toilet tank fogged on the inside. The cold water raised gooseflesh.

In the bedroom he turned back the covers then went and locked the bedroom door. He turned off the lights and lay still. But what did he want to happen now? Something unusual, he answered himself. Something wonderful and strange. Something from a pleasant dream or exotic movie. Or maybe not even pleasant. But mysterious. He was sure such things must happen to other people. Isn’t that what shows in some eyes? Or were those rich people, celebrities on TV, and was that just money and drugs?

He put his fingers to his forehead. He wondered if Annie had ever had such a thing happen. She seemed light on her feet. “Happy,” he said aloud in the dark room, the edges of the blinds rosy from the streetlight at the corner. But I’m fine there, too. It wasn’t happiness. That took place in tents, in canoes, at Molly’s birth, the placenta like some heavy wet scroll rolled up tightly.

Hush, he told himself. Listen. What is there to happen? And it wouldn’t just happen by itself.

Charles got up in the dark and straightened the covers. He took some blankets out of the closet and walked to the brick patio. Outside the sky was clear; he had never really learned the constellations, though once, long ago, he’d gone out at his parents’ every night with a star chart and a flashlight. But hadn’t that ended up in a tangle of opened clothes and elbows? Or maybe it’d been too hard or he’d lost interest with no one to impress.

He made a pallet behind the row of potted, blooming vincas and leaned against the rail, watching the motionless shadows. A dog barked twice. The hedge at the back of the yard needed trimming. Charles lay down and covered up. A gust of warm wind rattled the bamboo chimes; the sound the clatter of bones.

His head was full of movies and work and images of girls and women and the girls as women, their narrow hard butts now wide and embarrassing. Elvis, the family cat, came up the steps, curious at the strange sight. He put his gray face up to Charles’s, and Charles took him into the bed. He’d never slept with a cat before, or with a dog. For a long time they both fidgeted.

Saturday

The third time Charles awoke he swung his legs off the couch and sat up stiffly aching in a dozen places. He rubbed his eyes and noticed he’d left the muted TV on, which now showed some children’s cartoon with animal-people, in ugly colors, locked in dreadful combat.

Tasting his own sour breath, he saw it was almost one o’clock. He wondered when he’d pulled the den drapes closed. Rising, he turned off the TV, opened the heavy drapes, the bright summer light rebounding off the bricks of the patio, needling his tired eyes.

He poured himself a cup of coffee from the pot he’d made at daylight after the neighbors’ whispering had first wakened him. Sitting rigidly over the cup in the dainty, cheerful breakfast nook where he’d always felt too large and clumsy, he winced in embarrassment.

“Shhh… come look. See him? Over there on the patio. See?”

“Good lord. You think he’s okay?”

Charles had barely opened his eyes, his face wet with dew, cat hairs on his tongue and lips.

“Maybe it’s a heart attack.”

“Maybe Annie kicked him out or something.”

They had both laughed like naughty children.

Charles had realized he was the topic of the Hallistons’ conversation, the whispered voices as faint as the early morning light. But already the temperature was in the eighties, and though he wanted to lie still until Sam and Karen left the low hedge twenty feet beyond his head, he was terribly hot and miserable. Finally, their whispers lower now, more conspiratorial, he hurried them by groaning theatrically and tossing this way and that. Then he listened carefully over the sound of early mowers and the clink-clink of sprinklers until he heard their patio door open and close. Charles tried to sit but couldn’t, his spine a complicated network of aches. He had to turn gingerly onto his stomach and work himself to his knees by using the outdoor furniture until he sat, breathing shallowly under the shade of the pastel-striped table umbrella.

“Jesus Christ.” He pulled a damp sheet over his twisted boxer shorts. He’d popped two buttons off his pajama tops. He’d kicked out in the night and overturned two pots crowded with the white stars of vincas. The black dirt had been taken up into the bedding and his legs were streaked with the grime. Charles shook his head and began cleaning up. He scooped the dirt into the pots and gathered the bedclothes. It was full daylight before he finished and realized he was soaking with sweat and still outside in his underwear. Elvis sat on the steps down to the yard and stared at Charles, who, passing by, gently pushed him off the terrace.

The second time he’d awakened, he’d been asleep on the couch. It was nine by the VCR when Annie phoned. His mind had been full of retreating dreams, the voices of the Hallistons in the hedge, mortal embarrassment.

“Good morning, sleepyhead.”

And she’d talked on in her level voice full of straightforward information. Good descriptive details of their flight, her parents’ health, the progress of the wedding. He’d talked to the girls, their own voices full of cheer, the sound of birds, of innocent animals celebrating without any heaviness at all.

Now it was afternoon and Charles went to the kitchen and poured out the bitter, hours-old coffee. What foolishness, he thought. “Silly bastard.” His concerns now including the patio business, Sam’s and Karen’s voices, the tone of his wife on the phone. Her voice like a stalactite, fifteen years of accumulation. Steady in the face of operations, death, weddings, pain, and disappointment.

Make me like her, he thought, and was surprised because he had thought he was almost exactly like her already. Aren’t I? Isn’t that why we married, live together?

The rest of the day he worked hard at all the tasks he should already have done. He hosed down the brick walk and the front porch. He touched up the faded picnic table. He waved brazenly at the Hallistons as they left for the tennis courts.

So I’m alone for a day and I come unglued, huh? He laughed at himself and shook his head at the whole vague idea of something wonderful and exotic. That’s the movies talking, not me. And, for the longest time, he considered the devilish power of movies and rock music and commercials over our lives as he trimmed a hedge, even combed out the cat’s gray, shedding hair, its desperate claws scratching at the bricks.

But it must have been darkness, twilight, the end of activity, that brought last night back again over all those objections of neighbors, Annie, the kids, misplaced currycombs, slices of cucumber from the Tupperware bowl in the bottom of the fridge. Bob Davis not carrying his weight at work. Hadn’t for almost a year now.

Instead of showering, Charles took another hot bath. Gradually unclenching his muscles, the water worked on his mind, too. Looking up and over the lavatory, he saw the sky in its last dark blue light after the first star has appeared but not the rest.

He knew he’d only been deadening his mind, keeping it away paying penance, too—all at the same time—for some vague desire.

“I’m going crazy, is that it?” Charles’s voice ruffled the surface of the cloudy, steaming water.

He knew he’d wasted the entire day. There was tomorrow and then, on Monday, he’d leave work early to drive back down to Nashville.

So at dusk, the stars all out now, he brushed a dried piece of chicken liver off the car seat and backed out of the driveway.

It’s not at home; he knew that. What’s not at home? He shook his head and drove past the office, the homes of friends.

Turning off Bledsoe onto Poplar, he slowed down as he passed Melanie Kirk’s house. At the empty four-way stop he put the transmission in park and stuck his head out the window to look back. Her kitchen light was on. He ducked back in when he realized she was right there in the shadows watering the lawn. Her face, arms, legs, all pale in the dark up under the maples, catching the light from the street lamp directly over his flushed face.

What is this? He drove on, quickly, his foot pushing hard on the accelerator, going faster than he’d driven in twenty years. Speeding down streets crowded with homes, people in their yards, children he saw at ballet lessons, parents he recognized from soccer, piano. So once, years ago, she’d come up behind him at some party—Christmas, Halloween, or, back then, they had parties for no good reason at all. Where had they lived then? Over on Childress, before the oldest was born? Or was it even at their house at all? Charles was bent over the sink, twisting at an ice tray, and she’d fit her body snugly against his, run her fingernails down his spine. And he’d jerked around, popping ice cubes all over the place. They’d laughed, picked them up, talked too forcefully, not looking into each other’s eyes.

That was years ago. Before Nick Kirk’s second and last heart attack. Nick was small-boned and handsome. And though they were only casual acquaintances who played awful golf twice or three times a year, Charles had liked Nick. And now, oddly enough, missed him after neglecting his memory for ten years. Nick Kirk, who lived very carefully after the first heart attack. He had grown even thinner, more sunken-chested, but somehow that had only increased his handsomeness. He was thirty-two and had gone to bed without complaint and not gotten up.

Outside town, south on Antietam Road, he gathered speed. The car floated around the curves. Charles concentrated on the road. He moved the red needle past seventy. The tires squealed. He drifted over the twin yellow stripes. A blur of a sedan honked at him. The Buick brushed the high grass just off the shoulder.

He sped all the way to Madison County and the river. There at the Minit Market he filled the car with super unleaded and, sitting on the curb, drank a beer from a paper sack. He listened to the tick of the cooling engine. There were other roads in his head. He’d wanted a Mustang 289 for graduation.

“Then what the fuck do you want? What the Jesus fuck will get you to?”

Charles looked over his shoulder past the ice locker to the man on the pay phone. He paced between the rusted-out hood of a lime-green Gremlin and the minute privacy booth, the short silver cord limiting his range. Charles saw the pile of cigarette butts at his feet. He snuffed one out on the plastic side of the booth, the black pockmarks like bullet holes.

“Oh just hold that shit right there. Hell no I didn’t. Not for a minute, you hear me? Goddamn right. Absolutely right. Well, so he’s a motherfucker, too. You tell him that for me. Coming right from me. Go, tell him. Right now.”

“Just fuck you too!”

The young man slammed down the receiver and stood a minute. Then, lighting another cigarette, he put in a quarter and dialed.

“So, we have to talk, right? Am I right?”

At home Charles loaded in the vidéocassette and pushed the fast forward until the image became what he expected. He turned the sound off and lay on the couch.

No one knew him in Madisonville. He’d just walked right into the adults-only section and picked a number off the rack on the wall. Number 58. He hadn’t flipped through the catalogs on the shelf.

He hadn’t seen the title. And now he watched something he’d never seen before. Long tongues and penises as thick as beer sausages. The reds and pinks of women’s genitalia. All the semen spent on backs and breasts. On opened lips. Lapping tongues. Charles had never had a woman take him in her mouth. And every single moment of sex, even then, in tents, canoes, cars at drive-ins done without such detail, without really looking.

Standing, his penis bulging in his pants, Charles went from window to window, lowering blinds, drawing drapes.

His eyes locked on the large screen that had shown him, Annie, the girls, Swiss Family Robinson, The Sound of Music. He felt a tremendous guilt.

Later he lay on the bed and masturbated—something he hadn’t done in years. It was awkward, unnatural for him. Turning the light on in the bathroom, washing his hands and stomach, he felt caught. Before he went back to bed he rewound the tape and snapped the box shut. He’d mail it back to the store; he’d use the book mailer they’d gotten the latest Book-of-the-Month Club offering in, just last week.

Sunday

The morning began cool, but by eleven it was cloudy and humid. Charles’s aftershave remained sticky, his wet hair soured slowly as he sweated in front of the TV. He finally got up and turned the air-conditioner down to sixty. He watched “Face the Nation” and “Meet the Press.” He tried keeping his attention focused on this week’s familiar faces. The country had discovered the poor again.

Often he looked out the window at the sky. He considered mowing now that he’d trimmed the hedges. Balancing everything out. Finally, a weed-whacker trim at the base of the flowerbeds, the swingset.

Charles grew despondent. He wasn’t, he knew, the sort of person who dwells on things, who takes something and probes it, picks it to death. But in twenty-four hours he’d leave work and drive to Nashville and, by late tomorrow, the house would be filled with them again. The girls arguing like magpies; Annie making lists, catching him up on her family and the wedding. He lay back on the couch and tried his best to take comfort from those scenes sure to happen. He heard their voices and footsteps and his chest seemed difficult to lift, his breath shallow. He sat up.

Perhaps he should have gone to church; it would have helped pass the time.

He watched the Cubs lose until almost six, then he sacked the fridge for sandwich materials. Again in front of the television but looking out at the sky, he felt the same. “I really am going nuts, huh? Is that it?” He remembered a movie he’d seen years ago. In the very last scene Gene Hackman has gone nuts and, looking for a hidden microphone, had destroyed his beautiful apartment room by room. Stripped the wallpaper, pulled up the thin slats of oak flooring. Finally sat and played his saxophone in the middle of it all.

Charles turned off the TV and dressed in his yard clothes. But once outside he couldn’t find pleasure anywhere. He mowed a strip from front to back but the grass was so short it barely showed. His mind seemed locked up tight by nothing at all. The mugginess drenched him and his damp underwear chafed. There was nothing unexplained, exotic, mysterious. Only the Sears mower belching, acting up. The Hallistons’ terrible poodle barking.

Charles stopped the mower and drove off in the pickup. This time he drove slowly, carefully, through the neighborhoods. He chose streets he liked. He looked at the huge, tree-covered lots, the tremendous houses at the apex of circular drives. Then there were the narrower streets and smaller lots but older, too, with a more luxurious growth of lawns, trees, shrubs.

He drove all the way through town and out toward Mt. Carmel to the south. Five miles out he pulled off into an empty gravel parking lot. Here some huge international company had built and maintained a nature trail which looped through the hilly, forested countryside for two miles or so. It was a payback for a hundred years of corporate robbery. He and Annie had brought the girls out once and made it a quarter of the way around before insects and tired feet had turned them back. Charles shrugged his shoulders and locked the pickup. His sweat had left the dark outline of his back and legs on the upholstery.

He walked leisurely on the trail of pulverized wood bark. Every so often he stopped and read the slanting red metal plaques and stared off into the deep woods, his eyes searching hopelessly for certain types of maple, oak, ash. He remembered his silly canoeing trips, the dappled sunlight on bare flesh.

At plaque number twenty-seven Charles just stepped off the trail and walked down the hillside, crossed a dry stream, the water in its pools stagnant, covered with a hairy scum, and pulled his bulk through the thicket of undergrowth. He had scared himself already, and each step was taken with dread. Charlie, he kept saying to himself. Charlie, what are you doing? You idiot, the sun’s going down. My God, man, turn around. You’re not that teenage trailblazer. His thoughts kept hammering in his head trying to stop him, drag him back to the pickup. But after a while he’d sweated them away, and by sunset he only considered his raw thighs and heavy calves.

He walked a full hour, until almost dark, before he knew he could stop and rest without turning back, without running headlong toward the loop of trail and the pickup in the gravel lot. Because by now, with all the twisting and turning up easy valleys—treacherous slopes and limestone ledges soon proved too thwarting—he was lost. The sun was down, the clouds heavier than this morning.

He was tired. He figured he’d sweated away a couple of pounds. He pulled his soaking shirt away from his chest and stomach and looked around at the woods. The light was failing rapidly now. And all of this was incomprehensible. His back and legs began to stiffen; he stood clutching the trunk of a tree and walked on, amazed at the depth of these woods. He’d thought this countryside mostly open and cleared. Where farmers raised corn and soybeans, hogs and dairy herds.

In the dark, the travel was difficult. He learned to move carefully, to judge the distances of dark, unfamiliar shapes, to plant his feet cautiously, aware of the unevenness of the ground. He had fallen a half-dozen times and no longer feared falling, though by moving slowly he only stumbled occasionally, usually catching himself on a low bush or thick, supportive branch. He feared snakes, animals that shuffled away in the absolute dark of the lowest brush and fallen tree trunks. There was rain high over his head in the treetops; he heard it but it never reached his hot face.

He thought about Annie eating at her brother’s dining table. Later, birdsong, harsh and hesitant, broke out all around him.

Suddenly he stepped out of the woods and onto a dirt road that bordered an open field. The dark shape of a cow lumbered past on the other side of a rail fence. He smelled it, heard it defecate. To his left a few hundred yards was a large white frame house up under some trees. Charles blinked his eyes in what seemed intense light after the darkness of the forest.

He turned up the road. The windshield of an old car caught the light from a high window. He heard animals move easily as he passed the barn. Turning his watch face to the sky he tried to tell the time but couldn’t.

Almost at the front gate of the chain-link fence he stopped as a pack of small dogs tore out from under the house and raised an alarming racket of yelps and snapping teeth. The bravest lunged against the fence. Charles stepped back, gauging the height to the top bar.

Then a yellow porch light came on and the front door opened.

“Jasper, Mary, shut up, you hear me! Get quiet.”

Charles watched the thin old man descend the cement steps, his hand gripping the metal bannister. He scattered the dogs with a swipe of the cane in his free hand. Behind him, in the doorway, a small old woman pulled her quilted housecoat shut and locked it with clenched fists.

The old man hobbled to the gate and caught the top of it. Charles saw the scrollwork that framed a large letter W at its center.

“What the hell can I do for you? Sorta late to be making a social call, ain’t it, young fella?”

Charles stepped up to the gate and smiled.

“By God, you’re a mess.” The old man examined him. Charles noticed he tightened the grip on his cane, took half a step back toward the house.

Charles waved his right hand in front of his face, dismissed his appearance, any threat he might present. But then, before he said a word, he moved his hands again, the way he’d seen it done in the movies, on TV during congressional hearings. The woman signing at a frantic pace to keep up. Charles hoped they didn’t know any better, that they didn’t have a deaf son or granddaughter. He took the chance; he had no idea what the odds were. He just knew he didn’t want to say anything now. He had no desire to talk. He was amazed at himself; he felt his mouth open, his chin drop. But he moved his fingers in front of his chest slowly, trying hard to duplicate what he’d only half-noticed, hoping to hell this old man and woman didn’t recognize the fraud, scream, do anything but let him up on the porch and inside. He considered the news on TV, in newspapers, what his own reaction would be. Dreaded the scream, felt an answering one at the back of his throat.

“My God… well I’ll be goddamned.” The old man spoke over his shoulder. “Livy he can’t talk. It’s all with his hands. I’ll be damned.”

Charles smiled, tried to look harmless, bobbed his head, felt himself act foolish. Livy stepped down to the gate. In the weak light from the porch, her face was the color of her gray hair, which was long and thick and had fallen loose from her nest of pins. It covered her left cheek and one dark eye.

“Can you hear?” she asked. “Can you hear me?”

Charles tried not to blink. He felt himself drifting into some stereotype. The village idiot.

“Deaf and dumb,” the old man muttered. “And lost to boot. I’ll just be goddamned. Middle of the night. Look at the shape he’s in.”

Charles caught himself; he’d almost followed the old man’s eyes down to his torn pants.

“Mute,” Livy said, lifting the gate latch. “It’s mute, not dumb, Gale.”

She patted Charles’s shoulder and brought him through the gate. The pack of dogs came out to sniff his pants legs. Livy ignored them, waded through, pulling Charles with her.

“I don’t know about this, Livy.” The old man was behind and below them on the steps. “Middle of the goddamned night. No car. Torn clothes. Could be an escaped convict from up at Madisonville. Livy, you hear me?”

They all stopped under the yellow porch light and Charles didn’t have any idea what would happen next. He expected the old man to scream in his ear, the sudden trick in those war movies where the spy reflexively turns around and is carried away by the Gestapo. So, you can hear, you swine.

Livy looked into his face. Charles swallowed and smiled his best smile. He signed some more, caught her eyes with his fingers and tried to work them deftly, methodically, in some repeated patterns. He thought behind them, tried to speak with them, tried to tell this beautiful old woman everything he could about his life. What had happened to him, without excuses. What he understood and didn’t understand.

“He’s okay.” She spoke distinctly as if that would enable Charles to hear. “Let’s get in out of the mosquitoes.”

The old man sat in a chair by the refrigerator and crossed his hands on the cane handle. Charles smiled and ducked his head. The old man nodded his own but didn’t move his thin lips a fraction.

She touched Charles’s shoulder. “Here,” she said loudly. “Here’s some supper.”

“He’s a goddamned mess, Livy. Needs to wash up,” Gale added sharply.

Gale hobbled ahead of Charles back through the living room full of heavy ancient furniture. The nap of the horsehair sofa was prickly under Charles’s hand. Despite the warmth of the night, a low blue flame burned in the huge gas heater. A tin can of water bubbled in front of the red grates, humidifying the already damp, thick air.

Charles closed the bathroom door behind him, heard the old man’s cane bumping back down the hall. He smelled the soap, the odor of honeysuckle, and washed his hands and face. He opened their metal medicine cabinet and took out the plastic bottles. There were more for her than him. For pain, two a day. Something for blood pressure. For cloudy vision.

He squatted by the tub. It was large, solid, up off the floor on lion’s paws that had once been gilded but now had only flecks of gold between the claws. There was the smell of other, unknown lives, and he inhaled deeply. Vicks VapoRub, Ben-Gay lotions, the funk of hidden, dirty clothes, old furniture, older flesh.

Later he ate two bowls of thick beef stew. They talked about him, wondered all sorts of things. Until, finally, Livy stood and said “Ah ha,” and took a pencil stub and notepad from a drawer.

As the two stood close over his shoulder, he breathed in their smells. Gale leaned over as Charles wrote, rested a hand on Charles’s shoulder.

He wrote his real name and how he was coming from Madisonville and had had car trouble, walked into the woods, and gotten lost. Then he’d come out here, in their meadow.

“Didn’t know they let ‘em drive like that,” Gale mumbled.

Charles winced slightly for he didn’t know either. Then she took the dull pencil and wrote their names, how it was almost midnight and he’d sleep here, they’d take him into town for a mechanic in the morning. Did he need anything else before bed? Anything special? Was he still hungry?

They wrote back and forth for quite a time. Tore off pages, Livy finding another partial pad, Gale sharpening the pencil with a penknife.

Later Charles got into bed, the soft mattress swallowing him a bit. The weak bedside light dully illuminated the room. Charles guessed it had belonged to a child. Who would be much older than he now. It was full of heavy, dark furniture, all topped with lacework and photographs. Most were black and white.

Tonight he lived with these two old people, would sleep in a room unslept in in years, protected by all those small dogs.

He listened to them talking about him. They were almost deaf and shouted at one another.

“Ain’t it something. I mean, goddamn, ain’t it something.”

“It’s amazing.”

Charles guessed she had a smile on her face. They had done well. Here was something amazing, mysterious, they’d remember the rest of their lives. They’d talk about it, smile, and shake their heads.