STRATTON SAT in the rocking chair on the front porch long enough to drink the second of the gifted beers. His mind hadn’t left the girl since he’d dropped her at the end of the drive. He knew the rest of the road up the way she had gone and there couldn’t have been more than half a dozen places she could have had in mind to go to ground. It had to be the old homeplace at the back end of his property. They were all farms up that way, owned by the kind of good country people who would have hated the sight of her blond dreadlocks, the stink of her patchouli. She didn’t belong to any of them, that was for sure. And even if she had, there would have been no reason to carry that pack filled with beer and whatever else she’d got in town.
He went out to the CR-V and hauled in the few buckets of paint he’d picked up in town to finish off the back rooms, shifted some furniture around, and worked until an afternoon shower moved in and cooled things off. Damn Cat came in and circled his shins, tacitly demanding attention. He scratched the old tom on the top of his head until his ears saucered around, his expression of momentary satisfaction.
“Run off, now. I’m done with you.”
The cat slowly shuttered his eyes and ignored him, sliced each of his cheekbones into his ankles.
When the sun was gone but there still remained good enough light to walk by, he slipped on a ratty pair of sneakers and stepped around the side of the yard, made for the back trail that ran past the untended garden. He paused there at the tree line a moment, considered the problem he might be making for himself before he breached the woods.
The path narrowed almost immediately until it petered out into a game trail so that he had to stoop and pinch back low-hanging branches to pass through. Almost at once there was the staccato of flushed birds and ground squirrels. Later though not much later, the occasional serious break of something larger, deer hide flashing like a patch of shade made suddenly animate. And then after a while the sounds and shapes of startlement began to diminish as the woodland absorbed his trespass into its larger confusion.
The ground gently rose and hardened into shoulders of granite, protruding at times where the natural goblet of rock held a stream. The water circled and spoke and he passed his hands through it to drink. It tasted faintly of a woman.
He had to place his hands on gritty knobs of overhanging stone as he raised himself above the bank, careful but untroubled by the concentration the movement compelled. He had to remind himself not to muscle himself up but to use his legs and patiently crawl forward until gravity swung back to his advantage. His eyes remained on the close purchase of ground.
Once he achieved the top he took a minute to rest and draw away the sweat from his hairline and eyes. He was having to breathe harder than he should and this caused a wave of vain anger. To contemplate getting older was bitter enough without having to fight the physical restraints his body seemed anxious to impose. He forced himself to his feet and drove on.
He heard the sounds of hammering long before he could see where the woods cleared. He moved along behind the deep border of scrub so that he would have the advantage of whomever he might find there. Progress was restricted by his desire for stealth and it took him half an hour to cover the distance.
At first it was only a pair, a woman a few years older than the girl he’d picked up on the roadside, hair dreaded like hers though a shade darker and perhaps a few inches longer. Her carriage too was more vertical, heron-like, as she pried nails from boards laid flat on the ground. As she worked, her slim biceps jumped like something nervous beneath her skin. Standing a few feet away was the man, darkly bearded and tattooed across his pale chest and down the length of both arms. He wore a blue bandanna tied around his head to catch his sweat as he nailed good pieces of siding into the house’s frame. Occasionally they would pause from this and speak quietly, intimately, and his hand would stray to her bare shoulder where it would rest for a while. She did not appear anxious to have him remove it.
Then the girl appeared, coming down from the interior of the house, said something to them that Stratton couldn’t hear, and it was then that he could smell something cooking. The woman and man put down their work and followed her around the side of the house, mounted the stairs and vanished from sight. For a long time he listened to the sounds from within, the creak of the floors, the laughter amid the vines and standing heat. Eventually, he withdrew.
HE HURRIED home in the dark, took the road the last half mile now that he didn’t have to be concerned about being seen. He passed no neighbors on this back end of the dirt road. Everyone was already locked up safe for the night in their family homes, electric lights burning behind shaded windows, the lives they lit contained within the larger fact of darkness. He recalled how he had once given himself to their common peace and how simple it had seemed at the time to behave that way.
Once home he showered and dressed in a pair of clean shorts and a T-shirt, poured a tumbler full of whiskey that he carried into his office. Tonight was suited to John Adams’s Christian Zeal and Activity, and he turned the small silver sun of the compact disc against the light to check for smudges and scratches before he loaded it into the player. The sound staggered a few brief times before the track came alive from the speakers with the reassuring score against the frantic overlay of the preacher’s sermonizing, his rhetorical “What’s wrong with a withered hand?” repeating like errors too beautiful to correct.
In the bottom drawer beneath a sheaf of exams graded but never returned to students at the end of the semester, he found the property documents rubber-banded in a manila folder. He pulled them out and spread them on the desktop. There were well reports and original home inspections, everything maintained from the time he and Liza had bought the property. At the bottom was the tissue-thin trifold of the plat. Here were written the details of ownership, not only of the house but of the secondary holdings as well, the fifty acres of land that belonged to him alone, paid out fully now since the disbursement of Liza’s life insurance policy. He placed his finger where the derelict homeplace stood, the oil in his fingertip leaving its faint fading shape.
He refolded the plat and set it aside from the rest of the house’s papers, sat looking at it for a while as he finished his drink, his eyes lifting occasionally to regard the walls of the house, the blue portal of the window trained on the night. He took some quiet pleasure in the physical presence of the place itself, the real alignments of architecture and décor that comprised the structure anchoring him to this specific point in time. The abstraction of the plat told its own kind of truth, presented the science of azimuths and acreages, but it lacked the living experience of being at home among one’s private things. Impossible to explain that to someone who might come out to have a look around with the idea of buying it all in order to transpose their lives into what had already been lived through. Impossible also to explain the feelings this made him have for these people trespassing, his desire to wish their presence unknown because ultimately it would force an action he had no appetite for.
The CD ended and it was getting late. He shut off the office light and went into the kitchen to pour out a saucer of milk for the cat, warmed a small cupful of the same for himself. Like two old friends, they drank their simple nightcap while they watched over each other, companionably silent.