7 ◆ Micah

EVOLUTION HAD MADE A LOT OF TROUBLE at school. There had been night meetings at which fundamentalists from another state argued that it should not be taught. In the meantime, Micah’s teacher had to take down the poster of prehistoric men. The children were not privy to the meetings, but they noted a new sense of purpose in the teachers. The endless days for once seemed to hold an importance to the outside world. Micah’s parents had their own opinions. Descended from single-celled organisms or not, Charles said, everyone had to pay the electric bill or lose the house. Since Republicans were against evolution, however, he felt honor bound to be for it. Joan attended one of the meetings, in a long dress and airy perfume, and afterward she said that far from disproving the presence of God, the old changes showed the elegance of his work. Eventually evolution won, and the teacher taped the poster up again, and the children cheered the return of the naked extinct men striding forth, leading with their chins, as they might cheer the football team at homecoming.

Maybe this explains what Micah saw when he woke in Colette’s house. The figures from the poster had come to life and were walking through her living room. Java, Heidelberg, Peking, Broken Hill, Solo, Swanscombe. They sang and carried firesticks and flint scrapers. They lumbered thoughtfully, as if they had miles to go. Of course, they would not think in terms of miles. Solo Man banged into a standing brass ashtray, and Micah jumped from the davenport, too late to catch it. Swanscombe Man looked at the fallen ashtray, stepped over it, and followed the others out the door. Then Micah’s grandmother came into the room, taking her turn in line as if she were the latest model of human development. She turned on the overhead light, which shone soft yellow through a bowl of cut glass.

“Listen,” he said. “Do you hear singing?”

She stood the ashtray upright. “That’s ‘Absterge Domine’ on my new sound system.”

“Where’s Dad?”

“He had to go do something for someone.”

Micah looked around the room, wondering whether to tell her what he had seen. He decided to go ahead, since his grandmother was at ease with unusual notions. She believed, for example, that people should eat dirt once in a while to maintain their health.

She sat down. “They’re ghosts,” she said. “You don’t have to worry about them. What they want, they don’t want from you. Once in the hallway I seen an old farmer with a box of matches. Another time there was an Indian wearing snowshoes and a red hat with a string on it. Ghosts can’t help where they go. This house just gets them. I think at one time it was an important place.”

“I can’t sleep.”

She went out to the kitchen and brought back a tray bearing a bottle, a pitcher, two glasses, and some rocks. She gave him one of the rocks to look at.

Micah guessed it was an arrowhead, but his grandmother said more like a knife. She held it in her long, wrinkled fingers. “See all these little hone marks along the blade? That’s how you know it was worked by human hand.”

“Where’d you find it?”

“When they dug the sewer line, why, these were just laying on the ground. People walk by this sort of thing every day, but they’re not looking.”

“What did they cut with it?”

“Skins, I imagine. Deer and buffalo and so forth. Everybody’s got to eat.”

“Not ghosts.”

“That’s true. But even they want to eat. They’re always hungry and they don’t know why. And it’s too bad.”

She poured brandy and water into the glasses. “Go to sleep.”

“I’m not tired.”

“Drink this and you will be.”

“It tastes like blackberries.”

“That’s right.”

“Tell me about ghosts.”

They drank from their respective glasses while Colette told of traveling ghosts, who howl along with train whistles — Micah must have heard some of them, living as he did by the tracks — and paper ghosts, who mess up documents, and jealous ghosts, who call on the telephone and ask for people who aren’t there. Also touching ghosts, who give the shivers, and bridge ghosts, such as the so-called Baby Mahoney, and vain ghosts, which are the only ones that can be seen, and mumbling ghosts, who are responsible for the phenomenon of one person turning to another in a quiet room and asking, “Did you say something?”

“Do the men you married ever come back as ghosts?” said Micah.

“No.”

“They say Morris hit a train.”

“Eugene hit the train, who would have been your grandfather. Morris just fell over one day. He was before Eugene. The last to go was Jack Sandover.”

“I’m scared.”

She nodded, seemed far away. “Fear is a hard thing.”

“I don’t know what to do about it.”

“Finish your drink and say goodnight.”

She picked up the tray and left. Micah was alone in the living room. The music had stopped, but at least she had left the light on. He stretched out on the davenport. Wakefulness was like a fire inside him, and if he did nothing but lie still, he knew very well, it would soon be burning out of control. Adults seemed not to understand how desperate a child could get being awake when no one else was.

Maybe he should get a book. A cupboard by the kitchen door held a hardback guide to game animals. He took it down and returned to the davenport, where he lay on his back with his right ankle balanced on his left knee. He rested the book on his stomach and flipped the pages. The photographs were black-and-white and nothing special. The porcupine looked like a wig tossed in the grass, and the jaguar’s eyes were glassy from the light of a flashbulb. Micah was surprised to see the porcupine listed as a game animal. Most of the pages had no pictures, and many contained maps of North America with boring shaded areas. Impatiently he turned pages, arriving at last at the inside of the back cover. The paper had split, revealing a coarsely webbed backing. So this was how books were made.

Micah closed the cover, behind which lay an empty triangle framed on either side by his legs and across the top by his right calf. He opened the cover again and the space was hidden. His legs, in other words, formed the archway of a mountain pass, and the book cover was a crude wooden door that had been fitted into the stone by robbers. The three robbers had dismantled a cabin and set the door into rock, and now they were coming home. He spoke their conversation softly to himself.

“I’m so tired I could collapse right into bed.”

“Unfortunately, we have no beds.”

“It doesn’t matter, since I can’t sleep anyway.”

“You can’t sleep because you don’t try to sleep.”

“Maybe I will sleep on the stove.”

“We must steal some beds.”

“You will burn yourself sleeping on the stove.”

“That would be true if we had firewood, but as you remember, we’re fresh out.”

“We must remind ourselves to steal beds to sleep in and wood to burn in the stove.”

He muttered on, but the game would have been more entertaining if he had had small figures to move about. He thought he remembered seeing some of his father’s or Jerry’s or Bebe’s old cowboys in a coffee can on the porch. The cowboys were made of yellow rubber, and their feet were joined by flat platforms in the shape of a peanut. In his mind’s eye, the can was in a cardboard box, along with a piston of an old car that was no longer around. But he knew he might find no piston and no coffee can and no cardboard box. Maybe there were ghosts who made you believe that the things you wanted were in one place while they were moving them to another.

One of the most oppressive times for Micah was when Joan or Charles ordered him to help find something. Sometimes by moaning and kicking and looking where they had already looked he could get himself dismissed from the assignment. Until then, it was like purgatory, or a prison sentence of no fixed term. He would picture them all growing older — Joan stooped and fragile, Charles with a long gray beard, himself a tall and handsome young man — while doomed to the eternal hunt for the savings deposit book or the corkscrew or the little key that would fit onto the inset stems of the radiators if only someone could find it. And what about Lyris? What would she be in the years to come? A scientist, an aviator — something beyond their expectations.

He sighed and got up and went out to the porch through the door that the prehistoric singers had used. He closed the door silently and nudged the light switch, but the bulb had burned out. This would not matter if the yellow cowboys were where he thought they were. The street light filtering through the large slack porch screens would be enough. The box should be behind a defunct water heater that had been cut open for the storage of magazines. He found the box, found the piston with its lank shaft like a broken wing, found the coffee can full of . . . marbles. He clawed through them, making a glassy racket, as if the cowboys might be beneath them. Moving sadly back to the door, he opened a wooden cabinet to confirm that his chrome six-shooter was still there. Yes — at least something could be counted on. He picked up the shining gun and took hold of the doorknob, only to find that the door had locked when he had come out.

Micah thought of calling for his grandmother. Instead, he spoke her name in a low and confident voice that she might not have heard if she were standing beside him. “Grandma,” he said calmly and generously, as if bringing to her attention in the kindest way some obvious flaw in her logic. “Grandmother.” And what difference did it make? The night he was afraid of was inside the house, not outside. The darkness of the country could be fearsome, with its rumors of bridge ghosts and of wild cats that would maim the unsuspecting pet. Here in town, darkness was just a name that could not hide the relative wealth of light. Micah went down the swaybacked planks of the steps. These town people didn’t know how good they had it. There were streetlamps and house lights and a yellow traffic beacon that flashed and swayed on a cable over the street. The town was a playground of electricity, and he had the whole place almost to himself. A car rolled past so slowly that it seemed he might reach out and stop its tires with his hand. On the car radio, a woman sang in a deep and weary voice, “I think I lost it, let me know if you come across it . . .” Micah wondered how he must look to the driver — small but dangerous, a figure of mystery, a kid in the night with a pistol in his hand. He knew that adults sometimes mistook toy guns for real ones. In the city, police might even shoot you for hav- ing a cap pistol. Of course, the driver might not have seen him. He could not rule that out.

When the car had gone he crossed the street, which seemed to put years between him and Colette. Standing on the sidewalk, he thought of her as someone he had seen long ago, and he realized with a faint tremor that he should be standing beside the house calling her name or lobbing pebbles against her window. It occurred to him that he had split into two personalities, one of whom was trying to get back into the house while the other could do whatever it wanted.

A man sat in his living room, watching television and drinking from a mug. Micah stuck the gun into the waist of his jeans, cupped his hands around his eyes, and leaned against the window. On the television screen, a man and a woman with no clothes moved about, their bodies so large they might have been circus folk. They stalked each other around a wide bed. Micah had wondered about sex. Maybe they were about to launch into it.

He took one hand from the window, intending to scratch his back with his thumb, and his forehead clunked against the glass. The man got up and stood with his back to the television. Micah hurried from the window to hide behind a bank of split wood beside the house. A spider walked on his wrist, and he shook it off. The front door opened. The man looked dumpy and confused, nothing like the characters sporting on the television. He wore a sweatshirt from an automotive store. An orange cat ran out of the house, and the man called, “Who’s out there? Terry?” He drank from the mug and looked up and down the street. “If it’s Terry, you better show yourself. I mean it, honey.”

Micah waited until the man was in the house before walking carefully away. He passed the building that used to be the barbershop and another building that used to be the grocery store and was now said to be teeming with mice. He wondered what time it was. It might be midnight or it might be three-thirty or it might be fifty-hundred. The drying fan of the grain elevator ran all night this time of year. He listened to its thriving, empty sound. A ladder ran to the top of the silo, and he made a mental note that he would climb it someday to survey the town and the fields around it. He might yell his name — Micah! I am Micah! — though no one likes a showoff. For now, he walked to the top of the ramp that led into the covered alleyway and sat down on the concrete, his back to the big wooden doors. Kernels of corn littered the ramp. Scooped into a basket, they would make a fair amount. A person could earn extra money just picking up the grain that others had spilled in this town. It was surprising how many adult thoughts you could generate when no adults were around to remind you that you were not them. He would give his money to the bank, in front of which a cottontail rabbit now hopped uncertainly along the sidewalk. Micah took out his gun and trained it on the rabbit but made no shooting sound. Like his father, he would never eat rabbit.

It was high time to go back, but then he never should have left in the first place, so he kept walking. In a barn he saw an old Camaro, bleached of color, with empty sockets where its headlights should have been. On a curving street he saw a low building with a tall chimney. Charles always said that the bricklayers who made the chimney must have been working by the hour.

A pickup came down off the highway with light beaming from the roof lamps, followed by a car and a ton truck. Going where, he could not guess. Nothing was open now. As a matter of fact, very little was open in the daytime. He walked back to the elevator as the three vehicles gathered in the gravel lot where the restaurant used to be. Micah and Charles had come into town one day to watch the restaurant get knocked down and trucked away in pieces. Later they had gone to another town for dinner.

A man got out of the car and checked his watch. Micah went over and struck up a conversation.

“Town’s quiet tonight, wouldn’t you say?”

The man looked at him. He wore overalls and a whistle on a string around his neck. “Get out of here,” he said.

Another man jumped down from the bed of the ton truck. He had a sheet of notebook paper with squares and arrows penciled in. “The way I figure it, Vincent, we space ourselves out on the perimeter and walk inward.”

“What happens when we see one?” said Vincent, the man with the whistle.

“We shoot.”

“At each other. That’s your plan.” He took the page and looked it over and folded it and tore it up. “That’s Leo’s plan.”

“What are you hunting?” said Micah.

“Who asked you?”

“I’ll go along.”

“No you won’t.”

“Who brought the kid?” said the driver of the pickup. “Whose kid are you? Are you Kevin’s?”

“I wonder where Kevin is,” said Leo, whose plan lay torn to pieces on the gravel.

“Kevin’s got the dog. It’s pointless without him.”

Micah told them his parents’ names and where they lived and his grandmother’s name and where she lived.

“Get home.”

“I have a book of game animals back at the house.”

“Go curl up with it.”

The man in the pickup said, “You have no idea how to speak to a child. Son. Listen to old Bob. Go home.”

“I have good eyes.”

“We’re proud of you,” said Vincent. He took Micah by the back of his shirt and pushed him down the sidewalk. The chrome six-shooter fell on the ground.

“That’s my gun,” said Micah.

“Well, pick it up.”

Micah retrieved the pistol. “At least you could tell me what you’re hunting.”

“If I tell you, will you go home?”

“Maybe.”

“Fox.”

Micah went back to Colette’s house, and the three men waited for Kevin with their engines running. One of them turned on the radio, picking up the big station out of Little Rock. Once the men had left for a weekend in Las Vegas at the same time another plane was leaving for Arkansas, but that’s as close as any of them had ever got to Little Rock. Leo had had a plan for Vegas, just as he had a plan for hunting foxes. He thought he knew most of what there was to know about baccarat, and therefore he lost a thousand dollars, just like that. There was nothing wrong with his plan in that case, it was just that he was unlucky at cards. He was unlucky at everything, he said so himself, and why he had gone to Las Vegas was a question no one could answer.