She gave me an address. It was several miles outside of town. “When are you coming?” she asked.
“As soon as I can. I don’t have a car.”
“You say you’re no trouble?”
“Not in my opinion,” I said.
I hung up and pulled back the folding door on the phone booth. The air was bright with a clean, cold smell like dark water dipped out of a rain barrel in winter, perhaps a harbinger that the gifts of the earth are many, all of them waiting to be discovered.
That probably sounds like a foolish way to think. But youth is its own narcotic, its impermanence our greatest worry and greatest loss. So why put on sackcloth and ashes over the memories we should guard like blue diamonds the rest of our lives?
Chapter Four
SHE LIVED ON a rural road in an adobe-style house with a flagstone porch and a flat roof and cedar logs protruding horizontally from the tops of the walls. There were big shiny-blue ceramic jars on the porch, dripping bugle and clematis vine; an old black Ford pickup was parked in the porte cochere, a fire-engine-red Mustang behind it. I stepped under the porch roof and knocked. The rain-washed paint job on the Mustang seemed the only splash of color in the landscape. She opened the door. “You came here on the deck of a submarine?”
“I thumbed a ride.” I saw a man seated behind her at a counter that divided the kitchen and living room. “May I come in?”
“Yeah, sorry,” she said. ?
?I’ll get you a towel.”
Through a side window I could see a picked cornfield, a three-sided shed with pigs in it, a windmill ginning with the pump disconnected, a chain rattling against the stanchions, a gray, tormented sky.
I could feel the man on the counter stool taking my inventory. There is a radar in men that is seldom wrong. I suspect we inherit it from our fellow cave dwellers. You go to shake hands with a man whose benign face and relaxed posture are totally disarming. Then his fingers curl around yours, and a toxin enters your pores and flows up your arm and into your armpit and stays there like a prelude to a heart attack.
“Hi,” I said.
“Ciao,” he said. His boots were hooked on the stool’s rungs. He was tall and lean and wore ironed cargo pants and a leather vest with no shirt, his skin caramel-colored and smooth as clay, his hair long and sun-bleached on the tips, his eyes merry. “That’s ‘hello’ in Italian,” he said, and winked.
“No kidding?” I said.
Jo Anne came back with a towel. “This is Henri Devos, my art professor,” she said.
“How are you doing?” I said. I took off my raincoat and offered my hand. He did not rise from his stool. He didn’t blink, either, the way movie stars don’t blink.
“Are you the fellow who had a bad time of it last night?” he said.
“Nothing of historical importance,” I said.
“Glad you weren’t hurt too seriously. I’d leave the buggers alone.”
“I didn’t bother the ‘buggers.’?”
“Bravo! That gives you the moral high ground,” he said. “I’d let it go at that.”
I nodded, my gaze in neutral space.
“What I mean is they’re anachronisms who have no other place to go,” he said.
I folded my raincoat and placed it on the floor by the door, my back to him. I was never good at hiding my feelings. “They’re victims?”
He grinned, his eyes indulgent, warm, lingering on the edge of kind. He was obviously a pro and not one to take the bait.
“Do I have it right, sir?” I said.
He sniffed and took a breath as though caving in to social necessity. “Their own karma will catch up with them. That’s all I was saying. No great message there.”
“Like karma caught up with Joseph Stalin?” I said. “Or Hirohito? Boy, those suckers paid the price.”