A rolled-up wool blanket, a large thermos filled with hot coffee, a dozen packaged handkerchiefs, a thick turtleneck sweater, a package of athletic socks. Perera carried all this into his office, piecemeal, as the days came and went, and these offerings had the same aspect of futility that he saw in the primitive practice of laying out clothing and nourishment for the departed.

  He braved the Albatross used-book store not far from the library, trying not to breathe the invisible dust from the high stacks of disintegrating books, and in the dim poetry section came upon some unexpected finds. Ah, hah! Michaux, My life, you take off without me, and Trakl, sad, suicidal soul, Beneath the stars a man alone, and Anna Akhmatova, Before this grief the mountains stoop, and Ah! Machado, He was seen walking between rifles. Comments in the margins, someone’s own poem on a title page, bus schedules, indecipherable odds and ends of penciled thoughts intermingling with the printed ones. He wanted to keep these thin volumes for himself and instead he did as planned. He bought a green nylon parka in a discount place on Market Street, slid the books into the deep pockets, and folded the parka on top of the pile.

  On the morning of the twelfth day, before the hour when the public was admitted, Perera entered by the side door, bringing a pair of black plastic shoes, oxford style, made in China, recommended for their comfort by a street friend wearing a pair. The door guard silently led him to the foot of the marble stairs, where Okula, cops and paramedics and librarians were gathered around a man lying on the lowest step.

  Perera had never fainted and was not going to faint now, even though all the strength of his intelligence was leaving the abode of his head to darkness.

  “Mr. Perera,” Okula was saying but not to him, “was an acquaintance of this man. Wasn’t he?”

  Nobody was answering, though Perera gave them time.

  “Occasionally,” he said, “he stepped into my office. My door is usually open.” Sweat was rising from his scalp. “Did he fall?”

  “More like he lay down and died.” The paramedic’s voice was inappropriately young. “T.B. Take a look at that rag.”

  “You say you knew him?” A cop’s voice, “Do you know his name? He’s got nothing in his pockets.”

  “No,” said Perera.

  “Any idea where he concealed himself in here?”

  “Hundreds of places.” Okula, responding. “We check carefully. However, anyone wishing to stay in can also check carefully.”

  “What you might be needing is a couple of dogs. German shepherds are good at it. Dobermans, too. A couple of good dogs could cover this whole place in half an hour.”

  Kneeling by the body, Perera took a closer look at the face, closer than when they sat in the office, discoursing on the animal kingdom. The young man was now no one, as he’d feared he already was when alive. The absolute unwanted, that’s who the dead become.

  “Did this man bother you?”

  It would take many months, he knew, before he’d be able to speak without holding back. Humans speaking were unbearable to hear and abominable to see, himself among the rest. Worse, was all that was written down instead, the never-ending outpouring, given print and given covers, given shelves up and down and everywhere in this warehouse of fathomless darkness.

  “He did not bother me,” he said.

  The door to his office was closed but unlocked, just as he’d left it. Scattered over his desk were what appeared to be the contents of his waste-basket. But unfamiliar, not his. So many kinds of paper scraps, they were the bits and pieces his visitor had brought forth from that green parka. Throwaway ads, envelopes, a discount drugstore’s paper bag, business cards tossed away. On each, the cramped handwriting. By copying down all these stirringly strange ideas, had the fellow hoped to impress upon himself his likeness to these other humans? A break-in of a different sort. A young man breaking into a home of his own.

  Perera sat down at his desk, slipped his glasses on, and spread the scraps out before him as heedfully as his shaking hands allowed.

  The Stone Boy

  ARNOLD DREW HIS overalls and raveling gray sweater over his naked body. In the other narrow bed his brother Eugene went on sleeping, undisturbed by the alarm clock’s rusty ring. Arnold, watching his brother sleeping, felt a peculiar dismay; he was nine, six years younger than Eugie, and in their waking hours it was he who was subordinate. To dispel emphatically his uneasy advantage over his sleeping brother, he threw himself on the hump of Eugie’s body.

  “Get up! Get up!”

  Arnold felt his brother twist away and saw the blankets lifted in a great wing, and, all in an instant, he was lying on his back under the covers with only his face showing, like a baby, and Eugie was sprawled on top of him.

  “Whasa matter with you?” asked Eugie in sleepy anger, his face hanging close.

  “Get up,” Arnold repeated. “You said you’d pick peas with me.”

  Stupidly, Eugie gazed around the room to see if morning had come into it yet. Arnold began to laugh derisively, making soft, snorting noises, and was thrown off the bed. He got up from the floor and went down the stairs, the laughter continuing, like hiccups, against his will. But when he opened the staircase door and entered the parlor, he hunched up his shoulders and was quiet because his parents slept in the bedroom downstairs.

  Arnold lifted his .22-caliber rifle from the rack on the kitchen wall. It was an old lever-action that his father had given him because nobody else used it anymore. On their way down to the garden he and Eugie would go by the lake, and if there were any ducks on it he’d take a shot at them. Standing on the stool before the cupboard, he searched on the top shelf in the confusion of medicines and ointments for man and beast and found a small yellow box of .22 cartridges. Then he sat down on the stool and began to load his gun.

  It was cold in the kitchen so early, but later in the day, when his mother canned the peas, the heat from the woodstove would be almost unbearable. Yesterday she had finished preserving the huckleberries that the family had picked along the mountain, and before that she had canned all the cherries his father had brought from the warehouse in Corinth.

  Eugie came clomping down the stairs and into the kitchen, his head drooping with sleepiness. From his perch on the stool Arnold watched Eugie slip on his green knit cap. Eugie didn’t really need a cap; he hadn’t had a haircut in a long time and his brown curls grew thick and matted, close around his ears and down his neck, tapering there to a small whorl. Eugie passed his left hand through his hair before he set his cap down with his right. The very way he slipped his cap on was an announcement of his status; almost everything he did was a reminder that he was eldest—first he, then Nora, then Arnold—and called attention to how tall he was, almost as tall as his father, how long his legs were, how small he was in the hips, and what a neat dip above his buttocks his thicksoled logger’s boots gave him. Arnold never tired of watching Eugie offer silent praise unto himself. He wondered, as he sat enthralled, if when he got to be Eugie’s age he would still be undersized and his hair still straight.

  Eugie eyed the gun. “Don’t you know this ain’t duck season?” he asked gruffly, as if he were the sheriff.

  “No, I don’t know,” Arnold sniggered.

  Eugie picked up the tin washtub for the peas, unbolted the door with his free hand and kicked it open. Then, lifting the tub to his head, he went clomping down the back steps. Arnold followed, closing the door behind him.

  The sky was faintly gray, almost white. The mountains behind the farm made the sun climb a long way to show itself. Several miles to the south, where the range opened up, hung an orange mist, but the valley in which the farm lay was still cold and colorless.

  Eugie opened the gate to the yard and they passed between the barn and the row of chicken houses, their feet stirring up the carpet of brown feathers dropped by the molting chickens. They paused before going down the slope to the lake. A fluky morning wind ran among the shocks of wheat that covered the slope. It sent a shimmer northward across the lake, gently moving the rushes that formed an island in the center. Killdeer, their white markings flashing, skimmed the water, crying their shrill, sweet cry. And there at the south end of the lake were four wild ducks, swimming out from the willows into open water.

  Arnold followed Eugie down the slope, stealing, as his brother did, from one shock of wheat to another. Eugie paused before climbing through the wire fence that divided the wheat field from the marshy pasture around the lake. They were screened from the ducks by the willows along the lake’s edge.

  “If you hit your duck, you want me to go in after it?” Eugie said.

  “If you want,” Arnold said.

  Eugie lowered his eyelids, leaving slits of mocking blue. “You’d drown ’fore you got to it, them legs of yours are so puny.”

  He shoved the tub under the fence and, pressing down the center wire, climbed through into the pasture.

  Arnold pressed down the bottom wire, thrust a leg through and leaned forward to bring the other leg after. His rifle caught on the wire and he jerked at it. The air was rocked by the sound of the shot. Feeling foolish, he lifted his face, baring it to an expected shower of derision from his brother. But Eugie did not turn around. Instead, from his crouching position, he fell to his knees and then pitched forward onto his face. The ducks rose up crying from the lake, cleared the mountain background and beat away northward across the pale sky.

  Arnold squatted beside his brother. Eugie seemed to be climbing the earth, as if the earth ran up and down, and when he found he couldn’t scale it he lay still.

  “Eugie?”

  Then Arnold saw it, under the tendril of hair at the nape of the neck—a slow rising of bright blood. It had an obnoxious movement, like that of a parasite.

  “Hey, Eugie,” he said again. He was feeling the same discomfort he had felt when he had watched Eugie sleeping; his brother didn’t know that he was lying face down in the pasture.

  Again he said, “Hey, Eugie,” an anxious nudge in his voice. But Eugie was as still as the morning around them.

  Arnold set his rifle down on the ground and stood up. He picked up the tub and, dragging it behind him, walked along by the willows to the garden fence and climbed through. He went down on his knees among the tangled vines. The pods were cold with the night, but his hands were strange to him, and not until some time had passed did he realize that the pods were numbing his fingers. He picked from the top of the vine first, then lifted the vine to look underneath for pods, and moved on to the next.

  It was a warmth on his back, like a large hand laid firmly there, that made him raise his head. Way up the slope the gray farmhouse was struck by the sun. While his head had been bent the land had grown bright around him.

  When he got up his legs were so stiff that he had to go down on his knees again to ease the pain. Then, walking sideways, he dragged the tub, half full of peas, up the slope.

  THE KITCHEN WAS warm now; a fire was roaring in the stove with a closed-up, rushing sound. His mother was spooning eggs from a pot of boiling water and putting them into a bowl. Her short brown hair was uncombed and fell forward across her eyes as she bent her head. Nora was lifting a frying pan full of trout from the stove, holding the handle with a dish towel. His father had just come in from bringing the cows from the north pasture to the barn, and was sitting on the stool, unbuttoning his red plaid mackinaw.

  “Did you boys fill the tub?” his mother asked.

  “They ought’ve by now,” his father said. “They went out of the house an hour ago. Eugie woke me up comin’ downstairs. I heard you shootin’—did you get a duck?”

  “No,” Arnold said. They would want to know why Eugie wasn’t coming in for breakfast. “Eugie’s dead,” he told them.

  They stared at him. The pitch crackled in the stove.

  “You kids playin’ a joke?” his father asked.

  “Where’s Eugene?” his mother asked scoldingly. She wanted, Arnold knew, to see his eyes, and when he glanced at her she put the bowl and spoon down on the stove and walked past him. His father stood up and went out the door after her. Nora followed them with little skipping steps, as if afraid to be left behind.

  Arnold went into the barn, down along the foddering passage past the cows waiting to be milked, and climbed into the loft. After a few minutes he heard a terrifying sound coming toward the house. His parents and Nora were returning from the willows, and sounds sharp as knives were rising from his mother’s breast and carrying over the sloping fields. In a short while he heard his father go down the back steps, slam the car door and drive away.

  Arnold lay still as a fugitive, listening to the cows eating close by. If his parents never called him, he thought, he would stay up in the loft forever, out of the way. In the night he would sneak down for a drink of water from the faucet over the trough and for whatever food they left for him by the barn.

  The rattle of his father’s car as it turned down the lane recalled him to the present. He heard the voices of his Uncle Andy and Aunt Alice as they and his father went past the barn to the lake. He could feel the morning growing heavier with sun. Someone, probably Nora, had let the chickens out of their coops and they were cackling in the yard.

  After a while, a car, followed by another car, turned down the road off the highway. The cars drew to a stop and he heard the voices of strange men. The men also went past the barn and down to the lake. The sheriff’s men and the undertakers, whom his father must have phoned from Uncle Andy’s house, had arrived from Corinth. Then he heard everybody come back and heard the cars turn around and leave.

  “Arnold!” It was his father calling from the yard.

  He climbed down the ladder and went out into the sun, picking wisps of hay from his overalls.

  CORINTH, NINE MILES away, was the county seat, Arnold sat in the front seat of the old Ford between his father, who was driving, and Uncle Andy. No one spoke. Uncle Andy was his mother’s brother, and he had been fond of Eugie because Eugie had resembled him. Andy had taken Eugie hunting and had given him a knife and a lot of things, and now Andy, his eyes narrowed, sat tall and stiff beside Arnold.

  Arnold’s father parked the car before the courthouse. It was a two-story brick building with a lamp on each side of the bottom step. They went up the wide stone steps, Arnold and his father going first, and entered the darkly paneled hallway. The shirtsleeved man in the sheriff’s office said that the sheriff was at Carlson’s Parlor examining the boy who was shot.

  Andy went off to get the sheriff while Arnold and his father waited on a bench in the corridor. Arnold felt his father watching him, and he lifted his eyes with painful casualness to the announcement, on the opposite wall, of the Corinth County Annual Rodeo, and then to the clock with its loudly clucking pendulum. After he had come down from the loft his father and Uncle Andy had stood in the yard with him and asked him to tell them everything, and he had explained to them how the gun had caught on the wire. But when they had asked him why he hadn’t run back to the house to tell his parents, he had had no answer—all he could say was that he had gone down into the garden to pick the peas. His father had stared at him in a pale, puzzled way, and it was then he had felt his father and the others set their cold, turbulent silence against him. Arnold shifted on the bench, his only feeling a small one of compunction imposed by his father’s eyes.

  At a quarter past nine, Andy and the sheriff came in. They all went into the sheriff’s private office, and Arnold was sent forward to sit in the chair by the sheriff’s desk. His father and Andy sat down on the bench against the wall.

  The sheriff slumped down into his swivel chair and swung toward Arnold. He was an old man with white hair like wheat stubble. His restless green eyes made him seem not to be in his office but to be hurrying and bobbing around somewhere else.

  “What did you say your name was?” the sheriff asked.

  “Arnold,” he replied, but he could not remember telling the sheriff his name before.

  “What were you doing with a .22, Arnold?”

  “It’s mine,” he said.

  “Okay. What were you going to shoot?”

  “Some ducks,” he replied.

  “Out of season?”

  He nodded.

  “That’s bad,” said the sheriff. “Were you and your brother good friends?”

  What did he mean—good friends? Eugie was his brother. That was different from a friend. A best friend was your own age, but Eugie was almost a man. Eugie had had a way of looking at him, slyly and mockingly and yet confidentially, that had summed up how they both felt about being brothers. Arnold had wanted to be with Eugie more than with anybody else, but he couldn’t say they had been good friends.

  “Did they ever quarrel?” the sheriff asked his father.

  “Not that I know,” his father replied. “It seemed to me that Arnold cared a lot for Eugie.”

  “Did you?” the sheriff asked Arnold.

  If it seemed so to his father, then it was so. Arnold nodded.

  “Were you mad at him this morning?”

  “No.”

  “How did you happen to shoot him?”

  “We was crawlin’ through the fence.”

  “Yes?”

  “An’ the gun got caught on the wire.”

  “Seems the hammer must of caught,” his father put in.

  “All right, that’s what happened,” said the sheriff. “But what I want you to tell me is this. Why didn’t you go back to the house and tell your father right away? Why did you go and pick peas for an hour?”

  Arnold gazed over his shoulder at his father, expecting his father to have an answer for this also. But his father’s eyes, larger and even lighter blue than usual, were fixed upon him curiously. Arnold picked at a callus in his right palm. It seemed odd now that he had not run back to the house and wakened his father, but he could not remember why he had not. They were all waiting for him to answer.

 

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