“We had a dollar and a half left over, even after we bought the whiskey,” she said. “Maybe that deer will come back.”
“Take some salt to put on his tail,” McCord said. “Maybe he will stand still and pose for you.”
“I dont want him to pose. That’s just what I dont want. I dont want to copy a deer. Anybody can do that.” She went on, the screen door slapped behind her. Wilbourne did not look after her. He lay smoking too, his hands beneath his head.
“Listen,” McCord said. “You’ve got a lot of food, there’s plenty of wood here and cover when it turns cold, and when things begin to open up in town maybe I can sell some of that junk she made, get orders—”
“I’m not worrying. I told you I am happy. Nothing can take what I have already had away from me.”
“Now, aint that just sweet. Listen. Why dont you give me that damn check and send her back with me and you can eat through your hundred bucks and then move into the woods and eat ants and play Saint Anthony in a tree and on Christmas you can take a mussel shell and make yourself a present of your own oysters. I’m going to sleep.” He turned over and seemed to go to sleep at once, and soon Wilbourne slept too.
He waked once and knew by the sun that it was past noon and that she was not in the house. But he was not concerned; lying awake for a moment it was not the twenty-seven barren years he looked at, and she would not be far, the path straight and empty and quiet between the two fifty-dollar rows of cans and sacks, she would wait for him. If that is to be, she will wait, he thought. If we are to lie so, it will be together in the wavering solitude in spite of Mac and his ninth-rate Teasdale who seems to remember a hell of a lot of what people read, beneath the red and yellow drift of the waning year, the myriad kissing of the repeated leaves.
The sun was just above the trees when she returned. The top sheet of the pad was still blank, though the paints had been used. “Were they that bad?” McCord said. He was busy at the stove with beans and rice and dried apricots—one of those secret cooking or eating specialties such as every bachelor seems to have and which some can actually produce though, you would have said at first glance, not McCord.
“Maybe a little bird told her what you were doing with fifty cents’ worth of our grub, so she had to run,” Wilbourne said. The concoction was ready at last. It was not so bad, Wilbourne admitted. “Only I dont know whether it actually is not foul, or if it’s something protective—that what I taste is not this at all but the forty or fifty cents it represents, if maybe I dont have a gland for cowardice in my palate or stomach too.” He and Charlotte washed the dishes, McCord went out and returned with an armful of wood and laid a fire. “We wont need that tonight,” Wilbourne said.
“It wont cost you anything but the wood,” McCord said. “And you’ve got from here to the Canadian line to get more from. You can run all Northern Wisconsin up this chimney if you want to.” Then they sat before the fire, smoking and not talking a great deal, until time for McCord to leave. He would not stay, holiday tomorrow or not. Wilbourne went out to the car with him and he got into it, looking back at Charlotte in silhouette against the fire, in the door. “Yah,” he said. “You dont need to worry, no more than an old lady being led across the street by a policeman or an eagle scout. Because when the damned bloody wild drunken car comes along it wont be the old lady, it will be the cop or the scout it busts the hell out of. Watch yourself.”
“Watch myself?”
“Yah. You cant be even afraid all the time without taking some pains.”
Wilbourne returned to the house. It was late, yet she had not begun to undress; again he mused, not on the adaptability of women to circumstance but on the ability of women to adapt the illicit, even the criminal, to a bourgeois standard of respectability as he watched her, barefoot, moving about the room, making those subtle alterations in the fixtures of this temporary abode as they even do in hotel rooms rented for but one night, producing from one of the boxes which he had believed to contain only food objects from their apartment in Chicago which he not only did not know she still had but had forgotten they ever owned—the books they had acquired, a copper bowl, even the chintz cover from the ex-work bench; then from a cigarette carton which she had converted into a small receptacle resembling a coffin, the tiny figure of the old man, the Bad Smell; he watched her set it on the mantel and stand looking at it for a time, musing too, then take up the bottle with the drink they had saved her and, with the ritualistic sobriety of a child playing, pour the whiskey onto the hearth. “The lares and penates,” she said. “I dont know Latin, but They will know what I mean.”
They slept in the two cots on the porch, then, it turning cold just before dawn, in one cot, her bare feet fast on the boards, the hard plunge of elbow and hip waking him as she came into the blankets smelling of bacon and balsam. There was a gray light on the lake and when he heard the loon he knew exactly what it was, he even knew what it would look like, listening to the raucous idiot voice, thinking how man alone of all creatures deliberately atrophies his natural senses and that only at the expense of others; how the four-legged animal gains all its information through smelling and seeing and hearing and distrusts all else while the two-legged one believes only what it reads.
The fire felt good the next morning. While she washed the breakfast dishes he cut more wood for it behind the cabin, removing his sweater now, the sun definitely impacting now though he was not fooled, thinking how in these latitudes Labor Day and not equinox marked the suspiration of summer, the long sigh toward autumn and the cold, when she called him from the house. He entered; in the middle of the room stood a stranger carrying balanced on his shoulder a large cardboard box, a man no older than himself, barefoot, in faded khaki slacks and a sleeveless singlet, sunbrowned, with blue eyes and pale sunburned lashes and symmetrical ridges of straw-colored hair—the perfect reflexive coiffure—who was looking quietly at the effigy on the mantel. Through the open door behind him Wilbourne saw a beached canoe. “This is—” Charlotte said. “What did you say your name was?”
“Bradley,” the stranger said. He looked at Wilbourne, his eyes almost white against his skin like a kodak negative, balancing the box on his shoulder while he extended the other hand.
“Wilbourne,” Charlotte said. “Bradley’s the neighbor. He’s leaving today. He brought us what grub they had left.”
“No use lugging it out again,” Bradley said. “Your wife tells me you folks are going to stay on a while, so I thought—” he gave Wilbourne a brief hard violent bone-crushing meaningless grip—the broker’s front man two years out of an Eastern college.
“That’s decent of you. We’ll be glad to have it. Here, let me—” But the other had already swung the box to the floor; it was well filled. Charlotte and Wilbourne carefully did not look at it. “Thanks a lot. The more we have in the house, the harder it will be for the wolf to get in.”
“Or to crowd us out when he does,” Charlotte said. Bradley looked at her. He laughed, that is with his teeth. His eyes did not laugh, the assured, predatory eyes of the still successful prom leader.
“Not bad,” he said, “Do you—”
“Thanks,” Charlotte said. “Will you have some coffee?”
“Thanks, I’ve had breakfast. We were up at dawn. Must be back in town tonight.” Now he looked at the effigy on the mantel again. “May I?” he said. He approached the mantel. “Do I know him? I seem—”
“I hope not,” Charlotte said. Bradley looked at her.
“We hope not yet, she means,” Wilbourne said. But Bradley continued to watch Charlotte, the pale brows courteously interrogatory above the predatory eyes which did not smile when the mouth did.
“It’s the Bad Smell,” Charlotte said.
“Oh. I see.” He looked at the effigy. “You made it. I saw you sketching yesterday. Across the lake.”
“I know you did.”
“Touch,” he said. “Can I apologise? I wasn’t spying.”
“I wasn’t hiding.” Bradley looked at her and now Wilbourne for the first time saw the eyebrows and mouth in accord, quizzical, sardonic, ruthless, the whole man emanating a sort of crass and insolent confidence.
“Sure?” he said.
“Sufficiently,” Charlotte said. She moved to the mantel and took the effigy from it. “It’s too bad you are leaving before we can return your call upon your wife. But perhaps you will accept this as a memento of your perspicuity.”
“No; really, I—”
“Take it,” Charlotte said pleasantly. “You must need it much worse than we do.”
“Well, thanks.” He took the effigy. “Thanks. We’ve
