People of the Dark (12 page)

"What are you doing?" I asked.

"What?" he said.

I repeated, louder, "What are you doing?"

He answered, "I don't know."

This bothered me. I said nothing for a few moments because I could think of nothing to say. At last I asked him, "Who are you?"

He didn't answer.

"Could you tell me who you are?" I shouted.

From within the house I heard Erika yell, "What'd you say, Jack?"

I turned my face to the ceiling of the crawl space. "Nothing," I yelled. "Stay in the house, Erika!" I turned back to the crack in the foundation. I saw that more of the light coming through was obscured. "What are you doing?" I said to the man there.

"I'm sticking my fingers in," he answered.

"Don't do that," I said, paused, went on, "Why are you doing that?"

"I don't know," he answered.

"Don't stick your fingers in there," I said again, and turned to the ceiling of the crawl space. "Erika, stay in the house. Lock the doors."

The man outside the foundation said, "I can't get them out." He didn't sound bothered or upset. He was merely making a statement of fact. "My fingers are stuck."

"Please," I said loudly, "get your fingers
out
of there."

He said nothing.

"What did you stick your fingers in there for in the first place?"

Nothing.

"Are you still there?" I asked. It was a stupid question. I could see clearly enough that he was there.

"Yes," he said.

"Will you wait there?"

"I don't know."

"I'm asking you to wait there. Please."

He said nothing.

I watched him. I could see little—the suggestion of an eye, some dark skin, the center of a pair of dark, full lips, and beyond him, the trunk of our crab apple tree. At last I said, "Wait there. I'm coming out. Please wait there."

"I don't know," he said.

I started backing out of the crawl space. From within the house, Erika called, "What's wrong, Jack? Is something wrong?"

"Stay inside, Erika!" I yelled.

"Jack, I think there's someone outside the house!"

"Stay inside,
damnit
!" I was halfway back to the cellar proper now, and Erika's voice was growing indistinct. "Erika?" I yelled.

She yelled back. I couldn't understand her. I yelled, "Erika, call the police!" I heard nothing from her.

I was at the cellar door now. I pulled it open, ran up the short flight of stone steps, looked to my left, where the man should have been. I saw no one.

Erika appeared seconds later. She looked quizzically at me.

"Jack, there was someone out here. There was a man out here."

"Yes," I said, "I talked to him."

I
found some footprints in the mud near the crack in the foundation and I followed them to where the underbrush took over a hundred feet west of the house. I pushed into the underbrush, hollered, "Is anyone there?" I waited a moment, then added, "Are you there?" But I got no response, and when I turned to go back to the house, I found that Erika was just behind me.

"Jack," she said, "when you were in the cellar, did you tell me to call the police?"

I nodded. "Yes. I did."

"I thought so." She gestured vaguely toward the road far in front of the house and said, as if embarrassed, "They told me they'd be here in five minutes."

T
he cop who came was named Larry Whipple. He was dressed in overalls and an orange hunting jacket, and he explained that he never wore "that dumb police uniform" unless he had to, and since it was his day off—"But I still monitor the calls, you know"—he figured he didn't have to.

He was a big man, just on the unhealthy side of chubby. He had a long, full face, a short black beard and mustache, and small, wide-set eyes. He was in his late forties, I guessed. His black hair was thinning severely.

I showed him into the kitchen, asked him to sit down. He pulled a chair out, sat, got a notepad from one pocket of his hunting jacket and a pencil from another. "So, what seems to be the problem here?" He licked the end of the pencil, held it poised against a page of the notepad. I got the clear idea that he wasn't terribly bright.

"The problem is," I began and sat down across from him, "trespassers."

He wrote it in the notepad. It took him a while; he seemed to have trouble with the spelling. Finally, he looked up, grinned, looked down again, underlined the word, looked up once more, grinned yet again. He had very straight, white teeth. "What sorts of trespassers, Mr. Harris?"

"What sorts?" I asked. Erika came and sat down between us at the circular table. "I don't understand."

"Well." He held his hand up and touched the index finger of his right hand to the fingers of his left. "There's Number One: your hunting trespasser, and they're thicker than flies on cow shit. Then there's Two: your basic hiking type; you know, some asshole from the city, wants to walk in the woods and can't read signs. Then there's Number Three: the squatter type."

"The squatter type?" Erika asked.

Whipple nodded sagely. "Only a few a those, and I can name most of '
em
, but I don't think you got any or I'd know about it." He paused, scribbled something on the notepad, continued, "In fact, we got a whole mess a squatters down south of Cohocton, near the
Ononda
Creek. They built shacks, maybe thirty of '
em
, it's kind of a little community, you know, a little village, and we call it the Oxbow, I don't know why." He stopped again. "But it wouldn't be none of those people '
cuz
they pretty much stay right where they are, 'specially this time a the year '
cuz
it's not real warm yet, you know. What kind you got? You think it was a hunter?"

I shook my head. "No. I don't think so. I don't think he was carrying a gun."

"Uh-huh." He gestured to indicate the outdoors. "I saw all your No Hunting signs, and I guess you got the right to put '
em
up, but you ain't gonna make no friends that way '
cuz
we all—most of us, anyway—we all hunt, we been
huntin
' most our lives, practically—"

"That's neither here nor there, is it?" Erika broke in.

"Huh?" he said, obviously confused.

"Our No Hunting signs aren't what's at issue, right?" I said.

He shrugged. "I guess not."

"The man who was
trespassing
is the issue," Erika said. "That's why we called you."

Larry Whipple nodded slowly. "Yes. That's right. That's why I'm here." He smiled broadly. "So tell me about him."

"About the trespasser?"

His smile broadened even further. "Yes, Mr. Harris, about the trespasser."

"Okay," I said, feeling suddenly defensive and ill-at-ease, "I'll tell you about him." But I could tell him precious little, of course, only that the man was dark-skinned, but not black, and that his eyes were probably dark, that he'd gotten his fingers stuck in the crack in the foundation, and that he hadn't waited around, though I'd asked him to. Larry Whipple thought this was funny. "These trespassers usually don't do precisely what you tell them to do, Mr. Harris," he said, chuckling. Then he stood, stuck his notepad into the pocket of his hunting jacket, and said, at the door, "No, it's okay, I'll see myself out," though neither of us had stood. Then he left.

I turned to Erika. She had a look of puzzlement on her face. I said to her, "Erika, what in the hell do you suppose that was all about?"

She shrugged. "I guess he didn't want to help us, Jack."

W
e went into Cohocton several evenings later. Neither of us wanted to cook that night, and since we both enjoyed a submarine sandwich that was made well—mine with lots of mayonnaise, oil, and cheese, and Erika's with several inches of onions over lean meat—we decided to go to a place called Jack's Subs and Pizza. It was at the north end of
Cohocton's
main street, past three of the five hardware stores in town, a drugstore, Buckles, Boots & Buttons, a used clothing store, the First National Bank of
Cohocton
, a Laundromat, an "Art Gallery" that exhibited the works of local artists almost exclusively (some of whom were quite good, though there were the usual frowning clowns, aged barns, and stylized owls), a privately owned IGA store, the Cohocton Diner, and the Cohocton Hotel, a rambling Victorian monstrosity that had been renovated fifty years earlier to give its cavernous interior a gaudy art-deco look.

As usual in the evening, Cohocton was all but deserted. A few battered pickup trucks were parked on Main Street, one in front of the bank, two in front of C. R. Boring Hardware. A thin, aged man I had come to know only as
Knebel
, pronounced "
neeble
," was out walking his old, fat German Shepherd, Hans.

I stopped in front of Jack's Pizza and Subs; Erika and I got out of the car. I nodded at
Knebel
, who was across the street; he nodded back, brought Hans up short on the leash. "Shit," I whispered, because I realized that
Knebel
wanted to talk. He liked to talk. He lived alone, in a grim, two-room apartment behind the Middletown Tavern, on North Main Street, and had no living relatives or close friends. That was why, I'd been told, he latched onto newcomers and chewed their ears off.

He crossed the street, Hans in tow. In the middle of the street the dog decided to sit down; he coaxed it with a few soothing words and pats on the head and the dog got going.

"Hi,
Knebel
," I called.

Erika, beside me, asked, "Who's he?"

I turned to her, whispered, "No one. I won't be long. Why don't you go in and get the subs?"

She shrugged, said "Sure," and went inside.

Knebel
finished crossing the street and stuck his hand out to me. I took it. "Hi,
Knebel
," I said again.

"Jack," he said, "it's good to see you." He nodded at the sub shop. "Getting some subs?" I nodded.

"Give the little woman some time off, eh?" He nodded in agreement with himself. He was a painfully thin man, with a full head of bright white hair, a large skull, big, flat eyes, and a broad mouth; he reminded me of a huge, white lollypop that's had a face painted on it. He nodded again, still in agreement with himself, and added, "It's a good way to keep '
em
in line, Jack."

"I don't think that way,
Knebel
," I said, and was surprised that it sounded like an apology.

"Uh-huh." He nudged my arm with his elbow. "Don't stick around too long in town tonight, Jack."

This took me by surprise. "Sorry?" I said.

"We've got some trouble here tonight." He nodded, again in self-agreement.

"I don't understand. What kind of trouble?"

He turned, patted the German Shepherd's head, turned back to me. "I'm not sure. I saw some things." He stopped.

"What kind of things?" I coaxed.

"People," he answered, and gestured with his arm toward the Laundromat, several hundred feet away on the other side of the street. "There," he went on, and nodded at the Cohocton Hotel, on our side of the street and a block further down from the Laundromat. "There, too."

I felt a smile start on my lips; I suppressed it. "What's the significance,
Knebel
?" I asked.

"People," he repeated with emphasis, "standing by themselves, Jack. In the dark." He paused meaningfully, then repeated, "People standing by themselves, in the dark."

"Doing what?" I asked.

"Nothing."

"And?"

"That's it." He looked confused. "Isn't it enough?" I didn't know what to say. I shrugged.

"This is a little town," he said.

"Yes, it is."

"I know everyone. And they know me. You want significance?
That's
the significance."