About Grace (22 page)

One-one-two-two Alturas Street was a small slate-colored bungalow with three or four heat-stroked rhododendrons withering in the front bed. He kept his attention on the porch. No one went in or out.

It was the third of September, plenty of broth left in summer's cauldron, and by 10
A.M.
the temperature shoved past ninety. Winkler opened his collar and rocked in his seat. Every hour or so a pedestrian ambled by, one of them a sweating mailman who limped to Grace's door and pushed a pile of magazines through the slot.

Cars slugged past. A magpie landed on the Datsun's hood and rested a moment, panting. Winkler took his shells from the dashboard one by one and worked them between his fingers. He ate a convenience store sandwich; he drank a liter of water. In the afternoon a police car rolled past and slowed but did not stop.

Around six a lady in a little white pickup pulled in behind him. She closed her door, polished a smudge from the window with her sleeve. As she walked past, she studied him with a measure of suspicion before trying a wave. He waved back.

Grace, he assumed, was at her office. She likely held a very important job, a scientist, or a surgical intern. She would come home soon and if he was very lucky, she'd invite him inside and give him a glass of ice water.

The white-truck lady disappeared, swallowed by a neighboring house. The sun crept lower. Winkler knotted his tie in the rearview mirror and sat in his damp shirt watching shadows enter the trees. The
heat—unbelievably—seemed only to increase.

What were the chances? Ten thousand to one? A million to one? The light concentrated to orange. Red filled the undersides of his eyelids, and drained away, and filled again. Every few minutes he had the sensation of falling out of space and into a dream, then climbing out of the dream and back into the Datsun's misshapen driver's seat once more. At some point, nearing dusk, a Jeep rolled past his window. It parked in front of 1122 Alturas and a young woman in a short-sleeved button-down and slacks bounded out. Winkler's heart stalled; he tried to blink himself into awareness. The woman carried a nylon briefcase and her legs were long and quick and she had a certain exhausted loveliness to her. A short stripe of sweat darkened the middle of the back of her blouse. She took long strides and went straight to the door of 1122 Alturas and let herself in.

“Sandy,” he said to the photograph on the dash. “She looks like you.” He pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. He tried to breathe. He got out of the car.

He was halfway up the walk before he saw she had left her door wide open. Her briefcase lay just inside, a pair of loafers beside it. He glanced up and down the street but there were no neighbors about. The leaves hung still and heavy. It was hardly any cooler outside of the car. “Hello?” he called. “Miss?”

He shuffled forward, climbed the two porch steps, and stopped in the open doorway. Cool air washed out—air-conditioning. His body leaned involuntarily into it. Sweat evaporated from his forehead.

“Grace?” Her mail lay on the tile two feet away, a flyer for a pizza company, a newsmagazine, other envelopes he could not make out. The house looked tidy: little ceramic zebras on the windowsill, a chenille throw on the sofa, a potted ficus in a corner. On an end table behind the sofa were rows of photos in frames.

He rapped on the open door and cleared his throat. “Grace? Grace Winkler? Anybody home?”

Was she in some bedroom farther back? Or on the phone? Her briefcase was beside his foot; he could pick up and smell her shoes simply by bending forward. The photos on the end table were maybe fifteen
steps away. Her mail fluttered lightly; the cool air reached his throat.

A slight hesitation, then he let the impulse take him: he walked into the house. There was nothing to hear other than the drone of faraway traffic and the whoosh of her air conditioner as it forced air from a louvered panel in the ceiling.

Five steps, six, seven, eight. He was all the way inside her living room. Soon the front door was a good ten feet behind him. Sweat was drying on his face; his shoes boomed on the floor. Light fell through the western window and lit her curtain. Through an archway he could just glimpse the kitchen: an olive green refrigerator, a rag draped over a faucet arm.

There were two dozen photos on the sofa table. He had to lean close to make them out. One was of a sheepdog, another of a half dozen bridesmaids in purple gowns. There were several of a young man with a woman he was reasonably sure was the woman from the Jeep. The two of them posed on a mountaintop, waved from a canoe, patted the sheepdog. A brother? A boyfriend? In another photo, framed in silver, a family clustered around a Christmas tree.
The Winklers, 12/25/99
was engraved in the frame.

He picked it up. The air conditioner whirred.

The tree in the photograph was a spruce, swathed in strings of popcorn, a plastic angel clipped to the top. A spill of gifts gleamed beneath it. Everyone around the tree was wearing pajamas; the girl from the Jeep in a football jersey and boxer shorts; an elderly grandfather type in union jacks and an undershirt, gazing out from behind impossibly thick eyebrows. There were toddlers, and a mother, too: with white hair in a bob.

He felt the air leave him. This woman could have been her, but she wasn't. The mother was not Sandy—none of them was Sandy. Not even close.

Family—every pattern in a life derived from it. Who you were, how you acted, how you spoke, dressed, fought, worked, died. Here was yet another father, a tired-looking man in an undershirt; here was yet another Grace Winkler. He thought of his mother, carrying a box of groceries into their apartment, how there were hundreds of tiny blue
veins visible in her calves.

A toilet flushed behind a door to his right.

The Christmas portrait was still in his hand. She came out of the bathroom buttoning her slacks. When she saw him tendons leapt to attention in her throat.

Run, he thought.
Run.
But she was beautiful, tall, tan—why couldn't she have been his daughter?—and the cool air was washing down from the vent in the ceiling and there was this happy-seeming Winkler family gathered round a tree at Christmas, boys and girls and mothers and fathers, each with gifts bearing his or her name, and one of those girls was named Grace and he had been without her for so long…

She lunged for the ficus tree in the corner, as if she had planned all along, even at its purchase, to employ it as a weapon. She took its trunk in both fists, inverted the entire tree, and came at him. With the heavy clay pot over her shoulder, she managed two steps, shut her eyes, and swung, top to bottom, as if he were a log that needed splitting. At the bottom of the arc the pot slid off the cylinder of roots and smashed down on his right foot, where shoe met shin.

He felt the skin around his eyes stretch. They stood a moment, a tableau of pain: Grace Winkler dropping the unpotted ficus, her hands halfway to her mouth, the sound of impact—like a fist into the back of a sofa—followed by the sounds of the big pot rolling on the floor and the subsequent shower of soil.

He dropped the photo and the glass cracked undramatically—a quiet
tink.
Grace Winkler's shoulders quaked and her upper lip twitched. Her pants were still half-unbuttoned and a small triangle of white underwear showed in the gap. He could feel the tendrils of pain rising through his ankle, as though a fire had started down there, deep in the bone.

“I…” he whispered. He smoothed the end of his tie. “It's not what you think.”

She shrieked through her fingers: “Are you crazy? Are you totally fucking crazy?”

“Please. My daughter.”

She still had her hands over her mouth when he turned and shambled out, nearly tripping over her briefcase. His right foot dragged behind him. He was halfway to the Datsun when she appeared on the porch with a cordless telephone pressed to her ear.

“Come on, come on…” she said into the receiver. The street was as empty and hot as ever. The light was the color of blood. A neighbor's sprinkler swung back on its arc.

He fell into the driver's seat. The Datsun—faithful to the last—stuttered to life. He dropped it into reverse and pressed his good foot to the gas and crushed the front fender and right headlight of the white pickup behind him. The Datsun's hatchback dented and the latch sprung. “Oh,” said Winkler, and out on the sidewalk the Grace who was not his daughter was crying as she described his car to the police. He wrenched the transmission into drive, the tires screeched and spun, and the car lurched forward.

He ran stop signs, took random turns. The broken hatch flapped and knocked. A birthday party on a front lawn (silver streamers, clusters of Mylar balloons, children skimming across a wet tarp on their bellies) slid serenely past. His right foot felt wet inside his shoe and the pain tunneled deeper. He took a left, a right, sped straight. Where could he go? A motel? Back to the highway? The Datsun—running on one cylinder now—would never make it.

Winkler remembered seeing roads rising into the hills north of the city and he tried to guide the car toward them. The rearview mirror was empty, only road and trees, and a cyclist gliding through a cross street.

Two dead ends, two right turns. Soon the houses ended, and pavement gave way to dirt. The road began to climb sharply and the Datsun grunted over washboarded gravel. A plume of dust rose behind him and hung over the road. The engine moaned.

He coaxed it forward, up a series of switchbacks. He drove with only the parking lights on and in the plunging light could not see more than the broad wash of road in front of him.

Soon bushes scraped the Datsun's underside. The engine bucked. He managed to get it past a last washout to what looked like a trailhead and there the Datsun died, a final groan like a sad and weary beast
going to its knees, confused by the world to its end.

He pushed open the door and sat cradling his foot as the last light leached from the sky, a blue hem to the west and the sky dark red and stars coming on.

He pressed his thumbs to the top of his foot and threads of pain, thin as shards of glass, shot up his leg. Broken? It was hard to tell. The skin was not bleeding.

Far below him the apron of city lights shivered in the heat. Behind him were granite hills cloaked in sage. Beyond them: mountains.

He dumped things into the duffel: his three notebooks, two envelopes of money, his extra shirt, the two dozen cans of tomato soup, the emergency kit in its orange pouch. His foot throbbed steadily. He pocketed the nerite shells on the dash, tucked the picture of Sandy into his pocket, and got out of the car. The road had been cut into a hillside and below him it gave way into deepening shadow where clumps of sage faded into darkness. He tested his weight on his foot, pulled the duffel's straps across his shoulders, and started up the trail.

My shoes, he thought. I wish I had better shoes.

He passed the night shivering beneath a tangle of bitterbrush. His foot throbbed steadily. Below him the lights of Boise guttered and shook all night as if the wind might extinguish them at any moment. Or else they were about to detach from the valley floor and climb the hills after him.

At dawn he opened the emergency kit. Inside were twenty-four weatherproof matches, two road flares, a plastic canteen, several sleeves of saltines, a bright orange poncho, and a cheap two-blade jackknife. He sliced open a packet of crackers and chewed them slowly. There had to be a town farther north—he did not want to risk going back to Boise.

He shouldered his duffel and descended a few hundred yards and came across a trail heading east. The sun swung over the hills, big and pale.

He limped through a place of burned trees and exposed granite, ascending one ridge, then another. Within an hour he was over a rim and out of sight of the city, descending into a vast, furrowed brushland, hills upon hills, gallery after gallery of sage and bitterroot, all the way to the horizon.

He walked all that day and saw little more than airplanes crossing overhead and large black beetles toiling along the trail beside his feet. The straps of the duffel abraded his shoulders; the pain in his foot
flared at unexpected moments. There was not a town farther north, at least not one he could see. A few times he heard the buzz and drone of motorized bikes on trails far below, and once he saw a dust plume, and a flash of reflected sun that might have been a rider's helmet, but since he did not know whether to duck or wave, he merely stood and waited for the sound to fade. The sun seemed to lack the strength of the previous day, and a wind that was not entirely warm came up in the afternoon. He passed the wide, tangled nests of magpies, anthills the size of pitcher's mounds. Fistfuls of sunflowers stood dying and flagging on the hillsides. Clouds blew in from the west.

He decided to retrace his steps but could not—the trails branched almost ceaselessly, descended where they should have climbed, petered out where they should have widened. Over the next three days he would traverse half the northern stretch of the Boise Basin, making a large and ragged arc. He passed logging roads and cattle pastures, a cellular tower, a sun-collapsed shearing shack, a dark and perilous-looking mine entrance, even a graveyard for miners and their children, choked with skeletonweed. Once a pickup truck rumbled far below him across the scrub, flushing quail.

His joints creaked and protested; his ankles rolled in his shoes. He filled his gut and canteen at every stream and tried to drink sparingly as he went on, but water was scarce. The pain in his right foot faded to a steady throb, or perhaps he merely accustomed himself to it, so it was not the pain that diminished but his attention to it. He came to feel that there were figures both ahead and behind him, the one in front standing and departing his resting place seconds before Winkler arrived, the other pressing forward in its pursuit, about to catch up at any moment.

The hills were vast, endless: like an ocean in their immensity and indifference. In the failing light, in the broken faces of boulders slurring and vacillating in the sun, he'd become aware of a patient, invisible menace hiding just outside the range of his vision, something that did not care one way or another if he lived or died.

Even in the dark now he could not see the glow of the city reflecting off the sky and could not have said whether Boise was ahead of or behind him. He reasoned back the panic: perhaps it was better to stay lost a few days. Even if he could get back, then what? Descend into town, stroll past the capitol in his ruined suit?
Well, Officer, I had this dream…

At nights he made fires between slabs of rock. He spent the road flares as fire starters first, then the labels off the soup cans, and on his third night began burning pages from his notebooks.

Wind would buffet and turn the flames and carry them as sparks out into the dark: notes about floods and glaciers, marine limestone in Himalayan peaks, drawings of rivulets, an annotation about FitzRoy captaining Darwin's
Beagle
, studying beds of fossilized oysters, convinced he'd found evidence for the universal deluge. All of it wrinkled and faded into incandescent particles, smoke rising through branches.

His cans of soup would grow black, soup hissing as it boiled down the sides, and he'd reach for them with his shirt coiled around his hand and set them sizzling in the dust, and—because he was hungry—drink them before they cooled and scorch his tongue. Then he'd roll up in his poncho and watch the fire burn itself out, sparks racing downwind and the embers inside illumined like a miniature castle, complete with balusters and arches and tiny glowing pennants.

Nine Graces and none of them his daughter. He thought of Jed, and the future machine, its dozen clips and wires, none of them plugged into anything. And yet: “To enter a world of shadows is to leave this world for another.” Was the boy not exactly right?

In the air on his fourth night hung a smell of struck flint, an odor that started little tremors of fear in the back of Winkler's throat, and all night he found himself glancing uneasily toward the sky, the stars blotting out one by one, a more leaden darkness blowing in.