Giovanni's Gift (6 page)

—No, said Henry.

—How many were there?

—I just saw one, but it felt like there might have been more.

—How's that?

—I don't know. You know how you can feel people's presence.

—Not really. I don't have a third eye like some of us, said Noah, voice edged with a mild trace of sarcasm.

—You mean a sixth sense.

—Third eye, sixth sense. Edmé says the phone's dead.

Henry walked alongside Noah and said nothing; he and Noah had grown up together in so far as they were the same age and attended the same rural school, a clapboard structure that stood on the grass shores of the river and now, though its roof leaked and windows were boarded, bore a historical landmark plaque which designated it the oldest one-room schoolhouse in the region. This freedom to gibe came from so much shared history. Here was a childhood friendship that had never matured, and just beneath its surface, just at its edges, some of the comical cruelties of youth lay in wait. The cynicism, the taunts, the derision—neither of them could help himself: it was like some game begun with a boyhood bout, like a hundred-yard dash across the schoolyard that evolved into a subtle lifetime marathon.

—Maybe the storm knocked the service out, Noah said.

—It wasn't a storm. Mild rain is all. The line's been cut.

Henry pointed with his hand to the right as he spoke, gesturing over toward the creek, which widened down beyond the gorge. The two men deviated, still side by side, toward an enormous old barn with rusted tin mansard roof and adze-hewn boards that once had been painted flat red though the paint had since been flayed by weather, so that what remained was silvery plank siding. Along the back of this structure, white birches and mountain willows and cottonwoods curtained the runoff brook, which burbled in its pristine bed of smooth brown stones. Harrows, an old jeep with a mildewy canvas top, a vintage tractor crumbling into metal dust. They walked past these. And they walked around behind the barn, along a narrow natural corridor between it and creek trees, and then Henry halted.

—See that, he said.

Noah glanced at where he indicated with a nod of the head.

The line dipped at the corner of the barn, before the far end of its catenary curve lifted back high to an impromptu pole that had been fashioned of a dead, defoliate, and limbed tree farther down the hill. Henry said, —I keep meaning to raise the line here. It's my own damn fault.

—You don't even have to stand on nothing to get at it, said Noah, who squinted at the earth directly beneath where the black cable had been snipped away from the green glass insulator attached to the low eaves.

They both looked closely but could see no footprint.

—I'll call the phone company for you when I get back to town, said Noah.

—I'm sure Edmé already did.

Continuing up along the bank of Ash Creek, they passed the stone springhouse and veered left toward the foreyard.

—Was it kids, you say?

—The one I saw might've been a kid; he wasn't too tall. It was hard to tell—he had a mask on.

—Nobody you recognized from around here?

—I never saw the mask before, if that's what you mean.

Henry continued to play with the idea of whether or not he should mention the effigy, the hanging, the skull head, the thing dressed in his own clothes. He hadn't mentioned it to Edmé in part not wanting her frightened more than she already was, not to mention that she'd wondered aloud, before going to town this morning, about whether it'd been a mistake to move to Ash Creek, that maybe she'd been right to be reluctant. —Listen, Edmé, this kind of thing happens anywhere you live these days, he'd argued.

But also, he had to admit at least to himself, as he'd later confide to me, once all the secrets had been laid bare, that he was somewhat embarrassed—was that the word?—certainly unnerved, by that vision in the high meadow the night before. Perhaps it had been a rash move to burn it, after all, but it seemed the best way to
get it behind him.
As if by obliterating it and keeping the matter to himself, it
almost
didn't take place. Henry did have some idea why that effigy hung in the tree, but sensed it was premature to discuss it with Edmé, Noah, or anyone else.

Noah paused as Henry undid the latch that held the yard gate to the fence post and swung the gate aside, a movement that set clanging the cluster of sheep bells attached to the rounded gate newel.

—A mask, you say.

—Well—

—I guess it's one of those things where you had to be there.

Henry said nothing as Noah walked into the grassy yard still damp from the night shower. Now he wished Edmé were here to buffer Noah Daiches. But after having made her call to Noah, she had gone into town, to buy supplies while the sheriff was up at Ash Creek, so that Henry wouldn't be by himself, though of course this was not something she would ever tell her husband. The two men crossed the yard, along the ground floor of the house, passed the double doors that led into the cellar, and climbed the craggy stone stairs which were excavated into the steep bank at the northern end of the yard.

—I'm assuming, telling from what Edmé said, it was up here, then? Noah asked, as they mounted the wide cool stone steps.

Henry said, —Let's go.

One after the other, for the trail was not as wide as a bridle path, they scaled the sheer slope, Henry first, although Noah knew the way well, had known it for years. There were many trails that would take a hiker up away from the house and back into the endless rugged woods, but this one was used most. If you stayed with the trail along the quasi-perpendicular gorge, overgrown with thicket on either narrow side, the strait path eventually descended until it paralleled the wild creek, with its clutter of monumental boulders and many virginal deep pools holding grayling and trout. Farther up was superior hunting: elk, bear, and mule deer. The two of them had in the past forged their way miles upstream into settings so elementary, so rigorous and fierce and sacrosanct, so uncivilized, as to seem brutal, even though it was they who'd carried weaponry and entered the inhuman forest with the intent of killing. After what had happened back in there several years ago now, maybe not quite that long, Noah hadn't been back up to walk this trail with Henry, and were the truth to be known, Henry didn't trek far up there much anymore himself, though once it had easily been his favorite part of the world. What before he had loved in it—its primitive shadowy floor caped so deep in pine needles that when you walked on it you were buoyed by its sponginess; its trees that died never by the hand of a chainsawer but by lightning or simply felled by rot from old age; its sudden inexplicable meadows paved by thick grasses and decorated with mountain flowers, columbine and tiny rock-blossoms—he now found foreboding, though he would never admit this to Edmé, let alone Noah. He could hardly admit it to himself. For one flickering instant, his imagination connected that earlier tragedy—well, not a tragedy really, was it, but a personal disaster for him, and of course the ultimate personal catacylsm for his oldest friend—with these present disturbances. Less connected them than vaguely considered them at the same time, over the course of a dozen paces up this first rise. The death of Giovanni Trentas and the presence of a masked hangman surely had no connection other than place. And even regarding place, if one were to think about it, the terrain higher up, beyond where he'd encountered the kid last night, up where he had found Trentas, or what remained of Giovanni Trentas, might as well have been on a different world compared to the gracious banks, meadows, knolls down here at the mouth of the gorge, so dissimilar were they. Thus, the twelfth step taken, these discrete ideas proceeded in opposite directions, having never truly formulated as more than physically contiguous. As they dispersed from his thoughts, Henry slowed and turned to see that Noah had paused below him, had hands on hips, and was talking.

—What are you, deaf, man? Couldn't you hear me?

Henry said, —What?

—Damn it, Noah said. —I was telling you to hold your horses.

—You're getting soft, Daiches, Henry said.

—Listen. Who called who for help?

—At least I can walk up a hill, man. You sit too much.

Neither smiled; it was the genus of humor that involved neither laughs nor smiles and was premised on mild diminishments that were leveled one man at another.

Henry looked down past Noah and admired the way the morning light was reflected off the roof of the house. Bright as a mirror it glittered, just the converse of this back gable, which was sunk in profound shadow. He liked the many various angles and pitches of the roof, and how the graceful column of blue and gray stones rose from the foundation along the back wall to form the chimney, rising above the peak, and could remember with satisfaction how he managed to build that chimney and the enormous hearth inside, one stone at a time, cut from his own crude quarry on the other side of the creek. He never grew tired of admiring that house, and the other structures, too, which was something he could not say about all the buildings he had designed and seen built here and there in the world. Nor did he tire of what he saw out beyond the collection of buildings, green and gray-brown bluffs and the snaking tangle of trees hugging the creek as it meandered the valley, which widened and gradually flattened out, while spreading downward and on toward the great valley beyond, and the farther range even beyond that, some hundred miles away.

—All right, let's go, said Noah, who had begun again to climb.

Within the quarter hour they'd arrived at the clearing that had been the scene of Henry's encounter. The hasty indentation in the ground, where the trespasser had made his fire, shed flecks of white ash into the air as a faint breeze stirred. Having looked around the circumference of the fire site for prints, Noah walked the perimeter of the clearing, hands in his pockets, eyes on the ground. No prints: whoever it was, was good. Or else it had rained just hard enough to wash away any evidence. Henry dragged a crooked stick through the fire pit, probing for coals, hoping Noah wouldn't look too carefully at the ashes where minuscule bits of the cloth mannequin lay unburnt.

—Which way d'you say he took off?

Henry raised the stick and pointed at a breach in the shroud of foliage centering the west margin of the clearing.

—You follow him?

—No, said Henry.

—Well, I'm going to take a look.

Noah strolled over to the breach and entered the forest on the far side. Time passed, then from some way in, he called back to Henry. Henry dropped his stick beside the pit and followed the voice.

Crouched beside an object on the ground, Noah asked, —This yours? when Henry reached him. The shoe, a man's, but smaller than would fit either Henry or Noah, seemed pathetic beneath a stand of prematurely turned quaking aspen. Its buckle iridesced and the leather was stiff, as if it had been exposed to weather through many seasons. Not only did it look utterly foreign in this diffident and fluctuating shade, but its style was strangely anachronistic. Hurled languidly out of the human universe, it ended up here, collecting rainwater and fallen leaves, useful to no one, though once, somewhere, its leather had been tanned, measured, sewn, fitted, and the finished object placed in a nice shop window, where it was admired and bought. No doubt its owner had polished it back in the days when it was worn. Henry, who made it a habit to avoid the empty sentiment of such philosophical wayfaring, caught himself considering the shoe a perfect analogue for human endeavor, then snapped out of it, glancing into Noah's eyes, which were frankly staring into his.

—I don't think so, Henry said, remembering suddenly there'd been a question asked of him.

—You sure?

Henry said, —No, of course it's not mine.

—Does it look like what the guy was wearing last night?

—I don't think so, but I couldn't say for sure.

—How'd it get up here?

—You tell me.

The search became cursory and oddly reluctant after this absurd discovery, both having arrived at the same thought that they were not accomplishing much. No more words were exchanged, so that as they wandered about, purpose diffused and some edgy haze of defeat clouding any ability to observe, the only sounds they heard were of their own rubber-soled boots breaking fallen branches underfoot, the dead measure of breezes hissing in the high boughs above them, and the piercing random lament of some distant mourning dove. Without agreeing to give up, at least not verbally, they circled back toward the house from over west, down a gradual series of meadows that in Henry's father's day had been used for cattle and sheep, through ruined drystone ingresses whose single pole gates had long ago decomposed into mulch, having found aside from the pile of warm ash no trace of any trespasser. Noah considered the discovery of the forlorn single shoe to be barely of enough interest to warrant carrying the thing back down with them. He did, though, hoisting it aloft to one side of him at the end of a stick, carrying it as you would the diseased remains of a dead animal, like a rabid squirrel, say, depilated by rot and stiffened by rigor mortis.

Noah agreed to black coffee at the long kitchen table. Edmé had not returned yet. They spoke of other things, what was going on in town, of mutual friends, who was not healthy and who was. And afterward, Noah left, walking himself down to his car at the old steel horsegate, the shoe in a paper sack.

—We'll just see how it goes, Noah'd said.

And Henry had nodded, wishing for all the world, once again, that he and Edmé hadn't divulged to Noah or anyone else—now the neighbor whose telephone Edmé had used might know, too—what had happened. He should have foreseen that nothing worthwhile would have come of a visit from Noah. Not because Noah was unwilling to investigate—he had come, hadn't he? and promptly. But rather because he knew himself well enough to recognize it wasn't in his nature, nor even possibly in his best interest, to accept help. He decided, if that kid, whoever he was, whatever he wanted, was brazen enough to turn up here again, it would be far easier for Henry to shoot him than ever make another search of the premises with Noah.