Since it’s his first official day on the county force, Delbert Peck has risen early to dress for the occasion. Peck believes in preparation, so at 4:05 a.m. he is standing (clean, buffed and shiny) before his own bathroom mirror. He lifts his new trooper’s hat out of its box, shucking the tissue it came wrapped in and balancing it on his close-cropped head. He tips the hat forward, concealing his eyes. He has to lean back to look at himself. His face is smooth and ruddy, and he juts out his jaw and squares up his knobby shoulders inside the new shirt that still has creases from the box; Deputy Peck arches his thin chest as if to press these creases smooth. He believes his power comes from his disciplined preparation, as much as he believes that justice is the bedrock of the law. Still, he does surely hope everything goes well today.

* * *

When he reports to the barracks at 6 he meets up with Chief and the senior deputies, Morrow and Doyle. It is a quiet day and Peck spends most of it in the office, seated at the old IBM Selectric doing paperwork. Along about 4, though, Chief rolls in saying he’s heard from English Dick that the old trapper Reynaud Garnier has taken a deer on Cedar Mountain. But it’s June, so that’s illegal in Vermont. 

Chief says after supper he’ll go pick up a warrant from Judge Hoyt, and advises Peck to grab what sleep he can and report to barracks an hour early; at dawn they’ll go up there and raid the place, and Peck, the newest deputy, can begin what he intends to be a proud career in law enforcement by serving the warrant on old Reynaud. Peck is proud to be so immediately of use, even though he’d have appreciated a bit more warning. Peck always likes to have time ahead of time to prepare. 

***

The next morning, Peck passes the bottom of Garnier’s road on his way in to barracks, and it makes him wonder what-if: What if English Dick was wrong, or grinding an axe? Or simply too late with his tip? What if Garnier’s not even there when they roll in to his dooryard an hour from now? Peck slows down and pulls over. What if they search, and they do find a deer illegally taken, but the poacher’s not there for them to arrest? Peck feels sure Chief would want to wait till Garnier’s home. Otherwise, they might as well go home for the day, or stay down to the barracks and reschedule this raid for a better opportunity. Peck just wants it all to go well when he starts thinking: well, why don’t he just go check. He can do it sneaky-quiet; Garnier won’t ever even know he’s there. It won’t take just a minute. He backs up, turns the wheel, and creeps up the gravely slope.

* * *

Now Peck cuts the engine and lets the cruiser roll to a silent stop on the gravel road well below Garnier’s cabin. In the middle of June the weeds have grown thick and damp and high on every side. He pulls in a deep lungful of moist morning air and picks up the faintest trace of skunk. The sound of his car door closing is small and dry. His boots crunch on pea stone as he moves around to the shoulder. He looks up and down the road, listening. But he hears nothing except the thickening morning chorale of the birds. There is no breeze on the road. It’s going to be wicked hot later, but it’s cool now, and clear, and moist.

He picks his way silently along the shoulder, careful to step on mossy turf and pine needles only. He crouches in the scrub at the edge of the clearing. Nothing moves at the homestead, but there’s a 15-year old pickup with current plates in the dooryard and a thin tendril of smoke twining up out of the chimney. He can hear the hum of a refrigerator. He checks his watch; it’s half after four and no one yet stirs. Peck edges quietly along the side of the screen porch, his back to the boards, until he reaches the rear where loopy spirea and disheveled box-wood sprawl away from the house like a snarl of springs from a broken watch. He crouches and creeps around to get a look at the barn. He can tell Chief it stands across a tiny yard, empty except for an old, rusted swing set and a grimy Big Wheel trike. The barn’s big doors stand slightly ajar; Peck peers closely but at this distance he can make out nothing in the deep blackness beyond the doors. He squints at a smudge on the jamb that looks, from here, like blood? Could be, he decides. Or not. A breeze stirs the leaves in trees around the clearing and lifts a barn door slightly, outward on its roller track, and lets it fall again noiselessly.

Suddenly voices rumble, indistinct but just behind him. Peck jumps, crouches, his heart pounding. He hears the creak of bed slats. Twisting, he peers up through the unkempt shrubbery into the screen porch. For the first time he sees two cots there, dragged together.  He also sees a lumpy form moving under a Hudson Bay blanket, red with a wide black stripe. No, two people are under that blanket; he can see the tops of their heads – one a smoky copper, one steel-colored and glossy in the early morning sunlight. A man speaks again, low and indistinct. A woman chuckles. Nothing further moves but Peck feels exposed; he has no warrant.

 He can hear Chief now, angry but sounding as cool and calm as if he were pointing out gravity to an idiot child: “Technically,” Chief will say, “you were trespassing.”  And Peck is suddenly mortified at the folly of this visit. What if the poacher rolls over again, and blinks and sees the brim of his broad hat through the brush? Peck snatches his new hat down from his head, then holds very, very still, listening for the breathing of the couple on the porch to return to the slow, loping rhythms of sleep. The fridge clicks, shudders and falls silent. The birds, well awake now and noisy, seem distant as if sounding from a later hour. Peck creeps away.

* * *

Later, Peck has returned with the force. In high color, with Chief standing behind him to one side on the lower porch step, he raps smartly on the cabin door. He can hear a flat-footed shuffle approaching, slow and heavy; the dry hinges squeal as a woman pushes open the screen. She is a large, lumbering woman in a housedress with a faded floral print. Her legs are as smooth and stout as stovepipes. Her grey hair is thinly braided and coiled around the crown of her head. Her face looks to Peck like a potato with deep set dark eyes; her lips are thin and pale as a scar; a wing of rosacea curves across each cheek. She says nothing, but her eyes stay on the Deputy.

Peck pronounces his business. She turns her head without lifting her eyes from his face and yells for Garnier, “Reynaud – ici!” The old poacher himself now approaches from the dark heart of the cabin, in striped boxers and a stained vest, two days’ red-gold stubble furring his upper lip and chin. A hand-rolled cigarette, lumpy and loose, is clamped between his rusty teeth. But he takes the smoke out of his mouth with grimy finger tips to stare down the glossy young deputy. Reynaud’s eyes are small and his expression is unpleasant. Peck takes a breath and pronounces his business a second time; he lifts the warrant and shakes it for emphasis. Garnier’s eyes drop for an instant to these papers in Peck’s hand, then he reaches for them calling “Geneva, cherch’ mes lunettes.” The large woman rolls off into the house, returning a few moments later with a battered pair of drug store reading glasses, their plastic lenses cloudy with scratches.

He puts the roach back in his mouth and takes the glasses from his wife. He puts them on his nose and studies the warrant. His eyes scratch back and forth across the page. Then he stops. He leans in. He leans back and his smile spreads slowly. He taps the paper with his forefinger, and says, “You a day early Sherriff. This say the 19th.”

Peck’s chin juts out and there is a small twitch under the skin below his left ear. He snatches the papers back and looks at them closely, then at Chief. Chief’s face darkens; he checks his watch, then takes the warrant from Peck to inspect. Over Garnier’s shoulder Peck can see a calendar from the town garage hanging on the kitchen wall. They all turn and look. Sure enough: today’s date is the 18th, and just as sure the warrant says the 19th.  Peck scowls. His face goes from ruddy to an angry red. Behind him, the other deputies exchange bewildered glances but Chief recovers quickly and announces in his cool and steely voice, “Ok, then. We’ll wait.”

Garnier looks surprised, but shrugs his shoulders as he turns and walks into the cabin. “Suit yourself, Sherriff,” he calls.  Chief nods at the two senior deputies. “Somebody’s got to be back in town,” he says. “Peck and I can cover this.” Peck draws upright ever so slightly.  The other two nod and depart. Chief stations Peck at the corner where he can watch the porch door and the pantry windows. He seats himself on the stoop out front where he can see the way from the house to the barn.

“No one goes in, no one goes out,” he instructs Peck. His voice is tired.

 “10-4, Chief,” hollers Peck.

Chief sighs, shakes his head and settles in.

* * *

The curtains stay closed all day and into the evening. No one could see in. No one comes out. At 12:01 AM Chief gets up and says to Peck, “Wait here.”  He walks back to the cabin door to serve the now-legal warrant. Peck stays behind, composing on his face an expression of scathing reprimand. Reynaud Garnier opens the door as if he’d been waiting behind it and the two men stand briefly in the kerosene lamp light spilling through the open door. Then Peck sees Garnier turn aside, flattening himself against the wall to make room for the officer. But Chief signals Peck to come over. “Why don’t you search the house,” he says and heads out the back, off the porch and across the yard to look in the little barn. Peck takes the front steps in two bounds, and trains his practiced look on the poacher. His head swivels as if on gimbals, tracking Garnier’s closed face as he passes. Then he catches his toe on the crumbling linoleum just inside the house, and he stumbles, groping wildly for support. Clattering he catches himself on the back of a kitchen chair and thankfully does not fall all the way to the floor. But his look of censure collapses for an instant to reveal a man out of his natural depths.

Across the room, the massive Geneva leans with folded arms in the pantry door and chuckles. Peck draws himself up again and straightens his badge but the look on his face is drained of menace. Geneva rolls her eyes, turns her back and lumbers away into the pantry. Peck’s brow lowers. He ignores her.

Peck searches the house, managing to avoid Geneva though she stands behind him every minute, watching with those giant folded arms. He sees nothing to suspect – no blood, no bolts of hair. Meanwhile Garnier follows the Chief around the yard, opening doors when asked, watching him look, but volunteering nothing. The Chief steps into the shed and pulls open two old grain sacks in the corner, not really expecting legs or hoofs, bones, scraps of pelt, and finding only clods of old dried peat, a basket full of bobbin ends from the old mill, good for kindling. Nothing. No stains in the dirt, only the faintest metallic tang in the moist air, the scent of damp iron. Nothing there.

Geneva keeps her eye on Peck until he is done, then comes and stands in the kitchen door, her light apron lifting on the night breeze, strands of her steel hair escaping to flutter around her face. Her thin, pale mouth sets like a scar, tugging her cheeks in. Peck touches the broad brim of his hat as he steps out off the porch to go find Chief, but the woman doesn’t say a thing. Together the two lawmen search the shed, and the woodpile, and the back barn where the chickens are. They go to search the upper storey in the big barn where they can see a block and tackle dimly visible through the hay mow. But when they clamber up and walk around they see the dust there has not been disturbed in years.

After, Chief stands in the dooryard, rubbing the back of his red neck with the hand that also holds the signed warrant.

“I told ya,” says Reynaud Garnier.

“You told me,” says Chief.

Peck stands about, useless on this the first night of his distinguished career in law enforcement. Lamp light glints off his tin badge. After a while, Chief shrugs and steps along toward the cruiser.

“I’ll be watching you, Reynaud,” he says, patting his pockets for the car key.

“You watch me,” says Garnier, leaning against the side of the cabin, folding his arms across his chest.

“Peck, you got the key?” asks Chief.

Peck jolts at the sound of his own name, beats his chest and bottom furiously. “Uh no Chief,” he says.

Chief sighs. “Well,” he says, “go look in the house then.”

“Right!” says Peck, hot-footing it up the little block steps. There they are, on the corner of the kitchen table. He lunges for them, surprising Geneva who is just opening the oven. Beyond her, the open pantry door is no longer a black oblong in the back wall of the bright kitchen. Lamp light shines within, glinting off clean glass jars along a countertop. The hot blast from the open oven catches Peck square in the nostrils – a wonderful smell full of brandy and fat-back, raisins and roasted venison. His eyes widen as he looks at the flaky brown crust plumped up atop the china dish that Geneva is lifting from the oven rack. He forgets himself in an instant. Geneva looks him over. His face is child-like: all interest, and all and only about the pie.

Outside, Chief has turned out of the breeze to light his own cigarette. The wind catches and lifts the light blue checked curtain hanging across the pantry window before him. Chief lowers the burning match. The cigarette dangles, unlit, from his lower lip.

Reynaud Garnier shifts, tries to look nonchalant, cannot.

Behind the lofted bit of curtain, rank upon row of glass jars gleam in the lamp-light. They are packed full and freshly labeled. And Chief draws a breath and turns on his heel, about to step back into the kitchen when down the step comes Geneva holding out a china plate with a thick, steaming wedge of mincemeat pie, juices and brandy running into a spicy little soak at the edge. In her other hand she’s got a fork on which is speared a bite-sized bit she holds out now, toward Chief.

 “Pie, Sherriff?” she offers.

Peck has followed her out, a hound hanging by the nose on the fragrant steam. Chief gives Peck a deadly look and Peck looks up. His eyes flit back and forth between Chief and the pie. He twists the key chain nervously in his hands.

“Get in the car, you moron,” spits Chief.

In my limited experience as a story constructor, it seems to me that every thing has a proper place. That place, however, is not always immediately obvious (to me, at least). I often find I need a place to stash particular things whose proper place has yet to become clear to me. Excellent character names, for instance.  Or serendipitous revelations in quantum metaphysics. You know, the vagrant, not-precisely-idle thoughts that make for An Interesting Day. Henceforth, said particulates shall be tagged and categorized duly noted, that they may be readily flocked and effortlessly summoned with a mouseclick.

Every day a woodsman split and stacked more wood on this wood pile. One day the extra load discharged a large wood shaving that dropped right into the cricket’s bath behind him as he reached for the soap. The shaving made an enormous splash. Most of the water in the cricket’s bathtub went all over everywhere. “Oh well,” said the cricket, an hour later when the mopping up was nearly done. “I’m very late for work now, but at least no one is shooting at me.” And off he went about his business.

Time passed. The woodsman continued to split and stack wood on the woodpile, because winter was right around the corner and you can’t be too prepared. One Saturday morning, the cricket thought he’d sleep-in for a while, and brought his newspaper back to bed along with a big mug of very good coffee — dark roast, ground fine and brewed in a press-pot for the fullest flavor. The cricket’s bed, by the way, was a little wooden Diamond Matches matchbox with the drawer slid half-way open. He used a scrap of olive brocade from an upholsterer’s sample book for a duvet cover, and scraps of an old t-shirt for sheets.

He had just climbed back into the match box and drawn up the upholstery scrap when he heard a great, grinding clatter. Dust sifted down from the log overhead and the power went out. The cricket was very frightened. He dove down beneath the blankets to the very foot of the bed. After a time in which no further noises were heard and no more dust sifted down — but no lights came on either — he poked his nose out and said, “Well, at least no one is shooting at me,” and went about his business in the dark, although (he soon discovered) he was also without water because his well-pump was electric.

Some weeks passed and the cricket started to notice that the sun seemed to filter in earlier and more brightly than before. It was still very cold, but he thought this might be a thing to celebrate. He made a mental note to buy a package of Swedish ginger thins the next time he was in the supermarket, and make a little party for himself. But before he could get around to doing this, he awakened one morning with a sick feeling of enormous shifting movement: the log beneath his matchbox bed was being lifted up, and he felt a coolness on his cheeks as he was carried with it, up out into the open air. He sat up in his matchbox bed just in time to see and feel himself being flung into the fire in the woodsman’s Sam Daniels furnace.

“Oh well,” he thought as the fierce heat of the wood fire blossomed against his shiny cricket cheek. The very last thought that went through his mind before he was burnt to a cinder was, “At least no one is shooting at me.”

In heaven, God was watching all this, and made a mental note to smite the woodsman for being so unobservant as to fling into the fire a cute little matchbox, tricked out like a bed with a brocade duvet, in which sat up a tiny cricket wearing striped pajamas and a resigned expression. But in the press of other business, He never got around to it and the woodsman lived, reasonably content, for a good long while thereafter.

There is something about set type, though, on paper with the substance to withstand being squeezed in a press, between two conflicting narratives — paper that is just dense enough, just opaque enough to support them both, to carry them in tandem forward in time. There is something about such a sheet, especially when it is stacked with a finger’s-width of its fellows, and pressed between boards and stitched, or glued and wrapped on three sides  with an illustration on cover stock. Such a book-like package is assumed to be — if not Art, right out of the chute — at least an intentional work of the mind. Efforts Will Be Made, at least until its content has been parsed. But

if you cannot name a thing, it will be dismissed every time. Its force will be discounted. It will be banished from sleeping inside with the rest of us. It will be consigned instead to the tempest; its assignment will be: to rage Outside. It will be added to the catalog of assaults, to the litany of Injurious Tendencies. It will be deleted from the inventory of defenses. It will be, thenceforward, treated as a Pariah Force. When, that is, it is seen at all.  By laying low, however, the un-nameable can continue its influence, even (perhaps especially) indoors.

* * *

In a diner by a state highway that circumvents a minor country burgh, a salesman orders a cup of coffee and a piece of custard pie.  Now, it doesn’t matter whether he has chosen his knit shirt today or his woven button-down. But it DOES matter that he is attired in one or the other of these, and not, let us say, in a green twill coverall with his nickname — Donny — embroidered in red script across the chest pocket. Don’t picture him in that coverall; it’s much too workmanlike. It implies too much familiarity with sharp items, with grease, with flame, with the sorts of dangers posed by man-made things. So: choose for him either the knit shirt (a polo shirt, perhaps, in a solid pique?) or the button-down (in white, say, with hair-line stripes — yarn-dyed — in black or navy). Choose either for him. But do NOT dress him in your mind’s eye in that dark green coverall. Not the coverall.

He takes up his fork and slides it edgewise down across the pointed tip of his piece of custard pie –

Wait! wait, I can’t picture him at all! What did you say he was wearing?

I said he was wearing anything but a green twill coverall with his name stitched on the pocket in red script. The twill is not dark green. Anything but.

And his name was ‘Don,’ did you say?

Anything but.

I know a Don.

So do I. Everyone does. This is not him.

* * *

Up the street, an old man is making a commotion at the entrance to the community care home. But he is not trying to get in. He is trying to get out. He is brandishing his aluminum cane at the pair of scrub-suited attendants who are closing in, presumably to subdue him. He wheels and bolts and strikes the bar that releases the door latch with all his puny, desiccated fury. He breaks out, awkwardly, tilting off balance because the soles of his slippered feet have grown insensible, and he no longer feels clearly the ground he stands upon. He is trailing the bed-clothes. His plaid robe hangs open, its sash dangling across his hips and down his flanks like a clergyman’s stole. He squints in direct sunlight, to which he has grown unaccustomed. He waves his weak arms like the blades of an ancient windmill; his antique, whirling limbs fend off care, restraint, admonishment. The attendants drop away, lower their arms, hold their open palms facing forward. One flexes his fingers ever so slightly further apart. Subtly signaling: see how empty? See how open? Come now.

The old man appears to be listening, but at this distance, we can’t be sure. Then he lurches down the walk as far as the curb. He does not look both ways. He heads directly for a bicycle that leans up against a tree across the road. He breaks for it. He seizes it. He climbs aboard, although it agonizes his arthritic hip to throw his elderly leg up high enough to clear the seat. But he does so, shrieking when it hurts. He gropes next for the pedal with that calcifying foot of his. He mounts the bike, wobbling. He has not the strength in his thigh to push that pedal down, to make the grand gear turn, or even to stand up and force it around by his own weight; he is, alas, too puny. He balances, wobbling  hey! you never DO forget how!! but then he falls over it’s just that after a time you simply cannot do it anymore.

All this is seen at a distance. We can only imagine his dismay.

* * *

Meanwhile back at the diner, that salesman lifts that bite of pie to swallow. His mind is already registering the light, lightly-sweetened texture of the pale, tender custard, and the ruddy notes of its nutmegged top. His tongue pink, moist, lewd starts to poke out to receive it when he catches sight of a small, dark anomaly, a tiny, boomerang-shaped bit of limpid shadow in the soft opaque custard which just then breaks apart and falls in two pieces off either side of the lifted fork. On the stainless tines now there sits revealed: a jagged chunk of broken glass, flecked minutely with custard.

All this happened very quickly — in far less time than it has taken me to write it all down. In less time, even, than it has taken you to read it. In a fictive instant, that is, he is offered a bite of broken glass where he expected custard!

Imagine his agitation: how it must come on.

* * *

But I can’t tell you what to think.  I can tell you what to think ABOUT. But that’s all. Even on a good day, the best I can do is focus your attention.

A man sits on open ground, wearing a little braided bracelet coiled round his wrist. He broods. His eyes focus inward. Time passes. Night falls. Still he sits. Something glimmers nearby, on the ground. He looks at a puddle in a track. In it he sees a reflection of the moon. It shivers. He forgets his inner landscape. He watches the moon settle down as the water stills. He looks up and squints. He sees that moon hanging in the sky. He reaches out to finger its texture but his hand paws empty air. He stands up and reaches again. He points his toe and stretches himself up on a diagonal, pointing as much length as he can muster upward at the moon. His finger is extended, but he cannot reach the moon. He brings his hand down. He stands and looks around.       

He sees: a bare tree not far away. He looks up at its high branches. He moves toward the tree, inspecting it. He circles the tree looking up. The tiniest twigs at the top of its crown criss-cross the creamy, gleaming face of the moon. He jumps up with a grunt, catching the lowest stout limb. He throws his leg over the limb and exerts himself, to pull himself up into the tree. He reaches up – but his hand doesn’t even clear the branches, let alone pass out through the night air into the sky. He climbs higher in the tree; he reaches again. Still he cannot reach the moon. He climbs higher still; the boughs become branches that bend under his weight. He inches close to the trunk, to stand where the trunk joins the bough, where the tree is strongest, and best able to bear him up. Still he cannot reach the moon       

A cloud drifts across the night sky toward the moon. The man watches the cloud become illuminated, then luminous. He scrambles even higher, tries to touch its stuff. He fails. The cloud passes in front of the moon, blocking its brightest light. The man cannot reach it to brush it away. He settles back into the tree. The cloud diffuses the moonlight so that it sheds a wide, pearly-gray illumination over the tree and the ground; in seeing this, the man also suddenly realizes how high up he is, and he is frightened. He pulls his hand in from his up-reaching, and gropes for the trunk, gropes for small twigs he can grasp. He hugs the tree for a while, worrying his predicament. He can’t take his eyes off the ground.       

Gradually he senses a brightening. He makes himself look back up. The cloud has passed off the face of the moon and drifts slowly nearby, drifts away. The moon hangs a bit lower in the sky and seems larger than before. Crouching in the high fork of the tree, the man reaches out again, tentatively, for this moon. He still cannot touch it, yet it is closer than ever before. The moonlight gleams on the bead that fastens his bracelet. The man’s eyes re-focus on this near distance. With his teeth he bites at the knot on his wrist. He undoes the fastening. The bracelet begins to unspool; he catches the loose end, knots it round the bough on which he stands. Then, carefully holding the far end out away from his body, he inches out along the string toward the moon. He takes himself a good way out along the string.       

The implosion, when it comes, is abrupt and benign. Suddenly he sees himself doing all this. He sees the night plain, the bare tree, the moon in the sky, large and luminous, and his own figure laboring. He sees the string, pulled taut from the bough at the fork down to his heels, running level from sole to sole, and rising again to his wrist. He sees his arm extended, wavering slightly, uncertainly, side to side, bearing nearly all his own weight. He can watch his own wrist, flexing and dropping the next length of string. His path extended, he inches on, impossibly suspended. He sees all this and sees himself seeing it. What is outward becomes inward, what is inward is seen from outside.       

So he moves out along the string, inching outward, having cleared the tree, and upward toward the great moon. Now when he looks down, the world is far; he is very high. Now when he looks up; the moon is enormous, bigger than the circle he can compass with his empty arm. He inches toward it. He reaches and stretches and reaches but still he is not touching its bright face, and cannot finger the frothy texture of its rubble. He has long since lost his fear of falling. He is too far to fall now, to fall back to the earth. When he falls, he will fall into the moon. He will get what he wants.