The Mist

II. After the Storm. Norton. A Trip to Town.

«Jeee-pers,» Billy said.

He was standing by the fence that separates our property from Norton's and looking down our driveway. The driveway runs a quarter of a mile to a camp road which, in its turn, runs about three-quarters of mile to a stretch of two-lane blacktop, called Kansas Road. From Kansas Road you can go anywhere you want, as long as it's Bridgton.

I saw what Billy was looking at and my heart went cold.

«Don't go any closer, champ. Right there is close enough.»

Billy didn't argue.

The morning was bright and as clear as a bell. The sky, which had been a mushy, hazy color during the heat wave, had regained a deep, crisp blue that was nearly autumnal. There was a light breeze, making cheerful sun-dapples move back and forth in the driveway. Not far from where Billy was standing there was a steady hissing noise, and in the grass there was what you might at first have taken for a writhing bundle of snakes. The power lines leading to our house had fallen in an untidy tangle about twenty feet away and lay in a burned patch of grass. They were twisting lazily and spitting. If the trees and grass hadn't been so completely damped down by the torrential rains, the house might have gone up. As it was, there was only that black patch where the wires had touched directly.

«Could that lectercute a person, Daddy?»

«Yeah. It could.»

«What are we going to do about it?»

«Nothing. Wait for the CMP.»

«When will they come?»

«I don't know.» Five-year-olds have as many questions as Hallmark has cards. «I imagine they're pretty busy this morning. Want to take a walk up to the end of the driveway with me?»

He started to come and then stopped, eyeing the wires nervously. One of them humped up and turned over lazily, as if beckoning.

«Daddy, can lectricity shoot through the ground?»

A fair question. «Yes, but don't worry. Electricity wants the ground, not you, Billy. You'll be all right if you stay away from the wires.»

«Wants the ground,» he muttered, and then came to me. We walked up the driveway holding hands.

It was worse than I had imagined. Trees had fallen across the drive in four different places, one of them small, two of them middling, and one old baby that must have been five feet through the middle. Moss was crusted onto it like a moldy corset.

Branches, some half-stripped of their leaves, lay everywhere in jackstraw profusion. Billy and I walked up to the camp road, tossing the smaller branches off into the woods on either side. It reminded me of a summer's day that had been maybe twenty-five years before; I couldn't have been much older than Billy was now. All my uncles had been here, and they had spent the day in the woods with axes and hatchets and Darcy poles, cutting brush. Later that afternoon they had all sat down to the trestle picnic table my dad and mom used to have and there had been a monster meal of hot dogs and hamburgers and potato salad. The 'Gansett beer had flowed like water and my uncle Reuben took a dive into the lake with all his clothes on, even his deck-shoes. In those days there were still deer in these woods.

«Daddy, can I go down to the lake?»

He was tired of throwing branches, and the thing to do with a little boy when he's tired is to let him go do something else. «Sure.»

We walked back to the house together and then Billy cut right, going around the house and giving the downed wires a large berth. I went left, into the garage, to get my McCullough. As I had suspected, I could already hear the unpleasant song of the chainsaw up and down the lake.

I topped up the tank, took off my shirt, and was starting back up the driveway when Steff came out. She eyed the downed trees lying across the driveway nervously.

«How bad is it?»

«I can cut it up. How bad is it in there?»

«Well, I got the glass cleaned up, but you're going to have to do something about that tree, David. We can't have a tree in the living room.»

'No,» I said. «I guess we can't.»

We looked at each other in the morning sunlight and got giggling. I set the McCullough down on the cement areaway, and kissed her, holding her buttocks firmly.

«Don't,» she murmured. «Billy's-»

He came tearing around the corner of the house just then. «Dad! Daddy! Y'oughta see the»

Steffy saw the live wires and screamed for him to watch out. Billy, who was a good distance away from them, pulled up short and stared at his mother as if she had gone mad.

«I'm okay, Mom,» he said in the careful tone of voice you use to placate the very old and senile. He walked towards us, showing us how all right he was, and Steff began to tremble in my arms.

«It's all right,» I said in her ear. «He knows about them.»

«Yes, but people get killed,» she said. «They have ads all the time on television about live wires, people get-Billy, I want you to come in the house right now!»

«Aw, come on, Mom! I wanna show Dad the boathouse!» He was almost bug-eyed with excitement and disappointment. He had gotten a taste of poststorm apocalypse and wanted to share it.

«You go in right now! Those wires are dangerous and-»

«Dad said they want the ground, not me-»

«Billy, don't you argue with me!»

«I'll come down and look, champ. Go on down yourself.» I could feel Steff tensing against me. «Go around the other side, kiddo.»

«Yeah! Okay!»

He tore past us, taking the stone steps that led around the west end of the house two by two. He disappeared with his shirttail flying, trailing back one word — «Wow!» — as he spotted some other piece of destruction.

«He knows about the wires, Steffy.» I took her gently by the shoulders. «He's scared of them. That's good. It makes him safe.»

One tear tracked down her cheek. «David, I'm scared.»

«Come on! It's over.»

«Is it? Last winter … and the late spring … they called it a black spring in town … they said there hadn't been one in these parts since 1888-»

«They» undoubtedly meant Mrs. Carmody, who kept the Bridgton Antiquary, a junk shop that Steff liked to rummage around in sometimes. Billy loved to go with her. In one of the shadowy, dusty back rooms, stuffed owls with gold-ringed eyes spread their wings forever as their feet endlessly grasped varnished logs; stuffed raccoons stood in a trio around a «stream» that was a long fragment of dusty mirror; and one moth-eaten wolf, which was foaming sawdust instead of saliva around his muzzle, snarled a creepy eternal snarl. Mrs. Carmody claimed the wolf was shot by her father as it came to drink from Stevens Brook one September afternoon in 1901.

The expeditions to Mrs. Carmody's Antiquary shop worked well for my wife and son. She was into carnival glass and he was into death in the name of taxidermy. But I thought that the old woman exercised a rather unpleasant hold over Steff's mind, which was in all other ways practical and hardheaded. She had found Steff's vulnerable spot, a mental Achilles' heel. Nor was Steff the only one in town who was fascinated by Mrs. Carmody's gothic pronouncements and folk remedies (which were always prescribed in God's name).

Stump-water would take off bruises if your husband was the sort who got a bit too free with his fists after three drinks. You could tell what kind of a winter was coming by counting the rings on the caterpillars in June or by measuring the thickness of August honeycomb. And now, good God protect and preserve us, THE BLACK SPRING OF 1888 (add your own exclamation points, as many as you think it deserves). I had also heard the story. It's one they like to pass around up here-if the spring is cold enough, the ice on the lakes will eventually turn as black as a rotted tooth. It's rare, but hardly a once-in-a-century occurrence. They like to pass it around, but I doubt that many could pass it around with as much conviction as Mrs. Carmody.

«We had a hard winter and a late spring,» I said. «Now we're having a hot summer. And we had a storm but it's over. You're not acting like yourself, Stephanie.»

«That wasn't an ordinary storm,» she said in that same husky voice.

«No,» I said. «I'll go along with you there.»

I had heard the Black Spring story from Bill Giosti, who owned and operated-after a fashion-Giosti's Mobil in Casco Village. Bill ran the place with his three tosspot sons (with occasional help from his four tosspot grandsons … when they could take time off from tinkering with their snowmobiles and dirtbikes). Bill was seventy, looked eighty, and could still drink like twenty-three when the mood was on him. Billy and I had taken the Scout in for a fill-up the day after a surprise mid-May storm dropped nearly a foot of wet, heavy snow on the region, covering the new grass and flowers. Giosti had been in his cups for fair, and happy to pass along the Black Spring story, along with his own original twist. But we get snow in May sometimes; it comes and it's gone two days later. It's no big deal.

Steff was glancing doubtfully at the downed wires again. «When will the power company come?»

«Just as soon as they can. It won't be long. I just don't want you to worry about Billy. His head's on pretty straight. He forgets to pick up his clothes, but he isn't going to go and step on a bunch of live lines. He's got a good, healthy dose of self-interest.» I touched a corner of her mouth and it obliged by turning up in the beginning of a smile. «Better?»

«You always make it seem better,» she said, and that made me feel good.

From the lakeside of the house Billy was yelling for us to come and see.

«Come on,» I said. «Let's go look at the damage.»

She snorted ruefully. «if I want to look at damage, I can go sit in my living room.»

«Make a little kid happy, then.»

We walked down the stone steps hand in hand. We had just reached the first turn in them when Billy came from the other direction at speed, almost knocking us over.

«Take it easy,» Steff said, frowning a little. Maybe, in her mind, she was seeing him skidding into that deadly nest of live wires instead of the two of us.

«You gotta come see!» Billy panted. «The boathouse is all bashed! There's a dock on the rocks … and trees in the boat cove … Jesus Christ!»

«Billy Drayton!» Steff thundered.

«Sorry, Ma-but you gotta-wow!» He was gone again.

«Having spoken, the doomsayer departs,» I said, and that made Steff giggle again. «Listen, after I cut up those trees across the driveway, I'll go by the Central Maine Power office on Portland Road. Tell them what we got. Okay?»

«Okay,» she said gratefully. «When do you think you can go?»

Except for the big tree-the one with the moldy corset of moss-it would have been an hour's work. With the big one added in, I didn't think the job would be done until eleven or so.

«I'll give you lunch here, then. But you'll have to get some things at the market for me … we're almost out of milk and butter. Also … well, I'll have to make you a list.»

Give a woman a disaster and she turns squirrel. I gave her a hug and nodded. We went on around the house. It didn't take more than a glance to understand why Billy had been a little overwhelmed.

«Lordy,» Steff said in a faint voice.

From where we stood we had enough elevation to be able to see almost a quarter of a mile of shoreline-the Bibber property to our left, our own, and Brent Norton's to our right.

The huge old pine that had guarded our boat cove had been sheared off halfway up. What was left looked like a brutally sharpened pencil, and the inside of the tree seemed a glistening and defenseless white against the age-and-weatherdarkened outer bark. A hundred feet of tree, the old pine's top half, lay partly submerged in our shallow cove. It occurred to me that we were very lucky our little Star-Cruiser wasn't sunk underneath it. The week before, it had developed engine trouble and it was still at the Naples marina, patiently waiting its turn.

On the other side of our little piece of shorefront, the boathouse my father had built-the boathouse that had once housed a sixty-foot Chris-Craft when the Drayton family fortunes had been at a higher mark than they were today — lay under another big tree. It was the one that had stood on Norton's side of the property line, I saw. That raised the first flush of anger. The tree had been dead for five years and he should have long since had it taken down. Now it was three-quarters of the way down; our boathouse was propping it up. The roof had taken on a drunken, swaybacked look. The wind had swirled shingles from the hole the tree had made all over the point of land the boathouse stood on. Billy's description, «bashed,» was as good as any.

«That's Norton's tree!» Steff said. And she said it with such hurt indignation that I had to smile in spite of the pain I felt. The flagpole was lying in the water and Old Glory floated soggily beside it in a tangle of lanyard. And I could imagine Norton's response: Sue me.

Billy was on the rock breakwater, examining the dock that had washed up on the stones. It was painted in jaunty blue and yellow stripes. He looked back over his shoulder at us and yelled gleefully, «It's the Martinses', isn't it?»

«Yeah, it is,» I said. «Wade in and fish the flag out, would you, Big Bill?»

«Sure!»

To the right of the breakwater was a small sandy beach. In 1941, before Pearl Harbor paid off the Great Depression in blood, my dad hired a man to truck in that fine beach sand-six dumptrucks full-and to spread it out to a depth that is about nipple-high on me, say five feet. The workman charged eighty bucks for the job, and the sand has never moved just as well, you know, you can't put a sandy beach in on your land now. Now that the sewerage runoff from the booming cottage-building industry has killed most of the fish and made the rest of them unsafe to eat, the EPA has forbidden installing sand beaches. They might upset the ecology of the lake, you see, and it is presently against the law for anyone except land developers to do that.

Billy went for the flag — then stopped. At the same moment I felt Steff go rigid against me, and I saw it myself. The Harrison side of the lake was gone. It had been buried under a line of bright-white mist, like a fair-weather cloud fallen to earth.

My dream of the night before recurred, and when Steff asked me what it was, the word that nearly jumped first from my mouth was God.

«David?»

You couldn't see even a hint of the shoreline over there, but years of looking at Long Lake made me believe that the shoreline wasn't hidden by much; only yards, maybe. The edge of the mist was nearly ruler-straight.

«What is it, Dad?» Billy yelled. He was in the water up to his knees, groping for the soggy flag.

«Fogbank,» I said.

«On the lake?» Steff asked doubtfully, and I could see Mrs. Carmody's influence in her eyes. Damn the woman.

My own moment of unease was passing. Dreams, after all, are insubstantial things, like mist itself.

«Sure. You've seen fog on the lake before.»

«Never like that. That looks more like a cloud.»

«It's the brightness of the sun,» I said. «It's the same way clouds look from an airplane when you fly over them.»

«What would do it? We only get fog in damp weather.»

«No, we've got it right now,» I said. «Harrison does, anyway. It's a little leftover from the storm, that's all. Two fronts meeting. Something along that line.»

«David, are you sure?»

I laughed and hauled my arm around her neck. «No, actually, I'm bullshitting like crazy. If I was sure, I'd be doing the weather on the six-o'clock news. Go on and make your shopping list.»

She gave me one more doubtful glance, looked at the fogbank for a moment or two with the flat of her hand held up to shade her eyes, and then shook her head. «Weird,» she said, and walked away.

For Billy, the mist had lost its novelty. He had fished the flag and a tangle of lanyard out of the water. We spread it on the lawn to dry.

«I heard it was wrong to ever let the flag touch the ground, Daddy,» he said in a businesslike, let's-get-this-out-of-the-way tone.

«Yeah?»

«Yeah. Victor McAllister says they lectercute people for it.»

«Well, you tell Vic he's full of what makes the grass grow green.»

«Horseshit, right?» Billy is a bright boy, but oddly humorless. To the champ, everything is serious business. I'm hoping that he'll live long enough to learn that in this world that is a very dangerous attitude.

«Yeah, right, but don't tell your mother I said so. When the flag's dry, we'll put it away. We'll even fold it into a cocked hat, so we'll be on safe ground there.»

«Daddy, will we fix the boathouse roof and get a new flagpole?» For the first time he looked anxious. He'd maybe had enough destruction for a while.

I clapped him on the shoulder. «You're damn tooting.»

«Can I go over to the Bibbers' and see what happened there?»

«Just for a couple of minutes. They'll be cleaning up, too, and sometimes that makes people feel a little ugly.» The way I presently felt about Norton.

«Okay. Bye!» He was off.

«Stay out of their way, champ. And Billy?»

He glanced back.

«Remember about the live wires. If you see more, steer clear of them.»

«Sure, Dad.»

I stood there for a moment, first surveying the damage, then glancing out at the mist again. It seemed closer, but it was very hard to tell for sure. If it was closer, it was defying all the laws of nature, because the wind — a very gentle breeze-was against it. That, of course, was patently impossible. It was very, very white. The only thing I can compare it to would be fresh-fallen snow lying in dazzling contrast to the deep-blue brilliance of the winter sky. But snow reflects hundreds and hundreds of diamond points in the sun, and this peculiar fogbank, although bright and clean-looking, did not sparkle. In spite of what Steff had said, mist isn't uncommon on clear days, but when there's a lot of it, the suspended moisture almost always causes a rainbow. But there was no rainbow here.

The unease was back, tugging at me, but before it could deepen I heard a low, mechanical sound — whut-whut-whut! — followed by a barely audible «Shit!» The mechanical sound was repeated, but this time there was no oath. The third time the chuffing sound was followed by «Mother- fuck!» in the same low I'm-all-by-myself-but-boy-am-I-pissed tone.

Whut-whut-whut-whut

— Silence

— then: «You cunt.»

I began to grin. Sound carries well out here, and all the buzzing chainsaws were fairly distant. Distant enough for me to recognize the not-so-dulcet tones of my next-door neighbor, the renowned lawyer and lakefront-property-owner, Brenton Norton.

I moved down a little closer to the water, pretending to stroll toward the dock beached on our breakwater. Now I could see Norton. He was in the clearing beside his screened-in porch, standing on a carpet of old pine needles and dressed in paint-spotted jeans and a white strappy T-shirt. His forty-dollar haircut was in disarray and sweat poured down his face. He was down on one knee, laboring over his own chainsaw. It was much bigger and fancier than my little $79.95 Value House job. It seemed to have everything, in fact, but a starter button. He was yanking a cord, producing the listless whut-whut-whut sounds and nothing more. I was gladdened in my heart to see that a yellow birch had fallen across his picnic table and smashed it in two.

Norton gave a tremendous yank on the starter cord

Whut-whut-whutwhutwhut-WHAT! WHAT! WHAT! … WHAT! … Whut.

Almost had it there for a minute, fella.

Another Herculean tug.

Whut-whut-whut.

«Cocksucker,» Norton whispered fiercely, and bared his teeth at his fancy chainsaw.

I went back around the house, feeling really good for the first time since I got up. My own saw started on the first tug, and I went to work.

Around ten o'clock there was a tap on my shoulder. It was Billy with a can of beer in one hand and Steff's list in the other. I stuffed the list in the back pocket of my jeans and took the beer, which was not exactly frosty-cold but at least cool. I chugged almost half of it at once rarely does a beer taste that good-and tipped the can in salute at Billy. «Thanks, champ.»

«Can I have some.»

I let him have a swallow. He grimaced and handed the can back. I offed the rest and just caught myself as I started to crunch it up in the middle. The deposit law on bottles and cans has been in effect for over three years, but old ways die hard.

«She wrote something across the bottom of the list, but I can't read her writing,» Billy said.

I took out the list again. «I can't get WOXO on the radio,» Steff's note read. «Do you think the storm knocked them off the air?»

WOXO is the local automated FM rock outlet. It broadcast from Norway, about twenty miles north, and was all that our old and feeble FM receiver would haul in.

«Tell her probably,» I said, after reading the question over to him. «Ask her if she can get Portland on the AM band.»

«Okay, Daddy, can I come when you go to town?»

«Sure. You and Mommy both, if you want.»

«Okay.» He ran back to the house with the empty can.

I had worked my way up to the big tree. I made my first cut, sawed through, then turned the saw off for a few moments to let it cool down-the tree was really too big for it, but I thought it would be all right if I didn't rush it. I wondered if the dirt road leading up to Kansas Road was clear of falls, and just as I was wondering, an orange CMP truck lumbered past, probably on its way to the far end of our little road. So that was all right. The road was clear and the power guys would be here by noon to take care of the live lines.

I cut a big chunk off the tree, dragged it to the side of the driveway, and tumbled it over the — edge. It rolled down the slope and into the underbrush that had crept back since the long-ago day when my dad and his brothers-all of them artists, we have always been an artistic family, the Draytons-had cleared it away.

I wiped sweat off my face with my arm and wished for another beer; one really only sets your mouth. I picked up the chainsaw and thought about WOXO being off the air. That was the direction that funny fogbank had come from. And it was the direction Shaymore (pronounced Shammore by the locals) lay in. Shaymore was where the Arrowhead Project was.

That was old Bill Giosti's theory about the so-called Black Spring: the Arrowhead Project. In the western part of Shaymore, not far from where the town borders on Stoneham, there was a small government preserve surrounded with wire. There were sentries and closedcircuit television cameras and God knew what else. Or so I had heard; I'd never actually seen it, although the Old Shaymore Road runs along the eastern side of the government land for a mile or so.

No one knew for sure where the name Arrowhead Project came from and no one could tell you for one hundred percent sure that that really was the name of the project-if there was a project. Bill Giosti said there was, but when you asked him how and where he came by his information, he got vague. His niece, he said, worked for the Continental Phone Company, and she had heard things. It got like that.

«Atomic things,» Bill said that day, leaning in the Scout's window and blowing a healthy draught of Pabst into my face. «That's what they're fooling around with up there. Shooting atoms into the air and all that.»

«Mr. Giosti, the air's full of atoms,» Billy had said. «That's what Mrs. Neary says. Mrs. Neary says everything's full of atoms.»

Bill Giosti gave my son Bill a long, bloodshot glance that finally deflated him. «These are different atoms, Son.»

«Oh, yeah,» Billy muttered, giving in.

Dick Muehler, our insurance agent, said the Arrowhead Project was an agricultural station the government was running, no more or less. «Bigger tomatoes with a longer growing season,» Dick said sagely, and then went back to showing me how I could help my family most efficiently by dying young. Janine Lawless, our postlady, said it was a geological survey having something to do with shale oil. She knew for a fact, because her husband's brother worked for a man who had Mrs. Carmody, now … she probably leaned more to Bill Giosti's view of the matter. Not just atoms, but different atoms.

I cut two more chunks off the big tree and dropped them over the side before Billy came back with a fresh beer in one hand and a note from Steff in the other. If there's anything Big Bill likes to do more than run messages, I don't know what it could be.

«Thanks,» I said, taking them both.

«Can I have a swallow?»

«Just one. You took two last time. Can't have you running around drunk at ten in the morning.»

«Quarter past,» he said, and smiled shyly over the top of the can. I smiled back-not that it was such a great joke, you know, but Billy makes them so rarely-and then read the note.

«Got JBQ on the radio,» Steffy had written. «Don't get drunk before you go to town. You can have one more, but that's it before lunch. Do you think you can get up our road okay?»

I handed him the note back and took my beer. «Tell her the road's okay because a power truck just went by. They'll be working their way up here.»

«Okay.»

«Champ

«What, Dad?»

«Tell her everything's okay.»

He smiled again, maybe telling himself first. «Okay.»

He ran back and I watched him go, legs pumping, soles of his zori showing. I love him. It's his face and sometimes the way his eyes turn up to mine that make me feel as if things are really okay. It's a lie, of course-things are not okay and never have been-but my kid makes me believe the lie.

I drank some beer, set the can down carefully on a rock, and got the chainsaw going again. About twenty minutes later I felt a light tap on my shoulder and turned, expecting to see Billy again. Instead it was Brent Norton. I turned off the chainsaw.

He didn't look the way Norton usually looks. He looked hot and tired and unhappy and a little bewildered.

«Hi, Brent,» I said. Our last words had been hard ones, and I was a little unsure how to proceed. I had a funny feeling that he had been standing behind me for the last five minutes or so, clearing his throat decorously under the chainsaw's aggressive roar. I hadn't gotten a really good look at him this summer. He had lost weight, but it didn't look good. It should have, because he had been carrying around an extra twenty pounds, but it didn't. His wife had died the previous November. Cancer. Aggie Bibber told Steffy that. Aggie was our resident necrologist. Every neighborhood has one. From the casual way Norton had of ragging his wife and belittling her (doing it with the contemptuous ease of a veteran matador inserting banderillas in an old bull's lumbering body), I would have guessed he'd be glad to have her gone. If asked, I might even have speculated that he'd show up this summer with a girl twenty years younger than he was on his arm and a silly my-cock-has-died-and-gone-to-heaven grin on his face. But instead of the silly grin there was only a new batch of age lines, and the weight had come off in all the wrong places, leaving sags and folds and dewlaps that told their own story. For one passing moment I wanted only to lead Norton to a patch of sun and sit him beside one of the fallen trees with my can of beer in his hand, and do a charcoal sketch of him.

«Hi, Dave,» he said, after a long moment of awkward silence — a silence that was made even louder by the absence of the chainsaw's racket and roar. He stopped, then blurted: «That tree. That damn tree. I'm sorry. You were right.»

I shrugged.

He said, «Another tree fell on my car.»

«I'm sorry to h-» I began, and then a horrid suspicion dawned. «It wasn't the T-Bird, was it?»

«Yeah. It was.»

Norton had a 1960 Thunderbird in mint condition, only thirty thousand miles. It was a deep midnight blue inside and out. He drove it only summers, and then only rarely. He loved that Bird the way some men love electric trains or model ships or target-shooting pistols.

«That's a bitch,» I said, and meant it.

He shook his head slowly. «I almost didn't bring it up. Almost brought the station wagon, you know. Then I said what the hell, I drove it up and a big old rotten pine fell on it. The roof of it's all bashed in. And I thought I'd cut it up … the tree, I mean … but I can't get my chainsaw to fire up … I paid two hundred dollars for that sucker … and … and …»

His throat began to emit little clicking sounds. His mouth worked as if he were toothless and chewing dates. For one helpless second I thought he was going to stand there and bawl like a kid on a sandlot. Then he got himself under some halfway kind of control, shrugged, and turned away as if to look at the chunks of wood I had cut up.

«Well, we can look at your saw,» I said. «Your T-Bird insured?»

«Yeah,» he said, «like your boathouse.»

I saw what he meant, and remembered again what Steff had said about insurance.

«Listen, Dave, I wondered if I could borrow your Saab and take a run up to town. I thought I'd get some bread and cold cuts and beer. A lot of beer.»

«Billy and I are going up in the Scout,» I said. «Come with us if you want. That is, if you'll give me a hand dragging the rest of this tree off to one side.»

«Happy to.»

He grabbed one end but couldn't quite lift it up. I had to do most of the work. Between the two of us we were able to tumble it into the underbrush. Norton was puffing and panting, his cheeks nearly purple. After all the yanking he had done on that chainsaw starter pull, I was a little worried about his ticker.

«Okay?» I asked, and he nodded, still breathing fast. «Come on back to the house, then, I can fix you up with a beer.»

«Thank you,» he said. «How is Stephanie?» He was regaining some of the old smooth pomposity that I disliked.

«Very well, thanks.»

«And your son?»

«He's fine, too.»

«Glad to hear it.»

Steff came out, and a moment's surprise passed over her face when she saw who was with me. Norton smiled and his eyes crawled over her tight T-shirt. He hadn't changed that much after all.

«Hello, Brent,» she said cautiously. Billy poked his head out from under her arm.

«Hello, Stephanie. Hi, Billy.»

«Brent's T-Bird took a pretty good rap in the storm,» I told her. «Stove in the roof, he says.»

«Oh, no!»

Norton told it again while he drank one of our beers. I was sipping a third, but I had no kind of buzz on; apparently I had sweat the beer out as rapidly as I drank it.

«He's going to come to town with Billy and me.»

«Well, I won't expect you for a while. You may have to go to the Shop-and-Save in Norway.»

«Oh? Why?»

«Well, if the power's off in Bridgton-»

«Mom says all the cash registers and things run on electricity,» Billy supplied,

It was a good point.

«Have you still got the list?»

I patted my hip pocket.

Her eyes shifted to Norton. «I'm very sorry about Carla, Brent. We all were.»

«Thank you,» he said. «Thank you very much.»

There was another moment of awkward silence which Billy broke. «Can we go now, Daddy?» He had changed to jeans and sneakers.

«Yeah, I guess so. You ready, Brent?»

«Give me another beer for the road and I will be.»

Steffy's brow creased. She had never approved of the onefor- the- road philosophy, or of men who drive with a can of Bud leaning against their crotches. I gave her a bare nod and she shrugged. I didn't want to reopen things with Norton now, She got him a beer.

«Thanks,» he said to Steffy, not really thanking her but only mouthing a word. It was the way you thank a waitress in a restaurant. He turned back to me. «Lead on, Macduff.»

«Be right with you,» I said, and went into the living room.

Norton followed, and exclaimed over the birch, but I wasn't interested in that or in the cost of replacing the window just then. I was looking at the lake through the sliding glass panel that gave on our deck. The breeze had freshened a little and the day had warmed up five degrees or so while I was cutting wood. I thought the odd mist we'd noticed earlier would surely have broken up, but it hadn't. It was closer, too. Halfway across the lake now.

«I noticed that earlier,» Norton said, pontificating. «Some kind of temperature inversion, that's my guess.»

I didn't like it. I felt very strongly that I had never seen a mist exactly like this one. Part of it was the unnerving straight edge of its leading front. Nothing in nature is that even; man is the inventor of straight edges. Part of it was that pure, dazzling whiteness, with no variation but also without the sparkle of moisture. It was only half a mile or so off now, and the contrast between it and the blues of the lake and sky was more striking than ever.

«Come on, Dad!» Billy was tugging at my pants.

We all went back to the kitchen. Brent Norton spared one final glance at the tree that had crashed into our living room.

«Too bad it wasn't an apple tree, huh?» Billy remarked brightly. «That's what my mom said. Pretty funny, don't you think?»

«Your mother's a real card, Billy,» Norton said. He ruffled Billy's hair in a perfunctory way and his eyes went to the front of Steff's T-shirt again. No, he was not a man I was ever going to be able to really like.

«Listen, why don't you come with us, Steff?» I asked. For no concrete reason I suddenly wanted her to come along.

«No, I think I'll stay here and pull some weeds in the garden,» she said. Her eyes shifted toward Norton and then back to me. «This morning it seems like I'm the only thing around here that doesn't run on electricity.»

Norton laughed too heartily.

I was getting her message, but tried one more time. «You sure?»

«Sure,» she said firmly. «The old bend — and — stretch will do me good.»

«Well, don't get too much sun.»

«I'll put on my straw hat. We'll have sandwiches when you get back.»

«Good.»

She turned her face up to be kissed. «Be careful. There might be blowdowns on Kansas Road too, you know.»

«I'll be careful.»

«You be careful, too,» she told Billy, and kissed his cheek.

«Right, Mom.» He banged out of the door and the screen cracked shut behind him.

Norton and I walked out after him. «Why don't we go over to your place and cut the tree off your Bird?» I asked him. All of a sudden I could think of lots of reasons to delay leaving for town.

«I don't even want to look at it until after lunch and a few more of these» Norton said, holding up his beer can. «The damage has been done, Dave old buddy.»

I didn't like him calling me buddy, either.

We all got into the front seat of the Scout (in the far corner of the garage my scarred Fisher plow blade sat glimmering yellow, like the ghost of Christmas yet-to-come) and I backed out, crunching over a litter of storm-blown twigs. Steff was standing on the cement path which leads to the vegetable patch at the extreme west end of, our property. She had a pair of clippers in one gloved hand and the weeding claw in the other. She had put on her old floppy sunhat, and it cast a band of shadow over her face. I tapped the horn twice, lightly, and she raised the hand holding the clippers in answer. We pulled out. I haven't seen my wife since then.

We had to stop once on our way up to Kansas Road. Since the power truck had driven through, a pretty fair-sized pine had dropped across the road. Norton and I got out and moved it enough so I could inch the Scout by, getting our hands all pitchy in the process. Billy wanted to help but I waved him back. I was afraid he might get poked in the eye. Old trees have always reminded me of the Ents in Tolkien's wonderful Rings saga, only Ents that have gone bad. Old trees want to hurt you. It doesn't matter if you're snowshoeing, cross-country skiing, or just taking a walk in the woods. Old trees want to hurt you, and I think they'd kill you if they could.

Kansas Road itself was clear, but in several places we saw more lines down. About a quarter-mile past the Vicki-Linn Campground there was a power pole lying full-length in the ditch, heavy wires snarled around its top like wild hair.

«That was some storm,» Norton said in his mellifluous, courtroom- trained voice; but he didn't seem to be pontificating now, only solemn.

«Yeah, it was.»

«Look, Dad!»

He was pointing at the remains of the Ellitches' barn. For twelve years it had been sagging tiredly in Tommy Ellitch's back field, up to its hips in sunflowers, goldenrod, and Lolly-come-see-me. Every fall I would think it could not last through another winter. And every spring it would still be there. But it wasn't anymore. All that remained was a splintered wreckage and a roof that had been mostly stripped of shingles. Its number had come up. And for some reason that echoed solemnly, even ominously, inside me. The storm had come and smashed it flat.

Norton drained his beer, crushed the can in one hand, and dropped it indifferently to the floor of the Scout. Billy opened his mouth to say something and then closed it again-good boy. Norton came from New Jersey, where there was no bottle-can-law; I guess he could be forgiven for squashing my nickel when I could barely remember not to do it myself.

Billy started fooling with the radio, and I asked him to see if WOXO was back on the air. He dialed up to FM 92 and got nothing but a blank hum. He looked at me and shrugged. I thought for a moment. What other stations were on the far side of that peculiar fog front?

«Try, WBLM,» I said.

He dialed down to the other end, passing WJBQ-FM and WIGY-FM on the way. They were there, doing business as usual … but WBLM, Maine's premier progressive-rock station, was off the air.

«Funny,» I said.

«What's that?» Norton asked.

«Nothing. Just thinking out loud.»

Billy had tuned back to the musical cereal on WJBQ. Pretty soon we got to town.

The Norge Washateria in the shopping center was closed, it being impossible to run a coin-op laundry without electricity, but both the Bridgton Pharmacy and the Federal Foods Supermarket were open. The parking lot was pretty full, and as always in the middle of the summer, a lot of the cars had out-of-state plates. Little knots of people stood here and there in the sun, noodling about the storm, women with women, men with men.

I saw Mrs. Carmody, she of the stuffed animals and the stump-water lore. She sailed into the supermarket decked out in an amazing canary-yellow pantsuit. A purse that looked the size of a small Samsonite suitcase was slung over one forearm. Then an idiot on a Yamaha roared past me, missing my front bumper by a few scant inches. He wore a denim jacket, mirror sunglasses, and no helmet.

«Look at that stupid shit,» Norton growled.

I circled the parking lot once, looking for a good space. There were none. I was just resigning myself to a long walk from the far end of the lot when I got lucky. A lime-green Cadillac the size of a small cabin cruiser was easing out of a slot in the rank closest to the market's doors. The moment it was gone, I slid into the space.

I gave Billy Steffs shopping list. He was five, but he could read printing. «Get a cart and get started. I want to give your mother a jingle. Mr. Norton will help you. And I'll be right along.»

We got out and Billy immediately grabbed Mr. Norton's hand. He'd been taught not to cross the parking lot without holding an adult's hand when he was younger and hadn't yet lost the habit. Norton looked surprised for a moment, and then smiled a little. I could almost forgive him for feeling Steff up with his eyes. The two of them went into the market.

I strolled over to the pay phone, which was on the wall between the drugstore and the Norge. A sweltering woman in a purple sunsuit was jogging the cutoff switch up and down. I stood behind her with my hands in my pockets, wondering why I felt so uneasy about Steff, and why the unease should be all wrapped up with that line of white but unsparkling fog, the radio stations that were off the air and the Arrowhead Project.

The woman in the purple sunsuit had a sunburn and freckles on her fat shoulders. She looked like a sweaty orange baby. She slammed the phone back down on its cradle, turned toward the drugstore and saw me there.

«Save your dime,» she said. «Just dah-dah-dah.» She walked grumpily away.

I almost slapped my forehead. The phone lines were down someplace, of course. Some of them were underground, but nowhere near all of them. I tried the phone anyway. The pay phones in the area are what Steff calls Paranoid Pay Phones. Instead of putting your dime right in, you get a dial tone and make your call. When someone answers, there's an automatic cutoff and you have to shove your dime in before your party hangs up. They're irritating, but that day it did save me my dime. There was no dial tone. As the lady had said, it was just dah-dah-dah.

I hung up and walked slowly toward the market, just in time to see an amusing little incident. An elderly couple walked toward the IN door, chatting together. And still chatting, they walked right into it. They stopped talking in a jangle and the woman squawked her surprise. They stared at each other comically. Then they laughed, and the old guy pushed the door open for his wife with some effort-those electric-eye doors are heavy — and they went in. When the electricity goes off, it catches you in a hundred different ways.

I pushed the door open myself and noticed the lack of air conditioning first thing. Usually in the summer they have it cranked up high enough to give you frostbite if you stay in the market more than an hour at a stretch.

Like most modern markets, the Federal was constructed like a Skinner box-modern marketing techniques turn all customers into white rats. The stuff you really needed, staples, like bread, milk, meat, beer, and frozen dinners, was all on the far side of the store. To get there you had to walk past all the impulse items known to modern man-everything from Cricket lighters to rubber dog bones.

Beyond the IN door is the fruit-and-vegetable aisle. I looked up it, but there was no sign of Norton or my son. The old lady who had run into the door was examining grapefruits. Her husband had produced a net sack to store purchases in.

I walked up the aisle and went left. I found them in the third aisle, Billy mulling over the ranks of Jello-O packages and instant puddings. Norton was standing directly behind him, peering at Steff's list. I had to grin a little at his nonplussed expression.

I threaded my way down to them, past half-loaded carriages (Steff hadn't been the only one struck by the squirreling impulse apparently) and browsing shoppers. Norton took two cans of pie filling down from the top shelf and put them in the cart.

«How are you doing?» I asked, and Norton looked around with unmistakable relief.

«All right, aren't we, Billy?»

«Sure,» Billy said, and couldn't resist adding in a rather smug tone: «But there's lots of stuff Mr. Norton can't read either, Dad.»

«Let me see.» I took the list.

Norton had made a neat, lawyerly check beside each of the items he and Billy had picked up-half a dozen or so, including the milk and a six-pack of Coke. There were maybe ten other things that she wanted.

«We ought to go back to the fruits and vegetables,» I said. «She wants some tomatoes and cucumbers.»

Billy started to turn the card around and Norton said, «You ought to go have a look at the checkout, Dave.»

I went and had a look. It was the sort of thing you sometimes see photos of in the paper on a slow newsday, with a humorous caption beneath. Only two lanes were open, and the double line of people waiting to check their purchases out stretched past the mostly denuded bread racks, then made a jig to the right and went out of sight along the frozen-food coolers. All of the new computerized NCRs were hooded. At each of the two open positions, a harried-looking girl was totting up purchases on a battery-powered pocket calculator. Standing with each girl was one of the Federal's two managers, Bud Brown and Ollie Weeks. I liked Ollie but didn't care much for Bud

Brown, who seemed to fancy himself the Charles de Gaulle of the supermarket world.

As each girl finished checking her order, Bud or Ollie would paperclip a chit to the customer's cash or check and toss it into the box he was using as a cash repository. They all looked hot and tired,

«Hope you brought a good book,» Norton said, joining me. «We're going to be in line for a while.»

I thought of Steff again, at home alone, and had another flash of unease. «You go on and get your stuff,» I said. «Billy and I can handle the rest of this,»

«Want me to grab a few more beers for you too?»

I thought about it, but in spite of the rapprochement, I didn't want to spend the afternoon with Brent Norton getting drunk. Not with the mess things were in around the house.

«Sorry,» I said. «I've got to take a raincheck, Brent.»

I thought his face stiffened a little. «Okay,» he said shortly, and walked off. I watched him go, and then Billy was tugging at my shirt.

«Did you talk to Mommy?»

«Nope. The phone wasn't working. Those lines are down too, I guess.»

«Are you worried about her?»

«No,» I said, lying. I was worried, all right, but had no idea why I should be. «No, of course I'm not. Are you?»

«No-ooo …» But he was. His face had a pinched look. We should have gone back then. But even then it might have been too late.