“Mostly, that’s when you put handcuffs on them. But yeah, you do what you can to sort it out. Let me know if you want a job. We’re hiring. And you’re the kind of guy we want.”
“I’ll keep that in mind, if the thing with my uncle falls through.”
They sipped their hot chocolate. Mulligan said, “Say, Mike, what would you do if you had a cousin? Like a widow. And she started calling you?”
“Calling you how?”
“On the phone. Long distance. She lives out of state.” His cheeks crimsoned. “I saw her last year at a family wedding, out in Oregon. She was married, back then, though, I mean, her husband was still alive, and she’s family. Not a first cousin. Pretty distant.”
“You got a thing for her?”
Blush. “I don’t know about that.”
“Well then, put it another way. Does she have a thing for you?”
“Well, she’s said a few things when she called. She’s a very fine-looking woman.”
“So…what are you going to do about it?”
“I could ask her out here. I could do that, couldn’t I? She’s kind of said she’d like to come up here.”
“You’re both adults. I’d say go for it.”
Chad nodded, and blushed, and nodded again.
The telephone in Shadow’s apartment was silent and dead. He thought about getting it connected, but could think of no one he wanted to call. Late one night he picked it up and listened, and was convinced that he could hear a wind blowing and a distant conversation between a group of people whose voices were too faint to distinguish. He said, “Hello?” and “Who’s there?” but there was no reply, only a sudden silence and then the faraway sound of laughter, so faint he was not certain he was not imagining it.
Shadow made more journeys with Wednesday in the weeks that followed.
He waited in the kitchen of a Rhode Island cottage, and listened while Wednesday sat in a darkened bedroom and argued with a woman who would not get out of bed, nor would she let Wednesday or Shadow look at her face. In the refrigerator was a plastic bag filled with crickets, and another filled with the corpses of baby mice.
In a rock club in Seattle Shadow watched Wednesday shout his greeting, over the noise of the band, to a young woman with short red hair and blue-spiral tattoos. That talk must have gone well, for Wednesday came away from it grinning delightedly.
Five days later Shadow was waiting in the rental when Wednesday walked, scowling, from the lobby of an office building in Dallas. Wednesday slammed the car door when he got in, and sat there in silence, his face red with rage. He said, “Drive.” Then he said, “Fucking Albanians. Like anybody cares.”
Three days after that they flew to Boulder, where they had a pleasant lunch with five young Japanese women. It was a meal of pleasantries and politeness, and Shadow walked away from it unsure of whether anything had been agreed to or decided. Wednesday, though, seemed happy enough.
Shadow had begun to look forward to returning to Lakeside. There was a peace there, and a welcome, that he appreciated.
Each morning, when he was not away working for Wednesday, he would drive across the bridge to the town square. He would buy two pasties at Mabel’s; he would eat one pasty then and there, and drink a coffee. If someone had left a newspaper out he would read it, although he was never interested enough in the news to purchase a newspaper himself.
He would pocket the second pasty, wrapped in its paper bag, and eat it for his lunch.
He was reading USA Today one morning when Mabel said, “Hey, Mike. Where you going today?”
The sky was pale blue. The morning mist had left the trees covered with hoarfrost. “I don’t know,” said Shadow. “Maybe I’ll walk the wilderness trail again.”
She refilled his coffee. “You ever gone east on County Q? It’s kind of pretty out thataway. That’s the little road that starts acrost from the carpet store on Twentieth Avenue.”
“No. Never have.”
“Well,” she said, “it’s kind of pretty.”
It was extremely pretty. Shadow parked his car at the edge of town, and walked along the side of the road, a winding, country road that curled around the hills to the east of the town. Each of the hills was covered with leafless maple trees, and bone-white birches, and dark firs and pines. There was no footpath, and Shadow walked along the middle of