She laughs shrilly, the sound seeming to inject life into a gnarled oak tree, down in the meadow, halfway to her house. As if limbering up for a race, the tree’s foliated branches begin jauntily to bounce, then from them rises up, squawking, a grackle plague, its black smudge scarring the sky’s perfect blue. Abbie, breathing heavily, jumps up from her chair. “Trash birds,” she says.
“Go out this way,” says John, gently shoving her toward the deck steps.
“Do what?” Enhanced by adrenaline, her vital smell provides an antithesis to the death’s scent recently filling John’s nostrils. His vertigo is enhanced. Vague disorientation becomes dissolution of rational thought. There’s a ghost in the trailer, playing Willie Nelson tunes.
“No sense going out through the trailer.”
“I’m not going out any way at all, John Moon,” she says. Backing haughtily away from him, she puts her hands on her hips. Inside, the music is now a low, steady drone, sounding somewhere in the south end of the structure, where John’s bedroom is. “Not till I know if you got a bogeyman.”
John glances toward the room, forty feet to his left. A corner of its single window facing the valley is visible as a patch of mauve curtain, slightly pulled back from the open glass that last John remembers was covered by a screen but now is not. Into his chest enters a searing pain, like a ghost’s bullet fired from that ajar place. He looks at Abbie and she is Ingrid Banes behind a briar thicket in the final moment preceding her death, and a tiny voice in his head says, “Don’t shoot!”
“Got to be the transistor,” he says. “Had it on changin’ my clothes.”
“Weak batteries,” says Abbie with false bravado, “ ’ll make the sound fade in and out like that.”
“I’ll go turn it off.” John steps toward the deck door.
“I’ll come with you.”
“You stay here.”
“Give a holler if you got a band playing in there, John Moon.” She laughs too loudly.
John opens the door.
Like a straining maestro’s voice, his agitation rises as he steps into that airless, dark place he has inhabited these many years, though, once inside, he feels less as if he has entered his home than as if he’s exited the world of light. Here, where the soul and body of Ingrid Banes rests, more dangerous than what eyes can see, is what the sun can’t touch. Still, he wishes he had a gun. Halfway down the semidark corridor where the kitchen smells loiter, and ten feet from the closed bedroom door beyond which Willie Nelson sings, he remembers the .22 automatic he had hidden behind the toilet. He veers left into the bathroom, reaches down behind the toilet’s back, and finds the pistol. He checks to see that it’s loaded, then, holding it out in one hand, reenters the hallway.
In front of the bedroom door he stops, inclining an ear inward. The music abruptly ends. An ad for Agway fertilizer comes on. “The transistor,” thinks John. “I did leave it on.” He turns the knob and gently pushes the door open.
The radio sits on the bureau to his right. Everything else in the room looks as it had, except the screen that had been covering the window now stands at its base. A light breeze ruffles the curtain and John imagines the softly probing flatus to be a ghost’s inaudible whisper. A foreign scent taints the room, an organic stink concomitant to exorcised life. Now he’s not sure if the bed has been lain in or if the fault marring its center was created in its making. In this spiritually vibrant place, he suddenly feels like an inorganic lump. Like a stone marker in a cemetery. Even the tumultuous beat of his own heart seems like a sound disconnected from his static flesh. A frantic banging maybe, coming from the closet. He takes a deep breath and walks over to it. Brandishing the gun in one hand, he reaches down with the other and yanks open the mirrored door.
A whoosh of dust-filled air exits.
John reaches in and runs a hand through the closet’s sparse, dangling contents—two pairs of dress slacks, his one suit coat, half a dozen skirts or dresses left behind by Moira. He exhales pantingly, then shuts the door. He turns back to the bed. He thinks about looking under it but even in his revenant state thinks he won’t find anything significant in the couple of inches between the floor and two-by-four-raised spring. On the radio, a promo for the upcoming County Fair ends. A loud whinny sounds from the front of the trailer. Diablo’s uncharacteristic skittishness reregisters itself with John. He walks over to the radio, on which a Garth Brooks song now plays. He switches it off. Through the window, from the deck, he hears a sharp, dual-toned whistle like somebody calling a dog or remarking on a pretty girl. The sound repeats itself. John moves over to the curtain, pulls it back, and sticks his head out.