The Glass Village

“I don’t mean that.” The Judge paused, as if groping for the right words. “All day I’ve had the funniest feeling.”

“Feeling?”

“Well, it’s like waking up on one of those deathly still, high-humidity days. When the air weighs a ton and you can’t breathe.”

“Seen a doctor lately?” asked Johnny lightly.

“Last week,” growled the old man. “He says I’ll live to be a hundred.”

Johnny was silent. Then he said, “It’s tied up with Shinn Corners, of course. You don’t get down here much any more, you said. It doesn’t surprise me. This place is pretty grim.”

“Do you believe in premonitions, Johnny?” asked Judge Shinn suddenly.

Johnny said, “Sure do.”

The Judge shook himself a little.

He got up from the log and reached for his handkerchief again. “I promised Mathilda Scott I’d bring you over to meet Earl. Lord, it’s hot!”

The next day Aunt Fanny Adams was murdered.

Two...

He was plastered against the flimsy wall with his eye to the hole in the freezing dark righting off the stench from the alley and saying don’t don’t don’t he’s only a kid from Oklahoma who ought to be kissing his date in a jalopy under a willow by some moonlit river but they went on jamming lighted cigarets against his nipples and other places and telling him to say what he’d dropped from his plane on their people’s villages and the hole in the wall got bigger and bigger and bigger until the hole was the whole room and he was the kid flyer twisting and jerking like a trout on a line to get away from the little probing fires the fires the fires...

Johnny opened his eyes.

He was in a sweat and the room was black.

“Who is it?” he said.

“Me,” said the Judge’s voice. The old man’s finger was poking holes in him. “For a restless sleeper you’re sure hard to wake up. Get up, Johnny!”

“What time is it?”

“Almost five. That’s a three-mile walk to the pond, and the big ones bite early.”

They hiked up Shinn Road in the dawn with their fishing gear and a camping outfit, the Judge insisting they make a day of it. Or as much of a day as the threatening skies would allow.

“When a man gets to be as old as I am,” observed the Judge, “half a day is better than none.”

Each carried a gun, taken from a locked commode drawer in the Judge’s bedroom, where the weapons lay wrapped in oily rags among boxes of ammunition. The old jurist frowned on hunting for sport; he had his property severely posted to protect the pheasant and deer. But he considered chuck, rabbit, and such pests fair game. “When the fishing runs out we’ll go after some. They’re thick up around there. Come down into the valley and play hob with the farms. Maybe we’ll get a bead on some fox. They’ve done a lot of damage this year.” He had issued to Johnny a 20-gauge double for the rabbits, reserving to himself what he called his “varmint rifle.” It was a .22 caliber handloader designed to play a little hob of its own, the Judge said ferociously, with the damn woodchucks. And he sighed, wishing old Pokey were trotting along to heel. Pocahontas had been the Judge’s last hunting dog, a red setter bitch whose tenderly framed photograph hung on his study wall. Johnny had seen her grave in the woods behind the garage.

“Pokey and I had some fine times in the woods,” Judge Shinn said happily.

“Hunting the butterflies, no doubt,” grinned Johnny.

The Judge flushed and mumbled something about all that foolishness being dead and buried.

So the day began peacefully, nothing marring their pleasure but the closing sky. They netted some peepers for live bait and went out in the old flatbottomed boat the Judge had had carted up to the pond the week before, and they fished for largemouthed bass and were successful beyond their dreams. Then they hauled the boat up on shore and did some steel-rod casting for pickerel, and they caught not only pickerel in plenty but a couple of husky trout, at which the Judge declared gleefully the coming of the millennium, for Peepers Pond had been considered fished out of trout, he said, for years.

“Did I croak some twaddle yesterday about premonitions?” he chortled. “False prophet!”

Then they made camp on the edge of the pond, broiled their trout and swallowed the delectable flesh along with their pond-cooled beer and Millie Pangman’s oatmeal bread, and Johnny brewed he-man’s coffee while the Judge cut open the ambrosial currant pie Aunt Fanny Adams had sent over by little Cynthia Hackett the evening before; and they stuffed themselves and were in heaven.

Whereupon the Judge said drowsily, “Don’t feel a bit like snuffing out life. Hang the chucks,” and he spread his poncho and dropped off like a small boy after a picnic.

So Johnny lay down and did likewise, hoping this time he wouldn’t dream the one about the ten thousand men in yellow blanket-uniforms all shooting at him with the Russian guns in their yellow hands.

And that was how the rain caught them, two innocents fast asleep and soaked to the skin before they could scramble to their feet.

“I’m running true to form,” gasped Johnny. “Did I ever tell you I’m a jinx?”