It was as they were cuffing me that Mrs. McKay came out. She came right up and took my arm and the men stepped back for a moment. I will always remember her face there, so serious and pure. She said, “They were friends, Ray. Other men who have helped me keep this place together. I never gave any other man an apple pie, not even Mr. McKay.” I loved her for saying that. She didn’t have to. You have a woman make that kind of statement in broad daylight in front of the county officials and it’s a bracing experience; it certainly braced me. I smiled there as happy as I’d been in this life. As the deputy helped me into the car I realized that for the first time ever I was leaving home. I’d never really had one before.
“Save that paint,” I said to Mrs. McKay. “I’ll be back and finish this job.” I saw her face and it has sustained me.
THEY HAD FOUND me because I’d mowed. Think about it, you drive County Road 216 twice a week for a few years and then one day a hundred acres of milkweed, goldenrod, and what-have-you are trimmed like a city park. You’d make a phone call, which is what the sheriff had done. That’s what change is, a clue.
SO, HERE I AM in Windchime once again. I work at this second series of Ray Bold an hour or two a day. I can feel it evolving, that is, the font is a little more vertical than it was when I was on the outside and I’m thickening the stems. And I’m thinking it would look good with a spur serif—there’s time. It doesn’t have all the energy of Ray Bold I, but it’s an alphabet with staying power, and it has a different purpose: it has to keep me busy for fifteen months, when I’ll be going home to paint a barn and mow the fields. My days as a font maker are numbered.
My new cellmate, Victor Lee Peterson, the semifamous archer and survivalist who extorted all that money from Harrah’s in Reno recently and then put arrows in the radiators of so many state vehicles during his botched escape on horseback, has no time for my work. He leafs through the notebooks and shakes his head. He’s spent three weeks now etching a target, five concentric circles on the wall, and I’ll say this, he’s got a steady hand and he’s got a good understanding of symmetry. But, a target? He says the same thing about my letters. “The ABC’s?” he said when he first saw my work. I smile at him. I kind of like him. He’s an anarchist, but I think I can get through. As I said today: “Victor. You’ve got to treat it right. It’s just the alphabet but sometimes it’s all we’ve got.”
NIGHTCAP
I WAS FILING deeds, or rather, I had been filing deeds all day, and now I was taking a break to rest my head on the corner of my walnut desk and moan, when there was a knock at my door. My heart kicked in. People don’t come to my office. From time to time folders are slipped under my door, but my clients don’t come here. They call me and I copy something and send it to them. I’m an attorney.
Still and all, I hadn’t been much of anything since Lily, the woman I loved, had—justifiably—asked me to move out three months ago. Simply, these were days of filing. I didn’t moan that often, but I sat still for hours—hours I couldn’t bill to anyone. I wanted Lily back, and the short of it is that I’m not going to get her back in this story. She’s not even in this story. There’s another woman in this story, and I wish I could say there’s another man. But there isn’t. It’s me.
And now the heavy golden doorknob turned, and the woman entered. She wore a red print cowboy shirt and tight Levi’s and under one arm she held a tiny maroon purse.
“Wrong room,” I said. I had about four wrong rooms a week.
“Jack,” she said, stepping forward. It was either not the wrong room or really the wrong room. “I’m Lynn LaMoine. Phyllis told me that if I came over there was a good chance I could talk you into going to the ball game tonight.”
Well. She had me sitting down, half embarrassed about having my moaning interrupted, overheard, and her sister, Phyllis, Madame Cause-Effect, the most feared wrongful death attorney in the state, somehow knew that I was in limbo. I steered the middle road; it would be the last time. “I like baseball,” I said. “But don’t you have a husband?”
She nodded for a while, her mouth set. “Yeah,” she said. “I was married, but … maybe you remember Clark Dewar?”
“Sure,” I said. “He’s at Stover-Reynolds.”
She kept nodding. “A lawyer.” Then she said the thing that sealed this small chapter of my cheap fate. “Look, I just thought it might be fun to sit outside in the night and watch the game. I’m not good at being lonely. And I don’t like the lessons.”