The Snow Arrival

The last snow of the winter came down over Bellhaven on a Tuesday in the first week of February, and it came down the way snow comes down in the Cascade foothills, without ceremony, filling the ruts in Vine Street until the street was only a rumor of itself. Vera Pell had the porch light on at the Wayfarer Inn by four o'clock, and the two rooms at the front of the second floor made up and aired, because that was what she did on Tuesdays whether anybody came or not.

Nobody came. The mill had been shut since October, and the mill's people had gone where the work went, and the rooms at the Wayfarer had been made up and aired for an empty street since before Christmas. Vera had begun to think of the made-up rooms the way she thought of her good coat: something kept ready for an occasion that had stopped arriving.

So when the man came up the walk out of the snow, she was already at the window, and she had a moment to be wrong about him before he reached the door.

She was wrong about the coat first. It was a good coat, a city coat, black wool, not a Bellhaven coat, and it had been rained on and snowed on and slept in, and it hung on him as though the lining had come loose. She was wrong about the suitcase next: a black leather case, the kind a salesman carries, cornered in brass, and he held it in front of him with both hands the way a man holds a hymnal.

Then she was wrong about his face, and by that time he was close enough that she could not pretend she hadn't looked.

He had a hat pulled down and a scarf pulled up, which meant nothing, half of Bellhaven went around like that in February. But between the hat and the scarf there was no face. There was a bandage. There was more than a bandage: there was a wrapping, a white gauze wrapping that came down from under the hat brim and disappeared under the scarf, and across the middle of that wrapping, where a man's eyes would be, sat a pair of dark glasses with hinged side panels, the sort an old person wears after cataract surgery. Below the glasses the wrapping bulged once, in the place a nose should have been, and did not look like a nose. It looked like something carried in a pocket and set in place in a hurry.

Vera's hand came up off the tray and stopped, and she stood in the doorway of the office with her mouth set and let the word settle, and the word was sick. That was how Bellhaven classified anything it could not price, and the second thought came behind it the way it always did: who's paying.

She got the door. The snow came in past him in a small sheet and lay on the mat and began at once to become water.

"I'd like a room," he said.

His voice was the least troubling thing about him. It was a flat, educated voice with the region sanded off it, and it was not muffled by the wrapping the way she had braced herself for. It came through clean.

"I've got two," Vera said. "Front ones. Four hundred a week, and that's with the breakfast, and that's cash, because I don't have the machine working."

For a moment the bandaged head did not move. Then one gloved hand came up and touched the gauze at the cheek, the way a person checks whether a scarf has slipped.

"Cash is fine," he said. "Two rooms. Beginning tonight."

"Two rooms is seven hundred."

"Then seven hundred."

She had intended to say six. She had intended, in fact, to say six and then let him come back at five-fifty, because that was how the winter had been going. She had named a price to be refused and he had not refused it, and now there was a man in a bandage standing on her mat paying seven hundred dollars a week for two rooms in a town where the mill had been dark since October, and Vera did not say what she had been going to say, which was that the price was negotiable, because a man who does not bargain is not a man you tell that to, and she heard herself say, "Coffee's at six," and hated the sound of it.

He paid from a coat pocket. She watched his hands do it and could make nothing of them. There were no bills counted out one by one; there was a fold of bills produced and a fold of bills put into her hand, and she counted it after he had gone up the stairs and it was, in fact, seven hundred dollars, all twenties, and none of them new, and that was the strangest part, because in a town this size a new twenty is a thing people remember.

"Breakfast is six to eight," she called up after him. "Coffee's from five."

"There's a fire in the room?"

"There's a stove. I'll get the wood up."

"Put it outside the door," he said from the landing. "Don't come in."

Her husband Otis came in at half past five with the mail and his feet wet and smelled the coffee and the man at the same moment.

"Second floor's rented," Vera said.

"Since when?"

"Since an hour ago."

Otis sat down at the end of the counter and took his boots off without untying them, working them off heel to heel, which was a habit Vera had asked him to break eleven years running and which had outlived the asking. He was a good-natured man who had arrived at no opinion he could tell you about since the mill closed, and Vera had found in the last four months that a good-natured husband with no opinions is not company, it is furniture, and she had begun to say sharp things to the furniture, which was unfair, and she knew it, and it did not stop her.

"Paid up front," she said. "Two rooms."

"Two rooms."

"He's wrapped in bandages."

Otis got up, went to the window, and looked out at the snow coming down on Vine Street, in the direction of nothing in particular.

"Might be a burn case," he said. "They send them out of Portland to get the dressing changed someplace quiet."

"It's not a burn."

"Might be a skin thing."

"A man doesn't rent two rooms for a skin thing."

"He might," Otis said, and sat back down, and drank his coffee, and that was the whole of Otis Pell's contribution to the mystery of the man in bandages, which Vera would remember later, because later everyone in town would have something to say, and none of them would say that.

The crates came the next morning.

She heard the truck before she saw it: Augie Dieter's rig coming up Vine Street in low gear with something in the bed that made the springs talk. Augie hauled for everybody who needed hauling, and he had the only flatbed left in the county now that the mill's were all sold off, and he was also, according to everyone including Augie, a little short on imagination and a little long on forearms.

The rig stopped in front of the Wayfarer and Augie came up the walk with the snow on his shoulders and a look on his face that Vera recognized at once, because she had been wearing it since Tuesday evening.

"He wants these up," he said. "Two flights. Six crates."

"What's in them?"

"Glass."

"Glass," Vera said.

"Glass. Some of it full. He says if I break one I don't get paid."

Vera looked at the truck and then up at the window of the bandaged man's room, where nothing was visible except, in the gap of the curtain, a piece of white standing in the middle of the room, absolutely still, as though the bandage were its own person and the person had gone out.

"Then don't break one," she said.

It took the two of them the better part of forty minutes to get the crates up the staircase, which was narrow and had a turn in it, and Otis held the door and did not help, and Augie said nothing the whole time except once, at the top landing, when Vera stepped on a splinter that came off the fourth crate and Augie said, watching her face, "Look at that," and she said, "What," and he said, "Nothing," and Vera understood that what he had seen was a splinter of packing from that crate, and that the splinter was dry and pale and had a small printed word on it in a language that Vera could read well enough, because it was the same four letters you could find on the wall of the school lab and on the side of the swimming pool building, and the word was ACID.

She did not say anything about it to Augie, because saying it aloud would make it a fact about her house, and she was not ready for a fact about her house.

When the last crate was in, the bandaged man locked the door after them, and Vera stood in the hallway and listened to him work, because Vera had never been able to leave a thing alone, and what she heard was not moving furniture. What she heard was the tearing of paper in long strips, and then the small hard chime of glass against glass, once, and then a long stretch of nothing at all, and then that same chime again, and she went downstairs and stood in the kitchen with her hands in the sink for a while, and the water went cold around them.

At supper Otis said, "He wants his meals upstairs now."

"He'll eat in the kitchen or he won't eat."

"He paid seven hundred."

"He paid seven hundred for rooms," Vera said, and then she went and looked in the dining room, which was laid for a table that had been laid for thirty years, and she thought about a bandaged man coming down her stairs and sitting at it, and she made up a tray.

At nine o'clock that night the bandaged man came partway down the stairs and took the tray off the bottom step without a word, and Vera, standing in the dark of the office doorway where he could not see her, watched the tray go up, and watched the shadow it cast on the wallpaper, and saw that the shadow was not the shadow of a man carrying a tray.

It was the shadow of a tray.

The tray went up the stairs by itself, with the two flat pale hands of its shadow beneath it, and the hands were gloves, and above the gloves the wall was blank: the man who carried the tray was invisible, so the light from the hall passed through him and only the tray and the gloves cast anything at all, and the gray wallpaper ran unbroken behind where his head should have been, because there was nothing there to interrupt it.

Vera stood in the doorway until her feet hurt, and then she went and lay down next to Otis, who was asleep, and she did not tell him what she had seen, because Otis would say what he said about everything, which was that it was probably nothing, and Vera had reached the point in her life where she could stand almost anything except being told that a thing was nothing.

On Thursday the snow stopped. On Friday it began to melt, and the gutters ran, and the whole town came out of doors at once to be relieved about it, and it was on Friday that the first of the small strange things happened that Bellhaven would afterwards remember all in a piece, as though they had happened on one afternoon instead of over a week.

The first of them happened to Danny Wexler, who fixed clocks.

Vera sent him up because the room clock in the front bedroom had been losing eleven minutes a day since the mill closed, and it was busywork she had given herself, and she knew it, and she gave it anyway, and she went up the stairs with him to the landing because she had decided that after the business with the tray she would not let a person go up those stairs without her.

The bandaged man let them in. He let them in after a pause long enough for Vera to hear him put something down, and when the door opened the room was in order in the particular way a room is in order when everything in it has been shoved into the closet a minute ago. The bed was flat. The stove was hot. The crates were standing along the wall in two rows, and the paper was off them, and Vera counted anyway, without meaning to, the way she counted the register: there were, as far as she could see between the slats, bottles in those crates, in straw, hundreds of them, small and brown and green, and there were three big glass carboys in the corner with straw packed around them, and the whole room smelled like a hospital and a garage at the same time.

The clock was on the dresser. Danny Wexler went and got it and turned it over and said, "Balance wheel's fine. It's the oil's gone gummy. I'll need it a day," and the bandaged man said, "Fine," and turned away, and Danny, who was nineteen years old and had never in his life managed to leave a room without making it harder, said, "You get in an accident?" The clock came back on the Thursday, fixed, with the case wiped, and Vera hung it in the kitchen and did not think of it again.

There was a silence of a length Vera would afterwards think about. It was not a hostile silence. It was the silence of a man deciding which of several answers he was going to use, and taking his time about it, as though there were no hurry at all.

"My skin," the bandaged man said.

"Like a reaction?"

"Like a reaction."

"To what?"

"To something I was looking into."

Danny said, "Huh," and turned the clock in his hands, and wiped the case with his sleeve, and straightened up, and the mug of tea that the bandaged man had set down on the edge of the dresser was two inches too far back for anyone to reach without looking, and Danny did not look, and Danny put his hand back to put the clock down.

The cup met his elbow and went over.

The bandaged man moved faster than a man in a bandage should have been able to move, and he did not move to catch the cup, he moved to catch himself — Vera saw it, she could never afterwards make anyone else see it — he moved as though something he was wearing had come loose and had to be put back before anyone looked. He put his hand up to his face, and the hand was gloved, and the tea was on the floor, and Danny Wexler was staring at the place where the bandaged man's wrist came out of his sleeve, because the sleeve had ridden back when he reached, and Danny Wexler was staring at a wrist, a bare wrist, and there was nothing on it.

Not a scar. Not a bandage. Nothing. The sleeve had ridden back six inches, and there was the cuff of the shirt, and beyond the cuff there was the inside of the sleeve and the air, and between the cuff and the glove there was a length of nothing at all with a watch on it, and the watch was hanging in the air and swinging.