What Danny Wexler Saw

Danny Wexler told it four times before noon and the fourth telling was the one that got written down, because the fourth telling was to Bernie Kaminski in the back of the Bitterroot, and Bernie had a memory like a ledger and a mouth like a speaker.

The first telling was to Vera, on the stairs, on the way down, in a voice that was trying to be ordinary and kept slipping off the note. The second was to his mother, who told him to eat something. The third was to Boyd Trask at the garage, who put his head under the hood of the F-150 and left it there. The fourth was to Bernie, with the two of them standing where the light was, and by then Danny had begun to shape it, because that is what happens to a thing that is told three times, and the shape he gave it was this: he had knocked the cup, the man had reached, the sleeve had pulled back, and there had been a watch in the air with nobody wearing it.

Bernie said, "Nobody."

"Nothing. You could see the wallpaper through where his arm was."

"You could see the wallpaper," Bernie said, and drew Danny another Coke, which he did not charge for, because he wanted to keep him talking.

"You could see the wallpaper," Danny said, "and the arm was there, because it moved."

"Maybe he's got one of those —" and Bernie made a shape in the air with his hands, "— those prosthetic sleeves, they make them so you don't notice."

"There wasn't a sleeve. That's the point. There was the cuff of his shirt and then there was the wallpaper and then there was the glove, and the glove was moving, and it was holding onto his face."

Bernie Kaminski wiped the bar and thought about it and arrived where Bellhaven always arrived, which was a category.

"Radiation," he said. "You read about that. They come back from the plant with a hand like a glove."

"He didn't come back from any plant that I know of."

"Then where'd he come from?"

And Danny Wexler, nineteen years old, with a cup of Coke he was not paying for, said the sentence that Bellhaven repeated for the rest of that winter: "He came from the station with the snow on him and the snow didn't stay on him." It was not a thing Danny could have seen, standing in the doorway of the feed store, but it was the kind of sentence that was true by the time it had been said twice.

By Saturday the sentence had walked the four blocks to the Wayfarer, and Vera heard it and did not like it. She did not like it for a reason she could not have defended in front of a judge: it was too good. It had the shape of a thing that was true, and Bellhaven had spent her whole life handing her things shaped like truth, and half of them had been garbage.

What she knew was smaller and worse. She knew that the man took his trays off the bottom step and never let her past the door. She knew that the man drank nothing she served him. She knew this because of the tray, and because of the tray she had started counting cups. He took the tray up with coffee on it and he brought the tray down with coffee on it, cold, untouched, and the food she sent up came down eaten but the coffee did not, and a man who does not drink coffee in Bellhaven in February is a man who is not drinking for a reason.

She knew that he had asked her, on Saturday morning, whether there was a way to get a taxi to Cedar Hollow at night, and she had said no, and he had said, "Then I'll walk," and she had said, "You'll walk six miles," and he had said, "I've walked further," and Vera had thought, and gone on thinking, about what a man wrapped in bandages would look like walking six miles of county road at two in the morning, and about the fact that nobody had seen him do it, in a county where two people drove that road every hour and both of them reported every deer they hit.

What she knew, and what she did not say to anyone, was that on the Thursday night, when the snow had still been deep and the moon had been up, she had gone out to the woodpile behind the kitchen for one more split, and there had been a line of prints in the snow in the yard.

Not prints of boots, not prints of anything she could name — holes, is what they were. Round holes, about the size of the bottom of a coffee can, in the deep snow, a foot apart, going down the yard from under the kitchen windows toward the road, and then stopping.

That was the part Vera had turned over and over. Not that they went from the house, which was bad enough. That they stopped. Snow doesn't lie about an interval, and the interval was forty feet of nothing; the prints came down the yard and then the yard was smooth and white all the way to the fence, and beyond the fence, in the frozen slush at the edge of Vine Street, somebody had been walking who had the ordinary weight of a man and the ordinary feet of a man and left nothing behind them at all. And there was a mark on the fence rail, a single band of snow wiped off the top rail with a bare hand, and Vera had put her own hand on it and it was three inches to the left of any hand that had ever lived in the Pell family.

She went inside and bolted the door, which she had not bolted since the mill closed, and she did not tell Otis, or Danny, or Bernie Kaminski, and she put a chair under the handle of the cellar hatch that night, which was a thing she had not done since her father ran the place, and in the morning she took the chair away and was ashamed of it.

The dog happened on Sunday, and the dog was what moved the whole business out of the tavern and into the street, and the man who owned the dog was Augie Dieter.

Augie Dieter had a dog named Rip, which was a black-and-tan crossbreed of no particular lineage and about ninety pounds of it, and Rip was a friendly dog, and Rip had spent his whole life being an argument in Bellhaven about whether dogs could tell. On Sunday, Augie came up the walk to ask whether the bandaged man wanted anything carried to the station, because Augie had got it into his head — wrongly — that the man in bandages was about to leave and that hauling his crates back down to the station would be the best-paid three hours of Augie's winter.

The bandaged man was on the porch. He had come out to look at the sky, which he did sometimes, standing in the doorway with the bandages on, and he had his hands in his coat pockets and his back to the walk.

Rip came off the truck.

Augie told it later to the deputy and told it again to the newspaper man from Millvale and told it a third time in the Bitterroot, and every time he told it he told it the same way, which is the way of a man describing something he has decided not to think about.

"He goes up to him. Tail going. Sniffing. Friendly. Nothing in the world but friendly. And then he gets about a foot off of him, and he stops, and the tail goes down, and he starts — he starts backing up. Not running. Backing. Like a dog backing off a stove. And then he makes that noise."

"What noise," the deputy said.

"The one where it's not a bark," Augie said. "The one that means I don't know what that is but it's not what it's pretending to be."

And the dog had then — this was the part that mattered to Bellhaven, and the part that Augie could not stop retelling — the dog had not attacked the man. The dog had attacked the man's glove. It had come in low and snapped at the left hand, at the good black glove, and taken the cuff of it, and shaken it, and the glove had come away in the dog's mouth, and the dog had backed off and dropped it in the snow.

And there had been no hand.

Augie had been six feet away. He had been looking at the man's coat pocket, and at the glove on the ground, and at the place between the glove and the coat pocket, where there was no wrist and no shirt cuff and no hand, and the only thing he could see was a sleeve with nothing in it, hanging, and, floating a little above the level of the glove, at the exact height a man's outstretched hand would be, a few flakes of snow going round and round.

The bandaged man had leaned over. Augie watched a coat bend down and a glove lift off the snow, and he watched the glove go back up to the height of the pocket and turn and go into the pocket, and the whole time the sleeve hung and moved and the coat moved and there was nothing in any of it.

"You," Augie said, and did not get any further.

The bandaged man looked at him. Augie never afterwards could say with what expression, because there was no expression available; what came at him out of the bandages was just attention, a still and awful attention, as if a machine had been left running and had noticed him.

"Your dog," the bandaged man said, "has cost me a pair of gloves. Take him off this property."

And then — and Augie swore afterward that this was the true strange part, that this was the part he could not get to sit down in his head — the bandaged man turned and walked into the inn and shut the door, and as he walked he left prints, and the prints were in the wet snow on the porch, and the prints were the prints of bare feet, and the snow on the porch had been unbroken when Augie came up the walk.