He remembered someone saying / miss Sandy. Who was that?
“Good talking to you,” he said.
“Yeah,” she said. “You too.”
February passed in a succession of short, gray days. Some days the snow fell, most days it didn’t. The weather warmed up, and on the good days it got above freezing. Shadow stayed in his apartment until it began to feel like a prison cell, and then, on the days that Wednesday did not need him to travel, he began to walk.
He would walk for much of the day, long trudges out of the town. He walked, alone, until he reached the national forest to the north and the west, or the cornfields and cow pastures to the south. He walked the Lumber County Wilderness Trail, and he walked along the old railroad tracks, and he walked the back roads. A couple of times he even walked along the frozen lake, from north to south. Sometimes he’d see locals or winter tourists or joggers, and he’d wave and say hi. Mostly he saw nobody at all, just crows and finches, and a few times he spotted a hawk feasting on a roadkill possum or raccoon. On one memorable occasion he watched an eagle snatch a silver fish from the middle of the White Pine River, the water frozen at the edges, but still rushing and flowing at the center. The fish wriggled and jerked in the eagle’s talons, glittering in the midday sun; Shadow imagined the fish freeing itself and swimming off across the sky, and he smiled, grimly.
If he walked, he discovered, he did not have to:think, and that was just the way he liked it; when he thought, his mind went to places he could not control, places that made him feel uncomfortable. Exhaustion was the bei thing. When he was exhausted, his thoughts did not wander to Laura, or to the strange dreams, or to things that were not and could not be. He would return home from walking, and sleep without difficulty and without dreaming.
He ran into Police Chief Chad Mulligan in George’s Barber Shop in the town square. Shadow always had high hopes for haircuts, but they never lived up to his expectations. After every haircut he looked more or less the same, only with shorter hair. Chad, seated in the barber’s chair beside Shadow’s, seemed surprisingly concerned about his own appearance. When his haircut was finished he gazed grimly at his reflection, as if he were preparing to give it a speeding ticket.
“It looks good,” Shadow told him.
“Would it look good to you if you were a woman?”
“I guess.”
They went across the square to Mabel’s together, ordered mugs of hot chocolate. Chad said, “Hey. Mike. Have you ever thought about a career in law enforcement?”
Shadow shrugged. “I can’t say I have,” he said. “Seems like there’s a whole lot of things you got to know.”
Chad shook his head. “You know the main part of police work, somewhere like this? It’s just keeping your head. Something happens, somebody’s screaming at you, screaming blue murder, you simply have to be able to say that you’re sure that it’s all a mistake, and you’ll just sort it all out if they just step outside quietly. And you have to be able to mean it.”
“And then you sort it but?”
“Mostly, that’s when you put handcuffs on them. But yeah, you do what you can to sort it out. Let me know if you want a job. We’re hiring. And you’re the kind of guy we want.”
“I’ll keep that in mind, if the thing with my uncle falls through.”
They sipped their hot chocolate. Mulligan said, “Say, Mike, what would you do if you had a cousin. Like a widow. And she started calling you?”
“Calling you how?”
“On the phone. Long distance. She lives out of state.” His cheeks crimsoned. “I saw her last year at a family wedding. She was married, back then, though, I mean, her husband was still alive, and she’s family. Not a first cousin. Pretty distant.”
“You got a thing for her?”
Blush. “I don’t know about that.”
“Well then, put it another way. Does she have a thing for you?”
“Well, she’s said a few things, when she called. She’s a very fine-looking woman.”
“So ... what are you going to do about it?”
“I could ask her out here. I could do that, couldn’t I? She’s kind of said she’d like to come up here.”
“You’re both adults; I’d say go for it.”
Chad nodded, and blushed, and nodded again.
The telephone in Shadow’s apartment was silent and dead. He thought about getting it connected, but could think of no one he wanted to call. Late one night he picked it up and listened, and was convinced that he could hear a wind blowing and a distant conversation between a group of people talking in voices too low to properly make out. He said, “Hello?” and “Who’s there?” but there was no reply, only a sudden silence and then the faraway sound of laughter, so faint he was not certain he was not imagining it.