He sits down on the steps with the sneaker box on his thighs. Beyond him, in the north field, all is still and gray. Bunny Boettcher, son of Tom Tom, came and did the second cutting only a week ago, and now a fine mist hangs above the ankle-high stubble. Above it, the sky has just begun to brighten. Not a single cloud as yet marks its calm no-color. Somewhere a bird calls out. Jack breathes deeply and thinks, If this is where I go out, I could do worse. A lot worse.
Then, very carefully, he takes the lid off the box and sets it aside. Nothing explodes. But it looks as if someone has filled the New Balance sneaker box with night. Then he realizes that it's been packed with shiny black crow feathers, and his arms roughen with goose bumps.
He reaches toward them, then hesitates. He wants to touch those feathers about as much as he'd want to touch the corpse of a half-decayed plague victim, but there's something beneath them. He can see it. Should he get some gloves? There are gloves in the front hall closet —
"Fuck the gloves," Jack says, and dumps the box onto the brown paper wrapping lying beside him on the porch. There's a flood of feathers, which swirl a bit even in the perfectly still morning air. Then a thump as the object around which the feathers were packed lands on Jack's porch. The smell hits Jack's nose a moment later, an odor like rotting baloney.
Someone has delivered a child's bloodstained sneaker chez Sawyer on Norway Valley Road. Something has gnawed at it pretty briskly, and even more briskly at what's inside it. He sees a lining of bloody white cotton — that would be a sock. And inside the sock, tatters of skin. This is a child's New Balance sneaker with a child's foot inside it, one that has been badly used by some animal.
He sent it, Jack thinks. The Fisherman.
Taunting him. Telling him If you want in, come on in. The water's fine, Jacky-boy, the water is fine.
Jack gets up. His heart is hammering, the beats now too close together to count. The beads of sweat on his forehead have swelled and broken and gone running down his face like tears, his lips and hands and feet are numb . . . yet he tells himself he is calm. That he has seen worse, much worse, piled up against bridge abutments and freeway underpasses in L.A. Nor is this his first severed body part. Once, in 1997, he and his partner Kirby Tessier found a single testicle sitting on top of a toilet tank in the Culver City public library like an ancient soft-boiled egg. So he tells himself he is calm.
He gets up and walks down the porch steps. He walks past the hood of his burgundy-colored Dodge Ram with the world-class sound system inside; he walks past the bird hotel he and Dale put up at the edge of the north field a month or two after Jack moved into this, the most perfect house in the universe. He tells himself he is calm. He tells himself that it's evidence, that's all. Just one more loop in the hangman's noose that the Fisherman will eventually put around his own neck. He tells himself not to think of it as part of a kid, part of a little girl named Irma, but as Exhibit A. He can feel dew wetting his sockless ankles and the cuffs of his pants, knows that any sort of extended stroll through the hay stubble is going to ruin a five-hundred-dollar pair of Gucci loafers. And so what if it does? He's rich well beyond the point of vulgarity; he can have as many shoes as Imelda Marcos, if he wants. The important thing is he's calm. Someone brought him a shoe box with a human foot inside it, laid it on his porch in the dark of night, but he's calm. It's evidence, that's all. And he? He is a coppiceman. Evidence is his meat and drink. He just needs to get a little air, needs to clear his nose of the rotted baloney smell that came puffing out of the box —
Jack makes a strangled gagging, urking sound and begins to hurry on a little faster. There is a sense of approaching climax growing in his mind (my calm mind, he tells himself ). Something is getting ready to break . . . or change . . . or change back.
That last idea is particularly alarming and Jack begins to run across the field, knees lifting higher, arms pumping. His passage draws a dark line through the stubble, a diagonal that starts at the driveway and might end anywhere. Canada, maybe. Or the North Pole. White moths, startled out of their dew-heavy morning doze, flutter up in lacy swirls and then slump back into the cut stubble.