He didn't look the way Norton usually looks. He looked hot and tired and unhappy and a little bewildered.
"Hi, Brent," I said. Our last words had been hard ones, and I was a little unsure how to proceed. I had a funny feeling that he had been standing behind me for the last five minutes or so, clearing his throat decorously under the chainsaw's aggressive roar. I hadn't gotten a really good look at him this summer. He had lost weight, but it didn't look good. It should have, because he had been carrying around an extra twenty pounds, but it didn't. His wife had died the previous November. Cancer. Aggie Bibber told Steffy that. Aggie was our resident necrologist. Every neighborhood has one. From the casual way Norton had of ragging his wife and belittling her (doing it with the contemptuous ease of a veteran matador inserting banderillas in an old bull's lumbering body), I would have guessed he'd be glad to have her gone. If asked, I might even have speculated that he'd show up this summer with a girl twenty years younger than he was on his arm and a silly my-cock-has-died-and-gone-to-heaven grin on his face. But instead of the silly grin there was only a new batch of age lines, and the weight had come off in all the wrong places, leaving sags and folds and dewlaps that told their own story. For one passing moment I wanted only to lead Norton to a patch of sun and sit him beside one of the fallen trees with my can of beer in his hand, and do a charcoal sketch of him.
"Hi, Dave," he said, after a long moment of awkward silence - a silence that was made even louder by the absence of the chainsaw's racket and roar. He stopped, then blurted: "That tree. That damn tree. I'm sorry. You were right."
I shrugged.
He said, "Another tree fell on my car."
"I'm sorry to h-" I began, and then a horrid suspicion dawned. "It wasn't the T-Bird, was it?"
"Yeah. It was."
Norton had a 1960 Thunderbird in mint condition, only thirty thousand miles. It was a deep midnight blue inside and out. He drove it only summers, and then only rarely. He loved that Bird the way some men love electric trains or model ships or target-shooting pistols.
"That's a bitch," I said, and meant it.
He shook his head slowly. "I almost didn't bring it up. Almost brought the station wagon, you know. Then I said what the hell, I drove it up and a big old rotten pine fell on it. The roof of it's all bashed in. And I thought I'd cut it up ... the tree, I mean ... but I can't get my chainsaw to fire up ... I paid two hundred dollars for that sucker ... and ... and ..."
His throat began to emit little clicking sounds. His mouth worked as if he were toothless and chewing dates. For one helpless second I thought he was going to stand there and bawl like a kid on a sandlot. Then he got himself under some halfway kind of control, shrugged, and turned away as if to look at the chunks of wood I had cut up.
"Well, we can look at your saw," I said. "Your T-Bird insured?"
"Yeah," he said, "like your boathouse."
I saw what he meant, and remembered again what Steff had said about insurance.
"Listen, Dave, I wondered if I could borrow your Saab and take a run up to town. I thought I'd get some bread and cold cuts and beer. A lot of beer."
"Billy and I are going up in the Scout," I said. "Come with us if you want. That is, if you'll give me a hand dragging the rest of this tree off to one side."
"Happy to."
He grabbed one end but couldn't quite lift it up. I had to do most of the work. Between the two of us we were able to tumble it into the underbrush. Norton was puffing and panting, his cheeks nearly purple. After all the yanking he had done on that chainsaw starter pull, I was a little worried about his ticker.
"Okay?" I asked, and he nodded, still breathing fast. "Come on back to the house, then, I can fix you up with a beer."
"Thank you," he said. "How is Stephanie?" He was regaining some of the old smooth pomposity that I disliked.
"Very well, thanks."
"And your son?"
"He's fine, too."
"Glad to hear it."
Steff came out, and a moment's surprise passed over her face when she saw who was with me. Norton smiled and his eyes crawled over her tight T-shirt. He hadn't changed that much after all.
"Hello, Brent," she said cautiously. Billy poked his head out from under her arm.
"Hello, Stephanie. Hi, Billy."
"Brent's T-Bird took a pretty good rap in the storm," I told her. "Stove in the roof, he says."
"Oh, no!"
Norton told it again while he drank one of our beers. I was sipping a third, but I had no kind of buzz on; apparently I had sweat the beer out as rapidly as I drank it.
"He's going to come to town with Billy and me."
"Well, I won't expect you for a while. You may have to go to the Shop-and-Save in Norway."
"Oh? Why?"
"Well, if the power's off in Bridgton-"
"Mom says all the cash registers and things run on electricity," Billy supplied,
It was a good point.
"Have you still got the list?"
I patted my hip pocket.
Her eyes shifted to Norton. "I'm very sorry about Carla, Brent. We all were."