People of the Dark Read Online Free Page A

glanced at her, grinned. "Oh? I thought you liked that . . . "—I looked down briefly at the slight protrusion of my belly—"that small proof of my imperfection."
    She laughed quickly. "Jack, I love what makes you human. I wouldn't change any of it." She patted my stomach again. "Even that."
    "Thanks." I said, grinning. I glanced in the rearview mirror; the jogger had fallen. I stopped, looked back; Erika looked, too.
    "He'll be okay," she said, an edge to her tone that surprised me.
    I started backing up; the jogger was lying motionless face down in the road, his arms wide and his legs straight.
    "Jack." Erika said sharply, "he doesn't need your help. He'll be all right ."
    I looked at her, surprised: "What are you saying, Erika?—'Don't get involved'?"
    "Oh, of course not!" She was angry, now; I had rarely seen her so quick-tempered.
    The jogger pushed his upper body off the road, then, as if he were doing pushups. I stopped the car, watched him bring his knees forward so he was on his haunches, take a long, deep breath, and stand.
    Erika said, "These people can take care of them— selves , Jack, you'll see."
    "Thanks," I said testily, "for you old-time country wisdom."
    She sighed. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to get angry with you." She reached, patted my belly yet again in an effort to lighten things up. "C'mon, let's go home and make love, paunch and all."
     
    T he area around the house is starkly rural. The road in front of it is paved but badly rutted, and our nearest neighbors, when we moved in, were an old German couple named Alnor who lived in a huge and immaculate white Victorian house a good mile and a half north of our house. The Alnors ran an antique shop in their small white barn, and we soon found that they were friendly enough if we looked to be on the verge of buying something, but became stiff and cool if we just wanted to talk. We never got to know them well. When the trouble started, they didn't come to us for help; they toughed it out for a while, all by themselves (I give them credit for that). Then one day I saw that their house had a FOR SALE BY OWNER sign stuck on it and a distinct air of abandonment about it.
    The nearest town is called Cohocton. Once a year the locals stage what they call the Great Cohocton Tree-Sitting Festival, which involves neither trees nor sitting. Local men stand for twenty-four hours at a time on small platforms at the top of fifty-foot tall wooden poles. Lots of beer and handicrafts are sold at these festivals, and everyone involved seems to realize the kind of gritty charm they hold for city people, which Erika and I were. We've attended the Great Cohocton Tree-Sitting Festival only once, shortly after moving into the farmhouse. It was a sublimely simple diversion from the confusion, of moving in and getting things straightened around. The men on the poles wore broad, clownlike smiles, as if they realized the idiocy of the whole event. There was no real purpose to it. No one won anything for the longest time standing on a pole. It was merely something pointless to do, and even more pointless to watch, and everyone enjoyed the hell out of it.
     
    I t wasn't until several days after Jim Sandy left with his backhoe that Erika asked me, "What kind of body parts, Jack?"
    She was feeding our two cats their once-a-day can of Goff Pure Horsemeat Catfood (I'd once done some very good work for Goff, and as a kind of spiff they'd given me several years' worth of their cat food), and the kitchen smelled bad. "It's a hell of a time to ask something like that," I said.
    She shrugged. "What's a good time?"
    I shrugged, said, "None, I guess," paused, went on, "An arm. Some fingers. A few ribs."
    "Where?"
    "Where what?—Where'd they find the ribs?"
    "No. Everything, Jack." Our cats—a wiry tom we called Orphan, because that's the way he came to us, and a big, orange longhair named Ginger—were rubbing against her ankles, now, telling her thank you, could they please have some more.