It was chilly outside, as well. Indian summer seemed to be over. Drew had an attack of the shivers, and built up a good fire in the woodstove. He sat close to it in Pop’s rocker, had another knock of Dr. King’s, and read an old John D. MacDonald. From the credit page at the front, it looked like MacDonald had written sixty or seventy books. No problem finding the right word or phrase there, it seemed, and by the end of his life, he had even attained some critical cred. Lucky him.

Drew read a couple of chapters, then went to bed, hoping his cold would be better in the morning and also hoping he wouldn’t have a cough syrup hangover. His sleep was uneasy and dream-haunted. He couldn’t remember much of those dreams the next morning. Only that in one of them he had been in a seemingly endless hallway lined with doors on both sides. One of them, he felt sure, led to a way out, but he couldn’t decide which one to try, and before he could pick one, he woke up to a cold, clear morning, a full bladder, and aching joints. He made his way to the bathroom at the end of the gallery, cursing Roy DeWitt and his besnotted bandanna.

17

His fever was still there, but it seemed to be lower, and the combination of Goody’s Headache Powder and Dr. King’s helped with his other symptoms. The work went pretty well, only ten pages instead of eighteen, but still amazing for him. It was true that he had to pause every now and then, looking for the right word or phrase, but he chalked that up to the infection running around in his body. And those words and phrases always came after a few seconds, clicking neatly into place.

The story was getting good. Sheriff Jim Averill had the killer in jail, but the gun thugs had showed up on an unscheduled train, a midnight special paid for by Andy Prescott’s rich rancher daddy, and now they were laying siege to the town. Unlike Village, this book was more about plot than character and situation. That had worried Drew a little to begin with; as a teacher and reader (they weren’t the same, but surely first cousins) he had a tendency to concentrate on theme, language, and symbolism rather than story, but the pieces also seemed to be clicking into place, almost of their own accord. Best of all, there was a strange bond beginning to form between Averill and the Prescott kid, which gave his story a resonance as unexpected as that midnight train.

Instead of going for an afternoon walk, he turned on the TV and after a lengthy hunt through the DirecTV onscreen guide, found the Weather Channel. Having access to such a bewildering array of video input up here in the williwags might have amused him on another day, but not on this one. His long session at the laptop had left him wrung out, almost hollowed out, instead of energized. Why in God’s name had he shaken DeWitt’s hand? Common politeness, of course, and completely understandable, but why in God’s name hadn’t he washed afterwards?

Been through all that, he thought.

Yes, and here it was again, gnawing away. It sort of reminded him of his catastrophic last try at novel-writing, when he would lie awake long after Lucy had gone to sleep, mentally deconstructing and reconstructing the few paragraphs he’d managed that day, picking at the work until it bled.

Stop. That’s the past. This is now. Watch the goddam weather report.

But it wasn’t a report; the Weather Channel would never be so minimalist. This was a fucking opera of doom and gloom. Drew hadn’t been able to understand his wife’s love affair with the Weather Channel, which seemed populated solely by meteorological geeks. As if to underline this, they now gave names to even non-hurricane storms. The one the store clerk had warned him about, the one his wife was so worried about, had been dubbed Pierre. Drew could not conceive of a stupider name for a storm. It was swooping down from Saskatchewan on a northeast track (which made the woman with the lip stud full of shit, it was a nor’easter) that would bring it to TR-90 either tomorrow afternoon or evening. It was packing forty-mile-an-hour sustained winds, with gusts up to sixty-five.

“You might think that doesn’t sound too bad,” said the current weather geek, a young man with a fashionable beard scruff that made Drew’s eyes hurt. Mr. Scruffy was a poet of the Pierre Apocalypse, not quite speaking in iambic pentameter, but close. “What you need to remember, though, is that temperatures are going to fall radically when this front comes through, I mean they’re gonna drop off the table. Rain could turn to sleet, and you drivers up there in northern New England can’t discount the possibility of black ice.”

Maybe I should go home, Drew thought.

But it was no longer just the book that was keeping him. The idea of that long drive out Shithouse Road feeling as drained as he did today made him even more tired. And when he finally made it to something approximating civilization, was he supposed to go tooling down I-95 sipping away at alcohol-laced cold medicine?

“The major thing, though,” the scruffy weather geek was saying, “is that this baby is going to meet a ridge of high pressure coming in from east—a very unusual phenomenon. That means our friends north of Boston could be in for what the old Yankees called a three-day blow.”

Blow on this, Drew thought, and grabbed his crotch.

Later, after an unsuccessful try at napping—all he did was toss and turn—Lucy called. “Listen to me, Mister.” He hated when she called him that, it was like fingers dragged down a blackboard. “The forecast is only getting worse. You need to come home.”

“Lucy, it’s a storm, what my Pop used to call a cap of wind. Not nuclear war.”

“You need to come home while you still can.”

He had had enough of this, and enough of her. “No. I need to be here.”

“You’re a fool,” she said. Then, for the first time he could remember, she hung up on him.

18

Drew turned on the Weather Channel as soon as he got up the following morning, thinking As a dog returneth to its vomit, so a fool repeateth his folly.

He was hoping to hear that Autumn Storm Pierre had changed course. It had not. Nor had his cold changed course. It didn’t seem worse, but it didn’t seem better, either. He called Lucy and got her voicemail. Possibly she was running errands; possibly she just didn’t want to talk with him. That was okay with Drew either way. She was pissed at him, but she would get over it; no one trashed fifteen years of marriage over a storm, did they? Especially not one named Pierre.

Drew scrambled a couple of eggs and managed to eat half of them before his stomach warned him that stuffing down more might lead to a forcible ejection. He scraped his plate into the garbage, sat down in front of the laptop, and called up the current document (BITTER RIVER #3). He scrolled to where he had left off, looked at the white space beneath the blinking cursor, and started to fill it. The work went all right for the first hour or so, and then the trouble began. It started with the rocking chairs Sheriff Averill and his three deputies were meant to sit in outside the Bitter River jail.

They had to be sitting out front, in full view of the townsfolk and Dick Prescott’s gun thugs, because that was the basis of the clever plan Averill had hatched to get Prescott’s son out of town under the very noses of the hard men who were supposed to keep it from happening. The lawmen had to be seen, especially the deputy named Cal Hunt, who happened to be about the same height and build as the Prescott boy.