in his workshop while Matt Foreman across the road was probably awake and wondering how he could discover what his neighbour was hiding. No doubt he was waiting until he could be confident Arvo was asleep before sneaking over to pry open the doors. This would require no more than a half-decent crowbar.
Of course people here did not act like that. And anyway, a crowbar would cause nails to squeal loud enough to wake any number of households.
Maybe he should just take his blankets out and curl up on the driver’s seat of the hearse.
Not a good idea, somehow, to fall asleep in a hearse. Foreman and his crowbar would find him stiff and cold. He could imagine the local newspaper: Man Dies In Hearse: friends claim he liked to make things easy for others .
A sound from outside was probably a raccoon testing a garbage can lid, but just in case it was Foreman — or maybe Eleanor Robinson, a woman who seemed to think she had the right to know everyone’s business — he sat up and parted the curtains to check.
But he could see no unfamiliar shapes out there. No movement.
With his head on the pillow again, he remembered that Peter Sleggart had once admitted that he had a sleepwalking habit, and had wakened one night to find himself in Margaret Robinson’s bed. “What are you doing in my bed?” he was supposed to have said, indignantly, when he recognized Margaret asleep beside him. Margaret had laughed about it later, but her husband, once he’d returned from a business trip, was not amused. Sleggart could possibly use this same explanation if he were intercepted while leaning an extension ladder against the window wall of the workshop. “In my dream I decided to go up and clean out your eaves.”
Eventually he got up out of bed, put a mackinaw over his pyjamas, and went outside with a flashlight to check that the hearse was still where he’d left it.
Of course he knew he could be about to make a fool of himself, expecting Myrtle Birdsong to be grateful that he had rescued her father’s hearse. But it was important he find out at last whether he ought to have forgotten her long ago. How much had he missed in life by holding onto an adolescent crush?
He was still awake at 4:00 a.m.
Portuguese Creek was populated with any number of people who were used to having their curiosity satisfied by others willing to tell them all of their business. Arvo’s locked doors could be seen as a challenge, even an insult. There was bound to be someone who felt it his duty to satisfy everyone’s curiosity while teaching Arvo Saarikoski a lesson.
At 4:30, he decided that he was being childish to worry about a possible disappointment at the Birdsong doorstep, and a fool to think that others cared enough to see what was in his workshop to break in during the night. He checked that the alarm he’d set for 6:30 hadn’t changed its mind, and lowered his head to the pillow.
In sleep he revisited the city he hadn’t seen in forty years. In Helsinki’s harbour market, people turned from their buying and selling to claim him enthusiastically as one of their own. But before taking him home for kahvi and jalkiruokia they insisted he help them dredge up from the harbour floor the multitude of trucks and cars that had been driven off the pier by drunks and fools. But his protests were ignored, and he soon found himself drifting through a watery graveyard of vehicles with unfamiliar shapes, designed no doubt by Russians or Swedes. When he recognized Herbie, Bert Peterson, and Cynthia behind the windshield glass of a rusty Saab, his own horrified shout jolted him out of sleep.
Sitting up, with blankets spilled out around him onto the carpeted floor, he discovered he was alive and still breathing air. By pushing aside the window curtain he could see in the weak morning light the rough unpainted wall of his workshop, and, on the far side of the road, the dark side-window of the General Store.
Even so, something disagreeable was taking its time
Of course people here did not act like that. And anyway, a crowbar would cause nails to squeal loud enough to wake any number of households.
Maybe he should just take his blankets out and curl up on the driver’s seat of the hearse.
Not a good idea, somehow, to fall asleep in a hearse. Foreman and his crowbar would find him stiff and cold. He could imagine the local newspaper: Man Dies In Hearse: friends claim he liked to make things easy for others .
A sound from outside was probably a raccoon testing a garbage can lid, but just in case it was Foreman — or maybe Eleanor Robinson, a woman who seemed to think she had the right to know everyone’s business — he sat up and parted the curtains to check.
But he could see no unfamiliar shapes out there. No movement.
With his head on the pillow again, he remembered that Peter Sleggart had once admitted that he had a sleepwalking habit, and had wakened one night to find himself in Margaret Robinson’s bed. “What are you doing in my bed?” he was supposed to have said, indignantly, when he recognized Margaret asleep beside him. Margaret had laughed about it later, but her husband, once he’d returned from a business trip, was not amused. Sleggart could possibly use this same explanation if he were intercepted while leaning an extension ladder against the window wall of the workshop. “In my dream I decided to go up and clean out your eaves.”
Eventually he got up out of bed, put a mackinaw over his pyjamas, and went outside with a flashlight to check that the hearse was still where he’d left it.
Of course he knew he could be about to make a fool of himself, expecting Myrtle Birdsong to be grateful that he had rescued her father’s hearse. But it was important he find out at last whether he ought to have forgotten her long ago. How much had he missed in life by holding onto an adolescent crush?
He was still awake at 4:00 a.m.
Portuguese Creek was populated with any number of people who were used to having their curiosity satisfied by others willing to tell them all of their business. Arvo’s locked doors could be seen as a challenge, even an insult. There was bound to be someone who felt it his duty to satisfy everyone’s curiosity while teaching Arvo Saarikoski a lesson.
At 4:30, he decided that he was being childish to worry about a possible disappointment at the Birdsong doorstep, and a fool to think that others cared enough to see what was in his workshop to break in during the night. He checked that the alarm he’d set for 6:30 hadn’t changed its mind, and lowered his head to the pillow.
In sleep he revisited the city he hadn’t seen in forty years. In Helsinki’s harbour market, people turned from their buying and selling to claim him enthusiastically as one of their own. But before taking him home for kahvi and jalkiruokia they insisted he help them dredge up from the harbour floor the multitude of trucks and cars that had been driven off the pier by drunks and fools. But his protests were ignored, and he soon found himself drifting through a watery graveyard of vehicles with unfamiliar shapes, designed no doubt by Russians or Swedes. When he recognized Herbie, Bert Peterson, and Cynthia behind the windshield glass of a rusty Saab, his own horrified shout jolted him out of sleep.
Sitting up, with blankets spilled out around him onto the carpeted floor, he discovered he was alive and still breathing air. By pushing aside the window curtain he could see in the weak morning light the rough unpainted wall of his workshop, and, on the far side of the road, the dark side-window of the General Store.
Even so, something disagreeable was taking its time
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