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By Root 951 0

TV. No remote control ever had or ever would control it. There were heavy tattered rugs everywhere, too ― there was even one nailed to the living room wall, like an animal's hide-rugs with not much color in them (mostly brown and dark red), and you knew someone's grandmother had labored over them for a year and a day. Then there were the books: the living room ― its furniture, its floor ― was covered with a layer of books, like dust. The books were all from some library ― I could see the telltale laminated tag on the spines. I looked down, lifted my left foot, and saw I'd been standing on a copy of Ethan Frome, a book every eighth grader in Massachusetts since Edith Wharton had written it had been required to read and then wonder why. I kicked the novel away from me, something I'd been wanting to do for twenty-six years, and in doing so I imagined I was striking a blow on behalf of its many unwilling, barely pubescent readers. There were so many library books that I wondered if Peter had put the local public library out of business and whether his living room hadn't become the real library instead. I say the living room, but in addition to being the library and the living room, it was also the TV room and the dining room. There was a separate kitchen, which was only a little bigger than the TV, and between the two rooms was the most important appliance in the house: the woodstove. The stove was really going, high and hot, and it was so dry in there that your sinuses couldn't help but go screwy. My face, which was still raging from the cold outside, was no less red now that I was inside, and the effect of the extreme heat wasn't much different from that of the extreme cold.

The door slammed and rattled nervously in its frame. I turned around. Peter was right behind me, standing at the mouth of the room. He was still holding the plunger ― he really seemed attached to it ― and still hadn't said anything. My face felt even redder, just looking at how his wasn't. Boy, he was white, like the snow, but much paler and not so pure. Peter had tapped into some primordial whiteness, like a prehistoric fish in a cave, except wearing flannel and well over six feet tall. I was scared of him, always had been. There were guys like him in my high school, country guys with big scarred hands, brooding hulks who didn't say much and didn't need to. They seemed older, more serious than me, more manlike, and they also seemed to have properties and qualities and things that I did not, even when they didn't have much, which Peter obviously didn't. I could see rolled-up newspapers and towels shoved into the holes at the bottom of the trailer, where the elements had rusted through the metal.

"That's much better," I said, rubbing my hands together to indicate the improvement of my blood circulation. "Whew." Peter still didn't say anything, and now that I was warmer, I was feeling even more afraid, and so to calm my nerves and butter up my host, I said, "That's a good fire. I mean it. Really wonderful heat."

Still no response. I suddenly remembered this one time in high school, when I'd finished an apple and thrown it in the trash can from a great distance, or tried to. Instead I'd hit this dairy farmer's son named Kevin. I was thirteen and Kevin was thirteen, but it seemed as if we were from different planets, his the bigger one populated by a warrior race, and he charged in my direction when he realized who had thrown the apple. Once he got to me, he stared the way Peter was staring now, and I babbled how sorry I was and that it was an accident and what a poor shot I was in general (you could ask the gym coach), and so on and on out of nervousness and terror until Kevin punched me in the right cheek and knocked me down. I assumed he punched me because I'd hit him with the apple, but I found out later, from reliable sources, that he punched me because I just wouldn't stop talking. I couldn't stop talking with Peter, either, which just shows that history repeats itself whether you know it or not.

"Le Clair," I said. "Is that French? I mean French