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By Root 431 0

the door to the basement, and listened for a few minutes without hearing anything but the slow deep breathing of the old house itself. The wood felt cool against my cheek. My ankle was throbbing, and I realized that it had been hurting for the last hour without my having noticed. All at once it was killing me, and I told myself that I really ought to drive to the E.R. at Shadyside and have someone take a look at it. Instead I went over to the wreckage of bottles, tumblers, and plastic wineglasses on the kitchen table and administered a tall dose of Kentucky anesthesia. Then I carried the glass of bourbon down the front hall and into my office. The manuscript was gone from its accustomed resting place on my desk, and I panicked for an instant before remembering that Hannah had taken it down into her bedroom to read.

“Hey.”

I turned. There was a man sitting on the Honor Bilt, watching the television with the sound off. It was my old student, the one who’d dropped my class after coming to the conclusion that I was only a cheap Faulkner imitator with nothing of value to impart. He sat slumped backward on the sofa with a forty-ounce bottle of beer pressed between the ripped knees of his jeans, smiling at me as if we were the oldest of friends and he’d been waiting all night for me to show up. A copy of The Land Downstairs lay open on his lap but he was not giving it his close attention. In fact I thought he had it upside down.

“How are you?” I said. “Is it Jim?”

“Jeff,” he said.

“Welcome,” I said with mock solemnity, trying to let him see that I thought he had a lot of nerve but that it was nonetheless cool for him to be there. “What are you watching?”

“The news,” he said. “The news from Bulgaria.”

It was a wildly colored, out-of-focus program, streaked and pitted by the ionosphere. The newsreader had on a blazer the color of a taxicab and wore a vast hairdo like a thick sable hat. According to the reference date in the corner of the picture the transmission was already a few days old, but I didn’t suppose that mattered when the whole thing was in Bulgarian and turned all the way down. I sat down on the sofa and watched with Jeff for five minutes.

“Well,” I said, standing up. “Good night.”

“Ciao,” said Jeff without looking up.

I went down to Hannah’s room. All the lights were on, and she was lying on her bed, surrounded by the scattered pages of Wonder Boys, asleep. She was dressed in a white nightgown, lace at the bodice. Her feet were bare. They were thick, wide, ordinary feet, with long crooked toes. I sat down on the edge of her bed and hung my head. From this vantage I could see the little moth lying in my pocket. I fished him out and stared at him for a while.

“What are you holding in your hand?” said Hannah.

I started. She was looking at me through half-closed lids, not really awake. I uncurled my fingers, revealing the moth, embalmed in a thin white coating of wax.

“Just a moth,” I said.

“I fell asleep,” she told me, her voice cobwebbed with sleep. “I was reading.”

“That good, huh?” I said. There was no reply. “How far did you get?”

But her eyes had fluttered closed again. I looked at the clock. It was four thirty-two in the morning. I collected the parts of my manuscript, slapped them together, and set them on the nightstand beside her bed. Her bedclothes were all knotted and twisted, so I shook them out and let them fall billowing over her like parachute silks. I covered her feet, kissed her cheek, and wished her good night. Then I turned out the lights and went back upstairs to my office. Jeff had fallen asleep, too, stretched out shoeless on the Honor Bilt. I switched off the television, went over to my desk, and sat down to work.

I was still typing away and Jeff was still sleeping at nine o’clock, when the policeman came to take James Leer away.

PALE, PINK TERRY CRABTREE was sitting, propped up by two feather pillows and a throw cushion, in the wreckage of the bedclothes, naked except for a pair of pin-striped blue boxers, his legs drawn up to his chest. His body hair ran more to blond than