He felt a vague anticipation of Saturday and town and at length he fell asleep.

The storm sometime in the night reversed its course or its brother passed for he woke in a lull of the rain, the air leaden and motionless and the night holding its breath. Then lightning came staccato and strobic, a sudden hush of dryflies and frogs, the walls of the attic imprinted with inkblack images of the trees beyond the window, an instantaneous and profound transition into wall-less night as if the lightning had incinerated the walls or had scorched the delicate tracery of leaf and vine into wallpaper. Then gone in abrupt negation to a world of total dark so that the room and its austere furnishings seemed sucked down into some maelstrom and consigned to utter nothingness, to the antithesis of being, then thunder came uttering balefully down the wall of ridges and a cool wind was at the trees, the calm eddying away like roiled water.

He could not sleep. He stood at the window for a time, watching across the bottom where the storm was forming, banked lighting pulsing and limning the landscape with a black-and-silver nightmare quality.

Downstairs the windows were raised to the cool night and the house was a house of winds. It seemed enormous and barren in the dark, something abandoned to the windy reaches of space. He crossed the porch and went into the yard. The wind was stronger now and wove against the heavens a patternless and everchanging tapestry. Where three trees formed a triangle he had built a treehouse from old salvaged bridgetimbers and he climbed the ladder to it. The trees leaned their disparate ways, the treehouse creaking and popping, the branches above him a steady rushing sound.

It still was not raining. The storm passed to the south, the sky in a constant flux of electricity, sleek metallic clouds burnishing orange and pink. Ovoid and tracking west they look composed of some gleaming alloy, a vast armada visiting upon the world a plague of fire then fleeing on to some conjunction of all the world’s storms.

The treehouse rocked and yawned and here in the dark it seemed a craft adrift in roughening water, its decks tilting and sliding to the caprice of the seas, sails shredded and mast tilted and clocking like a gyroscope gone berserk: beyond it the night was unstarred, nothing for a mariner’s glass to fix upon.

Rain came like an afterthought. A belated kindness rapping at the makeshift roof. Resting on the deck with his head against the listing bulkhead he watched through the cracks the lightning grow faint and fainter, the thunder dimming away, muted by the rain. Winer half dozed, listening to the rain intensifying, spreading surcease across the dark and sleeping land.

William Tell Oliver awoke sometime in the night. The storm had passed and smoothed out to a steady downpour with an air of permanence about it. He went back to sleep and when he arose at five it was still raining. Day came halfheartedly to a grim and sunless world. It kept raining all day.

2

Motormouth Hodges had in mind specifically a radio he had seen sitting on a bedside table. By standing on tiptoe and peering through a crack in the venetian blinds he could just make it out, it had a wooden case and an expensive look about it and it was a small radio that would be easy to carry through the woods.

He had found it by accident. He’d been squirrelhunting here back in the spring and come up for a drink of water and there had been no one about, the intense craving to possess that radio had not come until later. Watching the house from his makeshift shelter of windbrought tin he had no doubt there would be other knickknacks he could use as well and he has visions of himself sitting before a cozy fire next winter listening to the wonders the radio unfolded for him.

Knowing the habits of country folk he had waited until Saturday. Through the slanting rain he had watched the pickup leave. Taking into consideration the cornerstanding and talking and lunch, then buying groceries, he figured he had about all day. He hurried anyway. He came out of his shelter in the stand of pines and down a sawbriarchoked gully to the blacktop. He walked up the highway toward the house, elaborately casual, whistling to himself, hands in pockets, only removing the right hand when a car passed him, raising it then in a perfunctory greeting. They’d think he lived here, who knew.

There was a look of well-kept prosperity about the house. It was a white two-story with a steeply gabled roof and neat green trim. An enormous hiproofed barn painted red loomed behind it and it was surrounded with newlooking farm equipment, cultivators and combines, an outsize orange tractor. A small yellow Caterpillar bulldozer he’d have started up and driven had he the time and clement weather.