Tony and Susan by Austin Wright Page A

a dirt yard separating it from its barn.
    ‘Okay,’ Bobby Andes said. ‘Can you take it from here?’
    He thought, if he was this slow recognizing Combs’s place in the bright morning, how could he recognize his track from the night? Despite its heavy engraving in the dreams he had not yet had time to have.
    ‘I came down that road,’ he said.
    Tracking, in reverse. The queasy reiterating panic – ‘Go slow’ – because nothing was familiar, not even the general shape of the valley which he had built in his imagination outof vague night shadows. This valley now was close and bumpy, the road turned and turned back more than he realized, the farms were small and getting smaller, it bumped into the woods, sliced corners of them, yet every few moments his panic unpulsed in the sight of something he recognized, usually not until it was passing or passed and he was looking at it from behind, which was the direction from which he had seen it before – mailbox, broken fence, house with porch and tool shed, narrow bridge over stream.
    The road climbed out of the valley into the woods, and he remembered the pull on his feet coming down. The trees were raggedy, he had not known that, and then they thickened and grew tall, a high forest on the sides of an endless hill, which he had not known either. They came to another road level along the side of the hill, intersection, what should have been a memory checkpoint though he did not recognize it. So they pulled up onto the level road and stopped, and then he remembered the turn he had made down and deduced the left turn they should make now.
    A road came in from the right, higher up, the fork which he remembered from his unslept nightmares as the probable point of deviation from the original route with Lou, the route where the lost church and mountain curve and dim-lighted trailer were. It did not look like much of a fork now, the upper road narrower and turning up sharply, no wonder he had missed it.
    All the while Laura and Helen were in his mind asking, where are you going? He tried to take them out of past and future, where they absent-mindedly occupied their usual places, chattering and joking, and put them into the actual present, the question being just where are you and what are you doing right now? He listened, trying to see or hear, and in the silencehe heard their silence slam across the stillness like a thunderbolt and saw their still faces frozen in a crash of marble. He tried to bring them to life – after all, they must be alive somewhere after who knows what kind of traumatic experience like his own? – and postulated them continually just around the next turn in the road: there they are now! walking down the middle of the road, mother and daughter, jeans kerchief traveling slacks dark sweater. Why aren’t they there? You never find what you’re looking for when you’re looking, or if you do, you call it a miracle. Another reason for dread, as if the mere hunting for his wife and child on these empty roads where they clearly were not were the surest way to assure they would never be.
    ‘There!’ Tony Hastings said. Sooner, much sooner than he expected: the broken gate, the diagonal white board, memorized to identify the entrance to the mountain woods road, which looked even less like a road now, a lane, a path, a pair of tracks.
    They stopped. The lieutenant wrote in his notebook. ‘That’s where they took you, huh?’
    Tony Hastings saw the ditch, the barbed wire, the bushes on the other side of the ditch, shallower, closer to the road than when he had jumped in the nightmare.
    ‘Want to go in?’ the driver said.
    Bobby Andes looked at Tony. ‘Any point in doing that?’ he asked.
    Tony Hastings frozen, paralyzed, unwilling, afraid. ‘What would we be looking for?’
    Bobby Andes looked at him again. He had hairs in his nostrils and the little pink nodes swam moist in the corners of his smeary eyes. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Let’s check out the