Gene Wolfe - Free Live Free

He walked on, then up the step and onto the porch of Mrs. Baker’s house. Wires emerged from long-splintered wood where the doorbell should have been. He knocked hard, a habit acquired from bill collecting.

There was no sound inside.

After waiting a moment, he knocked again; this time he heard footsteps, slow and hesitant. A new Yale lock had been set into the door, but the old-fashioned keyhole remained. Stooping, he put his mouth to it and called, “It’s just me, Mrs. Baker. Jim Stubb, remember? From the hotel last night? I have to talk to you.”

The door opened. Mrs. Baker wore a gray housecoat and slippers. Her sparse hair was in curlers.

“I’m sorry if I got you out of bed,” Stubb said.

“Time for me to get up anyway. ‘Early to bed and early to rise, and get the jump on the other guys,’ that’s what the late Mr. Baker used to say. It’s from Shakespeare.”

“I’ve always felt the same way myself,” Stubb told the old woman.

“Anyway, come in. Would you like some cooco? Or maybe tea? ‘Cooco’s a cad and a cow.’ Better than milk, it means. Isn’t that what they say?”

“‘Tea is like the East he grows in,’” Stubb quoted from memory. “‘A great yellow mandarin, with urbanity of manner and unconsciousness of sin.’”

“You’re right, that’s like the people here for sure. Even if I don’t think folks in California’s any better. Where’d you learn all that? Would you rather have tea than cooco?”

“Cocoa will be fine,” Stubb told her as he stepped inside. “I went to a parochial school when I was a kid, and there were poems we had to learn. That wasn’t one of them, but it was in the same book, and it was the only one I really liked.”

“No amounting for tastes,” Mrs. Baker’s gray back announced vaguely.

The house was cleaner than Free’s had been, but mustier too, as though its windows never opened and somewhere (upstairs, perhaps, in an unused bedroom) there was a vast accumulation of rags, dusty rags filling the room and spilling, so Stubb imagined them, from an open door into the hall.

They went through the parlor where Proudy had played with Puff, now silent and dark. The dining room was crowded with dark, heavy, oak furniture, the kitchen brighter than the other rooms but empty-seeming: a sink with a few dishes, a white-enameled refrigerator, a white-enameled gas stove, a table, and two chairs. Mrs. Baker filled a teakettle and put it over stiff blue flames.

“I don’t generally eat much breakfast,” she said. “Just cold cereal and milk. What the French call the breakfast of mushrooms, I’m told, though I’m sure I don’t know what that means.”

“I had breakfast quite a while back,” Stubb said, seating himself at the table. “That cocoa will be all I need. Mrs. Baker, I came to ask you about the two women you told us about last night.”

The kitten came out of the dining room, walked halfway across the kitchen floor before deciding Stubb was perilous, and scampered under the stove.

“You said these women didn’t give you their names, remember? That you didn’t even know if they were married or not, because they wore gloves. You thought they might be from the Federal Government, but you weren’t sure.”

“And you said not to tell them a thing till I talked to you,” Mrs. Baker continued for him. “Mom’s the word, that’s what my own mother used to say.”

“That’s right. And I wanted to talk to you some more, but not then, because the Duck girl was there.”

Mrs. Baker produced two china cups of the decorated sort sold in five-and-ten-cent stores when there were five-and-ten-cent stores. “We can talk while we have our cooco, Mr. Barnes. I’ll eat my cornflakes too, if you don’t observe.” She spooned cocoa powder into the cups. “The valiant flee to eat their breakfasts on the lip of the line, as the Bible teaches us. That means that if you’re brave you ought to run fast to get your breakfast, if there’s just a little while to eat it in.”

“I’m Stubb, Mrs. Baker. Mrs. Baker, do you ever watch crime shows on TV?”

“Once and awhile,” the old woman said, puzzled. “Not very much. As soon as you turn them on they’re all over but the shooting, as the saying goes. But the shooting is what troubles me.” She set a cup in front of Stubb.

“The reason I asked is that a lot of people seem to have gotten their ideas of detective work from them, and you’ll notice, if you watch them at all, that even when the detectives on those shows find someone very important, they just ask two or three questions and go away. Real detective work isn’t like that, Mrs. Baker—people who know something important are too hard to find. I’d like to ask you a lot of questions about those women who talked to you. It isn’t going to be very exciting, but I’d like to do it anyway because if I do I may find out something important to old Mr. Free as well as to me. Do you understand?”

The old woman nodded. “Every stone takes its turn.”

“Yes. That’s very well put, Mrs. Baker. Now, when these two women came to see you, did they telephone first, or let you know in any way that they were coming?”

“No. Just come knocking at the door like Bare-Knuckle Bill.”

“About what time?”

“You remember when they tore down Mr. Free’s front? A little after that. After work but not quiet dinner time, not but that all my times aren’t quiet now that I don’t work no longer and Mr. Baker’s gone.”

“You didn’t look at a clock?”

The old woman shook her head.

“Between five and six—would that be about right, Mrs. Baker?”

“If I’d have known it was so important, I’d have looked. A dilly of a five o’clock scholar, that’s what I am.”

“Not later than six?”

She put her bowl of cornflakes on the table, flanked it with a formerly silver-plated spoon, then paused in the act of sitting down. “Could have been as late as six thirty.”

Stubb rubbed his chin.

The old woman lowered herself into her chair. “No, I recompense. At five o’clock I always have the news. That nice man with the white hair.”

“Bryan O’Flynn? WROM?”

“That’s him. And the big story was about the president going somewhere. I used to vote, but it doesn’t do any good. It’s coffee that makes politicians wise—that’s what the Pope said—only they don’t drink enough.” She took a sip of cocoa. “Hot. Cave cane ’em, Mr. Barnes.”

“I’ve been stirring it,” Stubb told her.

“Anyway, there was a lot about him. And then the strike. I think whenever they strike they should cut their pay. That would put the kibitz to strikes pretty soon. Then the weather—more snow is what they said. Then the basketball. Did you ever play, Mr. Barnes?”

“No,” Stubb said. “I didn’t.”

“Me either. Just a lot of jumping around, if you ask me. Then about poor Mr. Free. I told you about that last night up at your hotel.”

Stubb nodded.

“And that was the end of the news—practically the end, anyway. Now curfew nods to tell of parting day; that’s what my father always used to say about that time of night, when the churchbells rang. We went to bed with the chickens a whole lot earlier then.”

“And then the two women came?”

“Well, not right away.”

“How long after?”

“I left the TV on just like I usually do, but I don’t remember now just what the show was. And I went to fix my dinner. I had real Irish stew, the frozen kind. I lit the gas and put it in the oven and set the table and so on—poured my milk—and just when I was finishing they come a-tap, tap, tapping like the poor raving.”

“Finishing setting the table or finishing eating, Mrs. Baker?”