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and moans. Travis had propped open the window with a hardware-store expansion screen and every once in a while a breeze picked up the corner of the sheet. Sleep, he thought, and it was a prayer now: sleep, oh, sleep.
    Shortly after midnight he heard footsteps on the stairway beyond his door.
    Slow, heavy footsteps coming up from below. Aunt Liza didn’t carry that much bulk—it could only be Creath.
    This time of night! Travis thought.
    The footsteps paused outside his door and then proceeded upward.
    Strange, Travis thought.
    And now they were over his head. Creath, for sure.
    A brief, low burr of conversation. Anna’s voice like faraway music, Creath’s like the grumble of some rusted old machine.
    The repetitive complaint of the bedsprings.
    Jesus God Almighty, Travis thought, that poor little girl!—and he covered his ears with his pillow.

Chapter Two
    T he evenings were essentially the same for the next week and a half: an elaborate ritual dinner, Anna’s opacity and silences, Creath’s clenched-fist approach to conversation. Later there might be radio, Creath lighting up a cigar and occupying the parlor easy chair for the duration of “Amos &. Andy” or Ed Wynn or, Sundays, Father Coughlin’s “Golden Hour of the Little Flower.” Then everybody eased upstairs to hot and insulated beds, and Travis, if he stayed awake, might hear Creath tiptoeing into the attic room … not always, but too often. It forced Travis to look at his Aunt Liza’s nervous flutters with a greater degree of sympathy: she knows, he thought, she must know.
    Weekdays Creath drove him down to the ice plant before dawn. The thought of all that ice had made Travis imagine the plant might be a nice place in which to endure this long summer. But—although he did sometimes enter the cool length of the storeroom where block ice lay stacked like uncut fragments from some fairy-tale diamond mine—most of his work was in the tin shed where the refrigerating machinery roared and thumped, perversely twenty degrees hotter than the outside air. The work he did was mostly lifting and cleaning, and he quickly learned that the other men who worked here, mechanics and loaders and drivers, considered him a liability, contemptible, the boss’s nephew. He ate bagged lunches alone in a weedy field beyond the loading dock, staring into the brown Fresnel River. The ice industry was doomed, Creath had said, victim of the goddamned Kelvinator. It might survive a while longer here in Haute Montagne, but orders were already way down for this time of year. Travis found the knowledge perversely consoling. The work itself was tedious and frustrating, and when the frustration threatened to overwhelm him he decided to ask Nancy Wilcox for a date.
    That Friday evening after work he told Creath to let him off at the corner of Lambeth and The Spur. Creath accelerated his Model A pickup through a yellow light and said, “Your aunt will have dinner ready. You not hungry?”
    “I’ll get something down here.” He avoided the older man’s eyes. “Maybe see a movie.”
    “Waste of money,” Creath said, but he downshifted the truck and slowed long enough to allow Travis to leap out.
    There were still a couple of hours of daylight left. The sky was a powdery blue, the shadows stark and angular. He went directly to the diner. Nancy Wilcox had not been on his mind nearly as much as Anna Blaise … but Anna Blaise was a mystery, at once violated and aloof, as unapproachable as a cat. Nancy was someone he might talk to.
    She was there in the murky interior of the diner. An overhead fan stirred the air. The tables were all busy and there was a second waitress on duty. He sat at the counter, smiled, ordered the chuck steak and a cole slaw side and wondered how to approach her.
    He was not shy with women, not in the ordinary sense, but he had had only a pittance of real experience. Back home only Millie Gardner, the neighbor girl, had spoken much with him, and by the time