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speaking of me and Maud, for Maud occasionally joins us on our meter-checking mornings and walks along.
    “Completely unlumbered by reality,” the Sheriff says again.
    But I think he’s wrong, for I feel very lumbered by it. It plain weighs me down.

FIVE
    “If we had to be concerned about reality , there wouldn’t be much point to imagining , would there?” Maud said, more or less answering for both of us, on that particular day which found the three of us on the curb while the Sheriff wrote a ticket and stuck it on the mayor’s white Oldsmobile. The car was a foot over into an alley, not really blocking it, but still making it a slight obstacle for a truck to make deliveries to the five-and-dime. The Sheriff didn’t answer, since it wasn’t really a question and Maud loved to suck him into pointless arguments, I knew.
    “Do you think it’s haunted?” I asked, largely of her, not him. No notion appeared too outlandish for Maud to entertain, which is one reason I like her. I was speaking of the Devereau place. I don’t believe in hauntings, but I thought it might introduce the Devereaus into our conversation.
    “What isn’t?” she asked, as we stopped before a meter.
    The Sheriff looked at her and shook his head. “Oh, for God’s sake.”
    “Hauntedness is pervasive,” she said. “I feel full of windy places, like a flute.” She stood by the curb, holding her elbows cupped in her hands. She seemed pleased with how she’d put that.
    The Sheriff made a strangling sound. He was slotting a dime into the meter where Miss Ruth Porte’s black VW was parked. “ ‘Like a flute.’ ”
    “You wouldn’t understand, of course,” said Maud, as we walked on.
    I smiled. I love to hear the way they razz each other, somethingthey don’t do with anybody else. No one talks to the Sheriff the way Maud does; everyone else was either in awe of him, like me, or a little afraid of him, like Mayor Sims and that car dealer over in Hebrides.
    It was the car dealer’s baby-blue Cadillac we were standing by now; the red flag was up on the meter. The Sheriff stuffed a ticket behind the windshield wiper and we passed on.
    Maud and I, on these little excursions, enjoy fitting out certain townspeople with imaginary histories, histories that the Sheriff occasionally attempts to bring in line with the reality the two of us he said were “unlumbered” by. Which is why his answer to my question about the Wood brothers surprised me.
    The two of them, Ulub and Ubub, were sitting on the bench outside of Axel’s Taxis. The bench is meant for Axel’s Taxis’ customers, a place where they can wait for the next taxi to come. There are only two taxis, Axel’s and the one driven by his employee, Delbert. We’d been talking, Maud and I, about how we never actually saw anyone taking Axel’s. Axel would pull out with no fare in it and it would come back with nobody in it. Except for Axel, of course. The Wood brothers sometimes sit on the bench and watch Axel and Delbert come and go, and when the taxi isn’t there, they watch the rest of us come and go. They are sometimes joined by Mr. Nasalwhite, who doesn’t like to talk much either, except to tell the Woods (and passersby) that he’s the King of Bohemia. Usually, the Woods have breakfast in the Rainbow Café, then the morning stint on either this bench or the one outside Britten’s store in Spirit Lake. Then it’s lunch in the café, and the afternoon bench-sitting. The Woods report to benches the way other people report to jobs. They sit in silence (for they rarely talk) and watch the world of La Porte go by.
    The Sheriff got them talking on a couple of occasions, and Maud kept after him to tell her what on earth they’d said, but he never did tell her. I had, on this occasion, asked him about their names—Ulub and Ubub. “Somebody told me they got them from license plates. But they must have names.”
    “Uh-huh,” said the Sheriff, who was searching his pockets for a