Once the sun was higher in the sky, Norman was out on the state highway with his thumb up. He hitched a ride with an eighteen wheeler to a county road, where he got a ride from a farmer, and then walked on a dirt road into the town.

That is, if you could call it a town. Small wonder that it even deserved a dot on the map. There were a few dilapidated buildings, most of them boarded-up, some scattered houses, but that was all. It was hard to tell if anyone lived in them. Norman didn’t see any signs of life. One of the better looking buildings had a hand-painted sign that read “Maxwell General Store.” It was a metal building with a small, covered wooden porch with a wooden bench by the door. The building’s metal sides and roof might have been a particular color at one time, but it had long since faded, and now the whole thing was the general shade of dirt. Norman climbed the steps to the porch, crossed a rubber mat with “Welcome” printed in fade red letters, and tried the door. It opened inward with a squeak.

Norman closed the door behind him. As it hissed shut, he noticed how much the wind was blowing. Until then, he hadn’t thought much about it, probably because it was so constant, but it never quit. The wind had an energy all its own, and Norman had to force the door shut with his shoulder. Even then, he could hear it whining around the edges. The light was dim inside, and Norman’s eyes had to adjust before he could see clearly.

It wasn’t much of a store, not very big anyway, but every inch of it was packed. There were a few groceries, clothing, hardware items, paper goods, toys and candy, magazines and paperback books, toiletries, and that was just what Norman saw at a quick scan. What wouldn’t fit on the shelves was hanging from the ceiling. In the far corner, there was a counter with an old time cash register, and behind the counter was a separate world altogether with cigarettes and tobacco, bottles of liquor, soft porn magazines, hunting knives, hand guns and ammunition, over-the-counter drugs, and God knew what all.

Amid all the clutter and paraphernalia, Norman didn’t see the figure behind he counter at first. The man sort of blended into the shadows with all the stuff. The light that came through the dusty window behind his shoulder shone on the page of the book that was spread on his lap. His sandy or gray-colored hair and his flannel shirt were all about the same shade as everything else. His eyes were bright, though, as they looked at Norman.

“What can I do for you, stranger?” he asked.

As Norman became more aware of the man, he couldn’t really tell how old he was, although he didn’t seem very young, and he didn’t seem very old, but somewhere in between. The only thing that moved was the man’s mouth. He never bothered to get up. He just sat there eying Norman, his chair tilted back against the shelves, his feet propped up under the counter.

“Well, I guess I’m just looking for some information, really,” began Norman.

Norman leaned forward against the counter, keeping his hands on the top in plain sight. That was the cop in him. He knew that you always wanted to see a stranger’s hands, and he noticed the man looking at his. That was all the man did, though. He said nothing, so Norman continued.

“I ran into a kind of strange situation last night during a bus ride.”

Norman didn’t know quite where to start, but he gave a brief rundown of the experience that he had the night before, including a description of Noah.

“The old guy had a funny way of talking, kind of double talk, like you were supposed to already know the people in the story,” continued Norman.

Norman hoped that the man would say something, anything to help him out, maybe pick it up and fill in some blanks, but he didn’t. He just sat there watching Norman with a vacant stare.

“And he had a funny way of talking about himself, too, like he wasn’t part of the story at all, but detached from the whole thing,” Norman went on. “It was never I or me, but always he or him.”

Still no help from the man behind the counter, but Norman thought that he saw a faint glimmer of recognition in his eyes. However, that was all, only a faint glimmer.

“The old guy might have just been loony, for all I know,” concluded Norman. “Ever know of a man like that around here?”

Norman was beginning to think he was wasting his time until the man behind the counter slowly folded back a corner of the page and closed his book.

“Sounds like old Noah,” he said. “He used to come in every once in a while, always carrying on like you said, but I haven’t seen him for a long time. I never paid him much mind, because he didn’t make no sense.”

The man paused, and Norman waited, hoping he would offer more.

“I don’t know too much about him,” he said, “but I’ll tell you. Theres a lady you need to see, name of Maxine. Been here forever. Just keep going up the road past the store. Hers is the last house before you get out of town.”

Before the storekeeper finished speaking, he had the book open again, and his gaze was back on the page.

“Thanks for the information,” said Norman.

Outside, a dust devil whirled ahead of him as he walked up the road. Everything was relative, thought Norman. The guy talked like Maxwell was a real town. The last house was really the only house, at least what Norman would call a house. It was about a hundred yards past the store. There were a couple of ramshackle huts in between that looked like they hadn’t seen life for decades.

What must have been Maxine’s house was a two-story place, and it was far and away the most notable dwelling in the burg. In Normans opinion, it was stately in comparison. It looked like one of countless other farmhouses built across the plains at the turn of the twentieth century. It was an L-shaped house with three gables and a high, peaked roofline. A porch stretched across the front side. The yard and outbuildings around it might have been the center of a prosperous farm at one time. There were two barns behind the house, one much larger than the other, and a barnyard in between. There was a small chicken coop surrounded by a chicken wire fence. Not far from the larger barn stood a windmill still trying to turn in the wind, although it only had two remaining vanes.

The house actually had two front doors, and Norman picked the one on the left. He stood on the porch and knocked at the screen door, careful to stay back far enough so that anyone could see him clearly from within. That was another cop thing, less threatening that way. No one answered the first knock, so he tried again, although he sensed being watched from a window, probably watched before he ever got to the porch. After a bit, the second knock brought the outline of a figure behind the lace curtain at the full-length glass in the door. A hand fumbled with the doorknob, and the door swung inward. The woman behind the screen was tall, nearly as tall as Norman, and Norman introduced himself.

“Are you Maxine?” he asked.

“Maybe,” answered the woman.

“I came to bring news about an old timer named Noah that I met the other night during a bus ride,” began Norman by way of explanation. “The man at the store pointed me in your direction. He said if anyone in town knew about Noah, it would be you. Said you’d been here forever.”

The woman was silent at first. She put her hand to a hair comb above one ear and fidgeted with it, seemingly uncertain whether to speak with a stranger.

“Is that true?” Norman asked with a slight smile. “Have you been here that long?”

The question caused the corners of her mouth to curve upward a little, and the skin crinkled at the corners of her eyes in what Norman took for a smile.

“Well, it probably is,” she said. “If not forever, damned near.”

She unhooked the screen door and pushed it open.

“Come on in,” she said. “I wondered if someone might pay me a visit about Noah one day.”

As Norman took the screen door, he had to hold it tightly in the tug of the wind, and as Maxine closed the inside door, the air hissed around the edges like at the store.

Inside, the house was full of large windows. All of the ones that Norman could see were hung with sheer lace curtains, and the place was full of sunlight. In the wall to the right of the left front door, the one that Norman entered, was a wide opening with pocket doors slid into the woodwork on either side that looked into the dining room. The other front door opened into that room, and besides a big dining table and chairs, Norman could see a tall grandfather clock against the far wall, its gleaming brass pendulum motionless, and the hands in its big face stuck squarely on twelve-thirty.

Like the clock, the house had the same feel, silent and frozen in time, as if Norman had just stepped through a time warp. Everything in it was from a by-gone day. Every wall was papered in faded floral prints, and the furniture as well as glass pieces and what not that were scattered around on tables looked like what you might see in a museum. In the corner of the room toward the center of the house was a freestanding metal furnace with an isinglass door to keep things cozy during the winter.

“I don’t get too much company anymore,” Maxine said.

She sat in an overstuffed armchair near the door, and she waved Norman to another chair facing hers that was next to a bay window. She plucked a cigarette from a pack that lay on a smoking stand next to her chair, and she looked at Norman.

“Care for one?” she asked.

“No, thanks,” he answered.

She lit the cigarette with a lighter that was set in green carnival glass that had its place on the top of the stand. She drew from the unfiltered cigarette and tilted back her head to blow a plume of smoke toward the ceiling. To the rear of the smoking stand was a pipe rack, full of half a dozen pipes, each bowl and each stem nestled in its place. On the bottom shelf was a can of Sir Walter Raleigh pipe tobacco, an open package of pipe cleaners, and an assortment of other pipe smoking tools. It was a long time since Norman had seen a fully equipped smoking station. Smoking a pipe was a lot of work. He was aware that Maxine watched him closely, and she followed his gaze. She tapped the ash from her cigarette into the ashtray that matched the cigarette lighter, and she held the cigarette to the side of her face to keep the smoke from her eyes.

“That was Daddy’s,” she told him. “He used to sit here after lunch, after he came in from the fields, and smoke those pipes. He would get one going, and he was usually asleep before it was done.”

As she spoke, the smoke from her cigarette exhaled gently from her mouth and nose, and she tapped the ash again in the green ashtray.

“Now, what was it that you came to tell me about Noah?” she asked.

Her voice trailed off at the end of the question, almost like she was not finished speaking, as if she had something else to offer, but she was silent. She watched Norman closely, and he shifted in his chair, unsure exactly how to begin the story.

“Actually,” continued Maxine before Norman had a chance to start, “I had a dream about Noah. Night before last, I believe it was. I had to think about that dream for a while, trying to figure out what it meant, but I finally arrived at the conclusion that he came to tell me goodbye, you know, in his strange kind of way. Old Noah was a little different. His brain didn’t work like most peoples’, but you probably already know that, if you talked much with him. I’ll let you go ahead. Sorry to interrupt.”

Norman started the story right at the beginning, at the point when he first became aware of Noah. His mind went back to the bus ride, and he described the events of the late afternoon and evening.

“I didn’t pay much attention to him at first,” said Norman, “but I knew someone was there that was getting on people’s nerves, the way the other riders kept moving away from him after each stop. That just gave him a fresh ear to bend. After a while, I looked over there to see what was going on, and I saw him, saw the paper bag that he kept tilting to his mouth. I could tell what he was doing. Been there, done that, and I knew.”

Norman paused, but Maxine just watched him.

“Noah was a drinker,” she said. “He always was. We just kind of looked out for him around here.”

Norman continued and moved the story into the nighttime and the dinner stop. He told about helping Noah back on the bus and riding next to him, about listening and talking to him.

“Noah never talked about himself, not directly, anyway,” put in Maxine. “It was always like he was somebody else. He’s been like that ever since I first knew him.”

“Yes,” said Norman. “That’s how he talked to me, too. I had to listen to him for a while, kind of step outside the box and get into his wavelength. Then, he started making a little sense.”

Maxine nodded.

“You kind of had to throw out the normal way you think about people, and start over again with Noah,” she said.

“He talked a lot about Angus,” said Norman. “Did you know anybody by that name?”

“Well, now you’re going back a ways,” she answered.

Maxine fumbled for the pack on the smoking stand without looking, picked out another cigarette and lit it from the end of the first one to start a chain before she stubbed out the the first and continued. Norman’s question had made her pause, and he could sense the wheels of her mind churning, like her thoughts had been thrown into reverse.

“That would be Angus MacTaggert,” she said, after she sent another plume of smoke at the ceiling, her cigarette again held behind her ear. “Angus took Noah in as an orphan. You see, Noah wasn’t a Mac Taggert. Noah was older than me, closer to my parents’ age, and Angus passed away when Noah was a young man. I was just a tiny girl, and I probably don’t remember the man at all. I seem to have a recollection of him, but it might be from things I heard my parents say. I’m not sure memories begin that young.”

She paused again, and Norman did not want to disturb her reflections. He waited for more.

“I know from the dates on the tombstone out in the cemetery that Angus lived to be eighty or ninety,” she went on. “There are some other Mac Taggerts out there in the cemetery, too, a couple generations of them before Angus. The first one had to be one of the earliest settlers in these parts.”

Norman was doing the math in his own head and putting together dates. That put things back to right after the Civil War.

“In other words, Angus was like me, older than dirt,” Maxine said with a smile, “and he lived here a long time ago. I’m the last one in my family, and he was the last one in his. There ain’t no more Mac Taggerts that I know of. Noah has been out there living in their cabin by himself ever since. Noah’s mind was probably just going back to the Mac Taggerts as his light was getting dim, if you know what I mean.”

“What did Angus do here?” asked Norman.

“Well, I imagine it took most of his time just to stay alive,” she said. “He probably took Noah in for the help. This would be a pretty tough country to live in before the days when you could go to the store to get what you needed. Some winters are real hard. There isn’t much out there except that cabin. I don’t really know how he managed.”

Maxine brushed stray ashes from her lap and turned her head toward the window, although she didn’t appear to be looking at anything in particular.

“Some say Angus found a treasure in that old mine out there that was dug into the hill behind the cabin,” she said, “although nobody’s ever saw any evidence of it. I think it sounded like a good story to make up. God knows Noah didn’t live like a king, if Angus gave him any of it. Noah lived off something, though, and I’m not real sure what.”

Whenever Maxine stopped talking, it was silent in the house, except for the whistling of the wind around the corners.

“So, I guess I’m not much help with your question about Angus MacTaggert,” she concluded. “Far as I know, there isn’t much to tell.”

“No, you’ve been a big help,” said Norman as he rose from his chair. “Do you think anyone would care if I went out there to look around? I’d kind of like to see where Noah called home.”

“Feel free,” she said. “I don’t think there’s anyone left around here to object. Most everyone has had their looks out there anyway, without finding much, certainly not any treasure. If anyone did, believe me, I would have heard about it. After all, I’ve been here forever.”

The “forever” part made Norman smile. He thanked the woman, and she saw him to the door. Norman could see her standing inside the screen and watching as he walked away, leaving her alone in the house with the clock that always said twelve-thirty.