I remember thinking how quiet they were, fumbling about in the trucks for their bags, their feet crunching on the cold gravel, their voices hushed and soft as breath. There was no light in the alley, nor on the street beyond; I followed them through the dark up along a narrow avenue of houses, wondering if they remembered I was there, or cared, or if they were simply too tired to bother. Once I heard Mary laugh, a wistful sound like dulcimer music that was almost drowned out in the whisper of crickets, the barking of a dog in the distant yards. Halfway up the hill we turned into a sidestreet and paused like tramps or ghosts before a high grey building with a sign planted below the steps. A sad old iron fence circled the yard. There was no gate; Jones stalked through, her shoulders set hard under the weight of her black coat. She went straight up the walk and entered the front of the house without knocking. I remember climbing into sudden light, into an entry hall that was much too small to hold us all. "Jones Company," I heard her say to the man behind the desk. "Oh, and there's one more of us as well."

It had been uncomfortably like falling back into childhood, riding again in the back seat with my head against the glass, watching the countryside roll by, not knowing how far we were going or when we would arrive. Up in front Jones and Lon passed the trip with their faces turned out to the road, their voices too low to be heard above the roar of the engine. Would it mean anything to me, I thought, even if I could make out their words?

We had gone more than two hundred miles before I dared ask Mrs. Templeton if she knew where we would be stopping. "Dexter," she said, brightening a little, as if she were glad to learn that I could talk. "It's some distance yet. I've never played there before. Let's hope they have running water."

Were there any towns that didn't? Oh yes, Mrs. Templeton said. She told me about horrible rooming houses with stairs half rotted away, about wind rushing through cracks, about vermin in the walls and under the floorboards, about frozen mornings when the rugs crunched underfoot, and what it felt like to meet a stranger on your way down to the bathroom in the middle of the night. She spoke with her face perfectly composed, almost serene, as if the subject was nothing more ominous than pickled herring. After a time I thought I saw the faintest hint of a twinkle buried down deep behind the oval frames of her glasses. She's trying to frighten me, I thought. Testing the new boy. I turned my face away, hoping that Jones would break into the conversation. But she never looked back.

Mrs. Templeton was still talking when we drove into Dexter. It was a little river town built into the side of a hill, the high windows of the houses above looking out over the roofs of the main street. We passed a general store, a diner, two banks and a barber shop that looked like a place people had been avoiding for a long time. Coming in past the theater, with its empty marquee and the cardboard posters Jones had sent ahead tacked up in the shade, I had the awful feeling of having switched places within my own memory, so that as we came opposite the lobby doors I half-expected to see another young man just inside, looking back through the glass. He'd be waiting in the yard behind the building, wearing a clean new suit, clean shoes, a businesslike tie with blue polka dots. Jones would climb down from the truck once again, and again he would not know what to make of her

We followed Moscow's truck onto the first sidestreet and then into an alleyway so narrow that I could hear the rasp of canvas against brick as we inched our way through. At the far end the stage door was standing open with a stocky greyhaired man inside, sweeping dust out into the yard. He frowned and poked at the sill. "Surprised you didn't draw a crowd," he said in the alien quiet that rushed in when Lon cut the motor. "We could hear you coming ten miles away."

Lon and Moscow climbed up in the sun and started to untie our load. "Ah, that's part of our advertising," Templeton said from the other truck. He came out of a sliver of shade behind the cab. "Can't afford advance men. So we've modified our trucks to blat out a fanfare."

"Heads up," Moscow said. He lifted a canvas sack out under the yellow glare and threw it down at me. It hit me in the chest, but I caught it, and held on.

It took an hour and a half to unload the trucks and get a start on raising the sets. By then everyone was tired and cranky, but resigned to the longest part of the day that remained ahead. Watching them rehearse from a musty seat far back in the stalls, I imagined that they must have felt like paper figures fading inside a sand toy, following through the repetition of ceaseless motion as grains of silver fell through the chambers of a watermill connected to their joints. Their words came up to me in sighs and mumbles from the stage below, and when I could make them out it was a strange mixture of dialogue and stage directions, questions and insults, fragments of incantation and baseball gossip, so that nothing made sense to me except that they were rehearsing some new kind of play, something discordant and European that would never have gone over in Saint Paul. In time I realized that they were not so much rehearsing the play as they were fitting it to the new stage, changing a mark here, compressing a bit of action there. Jones, circling the scenes like a predatory animal, was the only one of the cast who spoke all of her lines. But her mind was on other things; they came in a monotone under her breath, drifting without form or meaning down over the empty colors of the footlights.

Just before dark I went out alone to stand in the cool air that blew down from the end of the alley. All that remained were a few unused props still wrapped in sackcloth, frayed ends of rope dangling almost in silhouette; from where I stood, in the shadow cast by the lowering sun against the crest of the town, I could hear water rushing close below the theater. Inside, Lon was testing the thunder machine. It started with a rumble like the beginning of an earthquake, then let loose with an authentic wallop that I could feel through the stage door. At the peak of the blast Sylvie came stumbling over the threshold as if she had been caught up in the storm; her bare feet hit the ground hard enough to raise a cloud of dust that reached to the hem of her skirts.

She took a long stretch at the edge of the yard, then began to pace aimlessly in and around between the trucks, her toes pointed in the air, her legs trailing black lace. She pitched her shoes so that they landed and tumbled in the bed of the truck. She made a point of showing me that she didn't know I was there.

"You know it's never too late," she said, turning her face sidelong up to mine. "All of these places have train stations. You can always change your mind."

I watched her poke at the dirt with her foot. "You've got me wrong," I said. "I'm not having second thoughts. I feel a little guilty about that."

Sylvie pulled herself up and sat above the tailgate, looking through parallel slats out over the long, low hill that ran to the edge of town. "Well, I knew it was something. Just look at you. Ugh, are your palms sweaty as well?"

I said no, held them out for her to look at, and was surprised when she took them into her own. She ran her thumbs across my open hands, studied my fingers as intently as if she were staring into a bowl of clear water. "I read palms," she said, "but yours would take hours, all the little lines. That means you're indecisive. Look at how they all run cross-ways to each other. You could use a manicure, too. I don't do those."

She hopped down and danced away across the gravel, swaying inside of her skirt. Watching her, I wondered how she could travel and work in such fragile clothing without tearing it to shreds. "What will your first play be about?" she said. "Jones wouldn't tell."

A cool breeze had come up from the river; it was hard to keep from shivering. "I don't know. Not about actors. And not about runaway clerks."

Sylvie allowed her last spin to wear itself out. She stood with her weight on one leg, her arms crossed, and looked at me with a sad little frown. "Well, we'd better go in," she said. "Jones will have missed us by now. She'll cut off my head. She'll disembowel you."

Now at the front desk of the little boarding house Jones signed the register for everyone, dipping the pen, writing out her stage name, then dipping it again and drawing an arrow down along the edge of her finger, five, six lines. In her black jacket, her hair as wet as if it had been rained on, she reminded me again of a lady barnstormer coming in off the tarmac with the engines still roaring in the distance and the night air breaking around her, closing at her back. I remember the scratching of the pen, and the sound it made when she laid it flat in the book. Of the six keys the night man had set out, only two remained; Jones scooped them up, tossed one at me without looking at it, and turned into the stairwell after the others.

She climbed up ahead with a paper sack in one hand and a clothes bag draped over her shoulder. At the landing she looked down at me over the rail, laughed at something that she saw, and went on. The stairs ended in a little hall not more than three feet wide that wound all through the center of the building. It was lined with misshapen doors that didn't entirely fit in their frames. I found my room number in a blue triangle of light and was fitting my key into the lock when Jones looked back again. "You can if you want," she said. "That's your business. But aren't you the least bit hungry?"

"What's open at this time of night," I said. "In a town like this?"

Jones made a come-on motion with her head. "There's always Chateau Eckert. All we have to do is find it." And she put back her head, cried "Cooo-ee!" out loud in a broad mocking tone. "Number five," the voices called back.

We stepped through into a crowded, barewalled room that already looked as if it belonged to another building entirely. There was no sign of the bed, if there had ever been one; instead, an oriental rug covered the floor with a puddle of maroon and blue. Mary knelt at one end, dealing out cardboard plates and silverware and parcels of food wrapped in foil and waxed paper from a wicker basket at her side. I recognized Happiness Home Apple Pie and Happiness Home Molasses Doughnuts. They had coffee warming on a hotplate in the corner, also a thermos and a wine bottle still with a half pint of dark liquid slopping around inside. As we came in the company was just beginning to settle down. Moscow had taken a place below the window, his frock coat gathered all into a puddle around him. "Penalty for late arrival," he said.

"Well gosh," Jones said. "Hope you didn't eat all the fish eggs." She tapped Lon on the shoulder as she came to her place at the foot of the rug. "How's everyone doing? Ruth? Doctor?"

Templeton shook his head. He had changed into a clean summer suit; though their faces were drawn, the Templetons still made the rest of us look like hoboes. "I think we're all wishing that we'd listened to our parents," he said. "But that's not your fault."

"No," Moscow said. "That Shylock pie man."

Sylvie was busy setting a row of empty cans across the windowsill, lighting candles one from the other and then burning the bottoms so that they would stand free. It was Mary who asked if I was going to sit down; even then, I had to count the empty places before I could be sure that one of them was meant for me. "Well now," Jones said. She poured a little wine into the bottom of a glass, passed it on to Moscow at her left, found another and poured again. "Winston looks as if he's been holding up all right."

I had to smile at that. "Hah. And Mr. DeLodges said that I couldn't act."

No one laughed. "He has a one-act in progress that should be ready for us by the end of the week," Jones said. The glasses turned themselves over in her fingers and were filled with just a splash of purple liquid. "He'll continue with a draft one-act every week until he comes up with something we can use. Then, with any luck, he'll be ready for a little more"

The wine came around until we all had just enough to make a toast. Jones set aside the empty bottle. No one spoke. Light and candlesmoke moved on every face. Our shadows touched the wall, bound on both sides by patches of luminance reflected from off of the wine. Jones raised her glass. "Here's to a perfect little season," she said.

We drank to that, and then everyone helped themselves from the parcels of food. There was cold chicken and ham, two kinds of grapes, sourdough bread and a gooey jar of apricot preserves. It was all much more relaxed, now that the toast had ended; the company all began to talk at once. Leaning over the rug, balancing his food, Lon poked through the remains of the chicken as though trying to find the wish bone. "She always asks for the same thing," he said. "Just like a broken record."

Jones smiled. Her fork arced down towards the plate from her left hand. "I'll keep asking for it until I get it."

"One a week?" I said when I thought no one but Jones would hear. "Ouch, that, that's a lot of plays"

Jones shook her head. "It doesn't have to be much to start with. Just a skeleton we can hang something on. A flash of dialogue. You'll do fine."

Templeton came back from the sink with his glass full of tap water. He sank back painfully again into his place on the other side of the rug. "You're joining a long tradition of hack playwrights," he said. "It's real seat of the pants work. Lots of groping in the dark."

"Tell us the one you've started," Mary said.

The company fell silent. I was ashamed now to have repeated what Mr. DeLodges had told me, because I was not even actor enough to work up some business, some misdirection to cover myself until I could form a reply. And so it was just dead air, awkward silence, as if a curtain had risen before an empty stage. I did not want to make a liar out of Jones. But I had nothing to give them.

"He wouldn't say anything to me either," Sylvie said. She picked off a stem full of grapes, ate them one by one, trying to look saintly with the candles arranged in a close line at her knees.

"You'd better tell them," Jones said. "They won't leave you alone until you do."

The company waited, some with their eyes averted. I thought about the empty stage, and how I had felt alone on it since that moment when I left Mr. DeLodges's office for the last time. I thought about how well the company had tolerated me. I thought, What am I doing here? What am I doing here? and in the next moment I was saying, "It's about a group of ordinary folk, taking refuge in a gypsy camp."

The slightest flutter of interest, not more than that, went around the edge of the rug. Templeton said, "What are they running from?"

"A flood in the night. They run blind into the hills. They follow the firelight."

"Who are they?" Mary said.

For the first time I dared to look straight at them, each and every face, hoping for something that I could use, casting them in my mind. "A a protestant miller, his wife and a farm family, mother and daughter. Things happen to them; the Queen of the Gypsies whispers into their ears until they become drunk on the old stories. They learn how to call down the night. They drink moonshine. They dream of their faith, and the old faith of the gypsies, and they learn which is the strongest."

Jones turned her empty glass over and over in the air. She touched it to her lips, grinned, tapped it gently against her teeth. "You're learning," was all that she said.

*

All the rest of that night I never spoke another word, only listening to find out the things that made them laugh, or groan, or fall silent. Mary helped; her face was so easy to read, watching her was like having a translator who could not resist adding her own opinions, like pretending that I understood. I think now of how uncomfortable I was, of how I wished that the night would end, and that it would not. It felt as if home had never existed. It felt as if the whole world was sleeping, but for us.

At a quarter to two Jones looked at her wrist, yawned, folded her napkin into a careless V. It was the only signal that was needed; the company let out its breath all in one exhausted sigh and began to withdraw. Plates were wiped clean, the remaining food wrapped up tight, the rug folded in half, pushed aside. There was a lot of shuffling about and brushing of crumbs, but no one left the room until Templeton pulled the bed back down into place. He took off his jacket, sat on the edge, and said, "Goodnight folks."

Mine was a corner room, close by the stairs. It was a hot airless box with a window that couldn't be opened and a bed that looked as if it was made all of cold oatmeal. There was a single lamp with a shade that had yellowed so that it almost matched the color of the wallpaper, a clean sink sticking oddly from the middle of the wall, a closet wedged in where the stairs bent around the outside of the room. I waited half in the yellow light, in the faint creaking that rose out of the floor as the company spread out along the length of the building. I was just turning to close the door when I saw that Moscow was standing there, still in the frock coat, blue faced, his hair all uncombed, his cheeks darkened with stubble. He looked me in the eye, then moved his head as if to indicate the room. "So?" he said. "This is what you bought."