That week we played in a pretty, sweltering university town, where every night the brick theater-house cooked us under lamps that burned away whatever coolness the dark brought along. Costumes would not keep their shape in that heat; make up would not stand, always melting into a pasty mud that made the actors look like something out of Flash Gordon. Alone in her chair behind the scrim, past where the mountains billowed if anyone walked by, or sitting out in the evening sun before the show, Mrs. Templeton managed to stay dry. I thought she must have found a pocket of night air, a ventilation shaft pushing arcane breezes from below. But when I told Mary about my theory she only laughed. She had not yet made her entrance in act two, but already she'd soaked through the extra padding sewn into her costume. The layers of pancake and rouge on her face were beginning to run. Out in the windowless hall, I could hear the audience shifting in their seats. "That's just Ruth," she whispered, lowering her face sideways to mine. "She's always composed. You wait. There's the softest breeze out there now. By eleven thirty it'll be perfectly still."

She was right. In the boarding house after midnight I propped my writing board up under the window and sat there half naked, chin in palm, trying to stir the air with the pages of my second play. It was one of three projects that I had going all at once: a one-act called The Funeral that we never did use, an adaptation of my own story "Whisperings," and a "cannibal job" on a couple of plays by a Victorian author I'd never heard of. That one was turning into a nightmare; it meant combining two diverse, wholly melodramatic plots into a new framework, one that would be digestible to a modern audience and still maintain whatever integrity the original works possessed. It was too hot to work, but I kept at it out of guilt, thinking of what they endured to perform. At three o'clock I gave in and collapsed across the middle of the bed. It didn't matter that the spread was damp, that it smelled of mold. All I cared was that it felt cool against me.

I was wakened at dawn by a distant weight, down at the foot of the bed. In a groggy sort of way I knew that it had been there for some time. I had a long hard battle between opening my eyes and just drifting back into sleep, but in the end curiosity won. The weight

was Jones, in dungarees and a sky-colored blouse, sleeves rolled up to her elbows, hair tied back carelessly with a length of black string. I couldn't see her face. She was reading through the work that I'd done, holding the pages slightly out, angled against the morning air. The room was already bright. Below the window a car rolled by on its way to Main Street. Jones heard it and covered the stack of pages at her side, as if she expected a breeze to carry them away.

"Are you awake?" she said without looking around.

I said no. Snuffling like a mule, I sat up in bed and wondered what I'd done with my shirt.

Jones finished a page, set it aside, and read on. "We were just going out to search the town dump," she said. "Custom of ours. You're welcome to come along."

At any other time it would have seemed a thrill to be included in some company ritual, but just at the moment I wasn't sure of what I'd heard. The hall door was standing open. A two-headed shape lurked outside, mumbling to itself. "'Morning," Mary's bright voice said. I could just make out Lon looking blue over her shoulder. When she stepped into the light she looked as fresh as if she'd taken a week off. "Win? Will you join us?"

"Wull, I'm not sure. Did she say 'dump'?"

Jones tossed the plays aside. She kicked my shoes up close beside the bed. "Are you coming or not?"

I followed them down through the building, buttoning myself into a hideous smock that belonged to the company. "No, do you really mean a dump?" I said. Nobody answered; they were talking about breakfast and whether or not the trucks needed gas, and didn't hear. We crossed the street to a tiny park wilting green and brown in the heat. I counted two benches and a fountain without any water in it. In the motionless shade below the leaves, Mary began to whisper to herself:

Who d'you think is comin' to town

You'll never guess who

Loveable, hugable Emily Brown

Miss Brown to you

At the far edge of the park Lon looked both ways, then lumbered across, face downturned, hands in pockets, to the whitewalled diner that had just opened its doors. Its only other customer was a weatherbeaten man sitting at an end of the counter cutting his eggs into a yellowish mass. Lon walked us down to the last booth in the row, set in beside a window looking out into the park. I was about to ask again about the dump when Jones said, "How are you coming with Wynkin and Nod?"

She meant the Victorian melodramas, which she believed would cause audiences to snooze without the overhaul that we'd planned. I had to say that I hadn't got very far with them. Jones asked what was the problem.

The waitress came by with two coffees and two orange juices and set them down around the table. Lon shook his head. "Don't tell her anything."

I said that I was no Doctor Frankenstein, that I didn't feel up to bringing something new to life just by stitching together a couple of old corpses. But what really bothered me was that I had no feeling for the characters or the troubles they faced, and could find no solution to the thing even as a technical problem that didn't involve turning it into a farce. Jones listened with smoke twisting from the end of her fingers, her eyes fixed on me, her face expressing nothing more than boredom. "You're letting me down," she said at last.

It felt as if she'd reached across the table to slap my face. Lon sucked in some air and turned to look at his own reflection in the window. "I told you not to say anything."

"I'm sorry. But they're so overblown. They read like comedies."

"And what d'you think your plays will read like in twenty or thirty years?" Jones said. "Don't be so arrogant."

Mary looked up from her placemat. She'd been drawing on it ever since we sat down; the borders were filled with curlicues, triangles, ghost faces. "When I'm working at home Max and I sometimes listen to The Lone Ranger," she said. "It takes itself so seriously. It's kind of fun."

"Those plays are the radio dramas of their day," Jones said. She pointed to nothing in particular. "You have an ear for mystery; read them aloud. They may --"

Lon suddenly brightened and sat up in the booth. It was the waitress lugging our food on a metal tray that she carried along the length of her arm. The smells of egg and sausage settled around us. "Not a moment too soon," Lon told her. Jones stubbed out her cigarette and the subject was closed.

We ate a leisurely breakfast; I listened quietly while the others talked about the last night's performance, told some jokes, laughed in their food. When Jones had finished her third cup of coffee she called the girl over and asked for directions to the town dump.

"You're serious," I said when she had gone.

Jones said of course. She rose and edged her way out of the booth. "This isn't Radio City. How else do you think we dress the stage?"

Across the seat from me, Mary puckered her mouth in feigned embarrassment. Dust and trees passed in the square of window behind her. "Don't look at me that way," she said. "I don't live in a junkyard."

"No, you just furnished it from one," Lon said from behind the wheel.

"Oh, stop! So I have a few shelves with the fruit labels still on them. It just lends them character. My kitchen table has some very fancy Victorian legs but I think the top came from a butcher's."

"Mary's place has personality and pedigree both," Jones said. She grinned at us over her shoulder. "An anthropologist's dream."

We turned off of the main road, into a set of parallel ruts that climbed away up through a cave of brush. Lon shifted down. For a moment I wondered if the grade would be too much. Then the leaves fell away from around us, the hill levelled out into a broad plateau of dirt that overlooked the entire valley. Smoke rose from an invisible spot below the ledge, a scrim of vapor beyond which the roofs of the town could have been an ugly, washed-out backdrop. A dumpkeeper's shack squatted almost at the end of the ground; in piles around it were the things someone had thought worth saving: one half of a wagon wheel rotting in the sun, a barrel held together with the remains of a single hoop, a broken crate, an oldfashioned clothes wringer rusted through in at least six places. "Oh yes," I said. "Wonderful stuff. Just what we need."

"You never know," Jones said. She popped open her door, slid out into the dusty air. Smoke and a smell like dead fish came chugging into the cab; the heat had made it good and ripe.

The sun was high and diffuse behind a distant haze. We could have been near the town or 'way out past the county line; the amplified crunching of gravel under our feet was the only sound for miles and miles. Jones disappeared behind the dumpkeeper's shack, then came around the other side and peered in at the window. Mary joined her, and together they walked out along the perimeter.

Lon hadn't moved from the driver's seat. Eyes closed, he sank down until all I could see of him was the balding top of his head. A hand like a baseball mitt appeared, scrabbling about in the dust above the dashboard. It found the road map, shook it out and draped it blue and green over Lon's face.

I leaned in at the passenger side. "You're not joining this treasure hunt?"

"No reason why I should," Lon said. The inside of the truck was starting to heat up like a brick oven. Lon folded his fingers and took no notice of it. The map on his head didn't stir, didn't rustle. "If she finds anything she'll let me know. I'm just the chauffeur this trip."

I wondered what that made me. I stood with one foot up on the running board, watching Jones and Mary poking about on the other side of the heat. "What's she looking for, anyway?"

"Just what she said. Anything we can use. Anything that might give her an idea. Most times it isn't worth the trouble."

"Then why bother?"

Lon lifted a corner of the map and looked at me out of one eye. "She's Jones," he said as if that explained everything. "Maybe she's hoping for a pony."

Now the map began to tremble all over, a paper earthquake as the man underneath it laughed at his own joke. 'Way off beyond the shack, Jones heard us and lifted her eyes. "Speaking of looks," Lon said, "maybe you'd better go."

The only thing Jones had come across so far was a stick. She was leaning on it as I came up. She had the look of a crazy pioneer woman who'd just tilled ten acres of field, wrassled six bears, fought off an indian attack and walked away from it all with a healthy glow, ready for more. "How're you doing?" she said.

"I haven't found anything, if that's what you mean."

It wasn't and I knew it, but Jones let it go. "You don't look, you don't find," she said. "You don't find" She shrugged.

I said all right. Jones gave me her stick and I prodded the ground, sifting through mosaics of trash. From the edge of the dump there was a motionless tide of refuse sloping down into the brush about fifty yards away. I saw bedsprings and cracked tires lying in the dirt with extravagant weeds growing up through them. There were hollowed-out tins and bits of glass and metal, but nothing that gave me any ideas.

"Ruth thinks you need protecting," Jones said from above me. I looked at her against the sun and nodded.

"Maybe she's right. You wouldn't be planning on tossing me out would you?"

Jones kept her face straight just long enough to make me panic. "You never know," she said. We went on a few paces. "She wishes we could get you out of your shell."

I said, "Is that what this is all about? This dumpcrawling is supposed to make me unwind?" From around the slope of trash Mary appeared, loping along at the wood's edge, her face downturned, hands filled with blue and green bottles.

"To me you're not a stranger," Jones said. "But I'm not the only member of this company."

"Meg!" Mary said. She was looking at something big and smooth in the dirt.

I said, "Name one useful thing you ever found in a dump."

Jones grinned. "That's easy," she said. "You."

We pulled up in front of the boarding house just as the Templetons were crossing back from the diner beyond the park. "Don't have to be a swami to know where you folks have been," Templeton said. He made a show of sniffing the air.

Mrs. Templeton peered into the back. "Anything good?"

"Not much," Jones said. "Some odds and ends." She stood up the door that Mary had found and Templeton gave it a good knocking. "But this is the best"

and from an oilstained bag that had come back with her she produced the shattered remains of a child's celluloid mask. So little of it survived that she was able to fit it over her grown-up face with ease. When her eyes looked out at us they were utterly changed. Jones canted her head purposefully. "What d'you think, hey?"

During the day our rooms were as bad as the theater house, whitewalled and stale. In lieu of a doorstop I took off one shoe and jammed it hard against the corner. Jones came by as I was lifting the window. The floor creaked under her, or I wouldn't have known she was there. She was still carrying the sack; this time when she reached inside her hand came out with a leatherbound book.

"This is for you," she said. "I spotted it right off. Goethe. Ask Templeton to go through it with you; he has some German, I think."

The book was cool in my hands, a bit stained but otherwise undamaged, the pages still clean, edged in gold. Inside, a gothic typeface and woodcut illustrations of beggars in the wind, heroes on horses, bearded godlike figures made it look more like a volume of mythology. "I didn't see this," I said. It occurred to me that she hadn't really found the book at all, but had been waiting for a chance to pretend. "Where was it?"

Jones only gave me the glamour smile from her pictures. "Don't know why anyone would throw it away," she said. "Even if they hated Germans."

Lon had come up from the street. He paused in the doorway, as if he had a guest ion that needed answering. Perhaps that was Jones's cue; she turned away, and in passing dropped her hand to the plays strewn out in the light across my dressing table. "I've been thinking about these all morning," she said. "They're junk." She lowered her shoulder, lifted her eyes to mine. "But keep them anyway. They're the best kind of junk there is."

When she had gone I looked out at Lon and he stood in the hallway looking in at me. "What is she?" I said. Lon only shook his head. He didn't say a word.