His house is set into the side of the hill, cave dwelling-like. But this is a pine forest and the hill is a mountain, his house no cave but a log cabin. He climbs the hill behind the cabin to see the driveway that winds up to his garage. From here he can see when someone is coming.

She's driving up in a Ford or a Buick or something; it makes him laugh out loud. The car, moving as slowly as a tank, is as wide as the road. He wonders if she's been driving like that all the way up Boulder Canyon.

After the high, winding gravel roads, he thinks, she'll probably get out dizzy and ghost-white, a swearing flat-lander, complaining of the altitude. He stands watching like some sort of mountain cat stalking its prey, a hundred feet above, thinking about her. This was all her idea, to fly out from New York, rent a car, and drive up here, just to interview him. A little fright would serve her right, then. He smiles.

Her letter had been brief and courteous. Would he allow her, an editor at his publishers, to come to Colorado to talk with him for the anniversary edition of his children's book? Something for the dust jacket of The Tales of Edward Fitch, or for the press or something.

She'd mentioned his right to editorial veto. Besides, she'd written in a silly, almost childish postscript, she'd always been curious about Edward Fitch. "Mysterious," had been her word to describe him.

He starts down the slope to meet her, thinking that there's no mystery to her, and that he'll give her an hour. He hadn't liked her over the phone, when he'd

called her collect a week before to tell her she could come. Standing there in town, at the pay phone in the post office, he'd been put off by her Eastern accent and fast talking. Maria Sullivan. He should have pulled out then. He still doesn't know why he let her come.

Brittle, yellowed pine needles crack and crunch under his feet; the sound is like fire. It's early in the fire season, but already August has been dry, too dry. He hopes she isn't a smoker.

Tucked away as he keeps himself, far up the mountain in his cabin, he sees few people and goes to town only occasionally, when he has to. Last week's trip down, to call Maria Sullivan, had been his first in several months. He thinks of that day, remembering the queerness of things. The buildings and cars and roads had all looked the same, but something was up. He remembers how uneasy the people had seemed. He'd thought of livestock moving nervously before a storm, when the sun still shines and the clouds still seem harmless, suspended out on the horizon; that's how the people had seemed to him that day, like skittish animals growing more and more frantic. No women to be seen, which was funny; there had been just men gathered in stores, restless, on corners in groups of two and three, talking.

Then, in line at the food market he'd overheard a conversation:

"Never been this bad before. Not that

time with Castro in Cuba, or even last year, when people actually started coming up the damn canyon. Goddamn false alarm!" The other man had nodded, then said, "It'll be a stampede up here now. You watch."

And so he'd understood, and thought, it's coming;

well, let it. He'd packed his things and got away from them, got home, as soon as he could.

Now he hears the car's engine below him. What person with any brain at all would rent a tank to drive up unknown mountain roads? "Jesus," he breathes, and again tries to picture her.

He sees, from behind the garage, stopping in shadows, that the car is a Mercury. A Mercury. He'd told her to wait at the garage, and she comes in a Mercury.

The car door swings open, and he watches, wanting to see her first.

She's so small and slight that at first he thinks she's a child. But she isn't; she's older than he'd expected, older than she'd sounded on the phone. Her hair is auburn, a mass of copper curls, but streaked with grey.

The sun catches and gleams on both colors. It's beautiful hair. He watches, mesmerized, as she bends at the waist, throwing the hair over her head, and runs her hands through it from the roots out.

Aware that his mouth is

gaping open, he closes it, embarrassed for himself. She flips back up, moving the hair back from her face, running her fingers through like combs. Scratching her nose, as vigorously as she'd attended her hair, she looks around her, up to the heights of the trees, into the sky, then to the garage. He knows she's looking for him.

But he can't stop watching her. When she leans back against the Mercury, he can see too that she has nice breasts. Face to the sun, hands deep in her pockets, one ankle cocked across the other, she waits.

"Hi," he says, walking into the sun towards her. He hears the car radio.

"Ned Fitch."

"Well, yes, there you are," she says, standing up.

"Hello. Maria Sullivan." She smiles. 'I knew you'd have a beard."

He's not a big man at all, but facing her, looking down, he feels like a giant. He wonders if everyone she meets immediately feels responsible for her, the way he does now, because she's so small. He shakes her outstretched hand. She can't be more than five feet tall.

Her eyes are the color of almonds; honest eyes, he thinks.

At once he is glad he let her come.

"Have you heard?" she asks, squinting up.

He sees that she has freckles and fine bones. He can't imagine her age. "Heard what?"

"About the Level Three Alert? This could be it. The president's speaking at two o'clock, on radio and TV.

For all we know, out here under the trees this way, the whole eastern seaboard could be gone. Maybe us next!" She's keyed up, her voice is shrill. "Everyone's frantic.

The airport has really gone crazy. I couldn't get a flight out till tomorrow--maybe. And I couldn't stay at the airport with all those people. I didn't know what else to

do, so I just came on up here." She looks from him to the garage to the trees and back to the car.

"You did the right thing," he tells her, and tucks his hands into his back pockets, watching her, waiting.

I'We could go any minute, I guess," she says. Then, somewhat calmer, running a hand through her hair, "Have you got something cold to drink? My mouth is really dry."

'I don't have a radio, or TV," he says."

"We can come back to the car at two." She switches off the radio, rolls up the windows, and locks the door. She turns, and when he smiles, says, "City girl," but not defensively.

They sit on his porch, which faces east and has a view of the deeply wooded valley below. There is no hint of humanity before them, not even power lines; just pine, fir, some large spruces, quivering aspen, and the clear blue, cloudless sky. They're drinking Molsons, which he'd carried up from town after he'd spoken with her on the phone. Hummingbirds whir around their heads before diving for sugar water in red feeders. She watches the birds as if seeing them for the first time, and he thinks that that might be the case. They haven't spoken about the Level Three Alert or the president's address since climbing to the cabin.

"You're much younger than I expected," she says.

"You didn't do your homework, then, Ms. Sullivan.

The Tales of Edward Fitch was published when I was fourteen."

"Oh, I never believed it. I thought that was baloney, just sales hype." She laughs a little. "How in the world did it get published."

He wants to touch her hair, feel the texture. "You know, you're older than I thought you'd be." He sees her smile, displacing the freckles. "My uncle had a press; he printed those little religious tracts, home devotional booklets, you know, for the Baptists and Disciples of Christ. Ole Uncle Fran printed up a dozen Tales for my mother, his baby sister. Just to be nice, I'm sure. She kept one, gave a couple away, and then sold the rest at a friend's bookshop the week before Christmas." He takes a long drink of beer and sees that she's waiting for more.

"One little printing led to another; those books sold like, I don't know, like penny candy. Everybody wanted one. So before too long, Uncle Fran gave up the sacred and went with the secular. The money was much better. The Tales of Edward Fitch made us a lot of money."

"How did the fourteen-year-old feel about it all?" she asks, ducking as a hummingbird buzzes too close.

He thinks of his poems, verses about his menagerie of imaginary friends, verses he'd chanted to himself and to them for years. One day, when he'd realized he no longer chanted them and was going to forget, he'd written them down. About twenty, some short, some longer, some in rhyme, they'd been the stories of his childhood, a chronicle of his solitary days--nothing more than little ditties of a lonely child. He thinks sometimes that he never should have written them down, that instead he should have let them float off, bobbing out onto the sea of childhood's forgetting. He tells her all this, then adds, "After a couple of afternoons in that bookstore, having to stand and be hugged and patted and sign autographs, I wished I'd never thought of them, let alone written them down."

She makes a face. "Sounds like misery."

He nods. Her sleeves are rolled above her elbows, and he thinks she has the strongest-looking forearms he's ever seen on a woman.

"So," she says, "if you really were fourteen then, that makes you, what, nearly thirty now? Since this is the fifteenth anniversary edition coming out."

"Go to the head of the class, Maria Sullivan," he says, an old loneliness kneeing him in the groin as he looks at her. He wants to kiss her.

"So how old are you?" he asks.

"Old enough to have a married daughter. She and her husband live in England." A change comes into her face when she mentions her child, a heaviness, a mother's worry.

"And a husband?!

"One of those, too." She puts down her beer and twists in her chair. The affection in her voice had only been for her daughter. "What time is it?"

"You've got the watch," he says, gesturing.

"Ten after one," she tells him as if he'd been the one to ask. She stands up, twists nervously, and looks down to the car?"

hard at the cabin. "Can I see the inside before we go

The cabin is dark, the windows small. There's one large room, a fireplace across one wall, an enamel wood-burning cookstove, a pump that brings water into a sink.

A square table and two chairs on a round braided rug are directly at the center. Two rows of six drawers are built into one wall, and along the other walls, books are shelved neatly. Near an old sagging couch and armchair, books are in heaps, piled knee-deep. Hardbacks, paper, everything in neat rows on shelves, or in disorderly stacks on the floor; it is a mountain library. To Maria, it seems as though these books have climbed down from the surrounding trees, as though they belong there and nowhere else.

"This is unbelievable," she says, first inspecting the stove and the fireplace, then the pump, letting a little water run over her hand. "So your Tales made it possible for you to remove yourself the way you have?"

"Made it possible after making it necessary. I never got used to the kind of celebrity the Tales brought.

I'm a writer, or, I write, but I'm not a kids' poet. I got pretty sick of mothers pressing themselves on me, wanting to tell me how much little so-and-so loved my poems. There were too many conversations that began,

'Aren't you the Fitch. . . .' So here I live, as I choose.

As I have to." He looks down at his beer; he's turning the bottle between his palms. "Those royalty checks just keep rolling in. I sure couldn't live on the eighty-five dollars and copies I've made on publishing five stories in six years." He looks up and smiles at her. He loves the way she's listening, with her head tilted, the brown eyes wide.

She touches the carving on the drawers and looks at him, questioning. He nods, yes, it's his work. She fingers the books as she browses, glancing again and again at him, whispering occasionally,

, "Camus, Spinoza.

You have good taste. Joyce, Faulkner." Each time she looks up, his desire for her rises.

"Come and see this." He leads her to a wooden spiral staircase, and they climb. At the top he pulls a

cord that rolls back a sort of shade. The transformation, dark into light, is dazzling.

A skylight, an enormous

clear-glass skylight, brings the outside in. Because the ceiling is so low, they're kneeling. Her hands dangle as she looks up, smiling. The sunlight on her face and in her hair makes him think of fire. More stacks and shelves of books line the loft, with a mattress in the center.

lIThe end of the world is coming," she says, not looking at him, "and you'll play it out here under this quilt and skylight, reading your books.

"Can you think of a better way?!

On their knees, under the pitch of the ceiling and the skylight, he touches her shoulders, hesitantly at first.

"No," she says, pulling back.

But after the contact his hands want more. They grip her firmly, turn her straight towards him. "If what you say is true, then. . . ." His fingers speak to her as much as his voice; they are pressing into her shoulder blades, drawing her closer to him. "Then I am exactly where I want to be and with whom I choose."

"God," she says, her voice flat, "I should get out. I have people. . . ."

He can feel her willingness through his fingers; he knows the trembling isn't the movement of withdrawal but of desire. There hasn't been a woman in this cabin in three years. He's thinking now, it was worth the wait.

In the sunlight her hair blazes; his hands move into it from the nape of her neck. The texture is silky, the curls themselves, smooth, with the grey hair a wiry contrast. The pressure of his hands brings her forehead to his chest, and he feels her warmth through his shirt.

Neither speaks. Ned knows if they say another word it will be over before it begins. She will run, away, down the mountain and back into the world. For this moment he knows only that he wants her, here, with him, no matter what's happening everywhere else.

He guides her back on the quilt, supporting her head as one would a baby's. One hand finds her face, and he draws a light finger over her lips when they move to speak. The fingers of the other hand touch the freckles, individually, and feel the sharp cheekbones beneath them.

He holds her face between his hands and kisses her