Mattoon locked its windows in September, which was not a thing Mattoon had ever had to do.
The war was on. The men who were still in town worked late or sat on porches with the radio low. The rest of the country had Germans and ration books to think about. Coles County had a smell that came through the screen after dark and left a woman’s legs empty of will.
Ruth Ellen Price heard it first as sweetness.
Not flowers. Not cake. A chemical sweetness, close to the perfume counter at the dime store and then wrong, as if the perfume had been left in a hot room. She was in the front parlor with the lamp on and the paper open to the casualty lists. Her husband was at the rail yard. The baby was asleep in the back room. The window was raised three inches because the house held heat like a closed fist.
The sweetness thickened.
Ruth Ellen stood. Her mouth burned. Her lips felt as if they had been painted with something that wanted to stay. She took one step toward the window and her knees forgot the floor. She went down beside the davenport and could not make her hands push her up. She could hear herself breathing in a thin, astonished way. She could not call loud enough for the neighbor.
Outside, on the strip of grass between the walk and the hydrangeas, a figure stood at the screen.
Tall. Thin. A dark coat that did not belong to any man on that block. A hat brim low enough to cancel a face. In one gloved hand, something metal caught the porch light: a sprayer, the kind a person used on flies in summer, the nozzle aimed at the gap Ruth Ellen had left for air.
She tried to say her husband’s name. What came out was air.
The figure pumped once.
The sweetness became a pressure in her throat. Her legs were water. In the back room the baby did not wake. That, later, was the detail that stayed in her. The house had been entered without being entered. The night had reached through three inches of open window and taken the use of her body as if use were a thing that could be borrowed.
Then the figure was gone. She did not see it leave. The grass held no clear print in the morning, only the flattened place where someone might have stood.
By the end of the week the paper had a name for it.
Mad Gasser. Anesthetic prowler. Phantom.
Other women said the same sweetness, the same burning mouth, the same sudden vacancy in the knees. A few said they had seen a woman in a man’s coat. A few said a man too thin to be a man. Police walked the blocks after dark. Husbands sat up with flashlights and borrowed shotguns and found only each other in the alleys, startled, armed, ridiculous with fear.
Ruth Ellen kept the windows shut. The house grew hotter. She slept in a chair at the foot of the baby’s crib with a handkerchief over her face like a fool and still woke once to that sweetness at the sill, fainter, as if the thing outside were testing the wood.
Mattoon became a town that listened to its own screens.
People telephoned the station for a car backfire, for a cat, for a neighbor lighting a pipe. The panic had a weather. It sat over the porches. It made ordinary night sounds into a pump handle and a nozzle. Doctors spoke of nerves. The paper printed both the nerves and the nights. Neither explanation opened a window.
After two weeks the sweetness stopped coming to Ruth Ellen’s house. It stopped coming to the houses around hers, or the houses stopped reporting it, which was not the same thing and felt like the same thing. The police had no man in a cell. They had a season.
Ruth Ellen’s legs remembered the floor. Her mouth forgot the burn. She never again raised the parlor sash after dusk, not in September, not in July. When her husband asked why, she said the heat was better than the smell. He did not argue. He had walked those blocks with a light. He had seen how many other lights were moving.
The baby grew. The war ended. Mattoon went back to being a town that left its windows an inch up in late summer, except on the streets where the women still checked the screens with their fingers before they slept.
The Gasser did not need a face in order to remain. He needed a gap in a window, a sweet wrong smell, and a body that learned, for one night, that standing was a privilege.
They still tell it in Coles County when the weather turns and the hydrangeas go heavy. Lock the windows. Do not look for prints in the morning. The prints were never the point.
The ones who leave the sash up learn it in the same order.
The sweetness that is not flowers.
The burn on the mouth.
The knees that forget the floor.
The hat at the screen.
And the metal nozzle, catching the porch light, for as long as it takes to pump once.
