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windows while they come to see what is in the dollhouse and in the wicker chest, while they go upstairs to my mother and then return so I can tell them again, "The milk." But they still do not understand.
    "She killed them, of course," one man says. "But I don't see why the milk."
    Only when they speak to the neighbors down the road and learn how she came to them, needing the cans of milk, insisting that she carry them herself to the car, the agony she was in as she carried them, only when they find the empty cans and the knife in a stall in the barn, can I say, "The milk. The blood. There was so much blood, you know. She needed to deny it, so she washed it away with milk, purified it, started the dairy again. You see, there was so much blood."
    That autumn we lived in a house in the country, my mother's house, the house I was raised in. I have been to the village, struck even more by how nothing in it has changed, yet everything has, because I am older now, seeing it differently. It is as though I am both here now and back then, at once with the mind of a boy and a man.

 
    For the next ten years, I worked exclusively on book-length fiction. After finishing
First Blood
in 1971, I wrote several different types of novels, including a pursuit novel,
Testament
, a non-supernatural horror novel,
The Totem
, and a historical western,
Last Reveille
. Simultaneously, I continued to commit myself to teaching. There wasn't time for short fiction. Or energy — whenever I did sit down to attempt a short story, I found the effort frustratingly difficult. My block was finally broken in 1981 with "The Partnership." My inspiration for the story was a graduating senior who was worried about his job prospects. He did well, as it turned out, but I got to thinking about the lengths that some graduates might go to land a job.
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The Partnership
    Â« ^ »
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    Sure, it was cold-blooded, but there didn't seem another way. MacKenzie had spent months considering alternatives. He'd tried to buy his partner out, but Dolan had refused. Well, not exactly. Dolan's first response had been to laugh and say, "I wouldn't let you have the satisfaction." When MacKenzie kept insisting, Dolan's next response was, "Sure, I'll let you buy me out. All it takes is a million dollars." Dolan might as well have wanted
ten
. MacKenzie couldn't raise a million, even half a million or a quarter, and he knew that Dolan knew that.
    It was typical. MacKenzie couldn't say "Good morning" without Dolan's disagreeing. If MacKenzie bought a car, Dolan bought a bigger, more expensive one, and just to rub the salt in, Dolan bragged about the deal he got. And if MacKenzie took his wife and children on vacation to Bermuda, Dolan told him that Bermuda wasn't anything compared to Mazatlan where Dolan took his wife and kids.
    The two men argued constantly. They favored different football teams. Their taste in food was wildly different (lamb chops versus corned beef). When MacKenzie took up golf, his partner was suddenly playing tennis, pointing out that golf was just a game while tennis, in addition, was good exercise. But Dolan, even with his so-called exercise, was overweight. MacKenzie, on the other hand, was trim, but Dolan always made remarks about the hairpiece MacKenzie wore.
    It was impossible. A Scotsman trying to do business with an Irishman, MacKenzie should have known their relationship would never work. But at the start, they'd been rival builders, each attempting to outbid the other for construction jobs and losing money in the process. So they'd formed a partnership. Together they were more successful than they'd ever been independently. Still trying to outdo each other, one would think of ways to turn a greater profit, and the other would feel challenged to be twice as clever. They cut costs by mixing too much gravel with the concrete, by installing low-grade pipes and sub-spec insulation. They kept special books for the IRS.
    MacKenzie-Dolan