Burn the Dark

by S. A. Hunt

  Walker Memorial, where she’d gone to church a few times under the instruction of her therapists in her junior year of high school. Lasted about a month, but she could still hear the vaulted echoes of footsteps, smell the varnish on the pews, the dusty carpet, the faint reek of ancient hymnal books with stiff pages.

  “But you can’t take the country out of the girl,” said Joel, turning down the stereo so he could talk. He took out an iPhone and texted someone, typing with one thumb. “Been a few years, ain’t it?”

  “Yeah.” Robin spoke to the window, the world wheeling past her face like a diorama. They passed the Victory Lanes alley on 7th and Stuart, the neon sign out front showing a bowling ball knocking two pins into the rough shape of a V over and over. “I didn’t think I’d ever be back here. Lot of bad memories.”

  “You said this morning you wanted to pay your respects to your mom?” He attached his phone to a magnetized ball on the dash, click, where it perched above the radio.

  “Yeah. I might hit up my old house too, if I think I can handle it.”

  Black Velvet paused at a traffic light and the two of them sat there, listening to the muscle car idle. Joel sniffed, tugging his nose. He glanced out the window and then back at her as if he were about to give her nuclear secrets. “Hey, you want me to go with you?” he said in his own laconic Georgia drawl. Ay, you want me to go witchu? “You know, moral support? Or whatever? I don’t know when you wanna go, but I got some time off coming.”

  “I don’t know yet.” Robin’s twang matched it in a way. Iono yet. “Maybe some time this week.”

  “Lemme know. I’ll be there with bells on.” He flicked the tiny disco ball hanging from his rearview mirror and light danced around the interior of the car. “Jingle jangle.” No response from the woman in the passenger seat, so Joel leaned forward to catch her eye. “Hey, you gonna be aight? Must have been a hell of a nightmare. You say they happen all the time?”

  “Used to get ’em real bad back when I was in the hospital, after the fire.” After the fire, she always thought of it, because it was easier to focus on the fire than the sight of her dying mother looking up at her from the floor. “The medication helped. After a while they stopped … but by then I was basically a wooden mannequin, so it didn’t even matter.”

  The light turned green, and Joel eased through the intersection, the car’s engine grumbling. “Yeah, them anti-psychotics and anti-depressants, they can straight-up turn you inside out.”

  “You been on that stuff?”

  Joel made a flinchy sort of face and said, “Oh hell yeah. Baby, I’m a gay black man in the backwoods south. Even if my mama hadn’t lost her mind and drove my brother away and turned me into a fucking basket case, I’d still be on this town’s shit list. Some days I’d be fit to be tied if I didn’t have something to soften the blow.” He flexed a smoothly muscular arm. “Take this python right here, this started when I was workin’ for Mr. Barnett fresh outta high school, doing landscaping for his lil shit-ass company. Hard work toting around bags of concrete and big-ass rocks and digging holes all day. After a year and a half of that, I started to get swole. And you know what? I caught a little less shit because of it. People looked at these biceps and it made their bullshit dry up in their mouth.”

  “You ever get in any fights?”

  “A couple. People talkin’ shit about my mama. That’s why I don’t work for Barnett no more.”

  “You like fighting?”

  “No! Not at all. Hell naw. You kidding me? Look at this shit I got on. This is actual silk. I painted my muhfuckin’ nails. I hate fighting. I like my face the way it is, and I like my guts not full of holes. I’d rather smoke a little good-good and drive my car and play some video games and mind my own business. But sometimes people like to make their circus your circus.”

  He drove on. She noticed that he kept glancing into the rearview mirror, peering through it as if it were a mailslot. “And sometimes,” he continued, “when they see you get big, they send a few more dudes. That’s why I learned how to move out the way, too. How to drive. How to be elusive. Lot of Black folks, we talk about bein’ invisible, you know—white people, they can look right through you, like you ain’t even there. I judo that shit, right? I make it work for me. I’m like a ninja, I vanish. Ali said float like a butterfly. One minute I’m there, the next, I ain’t. Ain’t nothing but burnt rubber and a little bit of Forever Red in the air.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Robin.

  “For what?”

  “That you had—have—to put up with that kind of shit.”

  “Don’t be. Made me a stronger person. I made enough money there to make a down payment on Black Velvet. Either that or a security deposit on an apartment, and after Fish left to make his bones and get rich, I had to stay behind, live in our old house, and take care of my moms.” A few seconds passed and then he said, “I wasn’t really ever as smart as Fish. I didn’t have any choice in the matter.” He shrugged, glancing at her. “I do what I can, but I ain’t my brother.” He patted the dashboard. “But I got my Velvet here, I got gas in the tank and something to eat, and that’s enough for me.”

  They stopped for another traffic light, this one in front of a Taco Bell. Someone had stolen the C off the sign out front so instead of HIRING CLOSERS, it said HIRING LOSERS. Joel leaned forward, catching her eye with a look of concern.

  “So: the nightmares,” he said. “You wanna talk about ’em?”

  Robin gazed out the window, staring her reflection in the face. After a few moments to find the words, she spoke.

  “In my dream, I’m a little girl again, and my mom is still alive.” She elected not to mention the Red Lord. Seemed a little too heavy for a night like this, and for such a cramped space. “My mom and I go out the back door to talk to my dad while he’s mowing the lawn, and she starts acting weird, and then turns into a tree. And then she bursts into flames and starts to burn, and I always wake up before I can put her out.”

  “Weird.”

  As they pulled into the diagonal parking in front of his brother’s comic book store, Joel leaned over in a conspiratorial way, and murmured, “Well, it’s good to have you back, even if being back in town is making you have nightmares. You always welcome to come down to my place and share a bottle of cognac with me. I find the nectar of the gods is most efficacious when it comes to knockin’ y’ass out so you can sleep the dreamless sleep of the innocent.”

  Robin took a moment to study his smooth, open face. “You know, I might takes you up on that.”

  “Maybe we’ll even play a little dress-up like we did when we was kids,” Joel said, putting the car into Park and shutting off the leonine engine. “We won’t have to borrow your mama’s clothes to get gussied up like back then.” He flicked an earring. “I buy my own shit now!”

  5

  Roy was out gassing ant-hills when the sun went down. He slipped a Maglite out of the pocket of his jeans and took a knee, watching the gasoline soak in. Hundreds of ants percolated up from the tunnels, scrambling over each other in the pale blue-white glow of the flashlight beam.

  They had found a grasshopper somewhere and dragged it back to the nest, and they had been in the process of cutting it into pieces and pulling it down into the dirt when he’d interrupted them. He liked to imagine the jackboot tromping of their tiny feet, the sound of a klaxon going off as the gasoline washed down into the corridors of the nest, little panicked ant-people running to strengthen levees, hauling children to safety, swept away by the stinking flood into dark confines.

  Roy enjoyed watching videos on the Internet of riots and fights, natural disasters, and sometimes people falling off of bicycles and skateboards. Fights were fun as long as they were street-fights. Ultimate Fighting was too structured—he didn’t watch fights for the gore or brutality; the unpredictability was what drew him, the chaos and incongruity, the panic and frenzy that was almost slapstick in a way. Aimless beating, kicking, the rending of shirts and slipping and
falling and flopping around, reducing each other to meaningless ragdolls.

  If he were a decade or two younger, he probably would have enjoyed playing video games like the Grand Theft Auto series.

  As it was, behind the wheel he often fantasized about driving off the highway and tearing through backyards and flea markets, plowing through birthday parties and bar mitzvahs. Not so much for the violence of it, but for the strange sight of a car tear-assing through a place you didn’t expect to see it. You just don’t see things like that, and that’s what he enjoyed: things “you just don’t see.”

  When he was a kid, he’d gotten his hands on a smoke bomb and set it off in the gym showers after sophomore phys-ed, when he knew it would be full of unsuspecting people. Waiting until the smoke had almost filled the room and was beginning to curl over the tops of the shower curtains, Roy had shouted, “Fire! Fire!” and had run outside.

  His father had whooped his ass for it, but seeing thirty butt-naked high-schoolers storming through the gymnasium had been the highlight of his high school experience.

  He tipped another pint of gasoline onto the ants for good measure and got back on the lawn mower, starting it up and climbing the sprawling hill toward the adobe hacienda. A garage stood open out back where the driveway snaked up out of the darkness and curled around the house like a cat’s tail. Roy drove the lawn mower inside, filling the space with a deafening racket.

  When he cut the engine off, the silence was even louder. He sat in the dark stillness beside a huge Winnebago, packing a box of cigarettes.

  Outside, the evening was tempered by the faint murmur of Blackfield’s fading nightlife, an airy, whispering roar washing over the trees. In close pursuit was the constant drone of cicadas and tree frogs.

  Southern cities don’t necessarily have nightlife. You go up north or out to Atlanta, maybe, or Birmingham—Roy had been to Atlanta twice and didn’t care to ever go back, that traffic was horseshit—and yeah, the cities don’t sleep. Life runs around the clock. Out here in the sticks, though, a city of six thousand, seven thousand like Blackfield, there’s a few creepers after dark. Meth heads, winos, that sort of thing, sometimes hookers. But for the most part the main boulevard is a clear shot from one end of town to the other after dark, cold hollow streets like a John Carpenter movie.

  He lit up, wandered back up the driveway and around the house sucking smoke out of the Camel as he went. Standing at the top of the drive, he was treated to a horizon swimming with the red cityglow of Blackfield, and under the jagged rim of the treetops glimmered the windows of the blue Victorian on the other side of the trailer park, a tiny hive of glowing elevens in the darkness.

  A gray cat with honey eyes trotted out of the shadows.

  As he blew the smoke into the night, multicolored lights flickered in the Victorian’s cupola. Someone was watching TV up there. “Looks like somebody’s moved into the old Martine place.”

  An old woman stood by a barbecue grill crackling with flames. She was tall, taller than beanpole Roy even, and lean, broad-shouldered, with feathered gray hair. That and her hawkish nose made her resemble some sort of dour gray Big Bird.

  Or a bird of prey.

  The ice in her glass tinkled as she took a sip of a Long Island iced tea. Cutty always started dinner with one to whet her appetite. “Know anything about them?” she asked, as the gray cat slinked over to her and darted up onto the patio table.

  “Black fella from up north.” Roy ashed his Camel and spat a fleck of tobacco. The wind rolling across the top of the hill pushed at his copper hair. He’d once let her make him a Long Island, but it was so strong he could barely finish it. No idea how she could manage it, with her scarecrow figure. She wore enormous shirts and patterned sweaters and dressed in loose layers, so she always seemed to be wearing wizard-robes, even in the heat of summer. Roy was rail-thin and the jeans he wore draped from his bones, but even so he still sweat right through his shirts when he worked.

  “Him and some fat chick brought the car down couple weeks ago and the real estate agent showed him around the place. Looked like his sister. Or his wife. Or, hell, his grandmother. I can’t damn tell how old any of ’em are anymore.”

  “Have you spoken to him?” Cutty threw another handful of junk mail on the fire and gave the cat’s back a slow, luxurious stroke. The smoke stank, and the ink turned the flames green.

  “No.”

  “Have you got anything for supper?” she asked the flames.

  “No, ma’am.”

  Cutty closed the grill lid and started off toward the back of the house. “Why don’t you stay and eat with us, then? Theresa is making pork chops.”

  “I just might,” said Roy. “Thank you.”

  As soon as the door opened he was bombarded by the aroma of pork rub and steak fries, corn, green beans, baked apples. Theresa LaQuices bustled around the spacious kitchen, buttering rolls and stirring pots.

  Theresa was a solid and ruggedly pretty iceberg of a woman, a few years younger than Cutty. Her raven-black hair was dusted with gray. Spanish or maybe Italian or something, because of her exotic surname and olive skin, but Roy never could quite pin down her accent and it never really struck him as appropriate to ask. She was given to dressing like a woman twenty years her junior, and today she had on a winsome blue sundress roped about with white tie-dye splotches.

  He couldn’t deny she wore it well. Against the well-appointed kitchen, she looked like she belonged on the cover of a culinary magazine. Reminded him of that Barefoot Contessa chick, only a lot older and a lot heavier.

  “Well hello there, mister!” Theresa beamed. “Are you gonna be joinin’ us for dinner?”

  Roy realized Cutty had disappeared. She had an odd habit of doing that. “Yes, ma’am. And it smells damn good. I wasn’t even hungry before I came in here, but now I could eat a bowl of lard with a hair in it.”

  Theresa made a face and gave a musical laugh. “I didn’t prepare any lard, handsome, but you’re welcome to a pork chop or two.”

  “I’ll be glad to take you up on that.”

  Roy passed through a large dining room, past a long oak table carved with a huge compass-rose, and into a high-ceilinged living room with delicate wicker furniture. On a squat wooden pedestal was a flatscreen television that would not have been out of place on the bridge of a Star Trek spaceship.

  Behind the TV were enormous plate-glass windows looking out on the front garden inside the adobe privacy wall, a quaint, almost miniaturized bit of landscaping with several Japanese maples and a little pond populated by tiny knife-blade minnows.

  The downstairs bathroom was one of many doors in a long hallway bisecting the drafty old house. The slender corridor, like the rest of the house, was painted a rich candy-apple red, and as the light of the lamps at either end trickled along the wall Roy felt as if he were walking up an artery into the chambers of a massive heart.

  He washed his hands in a bathroom as large as his own living room. It was appointed with an ivory-white claw-foot tub, eggshell counters, a white marble floor, and a gilded portrait mirror over a sink resembling a smoked-glass punch bowl.

  The vanity lights over the oval mirror were harsh, glaring. Roy was surprised a house occupied by three elderly women would have a bathroom mirror that threw your face into such stark moon-surface relief. Every pit, pock, blemish, and crease stood out on his skin and all of a sudden he looked ten, twenty years older. And he had a lot of them for being in his forties.

  His lower lids sagged as if he hadn’t slept—which he hadn’t, really, he didn’t sleep well—and his red hair was fine, dry, cottony, piled on his head in a Lyle Lovett coif. The lights made his face look sallow, made him look melty and thin, like a wax statue under hot lamps.

  Junk food, probably. Slow-motion malnutrition. He ate a lot of crap because he didn’t cook.

  He could cook, no doubt—he could cook his ass off, learned from his mother Sally—but he never really made the effort. Not because he was lazy, but
because he could never find anything in the cabinets that enticed him enough to cook it (he was a chef, but not a shopper) and he never had anybody to eat with. So he really appreciated the chance for a proper home-cooked meal that left him out of the equation and gave him company to eat it with.

  Back in the hallway, Roy passed an open door through which he could see a headless woman in a crisp new wedding dress.

  “Hi there,” said a woman’s voice.

  “Hello, Miss Weaver.”

  An elderly flower child came flowing around the bridal mannequin to him, decked out in layers of wool and linen in muted earth colors. “How many times I gotta tell you?” she said, wagging a knurled finger. “Call me Karen. You staying for dinner tonight?”

  Locks of silver-blonde hair tumbled down from underneath a green knit cap and a long curl of yellow tailors’ measuring tape was yoked over the back of her neck, draping over her bosom. Karen Weaver had the open, honest face of a grandmother, and eyes as blue as a Montana sky. A silver pendant on her chest twinkled in the light, some obscure religious symbol he didn’t recognize. Could have been a pentagram, except there were too many parts, too many lines.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She playfully slapped him on the shoulder. Wisps of Nag Champa incense drifted through the open doorway behind her, accompanied by the sinuous, jangling strains of the Eagles. “Don’t ma’am me, young man.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” grinned Roy. He flinched away before she could slap him again.

  Dinner was excellent. The four of them ate at the compass-rose dining table under the soft crystal glare of a chandelier, Cutty hunched over her plate like a buzzard on roadkill, Theresa with a napkin pressed demurely across her lap. Weaver ate with the slurping-gulping gusto of a castaway fresh off the island.

  In the background, the turntable in the living room was playing one of those old records the girls liked so much—Glenn Miller, Cab Calloway, one of those guys, he wasn’t sure which. Roy was a golden-oldie man himself, dirty southern rock. Skynyrd fan through and through.