Sight Unseen

by Andrew Neiderman

  “I didn’t say I wouldn’t go for sure,” he said, almost under his breath.

  “We’ll meet at Chonin’s at eight forty-five,” Tony said. “We ain’t waitin’ for nobody either,” he added looking at David. David pulled out some grass and tried to blow on a blade between his palms to make it sing. Instead of that, however, they heard the train whistle as it rounded the turn to head through the village.

  “Here she comes,” Rube said.

  The gate to stop traffic went down by the station. When David looked at Ted Davis and Diane again, he saw them walking slowly around the car, studying the street. From the way they were looking and acting, he knew something was wrong.

  “All right,” Tony said standing up, “let’s rush across just before she gets here. No one goes until I say.”

  All of them stood obediently, driven by the challenge of courage. David looked from face to face and saw the excitement in their eyes. Why was it so thrilling to taunt death? he wondered, and why was it that older people didn’t do it as much? Was it because they were closer to death and understood it was nothing to tease?

  His heart started to pound in anticipation, just as everyone else’s did while they got set to play the spontaneous game of train-chicken. They dug their feet into the ground for a good forward thrust. David looked at Ted and Diane again. They were standing by the driver’s side of the car now. After a moment Ted went back into the butcher shop, and Diane waited by the car. David hoped she would look across the street and see them charging down the hill, challenging death.

  When he looked back at the engine though, he saw something that glued his feet to the ground. The engineer was looking out of the window, and from the way the late afternoon sun whitened his skin and reflected off his glasses, his face looked like a skull.

  The train whistle shrieked, and the engine bore down on the village. David could feel the very earth beneath him shake. Diane looked up from the street. Birds on store rooftops flew madly against the sky. Pedestrians stopped walking and stopped their conversations to turn toward the approaching train.

  “Now!” Tony screamed, and everyone but David shot down the hill shouting at the top of their voices. The engine was only twenty feet from them. David didn’t move as it roared past. Between the cars he could see all of his friends congratulating each other and shouting back at him. It was a long freight train so they started away, leaving him on the other side. By the time the train was completely past him, the others were down to the center of town, crossing over and into the various directions of their homes.

  Diane and Ted were still at his car. David walked down the slope slowly and crossed toward them. They didn’t notice his approach, but he heard Ted say, “I had it in my pocket. I’m almost sure of it.”

  “What happened?” David asked. Diane smirked, but even that expression wasn’t ugly, he thought. She could never be ugly. Now that he was right beside her, he realized he was just about her height.

  “Ted lost his car keys.”

  “I thought I had them in my pocket. They’re not around the car and they’re not anywhere in the store. They can’t just disappear, can they?” he asked, his long arms out for emphasis.

  “You looked in the car?”

  “Sure,” he said. “What do you think?”

  “Well, I’ve got to get this meat home,” Diane said. “My mother needs it for supper tonight.”

  “I’ll have to call my father to bring me the other set of keys,” Ted said, his voice filled with defeat and frustration. “He’s going to be pissed.”

  “Want me to help look?” David offered.

  “We looked everywhere,” Diane said turning to him. Her smile was polite, but impersonal. “Thanks.”

  He felt his heart sink with disappointment. She looked through him, not at him, when she spoke.

  “Let him look. Who the hell cares if he looks?” Ted said. He reached into his pocket for some change and went to the pay phone on the corner.

  “Sounds strange,” David said. “It’s gotta be here.”

  “I don’t know. I can’t wait around all day,” she said. The dimple in her cheek flickered as she expressed some anger. Her eyes sparkled, and he thought of the tips of the flames on birthday candles.

  He opened the car door and looked at the ignition lock. Then he touched it and thought about the key. For a moment he envisioned a basketball, and that confused him. She watched him with vague interest. He smiled at her and then, without looking anywhere for the key, he said, “It’s under the seat. He must’ve dropped it and kicked it there by accident.”

  “Huh?” She watched him reach down and under and come up with the key. It was on a small chain that also held a gold-plated basketball charm. “I don’t believe it,” she said. “Why didn’t we think of that?”

  David shrugged and handed her the key.

  “Thanks,” she said.

  “It’s nothing,” he said, but she was already running toward the pay phone to tell Ted. He watched her for a moment, locked her smile of her gratitude in his vault of memories and started for home.

  He had gone about half a block before he wondered, himself, how he knew that key was there. He just sensed it. No, he thought, saw it was more accurate. It appeared to him under the seat. Just luck, he thought, or logic. He was so deep in thought about it that he didn’t hear Ted and Diane pull up beside him. The window was rolled down on Diane’s side, and Ted leaned across her to call to him.

  “Hey, thanks,” Ted said.

  “Oh, sure.”

  “Need a lift?” Diane asked. He thought about it, thought about riding in the same car with her.

  “Sure, if it’s no problem.”

  “No problem,” Ted said. “You saved my ass. My father wasn’t even home yet, and if he had to come down to get me and we found the key in the car afterward…I don’t even want to think about it. Get in, Superman.”

  She opened the door and slid over to make more room for him in the front. Even so, his thighs touched hers, and his hand grazed her arm.

  This close to her, she was even more beautiful to him. Everything about her conspired to make him a worshipper: the scents of her hair spray and her perfume; the warmth of her body; the electricity of her very life force. He felt himself tuning into her, dialing himself into her frequency the way he would find a radio station. All other sound, all other sight was driven away. His concentration was so intense that he thought they took similar breaths. Even their hearts beat in synchronization. He made her part of him and himself part of her.

  He realized he was doing it again: imagining things so vividly that he lost track of what was real and what was not. In fact, he didn’t realize he was home when they arrived there.

  “This is it, isn’t it?” Ted asked when he made no move to get out of the car.

  “Oh, yeah, thanks,” he said looking at his house. He regretted its existence and wished they could ride forever in search of it. He shook off the fairy tale and got out of the vehicle.

  “So long,” Diane said smiling at him. It was a different smile this time. The warmth in her face was so real and so sincere it was difficult to pull himself away from her. He wanted to run the tips of his fingers gently over the tiny freckles just below her eyes. She turned back to Ted. “I got to get this meat home,” she reminded him, and David came crashing back into reality.

  Suddenly he wanted to warn her, to tell her about his friends planning to spy on her. No one should see her the way he saw her, he thought. It would take away from the special relationship he had conjured between them. He didn’t want to share that with anyone. And anyway, all of them out there, gaping at her, commenting, making jokes—it could turn her into something cheap and make the scene into a page from one of those girlie magazines kept on the high shelf in Chonin’s.

  “So long,” he said. He couldn’t say anything else. The words wouldn’t come because no matter what he thought, they were still words of betrayal.

  Feeling defeated, he stoo
d on the road and watched them drive away. Suddenly something chilling went past him in the direction of the car. It moved like a shadow cast by a great cloud, but when he looked up, he saw that the sky was clear. By the time he looked after them again, they had made the turn at the bottom of the hill and were gone. He felt the need to run after them and shout out to warn them about something. But what?

  He looked about frantically as though the answer had lingered behind and was loitering about his street, but there was nothing tangible, no hints, no sounds—nothing but the feeling. He had come to respect his feelings, to listen to them and to trust them. They came from somewhere deep inside him, perhaps from that portion of the brain unused by most people.

  “I have a power,” he whispered to himself, really making the conclusion for the first time. Yet he realized it was a power he didn’t understand and certainly not yet a power he could control. He was like an undisciplined but wonderful racehorse thrusting himself with great speed and grace in every direction, just reveling in the strength and the knowledge that he had that strength.

  Who would school him? Who would teach him the control and help him to make what he had into something useful? Could he do it himself? Teach himself self-discipline?

  This was frustrating, but more than frustrating, it was frightening. Perhaps he had the power to walk into a room and know that somewhere in it there was danger, but until he could aim that power and locate the danger, the power only added to his ordinary fear. In fact, it made him more vulnerable to fear. He saw the danger and the death everywhere, just like he had seen it on the approaching train today.

  But how could he live in a world in which everything was intensified? Would he burn up quickly? Was that what his grandmother was trying to tell him?

  He was different, and for a while today, he thought the difference was something good. Look what he had done for Ted and Diane. Now, as he stood before his house looking after the cloud of darkness and Ted Davis’s car, he felt more alone than ever.

  No one would understand him; no one would help him. All he could hope to do was try to ignore the visions and the feelings.

  The cloud was gone. The mystery had made him uneasy, but that uneasiness was passing as he turned to his house and thought about the enticing aromas and flavors of the meal his grandmother had prepared.

  He could do this—he could be like everyone else.

  Couldn’t he?

  The silence drove him into the sanctity of his home.

  4

  He hadn’t intended to meet his friends and go spying on Diane Jones, but he couldn’t get her out of his mind. Perhaps if he went along, he thought, he could prevent it somehow. He didn’t have much homework and, after supper, he did what little he had very quickly. No one checked on him. Roselyn Steiner, like most parents, didn’t show concern until the report cards came out, but he had already developed a sense of academic responsibility, which was another thing distinguishing him from most of his friends. Sometimes he felt they resented him because of it, but he couldn’t help it, just as he couldn’t prevent the other things that made him feel different.

  His mother announced she was going to the movies with Fred Myers, a widower whom she had been seeing on and off over the last year and a half.

  As far as David could tell, it was still a quite casual romance. Sometimes weeks went by without their doing anything together, and Fred rarely came to the house to spend any time with them. David didn’t mind him all that much. He was unassuming and pleasant, and he had brought him a few nice presents, including a powerful, multi-battery flashlight that threw a beam of light nearly all the way up the hill from his house.

  Myers was the business manager for the Centerville Steam Laundry, the biggest non-resort business in the county. Rumor was that he had large stock holdings and could live comfortably off those earnings alone. David knew the women kidded his mother about the romance, but from the tone of their comments, he suspected some of them were jealous.

  After his mother left, he went into his room. He knew his grandmother would fall asleep next to the radio, listening to a program of classical music.

  He started to work with his erector set, but his fingers trembled when he tried putting the smaller screws and nuts together. He couldn’t fight off the image of Diane Jones inches away from him, her lips gently pulled back into a soft smile, her eyes bright and as excited as the eyes of a newborn baby seeing things for the first time. There was such a vibrancy about her, a healthy energy that revealed itself in the smoothness of her skin, the line of her neck, and the uplift of what had become her magical breasts.

  He kept checking the time. When the hands of the clock pointed to eight-forty, he made the decision to sneak out and meet his friends at the corner. As he expected, his grandmother was asleep in her chair. He went to the back door quickly, opened it softly and slipped out into the night. Then he ran around the house and charged over the driveway and down the hill, still unsure as to what he would do when he met his friends.

  He was in such a hurry that he didn’t see the automobile coming from Maple Avenue. He heard the car brakes squeak and jumped to the side instinctively. When he looked back, he saw Peter Sills bent over his steering wheel. The big man leaned back slowly and rolled down his window.

  “That was pretty stupid.”

  “Sorry,” David said. “I was in a hurry.”

  Sills said nothing, but he stared at him so intently that David thought he was deciding whether or not to take some additional action. Finally, all he did was shake his head. When he started away, however, the illumination from the streetlights above played tricks with Sills’s face. It bleached out all color, and that reminded David of the skeleton face he had seen often in his nightmares. He watched Sills drive off before continuing on to meet his friends.

  He found only Rube and Tony at the corner. They were sitting on the stoop in front of Selznow’s grocery. They were smoking Camels. Tony had stolen his father’s whole pack this time, getting more courageous about his thefts.

  “Where’s Merle and Carl?” he asked.

  “We’ll give it a couple more minutes and then go without them,” Tony said. No one expected Buzzy would get out. “What’s doin’?”

  “Nothin’.”

  “You wanna a cigarette?”

  “No. My mother’s driving around here,” he added quickly and looked up and down the street to emphasize his anxiety.

  “Your mother don’t think you smoke?” Rube asked. He looked sincerely interested.

  “She smelled it on my clothes once and went crazy. I told her I was just around other people who were smoking, but I don’t think she believed me.”

  “My mother stopped crying about it,” he said. “She told me I could smoke my head off, only don’t ask her for money to buy cigarettes.”

  “What about your father?” David asked. He was always curious about the roles fathers played in his friends’ homes. From what he gathered, he sensed there were specific areas reserved for fathers to administer, and all the rest belonged to the mothers.

  “He was smoking when he was eleven, so he don’t say nothing except keep your hands off my smokes. My brother smokes a pipe,” he added. Rube’s older brother, Stuart, had graduated from high school the year before and was working as an account clerk for the Sandburg Bottling Works. Stuart and Rube were so different from one another that they barely acknowledged each other. Whenever David was over Rube’s house, he got the impression Stuart was more like a boarder. Even so, David wished he had had an older brother.

  David sat on the lower stoop and nodded with understanding after Rube explained. It always seemed to him that his friends were nicer to one another when there were fewer of them together. The pressure to impress one another wasn’t as strong, and they weren’t as afraid to say things about their family life.

  “Rube kept winning on the pinball machine at Charley’s. We finally had to tilt it to leave,” Tony said.

  “I heard his wife say they
were going to change that one. Too many people win on it,” David said. He sat back and tried to act nonchalant, but he couldn’t slow down his heartbeat, and his voice revealed his quickened breathing.

  Out there in the darkness within the glow of a window light, Diane Jones stood waiting unaware. Was she brushing her hair? Doing her nails? Reading? He could have called her and said in a disguised voice, “Keep your shades down tonight.” That would have put an end to it, but he didn’t do it. Why? Was it only because it would be betraying his friends, or did he really want to see her naked again?

  The traffic was light, and there were few people in the street. David saw Gerry Porter come out of the movie theater and stand aimlessly in front of it. He seemed unable to decide whether he should go left or right.

  “Looks like another big night out for Gerry,” Rube said. Tony laughed. Gerry Porter was a somewhat retarded thirty-year-old man who lived with his widow mother. He was often the butt of jokes.

  “He probably left before the movie ended, thinking that it ended,” Tony said. He shook his head and flipped his cigarette butt into the street, nearly hitting a passing car.

  “Maybe we should take him along with us,” Rube said. He was silent for a moment, and David looked up at him.

  “You’re not serious?”

  “I just wonder what he would do. You think he ever thinks about girls?”

  “Just wacks off probably,” Tony said.

  David looked at Gerry with new interest. What was it like to be that old and have the mind of a child? No matter how Gerry’s mother dressed him, he looked sloppy and disheveled a short while afterward. Now, he stood there with his dark-blue, short-sleeve shirt out of his pants, the shirt buttoned wrong so the sides were lopsided. His baggy pants hung loosely on his hips, the cuffs under heel half the time. As usual, his dark-brown hair, clipped unevenly by his mother while he sat restless in the pantry of their house, looked wild and disheveled, strands going straight up and out.

  Gerry’s face had nothing much to recommend it either. His bushy, untrimmed eyebrows sat above his dull, deep-brown eyes like two fat caterpillars lethargically awaiting metamorphosis. He had a wide, but bony nose with large, dark nostrils, the inside rims of which hosted hairs that were clearly visible. As far as David was concerned, part of Gerry’s mental condition had to have something to do with dehydration because his lips were habitually dry and cracked. He had a nervous habit of pressing the back of his right hand up against them and running the hand along the edge of his emerging tongue until he reached his wrist. Then he would wipe his dampened wrist on the side of his pants and, moments later, start again.