Eveningland

by Michael Knight

  “What’s the word?”

  “No answer.” Percy sipped from a glass of water and pointed at the TV. “That’s some rig,” he said.

  Lester said, “Three hundred eighteen channels.”

  “Did you know,” Percy said, “that the first communications satellite launched into orbit from this country was owned by Western Union?”

  Lester looked at him a second.

  “About when was that?”

  Percy shrugged. “The seventies.”

  “Still not much on, though,” Lester said.

  Percy rolled the water glass across his brow. Lester had already told him everything he knew. Which wasn’t much. His mother had fallen. They’d taken her to the hospital in an ambulance. He thought it best not to describe the way his sister sounded on the phone. Babydoll was leaning in the doorway behind them and when Percy set his glass on the coffee table, she started jabbering at his back. Percy looked to Lester for translation. He didn’t know for sure but he would have bet she was telling him to use a coaster. There was a coaster right there in plain sight.

  “She say we’ll listen for the phone. If Sister calls again, I’ll come get you.”

  He moved Percy’s glass to the coaster himself. Percy didn’t notice. He was worried. You could see that. Nodding and blinking like Lester had dragged him out of bed.

  Lucy re-read the last line of her book—The man in black walked away in the rain, Esmerelda’s diamonds clicking in his pocket—but the ending wasn’t anymore satisfying than the first time. She felt weird, disoriented. Then she realized it was raining for real, the windows of her sister’s room blurred with run-off, the sound of it all around her. Her mother had left them with strict instructions: go immediately to Uncle Angus’s, explain the situation to Aunt Nora, ride out the storm over there unless she called. Lucy wasn’t sure how much time had passed since then but it was enough to finish her book and here she was still in her sister’s room, Kathleen murmuring now into the phone.

  “I’m not sure that’s a good idea,” Kathleen said, but her voice was flirty and shrewd. She was talking to Dexter King. He lived just down the road. Kathleen snuck out at least three nights a week to meet Dexter at the empty lot, Uncle Percy’s lot, and Lucy followed her sometimes. They hid themselves inside a huge magnolia so what went on between them was hard to see, but Lucy could hear her sister’s voice, telling Dexter where to put his hands, his lips. The silence between those moments was profound.

  Sometimes, by daylight, she returned to the magnolia and parted the branches and stepped inside. That’s what it was like. Moving from outside in. The magnolia was at least three stories tall and beneath its canopy was a cool, shadowy space big enough to stand in, big enough to move around, the world and the sky barely visible through the leaves.

  “It does sound beautiful,” Kathleen said.

  She turned on her side to face the wall and said something else that Lucy couldn’t hear. Rain drummed on the roof. Not the hurricane yet, Lucy didn’t think, just some lesser storm blown ashore like a herald before a king.

  “We need to go,” Lucy said. “Mom’ll kill us.”

  Kathleen rolled her eyes, covered the phone with her hand.

  “Evaporate,” she said, and Lucy headed down the hall to her room carrying Murder is a Girl’s Best Friend. For a while, she stretched out in bed listening to the rain and trying to get caught up in worrying about her grandmother, pictured her in a gloomy room, machines beeping and purring, her mother beside the bed wracked with despair, tried to make herself cry but it felt like her grandfather’s funeral, the sight of him in his coffin, waxy and pale, as hard to believe in as a trashy novel.

  Lucy had seen her grandfather not an hour before he died, maybe less, she wasn’t sure. For all she knew she was the last person to see him alive. She’d been out on the lawn that morning chasing a butterfly. She had the idea that she would catch it and bring it to school for Mrs. Curtis, who taught science and kept a collection of specimens in a glass-front case. But the butterfly was flitting way up in a dogwood and she couldn’t reach it and the tree was too delicate to climb. It was early enough that there was still dew on the grass. Her grandfather must have seen her as he was leaving for the shipyard.

  “Hello, Little Girl,” he said, and she said, “Hey, Big Man,” because that’s what they called each other, just the two of them.

  He asked what she was doing and she told him and he took off his panama hat and reached up into the tree and scooped the butterfly down to her. She liked that her grandfather was the last man in the world who wore a hat to work.

  “I’ll bring it right back,” she said, already dashing for the house, holding the hat against her chest to keep the butterfly from escaping. “Let me put him in a jar.”

  “I’ll get it later,” he said. “I’m in a hurry,” and then his heart attacked him on the way to work and he ran off the road and died.

  She still had the hat, kept it hidden under her bed. Pale straw. Black band. Not even Kathleen knew. Lucy lay on her belly and reached way back to the wall to find it. She dusted it off and put it on and tipped the brim back from her eyes. Tiptoed down the hall and eavesdropped outside her sister’s room.

  “How will I know?” Kathleen said into the phone.

  Rain clattered against the window like a summons, like someone was pitching handfuls at the pane.

  The doctor rapped once on the open door, then stepped inside without waiting for an invitation and introduced herself to Doodle. She checked her mother’s IV. Checked the ventilator. Made a notation on her mother’s chart. She wore her hair in a messy topknot. Eyeglasses with neon-yellow frames. Doodle had failed to catch her name. She wasn’t sure how much time had passed since they moved her mother out of surgery and into the ICU. The doctor leaned on the windowsill and crossed her arms and Doodle took her mother’s hand.

  “We did the best we could but you need to understand your mom’s hurt pretty bad.” There was a veneer of practiced sympathy in the doctor’s tone, an affected folksiness. She went on, using words like hemorrhage and hippocampus. Doodle listened without hearing in a chair beside her mother’s bed. She understood that she needed to pay attention, ask questions, gather facts for her brothers, but not breaking down required all her concentration. The doctor turned her head and tapped the base of her own skull—she was explaining something to Doodle—and Doodle noticed that the back of her neck was paler than her face.

  “I tried to call my brothers,” Doodle said. “They need to hear this.”

  The doctor paused, the ventilator wheezing into the silence between them. Doodle felt a prickle rising in her cheeks. When Doodle said nothing more, the doctor pressed ahead.

  “The likelihood is some damage has already been done so even if she responds—and I’m not ruling that out—but even if she does you’re gonna have to make some hard decisions pretty soon.”

  “My husband is out of town,” Doodle said. “My father died last year. My brothers. I can’t do this alone.”

  She knew how she must have sounded to this woman but she couldn’t help herself. When her father died, Angus had made every decision, handled every last detail. Doodle’s role had been to hold her mother’s hand, to break the news gently to her children, to help Percy pick out a tie and smile through her tears in the receiving line and make sure everyone had a drink or plate of hors d’oeuvres during the wake. She could do those things. She could not do this. Behind the doctor, rain streaked the window glass but this side of the building was sheltered by a courtyard, the window double-paned and inlaid with mesh, thick enough that you could barely hear the wind.

  “This is a lot to take in,” the doctor said, “I understand,” though it was clear to Doodle that this woman found her pathetic. “I’ll come check on you in a while.”

  Then she went out and Doodle was alone again with her mother. Her head was wrapped in gauze,
lips parted, though no air was moving through them. The ventilator inflated and deflated her lungs. Despite all that, she still looked like herself, her eyelids fluttering, her face aware. Of something but not this: this white room, the rain against the window, her daughter right here beside the bed.

  The sound of the gunshot woke all three children at once but Muriel ignored their cries and went dashing down the stairs, Angus wailing in her arms, visions of her husband lying shot and bleeding on the kitchen floor playing in her head. She found him with the gun at his side, a dizzy look on his face, like he was on the verge of being sick. Facing him was a young white man with his hands in the air. He was wearing a mink coat, her mink coat she realized after a moment, his long arms jutting from the sleeves, his exposed wrists thin and fragile-looking. The air smelled like fireworks. The floor was littered with broken glass.

  “I might have killed you,” A.B. said.

  He brought his free hand up to his chest, took a breath, then closed the distance between himself and the young man in one long stride and hit him backhanded across the face. The young man crumpled, brought his elbows and knees up to protect himself.

  “You stupid, crazy fucker,” A.B. said.

  Angus was still crying and now Doodle was out of bed, calling from the head of the stairs, and all of this was so far removed from what Muriel had expected, that she felt disoriented, lightheaded with confusion and relief. Her eyes found the bullet hole in the wall, a perfect black circle surrounded by crumbling plaster, and it occurred to her that A.B. had pulled his shot on purpose. She identified the shards on the floor as the remains of a juice glass from the cabinet over the sink. A.B. was extending his hand to help the young man up. The young man whimpered and flinched and A.B. had to swat his arms aside in order to pull him to his feet. She studied his face more closely, recognition creeping over her. Mitchell King. Ted and Margaret’s boy. The one who’d gone to special schools. The one who still lived with his parents, though he was more than old enough to be out on his own. Rumor had followed him through his adolescence. The fire in the Caldwells’ garage. The Pressmans’ missing cat. Nothing ever proved or disproved. The Kings hardly mentioned him anymore and no one ever asked.

  A.B. walked him over to a chair at the breakfast table now and forced him to sit. He took the opposite chair, lit a cigarette with a kitchen match, offered one to Mitchell, who accepted it with trembling hands. His fingers were bumping so vigorously he couldn’t strike a match. A.B. took the cigarette, lit it with his own, then passed it back.

  “What’s the matter with you?” he said.

  “I was cold,” Mitchell said. “I was thirsty.”

  “Do you know where you are?”

  Mitchell’s eyes, Muriel noticed, were almost imperceptibly crossed and so wide open at that moment he looked like one of Doodle’s dolls. He glanced from A.B. to Muriel, then settled his gaze on Angus, who was wailing hard and loud enough that he couldn’t catch his breath.

  To Muriel, A.B. said, “Hush that baby up. And see to Doodle and Percy. They’re likely scared to death.”

  The heat in his words returned Muriel to herself and she bounced Angus in her arms on the way back upstairs. There was Doodle on the landing, all keyed up and afraid, and here was Percy whimpering toward her from his room. She murmured reassurances, let them climb into her bed, joined them with the baby. In a little while, A.B. would recount the details for her, how Mitchell had woken up in their backyard with no idea where he was or how he’d gotten there, how the back door was unlocked, how he’d found her mink in the hall closet and fixed himself a glass of water. But that was later. Now, she lifted her purse from the nightstand and fished her rosary out and handed it to Doodle, let the beads pool in the cup of her daughter’s palms. The rosary was knit of silver and pearls, handed down by Muriel’s mother, and Doodle looked upon it with dual reverence. She was seven years old, a second grader at Saint Ignatius School, at an age when piety held a certain glamour for a certain kind of child. She was also, Muriel knew, an ordinary little girl, in love with pretty things and the rosary was a favorite accessory in her dress-up games.

  “Will you say it with me?”

  Doodle said, “They haven’t taught us yet,” so Muriel walked her through the prayers, the sign of the cross, the Apostles’ Creed, an Our Father on the first large bead, Hail Marys on the three small beads that followed. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Angus dozed off almost right away in the crook of Muriel’s arm. She worried that Percy, who was only four, would grow restless with the rosary but he seemed to sense that something out of the ordinary had happened in their house tonight, was happening still right there in the bedroom. Perhaps it was simply the fact that it was so late and they were all awake and he had been granted the rare privilege of his parents’ bed, but he leaned his head on Muriel’s shoulder and chimed, “Amen,” when Doodle and Muriel finished another prayer. Glory Be to the Father on the next large bead, then ten Hail Marys on the adjacent beads, and so on through a final sign of the cross and Muriel found herself, despite everything, lulled calm by the prayers and the nearness of her children and the faraway murmur of her husband’s voice bubbling up through the floor.

  The longer he let himself dwell on the nature of Doodle’s call, the more afraid Percy became. She wouldn’t have bothered if whatever had happened to their mother wasn’t serious. If this was an emergency, he wanted to be home. He drank rum and Dr Pepper and paced the lodge, waiting for a report from Lester. Mutt trailed him at first, back and forth, back and forth, nails ticking on the hardwood, but the dog got bored after a while and sprawled on the rug, his head turning to follow Percy. Finally, when Percy couldn’t stand not knowing another minute, he freshened his drink and whistled Mutt into the passenger seat of his truck.

  For half an hour, the road itself was enough to occupy his thoughts but by the time he reached French Camp, came coasting to a stop at the town’s only light, the bait shop and the post office, the barbecue joint, the flea market, the little high school set back from the road, all of them dark now, not another car in sight, worry about his mother had begun to creep back in. He thought of her alone in that big old house. Doodle and Angus were right next door and he was glad for that, grateful even, but they couldn’t be with her all the time and he doubted their proximity made the nights any easier since his father died. How quiet the house must have seemed, how empty. His father could take up space like nobody in the world. In that moment, he was sure of two things: first, that her loneliness was incurable except by time, and second, that its incurability was beside the point. He knew what she wanted, what he might have done. Her windows looked out over the lawn to the lot she’d saved for him. How hard would it have been to build a little house back there, meet a girl, live a life?

  “Harder than it sounds,” he told Mutt, who was hanging his head out the window.

  Percy had always felt the pull of expectation, the shipyard, the empty lot, and he half believed that one day some latent switch would throw itself inside his chest, some gear would finally catch, and he’d desire the very life he’d been resisting. He’d run a charter boat out of Nags Head for a while. Bought a drive-in movie theater in Pigeon Forge. Opened a bar in Bozeman, which he called Blue Sky after the Allman Brothers’ song and not, as many of his customers believed, after the ubiquitous firmament of the West. He lived in a little apartment upstairs. During the day, Mutt lounged in the open door or wandered between the tables begging scraps and at night, when Percy brought a woman home, he tried to nose between them in the bed.

  Then Angus called to tell him that their father was gone. Heart attack. Hard to imagine that something so ordinary could kill his father. When they hung up, Percy said, “You ever been to Alabama?”

  The woman in his bed said, “Why on earth would anybody want to go to Alabama?” She was round-hipped and heavy-breasted, dark roots visible in her blonde hair. Her husband drove a long-haul truck.


  “I was talking to the dog,” he said.

  He met the rain ten miles farther down the road. Nothing serious at first but he pulled Mutt inside and rolled the window up. It occurred to Percy that he hadn’t seen anybody headed his way in quite some time.

  Another twenty miles and the gas gauge was brushing empty but the next three stations he passed were closed. He was getting nervous when he saw lights maybe fifty yards ahead, made glittery and indistinct by rain. A woman was locking the doors as Percy pulled into the lot. She hesitated, then waved and opened the doors again and Percy rolled up to the pump.

  When the tank was full, he left Mutt to guard the truck and dashed inside.

  “Damn,” he said, meaning the rain.

  The woman was waiting behind the counter. A birthmark ran from her chin to the lower lid of her left eye. Like a dialogue bubble in a comic book. It made her look naïve somehow.

  “Tell me about it. I figured on a big night with all these people clearing out of Mobile but now I’m thinking it’s not worth it. Hole up. Stay dry. That’s what I’m talking about.”

  Percy headed for the coffee machine but it was already washed and shut down for the night. He was tired enough and tipsy enough that more booze was the only thing other than coffee likely to keep him awake. He was on his way to grab a six-pack, when he realized what he’d just heard.

  “Clearing out?” he said.

  The woman squinted at him, then smiled, like Percy was pulling her leg. Twirled a ring of car keys on her finger.

  “Seriously,” Percy said.

  Another appraisal—the squint, the smile. “There’s a hurricane coming, mister.” She gestured at the night, the storm, the world out there. “Where you been?”