Nameless Night

by G. M. Ford

  Helen turned back and fixed her attention on the sink, allowing the warm water to cascade over her hands, warming both her fingers and her soul, as if the rushing water could somehow wash the whole mess away. To Helen, the situation with Paul Hardy seemed like a fall from grace, as if everything that transpired prior to Paul’s accident had been the golden days of innocence and everything that had happened since had become the slate-gray days of experience. Despite her efforts to find a silver lining, it seemed as if something valuable had been lost without anything having been gained in return. A single tear escaped from her right eye and rolled slowly down the side of her face.

  Ken was at her side now. “You okay?” he wanted to know.

  She hugged herself and nodded the kind of nod designed to convey the opposite message, something more like wounded pluck or grit in the face of horror. He stepped in close and put both hands on her shoulders. She leaned into him, resting the side of her face on his chest. She could feel the rhythm of his breathing as she began to sob.

  He put a hand around her head and pulled her to him. She went willingly, turning herself away from the sink and allowing her tears to fall onto his blue work shirt.

  “I’m just so frustrated,” she said between sobs.

  “I know.”

  “I feel like I need to do something.”

  “Maybe something will come from the fingerprints.”

  “What if it doesn’t?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She threw her arms around his neck and began to bawl. Wasn’t until she’d cried out her anger that she noticed how close to each other they were. How their usual chaste hip-to-hip embraces had today evolved into a full-frontal hug. She held on tighter and wondered something she had wondered before. About Ken and whether he was experienced in these matters…because she certainly wasn’t. She wondered whether he would be able to guide a neophyte like herself. Whether her lack of experience would sour the experience or whether…She hugged him tighter, pushing her substantial breasts against his chest. Her sobbing subsided.

  “It’s okay,” he said in a strangled voice.

  25

  Coupla minor problems. One…they came in from the opposite end of the street, so it looked way different. Two…it was daytime and the streetlights weren’t doing their thing. Didn’t matter, though…half an hour in, Randy snapped to it. This was his street of dreams. The same opulent suburban neighborhood he saw every night when he closed his eyes. The realization weakened his knees.

  They sat on top of a weathered picnic table at the back of a little neighborhood park, diagonally across the street from 432 Water Street. The houses sat on double or maybe even triple lots. Four thirty-two was, like the others on the street, an enormous two-story, white with black trim. The roof line suggested a vaulted ceiling on the ground floor, with a bunch of bedrooms upstairs. A quick trip around the block had revealed the obligatory lanai out back. The maturity of the landscaping and the size of the houses screamed of the late fifties. Cocoa Beach, Florida. Your Tropical Dreams Come True!

  Acey sucked on a cherry Popsicle. His lips and mouth were harlequin red.

  “You scared?” he asked between slurps.

  “Why would I be scared?”

  “Scared don’t need no ‘why,’ dog. You either scared or you ain’t.”

  “Maybe a little.”

  “’Bout what?”

  “I don’t know,” Randy said.

  “Maybe you scareda dat blond bitch.” Acey referred to the leggy woman they’d seen collecting the afternoon newspaper a half hour back. “Maybe you one of those guys like my ol’ man…go out one time fo’ cigarettes and doan nobody see your ass again.”

  “I don’t smoke.”

  Acey wasn’t going for diversions. “You figure dat ho see you again after all this time, she gonna put an ice pick in you’ fuckin’ ear.”

  “I thought we had an agreement about that word.”

  “I’m workin on it, dog. Ol’ habits die hard.” With that, he went back to scowling and slurping his Popsicle.

  The air was hot and thick and wet. Without enough breeze to stir their fronds, the trees hung limp. Randy dropped his head into his hands. He still harbored a dull ache deep behind his forehead. The images of things past were coming thicker than ever now, sounds and faces and places blazing past the inside of his eyes, like shop windows seen from a fast-moving train.

  An elbow to the ribs lifted his gaze. In the street, a blue-and-white police cruiser rolled slowly by the Mercedes. “Nosy motherfuckers,” Acey muttered. “Wanna make sure dere ain’t no niggers hanging round.” He giggled to himself. “’Cept dey know for sure some nigger woulda pimped that ride first thing.”

  An hour ago they’d disagreed about how and where to wait. Acey’d wanted to stay in the air-conditioned car, but Randy knew better. The Mercedes was the only car parked in the street. Neighborhoods like this didn’t park cars in the street. Probably against community covenants and that kind of shit. Way Randy saw it, sitting in the car was an invitation to meet the local cops. To show ID. To answer questions regarding his relationship with Acey. None of which appealed to his sense of well-being. Instead they’d repaired to their present position, deep in the shade, three quarters of a block down from the car, on the opposite side of the street.

  “Smart, dog. Hella smart,” the boy said as they watched the cruiser roll away. The whine and growl of a school bus brushed the words aside. They sat on the table and watched as half a dozen children disgorged themselves from the bright yellow bus.

  The kids stayed in a chattering knot for a moment and then, in ones and twos, splintered off in the direction of home, leaving only a pair of blond girls standing on the sidewalk. Took a minute for Randy to realize they were twins. They didn’t dress the same anymore. Matter of fact, they looked so different from each other Randy wondered whether they hadn’t gotten together and coordinated the difference.

  “About your age,” Randy said.

  “Punks,” Acey retorted.

  “Hey now.”

  “SpongeBob backpacks.” The boy sneered. “That’s fuckin’ gay.”

  Randy resisted the urge to disagree. Instead he watched in silence as the girls walked the half a block to 432, where the blond woman met them at the door. In the surrounding stillness, Randy heard the door click behind them. A minute passed.

  “Well, dog, you gonna do it or not?”

  “Don’t rush me.”

  “This what you come all this way for, ain’t it?”

  Randy dropped his head into his hands again, massaging his temples with his thumbs as arcs of images lit up the inside of his head like signal flares.

  “You okay?”

  Randy looked up into the boy’s brown eyes. “You’re right,” he said. “I’m scared.”

  “Doan worry ’bout it, dog. I been scared long as I can remember. Scared ’bout what that dumb ho gonna do wid me next. Scared some john gonna fuck her up more dan she already fucked up. Scared of the cops. Scared of the welfare people. I been scared of all dat shit my whole damn life.”

  “Kid your age, that’s not right.”

  “Right got nothin’ to do wid nothin’,” the boy said. “There’s what is and what ain’t.” He cut the air with his bare Popsicle stick. “That’s the whole show right dere.”

  Randy kept his gaze pinned on the boy. Behind the bravado was…was something else…terror probably. He wondered how a kid this age had managed to lose all sense of the ideal. How his short life had managed to extinguish that flickering sense of fairness most people carry inside themselves forever. That instinctual scale of justice with which people persistently refuse to part, no matter how many times they’ve been told that “life isn’t fair” or they “gotta roll with the punches” or any of the million other phrases designed to snuff out the eternal flame of how things actually “should” be.

  Randy slid down off the table. “I’ll be back,” he said.

  “Good luck, dog,” Ace
y said as Randy walked away.

  The sun was behind him as he crossed the street, stepped over the patch of grass separating the street from the sidewalk, where, for some reason, he thought of Shirley and all the odd funny things she had to say. He wondered how so much inner grace could have been contained in such an ungraceful exterior. He started to think it wasn’t fair but cut himself off midthought with a bitter laugh.

  Once on the sidewalk, he stopped walking and looked back at the park. He was barely able to make out Acey in the gloom of foliage. The boy waved him forward. He took a step. His head swam. He thought he might pass out.

  A single electronic whoop broke the spell. Randy looked over his shoulder just in time to watch a private security vehicle slide to a stop. The passenger side window slid down. The uniformed driver leaned over far enough to look Randy in the eye. He was black as the Beach Commons security car and just about as shiny.

  “Help you, sir?” The voice asked not so much if Randy needed assistance but instead tacitly demanded an explanation for his presence on the street.

  “Visiting friends,” Randy said with a car salesman smile.

  “Who would that be?”

  “Four thirty-two Water Street.” Randy anticipated the next question. “Wesley Howard.”

  The guy pushed a few buttons on his dashboard computer, then looked up.

  “Have a nice day, sir,” he said without conviction. The window slid up. The car drove silently off down Water Street. Randy stood and watched until the car turned right two blocks down and disappeared from view.

  Over in the park, Acey was on his feet now, standing with his hands on his hips, poised and ready to run. Randy gave him a wave and received one in return. He watched as the boy climbed back on the table and sat down, then turned and continued down the sidewalk to 432, where he mounted the small porch and rang the bell.

  He was about to ring again when he heard the rattling of a chain followed by the snapping of a bolt. The door eased open. One of the girls held the door in both hands. She had what he thought were the bluest eyes he had ever seen. For a moment he wondered if everybody didn’t start their lives with radiant eyes, only to have time and circumstance, little by little, dim the glow, to the point where the so-called windows of the soul came to function more like barricades.

  “Is your mom or dad home?” Randy asked.

  Opening her mouth to speak revealed a mouthful of clear plastic braces. “I’ll get her,” the girl said, running off toward the back of the house, her ponytail bobbing up and down as she half ran, half skipped around the corner. The sight tightened Randy’s chest.

  Her long graceful limbs suggested she was going to be tall, like her mother. He rubbed the back of his neck, trying to ease the growing knot of tension between his shoulder blades. The woman came around the corner alone.

  Up close, she was prettier than she’d appeared at a distance, and although the girls had inherited her height and coloring, the similarity ended there. Her narrow features spoke of a Scandinavian background. The girls, on the other hand, were, to his eye, destined to a wider, more…more…He couldn’t find the word.

  “Yes?” she said.

  Randy swallowed. Whatever he had imagined he was going to say at this most important moment burst from the thicket of his mind like a covey of startled birds. He waited for the feathers to settle, held up a finger, and managed a weak smile.

  “I was looking for Wesley Howard,” he managed finally.

  She turned her head and called over her shoulder. “Wes,” she called. “Wes.”

  He watched the cords in her neck bow as she called out the name. Something in her tone set Randy’s teeth on edge, as if a great distance existed between the woman and whomever she was calling to. One of the twins danced back and forth behind her mother.

  Footfalls padded their way to Randy’s ears. She looked over her shoulder again.

  “Here he comes,” she said without a shred of enthusiasm. She stepped back from the door, allowing a thickset specimen to plug the gap. “He was asking for you,” Randy heard her say to the man’s back.

  “Can I help you?” the man asked. He looked Randy up and down, like there was going to be a test on it later. He had the look of a boozer. Running to fat, red-faced, with one of those wide stippled noses that reminded Randy of a golf ball.

  “Hey, ah…” Randy stammered, still smiling, “I was looking for a person named Wesley Howard…guy I was in the service with…I was hoping…that maybe you were…”

  “Never been in the service,” the guy snapped. “Wish I could help you…”

  A muted voice in his head was telling him to watch the woman, to move his attention to the back of the stage, where the blond wife lingered stiff-legged and alert, and then yet another row back, where one of the girls skittered back and forth like a frightened fawn using the trees for cover.

  Wes started to close the door. Randy stepped forward and put his face in the way.

  The guy stopped the swinging door about an inch from Randy’s nose.

  “I don’t suppose you’d know of anybody else of—”

  “Lots of guys with my name. Good luck.”

  Randy pulled his face back just in time to avoid getting his nose broken. He listened as the chain was put in place and the door bolted. The last image…the look in the woman’s eyes in the second before the door closed spoke of something…

  He turned away from the door, walked down the pair of steps, and retraced his route. Instead of crossing the street to the park, he meandered all the way to the next corner, past the Mercedes and all the way around the block, so’s he could approach Acey and the park unseen. “They was lookin’,” Acey said as Randy sat on the table next to him. “Lookin’ fo’ a fuckin’ long time.”

  “Huh?”

  “They was peekin’ out though the curtains. I seen ’em.”

  Randy dropped his head into his hands. He ran his fingers through his hair.

  “So?” the boy asked.

  “Not the right one,” Randy said.

  “What? Da bitch got her a new man. So what?”

  “Her man’s name is Wesley Howard,” Randy said.

  “Shit,” the kid said. “What we gonna do?”

  Randy thought it over. “Let’s go to the beach,” he said.

  26

  Junior Harris and his chickens had been right on the money. Randy found his dream beach in just under an hour. He’d started out south and worked his way north until the tower was just the right size. By the time he was certain he was in the right place, the sun was getting low on the western horizon. The sand was dull yellow and sharp to the feet as if some ocean creature had ground seashells in its gullet and then cast them up, half digested, onto the waiting shore.

  What Randy had imagined to be a distracting hour of throwing a Frisbee on the beach had run into a few snags. First off, they had to go to three stores to find a white Frisbee. The first two stores had Frisbees all right, but none of them were the obligatory white. Second, Acey, despite having been born and raised in Florida, had never been to the beach in his life and had most certainly never thrown a Frisbee. Took Randy fifteen minutes to talk him into removing his sneakers and wiggling his bare toes in the sand. Another five or so to get him to dip a toe into the water, and then when he decided he liked the experience, another half hour to find and buy him a proper bathing suit.

  And so, as the last of the sunset doused itself to gray, Randy had yet to throw his newly acquired toy, but had instead spent the past hour watching a kid getting a chance to be a kid, maybe, if he were forced to guess, for the first time.

  He’d lounged in the rough sand watching the boy fight epic battles with the waves, marveling at the kid’s energy and wondering what in hell he was going to do next. All he could think of was to get a room for the night and to get up in the morning and take Acey to his auntie. And then? And then what? He had no idea what came next. As of a couple hours ago, he was coming from nowhere and headed nowhere. The
thought made him feel sick to his stomach.

  To the west, out over the tops of the shops and hotels, the day had turned purple, and the transitory warmth of spring had bolted town with the light. The kid’s teeth were chattering like castanets as the pair crossed the four-lane boulevard and hurried toward the Mercedes. As they approached the car, Randy pushed the button for the trunk, hoping he might get lucky and find a shirt or a blanket or something to help keep the kid warm until they got settled in a hotel room.

  And there it was, a black wool blanket with matching fringe all the way around the edges, the kind of thing old codgers threw over their arthritic knees to keep warm. He reached in and snatched the blanket, snapping it like a whip to remove anything loose and along for the ride.

  In a single motion, Randy settled the blanket around the kid’s shoulders and reached to close the trunk. Two green gym bags, much like his own but bigger, rested in the center of the trunk. He reached out and touched the nearest bag, pushing down on the shiny fabric with the flat of his hand, expecting whatever was inside to give. Nope.

  Whatever was inside was solid and square. Randy checked the street and told the kid to get in the car. The street was empty. Other than his lower jaw, which was still vibrating his teeth together, the kid didn’t so much as flinch. Instead he bellied up to the trunk and peered inside. “Oh fuck,” he whispered.

  Randy’s diaphragm froze. “Something I should know?” he croaked.

  “That pimp fuck in Atlanta…”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Tyrone,” the boy said.

  “What about him.”

  “He sell a lotta rock.”

  “And…you think what?”

  “Sometimes—” He stopped, took a couple of breaths, and then went on. “Sometimes he get his rock from that Berry motherfucker.” He pointed at the bag. “I seen him usin’ that bag before.”

  “Seen who?”

  “Berry.”

  “With this Tyrone guy?”

  “Yeah.”

  “When was that?”

  The boy turned away and didn’t answer. Randy opened his mouth to question the boy further, and then had a lightbulb come on in his head. Only way the kid could know what transpired between Chester Berry and this guy Tyrone when they were up in Atlanta was if he’d been there himself. Like maybe this wasn’t the first time he’d been used to pay his mama’s crack bills. Randy’s already queasy stomach rolled at the thought.