Out of the Darkness

by Robert D. McKee

  Shamed, he lifted his thumb and index finger and held them an inch apart. “All right,” he said, “maybe this much.”

  She nodded. “At least that much and more, I’d wager.” But she opened the door wider and allowed him in. She often bent her rules for Jackson. He’d helped her establish herself in this community when no one else would. “Lock that door after you,” she said as she tightened her apron. “I’ll fix you up a steak—a small one—but if you ain’t done by the time I’m finished my cleanin’, you’ll be leavin’ anyway, and what’s left of your supper’ll be goin’ to Rufus.” Rufus was the small terrier that always slept under the table at the rear of the café. It was a table reserved for Lottie to do her books and was never used by customers.

  “Lottie,” Jackson said as he slid into a chair, “you’re a lifesaver. A Samaritan. A—”

  He was about to go on, but the tiny woman stopped him with an arched eyebrow. “I don’t want to hear it,” she said. “I know that almost never stops you, Jackson Clark, but it’s late, and I’ve had myself a long day.”

  “Well, then, my dear, with that you may count on me to remain as quiet as a mouse. I’ll not say a word. Silence shall become my motto. If I—”

  She gave him a look, and he ended his sentence by clearing his throat.

  He enjoyed teasing Lottie, but he knew he could only go so far. Although he’d never asked, he guessed that Lottie was not yet fifty. Though she was not unattractive, he had to admit she looked every bit that old. But she’d had a hard life, one full of labor. They were friends, and she had told him some about her early years.

  She’d been born a slave in Iberia Parish, Louisiana, and had lived as one until Mr. Lincoln had signed his proclamation and beyond since the war raged on as it did. During her slavery days, she’d taken a husband and born him two sons. Reconstruction was not well accepted in south Louisiana, and Lottie’s husband had been an outspoken sort of fellow. Outspoken Negroes did not endear themselves to the local population, and one night their house was set afire and the husband and both boys died. Lottie might have died too, but at the time she was a live-in maid at a mill owner’s home outside of New Iberia, and she spent only one night a week with her family.

  She was twenty-two when that happened. The day after the funerals she asked the mill owner for her pay, and she left Iberia Parish and moved to New Orleans. It was there while working in a restaurant she met Gaston Charbunneau.

  He was a Frenchman who had immigrated to Canada and after a bit came to America by way of the Rocky Mountains. He loved the high country, but he’d always longed to see the city of New Orleans.

  “We was in love from the second we laid eyes on each other,” Lottie had once told Jackson. “We was married in a week, and nine quick months later we had us a baby girl.”

  They continued to live in New Orleans for the next five years, but their lives were hard. Folks did not take to a white man, even a Frenchman, marrying a colored. Eventually Gaston had enough. “He’d always promised to show me the geysers, so one day we jus’ picked up and headed north for the Yellowstone. Left Loosi-anna forever, and good riddance to it,” Lottie had said.

  She pulled an onion from under a cupboard and sliced it into the frying pan. “I reckon you’ll be wantin’ onions on top of this steak and some potatoes on the side as well,” she said in a put-upon voice.

  “Well, Lottie, I am mighty hungry,” Jackson admitted. “I haven’t had much in the way of food today.”

  “If you paid as much attention to your eatin’ as you do your drinkin’ I expect you’d be a whole lot fleshier.”

  “I’d planned to eat, Lottie,” Jackson said, defending himself. “It’s not like I forgot. I went to a picnic Dr. Hedstrom put on up at the park. I was going to eat there, but you would not believe what that man was serving. Long skinny sandwiches with the strangest meat you ever did see.”

  Lottie laughed. “That Dr. Hedstrom, he is the beatin’est, ain’t he?” She flipped Jackson’s steak and stirred the onions. “This afternoon one of my customers said he saw the doctor ridin’ some kind of motor-powered bicycle right down the middle of Main Street. He had horses and people runnin’ every which way.” She took a pot from the stove and poured Jackson a cup of coffee. “What was he havin’ a picnic for, anyway?”

  “It was a welcome-home party for his friend Micah McConners. Seems I have some new competition in town.” He lifted the cup and took a sip. “Micah was admitted to the bar a couple of days ago. He’s come home to practice law.”

  As he said that, Jackson felt eyes on him, and he looked toward the far end of the room. Lottie’s daughter stared at him from the doorway that led to the back. Jackson was always pleased to see the girl. She was bright, pleasant, and, at least to Jackson’s way of thinking, the prettiest girl in town. “Why, hello there, Fay, darlin’,” he said. “I didn’t hear you come in. How long’ve you been standing there?” The girl didn’t answer. She stared at the old lawyer without answering. “What’s the matter, girl?” he asked with a smile. “Has the cat got your tongue?”

  CHAPTER SIX

  He would hate to do this sort of thing every day of his life, but Micah had to admit he enjoyed manual labor. A little of it was good for the soul—not too much, but a little. For his tastes, Micah had been doing more than a little for the last five days, but he was about finished, and he was pleased with his efforts.

  Micah had rented the Stimpson property the first morning after arriving back in Probity, and he’d been fixing it up ever since. The first thing he did was clean the place from top to bottom. Joseph Hoover, the fellow who had rented the property prior to Micah, was fond of chewing tobacco. And though Mr. Hoover was a gentleman in most respects, he was negligent with his aim and rarely hit the spittoon. The floors of all three rooms were glazed with dried tobacco juice.

  After the cleaning, Micah had to repair the lath and plaster in a couple of places and put on a fresh coat of paint.

  It was a long, narrow building divided into three rooms. He made the room closest to the street into a waiting area, although it was hard to imagine he would ever have clients enough that waiting would be a problem. The second room he made his private office. And the room in back was where he meant to live.

  Two days earlier he had applied at the First National for a loan of five hundred dollars. This morning the check had come through, and he had already spent the entire amount down the street at Collier’s Furnishings.

  For the first room, he bought three chairs. If the day ever came when he needed more chairs than that, he expected he would be able to afford to buy them. He furnished the third room with only a bed and a small chiffonnier. He also bought a scattering of accessories: tables, lamps, and pictures for the walls. But it was in the second room where he’d spent the bulk of the money. He had purchased two sets of book cases—of course, he had not yet purchased the books to go in them—two chairs for clients and one for himself; and the pride of his shopping spree, a dark oak desk manufactured by the Merle and Heaney Company of Chicago, Illinois. It was the finest desk Mr. Collier had. Although it cost more than he should have spent, Micah had coveted the beautiful desk from the moment he set eyes on it. And in his effort to become more pragmatic, he reminded himself he’d be spending the largest portion of his life sitting at a desk, it might as well be the finest.

  Now he had only one thing left to accomplish and he’d be ready for business. He carried a stepladder out to the boardwalk, climbed it, and drilled four small holes on the outside wall to the left of the front door. He lifted the sign Chester had hired Carpenter Pecker to build—Micah smiled when he thought of that—pulled four screws from his pocket, and stuck them into his mouth.

  He was finally going to hang his shingle. This was a big moment, he told himself. One that deserved a fanfare with trumpets and drums. There should be a Greek Chorus behind him, filling the afternoon with its voices. The hanging of this shingle was, Micah mused, the culmination of years of dreaming and hard
work.

  He closed one eye as he aligned the holes in the sign with the ones he’d drilled. It was awkward balancing on the ladder, keeping the screw holes lined up, and at the same time trying to get the first screw started. He could use an extra pair of hands.

  As he told himself this, he felt the ladder wobble. His stomach lurched, but, luckily, as he was about to fall, he caught himself—or, at least, he thought he had. A half-second later the ladder shook again, and he knew in one sick stomach-dropping instant he was going down.

  The shingle and screwdriver clattered to the boardwalk, and as he spit out the screws, he shouted an obscenity that was seldom heard on the streets of Probity. He pin-wheeled his arms, scooping the air in an effort to regain his balance.

  At the moment he reached the point of no return, he felt one hand on his leg and another on the ladder. As quickly as the ladder had started to go, it was now steady again, and the rungs were solid under his boots.

  He grabbed the wall and exhaled in a gush. “My good God, that was a close one,” he said. “Thanks a lot. I nearly broke my—” He stopped when he realized he was staring down into the dark, bottomless eyes of Fay Charbunneau.

  She checked the ladder to make sure it was secure, and through her dimpled smile she said, “I should think, Mr. Mc-Conners, an attorney, a man versed in the law, would know better than to break the most basic law of all.”

  Micah stared at her stupidly. She was even more beautiful than she had been three years before. Her brow was ruffled as she looked up at him, and the slanted light from the afternoon sun accentuated the height of her high cheekbones and the fullness of her lips. Micah swallowed away the lump clogging his throat and mumbled, “What law would that be, Miss Charbunneau?”

  “Why, the Law of Gravity, of course.” She turned up the heat on her smile, flicked a strand of her thick, curly hair behind her, and stepped off the boardwalk into the street. “It’s good to see you back, Micah,” she said over her shoulder.

  He clutched the wall as he watched her walk away. She was a small woman, but her shoulders were wide. Her back tapered into a tiny waist, and her hips flared, pushing against the thin cotton of her summer dress.

  He closed his eyes and took a deep breath; when he opened them again she was gone.

  Micah decided he would ask Chester to help him put the shingle up later. Right now, feeling his heart thump against the inside of his chest, he eased himself down the ladder.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Chester sat in a rocker at his bedroom window sipping from a tumbler of milk. The only sounds were the metronomic tick of the clock and the counterpoint squeak of the chair. Chester was a poor sleeper, and often he’d wake in the night. He hated lying in bed, so in the winter he’d get up, stoke the fire in his bedroom hearth, and sit and watch the flames. In the summer, he’d move his chair to the window and stare into the night. Usually the combination of a half hour’s worth of rocking and a warm glass of milk would make him drowsy enough to get back to sleep, but Chester knew that would not be so this time.

  There were lights across the way in the dark pasture. They were shining, disembodied little orbs that floated a foot or less above the ground, soaking up the soft glow cast by the moon and stars and transforming it into something more than it was. They were eyes, of course—the eyes of predators: raccoons, skunks, foxes. These were animals with eyes evolved to a higher level than man’s, capable of cutting through the gloom, making the darkness irrelevant.

  In many ways Chester envied those creatures. They knew their motivation. They were well cast and comfortable in their roles. They never questioned their blocking nor brooded over their lines.

  He exhaled a noise that was part snicker, part sigh. He had carried that metaphor about as far as he dared. But it was true; sometimes he did envy the lower creatures’ lack of self-awareness. They played no conscious part in their own evolution, and Chester was convinced that humans did. We had choices. Now—or soon—we’d have more choices than ever. And with those choices there was responsibility.

  Polly and Cedra were coming into the office this afternoon so he could remove Polly’s stitches. He hadn’t seen them since the night Polly was attacked, but they’d filled his thoughts almost every minute since.

  Choices.

  The eastern sky was turning a pinkish gray, and the glowing eyes of the small creatures were beginning to dim. Chester drank the last of his milk, pushed up from the rocker, and crossed to his wardrobe. He took off his dressing gown and night shirt and dressed in jeans, shirt, and leather vest. He pulled on an old pair of boots and left the room. He stepped quietly on the landing so as not to wake Mrs. Eggers, whose room was at the far end of the hall. The walls of Chester’s room had been confining, and he ached to be outside. Once he got to the foot of the stairs, he hurried to the foyer, grabbed his riding cap and goggles, and left the house.

  A warm breeze wafted in from the west, and Chester filled his lungs with the clean morning air. He loved the fresh smells of Wyoming. That was the thing he’d missed most during his years of living beneath the sooty skies back East.

  He went around to the carriage house, opened the door, and walked in. It was dark inside, but Chester didn’t need to light a lamp. He knew what he was looking for and where he had left it. He crossed toward the double doors to where Uncle Oscar’s moto-cycle leaned against the wall. He pushed open the doors and rolled the machine outside. He had repaired the bent wheel a couple of days before but had not had a chance to try it out.

  Although it was still dark, the sky was a little brighter, and there was enough light to ride by. He straddled the seat and shoved off. After three quick pumps of the pedals, the motor caught. Chester pushed the speed lever forward, and the cycle accelerated with a head-snapping jerk. It was not the lumbering rise in momentum felt on a train, nor the loping acceleration of a horse. This acceleration was pure and smooth, unlike anything else. He pulled his cap down a notch along his forehead and increased the speed. The feeling of it, the pure joy, pulled his lips into a smile.

  He rode down Main toward the river faster than he knew he should, but he couldn’t resist. He didn’t even try. Riding the moto-cycle was like flying a magic carpet two feet above the ground. He loved the feel of the road beneath his wheels, the bounce and spin of the hard rubber tires, the blur of the buildings on either side.

  He crossed the bridge west of First Street and, beneath the buzz of the motor, he could hear the North Platte—low now in the late summer—lap against the bridge’s pilings. Past the bridge, the road became rougher, but Chester handled the moto-cycle with skill as the tires clawed at the ruts.

  The land rose as it moved away from the river, and Chester climbed toward the foothills that lay at the base of the Laramie Mountains. Two deer munching grass beside the road looked up in apparent bewilderment as he rode past, their graceful necks lifting high above their shoulders, their ears pricking toward a sound that no deer in this part of the world had ever heard.

  Chester was amazed at the freedom the moto-cycle provided. And, as he rode farther into the hills, he realized this freedom—this kind of freedom—was more than a word or even a concept. It was also a feeling, an emotion. The rush of air past his face opened his senses. It blew away the dust and cobwebs that had of late collected in his head.

  Still Chester increased his speed, leaning into the road’s wide curves, feeling the weight of the machine roll from side to side beneath him. He rode for another five miles and came to a stop at the crest of a tall hill. He shut the motor down, and the silence filled the morning, wrapping around him like a cloak. He propped the cycle against a large boulder and climbed to the top of the boulder and looked out at the world.

  To the south were the serrated aretes of the Laramie Mountains, with Laramie Peak itself, at over ten thousand feet, rising high above the rest. To the east he looked down onto Probity, and beyond that, the prairie stretched wide toward the horizon.

  Still buzzing from the moto-cycle’s
vibrations, he tried to rub the tingling out of his arms. But it wasn’t unpleasant and, after a bit, he shoved his hands into his pockets and allowed the feeling to fade on its own.

  He realized as he looked down on Probity that the ride up had been the first time in days when his thoughts hadn’t been full of Cedra and Polly. At first he’d been angry with them for what they wanted. What they asked of him was criminal. But now his anger toward them lessened, and he focused it on the fools who would write a law banning abortion and make no allowance for rape. Even if abortion itself was immoral, and Chester thought it might well be, ending a pregnancy that came about as Polly’s had was not immoral. But, intense as it was, that anger, too, began to dim.

  He breathed in the crisp, damp air. The day would be warm later, but right now he could detect a hint of autumn. He looked forward to it. Spring and autumn, the seasons of change, were the times Chester enjoyed the most.

  No, he was not angry any longer. Anger was not an emotion Chester could hold on to. Now he realized that as far as his role in all this was concerned, it had nothing to do with Cedra or even Polly. And it certainly had nothing to do with the band of buffoons who met in the capitol down in Cheyenne and drafted their narrow legislation. His decision had only to do with him, Chester Hedstrom, and his view of the world.

  He would not be shamed into helping Polly by the guilt Cedra Pratt tried her best to inflict. Nor would he be prohibited from helping her by a law drafted by idiots.

  As the sun lifted above the horizon, the shadows lengthened. Traffic began to stir through the streets below. And Chester watched as the town stretched, rubbed its eyes, and woke, preparing itself for another day.

  Polly winced as Chester plucked the last stitch from her cheek. “There,” he said, moving his thumb along the thin scar. “It’s red now, but that’ll fade with time. In a few months you won’t even notice it.”