Peaceable Kingdom

by Jack Ketchum

  I was afraid to wait any longer. Afraid the strain was showing.

  “We’ll get wet,” she said.

  I gave her a look and laughed.

  “That never stopped you before. Remember?”

  We hiked through our back yard over the hill and through the trees down to the water and then we walked upstream. The air was cool and still. Her cane clattered against the rocks. Our sneakers crunched the smooth gravel along the banks. We took it very slowly. I didn’t want to exhaust her.

  The pool was high that day because of the rainshowers, the stream pouring wide and fast from the rocks above. We sat down to catch our breath.

  “Can you manage the top?”

  “I think so. I got all this way, I might as well give it a try. Just let me sit a few minutes. What is it you want me to see?”

  “Show you when we get there, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  We sat until she was rested and then we started up. Midway to the ledge it began to rain again. Heavy at first and then fading fast. We waited under some birch trees until it stopped. A very long wait for me. But I suppose that by then Rita needed the break anyhow. Then the sun burned down again and water steamed off the rocks as we climbed.

  I think now that I could not have gone through with it had it not been for the cat.

  The cat and the roses.

  My heart was pounding too hard, my hands were doing too much shaking.

  My confidence was all gone and with it my resolve.

  Then, Shhh. Wait, Rita said and nodded toward the ledge just ahead.

  And there was Lily.

  Sprawled across the steaming rock. Basking in the sun.

  There’s something about the light here after a rain. I’d noticed it before but never so completely, never with such a shock of recognition. The light will plays tricks on your eyes and alter the color of things. Usually you’re barely aware of it. A rock will take on subtle shades of blue. There’s yellow in the leaves.

  Lily was a white cat.

  Yet here in this light she was green.

  Green as the leaves overhead, as the tall grass in the valley down below us, as the leaves of the wild roses which I saw had finally attained the summit of my ledge and among which she was lying so that from where we stood at some distance it almost seemed that one bright splash of red was growing from the tip of her tail, growing out of her, red echoed in her eyes as though rose and cat and foliage surrounding were all of one nature burst from the earth, out of decay, out of foment and death which I saw in that moment was only the proper way of things after all. Rita was wrong. Not eternal life, never. Because only death and decay could breed life in the first place and though, like the roses, Rita and I could strive and climb on and on, the earth was intractable and without remedy and each of us was rooted there, in loam and dirt and crumbled stone.

  The light shifted. We made our way.

  We got to the top of the ledge and this time Lily stayed. A white cat again lying languid in the sun.

  I showed Rita the letters. I watched hope brighten her face and then saw doubt. As though it couldn’t be true, we just weren’t that lucky. Look, I said. There’s the proof. There. It’s why I brought you here. And I pointed down to the valley below. All that, I said. It’s ours. I bought it a week ago. Look. We’ll build there when you’re better.

  She turned and looked.

  The rock was where I’d placed it days before.

  I took it up and then I brought it down.

  Thanks to McPheeters again for telling me about a dream of his, and of course, to Alan.

  Gone

  Seven-thirty and nobody at the door. No knock, no doorbell.

  What am I? The wicked old witch from Hansel and Gretel?

  The jack-o-lantern flickered out into the world from the window ledge, the jointed cardboard skeleton swayed dangling from the transom. Both there by way of invitation, which so far had been ignored. In a wooden salad bowl on the coffee table in front of her bite-sized Milky Ways and Mars Bars and Nestle’s Crunch winked at her reassuringly—crinkly gleaming foil-wrap and smooth shiny paper.

  Buy candy, and they will come.

  Don’t worry, she thought. Someone’ll show. It’s early yet.

  But it wasn’t.

  Not these days. At least that’s what she’d gathered from her window on Halloweens previous. By dark it was pretty much over on her block. When she was a kid they’d stayed out till eleven—twelve even. Roamed where they pleased. Nobody was afraid of strangers or razored apples or poisoned candy. Nobody’s mother or father lurked in attendance either. For everybody but the real toddlers, having mom and Dad around was ludicrous, unthinkable.

  But by today’s standards, seven-thirty was late.

  Somebody’ll come by. Don’t worry.

  ET was over and NBC were doing a marathon Third Rock every half hour from now till ten. What Third Rock had to do with Halloween she didn’t know. Maybe there was a clue in the Mars Bars. But Third Rock was usually okay for a laugh now and then so she padded barefoot to the kitchen and poured herself a second dirty Stoli martini from the shaker in the fridge and lay back on the couch and picked at the olives and tried to settle in.

  The waiting made her anxious, though. Thoughts nagged like scolding parents.

  Why’d you let yourself in for this, idiot?

  You knew it would hurt if they didn’t come.

  You knew it would hurt if they did.

  “You’ve got a no-win situation here,” she said.

  She was talking to herself out loud now. Great.

  It was a damn good question, though.

  Years past, she’d avoided this. Turned off the porch light and the lights in the living room. Nobody home. Watched TV in the bedroom.

  Maybe she should have done the same tonight.

  But for her, holidays were all about children. Thanksgiving and New Year’s Eve being the exceptions. Labor Day and the Presidents’ days and the rest didn’t even count—they weren’t real holidays. Christmas. That was Santa. Easter. The Easter Bunny. The Fourth of July. Firecrackers, sparklers, fireworks in the night sky. And none was more about kids than Halloween. Halloween was about dress-up and trick or treat. And trick or treat was children.

  She’d shut out children for a very long time now.

  She was trying to let them in.

  It looked like they weren’t buying.

  She didn’t know whether to be angry, laugh or cry.

  She knew it was partly her fault. She’d been such a god damnmess.

  People still talked about it. Talked about her. She knew they did. Was that why her house seemed to have PLAGUE painted on the door? Parents talking to their kids about the lady down the block? She could still walk by in a supermarket and stop somebody’s conversation dead in its tracks. Almost five years later and she still got that from time to time.

  Five years—shy three months, really, because the afternoon had been in August—over which time the MISSING posters gradually came down off the store windows and trees and phone poles, the police had stopped coming round long before, her mother had gone from calling her over twice a day to only once a week—she could be glad of some things, anyhow—and long-suffering Stephen, sick of her sullenness, sick of her brooding, sick of her rages, had finally moved in with his dental assistant, a pretty little strawberry blonde named Shirley who reminded them both of the actress Shirley Jones.

  The car was hers, the house was hers.

  The house was empty.

  Five years since the less than three minutes that changed everything.

  All she’d done was forget the newspaper—a simple event, an inconsequential event, everybody did it once in a while—and then go back for it and come out of the 7-Eleven and the car was there with the passenger door open and Alice wasn’t. It had occured with all the impact of a bullet or head-on collision and nearly that fast.

  Her three-year-old daughter, gone. Vanished. Not a soul in the lot. And she, Helen T
eal, nee Mazik, went from preschool teacher, homemaker, wife and mother to the three p’s—psychoanalysis, Prozac and paralysis.

  She took another sip of her martini. Not too much.

  Just in case they came.

  By nine-twenty-five Third Rock was wearing thin and she was considering a fourth and final dirty martini and then putting it to bed.

  At nine-thirty a Ford commercial brought her close to tears.

  There was this family, two kids in the back and mom and Dad in front and they were going somewhere with mom looking at the map and the kids peering over her shoulder and though she always clicked the MUTE button during the commercials and couldn’t tell what they were saying they were a happy family and you knew that.

  To hell with it, she thought, one more, the goddamn night was practically breaking her heart here, and got up and went to the refrigerator.

  She’d set the martini down and was headed for the hall to turn out the porch light, to give up the vigil, the night depressing her, the night a total loss finally, a total waste, when the doorbell rang.

  She stepped back.

  Teenagers, she thought. Uh-oh. They’d probably be the only ones out this late. With teenagers these days you never knew. Teens could be trouble. She turned and went to the window. The jack-o-lantern’s jagged carved top was caving slowly down into its body. It gave off a half-cooked musky aroma that pleased her. She felt excited and a little scared. She leaned over the windowsill and looked outside.

  On the porch stood a witch in a short black cloak, a werewolf in plaid shirt and jeans, and a bug-eyed alien. All wearing rubber masks. The alien standing in front by the doorbell.

  Not teenagers.

  Ten or eleven, tops.

  Not the little ones she’d been hoping for all night long in their ghost-sheets and ballerina costumes. But kids. Children.

  And the night’s thrill—the enchantment even—was suddenly there for her.

  She went to the door and opened it and her smile was wide and very real.

  “Trick or treat!”

  Two boys and a girl. She hadn’t been sure of the alien.

  “Happy Halloween!” she said.

  “Happy Halloween,” they chorused back.

  The witch was giggling. The werewolf elbowed her in the ribs.

  “Ow!” she said and hit him with her black plastic broom.

  “Wait right here, kids,” she said.

  She knew they wouldn’t come in. Nobody came in anymore. The days of bobbing for apples were long over.

  She wondered where their parents were. Usually there were parents around. She hadn’t seen them on the lawn or in the street.

  She took the bowl of candy off the coffee table and returned to them standing silent and expectant at the door. She was going to be generous with them, she’d decided that immediately. They were the first kids to show, for one thing. Possibly they’d be the only ones to show. But these also weren’t kids who came from money. You only had to take one look to see that. Not only were the three of them mostly skin and bones but the costumes were cheap-looking massmarket affairs—the kind you see in generic cardboard packages at Walgreen’s. In the werewolf’s case, not even a proper costume at all. Just a shirt and jeans and a mask with some fake fur attached.

  “Anybody have any preferences, candy-wise?”

  They shook their heads. She began digging into the candy and dropping fistfuls into their black plastic shopping bags.

  “Are you guys all related?”

  Nods.

  “Brothers and sister?”

  More nods.

  The shy type, she guessed. But that was okay. Doing this felt just right. Doing this was fine. She felt a kind of weight lifted off her, sailing away through the clear night sky. If nobody else came by for the rest of the night that was fine too. Next year would be even better.

  Somehow she knew that.

  “Do you live around here? Do I know you, or your mom and Dad maybe?”

  “No, ma’am,” said the alien.

  She waited for more but more evidently wasn’t forthcoming.

  They really were shy.

  “Well, I love your costumes,” she lied. “Very scary. You have a Happy Halloween now, okay?”

  “Thank you.” A murmured chorus.

  She emptied the bowl. Why not? she thought. She had more in the refrigerator just in case. Lots more. She smiled and said happy Halloween again and stepped back and was about to close the door when she realized that instead of tumbling down the stairs on their way to the next house the way she figured kids would always do all three of them were still standing there.

  Could they possibly want more? She almost laughed. Little gluttons.

  “You’re her, right, ma’am?” said the alien.

  “Excuse me?”

  “You’re her?”

  “Who?”

  “The lady who lost her baby? The little girl?”

  And of course she’d heard it in her head before he even said it, heard it from the first question, knew it could be nothing else. She just needed to hear him say it, hear the way he said it and determine what was there, mockery or pity or morbid curiosity but his voice held none of that, it was flat and indeterminate as a newly washed chalkboard. Yet she felt as if he’d hit her anyhow, as though they all had. As though the clear blue eyes gazing up at her from behind the masks were not so much awaiting her answer as awaiting an execution.

  She turned away a moment and swiped at the tears with the back of her hand and cleared her throat and then turned back to them.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Thought so,” he said. “We’re sorry. G’night, ma-am. Happy Halloween.”

  They turned away and headed slowly down the stairs and she almost asked them to wait, to stay a moment, for what reason and to what end she didn’t know but that would be silly and awful too, no reason to put them through her pain, they were just kids, children, they were just asking a question the way children did sometimes, oblivious to its consequences and it would be wrong to say anything further, so she began to close the door and almost didn’t hear him turn to his sister and say, too bad they wouldn’t let her out tonight, huh? too bad they never do in a low voice but loud enough to register but at first it didn’t register, not quite, as though the words held no meaning, as though the words were some strange rebus she could not immediately master, not until after she’d closed the door and then when finally they impacted her like grapeshot, she flung open the door and ran screaming down the stairs into the empty street.

  She thought when she was able to think at all of what she might say to the police.

  Witch, werewolf, alien. Of this age and that height and weight.

  Out of nowhere, vanished back into nowhere.

  Carrying along what was left of her.

  Gone.

  Closing Time

  Only the dead have seen the end of war.

  —Plato

  October 2001

  ONE

  Lenny saw the guy in his rear-view mirror, the guy running toward him trying to wave him down at the stoplight, running hard, looking scared, a guy on the tall side and thin in a shiny blue insulated parka slightly too heavy for the weather—one seriously distressed individual. Probably that was because of the other beefy citizen in his shirtsleeves chasing him up 10th Avenue.

  Pick him up or what?

  Traffic was light. Pitifully light ever since World Trade Center a month ago. New York was nothing like it used to be traffic-wise. And it was late, half past one at night. He had the green now. Nobody ahead of him. No problem just to pull away.

  And suppose he did. What was the guy gonna do? Report him to the Taxi and Limousine Commission?

  You had to figure that a chase meant trouble. For sure the guy in his shirtsleeves meant trouble if he ever caught up to the poor sonovabitch. You could read the weather on his face and it was Stormy Monday all the way down the line.

  Get the hell out of here, he thought. You go
t a wife and kids. Don’t be stupid. 10th and 59th was usually a pretty safe place to be these days but you never could tell. Not in this town. You’ve been driving for nearly thirty years now. You know better. So what if he’s white, middle-class. So what if you need the fare.

  He lifted his foot off the brake but he’d hesitated and by then the guy was already at the door. He flung it open and jumped inside and slammed it shut again.