by John Enright
“You’re up,” Amanda said as she came into the darkened room. She must have seen his silhouette against the lighter sky out the window.
“Who is the man in camo gear?” Dominick asked, stepping away from the window as she turned on a light.
“That’s Lloyd, Denise’s counterpart. Pull down the shades, why don’t you? Lloyd said lighted windows would just be targets.”
“Who else is still here besides Denise and Floyd?”
“No, not Floyd, Lloyd, as in of London. Just Denise’s two top girls and two of Lloyd’s boys. Morgan enticed the rest of them away to a concert over in Hudson. Are you okay? You didn’t look so good when you came in to lie down.”
“I’m fine. Sorry about commandeering your bed like that,” Dominick said as he pulled down the shade on the other window.
“Well, now that Morgan is gone you can have her room back,” Amanda said. “Are you hungry? I brought that cooler you brought up from the porch.” It was there in a corner of the room along with his grip bag. “I’ve eaten and the kitchen is pretty much closed down for the night.”
“What did you mean about lighted windows being targets?” Dominick asked.
“Oh, just Lloyd’s paramilitary paranoia. He thinks the folks still down there might try to take the place over tonight now that they have seen a mass desertion and have us outnumbered. He and his boys and Denise have worked themselves into some sort of Alamo mindset.” Amanda yawned, covering her mouth with the back of her hand. “Sorry,” she said. “This day seems to have gone on forever.”
“You don’t share Lloyd’s assessment?” Dominick went over to get his cooler and bag.
“No I don’t. Those were kids the other nights. Today’s group were just Christians and most of them are gone. They did their thing. They have to be home to get ready for church tomorrow morning. Maybe after church services we will have another visitation. In any event, I’ve left all the crazed defenses up to Lloyd and Denise.”
“I will give you your room back. Thanks for the loan,” Dominick said, picking up his stuff.
“Wait,” Amanda said. “You’ll need the key to Morgan’s room.” From the desk drawer she pulled out a key chain with a red plastic heart and two keys. “This is the key to her door,” she said, holding out one.
“And the other key?” Dominick asked.
“The other is to the stairs up to the cupola. No one else knows you are here, by the way. I didn’t mention it.”
“Tomorrow is soon enough.” Dominick pocketed the key chain and headed for the door.
“Dominick,” Amanda said, and the way she said his name called him back. “I’m glad you are here, that you made the effort to come back when things are so … so messed up.”
Dominick had to smile. There was really little or nothing of Marjorie in Amanda beyond memories. “De nada,” he said.
She smiled back. “By the way, do you play golf?”
Chapter 24
Dominick had never played golf. While most sports struck him as bizarre, empty rituals, golf had always seemed especially out there toward the edge of dangerous meaninglessness. At least team sports harkened back to the cooperative needs of the hunt, and running and throwing were masculine skills with obvious Darwinian advantages. But the solo wandering and whacking of a rock on the ground with a stick served no survival skill whatsoever save perhaps the de-evolutional pursuit of frustration. An appropriately Presbyterian pastime. Dominick had been surprised to find two sets of golf clubs—hers and his—in Marjorie’s Virginia garage. He wondered if Amanda had sold them along with everything else. He could not imagine his mother “out on the links,” nor could he see Amanda there.
He let himself into Morgan’s room and turned on the lights. The room seemed even sparser than before. The bed was unmade, and her alluring feminine aroma lingered in the still air. He felt a bit of the voyeur. “A fine trim piece of ass,” Barnett had called Morgan. Did that explain anything except Barnett’s appetite? Morgan was one of those women for whom being unknowable was an asset. He would put off signing the papers.
The ice Dominick had put in the cooler had melted, was now just cold water, but the sealed packets of cold cuts and cheese and the loaf of rye bread were dry, and he made himself a sandwich. He opened a still chilled can of Ballantine Ale. He avoided the bottle of Scotch; besides, he had no glass. This was the room in the house that he unrealistically thought of as one day being his. He turned off the light and pulled the desk chair up to one of the open windows to eat his sandwich. All the rest of the house was dark. In the daylight the view from here was east into the valley of the unseen river and then beyond the rising forested ridgelines of the far shore and the tops of the distant Berkshires. He had not yet seen it in autumn or winter or spring. Tonight there was no moon, and what stars he could see seemed especially distant through the hot summer air. All was quiet down by the road. There were voices in the hallway behind him.
A man’s voice: “Is this the room?”
A woman’s voice: “Yes, this is it. It’s always locked. Amanda may have a key. I’ll check.”
“Why not just break it down?” the man said.
“Just wait, Lloyd. I’ll see if I can get a key,” the woman said.
Dominick went over and opened the door. “No need for either. What’s up?” Two flashlight beams darted to his face, blinding him.
“Who the …? Who is this?” the man said.
“It’s what’s his name, Amanda’s brother,” the woman, whom Dominick now assumed to be Denise, said. “What are you doing here?”
“What do you want?” Dominick asked.
“Who let you in?” the man, Lloyd not Floyd, said.
With his left hand, in which he still held the can of ale, Dominick reached over and clicked on the wall switch for the ceiling light. Standing there in front of him in the doorway were Denise in a pair of bulging Capri pants and a hunter’s vest, complete with rows of shotgun shells, and the desert camouflage man Lloyd, who sported a stringy and strange sort of Chinese version of John Brown’s beard and was carrying a hunting rifle with a scope. In Dominick’s other hand he was still holding up what was left of his sandwich. They both were staring at it. “Would you like a sandwich?” he said. “Amanda said the kitchen was closed.”
“Turn off that light,” Lloyd said. “What are you doing, signaling them?” He reached in to the room to turn the light off.
Dominick turned it back on and kept his hand with the can of ale over the switch. “I was just grabbing a late bite to eat before retiring,” he said. “What can I do for you?”
“Stay away from the windows,” Lloyd told Denise. Then to Dominick, “Where are the stairs to the tower?”
“I don’t think we have met,” Dominick said, but Lloyd pushed by him into the room.
“You’re alone here?” Lloyd asked.
“Very much so,” Dominick said. “I would like to keep it that way.”
“No way, Jose. This is war and this here is the high ground. I’m going to station one of my boys up that tower. Where are the stairs? They got to be in this room.”
“I was told the cupola was unsafe,” Dominick said. “And besides, it is nighttime. What good would it do to have someone up there in the dark?”
“Ever heard of these, baby?” Lloyd said, ripping open the Velcro fastener of a side pocket in his cargo pants and pulling out a bulky pair of binoculars, only they weren’t truly binocular because while there were two eyepieces there was only one telescopic lens at the other end. “Night vision goggles. Our eye in the sky.” Lloyd spotted the door to the staircase and went right to it. “This it?” he asked and tried the door, which was locked. He raised the butt of his rifle to smash the lock.
“Wait. There is a key,” Dominick said. He wondered if breaking down doors was some sort of sacred warlock prerogative that he was interfering with. He still had the keys in his pocket and he unlocked the door. Unlocked and unlatched the door swung out into the room on its own. Th
e first three or four steps were lit by the light from the room, but beyond that was darkness deeper than shadow. “Captain,” Dominick said, gesturing up the stairs. Maybe the stairs ended abruptly, or exhausted wood would give out beneath a grown man’s weight. The passageway certainly smelled as if no one had ascended it in a very long time. It smelled the way that basement room had smelled when he had entered it, that stifled smell of history.
Lloyd shined his flashlight up the steps. “Denise?” he said.
“No, you go ahead, Lloyd. I’m not going up. I am going back down.”
“I’ll just check it out,” Lloyd said, and he headed up the stairs.
For a minute or so Dominick stood at the open door, listening to Lloyd finding his way upwards. The thought crossed Dominick’s mind to close the door and lock it, but that would just give Lloyd permission to exercise his door-breaking rights. There were no crashes or screams. Dominick had put down his sandwich and can of ale to open the door. He redeemed them now from the desk, but with the room’s overhead light now on he chose not to sit at a window. He sat on the bed instead.
There was some activity down at the road. Vehicles were coming and going. A car radio played some sort of jingling music with a thumbing bass, and there was the occasional sound of laughter. Dominick took two more pain pills. Only a half dozen or so were left. From up above, up the stairs, there was the distant but distinct sound of breaking glass. When Lloyd emerged into the room from the staircase door, Dominick asked him about the sound.
“Those windows were filthy and sealed shut. I had to break one to get a good view of the road. They are bringing up reinforcements.”
You finally got to break something, Dominick thought. The reinforcements were probably just kids returning from a beer run. “So you just smashed out a window,” he said.
“The goggles don’t work through dirty glass.”
They can see through the night but not dirty glass, Dominick thought. Dirty glass was the past. If you smash it you can see into the future. “What’s next?” Dominick asked.
“I’ll send up Joshua. He’s our best sniper.”
“Sniper? To snipe at what?”
“If they try a night attack, you want to protect your periphery from intruders.”
“Were you in Nam, Lloyd?”
“No, that was over before I was old enough to get the chance.”
“Too bad,” Dominick said.
“Yeah, that was a real war, against a real army, with generals and all.” Lloyd was headed toward the door to the hall when he stopped. “Say, are you armed?”
“No, I’m afraid not,” Dominick said.
“Shame. I really could use Joshua elsewhere.” And Lloyd left, closing the hall door behind him.
It was good that Dominick had taken a nap, because the evening was not going to be restful. After Lloyd left he turned off the light and went back to eating his sandwich in the chair by the open window. When he finished he lit a cigar. There was a fresh evening breeze rising up off the river, and off to his left, in what would be the northeast, he could see the white, pink, and green flashes of a fireworks display over Hudson. The flashes seemed all out of sync with the delayed muffled booms of their explosions, a disconcerting disconnect. Bombs bursting in air. That awful song. Through the perilous night.
When Lloyd returned with his sniper, Dominick did not move from his chair. Lloyd did not introduce them. They followed their torch beams up the stairs to the cupola, then Lloyd came back down and was gone. Dominick smoked his cigar. He opened the bottle of Scotch and took a sip, holding it in his mouth to blend with the cigar smoke. It was an old calming exercise, best done with cognac. The distant fireworks ended in a staccato flurry of explosions lighting up a slice of dark horizon sky. Then all was quiet. A wave of cricket chorus passed up from the valley and past them. Was it the pills again? He felt at peace sitting there in the dark, his feet up on his windowsill. He felt he was in the right place. In the morning the sun would come up in these windows, and if he wanted to he could stay. If he wanted to he could probably buy out Morgan and Amanda and make the place totally his, have the house all to himself. He would plant more trees. He would see what it was like in January, snowed in. He would have to fix that window in the cupola.
In the dark Dominick found his grip bag and went through it on the bed. It was not as if he had remembered to pack the penlight torch, but it was in the pocket where he always kept it, and its batteries still worked. He was looking to see what, in his hasty packing, he had brought to read. At the bottom of the bag were the papers and register book he had taken from the trunk in the basement. He had thought he would try again to return them, but now he felt no urgency to do so. If he was staying he could put them back anytime. He also had two of Sissy’s local history books that he had borrowed and not returned. If he was staying, he could return them in person as he would be seeing her again, maybe even regularly.
He still had the lights in the room turned off when the door to the hall opened and a flashlight beam searched around hesitantly inside. “Hello,” Dominick said.
“Oh, hello,” a woman’s voice answered. “I was … I am … looking for Joshua. Is this the right room?”
Dominick aimed his penlight in her direction. It was one of Denise’s lieutenants, Susan’s sister, whose name Dominick could not recall. “I believe it is Joshua who is upstairs,” Dominick said.
“Where is … How would I?”
“Over here,” Dominick said, and he got up off the bed and led her to the open door at the foot of the stairs. “Up there,” he said. “Joshua,” he called up the stairs, “you’ve got company.”
“Yo,” a voice from above called back.
“There you go,” Dominick said, “contact.” And he headed back to the bed.
“Josh?” she said, pointing her flashlight up the stairs.
“Come on up,” the voice named Joshua said from above. “It’s safe.”
“It’s spooky,” she said.
“Okay, wait, and I’ll come down to get you.”
Dominick could hear her giggling as her savior led her up the stairs. But soon enough they came back down, Susan’s sister hanging onto the young man’s arm.
“Say, you wouldn’t mind spelling me for just a bit, would you?” Joshua asked. “There’s nothing happening out there. I left the goggles and the gun. I’ll be back in a bit.”
“A bit and a half maybe,” Susan’s sister said. “Come on, Josh.”
“No problem. Got you covered,” Dominick said. “You kids run off and have some fun. I’m not going anywhere.”
“Thanks,” Joshua said.
Dominick stripped down to his boxer shorts and stretched out on the bed, resting his ribs. The night was still and hot. The air was heavy. He dozed off.
The next person to come through the door awakening him also did not knock. Dominick wondered if knocking before entering was a custom universally waived during blackouts. It was Lloyd this time. “Do you know this person?” he asked. “She was apprehended sneaking into the house. She says to see you.”
Dominick could not see in Lloyd’s torchlight whom he was leading by the arm. He showed his penlight on her. It was Sissy. “Yes, Lloyd, I know her,” he said. “She’s okay. Think of her as part of our reinforcements.”
“Okay then, if you say so, but I don’t like it. She’s not armed. What good is she? You boys do like your dark meat, don’t you?” Sissy jerked her arm out of his grasp and came into the room. “All quiet here?” Lloyd asked, gesturing with his torch to the cupola stairs.
“All quiet on the upper front,” Dominick said. He kept his penlight pointed at Lloyd’s chest. Sissy disappeared into the dark.
“I think the other dude got the better looking of the two,” Lloyd said as he left.
From somewhere behind Dominick, Sissy asked, “Who was that?”
“Wiccan homeland security. Lloyd’s not much for introducing himself. How are you? How did you get here? Where are you?” D
ominick flashed his penlight around the room until he found Sissy standing against the wall at the head of the bed.
“I’m good, I’m good. A little freaked right now. Why are all the lights out?”
“Just part of the game. Why are you here?” Dominick’s ribs were complaining. He sat down on the bed. He didn’t know where to shine his light.
“Game? What game? Daddy wouldn’t come in through the front, but drove way out of the way in the dark to drop me off in the back. He said he had brought you here because there was some sort of trouble.”
“Then why did he bring you here?”
“Because I made him. He said that I was the cause of the trouble. That article?”
“That’s probably what he meant, but your being here can’t undo any of that.”
“I had to find out what was going on,” Sissy said, and she went to the window to look out. “Daddy said there were people blocking the driveway.”
“I guess they’re still there,” Dominick said. He turned off his penlight, which had been shining into nothing. He could just make out Sissy’s silhouette against the night glow of the window. Somehow it seemed right that she was there in this room with him. It felt right that she had come. They had not talked since that interruptus event at her house. He wasn’t sure what to say, but the lingering silence felt like his responsibility. “Sissy,” he said.
“Yes?” she said, still standing at the window with her back to him.
“I’m glad you came. It’s good to see you.”
“Even in the dark? Is that because the other colored girl is better looking?”
Oh, why do they always go there? Dominick thought. “That wasn’t me, Sissy. No, because I missed seeing you, missed your smile and a sort of promise of something I feel when I’m with you.” He paused but Sissy said nothing. “And I have a couple of your books to return to you.”
