Night Relics

by James P. Blaylock

  Beth had done this same kind of thing twice before when he had taken her out to dinner. She didn’t argue about him paying the check or buying movie tickets afterward, but then the next day or the day after she showed up with some sort of very practical gift, as if she wanted to keep things balanced, or as if it was easier to invest money than to be expected to invest emotion. He hoped that wasn’t it.

  “It’s got to be deep enough to fit the whole pot into,” Peter said to Bobby.

  “There’s rocks here,” Bobby said. He skittered a little more dirt out of the hole before dragging the heavy plastic pot into it, checking the result.

  “Another foot and a half,” Peter said. “We need extra room for the root mulch.”

  “I think you’re smoking dope,” Bobby said back to him.

  “What?” Peter nearly laughed, but he restrained himself. He probably shouldn’t encourage that kind of talk.

  “Nothing,” Bobby said. “That’s what my friend Caleb says when he means you’re talking stupid. You know.”

  “Yeah, I knew that. I was just wondering if it was a good thing to say.”

  “It’s not dirty, is it?”

  “No, it’s just … it’s just not the kind of thing to say around people who wouldn’t understand you were just being funny.”

  “I don’t care what they think,” Bobby said. “You said people like that were hosers.”

  “Well,” Peter said, looking for some way to change the subject. “Dirt’s pretty hard, eh? You know what I’d do?”

  “Buy a six-pack and draw up plans?”

  Peter gave him a mock-threatening look. “I’m telling you to lay off that kind of thing. Maybe you don’t want to let your mother hear you talking that way. Where did you get that? Caleb again?”

  “No, I heard it on television. I was the one who told it to Caleb.”

  “Well, do your mother a favor and don’t tell her things like that. There’s some things mothers shouldn’t hear. You wouldn’t say that kind of thing to your teacher, would you? It’s kind of smart aleck, isn’t it?”

  Bobby shrugged. He hacked at the hole with the spade again. “Maybe I wouldn’t say it to her. But Caleb got in trouble yesterday for saying something worse.”

  “What?” Peter asked.

  “The S word.”

  “The S word?” Peter could only think of one.

  “Sex,” Bobby said.

  Mildly relieved, Peter shook his head, as if he couldn’t quite believe anybody would say such a thing. “Did your teacher give him detention? What’s her name again? Mrs. Cheese, isn’t it?”

  “Mrs. Crumb. He didn’t exactly say it, but he got in trouble for it anyway. It was Mrs. Crumb, really, who said it.”

  “She said the S word in class? What grade are you in?”

  “Second.”

  Peter shook his head. It was a brand-new world, full of mysteries. “So why did Caleb get in trouble?”

  “Well,” Bobby said, “Mrs. Crumb was talking about Columbus, you know? And she was talking about sailing to America, and how they were lost and all. And she said that they found their way by using a sextant. It’s one of our spelling words. Off the special list. And anyway, when she said sextant, Caleb said, ‘What kind of tent?’ ”

  Peter started laughing. He couldn’t help himself this time. Of course he ought to act as if the whole thing were shameful, so he pretended to be clearing his throat. “Right out loud?” he asked.

  “Yeah, and Mrs. Crumb really lost it.”

  “I bet. Nobody laughed, did they?”

  “Of course everybody laughed,” Bobby said. “Wouldn’t you laugh? You just did.”

  “I was coughing. And anyway, the thing is that you can’t say that kind of thing in front of grown-ups. They can’t take it. Kids can take it, but grown-ups have trouble with it.”

  Bobby looked at him suspiciously, as if he found Peter’s statement intriguing but probably a lie.

  “It’s true,” Peter said. “I’m not kidding about this. There’s things you better not say around adults. Now I don’t really care, mostly. You can say almost anything around me. But I’m what they call a deviation from the norm. Most people have a thing in their inner ear. You know about the inner ear?”

  “There’s bones in it. Little ones. The hammer and something.”

  “That’s right. Well, you understand then. I don’t have to tell you about that part of it. There’s a delicate balance there that mustn’t be upset. Mrs. Crumb’s ear bones upset easily, and you don’t want to start talking dirty in front of her and make her get dizzy and fall over.”

  “There’s nothing dirty about what I said about the six-pack.”

  “You know what I mean. Dig that hole deeper. You’ll never get to China at that rate. Here, let me take a stab at it.” Peter stepped down off the porch and kicked at the shovel, which clanked against a rock. He jammed at it and wiggled it, managing finally to unearth a piece of granite about as big as a lemon. Around it the dirt was hard and dry. They’d need a pick. Better yet, a jackhammer. “Does Caleb talk like that all the time in class?”

  “Yeah. He got in trouble on Wednesday, too.”

  “What did he say?”

  “The D word.”

  “Damn?” Peter asked.

  “No, ‘dick.’ ”

  Peter started laughing again, despite himself. “Dick! He said that? What? In a joke or something?”

  “No,” Bobby said. “Just out loud. He stood up, too.”

  “He just stood up and said, ‘Dick’? Then what did he do?”

  “Sat down again. He yelled it, actually. Mr. Brown heard him, too.”

  “Who’s Mr. Brown again?”

  “The principal. Caleb was dead meat.”

  “I bet he was,” Peter said. “That’s what I’ve been warning you about. Principals can’t stand that kind of language. They can’t take it. It’s a threat to them. It’s worse than the chicken pox. Worse than head lice. It gets into their eustachian tubes and they get dizzy and sick, like they just got off a bad carnival ride. People who say words like that in front of principals end up in the penitentiary half the time, picking oakum.” Peter tilted the shovel against the wall. It was no use even trying to dig the hole any deeper.

  “What’s oakum?” Bobby asked.

  “I don’t really know,” Peter said, wiping his forehead, “but in jail they make people pick it.”

  “Do you know what I’d do?”

  “About what? Caleb talking like that, or picking oakum?”

  “About this hole. I’d fill it with water, you know. And then you let the water soak in and maybe fill it up again. Then the ground’s softer, and you can dig in it.”

  “That’s a brilliant plan,” Peter said. “Get the hose.”

  Bobby trotted off around the side of the house. A moment later Peter heard the side door slam shut in the bus, and Bobby reappeared, dragging the hose and carrying a box full of toy trucks and alien-looking plastic figurines. “I’ll hold it,” he said. “You turn it on.”

  “Sure,” Peter said. He headed around to the back where the water spigot was. “Holler for me to shut it off!”

  “It’s not even on yet!” Bobby shouted.

  “I know. I mean when it is on.” He cranked the water on and waited until Bobby hollered. When he got back around to the front, the basinlike hole in the dirt was brimming with muddy water, and Bobby was dropping the aliens one by one into it. He picked up a couple of boards nearby, blocked one of them up into a ramp, and drove one of the trucks up the ramp so that it sailed into the water.

  “You want to do one?” Bobby asked hopefully.

  “Sure,” Peter said, picking a big truck out of the box. “Watch this.” He put one of the aliens into the cab, then drove the truck up the ramp. It sailed off into the hole, sinking until only the front bumper and the top of the cab stuck out.

  “We’ve got to get him out,” Bobby said, “before he drowns.” He ran off again. Peter heard the bus doo
r slide open and shut, and then Bobby was back, carrying a tow truck with a little winch in back wound with string.

  Pretending to be the trapped alien, Peter made drowning noises while Bobby tied the end of the string to the bumper of the sunken truck and began turning the crank on the winch. The truck bumped forward a couple of inches, exposing the head of the sorry-looking alien. Bobby picked up the rock dug out of the hole and dropped it into the water by the open truck window. A little wave washed into the cab, momentarily submerging the alien again. Peter made noises like a man talking underwater while Bobby scooted the tow truck forward, hauling the drowned truck out onto dry land.

  “He’s dead,” Bobby said, looking in the window at the creature behind the wheel. He poked at it with a finger, and the alien fell over sideways.

  “Maybe we can revive him,” Peter said.

  “No chance. He’s drowned. He was a bad guy anyway. He stole the truck.”

  “Oh,” Peter said.

  “We need more water. This is soaking in.”

  “What we need is a bigger hole,” Peter said.

  “And a river. There should be a river leading somewhere. Into the bushes. That over there is the jungle. Can we use any of those boards in the pile? We need a base.”

  “A base? We used to call it a fort.”

  “We call it a base now. Can we use them?”

  “Sure,” Peter said.

  Together they salvaged a dozen short pieces of lumber out of the scrap pile and built a base for the good aliens. Peter remembered doing that countless times as a kid. Once he had spent all day building a fort out of sticks in the soft dirt of a flower bed, fashioning a jungle compound like the one destroyed by King Kong. After dark he had wanted to go back out with a flashlight and work on it some more, but his mother hadn’t let him.

  Somehow he had never done that with David—built forts in the dirt. All his memories of that kind of thing were left over from his own childhood. Thinking about it now wrecked his mood, and suddenly all the magic went out of the boards and the waterways and the aliens. There was a time when that kind of thing looked like the kingdom of heaven, but somewhere along the line it had lost its glow. Maybe that was just the cost of growing up. And maybe the cost of growing up was too high.

  Those were easier days, he thought, but then suddenly he remembered David. What might he be going through? Nothing easy. He pushed the thought back into the darkness, and just then Beth came out of the house, carrying two plates.

  “Did you dig the hole for the rose?” she asked doubtfully.

  “We’re conditioning the soil first,” Peter said, taking one of the plates from her.

  “Ah,” she said. “That’s what it is. I can see that now.”

  “We just drownded the bad alien,” Bobby said. “Now we’re setting up a base. What you do is put your guys around inside and then knock it down and then see whether they got crushed or not.”

  “Seriously,” Peter said to Beth. “The ground’s too hard, so Bobby suggested we soak it with a little water. I think it’s a brilliant idea.”

  “I do too,” she said, picking up the shovel and scooping wet dirt out of the hole. She pried out a couple of rocks, chopped more dirt out, and sent Bobby around back to turn on the hose again. She worked silently, and Peter knew she had something to say and was waiting for the right time.

  “I brought the spud gun,” Bobby said to him. Peter hadn’t seen him return from the back of the house. Beth went back inside to get the coffee. Bobby pulled the gun out of the cardboard box along with potatoes in a paper bag. “Four potatoes,” he said. “Too bad we only have one gun.”

  “We have two,” Peter said. “I bought one for me at the same time I bought yours.” He stood up and walked over to the Suburban. There was no use letting the spud gun sit around in the glove compartment. So what if he had bought it for David? He’d done it out of guilt, and he could do it out of guilt again. When all this was over, he’d buy ten spud guns and a sack of potatoes for each one, and really make the guilt count for something. He opened the car door and twisted the glove compartment latch. When it sprang open, Peter stood there looking at it, not quite believing what he saw.

  The spud gun was gone, along with a tire pressure gauge and a ball-point pen. He rummaged among the insurance papers and maps. What else? There had been something else along with the spud gun….

  David’s flute. Damn it! To hell with the rest of it, David’s flute meant something. He couldn’t believe he’d been robbed, right in broad daylight. It must have been this morning, or maybe late last night. He checked the back: his toolbox was there along with a bundle of road flares. The notion was almost too preposterous. Between last night and this morning, someone had stolen four dollars’ worth of junk and left a hundred bucks’ worth of tools.

  14

  “WHY DO YOU THINK IT’S THIS GUY ADAMS?” PETER asked.

  “I don’t know,” Beth said. “Something. Intuition. I guess because he’s the only one I’ve met lately that would do something like that. I don’t believe it’s just some guy out walking in the neighborhood.”

  “Could you tell anything from his voice when he called?”

  “No. I don’t know what he was doing to it, but I didn’t recognize his voice. Probably he was talking through a towel or something.”

  Peter stood up and looked out toward the creek. Bobby had finally gotten bored with the aliens and their base and had gone for a hike. The wind was blowing hard again, and Peter was edgy even though Bobby had promised not to go very far. “You’ll have to get a line trap on your phone, whatever they call it,” he said, sitting down again. “A line I.D.”

  “That’s what the police said. Now that I’ve got a case number from the police, Pacific Bell can hook it up. The only trouble is that he’s calling from a pay phone. I could tell that much. So the best thing I can hope for is that if he keeps calling he’s stupid enough to keep using the same pay phone. I don’t think he will, though. And even if he does, then the police have to stake out the phone, and how long are they willing to do that?”

  “Probably not at all. Why don’t you think he’ll use the same phone? One near your house?”

  She shrugged. “That’s what he said—that he was nearby. But he’s obviously not just a telephone freak, not if he called twice and then came right over. I think he used the phone to call me just like anyone else would do.”

  “That’s a little bit scary.”

  “A little,” Beth said, wrapping her arms around herself as if she were suddenly cold. “It’s not quite as scary as your story, though. I think you win the prize.”

  “I don’t know. I think I’d rather have ghosts than maniacs. Anyway, I don’t like the idea of your being in the house alone,” he said, steering the conversation away from himself. “If he calls again, leave. Go to a hotel. Drive out here.”

  “And if you get a call from any ghosts, you leave. We can meet halfway and camp in the woods like refugees.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “I know. So am I. Anyway, Klein’s putting new dead bolts on the doors right now.”

  “Klein is?”

  “Uh-huh. New latches on the windows, too.”

  “I could have done that,” Peter said.

  “I’m not even sure it’s all necessary, but he wouldn’t take no for an answer. I almost think …”

  “What? You don’t think it was him, do you?”

  “No.” She shook her head. “Absolutely not.”

  “Why not? It would be easy as pie for him. Think about it. He’s out in the middle of the night and notices a light on in the neighbor lady’s bedroom. It’s too much temptation, and he sneaks through the gate and looks in the window, and when she sees him and screams, he simply pretends to be chasing the bad man off. Then he’s terrificly helpful afterward, and the neighbor lady ends up saying, ‘Thank God for Mr. Klein.’ ”

  “I can’t believe that.”

  “And to top it off, he ends up with copi
es of the new dead bolt keys.”

  “Too crazy.”

  “That’s what I’d do if I was him. I mean, I wouldn’t do that in the first place, but if I did, that’s exactly how I’d explain being out and about in the middle of the night. Why did he say he was out there?”

  “He couldn’t sleep. He was having a drink.”

  “Not very original.”

  “That’s why it’s probably true. You don’t know him as well as I do. He just wouldn’t—especially the breaking-in part. Especially not with Bobby in the house.”

  “And there were no fingerprints on the doorknob?”

  “Nothing but a smear.”

  “So the guy was wearing gloves.”

  She shook her head. “No. I saw his hand when he turned to run. He wasn’t wearing any gloves.”

  “Why did you say you ‘didn’t know’ a moment ago when you mentioned Klein? What don’t you know about him?”

  “Just that I don’t know how he’s mixed up with our friend Adams, but I know he is. He was lying about that last night at the steak house. And I think he’s lying for some good reason.”

  Peter listened as Beth told him about the overheard conversation that morning, but he was distracted by the wind and by Bobby’s being gone. Brown leaves blew out of the woods, carpeting the drive nearly ankle deep in places.

  “I thought Klein was going to kill him,” she said. “I’m not kidding. If Lorna hadn’t got in the way, I think he would have shot him. He threatened to.”

  There was a blast of wind just then that rattled the house, picking up the fallen leaves and filling the air with them. The trees creaked and swished in an orchestra of wind noise. Beth paused for a moment and then went on with what she was saying. But Peter barely heard her now. He stood up again, listening for stray sounds, for human voices on the wind. There was something urgent in the atmosphere, something wound tight.

  The dense shadows of the alders along the creek moved rhythmically, casting over and over again the shapes of swaying, gesturing limbs across the ground. There was the suggestion of animation in the shadows, of arms sweeping the sunlit spaces, of someone running forward only to be pulled backward again into the dark formless spaces among the trees.