Peaceable Kingdom (mobi)

by Jack Ketchum

  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 got 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.

  “Please!” he said. “That guy back there . . . his goddamn wife . . . Jesus!”

  Lenny smiled. “I got it.”

  He glanced at the American flag on his dashboard and thought, I love this fucking town.

  The beefy citizen was nearly on them, coming down off the curb just a couple steps away.

  Lenny floored it.

  They slid uptown through time-coordinated greens like a knife through warm butter.

  “Where to?”

  “Take it up to Amsterdam and 98th, okay?”

  “Sure. No problem.” He looked at the guy through the rear-view, the guy still breathing hard and sweating. Glancing back out the window, still worried about shirtsleeves. Like his ladyfriend’s irate hubby had found some other cab and was hot on his tail. It only happened in the movies.

  “So what’s the story, you don’t mind my asking? You mean you didn’t know?”

  “Hell, no, I didn’t know. It was a pickup in a bar. She’s got her hand on my leg for godsakes. It’s going great. Then this guy shows up. Says he’s
gonna push my face in! Jesus, I never even paid the bar-tab! I just got the hell out of there. Thank God for you, man!”

  Lenny reflected that nobody had ever thanked God for him before. Not that he could remember. It was a first.

  Your Good Deed for the Day, he thought. From the look of the shirtsleeves, maybe for the month.

  “So you go back, you pay your tab another time. No problem.”

  “I don’t even know the name of the place. I just wandered in.”

  “Corner of 58th and 10th? That would be the Landmark Grill.”

  The guy nodded. He saw it in the rearview mirror.

  And there was something in the guy’s face right then he didn’t like. Something nasty all of a sudden. Like the guy had gone away somewhere and left a different guy sitting in the back seat who only looked like him.

  Ah, the guy’s had a hard night, he thought.

  No babe. No pickup. Almost got his ass kicked for his trouble. You might be feeling nasty too.

  They drove in silence after that until Lenny dropped him at Amsterdam and 98th, northeast corner. The guy said thanks and left him exactly fifteen per cent over the meter. Not bad but not exactly great either, considering. The next fare took him to the East Side and the next four down to the Village and then Soho and Alphabet City and then to the Village again. He never did get back to Tenth or even to Hell’s Kitchen for that matter.

  So it was only when he returned to the lot at the end of his shift that he learned from his dispatcher that the Landmark Grill had been robbed at gunpoint by a tallish thin sandy-haired man in a parka. Who got away in a cab, for chrissake. Everybody was buzzing about it because he’d used a goddamn cab as getaway. Thought it was pretty funny.

  That and the fact that the bartender had been crazy enough to chase him.

  A guy with a gun. You had to be nuts to risk it.

  Or maybe you had to be bleeding from the head where the guy had used the butt end of his gun on you. Lenny hadn’t managed to catch that little detail in the rear-view.

  There was never any question in his mind about calling the cops. If they didn’t have his medallion number then so be it. You didn’t want to get involved in something like this unless you had to. But Lenny thought about his fifteen per cent over the meter and wondered what the take was like.

  No good deed ever goes unpunished his mother used to say.

  He hated to admit it but as in most things, he supposed his mom was right.

  TWO

  At first Elise was embarrassed by them. No—for them.

  First embarrassed. Then fascinated.

  And then she couldn’t look away.

  The train was real late—she’d wondered if it was another bomb scare somewhere up the line, it would be just her luck to miss her dance class entirely and it was the only class she could care about at all—so that the platform was crowded and getting more so, mostly kids like her just out of school for the day and thank God it was over, nobody but Elise seeming to care if the train was late or not, the noise level enormous with the echo of kids shouting, laughing, arguing, whatever.

  For sure these two over by the pillar there didn’t care.

  She doubted they even noticed the kids swarming around them. Much less the lateness of the train.

  She had never seen a pair of adults so . . . into one another.

  But it wasn’t a good thing.

  It was terrible. And it was going on and on.

  They were probably in their thirties, forties—Elise couldn’t tell but she thought they were younger than her mother—and the woman was a little taller than the man who was almost as cute, for an old guy, as she was pretty. Or they would have been cute and pretty if their faces didn’t keep . . . crumbling all the time.

  They kept hugging and pulling apart and staring at each other as though trying to memorize one another’s faces and then hugging again so hard she thought it must have hurt sometimes, she could see the man’s fingers digging deep into the back of her blouse. And both of them were crying, tears just pouring down their cheeks and they didn’t even bother to try to wipe them away half the time, they mostly just let them come.

  She saw them stop and smile at each other and the smiles were worse than the tears. My God, they’re so sad. And smiling seemed to bring the tears on again, like they were one and the same, coming from the very same place. It was like they couldn’t stop. Like she was watching two hearts breaking for ever and ever.

  She was already ten or fifteen feet away from them but she found herself stepping back without even knowing at first she was doing it. It was as though there were some kind of magnetic field around them that repelled instead of pulling, as though they were pushing out at empty space, in order to give them space, all the space they needed to perform this horrible dance.

  I meant what I said, you know that, right? she heard the woman tell him and he nodded and took her in his arms again and she missed what the woman said after that but then they were crying again though real silently this time and then she heard the woman say I just can’t anymore and then they were crying hard again, really sobbing, clutching each other and their shoulders shaking and she wanted to look away because what if they noticed her staring at them but somehow she knew that they weren’t going to notice, they weren’t going to notice anything but each other.

  They were splitting up, she knew now. At first she’d thought maybe they had a kid who’d died or something. I just can’t anymore. The woman was dumping him but she didn’t want to because they still loved each other. And they loved each other so much—she’d never seen two people that much in love. She wasn’t even sure she’d ever seen it in the movies.

  So how could you do that? How could you just break up if you felt that way? How was it even possible?

  She noticed that some of the other kids were watching too and would go silent for a while. Not as intently as Elise was watching and mostly the girls but there on the platform you could feel it pouring out of these people and it was getting to some of the other kids as well. Something was happening to them that she had the feeling only adults knew about, something secret played out right out there in the open. Something she sensed was important. And a little scary.

  If this was what being an adult was all about she wanted no part of it.

  And yet she did.

  To be in love that much? God! So much in love that nothing and nobody matters but the two of you standing together right where you’re standing, oblivious to everybody, just holding tight and feeling something, somebody, so much and deep. It must be wonderful.

  It must be awful.

  It must be both together.

  How could that be?

  So that as the train roared in and kids crowded into the car, Elise behind them, wiping at her own tears which only served to confuse her more now, the woman stepped on a little behind her to the side and turned to the window, hands pressed to the dirty cloudy glass to watch him standing there alone on the platform and somehow smaller-looking without her and Elise looked from one to the other and back again and saw their shattered smiles.

  THREE

  She put down the paper and washed her hands in the sink. As usual the Sunday Times was filthy with printer’s ink. She went back to her easel in the living room. Her lunch-break was over. The pastel was coming along.

  She had that much, anyway. The work.

  What did you expect? she thought. When things got bad they were probably bound to get worse. If only for a little while.

  She hoped it was only for a little while.

  Because she was seriously doubting, for the very first time ever, her actual survival here.

  Everybody in the city was fragile, she guessed. No matter where you were or who you were World Trade had touched you somehow. Even if you’d lost nobody close to you, you’d still lost something. She knew that was part of it.

  She could look at a cat in a window and start to cry.

  And breaking off with David would have been bad enou
gh under any circumstances—correction, still was bad enough. Because he wouldn’t quite let go and neither could she exactly. Lonely late-night e-mails still were all too common between them.

  I understand you can’t see me, I understand it hurts too much to keep seeing me and I’m sorry. But I miss just talking to you too. We always talked, even through the worst of it. E-mails just don’t work. I feel like I’ve lost not only my lover but my friend. Please—call me sometime, okay? I want my friend back. I want her bad. Love, David.

  I can’t call. Not yet. Someday maybe but not now. I’d call and we’d talk and the next step would be seeing you and you know that. Why do you want to make me go through this again, David? Jesus! You say you understand but you don’t seem to. You’re not going to leave her and that’s that. And I need somebody who’ll be there for me all the time, not just a couple nights a week. I miss you too but you’re not that person, David. You can’t be. And I can’t simply wish that away. So please, for awhile, just please leave me be. Love, Claire.

  She knew he was hurting and she hated that because there was so much good between them and the love was still there. She hated hurting him. But she was alone and he wasn’t. So she also knew who was hurting the worst. She was. She was tired of crying herself to sleep every night he wouldn’t be there next to her or every morning when he’d leave. It had to stop.

  He’d never stop it. It was up to her.

  She’d been alone most of her life but that was always basically okay. She liked her own company. She’d always been a loner.

  But she’d never felt this lonely.

  What was that Bob Dylan line? I’m sick of love.

  She knew exactly how he felt when he wrote it.

  Fuck it, she thought, get to work. You’re an artist. So make art.

  The piece was one of a series, a still-life, an apple core surrounded by chains. A padlock lay open, gleaming, embracing one of the links of chain.

  She studied it.

  She knew exactly what it meant. Most people didn’t. That was fine, so long as they felt it.

  And bought one now and then.