Lights Out

by Douglas Clegg

  Subway Turnstile

  Walks through the turnstile, dropping tokens, grasping the boy by the elbow.

  “Pull through,” he says, but the little boy won’t budge.

  Glances at others, in line, waiting.

  A friendly woman behind him suggests that they hurry.

  “The train’s coming. Please,” she says.

  “Come on,” he says, and again grasps, and again, the boy manages to stiffen.

  “Are you scared?” he asks, and glances up at the others. “He’s not usually scared.”

  Gets a kind look from the woman behind him.

  She is wrapped up in a thick tan winter coat. A large handbag over her shoulder.

  “Come on,” he says, and this time reaches around and places his fingers against the child’s throat.

  “Davy,” he says. “People are waiting.”

  “Let’s go,” the woman says, on the edge of polite.

  The train comes, and human noises of annoyance rise from a low grumble behind the woman who stands at the back of the man with the boy.

  “Just push him,” someone says.

  The heat of the train against his face.

  Davy looks up at him. Shakes his head.

  “I know what to do,” the wrapped woman says, and steps beside the man.

  She looks at Davy and smiles sweetly.

  She lifts him up in her arms and carries him through the turnstile.

  “See? Not scary at all.”

  The boy whispers against her ear, “He’s not my daddy. I don’t know him.”

  She feels a shock go through her. Lowers the boy to the platform. The man has come through, and takes the boy’s hand.

  “Thank you for that,” the man says.

  The little boy looks up at her.

  “Come on, Davy,” the man says.

  The boy looks back at her as the man tugs at his hand.

  They board the train.

  The woman watches them, nearly about to do something. She glances at the others on the platform.

  At the face of the boy through the smudged window of the train.

  The train leaves the station.

  She picks at her coat, unwrapping herself.

  She finds a place on a bench and waits for the next train, but the heat of his whisper remains.

  Where Flies Are Born

  The train stopped suddenly. Ellen watched her son fill in the coloring book with the three crayons left to him: aquamarine, burnt sienna, and silver.

  She was doing this for Joey. She could put up with Frank and his tirades and possessiveness, but not when he tried to hurt their son. Her son. She would make sure that Joey had a better life.

  Ellen turned to the crossword puzzle in the back of the magazine section to pass the time. She tried not to think of what they’d left behind.

  She was a fairly patient person, and so it didn’t annoy her much that it was another hour before anyone told the passengers it would be a three hour stop — or more.

  Or more, translated into overnight.

  Then her patience wore thin and Joey began to whine.

  The town was a quarter mile ahead, and so they would be put up somewhere for the night.

  So this was to be their Great Escape. February in a mountain town at thirty below. Frank would find them for sure; only a day’s journey from Springfield. Frank would hunt them down, as he’d done last time, and bring them back to his little castle and she would make it okay for another five years before she went crazy again and had to run.

  No. She would make sure he wouldn’t hurt Joey. She would kill him first. She would, with her bare hands, stop him from ever touching their son again.

  Joey said, “Can’t we just stay on the train? It’s cold out there.”

  “You’ll live,” she said, bringing out the overnight case and following in a line with the other passengers out of the car. They trudged along the snowy tracks to the short strip of junction, where each was directed to a different motel or private house.

  “I wanted a motel,” she told the conductor. She and Joey were to be overnight guests of the Neesons’, a farm family. “This isn’t what I paid for,” she said, “it’s not what I expected at all.”

  “You can sleep in the station, you like,” the man said, but she passed on that after looking around the filthy room with its greasy benches. “Anyway, the Neesons run a bed-and-breakfast, so you’ll do fine there.”

  The Neesons arrived in a four-wheel drive, looking just past the curve of middle age, tooth-rotted, with country indelibly sprayed across their grins and friendly winks.

  Mama Neeson, in her late fifties, spoke of the snow, of their warm house “where we’ll all be safe as kittens in a minute,” of the soup she’d been making. Papa Neeson was older (old enough to be my father, Ellen thought) and balder, eyes of a rodent, face of a baby-left-too-long-in-bathwater.

  Mama Neeson cooed over Joey, already asleep. Papa Neeson spoke of the snowfall and the roads.

  Ellen said very little, other than to thank them for putting her up.

  “Our pleasure,” Mama Neeson said. “The little ones will love the company.”

  “You have children?” Ellen winced at her inflection. She didn’t mean it to sound as if Mama Neeson was too old to have what could be called “little ones.”

  “Adopted, you could say,” Papa Neeson grumbled. “Mama, she loves kids, can’t get enough of them, you get the instinct, you see, the sniffs for babies and you got to have them whether your body gives ‘em up or not.”

  Ellen, embarrassed for his wife, shifted uncomfortably in the seat. What a rude man. This was what Frank would be like, under the skin, talking about women and their “sniffs,” their “hankerings.” Poor Mama Neeson, a houseful of babies and this man.

  “I have three little ones,” Mama Neeson said. “All under nine. How old’s yours?”

  “Six.”

  “He’s an angel. Papa, ain’t he just a little angel sent down from heaven?”

  Papa Neeson glanced over to Joey, curled up in a ball against Ellen’s side. “Don’t say much, does he?”

  The landscape was white and black; Ellen watched for ice patches in the road, but they went over it all smoothly. Woods rose up suddenly, parting for an empty flat stretch of land. They drove down a fenced road, snow piled all the way to the top of the fence posts. Then, a farmhouse with a barn behind it.

  We better not be sleeping in the barn.

  Mama Neeson sighed. “Hope they’re in bed. Put them to bed hours ago, but you know how they romp…”

  “They love to romp,” Papa Neeson said.

  The bed was large. She and Joey sank into it as soon as the door closed behind them. Ellen was too tired to think, and Joey was still dreaming.

  Sleep came quickly and was black and white, full of snowdrifts.

  Ellen awoke, thirsty, before dawn.

  Half-asleep, she lifted her head towards the window: the sound of some animal crunching in the snow outside. She looked out—had to open the window because of the frost on the pane.

  A hazy purple light brushed across the whiteness of the hills—the sun was somewhere rising beyond the treetops. A large brown bear sniffed along the porch rail. Bears should’ve frightened her, but this one seemed friendly and stupid, as it lumbered along in the tugging snow, nostrils wiggling.

  Sniffing the air; Mama Neeson would be up—four thirty—frying bacon, flipping hotcakes on the griddle, buttering toast. Country mama. The little ones would rise from their quilts and trundle beds, ready to go out and milk cows or some such farm thing, and Papa Neeson would get out his shotgun to scare off the bear that came sniffing.

  Ellen remembered Papa’s phrase: “the sniffs for babies,” and it gave her a discomforting thought about the bear.

  She lay back on the bed, stroking Joey’s fine hair, with this thought in her mind of the bear sniffing for the babies, when she saw a housefly circle above her head; then, another, coming from some corner of the
room, joining its mate. Three more arrived.

  Finally, she was restless to swat them. She got out of bed and went to her overnight bag for hairspray. This was her favorite method of disposing of houseflies. She shook the can, and then sprayed in the direction of the nine or ten fat black houseflies. They buzzed in curves of infinity. In a minute, they began dropping, one by one, to the rug. Ellen enjoyed taking her boots and slapping each fly into the next life.

  Her dry throat and heavy bladder sent her out to the hallway.

  Feeling along the wall for the light switch or the door to the bathroom—whichever came first. When she found the switch, she flicked it up, and a single unadorned bulb hummed into dull light.

  A little girl stood at the end of the hall, too old for the diaper she wore; her stringy hair falling wildly almost to her feet; her skin bruised in several places—particularly around her mouth, which was swollen on the upper lip.

  In her small pudgy fingers was a length of thread.

  Ellen was so shocked by this sight that she could not say a word—the girl was only seven or so, and what her appearance indicated about the Neesons…

  Papa Neeson was like Frank. Likes to beat people. Likes to beat children. Joey and his black eyes, this girl and her bruised face. I could kill them both.

  The little girl’s eyes crinkled up as if she were about to cry, wrinkled her forehead and nose, parted her swollen lips.

  From the black and white canyon of her mouth a fat green fly crawled the length of her lower lip, and then flew toward the light bulb above Ellen’s head.

  Later, when the sun was up, and the snow outside her window was blinding, Ellen knew she must’ve been half-dreaming, or perhaps it was a trick that the children played—for she’d seen all of them, the two-year-old, the five-year-old, and the girl.

  The boys had trooped out from the shadows of the hall. All wearing the filthy diapers, all bruised from beatings or worse. The only difference with the two younger boys was they had not yet torn the thread that had been used to sew their mouths and eyes and ears and nostrils closed.

  Such child abuse was beyond imagining. Ellen had seen them only briefly, and afterwards wondered if perhaps she had seen wrong. But it was a dream, a very bad one, because the little girl had flicked the light off again. When Ellen reached to turn it back on, they had retreated into the shadows and the feeling of a surreal waking state came upon her. The Neesons could not possibly be this evil. With the light on, she saw only houseflies sweeping through the heavy air.

  At breakfast, Joey devoured his scrambled eggs like he hadn’t eaten in days; Ellen had to admit they tasted better than she’d had before.

  “You live close to the earth,” Papa Neeson said. “And it gives up its treasures.”

  Joey said, “Eggs come from chickens.”

  “Chickens come from eggs,” Papa Neeson laughed, “and eggs are the beginning of all life. But we all gather our life from the earth, boy. You city folks don’t feel it because you’re removed. Out here, well, we get it under our fingernails, birth, death, and what comes in between.”

  “You’re something of a philosopher,” Ellen said, trying to hide her uneasiness. The image of the children still in her head, like a half-remembered dream. She was eager to get on her way, because that dream was beginning to seem more real. She had spent a half hour in the shower trying to talk herself out of having seen the children and what had been done to them: then, ten minutes drying off, positive that she had seen what she’d seen. It was Frank’s legacy: he had taught her to doubt what was right before her eyes. She wondered if Papa Neeson performed darker needlework on his babies.

  “I’m a realist,” Papa Neeson said. His eyes were bright and kind—it shocked her to look into them and think about what he might have done.

  Mama Neeson, sinking the last skillet into a washtub next to the stove, turned and said, “Papa just has a talent for making things work, Missus, for putting two and two together. That’s how he grows, and that’s how he gathers. Why if it weren’t for him, where would my children be?”

  “Where are they?” Joey asked.

  “We have to get back to the train,” Ellen said. “They said we’d take off by eleven.”

  Papa Neeson raised his eyebrows in an aside to his wife.

  “I saw some flies at the windows,” he said. “They been bad again.”

  Mama Neeson shrugged her broad shoulders. “They got to let them out at times or they’d be bursting, now, wouldn’t they. Must tickle something awful.” She wiped her dripping hands on the flower print apron, back and forth like she could never get dry enough. Ellen saw a shining in the old woman’s eyes like tears and hurt.

  Joey clanked his fork on his plate; Ellen felt a lump in her throat, and imaginary spiders and flies crawling up the back of her neck. Something in the atmosphere had changed, and she didn’t want to spend one more minute in this house with these people.

  Joey clapped a fly between his hands, catching it mid-air.

  “Mama’s sorry you didn’t see the kids,” Papa Neeson said, steering over a slick patch on the newly-plowed road.

  “But you’re not.” Ellen said. She was feeling brave. She hated this man like she hated Frank. Maybe she’d report him to some child welfare agency when she got back to the train station. She could see herself killing this man.

  “No,” Papa Neeson nodded. “I’m not. Mama, she don’t understand about other people, but I do.”

  “Well, I saw them. All three. What you do to them.”

  Papa Neeson sighed, pulling over and parking at the side of the road. “You don’t understand. Don’t know if I should waste my breath.”

  Joey was in the backseat, bundled up in blankets. He yawned, “Why we stopping?”

  Ellen directed him to turn around and sit quietly. He was a good boy. “I have a husband who hits children, too.”

  “I don’t hit the kids, lady, and how dare you think I do, why you can just get out of my car right now if that’s your attitude.”

  “I told you, I saw them,” she said defiantly.

  “You see the threads?”

  Ellen could barely stand his smug attitude.

  “You see ‘em? You know why my kids look like that?”

  Ellen reached for the door handle. She was going to get out. Fucking country people and their torture masked as discipline. Men, how she hated their power trips. Blood was boiling now; she was capable of anything, like two days ago when she took the baseball bat and slammed it against Frank’s chest, hearing ribs cracking. She was not going to let a man hurt her child like that. Never again. The rage was rising up inside her the way it had only done twice in her life before, both times with Frank, both times protecting Joey.

  Papa Neeson reached out and grabbed her wrist.

  “Don’t hold me like that,” she snarled.

  He let go.

  Papa Neeson began crying, pressing his head into the steering wheel. “She just wanted them so bad, I had to go dig ‘em up. I love her so much, and I didn’t want her to die from hurting, so I just dig ‘em up and I figured out what to do and did it.”

  When he calmed, he sat back up, looking straight ahead. “We better get to the junction. Train’ll be ready. You got your life moving ahead with it, don’t you?”

  “Tell me about your children,” she said, feeling a slight shiver as she thought of the flies. “What’s wrong with them?”

  He looked her straight in the eyes, making her flinch because of his intensity.

  “Nothing, except they been dead for a long time.” He let this sink in. He took a deep breath and looked out at the snowy world. “My wife, she loves ‘em like they’re her own. I dig ‘em up, see, I thought she was gonna die from grief not having none of her own, and I figured it out, you know, about the maggots and the flies, how they make things move if you put enough of ‘em inside the bodies.”

  She wanted him to stop talking. She couldn’t stand the pain in his voice.

  But he cont
inued. “I didn’t count on ‘em lasting this long, but what if they do? What if they do, lady? Mama, she loves those babies. We’re only humans, lady, and humans need to hold babies, they need to love something other than themselves, don’t they? Don’t you? You got your boy, you know how much that’s worth? Love beyond choosing, ain’t it? Love that don’t die. You know what it’s like to hug a child when you never got to hug one before? So I figured and I figured some more, and I thought about what makes things live, how do we know something’s alive, and I figured, when it moves it’s alive, and when it don’t move, it’s dead. So Mama, I had her sew the flies in, but they keep laying eggs and more and more, and the kids, they got the minds of flies, and sometimes they rip out the threads, so sometimes flies get out, but it’s a tiny price, ain’t it, lady? When you need to love little ones, and you ain’t got none, it’s a tiny price, a day in hell’s all, but then sunshine and children and love, lady, ain’t it worth that?”

  Ellen had a migraine by the time Papa Neeson dropped them off down at the junction. She barked at Joey. Apologized. Kissed him on the forehead.

  She bought Joey an orange soda and made him promise to stand just over by the long bench near the soda machine and not go anywhere.

  Ellen went into the restroom to wipe cold water across her face

  The mirror in the bathroom was warped. She thought she looked stunning: brown eyes circled with sleeplessness, the throbbing vein to the left side of her forehead, the dry, cracked lips. She thought of the threads, of the children tugging at them, popping them out to let the flies go. Ran a finger over her lips, imagining Mama Neeson taking her needle and thread, breaking the skin with tiny holes. Ears, nostrils, eyes, mouth, other openings, other places where flies could escape.

  Flies and life, sewn up into the bodies of dead children, buried by other grieving parents, brought back by the country folks who ran the bed-and-breakfast, and who spoke of children that no one ever saw much of.