Lights Out

by Douglas Clegg

  7

  And then, on his day off, he saw her again.

  It was just after 9, and the rain began, and he was going to have a late dinner at the Hong Kong Moon restaurant when he saw her walking out of the convenience store with a small bag of groceries. When he caught up to her at her car, she didn’t look happy to see him at all. He wanted to ask about the Lifesavers, but it seemed trivial and stupid now.

  “Oh, hi Layton,” she said. “I’m sorry I haven’t been around. My mother died. There was a lot to take care of.”

  “God, I’m sorry.”

  She got in the little car.

  He stood there, the blur of rain on the car window obscuring her features. He felt the shiver that always came at the end of new love.

  And then, she began laughing.

  For just a second — was it the rain? His tears? —he thought that it all shimmered.

  Not just her, but the rain and the glass and the metal of the car.

  8

  It took Layton twenty minutes to get up the hill, flash his badge at the guards, nod to the night nurse who was surprised to see him, and make his way down the ward. He found Nix sitting up on his mattress, his hair soaked. Nix glanced up, then back down to his own upturned palms. “My nerves are all tingly,” Nix said.

  “Tell me everything,” Layton said.

  Nix didn’t look up from his hands. Then he licked his lips like a hungry child. “You don’t know this for sure, Conner, what you’re thinking. Whatever it is you’re thinking.”

  “Do you know who Angela is?”

  Nix grinned. “I have known many angels.”

  “Angela. She’s the one who gave you the Lifesavers.”

  “I have saved several lives,” Nix said.

  Layton rushed over and grabbed him by the shoulders, lifting him to his feet. They stared eye to eye; sweat ran down Nix’s face. “What is it you do? What is it about the baby crying and the woman and the things that you babble about?”

  Nix’s grin faded. “It’s the machinery. It’s how it works. It’s how we work. It’s how the world changes in the dark, Conner. It’s how when light particles are lessened, it’s not just about seeing, it’s about how in absolute darkness it can change. We can change.”

  Layton pushed him back down on the bed. “Half an hour ago you were a woman in a car.”

  “Was I?” Nix asked, almost slyly. “Was I? Well, then, Nurse Conner, you have already begun your journey. Do you remember being inside her, this Angela? How you pushed in, how she opened, how she made those little noises that made you push to greater and greater heights, how she turned twenty one week and how she told you all about her dying mother and how you fell in love and how she broke your heart one night in the rain? Do you remember playing with her body, or asking her to do something that you find in your heart of hearts to be repulsive and lowly but which brings you great pleasure? Do you remember when she told you all her secrets, even the one about her uncle, or the time you both laughed at once over something you seemed to think of at the same time, as if you had so much in common, Nurse Conner, that this might just be the girl for you, this might just be Miss Right and you just might be the luckiest man in the world? And then you told her that awful secret, the dark secret, the one you thought you could trust her with, the one about your father’s madness, about how it pushed you to the edge and how one night you…”

  Later, when two psych techs pulled him off Nix, Layton could not remember raising his fists, let alone bringing them down near forty times over Nix’s head, nor could he remember through the trial that even after he’d begun to break the skin of Nix’s face, long after the patient was dead, particles of bone from the patient’s jaw and nose had splintered and some had gone, needle-like, into the palm of Layton’s hand.

  9

  Nearly a year later, Layton tried to sit up in bed, but the restraints held him fast. He wanted to shout for the night nurse, but whom could he trust? He knew them all, he knew they thought he was one of the many criminally insane, but he knew the staff well, and he didn’t understand why they should restrain him when he had only tried to kill himself once, and had botched the job anyway.

  It was the whisper of night coming up under the barred window, the last light of day was nearly vanished, and he still felt drowsy from the last med administered at two. The nights were the worst, because of the people who moved through it, who came and went and he watched in horror as they did what had to be done. Even Nix, even he came through, his face sometimes a bloody tangle, a forest of twisted flesh and bone, sometimes it was just his face, beads of sweat on his forehead, that trollish look, that milky complexion. The machinery hummed and if he could just believe strongly enough, he could slip through the restraints and join them, he could go and be anywhere and anyone, but it never seemed to happen. Some of the other patients came and went; the walls rippled like a flooding river; the air itself became vivid with the movement of nearly invisible molecules as they went like clouds of mosquitoes, forming and splitting apart again.

  Layton, in restraints, tried to pray.

  His heartbeat raced as he watched a swollen bubble of glass move along the window.

  “It’s belief,” he whispered. “Belief makes it move. It’s absolute belief,” but it wasn’t coming for him, the molecules weren’t changing, the mechanism of darkness was not clicking into place.

  “Please let me go. Please,” he begged, and then, as happened nightly, his voice became louder, sobs and screams.

  One of the nurses came by with another med.

  As she wiped the sweat from his forehead, he told her how they left nightly, how when the sun went down the machinery of night made it happen and their molecules swirled and how even the two men he had killed in his life, his father and Nix, sometimes came to him and made him do terrible things in the dark.

  “And the woman who spoke to the courts? Her name was Angela, but she’s really one of the men I killed, only you can’t ever really kill anyone, you can’t, it’s just a rearrangement of molecules and at night they can change again or if they want they can stay as they were that night for a whole day and they can even come to your trial and talk about you and things you told them and how you seemed to be going slowly mad only you never ever went mad, if anything it’s complete sanity, it’s the kind of sanity that’s like the sun at noon all bright and sharp and please don’t turn off the light, that’s all I ask, when you leave and I get sleepy from the pills, please leave the lights on,” his voice softened, and the nurse nodded.

  When he awoke later — when the meds were beginning to wear off — the room was dark and he felt the brush of a thousand particles that whispered with the voice of his father.

  The Wolf

  The man and the boy had been tracking the wolf since sunrise, but by the time the moon came up they made camp along the ridge.

  “Put your rifle over there,” the man told the boy, pointing to a pile of rocks covered with fern. “Always put your rifle as far from you and the fire as possible. Accidents happen when they're too close. We don't sleep with them. The wolf won't attack us. It's sheep he's after, not you. Not me.”

  The boy at first questioned this, because he liked to have his rifle close to him when he hunted. After a few minutes of consideration, the boy decided that the rancher had hired the man to lead, and he would let him. The boy also had done something he wished he hadn't that afternoon, by shooting at what he thought might be the wolf, but turned out to be a silver fox.

  By the fire, after supper, they sat across from each other. “We might have had him at the bluffs,” the man said. “He's smarter than us, I think.”

  “I didn't mean to shoot at it,” the boy said.

  “It doesn't matter.”

  “I thought I saw him.”

  “Foxes can look like wolves, sometimes. Coyotes, too.”

  “It was a stupid mistake.”

  “I don't care. You're young.”

  “I'm the best hunter for a hun
dred miles.”

  “I can tell.”

  “Mister, maybe they pay you money to hunt wolves, but when I hunt, it's for the love of the sport,” the boy said. “I can take anything out fast. Once I target it, it's mine and that's the end of it.”

  “I'm not here to argue with you, son.”

  “I'm not your son.”

  They went silent again. After he had relieved himself in the woods, the man checked their rifles, and then felt for the small gun beneath his jacket. The man returned to the fire and saw that the boy still sat there.

  “We need to get up before first light,” he said.

  “How many wolves you kill?” the boy asked.

  “What?”

  The boy glared at him in the firelight. “How many?”

  “Twenty. Maybe more.”

  “That's not a lot.”

  “No,” the man said. “It's not.”

  “When I'm your age, I bet I'll have more than twenty pelts.”

  “I don't keep souvenirs like scalps,” the man said. “You need to sleep closer to the fire. Take your coat and anything in your pack. Cover yourself good. In a few hours, it'll be colder than you can imagine.”

  “I hunt a lot,” the boy said. “I know how cold it gets up here.”

  The man did not sleep much. Just before dawn, he rose and rekindled the fire and drew an old rusty skillet from his pack. He made breakfast with the meager supplies he'd brought.

  The boy awoke to the smells, and after a mug of coffee began laughing.

  “You look like crap,” the boy said.

  They wandered off the main trails that morning. The man saw evidence of the wolf's passing through a route between narrow rocks. There was blood of fresh kill and the rotting smell of a dead animal in the air as they moved further along through the pines. He motioned for the boy to remain still. The man went up along moss-covered rock, through underbrush, and finally came to a cliff's edge overlooking the valley. He glanced out over it to see the distant lake and the dots that were the ranches below. He saw three whitetail deer in a clearing among the trees just above the rocks where he stood.

  He sensed the wolf, yet did not see him.

  The boy followed him up the trail. When the boy drew close to him, the man whispered, “He knows we're following him. This is a problem now. Yesterday, he didn't know.”

  The boy remained silent until they had made camp for the night.

  “It ain't my fault.”

  “No one's blaming you.”

  “You are. You think I scared him off. When I shot my rifle.”

  The man continued to peel an apple as he leaned back against his pack. “You can't look for blame all the time.”

  “It was one mistake,” the boy said. “I won three hunting trophies before I was fifteen.”

  The man glanced at him, nodding.

  “I bet they paid you a lot of money to do this,” the boy said after a minute. “I bet it's a racket you got. You set wolves free down in the valley. Then, eventually, they hire you.”

  The man laughed at first, but then saw that the boy meant every word. “There would be easier ways to make a living.”

  “I just can't figure why they'd hire a stranger when we got a lot of hunters in the valley,” the boy said. “That's all I meant.”

  “What did you do makes you special to that town?” the man asked.

  The boy wouldn't tell him. He shook his head and said, “I just hunt. That's all. I can hunt and trap and shoot. I win a lot of trophies at the fairground. I can shoot just about anything. Could since I was a boy. First kill was a rabbit when I was ten.”

  “Jack rabbit?”

  “Peter Cottontail,” the boy said.

  The man said, “What's the last thing you killed?”

  The boy didn't answer.

  The man said, “First thing I ever killed was a wolf. I was younger than you. You kill a wolf, you start to understand it.”

  After that, there wasn't much talk around the fire, and the man chuckled to himself when he rolled over to sleep. They had to sleep close beside each other for warmth. The boy's breathing kept him awake for another two hours.

  The next day, they went off toward Needle Heights, the bony points of the mountain that crossed into the mountain range leading up north.

  The boy asked him what he smelled in the air, and what signs of the wolf he followed, for the boy could not track as well as the man and knew it. At twilight, the man told him, “I learned from the old mountain men, when I was a boy. There are ways to track wolves. Different from tracking other animals. There was a mountain man, half-Cherokee, half-Scot. He was an old man, and he took me out to hunt wolves back in the days when we all hunted wolves. He told me that a wolf that got a taste for sheep would draw other wolves down to the ranches. You have to kill them before they can get back up to their pack. Usually, it's the young males. You see it with them first. Old wolves, they know not to go in the valleys, to the ranches. The young ones just see sheep and want them. We tracked this wolf for nine days, and when we finally cornered him, he didn't seem like a wolf anymore. He seemed like a man. I felt as if I knew him, just like I know you. I saw his eyes and I could almost tell what he was thinking. He wanted what you might want. Yes, you. What a lot of men want. He wanted a bite of it. A piece of it. He had wiles and instinct. He knew that if he found a pen full of sheep he might eat better than if he spent his time chasing deer or rabbit.”

  “Wolves are like rabid dogs,” the boy said.

  “You just never met one yet,” the man said. “They're smart. When they feel threatened, they attack. When you hunt a wolf, you don't let him know he's being hunted until you absolutely have to do it. You wait. You have patience.

  You let him think you're just part of the scenery. Just another wolf, maybe. This wolf.

  He's just looking for the sheep and then a place to hide. When he finds the prize sheep, that's the one he wants. He doesn't want the sickly or the scrawny. He wants the best.”

  “It's funny we kill 'em, then,” the boy said. “'Cause that's the way some people are. Some people I could name. Where I live.”

  “Wolves know each other,” the man said. “When I had that wolf cornered, when I was younger than you, that wolf looked at me and knew I was a wolf, too. He'd met his match. Only I wasn't a wolf until that day. I didn't want to take a bite of anything until that day. You think you're a wolf, son?”

  “A wolf? No.”

  “Some people are sheep. Maybe most people. And a few people in a thousand may be the vigilant dog that guards the sheep. Now and then, there's even a shepherd. But whenever a group of sheep are together, a wolf always comes 'round. You can count on it. That's why I get work. I'm an expert at wolf killing. They know it in towns in this region. Somebody talks to somebody, and they call me in and pay my fee,” the man said. “And I track the wolf. I don't make errors. I don't let the wolf know he's being tracked. I usually work alone. I make sure the wolf I kill is the wolf that's causing distress for people. I don't just kill wolves because I can. I find the right wolf and I do my business.”

  “I think all of them should just be killed. Every wolf. They all eventually will come down to the sheep. That's what I think,” the boy said.

  “That would be wrong,” the man said, looking the boy in the eye. “What if a man killed another man? Should all men be killed because that one man did wrong? Of course not.”

  “We're talking wolves, not men.”

  “Some men are wolves,” the man said.

  When they had crossed into the deep forest, the man thought for sure the wolf was near. He motioned for the boy to remain silent and at the ready. The man pointed toward the ramble up ahead, overgrown with dead vines.

  He gave the signal for the boy to step ahead of him.

  The boy raised his rifle up. He stepped slowly between the rocks and trees.

  Breaking the silence, the man said, “I was wrong. It's not him.”

  The boy glanced back at him.
His face gleamed bright red with sweat. “How do you know?”

  “It's a bitch,” the man said. “Heavy with cubs. I don't hunt like that.”

  The boy moved forward. The man raised his rifle and shot it into the air above the boy's head.

  Birds flew out from the underbrush, and the boy turned around in anger.