Lights Out

by Douglas Clegg

  At camp that night, the boy said, “You did that to scare me.”

  The man nodded. “We are after one wolf only. We don't shoot any others.”

  “How do you know she wasn't the wolf?”

  “I know the wolf is male. I know its size. I know the color of its coat. And I know its track. This was not the wolf.”

  “I say kill them all,” the boy said.

  “You're not a hunter if that's how you feel,” the man said. “You may win a hundred trophies, son, but a hunter does not wish to kill them all.”

  “I hate wolves,” the boy said. “I'm tired. I want to go home. The food is awful. Your coffee's awful. I want to be in my bed. At home.”

  “I know you do,” the man said. “You shouldn't have come with me. But here you are. Make the best of it. We'll have him soon.” After a moment, the man asked, “Why did you come?”

  “I owe it to him. The rancher.”

  “What do you owe him?”

  “I made a mistake once, on his ranch. With him. I need to make it right.”

  “Mistakes can be forgiven,” the man said. “But it's not good to make them.”

  The boy's lip turned up into a snarl. “That was a mistake. What you did today. Shooting like that. Warning the wolf. He was probably nearby.”

  “Everyone makes mistakes.”

  “I bet when they hired you…”

  “They?” the man asked.

  “The people in town. The ranchers. I bet when they hired you they thought you'd have this done fast. They sent me to learn from you, I bet. Learn. What I learned so far is you worry about wolves too much.”

  “I wasn't hired by people. I was hired by a person.”

  The boy thought about this for a moment, and seemed to chew on it. “The rancher was good to me once, but that changed. Maybe it was the wolf attacking his stock. Maybe it was something else.”

  “You see him as a rancher. I know him as a man who lost his only daughter.”

  The boy went silent for several minutes. The man watched him.

  Then, the boy said, “Not my fault, either.”

  “I believe you,” the man said.

  “I didn't do that to her,” the boy said.

  “I believe you,” the man said. “But he hired me to track this wolf. You came along because he wanted you to know what it meant to track a wolf. That's all.”

  “She was a good girl,” the boy said. “We would've been married if…it doesn't matter. It was an accident.”

  “I know nothing about her or you,” the man said. “I just know I was hired to track the wolf. You are the local boy who has all the hunting trophies. So you came with me.”

  “I wanted to help him. Her father. To make up for it,” the boy said.

  “If it was an accident,” the man said, “then there was nothing to make up for.”

  The man glanced over at the rifles, placed beyond the fire, in a ditch between rocks and a rotting log.

  The boy began to get up as if he, too, thought about the rifles.

  The man drew out the gun tucked under his coat, and pointed it at the boy. “Stay where you are, son,” he said.

  “You're not tracking the wolf,” the boy said.

  The man stood up and moved closer to the boy. He whispered to the boy that he should not be afraid.

  The boy looked as if he might turn and run at any minute, but the man's whispers were calming. The man spoke about how everything would be all right.

  “I didn't kill her,” the boy said. “Her father is crazy. I didn't kill her. She decided to do what she did. I had no part of it. I was hunting with my uncles. She thought I had abandoned her. I would've married her. I would've come back. If I had known. I would have. She was good. She was a wonderful girl. I knew I wanted a girl like that. Any man would. You would've if you had known her. She was like an angel to people. I saw it the minute I laid eyes on her. She was one of the good ones. Not all people are good, are they? But she was. She was a good one.”

  The man aimed the gun to the side of the boy's head. “Most people are sheep,” the man said. “A few are the dogs that guard the sheep. Now and then there is a shepherd, but they are rare. But there are always wolves. A wolf wants to find the best of the sheep and devour it. That is all a wolf wants to do when it finds sheep. That is all it can do.”

  After the man bound the boy's hands and legs, he went to get his rifle. He stood several feet back from the boy, estimating where best to make the killing shot.

  The Wicked

  Poor little Charlie, the man grinned.

  His hands were shaking as he stood there at the edge of the field. All those little boys, and Charlie there, standing with his fat little glove on his hand, his scrawny legs poking out from his balloon shorts, his baseball cap askew, his blond hair thrusting out from his cap like straw.

  Poor little Charlie. His mother was a lazy drunk. She drove a Buick with the windows blacked out so no one could watch her drink while she stopped at the light. His father was a workaholic who spent idle hours with the factory girls down at the road houses out on the parkway. They took a two week vacation together as a family every year, usually to the Caribbean, hiring a local girl to take care of the boy.

  All the neighbors knew this, apparently, and felt sad for the boy.

  “Always alone,” the busybody down the block from them had told the man four weeks before. Local gossip, told just in passing, in the local market when Charlie walked down the aisles looking for some candles. “His mother collects candles,” the busybody had said. “Poor little Charlie. You know, even on their holidays, his parents have practically nothing to do with him. No wonder he’s the way he is.”

  Charlie was all alone most of the time.

  The man had watched Charlie more than just at the house, but also when the boy walked from the bus stop, on Linden Avenue, all the way over to the small yellow house on Backus Street.

  The boy dragged his feet sometimes when he walked.

  Charlie kept his eyes down, and his hands over his books, which he hugged to his chest like treasured possessions.

  The man would sit in his car, and slowly follow the boy as he rounded the corner.

  He would see the aura around the boy that begged to be taken.

  Once, the man had gotten quite daring, and walked into the empty lot behind Charlie’s house.

  He’d crouched down at the back fence—an old wooden fence ready to fall down in a slight wind. The nervousness was delightful. If a neighbor caught him, or a passing patrol car, it might be the end for him.

  He crouched there for an hour before Charlie came down the steps of his house. Charlie shuffled his feet as he went to the little dirt and gravel area. It was almost a pit, beneath the dying crabapple tree where Charlie liked to play.

  The man had carved a small opening in the worn fence with his Swiss Army knife.

  Just to watch Charlie play.

  All afternoon, Charlie had played by himself. He sat down in the filthy pit, arranging stones in a circle around himself. The flies that always seemed to be seeking him out rose and fell like dust around each of his movements. Then he lit a match, and waved it around. He lit four small candles, no doubt filched from his mother’s kitchen without permission.

  That was the marvelous things about little boys. They could get up to such innocent mischief.

  He watched Charlie for a long time that afternoon as he sat in the pit and watched the candles as they burned. Charlie had held his hands over the flames a bit, and then closed his eyes and hummed even more.

  Charlie was a typical victim boy. His imagination took him away from the squalor of his existence.

  The man liked that about him. Knew that what he needed to do to Charlie was good for the boy. It wasn’t as if Charlie would even care about the pain.

  And the money he’d get from bringing the boy in, and taking the photographs: it was good compensation, but not the same as the sensation Charlie would give him.

  Mur
der was, after all, more a feeling than an action.

  On another night, while he drove around the neighborhood to get a feel for it, the man saw Charlie up in his bedroom window.

  The boy stood, without his shirt on, at the open window. He held his hands straight out into the night. He was humming again, and the man had laughed.

  Oh, poor little Charlie. Poor little Charlie who had no friends, whose parents were negligent and terrible, and who only had himself and his sad imagination to comfort him.

  Now, Saturday morning, eleven a.m., with the Little League game winding down, it was nearly time.

  The man glanced at his watch.

  Only ten minutes or so to go.

  They were in the last inning of play, and Charlie’s team was losing miserably.

  Not that Charlie seemed to mind. He stood in the outfield, apparently humming to himself.

  The man tried to keep from grinning. He remembered the other little boys, how they begged for death.

  Charlie would beg, too.

  The man felt the warm sweat along the back of his neck.

  Someone, coming up behind him, said, “You’re Charlie’s dad?”

  The man turned.

  It was one of the fathers.

  The fathers all had the same faces, and he knew why. They had abandoned sensation years ago. They had gotten fat and bald and were terribly nice. They had a glaze of niceness all about them as if they’d been too long in the freezer of nice.

  This one wore a black polo shirt and khaki shorts. All the hair that should’ve been on the top of his head was at the back of his neck. One day when this father got older and wealthier, that hair would crawl up again. He was one of those nonsexual fathers, with the wife who refused, with the pasty morals of one who would not find the thrill elsewhere. He had sad dog eyes. “Put me out of my misery” eyes.

  The man nodded. “Yeah. I’m so proud of him.”

  “I’m Hank Wilson. Billy’s dad. That Charlie, he’s a…quiet boy,” the father said.

  The father offered him a cup of coffee, which he accepted so as not to seem out of place. “All the fathers hang out after the game. You should come sit with us.”

  “Oh, no, really. I like it here. Where I am.” Could the father see through him? It didn’t seem likely.

  “My kid told me that Charlie’s real smart.” The father said this as a form of compensation for that other thing that hung in the air. Charlie is not a good Little Leaguer. Charlie’s a weakling. “He told me he did some amazing things with that science project of his.”

  “Oh?” the man said. “He never brags at home. I had no idea.” Sip of coffee. A brief flash of grin. A gentle nod. All to fit in.

  The father laughed. “Well, Charlie’s probably as modest as he is smart. Billy told me that he made this piece of paper turn into fire and then into a rock. He said even the teacher was amazed. But Charlie told them it was all scientific.”

  “He’s strange,” the man said, and then wished he hadn’t. Then, he made a joke of it. “I mean, it’s strange, considering how unscientific his mother and I are.”

  “That’s just it. That’s just it. I met your wife when she dropped by three weeks back, and she said almost the same thing.” The father was searching his face for something. For what? He couldn’t figure out.

  At first, the man thought that the father was looking for some crack in the mask he was presenting. Then, he knew. The father simply wanted to make sure they saw eye-to-eye.

  The crack of the bat — a fly ball — made them both look back at the game.

  “Well,” the man said. “Charlie is brilliant, isn’t he. Young and smart. Not much of an athlete, though.”

  “Kids can’t be good at everything.” The father sipped his coffee.

  The man sipped his coffee, too. A brief silence.

  The man was about to say something so that the father would move away. Maybe say that he had a headache. Maybe that he needed to get something from his car.

  Then, the father said, “Your wife told me about the cat.”

  The man nodded. He was going to go along with this.

  “I hope you don’t mind my bringing it up. But since I’m a psychologist…”

  “Really?” the man said. Could the psychologist see his nervousness? No. He was too good at hiding it.

  “Yes. So when I spoke to your wife…”

  “Oh, now I remember,” the man nodded. “Yes. Yes. She told me she spoke to you…about it.”

  “Oh, good. I didn’t want to be breaking a confidence. But most of the other kids know about it anyway. I just didn’t want to cause problems at home.”

  “No,” the man grinned, wishing he were anywhere but standing at the outer edge of the park, talking to Billy Wilson’s father. “No secrets between us. We try and keep up with what’s going on with Charlie. That cat…”

  “Well, it scared the other kids. I’m sure you talked to Mrs. Reilly yourself.”

  The man tried to place the name. Mrs. Reilly. The owner of the cat? Mrs. Reilly, the school teacher? Mrs. Reilly, the mother of one of the other boys? He sipped the last of the coffee. He peered into the coffee residue at the bottom of the cup.

  “I’ve been meaning to,” he said.

  “Well, I guess since it’s summer, it can wait. Frankly, I’m surprised about how she reacted herself. It seemed rather unprofessional.”

  “Women,” the man said, hoping the father had a sense of humor.

  The father gave him an odd look.

  He can see through me.

  He knows what I’m thinking.

  But the father chuckled. “I wouldn’t say that. She’s a good teacher, too. But I guess she just reached the boiling point with the cat. It was a neighbor’s?”

  The man nodded.

  “Well, I’m just happy to hear your wife got him some help. A counselor over in the city, I guess.”

  The man nodded.

  “I don’t mean to get into it here, but it does explain a bit why the other kids are a bit…shy…of being around Charlie.” When the father said this, the man glanced out at the playing field.

  Charlie stood off by himself, his face turned up to the sun. His baseball cap had fallen off, and his blond straw hair seemed longer than usual. He shut his eyes. He whispered something as if he were wishing to be somewhere else. The man knew about this, because he’d seen other little boys do it when they wanted to be somewhere else. They held their heads back, closed their eyes, and whispered. Or prayed.

  But now the man noticed the other boys. They played the game, paying little attention to Charlie.

  As he watched the boys move around, trying to catch a fly ball or running to change position, he noticed something that he’d missed before, in every single game. Yet it had been there. It had happened since late spring when the Little League started up.

  It wasn’t that they just didn’t like Charlie, or that they made fun of him. In all the months he’d spent watching Charlie, picking him out, he’d never seen the other kids interact in any way at all with the boy.

  On the field, it was as if there were an invisible barrier around Charlie, a horseshoe shaped magnetic field that the other boys moved around, without ever getting close to Charlie.

  Without ever coming within a certain number of feet of him.

  The father tapped his shoulder. “I’m sure it was a one time thing. I’m sure it’s not one of those worst-case scenarios where he’ll be scarred for life.”

  The man kept his eyes on the boys as they played the game around Charlie. “I never noticed.”

  “Huh?”

  “I never noticed how the other boys were shy around him. I thought it was the other way around.”

  “I guess it was…before. But something changed last year. Your wife said it was on your vacation to the islands. The Caribbean. She said…” The father patted him on the shoulder. “Oh, she just said something about how you two hired that babysitter. That native woman. To watch him. And how she taught
him all kinds of crazy things.”

  He didn’t like men’s hands on him. It made him squirm. He took a step forward to be out of patting reach.

  “My wife didn’t tell me. Oh, wait. Yes, that island woman. I can’t recall her name,” the man said. He kept his eyes on Charlie who nodded his head side to side. “My wife doesn’t always tell me everything about this kind of problem. And of course, Charlie doesn’t.”

  “We dads are always the last to know,” the father said. “Well, when Charlie killed the cat,” and the man was glad he hadn’t turned back to face the father, because this revelation nearly made him choke, and his eyes widened, “your wife told me that it was an accident. I buy that. I really do. Accidents happen. It’s not good to leave little kids with animals. And hell, Billy killed a bird with his slingshot once and we were none too happy about that. But kids do these things, right? But for Charlie to cut out its heart and bring it into school. Well, you know the rest. Mrs. Reilly got ferocious and ended up slapping him too hard.”

  “Oh, right,” the man said, as if he were recollecting. “The bruise.”

  “I’m sure the school district’ll fire her over it eventually. But Billy told me Charlie did this thing after she slapped him. And he made the lights go off in the classroom.”

  “Made the lights go off?”

  But the father kept talking, “And then made them flicker on and off. And Mrs. Reilly started screaming, and Charlie started saying something over and over. Some kind of nursery rhyme. And Billy said Judy Goffman tried to get out, but the door wouldn’t open. And then Charlie made Mrs. Reilly eat the cat’s heart right in front of the other kids.” The father was silent for a moment. “Your wife didn’t tell you?”

  The man shrugged. “Our marriage has its ups and downs. You know. She protects Charlie a lot. Too much.”

  “Sure,” the father said.

  The man could detect that edge in the father’s voice, as if maybe he suspected something wasn’t quite right.

  “Well, then Charlie, well, I know boys, and I understand these things, he apparently shows the other boys something. Only Billy won’t tell me what it is. I’m sure it’s nothing much. Maybe that dead cat, huh? Billy said something about not being able to tell, or else he’d get killed.”