“I just thought of a way we could make some money,” he said now. “We could start a lottery about when the lights will come back on.”
“We’d spend a fortune getting it started and before we could collect a penny the lights would come on.”
“A risk, I admit. Should’ve thought of it yesterday.”
The street wound toward sunlight, then dipped and widened, and here there were brick bungalows with little flower beds lining the sidewalks, and stone sculptures flanking the entrances.
Grant turned into a cul-de-sac. More low-slung houses and tree-shaded lawns, backing onto thick woods. “Here we go,” he said, pulling to a stop in front of the center house, a cedar-roofed, flagstone building with a big picture window under a dark green awning. A path to the left of it led up into the woods. “Ten minutes to spare.”
A thin, white-haired boy was framed in the big window, staring out. “We’re being watched,” Lyndhurst said.
“Probably thinks we’re company,” Grant muttered. “I’m gonna move us.” He pulled the car around to the top of the circle and stopped again.
“They just gonna pull in here, too? Is it a house?”
“It’s up that path. A little clearing in there. I lived in this cul-de-sac when I was a kid. I know these woods. I’ve been scoring dope there forever. There’s a playground about a half mile farther on. They’ll park there, see, and I’ll meet them in the clearing. Get it? Fast and clean. I’m in there and out in a minute. I trust I’ve explained this clearly to you.”
“No,” said Lyndhurst. “Start over.”
“How long we been living together?”
It was too hot to say much more. He took another deep breath, leaned his head against the seat rest again, then brought one hand to his forehead.
“Me-grain?” Grant said. “Well, we’ll fix you right up, there, Johnny boy.”
Lyndhurst had been living with Grant for more than a year, and still didn’t know much more than that he liked classic cars and did various forms of recreational drugs. Although there was a woman he saw fairly regularly—and there had been times when he had asked Lyndhurst to remain away from the apartment for a night or two—he was not forthcoming about his feelings for her, or for anyone. This girl—Ramona was her name—had once sought reassurance from Lyndhurst about his roommate. She had arrived for a date, and Grant was on the phone, and he sent her outside, with Lyndhurst. There she lighted a cigarette, blew the smoke, and said, “Tell me something. Tell me anything.”
“You look nice,” he told her, because she did.
“He never says anything like that to me.”
Lyndhurst shrugged.
She seemed a little impatient, drawing on the cigarette again and talking the smoke out. “He’s a complete mystery to me.”
“Just a guy out for a good time, I guess,” Lyndhurst said. He felt the emptiness of the observation, and then experienced a surge of resentment of her for involving him in this way.
“What about you,” she asked. “Don’t you have anyone?”
The question surprised him—or his reaction to it did: he felt caught out. “Sure,” he said, not returning her gaze.
“Are you like that with her? You never tell her anything about yourself?”
“I’m not seeing any one person right now,” he got out.
“I can’t stand this, like, feeling I have all the time like I’m not getting the real person. I mean I don’t know anything, really. He digs old cars. Classic rock. He won’t eat, like, onions or mushrooms or green peppers. He likes shellfish.”
“Maybe that’s about all anybody knows about anybody,” Lyndhurst said.
She didn’t appear to have heard him. “I don’t know the guy.”
“Well, but that’s how he is. Maybe there isn’t anything more.”
She was small and pretty, with thin, slender fingers and almond-shaped brown eyes. There was a quickness about her, a fluid, supple easiness of motion, as though her bones were softer than those of other people. He had found himself thinking about her now and then, except that she was Grant’s, had been with Grant, and there was something about that fact that left him cold. He couldn’t ever quite look straight back into her eyes. Ramona didn’t want simply to be charmed or entertained; she wanted it all, wanted to be there for the big things, and the longings for which there wasn’t any name. She was frightening, and Lyndhurst felt that he knew exactly why Grant kept her at a distance.
“You lived in the president’s house at the college, didn’t you?”
He nodded.
“What was that like?”
“It sucked.”
“Come on.”
“It did,” Lyndhurst told her. “It sucked big-time. When I was a kid I’d spend nights hiding under the fucking bed because I hated it all so much. The whole goddamn thing. That scene—one big pretension. My parents—so sweet and proud of the kid, you know, the happy family, smart and so cool and all that, but you should’ve heard them when there wasn’t anybody around. They picked at each other, when they talked at all. They wore each other down to little shivering lumps. And they wore me down, too. You couldn’t ever do anything right with them. Both of them. A couple of critics.”
“You see?” she said. “I don’t ever get from him anything like what you just told me. Nothing close to it.”
“Hell,” Lyndhurst told her. “I’m just talking about hiding from the grown-ups. That’s anybody’s life story.”
“But it’s you, like, as a boy. I feel I know you better now, see? I, like, know you better than I know him. That’s a lot—what you just told me.”
He thought she might actually make some move toward him. But then Grant came out of the apartment and her eyes lighted up and she was like a little girl.
“If the power comes on,” Grant said now, “move the car out of the light before you start celebrating.”
“Just go get the shit and let’s get out of here.”
The sun was slanting through the trees, lowering, sinking into red clouds.
“Darkness,” Grant said. “Here it comes again, man.”
“I can’t freaking breathe.” The shadows that lengthened on the lawns offered no relief. Lyndhurst gazed at the blank streetlamps without really seeing them.
“The power’s gonna come on and we’ll have a party and celebrate, because we’ll have something to celebrate with.”
They had indeed been expecting the power to kick on, every minute since the first day. The emergency services were calling it a grid failure as catastrophic as if there had been a nuclear explosion. Pure overwhelming demand had done it. The electric company had tried rolling blackouts. And then something went wrong somewhere, and they were still looking for the solution. Emblazoned across the front pages of the local broadsides was that there was no evidence of terrorism. Lyndhurst wondered where they found the power to print these circulated flyers.
Grant got out of the car, then leaned on the closed driver’s side door, taking a deep breath, as if having stood up into a stream of cooler air. “Don’t go anywhere.”
“Where am I gonna go? You’ve got three hundred dollars of mine.” This seemed to dawn on Lyndhurst as he spoke. “I’ll be right here.”
Grant strolled toward the entrance of the cul-de-sac and then made his way along the other side, and down, to the center house and the path. Lyndhurst saw him go on up into the trees and disappear. He watched the place for a few minutes, feeling doubtful about things. Sirens sounded in the distance. The sun was sinking fast, and there would be another night of pitch blackness to get through. The boy still waited in the big picture window of the center house.
Several times during the long nights of trying to sleep, Lyndhurst had looked at the fact that he was now afraid of the dark. The failure of light everywhere, the dead streetlamps and traffic lights, the dim structures of the street, which used to be illuminated—gas station signs, storefronts, fast-food joints, banks—seemed elements of something far worse than a pow
er outage brought on by a heat wave in an energy-stressed summer. It made him want to get in the car and drive to wherever there was light. Sometimes he dreamed that he had done just that.
But he did not dream this now: he dreamed that he was doing exactly what he was doing—waiting in Grant’s classic Mustang for Grant to come back. And Grant came back and got in and stared at him, and he couldn’t move, and then he was nothing, and no one was anywhere.
When he felt his head nod heavily to one side, he sat abruptly forward, rubbing his eyes, and, turning to look at the entrance to the woods where Grant had gone, saw the boy from the center house, standing close enough to touch, gaping at him, mouth open, hands shoved down into the pockets of baggy white shorts. Lyndhurst heard himself cry out.
The boy just stood there, staring. He had hair whiter than silk. The darkness of his skin made the hair seem unnatural, like a wig.
“What’re you doing there?”
No answer.
Lyndhurst looked at the skinny brown legs coming down out of the shorts. “Well?”
Nothing. Perhaps thirty seconds went by.
“You deaf or something?”
The kid looked eleven or twelve. He had a thin face, narrow lips, a short piglike nose. His eyes were ice blue and dry, and there didn’t seem to be anything in them. Glass eyes, Lyndhurst thought. Marble eyes. Maybe he’s blind.
He waved one hand across the boy’s line of vision. The eyes followed. “Can’t you talk? Christ—what’re you doing? Say something.”
The boy only stared at him, lips moving slightly, as if some nerve tic were playing over them.
“Get out of here,” Lyndhurst said. “Get.”
The boy didn’t move. Lyndhurst looked at his watch. Almost nine o’clock. Had he been asleep that long? He glared at the boy. “You better get, if you know what’s good for you.”
The boy took his hands from his pockets. He was clutching a rock in each one.
Lyndhurst flinched at this, though there was no other motion. The boy held the rocks.
“Don’t even think about it,” Lyndhurst said, as levelly as he could.
“You with a gang?” the boy asked. His voice was very high, a girl’s voice.
“No, I’m a ghost. I come from the night.”
He stood there.
“I’m not with a gang, kid,” Lyndhurst heard himself say. “My father’s president of District College.”
This information seemed to have the effect of confusing the other. “What’s that?”
Lyndhurst felt some of the same confusion. He said, “Nothing, forget it. I’m not from a gang and not a criminal. And if I was, do you think I’d tell you I was?”
“Just stay away from the house.”
“Did I come near your house?”
“We have a big dog.”
“Okay. And you have rocks. You’re protecting the castle. Where’s your folks?”
“They’re in the house, with guns.”
“You’re a tough bunch.”
In that instant, the lamps along the street came on, a dazzling shocking suddenness all around, and a buzzing. Lyndhurst gave forth another cry. There were lights in the houses now, too, the sound of televisions and radios rattling in open windows. It was as if the boy had done it, as if his walking out here and standing in the dimness had brought it about.
Lyndhurst got out of the car, keeping his eyes on the rocks in the boy’s small fists. “Go home, kid. Your lights are on, now. The world’s back to normal. You can watch television and wait for Mommy and Daddy to come home.” He felt weirdly like chattering now, wanted to tell the boy about the last strange four days. He held it back.
The boy slowly turned and walked a few paces away, then spun around and hurled one of the rocks. Lyndhurst ducked, but the boy was throwing it at the nearest streetlamp. It hit the metal dish above it with a clang and then flew on into the dark beyond it.
Lyndhurst said, “Nice shot. You trying to black us all out again?”
“I meant to hit that. That’s how good I am.”
“Well, fine. I’ll write home about it.”
“Are you a gangster?” said the boy.
“I’m waiting for a friend, okay?”
“Where’d he go?”
“He went to see somebody. He had an appointment. What the hell’s the matter with you, anyway?”
“Just keep away,” said the boy, turning warily, and going on toward the house.
Lyndhurst watched him go, but then followed him for a few paces. “Hey, you got a lot of crime around here or something?”
The boy went on.
“You got criminals coming around here?”
He glanced over his skinny shoulder, but said nothing, going on into the house. Lyndhurst turned, looked back at the Mustang with its passenger door still open. It seemed that every house had music and voices coming from it. Someone made a lot of noise closing the windows of one house, and a second later he heard the air conditioner kick on. That startled him, too. He walked to the car and got in. It was ridiculous to be so jumpy. The power was back on. Things could get back to normal. He had a sense of the life he had led being restored to him.
Except that it was now past nine o’clock. Grant had said it would be only a few minutes. But what constituted a few minutes?
There was the boy’s shape in the window, staring. The white hair showed even in silhouette.
He looked at the place where the path went on into the dark line of trees. The whole wide sky seemed flooded now with light and noise. Finally he got out, closed the door, and crept to the entrance of the woods, keeping track of the big picture window. He turned and faced the open half circle of houses, saw the lights in them and the lights beyond, thinking of going back to sit in the car. Grant could come from some other direction. It was possible. He waited another minute, then entered the woods, walked along in the closed-feeling dimness of the path, expecting to see Grant coming the other way. The path wound up an incline and then dipped steeply leftward. The shadows were deepening, the foliage bordering either side closing, narrowing. No air stirred. The only sound was the leaves rustling as he moved through them. “Grant? It’s me. The power’s back on.”
He stopped and waited.
“Hey?”
A whisper of leaves, and then stillness.
“Come on, man,” he said, mostly to himself.
Perhaps fifty yards farther on, down another declension that flattened out and widened, he came into the clearing. He saw Grant immediately. Grant was quite quiet at the far edge, sitting against the base of a tree. Lyndhurst stumbled blindly toward him, beginning, with a sick sinking at his heart, to understand, though he worked to deny it, had to get close enough to see, to make sure, telling himself it was a prank. “Don’t do this,” he said. “Come on.”
Grant stared unseeingly straight at the faint glow of the far sky. There was a bullet hole in the middle of his forehead.
Lyndhurst staggered back, and then began to flounder away low, gagging, coughing, back into the woods, running. Something caught at him and he fell hard, then scrabbled wildly to his feet, thrashing, and then stopping his own breath with his hands over his mouth, turning to look behind him, trying to make no noise at all, to slip away. He stumbled again, faltered through, blasting into crossing branches, losing the path and then finding it again.
When he came bursting out onto the center lawn, the boy was there, just in front of the open door of the house. The boy watched him as he stumbled to the car and got into it. He started it, heard the roar of the engine, and knew that he couldn’t take it with him, couldn’t be here behind the wheel. Crazily, wildly, as if it were on fire, he stood out of it, then reached back in and turned the key off. He couldn’t think, looking around himself, retching, gasping. The boy watched him warily from the house. Lyndhurst removed his shirt and wiped the steering wheel, the backs of the keys, the tops of the doors, the dash, hurrying, hearing his own breathing. He put the shirt back on, some little hop
eful part of his mind presenting him with the absurd thought that this would make everything come right.
“Mister.” The boy had approached to within a few feet of him.
Lyndhurst started to run the other way. He took a few uncertain strides, then stopped, and turned. “Go away, kid. Please? Will you leave me alone? I’m not a gangster.” He couldn’t stop shaking. “God,” he said. “God.”
“What happened?” the boy said. He had another stone in his hand, and was poised to throw it. “Where’s the other guy?”
“Just get,” Lyndhurst said.
The boy didn’t move, and abruptly Lyndhurst understood that he was afraid, that he had been afraid all along. He was alone, and trying to protect the house he lived in, the place where people cared for him.
“Nobody’s gonna hurt you,” Lyndhurst told him. “I’m as scared as you are. Can’t you see that?”
“I’m not scared,” the boy said.
Lyndhurst looked beyond him. “Good for you,” he said. “Good.” He was breathing the words. “Go back in the house. Lock the door. Because there are gangsters around here. You get me? And if anybody asks you, I was asleep. I never left this car.” He understood the absurdity of the words as he spoke them, and he swallowed, shaking his head, then turned and strode quickly away, trying to seem calm, keeping his pace steady, not looking back. He saw his own shadow under the streetlight; the shadow lengthened and then faded, and another took its place—the next streetlight. The whole vast, now-glowing night was harrowing, fantastical, and horrible, lights flashing, sirens wailing far off, dogs barking, car horns sounding, music coming from the open, empty houses. He kept walking, and then he was running again.
Something Is Out There Page 8
