Something Is Out There

by Richard Bausch

  “What the hell is going on?” Dora said. “For God’s sake—you actually let him in.”

  “He knows Christopher.”

  “I heard that. I never heard Christopher mention him.”

  “Well, he’s gone, Dora. And—look.” She held up the sheaf of forms. “He had to drop these off. That’s all. He was a nice man doing his job.”

  Dora only briefly glanced at her, then stepped to the window and looked out. “Well, I never heard of him.”

  Paula looked at the forms. They were all permits for electrical and plumbing work on the job Kent had talked about doing.

  “Oh, hell,” Dora said. “Where are you, Chris?”

  There didn’t seem to be any way to rest, now. They couldn’t even sit down, but kept vigil at all the road-facing windows, upstairs and down. Paula and Aunt Dora waited downstairs, looking out at the monotonous swirl of snow in the porch light.

  “Why doesn’t he call?” Dora muttered, several times. She kept calling his cell, and getting only the recording.

  “I want to know what Brice had in his mind,” said Paula. “Last week I came in and Kent was yelling at him on the phone. He hung up when he saw me and wouldn’t talk about it. He said it was Brice. And it surprised me because he had already fired Brice.”

  Dora had another glass of her whiskey and was sipping it slowly, staring out at the snowing half circle of light. “God,” she said. “I think it’s the dope and I think Christopher’s mixed up in it some way, too. Christopher and Brice and Kent and—and this guy, whoever he was.”

  “Kent fired Brice. Kent’s not mixed up in anything.”

  “I never heard this guy’s name and I never saw him with Christopher. I worked at Christopher’s school, Paula. I never saw the guy.”

  “Stop drinking,” said Paula. “I might need your help with some things around here.”

  “I’m fine, real—” Dora began, and they were suddenly in blackness. There was not the sense of light failing, but of dark closing down on them like a judgment. And there was only silence now, except for the wind in the eaves.

  “I knew it,” Paula said. “I fucking well knew it. Goddamn Virginia Power.”

  “Mom?” Virgil said from the stairs.

  “In here, sweetie.”

  He and his older brother made their way to the kitchen, feeling along the walls. Dora was already looking for candles, a flashlight, something. But it was pitch-black. Complete darkness. Even the streetlight by the road had gone out.

  Dora hit something and glass shattered. “Christ!” she said.

  “Where’s the phone?” said Luke.

  “Stay in here. All of us,” Paula said.

  They managed to get seated around the table. The dark was total. The only way they could tell one another’s proximity was by voice and touching. A light on them would have shown a tableau of grace before a meal—everyone holding hands. They waited. Paula had the thought that it was just the storm, just the aftermath of the bad afternoon, the shock of having been through it. They would wait out the night, and in the morning things would look normal again. A snow covering. Bright sun on hillocks of it, and bright sky, clouds trailing in the aftermath, across cleansed blue distances. But Dora was crying now, and muttering to herself, and Virgil, too, had begun. The wind whipped at the house like something searching the dark for them, in the angles of roof and wall. There was no light anywhere, no glimmer. This was darkness pure and unalloyed as any element.

  “It’ll be all right,” Paula said. “It’s a snowstorm. What happened today is over. It’s over. Brice went off the deep end, and they’ve got him and he’ll spend the next fifteen years in prison. And a man stopped by to leave some papers for Daddy.”

  None of them answered her. The wind shook the windows, even louder than before. The only sound inside now was Dora’s muttering and crying. Paula let go of her hand, and the others let go—you could feel the shifting in the chairs.

  “Dora, stop it,” Paula said. “Please.”

  “That wasn’t anybody Christopher went to school with,” Dora said.

  For a moment, they were all quiet again.

  “What’re you saying?” Paula demanded. “Christ. You can’t know everyone he went to school with.”

  “Something’s happening. I know it. Where’s Christopher?”

  “Christopher’s stopped somewhere in a motel. Probably asleep. Now stop it—stop it. Drink some more whiskey.”

  Dora’s answer was lost in the ramming of the wind.

  “You’d think my eyes would get adjusted to the dark,” Virgil said. “I’m blind.”

  “That’s how dark it is,” said Luke. He had left the table.

  “Watch the broken glass,” Paula said.

  He rattled glasses, and a drawer opened; they heard the sound of knives and silverware being moved.

  “It’s not in there,” Paula said to him about the flashlight.

  “I saw it in here, I swear.”

  “Don’t cut yourself.”

  “I’m okay,” the boy said. But there was such fright in his voice.

  It was Dora, finally, who found a lighter, and, with that, searched out some candles on a cabinet shelf. They lit the candles. As they were lighting the last ones, the telephone rang. Paula reached for it, knocked a candle over, and cursed, but picked up the receiver and said, “Hello?”

  The voice on the other end said, “Is Kent around?”

  “No.”

  Dora and Luke both, in a frantic kind of unison, said, “Find out who it is.”

  “Who’s calling, please?” Paula said.

  She waited. They were all three watching her, intense, fixed, focused, their eyes glittering in the flickering dimness.

  “Who’s calling, please?” she said again.

  But the connection had been broken.

  “Boys,” Dora said. “Take a candle and see if you can find the flashlights. There must be a couple of them somewhere.”

  “The utility closet, out back,” Luke said. “But the wind’ll blow the candles out.”

  “You are not going outside,” said Paula. “Stay here.” She picked up a candle and started toward the living room, and the doorway down to the basement. “I mean it—stay where you are.”

  Dora followed her. They went together in the chaotic shifting of shadow and light on the stairs. At the bottom, the candle went out—but Dora had her lighter, and they got it going again. They were standing very close in the dark, with the candle flame flickering between them.

  “They were all in on it,” Dora said. “They were all going to make so much money.”

  “What are you talking about?” Paula said. “Do you know something I don’t know?”

  “I know they were meeting about it. Brice, too.”

  “He fired Brice.”

  Dora said, “That was about the money. I’m sure of it.” Then she began to cry. “I don’t know how, but I think Christopher’s in on it, too. I think that guy was looking for Christopher. I’m afraid he’ll hurt him. Christopher dropped out of college, Paula. He was going to bypass it all. He told me that over the phone. He said he was going to make so much more money doing what he was doing and when I asked him what it was he wouldn’t tell me. And something’s gone wrong and Brice felt cut out of it and others got cut out of it—I heard Kent say that. Those very words. ‘What about the others that get cut out of this?’ I heard him say it. And I never saw that Stallings guy before. I never saw him. He’s too old to have gone to school with Christopher. My God, Paula—did you look at him? I’m scared. I’m so scared. He’s not gone. He didn’t leave. He’s out there waiting.”

  Paula looked for the flashlight. For batteries, a lantern, more candles, anything. Dora stood watching her. “Go on upstairs,” Paula said, “if you’re not going to help.”

  “You don’t believe me.”

  “I don’t know what I believe. I want this night to be over and I want more light. And an end to this fucking blizzard. And right now ther
e isn’t anything else that I want.”

  “A person couldn’t just hide out there in that cold and wind, right? A person would freeze to death.”

  “Yes, Dora. A person would freeze to death. Go upstairs.”

  The other woman made her way up out of the meager glow of the candle flame. And Paula was alone. She had been thinking of taking her two boys and leaving. She had been thinking about the end of her marriage, the troubles, the discontent of the long nights, sleepless and worried, wanting not to hurt anyone. She stood for a moment in the chilly gloom of the basement and had the thought that this day’s badness was the beginning of something more, an unfolding. She didn’t even know what it would be about; she wasn’t even sure it was coming. But her blood told her it was, and she had to be ready for it, whatever it might be. She moved to the workbench at the far end of the basement and, still holding the flickering candle—which seemed about to go out—she opened the heavy wooden drawer there, and held the candle over it. Here was Kent’s target revolver. She brought it out, opened it, and saw that it was loaded. She closed it, checked the safety, then moved to the other end of the bench, where she found a terry cloth rag. She wrapped the gun in it, and then looked for something with which to conceal it on her person. There was an old Baltimore Orioles jacket hanging on a hook at the other end of the room. She moved there, placed the revolver in its rag on the little lamp table against the wall, lifted the jacket down, and put it on. It was way too big for her. The ends of it drooped to her thighs. She rolled the too-long sleeves up. It would do. The storm outside made a terrible thudding, cracking roar that made her jump, and she crouched down for a second. She waited. There wasn’t any other sound now but the storm. Finally she picked up the revolver in its wrap and placed it in the deep left pocket.

  She was a woman in a little rural house in Virginia, in the middle of a big snowstorm, wearing a baseball jacket, armed, expecting grave business. There could never be anything so strange, so brutally exact, as experience, and she knew it. She had only wanted to go. She had only entertained the idea of leaving this house.

  She made her way up into the dark cave of the stairwell, lighting it as she went. Dora and the boys were back at the windows in the living room, hunched there in the uncertain light of more candles, staring out at the unabated agitation of the storm. It wasn’t even midnight. She went past them, upstairs, to the master bedroom, where she could have a good view of the road, if anything that had headlamps came down it. She watched the white expanse, through the fantastic churning, the eddies of wind made visible by the solidness of the swarming flakes. Nothing moved out there. But it was coming; she sensed it. Whatever it was. It was near.

  She took the revolver out of the jacket and set it on the windowsill, where she could reach it if and when she had to. She didn’t know, now. And there was so much time to go through until sunrise. Her sons were downstairs with their great-aunt, barricading the doors.

  She had begun this day, this very day, wholeheartedly believing in goodwill, work, contracts, commitments, friendship, helpfulness. She had believed that she might say to Kent, “I want to go. I want to move out for a while, and see what happens.” And he might be upset, but would accept it, too, because people did so in the circumstances; people came to these changes and suffered them quietly, or at least civilly. And nobody came looking for you with the intent to hurt you.

  She leaned into the icy glass, put her fingers on the cold handle of the revolver, and watched the distant commotion of the storm for any sign of light, hoping for it even as she understood that when she saw it, if she saw it, she would have to try to determine what it meant—safe arrival, help, someone seeking shelter, or intending harm.

  BLOOD

  Walker Clayfield’s older brother, Max, started the subcontracting business—house painting, carpentry, and wiring—upon his return from a hitch in the army in 1998. Back then, he and Walker and Sean, the youngest, all lived with their mother, Minnie, in the old place on Highpoint Terrace. The house had been added onto decades ago, when Minnie was a newly married lady, and happy. It had a narrow backyard, at one end of which was the partial spine of an unfinished boat under a cracked plastic tarp—the failed project of Theodore Clayfield, the boys’ sad excuse for a father. The old man had begun to build it out of wood from scratch before his madness and his drinking and other forms of excess got him—a fatal heart attack at fifty-one. Growing up, the old man had apprenticed to his own father as a boatwright.

  That man, too, had mental troubles—and bottle troubles.

  Walker, after he entered high school, began helping Max during summers. By then, Max was chasing after Jenny Glass, whose family didn’t like him. Once, when Jenny was having dinner at Paulette’s Restaurant with Bill Jonas, whom she had started seeing, Max stormed in and overturned the table where they sat, and then went after Jonas. The two of them fell over another table, breaking several plates and glasses. Max ended up in the hospital. Jenny forgave him for it because he was bruised and beaten and because he was so contrite. But when, with her mother’s encouragement, she went out with Jonas again, there Max was, wet-eyed and penitent and hurt—still wanting to fight.

  Max is like that. Like his father at least that much, Minnie will say. Whatever he sets his mind to can wither from the force of his attention. And of course Jenny Glass possesses her own kind of stubbornness. Even after Max finally won her, she wouldn’t live in the old place with the family. So Max bought a small house in a little neighborhood of World War II housing over by the river, and fixed it up for his mother and younger brothers to live in. The house is the last one on Darwood Avenue, a blind street beyond which is a field of wildflowers and, in the middle distance, an abandoned railroad trestle and the stone columns of what was one of the first bridges to Arkansas from this part of Memphis. Minnie made a garden out back and put white curtains in the windows and flower boxes on the windowsills across the front. Jenny helped her.

  Jenny and Max were married within a month of the completion of the little house. Jenny has always liked the Highpoint house, and the neighborhood, with its little corner grocery store only a block away. She and Max have had some very happy times there.

  Last year, Max got it into his head that he wanted to finish the old man’s boat and start a charter fishing business in the gulf, which is more than two hundred miles away on the interstate. People often pay up to fifteen hundred dollars a head to be able to say they fished the Gulf Stream. It’s big business down there. This can be freedom. Free at last. That’s what he’ll name the boat. When he talks about it, you can see that the whole thing has already been accomplished in his head.

  Free at last.

  But shortly after Christmas, Minnie suffered a mild stroke, and she requires some care. Also the real estate market has hit a bad slump, putting a big hole in the contracting. Max and Jenny have had to take jobs, Jenny tending the counter at an antiques store in the Cooper-Young district, Max working in the service bay at the local Chevrolet dealership, performing oil changes and lube jobs. Now every single minute of his free time on weekends goes into work on the boat. He’s given up softball league and sold all his hunting and camping gear. He no longer goes to ball games with his brothers or to movies with his wife or to restaurants with the family—or even to the occasional contract job either, though he does include himself in the process of preparing the estimates. He has left most of the actual work to Walker. He’s also become tightfisted, and he doesn’t want to talk about anything but this pet project of his. He goes on about rot-resistant oak and cedar planks and carvel construction of the hull and spar, though he hasn’t even finished the frame.

  The catafalque, as Jenny calls it, sits there in the backyard, an enormous rib cage of wood amid scattered scraps and piles of packed-down sawdust. Max tells anyone who will listen that when it’s finished it will be a cabin cruiser, eighteen feet long, with an inboard motor and all the modern equipment. Of course finishing is years away.

  Walker keeps
up with what business there is. He puts in an occasional ceiling fan or paints the inside of a house or builds bookshelves—but mostly he helps keep his mother’s little place, and he has more free time than is healthy. He lifts weights, plays basketball with Sean, goes more often than he should over to the Highpoint house, and then tries to keep to himself, a young man with too much room for thinking, as his mother would put it. Casting about, she would say. And he rides off in the truck to Mud Island, alone, and walks the long concrete model of the Mississippi, and stands on what he knows to be the Highpoint area of the black bronze-crossed representation of Memphis. He goes on down the fake river to the little park at the end and eats an ice cream and looks at the fountain. People walk by him; children play in the water. He sits there. Idleness and worry all the time, fidgeting, nervous, unable to think about anything but the one thing that has come to occupy him above all else, with a constant pressure under the breastbone. He’s continually brooding about it and turning on it in his thoughts, even in sleep, this affliction that came out of nowhere, this terrible surprise and misery, this secret hunger and aching.

  He has fallen desperately in love with Jenny Glass Clayfield.

  When he and his mother and Sean visit the old Highpoint house, they all end up sitting near the big wooden frame, tryoing to talk over the noise of Max’s labor. Walker watches his sister-in-law move back and forth from the house to the end of the yard, and the rib cage of blond wood there, and then he tries hard not to watch her. She’s a shape in his peripheral vision, and he hears her voice, that softness coming from her throat; he could pick it out of a crowd of people all talking at once. When he glances at her he sees the soft curve of her breasts in the little area of the open collar of her blouse. He hates his own mind, his own senses, because they are so attuned to every nuance of her being—sound, breath, touch, the fragrance of her, the physical power of her proximity, bones and flesh and the dark shine of the eyes and the hair with its perfect straight shimmer in sunlight.