Bad Things

by Michael Marshall

  She refocused on the screen, checking the sites with RSS feeds that automatically alerted her to additions, edits, new blog entries. Nothing. So she went for a trawl through some of her other bookmarks instead. Sites on mythology, folklore, local ephemera, anomalies. Still nothing.

  Which made perfect sense. Her emotions didn’t betoken a disturbance in the ether. She was not the micro- to the world’s macrocosm, one half of a pathetic fallacy (God, high school English again!). It was personal. Each time she went looking and found nothing new, it diminished the comfort she’d once found there. What had previously made her feel that she was not alone now increasingly confirmed that she was. So what next? When you know something’s wrong, but not how or why, what exactly can you do?

  Not panic. That’s all.

  Sometime later she was roused by a knocking sound.

  She blinked, realized the sound was someone knocking on the front door. Of course. She hauled herself up from the chair and trudged out of the kitchen. She was disquieted to realize that she’d spent at least some of the time in thoughts she believed had left her: the idea of killing herself.

  She opened the front door to see Rona smiling at her, looking teenage and wholesome as all get-out.

  “Mommmeeeee!” a voice shrieked from below, and she squatted down to let Tyler give her a hug. He gave good hugs. She straightened up with her son in her arms, and smiled broadly at his occasional sitter.

  “Thanks, honey,” she said as the four-year-old in her grasp wriggled for the door catch. Locks and light switches were catnip to this kid. Pockets of the world on which he could exert an influence, Carol supposed, first steps in controlling the chaos. She hoped he never learned how they could turn on you.

  “Oh, he’s a peach,” Rona said.

  Her cheer was unassailable. Tyler’s mother knew that, on occasion, her son was perfectly capable of not being a peach, but you’d never know it from Rona’s reports. “So, Friday morning next, right?”

  “Yep,” Carol said, her attention caught by the lock her son was manhandling.

  Thinking: I’ll be seeing you later.

  “You . . . okay, Mrs. Ransom?”

  Carol looked around to see her neighbor’s daughter looking at her curiously. “I’m great,” she said, with a big fake smile, and shut the door.

  While she fixed him a small holding snack in the kitchen she submitted her son to a forensic interrogation as to how he had spent his day.

  You needed to extract this information quickly. What had happened at kindergarten seemed to become unreal or uninteresting within a couple of hours, as if events were ephemeral, and the past lost its charge like a battery. Carol envied this a great deal.

  It appeared that he had “done things” and that it had been “fine.”

  They sat on the sofa together with a children’s book—one perk of working at the library was an inexhaustible supply of these—and within fifteen minutes Carol felt herself relaxing. They could do that to you, sometimes, children. They were so much themselves that if you let yourself be pulled fully into their orbit, you could forget your own world for a time.

  Then the phone rang. They looked up at it together. Their phone rang very seldom.

  “Someone’s calling,” Tyler said.

  “I know, sweetie.” She got up and went over to the table, picked up the handset. “Yes?”

  “Hello, my dear.”

  It was a woman’s voice.

  Carol knew immediately who it was. It was a moment before she could say anything in reply, and it came out as a brittle whisper.

  “How did you get this number?”

  “A little bird told me. Time to come home,” the woman said. “We can help.”

  Carol put down the phone.

  “Who was that?” her son asked.

  “Nobody, honey.”

  “Can nobody talk, then?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Sometimes.”

  She asked him to count up the number of cows on the page of the book in front of him, and managed to walk to the bathroom and close the door before she threw up.

  That night she checked the bolt thirty-two times when she went to bed, though she knew it was too late. Nobody was already inside the gates, and that’s what panic actually was, she realized. It was the noise of the world whispering in your ear, when your life was ruled by something that wasn’t there.

  It was the sound of nobody talking, all the time.

  CHAPTER 5

  It was a busy night in the restaurant. I didn’t give Ted a heads-up that we wouldn’t be seeing his pizza guy, as he’d have wondered where I’d got my information, but waited until he came asking for me to fill in—and acted like it was business as usual. I alternated between the oven, the floor, and the bar as we went through two half-full sets of covers. Unusually good for that time of year, and you could see Ted relax a little as he realized it was all going to help cover part of the day’s costs and appease the dark gods of cash flow.

  I was the last member of staff to leave the restaurant, and on hand when Ted gave the outside door a final looking over before locking it for the night. He grunted approvingly.

  “Nice job,” he said. “I should really give you something for all that work.”

  “You already do,” I said.

  He looked at me for a moment. “Want a lift?”

  “I’m good,” I said. “Looking forward to the walk.”

  “You’re a weird guy,” he said. When he got to his truck he looked back. “Thanks, John.”

  “All part of the service.”

  He shook his head and got in the pickup, a man looking forward to a beer on his home turf and putting his feet up in front of late-night television with no idea that—for reasons of which he was entirely ignorant—his world stood a little more fragile tonight. But I guess none of us ever do know that, until after the fact.

  I waited until he’d driven away, then got a chair down from the stacks.

  I’d told myself I’d wait half an hour, forty minutes tops, but it was only twenty before I heard a vehicle turn into the access road.

  I felt my heart sink as Becki’s car came into the lot, but got up and walked over. If I didn’t want to be here now, I shouldn’t have said the things I had earlier. This happens because of that, and words are actions, too. A lesson that mankind in general—and me in particular— seems to find hard to get through their heads.

  Kyle was in the passenger seat. He looked up, then away, and didn’t say anything. His hands lay on his thighs, the fingers of both drumming constantly.

  “Hey, Captain Stupid,” I said. “Having a good day?”

  “I’ve been there already,” Becki said.

  “So what does he have for me?”

  She turned and stared at her boyfriend. He spoke quietly. “Rick. And maybe Doug.”

  “Who would be?”

  “Assholes,” Becki said bitterly. “They’re on the beach sometimes. They were at the party last night.”

  I turned back to Kyle. “So how’d they come to know where you were keeping your stash?”

  “They just know, okay? I—”

  “Kyle, listen to me. I can tell you’ve got the message. But I need to know whether these guys found out because they’re smart and know how to play people like you, or if it’s one of those things that just happens and they decided to make something of it on their way home. I’m assuming it’s the latter, because of the amateur-night break-in, but I’d like to be sure.”

  “I told them,” he said. “I just kind of said it.”

  Becki rolled her eyes and muttered something under her breath. “Good. You know where these people live?”

  “Yeah.”

  I opened the car door. “So let’s go.”

  “What’s this to you, anyhow?” Kyle asked. “This is my problem. Becki already told me that.”

  “Where’d you get the coke from?”

  “Just some guys in Portland.”

  “And ten thousand is not h
uge in the scale of these things. But they’re still going to want their money. There are no acceptable losses to these people, Kyle. Losses make them look bad, and looking bad is something they will not countenance. If they can’t get what they’re owed from you, then they’ll branch out, with you as the fly in the center of the web. That means Becki next. She doesn’t have what they want. So that means they’ll move on to her dad, and his place of business.”

  He blinked.

  “No man is an island,” I said. “You get now what you’ve done?”

  I knew I was pushing him, and that his pride was already hurt, but either this had to serve as an object lesson or it would be even worse next time.

  “Yeah,” he said, very quietly.

  “Excellent,” I said, getting in the car. “So let’s go see if we can’t get things straightened out.”

  The house was on the northwest of Seaside, the town that lay between Marion Beach and Astoria. It took forty minutes to get there. I got Kyle to call ahead, acting like everything was cool—and arranging to meet the two guys the next day. This went smoothly, establishing they were home and further strengthening my impression that we weren’t dealing with master criminals. Also, assuming they were the people who staged the break-in, that they were assholes who were prepared to lie to a guy’s face and snigger about it afterward. If there’s anything I hate, it’s that.

  I asked Becki to park fifty yards down the street. I got out and opened the trunk, looked around until I found something I could use.

  “Okay,” I said. “Kyle, you’re coming with me.”

  Becki started in quickly. “What about—”

  “Trust me,” I said. “Comes to a fight, I’d bet on you any day. It’s just in case we feel like leaving quickly. That happens, I believe you’re the best person to be ready behind the wheel, don’t you?”

  She subsided. Kyle got out of the car and looked at me dubiously. “So . . . what now?”

  “Come with me. And do what I say.”

  We walked up the side of the street opposite the house. There were enough lights on to imply people were home, but nothing to suggest a windfall-driven debauch in full swing.

  “Stay here,” I said.

  I crossed and went around the house, quietly, to see what I could glimpse through the windows. Not much. Music coming from somewhere, still not party-loud. A room that looked like someone had upended a junk store into it and then taken back anything worth more than five dollars. The living room, with two ratty couches at right angles to a battered television playing MTV. Another room with a single mattress on a floor strewn with dirty clothes and empty soda cans.

  Around the back, the kitchen, lit by hanging bulbs fighting cigarette smoke. Two young guys hanging at a table: emo playing off an iPod with extension speakers, a few wine bottles, big bags of Doritos and an ashtray full of white powder on the side. Heaven on earth, slacker-style. And on the side counter, a battered industrial-style juicer.

  I walked backward from the house until Kyle could see me, and mimed him ringing the house bell. He hesitated but then started across the street.

  I went to the back door and waited until I heard the bell go. The two guys inside looked at each other, and then one of them got up and left the room. The other slipped the ashtray full of drugs into one of the Doritos bags.

  I gently turned the handle on the back door. It was locked. You build some, you break some. I raised my foot and kicked it in.

  The guy at the table was nowhere near his feet before I got in range. I grabbed him by the hair and shoved him down onto his chair, let him see the tire iron I was holding in the other hand.

  “You Rick or Doug?”

  “Who the hell—”

  “Nope,” I said, and rapped him on the kneecap with the iron. He yelped. “That’s not how this is going to play. Want to try again?”

  “Rick,” he said.

  “Better. Where are the drugs, Rick?”

  “What the fuck?”

  A new voice. I glanced up to see Kyle and the other guy—Doug, I assumed—standing in the doorway. Doug’s pupils were pinned even worse than his friend’s, and he was looking at me as if I was a commercial for a cancer charity in an evening that had otherwise featured very mellow programming.

  “Here’s the thing,” I said, to Doug. It had been his idea to visit the Pelican in the middle of the night. You can always tell the difference between the big dogs and the little dogs, even when the bigger ones are still damned small. “I’m the person who supplied your friend Kyle with his drugs.”

  “Shit,” he said urgently.

  “Yeah.” I pushed Rick to the side, making sure he stayed tangled with the chair and wound up falling heavily into the corner.

  “Shit,” Doug said, again, blinking fast. Dumb and high though he was, he was smart enough to realize the evening had taken a very poor turn.

  I left a beat and then lashed hard right with the tire iron, smashing the nearest light fitting and sending a shower of glass fragments around the room.

  Kyle and Doug leaped back, arms over their heads. Rick meanwhile was trying to fight free of the chair so he could regain his feet.

  I rested my own foot—pretty gently—on his chest. He went back down almost gratefully.

  “Tell me you’ve still got it,” I said. “Except, of course, for what you’ve sucked up into your faces already.”

  Doug nodded quickly, compulsively. He hadn’t been hit yet. He’d be valuing that position a great deal, and ready to do pretty much anything to protect it.

  “I’m waiting,” I said.

  He didn’t hesitate. Ran straight to the fridge and dug in the vegetable drawer. Out came a brown bag. He thrust it at me like it was on fire.

  I looked inside, threw it to Kyle. Then took a step closer to Doug, and looked him in the eyes.

  “Do you understand how lucky you’ve been?”

  He nodded feverishly.

  “I hope so,” I said. “Ordinarily this would go some whole other way. Kyle assures me you’re decent people, despite appearances, and so I’m hoping you’re not going to wake up tomorrow feeling pissed off and like you should have been more assertive about this, and decide to take it out on Kyle instead.”

  “No way,” Doug said quickly.

  “Good. You do, then I’ll come burn your house down. Understand? And I don’t mean this shit heap you’re living in.”

  “Honestly, man,” he said. “W-we’re cool.”

  I nodded to Kyle, and we walked out the door.

  Halfway back to the car I stopped and put my hand on Kyle’s arm. He turned warily. He looked about twelve years old.

  “I don’t need to talk this through with you in the same way, do I?” He shook his head quickly.

  “Get rid of that shit, fast. Pay back the people you got it from, then pay back the loan. And do not do this ever again. You are simply not up to this way of life. You piss off someone just one step higher up the food chain and you’re going to wind up fucked or dead. I mean you no disrespect, Kyle—this is just career advice from someone who knows.”

  He was nodding almost continually now, his chin twitching. “Okay.”

  “Here’s how this business works. At the top are the guys who make the stuff and run the top-level distribution: the shadows who make the real money and never get caught. Then there’s the next tier, the guys you bought your drugs from. They make a bunch of cash, too, though once in a while they go down or get shot when the next wave rolls over them. At the bottom there’s the guy you're trying to be, the street grunts. Who make a little cash in the beginning but always wind up junkies, or in jail, or dead, about which the guys above do not give a fuck.”

  I grabbed his chin and made sure I had his full attention. “You really want to be that guy? Bitch for some asshole who right now is sitting on a yacht bigger than any house you’ll ever own?”

  He shook his head, as best he could. “No.”

  “Well, then.” I let go and clapped him
on the shoulder. “We’re done. Let’s go home.”

  We walked the rest of the way back to Becki’s car. She slumped with relief when she saw the bag.

  “How?” she said. “Is everything—”

  “It’s all done,” I said. “And your boy did good.”

  I rode in the back. I should have felt okay about what had just happened, but I did not. I watched the town as we passed through, then down at the river as we went south over the bridge, then the dunes and the dark sea beyond.

  Becki stopped the car outside my house, a lot more gently than the night before.

  “Thank you,” she said, but she said it like someone who’d been done a favor.

  Then she shook her head, added, “See you tomorrow,” and the feeling backed off a little.

  When I got to the top of the path I looked back. The car was still there. Becki and Kyle were holding each other, their foreheads pressed together, her hand stroking the back of his head, the top of his neck. There’s nothing to beat that. Nothing in the world.

  I let myself into the house, feeling tired and wrong and like I could walk a thousand miles in any direction and have no reason to ever turn back.

  I felt better after a shower, and took a Coke and cigarette out onto the balcony. I wanted a beer, too, but I know better than that.

  No big deal, I’d decided as the hot water coursed over my head. Not doing anything would have led to a worse situation for people I cared about. Isn’t that as good a justification for action as any? And hadn’t I been staring at the waves the previous night, feeling too much to one side of the world?

  I shook my head, dismissed the train of thought. I know how much difference a night’s sleep can make, that what seems ungovernable and world-breaking at one a.m. can be made to feel like someone else’s dream if you put seven hours of unconsciousness between it and you. Tomorrow’s not just another day, another person lives it—and every time you go to sleep, you say good-bye. Amen.

  I went back indoors and got a glass of water to take to bed. As I passed the laptop I hesitated, then decided I could put the day properly to rest by checking my e-mail one last time.