After the People Lights Have Gone Off (10 page)

my didn’t die against the dashboard that day, but the surgeries are still coming. His prom date, she’s going to have to look inside to see the real him.

In quick succession, then, I flamed out of my year-to-year contract at our branch of the state university, was back to stocking tools and air conditioners at night.

And this. Talking about books.

More and more, I was thinking it was the only good thing I had in me. My only real gift. And that, if I didn’t share it, then the next time one of Jeremy’s bills came due, my wife’s dad wasn’t going to come through with a check, or the surgeon that day was going to have had one too many drinks at lunch.

I’d put up a flyer at the library, the Laundromat, the carwash, both coffee shops.

There were seven of us, most Wednesdays.

This week we were reading Stephen King again. Marcy from the bank had recommended him, because, she said, she was too scared to read him alone. So we went with her into those dark places. Well, I’d already been, but I toured them through—the life, the times, the legend—and then passed a photocopied story out for next week. For this week.

The story was “The Man in the Black Suit.” It was about a nine-year-old kid a century ago, just out fishing one day, then encountering the devil, barely getting away. It had some resonance to it, but no real gore. What I planned to tell the group was that how it worked was it was taking this kids’ blind faith—America’s stubborn Christianity—and making it real all at once. So, really, the story was a confirmation, a celebration. The old man who had been the boy, the old man writing this down in his diary, he was one of the lucky ones, the ones who never had to doubt if angels and demons were real. He knew.

So, the study question, it was going to be which is better, to know or not to know?

And, yes, of course Jeremy was nine that day I picked him up from third grade. He was a year older than his classmates—I’d taught in China for a year, when there were no jobs here—but his age didn’t mean anything to him yet. And now he was probably going to be two years behind. But alive. That’s the epithet I kept tagging onto everything: but alive. As in, this could all be worse. I should be thankful for whatever fell on me next.

Since my shift started at nine, we usually met at six, dinnertime. Each week a different person would bring a casserole, pass out the plates. This week it was Lew’s turn. He was retired Air Force, said he’d taken a stack of paperbacks with him on both tours. That he was the only one in his bunkhouse who would stay awake reading.

He brought chicken dumplings in a crock pot.

Aside from him, and Marcy—she of the bank—there was Drake, a straight-laced city planner, the one who’d told us about the community center; there was Evelyn, who always brought her crocheting to do but hardly ever said anything; and Jackie and her daughter Gwen, a junior in high school, there very much against her will for a taste of what literature was going to be like in college.

In the flyer, I’d of course mentioned my background.

So, we were a healthy group of bookworms. A good mix of backgrounds and ages, anyway, if not very diverse.

When the dumplings were gone and adequately praised, we put our plates under our chairs and dove into King.

Because it was his night—for food, but you could tell he felt responsible for the discussion as well—Lew pinched his jeans up his thighs, leaned forward like telling us a secret, and said that he hoped none of the ladies took a fright to this particular story.

Evelyn tittered, her needles flashing, and I got the sense that one of these nights Lew was going to ask her for coffee afterwards, and she was going to suggest the perfect place.

“Scared me,” Drake said.

He was still wearing his tie from the day’s work. Not loosed or anything.

“Me too,” I lied, just to not leave him hanging.

While King had stories that were terrifying, this one was, in comparison, safe. By burying the eight-year-old’s story in the frame of an old man’s journal, it was locating the devil in another time, another place. One far, far from us.

Jackie elbowed her daughter just enough to get her to talk: “You could tell right away who he was. From the eyes.”

“Those eyes,” Jackie said, seconding her daughter’s motion.

“How did he see out of them?” Lew said, leaning back, crossing his arms.

I nodded, was liking this.

The good thing about voluntary book discussions is that I don’t have to play dentist. Getting people to talk’s not like pulling teeth.

“Because they were—because there were flames in his eye sockets, right?” Marcy said.

We all nodded, as if seeing the devil again as King had drawn him: tall, neatly dressed in a black suit. Subtle claws at the ends of his fingertips. Instead of eyes, just orange flickering flames. And a mouth that could open well past what any human jawbone would allow. And the teeth. Those teeth.

“Maybe he doesn’t have to subscribe to our rules of biology,” I said, looking around the circle for support.

“He has to eat,” Gwen said, all on her own. “He eats that fish, right?”

“It’s not a human hunger, though,” Lew said. “Just doing it for meanness, like. To show off, scare that kid.”

“Good, good,” I said, wanting to stand because it’s the main way I know to think. “But, remember, this is eighty years ago for this old man remembering it now. What would you say if I offered that he just encountered a bad man in the woods that day, then, because of his upbringing,
he started to remember him as the devil. He started to add the stuff he knew from Sunday school. Claws, flame, teeth…”

“He does fall asleep before it all happens,” Evelyn said, hooking another stitch, pulling it through.

She was our cynic.

“But is it any less scary if it’s a dream or if it’s real?” Marcy asked.

“Or even if it was just a serial killer,” Jackie added. “That’s pretty scary too, isn’t it?”

“Damn straight,” Lew said, clapping his knee.

“But for every killer there’s a cop, right?” I asked.

Shrugging nods all the way around. This is what they would have been paying for, had they been paying.

“So, follow me now. If there’s devils, then there’s also…?”

“More devils?” Gwen said.

“Kids,” Marcy corrected.

“He means angels,” Evelyn said, stabbing with a needle.

I nodded like I’d been caught, was about to shift gears into my thesis when Lew said, “But who wants to read a story about an angel, right?”

I lowered my face to smile—he was right—and when I looked back up to the group, the twin doors on the other side of the gym were opening up.

Because they were on cylinders, were designed to not crush fingers, we all got the guy’s outline before we got him.

He was tall, spindly, top-hatted. His dark suit ragged at the edges, and not quite long enough for his legs or his arms.

For an instant his eyes flashed, taking my breath away, but in the next instant he was wearing a pair of those old pince-nez, their twin lenses catching the light.

Beside me, Gwen flinched. Jackie took her hand, pulled it across, to her own lap.

“Speak of the—” Lew said just loud enough for the book circle, and chuckled.

The spindly man hooked a stray chair by the door, dragged it all the long way across the wooden floor of the gym to us and set it down, opposite me.

“Room for one more?” he asked.

“How’d you hear about us?” I said, trying to sound casual.

He gave me a smile and a wink, then flapped open a much-folded piece of paper. One of my flyers. All of which I was pretty sure I’d collected, once we had a quorum.

“Looks like he’s invited,” Evelyn said.

“A scarf,” the spindly man said, about her crochet-job.

“Don’t know just yet,” Evelyn said back. Definitely a challenge in her voice. For all of us.

We had a rhythm, had already relaxed into our assign-ed roles.

The spindly man’s eyes made the circuit of our little circle, lingering maybe a touch too long on Gwen, then launching two fingers off his right eyebrow in salute to Lew.

“Even the moneyhandlers,” he said, about Marcy.

“And you?” she said right back to him, like he wasn’t the first ornery customer she’d had to deal with.

“Just happened to be strolling by,” he said, refolding the flyer, stuffing it in the waist pocket of his vest. “What’s the story, doc?” he said then, right to me.

I breathed in, breathed out.

Evidently we were doing this.

“Stephen King,” I said, then, pointedly, “The Man in the Black Suit.”

“Ahh,” the spindly man said, his eyes on Gwen again. “The King man cometh. I know him well, you could say.”

“We were just talking about how if you admit devils,” Drake said, “then that means the door must be open for angels as well.”

“Or more demons,” the spindly man said, sitting back into his chair. “Inside every angel, there’s a demon waiting to claw out, right? But please, don’t let me interrupt.”

And so we went valiantly forward. Just with not much heart.

Instead of listening, or contributing, the spindly man extracted Marcy’s plate from under her chair, then used his finger to scoop her thin layer of leftover dumplings into his wide mouth.

I heard myself traipsing back through Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown” for the group, trying to establish it as the literary antecedent for King this time out. Upon hearing “Hawthorne,” Jackie of course made Gwen recite what she knew about
The Scarlet Letter
.

It gave the spindly man more excuse to stare her up and down. To—and this was the only word for it—malinger.

“But—” I started, not at all sure where I was going, just that I had to pull his eyes off Gwen.

The spindly man was already speaking, though: “Go into the forest, taste the intangible. You come back with the story, never the proof. Am I right?”

Silence. Welcome to the land of crickets, I said in my head, quoting one of my former students.

Lew coughed an old man cough deep in his chest. Marcy scuffled her shoes on the gym floor. Drake stared into his lap, his fingertips drumming some arcane, personal rhythm against each other.

“Good,” I said at last. “Proof. It’s what we were talking about before you got here. If you can prove the vital tenets of a religion, then you lose the possibility of faith. So, King’s man in this black suit, by showing this boy that he was real, he also cored out the boy’s eventual leap of faith. Leaving him to lead a hollow life, as established by all the years between nine and ninety being, as far as we see on the page, empty, devoid of content. Not even interesting enough to paraphrase.”

Sometimes you have to knock a student down with preparation.

The spindly man just grinned a sharp grin.

“Proof,” he said. “We’ve all got proof, man. I bet every one of us has a story like this kid’s. Don’t we?”

Nobody said no.

“You,” he said to Marcy. “You’ve seen the devil, haven’t you?”

“We usually don’t—” I tried, but he held a hand out to me like a crossing guard might, his palm and fingers straight up.

Worse, I actually stopped.

“I don’t know what it was,” Marcy said.

The spindly man smiled. Lowered his hand.

“We were twelve,” Marcy said. “I’d told my mom I was staying at Reese’s, and she said she was staying at my house. You know. So we were going to camp under the old windmill. It was a dare.”

“Dare, dare,” the spindly man urged.

“Of course we didn’t sleep,” Marcy said, her eyes flashing up to Jackie in something like apology, as if she were being a bad influence on Gwen here. “Then, about two or three in the morning, our flashlights both died at once. And we looked up the side of the windmill. The moon was bright that night, and right above us.”

“No,” Lew said, and I looked to him.

Did he know where this story was going?

“And then, coming down the side of the windmill, already about ten feet from the top, I don’t know. There was somebody, okay? Maybe it was just a jacket a worker had left tied up there.”

“Because they always do that,” the spindly man said.

“We ran,” Marcy said. “We ran and we ran, and he was behind us the whole way. We just knew.”

“And you came back with the story,” the spindly man said. “That’s your proof. Good. Do we think she’s lying, folks? Is her story enough for you, or do you need her to have scars on her back, from sharp fingernails? Or a dead friend, who wasn’t quite fast enough?”

“She did die,” Marcy said, her voice cracking a bit. “Later that year. Got hit on the highway, trying to go…we didn’t know where. Oh God.”

She turned her head, balancing tears in her eyes.

“And you?” the spindly man said to Lew.

“Me,” Evelyn said, uncharacteristically. “One night coming home from bringing dinner to my husband on the night shift, I noticed the fuel gage was too far in the red. And there were only cotton fields between me and home, and there were these wild packs of dogs that year. My cousin had already been mauled. But then, right when the engine sputtered, a pair of headlights popped on in my rearview, and stayed there all the way until I pulled into the driveway. And then the car died.”