In the Night Season (23 page)

The boy watched him shamble to the window, where he looked out, hands in his pockets, and belched deep. The stupid, vulgar sound of him in the room called up a deeper vein of terror.

A sound came up out of Jason’s throat.

“Cut it out.”

“I can’t help it.”

“You shit your pants yet? People get scared enough, that’s what happens, you know. I seen it before.”

“Reuther thinks you’re stupid,” Jason told him. “He calls you and Travis the bozo brothers.”

Bags turned. “I think I’ll haul your little ass down to the basement. That way I can come up here and keep watch without the irritation of listening to you.”

Jason tried not to breathe.

The fat man stood at the window, hands still in his pockets, rocking on his heels. He lifted one heavy leg, the same antic motion, and farted again. “For the Kraut.” He laughed to himself, that moronic little windy sound, and came back, stooped down, working the knot at the boy’s feet. When it came loose, Jason’s feet dropped to the floor, and the shock in his calves and behind his knees made him yell. Bags lifted him by the back of his collar and pulled the noose from around his neck. He brought the knife out, clicked the blade open, and stepped to one side. “Down we go,” he said.

J
ASON HAD DESCENDED, PAST THE
empty kitchen where he saw brightness in a quadrant of the sky out one window—and knew that it wasn’t much past midday: the gray changing light at the window of the upstairs room had deceived him. At the realization of this, something in him gave way, a discouragement so profound that for a heartbeat he lacked the strength to keep moving. Bags pushed him in the upper back. “Get the lead out.” They went around to the stairwell and down, toward the basement. A dirt cellar. Jason saw exposed earth and received a sensation of its chilly dampness. Behind him, the fat man pressed forward, with the knife. The cellar was dark, and the mineral, wet-clay smell came over the boy. He stopped. At his back, a looming heavy shadow, Bags stopped too.

“There’s nothing down there,” Jason said.

“It’s dirt,” said Bags. “Id’n it?” He emitted his weird idiot’s laugh. “You could bury people here, and they’d finish the basement, and nobody’d ever find them.”

“Bags,” said the boy. “Please don’t make me stay here.”

“All you need is a shovel.”

“Please,” Jason said. “You’re not supposed to do this.”

“Oh, that’s right.” Bags widened his eyes and mocked being afraid. “The Kraut.”

“Come on, please,” Jason said.

Bags leaned down, gazing into the dimness. “Hey, mud, too.” The laugh came again. “Fucking place leaks.” With his free hand he pushed the boy between the shoulder blades, a nudge. “Go on.”

“Please. I’m not gonna try anything.”

The hand shoved him now, and he fell a step, grabbing onto the railing. He righted himself and tried to hold on, looking back at the massiveness of the other, one step up from him.

“Come on, Bags—please!”

The fat man made another pushing motion, and Jason, out of reflex, ducked away. The motion caused the big hand to miss him, and Bags pitched forward. He grabbed at the railing and missed that, losing balance. Jason was under him, then above him, and then, once more out of reflex, he kicked at the big shape. Utter desperation, a nightmarish flailing. He felt the knife cut his wrist, then his sore ankle, but he had made contact with his foot—he had hit bone or cartilage with it—and he kicked again, and still again, and it felt like the fights he had in dreams, when his body wouldn’t move fast enough, or with enough power. His legs felt heavy, slow, yet insubstantial as air, and there was no force behind any of his motions. He swung his arms wildly, trying to kick, hearing his own crying, and the thick gasping of the fat man, and then through this he heard the clatter of the knife dropping on the steps. He kicked one last time, with everything he could gather of his small weight, hitting something, feeling it move, a soft pushing-through, and the fat man went tumbling to the bottom of the stairs, yelling. It sounded like a scream of pain. But Jason knew it was rage. Bags was scrabbling, knife in hand, face bleeding, up the stairs. The boy slammed the door on him, pressed the little button in the center of the doorknob, then backed away, looking around for something to fight with. His hand was bleeding. At some point he had grabbed at the knife blade or hit it; his shoe was filled with blood. He limped to the doorway and saw trees, sun falling through bare branches, a brown patch of dead grass. There was the tremendous slamming of
the other against the door. The hinge cracked away from the thin wood of the frame.

The fat man was coming.

Jason got the back door open and staggered, crying, across the small space of grass and into the trees. There wasn’t enough growth here. He kept on, struggling up an incline, among rocks and packed pine needles, to a row of hedgelike bushes, where he fell, sobbing, dizzy, feeling that he might pass out. For what seemed a long time there hadn’t been any sound but his own striving. He tried to hold his breath, to clear his mind. When he looked through the interstices of pine needles and branches, he saw Bags standing in the yard, looking down. Bags was going to trail him, using the blood. There was blood on the knife. The boy backed away from the bush and went down a small dip in the ground. A creek. He washed his hand in the stinging partly solidified cold of it, crystals of ice clinging to his wrist, then crossed and went along the bank.

Bags yelled something.

Jason ran a few paces, or tried to, then stopped again. The other’s voice was coming to him through the woods, like an echo; it was not close.

“Hear me?”

He got down on all fours and moved through a wall of dry brush that clicked at his face and neck. Then he came to his feet and, crouching low, made his way along a dirt path and up into more trees.

“I’m going to slice your mother up real good when she gets back,” Bags yelled.

He knelt down, looked at his own bleeding wrist and hand, struggling not to make the slightest sound.

“You think they can stop me?”

He lay still on the cold floor of the woods, exhausted, confused, growing weaker by the second.

“I know you can hear me, you little fucker. I’m gonna hurt her good. I’m gonna make the old man look like a picnic.”

He tried to rise and couldn’t. The world went off into nothingness for an increment of slow time, sight and sound—the cold
earth, the odor of dead leaves. He’d thought the fat man had come closer, but there was just the quiet, the cold, the shivering. He had curled into himself, where it was a degree warmer, but something stirred in him, an urgency. He couldn’t make himself get up. He thought he had rolled over on his back and looked at his wounds, and then he thought someone was standing over him. He seemed to ascend into light, and sense, and it was true that someone, not Bags, was there, ranged above him. His father. He was sure now that it was his father. He looked into the white shape of the face in the failing light.

“Dad?” he said.

N
IGHTS WHEN HE WAS YOUNGER
, he would wake to the sounds of his parents in the house with friends, would hear the laughter, the voices rising, people trying to talk over each other, and he lay back in the warmth of the bed, content in the half-light from the doorway, the light that led along the upstairs hallway to the spacious area over the foyer and the living room. He would listen to the voices, choosing among them for those of his parents; it felt that way, as though he were making a choice, picking through an abundance of good sounds for the familiar, best ones. Time ended. Aware of his own safety and warmth, and the darkness all around like a living thing that had been pushed back and defeated, the boy wanted to keep awake, to hold on, but gradually a kind of hollowness would come to him, a blankness, and then he would come awake, startled, opening his eyes to darkness and silence, as if the house had emptied out in a terrible instant. The dark had covered everything, was all around. He would lie there, afraid—even as he understood that he had fallen asleep and this was merely home after the hours of being asleep. The fear gathered in him, and finally he would not be able to support it anymore, would feel the need to call his father in to him.

It was always his father he wanted to see, because his father was big and strong and could do things with his hands. It was always his father who came.

Sometimes with impatience. “What’s the matter now, Jason?”

The boy would feel compelled to make something up. “I had a bad dream.”

His father was a sighing shadow in the dimness. “Want to tell me about it?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Tell me about it,” his father would say, sitting on the edge of the bed and rubbing his eyes.

And so the boy would make it up. His father never gave a sign that he had seen through this ruse, but would let the boy talk—a patient stillness, elbows resting on knees, waiting for him to wind down. It never took him long to come to the end of whatever it was he had made up. Something about the other’s silence always distracted him. “And—and,” he would stammer. “That’s all I remember.”

“Do you feel better, having talked about it?”

“No.”

“It’s supposed to make it go away, Jason, if you talk about it.”

“I don’t feel any better.”

“You want me to sit here with you until you go to sleep?”

“Yes, sir.”

His father would sigh and wait. And the boy fought sleep with everything he had, wanting to keep him there. “You sleepy?”

“Not yet.”

The big hand would come down on his chest and pat it softly, then become very still there, a protecting soft weight. Jason felt sleep coming on, struggled to stay above it, hearing his father sigh in the dark, perhaps even nodding off himself. Finally, with what felt like another kind of suddenness, it would be morning, light at the windows, and Jason’s father would not be there. Even in the light, he felt oddly bereft, angry with himself for falling asleep.

He had confided this to his mother, some time shortly after his father’s death. She surprised him by confessing to a fear of her own,
also involving darkness. “Morning is the best time,” she told him. “My favorite time. And I never liked the nights, not when I was a little girl, and not now. Especially not now.”

Once—it was sometime before the planting of the trees—Jason had a dream that his father had died and was back, had been to the bottom of the vast dark that was the reason for all those wakeful nights when he had been smaller. His father was dead in the dream, as the people in movies and on television were dead, with an unreal, cosmetic, facile staginess, but walking and talking, teasing his mother as he used to do in the lighthearted days, when there wasn’t any tension—his parents obviously grateful for what they had together, amusing each other, and everybody having fun. That phrase was always an important one in the house: everybody having fun. It had been his father’s question. He’d walk into the house after working at one of the building sites and say, “Everybody having fun?” And the boy would run to him, throw his thin arms around his middle. In this dream, his father was a ghost, but exactly as he had been when things were happy. The dream poured horror into the boy’s bones, woke him in a cold sweat, and he cried out, twice, then waited in the stillness of the sleeping house for the sound of his father moving around. Silence. So he sat up in the bed and yelled, and yelled again, and finally his father came to the doorway of the room.

“You awake?” he said.

“I had a bad dream,” the boy told him.

“Go back to sleep.” The shape turned in the doorway.

“Dad?”

A small throat-clearing sound—irritation. “What?”

“Sit with me?”

“You’re a little old for that, son.”

“I’m scared.”

“Well, don’t be. There’s nothing to be afraid of.”

“I can’t help it.”

His father moved into the room, but this was almost a threatening motion. “Look, I’m trying to get some sleep. You’re too old for this. Now be a man and stop it.”

The boy, who was a long way from being a man and knew it, simply lay there waiting for his father to say or do whatever he would say or do now.

His father sighed deeply and sat down on the edge of the bed. “You had a bad dream.”

“Yes.”

“Want to tell me about it?”

“I dreamed you were here, but you were dead.”

Silence.

“We were—like we used to be but you were—” The boy couldn’t say it again.

“What do you mean, ‘like we used to be’?”

Jason couldn’t imagine how to explain. He said, “I don’t know.”

“Of course you do.”

“No, sir.”

“You said, ‘we were like we used to be.’ Well, what did you mean?”

“It’s hard to explain,” he said.

His father ran his hands through his hair. “I guess I know what you mean.”

Jason recognized, without words, the note of resignation in the murmuring voice. He waited, understanding through the nerves along the back of his neck that his father was far away from him, sitting quietly with whatever was troubling him.

“Look,” came the voice, and the big hand settled with wonderful soft weight on his chest. “I know it’s been rough around here lately. But it’s gonna be all right again. I promise.”

“Yes, sir.”

“We just have to—” He stopped. The hand moved, caressed. “Well.”

The boy was shaking.

His father lifted him, put his arms around him. “It’s gonna be all right, son. I’ll find a way to make it all right.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Listen—whatever you ever hear, or come to hear—whatever anyone ever tells you, I love you and your mother. You know that.”

“Yes, sir.”

“We’ve just hit a little hard place in the road.” The big hands were patting him in the middle of the back. “It’s gonna be all right.”

He cried into the hollow of his father’s shoulder, breathing the faint talcum and shaving lotion odor of him.

“Dad?”

“Try to go to sleep,” his father said.

They were quiet a moment. It was almost as if they were listening for something.

“I need you to be a brave young man now.”

“Yes, sir.” He lay back down.

“I know you will.” The hand came down on his chest again. “What is it that you have lots of to face the big bad world with?”

This was a question the answer to which his father and mother had taught him before he was old enough to understand what it meant. “Resources,” he said. For most of his growing out of babyhood this exchange had been as automatic as a wish good night. It had only been recently that the boy thought about what it signified. And, recently, almost as if understanding broke the spell, his father stopped asking it. But he had asked it now, and Jason answered it, and for a long time his father held him, the two of them sitting there in the dark, as the house made its night noises. Finally, his mother came to the doorway, a slender shape with the palest shimmer surrounding the outline of her body—light from the moon, shining through the hallway window. She said, sleepily, “What’s the matter?”

Jason spoke up. “I had a bad dream.”

She yawned. “Didn’t we all.”

“Meaning?” said his father.

She came into the room and sat on the boy’s bed and put her arms around her husband’s neck. “I had a nightmare, Jack. Can’t I have them, too?” There was something forlorn in her voice. The boy knew there was trouble between them, but even so this astonished him. His father held her—he held them both.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Honey, can you forgive me?”

She must have nodded into his shoulder, for he held her tighter.

“Sometimes I wonder why the hell you’re still here,” he said.

“Because I love you,” she told him.

They were quiet then, but no one moved. To Jason, it seemed as if they were huddled against something enormous and threatening, staggering toward them from the night, the darkness outside the windows of the house. He wanted them to crawl into the bed with him. But they stood; they were thinking only of each other now. His mother, almost as an afterthought, turned to make sure he was tucked in.

“Okay now?” she said.

“No.”

The two of them paused, as if waiting for him to say more. But then his father walked over and sat down on the edge of the bed again. “Hey,” he said. “Come on, now. You told me about the dream. It should be gone now.”

“Yes, sir.”

“If you’re scared, sometimes you have to just weather it. Go through it.”

“Yes.”

“Good man.” His father stood. “And what is it you have lots of to face the big bad—”

Jason broke in, saying the word at the shadow looming above him. “Resources.”

“There you go.”

But after they were gone he lay very still in the dark, with its shades and shapes of deeper blackness, and felt that he had no resources at all, nothing inside him but expanding fear, the sense that it filled him up, made it hard for him to expel the air he gasped in with each small spasm of his chest. And finally, when he couldn’t stand the stillness anymore, he sat up, gulping the close room air, sitting against the headboard with the blankets pulled high up to his chin, watching the subtle changes in the dark, waiting for morning. It seemed that morning would never come.

Of course, it did. It took him by surprise; it was almost impossible to imagine that it had actually happened. He opened his eyes in light, and his heart leapt at the fact of it: daylight. His back was sore, and his arms, from the near crouch he had fallen asleep in; and he
heard the sounds of his parents in the house, his mother’s voice calling him down to breakfast.

There was less than a year left in his father’s life.

In the nights after the accident, he lay awake in the dreadful knowledge of it and thought of all those times he had lain here with the comfort of knowing his father was sleeping in the next room. Now his mother slept alone there. The thought was so strange and so freighted with pain that he couldn’t quite get his mind to accept it. He stared into the dark as if into the badness itself of what had happened. And when he dozed off, the lapse frightened and depressed him—as though he had let go of his father, betrayed him somehow, drifting away into dreams, into not-knowing.

Later, on some of the endless nights, his mother would come in and lie down at the foot of his bed. “Don’t mind me, honey,” she would murmur. “It’s just so miserably uncomfortable in the other room.”

“No,” he told her, relieved.

It was all such a confusing mixture of emotions: that first couple of months she came to the room several nights a week, and a part of him felt happy about it, a separate floating part of him inside, which rejoiced all on its own that he was no longer alone in the dark so much.

“What is it we have lots of to face the big bad world with?” his mother would say sadly, emptily, sometimes almost sarcastically.

He would nod.

And she would answer herself. “Resources.”

It had been, after all, her expression—an exchange she and her mother used to have that Jason’s father had picked up, as family members do. But it never seemed quite the time to say the word back at her in those instances when she used it, during the hard, cruel days of trying to adjust to the new job and to the house being empty when he came home each day from school. He had preferred the silence, hadn’t wanted to talk about any of it. He had wanted the quiet and hidden feeling of the attic.