In the Night Season (6 page)

“You don’t belong here. You broke in.”

“Hey, let’s go downstairs and I’ll tell you the whole thing. I ain’t gonna hold nothing back. Okay?”

“Look,” the boy said. “Why don’t you just—take what you want and leave.”

“Damn—” Travis laughed and ran one heavy-knuckled hand across his mouth. Jason saw a blood-mark on one knuckle. “You think I’m a burglar? Is that what you think? Me?”

“I want to stay here,” the boy said and felt himself starting to cry.

“It’s getting dark. Man—when I was your age there wasn’t nothing in the world as scary as a dark attic. Ain’t you afraid of a dark attic?”

“You go down,” he said. “I’ll follow you.”

“Okay.” Travis seemed to ponder this, then started down. He looked over his shoulder. “When’s your mama getting home, anyway?”

“We don’t have anything,” Jason said, unable to control the tears now.

Travis turned there on the attic stairs and looked at him, and when he spoke it was with an exasperated urgency that reminded the boy painfully of his father. “Are you still harping on that burglar stuff? I ain’t no burglar.”

Jason followed him down, keeping back from him. They went into the kitchen, and the man searched for the light.

“It’s above you,” Jason told him.

“Thanks.”

The kitchen was a long room, with a counter on one side and a small booth on the other. There was a window seat, and a pantry door beyond this; an island stood in the middle of the room, with pots and pans suspended from a rack in the ceiling above it. Travis sat in the window seat. “Nice house.”

“What do you want?” the boy asked.

“Well, like I said. I ain’t no damn burglar.” Travis smiled.

Jason was on the other side of the room, near the entrance. Behind Travis, the windows in the door were darkening, but the boy saw that one of the panes was out.

Travis had seen him notice it. “Oh, that,” he said. “I lied about the door being unlocked.”

“We don’t have anything,” said the boy. “Please.”

“Okay, look,” Travis said, rising. “Turns out I ain’t a burglar, okay? But I
am
a criminal. I’m being straight with you, kid. I’m telling you the truth.” He reached into the back of his jeans, at the belt, and brought out a pistol. “There, see? Out in the open. I don’t want nobody to get hurt. Promise. I’m being right up front with you, ain’t I?”

Jason remained silent; his own legs felt like weights.

“Well, ain’t I?”

He couldn’t speak.

“Come on. Sit down. Really. I’ll put this away.” Travis stuck the gun back where he had got it, and moved to the door. There was some glass at his feet. He pushed this aside with the toe of his boot. “Look, I got accused of this crime I didn’t commit. I mean I know they all say that—but this is the truth. They had all this circumstantial evidence on me, and there was bad feeling about me in the town anyway, and it all added up, and they sent me away. I swore I’d find the guy that actually did the crime. You see?”

Jason shook his head, wasn’t even quite aware that he had done so. He was actually sitting here with this man, this armed someone, escaped from the penitentiary.

“Well, I couldn’t very well prove my innocence behind bars, could I?”

“No, sir.”

Travis smiled and shook his head. “Sir.” He moved to the sink and leaned against the counter. Jason heard the small bump of the pistol against the Formica. “Sir. Wow.”

“My mother called Mr. Bishop,” Jason said.

The other seemed only faintly interested in this. “Yeah. That guy lives in the farmhouse over yonder?”

The boy nodded.

“He’s not home.”

“He comes over.”

“Checking up on you, huh?”

Jason said nothing.

“They don’t trust you.”

“Yes they do.”

“Well, Jason, it don’t look like it. This old colored guy comes in to look you over. And your mother calling you like that. It don’t look like there’s much trust there. Course, you ain’t done much to help them trust you. Been skipping out of things in the last couple days, right?”

“My mother knows about it.”

“I bet she don’t.” Travis reached under his coat, into his shirt pocket, and brought out a cigarette. He turned the stove on and bent to the flame. The boy watched the side of his face, as the cigarette caught. Travis blew smoke at the ceiling and gave forth a small satisfied sound. He’d left the flame burning on the stove. He smiled, took another drag on the cigarette, then turned the flame off. “Guess you’re wondering what we’re waiting for.”

“No,” the boy said. “You’re from those people that sent those ugly letters.”

“Really.” Travis seemed amused.

“Mr. Bishop has been kind to us. You’re all a bunch of racists.”

“Tell you the truth, son, I don’t give a shit about that stuff, one way or the other. I’m an equal opportunity criminal.”

“You picked the wrong people.”

“Where’s your daddy?”

Jason didn’t answer.

“No daddy?”

“I don’t see why I should tell you anything.”

“No daddy.”

He sat there under the flat green gaze. “Leave me alone.”

After a pause, the other moved away from the sink and sat across from him. “Oh, hell. I’m really sorry, man.”

“Stop it,” Jason said. He was fighting tears again, and with this struggle to master himself, he discovered a slight lessening of his fear. The other sat there smoking, watching him.

“You feel like talking about it?”

The boy said nothing.

“I guess not.”

They were quiet. Travis leaned back in the chair and watched the smoke rise from his face. Then he blew smoke rings. “You ever smoke?”

Jason kept silent.

“You want one?”

“No.”

“What happened?”

He didn’t understand the question.

“Your father.”

“I don’t want to talk about my father with you.”

“I’m sorry.” Travis sat forward. “Is the smoke bothering you?”

“No.”

Again, there was an interval of quiet.

“He was killed in an accident,” Jason said, feeling an inward shock. It was the first time he had spoken the phrase out loud.

“Jeez,” said the other. “That’s a lousy thing to happen.”

The boy had the sense that this was some kind of game.

Travis smoked the cigarette, blew more smoke rings. “Were you close?”

Jason didn’t answer him. It was a long silence.

“I bet you were close.”

“What’re you gonna do with us?”

“Come on, Jason. We were talking. We were making friends, weren’t we?”

“I want to know what you’re gonna do.”

“Just answer the question for me. I ain’t talking for the exercise. I’m interested in you, boy. I wanted to know were you and your daddy close. Did you talk to each other a lot. Did he tell you things, you know, man to man, and like that.”

“I don’t know. He was my father.”

“Now that wasn’t so painful, was it? Sometimes it helps to talk about these things. Even if it’s with somebody you ain’t all that happy to be talking to. So you were—you and him—you were close.”

“I guess.”

“He tell you things?” Travis smiled at him, blowing the smoke; it wavered out of his scarred mouth and made a stemlike trail upward, as he breathed. “Advice, stuff about life, all that?”

“I guess. I don’t know.”

“Nothing about his business, say?”

“What?”

“Man, it’s so rough. See, I ain’t close to my daddy. In fact, if I’d had my way, he might could’ve ended up like your daddy, and I wouldn’t’ve minded at all, you know? I mean my old man ain’t nothing but a sorry son of a bitch. Don’t get me wrong, though. He’s not quite to blame for me. I got off on the wrong foot down there, all on my own.”

“Where—where does he live?” Jason asked. “Your daddy.”

“Hey—see? We’re getting along now. My daddy lives in Gainesville, Florida. But he raised me in Georgia, and I ain’t seen him since he moved to Gainesville. You ever been to Georgia?”

“No, sir.”

Travis laughed softly. “Sir.” He cleared his throat, took a last drag on the cigarette, then got up and ran the tap over the coal. “Where’s the trash?”

“Under the sink.”

He looked there and put the cigarette away. The little click of the cabinet closing reminded Jason of the careful fastidious way his mother moved around in the kitchen. Travis turned to the door with its open pane and pulled the remaining pieces of glass from it.

“How did you escape?”

For a little space, the other seemed to be listening for something, head cocked to one side, standing stock-still. “Escape?”

“Were you in Lorton?”

It was clear that the question pleased him. “Place ain’t fit for animals. Did you know DC sends all their criminals out there, too? From DC Jail, for Christ’s sake. Pardon the language. Well, they were set to move me downstate. I mean I had my orders and everything and I was waiting to go. And the, ah, opportunity to go sooner—um, than planned, sort of presented itself. Easiest damn thing in the world. I jumped into a freaking laundry hamper. Me. Just like the movies. Rode out in the back of the truck. And when they stopped, I just let myself out and went on my merry way.”

“Where’d you get the gun—and your clothes?”

Travis stared. “You’re a smart boy, ain’t you.”

“No, sir.”

“Well. I made a couple of other stops. Before I stopped here.”

“What—what was the crime they said you did?”

“Agh.” He waved this away. “Theft. You know. One thing and another.”

“I thought you said you weren’t a burglar.”

“I’m not.”

“Burglary is theft.”

“Well, it’s a particular kind of theft. This was a—a bank robbery.”

“There’s video cameras in banks. Wouldn’t they know from the tape if you were innocent?”

“Boy, you watch too much TV. It ain’t like TV everywhere, you know. There wasn’t any tape this time. Just circumstantial. Some folks said they saw me. Well. Some said it was me and some said it wasn’t.” He took another cigarette out and moved to the stove again. “This is nice,” he said, blowing more smoke. “Let’s keep talking. What else do you want to know?”

“Nothing,” the boy said. Something in the other’s animation, his confidence, and that hollow little smile, had discouraged any response.

“Nothing else you want to ask me?”

“No.”

“Course, I could be telling you a lot of lies here.”

Now there was just the sound of the furnace running, and when it stopped, the grandfather clock in the hall was sounding.

“Five o’clock,” Travis said.

“My mother won’t get home till six.”

“Hell, I don’t know, man. That’s a long time to wait for dinner. What do you usually do for dinner?”

“There’s stuff in the refrigerator. I make my own.”

Travis tilted his head to the side, regarding him. “She don’t like the job much—right? The job is a bad necessity.”

It was true. When the small contracting business Jack Michaelson had owned began to fail in the real estate slump, he had borrowed heavily on life insurance policies. Jason’s father had spent nearly everything trying to save the business, and in the end there had been little more than the money necessary to bury him. The last months of the man’s life had been so strange, requiring a kind of caution when with him that had never been necessary before, and he had spent many long hours looking through the account books, as if searching for the one mistake that had put him in the mess he was in. It had become almost impossible to talk to him, and his son imagined that when the bus had crossed the median strip, careening toward him, his mind was elsewhere.

But the boy had worked to unthink everything he knew about those last days, all of which seemed concentrated in the memory of a day they had planted maple saplings out in the back of the house; a freezing cold twilight, Jason standing with his father in the cold, the oncoming night having caught them before they could finish, Jason wishing he could be anywhere else, hating his father, and thinking about how good it would be to have him somewhere faraway for a while….

It felt as though that were the last time he saw his father alive. But the tree planting had been more than a week before the accident. Jason spent so much of that week avoiding him, attempting as often as possible to evade notice, to be invisible. Trouble between them, and an anger in the boy’s heart, a refusal, deep down, to forgive. He did not want to have his father to deal with, and he had succeeded too well. He could not remember the last thing he might
have said to him, what had passed between them. It was buried in the blur and stress of avoidance, the enforced, moody quiet of those last days.

Now, Travis said, “Yeah. Your mom’s left you for a career, I guess somebody’s gotta make money—I figured that. And you’re mad at her for it. I can see it. I can come up with stuff like that. I bet I’d make a good shrink.”

“We don’t even have much of a car. We had to sell the good one. There’s nothing here for you.”

Travis seemed to ponder this a moment, puffing on the cigarette and blowing the smoke rings. “Hell, I don’t know. These farms—there’s so much ground to cover out in the open.”

“Mr. Bishop’s gonna be here any minute,” Jason said.

The other nodded, with that sarcastic smile. The boy was sure of it now: the whole thing was a show, a fake; Travis was playing, stringing him along. “Like I said.” Travis kept the smile, breathing smoke. “The gentleman would be welcome.”

A moment later, he went to the window in the door. “Well—nothing out there.”

The phone rang again. They looked at each other. There was the small mechanical agitation and then the voice. “This is Nora…” The recorded message went on. The beep sounded. “Okay,” came the now distressed sound of the same voice. “I’m getting scared. Where is everybody? Hello? Jason?”

“Pick it up,” Travis said. “Come on. And son?” He took the pistol out of the back of his jeans. “You say anything about me, and I’ll kill you both. I have no plans to kill anybody, but you fuck up and that’s what’ll happen.”

“Jason?” came the voice. “Jason, please pick up.”

They moved into the hall, and Travis took the receiver and held it between them. Jason took hold of it and said, “Hello?”