The Night Always Comes

by Willy Vlautin

  “There it is,” she said and parked. She took the key from her purse and showed it to him.

  Cody wiped his nose on his hoodie. “It’s real,” he said and grinned.

  “Give me the money and I’ll give you the key.”

  “It better be the right key.”

  “It is.”

  He looked out the window at the Mercedes. “It’s brand new, isn’t it?”

  “I think so. I don’t know how many miles are on it, but he hasn’t had it long. So just give me the money and get out.”

  “How about you throw in the cocaine, too.”

  “No,” she said. “The key for the money. That was the deal.”

  Cody kept his eyes on the Mercedes. He took the envelope out of his hoodie pocket.

  “It better open the door.”

  “It does. I’m gonna hit the open button on the key.” She did and across the street the car lit up.

  “Goddamn,” he said and then suddenly lunged for the key and grabbed it. He put it in his hoodie pocket and went for the purse that was sitting on the floor underneath Lynette’s legs. He had it in his right hand, but he couldn’t get it out because the strap was around her left ankle. As he pulled on it, she hit him as hard as she could in the face. He let go of the purse and came after her. He put his hands around her throat and pressed so hard she couldn’t breathe. He was strangling her. She tried to pull his hands off her neck, but he was too strong and she was jammed against the driver’s-side door unable to move. She began to panic and tried desperately to move her feet from under the steering wheel but couldn’t. She began hitting him on the side of the head, but he wouldn’t stop squeezing. With her left hand she grabbed his hair and pulled on it as hard as she could. He screamed and took his hands from her throat and hit her in the stomach, but by then she got her feet up from under the steering wheel and began kicking him. She got his face twice and that stopped him. He opened the passenger-side door and got out.

  As he staggered back into the street, Lynette found Kenny’s old Portland Beavers mini-bat on the floor of the back seat, grabbed it, got out of the car, and ran to him. “Give me the fucking key back,” she yelled. But Cody was holding Kansas’s Buck knife. The blade was out and pointing toward her.

  “You’d really stab me?” she said. “You’d kill a person for a car?”

  “If you make me stab you I will.”

  “Just give me the money and take the car. That was the deal.”

  “I ain’t giving you the money,” he said, and a thin line of blood ran from his nose down over his upper lip. “I need that money.”

  Lynette tried to think and then said finally, “Okay. I don’t want to get stabbed. I’ll leave, but just so you know, you have the wrong key. It’s a key to a Saab. I have the right key in my pocket. I hit that one at the same time I hit the one I gave you.”

  A panic fell across Cody’s face and he took the key from his pocket and glanced at it for just a moment, and when he did, Lynette hit him on the side of the neck with the bat. He dropped the knife and the key and fell to the ground and she began to beat him. He cried out for her to stop, but she didn’t stop. She hit him more than a dozen times. By the end he was sobbing. His mouth and nose were pouring out blood and he was curled into a ball. When she quit, he was still breathing, but he wasn’t moving. She took the envelope from his pocket, picked up the knife, closed the blade, and put it in her coat pocket. She looked at the license plate of the Mercedes, memorized the number, and got back in her car, locked the doors, started the engine, and waited.

  Minutes passed and she stared at Cody on the pavement, under the street lamp, not moving. She was about to call for an ambulance when he sat up and slowly stood. He spit on the ground and felt his face and looked around until he found the Mercedes key. He opened the driver’s-side door, got in, and started it. The headlights came on and she watched him drive off.

  14

  The Original Hotcake House was a twenty-four-hour restaurant. It was three a.m. and the restaurant was empty but for three drunk men in their early twenties eating breakfast. Lynette ordered a Denver omelet and a cup of coffee at the counter and went to the bathroom and locked the door.

  She took her scarf and coat off and looked at herself in the mirror. There were red marks on her neck from Cody’s hands, but they weren’t as bad as she thought they would be. Her stomach was sore from the punches, but her face was untouched. She washed it and put her scarf and coat back on and went out. She sat on the opposite side of the restaurant from the men and after a few minutes her order came up.

  When she was a kid, her grandfather had brought her to the Hotcake House countless times. It was his favorite restaurant. He was a handsome, thickset man with huge forearms and shoulders and short gray hair. He worked as a union stevedore for forty years and wore the same thing every day: Levi’s, work boots, and a Ben Davis pin-striped half-zipper shirt. From when she was a baby, Lynette would spend three weekends a month with her grandmother and grandfather in St. Johns. When she grew older, her grandfather would wake her before dawn, put shoes on her feet and a jacket over her pajamas, and carry her to his truck. He would then drive them to the Hotcake House for breakfast.

  Afterward he’d take her to Portland Meadows horse track to watch the early-morning workouts. Her grandfather would carry her in one arm and hold a kid’s sleeping bag and a thermos of coffee in the other. He’d lay the sleeping bag out on a bench and she’d get in and watch the horses working out while her head rested on her grandfather’s leg. She would fall in and out of sleep for what seemed like hours. The smell of coffee from his thermos, the sound of the horses running, and her warmth inside the sleeping bag.

  Her grandfather took her everywhere: to the movies, to the hardware store and the auto parts store. She’d be there when he met his friends for coffee, when he went to the stock car races in St. Helens or the hockey games at Memorial Coliseum, when he bought new clothes at Jower’s or the Man’s Shop, when he ate Mexican food or Chinese food, or when he got his hair cut at Wayne’s barbershop. He was proud of her and always introduced her as “the greatest kid of all time.” He had been good to her, had always been kind, and he gave Lynette her only real break from Kenny. He gave her a chance to just be her and to be loved for it. But her time with her grandparents ended when she was nine. Her grandfather had dropped his truck off one morning to be repaired and was walking home on Lombard Street when he collapsed on the sidewalk and died of a heart attack. Her grandmother, already in ill health, moved to Yakima to live in a retirement home with her sister.

  As Lynette grew older, she went back to the Hotcake House. At thirteen or fourteen, if she had a free Saturday or Sunday, she would take the bus across town just to eat there and think about her grandfather. She told no one about it, about how important the place was to her, until she met Jack. After that, she and Jack would go there and she would tell him about her grandfather because she knew they would have been friends. Her grandfather would have been proud of her for being with a man like Jack.

  Tears leaked down her face as she ate. What would her grandfather think of her now? After all the horrible things she’d been a part of, the horrible things that she had done herself or let be done to her. It nearly made her fall to the floor just thinking about it. And for the last three years she’d even failed Kenny. What would her grandfather think of that? Of her ignoring Kenny the way she had. Sleep and work and trying to save money to buy the house. Three years without looking up once. It had strained them all. Her mother and Kenny had both become depressed, had both gained weight, and her mother was smoking too much and beginning to drink more. And now they wouldn’t even have a home of their own. She had failed.

  As she ate and drank her coffee, she knew that she was ruled by guilt. She had been broken by her brother because after her grandfather died her life as Kenny’s sister changed to her life as Kenny’s caregiver. On weekdays, before her mother got hired at Fred Meyer Jewelers, she was a dinner waitress at
Elmer’s restaurant in Delta Park. Lynette, still only nine, would look after Kenny during her mother’s shifts. Her mother would lock them inside the house so they couldn’t get out. Two key-only bolt locks on the front and back doors.

  By the age of twelve Lynette would get Kenny up before school, dress him, make his breakfast, and pack his lunch. In the afternoon, when her classes were finished, she went to Kenny’s school and brought him home on a city bus. When they were able to get seats, Kenny had to be on the inside or he would try to escape. If they had to stand, she would hold his hand as tight as she could when the bus driver came to a stop. If she wasn’t paying attention, if she wasn’t holding on to him hard enough, he’d break free and run for the exit. She’d have to yell at the driver to leave the door open and she’d run off, too, and chase him down the street.

  By thirteen she made his dinners: canned soup or macaroni and cheese or scrambled eggs or frozen pizza. She cleaned his room and the bathroom, where he made daily messes, and never once, during all those years, was he the brunt of her growing anger and anguish. As she sat there in the restaurant she was at least proud of that.

  What haunted her, however, was that she ignored him. She spent years just trying to distract him in any way she could think of to get relief, to get some time to herself. She fed him too much, left him in front of the TV too often, and when he was really difficult, she slipped him a Benadryl and put him to bed. In high school she sometimes left him alone. She would lock him in his bedroom and go to parties or go to movies with friends. Afterward she would rush home before her mother got off from work and calm Kenny with Pop-Tarts and cookies and movies. She’d dote on him while frantically cleaning his room so that her mother would never know she had locked him inside it.

  But she also knew that, for years, she and her mother had tried. They took him to whatever programs they could get him into, they worked on socializing him, they followed any and all advice from teachers, therapists, doctors, nurses, and specialists.

  When Lynette was fourteen and her brother sixteen, he was accepted to summer art camp just south of Coos Bay on a need-basis scholarship. Her mother planned that after they dropped him off she and Lynette would take their first family vacation. For two nights they rented a cabin near Port Orford. They took walks on the beach, ate Mexican food, and lay on the sand and read books side by side. The third and fourth nights they spent in San Francisco, where they stayed at a motel in Chinatown. They took tourist pictures, her mother bought Lynette a sweater, she bought them matching scarves, they rode a cable car, and they ate in Chinese and Italian restaurants. They held each hour like escaped convicts who knew they were soon to be taken back. They didn’t fight, they didn’t even bicker, they were for those few days almost friends. Because they were, for the first time, free. It was the longest Lynette had been away from Kenny in her life and the longest her mother had been away from Kenny since his birth.

  On the ride home with Kenny in the front seat and Lynette in the back, her mother drove them up Interstate 5 and smoked cigarette after cigarette, holding it next to the crack in the driver’s-side window, and quietly cried to herself. They came back to Portland and they were the same. They struggled and they tried for Kenny, and then her mother met Randy, and after three months of dating, Randy moved in. They kept trying even then, until Randy broke into the bathroom while Lynette was in the tub and she ran away from home at sixteen.

  Two drunk couples came into the Hotcake House and sat across from Lynette, so she finished her coffee, left half of the omelet on her plate, and got up. It was three forty a.m. Outside it seemed to be raining even harder. Her car started on the second try and she drove across the Ross Island Bridge and made her way back to the Hotel deLuxe and room 315. Inside she took off her coat and scarf, sat on the bed, and picked up the phone. She left a voice message to the 9th Street Bakery explaining that she couldn’t come in for the rest of the week. Next she called the police nonemergency line and left a message. “I’m staying at the Hotel deLuxe,” she said, “and I was parked on the street. I was going to my car when I saw a man break the driver’s-side window of a Mercedes and get in. The man was really tall. I’d guess around six-three or four. He was white and skinny. He had a patchy beard and really bright-colored tattoos on his arms. There was another man with him, but he didn’t get into the car. He just ran away. But before he took off I heard him say ‘Don’t fuck up the ignition, Cody.’ It was a black Mercedes four-door. Oregon license plate, 924-DVC. Here’s the thing though. When the man drove off I followed him. He went to a shop in the back of a white house on Con Littin Road, off Johnson Creek. There was a sign on the property that said ‘Johnson Creek Auto Repair.’ The man dropped the Mercedes off there and got into another car and drove to 14899 Graham Park Place. It’s off 160th and Sandy Boulevard. My name is Phyliss Waterson, room 315.”

  She found a phone number for the Parole & Probation Department in Portland. The offices were also closed, but she left another message. “Hello,” she said. “I’m calling to report that my brother, Cody Henson, who was an inmate in the prison in Pendleton, has been drinking and doing cocaine. I think he stole a car, too, a black Mercedes, Oregon license plate 924-DVC. I’m worried about his safety. I think he’ll harm himself and maybe others. He needs help. My name is Gloria Henson. My brother works at the Dutchman in southeast Portland, off Hawthorne. Thank you and please help him before he does something really bad.”

  When she hung up, she left the room and took the stairs down to the lobby. She got back into her car and dialed another number. It rang six times before a young woman answered.

  “Sorry to call so late,” said Lynette, “but JJ used to stay up all night and I thought maybe he still did.”

  “His TV’s still on,” a woman’s voice said. “I think he’s still up. Who’s this?”

  “Can you tell him it’s Lynette and it’s really important?”

  The woman put down the phone and Lynette took Kenny’s sleeping bag from the back seat, put it over her, and waited until a man’s voice came on the phone. “Hello,” he said uncertainly.

  “This is Lynette.”

  “Lynette?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You’re still living in Portland?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I thought you were long gone.”

  “No.”

  “Why are you calling me at four in the morning? I haven’t talked to you in what, almost seven years?”

  “Something like that. It’s been a long time,” she said.

  “What do you want?”

  “Do you still sell cocaine?”

  “Why would you ask that?”

  “I came across a package of it and I want to sell it.”

  She could hear him light a cigarette. “Why tonight and why me?”

  “Because I don’t know anyone else. I don’t even know anyone who does it and you used to sell it. Tonight because if I don’t do it now I’ll lose my nerve and just throw it away. But I think I’m leaving town and I want all the money I can get. I don’t need to make much off it, so it’ll probably be a good deal for you.”

  “Where did you get it?”

  “I just kind of stumbled upon it. No one knows I have it and I haven’t told anyone about it. And it’s no one dangerous I got it from. No one like that at all. Are you interested?”

  “I don’t have a ton of cash on me.”

  “You used to always have a lot of cash on you.”

  He was silent for nearly a minute, then said, “Come over, but don’t bring anyone else, just you, okay?”

  “Okay,” she said and hung up.

  15

  At Cully and 62nd, Lynette took a side street where the pavement turned to gravel, and she hit potholes and water splashed under the wheel wells and twice the car bottomed out. As she came to the house where she’d lived for eleven months when she was sixteen she parked the car, shut off the engine, and knew what she was doing was a mistake. She closed her eyes and waited unt
il the song playing on the radio ended and then got out of the car and headed toward the front door.

  There was a run-down vintage thrift shop on Alberta Street that Lynette used to stop in on Saturdays, a day that twice a month her mother let her have to herself. She was a freshman in high school and the owner, a forty-two-year-old man named JJ Benada, noticed her. He gave her free clothes if she helped in the store for the afternoon. Sometimes he’d order pizza and have her pick it up down the street and they’d eat it together. He paid attention to her, told her she was beautiful, told her jokes and made her laugh, and always he had a movie playing on a TV behind the counter and a beer going that he’d drink out of a coffee cup. After a while he even let her sit behind the counter with him. He taught her to use the register and how to price clothes, then began inviting her to parties and gigs that she was never able to attend.

  When she ran away, the first thing she thought of was money. She needed a job and went to the vintage shop and asked JJ for one. She remembered standing in front of him in tears one afternoon telling him she had nowhere to live, and he stepped out from behind the counter and hugged her. When the store closed that evening, he took her to his house, got them Mexican food, found her a sleeping bag and a bath towel, and gave her the couch.

  For eleven months she learned to drink, smoke weed, and do cocaine in that house. And it was there that she lost her virginity to JJ and slept with other men, and a woman, too. It was also where she first fell apart, where her anger finally erupted, where she lost ten pounds, had hives on her back, and spiraled into her first depression.

  The house itself was single story and painted dark purple. Security lights came on and lit the property as she walked up. The yard was overgrown, abandoned to grass, weeds, and blackberry bushes. The shrubs and trees next to the house nearly blocked it from view.