Where Night Stops

by Douglas Light

  Now, in the middle of the mess I made, I have to find a way out.

  The woman straddles the stool. Her hands are dripping wet. “They’re out of paper towels,” she says, then, “ask me a question.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “No, I mean a real question. Ask me something real.” She grasps her glass with both hands.

  I think. “Have you ever been in love?”

  “Yes,” she says. “What about you?”

  Sarah comes to mind. I remember all the things that started out good, which I turned bad. “No.”

  “You’ve never been in love?”

  “Well, it seemed like love at the time, but then, after…” I let it drop.

  She smiles, showing teeth uneven but lovely. “Have you noticed that people in love always describe love like it’s—” Breaking off, she looks lost for a moment. “I don’t know. They describe it like it were a thing, something you can hold or touch or put on the shelf for display. And yet they never can give a clear description of this thing.” Her voice lifts then drops like lapping waves. “I probably sound like an idiot for saying it, but love isn’t an object, it’s an action. A verb, not a noun,” she says, digging her nail into the scarred wood of the bar. “You know, I’ve been married three times.” She corrects herself quickly. “No, only twice. I’ve been married only twice. And all my men I met here.”

  “In Charm’s?”

  She nods, touches the bar. “I was married to him.” She points out another spot. “And him.”

  It takes me a moment to realize she’s pointing to names carved into the bar in block letters. MASON the first one reads. MASON reads the second.

  “You were married to the same guy twice?”

  “Two different guys,” she says. “Same name.”

  “Uncommon name.”

  “Uncommon men.” She swivels around on the stool to search the photos on the wall, then points. “That’s Mason One,” she says, getting up to touch a photo showing the back of a man’s head. Black hair, slightly wavy. “And that’s Mason Two.” She moves to set her fingertips on another. This one smiles at the camera. Young, large eyes, dark skin, and wavy black hair, like the other Mason.

  The photos could be a front and back shot of the same person.

  Names. A person is bound tight by a name from the moment of birth. It breaks down the bones of a man’s being, forces him into its own form. Manners, sensibilities, even a person’s face is shaped by the sound of the name he’s given. They form the person. Ashleys are always Ashleys, while Andrews are Andrews.

  And Masons are Masons.

  I am my name.

  “Are you still married?” I ask.

  She sits back on the stool and tilts her head slightly, giving me a look.

  “I lost Mason One,” she says, making it sound like she gambled him away. “Lost him in the Persian Gulf. I used to say the Iraq War but it confused people. They’d ask, ‘The first or the last?’ And I’d have to explain it was the middle one. Operation Desert Fox. Nineteen ninety-eight,” she says. “Most don’t remember it even happening. The people who do usually try to correct me. ‘Just six days of bombing,’ they say.” She drinks. “It was an action, they say, not a war. They tell me I lost Mason One to an action.” She runs her hand over her forehead like she’s trying to rub away a memory. “I lost Mason Two, too.”

  I wait for more. There is no more. I sip my drink. “How?”

  “I’d like to say it was to another woman,” she says. “At least with another woman, I could have fought for him, made my case. But it wasn’t a woman. It was bear claws.” She pauses. “The pastries. Mason’s Hoosier bear claws! ‘Don’t let the breakfast growl getcha!’” A strange giggle bubbles up from her throat.

  I’ve had Mason’s Hoosier bear claws. A bibbed, smiling bruin is on the wrapper. We sold them in the gas station where I used to work a few years ago. They are good in a bad way. They make you feel sick but you can’t stop eating them. “That’s your Mason?”

  “That was my Mason,” she says, finishing her drink. “My Mason Two. The king of the bear claws. And for a while,” she says, “I was queen.”

  A silence settles. Then a jangle of keys sounds. The bartender heads down to our end and sets a new drink before her without a word—her third. She swizzles the fresh drink with her straw. “I’m being unfair. It wasn’t bear claws I lost him to,” she says. “It was Indiana that took him. And it was all my fault.” A sip of gin. “I talked him into moving there after we married so he could open up a pastry factory. Cheap land. Middle of America. Great for shipping.” She lifts her hand, lets it drop. “We had a nice house, nice friends. Really, we had a nice life. But after two years—” She breaks off, takes another swallow. “Have you ever been to Indiana?”

  “I’ve been.” It’s the one place I’ve been arrested.

  “Miserable place, right? It’s like being caught at the edge of a sneeze. A constant, awful feeling of wanting to do something you can’t seem to make yourself do,” she says, her brow wrinkling. “Indiana is waiting for something you know can’t happen.”

  “What did you expect to happen?”

  She lifts her hands, empty. “Life. Or something. Anything. Shit, I don’t know. I was just circling stuff I wanted in catalogues with no money in the bank. It was just a bunch of expecting, hoping, wishing. I honestly believed,” she says, “that just being with Mason Two would be enough. That was happiness. Having Mason Two would make everything all right. I’d change. I could make myself into something.”

  She leans to me. “Know what sucks?” She doesn’t wait for me to answer. “We are born complete. Can’t change. You realize that, don’t you? We’re stuck with who we are.”

  “People can change.” I’ve seen them change, right before my eyes. It isn’t pretty. “Situations shape a person.”

  “We can’t change,” she says again. “Situations only show different bits of a person. Like turning a statue around so the light hits it another way. The statue doesn’t change. Nothing changes. You’re just seeing it differently.” Her gaze flickers to the far end of the bar, her attention caught.

  I turn, expecting to see someone I don’t want to see. But there’s no one there. It’s just us.

  “You’ve never done anything of importance.” Her voice is like paper catching fire.

  “I’m twenty-two.”

  “And soon you’ll be thirty. And then forty. And then so on,” she says, then swiftly leans in to press her lips to mine. Her kiss tastes like quinine and cayenne pepper. It heats and sickens me.

  Breaking, she says, “I don’t want to be alone right now. I don’t think I can live with being alone right now.”

  I know this for what it is. A request. A proposition.

  “Okay,” I say, flagging the bartender to have him call a car. “Let’s go.”

  Chapter 9

  Sunday night at the homeless shelter. I’d been out all day, walking about Seattle. Pondering. Wishing. Wanting.

  Money and time are inversely related. Lots of one means very little of the other. The heavier a person’s pocket is with cash, the quicker the minutes pass. Days, weeks, even years are consumed by the act of spending or trying not to spend. Being broke liberates a person. Time halts in its tracks when there’s no money to do anything. The day, free, aches by slowly.

  That morning, as every morning, I showered, shaved, dressed as best as I could, and got as far from the shelter as possible. Save Ray-Ray, I didn’t socialize with any of the other men. I didn’t want to be recognized for what I was—homeless.

  I’ve read studies and reports that claim society ignores the homeless. They are invisible to most people. Irrelevant. A silent blight. But I felt anything but invisible. I felt like I was on fire in a pitch-dark theater, the crowd quietly watching as I ran through the aisles screaming. Nothing in my acti
ons, I felt, went unnoticed, no matter how innocuous.

  I skipped dinner, returning just before 7:00 p.m. Checking in, I was stopped by one of the men. “Bad news,” he said excitedly. A big fight. Ray-Ray had been jumped by Big Bass. “He killed him.”

  My heart seized. “Killed him?”

  He nodded. It had happened at dinner. Big Bass, a white, ex-Boeing worker, attacked Ray-Ray with a soup ladle. “He caught Ray-Ray pissing into his toothpaste tube. Gave him a customized ass-beating, Bruce Lee–style,” he said. “Bashed him on the head two, three times, then chopped him to the floor.” He made a chopping motion with his hand. “Whack, whack. Blood everywhere. The faggot has been crying like a pussy ever since.”

  I was confused. “Who’s crying—Big Bass?”

  “No, Ray-Ray.”

  “He’s not dead?”

  “Ray-Ray dead?” he said. “Why would you think he’s dead?”

  “You said Big Bass killed him.”

  “Yeah, well, he did kill him,” he said. “Just not, you know, kill him dead.”

  I found Ray-Ray sitting on his cot, reading a lesbian street-gang novel called Razor Clit. His left eye was the hue of an overripe banana.

  “Hey,” I said.

  He looked up, gave a slight nod.

  I sat across from him, motioned to his eye. “I heard about the fight.”

  He barked out an angry laugh, put the book down. “Fight is too grand a term for it. It was a tussle at best. The real fight is still to come.” He shifted over next to me and leaned in. “Everyone starts out in clover with me. It takes a lot to get on my bad side,” he said, conspiratorially, “but once you do, it’s a miserable ride. Big Bass is now on my bad side.”

  He rested his hand on my knee, his fingers caressing my leg.

  I stood.

  “Sit,” he said.

  I sat.

  Ray-Ray put his arm around me. “I know who I am. I can understand why someone might hate me. But there’s a freedom in being hated, in being despised,” he said. “There’s no burden of responsibility. I can act any way I want and the results are the same—hatred.” He gingerly touched his bruised eye, asked if there was anything he could do for me. “Anything at all.”

  Thanks, but no.

  I showered, went to bed.

  The next week seeped by, then the following. A month.

  Near dinnertime one Tuesday, I returned to find an ambulance idling out front of the shelter, its lights flashing. The men had gathered outside, watching as the medics carried someone out on a wheeled stretcher.

  Big Bass, his face Jackson Pollocked with blood. A brace clamped his neck and his body was held to the gurney with straps. “He’s fine but fucked up,” the EMT said. Someone said that a rat bit him, another that he’d fallen off the building’s roof. It looked more like he’d been hit by a truck full of pitbulls.

  I found Ray-Ray lounging in the TV room, reading an article in Cosmopolitan magazine. “How to Get Your Man—No Matter His Age.”

  I pulled up a chair next to him. His shirt and pants were wet, like he’d walked through an open fire hydrant. He didn’t look up, didn’t acknowledge me. We sat silent until I finally said, “You heard, right?”

  Ray-Ray turned the page slowly. “Heard?”

  “About Big Bass.”

  He nodded. “I actually saw the man naked on the shower floor.” He gave a slight shiver. “A pretty nasty sight.”

  “Were you the one to call the ambulance?”

  He shook his head. “Though you could say I brought it,” he said, his eyes on the magazine. “Big Bass. Such a fitting name. The fucker flopped about like a fish each time I punched him.”

  ◉ ◉ ◉

  There was Big Bass, Bed Bug Bill, Two-Tone Hank, Johnny B., Johnny R., Little Johnny, Johnny Socks, Rathead Ron, Five Bucks Frank, Deadfoot, Old Steve, Crazy Steve, Big Steve, Small Dick Steve, Terry the Plumber, Doctor P., Viet Tom, Tommy Deaf, David the Jew, Sal the Jew, Cigar Jude, Pat Pizza, Buckshot Bill, Dollar Bill, Broke Bill, Billy Bill, Tiny Boy Bill, Skid Row Randy, Red Eye Wally, Stink, Dan the Man, Tacoma Tim, Utah Earl, Sam Francisco, London Larry, Hoosier Harry, Jelly Ben, Ben the Boy, Ben Nasty, Boots, Socks, Toothless Chris, Jesus Chris, Chris Cross, Gramps, Big Mac, Scabby Doo, 401Karl, Toothless Teddy, Chomper, Dentures Donny, Donny Lemongrass, Donny Keys, Four Fingers Alan, Double L Allan, Alen with an E, Lawrence the Lifer, Bob Noxious, Horseface, Paki Paul, Mick Jagged, Heath Bar, Jailbait James, Jimmy Come Nightly, Jimmy Skis, Jimmy Goat, Johan Not John, and Ray-Ray, to name just a few.

  In the shelter, no one had a last name.

  Chapter 10

  “You need purpose.” Ray-Ray ran his fingers gently through my wet hair, caressing my scalp.

  Haircuts had become a regular ritual between us. Every few weeks, we’d spread out newspaper on the bathroom floor and drape a towel around my neck. I’d sit on a plastic stool while Ray-Ray hovered over me, snipping and trimming and combing my thick hair.

  “I have purpose,” I said.

  “And what is that?”

  “Get some money together. Get my own place,” I said. “Get out of here.”

  He paused his hands. “That’s action, reaction. Cause and effect,” he said. “You eat, you shit. You sleep, you wake. Purpose,” he said, “is knowing the why of what you’re doing.”

  I’d overheard a couple guys at dinner talking about Big Bass. He was in a coma. Or had moved to Arizona. They didn’t know. The truth probably was that he was sleeping on the streets, ashamed and too frightened to come back to the shelter.

  Ray-Ray had feigned ignorance of the whole thing, slipping out of suspicion like it was a soiled shirt.

  Tipping my head under his palm, I asked him what had sparked the fight in the first place.

  Ray-Ray studied the length of my sideburns, then snipped at them. “Things happened.”

  “I heard he caught you pissing in his toothpaste.”

  He set his hand on my shoulder and laughed. “Are you saying I somehow pissed into a tube of toothpaste? How is that possible?”

  I laughed, too.

  He smoothed a comb over my scalp, the teeth biting slightly. Bits of my hair peppered the floor. Ray-Ray raised his scissors and paused. “We’re not done talking about your why,” he said.

  That night, as I faded to sleep, Ray-Ray said something.

  “What?” I propped myself up, looked across the dappled darkness.

  “It was his toothbrush,” he said. “He caught me pissing on his toothbrush.”

  Chapter 11

  The winter days began late and collapsed early, the sun visiting briefly before shunting off. All I wanted to do was sleep.

  The shelter expected everyone to work and required a small monthly fee from each resident. I got an off-the-books job at a gas station. The pay was awful, but I was allowed any snack I wanted, within a limit. Slim Jims were my favorite.

  Winter crept into spring. My birthday came and went. I plotted out a simple goal: get out of the shelter and into my own place.

  I managed to build some savings from my meager pay, which was handed to me each Friday in the form of worn bills. My cash was always with me, even when I showered, kept neatly folded in a plastic sandwich bag. But it seemed something was always calling on me to tap it. The sole of my left boot tore through or my one pair of work pants were stolen. Fate pissed in the boat while I was trying to bail out the water. Still, nine months, I figured, of saving and scrimping, and I’d have enough money for my own apartment. Come Thanksgiving, I could move out.

  With spring coming on strong, the shelter population turned over. The men celebrated the nice weather by hitting the street, cleansing themselves of the months of Christian charity by rebaptizing in drink or drugs.

  “You should look to get out of here,” Ray-Ray said one morning. “You should be focu
sing on your future.”

  “I’m working on it.”

  He eyed me. “Not fast enough.”

  A hot skewer of anger and embarrassment drove up my spine. “Yeah? Well, I don’t see you fighting to get out,” I fired back. Failure glared at me no matter where I looked. Ray-Ray’s reminder didn’t help. “I don’t see you out there taking on the world. Why is that? Why don’t you get out of here?”

  Ray-Ray glanced at the walls. He didn’t speak for a moment. “I’m probably jinxing myself by saying so, but I’m inconspicuous here.”

  “That’s a good thing?”

  “It is when you don’t want to be recognized.”

  Ray-Ray was recognized the next week by a new man at the shelter. He was gangly, with a pockmarked face, and had been assigned a cot the row over. He couldn’t keep his eyes off Ray-Ray.

  “Not good,” Ray-Ray said, stealing glances at Pockmark. He was rattled.

  While ugly, Pockmark seemed normal to me, or normal enough. No one in the shelter was normal. That’s why we were all there. “Who is he?”

  “I don’t know,” Ray-Ray said. “But just look at that mouth. That’s a mouth I’d never kiss. It’s a mouth of a harbinger.” He took my hand in his as a woman would and looked me in the eye. “Promise me,” he said, holding my fingers tight, “that you’ll shower tonight.”

  I pulled my hand free. “I already showered today.”

  “Tonight,” he repeated, his gaze steady. “When you get back from work. Promise me you’ll shower.”

  “Okay.”

  “Say you promise.”

  “Okay, I promise.”

  “Good,” Ray-Ray said. Fear blanched his face. “Good,” he said again, sounding anything but good.

  When I got back that evening, smelling of oil and gas and Slim Jims, Ray-Ray was gone, his cot stripped of its bedding and his footlocker empty.