Where Night Stops

by Douglas Light

  Resting on my cot was a bar of Dove soap. My bar. The one that had been stolen my first night at the shelter months earlier.

  I grabbed a towel.

  The soap bar came apart in the shower. It’d been sliced lengthwise, sandwiched back together. Between the halves was a narrow strip of paper with three lines written in pencil.

  Line one: YMCA.

  I ended my shower. As I toweled dry, the mildewy white plastic shower curtain was yanked back and I stood face-to-face with Pockmark. His skin was a warzone: pitted, torn, and scarred. Our eyes locked. A rumbling sounded from deep in his chest. “You done?” he asked.

  I nodded, grabbed my things, and left.

  Chapter 12

  He flagged down the cocktail waitress. “This isn’t my lipstick,” he said, holding up his scotch glass. A red lower-lip print kissed the rim of the glass.

  “That...” Her face wrinkled with worry. Flirting was in her skill set. Processing a situation—not so much. “I’m sorry for that,” she said. He’d already drank most of the scotch, which was forty-three dollars a shot. “If you’d like—”

  “Yes, I would,” he said. “And don’t just pour the drink into clean glass. Get me a fresh scotch.” Gratis was stated by the firmness of his tone.

  Glass in hand, the waitress made her way back to the bar like a tightrope walker with a head cold.

  He glanced around the place. A handful of people. Candles on the tables, a sound of hushed conversations, a spark of laughter. No one looked at him twice. That’s what he liked about hotel lounges. They weren’t destinations but pauses on the path from Point A to Point B. No one would remember him, save the waitress, and even that was doubtful.

  He touched the knot of his tie and turned his attention to back out the window to the building across the street. How did ties ever become a thing? he thought. Probably something to do with protecting your neck, not exposing your jugular to the enemy. And a business suit is a form of armor. Handshakes, he knew, evolved from the act of foes proving to each other they weren’t holding weapons. I come in peace, an extended, open palm said.

  Battles and fighting in high-polished shoes. That’s the definition of business: war without blood.

  Well, the man thought. Mostly without blood.

  He keyed out a text on his phone, signed off with name. His nickname. What everyone called him.

  He deleted it, signed off with his surname: HIGGLES.

  Business. Formal. Professional. No bullshit. That’s what this is. Work. Respect was required.

  The waitress set a fresh drink down and tried to salvage her chance for a big tip by lightly touching his shoulder. “Again,” she said, “I’m sorry for the dirty glass.”

  But the man didn’t hear her.

  His focus was out the window.

  On the young man.

  Entering the YMCA.

  The man downed the scotch.

  He hit send on his phone.

  He stood up. “Charge the drink to room three twenty,” he said to the waitress. “Add a twenty dollar tip.”

  The man wasn’t staying at the hotel.

  Chapter 13

  At the YMCA, I asked for a day pass. The desk clerk tried hard to upsell me into a full membership. “You should really think of your health,” he said.

  “I constantly do,” I told him.

  Line two: Locker 129.

  Dank and foul, the basement locker room was a moldy hole of wet towels and slick tile.

  Line three: 33-24-11.

  I spun the tumbler right, left, right, popped the lock, and pulled open the door.

  It’s only much later, long after the event has passed, that we realize the gravity of certain moments, the weight that one choice places on our lives. It etches its mark deep in the tablet of our days. We endure the trauma of our decisions. We gain knowledge. We grow sure that we could wisely navigate such an experience should it ever arise again.

  But it never does. Situations never repeat themselves in the exact same way.

  In hindsight, I shouldn’t have taken the fanny pack full of money that was in the locker. I shouldn’t have powered up the cell phone that was with it.

  Chapter 14

  My father loved vodka. He amped-up every drink with it: orange juice, coffee, Gatorade, even beer.

  His problem wasn’t alcohol, which he held astonishingly well, never showing the slightest tipsiness. My father’s problem was sobriety. It made him hard, complicated, and contradictory.

  He couldn’t handle a clear head. Life was too distressing for him. The world’s edges were too sharp, the situations too vivid, and people too real. He couldn’t hold on, so he comforted himself with drink, from morning to bedtime. It fastened him down, smoothed the corners, rounded off the roughness of the day.

  Drinking made him a better person.

  It made him a better driver, too.

  ◉ ◉ ◉

  It sounds like fortune cookie bullshit, but it’s true. With choice comes morality.

  Chapter 15

  Haven, Florida

  Outside, the livery cab honks.

  I pay up, tipping the bartender generously, then lead the woman out. Her skin is cool in my hand.

  Stepping from the comfort of Charm’s, I’m staggered by the Florida light, the sun making my head piston violently. Even in February, it’s strong.

  The woman laughs, lifting her hand to shade her eyes. “My mother used to hate going out in the daytime. Said it made her look her age.”

  She slides into the car first, her pale legs flashing sharply from inside her skirt. I follow closely.

  My battered, white Schwinn cruiser stands chained to the signpost. I should have the driver toss it in the trunk, then tell him to drive us to a motel. Instead, I ditch the bike and I hear myself break my own rule.

  I give the driver my address.

  In all the years of Kam Manning, I’ve never revealed where I live. In all the cities I’ve been, I’ve never taken anyone home.

  The lemon and cinnamon scent of her skin reminds me of Sunday breakfasts with my family, of lazy summer days filled with heat and sweat. It makes me think of the first girl I kissed.

  The woman takes my hand and laces her fingers with mine. She’s strong.

  The car flows smoothly through the thin morning traffic. Rush hour lasts ten minutes here, from five to nine to five after nine. She says, “I dreamt about bananas last night.”

  I laugh.

  “I wish it was funny.” Her face is somber. “I found it terrifying.”

  “Why?”

  She leans on me, laying her head to my shoulder. “I don’t know why,” she says, turning her face up to me. “It just was.” She takes my mouth with hers.

  A taste of juniper and lost opportunity floods my system, sparking a crippling erection.

  We kiss for a minute, for an hour, for a lifetime. The car grazes along, pausing at red lights and accelerating through greens.

  Breaking the kiss, she says, “I’m sorry for this. For what’s happened, for what now has to happen.”

  “What has to happen?”

  Her lipstick is smeared, a slash of kidney red. She turns and stares out the window at the buildings clicking past. “The people who read about us—”

  “Read about us?” Now she’s frightening me. “What are you talking about?”

  “In our story, if it ever gets written.” She taps the window with her fingertip. “Of course, no one would believe it because it’s all true. People don’t like the truth. At least not normal people’s truth.”

  “You’re normal?” I say, wishing I could retract the words the moment they’re out of my mouth.

  “Just as normal as you,” she says. “That’s why our story won’t fly. It makes too much sense. People reject what they can relate to.”<
br />
  “People can relate to drinking at the crack of dawn?”

  “There’s nothing odd about that. Anyone can do it. What people want are stories about things that they long to do, things that they could never bring themselves to do. Take my Mason One. He wanted to be an oceanographer but was scared of water,” she says, the words bubbling out of her. “Terrified of all the things below the surface he couldn’t see, all the things hidden under there. That’s what scared him most. But he always confronts his fears, so guess what he did?”

  “Became an oceanographer.”

  She shakes her head. “Wasn’t smart enough,” she says. “No, he got a job on a fishing trawler for a season, confronted his fears that way. Joined the army out of fear, too. Fighting, shooting, killing, Mason feared it more than he feared water.”

  I say nothing, thinking of my situation. Of Ray-Ray, of Higgles, of how afraid I am of them both. By day’s end, this whole life will be over.

  Blocks from my place, the car slows to a stop at a red light. The old highway tears before us, trucks rumbling past at top speed.

  The woman holds my hand. Charm’s is already forgotten. I ask her name again.

  She says, “How many girlfriends have you had?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Of course not, but I still want to know.”

  I think. “How do you define girlfriend?”

  “Anyone you’ve slept with.”

  I mentally count. “Three.” It’s the right answer for the moment.

  “Is that three to the third or fourth power?”

  I laugh.

  Out the left side window, there’s a large, sun-bleached poster in a storefront, the corners curling. It’s red, white, and blue, with cartoons of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln advertising a Presidents’ Day special: buy one box of Mason’s Hoosier bear claws, get one free. With coupon.

  Presidents’ Day was yesterday. Banks and government agencies were closed. I pushed both Higgles and Ray-Ray off with that excuse. I didn’t have what they wanted; it was in a safe-deposit box. They’re both expecting I’ll have it today.

  I don’t have it.

  I’ve never had it. Don’t even know exactly what “it” is.

  The light turns. The car accelerates. She takes her hand from mine, her eyes mournful. “Often, I do things not because I want to do them, but because I know that if I don’t do them I’ll hurt someone else.” She stares out the front window. “Does that make any sense?”

  I think of my parents enduring each other for all those years for my sake. I say, “It does.”

  She touches my face gently. “I feared that,” she says, then swings open the car door while we’re still in motion. She bolts like a cat sprung from a box, gracelessly stumbling out. But she doesn’t fall.

  The driver slams on the brakes, halting the car. I step out, call after her. “Hey!” But she’s gone, already down the street, heading back the way we came, back toward Charm’s. Back toward where we began.

  Chapter 16

  My mother was a handsome woman, much to her disappointment. She’d rather have been plain, even homely. Handsomeness, she said, was for deer hunters and heads of state, not for women. Handsome women were burdened with responsibilities they never asked for. They were relied on even if they were unreliable, and leaned on in times of trouble.

  My father, on the other hand, was anything but handsome. The strange geometry of his face should have repelled people, but instead it drew them in. He had an inexplicable allure, a tempting animal charge that canceled hesitancy. Babies regularly waddled up to him, their arms outspread. Women turned flustered and flirtatious when he entered a room. Men longed to be his friend.

  Together they were an arresting pair, a study in contrasts, on the surface and beneath. My mother had to have everything planned. My father left most everything up to fate. My mother was a morning person, my father a night owl. They couldn’t agree on anything. Even their shared memories didn’t match, fractured along some invisible fault line like separate histories of the same thing. Their stories became stories of stories, muffled echoes of the incident, distorted by time. Their tales shifted and changed with each telling, moving further and further from what really happened. In the end, I’m not even sure there was much truth left in either story.

  They couldn’t even agree on when they first met. Each version had the smooth, well-handled edges of the believable, though neither, I’m positive, was true. They’d made their own vivid fairy tales and presented them as fact so often that they came to believe their own lies. My mother claimed they first met in the fall, at a friend’s barbecue. “Your father spilled a drink on my dress,” she said.

  “It was the only way she’d take notice,” he replied, but then said that they’d met before that, over the summer. “Bowling,” he said. “You and that one guy you dated, the one with the weird ears—”

  “Richard Southwright. And I never dated him.” Her voice was even, hiding her agitation.

  “Right, him. Your boyfriend with goofy ears. You and him were bowling partners against me and another girl. We beat you, as I recall.”

  “Which girl?”

  My father lifted his chin, shrugged a half shrug. “Just some girl,” he said, topping off his drink.

  My mother said no. Impossible.

  “Why’s it impossible?”

  “For three reasons,” my mother said. “First off, I’d remember.”

  “Apparently not.”

  “Secondly,” she said, “Richard—who was never my boyfriend, mind you—got killed the spring before you and I met. Dead men can’t bowl.”

  “He was killed the spring after we met,” my father said.

  My mother thought on this. “Well, even if that’s true,” she said, “the third reason makes it impossible.”

  “Which is?”

  “I’ve never bowled in my life.”

  ◉ ◉ ◉

  My parents’ death was my fault.

  Chapter 17

  Seattle, Washington

  With Ray-Ray’s cash, I checked in to Water’s Edge Motel on Alaskan Way, threw down a fistful of dollars for a room. The thought of going back to the shelter to claim my few ratty things turned my tongue thick with worry. Pockmark was there, waiting.

  Inside, I turned on the light, dead-bolted then chained the room’s door. The space smelled of air long trapped, of failed liaisons. It smelled like nothing good had happened there in months. A trail from the bathroom to the bed was worn in the room’s carpet. The bed was troughed in the middle. I stripped, took a long, hot bath, and scrubbed myself with the plastic-scented motel soap. Lying in the tub with no worry of others barging in, I listened to the calming drip of the faucet. There is a luxury to quiet, to being alone, something I’d forgotten since leaving Iowa.

  Wrapped in a tiny, rough towel, I counted the money. Two hundred dollars, a little more. Mostly soiled twenties and tens with a few ones. No fives.

  I powered up the cell phone. The screen lit.

  There was a chime.

  One text.

  Instructions. A simple task with a nice payout. The last line read, Are we clover?

  The contact’s name: HIGGLES.

  I turned the cell phone off, clicked on the ancient TV. The image buzzed to life. Flipping through the channels, I searched for anything other than reruns or news. The phone stayed off. Finally, after ten minutes of finding nothing on TV, I went down the street for food and a six-pack of beer. Walking the empty night street, my kidneys rattled with anxiety. The quiet, the being alone, ate at me.

  I got a couple slices of pizza, some beer, and hurried back to the seeming safety of my room. I powered the phone back up, read the text again. The errand seemed stupidly easy. It seemed safe. Which meant it was neither simple nor safe.

  Higgles—whoever he wa
s—instructed me to go to the Number Won Sun Chinese restaurant in the International District, where I was to ask for Kam Man, and tell him I wanted a large order of chicken feet. And a Diet Apple Slice.

  Kam Man then would hand over some documents with instructions on what to do with them.

  For my efforts, I’d make $300 cash.

  Simple.

  I slept soundly that night, no loud snores from others shaking me awake.

  In the morning, I strapped on the fanny pack and checked out.

  Heading south, toward the International District, I stopped at a trash can, took the phone out. I had a couple hundred dollars, no real obligations. I saw it as seed money Ray-Ray had supplied me to launch my career. A career in what, I didn’t know. I didn’t have a clue who this Higgles was, or what Ray-Ray was tangled up in. I could take the money and buy a bus ticket to somewhere, anywhere, and try to start fresh. Or I could tie on a really good drunk, sober up in a handful of days no better off than I was.

  One thing my father loved to say was that small actions can vastly change your life. He had plenty of personal examples. Tons of “if onlys.” If only he’d had a firmer handshake when he interviewed for the manager’s position. If only he’d loaned Sam Milestone, now Windstop, Iowa’s richest resident, the five hundred bucks he needed to launch his landscaping business. He believed that taking a right turn instead of a left alters your life’s trajectory. At first, it may be unnoticeable. But, over time, the distance between where you were headed and where you ended up becomes substantial.

  I turned on the phone and reread the text.

  Stay clear, I thought. Keep the cash, toss the phone. Keep clean. Don’t get caught up with this Higgles character and whatever Ray-Ray was messing with, whatever it was that had made him run.

  We’re clover, I thumbed, then hit send.

  Chapter 18