Chapter 20
The street was totally deserted and totally dark. In all his earlier visits, Zach had failed to notice the lack of streetlights, but now their absence was all too apparent and ominous as he turned off the paved road. He down-shifted into first gear—a creeper gear designed for fieldwork—and the truck moved forward at a crawl. Not only was the street dark but so were all the houses. This made sense for the numerous structures that were boarded up or vacant, but even the occupied ones were not marked by even a nightlight’s glow. He tried to remember which houses were occupied then realized he couldn’t. This late at night, they were all the same. To a carload of punks driving by with guns pointed or bricks to throw, they were all equal, all dead and deserted.
He slowly approached Mrs. Brackett’s house on one side, Snake’s on the other. Both were dark. He wished his headlights had a wider spread so he could better see around each house, but their glow only reached a little ways off the road and showed nothing along the houses’ sides or back yards. To get a fuller view, he’d have to angle the truck in the road and shine his lights directly at the house; and he chose not to disrupt the peace and quiet of the setting through such an aggressive action, an action that might prompt a call to the police or a volley of gunshots.
He reached the dead end of the road a quarter-mile farther on, littered with more trash than the county landfill and looking especially forsaken in the limited reach of the truck’s lights. He turned around, careful not to run over a discarded mattress, and headed back the way he’d come at the same creeping speed. As he came up on Mrs. Brackett’s house from the other side, the bedroom side, he was praying to see some glimmer of light through those gable-end windows. But there was nothing. He could barely make out the end of the house from the surrounding night. Then he recalled how Becca had said Jonah’s windows were all taped over with dark paper. There’s no way he’d know from outside if anyone were inside.
As he crept past the house, his first thought was to keep going, drive on home and wait for morning—it wasn’t but a few hours away—to try to sort this all out. But then he imagined Becca’s face after telling her he hadn’t found Jonah and didn’t even know if he were at Mrs. Brackett’s or not. He couldn’t bear that sadness, that confusion, that desperation. He directed the creeping truck to the side of the road just beyond the house, the spot where he and Becca always parked when visiting, though facing the opposite direction and in dark black as pitch now.
He switched off the engine and cut the lights. He closed his eyes to let his pupils adjust to the darkness behind the lids, hoping it might be just a little darker than the darkness outside the lids, that his eyesight so adjusted might extract more from his surroundings. And when he opened his eyes it did seem he could see better, perceive more out of the night—the edge of the road as it threaded off toward the main road, the silhouette of the abandoned house on the next lot ahead, a leaning mailbox on the far side of the gravel track.
He reached into the glove compartment for the flashlight that was always there—and discovered it missing. He immediately recalled last using it while clearing the clogged drain under Snake’s kitchen sink. It must still be in that cabinet, just yards from where he sat but useless to him now. He shook his head, more troubled by his negligence at forgetting to collect the flashlight than at its absence. All his life, through childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood, he’d prowled the night alone—spying on unsuspecting friends in the neighborhood, hunting foxes, roaming deserted Boston alleyways—and he’d never carried a flashlight, felt that such artificial light would be an affront to the enfolding night, and would only draw attention to his presence. So he didn’t have a flashlight now—that was small concern. He could see what he had to see. Mrs. Brackett could add artificial light or not, as she saw fit, once he knocked on her door.
He stepped out into the night and closed the door gently till he heard the latch click. He was surprised at how well he could see and wondered if some source of light had been added without his noticing—a cloud cleared from in front of the moon? a pre-dawn glow from the eastern sky? some back porch light he’d missed? He looked about but discovered no source for whatever light guided his way. He shrugged to himself but by now was completely comfortable in this night, felt an old kinship in this new setting. He turned and walked slowly but confidently toward Mrs. Brackett’s front porch, using silent “Indian steps”—his heel-to-toe footfalls making virtually no sound on the rough gravel.
He reached the porch steps and was just starting to consider whether it would be better to knock on the door or call out through the thin walls when the club hit him squarely on the left side of his face. He fell hard to the porch floor, in that initial instant as much shocked by this treachery out of the old familiar night as by the blow itself. Then the club glanced off his shoulder and hit the other side of his face as he tried to sit up. The back of his head cracked against the floor.
The porch light came on. In a split second’s clarity of sight and awareness that was really more a frozen snapshot of vision than any perceived sense of time-propelled motion, Zach saw an unfamiliar black man standing over him with a baseball bat, Latonya with a gleaming small knife in her hand just behind him, and a voice—the word was part of this snapshot, frozen in time, with shape and dimension—saying “No” firmly, absolutely.
He didn’t see the muzzle flash or hear the boom that followed. He’d fallen beyond the time-driven order of things.
Part III
Birthday Dinner Page 29