The Dark Country

by Dennis Etchison

  The drink was up. I started on it. The kitchen wouldn't be serving for another hour and the room was still empty, even here at the bar. There were a couple of too-young waitresses making like they were busy, wiping off the plastic menus and refilling the little bowls with sugar packets. I sat watching them in the light of the sunset, their figures silhouetted against the empty panes, but I knew all about the game and I didn't feel up to it. They looked like nervous laughs and weekends at Mammoth and a taste for cold duck, and when they joked at each other under their breaths the sound came to me above the piped-in music: telephone voices just out of the shower, brittle as window glass, unexpectedly cold, and transparent.

  There wasn't much left of the drink so I turned on the stool for one last view. I knew I couldn't see my place from here, buried past a stretch of big rich ones, but I tried just the same.

  "Which one?"

  The voice was so flat, so toneless, the thought occurred that it might have been my own. I drained the glass against my teeth and put it down. The bartender was twisting some bottles of Bud in shaved ice. He flicked his eyes in what I took to be the direction of the color TV, but it wasn't on. It never was. I leaned in, trying to see past the end of the bar.

  She was back there at the small table, the one you never notice against the wood. I wouldn't have spotted her at all except for her eyes, the way the whites reflected the dim light coming through the stained glass porthole on the side door.

  They were huge, very wide-set, as if drawn by a Forties comic strip artist; I couldn't place the style. They were not looking at me. I squinted anyway, trying to see into the shadows. But she was not looking at me.

  Something small and white lifted to her lips. No, I thought, or maybe I muttered it. Not this time, and I did not reach for the matches on the bar.

  Then she did something I wasn't ready for, something that had a little class, just a little, at least. She went ahead and lit the cigarette, without the look, the wait. And suddenly I felt bitter in the throat at myself as well as the game, at the whole thing, just the whole damn thing.

  "The lady," said the bartender. "I think she's talking to you."

  She still wasn't looking at me. "What did she say?" "Don't ask me, man," he said, and he winked. That settled it for me. No way. "No way," I said.

  He shrugged. I climbed off the stool. He was watching but I wasn't going to give him the next act. "Set up one more," I told him. "I'm going to the head."

  "Sure," he said. You know how he said it.

  I took a couple of steps. Then I remembered about the head. (A varnished plaque on the door: BUCKS.) It was back there, down a hall between the cigarette machine and the pay phone. The hall next to the small table.

  Well, the hell with her.

  I passed the table. I was about to turn into the hall, but I couldn't resist checking her out, just once. Call it a flaw in my character, an itch in the place you know you can't scratch but can't stop yourself from trying, every time.

  There was something I recognized. Maybe she reminded me of the types in the class Beverly Hills saloons with the Boston ferns hanging from the ceiling, the ones I've seen as I passed by outside the glass: twenty-nine going on forty, skin diet-taut, a streak bleached into the hair; a look that says that she's got a C-note folded in her bag and that she's waiting, just waiting. This one had the expression, I guess, but that was all. Her hair was black, no streak. Not shiny black, but dull, more like what's left in the grate a minute before the fire goes out. Drawn back along the sides of her head, but not tight, not a cheap

  face-lift, not like she cared. Her skin was white, but not kept from the sun like some courtesan; it was the kind of pale you get when you don't care enough to go outside.

  And there were the eyes. They set me on edge. They were too extreme, like something you learn never to expect in this life: gilt on the lily, egg in the beer, too much, much too much for the way they tell you things are supposed to be.

  "Which one," she said, again. She said it that way, not a question, not anything.

  "Don't worry. You couldn't see my house if you tried." Don't worry. You couldn't see my house if you tried. I said it, I thought it, I don't know which.

  "Will you help me?"

  She did not bother to raise her head.

  "Which one? Which one of those people?" she continued.

  Now I knew we weren't on the same wavelength. I had no idea what she was talking about.

  Her eyes were fixed somewhere close to the line of houses. The pier, I gathered. A few tourists were out on the boards, strolling up and back, back and up. They reminded me of shooting gallery targets, rolling along on tracks and wobbling a little in the breeze. Except that I could hear footsteps, even here.

  "What about them?" I asked.

  "They remind me of mannequins." She stubbed out her cigarette, almost new. "Do mannequins have wheels, do you know?"

  I was standing there looking down at her, studying her face. It was an exaggerated triangle, inverted—like the Sub-Mariner, I think, if you remember. Then again, maybe it was only the perspective. "That's a funny thing to say," I said.

  "Which one would you kill," she said. Another nonques-tion. "Say you could name your price. Any one you choose."

  I thought about it, I don't know why. She was making some kind of point, I guess. I wanted to hear what it was. "You talk like they're not even human," I said.

  She raised her face a few degrees. Her chin was really tiny, almost lost below her enormous lower lip, which was puffed out in a perpetual pout. More than anything else, I saw her wide, pallid forehead. She had not arranged her hair to hide it.

  "And we are?" she said. "Is that what you mean?"

  I leaned on the rail and watched the water bringing sand up to the shoreline. Bringing it up or taking it away. "Say you had to choose."

  I pivoted, startled but not surprised. She had come up like a ghost, one of those with sheet trailing and no feet below to sound the boards. I turned back to the rail. The gulls were swooping on the pearled waters, trying to pick up fish that had come too close to shore, into the tide pools between the green rocks where they didn't belong.

  I heard her release a long, shuddering breath. With effort, her voice low, she said, "If you won't say it, I'll say it for you. You can't choose because it wouldn't make any difference. You can't tell them apart."

  I shut my eyes and held them shut for a while before I opened them. Shadows on the sand. People on the beach. Figures chasing a ball, picking driftwood, unleashing dogs, rolling trouser legs, walking hand in hand. I couldn't see their faces from here. Each time my eyes opened the configuration was different, the figures shuffled, interchanged.

  But I was letting myself go. It was easy. Too easy.

  I pressed my eyelids shut again, so tight I saw dull light.

  Thinking: well all right, why not, maybe this one is different, I pulled myself up. Finding the strength, blinking, I faced her with eyes open. I reached down, steeling myself and relaxing, setting and going with it. Hands on the rail behind, the nails whitened moons, they must have been, I heard myself saying, "What is it you really want?"

  I left the lights off.

  She wanted me, but not desperately. She gave, but not to lose herself. She took from me—received and did not grasp. The moment did seem to be out of time, but passed to the next moment as easily as the passing of a breath. I began to think of her as beautiful. She might have been anyone. She was familiar somehow; I had never known her like. I passed from her back into myself as easily as a breath is taken and released. I was aware of the wind outside, the lights in the windows of other houses going on and off along the point, the white sound of the waves, the passing and repassing of slapping feet on the

  beach, drunken laughter beyond the deck. The absence of laughter. The easy silence, and the night.

  "Who's out there?"

  "What? Nobody, probably. It's late."

  "I don't mean the beach. I thought I heard someone walk
ing. Outside, there."

  She meant the front of the house. ' "There's nothing out there but the highway. Not even a sidewalk. You know that."

  I watched her in the moonlight from the window.

  "All right, what is it?"

  She shifted to her side, her hair lifting away from the pillow in long black tendrils. "Sometimes there's a man, walking." I reached for my shirt. "Smoke?" "Mm."

  But before I could get to my cigarettes, she had one in her mouth. I don't know where she got it. I gave her a light. I saw the twisted end, the way it caught and burned unevenly.

  She filled her lungs without blinking and held out the joint.

  I hesitated, but only for a second. The last couple of times it had made me remember too much, had made the ache come again. I took it. It tasted like sweet garbage, but it went down easy.

  She lay back. Her eyes were staring. I seemed to be seeing her from above: the dark hollows over her collarbone, her breasts, the way they did not flatten when she lay on her back, the way her breath moved below her ribs, the tangle between her thighs, glistening under me. . . .

  "How do you know no one is there?" she said.

  "Because—" I flopped onto my back, took another lungful, executed a quick sit-up. I crossed the living room, drew open the top half of the door to the sun deck and leaned out. The tide was low, a good fifty feet from the supports, and nothing was moving but a line of sandpipers between the naked rocks. "Because there's nobody. On the beach or anywhere else around here." With irritation. "What's the—" matter with you, I started to say.

  "How do you know?" she repeated.

  My mouth opened. It stayed open, my jaw scissoring as I came back to the big pillows. I squatted next to her on the rug, almost over her. "I need some more of that, I guess," I said,

  reaching for the joint,' 'before I can pick up what you're trying to say."

  She punched up the pillow.

  "We were talking about something, back on the pier," she said. "Remember?"

  Though she would not meet my eyes, I stared at her. I thought her mouth began to move, but it was only her chin, receding further.

  Get it out, I thought. The rest of it, so that I can know what to think of you, before I let myself think any more of you than I do. "Come on." Or do you want to go back into hiding in that bar, I thought, do you really? Is that all you want? "Damn it," I said, "you're—" spooking me, I thought. Really.

  "I'm what?" She rose up on the pillow.

  "Nothing."

  "That's what I thought," she said, slumping. "Oh God."

  "All right," she said. "Only first you have to tell me something."

  Let this be good, I thought, and let it be quick. "Just this," she said. "When was the first time you heard the voice?"

  I didn't say anything.

  "For me," she said, her tone unchanged, 'it was only after I started having the dreams. They got so bad that for a while I was afraid to go to sleep. But then, the first time I heard it, I was finally able to give up the ghost. Just like that. I woke up laughing, and I knew the world was mine."

  I got up. I sat down. Then I got up again and went around the bookcase to the kitchen. The water felt good on my face. I tried to make it last.

  "Well?" she asked. "Will you do it?"

  I lit a cigarette. It was getting cold. I wanted to close a window, but none was open.

  "You know you've thought about it. Admit it. It could happen anywhere. In the middle of the night, in a place you've never been before, a place where no one knows you. Glendale, Upland, Paso Robles, it doesn't matter. Anywhere at all."

  Her voice rose half an octave, like a violin string tightening, winding up. She took a deep breath.

  "You're driving down an empty street at three o'clock in the

  morning, say. All the TV sets are off. The police cars are parked at the House of Pies. You don't know where you're going. You turn corners. Then you see someone, sooner or later you always do. He could be anyone. He's walking alone, hurrying home under the trees, the leaves are cracking under his feet like bones. You cut the lights and as you pass you feel the gun in your hand and your finger on the trigger and—and it doesn't matter.

  "Or maybe you wait until he crosses the street. You dare yourself not to hit the brakes, and—and all there is is a sound. And he's gone. He never was. And it doesn't matter."

  Her voice was rhythmic, incantatory.

  1 let her go on.

  "Or in an all-night laundromat. And the knife is there in your pocket, the way you knew it would be when you needed it. Or you feel your hands on a throat in the back row of a movie theater. Or standing on a cliff over the rocks. And your hands want to push. Or under a pier with only the waves, and you see him and suddenly you feel the rock in your hand. And it doesn't matter. Somewhere, anywhere, even right here, why not? It doesn't matter. In the middle of the night with no one to see. ..."

  I locked my knees. I dug my heels into the jute carpeting and set my back against the wall.

  "So why don't you?" I couldn't think of anything else to say.

  "Why don't you?" she said quickly.

  The cigarette tip made a track in the air. I watched it.

  "Because you've never understood the feeling," she continued, "until now. It's never been verified. You might be crazy. It's easy to think that. One alone is weak. But two is a point of view."

  Her words began to lose all meaning. They might have been sounds made by a pointed stick on a fence at midnight. "So name your price," she said. "Why?"

  "Oh, the money will make it easier the first time. It gives you a reason you can live with. That's only practical." Practical.

  "Five thousand," she said. "Why?"

  "Ten. Oh, I have it, don't worry." "But why me?"

  "Your eyes," she said. "The way you kept looking around every time somebody walked by on the pier. As if you almost expected to see yourself."

  I just looked at her. I don't know if she could see me.

  "Twenty-five thousand dollars," she said. "I can get it. Everyone has his price. Doesn't he."

  I tried to walk. The room moved before me. I saw her as if from a great distance, from the ceiling? The top of the head, the part in the hair like a white scar, the high cheekbones, the bony shoulders, the hands holding the knees, the knees like second breasts, the knuckles like worn-down teeth. I moved past her. Outside, a full moon hung over the water.

  "Listen," I heard her say, "you won't even have to choose. That's the hard part, isn't it? Well, I've already found one for you. There's one I always see, a man with his dog, back there between the rocks. You'll know him—the dog's crippled. Always the same time, every night. And he's old. It will be so easy. No one will see. Use anything you want."

  For a time, I don't know how long, I balanced there. The white sound was blowing in from the ocean.

  "You see?" she was saying. "I need someone. I need to know, to be free and know that I'm free. You will be free, too. We will be the fortunate ones, because we'll know no remorse."

  I faced her.

  "The voice," she said, "remember the voice." She reached to touch me. "Everybody has a price," she said. I had not realized until that moment how unfeeling she was. Her touch was almost cruel; her words were almost kind. "That may be true enough," I said slowly. "How much is it worth, then?" "Nothing." Then I just waited. "And we are?" she said.

  I took a long time trying to think of a way to answer her.

  Now the circling gulls were gone; only a single kingfisher remained to patrol the waters.

  I walked, touching each post on the pier.

  At first the sound was so familiar I didn't notice it.

  The sound of footsteps.

  Without looking up, I stopped by the rail.

  The footsteps stopped.

  Below the pier, the skin of the sand had been polished to an unearthly sheen. I stood there, looking down. "You got a light, by any chance?" said a voice. It was a man I had seen walking the boards earlier. I t
old him I didn't.

  "Don't ever depend on these throwaway lighters," he said, clicking the wheel uselessly against the flint. "Once they're empty, they're not worth a dime."

  He pitched it underhand into the water. It fell end-over-end, disappearing from sight.

  "The bar has matches," I said.

  He made no move to leave. Instead he leaned his back against the rail. I shifted and glanced around.

  Back at the bar, on the other side of the glass, bodies were moving, rearranging. I couldn't help but notice. The filtered moonlight caught one face out of all the others, at the small table by the hall to the cigarette machine and the pay phone.

  I must have stared for a long time. Then I got it, finally.

  Kirby.

  I said it, I thought it, I don't know which. "Who?"

  "Kirby," I said, snapping my fingers again. He was old enough to remember, so I went on. "A comic book artist, back in the Forties. See that girl in there, the one with the face like a broken moon? She looks like she was drawn by Jack Kirby." A portrait of Poe's sister, in fact, but I didn't say that.

  There was no reason he should have answered. He probably thought I was crazy.

  I turned oceanward again.

  The moonlight had broken up on the surface of the water now, like so much shattered mercury. I watched the edges of the tide foaming around the pilings, bringing a wet, white reflection to the hidden rocks.

  His elbow was almost touching mine. He was already off-balance. It wouldn't have taken much to send him backwards over the edge.

  I said to the man, "How would you like to set someone free for me." It was somewhere between a statement and a question. "Lean on, snuff. For money, of course. It'll have to be on the installment plan. But for her, I'll come up with a hell of a down payment."

  I felt a laugh starting, deep down.

  "Come on, come on," I said, "what's your price, man? Everybody has his price, doesn't he?"

  "Yeah," he said right off. He had been following it. "Only sometimes," he said, playing it out, "it may not be worth paying."