How to Find Your Way in the Dark

by Derek B. Miller

LENNY BERNSTEIN HAD IT ALL figured out. Like everyone else who had it all figured out, he announced it with the customary phrase: “Look. All we gotta do . . .”

  Lenny’s hands were back behind his head, his feet were stretched out in the grass in front of his house, and he was looking at a cloud that—given another moment—was promising to look like a burlesque dancer’s ass. He was prepared to wait it out.

  It was summer. Sheldon was sitting beside Lenny and using a long piece of dried grass to nudge a tiny stick in front of some marching ants. They were moving house from one hole in the ground to another (who makes these decisions and on what basis Sheldon had no idea) and Sheldon decided that adversity would breed character in the ants so annoying them was actually a way to help.

  One ant—hereby christened Jeff—had stopped to consider his options. It was now a competition to see whether Jeff or Lenny was going to be more interesting.

  Lenny continued: “. . . is get ourselves out to the Catskills to one of those fancy hotels where all the acts go in the summer. And get in on it.”

  “Get in on what?”

  “The act!”

  “The act.”

  “I said that. Twice. Aren’t you paying attention?”

  “To what?”

  It was the summer of 1941 and Sheldon was almost fifteen and Lenny already sixteen. The war in Europe had been raging for close to two years and America was not involved. The Bernsteins had invited Sheldon to spend the summer with them in Massachusetts and Nate—having nothing for Sheldon to do—had agreed and put him on a bus. Mirabelle had turned nineteen, was a high school graduate with a job at Underwood, and was dating an Italian who was threatening to propose to her. Sheldon couldn’t watch anymore. Getting away seemed like a good idea. Now he was flanked by the likes of Lenny and Jeff.

  “To my plan to break into show business and take over the world!”

  “The whole world’s at war,” said Sheldon, watching Jeff navigate the stick while gripping a leaf he insisted on carrying. “Everyone’s trying to take it over. We’re gonna have some stiff competition.”

  “All right, fine, just America then. We’re not at war. I’m telling you, Sheldon”—Lenny breathed out a sigh of gratitude to God as a perfect ass formed in the sky above him—“that if we get ourselves out there we can get jobs as busboys or bellhops or whatever, and then, you know, one night we do our act. I’ve heard stories about this happening.”

  “You’ve heard stories.”

  “On the radio. In the papers. Hoboes. Vagabonds. Gypsies. You know. The ways stories get around.”

  “I really don’t,” said Sheldon. Jeff had achieved victory. He had gone around the stick. All the other ants followed Jeff. Sheldon lost interest and turned to Lenny. “You’re not a comedian.”

  “Miss Simmons says I am.”

  “No,” said Sheldon, putting up a finger. “What she often said was ‘What are you, a comedian?’ That didn’t make you a comedian. That made you a pain in the ass.”

  “It’s a hop, skip, and a jump from one to the other. Most professional comedians started off as amateur pains in the asses.”

  “Your parents are gonna let us go?” Sheldon asked.

  “My dad says he has a friend in Springfield named Jackie Lowenthal. Mr. Lowenthal’s got a bad heart because he’s been running this bakery for like twenty years and he’s been eating half the inventory. He goes to this guy called Dr. Green, who my dad met at a bat mitzvah for Selma Berkowitz. You remember her? The ginger with the freckles who used to keep putting her ponytail under her nose so it looked like a mustache?”

  “No.”

  “She lived in Northampton? We met her at temple when we were about eight?”

  “Is there an end to this story? Or even a beginning?”

  “Dr. Green’s at Grossinger’s in the Catskills. It’s the King Kong of hotels, and there are . . . I don’t even know . . . hundreds of hotels. So, if things don’t work out there, we can walk down the street and we’ll bump into another place. Also, if I come up with ten minutes’ worth of jokes, I can do the same schtick ten times a day running from hotel to hotel.”

  “Or you could join a track team.”

  “I’m thinking you could be a lifeguard at one of the pools.”

  “Lenny, I can barely swim.”

  “When was the last time you saw a lifeguard swim?”

  “That’s a good point,” said Sheldon. “But in a pinch . . .”

  “How about tomorrow?”

  Sheldon and Lenny didn’t have the same feelings about being in Whately. For Sheldon, this was a visit home. Walking the long quiet streets gave him a sense of tranquility he hadn’t felt since his parents left him unwillingly. He still liked it here. Home had failed him, but it remained home.

  For Lenny, this was a place to wave at in a rearview mirror through a cloud of dust on his way toward a better and brighter future.

  “I like it here,” Sheldon confessed. “I like being back. Hartford’s been . . . hectic.”

  “We’ll be back after we’re gone. It’s not like anything’s gonna change here.”

  “That’s why I like it.”

  “Your life has been an adventure so far, Sheldon. Your letters are better than comic books. Batman’s life is boring compared to yours. Mine’s not like that. All I’ve had is your letters and I had to burn those. Dr. Green said we can call on him if we’re in any trouble. I don’t see us calling on the guy, but it satisfies my parents. We’re going. Now you know. It’s been nice talking to you.”

  The prospect of getting a bus tomorrow to go from Whately to Springfield to Albany to somewhere near Liberty, New York—with Lenny talking a mile a minute all the way—gave Sheldon a sense of what his mother used to mean when she used the word “weary.”

  “You really think,” Sheldon said, “that we’re going to get to the Catskills, find jobs, and before we know it, you’re a world-class comedian?”

  “You know how they say, ‘It’s better than sliced bread’ when they mean something’s better than the best thing ever?” asked Lenny.

  “Yeah.”

  “I read that it took the Wonder Bread company years to convince people to buy sliced bread.”

  “How does that help your case?”

  “I think,” said Lenny, “that things aren’t inevitable. I think you make them inevitable and then they only look inevitable on the back end. If it’s true for Wonder Bread, it’s got to be true across the board, right? I think the first step to success is for you to stop giving me lip and then getting on the damn bus.”

  * * *

  The morning of their departure, Lenny was a font of optimism that would have been infectious had Sheldon not been inoculated against the emotion. His eyes still closed, a touch of drool on the left corner of his mouth, Sheldon tried to shut out the happy noises as Lenny bounced around their bedroom like a soldier about to get laid.

  “You were right yesterday,” Lenny said. “I’m going to need an act. The question is whose. Because knowing what to steal from is a real skill. But at some point, I’m going to have to think of something funny. You don’t happen to know anything, do you?”

  “Nothing comes to mind.”

  “It doesn’t matter. We got time on the bus.”

  “The bus,” Sheldon repeated, as if it were the name of his new cellblock.

  “My mom’s making us pancakes before we go. We got some of that grade B maple syrup—you remember, right? Darker, thicker, puts hair on your chest? I think I can smell the butter now. Are you packed yet? They got a lot of sports there. You heard about that? You ever golf ? Powerful men all golf. I can’t figure out why. They walk around in Scottish clothes in the hot sun sweating for three hours. It doesn’t make sense. When we get there, do you want to try it?”

  “No.”

  “I like the idea of it. The gentiles won’t let us golf, so now we’ve got our own golf courses. How about them apples, huh?”

  * * *

  They packed
and showered, dressed and ate. Outside, the day was hot and still. The sun beat down on them with a permanence that stopped time. The cicadas were back this year and starting their racket in the sun. Nothing beyond Lenny’s front yard suggested that anything was in motion anyplace else or that escape was even possible. Everything driving them forward came from inside Lenny.

  The townsfolk knew Sheldon was back because he’d been to visit other old school friends, had lunches and dinners at classmates’ homes, and with his fortune from the pawn shop—Abe had left him money from his own take, and Mirabelle had too, on account of his own poor showing—he treated everyone to ice cream and became the pied piper of Whately, if only for a week.

  Though he’d been there long enough to catch everyone’s attention, it wasn’t until they were sitting at the bus stop waiting for the Greyhound that the police cruiser pulled up and Sheriff Simmons stepped out to have a few words.

  “Well, well. The man himself. Young Sheldon Horowitz.”

  “Hi, Sheriff,” said Sheldon.

  “Carol said you were back in town. Word is you’ve been doing OK down in Connecticut.”

  “It’s OK, sir.”

  “I’m glad to see you’re standing tall.”

  Sheldon didn’t reply.

  “Listen, Sheldon,” the sheriff said, taking his hat from his head. “There’s been something on my mind and it’s something I’ve been debating whether to tell you, but now that I see how much you’ve grown, I sort of think it’s only fair. Can I have a word in private for a minute?”

  Sheldon looked around. There was no one else on the bench aside from Lenny and not another person as far as the eye could see.

  “Whatever you tell me, I’m just gonna tell him,” Sheldon said, indicating Lenny.

  “Sure. OK,” the sheriff said, looking slightly embarrassed by the moment. “Here it goes. When your dad died, you tried to tell me something about the accident. At the time, I didn’t believe you. What with the house burning down and the Krupinskis stealing your stuff and your father gone and Lila before that—anyway, it was a world on the shoulders of a twelve-year-old boy and I didn’t think you had your head all together then. You told me someone ran you off the road during that rainstorm. I didn’t believe you. Well—now I do.”

  Sheldon and Lenny both stared at him.

  “In the last three years, it’s happened at least twice more that we know of. My brother is in Springfield, and he’s a cop too. We share war stories and that gives us a kind of bird’s-eye view of what’s happening around here; otherwise, there’d be no way to know. As it happens, there have been a couple of car accidents that haven’t made a lot of sense, not until we started to see a pattern. For one, when the wrecked cars were examined afterward, there was paint from another car found on the driver’s side, which suggests they were bumped before they went off the road. Second, when we looked into the people who were driving—or in your dad’s case, the owner of the truck—it turned out that the victims had some shady dealings with some people of a . . . criminal orientation. And third, they all happened at night on small roads not too far from here. So, the point is, it’s now our suspicion that some kind of Mob enforcer is doing hit-and-runs to get rid of people. Anyway, all of this is to say—I’m sorry. And I believe you, and people are working on this. We want to catch him too. I don’t want you thinking that no one knows or cares. That’s a burden I can take off your shoulders.”

  “Who did it?” Sheldon asked.

  “Oh, we don’t know that, Sheldon. I’m sorry. We’ve got people looking into it, though. Efforts are being made.”

  Lorenzo, Sheldon thought. He couldn’t get himself to say it, though.

  “OK,” Sheldon said. “Thanks, Sheriff. I appreciate that.”

  “That’s something you don’t see every day,” said Lenny, watching the sheriff return to the squad car and pull away. “I never doubted you but . . . wow, huh?”

  Sheldon, though, wasn’t listening to Lenny. He was checking his watch. They were forty-five minutes early for the bus. Lenny had talked him into it despite the bus stop being only ten minutes at most from his house. Sheldon did some quick math in his head.

  Ten minutes to the house, a few minutes to get one of the rifles Lenny had hidden, maybe eight minutes at a trot to his destination, and he could be back here with time to spare before the bus arrived. Then he’d be gone for more than a month to let things cool off.

  “I got something I got to do,” Sheldon said, taking off his rucksack to lighten his burden. “Something I should have done a long time ago. Wait for me and watch the stuff.”

  “Where you going?”

  “Abe was right, and I didn’t follow it up because I was young and scared, but I’m not scared anymore. And, you know what, Lenny? You’re right. Things are only inevitable in retrospect.” Sheldon was already off and running as Lenny sat there alone trying to remember what “retrospect” means.

  * * *

  Sheldon had almost forgotten the rifles were there. Lenny had mentioned that he’d wrapped them up in a blanket in his letter and Sheldon was pretty sure he knew where he’d hidden them.

  Keeping his head low so as not to bump it or brush a rusty nail, Sheldon crawled under Lenny’s back porch on his belly through a gap in the planks and pushed away the dirt underneath until he found the giant blanket he was looking for. Heaving it out of its shallow grave, he reached in the opening and unfolded the blanket just enough to grip the barrel of the Gewehr 98—the Mauser—that his father had brought home from the front.

  “It was my enemy’s and now it’s mine,” his father had once said. “It seemed fitting and it’s a good gun.”

  Sheldon yanked, but the bolt handle was caught on the blanket and this was costing him time. He yanked harder, which made things worse. Sucking the smell of cat poo into his nose, he calmed himself down and unfolded the blanket slowly, gently nudged the Winchester aside, then removed the Mauser. He left everything open and ready for him because he planned to be back soon.

  Sheldon shimmied out backward from the hole under the porch. Back in the hot sun, he saw that he was filthy and stunk of kitty excrement.

  He cussed.

  The Krupinski house was less than a mile away. It was oppressively hot, but time was limited, so he had to jog there. If anyone had been looking out their window, they would have seen a black shadow in the midday sun hauling ass across the yellow land with a German rifle, but Sheldon didn’t care. The dirt was masking his features and he felt somehow invisible. Powerful. Certain of himself. He wondered if Abe had felt this way when he confronted Mr. Henkler. Only Mr. Henkler hadn’t done anything. Or had he? Sheldon still didn’t know. It wasn’t clear, even now, whether Henkler had set up Uncle Nate to take the fall for the missing guns—knowing the consequences with the Mob if he didn’t—or whether it had only been Abe’s theory.

  * * *

  The barn on the Krupinski property was still there, but the house was even more in disrepair than Sheldon remembered; it sagged under the weight of its age and insignificance. The paint was peeling off like leprous skin. The front door was a faded gray and had a brass knob.

  He turned the knob and the door opened.

  It was dark inside. Sheldon’s eyes were accustomed to the brightness of a summer day so the darkness was more complete and more sinister for him than it was for the demon of a man who lived inside. No matter. Sheldon was on a quest and couldn’t be bothered with blindness. A few months ago, Timely Comics had introduced a new superhero called Captain America, and on the cover of the first issue, the captain was punching Hitler right in the jaw. Sheldon had seen a copy back in Hartford at Sundial News and Comics, but he hadn’t gotten the chance to read it because they’d sold out before he could buy a copy, but the image on the cover had stuck with him. No one was bad-mouthing the Nazis—even now, after the Brits had been at war for a year and a half—and it was about time someone did.

  But he didn’t feel like Captain America in the foyer o
f Old Krupinski’s house; he felt like Abe.

  Sheldon wanted to know the men Krupinski was doing business with. He wanted names and addresses, and he wanted to know what scam had pissed off which party and had led to his father’s death. He wanted to know if the brothers had set up his father deliberately that night or whether it was old-fashioned bad luck that the man with the mustache chose that night to run the Krupinski truck off the road.

  Or maybe it had been the old man’s plan all along. Was he the mastermind? Sitting there in the dark in an easy chair with a pipe while directing his evil minions to do his bidding like a small-town Mussolini? The Polish Al Capone of the Berkshires?

  What was Sheldon’s plan? He’d berated Lenny for not having a plan only yesterday, but he’d been wrong. Lenny did have a plan. He was going to show up at Grossinger’s hotel and, step by step, lie and connive and convince and con his way right to the top of show business “like everyone else.”

  The only plan that came to mind in that moment, though, was Abe’s plan: Make it look like a suicide. Leave a note that cleared it all up and moved all the pieces on the chessboard into better positions. It was genius. It was wrong too. Maybe it was both. Abe had made a bold move just like he’d said he would. He’d said that he wasn’t going to stand silently in front of the firing squad and wait to die. He was going to go down swinging, just as he’d done in the alley when he was beat up by McCullen’s kid and when he faced off against Mr. Henkler and Mr. Fowler.

  * * *

  Sheldon heard a noise coming from the room that had once been a dining room and was now a cave.

  * * *

  When Sheldon walked into the room, he saw the world through the eyes of a fourteen-year-old boy who was confronting the demon of the Berkshires. But Bruno Krupinski was looking out from eyes that were jaded by misery and superstition. They were the eyes of a drunk and a man too lonely for speech. So, when a figure covered in filth and carrying a German rifle walked into his dining room where he was sitting on a wingback chair with a bottle of bourbon, Bruno Krupinski did not see a boy or the shine of a boy’s eyes. He saw the ghost of Joseph Horowitz, a veteran of the Great War who had come—finally—to collect his due in the form of Bruno’s withered soul.