Benighted

by Kit Whitfield

  I steady my head with my hand as I rise. “Listen, I’d better go and get the inquiries about that call he made in order, you know how long that’ll take. Thanks, Ally. You will testify if I call you, won’t you?”

  “Sure, Lo. Whatever.”

  I turn toward the door. We shouldn’t have had this conversation.

  “Lola.” Ally’s voice makes me look back.

  “Yeah?”

  “You forgot your scissors.” He holds them up, studies them. His shoulders hunch, and suddenly he gives me half a crooked smile. “You said your lawyer friend only mentioned civilization, yeah?”

  “Yeah.” My voice is as quiet as his. “Only civilization.”

  “Well, what the hell.” He raises the scissors before I can stop him, takes his long ragged hair in his fist. “We’ll call it a draw.”

  There’s a grind as the scissors close, and then Ally is shorn, his hair hanging in uneven tassels to his shoulders. He throws the scissors across the room, and holds up his hand, clutching a sheaf of hair like a trophy.

  THIRTEEN

  There’s a handwritten sign taped to the garage door that says, “Please knock loud as our bell is broken.” Ally waits behind me, kicking at stones.

  “Ally,” I say, and then stop. This isn’t Marty, this isn’t Nate; I don’t need to tell him to let the lawyer do the talking. Ally’s my age, after all.

  I must send Marty a card. I sent some flowers, but that was a week ago, they’ll have faded by now. They still haven’t let him out of the hospital.

  “Yeah?” Ally’s voice cuts across my thoughts. He puts his hand on the door, leaning on it, and drums his fingers. Turned toward me, he takes up a lot of space.

  “Do you reckon you can find something?”

  He shrugs. “Find what?”

  “Something to back up his claims,” I say, hitching my bag on my shoulder and straightening my coat. “Ellaway says he broke down. Do you reckon you can confirm it?”

  Ally takes his hand off the door and pushes his hair out of his face. He hasn’t tidied it since he took the scissors to it in the stockroom, and it tumbles in lank tails around his fingers. “If they haven’t fixed it,” he says. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  I wasn’t asking for a favor, just an opinion, but I don’t say this. We stand without speaking for a few more seconds, and then the door swings up.

  A man in a clean white T-shirt and stained jeans stands under it. His face is youngish, in his thirties perhaps, and he’s shaved his head to allow for the fact that his hair is already receding. His scalp is dented looking; the planes and dips of his skull show through the brown stubble of his hair. The posture is assertive, wiry arms poised, shoulders sloping, but his face is amiable enough. “Yes?” he says.

  I can start this friendly, at least. “Good morning,” I say. “Do you run the garage?”

  He cocks his head and nods. He isn’t going to waste time elaborating, the nod suggests, but he’s happy enough to let me know.

  I hold out my hand and he looks at it for a moment and then shakes it. His hand is bony with a firm grip; lyco calluses and others beside them from holding wrenches and screwdrivers. “My name is Lola Galley, and this is my colleague, Alan Gregory.”

  “Kevin White.”

  I hand him my card rather than flashing it at him. “How do you do. I’m here on behalf of a client of mine, Richard Ellaway. He left his car at your garage a few weeks ago?”

  White looks at the card, looks at me.

  “I’m investigating his case,” I say. “He got stuck outside on a moon night and assaulted someone. I’d like to have a look at his car.”

  Ally taps his fingers against his legs beside me, and I stand still, settle all movements down and hold myself quietly.

  White shrugs and gestures with the card. “You got any proof you’ve come from him?”

  “We don’t need proof,” I say, trying to sound like I’m just reminding him of a fact: something about this man tells me that if he digs his heels in, there’ll be no shifting him. “But I have some letters he’s sent me about the case.” Neutral ones, from early on, before Ellaway got to know me. I take them out of a folder in my bag and hold them in front of White. “I take it you recognize the signature?”

  White studies it. There’s a pause; Ally shifts on his heels, and I hold out the letter for White to see. I doubt he does recognize the signature unless he has a photographic memory, but the letter’s genuine and White seems to have some sense. If he’ll just accept the letter and decide not to throw his weight around, we’ll be in without a fight. I keep silent, unthreatening, and let him read.

  “All right,” he says, looking up. “I’ll show you to it.” He turns and walks into the garage. When he can’t see, I let my head rock back and smile, just for a second. We’re in.

  “You’ve had his car since his arrest, haven’t you?” I say to his back.

  “When’s that?”

  I give him the date.

  “Yeah, that’s right.” Our footsteps echo against the concrete walls. There are a few men here and there, under or over cars; they don’t look up as we pass. Black tires loom at the corners of my vision.

  “And what would you say was the trouble?”

  “Trouble?”

  “When you had a look at the engine.”

  White slows down and looks over his shoulder. “You say you’re from Mr. Ellaway, right?”

  “Yes. Yes, we are.”

  He gives us a measuring look. “Only I have to be careful, you know, I run a good business here, my clients put their faith in me.”

  “I’m sure they do.” I mean this. His place is clean, his men are concentrating on their job. He could fix my car, if I had one.

  He stops. “It’s just, he was out after curfew, right? So I figured it might be evidence and I shouldn’t mess with it. Isn’t there a law about that?”

  I’m almost taken aback: an actual good citizen. “So you told him you couldn’t work on it?”

  White shrugs. “Yeah. But I didn’t do anything unusual, I mean, no one fixes a car unless they get a go-ahead from DORLA or some proof that the case is closed. No offense, I mean, but I don’t want to get into trouble with you all.”

  I raise my hands. I mustn’t look too surprised; this should have occurred to me. I just never thought that mechanics would be scared of us. I should have been chasing up the car sooner than this, even. I’m just used to alcoholics and homeless loiterers. Most of my clients don’t have cars. “Of course. So, where are you keeping it?”

  “At the back.” White keeps walking. Ally looks at me, and I glare him into silence.

  We reach the car. Here it is, the blue Maserati: even in the dark, it gleams. Ally puts his hand on it, strokes the curve. He’s going to love this.

  “Mr. White,” I say, “if it’s all right with you, I’d like to leave my colleague to have a look at it while I ask you a couple more questions. Would you be happy with that?”

  “I’ve got a busy morning.”

  “I’ll keep this as quick as I can.”

  Ally opens the hood and nestles inside, and I turn and follow White.

  We sit on plastic chairs and I sip coffee from a stained mug. “Did you know Mr. Ellaway before he sent you his car?” I ask.

  “No.”

  “You didn’t?”

  White just looks at me.

  I blow on the watery coffee. “So he just brought it in that day?”

  “He didn’t bring it in. He called and told us where to get it. He offered a collection fee and I accepted. We went and picked it up, and we’ve had it since then.”

  “Called when?” Did he call from the shelter? Was that the call he made on his cell phone, the one I’m waiting for the phone company to trace?

  “About eleven a.m.”

  Too late. The call from the shelter was not to Kevin White.

  “Anyway, I sent someone to pick it up, and we brought it back here. And it’s still here.”

&
nbsp; “Just like that?” I grip the mug to stop myself staring and sit still.

  White grins. “I don’t mind. Nice car like that, it raises the tone of the place.”

  I flash a smile and push on. “Mm, but has he been in to check on it since then?”

  “Nah.” White shrugs. “Up to him, he’s paying me for the space.”

  “Does he come in to pay the bill, check on the car?”

  He shakes his head. “Sends a check.”

  Ellaway hasn’t notified us about the car. He’s left it here instead, not telling me where it is. I had to spend some time researching to find this place. He hasn’t lied to me, he hasn’t broken the law and gotten the engine fixed before I could look at it, but he hasn’t given me the routine information, either. White seems to know his job, but I think again what I thought earlier: Ellaway has left his car a long way off the beaten track.

  “So—” I put the cup down on the concrete floor. “So he’s not been in at all?”

  White dusts his hands together and smiles. “Nope. Doesn’t bother me. Wish all my customers were that little trouble.”

  I go over to Ally. He’s practically crooning over the engine, tinkering and touching with the fascination of a true devotee. “Hope you’re enjoying yourself, Ally,” I say, making him flinch inside the hood. “It’s the closest we’ll ever get to a car like this.”

  Ally emerges, disheveled and with a smear of grease on his nose. “You’ve got—” I gesture at him.

  “Where?” His hand passes across his face.

  “There. On your—” I stand back and point. “Left. Down.” I point again. He gets some of it off, rubbing it off onto the heel of his hand, leaving a trace behind.

  “So,” I say, “did you find anything?”

  Ally stops cleaning himself and beckons me to the car. He dives into it from the front, and I lean over one of the sides. “See that?”

  “Yeah. It’s a car.”

  The hood overshadows us, and our voices echo back at each other in the confined space. Ally’s head is too near mine. I look down at his grimy hand, which is pointing at parts of the engine.

  “In words of one syllable, Ally,” I warn. I’m leaning hard against the side; sculpted metal presses into my hands.

  Ally draws a breath; it sounds louder than my own under the hood. “Your man—is right when he says the car is—broke. There’s a—flaw in the part that makes it go. You can’t drive this. But I’m not sure how the flaw got there. He could be wrong to act all—shocked.”

  “Ally, what the hell?”

  Ally points to the engine. “This car’s in a good state. That’s all. And the damage, well—it doesn’t look like wear and tear.”

  “For God’s sake, spit it out. I can’t stand it when you hedge.”

  Ally looks at me, opens his mouth, closes it, looks back at the engine. “I could be wrong. But what I’m saying is that he could have done the damage himself.”

  I pull myself out of the cramped space and walk to the wall. “You’re saying he trashed his own car?”

  “I’m not saying anything,” Ally says. His fingers flex in and out, and he paces. “I’m not messing with this guy, Lola. You can deal with him, you’re the lawyer, but I don’t want him after me for saying the wrong thing.”

  “Ally, stop it.” I can’t watch him fidgeting to and fro, I just can’t stand it. In a minute I’m going to slap him.

  He turns, runs his hands through his hair. I stand at the wall and watch him. “I just don’t know, Lo,” he says. “I just don’t know what to think.”

  FOURTEEN

  I mutter in my sleep, slap the blankets, and in the end I sit up in the dark. Paul lies beside me. After a while he reaches out and drapes his arm over my leg. Finding me upright wakes him. It isn’t until he takes hold of my hand that I realize he’s been fingering the scar on my foot.

  He looks for a moment, then says, “How did you get that?”

  “I was twenty-five. A caged juvenile with a small head stuck his face through the bars.” I shake my hair out of my face. “I was lucky compared to Marty. It doesn’t show when I’m dressed.”

  He lies quiet. Then his hand moves to the slash on my arm. “What about that?” He speaks softly.

  I don’t move. “When I was eighteen, my second catch. It was a hot night and I didn’t fasten my sleeve properly. I’d collared a woman, and she ran at me and drove the pole back in my hands. She got up close. And she did that to me before my trainer could stop her.”

  His fingers settle into the hollow in my hip, and I freeze. “How did you get that?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.” I roll over and put my arms up around my face.

  Paul sits up, leans against the wall. “Lola?” His tone is cautious. My hands clench against whatever he’s about to ask me. “What does a lune look like?”

  “Oh no.” I sit up and pull a blanket around myself. “No, you don’t get to ask me the questions.”

  “What do you mean?” He sits very still.

  “You don’t get to hear what I did in the creches. You don’t get to hear if tenderfoot skin has more erogenous zones. You don’t get to hear if I like rough sex because shiftless flesh needs a good workout. If we’re trained to get off on pain. You don’t ask me those things!”

  “Hey! Calm down.” Paul’s voice cuts across me. There’s an edge to it I haven’t heard before. “Don’t get paranoid on me. Look, people are stupid. I’m not. It’s not fair, Lola. I asked you something else. It’s not fair to go off on me just because other people are stupider than me.” The edge has gone; he sounds almost helpless.

  I slide off the bed and sit on the floor, wrapped in a blanket, and bury my head in the covers. There’s a long silence.

  Paul lies back down. He can stare at the wall forever, absorbed as a child, without even wondering if he should be bored.

  “They’re big,” I say. The voice I hear is hoarse and tentative, I hardly recognize it as my own. “They come up to your chest, just standing there. They have huge heads, big as watermelons.” I look up. “Why are you asking? You must know.”

  There are three feet between us. My room is on the seventh floor, many feet above the ground. We’re sitting over a canyon. “I’ve seen pictures,” Paul says. “And I remember. But it’s different.”

  “You remember?”

  “Some. I don’t know. It’s different.”

  He’ll see if I close my eyes. The sheets are forest green, and I stare down at them. “How?”

  Paul sighs, rumples his hair. “It’s hard to describe. I’d say atavistic, I guess, but it’s a long word and long academic words are no good for describing it. But I don’t think you ever really understand it. Not this way, anyway.” He gestures, two hands, two feet, upright spine. “It’d be like interpreting dreams. You can say this means that, you can do logic, but you aren’t—analytical in the state of mind you’re trying to analyze. It doesn’t work very well.”

  “Their eyes are green,” I say. I can’t answer what he’s said. “Not normally; they’re gray with a round black pupil. But you know how if you take a picture of someone you get red-eye, the retina reflects back pink. Different receptors come forward in a lune’s eye. If you catch one in the headlights, their eyes flash green.”

  “When you change states—you stop understanding what’s happening to you. The pain gets harder to deal with the further you go. But once it’s over, the pain and the analysis—they don’t matter. You don’t need to understand it.”

  “It’s the size of them. The weight. And they’re so fast.”

  “The pictures I’ve seen—” Paul turns his head and looks at me. “They looked beautiful.”

  “Anyone who had their hands free to work a camera was catching the lune in a tranquil moment. You can’t see beauty when it’s poised above your throat.”

  “Isn’t that just—I don’t know—your feelings rather than what you see?”

  My feelings. “Eye of the beholder.” He
says nothing. “I can’t help it, Paul. Yes, they’re graceful. That means they aim well when they leap at you. Yes, they’re—they’re beautifully proportioned. So they run fast, and they run toward you. A long smooth muzzle crackles up when it snarls, and as far as gray and white fur goes—well, I just know that if we tried to bite each other, I’d come off worst.”

  “So you’re afraid?”

  “Yes.” I look at him, and he’s watching me. “I’m afraid. I see them day to day and I know I can match them. But at night—there’s nothing I can do. Imagine it. Imagine facing someone who can tear you apart if they want to, who can’t understand why they shouldn’t. Who doesn’t have it in them, who’s flat-out lost how to understand why they shouldn’t. And often, they aren’t sorry the next day.”

  “That’s not so.” Paul shakes his head, more to himself than to me. “That can’t be so.”

  “I’ve seen what I’ve seen, Paul.”

  He sighs. I feel rather than see him take a quick glance at me, and then he speaks again. “I’m lyco, too. It’s what I am. And I can’t—wish I wasn’t. You’re right in a way. I can’t wish I never luned. I don’t.”

  A field stretches between us in the few inches across the bed, a winter field. Spiders weave their traps across the ground like hammocks, frost grains the grass blades, the air is cold and empty. A footfall, and the ice will crush and snap.

  “I’m scared of lunes, Paul.” I close my eyes. This is weakness. I’m laying myself open and handing him a knife.

  “I don’t want anything to hurt you,” he says.

  I feel my eyes sting. The rest of my body is numb, chilled, lost in a winter field.

  “I don’t wish I didn’t lune. If I could give it up, I wouldn’t. But I don’t want anything to hurt you.”

  “Animals run away from them,” I say. “Every animal. They’re all afraid.”

  “Wild animals run from people,” he says. “And it’s natural to avoid a predator.”

  “A predator?” My voice is very small.

  “It’s worth it, angel. It breaks your mind open. You can’t be so sure of things anymore.”

  “The lycos I meet are sure. They know God is for them and the world is theirs and the cripples are—are—” My words twist in my throat.