The Great Night

by Chris Adrian

  They marched for a little while, longer than ought to have been possible, given the size of the park, unless they were going around in circles, which Huff thought they were not. That was all right in the same way that the purposeful bunnies all around him were all right, though he could not tolerate it when he came upon a raccoon in the road worrying a pair of boxer shorts with his teeth. Huff shooed him away, and put the shorts, which were blue, and printed with little red Scotty dogs, on his head. The farther Huff proceeded down the road, the more he knew just where he was going as well: after the lady. It didn’t matter if she was an agent of the Mayor or something else—possibly even more dangerous—he was still going to follow her and talk to her and figure her out.

  The procession stopped at a rectangular clearing, the same size and shape as the tennis courts, and Huff thought it might actually have been the same place, since the trees that surrounded the clearing looked about the same as the ones that surrounded the tennis courts, even if there were no houses visible through the trees. The animals took up places at the edge of the field, giving a wide berth as they went to the figure standing in the middle. He was smiling hugely. Huff could see that even from yards and yards away, and it was that vain, shiteating smile as much as the malicious aura that radiated off the man that made him easy to recognize, despite the darkness and the distance. It was the Mayor.

  “Milady,” he said. “I said I would eat you last. Would you prefer I do it now?”

  “It’s time,” the lady said, “for us to fight again. Let’s make a noise, Puck.”

  “Did you make walls out of the air?” he asked her. “I want ice cream and a little mortal blood, but my way is blocked.” The lady shrugged. “No matter,” he said. “I’ll be through by dawn.”

  “Or bound again,” she said. “Or dead.” She swung her ax over her head and ran at him, and he laughed at her, which seemed unbearably disrespectful to Huff. He ran at him, too, though he wasn’t a violent person and had always been someone who fought with his wits and not with his fists. It was the very last straw, though, and worse somehow than feeding his constituents to his constituents, for this smirking asshole to be rude to someone who was obviously the most wonderful woman in the world.

  The Mayor slapped the woman down with one blow—her ax went flying and stuck in a tree—and then he caught Huff by his neck and lifted him up and sniffed at him. “Milady,” he said, “did you bring me ice cream as well?” Huff had all sorts of things to say, now that he had an audience with the man, but he couldn’t breathe to speak. The Mayor sniffed at him and smiled even wider—Huff could see the whole panoply of animals and goons reflected behind him in the man’s teeth—and then his smile vanished. “What’s this?’ he asked. “Could this be?” He took a long draught off the underwear on Huff ’s head, and then he shook him. “Are you disguised, my friend?” he said, giving Huff a shake. “My old friend!” he said, taking another sniff. “My dear friend! Or is this a trick?”

  “Maybe,” Huff tried to say, not sure what answer would distress the Mayor more. He plucked the underwear from Huff ’s head, then dropped him, and dragged him to where the lady was standing again, rubbing a bruise on her face.

  “Maybe not,” he said, after smelling the underwear and smelling Huff again. “These do not belong to you. Milady, I wish I had time to torture you better before I eat you, but this will have to do. Obey your husband.” He took a ring from Huff ’s finger, tearing it away hard enough to hurt, and jammed it on her thumb. She was staring blankly at both of them, all the harshness drained from her face. Huff grabbed the Mayor by the arm. “I am making a citizen’s arrest,” he said. It was a giant arm, thickly muscled and as wide around as Huff’s leg, but he couldn’t seem to hold on to it.

  “Abuse your wife,” the Mayor said, and ran off away into the trees.

  Her parents always gave the new kids a tambourine and stuck them back with Molly, because it was easy to play the tambourine, though there were intricacies to it that nobody else understood or appreciated, and because she was nice, though she was actually only about half as nice as everyone supposed her to be. The new boy was not very different to look at than any of his predecessors, the black foster brothers and sisters who came and went and came and went, circulating one at a time through her actual family until they were inevitably ejected. She had barely learned to remember Jordan’s name before he was gone, trundled off to a Job Corps assignment in Houston, and now here was Paul, at thirteen years old a little younger than his unmet foster brother once removed, and just as bad with the tambourine. Molly stepped closer to him in the garage and tried to keep the beat in a way that was more obvious and easier to copy, but he didn’t catch on, and though he stayed in tune when he sang, he kept getting the words wrong. “I love you,” Molly sang, coming in with the rest of the family for the chorus. “I love you a lot. I love you more than you can know, but Jesus loves you more more more more!” It wasn’t the hardest refrain to remember, but still he kept singing, “I love you so much” instead of “I love you a lot,” and “more than you can imagine” instead of “more than you can know.” It boded ill when they couldn’t get the refrain right on this song. It meant that nothing would be easy for them.

  It was useless, though, to worry about them, even at this early stage, when you’d think something could be done to help them out, to make them fit in better, or to defuse the inevitable conflicts that would lead to their being sent back to the pound or shipped off to some other family, or to a trade school, or the Marines—or to any number of pseudo-opportunities that were the consolation prize for not actually becoming a member of the musical Archer family of Virginia Beach, Virginia.

  Molly smiled at Paul, and he nodded coolly at her, which was something different. Usually, they just gave her a nervous smile on the first day, but he seemed to be appraising her somehow, looking her up and down with the nod. Then he turned, swinging his hips one way and his shoulders another, and he gave the same look to her sister Mary, where she stood tossing her hair back and forth at the keyboards, using one finger on each hand to play. He did one shake of the tambourine at her—it was off the beat—then turned around and did the same thing to her brother Colin, where he was playing the guitar, toward the front of the garage, near their parents. Colin was strumming and dipping from the waist, left and right and left, and hopping in place during the chorus. He was as pale as Molly and looked sickly all of a sudden, compared with the new boy. Molly held her breath and closed her eyes and with an effort—it was like squeezing something inside her head—she refrained from thinking something unpleasant about her actual brother.

  The new boy did the same thing to Malinda, singing between their parents to Craig, on the violin, and Clay, on the bass. He turned around to do the thing—a salute? a shake of the fist?—to Chris, on the drums, and to her parents, and then to little Melissa, a moving target since she played no instrument and did not sing but just danced around enthusiastically, and finally to the life-size picture of Jesus taped to the back side of the garage door, where a different sort of family, or a different sort of band, might have taped a picture of a stadium crowd. It was two shakes for Jesus.

  He closed his eyes then, and kept dancing in place and mumble-singing the wrong words. “Jesus Loves You More” did not rock very hard. None of their songs did, though their father, who wrote them with minimal input from Mary and Craig, the two eldest, would have said otherwise. Molly did what she could to shake things up. She and Chris had a thing going, where she accented his drumming just so, jingling grace beats that brought out the rhythm underneath their father’s vanilla melody, which was always one of only four melodies. One could do only so much, though. If you shook it too hard, you only drew attention to yourself in a way that made it clear you had given up on the song or that you were trying to drag it someplace it just didn’t belong. It was a subtle bit of tambourine lore, not something to be intuited the first time you picked one up. But the boy was stomping and shaking and spinning an
d clapping to a song that was the breathless, hopped-up cousin to the one they were actually playing. Chris and Mary and Clay frowned at him, but the others, standing in front of him with their hearts turned to Jesus, didn’t notice for another minute. The song stopped, not entirely on their father’s karate-chop cue, but the boy did not. His eyes were closed, his hands and his feet were flying, and he was smiling as he sang. “Jesus, he’s my friend, sort of! He’s my kind of sometimes friend. Jesus!” Melissa laughed and danced along until Mary grabbed her shoulder.

  “Paul,” their mother said. “Paul!” He stopped dancing and looked at her.

  “When the music stops,” their father said, “the song is over.”

  “My name,” the boy replied, “is Peabo.”

  There was a time when they had just been the Archers, and not the Archer Family Band, but Molly could barely remember it. There was a time when her father had been a full-time instead of a part-time dentist, and her mother had been the dental hygienist in his office, when they had all gone to regular school instead of home school, when the family car had been a Taurus instead of a short bus, and when Melissa hadn’t even been born. Then their parents woke up one morning—without having seen a vision or having experienced a dark night of the soul—with a new understanding of their lives’ purpose. They both took up guitars, never having played before, and started to praise Jesus in song.

  There was a time, too, before they had made albums or gone on tours or made Handycam videos produced and directed by their Aunt Jean, which aired (rather late at night) on the community cable channel and then eventually on Samaritan TV, when Molly actually liked being in the band and liked being in the family. She had had Melissa’s job once, and had danced as enthusiastically as Melissa did now, and had felt the most extraordinary joy during every performance, whether it was a rehearsal in the garage or a school-auditorium concert in front of three hundred kids. Then she had woken up one morning two months ago to find that the shine had gone off everything. It was a conversion as sudden as the one her parents had suffered. She had gone to breakfast feeling unwell but not sick, and was puzzling over how it was different to feel like something was not right with you and yet feel sure you were in perfect health, but she didn’t know what her problem could be until she noticed at breakfast how unattractive her father was. It wasn’t his old robe or his stained T-shirt or even how he talked with his mouth full of eggs; he wore those things every morning and he always talked with his mouth full; it was just how he was. She kept staring at him all through breakfast, and finally he asked her if there was something on his face. “No, sir,” she said, and a little voice—the sort that you hear very clearly even though it doesn’t actually speak—said somewhere inside her, He’s got ugly all over his face.

  Peabo sat next to her at dinner that first night. Molly had just been getting used to the extra room at the table, to being able to eat with her natural right hand instead of her don’t-bump-elbows-with-Mary left hand. She had said goodbye to the empty seat the night before, when their father had announced to the family that they were getting another brother.

  “Already?” Chris asked, because Jordan had been gone only three months.

  “Already?” their father said. “You mean finally!”

  “I miss Jeffrey,” said Malinda.

  “His name was Jordan,” said Chris.

  “What’s his name?’ asked Melissa. “Is it Jeffrey? Is it Elmo? Is it Sarsaparilla?”

  “Paul,” said their father, and their mother said, “Paul Winner,” and Chris said, “Yeah, I bet he’s a real winner.” Colin gave him a high-five, and they were both subsequently disfel-lowshipped for the rest of the meal, their chairs turned away toward the wall, their faces turned to their laps, and their desserts divided between chubby Mary and fat Craig.

  Chris and Colin stayed in the corner while all the others got to speak their gratitudes. Mary went first and used up the obvious one: she was grateful for their new guest; she was grateful for the totality of his life and for his spirit. She was always saying things like that. Molly could tell by the way Colin’s shoulders were moving that he was poking his finger in his mouth to gag himself. Clay was grateful for the tension in his guitar strings. Craig was grateful for the color alizarin crimson. Malinda was grateful for the note of D-flat, and Melissa was grateful for fur, but when pressed by their father to be more specific, she said “furry creatures.” Molly had been feeling a little panicked lately when her turn inevitably approached. There was a lot to be grateful for; the whole point of uttering one’s gratitudes was just that. It was meant to be easy, a nightly reminder that they lived their lives surrounded by visible and invisible bounty. But sometimes, out of sheer nervousness, Molly failed to think of anything, and sometimes the things that popped into her head were not the things she was supposed to be grateful for: the way her breasts were exactly the same size, while Mary’s and Malinda’s looked like they had traded four markedly different boobs between them; the way it felt when she rested all her weight on the tapering edge of her bicycle seat; the way Jordan’s right eye had been ever so slightly out of sync with his left eye. And lately the voice would speak with her, so when she said out loud, “Dandelion fluff,” or “The spots on the wings of a ladybug,” the voice would say Poverty or Measles. She said, “This fork,” and held it tightly, as if clutching it could keep her from saying “My asshole” instead.

  Peabo was quiet during his first dinner. Colin had predicted that he would be ravenous and nose for scraps off other people’s plates, but he hardly ate at all, tasting everything and finishing nothing but praising it all politely. Molly watched him, expecting him to pick up his plate and shake it at her, but he only cocked his head when he caught her looking. The family made the usual first-dinner conversation. On their mother’s instructions, they were supposed to let lie all the presumed horrors and not ask him anything directly about his past, and so the gist of the conversation was something like “I like potatoes, Peabo … Do you like potatoes?” He answered these questions the same way every time, with a solemn nod of his head and “I do.” Molly thought about the presumed horrors anyway. He had a burn on his left arm that she had noticed right away, and though she didn’t stare at him she wondered how he’d got it, and there was a scar on the side of his neck that had healed all bunched up and thick.

  It would have been tantamount to suggesting that they cast Jesus out of the household to say that an end should be put to the endless stream of foster brothers and sisters that had been coming and going in the seat next to her forever. But she wondered if it reduced the sum total of anybody’s suffering to keep them around for a few months in a situation that ultimately did nobody any good, that changed nothing in anybody’s life and only rearranged some things for a little while. But that was like wondering if they should stop playing and singing because their songs did not in fact enter into people’s hearts and make them love themselves and each other and Jesus, who mediated all love of any kind, the love clearinghouse and the love circuit board. Looking at the new boy, she thought that it might be easier for everyone if he just went away right now, and she waited for the voice to add something snarky and cruel to that thought. She waited and waited, but nothing came, and when he glanced her way again and caught her staring she put a piece of broccoli in her mouth and looked at her lap.

  “What an unusual name,” Mary said later, when the four girls were in the bathroom getting ready for bed. “Peabo. Pea … bo.”

  “It’s a dog name,” said Malinda. “Here, Peabo. Here, boy!”

  “Here, kitty kitty!” said Melissa, then thought a moment and added, “It has pee in it. I bet his middle name is Doody.” She struck a pose in front of Mary and stuck out her hand. “Hello, my name is Pee Doody. How do you doo-doo?” Mary slapped her hand away, and Melissa laughed. It was as typical and ordinary and expected as the dinner questions, or starting the new kid off on the tambourine—it had all happened before, and it would all happen again, the touch of cattin
ess in the beginning, relatively innocent doo-dooisms that lacked any deep venom. These would fade away little by little and the giggling denigrations would be replaced by goggling admirations, a slow fade-up that might not be noticed if it hadn’t been part of the eternal foster cycle. Molly paused while brushing her teeth to sigh expansively.

  “What?” Malinda asked.

  “Nothing,” Molly said, because Malinda had become convinced in the past few months that Molly thought she was better than all the rest of them, and she had taken it upon herself to teach Molly just how un-Christian and bitchy it was to go around heaving big sighs to let everyone know you were bored by your own superiority. That wasn’t it at all, of course. Molly actually felt pretty lowly, compared with the rest of them—just because she was always unwillingly coming up with insults against them all didn’t mean she thought she was better than anybody else. But she didn’t tell Malinda that.

  “What?” Malinda said again.

  “His middle name is Bo,” Molly said. “I saw his papers on Dad’s desk: B-O. Paul Bo. P. Bo.”

  “You like him,” said Mary, smiling.

  “You’re not supposed to be looking at things on that desk,” said Malinda.

  “Molly and Doody,” Melissa sang, “sittin’ in a tree.”

  “He won’t last a month,” Molly said. She rinsed out her mouth, put her toothbrush back into her color-coded space—blue—in the holder, and went to her bedroom. It was hers that year by lottery; her sisters shared a room. Malinda said that having her own room had gone to Molly’s head.

  She turned out the light, neglecting both her regular and her special Bible study, neglecting to kneel at her bed to pray, and only very quickly (though not insincerely) asking a silent blessing on all the people in her family, flipping their faces through her head like a deck of cards instead of turning them over in her mind like little statues. She considered the new boy last, picturing him on a card all his own, in his tambourine pose, in midshake and midbenediction or threat, whatever it had been, and let her mind go quiet for a moment while she held on to that image, as if inviting the voice to say something cruel about him. But again nothing came. For the rest of her family, she prayed for happiness and a long life, and that they be gathered up in Heaven if they should all die that night in an earthquake or a fire (and she briefly imagined them all buried under the earth, and with burning hair). For the boy, she just asked that things work out for him here after all. Then she went to sleep.