The Age of Perpetual Light

by Josh Weil

  They didn’t eat anything until it was well past midnight and he had taken the wheel. She turned in her seat and slid the rear window open and, reaching behind, unlocked the chest in the truckbed and lifted out a cookie tin. It was old and rusted around the lid. On the lid was an embossed scene of a cabin in winter some long ago night, its chimney smoke lost in the starry sky above the trees and its windows aglow in the blackness between the pines and in each pane a Christmas scene—fire, children; roast bird, dog. She put it in her lap and pried the lid off. It was filled with small pellets of puffed grain so sugared its smell made the air in the cab feel sticky. She offered it to him. He looked at it and asked her what it was. She took a pellet and shoved it between his lips. He didn’t want more. She shrugged and sat there eating handful after handful, lifting her palm to her chin and touching her tongue to a puff and snapping it back in. He said it was disgusting. When she was done, she licked her palm. “Look at me,” she told him, and slowly sucked the sugar off her fingers.

  “Whatever,” he said, as if it was too much.

  “Whatever what?” she said, and, staring him down to let him know she knew him already and how well, made him lick them for her all over again.

  That was it as far as food. By the time they were in Connecticut he was starving, and when they passed the Indian reservation, he turned in without asking.

  “Not with my money,” she said.

  “You don’t have any money.”

  “I could have shitloads, for all you know. I could be—”

  “If you had it, you would’ve paid for the spray job and left me staring.”

  “You think that’s why?”

  “No. But you don’t have it.”

  She reached over and gripped his wallet where it pressed the jeans atop his thigh. “Feels pretty skinny to me,” she said.

  “There’s enough in it for a steak and a coffee.” They pulled into the casino’s lot. “Two steaks if we get them here.”

  “I don’t eat meat,” she said.

  “Who said one of them’s for you?”

  The main building was shaped like a tepee, a hundred feet high and made of Plexiglas and the mirror-light flooding in to show the gaming going on and all around it like a wagon circle sat the outbuildings—from darkness vaults with their beds and black silence to the bulbous planetarium room grown beside the parking lot like a helium balloon tethered to earth. It was their busy time, near the end of the long dusk, when the sleepless gave up trying and wandered out to twenty-four-hour drugstores, or all-night coffee bars, or gambling joints that could help them pass the time till sunrise.

  He parked and got out and shut the door and waited for her. Then he came around to her side and leaned down to the window and said, “It’s as safe here as anywhere. It’s not even under federal jurisdiction.” She sat. “These are tribal cops,” he said. “What do you think they’re gonna do, wander out to the woods and do a bad woman dance and the Great Spirit comes down and slips them a vision of your truck? What? Is this the silent treatment?” He stood up and looked around and leaned back down again. “Come on,” he said, “I’ll buy you a squash.” Then he shrugged and reached in past her and popped the glove compartment and took out the Chief’s Special and unzipped his coverall and slid the pistol in his pantswaist and zipped back up and left her there.

  She watched him through the windshield until he was almost at the door and then she burst out and ran across the lot and caught him in the lobby and jumped on his back and yanked his hair like she meant to scalp him. She was laughing or he couldn’t have wrestled her off so easy.

  “That was smart,” he said when they were seated and most everyone had stopped looking at them.

  “They just think we’re in love,” she said.

  “Is that what this is?”

  “If you think this is love, you’ve got a worse past than I thought.”

  He ordered and she ordered and he told the waiter to bring her three of what she’d asked for. They were silent until it came and then they ate in silence. Halfway through he said, “Yeah, that’s what this is.”

  Afterwards they pooled their cash and tried their luck with the slots. Their luck ran to two buckets of nickels. She thought it might run further. He thought it might run out. And when they went to swap the coins for bills and saw a man in uniform with a gun chatting at the cashier’s window, neither one wanted to find out. On the way back to the lot, he left her for the washroom and took the buckets with him.

  She watched him walk off. His figure had become familiar to her already. The way he strode with one sneaker turned in a little, hips swinging, elbows stuck out like lug bolts, his crazy unwashed curled-up wildness of hair. His neck was thick as her own thighs and when she lifted the curls that covered it it was white as them, too, vulnerable like the underbelly of a pet, and she had fallen asleep and risen awake with the smell of it close to her, and it did something to her that she had not known could be done, and she felt it even now. Just before he went inside the door, he turned to her and winked and held up the buckets and she could see where the fabric of his coverall beneath his arm tightened and at his side the bulge of the handle of her gun.

  Walking back to the truck, she wondered if what he’d done was as bad as he seemed to think. She decided it probably wasn’t. She thought he was a good man deep down at heart and she liked that he was not one on the surface and she thought that his past probably lay somewhere in between, imagined for him a drug-dealing sentence, a stint in jail, a failed attempt to rob something, maybe a fight, a life of fights, and liked the idea of that, liked even the idea of someone shot, hurt bad, killed?

  She was halfway across the lot when the revolving casino door whirred so fast the noise stopped her. She turned in time to see it spit him out. Between the giant plastic buffalo mounted on either side, he came running.

  “Get the fuck!” He shouted. “Get the truck in the fuck!” He was running too fast to keep the buckets still and coins were flying loose around him. They came down clattering all over his feet, a twinkling rain of mirror-glint, and bounced off his thighs and struck his shins and he ran through them. “Get the fuck in the truck!” He had almost reached her and she was turning to run with him when she saw a man coming out of the revolving doorway behind him. He was an Indian and he was dressed like a cop and in his hands was a rifle.

  The shot smothered the rattling of the buckets. She had the cab of the truck open and she looked back. Minor had stopped running and he was trying to hold the buckets in one hand. His other was scrabbling at the zipper down his chest. Behind him she saw a flash of something arc in the air. Saw the reservation man thumbing another bullet into the chamber. Minor saw it too. He was running again when the second gunshot boomed. Her scream seemed to come directly out of the jerk his body gave. Then he was on the ground, dropped to half his height. His legs were bent under him. He was looking at his legs like he had just discovered them there. She was still screaming when he struggled up and she didn’t stop till she heard him shouting at her.

  “Take it take it take it!” he was saying.

  She ran back from the truck and reached for the buckets and he said, “The fucking gun! The gun!” He’d gotten his chest zipper down and his coverall was flapping at his front and she reached in and drew the .45 from his belt as he stumbled past. The Indian was jerking the bolt back. She raised the handgun and sighted at him and he saw her and froze. He shouted something. She held the gun in both hands. Behind her Minor was banging around. In a second the truck would start. She had never wanted anything more she thought, than to hear the truck start. The Indian stood there with his hand on the bolt and the rifle in his other hand and another brass casing in his teeth. He shook his head at her.

  “Shoot him!” she heard.

  But she just held the gun and in the moment after Minor’s shout it was as if the reservation man and she entered into some secret language neither of them had understood till just then. “Start the truck!” she shouted.<
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  “I can’t drive,” he said. “Shoot the fucker! Shoot him, shoot the fucker! I can’t fucking drive!”

  But the Indian had stopped shaking his head, and stopped shouting. He reached up and took the bullet from his teeth. She ran. She had just yanked open the truckdoor when the shot banged. She threw herself belly-down onto the seat. Minor was there with her. The sound of the bullet-struck metal all over them. Minor shouted at her, something about keys, and she got herself in and shut the door and tried to start the truck but she couldn’t find the ignition slot, and then the keys were out of her hand and Minor was saying “Push the clutch!” The truck roared. “Drive!” he said.

  The gravel thundered against the parked cars. She pulled the truck around. The Indian had come out into the open lane and was following the path of the truck with his gun and Minor was leaning out the window with the pistol in his hand and there were four or five shots. The truck lurched and Minor’s back was slammed against the window and she heard the blast of the air and could feel the rear drop at an angle and she shouted, “Minor?”

  “I oughta kill the fucker,” he said.

  “Kill him,” she said.

  He fired off the rest of the round—one long rattling blast. In the rearview she could see the ground smoking where the bullets had hit and the reservation cop standing with his gun and the wide space in all its wide quiet between the two.

  They drove with a flapping in the rear and then dragging and then just the rim grinding away at the road and they knew they’d have to stop and they didn’t.

  He had been shot in the leg. He was bleeding all over the seat and he got a rag out of the back and tied it around his thigh and tried to bend it so he could get it past the dash and up high where it would not bleed so bad but it was already stiffening. He had to slide around on the seat to get it out the window.

  She said, “Did it hit the bone?”

  “No.”

  “You okay?”

  “Fucking great. Fucking never been better.”

  “You gonna be okay in an hour?”

  “I’ll tell you in an hour.”

  She let her eyes leave the road long enough to take him in. He had shut his own against the pain. “What happened in there?” she said. He shrugged and she told him “fuck that” and said, “He just started shooting.”

  “I took a piss.”

  “What happened to make him—”

  “I unzipped is what happened.”

  “And he saw the gun?”

  “I guess you’d rather I’d have just showed him my ID. I guess you’d rather I’d have brought him out to the truck, out to you—”

  “You said you didn’t have an ID.”

  “So he could ask you for the license for the gun.” He had shut his eyes against the pain and he opened them and looked at her and shut them again. “Of course, I guess you’d have just shot him.”

  They drove on, too fast for the road and wrecking the wheel until a smaller road punched the side of theirs and she turned onto it skidding. When they had driven far enough, she pulled to the side and got out. He stayed half-prone with his leg out the window while she clanked around in the truckbed for the jack. He could feel all his blood rushing to his leg trying to refill it and could feel it leaking out just as fast and filling his pant leg instead. Back there the heavy spare wheel dragged on the metal and dropped to the ground with a thud. He tried to get his heart as low as possible. He tightened the rag. The truck jerked, began to rise. He couldn’t see her where she was crouched but he could feel every crank of the jack.

  “I’m gonna tell you something,” she said. She waited, then she went on. “Just because I’ve never shot somebody doesn’t mean shit. You think that means something?”

  “Just that you haven’t shot somebody,” he said.

  “Listen asshole, either you’re the fucking worst shot I’ve ever seen or—”

  “No, I meant to miss him.”

  “So don’t fucking say anything.”

  “I didn’t.”

  The truck stopped its rise and he heard her grunting at the lugs and then her breathing as she hauled the tire off. He listened to the spare go over the bolts and to her wrench the lugs tight again and then he heard her boots on the road. Then he saw her mirror-thrown shadow and then she was in the window looking at him.

  “You didn’t do anything, did you?” she said.

  “I never said I did.”

  “Huh,” he said. She shook her head. She took a cigarette and lit it and stood there smoking and when he asked for a drag she said, “You implied it.”

  “Give me a drag,” he said. “I’m fucking shot.”

  “It’s probably the first time.”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Why won’t you talk about your past then?”

  “Because I’m fucking shot. Give me a drag. I haven’t lied to you and I won’t.”

  “You haven’t lied,” she said, as if he had.

  “Or ever will,” he said. “You can shoot me if I do.”

  When she looked at him he felt a grin come up in him and she looked away, grinning, and said, “Asshole.”

  She took another drag on the cigarette and turned and handed it to him. Leaning in the window, filling the space left by his leg, she looked at him. “Does it hurt?” she said.

  “What do you think?”

  “What do you want to do?”

  “Get to the fucking border.”

  “Do you love me?”

  He watched her and smoked and watched her. “I think so.”

  She took the cigarette from his fingers. “If you knew what I’d done,” she said. “You wouldn’t. You would leave me. That’s why I won’t tell you, okay?”

  They did up his leg as best as they could with what she had in her first aid box, him grinding his teeth while she poured disinfectant over both holes of the wound and her trying to kiss him quiet afterwards while she wrapped it. He had passed out and rewoke and gone through his hours of faintness by the time they started looking for a place to bed for the day. The old border couldn’t be more than a half hour’s drive north. He commented on how if they had still been citizens in good standing and the Northeast Kingdom had been what it once was, they would be home free by sunrise. She said “citizens in good standing” like the whole idea was funny, and then pointed out how no matter where the mirror-light stopped they would still have to pay the exit tax citizens in good standing were made to pay. They had lived their lives with the benefits of endless light and if they took the resources of themselves away the government would demand its reimbursement, its mirror tax.

  “I’ve never been worth that much in my life,” he said.

  “And now you’re crippled.”

  “Or had near to that much on me.” He looked his question at her.

  “Good thing we’re not citizens in good standing,” she said.

  He told her, “I said I’d ask it again.”

  “And I told you I had it covered,” she said.

  They drove through the dim landscape of inland Maine, glinting rocks and stunted, wind-bent pines and bushy fields striated with dry grasses sheened in the reflected light, and they talked about what it would be like to get out from under the mirrors. They had heard rumors of the life up there—communes and villages and tribes eking out an existence on what they could grow in such barren land and what they could hunt and what life they could make heating peat for warmth and moving by firelight through long seasons of dark.

  He told her he was going to farm. She laughed at him, and then saw he was serious. There was little that would grow there she said, maybe tubers, roots. He said that sounded like farming to him. “Okay,” she told him. “Me too.”

  There was a strangeness over everything that was the tension of the real dawn coming into a brightness that was the exact brightness the mirrors had held over the world all night and for a moment it was as if the earth had ceased its forwards spin and had paused in the half light, waiting to
see if the glow of the mirrors would hold sway or if the aura of the coming sun would outdo them. The aura outdid them. Just before the sun itself rose they hit a small town. All the houses were still sleeping, windows blacked out with their heavy curtains and lightproof shades. They took the first small road that looked like it would lead them away. Instead, it dead-ended at a library. It was all rust and molding bricks, half swallowed by scrub woods, long forsaken by the town.

  She spoke of sinks and couches and the many weeks she’d spent sleeping in the truck. He wasn’t sure how well he could walk so he let her figure out how to get in. She went off in the growing light. He watched her go. He listened to her legs brushing through the high grass. When she was gone there was still the sound. It wasn’t her legs. From the edge of the woods came the noises of animals moving. Their eyes were lit in the gleam of the mirrors and their pelts shone in the dimness beneath the trees. He watched them, quick glimpses of oil-sleek fur like flashes of fishbacks breaking dark surface, and their eyes like the white buds of water lilies floating. He had heard they had gathered here, near the end of the mirrors’ reach, the ones that chose not to go across into the natural night, the ones that chose to stay and hunt the others who came up from the south to try. For a moment he worried about her and he looked to see if there were any others besides the ones that were gathered in the brush surrounding him but all were drawn to him. He didn’t know why and then the dizziness came and he shut his eyes against it and felt his leg throbbing and he thought for a moment that he had hallucinated them—them and the eyes of the child, that girl, rolled back in their sockets, shivering white eyes, pupils gone beneath her lids, irises gone, just white and the veins shaking in it, and the pond of blood growing itself across the bright green plastic of the fake lawn her grandparents had tacked to the screen porch floor, and the grandmother in the woodshed like a pile of rags thrown in a corner and the log that had crushed the pile dropped onto her shins with a crack and left there rolling, and the grandfather rolling back and forth on the kitchen floor, holding the spilled insides of his belly inside the bag of his shirt and crying, and as Minor looked up from the trembling whites of the girl’s skull-rolled eyes he could see every tiny square of the porch screen lit in the porch light and through them all the mirror-lit tulip trees with their pale blooms hanging—and then he opened his eyes and the eyes of the animals were still there watching him and he knew why. His thigh felt like it was eating itself. It had stopped bleeding so much. His jeans had been so sodden beneath his coveralls that she had stripped them from him and dumped them in their wet mess on the rubber mat beneath his feet. He reached down now and balled them up. He had grown so used to the smell of his blood he could not tell anymore what it did to the air. Out there, they could tell.