Night Relics

by James P. Blaylock

  He gave up and walked toward the rear of the store where there were two long counters full of toys, most of them tossed together, some of the packages ripped open. Peter picked through them, flipping a Nerf football in his hand. The football wasn’t enough; there probably wasn’t a kid alive who didn’t already have one. He found a rubber stack of pancakes wearing a hat and carrying a submachine gun, plenty weird enough to impress the modern child, but he decided he didn’t want that, either.

  Then, sorting through a row of plastic revolvers, by accident he found just the thing—something called a Spud Gun, a pistol that shot pieces of raw potato. There were two of them, dusty and lonely, misplaced behind the six-shooters as if they had been forgotten there in some more innocent age. Raised plastic letters spelled out the word “Spuderrific” on the barrel, and there were instructions on the back for loading the things with potato plugs. Feeling lucky now, he took them up to the counter and handed them to the checker, who pretended to be surprised.

  “Robbing the bank?” she asked.

  “Brink’s truck,” Peter said.

  “I got one of these for my grandson,” she said. “When he was six or seven.”

  “Did he like it?”

  “He loved it,” she said. “His mother wasn’t crazy about it, though.”

  Peter hadn’t thought about that—hundreds of little potato globs stuck to the kitchen wall. It was too late now, though. The deal was done. She counted out his change and put the guns in a bag, stapling the top shut through the receipt.

  “How old is your son?” she asked, as if she wanted to chat, to hold him there a moment longer.

  “One’s ten and the other’s six,” Peter said, which was only a small lie, since Bobby wasn’t his son at all yet. Suddenly full of unanswered questions, he thanked the woman and walked out into the wind.

  5

  SOMEBODY HAD GOTTEN OVER THE FENCE DURING THE night and glued a bumper sticker to the front door. “Save a lion,” it said, “shoot a developer.” It wasn’t meant to be a death threat. Klein knew that. It was put there by a local backwoods no-growth hippie who couldn’t think of anything better to do with his time than screw up another man’s property with petty acts of malice. Since when had it been a crime to be a building contractor?

  People said that Orange County was one big suburb, but the truth was that there were thousands of acres of wilderness left in the county. You could draw in another half million people and not even crowd them—not any more than they were already crowded. What the guy with the bumper sticker needed was a dose of reality therapy. Progress actually was manifest destiny. There was no stopping it.

  You could define it any way you wanted to. You could hate the very idea of it. You could go to community meetings and make speeches from a plywood podium. Your opinion wasn’t worth a steel slug. The stone-cold fact was that smart people were going to make a dollar by putting their money on growth. The thing was to figure out how to do it right, without screwing things up.

  Klein looked out through the french doors into the backyard, where the wind ruffled the surface of the pool. He had built this house on spec a few years ago, at the end of the road in Trabuco Oaks, where the old Parker ranch had been. When he couldn’t sell it, he and Lorna had moved into it. Now it was worth upwards of half a million dollars.

  Most of that was a result of the last couple of years of heavy real estate inflation, and all of it was leveraged, most of the equity sunk into the deal he had going out in Trabuco Canyon. When it paid off, though, he’d walk away with double what he owed.

  That’s when he’d tell Lorna about it. He had found over the past few years that you kept most of your dreams and schemes concealed. Your wife wasn’t your business partner. He unhanded the newspaper that lay on the coffee table and took a look at the headlines, then dropped it again. Later he’d read the baseball. Somehow he didn’t give a damn about the rest of it.

  He heard the rattle of a Volkswagen engine out on the street—his only neighbor, waking up the local dog population. She was one of the community’s assets, although sometimes she was too smart for her own good. Her kid was okay, too—all boy. Klein had shown him how to catch a baseball the right way, holding his glove up instead of upside down, like most kids wanted to do. The kid would get right out in front of a ground ball, too, and stop it, instead of stepping aside and reaching for it. Klein would have coached Little League if he’d had a son.

  For a moment he daydreamed, picturing a son of his own. Somehow he knew just what the boy would look like. It was strange how you could miss something that had never existed. Klein was a practical man, and he knew that dreams were just so much air. And yet when it came to the son he wanted but couldn’t have, the air that filled the empty space was just as solid as flesh and blood and bone. It was probably crazy, thinking like that, but as long as he knew it was crazy, then he could go ahead and dream.

  He walked into the kitchen and spread low-fat cream cheese across a puffed rice cake. He was up to two hundred sit-ups a day and eighty laps in the pool. In two weeks he’d be fifty-five years old, but he had never been as fit as he was now. After checking his watch he looked at the portable phone on the counter, wondering whether the call this morning would be good news, bad news, or just the usual games.

  Klein had a man making inquiries out in Trabuco Canyon, but he was pretty much a dough-head, or pretended to be; you couldn’t always tell. His name was Bernard Pomeroy—”Just call me Barney.” Although that wasn’t the name he was using at the moment. He shook hands too much and he wanted to call you by your first name, a lot. There was nothing that sounded more like a car salesman than first-naming people you didn’t know, and in fact Barney Pomeroy hustled cars at a Mercedes dealership down at the beach during the week. He worked for Klein on the side. There were other partners, but all of them were silent. Barney Pomeroy should have been. He was worthless, or worse, in about eighteen ways.

  Klein’s business angle out in the canyon wasn’t illegal, strictly speaking, but aspects of it were edgy, and the whole thing was strictly under the table. There were other reasons, too, that Klein couldn’t just tell Pomeroy to go to hell. Getting rid of him would be a complicated thing, and Klein didn’t need that kind of complication right now. He had enough without it. His marriage, his bank account, his nerves, everything was strung tight as a wire.

  “¡Imelda! ¡Escuche!” he said suddenly, looking back out into the living room. The young Mexican maid rubbed at the furniture with a dustrag. “¿Dónde está la señora?”

  “Está durmiendo.”

  Asleep. Lorna was still asleep. Sometimes it disgusted him how she could spend so much of her life unconscious. And when she woke up, long about ten, she’d spend two hours putting on her face. Why bother getting up at all? On the other hand, once she had her face on she was what a man in his business needed—a wife that looked right, who knew what to wear and how to wear it. It took Lorna a while to get the engines up to full rev, but then she was showroom quality.

  Last night she had looked dynamite. There wasn’t a man at the party that hadn’t been cadging looks at her. What had Klein said at the party that had been so funny? He tried to remember exactly how it went; otherwise it didn’t make any sense. A television had been on, out by the pool. A highbrow historical program on PBS—some sort of documentary about Israel. A little man with a crazy person’s idea of a haircut had been speaking. “Who the hell’s that?” Klein had asked out loud. “He’s Begin,” Winters had said, and Klein had nodded seriously, and then said, “Hell, if you looked like that, you’d be beggin’, too.”

  The joke had torn everyone up, especially Winters. People couldn’t repeat it enough times to satisfy themselves. It had gone from room to room like a laugh virus. He had roped in something like six potential front men just on the strength of having said something that funny. Thinking about it now, he nearly laughed all over again, and he pictured Winters, a big man with a face like a boiled ham, laughing so hard that it h
ad left him gasping for breath. Winters was one of his silent partners. He represented a firm called Sloane Investment Services, which would pretty much own the deed to Klein’s house if his business dealings out in the canyon failed.

  He pushed the thought out of his mind, then abruptly remembered Lorna trying to tell her own joke right afterward. She had been out in the kitchen for an hour or so with Uncle Gin and Aunt Tonic, and that hadn’t helped matters. When everyone was laughing at Klein’s joke, she had come into the room, and then when someone told her what Klein had said, she had smiled, but pretty clearly hadn’t understood it. Almost at once she had announced that she had a better one.

  Somehow, she had thought it would be a good idea to work through the naked man and the elephant joke, of all the damned stupid things: “What did the elephant say to the naked man?” the joke went. Then the punch line: “How do you breathe through that little trunk?” Hah, hah, hah. That’s what it was worth, about three hahs, and that was when you told it right.

  Anyway, while everyone except Lorna was still laughing about the Begin joke, she had stood up straight, as if reciting, and started out: “What did the elephant say to the naked man?” There had been a silence in the room, partly out of embarrassment. Klein had wanted to kill her. Then, with a loopy grin, she had delivered the punch line, or what she remembered as the punch line: “How do you breathe through that dick?” she had said.

  The silence lasted another five seconds, and then the room just came apart. People were laughing so hard that drinks got sloshed onto the carpet. One man got chest pains, and they had to lay him out on the couch until he could take his nitro tablet and boost his heart back up to full power. Klein’s Begin joke was forgotten, although when he had reminded people of it later, they still thought it was pretty funny.

  On the way home, Lorna had wanted to talk about her joke, how successful it had been. “Wasn’t I funny?” she had asked.

  “A scream,” he had said, and then he realized that she had no clue that she had screwed up the punch line, that people were laughing because she had gotten it so stupidly and inconceivably wrong. She had never figured that out. So he had told her, very patiently, right there in the car….

  He elbowed the unpleasant memory into the back of his mind and watched Imelda’s legs as she dusted her way across the room. She was just about to leave when he signaled her again. She smiled, and he wondered what her smile meant. There was a lot in a smile, if you knew how to look. Sometimes he wondered if her smile was meant to ridicule him.

  “Quita usted el papel de la puerta” he said, gesturing toward the front of the house where the offensive bumper sticker was still glued to the door.

  “Sí, señor, ¿cuál puerta?”

  “En … el frente. De la entrada.”

  Feeling lousy, he broke up the rest of his rice cake with the point of the knife. Lorna drank too much. Unless it was a social occasion, she didn’t get started until evening, but then she got toasted fast. By seven-thirty she was gone. You might as well talk to the television set. It had gotten to the point where she’d sleep all night sitting in her chair, oblivious, but that had scared her badly enough that she’d cut back a little.

  He stared out the window toward the tree-shaded hills, suddenly recalling the dream that had awakened him again early that morning. There was something in the windy morning, in the sagebrush smell of the air, that suggested the dream, and he sat forward, his heart racing, watching the tree shadows on the grassy hillside. He could almost swear that one of them hadn’t been a shadow at all, that a woman in a black dress had been walking beneath the trees along the trail that descended from the ridge. Now there was nothing.

  His heart fluttered, and unconsciously he rubbed his chest. The first moments of the dream replayed in his mind—the anticipation, the windy moonlight, the sudden appearance of the woman—and he watched uneasily as the wind stirred the trees now, their shadows shifting like the surface of a dark sea.

  6

  PETER CLIMBED INTO THE SUBURBAN, TOSSED THE BAG with the spud guns onto the backseat, and drove out onto Chapman Avenue again. Just before Amanda and David went off to Hawaii last week, David promised to send postcards. It was his first plane trip, complete with a ride in the airport limo, and so he was going to send the first card from the airport. Peter had given him a little packet of stamps. No postcards had come, from the airport or anywhere else.

  It wasn’t like David to neglect to send the card. Like Amanda, he was organized and responsible to a fault, especially for a ten-year-old. It shouldn’t have taken two days for the card to make it across town.

  Regardless of what his marriage had come to, fifteen years of it had made Peter feel necessary, and the feeling was something he couldn’t lose overnight. He had told Amanda that he would look at the front brakes on her Honda while she was gone. He couldn’t have her paying a hundred fifty bucks for a brake job, not for something that took thirty minutes and a twelve-dollar trip to the Pep Boys.

  The banners at Selman Chevrolet whipped on their lines, blowing straight out toward the ocean, and a big tumble-weed, freed at last from whatever lot it had grown up in, rolled across the Tustin Avenue intersection, only to be knocked to pieces by a pickup truck gunning away east, toward the foothills.

  Instead of stopping at the Pep Boys for brake linings, Peter crossed the intersection and turned right on Monterey, pulling up to the curb outside the house. The house now rather than his house. Each day brought new revelations. Just out of habit he was tempted to haul out the lawn rake and clean up the windblown leaves and papers that choked the flower beds.

  Through the open window of the Suburban he could hear the distant growl of a lawnmower, and he could see that the girl down at the corner house on Maple was washing her car in the driveway. Weekend mornings in the suburb— the smell of bacon and coffee through an open kitchen window, kids playing on the sidewalk, the hissing of lawn sprinklers. Maybe you had to get away from it to see it all clearly again.

  He climbed out of the car and walked up onto the porch. The blinds were drawn across the front windows. He knocked but he could tell straight off that the house was empty. They were in Hawaii. They wouldn’t be home for a week. He had known that but had knocked anyway. It wasn’t his house anymore and he couldn’t just walk in uninvited, even when he knew the house was empty.

  He headed up the driveway into the backyard, found the back door key inside a hollow plastic rock in the flower bed, then stepped up onto the back porch to let himself in. Amanda’s cat, Tully, appeared out of nowhere and darted up onto the porch, brushing against his leg and purring loudly. A neighbor was feeding it, but it was used to having the run of the house. Peter stooped to pet it, then blocked the door with his leg and slipped inside. If he let Tully in he’d be chasing the cat around the house all morning.

  “Relax,” Peter said to it. “You’ve only got a week to go and you’re back in. For me there’s no end in sight.”

  He closed the door behind him. The house smelled and sounded empty, nothing but dusty echoes. With no idea what he was looking for, he wandered from the service porch into the kitchen. A glass pitcher half-full of lime Kool-Aid sat on the kitchen table alongside two nearly empty glasses, a plate speckled with cookie crumbs and a single broken Oreo, and a dealt-out deck of playing cards.

  Crazy Eights. It was David’s favorite game, and the three of them had played countless hands of it, drinking green Kool-Aid and eating Oreos, arguing off and on about the wisdom of dunking the Oreos in the Kool-Aid and whether you ought to unscrew them first and eat the center and then dunk either half separately, so that you seemed to have two cookies instead of one. Suddenly hungry, he opened the cupboard and searched for the open package of Oreos, but he couldn’t find it.

  How could it still be going on without him? Peter was a part of it, part of the ritual. It was Peter who had always made the Kool-Aid.

  Well, now somebody else was making it. He carried the glasses and pitcher to the sink
and rinsed them out. He could play out that part of the ritual anyway. It wasn’t like Amanda to leave dirty dishes on the table—an open invitation to ants.

  He went out into the dining room and then into David’s room, which was almost appallingly neat. Books and toys were carefully arranged on the shelves that Peter had built when David was—what? Two? He sat at the foot of the bed, looking around at the posters on the wall and at the airplane models and sets of high-tech building blocks. Over one of the headboard bedposts hung a wooden heart on a string. Peter and David had cut it out on the band saw five years ago, when David was on his Oz kick. The only sign of disorder in the room was that the closet door stood open, blocking some of the sunlight that shone through the window.

  Peter gave the wooden heart a shove, so that it swung back and forth like a pendulum. It dawned on him that he was chasing ghosts, driving like crazy out of the hills in order to wander around the empty house. What did he expect to find? A clue to what? Outside, the wind blew past the lonesome willow tree in the yard, making the branches sway. He sat daydreaming for a moment, nearly hypnotized by the easy dance of the slender willow branches.

  Then, in a rush, he was struck with the uncanny notion that he had seen this very same thing before—early this morning. Except that his predawn hallucination had been even more real, if that were possible, with its kitchen sounds and smell of charcoal smoke. Now, except for the swishing of branches beyond the window, all was quiet, and the only smell in the air was the faintly dusty odor of a closed-up house.