Night Relics

by James P. Blaylock

  “Uh-huh,” he said. “Can I look out?”

  “One look and then back to bed,” she said to him, steering him toward the window. The police were already out of the car, moving up the Kleins’ driveway. “Doesn’t look like much is going on,” she said. “I think maybe it was some animal got into his backyard—coyotes, probably.”

  “That’s because of his fence,” Bobby said.

  “I bet that’s it. He needs one like ours. Now, time for bed.”

  “But I heard someone, like, knocking on the back door or something.”

  “That was just Peter.”

  “Peter? He’s over?”

  “Yeah. He stopped by for a little bit to find out about Sheba.”

  Bobby scooted away from her, straight into the kitchen, Beth following, trying to think what to say, wondering whether to grab him.

  Peter was standing nonchalantly by the service porch sink, rubbing his hands with a dish towel out of the clothes hamper. The light over his head was still off, but there was kitchen light shining in, and she could see that his face was clean and his hair was wet and smoothed back. He didn’t look happy, but the look of crazy confusion was gone from his face.

  “Hey, man,” he said, holding his hand out, palm up.

  “Hey,” Bobby said, slapping his hand. Then he said, “Man, your jeans are dirty!”

  “I worked hard to get these jeans dirty like this. That’s the style now. You don’t like them?” He edged toward the kitchen, positioning himself so that he couldn’t be seen through any of the windows.

  “Sure,” Bobby said. “I don’t like wearing jeans. What happened to your face?”

  “Walked right into a tree limb. You ever do that?”

  “I had three stitches once from broken glass.”

  “That’s worse than a tree limb,” Peter said. “This is just a scratch.”

  “What are you looking at? The Kleins’?” Bobby boosted himself up on the washer and looked out through the side window. “You see better with the light out, huh?”

  Beth looked past him. The two policemen stood in the Kleins’ backyard, one of them gesturing toward the fence. Klein and Lorna were both in bathrobes, and the door to their poolhouse was hanging crazily, the paint scarred off in a long slash. She almost looked at Peter, but didn’t. He needed time to get around to telling her about it. She felt cold, though. Something had gone out of control tonight. She had half prepared herself to deal with a prowler, but this was something beyond her. She glanced at him, and he smiled and shrugged and shook his head slightly. She took the dish towel from him and dabbed the line of fresh blood on his cheek.

  Bobby drummed his feet on the front of the washer and then hopped down. “Where did the coyotes go?” he asked Peter.

  “What coyotes?”

  “The ones that were in the Kleins’ backyard,” Beth said to him. “We think that maybe they got in through the bars of the fence. I was thinking that it was a good idea we didn’t have bars. They can’t get into our yard.”

  “That’s right,” Peter said. “There were a couple of them, I think. Probably they went back out through the fence. They aren’t going to hurt anybody anyway, unless you’re a cat.”

  “Yeah, but there are a couple holes in our fence,” Bobby said. “One goes into the Kleins’ yard. It’s where that possum was going back and forth, remember?”

  Bobby looked out through the window in the door now, into the backyard, apparently seeing nothing interesting. Then he looked down toward the porch and said, “What’s all the flowers?”

  “What?” Beth asked, looking out herself. There, at the corner of the porch, sat a vase of flowers. Out of curiosity she started to open the door, then realized what it was, turned to Bobby, and said, “Time for bed now,” in a no-nonsense voice.

  “Aw,” he said. “Can’t I stay up with you guys?”

  “Nope,” Beth said. “Hit the sack. Peter and I want to talk.”

  Bobby rolled his eyes. “Adults talk,” he said, as if it were the stupidest, most pointless activity in the world.

  Beth propelled him forward, through the kitchen and into the bedroom, thinking all the time about the flowers on the porch. There wasn’t any doubt who left them. He’d been there again. She had come in through the back door when Mr. Ackroyd dropped them off late that afternoon, and the flowers hadn’t been there.

  “And stay there,” she said, tucking Bobby in and settling the quilt over him.

  “Read me a story,” he said.

  “No story. It’s too late for a story.”

  “Then put in a tape. ‘Baby Beluga.’ ”

  “All right.” She searched through the tapes in the tape box, found the right one, and slid it into the tape player, leaving the volume turned up a little higher than she usually would. There was no use Bobby listening to her and Peter talk, and he’d fall asleep anyway, no matter what the volume was like. His eyes were at half mast already, and he yawned wide, turning over onto his side and shutting his eyes as the music started up.

  By the time she got back out onto the porch, Peter had brought in the flowers. He stood in the darkness, peering out the window. The police were still in the Kleins’ backyard, and one of them walked over to the fence, boosted himself up, and looked over. He dropped, walking back toward his partner and dusting his hands off.

  “Let’s go into the kitchen,” she said. “I’ll put on some coffee.”

  “I’m going to stay out of the light for another minute,” he said. “Till the cops leave.”

  He handed her the flowers. “You’ve got an admirer,” he said, then abruptly shivered as if he’d suddenly gotten a chill.

  “I know I do,” she said, and kissed him on the scratched cheek. In a while she’d tell him about it.

  “Don’t tell me you’re a vampire,” he said softly.

  “Only in the dark.” She set the flowers down on top of the washer and put her arm around his shoulder, pulling him close to her. Together they watched the night through the window.

  36

  THE POOL LIGHT GLOWED THROUGH THE DEAD LEAVES that covered the water. Klein had pulled the chaise longue free of the pool, but he didn’t bother trying to net out the leaves. There were too many, and he was too tired. He swam slowly, pushing clots of leaves away with each stroke, watching them swirl away into the lamplit depths and not bothering to peel off the limp leaves that clung to his face when he raised his head to breathe. A lawn chair sat on the bottom of the deep end, squarely over the drain, lamplight shining between the plastic strips on the backrest like the sun through clouds.

  He moved his arms mechanically, letting his feet trail behind him, pushing off the wall and plowing into the leaves again. Lorna was gone; he didn’t know where, probably to her sister’s. She had put a few things in an overnight bag and then left without saying anything to him except that tomorrow was Imelda’s day off, as if that piece of trivia had been worth opening her mouth for.

  He couldn’t even pretend that he blamed her—her going away like that, giving him the silent treatment, and he wondered how much she knew, what she’d seen. He thought of her finding him like that, hugging the goddamn sofa pillow, and he flushed with shame.

  He stopped swimming and leaned on the coping, looking out into the hills. What had Lorna said about them acting like they were on different sides in a war, when really they were on the same side? Sometimes she could say things just right, but he couldn’t see the lightness of it until later, after he’d blown off a lot of steam and managed to hurt her. He had never thought about whether there was such a thing as too late, and he wondered abruptly if he was scared a little by the idea of Lorna sober. Up till now it had always been easy to win.

  Why the hell hadn’t he told her about things this afternoon when she’d pleaded with him to get it out in the open? Hell, because this—this thing in the poolhouse—wasn’t what she meant, that’s why. He couldn’t tell her about something that he himself didn’t understand, something he couldn’t fo
resee. He wondered if she had seen the woman leave, known what he was doing out there? He wasn’t sure himself if the woman had left at all, or had simply evaporated into the shadows.

  His thoughts and fears trailed away into nothing, into fatigue, and he pushed off the wall and set out tiredly again. How long had he been swimming? An hour? Two hours? The moon was halfway across the sky. He felt loose and enervated now, and out of nowhere came the memory of something he’d read once, about someone who dived to the bottom of a pool, curled his fingers into the drain cover, and then drowned, unable or unwilling to pull loose.

  When he lifted his head to breathe, he could feel that the wind was starting to blow again. Little wavelets pushed the leaves into the shallow end, and the water slapped his face, getting into his mouth. He submerged his head, treading water over the sunken chair, then let himself sink, exhaling slowly, settling into the chair and gripping the aluminum arms to hold himself in. The leaves curling down into the water looked black from underneath, and the wind churned the surface so that clusters of leaves and twigs were stirred under, drifting in slowly moving currents.

  His lungs ached, and he closed his throat and watched the leaves swirl. They caught the pool light and turned from black to gold. He wondered if it was physically possible to open his throat and fill his lungs with water, and what Lorna would think if she found him that way tomorrow, dead at the bottom of the pool, sitting in a lawn chair.

  Christ, he nearly laughed out loud. He would drown if he didn’t quit acting like some kind of stupid … He pushed off hard with his feet, hanging on to the chair and carrying it with him to the surface. He sucked air into his lungs as he kicked toward the side and with both hands managed to push the chair up onto the coping. Immediately it tottered in the wind, nearly falling back in. “No, you don’t, you dirty bastard,” he said, talking to the wind rather than to the chair, and he gave it a shove that propelled it into the flower bed along the wall of the house. Then he climbed up the ladder, nearly falling back into the pool, surprised at how bone weary he was.

  Inside the house he caught sight of the half-full decanter of scotch. The glass was gone. He picked it up and carried it into the kitchen, pulling the scotch bottle out of the cupboard and dumping the contents of the decanter into the bottle before rinsing the empty decanter at the sink and putting the bottle away. He went into the bedroom, where he left his wet trunks in a heap on the floor. After a moment’s hesitation he climbed into bed on Lorna’s side and shut his eyes, breathing her scent, his face on her pillow.

  MONDAY

  …trifles make the sum of life.

  —Charles Dickens

  David Copperfield

  1

  KLEIN WOKE UP FAST OUT OF A DEAD SLEEP THE NEXT morning and bolted out of bed, standing in the middle of the bedroom floor and looking around, breathing heavily, overwhelmed with sudden fear. Then he saw his swimming trunks on the floor and the sunlight through the curtains. He moved the trunks with his toe, grimacing at the pink stain that the fluorescent nylon had left on the white Berber carpet. He’d get Imelda to scrub it out, except that it was Imelda’s day off. He looked at the alarm clock—nearly noon. No call from Pomeroy, thank God.

  He knew without having to look that the house was empty.

  He got dressed and went into the kitchen, sitting down in front of the phone. After a few moments of thinking he punched in Lorna’s sister’s number. She answered after the fourth ring, just as he was about to hang up so that he wouldn’t have to listen to the phone message.

  “Joanne?”

  “Speaking,” she said, then waited. She knew who it was. Lorna was there, or had been.

  “Can I talk to her?” he asked.

  “She’s not here now.”

  “Yeah,” Klein said. “Just let me talk to her.”

  “She’s not here, Lance. She was here but she’s gone. If I were her I’d be scouting out lawyers, after what you did to her.”

  “Whoa,” Klein said. “Wait. What the hell did she tell you?”

  “She had to tell somebody, for God’s sake. She could hardly talk it over with you. She was a goddamn wreck when she got here.”

  “What’d she say, Joanne?” Klein asked tiredly. “I need to know. There was a lot of confusion last night. I’m not even sure I know what happened. She wouldn’t say two words to me.”

  After a silence she said, “Okay, Lance. I’ll tell you. She opened up with the whole story—the phone call, the jealous husband, you out in the shed or wherever it was you took the bimbo to have your way with her while your wife was asleep right inside the goddamn house, for Christ’s sake. You want more? If you had any kind of shame at all you would have died there when she found you. She even told me what you said: ‘I can explain.’ She started laughing so hard when she told me that I nearly had to slap her. Then she curled up on the damned couch and wouldn’t say anything more, just laid there and cried herself to sleep.”

  There was silence again, but he could hear her breathing hard on the other end of the line. He stood with his eyes closed, his mind stuttering. “What phone call?” he asked.

  “What?”

  “A phone call. You said something about a phone call and a jealous husband. What phone call?”

  “From the guy. The one that’s been calling her. One of your friends or something, called her up and ratted you out. What’d you do? Brag about it to your pals beforehand?”

  Klein counted slowly to ten, composing himself. “No,” he said finally. “I didn’t brag about it. There’s so much … so much Lorna doesn’t know.”

  “Thank God, I’d say.”

  “Where is she now?”

  “Why don’t you leave her alone, give her a little space?”

  He fought down the urge to tell her what to do with her advice. “Give me a break,” he said. “Give us both a break.”

  “And what are you going to do if I give you a break, if I tell you where she is? Run over there and yell? Push someone around? Get into someone’s face?”

  “Please,” he said.

  After a moment Joanne said, “All right. I’ll give you a break, but for God’s sake, don’t screw it up this time. She drove out into the canyon. There’s that old man out there, the one she worked with at the library. She wanted to cry on his shoulder, I guess.”

  “Yeah,” Klein said. “I know him. Thanks, Joanne.”

  “Uh-huh,” she said. “Just try to do the right thing this time, will you, Lance? And let me tell you something, because I know you’re thinking about it. No, she didn’t drink anything last night when she showed up. I offered her a drink and she turned it down flat. What she told me last night was her talking, not alcohol.”

  “Yeah,” Klein said again. “Thanks.” She hung up then, and he listened to the silence until the dial tone started up. At loose ends now, he walked to the front door, picked up the mail, and shuffled through it, pulling out a padded manila envelope with something sliding around inside—some kind of junk mail, maybe a real estate come-on. But it was full postage, mailed locally, and there was no return address. The lettering on the front had been rubbed on, a couple of the letters already peeling away from the paper.

  He closed his eyes, feeling his forehead tighten with a sudden tension. This was it; this was why Pomeroy hadn’t given him a wake-up call—what all his talk yesterday morning had been leading to. He tore it open, scanning the contents of the several pages of Xerox. It took him a couple of moments to understand what it was exactly. Inside the envelope lay a cassette tape. There was no letter of instruction, no list of demands. Pomeroy wasn’t a hasty man; he was working this into a long-term investment, like some kind of carefully built-up tax-sheltered retirement.

  Klein walked into the living room, bent down, and turned on the automatic ignition in the fireplace. The gas burner whooshed on, flames curling up around the cleverly painted concrete logs. One by one he fed the Xerox pages into the flames, picking up the unburned scraps and feeding them back in until
nothing but ash remained. He tore up the envelope then, and tossed it into the fire, too. Then he snagged the tape out of the cassette with his fingernail and jerked it out, yanking yards and yards of it onto the living room floor. Slamming the plastic cartridge down onto the brick hearth, he pulled out the ornamental fireplace poker and beat the little rectangle of black plastic until the iron head of the poker flew off its spindly brass pole and clunked into the leg of the coffee table.

  He heaped the tape into the fire, watching it flare up and disappear, then snapped each half of the cassette shell apart with his hands, getting up finally to throw the pieces away in the trash compactor. He washed the ash off his hands at the sink, over and over again with Ivory soap out of the squeeze bottle as if it were Pomeroy and all his filth that he was washing away.

  He had told himself not two days ago that although he had been guilty of crimes, of big mistakes, all of that had been in the past, years ago. He’d met Lorna since then, started a new life. But suddenly he was neck deep in it again, complicit in Pomeroy’s breaking into Beth’s house, in the rats in the damned water tank, in every single damned twisted crime that Pomeroy was out there committing in both their names. And the insane truth of it was that he hadn’t even needed Pomeroy’s help in what happened last night. What Joanne said was true; he’d screwed things up with Lorna entirely on his own.

  Help fighting the war—that’s what Lorna had offered him yesterday. And he’d turned away from her and gone off to fight it himself, with a claw hammer. Maybe it would have been better for all of them if he’d had a chance to use it.

  Outside it was sunny and almost hot, the wind fallen. The poolhouse door still hung open, and he realized that he could barely look at it. He pushed the button to open the garage door, then went out through the back, fetching the screw gun off the bench along with a box of wooden kitchen matches before heading for the poolhouse. One by one he jammed kitchen matches into the stripped-out screw holes in the doorjamb, snapping the matches off flush with the wood. He tilted the door back into place, forcing it upright with his knee against the knob, then ran the screws back into the plugged-up holes. He opened and shut the door a few times, then looked at where the bolt had splintered free of the wood. He’d have to chisel it out and scab in a piece, then fill the door panel and repaint the whole thing.