Lights Out

by Douglas Clegg

  “He kills his family and then donates books?” I asked.

  Ed didn’t smile. “Believe it or not, Joe was a smart man, well-read, quiet, but strong. Admired, here in town, too. When a man cracks, you never know where the light’s gonna show through. I guess with Joe it just showed through a bit strong.”

  “Did you know them well?”

  He shook his head. “Barely. I was involved in the library here, but also the County museum over in Berdoo. Joe was always nice. Careful with books, too. That’s about how well I knew him. A hello-goodbye-nice weather kind of thing. It bothers you too, though, huh?”

  I assumed he meant living in the house, knowing about the murders. “Not too much. I find it more fascinating than frightening.”

  “Well, always got to be some mystery in life, anyway, stirs the blood up a little, but it seems strange to me she never showed.”

  I asked, “Who?”

  “The oldest one. Kim. She was sweet and pretty. Fifteen. Some say she ran about a year before the killings—she may have had a boyfriend here, met on the sly because her folks were real strict about that kind of thing. Maybe she ran off with him. Maybe she did the killings, gossip was. But I don’t think so—she was fifteen and sweet and small, like a little bird. Me, I think she got killed, too, only Joe, he did it somewhere else. I hope I’m wrong; I hope that pretty little girl is all grown up and living across the world and putting it all behind her best she can.”

  6

  My wife was sitting at her canvas, painting, and I arrived swearing, as I went through the area packed with art supplies that surrounded her. “Damn it all,” I said, “this is the only garage in creation without garage things.”

  “Damn right,” she responded, “now take your damn language and get the hell out of here.” All of this in a calm, carefully modulated voice.

  I gave a false laugh and slapped the inside wall with my hand. “Now, where in hell would a shovel be when I need one?”

  Jackie pointed with her paintbrush to the courtyard. “He’d know, Mister Brainiac.” She looked more beautiful now, with the late afternoon light on her hair, her face seeming unlined, like she always had, to me, and it amazed me, that moment, how love did that between two people: how it takes you out of time, and makes you virtually untouchable.

  I turned in the direction of her pointing—it was to Stu, our gardener, kneeling beside the bird of paradise, trimming back the dying stems that thrust from between the enormous, stiff leaves. I went out into the yard. “You have a shovel I can borrow?”

  He didn’t hear me at first.

  He was humming. When he noticed my shadow, he turned toward me.

  He’d begun to look older than his age. Not on the surface of his skin (except in laugh and smile lines), but in something I’d seen mainly in cities: a hard life. Not difficult, for all lives are difficult to varying degrees and some people suffer with more relish than others; but hard, as if the lessons learned were not pleasant ones. I had always thought the gardening life would be a fairly serene one.

  “I need a shovel,” I repeated.

  “No problem,” he said, and stood. He led me out to his truck and reached in the back of it, withdrawing a hoe and a shovel. “I assume,” he said, “You’re planting.”

  “Just digging,” I said.

  He nodded, handed me the shovel, and set the hoe back down.

  “You’ve done a good job around here,” I said.

  He almost smiled with pride, but another kind of pride seemed to hold him back. “It’s my life,” he said simply, then returned to work.

  I watched him go, his overalls muddy, the muscles in his back and shoulders so pronounced that he seemed to ripple like something dropped into still water. Then I turned. I didn’t know if I was going to bury a dead animal, or to dig something up, something that had been in the ground for four decades. I used the shovel to press my way through the blackberry bush fence that had become thin with autumn, and headed into the field.

  The stink of the dead pig came back to me, along with the scent of its orange blossom garlands. There was a wind from downfield, and it brought with it these, and other smells: of car exhaust, of pies baking, of rotting oranges and other fruit ripening. It almost made bearable the task I was about. When I got to the brief clutch of orange trees, I saw the flies had devoured much of the dead animal, but, oddly, the local coyotes had left it alone.

  Behind me, a man’s voice: “You planning on burying it?”

  I turned; it was Stu, the gardener. He shrugged. “Decided to follow you out here. Figured you could use some help.”

  He reached up to a branch of one of the trees and plucked off a small blossom. He brought it to his nose, inhaled, and then to his lips. It seemed to me that he kissed the blossom before letting it fall.

  “Do you know anything about this?” I asked, indicating the pig. “Local kids?”

  Stu shook his head. He had kind but weary eyes, as if he’d been on the longest journey and had seen much, but now wanted only sleep. “You won’t be burying the pig, will you, Mr. Richter?”

  “No,” I said.

  “What the hell,” he said. “I know you know about it.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I hear her sometimes,” he said, “when I touch the leaves.”

  “Who?”

  He looked dead at me, almost angrily. “I don’t have nothing to hide. I didn’t put her there.” He pointed to the ground beneath the dead pig.

  “The dead girl.”

  He whispered, “Not dead.” His eyes seemed to grow smaller, lids pressing down hard, like pressing grapes for wine, tears. “I don’t believe it.”

  “You were her friend,” I said.

  “I love her. I always will love her.” Stu wiped at his eyes. “Look around. This field used to be nothing. Dirt. Nothing would grow. No orange trees. And your house, dead all around, a desert. But she’s done this.” He spread his arms out wide, as if measuring the distance of the earth.

  “Did you do it?” I asked, even though I didn’t want to.

  “I killed the pig, if that’s what you’re asking. It’s an offering.”

  “To whom? To Kim Redlander?” I glanced at the ground, wondering how deep she had been buried; buried alive for a mystery more ancient than what was written down in a book.

  “To the goddess,” he said.

  We went out into the field, as two farmers might after a long day of work, and spoke of the past.

  He said, “I have faith in this. I have faith. It wasn’t strong at first. He told me he and her mother went all crazy and it was their festival time or something, and what he did to the other kid — and to Kim — was because she didn’t come up that spring. He went wild, Joe did. I read all the books, later, and I came to a kind of understanding. I spoke to Joe before he killed himself. He lost his faith, you know? He didn’t believe anymore. But I had nothing but faith. I know she’s there. Look.” He showed me the palm of his dirt-smeared hand. “She’s in the earth, I can see her, there.”

  Joe Redlander and his family buried their daughter alive, I thought.

  For the Mother of Creation, buried her in the earth, Persephone going to the underworld to be with her sworn consort, and they must have expected her to return in the spring. A family of religious nuts, and one teenage boy, hopelessly in love with a girl.

  In love forever.

  “It never happened,” Stu said, “that’s what her dad told me. They waited in the spring, and she didn’t return. But I knew she was still here. I know she’ll come back, one fine spring day. Till then, gardening seems to bring me closer to her.”

  “She’s dead, Stu. I know you weren’t responsible. But she’s dead. It’s been over forty years.” I was shivering a little, because I sensed the truth in his story.

  He looked across the land, back to the orange trees. “She’s in everything here, everything. You may not believe, but I do. I’ve known things. I’ve seen things. She’s down there, fifteen, b
eautiful, her hands touching the roots of the trees. She’s going to come up one day. I absolutely know it.”

  As we both stood there, I knew that I was going to have to fire Stu, because there was something unbalanced in his story, in his fervor. I didn’t think I could bear to look out the windows and see him gardening, thinking of love and loss as he tended flowers.

  I knew I would lose sleep for many nights to come, looking out at that field, wondering.

  7

  Then, one night the following April, someone set fire to the field, and in spite of the best efforts of the local firemen, my wife and I awoke the next morning and found we were living next door to a blackened wasteland. I got my morning coffee and went to the edge of the field, near the road. The orange trees were standing, but had been turned to crouching embers. I walked across dirt, stepping around the bits of twig that continued to give off breaths of fugitive smoke.

  Where the girl had been buried: a deep gouge in the earth.

  I watched the field after that but saw nothing special. In a month new grass was growing, and by summer, only through the dark bald patches could anyone tell that there’d been a fire at all.

  And today, while my wife painted a picture of the courtyard, I went into the garage and found an old tool, a scythe. I took it up and went out into the field to mow. This action was not taken because of some fear or knowledge, for the Mystery remained—I didn’t know if some animal had been digging at the hole where Kim Redlander was offered to the world, or if Stu himself had dug her up days before, moving rotting bones to another resting place. I didn’t go to the field with any knowledge. I went singing into the field, cutting the hair of the earth, propelled by an urge that seemed older than any other.

  Some have called this instinct the Mystery, but the simpler term is Stu’s:

  Faith.

  I swiped the scythe across the fruit of her womb, then gave thanks and praise to the Mother all that day, for I could feel Her now, walking among her children; I spilled my own blood in the moistened dirt for Her.

  My wife called to me, waving from the yard, and I turned, holding fast to the bloodied scythe, while I heard a young girl whisper in my ear that faith demands sacrifice.

  Life was precious, for that moment, full of meaning, and wonder.

  I walked wearily but gladly across the field, and when I reached my wife, her face brightened.

  “You’ve found it,” she said.

  “What’s that?”

  “Your joy,” and she seemed truly happy for me.

  “I have.”

  I thought of Joe Redlander, and Stu, and Kim, the believers who brought me to this place.

  The scythe seemed to shine like a crescent moon in my hand as I brought it across my wife’s neck.

  Becoming Men

  A match struck; its tiny yellow flame illuminated the circle of boys, casting their faces in flickering.

  Ralph went first, his breath coming slowly because he still hadn’t recovered from the way they’d held him down; his asthma had kicked in slightly and they’d taken away his inhaler so he had to be careful.

  Slow, deep breaths. His eyes hurt just from the memory of the interrogation’s bright lights and then the bitter tears that followed his confession. Was he still crying? Even he wasn’t sure, but he tried to hold it in as much as possible, to hold in the little boy inside him who threatened to burst out and show the others that he was what he’d always feared himself to be: a weakling.

  The darting light of the match slapped yellow warpaint on all of their features.

  He closed his eyes and began, “I had just barely gotten to sleep — halfway in a dream and it was all kind of like a dream when I heard all the shouting, it was my dad, he was shouting like crazy.”

  Jesus de Miranda, the smallest boy of thirteen that Ralph had ever seen, said nothing but his eyes widened and he had a curious curl to his lips like he was about to say something, even wanted to, but could not. There was something compelling to his face, something withdrawn yet very proud.

  Ralph tried not to only look at him, because it made him feel little and ready to break down crying again, so he laughed like it didn’t matter, “And my dad is such a loud son of a bitch.”

  Jack jumped in, “My dad didn’t say a word. The bastard.”

  Hugh coughed. “My dad went nuts, he was just shouting, and my mom was crying, but even when the big guy grabbed me—”

  “The big black guy,” Jack added, then glanced at the others. The match died. Another one burst to life immediately; Ralph and his matchbook again.

  “A big white guy,” Marsh said, slapping Jack across the top of the head.

  “Yeah, a big white guy, wearing camouflage shit and his face was all green, it was freaky, I tell ya,” Ralph said, holding the piss-colored fire in his hands like a delicate small bird in front of the others so they could all see their own fear. “And I was so scared I pissed myself and my dad, when I saw him, he was practically crying but since I could tell they weren’t beat up I knew somehow that they had something to do with this, and it had something to do with that thing with my cousin from three days before and maybe with the fire that burned down this old shack, but I never really thought they’d do something like this, I mean, shit, this kind of Nazi bullshit—”

  “It’s scary,” Marsh said, and his voice seemed too small for his six-foot tall frame. He grasped his elbows, leaning forward on his knees. “I just smoked some pot. That was it. Not half as much as my friends.”

  “What did you do that got you sent here?” Ralph asked Jack.

  A silence.

  Match died.

  “Ralph,” someone said in the dark.

  Ralph wasn’t sure who it was, but he waited in the dark for a moment because the ghosts of their faces still hung there, photographed by the last light of the match.

  Scraped another one against the matchbook. The little flame came up.

  Marsh continued. “With me, I thought they’d killed my folks and my sister and they were gonna do something terrible to me. And then I wished it was a dream. All of it.”

  “They hit you hard?” Hugh asked.

  Marsh shrugged. “Yeah. They hit me. That’s all. I barely felt it by then. I just figured they were gonna kill me. I figured if I just concentrated or something it would all happen and then it would be over. I thought it was because of the time I bought pot and got more than I paid for. That’s what I thought. I didn’t even think. I just figured that was it. It was over.”

  “And it’s worse than that,” Jack said. “You know what I heard my mother say when they put the blindfold on me? I heard her say—”

  “No one cares,” Ralph said, too wisely. “They all lied.”

  The boys fell silent for a minute.

  “I thought it was gonna be like tough love or something.”

  “They sold us up a river.”

  Jesus opened his mouth as if to speak, but closed it again. Fear had sealed his lips.

  “They did it because they love me,” Jack said, but he was crying, he was fourteen and crying like a baby and Ralph decided then and there that he didn’t care what the others thought. He leaned over and threw his arm over Jack’s shoulder. It reminded him of when his little brother got scared of lightning or of nightmares, and even though Jack was his age, it seemed okay, it seemed like it was the only thing to do.

  Jack leaned his head against Ralph’s neck and wept while the others watched.

  Jesus de Miranda wept, too. Ralph asked him why, and he said it was because he was afraid of the dark.

  Ralph gave him one match to keep.

  “For an emergency,” he said, and all the boys watched as the little de Miranda boy put it in his pocket, as if the match were hope and someone needed to keep it.

  Ralph kept lighting his matches as other boys gathered around in the darkness and told their stories of woe, and wept, and gave up what fight they had in them.

  By the time Ralph’s last match died, mornin
g had come, and with it, silence until the foghorn blasted its wake-up call.

  TO BE A MAN

  YOU MUST KILL THE CHILD

  YOU MUST BURY THE CHILD

  YOU MUST GROW UP

  YOU MUST ACCEPT RESPONSIBILITY FOR YOUR ACTIONS

  YOU MUST TAKE ON THE RESPONSIBILITIES OF OTHERS

  YOU MUST BURN

  YOU MUST FREEZE

  YOU MUST GIVE YOURSELF TO US

  The words were emblazoned on the side of the barrack wall, and every morning, Ralph knew, he would see those words, every morning, no matter how hard he tried to resist them, they would enter his soul. In the line up, they had to shout out the words, they had to shout them out loud, louder, I can’t hear you, louder, over and over until it seemed as if those words were God.

  “Number one!” the big man named Cleft shouted so loud in rang in their ears, pounding his chest hard as if he were beating it into his heart, “I am your priest, your father, your only authority, understand? I am Sergeant Cleft, and my colleagues and I, your superiors in every way, are here to drill you until you break. We are not interested in bolstering your gutless egos. We are not interested in making men out of you. You are the worst kinds of boys imaginable, every one of your families has disowned you, and we intend to break you down as far as is humanly possible to go. Then, if you have what it takes, you will build yourself up from the tools we give you here. Right now, this is Hell to you. But when we are through grinding your bones and spirits, this will be heaven. I don’t want any quitters, either. You never give up, do you understand me, grunts? Never ever give up! This isn’t a camp for sissies and pansies, and you aren’t here because you been good little boys! You got sent here because you are headed for destruction! You got sent here because you couldn’t cut it like others your age! You got sent here before someone sent you to jail! Before you destroyed your families! Before you could keep up your stupid antisocial ways!”

  His barks sailed over them, for by dawn, even the terrified ones were ready to put up some resistance, even Ralph’s tears were dry and he spent the time imagining how to escape from this island in the middle of nowhere, how to get a message out to the authorities that he’d been kidnapped against his will, and then he was going to sue his parents for kidnapping, endangerment, and trauma.