Cage of Night

by Ed Gorman

  "You missed out on all the fun, huh?"

  "My old man used to tell me about R&R. You know, when they'd take you out of the jungle and send you to Australia or somewhere for a couple weeks vacation. You wouldn't believe some of the stories, man. My old lady gets real pissed when he tells the one about him sleeping with three different Oriental chicks in the same night."

  He was the first one of the kegger to come over to my tree stump and talk to me. He was skinny, and he wore a ponytail, and he had matching tiger tattoos on his forearms.

  He put out his hand. He was very earnest about it. "My name's Ken, man."

  "Nice to meet you, Ken."

  "I'm gonna do what you did."

  "Oh?"

  "Day we graduate, I'm goin' to the recruiter's office and join up." He shook his head. "I just wish there was a war on. I mean, that'd be the fun part of being in the service. War, and shit like that. You know what I mean?"

  "Army's a bunch've pussies," said another kid who stood nearby.

  He was big and he was mean and he'd probably had enough beer to get three or four people my size good and drunk for two days. He was trying to impress everybody by walking around without his shirt on. He looked to be at least as dumb as he was drunk.

  "Pussies," he repeated.

  "Fuck yourself, Sullivan," Ken said. "My old man ain't no pussy, I'll tell you that."

  "The hell if he ain't," Sullivan said. "And you're a pussy and so's this asshole."

  The asshole in question was yours truly.

  In the service I'd learned how to handle myself pretty well. But being called an asshole by an asshole like this didn't seem worth fighting over.

  Ken was of a different mind. "You call my old man a pussy again, Sullivan, I'll punch your face in."

  The beers went pluming into the air as Sullivan's arms sprung out just far enough to grab Ken by the throat and lift him up into the air. Sullivan was a lot more formidable than I'd given him credit for.

  Most of the people around the campfire were already shouting for Sullivan to put him down. But that wasn't going to happen. Ken's face was already dark with blood.

  "Put him down," I said.

  "Little faggot fucker," Sullivan said to Ken, choking him some more. He didn't seem to have heard me.

  I hit him as hard as I could in the kidney and I was gratified to hear him groan immediately. I followed up with two more punches to the same area. His grip had slipped but he still had a loose grasp of Ken so I slammed a fist hard into his ear.

  This definitely got his attention.

  He not only dropped Ken but turned to start for me. But he was too fat and too stupid to protect himself so I planted the steel-toe of my boot right into his crotch and as he dropped to his knees, I kicked him hard on the jaw for good measure.

  He started vomiting right away, and crying, but they were tears of rage and frustration. I'd scared him and that was an awful thing for somebody like Sullivan to acknowledge.

  I went over and took Ken by the elbow and dragged him down toward the river, picking us up two fresh beers as we passed a big iced aluminum tub.

  I said, eager to change the subject, "Who's that girl?"

  "I just want to thank you, man."

  "Just watch yourself. He's probably going to take another run at you tonight."

  "Or you."

  "Yeah," I said. "Maybe." Then, "Who's that girl?"

  "Which one?"

  "Blue sweater."

  "Cindy Brasher." He grinned at me slyly. "Like to get a sniff of her panties, wouldn't ya?"

  He was one elegant sonofabitch, no doubt about it.

  "She's pretty."

  "I wouldn't say that in front of David Myles."

  "That's the guy she's with?"

  "Yeah. Captain of the football team. Has about three colleges a week fly out here to try and recruit him. He's also a real bad drunk. Mean." He hoisted his paper cup of beer. "You want to share a joint?"

  "No, thanks."

  He looked at Cindy some more. "The funny thing is, you'd never know she was in the nut house most of last year."

  "The nut house?"

  "Yeah. You know, mental hospital."

  "For what?"

  He shrugged. "Her parents are kind of upper-class or think they are. You know, they think their shit don't stink. Anyway, her parents inherited the old Miller mansion and moved here two years ago."

  "Why did Cindy go to the mental hospital?"

  "Nobody's real sure. Just one day in school she started talking to somebody that nobody else could see. And so the principal took her out of class and called her parents, and next thing everybody knew Cindy was in the nut house. She's got great tits, doesn't she?"

  The next couple of hours confirmed my suspicions that I hadn't missed anything by not being invited to keggers.

  A plump girl stripped down to her bra and panties and did an "Indian" dance in front of the fire, while a number of boys without dates found ways to grab cheap feels. A very drunk kid climbed a tree and promptly fell out and started sobbing until I suggested that somebody should maybe take him to the hospital. You could see raw white bone sticking out of his right arm. A hospital was probably a good idea. A kid with an acoustic guitar tried to sing a few songs. He had a decent enough voice but nobody was up for the kind of mordant folk songs he'd written, most of them about buddies of his who'd overdosed on one drug or another, and girls who'd dumped him.

  The lucky kids were scattered through the woods making love.

  I went down a narrow dark path a few times to take a leak and heard a symphony of ecstasy from behind the bushes and undergrowth.

  Being a twenty-one year old virgin, I felt like a spy.

  Josh put in various appearances and the kids crowded around him as usual.

  He had that quick movie star grin and wave down real good. Somewhere there was an invisible camera snapping all this stuff. That was the impression he gave you, anyway.

  Most of the time he was in the woods. He'd found an especially voluptuous girl to spend time with. She looked delighted to be with him. I felt a real jealousy for my brother—my little brother, yet—the geeky little kid I'd left behind a few summers ago when I'd gone to the Army.

  Now he was instructing me in the ways of fashion and hair styles and proper behavior around nubile young girls.

  For a time, I ended up downriver, along the edge of the water, watching an eagle sail past the full silver moon. I wanted to enjoy this moment with nature but all I could think about was Cindy Brasher.

  I just kept thinking about those eyes of hers, those sad, spooked eyes, and the time she'd spent in a mental hospital.

  I wondered about her. I wondered about her a lot.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Toward eleven o'clock it started getting cold, an autumn cold that smelled of leaves burning in the hills, and the first bites of winter wind.

  Josh came over to my tree stump several times, once even bringing a girl along, one he intended to set me up with, apparently.

  She was beautiful and she intimidated me and the way she looked at me I could see that Josh had had to drag her over here.

  "Guess how old she is?" Josh said.

  "How old?"

  "Nineteen. Right, Sharon?"

  "Right."

  "She's Marcy Daniel's sister. Just back for a long weekend from college. I thought you two might have a brewski together. Huh?"

  He kind of gave her a little shove toward me and said, "Have some fun, kids. I'm sure going to."

  Then he stopped. "Hey, brother, I hear you beat the crap out of Sullivan tonight."

  "I sure gave it a try."

  He gave me the thumbs up. "I was thinking about doing it myself. He's a real asshole."

  "Yeah, I kinda noticed that."

  Then he was gone.

  The kids around the big bonfire were getting orgiastic now.

  The puking contests had moved up to the river's edge and there'd already been a couple of minor fist fi
ghts and the making out had turned pretty heavy, one boy and girl snuggled under a blanket pretty obviously making love.

  Sharon, who was a sleek blonde goddess, said, "So you were in the Army?"

  "Right."

  "How come you didn't go to college?"

  "Wasn't ready. Now I am. You like college?"

  "Not really. Not so far. I want to be a doctor. I'll like it a lot better when I can start my pre-med courses."

  A blonde goddess who was going to be a doctor. I decided not to tell her about my plans for communty college.

  "They look so immature, don't they?" she said.

  "Yeah."

  "You see that puking contest?"

  "Yeah."

  "I'm going out with this neurologist. He thinks that boys don't mature until they're in their mid-twenties." She looked at the people around the campfire. "They're also into some pretty terrible stuff."

  "Drugs?"

  "Drugs, and violence."

  "The fights I saw tonight weren't much."

  "Not fights. I went into the woods and I saw this boy hit this girl right in the face. I said something to them but they ran away. The Homecoming Queen. I think my sister said her name was Cindy."

  "He hit her in the face?"

  "Yes, and hard, too."

  She drained her paper cup. "Well, I'd better see if I can talk my sister into going home. I don't know why I agreed to come out here in the first place. There wasn't anybody worth meeting."

  She blessed me with a smile, and was gone.

  I spent the rest of the night looking for Cindy Brasher. I couldn't forget what Sharon had told me about Myles hitting her in the face. Then the two of them running away.

  By eleven o'clock, the wind was getting so cold that everybody starting packing up and heading back. Even the guys in the never-ending puking contest had started to look cold.

  Josh wasn't back. I was tired and the wind was getting to me. I decided to water some more foliage in the woods. Maybe when I returned, Josh would be there and ready to go.

  A lot of the leaves were gone this time of year so the moonlight was bright and strong. I found a big boulder and walked behind it and peed. I was feeling the beer just enough to get that melancholy feeling alcohol always gives me. There was something lonely about the way steam rose off my piss as I peed against the rock. I heard a nearby animal in the undergrowth and sort of envied him. It would be nice not to have deal with the human world sometimes.

  I was on my way back to the dying bonfire when I heard the crying. I recognized it right away for what it was and I guess I probably knew who it was, too.

  Off-trail was an old line-shack that the electric company people had probably used sixty, seventy years ago when they were stringing wire out here in the boonies.

  Now it was all tumbledown, all busted windows and jagged boards.

  She sat in the doorway of it, her face in her hands. She wasn't crying hard, it was just a kind of soft, exhausted grief.

  She heard the dead leaves crunch beneath my feet and looked up.

  "Oh," she said, "hi."

  "Hi."

  She sniffled and wiped the tears from her eyes with cute little red mittens. I found everything about her cute and fetching and overwhelming. I'd never felt this before and it scared me. It was like driving a car at 200 miles an hour and all of a sudden the steering goes out and then the brakes go out, too.

  "You're Josh's brother."

  "Yeah."

  "I'm Cindy Brasher."

  "The Homecoming Queen."

  She laughed. "Big deal, huh?"

  "It is a big deal."

  She kept her right hand mitten under her eye. When she took it away, I saw why. She had a shiner, and a good one, and it was turning big and ugly already.

  "Hey," I said, "what happened?"

  "Oh, I tripped and fell down."

  "You did, huh?"

  "Yeah."

  "You should get some ice on that."

  "Ice helps?"

  "Helps a lot. If you get it on soon enough."

  "Maybe I will."

  In two more steps I was next to her and then before I knew what I was doing, I knelt down beside her and touched my finger to her eye.

  "Wow," I said. "You really hurt yourself. You got a headache?"

  "I had a little one, I guess."

  I couldn't believe that I was touching her this way.

  "You're really gentle. Your hand, I mean."

  "Thanks."

  "I really like gentle things," she said. There was a dreamy, far-off quality to her voice now, as if she were addressing not me but somebody else.

  "Hey asshole, what the hell're you doing?"

  Before I could even turn around to see him, David Myles had grabbed the back of my coat and lifted me up off the ground and started shaking me.

  "Just because you're Josh's asshole brother doesn't cut any shit with me, you understand?"

  By now, even though I was shaking, I'd gathered myself enough to kick him sharply in the shin. He cried out and released me when my heel met his shin bone. I turned to face him. He was protecting himself, but I got him a nice solid one right on the nose.

  Then she was between us, screaming for us to stop, shouting to Myles that it was all her fault, and frantically pushing me away.

  "Just get out of here," she said. "I shouldn't have been talking to you. This is all my fault."

  "I ever see you touching her again, jerk-off, you're going to be very, very sorry. You understand?"

  He wanted another go at me and I guess I wanted another go at him, too. Our dislike of each other was immediate and profound. But she was still screaming to keep us apart.

  And then they were gone. I stood in the silver moonlight thinking of how tender and warm her cheek had felt to my touch. I was back in that car again, 200 mph and no brakes. Out of control.

  "You have a good time?" Josh said.

  "Yeah."

  He looked over at me.

  "Yeah, you sound like it. Two fights in one night, huh? My brother the bad-ass. Who would've thought?"

  "You've got some nice friends."

  "A lot of them are just silly-ass little kids." He grinned at me. We had the top down and were freezing our balls off. It was some kind of macho rite. We were going maybe 80 mph. "You got the hots for Cindy Brasher, huh?"

  "You're full of shit."

  "Hey, man, it's all right. Lots of guys have the hots for Cindy. Just watch out for Myles. He's going to come back for round two."

  "Yeah," I said. "I kind've figured he might."

  "Well, brother, I got some bad news for you," Josh said.

  "Yeah?"

  "Yeah. Most guys at that school, I can kick their butts without breaking a sweat. David Myles, I couldn't kick his butt if I had a gun and he had his hands tied behind his back. He's a real animal. He's a lot tougher when he isn't as drunk as he was tonight."

  "How come she goes out with him, anyway?"

  He shrugged. Questions about psychology didn't seem to interest him much. "Who knows? Maybe she's nuts. She had some kind of breakdown last year. Ended up in the bug house. Had those treatments—riding the lightning they call it."

  "Electro-shock?"

  "Yeah."

  "Wow. That's bad shit."

  "Tell me about it," Josh said. "Young girl like that, pumping all that voltage into her."

  I could barely stand to think about it. Couple guys in the Army had ridden the lightning. It was pretty bad. I just kept thinking of Cindy Brasher, her body dancing around as they shot her up with electricity.

  Twenty minutes later, we pulled up in front of our house. Josh didn't cut the lights.

  "You going somewhere?" I said.

  "Brother of mine, I've got some sweet young pussy waiting for me. And I'm in a hurry to get to it."

  It was funny to me again, me being older and more experienced in many ways. But somehow Josh was senior and I was junior.

  "Well, I may still be up when you get h
ome."

  He grinned. "Don't count on it."

  Richard Mitchell, KNAX-TV:

  "One thing the folks at home should understand about this execution today, Paul, is that they've rehearsed it three times a day for the past three days. And I mean, rehearsed it with a stopwatch. The warden says that if everything goes right, the whole thing should take fifty-five minutes. This is counting from the time the prisoner is brought over to the death house to the time the medical examiner pronounces the prisoner dead. The warden wants to make very sure that this operation goes smoothly."

  Tape 11-D, August 6; Interview between Risa Wiggins and her client in the Clark County Jail.

  A: So you definitely heard this—thing?

  C: Yes, definitely.

  A: It spoke to you.

  C: You're just like that other bitch, you don't believe me, do you?

  A: I don't like being called names. That's one reason Susan quit the case.

  C: I heard the fucking alien, all right? It really exists and it really fucking spoke to me, OK?

  CHAPTER FOUR

  A freak snowstorm hit two weeks later.

  I watched it falling past the front windows of Schroeder's department store. Schroeder's used to be the place that most people bought everything, from their TV sets to their school clothes. It was a four-story building packed with just about everything you could think of. They'd given extended credit to the farmers who could only pay when the crops came in, and they'd given the men and women who worked out at the vulcanizing factory a special 10% discount because of a bargain they'd struck with the union.

  That's how things used to be.

  Out here now, the chains have pretty much changed everything.

  McDonald's and Burger King have pretty much wiped out the mom and pop diners; the new owners of the three factories drove the unions out when they took over; and Wal-Mart chased away all the department stores.

  If you wanted to shop now, you likely went out to the mall. A lot of storefronts downtown were either boarded up or draped in pigeon droppings.

  I had two and a half months to go before I started community college so I had to do something. I saw an ad for Schroeder's in the paper and decided to take the job. Josh prepped me. He made me get that haircut he wanted, the one with the sideburns cut straight across near the top of the ear with enough left in back for a fussy little ponytail, and he bought me those clothes he'd promised. I had to admit, I looked better. I'd never have Josh's good looks but at least I had a little style.