by Kirby Gann
He interrupts the cop’s speech by brandishing his shotgun, a simple rising up and down.
“I’m pressing charges and I’ll be there in court when need be. Your badge identifies you as officer number 367. I expect to be notified of a court date and if I don’t I will file a complaint.”
The cop sighs in that slow and deliberate way of one about to embark upon a task that requires patience and that he does not want especially to do. The four boys now sit with elbows on knees, staring in dubious incredulity as the officer explains they’ve no one to blame but themselves for the inconvenience and the caretaker is in his rights and they are all going to the station. Moreover, he does not expect any expressions of attitude from a one of them. The fat boy complains they should press charges against the caretaker, for all they knew they had a friend bleeding out dead in the corn. Hardesty resists his urge to fire the shotgun into the seminary wall to silence everyone, to wield the weapon like a gnarled staff and he some mad prophet returned from the wilderness to warn of imminent perdition for them all. He resists his own impulses until the two officers have the kids cuffed in their cruisers and the spotlights and roof lights are extinguished and they are gone, up the pocked drive past the corn field and onto the county road and out of his life. Then he roars back at the dogs still yapping on the floors above, acquiring the kind of silence he seeks by firing his gun straight into the night air.
Excellent quiet then. The rain has died to a weak drizzle but the wind is up, and the drops needle into the corners of his eyes.
“Vandal hordes, Bone. Where do I come up with this shit?” The phrase brings him genuine laughter. He waits to be certain the shotgun doesn’t invite the return of either cruiser and, once satisfied he and the dog are left alone, steps over the boxwoods and picks up the baggie flung there, holding it close in the dark to examine the chalky crystals inside.
Another defeat. Every freaking day, another defeat.
“Least we come out ahead,” he tells the dog, swinging the baggie playfully before her. She begins to duck and sway with the movement, and her tail spirals water into the air again. Hardesty nudges her with his boot. “Get yer coon ass back in that house, bitch. We done our duty this night.”
An hour later lightning strikes the transformer that powers Hardesty’s house. He had been comfortable and almost dozing in the small cottage that smells faintly of mold and Bone’s wet fur and a heady syrup sweetness he tries to ignore—he should be used to it by now—and the hour is deep enough for the TV to be into reruns of detective shows from his childhood that Hardesty can practically recite. Bone lay curled on the wool rug beneath the set, Hardesty had his socked feet on the coffee table that lacks one leg and requires careful placement of his feet to avoid spillage of magazines and candy wrappers and half-empty mason jars, two fingers of vodka tilted on his belly rising in rhythm with his low breathing, when the transformer cracked the sky like a cannon shot. The explosion is already an echo when Hardesty realizes the vodka gone, his table has upended everything onto the floor, and he is standing in the middle of the room with an empty jar.
Through the kitchen he pulls back the threadbare curtain and wipes humidity off a pane of glass with the heel of his hand. Fog hangs heavy outside. He has to crane his neck upward to find the transformer in bright burn—quivering flame licks the steel casing and disappears into the mist, coloring a tiny fogbow; a strand of violet dances up the wooden post harnessed to the building. The flames create a strange, unfamiliar noise he can barely hear, like a radio receiver between direct signals, all crackle and burst. His nostrils tingle with a smell remembered from Army maneuvers and the cottage has fallen entirely dark.
Bone presses into his legs, her frightened whimper winging up to join the howls of Fleece’s dogs in the big seminary itself. Hardesty pats at his chest pockets, not looking for anything but out of habit, and as he turns to seek one overhead cabinet for his power light—a quality instrument with a one-million candlelight beam—he trips over the dog tucked into his legs. He curses and shoves her out of the way with his ankle. In the darkness he doesn’t see her skitter back to his legs again, and Hardesty hears her squeal as his heavy foot lands on what might be her foreleg and he feels her mass against his knee and then he’s falling, one shoulder cracking into the corner of a chair back, his forehead shucking the edge of the refrigerator door.
He’s unsure if he passed out or not. It feels like a discovery when he realizes his back against the refrigerator, Bone licking his cheek. Get, he says, moving his hand between her mouth and his face, but his speaking only makes the dog lick with more enthusiasm and he has to shove her away.
He doesn’t rise from the floor immediately. One hand cups his knee; the other feels accumulated dirt on the peeling linoleum. Through the kitchen window the glow has turned the bluish white of moonbeams. Perhaps the fire burned itself out.
“Aw, let the old thing burn, Bone, what do you say?”
She takes it as invitation and dives at his face again with her tongue, forcing him to his feet, the nails of her paws a scramble-scratching on the withered tiles. Hardesty leaves her inside and slams the door behind him, power light in hand.
He doesn’t like to exit his home without his boots and gun but he’s halfway to the building before he realizes he has left with neither. Midnight lies quiet, a gentle hushing amid the crowns of trees a hundred yards away in the old cemetery. The crooked moon shines over what has turned into a cold clear night, a few clouds aglow in ghostly hues passing slow beneath the stars. Smoke blankets the rooftop with moody shifts of the wind, an odor of burned rubber and singed plastic heavy within it.
He shines the power light up to the transformer, over the scorched steel and melted cable insulation, and with a lethargic sigh drags the beam down the length of the wall to his cold feet, where he takes his finger off the button and the night surrounds him again. He’ll be eating off the charcoal grill for a few days; the power company does not place a high priority on this transformer.
Hardesty digs his fingernails into the flesh just beneath his jawbone and starts to backstep carefully over the gravel again but then stops short: something is off about the sounds around him. He stills himself with head askew, tongue fingering small gaps in his molars, wary, senses keen, listening. The low chug of a powerful engine idles nearby, behind the seminary; a radio scratches out old country music, the high trebly kind of curdled yawps and wails that rise into the quiet and toil with the wind in the trees.
Are kids so brazen these days that they would start to tailgate back here? He keeps close to the wall and crosses the width of the east wing, socks soaked, toes numb; the unseen engine coughs out but the radio continues, and then it’s the rough hinge of a car door pushed open. Hardesty flattens himself against the brick where a gap between the building’s wing and center chapel forms a deep courtyard, a space for the cement island that used to be a basketball court.
The car door clicks shut softly. A groan from what must be the trunk opens then, another hinge in need of oil. Must be an old car. Hardesty presses into the brick and listens to a woman’s forlorn voice sing from the radio:
Where you’ve gone I’ll follow
Who you were I’ll be
I’ll become your shadow
if you no longer think of me
no, you no longer think of me
and a man (for it could be only a man, to Hardesty’s mind) whistles a counterpoint that doesn’t agree with her melody. Beneath the whistling comes a slosh from liquid poured, a heavy gushing that splashes loud over the flex and gulp from some pliable container. Hardesty looks back toward home, weighing the cost and opportunity to retrieve his gun, his boots. But he does not go. Instead he chances a glimpse past the corner to see.
A man there, looking nothing more than a humanoid shadow. He works the length of the vehicle, emptying two large jugs over the cowl and hood. It doesn’t take long, and once he finishes he steps back and looks over the car, continuing to whistle as he toss
es the jugs into high grass Hardesty never gets around to mowing. The man begins to fiddle in his pockets as the singer’s voice fades to silence, a brief quiet enduring until the opening guitar strum of another song begins.
Hardesty is about to shine his power light on the scene when the man strikes a match. It’s a sudden firefly in the air and then a soft whup like a great gas oven firing overcomes the music. Blue flame washes over the chassis. Behind that ethereal blue, a color found in flame only that has fascinated him since childhood, high capes of yellow and gold race to catch up, and in another instant the entire car is rapidly burning, a single coal visible through the flames. The gentle lament of a song can still be heard beneath the crackle of fire. The man shades his face from the heat as he begins to walk a distant perimeter, admiring the success of his handiwork. In that light Hardesty can make out a dark sport coat and tie, a shuffling thin body moving like a boxer. The flames start to eat at the interior. One tire detonates from the heat—sparks spiral into the dark—and Hardesty can’t see the man on the far side of the flames. It gives him the courage to step from his hiding place, and as he does he catches sight of the man again, tail-turned and flatfoot running toward the distant Possler Woods, the gated cemetery.
Only then does the caretaker find his voice: “Hey! Hey you there!” he calls, directing his light over the great lawn behind the looming building. But even a million candlelights cannot sight the figure fleeing the scene. Like that, he has vanished.
Hardesty jumps at the touch of something live against his leg and he drops the power light—Bone has managed to open the unlocked back door. She cowers from him, expecting a kick. But Hardesty reaches to pet her gently as he looks back toward the cemetery and the Possler Woods and the moonlight that etches the outlines of forms. All he can discern now is the refuse abandoned back there, old refrigerators with the doors still connected, rusted bedsprings and engine blocks, piles of bottles and cans.
“What kind of guard dog are you?” he asks, toeing her ribs, her fur as soaked as his sock. “I mean really. What you good for?”
Bone glances at him with apparent wariness. She sits back on her haunches, and peers into the same direction as Hardesty as he strains to descry any movement within the moonlight shadows there.
Another soft detonation as another tire blows out; Hardesty scratches at the flesh under his jaw again and watches the flames curl through the windows and thrive on the seats and dash. Transmission fluid boils on the cracked cement court.
“Neither one of us did all that good tonight,” he tells Bone. “Damn if sometimes I don’t believe we can’t make a caretaker worth the name between the both of us.”
They had fled a pack of dogs on one floor and then before they had caught their breaths behind the stairwell door, slammed shut behind them and still echoing through the corridors, they were sent into flight again at the blast from the caretaker’s shotgun outside. This took them as high in the building as they could go, which also happened to be where Fleece kept what he called his penthouse. It had been a suite of offices at one time but he had made a home there and now as they stumbled into it they found the rooms nearly barren again, no different from any of the others falling apart throughout the building. A pleather desk chair faced one corner, an arm rest torn off. A few books were stacked spines-out on a windowsill—mostly Catholic theology texts that he must have found somewhere in the building, but a few mystery novels as well—and they were warped from water and stank when opened. Beside them on the sill paper clips burned to a copper shine stood posed in models of twisted disfigurement. Through a second door slumped on its highest hinge they discovered bed sheets wadded in the corner and a pair of mismatched socks. Spunk asked if Cole was sure they had the right place and Cole told him angrily that sure he was sure and the three followed the two flashlights illuminating empty corners.
“Well by the evidence I’d judge he is not here now,” Spunk said.
It took a moment for his words to sink in to start their snorts of laughter at his stating the obvious. He put his flashlight on the floor and pulled out the baggie he’d stolen from his father and they all three sat down while he made his preparations and they could smoke up again in the dark, waiting until the police lights flashing outside had disappeared before moving on.
Somehow they end up on the roof. The seminary’s shaped like a capital E with the facade stacked one floor higher than the two wings that extend out either end, the chapel in the building’s center. Spunk has wandered off on his own. Alone for the first time, Shady and Cole follow a gray glow that wavers within a long passageway—a passage, he thinks, like what people are said to see when they die, an obscure light at the end of the darkness. In this case the light turns out to be the night visible through the window in a steel door. The door wings open with a retch onto the rooftop, and the cool fresh wind feels as necessary then as longed-for water. Shady squeals in stoned delight; she jumps down two wooden steps and skips the length of the roof some fifty feet, her shoes scattering wet gravel over tarpaper to the far ledge, her white top glowing phosphor beneath silent lightning flares.
Thunder follows the lightning and lingers in such a continuous roll it could be a jet circling overhead. Cole doesn’t join her until she motions to him. The drugs in his body, his success in tracking down his friends after they had abandoned him, have instilled a weird confidence in him tonight and he wraps his arms around her waist from behind, rests his chin on her shoulder. Wind shushes the trees in the distant Possler Woods, and it is good wind, wind as God must imagine it, pure and singing.
“What are you doing,” Shady says. Softly. He can hear the smile in her voice as she leans into him, presses one hand into the back of his head to keep him there.
The smell of her up close jumps in his blood like another heavy and wondrous drug; he could pass out in it, his nose against her neck, inhaling the moist heat off her skin. His hand moves toward her breast, drawn there by the arch in her back—but then his eyes part, and the view stops him still. He has been in this very spot before. Yes, he had been here with his brother. When? They had sat with their legs dangling over the edge on a bright afternoon, taking in the old cemetery and its crumbling stone perimeter, listening for the gravel they tossed into the air to hit the asphalt court below. This would have been before their mother sent Cole to live with his dead father’s family. He remembered it had been maybe the third or fourth time he had ever smoked weed and he was still cataloging the effects it made in his body, trying to note the difference between stoned and not-stoned, between cottonmouth and thirst, and he was smiling stupidly when Fleece declared that in that cemetery stood headstones so old they had been rained blank and smooth.
No names or dates, nothing left, he said. Nothing but an old stone to mark somebody down there that nobody remembers.
He gestured again as if directing Cole toward specific headstones even though they were too far away to see more than the suggestion of stones, winking white beneath the dense trees’ dipping limbs. He said something about how the bodies lying buried there, how the lives those bodies had once led, which must have seemed very important to them in their time, may as well have never happened at all. Know what I mean? he asked.
No, Cole did not know. He had been eleven or twelve. Fleece always seemed to be on to things Cole was too young or too dull to come upon on his own.
That’s pretty sad, Cole said.
What is?
Being forgotten like that. Being so forgotten it’s like you never even lived here.
Fleece turned from the cemetery toward the horizon of trees that, at that time, appeared to go on forever, before old man Possler sold to developers who began to carve out the woods into bedroom communities and condos and office parks. Naw, it’s not sad, that’s not what I mean, Fleece said. It’s beautiful. It’s only sad because life is kind of sad. And still beautiful.
I’ll remember you.
You do that, puppy. But then one day you’ll be gone too, won’t
you?
A sound like a pigeon’s coo rises in Shady’s throat. She asks what’s on his mind.
“Do you miss him?”
Power lines lift to the rooftop from a pole in the meadow; a rusty transformer hums hanging at one corner. It seems strange that live power connects to this empty place, and again Cole can only shrug at what he doesn’t understand, which appears to be many many things as his head glides off to imagine electrical grids covering these acres and this land and off to the townships and county after county, stretching over the entire nation and all of it connected, all of it coordinated by hands and minds he will never see and leading to this small forgotten cylinder to throb with it.
“Fleece never needed me. That’s no fun for any girl I know,” Shady says.
“Still, you miss him?”
“Sure I miss him, sometimes. Not always. Sometimes I miss being a little kid, too. Doesn’t mean I want to be five again.” She turns in his arms and politely breaks their embrace. She moves to the inside of the roof over the campus interior, where a basketball court crumbles surrounded and broken by high grass, leaving Cole to stare at the trees where the cemetery would be.
What could Fleece have got up to? It’s odd that Greuel would confess so much of his trouble to Cole unless he was genuinely perplexed by the situation, honestly at a loss as to what has happened, a parent unsure whether to be angry or worried at a child yet to come home. That seems hard to imagine; Greuel always knows what he’s doing, and who could guess what he’s thinking? Could Fleece vanish and leave no sign behind? Is that even possible? That day with his brother on this same ledge they held in one of their casual drawn-out silences—when he thinks of time with his brother there is a typical silence attached to it, so much time passed with neither of them speaking a word, just staring out at fields or the car window, listening to music or to the Nova’s engine—Fleece had stood on the raised ledge near where Shady stands now, arms raised at his sides, eyes closed, his face contorted in this combination of grin and grimace as he leaned back as far as his strength allowed. The breeze that day feathered his smooth dark hair as if he were already falling, and he waved his hands dramatically.