After the People Lights Have Gone Off

by Stephen Graham Jones

  He sets his feet against the floorboard—the car’s only idling forward—thrusts his hips out, and, yep, he was stuck. The jelly drying against the seat.

  That’ll be another part of the story. The part where everybody feels sorry for him but empathizes too, has sat in jelly themselves at some point, of course.

  “Hold, hold!” Lucas calls from outside and Jonathan finds the brake pedal, finds it isn’t the brake pedal. Surges ahead instead, clumping over something.

  And then he stops.

  “It’s right under us, isn’t it?” Jonathan says. Just out loud.

  The dog, the deer, the whatever it is the truckers caught with their tall chrome bumpers, slung out to the side, for the birds to feast on.

  Lucas doesn’t answer, or, the smell coming in through the open window, it’s all the answer he needs.

  Jonathan dry heaves, his first instinct to thumb the window shut, but then, because it’s part of a deal—all it would have taken is one wrong trucker to have seen Lucas’s ruler tat, and let his rig drift over two, three feet, play some fag tag out on the interstate—he makes himself breathe the decay in.

  His eyes water, his hands tighter than tight on the thin steering wheel, and he clumps the car ahead, over whatever it was, the left tire even spinning a time or two in the—the—

  Jonathan’s mouth fills with vomit, hot and burning, and he’s only just able to slam the car into park before diving from his door, losing it in the tall grass, completely emptying himself out, the kind that comes out his nose too so that his eyes are crying, his lungs contracting, trying to breathe—is that brains? am I throwing up brains?—and the grass is so tall that it catches whatever he had in his stomach, paints his face back with it.

  This starts it all over again, Jonathan pushing away, getting his hands in it now, suddenly sure beyond a doubt that what really happened was Lucas tipped over the front of the car, under the wheels, had been asking Jonathan to stop, stop, please.

  Blurry, blinding headlights streaming by, Jonathan looks to the car to be sure he’s wrong.

  Like the boy in his camper at the rest stop, though, Lucas, he’s not there. Gone. Not rolled onto the hood laughing like Jonathan half-expected, not still on the roof, his ass to the truckers, his shorts nothing his father ever would have stuffed a wallet into, and not squatted there by Jonathan with a towel from the backseat, to help.

  Just gone.

  Jonathan wipes his mouth and nose with the back of his arm, wipes his arm on his shorts.

  No, he’s telling himself. No. No no no, that wasn’t Lucas under the car, it wasn’t—

  And then he hears him, Lucas. Beside, ahead, the woods. Isn’t going to smile but can’t help it either.

  “Lucas!” he calls out, standing.

  Just that sound: feet on leaf litter. Moving away.

  The perfect time for games, yes. The most appropriate place.

  “Lucas,” he says again, this time mostly just to himself, in explanation.

  One last look to the road, the car, the dome light still on because the door’s open, the car in park, some unmentionable lump of gore just behind the rear bumper. The trunk packed with two days of perfect camping. Those thick socks.

  And, on the other side of the ditch, in the trees, Lucas’s flashlight, bobbing dimly.

  What Jonathan’s trying to pace out is whether this can be part of the story they’re going to tell. Does trudging back up the interstate at dawn, their clothes sodden from various riverside frolics, trudging up to a car stripped to nothing, probably vandalized, can that be the punchline? Or, what if the battery’s just dead? What if there’s just a tow-me pink sticker on the windshield?

  Or—or what if Lucas panics out there alone, falls into one of the old mining shafts or whatever it is that’s always making the news out here?

  An easy decision, really.

  Jonathan steps out into the ditch, the bottom soggy down under all that grass, and follows.

  If this is like he imagines Lucas wants it to be, then, a hundred feet into the cover, he’ll find Lucas’s shirt draped across a lower limb, then a sock, then those stupid shorts.

  It makes him try harder to keep up, to keep that dim light in view, make a line for it.

  Instead of shorts, what he finds, cocked open in the mud, the white license flashing, is Lucas’s dad’s wallet. Dark green, practically black.

  Jonathan eases it up to keep it from spilling. Studies it—just what it is—wipes the dirty side on a tree, then the leg of his shorts, and pockets it. Front pocket, thank you.

  But—does this mean Lucas had it all along?

  Jonathan looks ahead, for the light. Makes a less patient line for it, only realizing once he’s committed that it’s not a flashlight at all, but one of the tall parking lot lights of the rest stop.

  Already?

  Behind him, though, there’s no longer any interstate sound. No still-open door, inviting him back in, to make the right decision.

  Well then.

  The way it had been in his head, Lucas had been on a grand trek, just lucking up onto the blacktop. How it is, though, is Lucas just walked through a couple hundred yards of trees, only out of the light for maybe thirty seconds, all told. The rest of the time he was, what? Sitting in the ditch? Or, no: a rig with a sleeper, parked on the side of the road?

  Lucas wouldn’t, though.

  Not even mad like he was, he wouldn’t have crawled up into that cab for the afternoon.

  Never. Never never never.

  But then why didn’t he even answer the voice mails last weekend? Why did he blow up instead of answer that one question?

  Jonathan shakes his head no, no, closes his eyes, taps both his fingers against both his thumbs, a furious, desperate rhythm.

  It could explain the diversion of the lost wallet, though. After an afternoon like that, Lucas wouldn’t be ready for any make-up fun, would at least need a shower first, or a swim. A staged fall into the river.

  You can’t jump to conclusions like that, though.

  Jonathan tells himself this. That there’s an explanation. That the place where he just walked into the woods, it doesn’t have to be the place where Lucas walked out. That the interstate for miles back, it’s a long curve, no place any trucker would stop to sleep, especially when he knew—don’t truckers always know where the rest stops with the big parking lots are?—there was a good place just a minute or two ahead. With a river, restrooms. Lights.

  You’re being stupid again, Jonathan tells himself. Thinking the bad instead of the good, defaulting to disaster instead of joy, letting the world infect you. And you know better. That’s no way to live.

  Jonathan flips the wallet open again, studies Lucas’s face. Forgives him.

  For nothing, but still.

  Thick socks, thick socks.

  Jonathan smiles, steps ahead, having to duck around trees to get to the light, the wallet still in his hand like a prize, like a talisman, a charm. And that’s when he hears the sniffling.

  It’s the boy. From the rest stop. Who was sitting in the shelf in the side of the unpopped-up camper.

  Now he’s sitting beside a rusted pipe slanting up from the ground, some leftover of a drilling operation, or mining, Jonathan doesn’t have a clue. Rocking back and forth, hugging his knees, his face grimy with tears.

  “Hey,” Jonathan says, kneeling from a spot a bit farther than’s easy, just because, if anybody’s watching—he’s not stupid—then of course all gay guys are pedophiles too. It goes without saying.

  Especially out in the woods, alone like this. After dark.

  “Hey, hey,” Jonathan says, touching the boy’s face with the back of his hand.

  The boy looks up, his lips fluttering, and then Jonathan sees: he’s not using the pipe for support, or because it’s the one man-made thing in the area to hold onto. The index finger of his right hand, the one you always use to probe holes where there might be treasure, especially when you’re eight, it’s in a ragge
d hole in the side of the pipe. Stuck. For hours. Bleeding.

  “Oh, oh,” Jonathan says, repositioning himself so he can hold the boy without pulling against that finger.

  Even that makes the boy shudder, though.

  How hard has he already been pulling his hand away? What does that finger look like, in there?

  Jonathan, nodding to the boy the whole time—it’s all right, all right—stands, looks down the pipe but it’s dark, too dark. So he closes his eyes and feels: trash. Years of bottles and beer cans, kids out here, or the original roughneckers, who knows.

  Something sharp in there, anyway. Something jagged, angled into the flesh of the boy’s finger. Keeping him there.

  “I’m sorry, sorry,” Jonathan says, then looks to the lights of the rest stop, for help.

  It makes the boy whimper, reach up, take the side of the Jonathan’s hand.

  Jonathan squats back down, his own eyes wetter than he’d want—he’d be a terrible father, could never be strong like he’d need to be—and tells the boy he’ll be right back, that he’s just going to go get somebody, that his daddy’s probably still there, right? Won’t Daddy know what to do?

  The boy nods, scared, crying, and Jonathan turns his back, is going to make this as fast as possible, is going to run screaming onto the mown grass of the rest stop, his 911 voice, but then he can’t leave the boy there like that. So he does it all over, the assurance, the goodbye, the promises, even mumbling through some made-up recollection about how when he was a kid he got lost at a rest stop too, and his parents were so worried, and something something, it ended happy, and this time he leaves Lucas’s wallet with the boy, to prove he’s coming back. In the dark, the boy won’t know it’s not Jonathan’s.

  The boy hugs the wallet to his throat, looks away, to some sound, and in that moment Jonathan’s gone, tearing through vines and whatever, crashing out from the edge of the woods, stumbling into the bright-bright light, seeing only, at first, the vague outline of the boy’s family’s pop-up camper, a shadow really, still hitched to the shape of the supercab—what?—and he breathes in to cry the alarm but in that moment the light at the top of its pole over the parking lot flares, bathing the whole rest stop, heating it up in a flash. Taking it back to that heat, back to the daytime, the afternoon.

  Jonathan looks around, his jaw cartoon-character slack. Cars everywhere again. Families. Commotion.

  What?

  And—and and and there on the picnic table, his head in his hands, so obviously—okay, dramatically—distraught, cutting this perfect figure of regret, is Jonathan himself. Jonathan, rewound to this moment all over again, commotion all around him, panic he never even cued into, as lost in his own theatric grief as he was. As hiding in it as he’d been. As reveling in it as he’d been.

  It’s about the boy, though.

  The missing boy, the boy who just stuck his finger in a hole in the woods, is probably screaming for help right now. But everybody at the rest stop, they’re screaming too, at least with their eyes, and the mother, that’s got to be the mother, just collapsed by the trashcan, crying. All the other dads beating the bushes, scouring the cars. One trucker blocking the exit, so nobody can leave until the boy’s found. A tape-wound tire beater held down low by his leg, the brim of his cap pulled low and serious.

  No.

  Jonathan looks to himself on the picnic table, tells himself to look up, to help, to come into the woods, save the boy, save this boy, but now, now the inevitable: the boy’s dad, breathing hard, pulling open car doors in the parking lot, everybody standing aside.

  Look, look, Jonathan says to himself, across all that space, all this time.

  And he does, he looks up to the camper, to the boy unaccountably not there, but it’s too late, has always been too late.

  By this point the boy’s dad’s striding across the grass to the fag on the picnic table, striding across, reaching down for the fag’s chin, tilting his head up, the fag’s eyes so guilty, so crying, and then the dad’s shaking his head no, not this, making the obvious connections—deserted bathroom stall, hide what was left in the river—his other hand coming around from his waistband, the pistol right against the fag’s face, the sound of the gun not even there, the father blowing off two of his own fingers even, the fag’s brains sloughing down onto the picnic table like jelly.

  The mom, screaming something now, pulling herself up with the lip of the trashcan. The other dads pulling their families close here, now. One of them looking over his wife’s shoulder to Jonathan, standing at the edge of the trees. Seeing what Jonathan can feel now, should have felt all along: no shirt, his shorts so stupid and giveaway, rolled up a turn or two farther than decent company would ever accept. The ruler in blue ink on his lower back, extending out to nine inches.

  Of course.

  This is where Lucas went. All along, this is where he was, where he is.

  That second dad pushes his wife to the side, steps forward. The first dad, the eight-fingered dad, sees too, and raises his pistol through the red mist still in the air, Lucas falling back from it, tearing through the trees, running headlong away, his own breath heavy in his ears. Finally crashing out through the ditch, falling up the other side, into the crush of interstate commerce, into a moment’s inattention, so that he could have been a deer, a dog, a bag of trash. Less. Only enough left of him to walk back to the rest stop at dusk, to what’s left of the love of his life, to take his hand and continue this camping trip, to keep doing it over and over until they get it right, find the mountains, drink their plastic-tasting water, rub sunscreen onto each other’s noses, push their thick-socked feet deep into their sleeping bags and know that nothing can touch them, up here. That it’s just them.

  my didn’t die against the dashboard that day, but the surgeries are still coming. His prom date, she’s going to have to look inside to see the real him.

  In quick succession, then, I flamed out of my year-to-year contract at our branch of the state university, was back to stocking tools and air conditioners at night.

  And this. Talking about books.

  More and more, I was thinking it was the only good thing I had in me. My only real gift. And that, if I didn’t share it, then the next time one of Jeremy’s bills came due, my wife’s dad wasn’t going to come through with a check, or the surgeon that day was going to have had one too many drinks at lunch.

  I’d put up a flyer at the library, the Laundromat, the carwash, both coffee shops.

  There were seven of us, most Wednesdays.

  This week we were reading Stephen King again. Marcy from the bank had recommended him, because, she said, she was too scared to read him alone. So we went with her into those dark places. Well, I’d already been, but I toured them through—the life, the times, the legend—and then passed a photocopied story out for next week. For this week.

  The story was “The Man in the Black Suit.” It was about a nine-year-old kid a century ago, just out fishing one day, then encountering the devil, barely getting away. It had some resonance to it, but no real gore. What I planned to tell the group was that how it worked was it was taking this kids’ blind faith—America’s stubborn Christianity—and making it real all at once. So, really, the story was a confirmation, a celebration. The old man who had been the boy, the old man writing this down in his diary, he was one of the lucky ones, the ones who never had to doubt if angels and demons were real. He knew.

  So, the study question, it was going to be which is better, to know or not to know?

  And, yes, of course Jeremy was nine that day I picked him up from third grade. He was a year older than his classmates—I’d taught in China for a year, when there were no jobs here—but his age didn’t mean anything to him yet. And now he was probably going to be two years behind. But alive. That’s the epithet I kept tagging onto everything: but alive. As in, this could all be worse. I should be thankful for whatever fell on me next.

  Since my shift started at nine, we usually met at six, di
nnertime. Each week a different person would bring a casserole, pass out the plates. This week it was Lew’s turn. He was retired Air Force, said he’d taken a stack of paperbacks with him on both tours. That he was the only one in his bunkhouse who would stay awake reading.

  He brought chicken dumplings in a crock pot.

  Aside from him, and Marcy—she of the bank—there was Drake, a straight-laced city planner, the one who’d told us about the community center; there was Evelyn, who always brought her crocheting to do but hardly ever said anything; and Jackie and her daughter Gwen, a junior in high school, there very much against her will for a taste of what literature was going to be like in college.

  In the flyer, I’d of course mentioned my background.

  So, we were a healthy group of bookworms. A good mix of backgrounds and ages, anyway, if not very diverse.

  When the dumplings were gone and adequately praised, we put our plates under our chairs and dove into King.

  Because it was his night—for food, but you could tell he felt responsible for the discussion as well—Lew pinched his jeans up his thighs, leaned forward like telling us a secret, and said that he hoped none of the ladies took a fright to this particular story.

  Evelyn tittered, her needles flashing, and I got the sense that one of these nights Lew was going to ask her for coffee afterwards, and she was going to suggest the perfect place.

  “Scared me,” Drake said.

  He was still wearing his tie from the day’s work. Not loosed or anything.

  “Me too,” I lied, just to not leave him hanging.

  While King had stories that were terrifying, this one was, in comparison, safe. By burying the eight-year-old’s story in the frame of an old man’s journal, it was locating the devil in another time, another place. One far, far from us.

  Jackie elbowed her daughter just enough to get her to talk: “You could tell right away who he was. From the eyes.”

  “Those eyes,” Jackie said, seconding her daughter’s motion.