The Horses of the Night

by Michael Cadnum

  “There is nothing to worry about,” I said. “Everything is different now.”

  “There are people who don’t care about human beings, Strater. They aren’t like us.”

  “Don’t worry about them.”

  “We were raised innocent, like it or not. The world is ruled by violence, and we’ve always tried to finesse it, be polite, get by on charm.”

  “They won’t bother us.”

  Now Rick laughed, incredulous, hopeful. He could see that I meant it, and he was almost willing to believe that I could do something. “You always take this view of things. You always believe things will be all right.”

  “It’s all over. All the gray, dead times are done.” I stood and took him in my arms, and I felt him stir with surprise, because we had never been an affectionate family. And then, slowly, but with feeling, he returned my embrace.

  Rick had been my father’s favorite. This had never been talked about, but if my father wanted to read Plato to someone, or if he wanted someone to massage his shoulders, he called Rick in from play to be near him. “The allure of the youngest son,” my mother had called it, and I had wondered if she shared my father’s affection for their younger, more lively offspring.

  How could I be sure, I wondered, that my new confidence was not misplaced? My mood might be the afterglow of the award, combined with the memory of a woman who might have been only a reverie, a hallucination.

  My brother gambles, I thought.

  So do I.

  But as soon as he left me I tried to call Nona. She did not have her answering machine connected.

  In my disordered mood I watched television briefly, pacing the channels through canned laughter and ads before letting the screen go blank. I paced, tried to reach Nona again, looked through magazines. A recent Wall Street Journal had an article that caught my eye. The article ran beneath a pen-and-ink sketch of DeVere, one of those finely detailed portraits about the size of a thumbprint.

  The article described DeVere’s empire as “losing its marketing stamina.” The newspaper detailed a series of disappointing products, sluggish sales, and a failure to “regroup before economic realities.” I hurled the pages away, the large sheafs of newsprint wafting to the floor.

  This article was absurd. Everyone knew the extent of DeVere’s power. Men like DeVere and Renman could do anything they wanted.

  I stepped outside and across the lawn in the darkness. The conversation with my brother had troubled me deeply. I needed time to think, because on this day everything had been happening so quickly that I could not focus, I could not begin to sort my emotions.

  They would not hurt Rick. I would not let them. And yet, as I surveyed the things that I could do I felt a growing feeling of impotence replacing my earlier confidence.

  I unlocked the hothouse. I fumbled for the light. I found the switch, and stooped to unravel the hose, its bright brass nozzle draped across a steppingstone.

  I straightened.

  Disbelief kept me from moving. This was impossible. It couldn’t be true. I had to put my hand out to the potting bench. I could not take a breath. I closed my eyes. I opened them again.

  The smell of the place had changed, too, from something fertile to a sour, dead place. The hothouse had been lush and green, the flowers richly colored, the leaves gleaming.

  Now each leaf was bleached and limp. The heliconia dangled, pale and withered. My fingers went out to yellow, wrinkled leaves. Stems were slack. Blossoms were brown.

  The entire hothouse, every plant, was dead.

  I covered my eyes with my hands. I had seen this before, in my botanical studies in Hawaii. The highway department kept certain roads clear by using chemicals strong enough to do this. Someone expert had used a powerful herbicide.

  I had to admire his thoroughness.

  The feather drifted to the floor, spun, lifted, and wafted upward, in a new direction, toward my outstretched hand. The plume was all colors at once, like the splendor of a hummingbird, white, yes, but then vermilion, then Lincoln green. Radiant alternate colors raced across its filaments as it swung, fluttered, and fell at last upon my fingertips.

  Rick, and then my plants. What would be next? When would they get around to Nona? When would someone decide to pay a visit to my mother?

  DeVere, I thought.

  Stop DeVere.

  19

  It did not take long.

  Perhaps it should have surprised me, but it didn’t. A call came just before midnight.

  It was Childress. He wanted to see me, at the scene of a crime. That was the word he used: crime. And the word reverberated in my mind, a painful syllable, a word like cry.

  Whatever you do, I told myself, don’t think. Don’t think about your feelings, don’t think about anything.

  I did not trust myself to drive.

  The evening was cold, but it was a cold that was beginning to fade. The streets were glazed with a drizzle that did not fall from the sky so much as drift out of nowhere, sideways, idle and weightless. The tires of the cab hissed, and the Financial District was both ablaze with the lights of offices and deserted.

  I sat in the backseat not sure what to think, afraid to think.

  It looked like a movie being filmed, bright lights and a tangle of people. In a giddy, uneasy way, I convinced himself that perhaps it wasn’t true. It was all a mistake. Surely nothing bad had happened here. They were making a movie, nothing more.

  I slammed the cab door, thrust some currency into the cab-driver’s hand, and then hunched in a gust of wind. I made my way toward the activity, the bright illumination, the flash of emergency lights.

  A fire truck was rumbling slowly into position. The streets were quiet otherwise. The cloudy sky was blocked here by the buildings that made it even colder, and the street vents exhaled vapor that streamed into the air and vanished.

  I could still feel the struggle to deny wrenching at me. Not true—it can’t be.

  Just keep repeating that charm, I told myself. Just keep saying that. Maybe reality will change. Maybe you’ll be able to lie to yourself so well you’ll begin to believe it. Didn’t you always believe in magic?

  The window glass glittered on the sidewalks, and crunched under the feet of men in long, yellow plastic raincoats.

  I shouldered my way into the light and then stopped. My breath caught. The plastic sheets did not begin to be sufficient. My shoes made sucking sounds on the pavement. Red was sticky underfoot.

  One or two cops greeted me, solemn, courteous, “Hello, Mr. Fields.” “You don’t want to see this, Mr. Fields.”

  I could not move.

  “We’re sure who it is, in case you’re wondering,” said Childress. Not: Good evening. Not: Why don’t you step away from here and spare yourself.

  The best politician on the police force, Childress, a man destined to do well in interviews, was panting like a man out of breath.

  “I’m sure you’re right,” I said, sounding, I hoped, both ignorant and innocent.

  My tone must have irritated Childress. To shock me, to make me eat the truth, Childress whisked the plastic sheet aside.

  The falling body had struck a parking meter. The steel fist had punched through the skull, and yet the impact was so great that the violation tag stuck out of the mass on the sidewalk.

  Childress made a remark to some of the policemen nearby and gave a command. He was letting me take a good, scalding look. Then he turned to me.

  Surely I was mistaken. Surely—it was an ugly hope—this was a stranger.

  “It’s DeVere,” said Childress. The deferential detective, kind and yet burdened with the task of filling out forms, was gone. This was the real Childress, a man who did not like his work. He wanted television, press conferences, headlines. He did not want this.

  I asked, “What happened?” It was a way of trying to deflect, unsuccessfully, what I was seeing. Ask questions. Talk. Don’t just stand here looking. Such a sight should blind, but it didn’t.

&n
bsp; “What happened,” echoed Childress.

  “Was he pushed?” I said, my voice thin but steady. There is, in a man like Childress, despite his polish and earnestness, a dislike for the rich. It is the dislike some men have for very beautiful women, a resentment: Some people have everything.

  “Don’t even suggest murder,” he said. “We won’t even consider such a thing.”

  I would not please Childress by shuddering, looking away. There was a long pause while the death-heavy lights did their job, illuminating everything. And then I must have passed the test. The plastic sheet was settled back over the mess.

  “He jumped,” said Childress after a long time, during which he looked at me with something like apology.

  I could think only of the fall, the arms and legs swimming, the street swelling to fill his eyes.

  I rasped, “How can you be certain?”

  “We’re sure.” Childress cleared his throat. “People don’t push each other out of men’s-room windows. He had to climb on top of a toilet.”

  “Someone was chasing him, perhaps.”

  “Who?”

  I was afraid to guess. “This is the suicide capital of North America,” I said, as though that ugly label would make either one of us feel better. “You want to ask me some questions.”

  “Again. More questions.”

  “Why did you call me? Why did you ask me to come?”

  “I wanted to see if you’d show up.”

  “You don’t think this was a suicide, do you?”

  He led me up the sidewalk several steps, out of the hearing of the other men. He gazed at the sidewalk. “The security in this building isn’t very good. They’re putting on a new roof. There are scaffolds, doors left unconnected to the alarm.”

  I said nothing.

  He eyed me, as though to verify that I was not an illusion. “Why would DeVere want to take his own life?”

  “I have no idea.” I was stunned at what I had seen. And yet the world continued: buildings, cold darkness.

  “Why was DeVere investigating Blake’s death?”

  “Was he?”

  Childress waited. He was unwilling to irritate me, but seemed dogged, even proud of having someone like me to question. At the same time he knew it was a simple case. A man had jumped. “He did not believe Blake simply shot himself.”

  “They were associates.” There was a catch in my voice, and I recalled that DeVere, for all of his shortcomings, had felt real respect for Blake.

  Childress’s eyes glittered in the emergency lights. He turned so his face was half-hidden, and he stood so he could see my face clearly. “He was putting pressure on me to investigate you. He hired private detectives to follow you around. Rumor was that he was obsessed with you.”

  There was the sound of a car door at the end of the street, a thud, and a distant patter of voices.

  “The media,” said Childress, as though uttering an obscene phrase.

  I understood the core of Childress’s anger. He did not like corpses, and he did not like being saddled with another possible homicide. It was natural to take out his disgust on me, a knowledgeable man who knew so little about mortality. I needed to lean against a wall to strengthen myself. He put his best expression on, a manly, set-jawed look that hid all feeling.

  I said exactly the right thing. “You’re a good cop, Childress.”

  He looked at me and lifted an eyebrow. Maybe, he meant to say, and maybe not. He had a broad, pale face, the sort poor at disguising feeling. “It doesn’t have to make sense. It doesn’t have to be logical.”

  “What are you trying to tell me?”

  “The DeVere people are going to figure you did this.”

  “What do you think?”

  “What I think doesn’t matter.”

  He turned back to his work, rich in experience I would never understand, a man only a little older than myself.

  It was easy to hate the casual efficiency of the men and women there. As I watched them work I tried to reassure myself. This might have nothing to do with me. DeVere might have lost his grasp on hope, on life.

  I tried to lie to myself.

  When the ambulance was gone the fire department hosed down the street, and the gutter ran with black. I followed the stream along toward the drain, where the flow reflected the building lights. The current ran red and then faintly pink and at last clear and empty, finished.

  I couldn’t lie to myself any longer.

  I was dirty inside. I had that feeling that is out of fashion, that feeling that is so rarely discussed in polite conversation. I felt sinful.

  I trod sand until I was far out of sight of the Great Highway, out of the flick and lick of headlights. The surf would be too cold tonight. I was making a mistake this time. This was, though, what I had to do. I loosened my tie, worked at the knot, let it drop.

  Subliminally, or perhaps by an act of memory tinged with imagination, I registered the warning on the weathered, dark signs: Dangerous.

  My clothes left me. The sand was not subtle, fine stuff. It was marred with gravel, and the crisp, toastlike remains I recognized, in the dark, as chunks of charcoal.

  There was a storm coming. The air smelled not only of sea, but of land, of a land far away, an ocean away. Experienced as I was, I crouched, naked, panting. The wind was rising, and the waves were huge. Don’t go in, I told myself. Not tonight.

  I was polluted. I had done something wrong.

  A sin.

  I stood naked, clear of the fling of the foam. Mountains lifted, sloughed half their bulk, and then ascended again. Cliffs marched forward and collapsed. A range of breakers combed in from the side, and the clap the mountains made colliding was a steel smack, a freight-car coupling, a canyon wall going down.

  I stepped carefully, as if upon ice. The water was not warm. It stunned. It was nearly ice, and muscular. I let myself cringe, dance backward, and then I strode forward, and plunged.

  I dived under a wave, and surfaced, shaking water from my hair. My body contracted, scrotum, lips, the very soles of my feet tightening. I was swimming, hard, and had been swimming for quite some time, I realized, chill-dazzled, unable to sense the passage of time.

  The air I breathed tasted of iodine. I climbed a cliff-face of water. The surf-sheer grew as I worked upward, growing taller. Then it leaned backward, hesitated, and straightened again. It was an unfeeling thing, a happenstance of bulk and power, mass given force. It fell forward, taking me with it.

  I rolled, kicked, found the roiling afterwave. The cold hurt. It stopped aching. It was pain. How much of this could I withstand? It was the cold. It would take my life.

  Perhaps this was what I wanted. Perhaps this was what I deserved.

  I turned back and began to seek the shore. I had hoped that the surf would awaken me, sweep the sight of DeVere’s blood from my mind.

  But it hadn’t worked. Instead, sparring with the waves, fighting to keep breathing, I knew something. I knew something that did not make sense, any more than the slamming of the breakers around me represented logic: I had caused DeVere’s death.

  It was not too late. I could return to the simple shore of everyday life and escape whatever the woman represented. But as I swam, with strong, steady strokes toward the pinpoints of light, safety, home, I could feel the power leave my limbs. The cold was doing its work.

  That’s all right, I told myself, that boyish confidence returning to me as it often did here in the surf. Don’t worry. The waves will wash you back onshore. It was the irony of such waves—they weighed like boulders but could not crush.

  There was something wrong. I was swimming hard, but I was going nowhere. I had always been curious what it would be like, and now I would find out.

  This was a riptide.

  20

  A riptide slices outward, away from the beach.

  It cuts through the line of waves, a horizontal tornado of water that drags a swimmer far out, far away from land. Fighting against it is generally u
seless. The only chance is to swim across the riptide, parallel to the shore, because it is like a violent stream—deadly, but not wide.

  A riptide is ugly, even at night, the boom and roll of surf flattened, choppy and thick. A riptide even smells different, less like an ocean and more like salt waste. And they are quieter than the ocean, more silent, and thick with sand clawed from the bottom.

  Nona had said I was flirting with suicide. What would I choose to do, now that dying would be so easy, if not without a certain anguish toward the end?

  I forced life into my arms. I knew the waves. This sport was one I understood and I made way across the riptide, only to realize that this current was wider and stronger than I had expected. I was much more weary, and stiff from the cold, than I had anticipated.

  What are you? I asked myself. Aren’t you a man who wishes other people dead? Aren’t you a man who can make things happen with a thought?

  That doesn’t happen, I reminded myself. Wishes have no power. The body has power, and the ocean does. But thoughts are next to nothing. I swam hard, exhausted. The opposite bank of the riptide shrank away from me, as though my outstretched hand was surrounded with a force field.

  With a last burst of strength I struggled out of the riptide. I reached the relatively powerless tossing of the surf, and treaded water there, my head back, panting, joyful.

  I was elated. So that was a riptide, I thought. Not much of a challenge, really. You might even consider them overrated.

  A nasty little thought flickered: far from shore. Too far.

  Could I be this far from land? Was that vague streak to the east the beach? There wasn’t any shore. There was no sense of direction. A wave broke over me.

  Too tired. When I spluttered to the surface to see a massive comber, I was eager to take advantage of it. I pumped my limbs to reach the same speed as the wave, and when it broke I let the flow crash around me, over me, thundering over my head, pressing my eardrums, momentarily deafening me.

  The water tossed, churned, seethed. I did not have long before hypothermia would steal me away, make me leaden, lightheaded. But I was still confident. After all, the ocean is only so much water.