Strange Weather

by Joe Hill

  “I almost had it working this afternoon when Shelly showed up. If I finish, I’ll show you tomorrow.”

  “That’s good. You have to hurry up and make your first million bucks so I can retire and focus on what I really love—doing original things with Jell-O.” My father took a few steps down to his panel van, then turned back, frowning. “I want you to call if—”

  There was another cannonade of thunder. My father went right on talking, but I didn’t hear a word. That was very like him. He had an unmatched gift for tuning out background details that didn’t concern him. The Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders could’ve romped by naked, shaking their pom-poms, and if he was up in his crane repairing a transformer, I doubt he would’ve so much as glanced down.

  I nodded as if I’d heard him. I supposed he was dishing out a standard-issue caution for me to call the office and have them radio him if anything came up. He waved and turned away. A blue light snapped on, high in the clouds, a flash on the world’s biggest camera. I flinched (Don’t let him take your picture) and half shut the front door.

  The headlights of the panel van blinked on and the afternoon blinked off in the same moment. It was only six-fifteen in mid-August, and the sun wouldn’t be down for another three hours, but the day was lost in a smothering darkness. The van backed away. I closed the door.

  6

  I DON’T KNOW HOW LONG I stood in the foyer, listening to the tick of my pulse in my ears. The taut, expectant hush of the afternoon held me in place. At some point I realized I had my hand over my heart, as if I were a child about to pledge allegiance.

  No—not over my heart. Over the Polaroid.

  I had a powerful impulse to get rid of it, to throw it away. It felt awful to have it there in my pocket—awful and dangerous, like walking around with a vial of infected blood. I even went into the kitchen and opened the cupboard under the sink, meaning to cram it down into the garbage.

  But when I slipped it out of my pocket, I just stood there looking at it: looking at the fat, red-faced boy in a Huey Lewis T-shirt, bent over Popular Mechanics.

  Have we met before? Mat asked, smiling apologetically.

  A flash snapped outside, and I lurched back, dropped the photo. When I looked up, for an instant I saw him, the Phoenician, right on the other side of the kitchen window, and don’t let him take your picture, oh God, don’t let him—

  But it wasn’t the Phoenician with his Solarid. The flash was only another blue crackle of lightning. The face I saw in the window was my own, a faint reflection suspended in the glass.

  When the next crash of thunder came, I was in the garage. I carefully set the snapshot down, aligning it with the edge of my worktable. I switched on my Luxo lamp and twisted its hinged arm to nail the picture down in a hot circle of white light. Finally, and with a kind of nasty pleasure, I stuck a pushpin through the top, to hold it in place. I felt better then. It was in my operational theater now, fastened to my autopsy table. This was where I pried things apart and made them tell me everything, all their powers and vulnerabilities.

  To add to my feeling of confidence and control, I unbuttoned my pants and let them fall around my ankles and stepped out of them. I had discovered some time ago that nothing frees the mind like dropping the pants. Try it if you doubt me. American productivity would, I believe, nearly double if everyone were free to work pantsless.

  Just to show the photo who was boss, I ignored it and worked on the party gun. I squeezed the trigger to hear the fan whir inside the casing. I unbolted the side and lifted out the circuit board, picked and prodded at it. At first I was distracted. I kept looking at the picture that had no right to exist, and then, when I turned back to my new toy, I couldn’t remember what I’d been doing. After a while, though, I settled into my own capsule of focus, and the Phoenician, Shelly Beukes, the Solarid, all of it went gray—like a Polaroid developing in reverse, returning to unmixed blank chemicals.

  I soldered and wired. It was warm in the garage and fragrant with that smell I still love: melted rubber and hot copper and oil. I had oil on one of my hands, a little WD-40, and I wiped it with a rag, to expose pink skin. I studied the rag, watched the way the ink stain spread, leeching into the fabric. Sponged away. Absorbed.

  I had snapped a picture of Mobil Station Mat, Yoshi Matsuzaka, but what the Solarid captured was something in his head, a picture he held in his mind—of me. It soaked it up, like the rag in my fist, absorbing oil.

  Blue light flashbulbed outside the windows.

  I was not alarmed. The idea, when it came to me, was no shock. I suppose, down below the level of my conscious mind, I already knew. I believe that our subconscious often finishes ideas hours, days, weeks, even years before it decides to present them to the higher reaches of the brain. And after all, Shelly had already explained everything to me.

  Don’t let him take a picture of you. Don’t let him start taking things away.

  It’s odd that when I knew—when I understood—I wasn’t more afraid. That I didn’t go clammy and shivery and try to tell myself I was being crazy. Instead I was almost serene. I remember I calmly turned a shoulder to the photo and bent back to the party gun, screwing it together again and then shaking a packet of glitter down into the barrel, loading it like a musket. I behaved as if I had solved a math problem of no particular import.

  The last part of the gun was the flash, which could be snapped into the top, where a sharpshooter might put his scope. I had in fact swiped the disposable flash from our own Polaroid for this purpose. I held the flash in my hand, as if I were weighing it, and thought of the camera going off in Mat’s face, that hot, white snap of light, and how he had staggered away, blinking rapidly.

  I thought of Shelly Beukes, casting her baffled stare around the neighborhood she’d lived in for at least two decades, looking as dazed as if a flash had just gone off in her face. I thought about the black photo albums in the back of the Phoenician’s Caddy. I thought about the photo I’d seen in one of them, a photo that was almost certainly of Shelly’s own son.

  There was a long rolling peal of thunder that seemed to cause the whole garage to shudder, and afterward the air rang strangely. Then I decided I was the one shuddering, and abruptly I stood up, feeling dizzy. I switched off the Luxo and stood in the dark, taking deep breaths of the coppery-smelling air. I wondered if I was going to be sick.

  The ringing sound in my ears went on and on, and all at once it came to me that I wasn’t hearing an aftershock from the thunder. Someone was leaning on the doorbell.

  I was afraid to answer it. By some thirteen-year-old logic, I felt sure it had to be the Phoenician, who somehow knew I had solved the riddle of his Solarid and was here to shut me up forever. I looked around for something I could use as a weapon, considered the screwdriver, then took the party gun instead. I had the wild idea that in the shadows of the foyer it might look like a real gun.

  As I approached the front door, the storm clouds launched a fresh salvo of house-shaking thunder, and I heard a whispered curse in a heavy South African brogue. My anxiety drained away, leaving my legs loosey-goosey and my head light.

  I cracked the door and said, “Hi, Mr. Beukes.”

  His Rock Hudson features were haggard, deeply lined, and his lips were discolored, as if he’d been walking for a long time in the cold. He might’ve aged ten years since I’d last seen him.

  For all the crashing and flaring lights, it still wasn’t raining. The wind, though, lashed at his trench coat, so it flapped frantically around his massive torso and narrow hips. It was the same coat Shelly had been wearing that morning. It looked better on him. The gale flung his silver hair across his seamed, bold forehead.

  “Michael,” he said, “I did not eggspect I would have need of you so soon or on a night like this. I am so sorry. I am just— Oh, Gott. What a day. I am sure you must be busy. Doing something with your friends. I hate—on such short notice—”

  Under other circumstances this would’ve sounded like the setup f
or a punch line. I was less a social butterfly than a social death’s-head moth. But in the rushing darkness of that storm that refused to break, I hardly registered his line about how I must be doing something with my friends.

  The storm, the feeling of electric charge in the air, Mr. Beukes’s strained, raspy breath, and all the strangeness of the day had me keyed up, almost quivering with tension. Yet for all that, I wasn’t surprised to see him on the front step. Some part of me had been expecting him all afternoon . . . had been waiting for the third act of today’s performance to begin, the conclusion to an absurdist drama in which I was both the lead and the audience.

  “What’s up, Mr. Beukes? Is Shelly all right?”

  “Is she . . . ? Yes. No.” He laughed bitterly. “You know how she is. At the moment she is asleep. I hoff to go out. Something has happened. Today I am a man in a sinking boot, trying to bail out the water with a spoon.” It took me a moment to realize that “sinking boot” was Larry Beukesese for “sinking boat.”

  “What happened?”

  “Do you remember what I tolt you about my gyms, how there is always a fire to put out?” He laughed again, bleakly. “I shoot watch my metaphors. My gym, the one next to the Microcenter? There has been a fire—an actual fire. No one is hurt, thank Gott for his blessings. It was closed. The fire department eggstinguished the blaze, but I must go inspegg the damage.”

  “What kind of fire?”

  He wasn’t expecting that question, and it took him a beat to process it. I don’t blame him for being surprised. I was surprised, too. I didn’t know I was going to ask him that until I heard the question come out of my mouth.

  “I . . . I thingg it must be the lightning. They didn’t say. I hope it is the lightning and not old wiring. The insurance company will heave me by my shriveled olt ball sack.”

  I barked with laughter at this passing mention of his shriveled olt ball sack. I had never heard an adult—let alone an elderly man like Lawrence Beukes—speak to me this way: with a profane, desperate honesty, with such a mix of black humor and undisguised vulnerability. It was a jolting experience. At the same time, I had a thought, two simple, dreadful words—It’s him—and felt a light touch of vertigo.

  Thoughts flashed by, like cards glimpsed as the dealer shuffles the deck.

  Tell him not to go, I thought. But there’d been a fire, and he had to go, and I had no argument to make him stay, none that made sense. If I told him there was a man with a camera that stole thoughts circling his wife, he would never let me near Shelly again. In that case he might stay home—to protect her from me.

  I thought, He will go, and I will call the police and warn them his wife is in danger. Again I asked myself, In danger from what? From who? A man with a Polaroid camera? I was thirteen, not thirty, and my dread, my anxieties, would count for nothing with the police. I would sound like a hysterical child.

  Also, a quadrant of my brain held out hope that I was only scaring myself with a lunatic ghost story, the result of a childhood spent reading too many comic books and watching too many episodes of The Tomorrow People. The rational counterargument presented itself to me in a series of forceful, unequivocal points: Shelly Beukes did not suffer from a curse inflicted by a knockoff Polaroid. She was the victim of Alzheimer’s disease, no magical explanation required. As for the snapshot that showed me reading Popular Mechanics—so what? Someone must’ve taken my picture weeks ago, and at the time I hadn’t noticed. Simple explanations have the disappointing tendency to be the best explanations.

  Only the rational counterargument was a pile of shit, and I knew it. I knew it. I just didn’t want to know it.

  All this flickered through my mind in a moment. The wind blew a can rattling down the road, and Mr. Beukes turned to watch it go, then cast a distraught and distracted look at his idling Town Car.

  “I will drive you. This weather. If not for this morning, I might’ve risked leafing her by herself tonight. She has had the pill for her arthritis, and she sleeps so heavy, sometimes ten hours. But tonight there is the thunder. What if she wake up and is afraid? You must imagine me very wicked to have left her even for a minute.”

  At not quite thirteen, I wasn’t emotionally equipped to respond to a distressed and elderly man, viciously finding fault with himself. I mumbled some eloquent words of comfort, like, “Uh, no, not at all.”

  “I tried to dial you, but when there was no answer, I thingg he is in his garage and cannot hear the phone ringing. I kissed her goot-bye, very softly, so not to wake her, and came straight over.” He showed me a smile that was close to a grimace. “When she is asleep, she look like her olt self. Sometimes I thingg in her dreams she gets it all back. The path to her old self is overgrown, lost in the briars. But her sleeping mind . . . you thingg, Michael, the sleeping mind has paths of its own? Trails the waking self has never walked?”

  “I don’t know, Mr. Beukes.”

  He dismissed his own question with a weary nod. “Come. I will drive you now. You should get a book maybe and I dunno what else.” He lowered his eyes, took in the fact that I was wearing boxers and socks. He lifted one white, stupendously shaggy eyebrow. “Trousers perhaps.”

  “I don’t need you to drive me around the corner. Go see if your gym is okay. And don’t worry about Shelly. I’ll be over there in five minutes.”

  Thunder growled at his back. He cast another aggrieved look up at the sky, then leaned through the door and took my hand in both of his.

  “You are a goot damn kid,” he announced. “Shelly always tolt me this, you know. Every time she came home. ‘That is a goot damn kid, Larry. All the funny things he talks about building. Beware, Afrikaner. I will ask him to build me a new husband, one who doesn’t shave in the shower so it looks like a ferret exploded in there.’” He smiled at the memory, while the rest of his face crumpled, and for a horrible moment I thought he was going to cry again. Instead he lifted his hand and rested it on the back of my neck. “Goot damn kid, she said. She always knew when someone had greatness in them. She didn’t waste her time with second-rate people, not never. Only the best. Always.”

  “Always?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “She married me, didn’t she?” And winked.

  7

  ON THE WAY TO COLLECT my pants, I took a detour into the kitchen and dialed NorWes Utility. I knew the direct number to the switchboard by heart and thought maybe they could patch me straight through to my dad’s radio. I wanted to let him know where I was going to be—I thought there was a very reasonable chance I’d wind up sacking out on the Beukeses’ couch that evening. Only no one picked up on the other end because it never rang. There was just a long, dead hiss. I hung up and was about to try again when I realized there wasn’t any dial tone.

  It came to me, suddenly, that it was very dim in the kitchen. Experimentally, I flipped the light switch. The room didn’t get any brighter.

  I went to the picture window in the living room and looked out at the dead street; not a light on in a single window, in spite of the darkness of the day. The Ambersons, across the road, always had their TV on by midafternoon, but tonight there was no spectral blue glow pulsing in the windows of the den. At some point while Mr. Beukes and I had been talking, a line had gone down somewhere, cutting the juice to the whole neighborhood.

  I thought, No. It’s him.

  My stomach flopped. Suddenly I wanted to sit down. The aftertaste of Panama Thrill was in my mouth, a flavor like sweet bile.

  The house buckled in the wind, creaking and popping. Probably a lot of lines were going down tonight. As far as that went, it was entirely credible to imagine that the fire at the gym had something to do with the storm—a fire that had conveniently left Shelly all alone, with no way to raise an alarm if there was trouble, because even if she could remember how to call the police, her phone would be as dead as mine.

  I considered running across the road and beating a fist on Mr. Amberson’s door and yelling for help and—

  And the
n what? What was I going to tell him? That I was afraid a cruel man with tattoos had engineered a fire and a power outage so he could take Polaroids of a senile old woman? Let me tell you how that would look: like a fat kid with a headful of horror movies getting hysterical because of a little thunder and lightning.

  I wondered if I could just stay home. I don’t like admitting that, but it crossed my mind that Mr. Beukes would never really know if I’d walked over to watch his wife. Yeah, sure, in a couple of hours he would get back from his gym and I wouldn’t be there. But I could always bullshit him, say I’d only gone home for a minute to get my pillow and was coming right back.

  The idea briefly filled me with a shameful throb of relief. I could stay home, and if the Phoenician came and did something to Shelly—something awful—I wouldn’t be in the way and wouldn’t have to know. I was only thirteen, and no one could expect me to try to protect a mentally crippled old woman from a sadistic freak with a mile of ink on his body.

  I was afraid to go—but in the end I was even more afraid to stay. I envisioned Mr. Beukes coming home and finding Shelly toppled out of bed, her neck snapped, head turned halfway around to look back between her shoulder blades. When I closed my eyes, I could see it: her lips wrinkled in a grimace of terror and anguish, her stiffening corpse surrounded by hundreds of Polaroid snapshots. If the Phoenician visited her while I cowered at home, I might be able to lie my way out of it with Mr. Beukes. But I could not lie my way out of it with myself. The guilt would be too much. It would rot my insides and spoil every good thing in my life. Worst of all, I felt that my dad would somehow intuit my cowardice and I’d never be able to look him in the eye again. He would know I hadn’t really gone to watch Mrs. Beukes. I’d never been any good at lying to him, not about anything that mattered.