As a Thief in the Night (30 page)

It often happens that, in dreams, we find ourselves in a situation where we are the guardians of some secret that we must keep in order for some very delicate or perhaps even deadly situation not to end in blood and tragedy. It is also true that in such dreams we are for some reason very bad at concealing what needs to be concealed. Our anxiety is impossible to hide, and the personified threats daylight protects us from are very quick to pick up on our fears, and we know it.
 

Ezra knew that the giants had not noticed the living quarters, though the shacks stood in plain sight, but knew also that as soon as they saw the building, and heard everyone inside, they would set out to destroy it. The sounds coming from the guitar strings grew louder and he looked to the giants to see if they had heard it. Their huge heads turned slowly, searching for the sound, but could not seem to locate it. He had to get there before they did and warn Ruiz and Nectario and the others. Ezra set off through the forest of vines and tried to hurry. But, it seemed, at every step he tried to take there was a twig underfoot that he had not seen and that cracked loudly, or he ran into a branch he could not negotiate and that made some unnatural and alarming noise. Always the giants' heads moved back and forth, searching for that which was right before their eyes but somehow remained hidden from their sight. Ezra was getting closer, but just as he passed under the last monstrous shadow they saw him and, finally, the Maison Saltimbanques. He had given it away. The noise he had made, his panic, had drawn their attention to it. The ground shook as each of the towering brothers rushed across the field, crushing the vines and trellises in their path. He knew he was responsible and the shame and consequences of his incompetence flooded his limbs and made them slow and heavy. As the soil under his feet shook he felt their last thundering steps right behind him, and he was finally thrown to the ground. He buried his face in his arms expecting to be trampled, and when he was not, looked up from the dirt expecting to see his friends crushed beneath the giants' huge boots. But the music didn't stop, the lights did not go out, and the hum of dance and drink continued. Instead the massive, unnatural men stopped and formed lines, lines that looked like some medieval military formation. Ezra stood still for a moment and listened to the music coming from inside and watched the light pulse between the huge, menacing figures. In front of the humble hut of his liberation the giants stood, gnashing their teeth at him, and barring his way.

He heard something move in the vines behind him. Turning to see what it was, the most pathetic looking horse he had ever seen emerged from the rows of grapes. It was tall and thin, its legs bony, and it might have been sick. At its side was a lance that had been tied in with a leather strap, and a sort of helmet hung from its saddle. Ezra mounted this poor beast, suddenly believing it to be, for the moment, as great a steed as Alexander's Buccephalus, put on the helmet and took up the lance, which he now saw was somewhat crooked. The helmet was no better, some poorly constructed combination of metal and cardboard, and looked like it had been put together by some well-intentioned mother for Halloween. Tilting his crooked spear, and in spite of the awful fear that the windmills turned giants struck in his heart, Ezra charged them.

He bore down on them, hard and fast, his spear in rest, bracing for what would surely be a horrible impact and probably his death. The horse breathed heavily underneath him and its hooves pounded the earth. Ezra looked over the end of his lance and set his eye on the enemy he would impale first. But just before impact the horrible faces of the giants relaxed, their teeth stopped gnashing, and, as one, they stepped aside to allow Ezra to pass peacefully between them.
  His pale blue eyes opened wide in disbelief and wonder at the dissolution of his terror. But his horse was still in a panic. Instead of continuing on the path of safety he had been granted, it veered and charged headlong towards the huge boot of one of the giants. He pulled back hard on the reins, but it was no use, his crazy horse crashed full tilt into the giant's boot and flung Ezra, his lance still extended, into the door at the base of the windmill. The door smashed open, the hinges exploding with a clap like thunder, and he rolled headlong onto the concrete floor inside.

It was a dusty, empty room with the windmill's clockworks, gears and levers, and machines mounted on its walls and ceiling. He got up slowly, groaning at the pain he felt all over, walked over to the door he'd crashed through, and looked outside. Off in the distance he saw the baseball hats of a couple of the Mexicans just above the vines. They worked quietly and steadily at their task. All the other windmills stood still in the coming evening. Ezra looked around the inside of the room where he stood. He had always been fascinated by clocks and watches, done in silver or gold, that were built with windows or glass that revealed their inner workings. It was dirty, but much of what he saw inside the windmill reminded him of those timepieces.

And there were fresh footprints on the dusty floor, and he followed them to the corner of the room behind a machine, about the size of a wardrobe, with dials, plug-ins, and red and yellow lights. Behind it, on the floor, was a wooden door. Ezra pulled it up by the rope handle attached to it so that it rested at an angle against the wall.  Concrete steps led to whatever was underneath. He went down slowly, with only the light filtering in from overhead by which to see. He squinted and tried to allow his eyes to adjust to the dark.

The ceiling was low so he stooped and felt around in front of him like a blind man.
  Finally, in what he thought must be the middle of the room, he came across what felt like several large wooden boxes. He opened one of the lids slowly and then pulled back the loose burlap bags that covered whatever was inside. The smell of steel and oil left no doubt as to what he had found. Ezra ran back to the stairs with it in his hands and held it up to the light. The shotgun had a double barrel and was black and heavy and new. Shaking with disbelief and fear, he held it under his arm like he was about to use it, then spun it round to look down the barrel. He could not tell if it was loaded. Setting it down on the stairs he walked back to the box, more confident now that he knew his way, and felt deeper inside.  The box was filled with guns, he didn't know how many, that were identical to the one he had taken out. Ezra opened the next box and instead of guns found small, heavy cardboard boxes. He brought one to the light under the doorway and ripped it open. The points of several bullets shone up at him. What could his grandfather be doing with all this? What possible use could the old man have for so many guns? Ezra rushed back to the third box and pushed open the lid.

"You should not be here, Cabra."

Ezra jumped at the sharp voice behind him and spun around. Ruiz was sitting on the stairs. He was a few steps up from where Ezra had laid the shotgun. His friend's face was grave and he did not look like himself. "You should not be here, Cabra," he repeated.

"Ruiz, what is all this?"

"It does not concern you," said Ruiz angrily. "Now, I do not know what we will do about this."

"What do you mean?" Ezra asked, stepping under the light and facing him.

"I mean all of this..." He motioned toward the boxes. "This is very important for myself and the others."

"You mean this isn't Harold's?"
  Ezra asked, surprised he had used his grandfather's first name.

"No."

"Does he know about it?"

"No."

"Ruiz, what the hell is all this?" Ezra raised his voice nervously.

"These are our weapons, Cabra. The instruments of our cause."

"Cause? What cause?"

"Nectario and me and the others, we are all Zapatista. There is a war going on among the people of the sun, Ezra. We are its messengers, and its soldiers."

"Ruiz, what the hell are you talking about?"

"Calm down, Cabra. Sit with me for a moment," Ruiz said.

Reassured at the appearance of the friend he knew, Ezra sat down, his back against the wall, at the bottom of the stairs. He could see the black, oiled, shotgun barrels gleaming in the nearly dark room. Ruiz told him of the struggles of the Zapatista in Mexico, of the corruption of the Mexican government, and the aid and complicity of the Americans. It was difficult for them to get good weapons at home, so while they worked here they bought them, and then, through bribes and cunning, snuck them across the American/Mexican border into Chiapas. They were smugglers.

"And the other windmills?" Ezra asked.

Ruiz nodded silently.

"Where do you get the guns and amunition?"

"It comes by boat from a man who brings it from Columbus, Ohio."

"And how do you keep it a secret?"

"It comes late at night, in the dark. Of course your grandfather does not know. He is old, and leaves the upkeep of the windmills to me."

"I can't believe this." Ezra shook his head.

"You can never tell anyone about this, Cabra."

Ezra sat silently at the bottom of the steps.

"Cabra, you must never speak of this."

"And you'll use these guns to kill?" he asked, ignoring what Ruiz had said.

"If we must."

Ezra stood up quickly. "I can't be part of this." An image of himself being cuffed again flickered before his mind's eye. "Are there other things besides guns?"

"Yes."

"What?"

"It is best if you do not know. Put the gun back in the box, Cabra. It is time to go."

Ezra snatched the gun off the stairs, placed it back inside the box, covered it with the burlap bag, and shut the lid. The two men walked back through the vineyard without talking.
  Before Ezra headed off in the direction of his grandfather's house for dinner, Ruiz placed his hand on his shoulder, then let him go his way.

Two days later, after they were finished boxing, Nectario passed Ezra a small box without Harold seeing. Ezra waited until they were gone before he opened it. It was a bullet. It was heavy and bronze, like the ones he had seen hidden in the windmill foundation. Rough letters were carved onto its length. He held it up to his eyes to read it: "Bullets and books have their own destinies."

That night Ezra returned to the Maison Saltimbanques for the first time since he had discovered the secret his friends had been carefully keeping from him. Nectario was playing his guitar, lost in the song at the other end of the room. Ezra watched him. It took a while before the young man looked up, still playing his instrument, and smiled at him. Ezra smiled back. He would never say a word.

T
raining camp did not go well. He was in great shape but had difficulty catching the football.  Coach Walsh had him work at tight end and, although he surprised most of his opponents in contact drills, all the passes he dropped poisoned his confidence. It was not fear that prevented him from catching the football; the ball itself felt foreign to him when it hit his hands, and he could not explain why.

Alex DaLivre was in camp too, but Ezra did not speak to him. Although Alex showed flashes of the same acuity displayed during the previous season, he had clearly lost some of his fire. The drugs and drink had killed his hunger, and it showed in his stride and in the steps that defenders had gained on him. Ezra was not afraid or uncomfortable around him anymore.

Like Ezra, it was Nick Carraway's first season of senior football. He played back-up running back and he and Ezra walked home from practice together every night. Nick's parents still attended the Pentecostal Assembly but, taking the example of their lord and savior, they had apparently forgiven Ezra and still welcomed him into their house. They did not suspect that Ezra had begun to doubt that he
needed
forgiveness at all.

"Ezra Mignon! You're going to get only one chance to run that play tomorrow. One chance! If you can't do it, I'll find someone who bloody well can!" It was the fifth pass that Ezra had dropped during practice, and Coach Walsh stormed toward the back of the scrimmage. It was the day before the first game of the year, Belle River's annual exhibition game against London.

The next morning he sat at the front of the bus by himself. He was wearing his football pants but his helmet rested on the floor beside him. Gord and Elsie were driving to London to watch the game. Ezra had a football with him and he held it in his lap. But it was not football he was thinking about as they took the ramp and merged onto the highway bound for London, Ontario.

The man driving the bus wore a three-piece suit and tie, which struck Ezra as a strange choice of clothing for a bus driver. It was an old suit and a little threadbare, but he wore it nobly. He had very low classical music playing in the front of the bus and a high, neatly stacked, pile of cassette tapes on the ledge beside him. He watched the man closely without being noticed and came to understand that the man did not just listen to music, but that he was in fact
musical
. Not musical in the sense that he could play an instrument, though perhaps he could, but musical in the sense that it was a standard by which he lived.

The bus driver's hands rested on the large steering wheel as if upon the keys of a piano. He played his instrument surely and easily, according to its needs. Ezra picked up the football in his lap but did not take his eyes off the driver's hands upon the steering wheel. A strange sense of strength and energy seemed to grow into his own hands as he took possession of the ball and subdued it under his new power. Ezra knew that although it was a football in his hands, it could have been anything; a steering wheel, a sword, the lyre or guitar, a pen, clay, bronze, or stone. The energy that flooded his hands reached out and touched the dark river of his blood and then, tidal and gravity blessed, rushed his mind. Yes, his action would become his eloquence and his hands would become the living expression of his heart,
whatever
they reached out for. He turned the ball quickly, gripped it, and felt it give way. 

Before everything happened, he knew. Doubts and fears fell away, he did not know how, and the hour delivered him into a freedom he was not the cause of. The entire way to London he did not let go of the football, and he did not speak.

Walsh called in Belle River's second offensive play of the game: "Split left, pro twenty slant," Jason Shoemaker said in the huddle without making eye contact with him. Ezra was not afraid or nervous and lined up wide to the left on the line of scrimmage, checked with the referee to make sure he was on side, and sank into his stance with his right foot forward. He kept his right foot up so that his first step could be with his left. The ball was snapped and he felt like a sharp blade coming across the middle of the field. Between the outside and middle linebackers Shoemaker drilled the ball. Before he had time to think Ezra extended his arms and claimed the ball. His hands picked it clean and his grip on it felt exactly as it had on the bus ride.

As soon as he had it. the middle linebacker laid him out. The loud smack rang across the field and Ezra's head snapped back. His body went limp and then he was slammed on his back, the linebacker driving him into the ground and coming down on top of him. Coach Walsh dropped his clipboard and ran onto the field before the referee had even waved him out for the injury.

People casually compare football to other contact sports, like hockey or rugby, but this is a mistake. In those games angles are the rule and direct contact is the exception; in football collision is the rule.  Rugby contact resembles wrestling, football hits look more like car accidents.

Before Walsh could reach them Ezra pushed the young man on top of him onto his back, popped up fast to his feet, and dropped the football onto the linebacker's stomach. Walsh, already halfway onto the field, stopped dead in his tracks, his face blank with shock, and watched Ezra jog back to the huddle.

"Watch the stuff after the whistle," the referee, who was just as surprised as everyone else that Ezra was not paralyzed on the ground, instructed half-heartedly. Ezra ignored him and stepped into the huddle with his teammates.

"Nice catch!" Alex DaLivre said from the other side of the huddle. He held his hand up to slap Ezra's. It was the first time they had spoken since that spring day when Alex and Rick had chased him through the outdoor market and he had had a collision with Jason B. Prism. Ezra offered his friend and enemy his hand and, for a moment, they were brothers again.

That September afternoon, with autumn not even in the air yet, Ezra caught six passes for a hundred and thirty yards. Twice he turned short passes into long gains and broke tackles all the way down the field. It was his first game of varsity football and it was the best game of his life. 

The games that followed were no different. Ezra quickly became Shoemaker's go-to receiver, and he caught more passes in the first three games of the season than all his other teammates combined. He felt good and strong and knew that he had come to be seen as sure handed and tough.

Word spread throughout the school. His classmates read his name in the newspaper and then spoke it again in the halls and cafeteria. Girls he did not know sat beside him in class and said hello as they walked past him. The humiliations and shame of the previous spring seemed forgotten or ignored now that his crimes had been replaced with fresh glories.

There were not many black people living in Belle River, so almost everyone made note of and recognized those that did live there. Lila Channer's parents were Jamaican and lived in Tecumseh, the town where Ezra had attended St. Anne's for his first two years of high school.  Lila was a notorious troublemaker, and partly because of this she was well liked and even admired by the other students at Belle River High. Ezra knew who she was but had never spoken to her. He had stood with her in circles of friends and at crowded cafeteria tables but had had neither the nerve nor the occasion to speak with her. She wore her hair short, and it fell around her face at the height of her mouth.  Her full breasts stuck out prominently under the t-shirts she wore tucked into her jeans, and her skin was soft and smooth.

She was ten minutes late for class and walked in without apology. When she could not find a seat she huffed loudly, creating even more of a disturbance to the lesson in progress, then stood still, looking at the teacher as if it was his responsibility to find somewhere for her to work.
  He pointed to the computer beside Ezra, at the back of the room, and she flopped down beside him. The teacher paused until she was settled and then continued with his instructions.

"Hi!" She turned completely sideways in her seat and looked at him flatly. "You're that football player, right?" she blurted out. Some of the other students looked at her.

"Yeah, I suppose so," he said much more quietly, attempting to clue her in.

"What's your name?"

"Ezra."

"Ezra?" she asked, quieting down a little. "That's a book in the Old Testament, you know."

"I know."

"Is that who you're named after?"

"No, I'm named after a poet."

"A poet?" The teacher was done giving instructions and the other students in the room started talking amongst themselves while they began their assignment.

"Yes."

"Well, that's better I suppose. My parents are still always dragging me to church and I don't even believe in God."

"Did you tell them that?"

"I tell them all the time."

"And what do they say?"

"My father says I will once I'm older and the world beats me down and I see how badly I need Him. My mother says I'll go to hell."

"Does that scare you?"

"Only first thing in the morning, for two or three minutes, right when I wake up."

"Why only then?"

"I don't know."

Lila had no intention of finishing or even beginning the assignment. She talked to Ezra instead, and he was happy for the distraction and the novelty and rashness of the things she said. She smelled of cigarette smoke and was wearing a belt that was green, yellow and black, like the Jamaican flag. They flirted and wrote short notes to each other on the computer screens and kept switching seats to read them.

For the next couple of days, whenever they crossed paths in the halls, she said hello to him. When she did she said his name in a strange way that he liked and that made it seem like they knew each other better than they really did.

On the weekends he hung with Nick Carraway and other players from the football team.
  They drank hard liquor and beer and went to parties in the woods and to school dances. At the dances the teachers knew that they had been drinking and were drunk but didn't say anything as long as they didn't cause trouble. When he drank Ezra thought about his time with the Mexicans, and that drinking with his friends was fun but not special in the same way it had been with Ruiz and Nectario and Maria during the summer. Sometimes he told his friends about his time on the island, and about the people with whom he had worked. He never spoke about the guns he had found though, but he often thought about them. In whose hands were they now? Whose hungry eye stared down the black barrels?

Some nights he stayed home, and things were quiet. The time that he'd spent reading
Demian
that summer had changed him. He now realized that books could keep him company, and that he could finish reading one and feel like he knew the man who had written it better than he knew his own friends. Sometimes he read on these nights and, other times, he worked on his poems and the short story he was trying to write.

Lila started calling the house regularly and Elsie, not knowing whom she was, and sensing that something more serious was brewing, asked Ezra about her. He was vague and dismissive, as most young men are when they speak to their mothers about such things. Both Elise and Gord went to each of his football games, and it did not take Elsie long to determine Lila's identity.  She saw Lila smoking freely, and swearing too, and she was not pleased. Gord was not nearly so worried and even laughed a bit.

The problems resulting from Ezra's arrest the previous spring aside, things were going better between Gord and Elsie too. The trucking company was doing well, and Gord was advancing steadily, both financially and in stature. Although he was not a formally educated man, he was very intelligent and, in a sense, an excellent problem solver. He enjoyed the challenges and the social aspect of business and took pride in his ability to bargain and barter with customers. In the evenings he still coached Belle River's minor football team.

Knowing that her relationship with her husband, and their circumstances, had improved, one might have been tempted to think that it was the reason for Elsie's very evident new happiness. But it was not. She was pregnant. She and Gord had tried off and on for the last ten years without any success. She was certain that the barrier had been in her mind and not in the physical ability of either of them to conceive. Though they had tried, and though she had struggled to banish the thought, the compulsive idea that her new baby would be a betrayal of the one she had lost forced itself upon her. She had even been tormented by nightmares, dark dreams that any new baby could only be some sort of awful
doppleganger
of the baby that lay under the earth in the Walpurgis cemetery.

But in the last few years she had become daring in the face of her fears and had in fact dared fate to send her another child, and she had known the moment she became pregnant. A few weeks later she had gone and bought a test. Layne had been drawing in the living room when she took it. She came out of the bathroom crying and lay down close beside him on the carpet. He felt her looking over what he had done. It took a minute for him to look at her.

"Why are you crying, Elsie?" he asked.