In the Night Season (10 page)

His heavy, bloated face gave no indication that he’d heard.

“Please,” she said. “What is this? Are you with those people?”

The laugh came forth. “What people?”

“I don’t have any money,” she said. “You’re wrong about me. I came to work—we’re the wrong people. Please.”

His face registered nothing at all. “Come on, get it started.”

“Where—” she began.

“Let’s go to your house,” he said.

The lighted windows of the school building looked gold in the increasing dark. They were safety. Without quite realizing that she would do so, she opened her door and tried to get out. He was startlingly quick for his size. He had her by the upper arm and pulled roughly, hurting her. She screamed, her head still outside the frame of the open door of the car. But now he gripped her by her hair and forced her back, reached beyond her with one bearlike hugging motion and shut the door.

“Don’t scream again. If we don’t get to your house, your boy’ll die. We already got your boy. You understand me? I mean I thought you understood me.”

“Oh, God,” Nora said. “Oh, please—no.”

“Calm down,” he said and smiled. “You’ve got the power.” He laughed—the small unpleasant sound—apparently pleased with his own expression. She was silent. “Start the car.” He looked out again and back down the road. She commenced struggling with the ignition.

“I got a vehicle over there,” he said. “We could take it, I guess. But it’s hot and I’d like to leave it behind, if you know what I mean.”

The engine caught.

“What do you want?” Nora asked him, through tears.

“Hell.” He smiled. “I’m not the one with the ideas.”

“Oh, come
on
,” she said. “You put that filth in my mailbox.”

The smile changed slightly. “Drive,” he told her.

I
N THE LUNAR LIGHT, THE TREES
looked as though they were reaching helplessly skyward. Their shadows on the uneven ground made a cross-stitch of lines intersecting other lines. Jason had made it to the other side of the house, keeping to the trees, and he had reached the hill overlooking the road. He was winded, shaking from the chill and from his own terror. The trees confused and frightened him; the moon was so bright. Even the stars seemed brighter.

On nights like this, nights of the amazing country sky, where you felt you could see all the way to the end of the galaxy, and you understood why they called it the Milky Way, he and his father used to take long walks, keeping to the county road, away from the new developments on the other end of Steel Run Creek, where the highway was. His father would talk about the way farmers used to predict the weather by looking at the night sky. This was the same kind of night sky, with a bright, wide halo around the moon. To the boy it was a sick pallor, that brightness all around. The moon was the color of bones.

He came down the embankment to the road, then looked back at the trees, the thousand stitches of shadow. On the other side, beyond
the wild-grass field there, he could see the dark shape of the LaCombe house—Mr. LaCombe had once been brother-in-law to some army general who had owned much of the land surrounding Mr. Bishop’s farm. Because of the housing developments starting up out near the highway, old Mr. LaCombe had sold his house and land and moved to Wyoming, where there was more space. The house had been empty, like so many others in the county, and his land had been divided into five-acre parcels, for sale, but the real estate slump had stopped all that, and there were now three other empty houses on what had once been the LaCombe farm. The boy knew all this from listening to his father’s talk in the months before he died.

The nearest house where there would be people was halfway up Cider Mountain, almost a mile away; it was the next stop the school bus made in the mornings after Jason got on. Missy James lived there with her mother and her aunt. Jason thought of trying to make it up the long, packed, earth-and-gravel road to them, and abruptly he had an image of himself finding them dead. He shook this off, deciding not to chance missing his mother.

Skirting the edge of the road toward where it descended, he tried to hear—over the soughing of the wind in the high tree branches and the clicking of dry wood—the sound of a car. He thought he could hear the low, far-off hum of trucks on the highway, two miles to the north. But it might have been the wind. He stood in the middle of the road. The night was almost day brilliant, except for the trees and the thick dry undergrowth, which was ink-black, impenetrable, a wall of dark, out of which Travis might leap at any moment. The boy was exposed here, and he took himself to the edge of the asphalt surface, at the crest of the long hill leading down toward the highway. He could not stay still, could not simply wait, but kept moving along the road, cold, half-crying, frightened so deeply that his senses had become excruciatingly sharper. He could smell the woods, the several odors of damp and death and the decay of leaves, the larvae of millions of dormant insects, everything. He heard breathing in the interstices of darkness behind him, and he crept away from the edge of the road, still following it, looking back.

He fell—stepped in a hole, or an unevenness in the ground—and pitched forward, facedown in the mulchy leaves and grass. Immediately he rolled to his back and tried to come to his feet. Something moved inside the black wall of the woods, a few feet away. He got to a crouch, then limped over to the other side, aware of the stark definition of his own shadow on the blue surface, and dropped into the declension there, which was almost as deep as a trench. The wind had picked up; it was so cold. He put his hands to his face and shivered, crying. A moment later, he looked back at where he had been and saw movement out of the corner of his eye. Travis emerged from the woods a few yards farther down, came bursting out, almost stumbling. He had been running. He slid down the embankment and then stood, hands open as if to claw the air, looking up and down the road. “If you can hear me, boy, I’m gonna tell you the truth. I’m scared bad. I don’t know what happened. I don’t have a goddam clue. But it wasn’t me. I didn’t do it, kid. I’m telling you. And I respect you for outsmarting me. Okay? You hear me? But we got your mother.” He looked around, slow. And then he shouted. “You hear me?”

Jason felt himself about to gag on the cold; it was like that: he was shivering so severely that he had become nauseous. His sides hurt; his teeth were chattering. It amazed him that the other hadn’t heard. But the wind swept across the moon-white sky, as though it might drag the stars down with it. Travis turned and walked in the very center of the road, back in the direction of the house. He stopped and turned around and appeared to be listening. “Goddammit.”

The wait for him to continue was horrible.

“Don’t do this.”

The boy sobbed, put his hands tight over his mouth.

And now Travis was running, coming fast down the center of the road, not looking to either side, but sprinting, and Jason felt himself rising, unable to keep still with that rushing shadow nearing him, the violent, crazy blast of the other, coming like wind. The shadow veered at the last second, Travis having seen him move, and Jason scrambled up out of the trench, his ankle hurting, his hands
grasping at the grass and dirt and stones. Travis jumped on him, his boots landing on either side of his shoulders, and the boy found a stone with his left hand, turning in the closing darkness to swing it. He hit the side of the knee and heard Travis yell. He swung again, still trying to push with his legs to get away, and Travis reached down to catch the wrist of the hand that held the stone. His grip felt strong enough to break the bone.

Jason used his other hand to grab the lower leg and, with all his desperate strength, bit the flesh of the calf. He was biting through the heavy denim of the jeans, but he heard Travis yell again, and then he was loose, he had got out from his grasp and scrambled up onto the road surface, running. Travis had fallen, and from the trench he yelled, “I’m gonna make you pay for that you little son of a bitch!”

The boy ran, or attempted to run. There was a piercing stab of pain in his ankle with each stride, but he was managing it now, running, staggering, and the chilly air went through his chest, stinging his lungs. Light shone from behind him, the whir of a car. He got to the edge of the asphalt and up a small embankment there, toward a wooden fence. The car came on. He saw no sign of Travis. He hauled himself back to the road and waved with both arms at the brightness. The car slowed, then stopped. The driver’s side door opened. “Jason? Honey?”

His mother. He heard the note of fear in her voice and relief, too. He went toward her, and then the passenger door opened, and he saw, over the headlights, an enormous man getting out, a red and black wideness, like a wall.

“Mom?” the boy said.

“Oh, honey.” His mother put her arms around him. “Don’t be afraid.”

There was a surge of warmth and relief inside him, as though everything would be all right now. But then he understood that it was just beginning, and he heard himself whimper.

Travis came limping up from the dark beyond the fan of the lights. He looked at the heavy man. “Jesus Christ, Billy.” Then he took Jason’s mother by her arms and pulled her away into the blind
ing space of the headlights. “Go on and park the fucking car in the driveway of the house,” he said to the fat man.

They were big shadows moving in the glare. The fat man went out of the light, got in, and the car moved forward with a whine of the little engine; it took the light on up the road. Travis held the boy’s mother by the arms. “A short walk,” he said. “Just the three of us. Right, Jason, buddy?” He had started walking her toward the house. “Course, you can stay here, if you want, and I’ll just put a bullet in her eye when we get inside. What do you think?”

“You better leave us alone,” Jason shouted, following him.

The fat man stood by the idling car in the driveway, waiting. His big loose coat hung on him, and he was chewing something. In the shadows, his jowls looked rubbery and thin. The eyes were small, way up in the mass of flesh. Travis went on into the house with Nora, and Jason ran to catch up. By the time he got to the back door, his mother was already blindfolded, her hands tied behind her back. And now the fat man grabbed Jason, lifting him by his arms, pulling them back.

“Get him good and tight,” Travis said. “He’s a slippery little son of a bitch.”

“What do you want with us?” the boy’s mother said. “What’re you going to do?” He heard it as the fat man trussed his hands, hurting him, and then Travis walked over and put a pillowcase over his head. Nora said, “Please don’t hurt us.”

They were led outside again and forced into the back of the car; Jason hit his head on the door, and one of the men put a hand to the back of his cheek, pushing him down. He was on the backseat, and his mother was there, lying over on him. He could feel her shoulders, and the line of her jaw along the top of his head. He breathed her perfume.

“Ow,” she said. “Don’t.”

The door closed on them.

“Mom?” he said.

She was crying. The car rocked to one side and then to the other with the weight of the men getting in.

“Okay,” Travis said. “Now I think we’re all gonna get to know each other.”

They were moving, the car moved with slow jerking motions, the engine whining.

“Should’ve kept the other car,” the fat man said. Jason could tell his voice from Travis’s. “This thing’s a piece of shit.”

“Yeah, well, shut up about it,” Travis said. “Everybody comfortable back there? Let me know if it gets too warm or anything.”

The fat man laughed. “You’re meaner than I am.” It was the fat man’s voice.

“I told you I wanted you to shut up, Bags. So shut up.”

“Don’t talk to me like that.”

“Yeah, well, just do it. Shut the fuck up. You stupid, fat-assed, murdering ape.”

“What’re you gonna do, Travis. You gonna beat me up? The man kept talking at me, yapping at me, okay? Yap-yap. Running his mouth.”

“Shut up. Stop running
your
mouth.”

The fat man muttered something the boy couldn’t make out, and then there was only the sensation of motion, the road winding, and the turns, and more turns. One of the men put the radio on—Jason heard disconnected talk, voices, parts of songs. It stopped, and there was a jazzy something, piano and guitar, drums and bass. It sounded to the boy like something his father had listened to. The kind of music you couldn’t hum.

The smell of the pillowcase made him cough, and he thought he might suffocate. They were jostled and shaken as the road dipped and wound through the hills—and time went on and on. He heard other music, and a newsman talking, advertisements about skin cream, new cars, the Door Store, banks, restaurants. The weight of his mother’s body on him, her tearful breathing, and his own struggle for air seemed to take on a force and reality all their own, separate from the sound of the engine, or the lunacy coming from the radio. And it was lunacy; it rattled through its bright messages in voices that sang or crowed, as if there were no harm in the world. It was so terribly separate and distant now, this radio banter among the safe, the nice. It sounded insane. He hated them for their very insulation from the terror he felt, though he could not have put this
into words. The terror had become a numbing force in his limbs, like something cold dripping down the inside surfaces of his skin.

When the car stopped, he simply waited for what would follow. He had lost the will to resist. His mother was pulled from the car, and then the rough hands took hold of him, and he was jerked out of the space, his legs flailing. He fell, he was on the ground briefly, something barking his knee—a stone in the hard surface. Then he was lifted and half-carried across some span of uneven ground.

There was a doorway. His mother had started screaming. The rough hands pulled him through an opening, into a room, and his mother’s cries echoed in the walls. He was pulled forward, then turned and pushed down into a chair.

“You leave my mother alone,” he said.

She was in another part of the building. Jason kicked with his feet and hit only air.

“Stop it!” he shrieked. “Let her alone!”

The fat man pulled the pillowcase from his head. He saw a bare room—finished walls, with crown molding and chair railing, a dining room, with new windows that had crosses of masking tape in them. A kitchen with a refrigerator, a stove, a place carved out for a pantry. The fat man, who stood out of reach, arms folded, simply stared at him. He walked around the chair, took off his lumber jacket, and let it drop to the floor.

Then Travis came in, from an opening in the wall. Jason saw stairs going up into the dark. Travis walked over and bent down to look into his eyes. “So,” he said.

“What did you do to my mother?” Jason demanded.

In the next instant he heard her calling from what sounded like another floor. “Jason!” she yelled. “Jason!”

Travis reached over and put a hand on the boy’s neck. It stopped his breath. “Go up there and take care of that,” Travis said to the fat man. “And if you hurt her I’ll break your fat neck.”

“Shut up, Travis.”

“Just do what I say.”

The fat man went up the stairs.

“Jason!”

The fingers were tight on the boy’s throat. The room wavered and seemed to darken, then was gone for a space. He coughed, choked, drew breath and the light came back. The fat man had come down the stairs. He had Nora’s dress.

“What did you—” He couldn’t get the words out. The words ran together into a scream. Travis took hold of his throat again and stopped everything. Once more, there was a blank space. The boy seemed to clamor upward inside his own skin, so that he was looking out again. He saw Travis standing on the other side of the room. Travis now held the dress. “This is just to keep her from getting loose and running, okay? Like you did.”