In the Night Season (22 page)

“What?”

“Maybe we can help you.”

“I swear Travis never said anything about anybody getting hurt. It was just to keep Reuther happy. Just his German clockwork mind. We joked about it. Just in case anything went wrong.”

“Well,” Henry Spencer told him. “Something went wrong.”

J
ASON LAY ON HIS SIDE IN THE UPSTAIRS
room. It was overly warm now. Sunlight poured through the window glass; the crossed tape made a shadow cross on the floor. Below him, the fat man and the foreigner were keeping up a low muttering that he could not make sense of. His wrists hurt. A pins-and-needles feeling crept up and down the bones of his fingers. Whenever he moved, the noose around his neck tightened. He would have to urinate soon; his lower abdomen ached terribly. Below, the two men had apparently broken into an argument. One of them took a car away and came back.

“Hey!” Jason yelled. “I have to go to the bathroom!”

Silence.

He tried it again. “Hey!”

Footsteps on the stairs. Bags. He did not want anything to do with Bags. The little muddy eyes in their folds of heavy flesh gazed at him with an impervious flatness, as though he were something small and dumb, a cat, or a mouse. “What’s the deal?”

“I have to go to the bathroom.”

The fat man went back down the stairs, and there was another discussion—Jason couldn’t make out the words. Finally Reuther came up, walking briskly. “Nature calls,” he said.

“Hurry,” Jason told him.

Reuther untied his feet, then pulled on the rope, lifting him by pulling his arms backward.

“Ow!”

“Sorry.”

Reuther stood behind him, got him to his feet, then walked with him out of the room, down the hall to a bathroom. There wasn’t any toilet here—just the open pipe. “Can’t I go downstairs?”

“Piss in the hole,” Reuther said. He did not seem the slightest bit nervous, or worried.

Jason stood over the hole and then sighed. “I need my hands.”

Reuther said, “Of course you do. What’s the matter with me?” He untied the boy’s hands and held him by the shoulders. Jason let the stream come, thinking about all the movies and television shows he’d seen where the prisoner whirls around and surprises the one standing behind him. But the grip on his shoulders was strong. He finished and put himself back and Reuther pulled his hands around and tied them again.

“Can I please not be on the floor?” Jason asked him. “Please?”

“What do you want to do—stand?”

“Can’t I walk around a little? I’m not going anywhere. Just up there in the room.”

“No,” Reuther said. “Travis told me about you.” He walked the boy back into the room and forced him down onto the floor, where he began to tie his feet.

“Can’t you please tie it in front, so I can sit up?”

Reuther smiled. “The point is to make you helpless.”

“You’ve got my mother. Where would I go?”

“Good point. Not good enough.”

“Come on, mister.”

The other took a moment to study him. “Life’s been bad to you lately, hmm?”

Jason gave no answer.

“Tell me—you like computers?”

He nodded.

“You have one, yes?”

He kept his head down.

“You have a computer, yes?” Reuther simply waited.

“Yes.”

“You and your father ever talk about them?”

“My father showed me how to use mine.”

“Did you know your father was a hacker? Back in the beginning, when they were big and clunky.”

“No,” the boy said.

“You’re lying, aren’t you?”

“I’m not lying.”

“Your father trained you on this wonderful machine and never mentioned that he worked on them years ago when they were all getting started?”

“I don’t remember.”

“I actually talked with your father, you know. Several times, long distance. I sent him money. I remember that he sounded intelligent. My great misfortune is that I got myself tied up with the bozo brothers, hmm? But I couldn’t really be choosy. Travis had the means of procuring my merchandise, and your father had the means of arranging a sale. I’m the one who could get everything out of one country and into another. And then it was so good, and so easy, I got greedy. Just as your father was getting a conscience.”

“I don’t want to talk about my father.”

“I suppose he was a disappointment to you.”

“He was not.”

Reuther took out his little shiny box, opened it, put a little of the powder on his tongue, then put it back. “Well, to find out that he’s got himself mixed up with shady dealings—”

“Shut up,” Jason said.

“It’s perfectly understandable—”

“You don’t understand anything,” he said under his breath.

“Okay,” said Reuther. “On your stomach.” He pushed the boy over, and pulled his feet up. “I feel like an American cowboy when I do this.”

“Can I not have the noose around my neck?”

There was a pause. “Well, okay—no noose. But if I hear you moving around, I’ll have to come up and fix it.”

“How long am I going to be here?” Jason asked, but the other didn’t answer.

A little later, he lay half-dreaming, in dull pain. His whole body felt like an exposed nerve. The house had grown quiet. Sweat ran down his sides and gave him the unpleasant sensation of crawling things, insects. Were the men dozing, too, or had they gone somewhere? He hadn’t heard a car. He could move slightly. It was just possible to make himself slither along the floor, though it made the pain in his wrists worse and caused awful stabbing spasms in his lower back. He had no sense of the time of day, or how long he had been here. When he closed his eyes, a rush of sound rose in his ears. He had been seeing his father on one of the last days, when they had spent a cold early twilight planting the two maple saplings in the backyard. The boy had stood by while his father worked, digging the holes, and the wind came on across the open field, all ice, the north itself flying down the continent, carrying snow and freezing rain.

“I’m cold,” Jason had said to him.

“For Christ’s sake,” said his father. “Quit complaining.”

“But I’m freezing.”

“Move around a little. Here, dig the other hole.”

“I can’t.”

His father mimicked him. “I can’t. Jesus—you should hear how you sound.”

“Well, my hands are too cold. Why do we have to plant trees now?”

“Because I said so, okay? Now shut up and quit complaining.”

Jason had watched him work, hating him. It was as though some spell had got hold of him. The boy was old enough to understand that his parents had run into some trouble involving money. He had seen his mother sitting on the sofa in the living room, with notebooks open on her lap, frowning, figuring the numbers, while his father sat next to her chewing his fingernails, looking worried and angry. He had watched his father walking alone out on the
lawn, hands in his pockets, muttering to himself and shaking his head. Now he was flailing away at the ground, and the boy touched his arm. “Dad?”

“Can’t you see I’m busy?” he said. “Stand there and shut up.”

It seemed that the cold was coming from the frigid spaces beyond the stars, but finally the trees were planted, and father and son walked back to the house in the dark, the deepening chill.

“For God’s sake,” Jason’s mother had said. “Look at him. He’s freezing.”

“Maybe I should’ve waited till it was warmer,” said his father.

“Yeah, maybe.”

“I couldn’t feel it as much. I was working so hard. Forgive me.” His father knelt before him. “You okay, son?”

The boy was too cold to speak. And he was furious. He pulled away from the other’s grasp and started toward the stairs. He listened with a sense of vindication to his mother’s displeasure at the whole affair. And later, when Jack Michaelson went out and got into the pickup truck and pulled away, the boy hoped that something would keep him gone for a time. He was tired of the complication of his father’s presence in the house, and he lay on his bed, imagining the freedom of having him somewhere else, some great distance away.

China.

He fell asleep dreaming of his father moving among exotic buildings, in a crowd of foreigners, happy, finding some answer to the trouble that had made him so hard to be with. This was more than a week before Jack Michaelson died, and yet in Jason’s memory, he was having this same dream when his mother came into the room and woke him to say that there was trouble, an accident. He had never heard that note of almost childlike fear and grief in her voice. “Honey, a terrible accident—your father,” she said.

His memory was playing tricks on him.

She had waked him to tell him, but it was not the night of the dream, not the night of wanting him far away. Jason had thought of it in those first moments of knowing his father was gone, had remembered thinking about his father in distance.

He woke now. It was all fresh. He even looked around for her and discovered again that his hands and feet were bound. His cheekbone was sore, and he had a pressure headache on that side. To move was anguish.

“Hello?” he said.

The house was still. He made another slithering movement toward the wall, wanting to squirm out of the square of hot light from the sunny window. He got to the baseboard and put his heels against it. The pain in his shoulder and hip felt like fire.

“Come on,” he said.

Still no other sound in the house. He waited a few seconds, listening, and then began working to get one hand free of the knot that held his wrists. He couldn’t see it, but felt it pressing the nerve there, too tight, cutting off circulation. When he attempted to turn his head, the pressure was too much, the pain made him stop and lie still—exhausted, dizzy. He thought he might pass out. Then he thought he might die. This made him struggle more, pulling with one arm and then the other. It was no use. Maybe they had gone for good, and he would starve here.

He wriggled and pulled and struggled desperately to extricate himself, every muscle of his arms and shoulders and back burning. His own effort blotted out all other sound, and so it startled him to find that Reuther had come upstairs again and was watching him from the doorway.

“I think if you had enough time, you’d get out of that,” Reuther said.

He lay in the noose again, all his nerves jumping with pain, and every movement choked him. After what seemed an hour, Reuther returned. The light had changed at the windows. It had to be afternoon by now.

“I’m going out for a little food. Remember how Bags can be, and keep very, very still, hmm?” He went away.

The boy heard the car engine, the tires on gravel or stones. He couldn’t remember if he had heard this earlier, when the car had gone away and come back. Maybe there were more than two cars
now. There was the whine of the car, pulling away. It sounded the same. In the silence that followed, he listened for Bags. The house itself seemed suspended in a terrorized pause of expectation. Outside, a gust of wind moaned in the angle of the roof. The light had begun to change once more, and he was sure this was the brightness before sunset; it had to be. And now there were the heavy footsteps on the stairs. He couldn’t look right at the doorway, could only see it out of the corner of his eye.

Bags stood there, a swollen, vacant look about his features, a look almost of docility. “You don’t look too comfortable,” he said.

“Please untie me,” the boy said. “At least take the noose off.”

Bags made a murmurous dismissive sound and walked into the room. He crossed to the window, hands in his pockets. His shoes scraped the floor. Looking out the window, he brought a package of chewing gum out of his shirt pocket, unwrapped a piece, and stuck it in his mouth.

“Untie me,” Jason said. “Come on, man. I’m not going anywhere.”

Without turning from the window, Bags said, “I know.”

“Then untie me.”

“Shut up.”

“You’re afraid to.”

Bags turned, put his arms across his big chest, and shivered. “Oooo,” he said.

“You are. You’re afraid.”

“I’m in a panic. Shaking in my boots.”

“You’re afraid Reuther’ll get mad at you.”

“Want to see my knife?”

“Reuther took your gun. You’re afraid of him.”

“Keep talking.”

“You won’t take the noose off because Reuther’ll be upset with you.”

Bags smiled. “You must think I’m stupid.”

“Can’t you at least take the noose off? I’m choking.”

“Aw.”

“I won’t run, man. You’ve got my mother.”

The smile changed. “I’d like to have her. In fact, I got a little something of her last night.”

“You fat piece of shit,” Jason said.

“I did get a little jolly yesterday, you know.”

“You fucking
—stain
,” Jason said.

“You know how all that stuff works yet, old son?”

Jason watched him.

“Yeah. You know.”

“If you touch her again I’ll kill you, you—goddam tub of shit.”

Bags walked over to him and picked him up by the small length of rope between his ankles and his hands. The noose tightened on his neck; his arms were pulled painfully back at the shoulder. He couldn’t scream for the lack of air. Everything spun in the periphery of his vision, and then it all grew cloudy. It was going far off. But then he was jolted by the surface of the floor, thudding pain in his chest and knees, his abdomen. The son of a bitch had dropped him. He struggled for air, coughing and gagging, and Bags stuck a finger into the noose and pulled at it, loosened it. Jason sucked in air, the pain traveling along the front of his body and through his shoulders and wrists, his lower back. Everything, every nerve, throbbed.

Bags had knelt by him and taken out a knife—a switchblade. He opened it and held it to the boy’s throat. “See this? See how easy it is?”

“No,” Jason said, choking. “Please. I’m sorry.”

“Guess what I’m gonna do,” Bags said.

The boy tried to see him, the wide wall of him, blocking out light.

“When it’s all over, I’m gonna stick you like a pig and watch you bleed out.”

Coughing, still choking, his throat burning inside and the skin stinging with the cold blade held against it, Jason was appalled to hear himself say, “Put the knife away, man, or Reuther’s going to give you all kinds of hell when he gets back.”

Bags leaned in. His breath smelled sickeningly like peppermint. “You think I’m afraid of the Kraut?” He folded the knife and stood, putting it back in his pants pocket. Rocking slightly on the heels of
his shoes, he turned toward the window again. “Shit,” he said, then lifted one leg and, in a clownish pantomime of stress, farted, loud and long. It sounded to Jason like a motor. In school, he would have laughed at the sound. “That’s for the Kraut,” Bags said.