The Sleepwalkers (13 page)

P
ACK OF
M
ARLBORO
R
EDS
. One left. He holds it in his good hand, sticks it in his lips. It dangles there until he digs a lighter out from under a crushed RC Cola can and pops a flame. Then he snaps the cigarette to attention, taut, and breathes all that mother-lovin’, toxic shit into his lungs. He dumps it out in a sigh. Looks down at the crumpled map on the desk in front of him. Spreads it out with his good hand as if to smooth out all the wrinkles, an impossible task. He slouches in his chair and takes another drag. No revelation, nothing. One thing’s for sure, he’s no Sherlock Holmes. Praise God.

Not surprising. In middle-school gym class, he was no rope climber. At Markston High School he was no mathematician. No writer, either. Not much of a mechanic when he did that stint in his stepdad’s shop, and the old bastard never missed a chance to remind him of it. Was never much good with women, so it made perfect sense that he was a lousy husband when he finally got the chance. Couldn’t hold down that job keepin’ books at the industrial supply—morphine makes the numbers swim once you’re on the third or fourth pull from the whiskey flask. Couldn’t just keep his blessed mouth shut and swallow his pride enough to appreciate that job checkin’ groceries at the Publix, even though they had health benefits and everything. And, of course, let’s not ever forget the last fiasco, the crown of them all. After that one, anything is easy to swallow. So there’s not a speck of surprise in the fact that he can’t figure this out, a bona fide mystery. One thing, though, gotta be fair. One thing no one can deny, one thing they can scrawl on his gravestone:
Ron Bent
was a good father.
At least there’s that. Praise God.

He goes to fold up the map and gets ashes all over it: one more screwup to go in his ever growing screwup file. He brushes the map off and folds it up, against the folds. Seems like he’s folding against the folds every time with this blessed map. Seems like there’s no
right
way to fold the thing. The shiny star stickers—gold, red, blue, and the scrawled, nearly illegible “Ron writ,” as he thinks of it, disappear in the folds until finally, miraculously, the part saying “The Florida Panhandle, by Rand McNally” faces up. He sets it neatly in front of him, thinking he might never unfold it again, now that it’s actually put away right.

Maybe that would be best. He’s been staring at the thing for over two years.

Three big steps and he’s at the sink, tosses the cigarette in. It hisses and smokes, then shuts up. Squirts some Colgate on his finger (forgot his toothbrush at the last motel, go figure) and brushes. Looks at himself. Gaining weight? Check. Hair a little thinner? Check. Grayer? Hard to tell with this flickering fluorescent light, but it’s safe to say—check. Spits, splashes water into his mouth, pulls the rubberband out of his ponytail. It pulls and hurts. Tosses it next to the sink, takes a leak, undresses to his skivvies, and sits down on the bed, feeling it strain and hearing it squeal under the weight of his body. What’s the blessed box spring complaining about? He’s the one who has to carry his heavy ass around all day, not it. He shoves his feet under the covers and clicks off the light next to his head. It’s dark. A truck yells past on the highway, then another, then another. Hollow light seeps in between the curtains. Somebody’s clomping up the steps outside, shaking the whole place. They walk by his door; he can hear them clearly:

“That’s fine. Let’s just worry about it in the morning. Jesus.”

“I’m just saying . . . ” This voice is a woman’s—the other one was a man’s.

“Goddamn, I’ve been driving all day, can we just—”

The words are cut to a dim muffle as the door to the room next to him thumps shut.

He closes his eyes.

This is the ritual. It never changes. Another night, another cheap motel, another shallow sleep with another restless day nipping at its heels. Now, one last thing before sleep: the prayer.

Hey, Lord.

Here we are again.

Bet you get tired of hearing from me.

Same old prayer as always.

Keep me alive, keep me breathin’.

Keep me believing.

Not much new, I guess, just another day

On the trail.

Keep Keisha well, Lord.

Hold her tight to you.

Keep her safe.

And if I can do her any good,

Bring me to her.

If I can’t do her any good,

At least let me see her bones once

Before I put her in the ground

Before they put me in the ground.

And when they do, please bring us both home,

Lord.

Thanks for your blessings.

You know I’m your servant.

Always have been,

In my way,

Always just been waiting for your bidding.

Waiting for you to touch me.

Or to answer me at all.

Still waiting.

Anyway.

God, bless the sinners,

And the believers,

And bless my Keisha.

Amen.

Ron opens his eyes. All is still. A truck rumbles past again. The far wall starts shaking, a rhythmic hammering. A breathy moaning, animal grunts. Every cheap adornment in the cheap room rattles.

Before he knows it, Ron is stifling tears. Embarrassed, he blinks them away, pulls his lips together tight. The muscles of his face quiver with tension. He tries to remember the last time he cried. It’s been a long time, he knows that much. Why now? Why here, finally?

Why anything?

The muscles of his face relax and his eyes stop blinking. He sits very still and stares at a picture on the wall in front of him across the darkened room. It’s a print of an abstract painting, which is to say a picture of nothing. He’s won the fight, knows he’s not going to cry tonight. The emotion has ebbed and left him vacant, an empty seashell washed up on a deserted beach. Not surprising that’s how he’d end up. He was never good for much anyway.

In five minutes, the screwing is over next door and his tears are forgotten. Another truck bellows past and Ron Bent falls asleep.

It’s dark in the Mason house. The fire has burned away to smoke. Caleb blinks in the dark. He hears Bean breathing next to him in long, even breaths. Outside, the wind gusts and a tree branch whispers against the window. When the wind dies away, Caleb hears something. The noise is tiny, barely a scratch in the surface of silence, and he pushes up on one elbow and cocks his head to listen intently, to be sure. Something is ticking. His first impulse is to look at the mantle—there was always an antique clock there, and a memory races through Caleb’s mind of his father winding it before bedtime with the slow, mechanical-sounding twist of a silver key. The clock is still on the mantle, its once-white face dark with dust, but even with no light Caleb can see that the pendulum is still.
Tick, tick, tick.
Caleb reaches for the flashlight—should be by his shoulder. His heart begins to feel tight with fear as his hand gropes the dirty rug, finding nothing. Then he finds it—it had only rolled a few feet away.

With a click, the light is on. Caleb glances over at Bean. There’s a glint of drool at the corner of his mouth, but he lies still and his breathing stays steady. For a minute, Caleb considers waking his friend, then decides against it.
Tick, tick, tick.
After all, he’s dragged Bean halfway across the country, and for what? To visit some crazy girl and squat in an abandoned building? Some vacation. Some friend. But at least he knows when to quit. They’ll buy a plane ticket tomorrow and be back in LA by happy hour.
Tick, tick, tick.
Caleb looks at the ceiling. The sound is coming from upstairs.

He crosses the living room in slow, measured steps. His feet crackle across the grit-strewn marble floor of the foyer.

Suddenly, he freezes. He whips the beam of his flashlight around. It comes to rest on the obsidian surface of a window. Felt like somebody was watching him, but there’s nothing there but homogenous darkness and the white oval of his reflected flashlight beam.

Up the steps, slow, one at a time, his eyes trained upward, toward the darkness crouching behind every doorway in the long, long, hallway. He reaches the top of the steps. This was the spare bedroom; that was a bathroom. He remembers when this carpet was new. His mom had dragged him all over three counties trying to find the perfect color to match the drapes. Now it’s littered with little black seeds of mouse crap and stained from the mildew and the dust.

Tick, tick, tick.

He pushes open the door to his old room. There’s a desk and a computer, a home-gym system against the far wall; nothing else. Not a single teddy bear or Matchbox car or old baseball poster; nothing to indicate that Caleb used to live there all. He shuts the door and walks on.

A sound. He stops, freezes. A scraping, faint. Then again. Something moving slowly, just behind the door right next to him.

With a crash, he elbows it open and the flashlight swoops in. His breath exhales in a hiss. Two glowing eyes stare back at him.

There’s a raccoon in the bathtub.

He curses and shuts the door, angry at first, then laughing at himself. He shakes his head and continues down the hall. He’s remembering back a few years when he was a kid, almost a teenager. He hadn’t been living in California too long when he went to a Halloween party with some friends. He had always been a well-liked kid, but he was just becoming cognizant of the social implications of real popularity when he got invited to this party. There were five or six of the most popular kids in the school there, and they led him down to the basement. They all got some punch and were arguing about Pete Rose or something when Caleb wandered over to a coffin sitting in the corner of the room, ignored by everyone else. Inside was a mannequin, or an exquisite dummy, which looked just like the dead body of a beautiful girl. Caleb had leaned close, admiring the detail of the pale figure—even the eyelashes looked real—when it screamed. Caleb jumped back, yelled, and dumped his punch on his pants and had to go home. Turns out the woman in the coffin was the mother of Caleb’s friend, an ex-Playboy model, who had set everything up for a little Halloween joke. Looking back, it was funny. It could have been anybody who walked up to the coffin and got the shit scared out of him. Caleb just wished it hadn’t been him.

This is what he thinks to himself as he walks into his dad’s old bedroom, where he used to sleep between his parents if he had nightmares. He’s still almost smiling with embarrassment at the memory as he flashes the beam of light over the objects in the room. Some are familiar, the bed, the dresser—and some are new, like an ugly, African-looking statue in the corner. He walks to the nightstand and the ticking gets softer. As he rounds the foot of the bed, it gets louder again, and when he slowly opens the closet door, it becomes twice as distinct. As he looks up at the closet ceiling, Caleb stops smiling.

There’s a square of plywood with a pull string hanging from it. Pull the string, and the staircase comes down. Climb the staircase, and you reach the attic.

Around the edges of the plywood, Caleb sees a light.

Tick-tick-tick-tick.

He reaches up with a trembling hand and pulls down hard. A dusting of particles drifts into his eyes, but he blinks them away, finishing the motion and pulling the staircase down as the light of one bare electric bulb, burning above, leaves him half-blinded.
But there’s
no electricity. So how . . . ?
His shoulders are tense, pulled almost up to his ears. He isn’t breathing. The staircase moans as he puts his weight on it. He wants to look down to make sure he doesn’t miss a step, but he can’t take his eyes off the door above. Because somebody turned on this light.

Tick, Tick, Tick.

His head breaks the plain of the attic floor and he jerks it around, back and forth, looking for feet, looking for a figure, seeing only walls and rafters, layers of fluffy, dusty, pink insulation. Satisfied that he’s alone, he pulls himself up, kneeling first, then standing halfway, as much as the pitch of the roof will allow. The light beam traces back and forth. Nothing but cobwebs and suspended dust. But here—over this way, a series of particleboard sheets bridge the insulation. Somebody put them there. That’s the direction.
Tick, tick.
That’s the way. He hears his footfalls on the boards, muted steps. He breathes shallowly. The air is heavy, almost too thick to breathe at all, and hot. The particleboard sheets tilt under him, but he walks on. Ahead, something reflects in the light. Something glass. As he comes toward it, a room emerges out of the darkness, walled off with plywood. He steps slowly through the uneven doorway,
ticktock,
and sees a clock, choked with dust. Its pendulum is still. The light beam drifts to . . . another clock. And another. And another. And another. And another, and another and another and anotherandanother.