In the Night Season (5 page)

F
ROM THE TOP WINDOW, LOOKING
out over the brown field with its patches of snow and its sticklike, bare-branched saplings, Jason Michaelson saw the man coming. The field was frozen, but the man’s boots looked dirty. He had come from the crest of the hill, beyond the little pond at that end of the property, moving slow, but with a sureness, too.

It was not Mr. Bishop. This was a white guy, bigger than Bishop and a lot younger and more solid. The man reached the wooden fence and put one hand on it, then used the hand to hop over. He was in the far end of the yard, turning to survey where he had come from, leaning on the top rail of the fence for a moment, almost as if waiting for someone. Jason watched him, curious—a stranger wandering by, walking across the farm fields alone. The man just stood there, but then he seemed a little impatient, turning and gazing at the house. He strode along the fence for a few feet, one gloved hand on it, still glancing back at where he had come from. Stopping, seeming to wait again, he leaned on the fence. His head drooped. Then he stood back and kicked at the lowest rail, broke it, and pulled a piece of it loose, with some effort.

Jason uttered a small surprised sound of alarm and ducked back from the square of the window. He waited, thinking about how he
would tell his mother he had seen a man damage the fence, a grown man. A person walking in from the world and taking that liberty with something that didn’t belong to him. In a way, the boy felt, it was only what he might’ve expected. The whole of life was upside down: his father dead; misfortune upon them and everything, everything wrong. Jason and his mother had joined the ranks of the unlucky, and he felt a surliness about it all the time.

A man had come walking out of the distance and broken the fence, and that was just part of the whole badness of things now. The world.

He looked out the window again. The man was facing away from the house, holding the piece of wood like a club; he turned, slowly, and faced the house again. One gloved hand went up to the face, the gloved index finger into the mouth; the hand came from the glove, and the glove still dangled in the mouth. The man wiped his nose with the flat of his bare hand, wiped the hand against his jeans, then took the glove from his mouth and put it back on.

The boy experienced a heightening of the sense of being hidden.

During the darker days of this winter, the attic was the only place he could stand—this hemmed-in area of boxes and old furniture at the very pinnacle of the old house. He had spent many recent afternoons up here, looking at the lawn and the adjoining fields below, and deriving an undefined sense of peace from the empty quiet spaces out there and the changes in the sky—Mr. Bishop coming to knock on the door and draw him down, talk to him about the weather and the thousand things he was behind on, trying to distract him from the thinking too much that all the adults were afraid he was doing. Or anyway that was what Jason had gleaned from their talk, the worry everyone had about what was going on in his mind now, with his grades falling and his teachers reporting on his general bad attitude and all the adjustments he and his mother had been forced to make—the job, these hours he spent alone in the house.

It had been a terrible year.

Mr. Bishop had come right out and asked him: “What’s bothering you now, boy? What’s on your mind?”

“Nothing,” Jason said.

“What is it that you find so interesting up in that attic?”

“Nothing, sir.”

Mr. Bishop shook his head, pouring coffee for himself. “It’s none of my business, I know.”

Usually, he’d take the cup of coffee and walk through the downstairs rooms of the house, quiet as a tourist in a museum. Jason would follow him.

“You get along in school today?”

“Fine,” Jason said, though this was often a lie. It seemed to him that everything his teachers had to say was beside the point. The point was that you could work like hell and study hard and do everything they wanted you to do and then go out and die in a crash on the highway, and the whole thing would count for nothing.

This week, it had become so bad that he hadn’t been able to bring himself to go. He had missed the last three days, using a forged signature from his mother, a request for absence to take care of pressing family matters. No one questioned it. He was a boy whose father had died, and everyone wanted to help.

Now, the man out on the lawn fidgeted and tapped the piece of wood against the top rail of the fence. He was quite big—someone who didn’t care about private property. A man not just tall, but powerfully built. The heavy muscles of his chest stretched the denim of the sleeveless coat he wore. Jason thought of weights and weight lifting. He was still not much more than curious—the damage to the fence was an adult matter. But something about the casualness of the action had caused a part of him to tighten inside, a slowly increasing wariness.

The man made a pivoting motion from the hips, like someone limbering up, preparing for exercise. He started walking again, coming on a little more quickly, looking one way and then the other. There was something stealthy about him, a watchfulness, and abruptly the boy understood that an element of this had been there all along. The man headed straight for the house and now Jason’s curiosity caved inward. He ducked back from the window, sitting down with a thud against the attic wall, not even breathing for a few seconds.

The house, the whole house below him, took on a living quality.

He remained perfectly still, listening, through the little creaks of the corners and joists and the small sighing of the radiator pipes, for some sound of the man entering. The doors, he knew, were locked. The man would have to break in. Jason remained still. Perhaps five minutes went by. The heat kicked on and whirred in the ducts, an interval of time in which he felt deaf to the rest of the house. It went off and revealed what felt like a listening silence. He waited, perfectly still, through the minutes.

And his fear began to leave him. It was like a game now.

Carefully, very slowly, he got himself below the window and rose to look over the sill. He saw the field, empty, the patches of snow, the trees, the gray distances of late afternoon in winter. He stood, keeping himself out of the frame of the window, and then he looked out again and down.

The man was standing in the yard, staring straight up at him, one hand up to block the light. Jason saw the grizzled face, the narrow muddy eyes, the long curve of the jaw. There was something white running down from one side of the mouth. He gasped, seeing it, but held still, and the man seemed to squint, tilting his head a little, peering at the window. The only thing to do was stay frozen, watching him tilt his head the other way, staring. When he looked out at the road, the boy moved quickly back, leaned against the wall, and waited. Silence. The wide world was wrapped in a quiet. There had to have been a reflection, or the glare of the gray sky in the window; it was possible the man hadn’t seen him. He kept still, listening, and he didn’t know how much time went by. The watery light at the window had begun to fade; it would be dark soon.

On all fours, moving as noiselessly as he could, and pausing now and again to listen, he made his way to the entrance of the attic. The wind had picked up outside and it roared in the eaves of the house. He couldn’t hear any sound but that for a few seconds. He imagined the man walking on down the road, perhaps almost out of sight by now, and even so he descended the attic stairs very slowly. There were deep shadows in the hall and down the stairwell into the main foyer of the house. The pictures on the wall were all of
the time before his father’s death. He couldn’t ever look at them anymore. He glided along the wall, to the entrance of what had once been his parents’ bedroom, then peeked around the frame. The room was empty. The light on the bed was losing the outline of the window, which looked out on the same field where the man had stood. Jason eased himself across the open space of the doorway and started along the wall toward the stairs down.

The phone rang and brought a little gasp up out of the back of his throat. He braced himself against the wall, believing under the flow of his fear that he had created his own alarm, that this wasn’t serious. The man was gone. He had damaged the fence in his careless passing and was elsewhere now, going on to whatever he would be going on to: a stranger, hitchhiking, with his life that was far from here. Mr. Bishop would knock on the door any second. Yet the boy couldn’t bring himself to break the spell and move.

The phone rang three times and then paused, and the little mechanical clicking of the answering machine started, followed by his mother’s recorded voice: “This is Nora. Jason and I can’t come to the phone right now. Leave your name and number and we’ll call you back.” There was the beep and then his mother’s voice again: “Jason? Edward? Where are you? Jason—honey, you’re not in the attic again, are you? Hello. I know you’re home, son. At least you better be. All right, I’ll call Mr. Bishop. Bye.” The machine beeped again, then was silent. The boy took a breath and stepped away from the wall.

“Oh, Jason.” A man’s voice, from below him, soft, almost affectionate. “Jason.”

He backed soundlessly to the attic stairs, then froze again.

“Hey.”

The house creaked. Some weight on the floorboards below, moving away, it seemed.

“On my way, Jason.” The voice was coming from another part of the house, from the family room, beyond the kitchen, the enclosed porch on that side.

He backed soundlessly up the attic stairs and pulled the door up. It made a small squeak, and he held it a moment, then pulled it
the rest of the way, in what seemed like far too much noise. He lay on the planks next to its pine-smelling, metal-braced stepboards and put his ear against the wood. His own heartbeat, which seemed louder than anything else now, pounded in his ears and face and neck. The heat pipes sighed and hissed, the furnace kicked on again, and for a long while there was the hum of it in the walls. When it stopped, the stillness was muffling, seemed to press down on him where he lay with his drumming heart.

“Hey, Jason.” The voice was a whisper, close.

The boy stood, looked around himself for something to use as a weapon. He picked up a lamp, but it was thin glass—no real weight to it. The attic door was being pulled down, the springs stretching, and Jason set the lamp on the floor, moved quickly to the other end of the space, behind a stack of cardboard boxes, stuffed with old clothes his mother hadn’t been able to part with. The smell of mothballs choked him. But he was motionless. He heard the heavy footsteps of the man, coming up.

“There’s somebody here,” the voice said. “Right? And his name is Jason. How old are you, Jason? I bet I know.”

The boy remained where he was.

“Come on, kid. I know you’re up here. I ain’t gonna hurt you.”

The heat came on again and whirred, and he edged himself deeper into the recesses of that space, under the angles of roof and ceiling, behind more boxes.

There was a cracking sound and then a thud, nearby. Something had broken through the ceiling. The heater stopped, and he heard the voice.

“Shit. My leg went through the goddam ceiling, Jason.”

The boy held his breath, while the man struggled back to his feet.

“Gotta remember to keep to the studs and the planks, right?”

He couldn’t see anything now, cringing behind the boxes, in the odor of the mothballs, and listening to the man moving around. The man pushed a chair aside.

“No, not there, Jason, old bud.”

Something scraped across the planks.

“Come on, kid. I wanna make friends.”

In the next instant, the boxes in front of him opened outward from him, and there the man was, leaning in, offering him a hand.

“Come on, pal. I ain’t gonna hurt you. I need you.”

“My mother called Mr. Bishop,” the boy said. “He’ll be here any minute.”

The man smiled. “He’ll be welcome.”

“He’ll call the police.”

The smile broadened slightly; it stretched the scar. “
They’ll
be welcome.” The man was crouched down, with the one hand outstretched. “Come on. I ain’t gonna hurt you. I swear.”

“How did you get in?”

“I knocked, you know.”

“The doors are locked.”

“The side door wasn’t. I saw you in the window, and I thought there might be something wrong. The side door was sitting open, Jason. I let myself in.”

“Who are you—what do you want?”

“Come on out of there and we’ll get to know each other. Here.” He reached in as if to shake hands. “I’m Travis. Okay? Travis Buford Lawrence Baker. Nice to meet you.”

“Go to the other end of the attic and I’ll come out,” Jason told him.

The head tilted slightly. “That’s kind of silly, ain’t it? Is that the way things are between men these days? Come on, shake hands.”

“No,” Jason said. “Go to the other side.”

The man looked away for an instant and seemed about to comply, but then he reached back suddenly and caught the boy’s wrist. His grip was paralyzingly strong; it seemed to send a weakening current through the boy. Jason felt himself being pulled out of the space and then lifted. He was big for his age, almost as tall as his mother’s five-seven, and yet the man hauled him up as though he were a doll. They were face-to-face, and Jason thought he smelled decay, something foul from the scarred mouth.

“There we go,” the man said, setting him down on his feet, holding him by the arms. “You’re a big tall boy. Your voice ain’t changed yet.”

Jason was silent.

“Don’t be scared. I ain’t gonna hurt you, really.”

“You’re hurting me now.”

The hands dropped away, and the man stood back a step. “See?” Then he held out his hand again. “I’m Travis. Like I said. And you’re Jason. How old are you, Jason?”

“Why’d you come in here?” Jason said.

“Tell me how old you are, son.”

“I don’t have to tell you anything.”

“Now, have I done one thing to hurt you?”

Jason stood there.

“Well, have I?”