Ask the Dark (14 page)

I hear the brakes of the car and the door slam. I hear the bushes out front shake, and then the footfalls of a man.

And there he is. I see’m just out the opening, dungarees and work boots stomping by.
You one bold motherfucker,
I’m thinking, and I look around under the porch to see what’s lying there to poke him with, rake pole or something, in case he thinks to have a look inside.

But he never seen me. Ain’t a man alive gonna catch me in my own neighborhood if I got a head start, that’s for damn sure. He prob’ly went straight through the yard and out the alley behind, then back around the block, ’cause a few minutes later I hear that car start up and go off slow.

He’s gone but I don’t move. I’m thinking. Trying to think. I figure I’ll wait until it’s good and dark before I risk coming out and going home.

Then a thought hits me.

I can’t go home.

Fucker knows where I live,
I think,
and I be damned I’m gonna have him coming in my window at three a.m.
For all I know the fucker’s sitting on my porch right now, and just the thought makes me shiver.

I can’t go to the cops. What could I tell’m? Red paper wouldn’t mean jack shit to nobody. I was just a boy who busted up a man’s car, busted in his house, made life hell for’m. That’s what they’d say. And what could I say against it? Was any cop gonna listen to me? Hell fuckin’ no. Like I started telling Richie, one day ’bout a week back I’d seen Officer Dryker in the street. And I went up to him. I wanted to know what he needed from me about finding Jimmy Brest, whether I needed to give him a name or show him something, evidence, I mean. He laughed right at me. But not a good laugh, nice and friendly, but this sort of laugh that sounded sick and sharp and made me out as nothing but a liar, just nothing at all.

Billy,
he said to me,
you
really
want that hundred thousand dollars, don’t you?

Hearing that made me stand still and almost forget why I’d stopped him. And he didn’t wait for me to say more, but went right on, sitting there in his car where I’d come up to him, his face hard and craggy-looking, and his police cap off so his hair that’s all silver was sticking up in that wave it got, and his eyes cold and blue, staring at me. And he said,
Billy, I wouldn’t believe a word you say. I know what you are,
he said,
so don’t come to me accusing anyone around here, or I’ll have you arrested.

A couple years back I’d of just left and maybe stole some eggs and waited on top’f some garage till he came by, and egged his ass good. But now I didn’t go that route. Instead I stood a second, sort of scared of’m I ain’t embarrassed to tell you, and I managed to say,
What
do
I need to bring you?

How about Jimmy Brest, alive and well. Then we’ll talk, okay, Billy?

His eyes still cold and blue had a sort of joke in’m, and he winked at me.

Yessir,
I said.

When he pulled out I watched his car go off, and I thought,
You dumbass.
’Cause if he’d treated me good and talked I’d prob’ly’f told him everything, how it was me who’d found Evans, even showed him the piece of red paper. But not no more. ’Cause he made it plain to me, I’d busted too many windows, stolen too many bikes, soaped too many cars.

Weren’t no police for me. I was on my own.

Chapter Twenty-One

I waited till dark, thinking every car going past was his, and wondering if he was on my porch, waiting to jump me. I thought about hiding in my yard. But if I fell asleep or made a noise he might find me, ’cause he could be coming and going all night long.

So when I come out I done something I ain’t done for a year.

Crost the alley from me is Old Man Pedersen’s house. He a drunk and don’t do much, but as he ain’t got no car what he rides is a bike, and he ain’t particular about what sort, ’cause it’s a girls’ bike but full-size and it got those plastic strips, tassels, on the hand grips. He keeps it out back’f his house, and he don’t never lock it, but just wraps the chain round it so it looks locked, prob’ly ’cause he afraid of losing the key. So what I do when I come out from under the porch is go up to that bike and unwrap the chain from round the seat, and wheel it out to the alley, real quiet. It’s got a tarp tossed over it all spattered with dried paint. I take that off ’cause it’s gonna rain, and I tear a hole for my head and put it over me like a poncho, and use the chain round my middle like a belt, thinking that chain might come in handy.

Then I get on and pedal.

I go down the alley and afore I gone far, the rain comes hard, hits my eyes and fills’m. I come out on the streets, looking for the car but it ain’t around, and then I’m going up to the avenue where I start on fast, headed downtown, far from home as I can get.

After a few miles I pull into a gas station parking lot, the station closed down and out of business and plywood sheets nailed up over the windows. I hide a minute under the big awnings near the busted pumps in the dark, ’cause riding I couldn’t see too good, and my hair was wet too, ’cause that tarp poncho don’t cover my head. Didn’t matter much, though. Night was warm and the rain felt good and I didn’t get sick. Just hard to see, is all. Didn’t see a cop around. Rain must’f put a dent in the curfew. Then I got back on and rode more.

City at night’s like a big empty field, ’cept it got all them buildings in it. But they ain’t got lights on, at least most don’t, and there’s nothing so quiet and peaceful. Like I told you, I use to ride downtown real late damn near all last summertime, ’cause it was something wild to do, and fun, too, and I used to meet all sort’f people, night people, bums and such. In the day the whole world crowds in, but at night it’s like I own it, and it’s all for me, with them long streets and so many streetlights the air shines bright like crystals.

Before I knew it I was through the city and past the harbor where the air smelled like rotty fish, and I was past the wharves. Rain quit and I kept going. Came into the factories, dropped my bike, and sat awhile, breathing. These is old factories I’m talking about, a whole city of’m damn near, all of’m empty and busted up, with the windows gone and no lights, and walls and roofs caved in and even trees growing up through’m ’cause no man has worked here for thirty/forty years. Sort’f place you’d never go in, even if I dared you. This a place where nobody’d ever find me, and I wouldn’t see a soul.

The buildings sure was scary, big and dark, looming over me. Every little sound made me jump.
But there ain’t no good in being scared,
I thought. So I got up and went in through a big hole in a wall where bricks collapsed.

I found a staircase, and I went up. I went slow ’cause I couldn’t see hardly nothing. Up and up. Must’f been about the fifth floor when I saw the stairs had fallen in. All around me were drops going straight down. I felt the air rising, cold from the rain, and everywhere was just dark, dark, nothing to see ’cept little bits of the railing round where a big wide pit opened all the way down to the ground floor, like a gorge.

I sat on the edge.
Ain’t nothing to be scared of,
I thought. Even squeaks from critters and groans of wind didn’t bother me, and dripping water splashing far and near.

Because even then I knew there was
something.

I mean there was something I forgot, something I
had.
Something I’d been thinking about and trying to remember ever since lying under that porch with that bastard looking for me, or even earlier when I was up in the attic with Richie after I found where the paper piece fit. Something all I had to do was look at and everything would come straight.

So I sat there in the dark with my feet hanging and my shoes wet and cold, but I couldn’t damn well remember. And nothing else bothered me, or scared me, ’cept wondering what the hell it was I’d forgot, what it was I hadn’t noticed when I was looking right at it.

And maybe ’cause it was so damn dark and quiet it came to me then. Like lightning. So I knew I couldn’t wait till tomorrow.

I got to go home
now.

Even if he’s right there waiting for me, I got to go home.

Chapter Twenty-Two

I’ll never know if he waited or not, ’cause up around Twenty-Third Street I popped a tire on a piece of glass and had to walk the damn thing the rest of the way, eight miles, and it rained again. When I finally did get home it was day and I was wet and cold and had a cough and didn’t care if I saw him or not—I just figured I’d yell my ass off and run to a neighbor’s. Coming in I didn’t see Daddy. He was prob’ly out hunting up more boxes, and right there in the front hall I seen the ones he already had all full of stuff like a toaster and power cords and all sort of other junk from the kitchen. But that didn’t bother me much. Without a place to move to, what he packed weren’t going nowhere, so why worry?

I went up and lay down. Didn’t even take my shoes off. I lay there and stared up. I hadn’t slept in more’n thirty hours, I guessed. And I didn’t sleep now. Couldn’t. I’d shot rats and rode that bike all over and hardly ate, but that didn’t matter.

All I could really think about was what I’d remembered sitting in the dark on them factory stairs.

But the excitement had died in me. I’d had to go home, and I’d had to walk that bike all that way through the rain, and that poncho I’d made got soaked and I was colder’n hell and with every step I took what I’d remembered seemed smaller and smaller, so nows when I’m finally in my room lying on the bed I hardly even wanna go through with it, with looking at them, I mean, ’cause now I know it ain’t such a big thing and if I’m wrong I’m gonna feel like a goddamn fool.

So for five minutes I lie there, not even looking at’m.

The mittens.

’Cause I’m thinking, thinking ’bout what I’d remembered, and it was this. The first night I went in the dark house was that day I’d delivered prescriptions to Simon Hooper with Marvin and peeked in the window of the house next door. Remember that? Well, when I was standing in the house that night I had that puffy coat in my hands and unhooked the mittens. Then I tossed down the coat and looked inside the boxes with the fake jewels, which sort’f made me forget the coat, and after that I heard the man come in, but I still had the mittens in my back pocket.

But think about this. Before I tossed down the coat, I saw initials wrote on the collar, inside where the label was stitched. I remembered how I’d wanted a light to read’m but didn’t have none. And that coat, I’d tried to find it at Miss Gurpy’s when I was shooting rats with Richie, but it weren’t there. So I’d give up on ever seeing what was wrote on it.

But sitting on them stairs in the dark I started thinking like this. If you got a mother who’s so careful to write your initials on your coat collar, maybe she writes’m other places too. ’Cause like with mittens, they ain’t always gonna be hooked to your coat sleeves. You take’m off, and if you leave’m somewheres you might want your initials wrote on’m, so whoever finds’m might know to bring’m right to you.

That’s what I remembered. But it ain’t like I was sure and I hardly wanted to look, because if I’m wrong everything I’m thinking is wrong, I mean about this man Hodsworth, and he really would be just a man whose house I busted in and whose car I busted up and in the cops’ eyes has a goddamn
right
to be mad at me and chasing me around and he’d be crazy not to.

So I go on lying there until a good minute later I get up and take them mittens in my hands. And I fold back the lower part that covers your wrist, and on the label there’s wrote in black Magic Marker halfways worn out with age the letters
TB.

I sit down. Stare at the flaky place.

Now here goes,
I’m thinking.

These are Tuckie Brenner’s mittens.

Was like getting hit by a truck thinking that, way it come over me.

But what did it mean?

It means Tuckie Brenner was in that house, in wintertime, when a boy might need his coat and mittens. It means he was there after he was took out’f that park where he was playing with them boys at sundown.

And right then, the other thing I forgot come to me. Here it is. There was something about Hodsworth’s car, his old beat-up piece-of-shit car. I’d tried to remember it that day I was mowing Highdale’s lawn but couldn’t, remember? It weren’t the license plate from Florida. It weren’t seeing it parked at the dark house. It was something I’d heard long ago and forgot.

But now I remembered.

It was the lady cleaning her porch spars who saw Tommy Evans get took. She couldn’t say about the car or truck she saw him get in, she kept saying it was one or the other. But she never said it was
both,
a car that’s a pickup truck. And then I remembered something Richie’d told me about when they come for him on suspicion, saying one of their reasons was ’cause of the pickup he drives, old pickup. They thought it was maybe what the lady’d seen, the cops did, and it was one of the reasons they questioned him. But it weren’t a pickup that took away Tommy Evans. It was a car
and
a pickup.

It was Peter Hodsworth’s car.

My mind felt on fire and I jumped up. I’m thinking,
I’m going to the police right now because I found Tuckie Brenner’s mittens and it’ll help find who took’m.

Then I sit my ass down.

What’s Officer Dryker gonna ask when I get there? He’ll ask,
Where’d you find the mittens?
And what do I tell’m?
Well, sir, I was breaking in this house, you see, looking to maybe find something worth money I could sell, and a man come in I couldn’t see, and I come away with these mittens.

That weren’t nothing I wanted to say. ’Cause gettin’ locked up wouldn’t help me right about now.

And anyway, another part of me starts to wonder.

Who’s TB?

Tuckie Brenner?

Maybe.

Maybe not.