Ask the Dark (8 page)

I went alongside and the window I’d looked in was covered now, same as the others, with black plastic, piece of a tarp, or just a trash bag. I felt a little bad ’cause I was hoping to see something, but there was nothing.

Then I went around back and stopped dead.

A car was parked there on the grass of the yard. Same car I’d seen Skugger in, blue Ranchero.

I went up to it. Tried the doors but they was locked. Looked inside, and I seen this man don’t never clean his car, ’cause there a big mess of trash and cans on the floor, and on top it all Skugger’s goofball hat, long one with the pompom at the end.

I was thinking to leave but I stopped.

A car’s here,
I thought.
So a man’s here too.

I looked around a sec, and then I went over to the board fence. Here, out back, there’s a big old gnarled tree in that fence, I mean the fence comes up to both sides of it with the tree right in the middle. And nailed on the tree is these wood steps, pieces of two-by-four sawed about a foot wide nailed up by some boy who lived here long ago. I tried’m and they held tight, so I climbed.

When I was up in the tree with the leaves all round me I found the tree fort. I’d seen it before in daytime, just an old rotty thing of worn planks, and I’d never thought to go up it till now. What I did was climb on and spread myself out facedown, over a place where the planks was busted, looking down at the car in the yard.

I felt cold up there, wind was blowing over me. I don’t know how long it took. Hour, maybe. But soon after that I heard a lock turning there on the back porch, and the door opened.

A man come out. But he didn’t turn the light on. Not the house light in the room he was coming from, or the porch light outside. He stood for a minute, looking around, then he closed the door real quiet and come down the back porch steps and went to the fence, walking slow. At the fence he unlocked a lock, gave a shove, and the whole middle of the fence swung open into the alley behind. Then he got in the car and started it, but he didn’t turn the lights on. He backed out real slow, and when he was in the alley he got out and closed the gate and then got back in the car and drove away, driving up the alley and never turning his lights on far as I could see.

I stayed in that tree ten more minutes, long enough to know he weren’t coming right back.

I hadn’t seen him good. Couldn’t say who he was. Was too damn dark. Must be the same man who come in the room that night, but I couldn’t tell for sure, ’cause down there in the yard with no lights on I’d only seen the shape of’m. From how he walked he was all thick and dumpy. Big, too.

Was it the man in the car today?

Maybe.

If he was, and knowing who Skugger was, I figured he’s the man who gets’m the drugs, all that pot and them pills Skugger sells to his friends.

But why’s he sneaking around in there, not turning on the lights?

I’m still looking at the house.

What’s he
hiding
in there?
I’m thinkin’.

I was getting close to something, and the closer I got, the more my other worries went away.
What is it? What is it?
Questions burned in my head. And right then they burned so hot I think I’d’f give all the money I made that summer just to know.

Chapter Thirteen

I couldn’t think about it too much ’cause the next day they turned the electric off and Daddy and me went downtown real early. We had to go downtown ’cause we couldn’t call nobody ’cause the phone’d been turned off about a week then and we had to go in person, to the electric company, I mean, so’s to get on what they call the low-income rate for electrical consumption. Actually we could’f called ’cause Leezie still got’r cell phone and don’t ask me how she was paying for it, prob’ly just sweet-talking some cell phone operator, ’cause she never did get a job back then, just me. But what I’m saying is she weren’t home that morning, she’d been out all night, and after seeing who she was going out with I didn’t even want to think about it.

Downtown after we got off the bus we went to the building and waited in a long line just to get inside, then waited in another line, and they put Daddy on the runaround, always going to the wrong room and talking to the wrong person, till we got what they call an emergency reconnect ’cause there’s children in the house, then got sent out ’cause Daddy, he ain’t brought the right papers to prove lack of income, so they called it, so except for that emergency reconnect the whole thing was a goddamn waste of time.

But coming home before we got the bus—we got free tokens by the way, Welfare tokens—Daddy, he remembered the larder was open, Social Services Larder, they call it, sort of like a ugly grocery store, more like a cage with food in it. So we went there first, and filled the two bags they give you, we going up to these racks where they got macaroni and cheese mix and corn cereal and these packs of cottage cheese that Leezie likes and cans of red salmon I personally can’t fuckin’ stand.

So it weren’t all a waste, the day, I mean, ’cause we got all that and lugged it home, which was hard work, ’specially seein’ as how the bus stop up our way is at least half a mile from my house, and when we get there Leezie
still
ain’t home and I’m thinking,
What’s that bastard Bad-Ass Ricky doing with’r?

Now I’d promised Marvin I’d go out early but I was late and I felt bad for it, ’specially thinkin ’bout the money I could’f made. So after I got home I run down there. He was still out going his rounds, Miss Norris told me, so all I did was step out to the parking lot alongside and sit there, my back against the wall, my ass on the ground, feeling a shitload of gravel through my pants, chucking bits of that gravel at a sheared-off pipe I seen to see how many I could get in.

After about twenty minutes Marvin drove up.

He parked at the curb but then when he seen me he pulled in the lot and stopped right acrost from me. I’d been sitting there awhile and maybe I was worried about Leezie or thinking ’bout seeing that man last night, but Marvin looked at me like there was something wrong with my face, like I felt
terrible,
I mean, and he said, So, Billy, I guess you heard.

Now I did feel bad. Sort’f dreadful. I just looked at him and groaned, Oh God, Marvin,
now
what?

He looked a little surprised.

You don’t know?

He didn’t say nothing more, just reached aside. And when his hand come back up he was holding a piece of paper with Jimmy Brest’s face printed on it, under where big black letters wrote
M-I-S-S-I-N-G
.

We drove and I was staring forward, looking at this piece of dashboard where the vinyl was cracked and had yellow foam in it, all tore up and brown at the edges under the crack. We’d go a block, stop, I’d jump out and tape a flyer, get back in, go another block, jump back out. That’s how it went. We didn’t talk at all, me and Marvin.

The street was bright, with the green of the trees all spread over it, and flashes of sunlight comin’ through the leaves. The houses looked empty and clean and white under the gray roofs, set back far on the wide green lawns, no lawn furniture ’cause it ain’t allowed around here, not on front lawns, no jungle gyms, neither, or kiddie pools, nothing to play on, just grass and flowers and ivy and trees everywhere thick as you please.

We got stopped three times. First by people in their yards who came over and talked about Jimmy Brest and the last time they seen him and where. Word was generally that he must still be around, that even if he was captured and kidnapped by this killer he had to still be in the neighborhood or in town at least, because here’s where Tommy Evans was found. So even though there was this sense of him being already dead, there was the idea that maybe he’d be found, or the man who took him would. Day was sunny and I remember ’specially how when we talked the people was always in the sun, holding hands up to cover their eyes but it weren’t any good, and they were squinting like they hurt, their eyes, I mean, and the streets and houses all seemed empty in rows behind’m.

Third time we was stopped it was a cop. He asked Marvin what he was doing with me, and we both told’m no Marvin ain’t doing nothing wrong and we knowed each other real good and was even the ones hanging the flyers for Jimmy Brest and showed’m a bunch of’m. But this cop was young and dumb and new and looking for something to do, so he radioed in and wouldn’t let us go until another cop showed up, officer named Dryker, big old cop with white hair, who knowed both Marvin and me, Marvin from just around and me from when he caught me once taking eggs off porches.

We talked and he asked us both if we knowed Brest and when we last seen him. I told him I did know him but hadn’t seen him awhile, and Marvin said pretty much the same. Then looking at me, Dryker said what a wiseass I thought I was but that this man out there was killing boys and for me to mind the curfew, which was now an hour earlier, five o’clock. I said, Yessir, I will, sir, or something like that, and he went off.

Day after that was when they found Tuckie Brenner in Florida.

Florida.

So he ain’t around here, that Jimmy Brest, Marvin said. He was driving, looking on at the street. I was looking at the foam piece.

Yeah, I said.

Could be here. Could be in Florida. Could be anywhere.

Yeah, I said.

They hadn’t found all Tuckie Brenner, just a piece of’m, and that was three weeks back from when we was driving around now. Took’m three weeks, Florida cops, I mean, to identify out who it was.

We didn’t talk about that, though. Just drove. I weren’t feeling at all good. I mean I felt real bad, but couldn’t say why, and I couldn’t talk much, or even look at anybody. And I guess Marvin, he noticed, ’cause after a bit he pulls the van to the side of the street and he stops and looks at me.

Billy?

Yar? I said.

You didn’t get along with this Brest boy, did you?

No, I said.

He watched me a minute, Marvin, me just sitting there sort’f blank-faced and staring at the foam piece, and then he talked, low and smooth, almost a whisper to his voice.

Billy, one thing you gotta know is, what you do or say, it don’t mean shit ’bout what’s real. You understand that?

I didn’t say anything and he said, Fact is, you can even kill a man and it ain’t real. I mean it ain’t nothing you
wanted
to do, ain’t nothing you
meant
to do, but just something you
had
to do, ’cause that’s the way things were. War taught me that. Life—it all fucked up. Once you know that, things go easier. You can get complicated all you want but that ain’t gonna help. You just gotta
know
it. ’Cause what I’m saying is, what you said or done or what he said or done, that don’t mean shit now. What you
been
ain’t what you
are.
Understand? Most men take their whole life to learn that. But you gotta learn it right now. You hear what I’m saying?

I hear, I said.

So it don’t matter what you ever thought about him. You didn’t do this, Billy, even if you
wished
it. You understand?

I sat still a minute then, just looking at him, and he never took his eyes off me.

He was right. I
had
wished it.

I fuckin’ hated Jimmy Brest.

And he hated me.

Since I was five years old he’d called me the worst names I knew or could remember, for no reason I could ever understand, saying things about my sister and Daddy and even my mother after she died that I could never forget. He hit me and beat on me more times than I could count. But the last thing I wanted, no matter how many times I’d cussed him and said I hated him and wished he was dead, was for him to get anything like what got Tommy Evans. I get mad but I ain’t never that mad. So yeah, I was feeling bad ’bout stuff I’d said and thought, and felt guilty for all that.

But maybe those thoughts just hurt too bad, I don’t know, ’cause right then they kind’f faded away, and I was thinkin’ more about the day before yesterday, before he was took, my mind goin’ over all that I’d seen. Last thing I knew he’d done was chase me down that alley into that garage, where I went up the rafters and sat waiting to chuck paint on his fuckin’ head should he find me. And there was something else, too, something—

Billy?
You all right? Marvin asked me.

I didn’t say nothing. He must’f thought I was nuts. But I was staring at that foam piece, thinking, trying to think, to remember about something he had with’m in his hands, that bag of chips he was eating when he chased me, that he never threw down as he ran.

Billy?
Marvin’s eyes was buggin’ now.

Night before last, looking in that car, didn’t I see that chip bag? Lying there? Next to Skugger’s goofball hat?

Didn’t
I?

I knew then I had to see that car again, see if it was still there.

Marvin, now he shoves my shoulder. You okay, Billy?

I’m fine, Marvin, I say.

Damn, boy, he says. You was in a
trance
or something!

I guess I sort’f grinned at’m. Then I said, Marvin?

Yeah?

I wanna find’m.

Marvin nods his head and from off the dashboard he takes one of them cigarettes he smokes ’bout once every two weeks when he’s thinking hard. Real slow he lights it, and then he looks at me and says, That would mean a lot to you, that right, Billy?

To
me?
How you mean?

His face sort’f pinches. He says, People might think a lot different ’bout you if you done a thing like that. Might forgive you a lot. Ain’t that what you was thinking about just now?

Yeah, Marvin, I say. Sure. That’s just it.

And it was, a little. But even more I was thinking about that chip bag, wonderin’ if I could get hold of it.

He smiles, sad smile sort’f. Puffs out some smoke and says, That’ll be hard, Billy. Findin’ him. That gonna take
double
luck. And that shit just don’t happen.