Everything You Need: Short Stories (19 page)

‘What?’

‘This is it.’

Miller looked again at the bridge. ‘A dollar, to look at a bridge some guy threw up fifty years ago?’ Suddenly it wasn’t seeming so dumb a pricing system after all.

The man handed him a small, tarnished key, and raised his other arm to point. Between the trees on the other side of the creek was a small hut.

‘It’s in there.’

‘What is?’

The man shrugged. ‘A sad, dark thing.’

The water which trickled below the bridge smelled fresh and clean. Miller got a better look at the hut, shed, whatever, when he reached the other side. It was about half the size of a log cabin, but made of grey, battered planks instead of logs. The patterns of lichen over the sides and the moss-covered roof said it been here, and in this form, for a good long time — far longer than the house, most likely. Could be an original settler’s cabin, the home of whichever long-ago pioneer had first arrived here, driven west by hope or desperation. It looked about contemporary with the rickety bridge, certainly.

There was a small padlock on the door.

He looked back.

The other man was still standing at the far end of the bridge, looking at the canopy of leaves above. It wasn’t clear what he’d be looking at, but it didn’t seem like he was waiting for the right moment to rush over, bang the other guy on the head, and steal his wallet. If he’d wanted to do that he could have done it back up at the house. There was no sign of anyone else around — this boy he’d mentioned, for example – and he looked like he was waiting patiently for the conclusion of whatever needed to happen for him to have earned his dollar.

Miller turned back and fitted the key in the lock. It was stiff, but it turned. He opened the door. Inside was total dark. He hesitated, looked back across the bridge, but the man had gone.

He opened the door further, and stepped inside.

T
he interior
of the cabin was cooler than it had been outside, but also stuffy. There was a faint smell. Not a bad smell, particularly. It was like old, damp leaves. It was like the back of a closet where you store things you do not need. It was like a corner of the attic of a house not much loved, in the night, after rain.

The only light was that which managed to get past him from the door behind. The cabin had no windows, or if it had, they had been covered over. The door he’d entered by was right at one end of the building, which meant the rest of the interior led ahead. It could only have been ten, twelve feet. It seemed longer, because it was so dark. The man stood there, not sure what happened next.

The door slowly swung closed behind him, not all the way, but leaving a gap of a couple of inches. No-one came and shut it on him or turned the lock or started hollering about he’d have to pay a thousand bucks to get back out again. The man waited.

In a while, there was a quiet sound.

It was a rustling. Not quite a shuffling. A sense of something moving a little at the far end, turning away from the wall, perhaps. Just after the sound, there was a low waft of a new odor, as if the movement had caused something to change its relationship to the environment, as if a body long held curled or crouched in a particular shape or position had realigned enough for hidden sweat to be released into the unmoving air.

Miller froze.

In all his life, he’d never felt the hairs on the back of his neck rise. You read about it, hear about it. You knew they were supposed to do it, but he’d never felt it, not his own hairs, on his own neck. They did it then, though, and the peculiar thing was that he was not afraid, or not only that.

He was in there with something, that was for certain. It was not a known thing, either. It was... he didn’t know. He wasn’t sure. He just knew that there was
something
over there in the darkness. Something about the size of a man, he thought, maybe a little smaller.

He wasn’t sure it was male, though. Something said to him it was female. He couldn’t imagine where this impression might be coming from, as he couldn’t see it and he couldn’t hear anything, either — after the initial movement, it had been still. There was just something in the air that told him things about it, that said underneath the shadows it wrapped around itself like a pair of dark angel’s wings, it knew despair, bitter madness and melancholy better even than he did. He knew that beneath those shadows it was naked, and not male.

He knew also that it was this, and not fear, that was making his breathing come ragged and forced.

H
e stayed
in there with it for half an hour, doing nothing, just listening, staring into the darkness but not seeing anything. That’s how long it seemed like it had been, anyway, when he eventually emerged back into the forest. It was hard to tell.

He closed the cabin door behind him but he did not lock it, because he saw that the man was back, standing once more at the far end of the bridge. Miller clasped the key firmly in his fist and walked over toward him.

‘How much,’ he said.

‘For what? You already paid.’

‘No,’ Miller said. ‘I want to buy it.’

I
t was
eight by the time Miller got back to his house. He didn’t know how that could be unless he’d spent longer in the cabin than he realised. It didn’t matter a whole lot, and in fact there were good things about it. The light had begun to fade. In twenty minutes it would be gone entirely. He spent those minutes sitting in the front seat of the car, waiting for darkness, his mind as close to a comfortable blank as it had been in a long time.

When it was finally dark he got out the car and went over to the house. He dealt with the security system, opened the front door and left it hanging open.

He walked back to the vehicle and went around to the trunk. He rested his hand on the metal there for a moment, and it felt cold. He unlocked the back and turned away, not fast but naturally, and walked toward the wooden steps which led to the smaller of the two raised decks. He walked up them and stood there for a few minutes, looking out into the dark stand of trees, and then turned and headed back down the steps toward the car.

The trunk was empty now, and so he shut it, and walked slowly toward the open door of his house, and went inside, and shut and locked that door behind him too.

It was night, and it was dark, and they were both inside and that felt right.

H
e poured
a small scotch into a large glass. He took it out through the sliding glass doors to the chair on the main deck where he’d spent the morning, and sat cradling the drink, taking a sip once in a while. He found himself remembering, as he often did at this time of day, the first time he’d met his wife. He’d been living down on East Cliff then, in a house which was much smaller than this one but only a couple of minutes’ walk from the beach. Late one Saturday afternoon, bored and restless, he’d taken a walk to the Crow’s Nest, the big restaurant that was the only place to eat or drink along that stretch. He’d bought a similar scotch at the upstairs bar and taken it out onto the balcony to watch the sun go down over the harbor. After a while he noticed that amongst the family groups of sunburned tourists and knots of tattooed locals there was a woman at a table by herself. She had a tall glass of beer and seemed to be doing the same thing he was, and he wondered why. Not why she was doing it, but why he was — why they both were. He did not know then, and he did not know now, why people sit and look out into the distance by themselves, or what they hope to see.

After a couple more drinks he went over and introduced himself. Her name was Catherine and she worked at the university. They got married eighteen months later and though by then — his business having taken off in the meantime — he could have afforded anywhere in town, they hired out the Crow’s Nest and had the wedding party there. A year after that their daughter was born and they called her Matilde, after Catherine’s mother, who was French. Business was still good and they moved out of his place on East Cliff and into the big house he had built in the mountains and for seven years all was good, and then, for some reason, it was no longer good any more. He didn’t think it had been his fault, though it could have been. He didn’t think it was her fault either, though that too was possible. It had simply stopped working. They’d been two people, and then one, but then two again, facing different ways. There had been a view to share together, then there was not, and if you look with only one eye then there is no depth of field. There had been no infidelity. In some ways that might have been easier. It would have been something to react to, to blame, to hide behind. Far worse, in fact, to sit on opposite sides of the breakfast table and wonder who the other person was, and why they were there, and when they would go.

Six months later, she did. Matilde went with her, of course. He didn’t think there was much more that could be said or understood on the subject. When first he’d sat out on this deck alone, trying to work it all through in his head, the recounting could take hours. As time went on, the story seemed to get shorter and shorter. As they said around these parts, it is what it is.

Or it was what it was.

T
ime passed
and then it was late. The scotch was long gone but he didn’t feel the desire for more. He took the glass indoors and washed at the sink, putting it on the draining board next to the plate and the knife and the fork from lunch. No lights were on. He hadn’t bothered to flick any switches when he came in, and — having sat for so long out on the deck — his eyes were accustomed, and he felt no need to turn any on now.

He dried his hands on a cloth and walked around the house, aimlessly at first. He had done this many times in the last few months, hearing echoes. When he got to the area which had been Catherine’s study, he stopped. There was nothing left in the space now, bar the empty desk and the empty bookshelves. He could tell that the chair had been moved, however. He didn’t recall precisely how it had been, or when he’d last listlessly walked this way, but he knew that it had been moved, somehow.

He went back to walking, and eventually fetched up outside the room that had been Matilde’s. The door was slightly ajar. The space beyond was dark.

He could feel a warmth coming out of it, though, and heard a sound in there, something quiet, and he turned and walked slowly away.

H
e took
a shower in the dark. Afterward he padded back to the kitchen in his bare feet and a gown and picked his scotch glass up from the draining board. Even after many, many trips through the dishwasher you could see the ghost of the restaurant logo that had once been stamped on it, the remains of a mast and a crow’s nest. Catherine had slipped it into her purse one long-ago night, without him knowing about it, and then given the glass to him as an anniversary present. How did a person who would do that change into the person now living half the state away? He didn’t know, any more than he knew why he had so little to say on the phone to his daughter, or why people sat and looked at views, or why they drove to nowhere on Saturday afternoons. Our heads turn and point at things. Light comes into our eyes. Words come out of our mouths.

And then? And so?

Carefully, he brought the edge of the glass down upon the edge of the counter. It broke pretty much as he’d hoped it would, the base remaining in one piece, the sides shattering into several jagged points.

He padded back through into the bedroom, put the glass on the night stand, took off the robe, and lay back on the bed. That’s how they’d always done it, when they’d wanted to signal that tonight didn’t have to just be about going to sleep. Under the covers with a book, then probably not tonight, Josephine.

Naked and on top, on the other hand...

A shorthand. A shared language. There is little sadder than a tongue for which only one speaker remains. He closed his eyes, and after a while, for the first time since he’d stood stunned in the driveway and watched his family drive away, he cried.

Afterward he lay and waited.

She came in the night.

T
hree days later
, in the late afternoon, a battered truck pulled down into the driveway and parked alongside the car that was there. It was the first time the truck had been on the road in nearly two years, and the driver left the engine running when he got out because he wasn’t sure it would start up again. The patched front tire was holding up, though, for now.

He went around the back and opened up the wooden crate, propping the flap with a stick. Then he walked over to the big front door and rang on the bell. Waited a while, and did it again. No answer. Of course.

He rubbed his face in his hands, wearily, took a step back. The door looked solid. No way a kick would get it open. He looked around and saw the steps up to the side deck.

When he got to the back of the house he picked up the chair that sat by itself, hefted it to judge the weight, and threw it through the big glass door. When he’d satisfied himself that the hole in the smashed glass was big enough, he walked back along the deck and around the front and then up the driveway to stand on the road for a while, out of view of the house.

He smoked a cigarette, and then another to be sure, and when he came back down the driveway he was relived to see that the flap on the crate on the back of his truck was now closed.

He climbed into the cab and sat a moment, looking at the big house. Then he put the truck into reverse, got back up to the highway, and drove slowly home.

When he made the turn into his own drive later, he saw the STOP sign was still there. Didn’t matter how many times he told the boy, the sign was still there.

He drove along the track to the house, parked the truck. He opened the crate without looking at it, and went inside.