Something Is Out There (11 page)

When he came bursting out onto the center lawn, the boy was there, just in front of the open door of the house. The boy watched him as he stumbled to the car and got into it. He started it, heard the roar of the engine, and knew that he couldn’t take it with him, couldn’t be here behind the wheel. Crazily, wildly, as if it were on fire, he stood out of it, then
reached back in and turned the key off. He couldn’t think, looking around himself, retching, gasping. The boy watched him warily from the house. Lyndhurst removed his shirt and wiped the steering wheel, the backs of the keys, the tops of the doors, the dash, hurrying, hearing his own breathing. He put the shirt back on, some little hopeful part of his mind presenting him with the absurd thought that this would make everything come right.

“Mister.” The boy had approached to within a few feet of him.

Lyndhurst started to run the other way. He took a few uncertain strides, then stopped, and turned. “Go away, kid. Please? Will you leave me alone? I’m not a gangster.” He couldn’t stop shaking. “God,” he said. “God.”

“What happened?” the boy said. He had another stone in his hand, and was poised to throw it. “Where’s the other guy?”

“Just get,” Lyndhurst said.

The boy didn’t move, and abruptly Lyndhurst understood that he was afraid, that he had been afraid all along. He was alone, and trying to protect the house he lived in, the place where people cared for him.

“Nobody’s gonna hurt you,” Lyndhurst told him. “I’m as scared as you are. Can’t you see that?”

“I’m not scared,” the boy said.

Lyndhurst looked beyond him. “Good for you,” he said. “Good.” He was breathing the words. “Go back in the house. Lock the door. Because there
are
gangsters around here. You get me? And if anybody asks you, I was asleep. I never left this car.” He understood the absurdity of the words as he spoke them, and he swallowed, shaking his head, then turned and strode quickly away, trying to seem calm, keeping his pace steady, not looking back. He saw his own shadow under the streetlight; the shadow
lengthened and then faded, and another took its place—the next streetlight. The whole vast, now-glowing night was harrowing, fantastical, and horrible, lights flashing, sirens wailing far off, dogs barking, car horns sounding, music coming from the open, empty houses. He kept walking, and then he was running again.

He went toward the bigger glow of the city, across the bridge with the shimmering dirty river running below him. Everything looked as it always had. It was awfully itself. The city, with its high crime rate and its dangerous, run-down neighborhoods. There were people out walking, and a jogger came by in the opposite direction. Lyndhurst kept going, half-running, looking behind him, and then trying merely to walk quickly, to seem casual, fighting for breath. The image of Grant sitting against the tree kept coming to him. He was near the apartment building, where all the lights seemed to be on, and everyone was out. There were people on the balconies, drinking beer and celebrating.

The boy had seen him. The boy would tell the police about it.

In the apartment were Grant’s things—a baseball cap, a pair of sandals, a beer glass in the sink. Lyndhurst got rid of his works, put it all in a plastic bag and threw it into the dumpster outside. He leaned on the iron door, in the sound of the celebrations, and fought to keep from being sick again.

When she pulled up, he tried to move to the other side of the dumpster, but she had seen him. She got out of the car and walked over, head tilted slightly, as if she wasn’t sure it was Lyndhurst.

“Hey?” she said.

“He’s—he’s not home.”

“Where is he? He said to meet him here.”

“He’s not here,” Lyndhurst nearly choked on the words. “Go home, Ramona. Please.”

“What’s wrong? Something’s wrong.”

“Go home.”

“Are you sick?”

“Yeah—sick.”

“Poor Lyndhurst.” She waited. “Hey, the power’s back on.” She seemed to want to celebrate.

“I don’t know where he is, okay?” He had nearly shouted at her.

She stood there with her head tilted in that way, regarding him, and then she seemed to sink into herself. “Oh,” she said, turning. “No.” She walked a few steps away, and turned to look at him again. “He was going to do something with you—you were both going somewhere. He told me that. Something’s happened. He got arrested. Tell me.”

“I’ve been here the whole night,” he said. “Goddamn. What do you want from me? I’ve been here the whole night. I didn’t go anywhere.”

“I was here earlier.” Her eyes had narrowed, and she took a step toward him again. “I rode back out to get some beer. No one was here. You’re shaking.”

“I went for a walk. I went for a walk.” He held his hands out as if to show his helplessness to explain anything. “I went for a walk, goddamn it.”

“You don’t have to shout.” She stepped closer, and touched his shoulder. “Tell me.”

He said, “I’m sorry. I got sick. I’m sick. Go home. Don’t come here anymore.”

For what seemed a long time, she stood and looked at him. His breathing was coming with a rasp. He couldn’t get enough
of the hot night air to make a single exhalation. He thought he might keel over.

“We could go inside and, like, wait for him?” There was something pleading in her voice.

“Don’t you get what I’m telling you?” Lyndhurst said. “Get!” He straightened, and felt himself begin to gag. “Go home. Go back to your life.”

“Oh, no,” she said again. “No.” Then she turned and walked slowly up the lighted walk to the building, and around the corner of it, out of sight. Her motions were those of a person expecting any moment to be set upon by something bad. He waited a moment, bending, with his hands on his knees, trying to gather himself. Finally he started down the street, hurrying, glancing over his shoulder to be certain that she wasn’t following him. He thought of what was ahead of her this night, and was afraid she would remember him as he was now. He felt sorry for her, and yet he wanted never to see her, or hear her name, or know of her, ever again.

Not quite an hour later, he was on the street in front of his parents’ house, the president’s house, standing with hands on his knees again, choking for air, the muscles of his legs and arms jumping. He stood under the streetlamp, and then realized that he was in light, and moved to the shadow of the spruce tree at the edge of the lawn. The house was dark, save for one light upstairs—the one his parents had on a timer whenever they were going to be gone for longer than one night. Of course they had gone to the Eastern Shore when the power failure continued. He heard voices from the neighboring house—people who had moved in since he left home. He crossed to the side door, the one into the sunroom, where he knew a key was hidden under the mat. It was there. He went in,
closed and locked the door. The quiet and the dark made him feel slightly calmer, but the air was stifling, and the memory of Grant’s still shape in the clearing, with the little perfect black circle in his forehead, kept returning to him. He began to cry softly, moving through the house, up the stairs, no one home, everything turned off, all the lamps unplugged. He reached for a wall switch, flicked it, was bathed in dreadful bright light, cried out, and turned it off again immediately.

It had all begun as a lark, going for a ride in the sporty convertible, something to do. Killing the routine.

Here was the doorway to his room. It seemed that the sirens never let up; they were still sounding across the night. But it was the silence of the clearing that remained with him, the vastness of that quiet, the hugeness of it—the not-breath, not-seeing of the shape there, sitting against the base of the tree. On the table by his bed, the digital clock had not been unplugged. The little red light showing the wrong time to the minute changed, and then changed again, and still again while he watched. The night would pass slowly. One little increment at a time. His father would want to come home before morning. He never really liked being away from the house. They were probably already on their way. He had a picture of them, sitting in the car, not speaking, the silence between them heavy with all the old discontents and resentments, the radio on, the night gliding by the windows, and the lights of the city restored. They would want to be home.

He got down on his knees and crawled under the bed.

Today I got a letter from an old friend inviting me to come back to Virginia to help him celebrate a new opening in his chain of hot-dog stands. I might actually go. This is the ninth such invitation he’s extended in the last eleven years. I always liked Jimmy, and in fact did go when he opened the first one, back in ′94. I met his new wife, saw his new house, and we had a happy couple of days. We even played golf once, like we used to back when I sold cars for a living and he owned the dealership. We haven’t been in very consistent touch since then, so it really would be something if I did show up again now.

Hell, I probably won’t. Life’s so busy anymore. But getting the invitation made me think about him, and about something that happened, on a golf course, all those years ago.

You don’t know anybody I knew then, so the names won’t matter, but I’ll make them up anyway. And I won’t tell you exactly where it happened, either. There are several public courses up and down the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia. Say it was one of those—far, far away.

One foggy Sunday morning, five of us were going to play eighteen holes. Although we knew one another and had played together in different combinations before, this was one of the
few times we were all together at the same time. The others were Daryl, Harry, Anthony, and, of course, Jimmy.

We’d gone to work for him at X Motors back in the earliest part of the Clinton boom, before the bottom fell out and Jimmy’s tax troubles came to light and he had to sell the lot. None of us was thinking much then about whether we would stick to this line of work. That aspect of things hadn’t become quite real to us, was only a shadow on the distant horizon. We’d cooked up this day of golf essentially just to lighten Jimmy’s heart, although none of us spoke about that directly.

We decided to split up this way: Daryl and I would go ahead and tee off, while Harry and Jimmy would wait for Anthony, because together Anthony and Harry could always make Jimmy laugh, and they were better golfers, too.

I didn’t know this yet, but that week the corporate people, putting on the finishing touch, had told Jimmy they’d been forced by the IRS to pull his floor plan, so the IRS could collect on inventory. What this meant, if you ran a car dealership, was that you couldn’t sell that company’s cars anymore. The government would sell them against your tax debt.

Like I say, that was only the finishing touch. For Jimmy, things had been going from bad to worse for the last couple of years.

We had all benefited from his generosity, and we talked about him like a father or an older brother, admiring his ability to be lighthearted and to make fun of himself in his sea of troubles: business failing, payments mounting up, wife living elsewhere—a recent development—and his daughter from the first marriage not speaking to him anymore, having sided with her mother.

The major reason for the new wife trouble, really, was that the dealership consumed so much of his time—in the boom
years because business was good, and in the bust years because it was bad. In fact, there wasn’t much time at home for any of us then, but especially not for Jimmy. And so the wife, let’s call her Elaine, twenty years younger than he was anyway, started feeling neglected and lonely. The rest of
that
story hardly needs telling: she’d moved out three weeks before.

My own wife was having trouble understanding the hours, but she managed all right; she’s still with me. We’re in pretty solid shape, too. But this isn’t about me.

Jimmy was our friend, and in a way our mentor, too—we were in our thirties and he was fifty. He’d taken each of us in at various points as salesmen (me, Daryl) or mechanics (Harry, Anthony), and we’d spent some really magnificent, deep-laughing hours over whiskey or wine or beer, almost always at the nineteenth hole at one course or another, mostly on Sundays. Elaine also played now and then; at least that gave them a little time together. They both knew Chris, the owner of the course we were playing the day I’m remembering. Chris, apparently believing that Jimmy knew everything, told him how sad he was about the situation with Elaine, who’d played eighteen holes on Friday and confessed she was going out with somebody from her Asian cooking night class. To me, it seemed pretty harsh for her to do that, knowing Chris would talk and it would get back to us. When Chris saw that Jimmy didn’t know, he tried to take it back. “I don’t know, though, could be just talk.”

“Probably not,” Jimmy said.

“Have you talked to her?”

“Everything she says to me is straight out of Fuck You Central.”

“I never heard that one,” Daryl said, and laughed a little.

Jimmy said, “Well, there’s nothing much I can do about it,” and thanked Chris for his concern. But it hurt him; I could see it in his eyes. He smiled and took a club from his bag and made a little loosening-up swing. “Thanks,” he said again, in case Chris had missed the first expression of gratitude. Then he looked down at the club head and waggled it a little, concentrating.

Jimmy was six-five and heavy boned, with great green eyes under thick brows that seemed always knitted, even when he smiled. He’d concentrate on what you were saying and remember little details about what was going on in your life, and you felt like you were important to him. He had large intelligence, and he could be very funny. And even so, all his troubles were in that face—that long, gaunt, grief-stricken, disconsolate face. Not just the recent trouble, but a pretty steady stream of bad luck: his brother killed in Vietnam; a younger sister gone off to some cult and never heard from since, probably as a direct result of losing the brother; both parents dead, evidently of heartbreak. He had a long-established habit of expecting the worst, and this assumption informed everything he said, though he’d express this as calmly as someone making observations about the news. Really, you never had the sense that he was complaining and yet no misfortune was the slightest surprise to him. He’d already imagined all of it. His life was just going that way—hard passages, failed ventures, people leaving, sorrow after sorrow.