Night Work (29 page)

The hours passed until the light came in around the door’s edges and I saw the writing scratched into the
walls again, the obscenities and the drawings. I could not bear the thought of another day in this thing.

This is how Brian felt right before he hung himself, I thought. This is what it feels like to not want to live anymore. Hell, maybe this is what Albert Ayler felt, back on the day I was born in 1970. Maybe he really did throw himself into the East River. Maybe he was living inside his own cage.

I thought I heard voices. I put my ear to the metal, listening. There were no voices now, but I did hear an engine starting, and then the crunch of gravel as the tires went down the driveway. The sound got fainter as the car made it to the road and drove away. Maurice, I thought, heading to the gym for another day of masquerading as a normal human being. What day is it today, anyway? I’ve totally lost track.

The light in the shed seemed a little brighter. Maybe there were no clouds today. Meaning more sunlight. More heat.

I must have drifted off to sleep for a while. A sound woke me. A car coming up the driveway. I put my ear to the door. Is that Maurice coming back already? Or is it a different car? Does it
sound
different?

I waited. The sound got closer and closer. I heard a door open and shut.

“HEY!” I yelled. My dry throat ached, but I didn’t care. This felt like it might be my last chance. If it wasn’t Maurice out there, then I had to get his attention, whoever it might be. “HELLO! CAN YOU HEAR ME?”

I banged on the door as hard as I could, using every ounce of energy I had left.

“HEY! YOU OUT THERE! CAN YOU HEAR ME? I’M IN THE SHED OVER HERE! HEY!”

I banged some more and then listened for the sound of someone coming closer. I heard nothing but the sound of my own breathing.

“Come on,” I said. “Come on. There has to be somebody out there.”

I was just about to start banging again when the little side door was suddenly pushed open. Maurice’s face appeared in the light.

“What the hell are you doing?” he said.

My throat felt like it was closing down. I couldn’t have answered him if I wanted to.

“That’s real cute,” he said. “You wanna know what happens now?” He lifted a cooler into the little doorway. Before I could even move toward him, he turned it over and dumped it out.

“No,” I tried to say. It came out as a moan.

He poured the water out. It dribbled down the inside of the wall and mixed with the dirt on the floor. When the water was gone, he took the empty cooler away from the door and showed me a paper bag.

“Here’s your breakfast,” he said. He smashed the bag into pulp and dropped it just outside the door.

“Every time you make a noise, Joe. Every time. That’s what happens. Do you understand me?”

I didn’t answer him. I just looked at the small puddle of mud beneath the door.

He waited another beat, then he slammed the door shut.

When he was gone, I crawled over and put my fingers in the mud. I tried tasting it, tried to get some small amount of moisture on my tongue. The foulness in my mouth tasted like death and decay. I slumped forward and lay half-collapsed in the dirt.

More time passed.

I tried to pray, but it felt like God must have been a million light-years away from me. So I tried talking to Laurel instead. If you’re there, I said to her, inside my head. It hurt so much to talk to you for such a long time. But now it makes me feel better. I was so afraid to remember how it was, back when I had a real life. Back when you and I were together and I thought it would always be that way. If I had to pick one moment out of all of them … One moment I could live in forever …

The day you came up to Kingston to break up with me. You remember that? It wasn’t right, you said. You were engaged. You had your whole life planned out, the whole deal. I was just this thing that happened to you. This thing, you said. It was wrong and it had to end and you thought I deserved to hear it from you face to face. I said, that’s not why you came up here. You got angry with me and I thought you might even take a swing at me, slap me right across the face. I grabbed the back of your hair and I kissed you, and you said I had one last chance to stop this. And I said, the way I saw it, I had one last chance to start it.

Are you there, Laurel? Can you hear me? If you’re there, maybe I’ll be seeing you soon. Like today. If you’re not … Well, then nothing makes sense and I can understand why Brian Gayle spent all this time carving these words in the walls.

But no, it’s okay. Either I see you again or I don’t. Either way, this is all going to end soon. No more of this.

No more.

The minutes passed. I sat and waited for whatever was going to happen to me.

Hours. I waited.

At some point, I fell over onto my back. More time passed. Then the light came. The whole world was suddenly bright, then just as suddenly it was cold. It was shockingly cold, but it felt so good after all the heat. Ice cold and then wet. It was water. It was water!

I opened my mouth, felt the cold water on my tongue. I kept my eyes closed and my mouth open. I kept tasting the cold, cold water until it started to overpower me. I was drowning in it.

I opened my eyes. The main door to the shed was open, and Maurice was standing there with a hose in one hand, the rifle in the other. The cold water from the hose was hitting me in the face.

“Drink all you want,” he said, “but don’t get up until I tell you.”

He flipped the hose toward me. I picked it up and drank as much water as I could, as much water as my
body could hold at one time. Then I poured the water over my head, so cold it almost made me pass out.

“Okay, now you’re going to get up slow,” he said. He was wearing jeans and a white undershirt today. Solid muscle and the two tattoos. “You’re not going to try anything stupid, right? If you do I will shoot you right through the head. You got that?”

“Yes,” I said. I had a voice again.

“Don’t think for a second that I won’t do it. I will not hesitate to kill you on the spot.”

“I got it.”

“All right. Just so we’re clear on that. Now get on your feet.”

I dropped the hose and pushed myself up. Maurice backed up and motioned me outside. I’m actually going to get out of this shed, I thought. I wonder for how long? And what will be waiting for me out there?

“This way,” he said, waving me to my right.

“Where are we going?” I shielded my eyes as I stepped out into the sunlight. I was standing on grass, and as I breathed in the fresh air I vowed to appreciate every lungful for as long as I lived. Even if it was just another few minutes.

“You’ll see.”

He kept a few feet away from me as he led me to the house. I wasn’t sure why he was being so careful. He had already proven he could beat me hand to hand. After so much time in that hot shed, I wasn’t even operating at quarter strength.

“Turn off that hose,” he said as we passed the faucet. “We don’t want to empty the well.”

I bent down and turned the handle.

“Okay, keep going,” he said. “Around back.”

“What’s going on, Maurice?”

“Just move.”

When I turned the corner, I saw a large backyard ringed by hedges and rosebushes. There was a covered in-ground swimming pool with a cabana, deck chairs, a gas grill—everything you needed for a nice summer party. But there was nobody around except me and Maurice.

“Now what?” I said.

“Over there.” He waved me to a table set up on the far side of the pool, by the cabana. “Go sit down.”

As I got closer to the table, I saw the food laid out there. Sandwiches on a large plate, hot dogs, some bean salad in a plastic bowl, potato chips, even a few bottles of beer cooling in an ice bucket.

“It’s a little picnic,” he said. “Go ahead. Help yourself.”

“You’re going to make me eat at gunpoint?”

“Don’t be an idiot. You’re starving.”

I hesitated for about two seconds. I didn’t want to cooperate with him, but I had never been so hungry in my life. This food will give me strength, I thought. It will give me energy and a clear head. That’s the rationalization I made to myself as I dove in.

There were no peanut butter and jelly sandwiches
this time, but there were cold cuts and cheese and tuna fish. I started in on the cold cuts, and by the third mouthful I was making myself slow down so I wouldn’t choke.

“Have a beer,” he said. He kept standing a few feet away, the rifle barrel trained at my chest. “Doesn’t that sound good?”

“I think a beer would wipe me out right now.”

“Suit yourself, but I’m sure you’re still thirsty.”

“That’s all right, thanks.”

He grabbed one from the ice bucket and opened it. “What, are you afraid I poisoned it or something? Here, watch.” He took a long swallow and then put the open bottle right in front of me. “See? No problem. Just an ice cold beer on a hot summer day.”

I looked up at him. He was standing with his back to the sun, so I had to squint to make out his face. The rifle was pointing to the ground now.

“I’m not drinking with you,” I said. “I’ll eat rather than starve, but I will not drink with you.”

He lifted the rifle slowly, until it was aimed at my face. “This is Mr. Gayle’s gun. I watched him take down a twelve-point buck with one shot. Do you have any idea what it would do to your head if I were to pull the trigger?”

I didn’t answer him.

“I’ve never shot a man, Joe. In my whole damned life, all the bad things I’ve done, I’ve never shot a man. But on the count of three, that’s all gonna change unless you drink that beer for me.”

I didn’t move. He won’t do it, I thought. If he was going to shoot me, he would have done it already.

“One.”

On the other hand, this would be a completely insane reason to die.

“Two.”

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll drink the beer.” I picked it up and took a swallow. It was cold, and after three days in a broiling-hot metal box, it tasted just as good as I knew it would.

“All of it. Drink it down. Hits the spot, doesn’t it?”

I kept drinking. In my weakened state, I could feel my head buzzing already. It was hitting my bloodstream like straight tequila.

“What’s the game?” I said. “Why are you feeding me and trying to get me drunk?”

“Maybe I’m trying to apologize, Joe. You ever think of that? What I did to you this morning … You know, dumping out your water, taking your food away … That was uncalled for. I let my temper get the best of me.”

“As opposed to everything else you’ve done to me,” I said. “Which was perfectly acceptable.”

“I told you before. It’s just business.”

“Yeah, so you said. What does that mean? You still haven’t told me.”

“Look … This was the first family I ever stuck to, okay? After running away when I was fifteen years old, making my way downstate, doing whatever I had to do to survive. For years I was doing that. Until I
ended up here in Woodstock, running my usual scam, which was to find a big house, tell the people I’d cut their lawn, do whatever they needed, just long enough to see what kind of score I could line up before taking off to the next town. But this place … Hell, I showed up right when everything was falling apart. Brian was just starting to get into big trouble, his father was doing all sorts of evil shit to him, and I was thinking, man, this looks just like what I ran away from. But then Agnes … This woman, out of nowhere, doesn’t even know me, she wants me to live in the extra house they got out back, she wants to talk to me all the time. At first, I was thinking, I don’t need this. But then I realized, this is the first person who ever really cared about me. My whole life, this is the first person who wants to give me everything. Not just food, not just a place to sleep. Everything.”

“She’s a very disturbed woman,” I said. “You know that, right?”

“She’s a little out there sometimes. Actually, I thought having her husband out of the picture would really help her. But I think she’s been getting worse.”

“Should I even ask you what happened to Mr. Gayle? She mentioned him being depressed, but she didn’t say how he died.”

“Yeah, she’s kind of blocked that out now, I think. At the time, though, she was all for it, believe me.”

“All for what?”

“For making things right. You see, what Mr. Gayle
did to Brian, at the time I figured that was just something between him and his son. But when Brian went away and Mr. Gayle started in on Agnes? No way, man. I wasn’t gonna let that happen.”

“So you killed him?”

“That’s a funny story, actually. I tried to this one time, when I walked in and he was beating on her. I got him right by the throat. That was the first time I’d ever done that, by the way, and I tell you, when you see somebody’s life getting squeezed out between your two hands … It’s something, man. Anyway, she started hitting me with things, telling me to stop. Then later she says if I killed him that way and went away to prison just like Brian did, then she’d be all alone. So hell, I’m not stupid. I got the message. If he was going to go, he had to go clean.”

“So how did you do it?”

“Well, let’s just say Mr. Gayle ended up hanging himself in the barn. Losing his son and all, it was just too much for him. If only Mrs. Gayle had been home at the time, or if I hadn’t been out mowing, maybe I would have heard him. It’s tragic, isn’t it?”

“It sounds like you two are perfect together,” I said.

“Yeah, well, whatever it takes to make her happy. I’m right there.”

I looked around the place, at the pool, the house, the bright white furniture glowing in the sunlight. “Let me guess,” I said. “Mrs. Gayle has a little bit of money in the bank …”

“More than a little bit, let’s say.”

“And if you do what she tells you, no matter what it is …”

“As it happens … Yeah, she considers me the only real family she’s got left.”

It’s still not enough, I thought. People will do almost everything for money. But what Maurice did … No. No way. That kind of thing has to be in your heart to begin with.

“That’s the part Brian never understood,” Maurice said, shaking his head. “Stupidest kid I ever met. Before everything went bad, I told him, I said, you got the best mother in the world. Your father, well, all you gotta do is play along with him for one more year, say ‘no, sir’ and ‘yes, sir’ and go to school instead of getting in trouble all the time. Then you can go off to college anywhere you want. Your mother will always make sure you have all the money you ever need.”