Out There in the Darkness (7 page)

“What if he takes it and comes back for more?”

“We make it absolutely clear,” Neil said, “that there is no more.
 
That this is it.
 
Period.”

“And if not?”

Neil nodded.
 
“I've thought this through.
 
You know the kind of lowlife we're dealing with?
 
A) He's a burglar which means, these days, that he's a junkie.
 
B) If he's a junkie then that means he's very susceptible to AIDS.
 
So between being a burglar and shooting up, this guy is probably going to have a very short lifespan.”

“I guess I'd agree.”

“Even if he wants to make our lives miserable, he probably won't live long enough to do it.
 
So I think we'll be making just the one payment.
 
We'll buy enough time to let nature take its course—his nature.”

“What if he wants more than the eleven grand?”

“He won't.
 
His eyes'll pop out when he sees this.”

I looked at the kitchen clock.
 
It was going on nine now.

“I guess we could drive over there.”

“It may be a long night,” Neil said.

“I know.”

“But I guess we don't have a hell of a lot of choice, do we?”

A
s we'd done the last time we'd been here, we split up the duties.
 
I took the backyard, Neil the apartment door.
 
We waited until midnight.
 
The rap music had died by now.
 
Babies cried and mothers screamed; couples fought.
 
TV screens flickered in dark windows.

I went up the fire escape slowly and carefully.
 
We'd talked about bringing guns then decided against it.
 
We weren't exactly marksmen and if a cop stopped us for some reason, we could be arrested for carrying unlicensed firearms.
 
All I carried was a flashlight in my back pocket.

As I grabbed the rungs of the ladder, powdery rust dusted my hands.
 
I was chilly with sweat.
 
My bowels felt sick.
 
I was scared.
 
I just wanted it to be over with.
 
I wanted him to say yes he'd take the money and then that would be the end of it.

The stucco veranda was filled with discarded toys—a tricycle, innumerable games, a space helmet, a Wiffle bat and ball.
 
The floor was crunchy with dried animal feces.
 
At least I hoped the feces belonged to animals and not human children.

The door between veranda and apartment was open.
 
Fingers of moonlight revealed an overstuffed couch and chair and a floor covered with the debris of fast food.
 
McDonald's sacks.
 
Pizza Hut wrappers and cardboards.
 
Arby's wrappers, and what seemed to be five or six dozen empty beer cans.
 
Far toward the hall that led to the front door I saw four red eyes watching me; a pair of curious rats.

I stood still and listened.
 
Nothing.
 
No sign of life.
 
I went inside.
 
Tiptoeing.

I went to the front door and let Neil in.
 
There in the murky light of the hallway, he made a face.
 
The smell
was
pretty bad.

Over the next ten minutes, we searched the apartment.
 
And found nobody.

“We could wait here for him,” I said.

“No way.”

“The smell?”

“The smell, the rats, God; don't you just feel unclean?”

“Yeah, guess I do.”

“There's an empty garage about halfway down the alley.
 
We'd have a good view of the back of this building.”

“Sounds pretty good.”

“Sounds better than this place, anyway.”

This time, we both went out the front door and down the stairway.
 
Now the smells were getting to me as they'd earlier gotten to Neil.
 
Unclean.
 
He was right.

We got in Neil's Buick, drove down the alley that ran along the west side of the apartment house, backed up to the dark garage, and whipped inside.

“There's a sack in back,” Neil said.
 
“It's on your side.”

“A sack?”

“Brewskis.
 
Quart for you, quart for me.”

“That's how my old man used to drink them,” I said.
 
I was the only blue-collar member of the poker game club.
 
“Get off work at the plant and stop by and pick up two quart bottles of Hamms.
 
Never missed.”

“Sometimes I wish I would've been born into the working class,” Neil said.

I was the blue-collar guy and Neil was the dreamer, always inventing alternate realities for himself.

“No, you don't,” I said, leaning over the seat and picking up the sack damp from the quart bottles.
 
“You had a damned nice life in Boston.”

“Yeah, but I didn't learn anything.
 
You know I was eighteen before I learned about cunnilingus?”

“Talk about cultural deprivation,” I said.

“Well, every girl I went out with probably looks back on me as a pretty lame lover.
 
They went down on me but I never went down on them.
 
How old were you when you learned about cunnilingus?”

“Maybe thirteen.”

“See?”

“I learned about it but I didn't do anything about it.”

“I was twenty years old before I lost my cherry,” Neil said.

“I was seventeen.”

“Bullshit.”

“Bullshit what?
 
I was seventeen.”

“In sociology, they always taught us that blue-collar kids always lost their virginity a lot earlier than white-collar kids.”

“That's the trouble with sociology.
 
It tries to particularize from generalities.”

“Huh?”
 
He grinned.
 
“Yeah, I always thought sociology was full of shit, too, actually.
 
But you were really seventeen?”

“I was really seventeen.”

I wish I could tell you that I knew what it was right away, the missile that hit the windshield and shattered and starred it, and then kept right on tearing through the car until the back window was also shattered and starred.

But all I knew was that Neil was screaming and I was screaming and my quart bottle of Miller's was spilling all over my crotch as I tried to hunch down behind the dashboard.
 
It was a tight fit because Neil was trying to hunch down behind the steering wheel.

The second time, I knew what was going on: somebody was shooting at us.
 
Given the trajectory of the bullet, he had to be right in front of us, probably behind the two dumpsters that sat on the other side of the alley.

“Can you keep down and drive this sonofabitch at the same time?”

“I can try,” Neil said.

“If we sit here much longer, he's going to figure out we don't have guns.
 
Then he's gonna come for us for sure.”

Neil leaned over and turned on the ignition.
 
“I'm going to turn left when we get out of here.”

“Fine.
 
Just get moving.”

“Hold on.”

What he did was kind of slump over the bottom half of the wheel, just enough so he could sneak a peek at where the car was headed.

There were no more shots.

All I could hear was the smooth-running Buick motor.

He eased out of the garage, ducking down all the time.

When he got a chance, he bore left.

He kept the lights off.

Through the bullet hole in the windshield I could see an inch or so of starry sky.

It was a long alley and we must have gone a quarter block before he said, “I'm going to sit up.
 
I think we lost him.”

“So do I.”

“Look at that frigging windshield.”

Not only was the windshield a mess, the car reeked of spilled beer.

“You think I should turn on the headlights?”

“Sure,” I said.
 
“We're safe now.”

We were still crawling at maybe ten miles per hour when he pulled the headlights on.

That's when we saw him, silver of eye, dark of hair, crouching in the middle of the alley waiting for us.
 
He was a good fifty yards ahead of us but we were still within range.

There was no place we could turn around.

He fired.

This bullet shattered whatever had been left untouched of the windshield.
 
Neil slammed on the brakes.

Then he fired a second time.

By now, both Neil and I were screaming and cursing again.

A third bullet.

“Run him over!” I yelled, ducking behind the dashboard.

“What?” Neil yelled back.

“Floor it!”

He floored it.
 
He wasn't even sitting up straight.
 
We might have gone careening into one of the garages or Dumpsters.
 
But somehow the Buick stayed in the alley.
 
And very soon it was traveling eighty-five miles per hour.
 
I watched the speedometer peg it.

More shots, a lot of them now, side windows shattering, bullets ripping into fender and hood and top.

I didn't see us hit him but I
felt
us hit him, the car traveling that fast, the creep so intent on killing us he hadn't bothered to get out of the way in time.

The front of the car picked him up and hurled him into a garage near the head of the alley.

We both sat up, watched as his entire body was broken against the edge of the garage, and he then fell smashed and unmoving to the grass.

“Kill the lights,” I said.

“What?”

“Kill the lights and let's go look at him.”

Neil punched off the headlights.

We left the car and ran over to him.

A white rib stuck bloody and brazen from his side.
 
Blood poured from his ears, nose, mouth.
 
One leg had been crushed and also showed white bone.
 
His arms had been broken, too.

I played my flashlight beam over him.

He was dead, all right.

“Looks like we can save our money,” I said.
 
“It's all over now.”

“I want to get the hell out of here.”

“Yeah,” I said.
 
“So do I.”

We got the hell out of there.

A
month later, just as you could smell autumn on the summer winds, Jan and I celebrated our twelfth wedding anniversary.
 
We drove up to Lake Geneva, in Wisconsin, and stayed at a very nice hotel and rented a Chris-Craft for a couple of days.
 
This was the first time I'd been able to relax since the thing with the burglar had started.

One night when Jan was asleep, I went up on the deck of the boat and just watched the stars.
 
I used to read a lot of Edgar Rice Burroughs when I was a boy.
 
I always remembered how John Carter felt—that the stars had a very special destiny for him—and that night there on the deck, that was to be a good family man, a good stockbroker, and a good neighbor.
 
The bad things were all behind me now.
 
I imagined Neil was feeling pretty much the same way.
 
Hot bitter July seemed a long ways behind us now.
 
Fall was coming, bringing with it football and Thanksgiving and Christmas.
 
July would recede even more with snow on the ground.

The funny thing was, I didn't see Neil much anymore.
 
It was as if the sight of each other brought back a lot of bad memories.
 
It was a mutual feeling, too.
 
I didn't want to see him any more than he wanted to see me.
 
Our wives thought this was pretty strange.
 
They'd meet at the supermarket or shopping center and wonder why “the boys” didn't get together anymore.
 
Neil's wife, Sarah, kept inviting us over to “sit around the pool and watch Neil pretend he knows how to swim.”
 
September was summer hot.
 
The pool was still the centerpiece of their life.