He cries the whole time. “Why?”
I move through the house, snapping on lights. There’s three bedrooms — a master, an office, and one full of brand-new, in-the-box toys. Simon Says and He-Man action figures, and yo-yos. I almost vomit. There’s a Polaroid on his nightstand.
Blinky. Smiling, holding a toy.
I toss the picture on the floor in front of Glass’s withered form. “This is why.”
“What? I didn’t do anything to Alfie. I would never. I only wanted him to be happy.” Glass clears his throat, puts some beef behind it. “If you let me go now, I won’t say anything to the police, Emmett. You could go to jail... prison even.”
I pick up the picture. “Hey, Mr. Glass, I have a question. Why do you have a picture of Blinky?”
He laughs. “Don’t be jealous, Emmett. Alfie needed extra attention. He was a special boy.”
“Why was this photo taken in this house?” I look around. “Right there on that wall.”
Only silence answers me, and in the quiet it strikes me that I sound just like my father.
So I gag him, drag him out to his car, put my bike and bag in the trunk. His car is weird, but I’ve had plenty of practice driving on the farm. The strangest thing is driving on smooth roads. No one passes and nothing moves.
When we get to my home, I drive the last leg with the lights off and kind of coast in. The dome light comes on when I open his door and he screams behind the duct tape. I drag him out despite his struggle and drop him on the tarp, right next to the burn barrel. I think of Blinky, beneath the water, staring up. I hope there was blue sky for him to see. I don’t know why.
“This can’t be settled with Scotch,” I tell him. The snick of the Buck knife opening is loud in the cloudless night.
Soon I have the burn barrel going nice and hot, a few logs of oak and a whole container of lighter fluid. When my dad comes out, coffee mug in hand, gray light has painted the horizon starless. He leans over the barrel. “Jesus.” And after a moment, “You’re definitely going to need the hammer. Remember—”
“I know. The framing hammer.”
“Well, a finish hammer with dings on the face is no good,” he says reasonably. “Now about that car out front...”
And he tells me that lesson.
Steven Heighton
Shared room on Union
From New England Review
They were parked on Union, in front of her place, their knees locked in conference around the stick shift, Janna and Justin talking, necking a little, the windows just beginning to steam. We’d better stop, she said. I should go now. It was 1 A.M., a Thursday night turned Friday morning. Squads of drunken students were on the town. So far nobody had passed the car. Hey, take it to a Travelodge, man! Nights like this, that sort of thing could happen — one time a rigid hand had rammed the hood, another time someone had smacked the passenger window a foot from her ear, Justin’s fingers in her hair stopping dead.
I won’t miss this part, he told her.
I really should go, Jus.
Friday was her “nightmare day,” a double shift at the upscale café/bistro where she was now manager. Thursday nights she insisted on sleeping at her own place, alone. Sleep wasn’t really the issue, he sensed. This seemed to be a ritual of independence, and he knew she would maintain it strictly, having declared she would, until they moved in together in the new year. Other nights of the week they slept at his place or hers. They would be moving into a storm-worn but solid Victorian red-brick bungalow, three bedrooms, hardwood floors, in a druggy neighborhood now being colonized by bohemians and young professionals. Justin and Janna were somewhere on the chart between those categories. In March they planned to fly, tongues somewhat in cheeks, to Las Vegas to get married.
These separate Thursday nights, this symbolic vestige (as he saw it), tore him up in a small way. He could never take in too much of her. He had never been in this position before — the one who loves harder and lives the risk of it. It hadn’t been this way at first. Then it was this way, then it wasn’t, and now it was again, but more so. This must be a good thing, he felt — this swaying of the balance of desire — and he would try to work out in his mind why it was a good thing, and the words reciprocal and mutuality would pop up from somewhere, and the idea of a “marital dance,” which he thought he had probably read somewhere, yes, definitely... and his mind would start to drift, unable to concentrate on the matter for so long, and he would simply want her body next to his again. For now, no excess seemed possible.
Okay, he said. I know.
I’ll see you tomorrow, Jus.
Great.
From somewhere the remote, tuneless roar of frat-boy singing. Possibly the sound was approaching. One of the ironies of existence in this city of life-term welfare and psychiatric cases was that the student “ghetto,” on a weekend night, could be as dangerous as any slum north of the Hub or in the wartime projects further up. She tightened her eyes and peered through the misty windshield. She had a vertical crease between her brows and it would deepen when she was tired. That one hard crease; otherwise her face was unlined.
What’s that?
The boys seemed to be receding, maybe turning south toward the lake. Then another sound — the flat tootling ring of a cell phone, as if right behind the car. Still in a loose embrace they looked back over their shoulders. Someone was there, a shadow, as if seen through frosted glass, standing by the right fender.
What? Yeah, but I can’t talk right now. Right, I’m just about to. What’s that? Yeah, I believe so.
I’d better go, she said.
I’ll walk you in.
It’s okay, she said. She didn’t move.
Call you in five minutes, the voice said in a clumsy, loud whisper. Me you, not you me, okay? The shadow wasn’t there by the fender. There was a rapping on the driver’s side window, a shape hulking. Justin let in the clutch and pinched the ignition key but didn’t twist. With his free hand he buffed a sort of porthole in the steam of the window. That middle-class aversion to being discourteous, even to a lurking silhouette at one in the morning.
Open it, the voice said roughly. No face visible in the porthole. Justin twisted the key.
Don’t!
Jus, he’s got something, stop!
It’s not a fake — open the fucking door. The man clapped the muzzle to the glass. Behind the pistol a face appeared: pocked and moon-colored under the sodium streetlights, eyes wide and vacated. A too-small baseball cap, hair long behind the ears, dark handlebar mustache.
Justin got out slowly, numbly, and stood beside the car, his eyes at the level of that mustache. The man put the pistol to Justin’s chest. An elongated, concave man. Some detached quarter of Justin’s mind thought of an extra in a spaghetti western — one of the dirty, stubbly, expendable ones. A hoarfrost of dried spittle on the chin.
Janna was getting out on her side, he could hear her.
Just give him the keys, Justin.
There.
And your wallet, the man said. Nice key chain. And your bag, ma’am. Come on.
Ma’am, he’d said. Justin dug for his wallet. His fingers and body trembled as though hypothermic. The night wasn’t cold — mild air was lofting up from Lake Ontario and Justin smelled the vast lake in the air, a stored summer’s worth of heat. The pupils in the man’s pale eyes were dilated with crystal meth, or coke, Justin guessed, aware again of that aloof internal observer — that scientist — though actually in his life he was impulsive to a fault, and in his work he progressed by instinctive leaps instead of careful, calibrated steps. He lacked focus but he had energy, good hunches. Two years past his PhD he was in medical research at the university, assisting in a five-year study of fetal alcohol syndrome. No shortage of study subjects in this city.