What You See in the Dark (17 page)

“Dan, you can’t do this …”

“Mama … ,” he said sternly. “I took the cash from the office and I’m sorry about that. But you get rid of that truck. Okay? Take it up into the mountains and burn it or push it into the river. Just get rid of it.”

“I won’t do any such thing,” she said, with a firm voice, a glimmer of defiance, the same tone she had used when speaking to Frederick those years ago in this very kitchen, when he threatened to leave her if she didn’t stop pestering him about his late hours. Frederick had looked at her with a stare as thin and deadly as a razor.

“You do what you want,” Dan said. He gathered the food and the suitcase and butted his way to the front door, unstoppable, and she wanted to reach out to him, remembering how her mother had reached out to her brother to embrace him when he came back.

To her surprise, Dan put his things down and hugged her. He held her hard and she allowed him to. She closed her eyes against the half-moons on his cheek, their ugly certainties, and willed everything to stop, to stay as it was.

“I’m sorry, Mama,” he said. “I am.” He gathered the suitcase and the paper bag of food and bounded out to the parking lot. She ran out to the porch, almost following him down in her bare feet. She watched his dark form fumble with the keys, heard the click of the door as he unlocked the sedan. The night was still, no cars on the highway, no sound at all, the entire city
asleep, and her car roared to life, startling her. The inevitability startled her, the coming change. The motor gunned and the lights, weak willed and scant, dimmed as Dan put the car into reverse and wheeled right out of the parking lot. Just like that. Just like Frederick, whom she had not witnessed leaving, only finding an envelope on the kitchen table announcing his departure. The envelope held the deeds to the motel and the house and a bit of cash, but otherwise no indication about where he had gone. But the dark silhouette in the sedan tonight was not Frederick—it was Dan, making a hurried right turn onto the highway, heading south, the red taillights disappearing, the rumble of the engine receding, and Arlene on the front porch alone and looking at the dark.

Dan’s black Ford pickup stared at her, parked lengthwise, its one visible headlight a wary eye. It sat there like a still but breathing animal. The truck spooked her, a dark hulk in the empty space of their parking lot, and Arlene had to step away from the door, a foolish fear of the truck somehow turning on and idling there. It reminded her of falling asleep in front of the television set and waking up to static that unnerved her, filled her with a shaky dread as she rose from the armchair and moved toward the set, deeper toward the source of her irrational fear, just to turn the thing off.

Sooner or later an officer would indeed come and park his patrol car in front of her house, stepping out with questions. The truck sat out there with the inevitable answers. She wondered what was in it, why Dan wanted her to dispose of it. She pictured herself driving it east of Bakersfield, on any of the roads that headed out on big, easy asphalt, then meandered
into swerving, near-single-lane passages that hardly anybody traveled. Not this time of year, with fog and sometimes even snow in those hills if a cold front came in hard. Those were summer roads, roads for fishing spots along the creek, bass and trout making their way down the Sierra, picked off all along the way until only the lowly catfish survived. The hills blazed with dry grass but by winter went green again and even muddy, the tree trunks rich with moss. Hardly anybody went up there, just the locals who knew the roads. No guardrails to stop a vehicle from plummeting down into the ravines that grew deeper and deeper as the hills gradually turned into mountain.

She could see herself doing it.

She could see herself driving the truck up there, the hairpin turns of those roads. Far up there. Ten miles, maybe, of that kind of driving, then pulling over and turning off the engine. And then what? A box of matches and a jug of gasoline? Would the truck explode? She could see it, the truck blooming in flame, consumed. Would anybody hear it, the echo of the blast, somebody looking east and seeing an odd orange glow over there in the mountains way before dawn? The orange tip of her brother’s cigarette glowed when he puffed, its blaze a signal that he didn’t want to talk anymore, just listen. Would the truck burn itself out, or would the flames leap over to the grass, the damp winter containing it? What then, with a ten-mile walk back to town? How long would that take, especially in this cold, her hands huddled around her elbows, her feet against the asphalt in thin shoes? The little girl in her childhood picture book walked all that way. But how impossible! Five miles, then? Three? Just far enough away from the eastern edge of
Bakersfield, at the beginning of the hill slopes, far enough away to slip the truck into neutral and steer it over the side of a ravine, out of sight of the road.

For what? It was nothing she had done. She had no lies to conceal. She knew where Dan was headed. Only south. And that was logical. Over to Los Angeles to hide in that enormous city. Over to San Diego. To Tijuana and everything she’d heard about its teeming, ugly life.

She didn’t even know what he’d done, really.

The truck stared back at her, and she stood on the porch for a long moment, the way she had stood in the early morning hallway of her house when her brother had returned. She had been waiting for answers back then. Right in front of her, the truck held them. She went back into the house to wrap herself tight in a housecoat, and she slipped on a pair of Keds. She walked down the porch stairs, the truck beckoning like a faithful star. Her eyes fixed on the cab, its interior too dark for her to see inside. What was she expecting, the body of the dead girl? Arlene chided herself for being so afraid, never having been so, after all these years near the highway, so far away from town, having grown up in the countryside. Darkness was just not being able to see. Nothing came out of it. She had stared at darkness throughout her childhood summers as she’d gone to sleep, the strange noises outside nothing but small animals foraging for food. Yet here she was, approaching the truck with so much timidity that she felt foolish.

She opened the truck door, the dome light dim, and ran her eyes over the interior. What had she expected? A torn and bloodied bench seat? Red handprints on the steering wheel?
Nothing seemed unusual, nothing that demanded the truck be destroyed as Dan had adamantly suggested. Maybe, Arlene thought, it was simply that the police would be searching for the vehicle, that someone had spotted it making a getaway from whatever horrible scene still waited to be discovered. She needed the truck now, Dan having taken her car.

But then she spotted something. The dome light was too dim for her to see clearly, so Arlene leaned in. Along the curve of the steering wheel, along the ridges made for the fingers to grip, she could see a vague discoloration, a darkness. Her stomach gripped in panic, the fear coming again, and she stepped back as if shocked by an electric wire.

“Stupid, stupid, stupid,” Arlene muttered, anger overtaking her fear, wishing Dan had driven away in the truck instead of her sedan. Now what was she to do? She looked at the steering wheel more closely, her eyes following the curve and spotting the rest of the marks, streaky, as if he’d already tried to wipe them away. Fearless now, Arlene put her finger on the wheel, expecting to feel something slick or dried, but nothing was discernible, just the cold, smooth surface chilled by the December night, and the keys still in the ignition.

“Stupid, stupid … ,” she muttered again. She eased onto the bench seat, the door still open so the weak dome light could give a measure of guidance. She spit on the steering wheel and, with the inside hem of her housecoat, began to wipe away. She spit into her hand and ran it along another spot, working the hem along the steering wheel as if she were fastidiously wiping down the café counters, the task of cleaning always something she could put muscle into. Arlene turned the hem of the
housecoat and inspected it, the fabric now tinted with a deep color. She wriggled out of it, impervious to the chill of the vinyl seat, and spit a few more times on the steering wheel, on the dashboard, swiping her housecoat along the surface with a confused vigor. Why was she doing this? What, exactly, was she trying to hide? It wasn’t her story to manipulate, not her words that she needed to consider carefully when the police came looking. She stopped wiping for a moment, considering. She looked at the inside hem of her coat, the newly dark smears on the cloth, but then turned the hem down, the coat back to how it looked every day, and decided then and there that Dan was on his own.

You know where he went that night, right?
Frederick had asked her when she told him years later about her brother, about wondering where he’d gone that first night after getting home. They’d been lying in bed, very young, when being in bed was still thrilling and exhausting, and Arlene had her hand on Frederick’s chest. She could feel in her palm the deep, guttural cackle he let out when he asked the question, a pulse so disconcerting she had to take her hand away.

He was out getting pussy,
Frederick had said, laughing, both of them in the dark, and she was grateful now, sitting in the truck, that she had not seen the look on his face when he had said that.
If your brother was in prison for three years, believe me, that was the first thing he went out to get.
Her brother, who had shown up at her wedding at City Hall all cleaned up, a poorly fitting suit picked out from the secondhand shop on Union Avenue, but cleaned up nonetheless. Sober, clean shaven, his hair combed, freshly cut in the kitchen the day before. Hardworking, too,
stacking fruit crates on the farms up north by Exeter and Porterville, picking strawberries and almonds, driving trucks. All the love shown to him by their mother, only to find that he’d left all the hard work and gone off to Los Angeles, never to return.

That was one unlucky woman,
Frederick had said.
Whoever she was.

Dan, she thought, her own son, was ripped through with that same ugliness, the same disregard, as her own brother, whatever was contained in the pulse rooted in her palm, holding her hand against Frederick’s chest as if she could keep his ugliness at bay.

The parking lot sat silent, greeting her revelation. The night sat silent. Nothing moved. Not even a cold breeze to disturb the trees. Nothing from the highway. Not the truck still settling with metallic pings. Not even her own breathing. The windows of the house beckoned to her, but not warmly, not the yellow picture windows of her childhood storybook. They stared back at her with a cold, white gleam, and inside, Arlene knew, were years of empty rooms.

From the road came the sound of a distant motor. A truck: she could tell by its downshifting gears, the way the engine sounded as it approached and slowed. Arlene looked in the rearview mirror, but then came the distinct sound of brakes that needed a tending to, and the soft arc of headlights sweeping left as if preparing to make a turn into the parking lot. Hadn’t she turned off the lights to the motel’s road sign? She quickly closed the door to the truck to shut off the dome light, one eye on the rearview mirror.

Sure enough, a diesel truck turned a slow roll into the parking lot. Its headlights swept over the cab and glistened on the chrome and glass, refracting, and Arlene edged herself against the door. She held her breath as if doing so would send the truck away, but it eased over to the edge of the parking lot, near one of the motel wings. The truck sat chugging for a moment, and Arlene listened, not able to hear anything over the noise of the truck’s idling engine, and unable to see much in the rearview mirror. Maybe the driver was studying the darkened motel office or looking at the still-lit windows of the house, judging whether it was worth it to disturb anyone at this time of night.

The engine idled interminably and then suddenly stopped. The parking lot was plunged back into silence—she could even make out the diesel truck’s engine ticking away as it cooled. It was too late, she realized, to step out of the truck, even if the driver might make nothing of it. But later, when the police came and maybe questioned him, it would seem suspicious, her getting out of a truck, housecoat over a nightgown. She craned her neck to get a better look in the rearview mirror but could see nothing in the darkness, and then the door to the diesel truck opened.

The sounds carried. The weight of his body as he jumped down to the ground. A gob of spit as he hacked to clear his throat. His boots stepping across the gravel. Another door opening and then the rough whisper of his voice saying something in the dark—were there two of them? She listened for an exchange, but it was only the driver’s voice. He was talking to himself as she heard him step onto the wooden porch in front of the motel office, then rap on the door. Arlene heard him
knock again before he let out a whistle and an admonishment that she couldn’t make out: that was when she made out the soft footfalls alarmingly near the truck and realized the driver had let out a dog. She could spot its dark form in the side-view mirror, lifting its leg to whiz on the truck’s rear tire. She stayed absolutely still, even as the dog sniffed its way along the side of the truck, as if it sensed her inside. The dog paused for a moment, its attention held stone-tight at her window, and it let out a short, anticipatory growl.

“Buddy!” she heard the truck driver call out in a hoarse whisper, then a quick, sharp whistle of a command. The dog obeyed, but she could see the dark form of its head still fixed on her as it trotted back toward its owner. One more time, the driver let out a short whistle of admonishment, as if the dog had stopped to rethink its retreat, and then the parking lot went silent again.

In the mirror, for the briefest moment, she saw a tip of light, as if a firefly had flown into view. She wanted to rub her eyes to see if she’d imagined it, but it came again and this time she caught its orange color, the tip of light she remembered from her childhood, watching her brother. He was smoking. She shifted a bit and turned to take a sidelong glance out the back window. The tip of his cigarette bloomed a few more times. He was too far away for her to see his silhouette in the darkness, to know whether he was facing the road or staring up at the cold light of the house, deciding once and for all whether he would make the effort to knock up there.