Read American Elsewhere Online
Authors: Robert Jackson Bennett
American Elsewhere
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Copyright © 2013 by Robert Jackson Bennett
Excerpt from
The Troupe
copyright © 2012 Robert Jackson Bennett
All rights reserved.
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ISBN 978-0-316-21451-3
WE ARE NOT HAVING THIS CONVERSATION
WHERE THE SKY TOUCHES THE EARTH
In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at [email protected] Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
“Men always forget that human happiness is a disposition of mind and not a condition of circumstances.”
—John Locke
CHAPTER ONE
Even though it is a fairly cool night, Norris is sweating abundantly. The sweat leaks out of his temples and the top of his skull and runs down his cheeks to pool around his collarbones. He feels little trickles weaving down his arms to soak into the elbows and wrists of his shirt. The entire car now has a saline reek, like a locker room.
Norris is sitting in the driver’s seat with the car running, and for the past twenty minutes he’s been debating whether leaving the car running was a good idea or not. He’s made several mental charts of pros and cons and probabilities, and overall he thinks it was a good idea: the odds that someone will notice the sound of a car idling on this neighborhood lane, and check it out and sense something suspicious, feel fairly low; whereas the odds of him fumbling with the ignition or the clutch if he needs to start the car quickly seem very, very high right now. He is so convinced of his own impending clumsiness that he hasn’t even dared to take his hands off the steering wheel. He is gripping it so hard and his palms are so sweaty that he doesn’t know if he could remove them if he tried.
Suction
, he thinks.
I’m stuck here forever, no matter who notices what.
He’s not sure why he’s so worried about being noticed. No one lives in the neighboring houses. Though it is not posted anywhere—in any visual manner, that is—this part of town is not open to the public. There is only one resident on this street.
Norris leans forward in his seat to reexamine the house. He is
parked right before its front walk. Behind the car is a small, neat gravel driveway that breaks off from the paved road and curves down the slope to a massive garage. The house itself is very, very big, but its size is mostly hidden behind the Englemann spruces; one can make out only hints of pristine white wooden siding, sprawling lantana, perfectly draped windows, and clean red-brick walls. And there, at the end of the front walk, is a modest, inviting front door with a coat of bright red paint and a cheery bronze handle.
It is a flawless house, really, a dream house. It is a dream house not only in the sense that anyone would dream of living there; rather, it is so perfect that a house like this could exist only in a dream.
Norris checks his watch. It has been four minutes by now. The wind runs through the pines, and the sound of thousands of whispering needles makes him shiver. Otherwise, it is quiet. But it is always quiet near homes like this, and it is always ill-advised to venture out at night in Wink. Everyone knows that. Things could happen.
He sits up: there are noises coming from the garage. Voices. He grips the steering wheel a little harder.
Two dark figures in ski masks emerge from the garage dragging something bulky between them. Norris stares at them in dismay as they begin making their way up to the car. When they finally get close enough, he rolls down the passenger-side window and whispers, “What happened? Where’s Mitchell?”
“Shut up!” one of them says.
“Where is he? Did you leave him in there?”
“Will you shut up and open the trunk?”
Norris starts to, but he is distracted by what they are carrying. It appears to be a short man wearing a blue sweater and khakis, but his hands and feet are tightly bound, and a burlap sack has been pulled down over his face. Yet despite all this the man is speaking very, very quickly, almost chanting: “… Cannot succeed,
will not
succeed, such a vain hope that I personally cannot
imagine
, do you understand, I cannot
imagine
it. You do not have the
authorities
, the
privileges
, and without those this is but sand brushing over my neck, do you understand, no more than reeds dancing in violent waters…”
“Open the fucking trunk already!” says one of the men.
Norris, startled, reaches over and pulls the trunk lever. The trunk pops open and the two drag the hooded man back, stuff him in, and slam it shut. Then they scramble back around and jump in the backseat.
“Where’s Mitchell?” asks Norris again. “What happened to him?”
“Fucking drive!” shouts one of the men.
Norris glances at the house again. There is movement in all the windows now—could those be dark figures pacing back and forth in the halls? Pale faces peeping out the windows? And some of the front lights are on, ones Norris could have sworn were dark just a second ago. He tears his eyes away, puts the car in first, and guns it.
They rip through the neighborhood lanes until they reach the main roads. The two men remove their ski masks. Zimmerman is older and bald with a graying beard, his cheeks bulging with the promise of pendulous jowls in later life. Out of the three of them he’s by far the most experienced in this kind of thing, so it’s extra unnerving to see how obviously terrified he is. The other, Dee, is an athletic young man with blond, perfectly parted hair, the sort of hair found only in Boy Scout advertisements. Dee either doesn’t understand what’s going on or is so dazed by everything that he can hardly shut his mouth.
“Jesus,” says Zimmerman. “Jesus. Jesus fucking Christ.”
“What happened?” asks Norris again. “Where’s Mitchell? Is he all right?”
“No. No, Mitchell isn’t all right.”
“Well, what happened?”
There is a long silence. Then Dee says, “He fell.”
“He what? He fell? Fell into what?”
The two are quiet again. Zimmerman says, “There was a room. And… it just seemed to keep going. And Mitchell fell in.”
“And when he fell,” says Dee, “he just didn’t
stop
… he just kept
falling
into the room…”
“What do you mean?” asks Norris.
“What makes you think we understand what we saw in there?” asks Zimmerman angrily.
Norris turns back to the road, abashed. He points the car north toward the dark mesa that hangs over the town. Sometimes there is a thud or a shout from the trunk behind them. They all try to ignore it.