Lights Out (5 page)

That reassured him. “For on the water, or just swanning around?” he said.

“For glare.”

The man pointed a nicotine-tipped finger. “Try those.”

“Yellow?”

“That’s amber. Says antiglare right on them.”

Eddie tried on amber sunglasses. They made everything yellow. “I’ll have to look outside.” He walked out of the shop, to the entrance of the bus station. The man followed, close behind. Eddie looked out. There was less glare, but everything was yellow, including the cop and his squad car, now parked in the bus-station parking lot. Donut consumed, but the cop was still watching him.

“Well?” the clerk asked, gazing up at his face. Eddie could smell him. “You want them or not?”

“Okay,” Eddie said.

They returned to the shop. The clerk punched numbers on the cash register. “Twenty-four ninety-five,” he said.

That seemed like a lot for sunglasses. Eddie took out the brown envelope, fished through for a ten and a twenty. The money hadn’t changed at all.
It’s expensive, outside these walls
. But you could buy things that changed the color of the view.

“I haven’t got all day.”

Eddie handed over the cash and put on the glasses. The clerk gave him $5.05 and came at him with a pair of scissors. Eddie jumped back.

“You wanna go around with that tag flappin’ on your nose, fine with me.”

Eddie let him cut off the tag. He joined the line at the ticket counter. In front of him stood a squat, olive-skinned woman with a baby in her arms and a restless little girl at her side. The little girl wore earrings, a frilly dress, and shiny black dancing shoes. She seemed too young to be turned out like that, but still Eddie couldn’t take his eyes off her. She had skinny arms and legs and big, serious eyes, and she skipped around in circles, singing a Spanish song under her breath. Eddie had forgotten that such creatures lived, and lived on the same planet as the man with the ring in his tongue. He suddenly thought of the beautiful water snakes that saved the mariner’s soul—“O happy living things!”—and understood them a little better. Then the girl saw him watching and buried herself in her mother’s skirt. The mother turned, gave Eddie a hard stare and the girl a smack on the back of her head. Eddie, towering over them, tried to appear harmless.

“Where to, buddy?”

Then he was at the counter, facing the ticket agent. The ticket agent was an old man with hairs sticking out of his ears and nose and formless and faded tattoos on his shriveled forearms. He was a con; Eddie knew it at once.

“Where to?”

That was the question. The answer depended on his plans—
what you’re going to do tomorrow, next week, next year
. Eddie scanned the destination board on the wall behind the agent. He thought of going down to the Gulf, finding work on a fishing boat. He knew, had known, a little about boats. There was a bus to Baton Rouge at four-thirty. Eddie moved to look at his watch, but of course it was gone. “What time is it?”

“Two hairs past a freckle,” said the old man. “C’mon, buddy. We’s on a tight schedule here.” He tried drumming his fingers aggressively on the counter, but they were too arthritic for stunts like that.

Home, Eddie thought. That was a laugh; but why not? Had he known it all along? “Any buses going north?”

“All the ways to Beantown.”

Close enough. “When?”

“Two minutes ago. You can catch it if you’ll just kindly the hell move.”

“How much?”

“One way or return?”

“One way.”

The ticket cost Eddie almost a third of his gate money. He hurried out into the yellow, past the cop still watching from his squad car, and knocked on the door of the Americruiser. It opened. “Luggage?” the driver said.

“Nope.”

“Lez go.” The driver’s hand was out, fingers gesturing for something to be laid in it. Eddie climbed on and gave him the ticket. Outside, in the real world, as the C.O. had put it, he was a step or two slow, like a visitor from another land.

The bus wasn’t crowded. Eddie found a window seat halfway back. The bus rolled across the lot, past the squad car, onto the open road. Eddie watched the real world go by, all yellow. Then the motion got to him. I can’t be tired, he thought, not after a lifetime on that bunk. But his eyes closed anyway.

He dreamed a familiar dream, of the banana-shaped island and the shed beside the tennis court. It was dark inside, despite the summer afternoon heat, and smelled of pig blood and red clay. Mandy smelled of red clay too, red clay and fresh sweat. Her tennis clothes clung to her body. She slipped her hand between his legs, under his shorts, around his balls. “Shh,” she said. They had to be quiet. He couldn’t remember why.

Eddie awoke with a dry throat and an erection. The bus was stopped and full of people moving around. A slight man in a cheap black suit said: “Excuse me, sir, is this seat taken?”

Eddie straightened, shook his head. The man sat in the aisle seat, opened a Bible. The bus started with a jerk and picked up speed. Eddie looked out. A long line of leafless trees went by, then a billboard that said “Christ Is Love” and pictured a garish Jesus on the verge of tears. Eddie glanced at the man in the black suit. With a kind of grease pencil Eddie hadn’t seen before, he was highlighting a passage. Eddie leaned closer.
“Whoever perished, being innocent? or where were the righteous cut off?” The man felt his presence and made a wall with his hand between Eddie and the text, like an A student stopping an unprepared one from cheating on a test.

Eddie gazed out the window. The sun was low in the sky now, everything still yellow. He removed the glasses to see if the glare had gone, but it had not. He put them on and was soon asleep.

When he awoke it was night and the man with the Bible was gone. Eddie felt in his pocket and found that his gate-money envelope and its contents, all but the $5.05 in change from the sunglasses, were gone too. He got down on the floor, peered under the seat, felt behind the cushion. He found Prof’s cardboard tube, a book of matches, Kleenex, a used condom, but no gate money. He sat up, looked around. There was no one else on the bus, except the driver and a gum-chewing woman wearing hair curlers the same shade of green as his shirt. Not yellow: green. That’s when he realized that the sunglasses were gone as well, snatched right off his sleeping face.

Eddie strode to the front of the bus. “Where’d the guy in the black suit get off?”

“Mind stepping back of the line?” said the driver. A new driver, Eddie saw: a woman. She had frosted blond hair and a strong jaw. No reason it shouldn’t be a woman, but it stopped his momentum just the same. Eddie looked down at the white line in the aisle. “Do not cross when bus is in motion” was stenciled on the rubber. Eddie stepped back and repeated his question.

“Couldn’t say,” the driver replied. “I’ve got enough to do with this storm.”

Eddie glanced out. Flying things swarmed all around, like insects. Snow. No reason there shouldn’t be snow, but that threw him too, after fifteen snowless years. “Where are we?”

“Just across the state line,” the driver said. She didn’t say what state and Eddie didn’t ask. What he wanted to do, at that moment, was get on a bus going the other way, back; back down south, to that shrimp boat. A much better idea. What the hell was he thinking, going home? Home was just snow, ice, a
frozen river. Other than that, it didn’t exist and never had. He came from somewhere, that was all. Everybody came from somewhere. It didn’t mean a thing.

Eddie made his way to his seat, past the woman in green curlers who was now wearing earphones as well. He needed a smoke. Didn’t have any, because that was one of the things he was giving up in his new life. What kind of a plan was that? These were his plans: 1) steam bath; 2) quit smoking; 3) take nothing with him when he went. So now he was hungry, hadn’t eaten since yesterday, and was forced to ask others for the time. Fifteen years to think, and that was it?

Conscious of his hunger, Eddie wanted a cigarette all the more. But of course he had one: the cigarette El Rojo had given him. He reached in the pocket of his green shirt. Somehow the Bible man had missed it. Eddie stuck it in his mouth, took out the matches he’d found under the seat. On the cover was an eight-hundred number to call if you suspected child abuse. Eddie lit a match, held it to the tip of El Rojo’s cigarette, inhaled. The tip flared and he sucked in smoke luxuriously. Then the woman in green curlers was standing over him, gesturing. From her earphones a tiny voice shrilled, “Dance, dance, dance.” She mouthed something at him.

“I can’t hear because you’re wearing earphones?” Eddie said.

The woman didn’t answer. She pointed to a sign on the wall: No Smoking. The women on this bus seemed to communicate with him through the written word. This one stood with her arms crossed, waiting for him to do the right thing. I killed three men, you stupid bitch, Eddie thought, but he butted out the cigarette on the plastic armrest. The woman went away.

Eddie was angry. In his anger he could have pounded the armrest, or ripped out a few seats, or smashed windows. Those images ran through his mind as he sat, motionless. His heart pounded like a war drum. He wanted to kill, not the woman in curlers, but whoever had ruined him. But there was no one to blame. It was just the way things were—the luck of the draw, bad break, Mother Nature’s way, God’s way; or the albatross’s way, he thought suddenly. Maybe you were supposed
to see the whole thing through the albatross’s eyes. Maybe he’d read it totally wrong. Fifteen years, and he couldn’t understand a simple poem.

Eddie saw his face reflected in the night and turned away.

He still had the cigarette in his hand. About to return it to his pocket, Eddie noticed a green corner sticking out of the burnt end. Pulling at it revealed more green. With his fingernails he tore through the cigarette paper, peeled it away. Underneath, wrapped tightly around the tobacco, was a bank note. Eddie unrolled it, scattering tobacco shreds in his lap, and found himself gazing at the face of Benjamin Franklin; an intelligent face, somewhat amused.

A one-hundred-dollar bill. He held it up to the overhead light, turned it over, snapped it. It looked and felt like the real thing. No reason to think it wasn’t.

Eddie smiled. He’d heard of people lighting cigarettes with hundred-dollar bills, but never smoking the money itself. El Rojo, Angel Cruz, whatever the hell his name was, had told him to smoke the cigarette later, on the outside. Kind of sentimental, but maybe it was a Latino thing. Save it for later, El Rojo had told him:
after you get laid for me
. Then Eddie remembered the woman in the red convertible and stopped smiling.

Outside: Day 2

4

E
ddie, with Prof’s cardboard mailing tube in his hand and $105.05 in his pocket, stepped down onto the bus-station platform in his old hometown. The wind tore through his khaki windbreaker and green short-sleeved shirt. Snow was blowing, but not in the form of flakes: they were too small, too hard, too gray.

Eddie had forgotten that wind. It made him think again of shrimp boats on the Gulf, and getting back on the bus. This, after all, was the town he had always wanted to get out of, wasn’t it? The door of the bus jerked shut behind him.

Eddie went into the station, thinking, I’ll sit in here where it’s warm, order a sandwich and coffee, eat all by myself: luxury. But the station was not as he recalled: the coffee shop, newsstand, drugstore, were all gone. Time changes everything, as El Rojo had said. There was nothing inside but vending machines, a ticket counter with no one behind it, and a stubble-faced man mopping the floor.

Eddie examined the vending machines. Coffee cost sixty-five cents. He had the hundred-dollar bill, a five, and a nickel. “Got change for a five-dollar bill?” he called to the man. Maybe he should have just said, “Got change for a five?” Was that more natural? He needed a phrase book.

Not looking up, the man replied, “Change machine makes change.” He spoke with the accent of the town, of the whole river valley, a sound Eddie hadn’t consciously associated with his childhood until that moment. It didn’t warm him.

Eddie found the changer at the end of the row of vending machines. “Insert one or five dollar bill,” read the instructions. “This way up.” He took out the five and was about to stick it in
the slot when he noticed that someone had written in lipstick on the wall, “Does not work you assholes.” He didn’t chance it.

Eddie went outside. He remembered that wind but didn’t remember it bothering him like this. Had he been weakened by fifteen years spent indoors? Or was it just his shaven skull that gave the wind its bite?

Hunched inside the khaki windbreaker, Eddie walked down Main Street. Downtown had been decaying when he left. Now it had decayed more. Shop windows were dusty, the goods in them yellowed, nothing had been painted in years. He moved on toward Weisner’s Department Store, maybe to buy a hat, at least to have a sandwich at the U-shaped lunch counter. But Weisner’s, with that U-shaped lunch counter, faded hardwood floors, scrawny-necked clerks in jackets and ties, was gone; just an empty lot, covered in crusty brown snow, littered with broken glass and windblown scraps.

Eddie turned onto River. A dog came trotting his way, a little spotted mongrel with pointed ears. Eddie remembered he liked dogs and made a clicking sound, hoping to draw it closer, maybe within patting distance. The dog heard the sound and without changing speed cut across the street. Eddie noticed the bone sticking out of its mouth; maybe the dog thought he was after it.

He walked onto the bridge and started across the river toward New Town. The river was frozen over, except for a narrow band in the middle where water ran black and fast. As Eddie watched, a mattress-size slab of ice broke loose from the New Town bank, spun slowly into the stream, picked up speed, came surging closer, vanished under the bridge. Eddie crossed to the other side and watched the ice slab bob down the river, past the limits of the town to where the woods began, and out of sight.

Two boys, Eddie and Jack, on a mattress in a darkened room. The mattress was the good ship
Fearless
, the room a storm-toss’d sea. Eddie was Sir Wentworth Staples, captain in the British Navy, on a mission to exterminate pirates on the Spanish Main, and Jack was One-Eye Staples, king of the buccaneers. Through a series of efficient coincidences, the
long-separated brothers now found themselves alone on the
Fearless
, sailors and pirates all drowned, the ship sundered and foundering. The situation and characters came from a book the boys had found in a trunk in the basement of one of the rooming houses they’d lived in after their mother got fired:
Muskets and Doubloons
. They made up their own endings.