The Horses of the Night (40 page)

Okay, I thought. Okay, it looks bad, but there's a way out. Always a way out.

The ocean was out there, surf pale in the darkness. A beach flashed by. Then we were high above the beach. There was a blur of guardrails. The shoulder of the road was the edge of a cliff. We were one hundred feet above the ocean.

I decided to keep talking. “We were good people. We made things happen. Politics. Art. People admired us,” I continued, feeling myself, in a crazy way, involved in one of our adolescent debates. I felt lucid and giddy. Why not argue family history at a speed like this? It made as much sense as anything.

“We were better than the other people, weren't we?” cried Rick over the noise of the engine.

“Maybe we were.”

“I'm as sick as you are,” he said, his voice so low that I was certain I had not heard him correctly.

“You're just a little mixed up,” I said. “Everything is going to be fine.” I was shouting the words over the keen of the engine.

Slow down
.

The car left the road from time to time, leaping from a minor promontory, rebounding from the crest of the road. The highway was now a two-lane. Rocky embankment scorched past us in the dark. This section of road, called the Devil's Slide, was irregular, constantly washed by landslides.

Rick was laughing. Weeping and laughing.

How can he see?

We were on the wrong side of the road. An outcropping of rock flashed before us. Rick avoided it, all but a feathered edge of it. The car slammed to one side, and nearly spun all the way around.

I could think only: We're going to go off.

Off the cliff.

But we didn't. Rick had the car on the road again, and back at peak speed. Against my better judgment, I jacked the door open. I sensed more than saw the streaking black asphalt. It was inches away from me. It had a smell, damp and mineral.

The highway roared. It would kill me. I slammed the door. The door bounced open again. I worked the door shut, and then wished that there was something to hang on to as the car leaped and rocked.

Rick raised his voice so I could hear. “I was tired of seeing good people suffer. I was even going to let Nona die. I was going to smother her with a pillow. Besides, everyone associated with us should be destroyed, Stratton. Everyone.”

He sensed my reaction. “I changed my mind. So I didn't do it. Don't be upset.”

“You didn't kill Father, either. I don't know what made me think it.”

“But I did. And you must have guessed why.”

I tried to say no, but my voice was soundless.

“You thought Father was a god. But he used me, Stratton. Played with me and made me play with him, for years. I hated him. Didn't you know? Couldn't you guess? Maybe your exaggerated respect for him was your way of covering it up, hiding it from yourself.”

I could not stand to hear my brother suffering so.

“What are you saying?”

“Sexually, Strater. Father abused me.”

There's got to be something to say. Don't sit there like this.

“It wasn't right,” he said, his voice broken. “That's all I wanted, Strater. Fairness. Justice. Haven't you ever wondered how such terrible things can happen?”

Maybe I said it out loud, and maybe I nearly shrieked it in every organ of my body:
I'm going to jump out of the car even if it kills me
.

“This is the way to do it. Finish it all off. Isn't it wonderful, Strater? You have to admit it's wonderful! Do you know something? I'm proud of what I did because we put up with so much and I showed them. I don't care what you think, Strater, I did what had to be done.”

I reached for the handbrake and Rick's grip stopped me.

The car was no longer on the road. At first I believed that we had touched off of a high point in the road, but then I registered what had happened.

We were in the air.

The sportscar lofted upward for awhile, carried by its own momentum, describing an arc up into the drizzle. It swept upward for what seemed like a long time, while the sight of the dashboard ahead of me was imprinted on my consciousness.

It was blond wood, varnished, and delicately grained. In one place the varnish was flawed, leaving a little pucker, an acne scar. My hands went out to this dashboard to steady myself.

There was a tickling vibration as the engine raced, full-throttle, and the tires spun against emptiness. I felt my weight shift sickeningly. I had that unmistakable sensation: The car was turning over. There was a sound, a banshee howl that I understood, vaguely, was my own voice.

Rick was beside me, silent, both hands on the wheel.

63

We tumbled.

There was a scribble of surf. It swung past us, and when we saw it again it was much closer. There was the deafening sound of my own cry, a sound that tore my throat. The sky was a gray blanket, and the ocean was black.

I tried to work the door handle, but my hand slipped off. I gripped hard, straining, and yet the door would not open.

A darkness exactly the shape of my own body filled me. It was a perfect fit. It was all of me eclipsed—all but that residue, that remembered cheater of the dark, the mind.

And the mind said: Go to sleep. Rest. You must be tired. And no wonder. Don't try. Stay still.

I climbed.

At the same time, I slipped downward. My feet stirred the pebbles of the field. It was dark. My nasal passages burned. My eyes stung. My body was heavy. My figure was bronze, clad in barnacles and coral, one of those bed-thickened relics treasure hunters find. I felt myself frozen on the posture of one of those classic deities, a figure of Mercury, crust-clad and eyeless.

There, said my mind, the tones of implacable common sense. You see how useless it is to struggle. Just go to sleep. Forget everything.

I was too heavy. I would never make it upward. Why bother trying? But I needed air.

You must take a breath of air, I told myself, lest the potsherds and mud of the landscape force me to stay where I was. “Hurry up. Be careful. Don't waste time.” These messages, the urgings of the appointment book, the airline schedule, the showing times at the corner cinema, had clothed my life.

In that twilight after adulthood has begun, foreign commands clutter the desk. We have lost money, or we have not. It is not enough to have loved, not enough to have mourned. Even honesty, the prideful election of the noble path, is not enough. There is something more, something humans cannot commit, that gathers the twigs from under the ancient tree so the roots can absorb the rain, a grace the days cannot touch, and the hands cannot administer.

The actual fall—the killing fall—has happened before we know it. There is only the aftermath. My body fragmented. I gasped, speaking a name. My brother's name.

Air. Air, and the sounds of surf.

It was the surface of the ocean. I had stepped through it like someone walking through a glass door. Fragments, lights, the sensation of a new temperature on the skin.

Rick. I must find Rick. I flung my arms, my legs, disoriented.

I breathed hard, treading water. Mist fell over my face, a cold wet wool. Sky, I told myself. And, over there, the cliff. Far up a pair of headlights broke the dark. A headlight winked as a figure passed before it. Another set of headlights arrived. I called out, called upward.

Then I dived, swimming with my strongest, surest strokes. Down here, I knew, was the car. Down there with my brother.

My hands churned the sharp rocks. I kicked, searched, and then had to find the surface again. I gulped air and repeated my search.

At one point during my search for Rick, flashing red lights joined the headlights far above us, on the cliff. I called out to them, but realized that my voice would not carry over the sound of the waves.

At another point, later, after much more searching, a spotlight swept the surf, igniting it. Vapor rose from the surface. The beam swept by me, missing me, groping across the tossing darkness.

I had to dive again, and this time I knew I would find him. I felt my way through an acropolis of stones, boulders, limpet-armored berms. Once I grasped what had to be a fragment of the car. A door handle, I told myself. That had to be what it was.

I studied this bit of treasure with my fingertips, blind, until lack of oxygen forced me upward. In the half-dark I examined my find. There was no chrome glitter. There was no flash of manufactured metal.

I held a dark implement, an accidental tool. It was a worn spool of stone, nothing more. I threw the thing away, as far as I could hurl it. And then I saw him.

He was far away.

He must have kicked off his dark suit, because now his arms and shoulders were naked. He was swimming, hard, away from the beach. Away from land. He was swimming out into the Pacific.

I told myself that my brother and I were, athletically, well matched. There was a moment in which I saw this as a contest, a grand, reckless game. But then as I swam after him, I knew what was about to happen.

I must have known this, I thought, for a long time. That night when I found the glowing feather I must have known that this would happen. Perhaps this was the price of my soul. Perhaps the Others were taking Rick, or perhaps Rick was giving himself away, exchanging his life for mine.

That was absurd, I reminded myself. This was salt water, nothing more. I was strong. I knew the waves. Rick was in decent shape for tennis or a night of dancing, but this was my kind of fight.

I was gaining on him. He turned back and I saw, in the least flicker of a spotlight, that his face was masked in scarlet, his eye a metallic glint in the flow of blood. The sight pained me, but it pleased me, too. My brother was weakened. His arms were slowing down. His kick did not cause nearly as much spray as it had just a few moments before.

Artificial light has the characteristic of illuminating what it shines upon at the cost of increasing the darkness around it, even after the light has been removed. A beam shined high over our heads, hunted the swells, finding nothing, and then, with a deliberateness that pained me, the light went out.

I could imagine someone like Childress, someone impatient to have a cup of hot coffee, someone who ached for the prose of the office and the press release. Someone who was not like my brother and myself. I had never loved or admired my brother so much as I did just then as I swam, the cold creeping into the muscles of my thighs.

But then it hit me: We were abandoned now. Civilization, that little highway of order and hope, was about to leave us. Doors were being shut even then, engines started. Rational people had determined that nothing had happened.

We were alone.

My brother's pale arms churned the water. I followed him, digging hard with my hands, pulling myself through the water, gritting my teeth. Sometimes I got so close I could hear the sound of his feet lashing the swells.

The summer afternoons flashed upon me, the
pock
of the tennis ball, the swimming lessons taught by that muscular man with white eyelashes, a former Olympian with an accent that was, I realized now, Swedish. A Swedish swimming coach, I recalled now, baffled, puzzled, as always, over my father's unusual but always exactly correct string of instructors, ex-priests, scientists, former athletes muscled with both skill and experience.

We had been raised to see ourselves as people both favored and responsible. More was given to us, and more required of us. I could hear my father's laugh. His sigh. His way of announcing that he was tired and that he had to be up at “rosy fingered dawn.”

Because I was tired now, too. I was too tired to keep swimming, but I did, thrashing, churning onward. He did it, I realized. It was not a joke, not a wry pose to see how I would react.

My father: I had never really known him.

Rick and my mother killed my father. Rick killed Blake, and DeVere. I was innocent. I should have felt relief. But what I felt was an experience of being foreign to my brother, a stranger to him. I also understood what he was doing.

My brother was winning the race. He was swimming faster, now, getting better at it as he found his pace, that steady, ever-forward pace that found him out far, far beyond anything I could do.

I thought, once, that I tasted his blood in the water, but surely that was an illusion, another one of my misperceptions of the truth, as I called to him at last. Called to him, his name going nowhere, the sea air absorbing, killing my cry.

Until he was gone.

I splashed, my legs kicking to keep me in place. He had been here moments before. Hadn't he? My lungs burned. I called his name, that single syllable, as though it had power to bring him back.

But I had arrived where there were no powers—no human powers—at all. There was silence, and no sign of him.

Except, as the mist thinned, far away, a flash of pale arms still swimming, outward, where no man could take his hand.

Part Seven

64

In the weeks that followed I spent hours in the sun.

Nona joined me, shading her eyes as she watched me work in the garden. I planted an herb garden of myrtle, lavender germander, and sage. I trimmed the copper beech hedge, the beet-dark leaves scattering about to be raked. And I raked, shoveled, trimmed, and turned over the soil for a wild garden of purely native plants, wild radish, wild iris, lupine, and California poppy.

Nona said that she liked watching me work. I suggested videos, books, tapes, but she laughed. “You're more entertaining,” she said.

“That's wonderful,” I said. “Stratton Fields, comic gardener.”

“Not comic, exactly. You look strong, digging and shaking the clods off the pitchfork like that.”

“Someone for the gardener decathalon?” I said.

“I was thinking something a little sexier than that.”

I gazed at her, a woman in a lawn chair and a large sunhat. “I thought sick people didn't have amorous intentions.”

“I'm not sick. Anyway, they do. And it's called ‘sex drive,' not amorous intentions.”