Ken Douglas - Nightwitch

“ There he is, over there.” Oxlade pointed.

Gibson squinted into the night and saw his son moving out from between two parked cars up ahead. Both men dropped into a crouch and slid behind an old Chevy pickup parked ten houses down the block. They watched as Arty crossed a front lawn up ahead and slipped through the bushes guarding the space between two houses.

“ I knew it. He’s sneaking out to visit a girl.”

“ We don’t know that yet.”

“ Come on, Billy Boy, give it up. Let’s go back and play some cards.”

“ Not yet,” Gibson said. If he hadn’t seen Arty crawl through the bushes he wouldn’t have believed it. He didn’t know what to do. Part of him wanted to crawl in there after him, pull him out by the scruff of the neck and give the little bastard a good going over for sneaking out at night, but the other part was afraid of dark places.

“ How long you wanna wait?”

“ Just a little while.” Gibson reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a pack of cigarettes and a silver Zippo, and with the fluid motion of a serious smoker, he flipped the lighter open with his thumb and spun the flint to flame, so fast that an observer would have thought he ordered up the fire by snapping his fingers.

He shook his other hand with just enough force to cause a cigarette to expose itself from the pack. He caught it between his lips and touched it to the flame. He took a deep drag, letting the smoke fill his lungs. He loved the taste of filtered tobacco mingled with the smell of lighter fluid.

“ Here.” He held the pack out and Oxlade took one. Then they sat on the curb and smoked.

“ I think he went in a window,” Oxlade said. “If he was my kid I’d march right up there and bang on that door.”

“ Which door?” They could see from where they were that the lights were on in both houses.

“ Both.”

“ Let’s wait a few minutes, ’case he comes out,” Gibson said.

“ It’s a good thing I brought something to the party.” Oxlade pulled a fifth of cheap whisky out of his pants pocket.

“ Seymour, you think of everything,” Gibson said. Oxlade was beaming as he opened the bottle. Gibson scooted closer to him. He wasn’t a man to pass up a free drink.

“ I gotta take a leak.” Oxlade got up. “I’ll be right back.”

Gibson watched as he walked around to the other end of the truck. He heard the steady stream hitting the street. He took a long drag on his cigarette and pondered his problems. His wife and son were bricks lashed to his ankles and he was drowning. But there was nothing he could do. He couldn’t afford a divorce and Lucy wouldn’t see him any more if he didn’t get one. If only something would happen to them, he thought, but he didn’t have the courage to do anything. No, he was stuck. He was going to wind up the rest of his days in this god forsaken town with a skinny wife, a fat boy and a dead future.

“ I’m back,” Oxlade said, interrupting Gibson’s thoughts.

“ That was fast.”

“ These old bones ain’t dead, yet.” He zipped up.

“ Damn, this is good.” Gibson took another pull on the cheap whisky.

“ I figured if we gotta wait till you get ready to do something, we might as well be enjoying ourselves while we’re doing it.”

“ Yeah,” Gibson said, but he thought for a second, trying to work out if Seymour Oxlade was insinuating he was chicken, but when the second was over he decided his friend had only been making conversation.

For the next fifteen minutes the two men sat on the curb, drinking. The world started to seem quite all right to Bill Gibson. He looked at Oxlade and was pleased that he’d met someone like him. A friend he could relate to. He wondered how he got the scratches on the side of his neck. He bet that would be a story he could enjoy. He was about to ask when Oxlade pointed down the block and said, “Someone’s coming.”

“ But this is our street?” Gibson laughed at his joke and Oxlade joined in.

“ Yeah, this is our street. We were here first,” Oxlade said.

Gibson tried to clear his head by taking a deep breath. It wasn’t fair, he thought, here he was sitting and having a couple of drinks with his friend, minding his own business, when someone has to come along and spoil it. Probably someone from the neighborhood who was gonna tell them if they didn’t move on they were gonna call the police. He hated this town of snobs.

“ Maybe we should charge a toll,” Oxlade said, his thoughts running along different lines than Gibson’s. He looked down the block. Whoever it was had stopped, offering only a dark shadow in the fog. He dropped his cigarette in the gutter, stomped on it and slid back around the pickup, so that the truck was between him and whoever was out there. Oxlade moved with him. Gibson was glad to see that words weren’t necessary between them.

“ Can you see anything?” Gibson whispered.

“ No, we’ll have to wait till he gets closer.” Oxlade was whispering, too.

Gibson wondered who would be out walking in the fog and he willed himself to be quiet. Then he coughed. He tried to cut it back, but that only made it worse. He coughed again, sending sounds bouncing down the street. “Sorry, I couldn’t keep it in.”

“ Maybe I should just pop on over and say hello and see who it is. It’s a free country, you know. We got just as much right to be here as anyone else.”

But something told Bill Gibson to stay put and stay out of sight. There was a current in the air. He smelled the ocean, but the sounds of waves slapping the shore in the distance escaped him. He crossed his arms and ran his fingers from elbows to palms. His skin tickled and tingled and he tried in vain to hide the sound of his own breathing.

“ I don’t think that’s a good idea. I think we should stay out of sight till the last minute,” Gibson said.

“ Gotcha. Good thinking,” Oxlade said. For a second Gibson wondered why he’d say something like that. Then it hit him. Oxlade thought they were going to mug the person out there and Gibson was surprised to find that it didn’t seem like such a bad idea. The folks in this town had been looking down on him long enough. It was time for him to get a little of his own back.

Still there was something in the air.

“ Hey, Billy Boy,” Oxlade whispered, “you getting any off that Lucy down to the bowling alley?”

“ Maybe,” Gibson whispered back, puffing up.

“ Me, too,” Oxlade said. All of a sudden Bill Gibson wasn’t so sure he liked Seymour Oxlade.

“ I didn’t know that,” Gibson said.

“ She tells me everything, and I mean everything,” Oxlade winked and Gibson didn’t think he’d be seeing Lucy or Oxlade anymore.

“ He’s moving.” Gibson turned away from the smirking Oxlade to the figure down the block.

“ Aw, come on, let’s go.”

“ No, there’s two of us,” Gibson said. If Oxlade wouldn’t have told him about Lucy, he would have called it quits and gone home. But not now. If Seymour wanted to back out, well who was the chicken then.

“ How we gonna do it?” Oxlade asked, his superior attitude gone now.

“ Let’s wait and see who it is, then we’ll know how to play it.”

The figure came closer. It was an old woman, nothing more. He had been hiding for nothing. He started to get up, but a wave of nausea gripped him and a blast of ice cold something ran from his buttocks along his spine and gripped him at the back of the neck. And the old woman got closer.

“ I don’t know about this,” Oxlade said, and Big Bill Gibson could tell that Oxlade felt it, too. But he wasn’t going to back down. He needed to put the man in his place. To show him who was a coward and who wasn’t.

“ It’ll be easy. It’s just an old woman,” Gibson said. Maybe she was his salvation. Maybe she was carrying cash. All he had to do was jump up when she passed by, push her over and grab her bag. He could be down the road in a flash, leaving her face to face with Oxlade. He’d love to see the expression on their faces as they faced each other. Would he hit her to keep from telling or would he turn and run, too. Either way he didn’t care.