Timothy Johnston - The Current

She saw herself rise from the bed and walk through a wall of heat to the window and draw the curtains, the light so bright, and unlatch the window and raise it with pain shooting all through her and the air so cold flooding in and she saw the dark shapes of two men standing next to a truck and they were faced off and talking and she could hear every word they spoke as if the two men floated there outside the window, and as she listened she saw a man in a sheriff’s hat driving down a dark road and there was a girl sitting next to him but she could not see their faces and she was frightened, and then the car vanished and next she saw dogs, or wolves, running down the middle of the river chasing something she couldn’t see and the thing they chased howled and cried but the dogs themselves were silent as they ran, white smoke jetting from their snouts as from furnaces and no sound to them at all.

HE CARRIED THE tray back downstairs and set it on the kitchen table and stood looking at the glass of orange juice, the bowl of soup, the soda crackers. Then he sat down and crumbled the crackers into the bowl and ate the soup. It was just past noon. The house seemed strangely quiet and after a moment he realized it was because there was no fire in the woodburner, because he’d not built the fire, because the heat from the fire would keep the furnace from kicking in and blowing heat into the upstairs rooms, exactly as it was supposed to do.

A man could put a space heater up there and have his fire and his heated bedroom, both. Could, if he cared to burn the house down. That time the alarm went off in the middle of the night and it was the alarm in her room and he’d thrown open the door with his heart slamming and there she sat cross-legged on the floor with a candle on a cookie sheet, her eyes so wide, and she was blowing at the blackened feet of a Barbie doll like it was a birthday cake and you had to carry the doll dripping hot, pink plastic into the bathroom and put it under the tap, and when you got back she was facedown on her bed and the alarm still going until you stood on the chair and took it down and got the battery out, and only then did you hear her crying. And she would not turn over, she would not look at you and she was so small and she trembled and cried until her mother moved you away and scooped her up and held her sobbing against her chest as you stood there, as you did all you could think to do, which was to open the window and fan the air with the cookie sheet.

You frightened her, Gordon , Meredith telling him later. And Gordon saying, I frightened her? I frightened her ?

There was the sound of car tires on the packed snow and the sound returned him to his kitchen—smoke gone, girl gone, wife gone—and he sat listening, frowning, thinking Doc Van Allen was back, had forgotten something. But when he went to the window it was not the light-blue Olds he saw coming to a stop in the drive but a dark-blue pickup. The sun was on the windshield and the driver sat with the truck idling, white clouds chugging from the tailpipe—rechecking his directions or his information, whatever it was, this dumb cluck, and Gordon standing at the window looking for the guy to turn the truck around and drive away again. Instead the exhaust clouds stopped and the driver’s door swung open and a young man stepped out in a billcap and shut the door again and faced the house, and although the young man’s face was half in shadow under the bill, Gordon knew him at once. Knew him by shape and by stance and by movement and by other signs he couldn’t name but that were as old as the young man was himself.

I will be God damned. I will be God damned. His heart pounding and all the blood going out of him.

The boy took a few steps toward the porch and stopped and came no farther. He’d seen Gordon in the window. He stood with his hands in his jacket pockets, looking at Gordon and waiting.

Gordon stepped from the window and sat on the bench by the door and pulled on his boots, and every movement was strange, like déjà vu, and the side of his neck was beating and he fumbled with the laces as if his fingers were half-frozen and when he got them tied he held his hands before him to see if they were shaking but they were not, they were steady. He got into his jacket and opened the door and stepped into the winter brightness and the boy was still there—he was no trick of the eyes, no dream—and Gordon closed the door and went down the porchsteps, never once looking away from the boy and the boy never once looking away from him and all of it no trick, no dream. He walked up to the boy and stopped short of him and stood looking into his shadowed eyes, and the boy lifted a hand and tilted back the bill of the cap and returned his hand to his jacket pocket.

“If you’re gonna slug me go ahead and slug me, Gordon,” he said.

Gordon felt the skin under his left eye twitch. “What makes you think I’m gonna slug you?”

“Those two fists at the ends of your arms.”

Gordon held the boy’s eyes. Then he brought his hands together and ran one through the grip of the other as if they were cold. As if that was the only way to straighten them out.

He said, “I’d say you got some nerve showing up here but I know you haven’t got any nerve. So now I’m thinking maybe you’re just plain crazy.”

“I might be.”

“You might be shot for trespassing.”

“It wouldn’t surprise me, after last night.”

“Am I supposed to know what that means?”

“I thought you might.”

“I got no idea what that means.”

“It means this,” the boy said, and he turned and stepped back to the truck, moving around it to the far rear fender. And looking back at Gordon he tapped his fingers on the metal.

Gordon didn’t move. Then he came around and, taking his eyes off the boy for the first time, leaned down to see. And stood again.

“You think I did that?”

“It crossed my mind.”

“You think I’m the only one in this town who’d take a shot at you?”

The boy didn’t answer.

“Where did that even happen?” Gordon said.

“In the park.”

Gordon stared at him. “Henry Sibley?”

“Yes, sir.”

A black insect swam across Gordon’s vision. “You were driving through that park at night?”

The boy was about to answer, but just then there was a sound from the house and they both turned to see an upstairs window raised and a face framed briefly in the dark square, a girl’s face, pale and half-covered in dark strings of hair, before the curtains fell and the face was gone again.

When he turned back to him the boy was still watching the window. The knuckle of his throat rose and fell. Finally he turned back to Gordon and stared at him. As if Gordon might bother to explain what he’d just seen.

Gordon said, “I won’t even try to tell you all the ways you are crazy if you think I shot your truck but I will say this. If I was gonna go to all the trouble to lay down on you with a rifle I damn sure wouldn’t put my bullet in the side of your truck.”

The boy had no response.

“And one more thing,” Gordon said. “If I was gonna shoot you, why wouldn’t I of done it ten years ago? Why would I do it now?”

“Maybe you’d figure nobody’d suspect you, all these years later.”

“Just like nobody’d still suspect you, all these years later.”

The boy stood looking at him. Then he looked down at his boots.

“I’m just a dumbfounded son of a bitch,” Gordon said. “Whatever gave you the idea to come back here anyhow?”

“My old dog died.” The boy looked up.

“I know it. I helped your mother bury him.”

“I know you did.”

Gordon did not believe the boy would go so far as to thank him for that and he was right.