Robert Wilson - Mysterium

There were wolves in the forest, and periodically that autumn they had come loping into the outskirts of town, their curiosity aroused by the powerful and unfamiliar mixture of human scents. But the wolves, after a cautious investigation, almost always chose to avoid the paved streets. There was something in this mingled air they didn’t like.

Beyond the westernmost arc of the lake, on what had once been Ojibway treaty land, the ruins of the Two Rivers Physical Research Laboratory cast a delicate light across the belly of a cloud. Other lights moved unseen among the trees.

In the town itself, along the gridwork of empty streets, the only moving lights were the headlights of the patrol cars; the only sound was the sound of their motors, of their tires gritting on the frost-white asphalt.

Luke was not visiting tonight, and Clifford’s mother had gone to bed at ten o’clock. When she didn’t have company she went to bed early and slept almost till noon. Which was okay with Clifford.

He stayed up much later. He was allowed to sleep in as long as he wanted, and he had learned that when his mother went to bed—braced by stiff doses of the unlabeled distilled whiskey Luke brought her on a weekly basis—the house became his own.

He owned it. From the cavernous, cluttered living room to the dark and scary basement, it was his domain. On nights like this the house seemed immensely large. It was a kingdom, vast and a little eerie, and he was its uneasy ruler.

Tonight Clifford chose to stay in his room with the radio scanner. Since last week he had been spending most of his nights listening to the military radio traffic, the scanner’s speaker disconnected and his Walkman headphones plugged in so his mother wouldn’t hear. He was careful to keep the scanner a private business. He had learned a lot from it.

He had borrowed the folding map of Two Rivers from the kitchen drawer and tacked it up on his bulletin board. (He took it down—a precaution—when Luke was visiting.) For three consecutive nights he had used it to track the military patrol routes through town. He gave each car (there were ten in all) a letter of the alphabet, and he wrote down the time whenever an intersection was called out. He had needed to stay up until four in the morning, with the help of some coffee brewed without permission, but the final product of this systematic eavesdropping was a complete schedule of the nightly curfew patrol: where the cars would be and when.

The last few nights, Clifford had been double-checking his results.

They seemed accurate. A car might be late at a checkpoint or call in early, but never by more than a few minutes. There might be a few rogues, visitors like Luke who had made acquaintances among the townspeople, but even Luke was usually careful to observe the curfew; it was a barracks deal involving more of that white corn liquor that allowed him to stay out all night on Friday or Saturday. Clifford had overheard this explanation and took it to be true.

Armed with his notes, Clifford had drawn his own amendment to the map: a pencil-line route connecting his house to Powell Creek Park. Given the right timing, this was the way a person on a bicycle could travel to the park and back without crossing the path of a patrol car.

The idea of a nighttime bicycle jaunt had come to him last week. The scanner made it a practical possibility, but the idea was intrinsically appealing. Curfew had made the night a forbidden zone, but Clifford had always liked the night. He liked summer evenings with their hush and warmth and the lingering smell of trimmed lawns and hot supper; he liked winter nights, so cold the snow squealed under the pressure of his boots. But above all he had liked autumn evenings, smoky and mysterious; and most of this autumn was already gone—had been stolen from him, he thought.

Too, he liked the idea of exercising the secret knowledge the scanner had given him, using it to his own advantage.

He was afraid, of course, but he was powerfully tempted. On a windy night like this the temptation was especially strong. He sat for a time in his room in the dark, listening to the headphones and resting his elbows on the windowsill. The window glass was cold. Wind turned the branches of a leafless oak in the yard next door, and when the high clouds opened, there were stars. It was well after midnight now. All the patrols were on schedule.

He looked at his watch and made a mental calculation. The decision he came to was sudden and wordless. He didn’t even think about it, just moved. He padded downstairs, turned on the hallway light, and found his sneakers; he laced them high and tight.

He put on his padded blue winter jacket and locked the door behind him when he left.

His bike was leaning against the wall of the garage. The handlebars were shockingly cold, and Clifford wondered whether he ought to have worn gloves. But there was no time to go back. He was on the clock now—and the schedule was tight.

The wind tugged his hair as he rolled down the empty street. Every house was dark. The bicycle’s bearings ticked into silence, and the clouds lifted like a curtain on a great show of stars.

What made this dangerous, Dex Graham told himself, was the peculiarity of the empty town. It was too easy to feel alone. Hence safe. Hence careless.

He wanted to say this to Howard, but they had resolved not to talk unless it was absolutely necessary. The sound of their voices might wake someone, and there ought to be no witnesses to this expedition.

The alley behind the Cantwell house passed between tar paper garages and the brittle remains of vegetable gardens. The paving was ancient and frost-cracked. Set back on each side, wood-frame houses slept behind wooden siding, screen doors, peeling shingles. Lights were sparse. Dex carried a crowbar in his right hand and resisted a juvenile impulse to bang it against these fence slats.

Howard stalked ahead in long, nervous strides. He wants this over with, Dex thought. But caution: caution was vital.

They walked downhill in the deepest shadows and stopped where the alleyway opened onto Oak Street.

Crossing Oak was going to be the hard part, the big question mark. Oak Street divided the town from east to west and had once carried most of the traffic to the cement plant and the quarries. It had been widened last year and lamp standards had been planted every ten yards. The light was surgically bright. Worse, the road intersected every commercial street including Beacon; a car might turn any corner for four blocks in either direction without warning. The road was an asphalt desert, much too wide and as hospitable as a guillotine. The wind came down that avenue in frigid torrents.

“We should cross one at a time,” Howard whispered. “From the other side you can see more of the intersection,” pointing to Beacon a block away where a traffic light rattled in a cold gust. “Then, if it seems safe, wave the second man across.”

“I’ll go,” Dex said.

“No. I should be the one.”

The declaration was brave. Dex felt a little of what this trip meant to Howard. Howard never talked much about himself but Dex had learned a few things about him, in the same wordless way he came to understand the kids who filed into his classroom every September: by gesture and posture, by what was said and what wasn’t. Howard took no delight in defying authority. Dex pictured him as the bright, quiet kid who always picks a desk at the back of the room, the one who doesn’t smoke on school grounds or liberate bags of M M’s from the corner grocery. The one who follows the rules and takes a certain pride in doing so.

Not much like me, Dex thought. A middle-aged man with no possession but himself and too careless even with that. He said, “No, I’ll go.”