John Saul - In the Dark of the Night

“Not me,” Adam promptly answered. “I got acrophobia so bad I’d fall off in a second. Besides, you’re the one who was so excited about taking this job. You do it.”

“Hey, it’s money, right?” Ellis shot back. “And I’ve got no problem going up on the roof, so just give me a hand with the ladder, okay?”

A few minutes later, as Ellis tied one end of a nylon rope to himself and the other around the chimney, Adam took a bow saw and a pair of pruners and went to work on the clutter of dead branches that had fallen from the trees over the last seven years. He knew Ellis was right; he could use the money as much as Ellis, but he was still pissed off about having to work for a bunch of rich people whose kids would arrive in their L.L.Bean clothes with their Jet Skis and speedboats and spend the summer acting like they owned the whole town.

And everybody in it.

He picked up a bunch of branches and hurled them onto the growing pile of trash, his anger at the injustice of it growing steadily. None of those Chicago kids were going to be cleaning up stuff like this — their fathers would just peel off bills from the wads in their pockets and hand over the keys to the Range Rover or the Escalade, or whatever fake sport utility vehicle the rich people were driving this year.

Adam dumped another load of brush onto the pile, and felt a stab of pain as a long sliver drove deep into the palm of his right hand. Cursing silently, he sat down on the patio and pulled his jackknife out of his pocket, pried the smaller of the two blades open, then realized it wasn’t going to work: he was right-handed and he wouldn’t be able to get the splinter out himself. “Chris!” he yelled.

A moment later Chris McIvens appeared from behind the greenhouse, pushing a wheelbarrow full of broken glass. He dumped it onto an old tarp they’d found in the trailer and spread out next to the rubbish pile, then inspected Adam’s hand. “It’s gonna hurt,” he said as he took the knife from Adam. “You sure you want me to do it?”

Adam nodded grimly. “I’m only doing this for the money, and I can’t do it with a freakin’ log in my hand, can I?”

“Okay,” Chris said. “Here goes.” He poised the blade of the knife over Adam’s palm, then carefully sliced through the skin over the sliver as Adam gritted his teeth against the pain. A moment later Chris lifted the fragment of wood out of the open wound, and Adam instantly began sucking on the cut, which, now that the operation was over, didn’t really hurt all that much.

“Lucky it wasn’t a nail,” Chris observed as he wiped the blade of the jackknife, then closed it and handed it back to Adam. “Coulda gotten lockjaw.”

Adam rolled his eyes. “They got shots for that, idiot. ” Then his eyes moved out past the house and down the lawn toward the lake. Shadows from the forest were creeping quickly across the lawn, the glassy water rippling where the fish were starting their evening feed. If it wasn’t for who was going to be living here, this could be a nice place. Then he heard Chris talking to him.

“I was thinking we ought to do something out here.”

“Yeah?” Adam asked. “Like what? Mow the lawn in a goddamned diamond pattern?”

Now it was Chris who rolled his eyes. “No, idiot, ” he said, giving the second word the exact enunciation Adam had used only a moment before. “I meant like we should set a booby-trap or something.”

Adam eyed Chris with new respect. “Like what?” he said again.

Chris shrugged. “I don’t know yet. There’s got to be something. And we’ve got a whole week to think about it.”

The leaf blower suddenly roared to life above them, and a moment later a shower of filth rained down on their heads.

Adam jumped up, shook the moss and dirt out of his hair, and looked up to the roof, but he couldn’t see Ellis, and knew Ellis wouldn’t hear him over the roar of the blower even if he yelled until he ruptured his larynx. His eyes met Chris’s. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s think of something. But we don’t tell Ellis, right?”

Chris nodded, knowing as well as Adam that no matter how harmless whatever they came up with was, Ellis would talk them out of it. So now he and Chris knocked their fists together in a gesture of solidarity — if not actual conspiracy — and went back to work, Chris to the greenhouse, and Adam to cleaning up the yard so it could be mowed.

But now both boys felt an energy about the work that hadn’t been there before.

They’d clean this place up, all right. But that wasn’t all they’d do.

• • •

“YA READY, BOY?”

The words came out of the old man’s mouth as little more than an indistinct whisper. Not that it mattered; the old dog’s ears had failed three years ago. There wasn’t anyone else to talk to, though, so the old man just kept on talking to the dog. Not that there was much to say, either, since the old man’s mind had become almost as indistinct as his voice. Nowadays, he only remembered the important things. His name for instance.

Logan.

He still knew his name was Logan, and he knew he had a first name, too. Or at least he’d had one a long time ago, before the bad times.

Now, as the sun began to drop toward the horizon, Logan gently lifted the bony old Labrador and settled him carefully onto a pile of rags in the bottom of the boat near the bow, where the dog could rest his head on the gunwale next to the rough wooden cross Logan had mounted on the boat’s bow sometime in the past. If anybody had asked Logan why the cross was there, he wouldn’t have been able to say. “Following Jesus,” he’d probably have mumbled. “Can’t be too careful, can you?” Nobody, however, had ever asked, and even if they had, they wouldn’t have paid much attention to his answer.

Except the dog. The dog always listened, and the dog always understood. “Good boy,” Logan sighed as he transferred the weight of the animal from his arms to the floorboards of the skiff.

Sensing more than hearing the sound of his master’s voice, the dog managed a thump of his tail as Logan stepped into the boat and used an oar to push off from the shore. As the boat drifted through the cattails and marsh grasses that choked this part of the lake, the dog managed to sit up, his grizzled muzzle lifting so he could fill his nostrils with what little breeze there was.

Logan used one of the oars to pole the boat quietly from its hiding place in the tangle of growth out into the open water thirty yards away.

The dog’s head swiveled, his nose pointing directly across the lake toward the small town nestled on the opposite shore, and an eager whine bubbled up from his throat. “Not today, boy,” Logan whispered. “We’re just watching tonight. Just watching…just making sure.”

The dog turned its all but totally blind eyes toward his master’s voice, and a warm wave of affection — affection mixed with sadness — broke over Logan. The dog wasn’t going to be around much longer, and Logan was pretty sure that when the dog died, he’d die, too.

He could keep watch for only so long.

He and the dog could protect things for only so long, and after that someone else would have to keep watch.

But who?

Nobody else knew what he knew.

Nobody else had lived what he had.

Nobody else understood the way things really were.

Nobody.

Nobody but him.

Logan rowed quietly as the setting sun painted the sky a shade of red that made him think of the hell he was certain waited for him on the day he died, and the pines turned to skeletal silhouettes that looked like fingers reaching desperately for salvation.

A salvation that Logan knew was far beyond his reach.

Turning away from the hopelessness of the sky, he pulled slowly on the oars, keeping close to the shoreline as the rowboat cut silently through the water. He could hear the faint putting of idling outboard motors drifting across the lake, and knew that people were still on the water, especially fishermen.