Jim Shepard - Flights

“Ronnie’s here,” Biddy said. His car was behind Cindy’s.

“My sister, too. What a liar.” Mickey wiped his nose with a mitten, the smear across it shining under the streetlight. “We should spy on them.” He seemed to have no interest in the idea.

They came up the driveway quietly and Mickey tested the door. “It’s unlocked,” he said. He creaked it open. It occurred to Biddy while he waited that something shameful or illicit or exciting might be going on, but the door was swinging open and he followed Mickey in.

They could make out Ronnie at the kitchen table, his finger to his lips. He wasn’t moving.

“What are you doing in the dark?” Mickey whispered, quieted more by the lack of light than by Ronnie’s gesture.

“Be quiet,” Ronnie said. A radio was softly playing in another room. They came into the kitchen soundlessly. Ronnie still hadn’t moved, frozen in his chair. His voice came out of the darkness like a recording. “What’re you doing here?”

“Came to get a game,” Mickey said faintly. “Where’s Cindy?”

“Go get it. Go upstairs. Don’t make a sound.”

Mickey edged past him into the hallway and disappeared.

“You too,” he said. Biddy couldn’t see his eyes. “Get out of here. Go upstairs.”

“What’s wrong?” The whispering, the sitting in the dark, the tone of Ronnie’s voice scared him.

“Go upstairs.”

Biddy slipped past him through the hallway and into the living room, shrinking into the shadows against the wall. He could make out other noises in the bedroom as well as the radio, but they were muffled and intermittent.

Ronnie was still perfectly silent. The pendulum of the clock near him clicked steadily. Finally there was the slightest noise, of the chair on the linoleum floor, and the faint clatter of the cutlery drawer being opened. Something was slid out, the sound like that of a single stroke of a knife on a sharpening steel.

Biddy waited, the only sounds coming from the bedroom. When he couldn’t bear it any longer he eased forward and was about to peek around the corner into the kitchen when Ronnie moved noiselessly past, their faces only inches apart, with the wall between them. He disappeared down the hall. After a moment Biddy followed, amazed at himself. The hall closet door was slightly ajar and he slipped behind it, his feet nudging aside clothes baskets and boxes of detergent on the floor. He edged in until, leaning on the inside wall, he could peer out of the crack under the hinge between the door and the jamb.

Ronnie stood framed in his vision, pausing at the bedroom door. His hand was closed around the knob. The noises inside were more distinct now and Biddy could distinguish Cindy’s murmurs. Ronnie had a knife in his hand.

He realized it with a shock — Ronnie had a knife in his hand, ten inches, twelve inches long. Leaning there in the dark, with an eye screwed to the crack between door and wall and one foot on the other to avoid moving anything else on the floor, he had a sudden horrifying sense of something inconceivable about to happen, and before he could cry out or even react fully Ronnie turned the handle and threw the door open, the light flooding into the hall until he moved into the doorway to block it.

“Oh, my God,” Cindy said.

There was no other sound. The radio was switched off. Ronnie was perfectly still. Biddy strained to see what was going on, moving his eye up and down the crack in terror and suspense.

“Why don’t you just pull right out, trooper.” Ronnie’s voice was low and even and terrifying. “Don’t even bother to wipe the goo off. Get up.”

The bed squeaked and someone’s leg appeared beyond his silhouette.

“Get your car keys.” Ronnie still hadn’t moved. There was a jingling of a belt buckle and coins. He gestured past Biddy down the hall, the sudden motion startling. “Get out.”

The other man said something, his voice low, as frightened as Biddy would have been.

“Touch those clothes and I’ll cut your pecker off. Get out.”

The man said something about pants.

“Get out.” Ronnie’s voice was indescribable: Biddy was momentarily certain that if he was discovered he’d be killed as well.

The man popped through the doorway abruptly, naked, his penis gleaming before Biddy could look away: the man in the store, Sean. Ronnie followed him down the hall, and the back door opened and slammed shut. Biddy imagined the man standing naked in the driveway, bare feet on the ice.

In the bedroom he saw Cindy’s naked thigh, her arms struggling with a pair of pants. The closet door swung open. Ronnie loomed above him, the knife pointed at the floor. Biddy froze, breath changing direction in his throat. “All right, get out of here,” Ronnie said. “The show’s over.” He called Mickey, his raised voice the first loud noise in the house.

Biddy scrambled from the closet, intercepting Mickey in the kitchen in his rush to the door.

“What’s going on?” Mickey said. “Did Cindy leave?” Biddy shook his head, unable to speak. “I couldn’t find all the pieces to the Stratamatic.” Mickey opened the back door and stepped out. “I should tell my parents those two were here when they weren’t supposed to be.”

He continued to talk, and at the corner Biddy collapsed to a sitting position and refused to get up, mired, it seemed, in the ice and snow, not responding, tears filling his eyes and the cold and wet coming through his pants, until Mickey gave up in exasperation and left, disappearing in the direction of Biddy’s home, leaving him alone and soaked in the rear with the night closing in around him.

“Biddy’s sitting in the road and he won’t get up,” Mickey announced after taking off his mittens in the Sieberts’ kitchen.

His father arrived in minutes, the dark Buick pulling up next to him and sliding a little in its haste to stop. He wouldn’t respond to questions and his father, impatient, frightened, and despairing, finally picked him up, Biddy as quiescent as a drunk or baby, and carried him into the car. All he was able to say was “Nothing” in response to their questions of what was wrong, what had happened. Mickey was almost no help. Biddy was put to bed. Mickey was put in front of the television. Kristi stayed in the living room, shooting at ornaments with a rubber band. His parents huddled outside his room debating in fierce whispers what should be done. His mother wanted to call Dr. Hanzlik here, now, this minute, get him out of bed if they had to. His father favored waiting until after Christmas: Hanzlik probably wouldn’t see him until then anyway, and why ruin everyone’s Christmas? And who knew what was wrong? Who knew how serious it was? Maybe he’d seen another three-legged dog, for all they knew.

Finally, in whispers that grew calmer, they got hold of themselves and decided they’d wait until after the holidays.

Before she went to bed, Kristi poked her head into his room, a crack of light from the hall spreading across the floor.

“Are you sick?” she said.

He lay under his covers like an exhausted Channel swimmer.

“They say to leave you alone.” She stepped a bit farther in, the hall light slanting across her cheek, catching on her hair. “Cindy called you. They said you were sick and couldn’t come to the phone.”

He lay as if asleep.

“Are you gonna get real sick right before Christmas?”

He opened his eyes at the worry in her voice, and raised his head. “You don’t want me to get sick?” he asked quietly.

She sat on the edge of the bed. “No.”

They remained where they were. The furnace kicked on in the cellar.

She rubbed her leg. “Know what I got you for Christmas?”

He shook his head, his hair making soft noises against the pillow. “Where’s Mickey?”