Mysterium

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.”

Howard seemed to be working up an objection, but Dex made it moot by vaulting out onto the windy space of Oak Street.

He sprinted toward the opposite side. He felt a little giddy, actually, out here on the empty pavement. Once, when he was seventeen and living with his parents in Phoenix, he had gotten drunk at someone’s party and ended up walking home at four in the morning. On an impulse he had stepped into the middle of what in daylight was a busy suburban street, and he had sat down cross-legged on the white line. King of creation. There had been no other pedestrians that night, no traffic, only dry air and a patient, starry sky. He had stayed in that sublime lotus for almost five minutes, until he saw a distant wink of headlights; then he got up, yawned, and sauntered home to bed. It amounted to nothing. But the feeling still lingered in his memory.

He was tempted to sit down in the middle of this street. A dumb and reckless notion. It was a familiar impulse, though, the urge to wave some flag of defiance in the face of the universe, and he supposed one day it would get him hurt or killed—probably sooner than later, given the state of things. But at times like this he felt both genuinely alive and somehow closer to Abigail and David, who had perished in the fire fifteen years ago. Maybe they were around one of these dark corners. Maybe, if he tempted fate, fate would deliver him to his lost wife and son.

But he crossed Oak without incident and stopped, a little breathless, in the shadows on the opposite side.

The silence seemed larger here. He paid attention to it, sorting through wind-sounds for the rumble of a motor. There was nothing. He braced himself against a brick wall and leaned into the street. He looked hard east and west and saw only streetlights, traffic signals, and the icy white sidewalks.

He located Howard’s silhouette in the alleyway and waved an all-clear.

Howard jogged toward the meridian of Oak in gawky, birdlike strides. He wore a khaki hunting jacket that came nearly to his knees and a black watch cap too low over his eyes. His duct-taped eyeglasses winked in the artificial light. He looked like a cartoon terrorist, Dex thought, and why the hell didn’t he get a move on? He was a target out there.

Howard had only just crossed the white line when Dex saw headlights probing the corner of Oak and Beacon.

He took a half step out of the alley and waved frantically at Howard, trying to hurry him in. Howard saw him and did exactly the wrong thing: froze in place, confused and frightened.