“I won’t.”
“It’s like . . . a house after someone moves out. The house is still there, but all their stuff is gone. Someone took away the furniture and rolled up the rugs. The movers crated all the parts of Shelly Beukes up and shipped her away. There’s just not much left of her anymore except the empty house.” He scraped the ruins of Stalingrad into the disposal. “That and what’s in old photographs.”
5
“YOU’LL BE ALL RIGHT HERE?” my father asked me on his way out the door. He had one foot on the front step and the other on our pea-green shag carpet. Lightning lit the low, boiling clouds behind him in a soundless flicker.
“Been a while since I needed Shelly Beukes to tuck me in,” I said.
“Yeah, it has. I don’t know that’s how it should be, but that’s how it is, huh?”
That was such an uncharacteristic thing for my dad to say—to acknowledge, even a little, that our life was somehow not quite ideal—that I opened my mouth to answer him and found I had no reply at all.
He glanced out into the turbulent, thundercloudy dusk. “I hate working nights. When Al gets back in the rotation, I’ll put in for days.”
My father had been pulling night shifts with the utility company all summer. They had a staffing gap. His best pal, Al Murdoch, wasn’t working while he received treatment for lymphoma. One of the line engineers, John Hawthorne, had recently been arrested for assaulting his ex-wife. Piper Wilson had left to have a baby. Suddenly my father was the senior lineman and working sixty hours a week, most of them after I went to bed.
At first I liked it. I liked staying up after I was supposed to be asleep, catching soft-core porn on what we called Skinemax in those days. But by mid-July all the fun had gone out of being alone in the house at night. I had a vivid imagination and in late July had made the mistake of reading Zodiac. After that the emptiness of the house began to seriously creep me the fuck out. I’d lie in bed dry-mouthed at two in the morning, listening to the silence, breathlessly expecting to hear a splintering crunch as good old Zodiac forced open a window with a crowbar. He’d use one of the kitchen knives to cut astrological signs into my fat gut—not after I was dead but while I was still alive, so he could hear me shriek.
I never talked about any of this with my father, because the only thing worse than my nighttime anxiety attacks was the idea that he might decide to hire someone to babysit me. All the Zodiac Killer could do was torture and kill me. If my dad hired some teenage Valley girl to put me to bed at nine-thirty and then spend the rest of the night on our phone jawing with her friends, I’d wish I were dead. The indignity would stomp up and down on my brittle, thirteen-year-old boy’s ego.
After my run-in with the Phoenician, I especially dreaded being alone that evening. Plus, there were those thunderheads and a sense of electrical charge in the air, a prickling energy I could feel in the fine hairs on my forearms. The thunder had been rolling all afternoon, and you could just tell it was going to cut loose soon—cut loose and roar.
“Think you’ll work on the party gun some more?” he asked.
“Probably. I—”
What followed was not melodramatic horror-movie thunder but more like a world-splitting sci-fi missile launch, a single obliterating cannon blast. It was noise at such a volume that it drove the air out of me.
My father would spend his evening offered up to that sky on an iron crane, repairing power lines, a thought that made my insides bunch up with worry when I allowed myself to think about it. He only looked disgruntled and a little weary, as if the thunder were a tiresome irritation, like the sound of kids fighting in the backseat. He cupped one hand behind his right ear to indicate he hadn’t heard me.
“I almost had it working this afternoon when Shelly showed up. If I finish, I’ll show you tomorrow.”
“That’s good. You have to hurry up and make your first million bucks so I can retire and focus on what I really love—doing original things with Jell-O.” My father took a few steps down to his panel van, then turned back, frowning. “I want you to call if—”
There was another cannonade of thunder. My father went right on talking, but I didn’t hear a word. That was very like him. He had an unmatched gift for tuning out background details that didn’t concern him. The Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders could’ve romped by naked, shaking their pom-poms, and if he was up in his crane repairing a transformer, I doubt he would’ve so much as glanced down.
I nodded as if I’d heard him. I supposed he was dishing out a standard-issue caution for me to call the office and have them radio him if anything came up. He waved and turned away. A blue light snapped on, high in the clouds, a flash on the world’s biggest camera. I flinched (Don’t let him take your picture) and half shut the front door.
The headlights of the panel van blinked on and the afternoon blinked off in the same moment. It was only six-fifteen in mid-August, and the sun wouldn’t be down for another three hours, but the day was lost in a smothering darkness. The van backed away. I closed the door.
6
I DON’T KNOW HOW LONG I stood in the foyer, listening to the tick of my pulse in my ears. The taut, expectant hush of the afternoon held me in place. At some point I realized I had my hand over my heart, as if I were a child about to pledge allegiance.
No—not over my heart. Over the Polaroid.
I had a powerful impulse to get rid of it, to throw it away. It felt awful to have it there in my pocket—awful and dangerous, like walking around with a vial of infected blood. I even went into the kitchen and opened the cupboard under the sink, meaning to cram it down into the garbage.
But when I slipped it out of my pocket, I just stood there looking at it: looking at the fat, red-faced boy in a Huey Lewis T-shirt, bent over Popular Mechanics.
Have we met before? Mat asked, smiling apologetically.
A flash snapped outside, and I lurched back, dropped the photo. When I looked up, for an instant I saw him, the Phoenician, right on the other side of the kitchen window, and don’t let him take your picture, oh God, don’t let him—
But it wasn’t the Phoenician with his Solarid. The flash was only another blue crackle of lightning. The face I saw in the window was my own, a faint reflection suspended in the glass.