“I . . . I thingg it must be the lightning. They didn’t say. I hope it is the lightning and not old wiring. The insurance company will heave me by my shriveled olt ball sack.”
I barked with laughter at this passing mention of his shriveled olt ball sack. I had never heard an adult—let alone an elderly man like Lawrence Beukes—speak to me this way: with a profane, desperate honesty, with such a mix of black humor and undisguised vulnerability. It was a jolting experience. At the same time, I had a thought, two simple, dreadful words—It’s him—and felt a light touch of vertigo.
Thoughts flashed by, like cards glimpsed as the dealer shuffles the deck.
Tell him not to go, I thought. But there’d been a fire, and he had to go, and I had no argument to make him stay, none that made sense. If I told him there was a man with a camera that stole thoughts circling his wife, he would never let me near Shelly again. In that case he might stay home—to protect her from me.
I thought, He will go, and I will call the police and warn them his wife is in danger. Again I asked myself, In danger from what? From who? A man with a Polaroid camera? I was thirteen, not thirty, and my dread, my anxieties, would count for nothing with the police. I would sound like a hysterical child.
Also, a quadrant of my brain held out hope that I was only scaring myself with a lunatic ghost story, the result of a childhood spent reading too many comic books and watching too many episodes of The Tomorrow People. The rational counterargument presented itself to me in a series of forceful, unequivocal points: Shelly Beukes did not suffer from a curse inflicted by a knockoff Polaroid. She was the victim of Alzheimer’s disease, no magical explanation required. As for the snapshot that showed me reading Popular Mechanics—so what? Someone must’ve taken my picture weeks ago, and at the time I hadn’t noticed. Simple explanations have the disappointing tendency to be the best explanations.
Only the rational counterargument was a pile of shit, and I knew it. I knew it. I just didn’t want to know it.
All this flickered through my mind in a moment. The wind blew a can rattling down the road, and Mr. Beukes turned to watch it go, then cast a distraught and distracted look at his idling Town Car.
“I will drive you. This weather. If not for this morning, I might’ve risked leafing her by herself tonight. She has had the pill for her arthritis, and she sleeps so heavy, sometimes ten hours. But tonight there is the thunder. What if she wake up and is afraid? You must imagine me very wicked to have left her even for a minute.”
At not quite thirteen, I wasn’t emotionally equipped to respond to a distressed and elderly man, viciously finding fault with himself. I mumbled some eloquent words of comfort, like, “Uh, no, not at all.”
“I tried to dial you, but when there was no answer, I thingg he is in his garage and cannot hear the phone ringing. I kissed her goot-bye, very softly, so not to wake her, and came straight over.” He showed me a smile that was close to a grimace. “When she is asleep, she look like her olt self. Sometimes I thingg in her dreams she gets it all back. The path to her old self is overgrown, lost in the briars. But her sleeping mind . . . you thingg, Michael, the sleeping mind has paths of its own? Trails the waking self has never walked?”
“I don’t know, Mr. Beukes.”
He dismissed his own question with a weary nod. “Come. I will drive you now. You should get a book maybe and I dunno what else.” He lowered his eyes, took in the fact that I was wearing boxers and socks. He lifted one white, stupendously shaggy eyebrow. “Trousers perhaps.”
“I don’t need you to drive me around the corner. Go see if your gym is okay. And don’t worry about Shelly. I’ll be over there in five minutes.”
Thunder growled at his back. He cast another aggrieved look up at the sky, then leaned through the door and took my hand in both of his.
“You are a goot damn kid,” he announced. “Shelly always tolt me this, you know. Every time she came home. ‘That is a goot damn kid, Larry. All the funny things he talks about building. Beware, Afrikaner. I will ask him to build me a new husband, one who doesn’t shave in the shower so it looks like a ferret exploded in there.’” He smiled at the memory, while the rest of his face crumpled, and for a horrible moment I thought he was going to cry again. Instead he lifted his hand and rested it on the back of my neck. “Goot damn kid, she said. She always knew when someone had greatness in them. She didn’t waste her time with second-rate people, not never. Only the best. Always.”
“Always?” I asked.
He shrugged. “She married me, didn’t she?” And winked.
7
ON THE WAY TO COLLECT my pants, I took a detour into the kitchen and dialed NorWes Utility. I knew the direct number to the switchboard by heart and thought maybe they could patch me straight through to my dad’s radio. I wanted to let him know where I was going to be—I thought there was a very reasonable chance I’d wind up sacking out on the Beukeses’ couch that evening. Only no one picked up on the other end because it never rang. There was just a long, dead hiss. I hung up and was about to try again when I realized there wasn’t any dial tone.
It came to me, suddenly, that it was very dim in the kitchen. Experimentally, I flipped the light switch. The room didn’t get any brighter.
I went to the picture window in the living room and looked out at the dead street; not a light on in a single window, in spite of the darkness of the day. The Ambersons, across the road, always had their TV on by midafternoon, but tonight there was no spectral blue glow pulsing in the windows of the den. At some point while Mr. Beukes and I had been talking, a line had gone down somewhere, cutting the juice to the whole neighborhood.
I thought, No. It’s him.
My stomach flopped. Suddenly I wanted to sit down. The aftertaste of Panama Thrill was in my mouth, a flavor like sweet bile.
The house buckled in the wind, creaking and popping. Probably a lot of lines were going down tonight. As far as that went, it was entirely credible to imagine that the fire at the gym had something to do with the storm—a fire that had conveniently left Shelly all alone, with no way to raise an alarm if there was trouble, because even if she could remember how to call the police, her phone would be as dead as mine.
I considered running across the road and beating a fist on Mr. Amberson’s door and yelling for help and—