Nightlife: A Novel

43

Judith Nathan filled the small backpack with the quart cans she had bought, and then lifted it. She had not expected it to be this heavy, or this hard and lumpy. She took everything out, wrapped the cans in a towel, put them in the backpack, and slipped another folded towel into the space between the cans and her back. She put the straps on her shoulders to repeat the test, and the pack felt more comfortable.

Judith dressed in her black pants and her running shoes, put on her black sweater and her raincoat. She inspected herself in the mirror, then looked at her watch. It was just after two A.M.

She opened the cylinder of Mary Tilson’s revolver and made sure all the chambers were loaded. She put it into the deep right-hand pocket of the raincoat and examined herself in the mirror once more to be sure it didn’t show. She took six extra bullets from the box and put them into her left pocket. Then she went outside and locked her door.

She had always been able to make herself feel better by going out into the night. When she was about six she had sometimes waited until her mother and the current boyfriend were back from their evening at the bars and had fallen asleep. Then she would slip on some clothes, quietly open the front door, and go out. The first time, she started by just stepping out on the front porch, looking and listening.

The night was not black, as it had always seemed from inside the lighted house. It was made of gray-blues, deep greens, and the white moonlight. She could see the familiar trees, sidewalks, and houses, but all of them were now silent, and everything was motionless. The people had not just gone. In the deep night they did not exist. The world was quiet.

At first she crouched on the porch with her back against the front of the house, far from the railing and near enough to the door so she had a fair chance of getting to safety ahead of whatever might leap out of the shadows to eat her. She stayed there for a long time that night and on several others before she was sure that no such thing would happen, and then stepped forward to the railing.

After that she moved to the porch steps, and it made an enormous difference. The porch roof had kept her in the shadows and hidden her, but it had also hidden the stars and the sky from her, and blocked her from the gentle current of slowly moving air. What she could hear once she was away from the house was a silence that had a range, that came to her from a great distance, from everywhere the dark could reach.

By the end of summer she had moved away from the house to the sidewalk, and on into the world. By the time she was eight she was in the habit of sneaking out every night and walking the streets. First she walked the streets of her neighborhood and looked at the houses she had always seen in daylight. Then she got into the habit of walking to school. The night walk became a tour of all of the places where she had been during the day. It was a chance to revisit scenes where things had happened. At night, the places were only hers.

She would look down at a spot on the concrete steps of the school and remember it was where Marlene Mastich had stood and said Charlene’s hair was dirty. She had stood right there to say it to the other girls, not an inch to either side. But now this spot, this step, this whole school, belonged to Charlene, and all other people were only memories, disturbances left in her brain from an ugly day. People weren’t even real now, only the ground where they had stood. There was only Charlene in the night world. The trees were real, the dark stores with iron grates across their windows were real, and Charlene was real. That was all.

Charlene was Judith Nathan tonight, and it was time to move. She stepped around the building to the row of carports along the back. She wasn’t worried that she would wake up any of the other tenants. Each carport had a cage at the rear of it where people stored things, and behind that was the laundry room. The first room where anybody slept was one floor up, and it was Judith Nathan’s.

She drove her Acura far across town to the foot of Catherine Hobbes’s street. Then she parked it a block away in a line of cars that seemed to belong to people asleep in a row of big old apartment buildings. She put on her backpack, walked to the foot of Catherine Hobbes’s street, and began to climb.

The houses along the way were all dark and silent. After a minute of walking she began to feel again the peculiar sensation that had comforted her as a child, that the world was empty except for her. In the flat places downtown there were always people out and driving around, businesses with lights on. But up here on the winding, tree-shadowed street where people were all asleep, she was alone.

Judith had walked these same steps a number of times since she had arrived in Portland, but now the feeling was different. She was taking possession of the place. The neighborhood had moved into the few hours of late night when all of the people had fallen into unconsciousness.

She walked along comfortably even though her small pack was heavy. She was used to exercising and jogging long distances. The weight of the pack made her breathing seem louder to her own ears, but she took the extra weight in her thighs and calves instead of her back, so it wasn’t a strain.

Judith reached the row of houses along the crest of the hill and sat down on the curb across the street to study them. She yawned to be sure her ears were clear and she was hearing every sound. It was two forty-five A.M., and the silence was still unbroken. When she felt ready, she stood and noticed that up here along the ridge there was a slight breeze. Good. That would help.

Judith walked across the street slowly, careful not to disturb the perfect quiet. She climbed the steps beside Catherine’s house and walked around to the back door. She looked in the window at the kitchen. It was pretty. The color of the walls seemed to be a pale yellow, but it was difficult to tell the exact shade in the darkness. She could see that here, as in most houses, there were no smoke detectors in the kitchen, where cooking would continually set them off. Judith took off her pack, pulled out a can, opened the spout, and poured charcoal starter on the door and the wooden footing below it.

Judith poured the rest of the can of charcoal starter on the clapboards of the house, letting extra pools of it soak into the sills of all the windows. She put the empty can back in the backpack, opened another, and kept going along the side of the house, searching for the things she had noticed in previous visits. When she reached the narrow door set into the wall outside the house, she slowly and cautiously opened it to verify that it covered a gas water heater. She took the adjustable wrench out of her backpack, unhooked the gas line from the heater, and closed the door. Then she poured some charcoal starter on the door and the walls beside and below it.

She tried to keep a steady stream of charcoal starter going as she walked beside the house, soaking the lowest few rows of clapboards. Whenever a can was empty she put it back into the pack and opened another. She took her time, trying to be thorough. There was a front entrance at street level that she knew opened into a narrow hallway with a side entrance to the garage. From there an interior staircase climbed to the living areas on the upper floor. She had glimpsed it the night when she had watched Catherine pull her car into the garage and open the door to go upstairs. Judith poured a whole can of charcoal starter on and around the front entrance and another on the garage door.

Judith still had a couple of cans left, so she used them on the wooden clapboards along the side of the house as she made her way again along the steps up the hill to the back door. Then Judith put on her pack. It felt incredibly light now. She took out her matches, and listened once more to the world. She could hear nothing, not even a distant swish of traffic from the city below.

Judith wanted to do this in a particular way. She wanted the fires in the back of the house to burn unnoticed for a time. She would light them first, beginning with the one that would block the back door and eat its way into the kitchen, where there were no smoke detectors. After a time the fire would spread to the petroleum-soaked wood on the sides and front of the house, blocking the other exits. They were the lowest parts of the house and they faced the river, where the wind was coming from tonight. Once the back of the house was engulfed, the fire in front would run right up the stairs to meet it.

She struck a match, listening to the scrape and then the hiss as the match head flared. She dropped it into the pool of charcoal lighter that had dripped to the foot of the back door. The wet fluid lit and the flames began to flicker up the surface of the wooden door. She moved a few paces and lit the next match, which she held against the lowest clapboard where it met the concrete footing below.

The saturated boards began to flare up, and the flames moved along the back of the house more quickly than she was walking: Judith had overdone it. The flames were running along ahead of her now. She stopped, turned, and hurried along the back of the house the way she had come. She had no time to go the long way, because the little house was already ablaze. The flames were blistering and peeling the layers of old paint to get to the dry wood beneath, then blackening it and beginning to devour it.

Judith trotted down the steps beside the house toward the street. She could feel the breeze making the short hairs along her hairline move, and she knew she had to escape. The fire was moving too quickly. Judith reached the bottom of the steps. She had to block the front exits, or it would all go wrong, so she struck another match and dropped it in front of the garage door. She watched flames unfurl from it, rolling up the surface of the garage door.

Judith whirled and started down the street. The flames were bright and yellow now, and her shadow stretched ahead of her on the empty asphalt of the street. She began to trot. She needed to get away from the neighborhood before the fire trucks and police cars came up that road. She had trotted only a few paces before she realized that the faster she went the better she felt, so she broke into a run, pumping her arms and pushing off with the balls of her feet.

The sidewalk was too treacherous, a series of tilted blocks and cracks to catch her feet, so she moved to the middle of the street. She sprinted, dashing for the first curve that would get her out of the light of the fire. She made it around the first corner and the light was dimmer. She ran hard for a few seconds, but then the light seemed to get brighter again.

Judith turned to look behind her. It was a set of headlights brightening the trunks of trees. She could hear the car coming fast. The car stopped a few feet from her and the driver was out, crouching behind his open door. He had a gun in his hand. “Hold it.”

She said, “What? What do you want?”

The man said, “You. I’ve been waiting for you, honey. I’ve been watching, and waiting, and here you are.”

“Who are you?”

“My name is Calvin Dunn,” he said. “Put the knapsack down and step away from it.”

Calvin Dunn. That was the name in the newspapers, the man who had killed Tyler. She knew that she had no choice except to do what he said. She set the backpack down on the street and took a few steps away from it, stepping to the side to get the light of the burning house behind her, trying to see Calvin Dunn’s eyes.

They were focused on her. He said, “All right. Stop there.” She could see the fire’s reflection in his eyes, the glow flickering on the retina. Calvin Dunn took two steps from the car. His eyes moved to the backpack.

Judith’s right hand slipped into the pocket of her raincoat and grasped the pistol. She sensed from a slight change in his posture that Calvin Dunn’s brain had registered his mistake. She saw the eyes flick back to her and his body begin to tense, trying to raise his gun.

She fired through her pocket. The round hit his chest, but he didn’t go down, so she leapt to the side. He fired at her, but she reached the barrier of a parked car. She heard Dunn running too, so she popped up and fired. This time when she hit him, he slowed as though the loss of blood was weakening him, so she fired twice more. He toppled to the pavement, and she stepped closer to fire into the back of his head.

The return of the silence seemed to waken her, and she began to run again. She took a half dozen steps down the center of the street, her gun still in her hand, before she remembered the backpack. She couldn’t leave it lying on the pavement beside Dunn’s body. She turned and ran back, snatched up her pack, and dashed down the street carrying it. She saw the end of the street bathed in light from the streetlamps, and she pushed the gun back into her pocket and ran toward the light. When she reached the bottom of the hill she tried to slow down, but her legs refused to obey her. She ran until she was around the corner and at her car. She fumbled with the keys for a second or two, but got it started and drove.

Catherine was in the midst of a dream she’d had many times. In it she had bought a huge, rambling house full of long turning hallways, attics, and secret rooms. She knew there was something in it that she had forgotten to take care of, something that was getting worse every second. She heard a shot, then another. Her brain worked to fit the sounds into the dream. Then there were three in a row, and she wasn’t in that dream house anymore. She was in her bed. For a moment she felt the relief that awakening brought, the reassurance that the impressions had not been real. But something was still wrong.

She opened her eyes, and she could see there was light beyond the blinds in her room. She glanced at the clock, but it was only three-ten. Catherine sat up. The light in the cracks between the blinds was flickering and moving as though— She was up on her feet, and the air was thick and hot. She went down to the floor and began to crawl. As she did, the smoke detector overhead began to shriek at her, and she had to fight panic.

The lights were flickering beyond all of the windows. She had to get to the front of the house, where there were more exits. She crawled to the closet and pulled an armload of clothes off the hangers. There were a pair of pants—the silky black ones that were from her best suit—and a navy peacoat that she sometimes wore in cold weather. She put them on and crawled to the bedroom door. She reached up cautiously and touched the doorknob. It felt warm, as though it was beginning to heat up, but she could still grasp it. She turned it gingerly and opened the door.

She could see the sky through the greenhouse windows across the room at the front of the house, but there were flames moving along the walls on both sides of the room. The only windows still free of flames were the greenhouse windows, and they didn’t open. Catherine rose to a crouch and rushed to the dining room table. She lifted one of the chairs and swung it hard into the greenhouse window. There was a crash and a spray of glass, and she pushed the chair the rest of the way out.

She wrapped the tablecloth around her right hand and forearm, used it to clear the glass shards from the bottom of the window, draped it over the sill to protect her while she put her feet out, then slid her body out after them and held herself there. She extended her arms, looked down, then dropped.