The Voice of the Night

21

Weezy couldn’t come home Tuesday evening; she had dinner with a business associate. She gave Colin money to eat at Charlie’s Cafe again, and Colin took Roy with him.

After cheeseburgers and milkshakes, Colin said, “Want to see a movie?”

“Where?”

“There’s a good one on television.”

“What is it?”

“The Shadow of Dracula.”

“Why do you want to see junk like that?”

“It’s not junk. It’s gotten good reviews.”

“There’s no such thing as vampires,” Roy said.

“Maybe. Maybe not.”

“No maybes. Positively not. Vampires… that’s bunk.”

“But they make for scary movies.”

“Boring,” Roy said.

“Why don’t you give it a chance?”

Roy sighed and shook his head. “How can you be scared of something that doesn’t exist?”

“You just have to use your imagination a little.”

“Why should I imagine scary things when there are so many real things to be afraid of?”

Colin shrugged. “Okay. So you don’t want to see the movie.”

“Besides, I have something planned for later.”

“What?” Colin asked.

Roy gave him a sly look. “You’ll see.”

“Don’t be mysterious. Tell me.”

“In good time.”

“When?”

“Oh … eight o‘clock,” Roy said.

“What’ll we do till then?”

They rode down Central Avenue to the small craft harbor, chained their bicycles in a parking lot, and explored the maze of waterfront shops and amusements. They strolled through swarms of buzzing tourists, looking for pretty girls in shorts or bikinis.

Over the bay, sea gulls soared and swooped. With piercing, melancholy cries, they darted up and down, back and forth, sewing together the sky, the earth, and the water.

Colin thought the harbor was beautiful. The westering sun streamed between scattered white clouds and appeared to lay in shimmering bronze puddles on the water. Seven small boats were sailing in formation, snaking across the sheltered water toward the open sea. The evening was drenched in that peculiar California light that is perfectly clear but that seems at the same time to have considerable substance, as if you were looking at the world through countless sheets of expensive, highly polished crystal.

At that moment the harbor seemed to be the safest and most welcoming place on earth, but Colin was cursed with the ability to see how it would change for the worse in just an hour or two. In his mind he could picture it at night-the crowds gone, the shops closed, and no light but that from a few wharf lamps. In the late hours the only sound would be the voice of the night: the continuous lapping of the sea at the dark pilings, the creaking of moored boats, the sinister rustling of wings as the gulls settled down to sleep, and that ever-present undercurrent of demonic whispers that most people could not hear. He knew that evil would creep in with the dying of the light. In the lonely shadows, something hideous would rise out of the water and snatch away the unwary passerby; something slimy and scaly; something with awful, insatiable hungers; something with razor teeth and powerful jaws that could tear a man apart.

Unable to shake that horror-movie image, Colin suddenly found that he could no longer enjoy the beauty around him. It was as if he were looking at a pretty girl and, against his will, seeing within her the rotting corpse that she would eventually become.

Sometimes he wondered if he were crazy.

Sometimes he hated himself.

“It’s eight o‘clock,” Roy said.

“Where we going?”

“Just follow me.”

With Roy in the lead, they cycled all the way to the eastern end of Central Avenue, then continued east on Santa Leona Road. In the hills beyond town, they turned onto a narrow dirt lane, followed it down one flank of a shallow glen and up the other. On both sides of the dusty track, wildflowers shone like blue and red flames in the tall, dry grass.

Sunset was nearly upon them; and this close to the sea, the twilight hour was more like fifteen minutes. Night would swiftly lay claim to the land. Wherever they were going, they would have to come back in the dark. And Colin didn’t like that.

On high ground again, they rounded a curve that lay in shadows cast by several eucalyptus trees. The land ended fifty yards beyond the curve, in the middle of an automobile graveyard.

“Hermit Hobson’s place,” Roy said.

“Who’s he?”

“Used to live here.”

A one-story clapboard building, more shack than house, overlooked two hundred or more decaying automobiles that were strewn across a few acres of the grassy hilltop.

They parked their bicycles in front of the shack.

“Why’s he called ‘Hermit’?” Colin asked.

“Because that’s what he was. He lived all alone out here, and he didn’t like people.”

A four-inch, blue-green lizard slithered onto a sagging porch step and halfway across the breadth of it, then froze, rolling one milky eye at the boys.

“What’re all these cars for?” Colin asked.

“When he first moved in, that’s how he supported himself. He bought up cars that had been in real bad accidents and sold spare parts.”

“You can make a living that way?”

“Well, he didn’t want much.”

“I can see that.”

The lizard came off the step, onto a patch of hard, dry earth. It was still watchful.

“Later on,” Roy said, “old Hermit Hobson inherited some money.”

“He was rich?”

“No. He got just enough so he could keep on living here without the spare-parts business. After that he saw other people just once a month, when he came to town for supplies.”

The lizard skittered back toward the step, froze again, this time facing away from them.

Roy moved fast. The lizard’s eyes looked backward as well as sideways and forward, so it saw him coming. Nevertheless, he caught it by the tail, held it, and brought his foot down hard on its head.

Colin turned away in disgust. “Why the hell did you have to do that?”

“Did you hear it crunch?”

“What was the point?”

“It was a popper.”

“Jeez.”

Roy wiped his shoe in the grass.

Colin cleared his throat and said, “Where’s Hermit Hobson now?”

“Dead.”

Colin looked suspiciously at Roy. “I guess you’re going to try to make me believe you killed him, too.”

“Nope. Natural causes. Four months ago.”

“Then why’re we here?”

“For the train wreck.”

“Huh?”

“Come see what I’ve done.”

Roy walked toward the rusting automobiles.

After a moment, Colin followed him. “It’ll be dark before long.”

“That’s good. It’ll cover our escape.”

“Escape from what?”

“The scene of the crime.”

“What crime?”

“I told you. The train wreck.”

“What’re you talking about?”

Roy didn’t answer.

They walked through knee-high grass. Close to the abandoned junkers, where a mower couldn’t reach and where Hermit Hobson had never trimmed, the grass was much higher and thicker than it was elsewhere.

The hilltop ended in a rounded point somewhat like the prow of a ship.

Roy stood on the edge of the slope and looked down. “That’s where it’ll happen.”

Eighty feet below, railroad tracks curved around the prow of the hill.

“We’ll derail it on the curve,” Roy said. He pointed to two parallel ribbons of heavy corrugated sheet metal that led from the tracks, up the slope, and over the brow of the hill. “Hobson was a real packrat. I found fifty of those six-foot long sheets in big piles of junk behind his shack. That was a hell of a piece of luck. Without them, I wouldn’t have been able to set this up.”

“What’re they for?” Colin asked.

“The truck.”

“What truck?”

“Over there.”

A four-year-old, battered Ford pickup stood about thirty feet back from the slope. The corrugated strips led to it, then under it. The Ford had no tires; its rust-filmed wheels rested on the sheet metal.

Colin hunkered down beside the truck. “How’d you get the corrugated panels under there?”

“I lifted one wheel at a time with a jack I found in one of these wrecks.”

“Why go to all that trouble?”

“Because we can’t just push the truck across bare ground,” Roy said. “The wheels would dig into the earth and stop it.”

Colin looked from the truck to the brow of the hill. “Let me get this straight. Let me see if I understand. You want to push the truck along this track you’ve made, let it roll down the slope, into the side of the train.”

“Yeah.”

Colin sighed.

“What’s wrong?” Roy asked.

“Another damned game.”

“No game.”

“I guess I’m supposed to do what I did with the Sarah Callahan scheme. You want me to show you the holes in it so you’ll have an excuse to chicken out.”

“What holes?” Roy challenged.

“For one thing, a train is too damned big and heavy to be derailed by a little truck like this.”

“Not if we do it right,” Roy said. “If it’s perfectly timed, if the truck’s coming down the slope just as the train’s rounding the bend, the engineer will hit the brakes. When he tries to stop the train on a sharp curve like that, it’ll start rocking like crazy. And then when the truck hits it, it’ll roll right off the tracks.”

“I don’t think so.”

“You’re wrong,” Roy said. “There’s a pretty good chance it’ll happen just like I say.”

“No.”

“It’s worth a try. Even if it doesn’t derail the train, it’ll scare the hell out of them. Either way, it’ll be a popper.”

“There’s something else you haven’t thought of. This truck’s been sitting out here for a couple of years. The wheels are rusted. No matter how hard we push, they aren’t going to turn.”

“You’re wrong again,” Roy said happily. “I thought of that. There hasn’t been that much rain the past few years. They weren’t rusted really bad. I had to spend a few days working on the truck, but now the wheels will turn for us.”

For the first time, Colin noticed dark, oily stains on the wheel beside him. He reached behind it and found that it had been freshly, excessively lubricated. His hand came away with gobs of grease on it.

Roy grinned. “You see any other flaws in the plan?”

Colin wiped his hand in the grass and stood up.

Roy stood, too. “Well?”

The sun had just set. The western sky was golden.

“When do you figure to do it?” Colin asked.

Roy looked at his wristwatch. “About six or seven minutes from now.”

“There’ll be a train then?”

“Six nights a week at this time, a passenger train comes through here. I’ve done some checking. It starts in San Diego, stops in L.A., goes on to San Francisco and then Seattle before starting back: I’ve sat on the hill and watched it a lot of nights. It really moves. It’s an express.”

“You said the timing has to be perfect.”

“It will be. Or near enough.”

“But no matter how carefully you’ve planned it, you can’t expect the railroad to co-operate. I mean, trains don’t always run on time.”

“This one usually does,” Roy said confidently. “Besides, that’s not too important. All we have to do is push the truck closer to the edge, then wait until the train is almost here. When we see the locomotive coming, we’ll give the truck a little shove, tip it over the brink, and away it’ll go:”

Colin bit his lip, frowned. “I know you set this up so it can’t be done.”

“Wrong. I want to do it.”

“It’s a game. There’s a big hole in the plan, and you expect me to find it.”

“No holes.”

“I must be missing something.”

“You haven’t missed anything.”

Each of the ruined pickup’s front wheels was jammed against a wooden chock. Roy removed these braces and threw them aside.

“What’s the joke?” Colin asked.

“We’ve got to get moving.”

“There must be a joke.”

“We don’t have much time.”

Both of the truck’s doors had been removed, either by the collision or by Hermit Hobson. Roy went to the open driver’s side, reached in, and put his right hand on the steering wheel. He put his left hand on the door frame, ready to push.

“Roy, why don’t you give up? I know there’s got to be a catch.”

“Get around on the other side and help.”

Still trying to find the hole, still wondering what he had overlooked, still certain that Roy was playing an elaborate trick on him, Colin walked around the truck and stationed himself at the open passenger side.

Roy looked through the truck at him. “Put both hands on the front of the door frame and push.”

Colin did as he was told, and Roy pushed from the other side.

The truck didn’t move.

What’s the joke?

“It’s been sitting here awhile,” Roy said. “It’s made a sort of depression for itself.”

“Ahhh,” Colin said. “And of course we’re not strong enough to push it out.”

“Sure we are,” Roy said. “Put your back into it.”

Colin strained.

“Harder!” Roy said.

It won’t come up out of its little depression, Colin thought. He knows it. That’s the way he planned it.

“Push!”

The land was not flat. It graded down toward the edge of the hill.

“Harder!”

The firm, sun-baked earth helped them, and the corrugated metal tracks helped them.

“Harder!”

The recent grease job helped them.

“Harder!”

But most of all, the gently sloping land and gravity helped them.

The truck moved.