Darkness Under the Sun

3

Three photo albums and several boxes of loose photos were kept in the hall closet. Howie didn’t touch the albums because they dated back to the days before the divorce and the burning, when he loved his dad and thought his dad loved him. Looking at those old snapshots drained something from him, a quality he couldn’t name but without which he felt gray and cold inside for days after. They affected the way he saw the world, which seemed flat and dull and less colorful for a while after he spent time with those photographs. He suspected that if he looked at them often enough, the pictures would drain him entirely, and he would never get his world back the way it had once been.

Howie sat on the living-room floor with just two shoeboxes of photos, quickly sorting through them until he found one that showed the house from the street, another that showed the garage shaded by the probably hundred-year-old beech tree. There were pictures of his mother and pictures of his sister, but he chose a recent one in which they were together, their arms around each other’s shoulders, because in that one they were smiling so big that Mr. Blackwood would be able to see how nice they were, how special, and he would know that they wouldn’t be bad people to rent from. Mrs. Norris, who had moved out three days ago, to go back to Illinois to live with her sister, said Howie’s mom wasn’t just a landlord, she was also a friend. In this photo, Mr. Blackwood would be able to see that not just Howie could be his friend, that Mom and Corrine were also the kind of people who wouldn’t care about how he looked, who would be his friends, too.

He returned the shoeboxes full of snapshots to the closet. From the desk in the small study, he got an envelope and he put the three pictures in it. Happier than he had been in a long time, he locked the back door as he left and hurried through the graveyard, where a raven sat on a tombstone, watching him, working its beak but making no sound, probably not the same bird but one that just looked similar to Mr. Blackwood’s. He returned to the old Boswell building, where he had left the latch switch straight up on the alley door, so he could enter without having to go through the basement window. He locked the door behind him.

On the roof, Mr. Blackwood waited in the late-afternoon sun, once more peering through a crenellation in the parapet, watching the people on the street below. At first sight, just for an instant, the misshapen man reminded Howie of the large beetle that the raven had snatched up and crunched in its beak: his unusually smooth skin as glossy in places as a beetle’s shell, stretched over blunt jawbones that made his malformed mouth resemble the mandibles of a bug. But this comparison was so unkind that it shamed Howie, and he forced it out of his mind as he hurried across the roof and knelt beside his friend to give him the envelope.

Mr. Blackwood liked the picture of the house on Wyatt Street, and he said it appeared to be a cozy place, maybe the coziest place that he had ever seen. He liked that there were neighbors on only one side, the cemetery on the other, the quiet and the privacy. He liked the address number, too, which was visible on one of the front-porch posts: 344. He said that was a lucky number, which Howie didn’t understand until Mr. Blackwood pointed out that it added up to eleven. He noted that the big beech tree shading the garage would keep the apartment cooler in summer and would give him something nice to look at from his front window.

He stared for a longer time at the photo of Howie’s mother and sister, for so long in fact that a sick sinking feeling overcame Howie. He wondered if maybe his mother or Corrine resembled someone who had been mean to Mr. Blackwood. But at last his new friend said they looked like “nice ladies, good church-going ladies. Do they go to church, Howie?”

“More Sundays than not,” Howie said. “Mom makes me go, too, though she lets me wear a cap to hide the part of my head where hair won’t grow anymore.”

“She’s a good woman,” said Mr. Blackwood, taking one more look at the snapshot. “I can see how good she would be. She would be very good. And your sister no less than your mom. The two of them, very good, very sweet together.” He tucked the photos in a pocket of his khaki shirt.

“Will you come to see the apartment, then?”

“I need to think on it till tomorrow. It’s a big decision. I’m leaning toward staying in this town awhile, but I need to sleep on it first. I don’t sleep well at night. I mostly sleep during the day, but we’ve had such a good time, I haven’t gotten so much as a nap. I’m going downstairs now and have a good snooze. You remember, I’m a dreamer. I’ll sleep maybe till nine o’clock this evening, and when I wake up, maybe what I should do about the apartment will have come to me in a dream. Things come to me in dreams. If not, I’ll know by morning, sure enough. You come see me in the morning, my faithful friend.”

Howie was disappointed not to receive a positive answer right then and there. But he remained hopeful that Mr. Blackwood would dream about how fine it would be to live in the shade of the beech tree, at the house with the lucky number. Howie could not remember anyone ever calling him a friend, let alone a “faithful friend,” which was like something one of the three musketeers might say to another, or one soldier to another, like in the French Foreign Legion, and it was a positive sign that suggested Mr. Blackwood might rent from them.

Mr. Blackwood got to his feet, and for the first time Howie saw him standing. He knew that his friend must be tall, but Mr. Blackwood seemed gigantic, even though he wasn’t as tall as any professional basketball player. His thick and weirdly shaped shoulder blades were more prominent when he was standing, and his shirt stretched so tight across them that Howie thought it might rip; it seemed almost as if there were great wings folded on Mr. Blackwood’s upper back, under his shirt. His arms appeared longer, too, when he was standing, and his hands were like shovels.

As they crossed the roof, their shadows preceded them. Mr. Blackwood’s shadow was three times longer than Howie’s. The sight of their elongated silhouettes moving side by side made Howie feel small, but at the same time it also made him feel safe. No one would be crazy enough to mess with Mr. Blackwood. And if Howie was his friend, no one would mess with Howie, either. No one would dare.

For the first time, he noticed a special detail of his friend’s black boots. The toes were capped with brushed steel, like boots that a mountain climber might wear. They were supercool.

As Howie switched on his flashlight, Mr. Blackwood opened the door to the shed at the head of the stairs. He put a hand on Howie’s shoulder—“Be careful, son, that first flight is steep”—and Howie was impressed that the man’s big hand seemed even bigger when it touched you.

“Where’s your flashlight?” Howie asked.

“I’ve got one with my gear downstairs. But the few windows are enough light for me. I see pretty good in the dark.”

At each floor, multipaned windows were set high in the walls, but not many, and they were opaque with dust. Howie figured that maybe being a dreamer and sleeping in daylight might save your eyesight and help you to see better in the dark. Maybe he would become a dreamer, too, and sleep by day.

On the ground floor, at the rear of the empty building, as Howie opened the deadbolt and put his hand on the lever-style doorknob, Mr. Blackwood said, “Come back in the morning, and we’ll have breakfast together. I’ll tell you all about this famous movie star who was my great-grandmother.”

“What movie star?” Howie asked, surprised that his friend had kept such an amazing secret even though they had talked most of the day, talked more than Howie had ever talked with anyone but his mom and Corrine.

“She was in silent movies a long time ago. You wouldn’t know her name, but it’s an amazing story. I love telling it.”

“Okay, sure, wow, that’ll be great,” he said, and he opened the door into the alleyway, blinking in the brighter light.

Before Howie could step across the threshold, Ron Bleeker rushed him, shoving him hard backward: “Butt-Ugly Dugley, you little creep, why’re you going in and out of here, what’re you up to, freak boy?”

Bleeker was four years older than Howie, fifteen and muscular. He wore sleeveless T-shirts sometimes so you could see his biceps better, and he knocked Howie off his feet.

The flashlight flew out of Howie’s hand, and Bleeker came through the door fast, dropped on top of him, grabbed Howie by his ears, by his good one and his ugly one, threatening to jerk his head off the floor and slam it down again to crack his skull. The wedge of daylight narrowed as the swinging door closed, and in the gathering darkness, Bleeker said, “You little puke-face shit, what’re you—”

His voice cut off with a wordless sound of surprise and pain, and in the same instant, as if Bleeker suddenly took flight, his weight lifted from Howie.

From the darkness, Mr. Blackwood said, “Get your flashlight, son.”

Howie crawled to the Eveready, which was the source of most of the light now that the door had closed. With the flashlight in hand, he thrust to his feet and turned in confusion, trying to locate his friend and his enemy.

They were together, and they were an amazing sight. One of Mr. Blackwood’s hands was tight around Ron Bleeker’s throat, and the other hand clutched the boy’s crotch. He held Bleeker off the floor, letting his feet dangle in empty air. Old Bleeker rolled his eyes in terror when the flashlight revealed his captor’s face.

“You try to take one punch at me,” Mr. Blackwood told Bleeker, “and I’ll crush everything I’m holding in my left hand, crush it and tear it off, and then you can wear girls’ clothes the rest of your life.”

Bleeker didn’t look like he had either the intention or the strength to take a punch at Mr. Blackwood. Tears rolled down his face, which was as white and greasy as the belly of a fish, and the most pathetic kittenlike whimpers escaped him.

“You go on home, son,” Mr. Blackwood said. “I want to have a few words with your friend here. I want to set him straight about a couple things.”

Howie stood transfixed, astonished at the sight of Bleeker, so long a figure of terror, abruptly reduced to helplessness, looking so small, like a half-broken doll.

“If that’s all right with you?” Mr. Blackwood said. “Is it all right with you if I just explain the new rules to this young fella?”

“Sure,” Howie said. “That’s okay. So I’ll just go now. I’ll go on home.” He went to the door and glanced back at them. “The new rules.” He opened the door, stepped outside, and glanced back once more. “In the morning, maybe you’ll tell me the new rules, too. I guess I’ll need to know them. So I can be sure everybody is, you know, living by them.” He pulled the door shut.

Dazed and amazed, he followed the alley through the afternoon light and shadows. He was most of the way across the cemetery beside St. Anthony’s when his half-trance, like a veil, slid off his mind and the full importance of what had just happened became clear to him. The rest of the way home, he couldn’t stop grinning.