Where Night Stops
Douglas Light
Praise for where night stops
“Douglas Light’s fast-paced Where Night Stops is a well-executed thriller that combines genre staples with literary style.”
—Foreword
“This sinuous narrative works neatly, both as a gripping novel and a solid meditation on identity.”
—Kirkus Reviews
Praise for girls in trouble
“Wonderful collection about some rough-ass lives—this dude is the real deal.”
—Junot Diaz, Pulitzer-Prize winning author of
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
“Light enters the minds, hearts, and hurts of these characters with prose that is often lyrical, and always hypnotic.”
—Heidi Durrow, author of The Girl Who Fell from the Sky
“These are gems of stories, slyly, skillfully interrelated and captivating in their economy, truth, and acid wisdom.”
—Frederic Tuten, author of Self Portraits: Fictions, The Green Hour,
and Tintin in the New World
“Light deftly explores the rocky terrain of human emotion.…In the most subtle of manners, Light portrays the essential paradigm of adolescence.…[He] probes beneath complex layers of what it means to be alive, revealing the occasionally magnificent terrain of selfhood.”
—Foreword
“With this collection you will enjoy engrossing fiction tightly executed, but you will also get back in touch with your own humanity, further plumbing your own capacity for compassion and reflection.”
—The Collagist
Light’s stories go down easy.…The stories are fun to read and…fun to see being put together one word and sentence at a time. Light makes it look easy.”
—Short Story Reader
“Girls in Trouble is a fine and thoughtful collection of fiction, very much recommended.”
—Midwest Book Review
Praise for east fifth bliss
“Set on New York’s Lower East Side, this first novel by Light (founding editor, Epiphany) introduces Morris Bliss, thirty-five years old and living with his widowed father. Morris has big dreams of traveling all over the world. Unfortunately, he doesn’t have a job or the means to take his aspirations beyond a collection of travel brochures and pushpins in a map on his bedroom wall. This fun read boasts a likable protagonist, other quirky and interesting characters, and vivid and humorous descriptions of New York while also providing some significant social commentary. The scene in which Morris and a former high school classmate (and father of the eighteen-year-old girl with whom Morris is sleeping) storm a vacant building in the middle of the night to roust out a group of homeless squatters is both funny and disturbing. Recommended for large public libraries with an interest in new and unknown authors.”
—Library Journal
This is a Genuine Vireo Book
A Vireo Book | Rare Bird Books
453 South Spring Street, Suite 302
Los Angeles, CA 90013
rarebirdbooks.com
Copyright © 2018 by Douglas Light
first trade paperback original edition
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever, including but not limited to print, audio, and electronic. For more information, address: A Vireo Book | Rare Bird Books Subsidiary Rights Department, 453 South Spring Street, Suite 302,
Los Angeles, CA 90013.
Set in Dante
epub isbn: 9781947856448
Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication data
Names: Light, Douglas, author.
Title: Where night stops / Douglas Light.
Description: First Trade Paperback Original Edition | A Genuine Vireo Book | New York, NY; Los Angeles, CA: Rare Bird Books, 2018.
Identifiers: ISBN 9781945572661
Subjects: LCSH Crime—Fiction. | Bildungsroman. | Espionage—Fiction. | Mystery fiction. | Suspense fiction. | BISAC FICTION / Thrillers / Espionage | FICTION / Thrillers / Crime
Classification: LCC PS3612.I3445 W54 2018 | DDC 813.6—dc23
For Micah
This frail engine, we think, and yet what murder is needed to take it down.
—James Salter, Light Years
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 1
Haven, Florida
She smells of lemons and warm cinnamon and isn’t very pretty. Sliding onto the barstool next to me, she says, “Can I sit here?”
The bartender, the woman, and I—we’re the only people in the bar. She can sit anywhere. It’s not just a seat she wants.
I study her a moment then catch the bartender’s eye; the order is placed without a word. Whatever the woman wants. Alcohol, like long marriages, has a language of its own, one not composed of speech.
Tuesday. The hard light of the Florida morning pours into Charm’s Tavern, bleaching everything to its true ugliness. Open daily from 8:00 a.m. to 2:00 a.m., Charm’s is anything but charming. Providing hangovers and alibis since 1968, the sign above the cash till reads. The oak bar cutting the length of the space looks whittled from a tree felled on the spot. The barstools wobble, their seats swaddled in duct tape, while stalactites of grime dangle from the exposed wires crisscrossing the ceiling. Everything in the place is warped from decades of spilt drinks.
Covering the wall opposite the bar are photographs. Hundreds, if not thousands. Floor to ceiling, people smile, shout, and hold drinks up in moments they’ll never remember.
The bartender pours a gin on ice and walks it dow
n to where we sit. The key ring looped on his belt jangles with each step.
She nods thanks.
He turns on the TV and mutes it.
She lifts the glass to her lips, downs a solid swallow. The weight of the drink seems to strain her narrow wrists. “Gin,” she says, catching me with a direct stare. Her eyes are a broken blue, muted light through scratched stained glass. “A beautiful, brutal creation,” she says, then touches my arm. “Was a time I could tell you everything about gin, its history, the different types, medicinal uses, even its effect on the British fertility in the mid-seventeen hundreds. Now,” she says, “all I can tell you about it is how I like to drink it—cold.” She tilts her head to one side then the other, like a gold finch at the feeder. “You don’t like to talk?”
“I like to talk,” I say. “I like to listen, too.” And I like to be left alone, I think. It was a mistake buying this woman a drink.
She leans to me, her breath charged with loneliness. “I’m not pretty,” she says. “I know I’m not pretty. I’ve come to accept that, and it isn’t an easy thing to accept.” She sways back, takes in the rest of her drink. “Now you know my problem. What’s yours?”
I gauge her face, sidelong. She has me by a solid two decades, midforties. “What makes you think I’ve got a problem?”
She taps her wrist where a watch should be. “It’s just past eight a.m. You’re drinking at Charm’s,” she says.
Touché. “I’m working,” I say, leaving it there. I’m not positive I could say what it is I do exactly, but even if I could, I wouldn’t. People’s perceptions change the moment you’re defined. The weight of your words changes. The phrase I can help means something different coming from a lunch lady and a doctor.
The woman smiles. “Work.” She considers me, then nods slightly, a small dip of confirmation. “You’re not a hard one to figure out,” she says. “I know your problem—or at least one of them.” She touches her lips as though to reassure herself, ready to serve. “Gin and people. The two things I know. And what I know is that this gin”—she holds her glass up—“is French, ninety-eight proof, and the cause of many car wrecks and failed marriages. I also know,” she says, “that you don’t have friends.”
“How’s that a problem?”
She lifts her chin. “Maybe it’s not,” she says, clattering the ice in her glass. “Other people need them to feel they have a purpose.” She folds her arms across the bar, lays her head on them. “Maybe you don’t need that.” Her voice is distant, longing. She closes her eyes. “You know what the problem with problems is? It’s not solving them. You’d think that’d be the hard part but it’s not. The hard part is living with the solution. It’s like you spend the first part of your life trying to figure it all out. Then you spend the second part just trying to forget all the stupid things you did to figure it all out.”
“You’re a mess,” I tell her. “Keep talking.”
She sits up, looks at me without looking at me, and forces a smile. “Alcoholosophy,” she says. “The act of being profoundly unprofound.”
The idea of grappling naked with her seeps into my mind. There’s something about her smell. I motion to the bartender—another drink for the lady. “I wasn’t kidding,” I say. “Keep talking. You have a nice voice. I like the sound of your voice.”
“A nice voice that has nothing to say.” She points to the TV bolted to the corner wall. An old black-and-white movie flashes on the screen. The Third Man. “See that?”
Orson Welles fills the screen. Young, still handsome, a mop of thick hair. He and Joseph Cotton are at the top of a Ferris wheel, war-torn Vienna spread out beneath them. A ruined Austria.
“That right there,” she says, nodding at the TV. “That’s my heart.”
On the screen, Welles stares down from the top of the ride at the ravaged city. “Your heart is Orson Welles?” I ask.
“Orson Welles?” She makes a noise that’s the approximation of a laugh. Her eyes brim with tears. “God no,” she says. “My heart is a divided Vienna.”
◉ ◉ ◉
We’re born with a finite number of opportunities. Attrition, bad choices, misspent goodwill, and fucked-up luck. The opportunities dwindle through a process called living. Our portfolio of prospects turns into a tattered novel of outcomes.
I am twenty-two.
Chapter 2
Windstop, Iowa. My hometown. When I think of it I think of summers, the heat rising in thick waves from the long, flat roads. Never-ending bike rides, tires clinging to the pavement. The rainbow, metallic spray of the garden hose, the calming sway of the cornfields, a sweet, stewing smell. Soil, sunlight, photosynthesis.
When I was a kid, there seemed nothing my folks couldn’t do. My father was not only strong and good at sports, he was also an expert with tools; he could build and repair furniture, birdhouses, and nearly anything made of wood. People skills and the power of persuasion were my mother’s gifts: gathering signatures for a new speed bump in front of the school, getting volunteers for a bake sale to support my Cub Scout troop, or organizing a drive to collect Green Stamps for the church. Once an idea got lodged in my mother’s head, she could corral the whole community into the effort. She could talk anyone into doing anything. What she couldn’t do was convince my father to care for her. And unlike one of his projects, my father couldn’t hammer the relationship back into shape. They endured each other for me and acted out the role of parents as best they could. Voices rarely got raised when I was around. Arguments were fought in flat, conversational tones, the anger a strong undercurrent.
Still, I had a good childhood, filled with friends, fairly good grades, and teachers and coaches who liked me well enough. Everyone in the tiny town knew everyone else and their business. I never got away with anything. News of the occasional fight or the shoplifted candy made it home before I did. My punishment was rarely severe.
Instead of a sibling, my folks got me a dog, Mackerel, whom I loved like nothing else. Why my folks named her Mackerel, I can’t say. The dog hated fish.
Since leaving Windstop, I’ve traveled the world and killed a few people, though always in self-defense. Always in the interest of self-preservation.
The first time was terrifying. I used to have bad dreams about it. But that passed. It’s the second that really haunts me.
The Greek shouldn’t have tried blackmailing me. A marble figurine of Artemis was close at hand. It seems so easy on TV. He made a savage mess as he lurched about the tiny Athens apartment.
By the time he finally dropped, blood splayed every wall.
People search everywhere for the taproot of their mistakes. They want to blame strict parents, an unsupportive school, a drunk scoutmaster, bullying siblings, or mean friends. They blame anyone but themselves.
I can’t blame anyone for where I find myself now. I was taught the difference between right and wrong.
Chapter 3
Windstop, Iowa
Four years prior
My ribs crackled with pain when I coughed. Bruises peppered my body. Still, I’d healed enough to be able to walk out. The nurse insisted I exit by wheelchair. Hospital rules. “We wheel you in, we wheel you out,” she said, gliding me down Windstop Memorial General’s off-white corridors. The odor of urine and pine needles, of desperation masked by cleaning supplies, filled the entire place.
I’d been born in that building and had ventured back numerous times. These were the people who had stitched my head together after the diving board interrupted my backflip, cut out my tonsils, freed my Krazy Glued fingers, and diagnosed the rash speckling my skin as a case of flea bites—courtesy of Mackerel. These were my neighbors, fellow church members, the parents and relatives of my classmates, the people my family and I depended on in times of emergency.
In the lobby, the summer light pounded through the windows, sharp and blinding. Outside, a world I wasn’t rea
dy for waited.
I had the nurse stop at the gift shop where I bought a cheap pair of sunglasses and a pack of cigarettes. “Really?” she asked. “I didn’t take you as a smoker.”
I slid on the sunglasses and gripped the cigarette pack. “I’m not.”
A battered ambulette the color of creamed corn waited out front. As she helped hoist me into the passenger’s seat, the nurse said, “Don’t forget to…” She trailed off, realizing her words—whatever they might be—were useless. I buckled up.
Nodding to the driver, I told him my address. There was no need. He knew me, knew my family. Knew what had happened. He was the father of my old church youth group leader. He used to provide apples and shelled peanuts as snacks for the group. Clamping the steering wheel like it was the last life buoy on a stricken ship, he shuttled me home in silence. Nothing new could be learned through talk.
My father, mother, and best friend Clement. Everyone in Windstop knew what had happened. Just as everyone in Windstop knew of the brutal knocks of life and bad luck my ambulette driver had endured. Within a matter of months, he’d been diagnosed with cirrhosis, lost his wife to skin cancer, and lost his son—my youth group leader—to a meth lab explosion. He’d been stripped of his reasons to live. Still, the magical mechanism propelling life continued to churn deep inside him, pushing him forward.
During one youth group meeting, his son made everyone kiss the blade of a hatchet while he explained that our own birth and death were the only two things we could truly call our own.
But he was wrong. His father was proof. I was proof. Your death is owned by family, friends, and creditors, the people left with the burden created by your absence.
The van pulled to a stop in front of my house. Loneliness cauterized my blood, burning it dry in my veins. I didn’t want to be here, but then again I didn’t want to be anywhere. I slid out, then turned and offered my hand in thanks. Disdain flashed over his face like the sharp, fleeting shadow of a passing plane. His misery didn’t need the company of mine. My tragedy had upstaged his, stolen the town’s sympathy, and left him even more hollow.
That first night home, I lay in my parents’ bed and listened to soft noises work their way through the empty rooms: the drip of the tub’s faucet, the rattle of a loose window screen, the scrape of some small animal making its way through the walls. All sounds my father had said he’d get around to taking care of. Now they were mine. Everything that was once my folks was mine.
