Fear of the Dark by Mitch Evich (Click for bio.)

Warren Dahl was sitting in a lawn chair drinking lukewarm coffee and reading the newspaper when the blind girl who lived three houses away pedaled by on her bicycle. She had on a white plastic helmet that sat just above her ears, and sunglasses, and it was not until Warren waved to her that he remembered she could not see. Embarrassed, he shouted, "You're doing great!" and the little girl's head turned slowly in the direction of the sound and a proud smile appeared.

It was a shame, Warren decided, that he didn't know the girl's name. On Sunday mornings he would see the whole family pile inside their station wagon--the father in sportcoat and tie with his hair slicked back, the mother in a cream-colored dress, the boys in little suits of their own, one of them leading the girl by the hand. The father was polite in a purposeful, preoccupied way, and Warren, whose half-hearted attempts at small talk had failed, envied him for always being kept so busy.

The girl's bike made a clicking sound. Playing cards had been fitted onto the spokes of each wheel --not, Warren could tell, for decorative effect, but to serve as a rudimentary sonar system. The girl would be attuned to changes in frequency which would help her negotiate a parked car or curb. Warren's estimation of the girl's father rose immediately, and he imagined sharing with him stories of his own skills at navigation. The girl had reached the broad, bulbous head at the end of the cul-de-sac, and Warren watched as she moved in a slow tilt around the half-circle, her head cocked as if listening for something far away. Then she came back past him, and there was that same illuminating smile, but this time more knowing and serene, almost smug. It was as if she could feel him watching her.

Warren looked down at the brackish remainder of his coffee, and the black-and-grey images of the front page. It was all the same, every day: somewhere nations warred, and people slaughtered each other by the thousands; closer to home the murders were more luridly personal, free of fancy justifications. Two years ago, Warren had sold his commercial fishing boat at a hefty price to the federal government, which in turn leased the vessel to the local Indian tribe. The money had enabled him and Miriam to buy this home in a bright new subdivision at the edge of town, and Warren knew he had no reason to be bitter--that he should be grateful for having lived in a time when you could still make a living off the local salmon runs. The young guys nowadays didn't have it nearly so good.

This was Warren's typical morning's circle of thought, and it always led back to Bradley--the child of one of his daughters, the family's lone male descendent. The odds had been against the boy from the start. First Jill had gone and married that idiot kid from the university--John Linkletter, the man who became Bradley's father. Then they'd divorced, and Jill had met another man and moved back East, and Bradley had spent his time shuttling between two coasts, often at Warren's expense. As Bradley got older, Jill would complain, "I simply cannot control him! I just can't!" and so it had been left to Warren to break the boy, as if he were somebody's horse. Yet Warren never doubted that he was doing the child a favor.

He heard the door fly open behind him, and out came Miriam in swift, jerky steps, wearing running shoes and a tennis skirt that left her wizened knees bare. "Did you see her?" Miriam said. "Did you see the Frazier girl? She was riding her bicycle! All by herself!"

"I saw her, honey," Warren said.
"It's almost a kind of miracle. Don't you think?"
"It's pretty impressive all right."
"How do you think she does it?"
Warren explained the purpose of the playing cards.
"She's a brave little girl!"
"She certainly is. Say, Miriam, you remember what time that fellow is coming over to prune those pine trees?"

Miriam said that the man was coming at one o'clock. Then she asked Warren if he still wanted to play tennis later in the day.

"Let me see how my knee feels," Warren replied, though actually his knee felt fine, or as fine as he could expect it to feel at the age of sixty-six. Sometimes he got a little queasy at the sight of his diminished legs, or the way the skin hung so loosely from his arms and shoulders. It was as if his body had become a stranger who mocked his memories of what he once could do. Warren's own father, when he'd reached this age, never dreamt of playing tennis or riding bicycles--he sat inside the sun-porch of the house on 13th street, looking out over the bay and contemplating the time he had left.

Miriam took the chair next to Warren and flipped open a magazine called Better Living. Tenacious in her optimism, she seemed through some wonder of nutritional science to be getting younger. Years ago, when Warren was still breakfasting on sausage and eggs, Miriam had begun eating whole-grain cereals sprinkled with wheat germ, and dark-green salads, and frothy blender drinks made of fresh fruit and yogurt. Her change in diet had come like a conversion, and slowly Warren had been won over to her ways--not because he saw anything spiritually sustaining about plant-based proteins, but because he had a loathsome fear of heart attack. Recently, however, when Dr. Smithson said that his cholesterol was impressively low, Warren had not felt as elated as the doctor supposed; good health now seemed a mere reminder of the wantonness of mishap, equally undeserved.

Bradley had been a troubled kid, no doubt about it. Still, Warren had been willing to forgive him for his failings, even empathize with him. The boy smoked marijuana and probably did more serious things, and once caused a woman to crash her Toyota by pelting the windshield with eggs. He wore his hair even longer than did his friends, rarely washed it, and sometimes bound it in a ponytail. He had long, strong legs but a pretty meager upper body; yet he wasn't afraid to defend himself, and once punched his own dad. This had pleased Warren, hearing about Bradley socking John Linkletter in the gut; occasionally Warren desired to do the same. His son-in-law was by then nearly 40 years old, but still would forget to pick up Bradley after work, or not go to work at all, or return home with his clothes full of the smoke of some downtown dive, his breath sour with gin. You had to give Bradley the benefit of the doubt with a father like that, Warren had decided. You had to hope the boy would grow into a strong and decent man.

When Bradley was fifteen, Warren had hired him as a crewman on his purse-seiner, and the boy's smirking suspicion of the adult world slowly melted in the sweat and thrill of lucrative labor. On Warren's boat Bradley earned a $4,000 share that first summer, and bought himself a red MGB with a black canvas top. Even John Linkletter was pleased that his son had finally found something he could take seriously, although maybe a little envious, too, now that Bradley's future looked brighter than his own. Warren knew better. The gravy days of salmon fishing were almost over. If a kid was serious about becoming a fisherman he'd have to go to Alaska, which is what Bradley eventually did.

He was eighteen by then, and Warren had already sold his boat. A guy he knew in Seattle who owned several King-crabbing vessels was now a millionaire, and even crew members were doing extremely well: one kid purportedly earned seventy-grand in just a couple months. The drawback was that the work was brutally dangerous. The boats fished in the winter in the Bering Sea, mostly in darkness, and accidents resulting in lost fingers and mangled hands, even deaths, were calculated as just another business expense. So Warren should have known--did know--what might happen. But he himself had fished in the Aleutians as a very young man and now treasured the experience as a kind of mental heirloom. Back then the crews kept live chickens on board, and hauled in the big purse-seine nets entirely by hand, and some of the older men still knew how to navigate based on the position of the stars. In those days, too, a guy could make a lot of money very quickly. And the danger--hell, Warren had figured, what was the point of adventure without a little danger?

Should he never have mentioned Alaska? Should he have put his foot down--he, the only adult whom the boy was willing to obey? But how could he? The kid was legally grown up. And who could blame him for wanting to get away from John Linkletter, for wanting to show that he could be a big success in the world after all?

These questions Warren had asked himself dozens of times. Yet it had been a mostly private inquiry. Miriam warned him that captive grief was at least as bad for his heart as saturated fats, but talking only made Warren less certain of the things he thought he knew. What was he supposed to do, renounce the way he'd lived? Miriam had never been up there herself, and Warren feared she'd see the surface of his distress but not its depths. Often he thought about the letter that had arrived on a cold and sunny February afternoon, a hastily scrawled message full of exclamation points and capitalized words: "Grandpa, I'm scared SHITless!! I think the skipper wants to get us all KILLED!!! All I really want is to sleep, or hide, or throw up, but puking is the only thing I have TIME for! Can all the money in the world be worth something this BAD???"

Warren had clacked out a reply on a typewriter sadly in need of a fresh ribbon, carefully explaining how fear was something that lurked inside us all, how we had to conquer fear, and not let it control us. "When you come home, you'll be a man in ways that most men never are," Warren wrote. "You'll have something inside you, something you can draw from for the rest of your life." And then he had ridden Miriam's bicycle to the post office a mile-and-a-half away, and returned home feeling invigorated by exercise and satisfied that he'd done the right thing.

Late that night, after re-reading his grandson's letter, Warren had knelt over the toilet and thrown up. He wished that he could retrieve his own letter from the vaults of the post office and scratch out all his high-minded advice; what Bradley really needed was to get the hell out of there. It was the boy's description of the darkness that had sickened the old man. "We get up after maybe four hours of sleep, if were lucky, and everything is BLACK! The skipper switches on the deck light so we can see what were doing, and then we see each other, and all the machinery around us, but past that circle of brightness everything is still BLACK!! Is this what outer space is like, black and cold and empty??? They say the waters so cold if you fell overbord youd be dead before they found you. But I don't think they COULD find you. We wouldn't even no where to LOOK!!!"

Hunched in his lawn chair now, the sun climbing in the sky, his wife's shadow falling over the pages of her magazine, Warren sunk his chin into the palms of his hands and pressed his fingers against his cheeks. At times like this he felt cocooned within his memories, beyond the world's reach; it was therefore a surprise to sense Miriam's hand against the blanched hair at the base of his neck. In a voice intended to soothe him, she said, "You must be thinking about him again."

"Who else would I be thinking about?"
"There was nothing you could have done."
"I didn't have to send him up there, did I?"
"You didn't send him. He went out of his own free will."
"Oh, Miriam, do we have to keep telling these same stupid lies?"
She was silent for a moment, then rubbed her hand against his left shoulder. "Let's go for a walk this afternoon--it's not that often we get a day this good."

Warren gazed directly into the sun, so that large red spots lingered in his field of vision. "What in hell's so good about it? Will you tell me that? What's so good about the way we live now?"

Miriam sighed and flipped shut her magazine and lowered her orange-tinted sunglasses, and she and Warren sat side by side, while the life on the street around them remained as still as a scene in a photograph. Miriam used to tell him that things had a way of working out, and although she'd finally discarded this belief, she retained a capacity for resilience that made Warren feel as brittle as a bone. When he closed his eyes now he could see the boy's stringy black hair down near his shoulders and curling up like a girl's, the thin, silver chain around his neck, the sloping chin that Warren recognized as his own, the way the kid would gaze at you when he thought he was being duped, the eyebrows rising and his small, thin-lipped mouth opening so he could say, "Oh yeah?" Two days after receiving the letter Warren had tried to contact the boat through the marine-operator, but the skipper either had his radio off or was simply too far out. In any case, Warren was not exactly sure what he planned to ask. Send my grandson home because I fear for his safety? That was a decision that Bradley himself would have to make--or so Warren believed at the time.

By now the Frazier girl was making another pass down the street, and Miriam nudged Warren in the arm. He could already hear the clicking sound of the playing cards, and when he finally opened his eyes she was just a couple houses away, a tall and skinny kid whose long red hair came out from beneath her helmet and wound around her neck like a scarf. It occurred to Warren that she'd never know how beautiful that hair was, that she'd never even know what a cumulus cloud looked like on a breezy afternoon.

She was riding along the right side of the road, the part where no cars parked. Then she was veering closer to the curb and Warren realized with looming apprehension that the sonar device was by no means foolproof. First the pedal gashed against the asphalt and then came the scrape of fenders and frame, and the girl's outstretched hands, followed by her shoulder and hip. Soon she was sitting up and gripping her upper arm and quietly moaning.

Miriam was the first to reach her, with Warren hobbling several steps behind. "Are you okay, sweetie?" she asked, crouching down and holding the child by the wrist.

"I think so," the girl replied, slowly and evenly. The fingers that had been pressed against her arm were now dabbed with blood; she lifted them to her nose and sniffed.

"It's just a scrape," said Warren. He wished that he could lift her from the pavement and carry her home, and present her to her stunned but grateful father. "Move your arm around slowly to make sure nothing's wrong."

The girl did as she was asked, then pursed her lips and said, "I knew that curb was coming! I should have been more careful!"

Next she asked about her bike and Warren gingerly raised the vehicle until it stood upright, and examined the tires and the rim, and made sure the handlebars were straight, and lifted the rear wheel and cranked the pedal and listened to the shifting gears. The only signs of damage were a couple of silver scrapes along the cherry-red frame.

With vague regret he told her that everything was fine.
Miriam asked, "Do you want us to walk you home?"


The girl shook her head. "But thank you. My parents will be very pleased to hear about your concern." And then she took her bike from Warren by the handlebars, felt for the curb with her foot, lifted the bicycle onto the sidewalk, and turned and headed toward her house.

"She's fearless," Warren said in a low and tired voice.
"She really is."
"You think that's a good thing?"
"It's just the way some people are," Miriam replied with a shrug, and then they both watched as the girl disappeared with the bike inside of her garage. After a moment Warren closed his eyes and tried to imagine what it would be like to be blind, to be unable to see the way things really were. But he couldn't imagine this, any more than he could imagine a world without him in it. To Miriam he whispered: "I'm surprised her father lets her ride at all. Doesn't he realize she might get hurt?"



Current Issue | Mystic No. 1 Contents |