Thank You and Good Night Page 2

  Standing in the field near Cayuga Lake, on vacation for but a week of the summer, Emery’s hunt now only chilled him and offered a sobering trill through his mind. The warm kill at his feet, so unwieldy and replenishing, was no longer something of which he might be proud. The downed animal was neither the triumph of man over beast nor the fruition of a weapon’s clamor against life, but instead presented itself as stunning proof of nature’s coldness, her invasive and grave-hungry truth that the largest of monsters could be killed by something as simple as a child’s ingenuity.

  “You look displeased, my boy.”

  “Well, it’s just dead now. It’s not great anymore,” Emery said.

  Of course there was Paige. Back home. Another Binger. A little girl of such temerity that she often followed him about on school grounds questioning his adventures, each detail and unlikelihood. A pretty killjoy in pigtails with notebook and pencil. There could be triumph there, at least, as she heard out his adventures. When he returned to Binghamton from his family’s vacation, he would have a wondrous story for her. One so courageous she would have no choice but to abandon her scrutiny and simply adore him, for once. Riding a mastodon to its perish was much more difficult than riding a high stepper, but the one had trained him for the other, and perhaps he would bring Paige to his father’s stable and show her the two horses. One was a dray, but cared for and not yet old. He would demonstrate and reenact the mastodon hunt for Paige. He thought of her often, a new arrangement. Truly, he thought more often about why he thought of her, and had yet come any real conclusion, though his knowledge of heart matters was not lacking and he did understand the impetuousness of that strange fever between boys and girls. It was quite palpable, and Paige seemed the sort of person to impress, he supposed. People like that deserved adventures, even those that were not their own. She would want to write his adventure into her little notebook, of course, but how little her pencil would flutter when she saw his form atop the dray horse. How believable he would be.

  The sound hurried across the field from the lake. An irascible and authoritative noise most certainly issued from the lungs of his troll-faced brother.

  “EMERY. DINNER.”

  “IT’S ONLY FOUR.”

  “IT’S SIX. COME ON.”

  That no fouler sound could have left a man than that loathsome voice of William’s was no assurance against doing what the older brother ordered. William’s lecturing, judgmental tone woke Emery some mornings, sent him to lunch, told him about girls, and uncorroborated a great many things Emery felt were true in the world. Mastodons were not real, and William was obliged to flaunt such information. The older brother was entirely incorrect, however; it was William’s nature to be wrong, in all ways known to science and logic, and concerning every possible thing. In fact, William was known across Binghamton as having been perpetually wrong for the longest duration any one man had ever been known to be mistaken. The only time William was correct was when repeating the words of the parents.

  Emery looked down at his kill, saber in hand, and this view burned into his mind as aching proof of how silly and boring his brother had become over the past year. This felt good to note, and so he kept the thought, making his way across the field toward the lake and vacationing families. Lieutenant Merrill stayed behind, taking back his steel blade and hitching Lauderdale to a walnut tree.

  “Another day, my boy,” he said to the exiting young man.

  Susa brought the popping frankfurters from the cast-iron skillet into the house. The fire, a source of sit-around warmth, was diminishing in the twilight of Cayuga’s hills, and the chill of the air had brought the family into the house for dinner. Sitting at the wooden table in the small, rented cabin, the family talked over the day’s events and the happenings of their collective vacation. The mustard was fancy and the catsup, watery, but the salt of the frankfurters was more than enough flavor to induce good salivation and the sating of stomachs.

  “How about a night fish?” Henry asked his boys.

  “In the dark?” Susa asked, her acute, mothering sense having been tripped by the idea of children operating after nine p.m.

  “Well sure. We have a lantern, don’t we? I’m sure we brought it. And there’s good fish in this lake night or day. Not like they can go anywhere.”

  “I don’t want to fish tonight. I want to make a compass,” William responded. Henry had a bite of the cylindrical meat and its bread housing, chewed with a nod as he looked on his youngest.

  “Well, what about you, Emery? Fish tonight?”

  “That’d be fun,” Emery agreed, “We’ll catch breakfast.”

  “Please clean them yourselves,” Susa commented in mock annoyance.

  “And I thought tomorrow we’d go to Taughannock,” the father added.

  “Oh, I can use my compass there,” William said, a nudge of excitement tilting his brows up from their usual place behind the thick, black rim of his glasses.

  Susa licked her lips and reached for the pitcher, pouring water into her glass with an articulate wrist. Her mood was pleasant; the lake trip had excited her all the way to smiles. Cayuga was family time, away from the shop and school, away from routine. Being away from the usual mode was helpful to her, no matter how well-meaning the city was for her at home. Binghamton was pleasant, but it was easier to uncover a sense of felicity when there were fewer things to distract her. A person could be quite pleased with life, but not know it through all the weather of occupations and institutions and the street-side, domestic din so common back home.

  “I want to go there. To Taughannock. First thing tomorrow,” Emery voiced.

  “Yeah,” William agreed.

  “Oh, it really is a lovely park,” Susa said, “I enjoy the smell up there.”

  “Sure, it’s nice,” Henry said, “Expansive place. Big.”

  Emery swallowed a bit of his meal and had a small sip of water. After rubbing his eye with a palm and fighting off a bit of weariness, he announced with certainty the adventure of his day.

  “I brought down a mastodon today.” Henry stopped chewing and lifted his curious eyes. William frowned.

  “Oh did you?” the father inquired.

  “Couldn’t kill it the usual way. Too large. I had to cut its throat.”

  “Now, Emery,” Susa said, a touch reproachful. She noticed that her son’s hair was misbehaving in the back and this bothered her. The young boy had his father’s hair, mostly, but her uncle’s troublesome licks near the whorl.

  “Carotid artery. Bled it out,” Emery said, mild.

  “Huh,” Henry muttered, taking in his son.

  “Did it with a cavalry sword,” the boy continued, “Crept up on it for an hour, so I didn’t spook it.”

  “Say, that was smart of you,” the father accommodated.

  “I know.”

  “You ran around in the field like a moron,” William voiced then, “I watched you do it.” The father looked over both of his boys and had another bite. Through this mouthful of nitrated pork and breading, he asked a simple question.

  “Well, which is it, Em? Did you hunt a mastodon, or run around like a moron?”

  “Moron,” William chose.

  “William, stop it,” their mother said. Emery set his frankfurter on the small plate and folded his arms across his chest. He had no need to answer, and knew which he had been.

  The importance of his day thus spent now occluded into the more familial importance of a night well spent. This came, the late night, and there was fishing to do, and tomorrow, Taughannock. That a tour of the state park might please his parents and brother was only a secondary objective. Emery’s true mission was to keep them safe from the roving samurai that had made their encampments shortly out of view of the main trails. The armor placement on these foes made them a particular nuisance, even for a man as submerged in the tactics of war as Lieutenant Merrill.

  Susa reached into her handbag and retrieved a steel comb, set it beside her youngest son’s plate. The s
ilvery tines loomed as if filaments, undulating like the legs of a centipede. The comb arched its back then and inched toward his hand.

  “Sticking up in the back,” his mother said.

  Chapter Two

  North High School was a matryoshka. Dolls within dolls. First the outer layer of street and yard, parking and brush. The father. Once lifted free, there was but the structure, cube-like with an awning and sheer supports in the face. The mother. When this was lifted, thrown aside, there was yet a smaller layer, hallways and rooms bustling with talk and worry. The school’s brood in the school’s image. Removing this gave one a row of lockers, each pregnant with the relics of education and personal need, and within these were the smallest dolls, the Micro-men, propped up and bolted back into the hind-wall of each locker, small men made of steel with penny slots and sage eyes. They were babies in the matryoshka. They were wise machines and each young boy or girl was assigned one. A student would open a locker, choose whatever book was needed for the next class, and if there was need and a penny, they would face and activate their Micro-man. That student would have made it to the center of the North High matryoshka, to the smallest doll, and now might incur the most expensive, inner-sanctum wisdom of the school.

  Emery glanced over his Micro-man, which was humanoid in shape and consisted of various cogs and clothed wiring, a press-plate atop its head and a slot for copper currency in its open, tin hand. He drew his day’s penny from his pocket and, debating what else he might use if for, resigned himself to a bout of wisdom. The penny was placed in the tin hand, and the coin began down the narrow groove in the arm, scraping and rolling along until finally dropping into the steel gut of the machine. There was a puff of exhaust as the mouth of Emery’s assigned Micro-man opened and the word came out.

  “Question?” asked the voice, metallic and fuzzed with the close-quarters of locker walls.

  “Hello dwarf. I need advice about a girl.”

  Near him, another young man shut his own locker and glanced over at Emery, having heard the question.

  “That doesn’t work, you know. All they know is fact,” the other student said.

  “Mine’s different. Bashed it with a brick last term. Thinks it knows everything now and it tries to answer. Can’t say ‘no’ anymore,” Emery replied.

  “You should get it fixed, then.”

  The young man left for his class and was quickly replaced by another young student at another nearby locker. They came and went.

  “Question?” the Micro-man repeated. Emery lowered his voice and leaned closer to the mechanical figure.

  “It’s Paige Girdwood. What do you know about her? I want to take her to the promenade. She likes Hugh Karcher. I want her to like me, instead.”

  The Micro-man whirred to life and a brief light shot from its ears. The cogs within turned and a scent of ozone wafted from Emery’s locker. The familiar smell of gaining an answer. The sounds of machinery tapered into a dull rattle and the Micro-man spoke.

  “The name is English. Paige: Attendant. Servicer of homes or nobles.”

  “Sure. How do I get her to like me, instead of liking Hugh?” There was no response, however. Emery sighed and reached into his pocket, inserted another penny into the tin hand, watched it roll into the machine.

  “Question?” the factoid golem asked.

  “How do I get Paige Girdwood to like me instead of Hugh Karcher?” Clicks and whirrs. A tussle of smoke across metal that drifted from the locker and dissipated upward.

  “An attendant’s respect calls good faith and fondness,” the Micro-man replied.

  “So… I should get her respect? And that’ll give her good faith in me, and fondness?” No answer. Penny. Insert.

  “Question?”

  “If I get Paige Girdwood’s respect, she’ll have faith in me and be fond of me?” Emery asked.

  “She’ll attend a home or noble,” the machine repeated.

  “But I’m only in high school, dwarf. I’m just a normal citizen. I live in my parents’ home.” Penny. Insert. Annoyance.

  “Question?”

  “How do I get to be noble?”

  “Show your value, station, or courage as being worthy of attendance.”

  “I have no value, dwarf. My station is… it’s not much. And I’m not courageous.”

  “Ignoble,” the Micro-man added, giving a free correction. These were rare.

  “I’ll throw you out with the trash,” Emery said, inserting another penny. It rolled down the arm and clanked into the gut bin with the others. This coin-scratched digestive tract was beginning to sound somewhat full. Emery was running out of pennies.

  “Question?”

  “Listen to me: I want to know how to be what she’s looking for. I can’t raise my station yet, so how would I go about maybe getting some value and showing the courage thing you told me?”

  “Value: Be needed. Courage: Show no fear.”

  “Well, that’s kind of a stretch. What could she possibly need from me? And what the hell am I supposed to show no fear about?” No answer without more money.

  “You’re useless. Give me my pennies back.”

  The route of mathematics was steep in the wonders of numerical alchemy. That the stately number ten might stomp the guts from a six by simply being more easily used was a sort of blessing. The metric system seemed to discern this, but the system he knew the more was not so fond of tens being hundreds being thousands. It preferred pounds into tons and inches into miles. These were strange affairs, but seemed crucial in any industry he might enter.

  Emery inched toward class with a defeated, ninety-five pound posture and the robust sense of being unfairly smitten. How many liters made up Paige Girdwood? It felt as if a mile passed beneath his shoes while walking the hallway. 5,280 feet of thought. Which were sixty-some-odd-thousand inches. If he were to write down every instance of thinking about Paige Girdwood over the last two terms, that barely countable number would bear an exponent. Converted to a percent, would this amount of thinking dedicated to the incredibly fetching nature of her come close to equaling ten percent of his conscious time in thought? Or a more Gregorian six minutes of each hour? Paige thought he was a twit. He might have been. As he walked toward his next class, the weight of his ruminations bore a full ton, but he had no time to think over these things: A bell rang across the air like the icy squeal of an angry cornet. Emergency. Emergency. He was exactly late.

  Hugh Karcher sat in the next row, two seats closer to the front. He just undulated there, his troll flesh roiled in pits on his face that some foolishly called dimples. The cleft in his chin was as if someone had placed a nail there. His idealized frame was simply given to him and the rudimentary ability of catching a rotund little ball had caused Hugh (often referred to as ‘The Karch’) to possess a certain value among staff and other boys alike. And girls. That Emery had been denied varsity this year, in favor of the larger and yet lither, new quarterback, was a mild treachery, but did cause him to envy those who had again made the team. Hugh should have been halfback. Emery should have been handing off to the horned troll with knotted hands, not sourly pitting himself against the boy for a girl that preferred Brawns over Ichabods.

  The day of classes spanned the destruction of Carthage and the geometric intrigue of quatrefoils, to his brief mulling over of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness aloud during class discussion. This synopsis was met with yawns and disagreement. In his next-to-last class, Emery’s proximity to sleep during reflections on the common use of bicarbonates brought him tight-rope close to being officially disciplined. He had, in his final class for the day, whacked a baseball quite far, and this had caused his mood to fetter upward a bit, so the day was not an entire loss. As he packed at his locker, ready to go home, the Micro-man did aid in reminding him to study his economics for the following day’s test, gratis, fulfilling its only payment-free function. Some things worked out well enough, he supposed, even if what you wanted most did not.

  FADE OUT
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  FADE IN

  As school began to empty, young women and men exiting through the outer layer of campus, the girls awaiting parents and the men exiting to their walks home or, in rarity, cars, Emery found Paige near her locker. She was engaged in talk with Hugh, of course, and this young man was holding her books and leaning against the wall in an assured manner as she rummaged in her locker for some item or two. Emery walked into their midst like a ship’s bow ploughing through two squid attempting to mate.

  “What’s buzzin’, cousin?” he asked.

  “Oh… hi,” Paige responded. The Karch raised an eyebrow, a bit agitated at the intrusion.

  “I don’t mean to interrupt, uh, but you see I have a tiny man that lives in my locker, and he told me that I’m quite fond of you, and I wanted to briefly ask if you might let me accompany you to the prom,” Emery said. Maybe he had ideas about courage and being noble, or else he was simply the sort that exposed things once he deemed they were taking up too much of his thought. Why hide an important thing? For better or worse, Emery was an insolent or concluding sort of person.

  “Hey, hey, back off, Asher. I just asked her that,” Hugh said.

  “A man in your locker?” Paige asked, intrigued.