The Narrows(74)
It was the garage that bothered her. Even when she could not remember it, she knew she had dreamt of it in the night. It was a subliminal text hidden between the pages of her pleasant and youthful dreams of summers among the tree-lined roads while kicking up balls of dead leaves as she bulldozed through the forest. Tree frogs croaked and the summer crickets sounded like mechanical sprinklers going off. Yet this notion of darkness—a closet of darkness opening up into more darkness, like those Russian fertility dolls—right here on the property, right here in the yard, never fully left her.
She passed now through the kitchen, the moonlight coming through the curtained windows and the glass in the back door the color of the moon. No different would it be if the Crawly house—right here, right now—existed on the moon. She thought of the great horned owls and tried to remember if they were from real life or her dreams.
Brandy opened the back door. Frigid air rushed into the kitchen, rattling papers on the corkboard in the laundry room and twirling dead leaves around the slouching porch. In the distance, she could hear wind chimes.
Maybe I’m still asleep, she thought…but didn’t think it was true. Maybe I’m not standing here at all.
Across the yard, she could see the dark frame of the detached garage. Wind rattled the bushes and moaned through the eaves of the house. It chilled Brandy’s bones and her skin prickled beneath the thin fabric of her nightclothes.
Without giving it a conscious thought, she stepped out onto the porch. The floorboards creaked beneath her bare feet and the screen door slammed against the frame as she let it go. There was a rusty, scraping sound, and it took her several seconds to realize it was the wind bullying the clothesline that hung from the porch to the garage; the line jounced fiercely in the metal wheel that was hooked to the side of the garage.
The chrome on Matthew’s bike glowed in the moonlight. It still lay slouched against the side of the garage, causing a weakening tremor to vibrate up through the center of Brandy’s body. Before she realized what she was doing, she descended the porch steps and stood in the cool dirt of the yard, facing the garage.
And the garage was alive. Seeing this, she stopped moving and stood in absolute fear and immobility at the foot of the porch steps. The garage moved. Or, rather, parts of it moved: she could see them clearly enough even in the dark. Swarthy, undulating husks of deeper darkness hidden among the black. It—
Bats, she knew.
They still hung from the eaves of the garage. There were several of them dangling upside down from the clothesline, too. The nearby hedges were alive with them. Their fluttery wings and scrabbling claws and high-pitched chirps were suddenly all she could hear. It made the hairs on the back of her neck stand at attention.
Just then, a cold wind whipped down from the mountains and coursed through the gutted valley of the dying town. The sound of the wind in the trees was like the clash of the ocean’s surf on a rocky shore. The wind emanating from the hollowed trunks of trees moaned like the mournful cries of the ghosts of anguished mothers.
As she stood there, she heard something move inside the garage. It was a subtle sound, like the repositioning of feet on a gritty floor, but she heard it nonetheless. This was followed by a much louder sound, the sound of something crashing from within the garage…items being knocked to the floor and kicked about.
Brandy took several steps closer to the garage. In the eaves, the black bats’ claws scrabbled for more secure footholds along the perimeter of the garage. Off to her left, the bats in the hedges twittered and hummed like electronic equipment. This close to Matthew’s bike, a dizzying wave of sadness threatened to collapse her to the ground. She fought it off with all the strength she could muster.
Someone is in the garage…
“Matthew?” Her voice was shaky and unsure. Above, the bats squealed like pigs and Brandy blinked, suddenly realizing there were at least twice as many as she had originally thought—the darkness was playing tricks on her eyes.
Then, for reasons hidden too deeply within her subconscious to be examined and fully understood, she thought of a summer where she’d bounced about in the passenger seat of her father’s pickup truck, some Americana rock song straining the speakers of the truck’s radio, a set of fishing poles and a five-gallon bucket stowed in the bed of the truck. Just Brandy and her dad, driving out in the early predawn hours to his favorite fishing hole at the crook where Wills Creek emptied into the cold and gray Potomac River, hot air pumping from the dashboard vents and the smell of her father’s cologne filling the cab. In her mind’s eye, she could see her father clear as day, the unshaven scruff at his cheeks, his chin, his neck; the somber blue eyes hidden beneath the shadowed bill of the Orioles baseball cap he wore; his big-knuckled hands gripping the steering wheel while he occasionally spit gobs of tobacco juice into an old plastic Gatorade bottle. Tattered paperbacks slid back and forth across the top of the dashboard—old Aldo Leopold essays and a book called Four Seasons North that was about arctic and subarctic exploration.
Land is important, Hugh Crawly would tell his daughter. Land is most important, Brandy. This town used to be alive. Now it’s dead. People do that to the land. We build things up and make machines that fly and crush and swim and kill, but people do it. It’s our fault Stillwater is dying.
She could smell him, even now—a smell like gun oil and cheap cologne. Those were the same scents he would leave on the couch cushions after he’d sat there watching an old black-and-white movie on the weekends or football on Monday nights.