How to Find Your Way in the Dark Read online

  Lenny warmed the water on the gas stove and carried the heavy pot to the bathtub, where he poured it in, mixing it with some colder water to increase the volume. Sheldon stepped into it naked and turned the water to blood as he ran the washcloth over himself with a bar of white soap. Lenny forced Sheldon to drain it and sit there shivering as he warmed another pot and poured it in. They repeated this until Sheldon was clean and Lenny satisfied.

  From the bedroom drawers, Lenny pulled out a pair of dungarees that buttoned up at the chest and a white work shirt with three buttons and no collar. These weren’t school clothes, but they were clean and a number of farm kids came to class looking far worse.

  “You’ve barely said a word. You in one of those no-talking moods?”

  “I’m talking,” Sheldon said.

  “You want to explain what’s what to me?” Lenny asked.

  “I can’t.”

  “Suit yourself.”

  * * *

  Their walk to school was light and airy on that Friday morning. They turned off the main road for Mill River, which was running shallow from the drought. Hands in their pockets, the boys stepped lightly from rounded stone to rounded stone, Lenny leading the way and Sheldon matching Lenny’s steps, glad not to be talking.

  Sheldon halted where the river crossed beneath the road through a wide culvert. Someone had tossed a paper from the road above and it was still dry.

  “Boston Daily Globe ?” Lenny asked.

  Sheldon shook his head. “Sentinel.”

  Lenny didn’t rate the Fitchburg Sentinel. He was a Boston Daily Globe guy and never explained the reason, but Sheldon slowed to a halt and opened it up. He wanted to see whether the accident was mentioned as Lenny passed through to the other side.

  Newspapers had always been a comfort to him. His father often read the evening editions aloud over dinner and brought up topics that he and his mother would discuss. Along with the new radio and the old phonograph (and school), newspapers were Sheldon’s gateway to the world. Joseph liked to say that newspapers didn’t tell people what to think, but they did tell them what to think about, and it was helpful for people to share questions because it was the only way to arrive at a common answer. Their family needed to follow along too, he had said. “We don’t want to be left out, do we?”

  Sheldon flipped past the big news and looked for a picture of the Krupinski truck, but there was nothing.

  He landed on page four, which had a strange photograph of a dozen hands all clapping under a headline that read, THE UNSEEN HAND . . .

  It was an advertisement for motion pictures and provided the show listings at the bottom.

  Sheldon had not been to a theater since his mother died and was certain he’d never go to another movie for the rest of his life. The advertisement read:

  Send an expedition to Africa to film this glorious novel in its authentic locale! Locate a little English boy to depict the heart-stirring story of a beloved Dickens character! Search the world for the one man who knows better than all the others how people lived in Elizabethan days! It is for your entertainment that an army of the world’s greatest talents is ever on the march, forging ahead to open new vistas for your delight. Spare nothing, says Hollywood, to make the motion picture theatre the happy haven it is, the place to which millions may confidently come for the freedom from boredom and care . . . for romance that warms the heart . . . for hearty laughter and eye-filling beauty. The unseen hands applaud—and we who make the motion pictures hear the echo. It guides us, inspires us, challenges us to fresh endeavors to make the movies better and better.

  “Sheldon,” Lenny yelled back at him. “We’re already late!”

  Sheldon didn’t hurry up, though. Balancing on two rocks as the river babbled under his legs, Sheldon lowered the paper and stood there looking through the culvert at Lenny.

  This wasn’t the first time Sheldon had become sidetracked on their way to school, but they really were late and Lenny was sick of getting into trouble. He shouted: “Miss Simmons’s father is the sheriff. He’s going to kill us. Can we go?”

  “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do,” Sheldon said.

  “Left foot, right foot, repeat,” Lenny said, his voice amplified through the culvert. He was framed by the black circle as though it were an enormous scope on a rifle.

  “You think things can just go on like before?” Sheldon asked.

  “You mean because of your mom?”

  Sheldon didn’t answer.

  “No,” Lenny said. “I guess not. What does your dad think?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You should ask him.”

  * * *

  Miss Simmons was sitting on the school steps in her long thick woolen skirt watching the children play at recess when Lenny and Sheldon came strolling up. Lenny’s left foot was soaked from having slipped in the river. It was 10:30 in the morning and two hours after school began. For these two reasons, she’d have normally turned the two boys around like little soldiers and marched them right back home with an assignment to explain to their parents why they’d been removed from school today, but Carol Simmons saw that Sheldon Horowitz was trailing in Lenny’s wake and her heart went out to him. He had once been a vivacious, talkative, highly motivated student and then his mother had died in that horrible fire, and he’d turned inward and quiet and withdrawn. He was still an excellent student and she thanked heaven for the boy’s father, who—though no educator himself—was dogged about Sheldon’s progress and was a stable force in his life. She knew this well because she’d lost her own mother when she was young.

  Miss Simmons stood as they approached.

  Sheldon looked clean and cared for; his bushy black hair was washed and combed, and aside from some boyhood scrapes on his cheek and an odd bruise on his forehead she chose to ignore, he looked neat if a bit thin. She was glad for that. He was hard to manage and more of a personality than she might have preferred, but Carol Simmons had a soft spot for him. Such beautiful blue eyes shining out from under that mop.

  “Sheldon? Are you doing OK?” She knew he’d been to Hartford and she knew why.

  Sheldon didn’t know how to answer that. Compared to everyone else in his family, he was doing pretty well. “I don’t really know how I’m supposed to be doing, ma’am,” he said.

  “No,” she said, brushing down her pleats and checking her hair. “Of course not.”

  * * *

  Sheldon sat out the day at his desk watching Miss Simmons. The blue skies were calling the wind back and the trees were starting to blow and dance again outside the classroom window. Sheldon, though, wasn’t interested in the leaves; he was watching the pleats on Miss Simmons skirt move back and forth. They weren’t affecting him like they did last week, though. Before his father died, Sheldon had been watching her legs. Now it was the fabric itself that commanded his attention. It was a tweed pattern of some kind. Mostly gray with tiny threads of red and blue woven in. It looked heavy, clothing for winter but open underneath. What a thing, Sheldon thought: to walk around all exposed like that all the time.

  * * *

  After school, Lenny had baseball practice, so Sheldon walked home alone. Though mid-September, it wasn’t sweater weather yet. There were faster ways to get home than retracing his footsteps along the river, but he didn’t want to take them. As best he could, he returned on the same stones and tried to revisit the same thoughts along the way.

  Sheldon stopped when the cottage came into view. There on the doorstep were the Krupinski brothers—Ronny and Theo—both wearing suspenders that held up stained work pants. They wore matching engineer boots of the same size. He wondered whether they could keep the pairs straight.

  Ronny was older and thicker with a barrel chest, and was close to twenty years old. He had the brain of a newt and the body of a boxer. His eyes were too close together for even Bible thumpers to dismiss the monkey theory of evolution. Theo was more slender and taller and two years younger. If he was an
y smarter, Sheldon didn’t know it. What he did know was that the brothers barely tolerated him and his family because—for reasons he didn’t understand—being Polish was better than being Jewish. The standoff between them was on account of Old Bruno and Joseph having both served in the war. And maybe Bruno knew in his heart that Joseph was strong and clear-eyed whereas he was now a folding drunk.

  Ronny the oaf saw Sheldon first. “Where’s our truck, Little Shit?”

  The truck? Sheldon hadn’t given any thought to the truck since leaving the accident. It hadn’t crossed his mind that he’d left the truck behind with his father. Not that he could have done anything about it.

  “There was an accident,” Sheldon whispered.

  “What was that, Little Shit?”

  “There was an accident,” Sheldon said, raising his voice with his indignation.

  More than that, Sheldon didn’t want to say. The knowledge of what happened was sacred to him somehow, as though holding on to the secret of his father made the truth his alone. If he’d been inclined to tell anyone, it would have been Lenny, and after him, Miss Simmons. He wasn’t about to hand that over to Ronny and Theo Krupinski.

  “What kind of accident?” said the hissing, slithering Theo.

  “A bad one,” said Sheldon.

  Ronny took a step in his direction and Sheldon took a step back. Either one of the brothers could snap Sheldon in two and everyone knew it.

  “Where’s the fucking truck!” shouted Theo.

  “South of Leeds. Sylvester Road. Check the bushes.”

  Theo took another step toward Sheldon, but Ronny stopped him.

  “Where’s your daddy?”

  “None of your business,” said Sheldon, trying to sound tough and brave but achieving neither. There was nothing he could do to his voice to make it intimidating. He hated that. He hated that about being young. At best, he could hold his ground. He decided not to step back again.

  “So, he’s not home, then,” said Theo, the smarter one.

  Theo tried the cottage’s doorknob and found it open. Sheldon had never thought to lock it. Did it even have a lock? The town was too small and isolated for wandering thieves, anyone local who robbed them would be caught, and what was inside anyway?

  Theo walked in and pulled Ronny in after him.

  Watching the Krupinski brothers invade his house was worse than being punched. Standing outside his home, he felt like the brothers were desecrating a grave.

  “Get out of there,” Sheldon said under his breath.

  The world did not yield.

  “Get out of my house,” he said louder but not loud enough, not loud enough to fill the Krupinski brothers with the dread to wake them from their actions and change their minds, not loud enough to reach any ears but his own.

  Sheldon stood there shaking with rage. Minutes passed but Sheldon couldn’t move his feet. When they emerged, the brothers were not empty-handed. Ronny, the larger of the two, was carrying Joseph’s clock in his arms with the care he would give to a sack of potatoes. Theo was carrying Sheldon’s mother’s monogrammed suitcase that Sheldon knew instantly was filled with all her best clothes and the few pieces of jewelry she hadn’t been wearing the night of the fire.

  Frozen in place as he watched this, Sheldon didn’t scream. The air in his lungs felt like a solid mass that couldn’t be pushed out; the muscles were too tensed around them to even move. Fists clenched, he tottered as Ronny walked up the road.

  “Collateral for the truck. We’ll be back for the rest. We know you’ve got more hidden away someplace. You fuckin’ Jews always have more hidden away. But we’ll find it. Don’t you worry.”

  Burn

  SHELDON WAITED OUTSIDE HIS house until darkness trying to think of what to do. He could have gone inside, but he didn’t want to. The house wasn’t only vacant now. It was also violated and gutted. He knew what a carcass looked like after it had been cleaned and the guts removed. It’s not really the animal anymore, only a hollow shell of one. Sheldon never got entirely used to seeing animals in traps or suddenly dead after a clean shot, but the sight of them cleaned and hanging never bothered him. The soul was long gone. That’s what the house looked like now.

  It was an Indian summer night and the dry air was smooth and soft on his skin. It was quiet too. There were few houses here to the west of town out by the forest. Not a car passed him that evening, only one horse and buggy that Sheldon took to be Mr. O’Neill, who dealt in scrap metal and spent the rest of his time restoring furniture he’d collect at people’s houses and lug back to his garage in a cart pulled by Mickey—a horse that wasn’t getting any younger or prettier.

  Neither Mr. O’Neill nor Mickey saw Sheldon in the shadows as they passed. He listened to the footfalls of the horse and the crunching sound of the wheels as they faded off into the distance and left only the silent breeze behind.

  Someone would find him eventually. This was the understanding that came to Sheldon in the silence after the horse and owner had gone. Maybe not tonight as he stood there, but sooner or later.

  Sooner or later they would wise up to his situation.

  Sooner or later they’d tear him away from here and send him to Hartford and Uncle Nate and Abe and Mirabelle. He was sure of it. He was too young to live on his own and the town was too small to not see it happening.

  Sheldon pictured that. He and Mirabelle in the same house. The smell of shampoo in the hallways.

  There was no going back to the house now. There was no living there anymore. The house wasn’t a home or a refuge now. It was a place. A place without life.

  But he wanted the clock back. And the suitcase and the clothes and the jewelry.

  And Sheldon Horowitz wanted them now.

  That’s when Sheldon thought about his father’s lighter.

  He used to play with it all the time. It was a solid brass piece. Not like those fancy new Zippos he’d seen around. This was a trench lighter. It was made from an old bullet casing that was wrapped in a second casing that he could move up and down along a ridge with his thumb, which displaced the cap. There was an iron wheel near the top, and when the cap was off and the windscreen was up, a single flick would shoot sparks onto the soaked cotton wick. It was a beautiful thing, a relic from the war, a keepsake.

  It was the thought of the lighter that made Sheldon walk back into the house.

  * * *

  An oil lamp burned on the kitchen table, and beyond its reach, the house was dark. Each doorway was a shadow hiding something unseeable. There was no fire in the fireplace, and his mother wasn’t here to brighten the night with the candles she’d place on the windowsills. Summer or winter, the dark was always pushed back by her one way or another.

  Taking the oil lamp with him, Sheldon walked up the stairs in his dirty shoes, leaving prints behind him. In his father’s closet he found his rucksack, a green canvas number with leather straps and brass fittings. It was a little big for Sheldon, but it would do for his plans.

  Back in his room, he found two pairs of trousers, some underwear and socks, three shirts he liked, and a winter parka.

  In his parents’ room, Sheldon’s worst suspicions were confirmed. The Krupinski brothers had cleaned out his mother’s closet and taken his father’s army medal. The drawers were all overturned. Her jewelry box was gone. From the opened dresser drawer, Sheldon removed his father’s infantry patch and a sheathed bayonet, neither of them worth a damn to the brothers. When he left the room where he used to snuggle between his parents on winter nights, he didn’t look back.

  Downstairs in the kitchen drawer, he located Joseph’s brass trench lighter.

  He slid up the shield and smelled the wick. It smelled sharp and caustic like gasoline.

  Sheldon took a last look around. Nothing that he cared about was here anymore. Not the people, not the things, not the future. The past he loved so much had been gutted from this place. Whatever was left was inside his head or in the possession of the Krupinski brothers.
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  And what was inside his head wasn’t nearly enough. He wanted his stuff back.

  He lit the tablecloth on fire.

  The edge caught, gently at first, until the fire started to widen along the frayed edges. Before it began to spread, the fire had only been an idea—one he could put out with his fingers the way he’d once seen his cousin Abe do to a wick. This fire, though, was now more than an idea. The thin blue edge crept higher up the fabric, and soon Sheldon smelled the smoke that was rising up to the ceiling and spreading outward, a cloud inside his own house.

  In a moment, it was beyond all control. What had started as an impulse had become a fact that lived outside of him—a creation larger than the creator, a creation bent on consumption and destruction.

  Sheldon stepped back in fear and awe at what he had made. And yet, as the flames reached the ceiling, he wasn’t sure whether he even wanted them to stop. As he watched everything he ever knew begin to burn—as he thought of his mother and the movie theater and all the people who must have been rushing to get out but who were trapped by the smoke and the dark—a part of him was thankful that the stillness had ended, that a decision had been made by someone, and whether the world would soon be better or worse, it would at least be blessedly different.

  He backed out of the kitchen and tripped over the threshold on the way out, landing on his backside.

  As he pushed himself backward, the first waves of scorching heat blasted his face. The shock of it against his skin jarred him, and for the first time since the car accident, he started to cry.

  Sheldon’s crying was silenced under the cracks and groans of the burning house and the sound of the wind being sucked into the fire. Sheldon crawled away, and at the front steps, he raised himself to his feet and distanced himself from the fire with his rucksack in tow.