Just After Sunset

  When Curtis saw the light coming through the holes in the cladding--the few that weren't facedown in the ditch--fading from peach to gray, he realized he was actually going to spend the night in this stinking coffin with two inches of water on the floor and a half-closed toilet hole at his feet. He was probably going to die in here, but that seemed academic. To spend the night in here, however--hours stacked on more hours, piles of hours like piles of great black books--that was real and unavoidable.

  The panic pounced again. He once more began to scream and pound the walls, this time turning around and around on his knees, first beating his right shoulder against one wall and then his left against the other. Like a bird caught in a church steeple, he thought, but could not stop. One flailing foot splattered the escaped turd against the bottom of the bench seat. He tore his pants. He first bruised his knuckles, then split them. At last he stopped, weeping and sucking at his hands.

  Got to stop. Got to save my strength.

  Then he thought: For what?

  By eight o'clock, the air had begun to cool. By ten o'clock, the puddle in which Curtis was lying had also cooled--seemed cold, in fact--and he began to tremble. He clutched his arms around himself and drew his knees up to his chest.

  I'll be all right as long as my teeth don't chatter, he thought. I can't bear to hear my teeth chatter.

  At eleven o'clock, Grunwald went to bed. He lay there in his pajamas under the revolving fan, looking up into the dark and smiling. He felt better than he had felt for months. He was gratified but not surprised. "Goodnight, neighbor," he said, and closed his eyes. He slept through the night without waking for the first time in six months.

  At midnight, not far away from Curtis's makeshift cell, some animal--probably just a wild dog, but to Curtis it sounded like a hyena--let out a long, screaming howl. His teeth began to chatter. The sound was every bit as awful as he had feared.

  Some unimaginable time later, he slept.

  When he woke up, he was shivering all over. Even his feet were jerking, tapdancing like the feet of a junkie in withdrawal. I'm getting sick, I'll have to go to the damn doctor, I ache all over, he thought. Then he opened his eyes, saw where he was, remembered where he was, and gave a loud, desolate cry: "Ohhhh...no! NO!"

  But it was oh yes. At least the Port-O-San wasn't entirely dark anymore. Light was coming through the circular holes: the pale rose glow of morning. It would soon strengthen as the day brightened and heated up. Before long he would be steam-cooking again.

  Grunwald will come back. He's had a night to think it over, he'll realize how insane this is, and he'll come back. He'll let me out.

  Curtis did not believe this. He wanted to, but didn't.

  He needed to take a leak in the worst way, but he was damned if he was going to piss in the corner, even though there was crap and used toilet paper everywhere from yesterday's overturning. He felt somehow that if he did that--a nasty thing like that--it would be the same as announcing to himself that he had given up hope.

  I have given up hope.

  But he hadn't. Not completely. As tired and achey as he was, as frightened and dispirited, part of him still hadn't given up hope. And there was a bright side: he felt no urge to gag himself, and he hadn't spent even a single minute of the night just gone by, nearly eternal though it had been, scourging his scalp with his comb.

  There was no need to piss in the corner, anyway. He would just raise the toilet seat lid with one hand, aim with the other, and let fly. Of course, given the Port-O-San's new configuration, that would mean pissing horizontally instead of at a downward-pointing angle. The current throb in his bladder suggested that would be absolutely no problem. Of course the final squirt or two would probably go on the floor, but--

  "But thems are the fortunes of war," he said, and surprised himself with a croaky laugh. "And as far as the toilet seat goes...fuck holding it up. I can do better than that."

  He was no Mr. Hercules, but both the half-ajar toilet seat and the flanges holding it to the bench were plastic--the seat and ring black, the flanges white. This whole goddam box was really just a cheap plastic prefab job, you didn't have to be a big-time construction contractor to see that, and unlike the walls and the door, there was no cladding on the seat and its fastenings. He thought he could tear it off pretty easily, and if he could he would--if only to vent some of his anger and terror.

  Curtis seized the seat and lifted it, meaning to grip the ring just beneath and pull sideways. Instead he paused, looking through the circular hole and into the tank beneath, trying to make sense of what he saw.

  It looked like a thin seam of daylight.

  He looked at this with perplexity into which hope came stealing slowly--not dawning, exactly, but seeming to rise through his sweaty, ordure-streaked skin. At first he thought it was either a swatch of fluorescent paint or an out-and-out optical illusion. This latter idea was reinforced when the line of light began to fade away. Little...less...least...

  But then, just before it could disappear completely, it began to brighten again, a line of light so brilliant he could see it floating behind his lids when he closed his eyes.

  That's sunlight. The bottom of the toilet--what was the bottom before Grunwald tipped it over--is facing east, where the sun just rose.

  And when it faded?

  "Sun went behind a cloud," he said, and shoved his sweat-clumped hair back from his forehead with the hand not holding the toilet seat. "Now it's out again."

  He examined this idea for the deadly pollution of wishful thinking and found none. The evidence was before his eyes: sunlight shining through a thin crack in the bottom of the Port-O-San's holding tank. Or perhaps it was a split. If he could get in there and widen that split, that glowing aperture into the outside world--

  Don't count on it.

  And to get to it, he would have to--

  Impossible, he thought. If you're thinking of wriggling into the holding tank through the toilet seat--like Alice into some shit-splattered Wonderland--think again. Maybe if you were the skinny kid you used to be, but that kid was thirty-five years ago.

  That was true. But he was still slim--he supposed his daily bicycle rides were mostly responsible for that--and the thing was, he thought he could wriggle in through the hole under the toilet seat's ring. It might not even be that tough.

  What about getting back out?

  Well...if he could do something about that seam of light, maybe he wouldn't have to leave the same way he went in.

  "Assuming I can even get in," he said. His empty stomach was suddenly full of butterflies, and for the first time since arriving here at scenic Durkin Grove Village, he felt an urge to gag himself. He would be able to think more clearly about this if he just stuck his fingers down his throat and--

  "No," he said curtly, and yanked the toilet seat and ring sideways with his left hand. The flanges creaked but didn't let go. He applied his other hand to the task. His hair fell back down on his forehead, and he gave an impatient snap of his head to flop it aside. He yanked again. The seat and ring held a moment longer, then tore free. One of the two white plastic dowels fell into the waste tank. The other, cracked down the middle, spun across the door Curtis was kneeling on.

  He tossed the seat and ring aside and peered into the tank, hands braced on the bench. The first whiff of the poisoned atmosphere down there caused him to recoil, wincing. He thought he'd gotten used to the smell (or numbed to it), but that wasn't the case, at least not this close to the source. He wondered again when the damned thing had last been pumped.

  Look on the bright side; it's been a long time since it was used, too.

  Maybe, probably, but Curtis wasn't sure that made things any better. There was still a lot of stuff down there--a lot of crap down there, floating in whatever remained of the disinfected water. Dim as the light was, there was enough to be sure of that. Then there was the matter of getting back out again. He could probably do it--if he could go one way, he could almost certainly go the
other--but it was all too easy to imagine how he'd look, a stinking creature being born from the ooze, not a mud-man but a shit-man.

  The question was, did he have another choice?

  Well, yes. He could sit here, trying to persuade himself that rescue probably would come after all. The cavalry, like in the last reel of an old western. Only he thought it was more likely that The Motherfucker would come back, wanting to make sure he was still...what had he said? Snug in his little housie. Something like that.

  That decided him. He looked at the hole in the bench, the dark hole with its evil aroma drifting out, the dark hole with its one hopeful seam of light. A hope as thin as the light itself. He calculated. First his right arm, then his head. Left arm pressed against his body until he had wriggled in as far as his waist. Then, when his left arm was free...

  Only what if he wasn't able to get it free? He saw himself stuck, right arm in the tank, left arm pinned against his body, his midsection blocking the hole, blocking the air, dying a dog's death, flailing at the sludge just below him while he strangled, the last thing he saw the mocking bright stitch that had lured him on.

  He saw someone finding his body half-plugged into the toilet hole with his ass sticking up and his legs splayed, smeary brown sneaker prints stamped on the goddam toilet cubicle from his final dying kicks. He could hear someone--perhaps the IRS agent who was The Motherfucker's bete noire--saying "Holy shit, he must have dropped something really valuable down there."

  It was funny, but Curtis didn't feel like laughing.

  How long had he been kneeling there, peering into the tank? He didn't know--his watch was back in his study, sitting by his computer's mousepad--but the ache in his thighs suggested quite awhile. And the light had brightened considerably. The sun would be entirely over the horizon now, and soon his prison would once more turn into a steam room.

  "Gotta go," he said, and wiped sweat from his cheeks with the palms of his hands. "It's the only thing." But he paused again, because another thought had occurred to him.

  What if there was a snake in there?

  What if The Motherfucker, imagining that his witchly enemy might try this very thing, had put a snake in there? A copperhead, perhaps, for the time being fast asleep under a layer of cool human mud? A copperhead bite on the arm and he would die slowly and painfully, his arm swelling even as the temperature climbed. A bite from a coral snake would take him more quickly but even more painfully: his heart lunging, stopping, lunging again, then finally giving up.

  There are no snakes in there. Bugs, maybe, but no snakes. You saw him, you heard him. He wasn't thinking that far ahead. He was too sick, too crazy.

  Perhaps, perhaps not. You couldn't really gauge crazy people, could you? They were wild cards.

  "Deuces and jacks, man with the axe, natural sevens take all," Curtis said. The Tao of The Motherfucker. All he knew for sure was that if he didn't try it down there, he was almost certainly going to die up here. And in the end, a snakebite might be quicker and more merciful.

  "Gotta," he said, once more wiping his cheeks. "Gotta."

  As long as he didn't get stuck halfway in and halfway out of the hole. That would be a terrible way to die.

  "Not going to get stuck," he said. "Look how big it is. That thing was built for the asses of doughnut-eating long-haul truckers."

  This made him giggle. The sound contained more hysteria than humor. The toilet hole did not look big to him; it looked small. Almost tiny. He knew that was only his nervous perception of it--hell, his scared perception, his frightened to death perception--but knowing that didn't help much.

  "Gotta do it, though," he said. "There's really nothing else."

  And in the end it would probably be for nothing...but he doubted anyone had bothered to add a steel outer layer to the holding tank, and that decided him.

  "God help me," he said. It was his first prayer in almost forty years. "God, please help me not get stuck."

  He poked his right arm through the hole, then his head (first taking one more deep breath of the better air in the cubicle). He pressed his left arm to his side and slithered into the hole. His left shoulder caught, but before he could panic and draw back--this was, part of him understood, the critical moment, the point of no return--he shimmied it like a man doing the Watusi. His shoulder popped through. He jackknifed into the stinking tank up to his waist. With his hips--slim, but not nonexistent--plugging the hole, it was now as black as pitch. That seam of light seemed to float mockingly just before his eyes. Like a mirage.

  Oh God, please don't let it be a mirage.

  The tank was maybe four feet deep, maybe a trifle more. Bigger than the trunk of a car, but not--unfortunately--the size of a pickup truck's bed. There was no way to tell for sure, but he thought his hanging hair was touching the disinfected water, and that the top of his head must be within inches of the muck filling the bottom. His left arm was still pinned against his body. Pinned at the wrist now. He couldn't get it free. He shimmied from one side to the other. His arm stayed where it was. His worst nightmare: caught. Caught after all. Caught head down in stinking blackness.

  Panic flared. He reached out with his free hand, not thinking about it, just doing it. For a moment he could see his fingers outlined by the scant light coming in through the bottom of the tank, which was now facing the sunrise instead of the ground. The light was right there, right in front of him. He grabbed for it. The first three fingers of his flailing hand were too big to fit through the narrow gap, but he was able to hook his pinky into the split. He pulled, feeling the ragged edge--metal or plastic, he didn't know which--first dig into the skin of his finger and then tear it open. Curtis didn't care. He pulled harder.

  His hips popped through the hole like a cork coming out of a bottle. His wrist came free, but too late for him to lift his left arm and help break his fall. He crashed headfirst into the shit.

  Curtis came up choking and flailing, his nose plugged with wet stink. He coughed and spat, aware that he was in a very tight place now, oh for sure. Had he thought the toilet was tight? Ridiculous. The toilet was the wide-open spaces. The toilet was the American west, the Australian Outback, the Great Horsehead Nebula. And he had given it up to crawl into a dark womb half-filled with rotting shit.

  He wiped his face, then flung his hands to either side. Ribbons of dark stuff flew from his fingertips. His eyes were stinging, blurring. He wiped them with first one arm, then the other. His nose was plugged. He stuck his pinky fingers up them--he could feel blood running down the right one--and cleared his nostrils as best he could. He got enough out so he could breathe again, but when he did, the stench of the tank seemed to leap down his throat and sink claws into his stomach. He retched, a deep growling sound.

  Get hold of yourself. Just get hold, or it's for nothing.

  He leaned back against the caked side of the tank, dragging in deep gasps of air through his mouth, but that was almost as bad. Just above him was a large pearl of oval light. The toilet hole he had, in his madness, wriggled through. He retched again. To his own ears he sounded like a bad-tempered dog on a hot day, trying to bark while half-strangled by a too-tight collar.

  What if I can't stop? What if I can't stop doing that? I'll have a seizure.

  He was too frightened and overwhelmed to think, so his body thought for him. He turned on his knees, which was hard--the side wall of the holding tank, which was now the floor, was slippery--but just possible. He applied his mouth to the split in the floor of the tank and breathed through it. As he did, a memory of some story he'd heard or read in grammar school came back to him: Indians hiding from their enemies by lying on the bottom of a shallow pond. Lying there and breathing through hollow reeds. You could do that. You could do that if you remained calm.

  He closed his eyes. He breathed, and the air coming in through the split was blessedly sweet. Little by little, his runaway heartbeat began to slow.

  You can go back up. If you can go one way, you can go the other. And going
back up will be easier, because now you're...

  "Now I'm greasy," he said, and managed a shaky laugh...even though the dull, closed-in sound of his own voice frightened him all over again.

  When he felt he had some control, he opened his eyes. They had adjusted to the deeper gloom of the tank. He could see his shit-caked arms, and a matted ribbon of paper hanging from his right hand. He plucked it off and dropped it. He supposed he was getting used to such things. He supposed people could get used to anything, if they had to. This wasn't a particularly comforting thought.

  He looked at the split. He looked at it for some time, trying to make sense of what he was seeing. It was like a split along the seam of a badly sewn garment. Because there was a seam here. The tank was plastic after all--a plastic shell--but it wasn't a single piece; it was two. It was held together by a line of screws that glimmered in the dark. They glimmered because they were white. Curtis tried to remember if he had ever seen white screws before. He couldn't. Several of them at the lowest point of the tank had broken off, creating that split. Waste and wastewater must have been dribbling out and onto the ground beneath for some time.

  If the EPA knew about this. Motherfucker, you'd have them on your back, too, Curtis thought. He touched one of the screws still holding, the one just to the left of where the split ended. He couldn't be sure, but he thought it was hard plastic rather than metal. The same kind of plastic the toilet-ring flanges were made of, probably.

  So. Two-piece construction. The tanks put together on some portable-toilet assembly line in Defiance, Missouri, Magic City, Idaho, or--who knew?--What Cheer, Iowa. Screwed together with hard plastic screws, the seam running across the bottom and up the sides like a big old smile. The screws tightened with some special long-barreled screwdriver, probably air-driven, like the gadget they used in garages to loosen the lug-nuts holding on your tires. And why put these screwheads on the inside? That was easy. So some merry prankster couldn't come along with his own screwdriver and open a full tank from the outside, of course.