Fall Back (1)

The fountain came on at six in the morning and ran until midnight. He had only ever seen the half of it that happened in the dark.

He watched it from the wharf below the bridge, where the Belle of Louisville lay tied up for the night with her stacks cold and her deck lights off. Out in the river the fountain threw its water three hundred and seventy-five feet straight up in the shape the city put on everything, a lily with its petals bent back, and lights set under the surface changed the color of the spray every few seconds. Gold went to red. Red went to a green that looked wrong on water. When the wind came downriver it tore the top off the spray and carried it toward Indiana, and the color went with it, so that for a second the dark over Jeffersonville had a pink stain in it.

People came down the hill from the Belvedere to see it. Couples, mostly, with their arms through each other's. A man with a camera on a tripod who never once looked behind him. East along the bank the city had run chain-link around a stretch of torn-up ground where the scrap yards used to be. Earthmovers sat inside the fence with their buckets resting in the dirt, and a painted sign promised a park. He would see it or he wouldn't.

At five minutes before twelve the couples started back up the hill. They knew the schedule. At midnight the lights under the water went out and the column dropped all at once, and the water coming down hit the river with a sound like a truck letting go a load of gravel. Then the river was only the river, black, with the bridge lights lying on it in long smears.

That was when he left.

He had found her eleven nights before, at a bank machine on Shelbyville Road. The branch behind it was closed, a credit union with its blinds down, and the machine was set into the brick beside the night deposit under a light bright enough to show the color of her coat. She put her card in. Then she turned her whole body around and looked at the lot behind her, and held there with her purse pressed against her side, and turned back and keyed her numbers with her shoulder up between the machine and the dark.

He had been standing across four lanes of Shelbyville Road under a streetlight that was out. In all his years nobody had ever turned around for him. People felt a cold spot or a pressure in their ears, and they hurried without knowing why they hurried. She had turned and looked straight across the road into the dark where he stood, and then she had covered the numbers from him with her body.

He followed her home. Townhouses out past the Watterson, a dozen buildings in a horseshoe around one lot, with a lamp over every door. A sign at the entrance with a name on it that meant nothing. A white car with an amber light on the roof parked by the rental office, SECURITY on the door, nobody in it.

Hers was the end unit on the left. She parked under the lamp and sat with the engine running and looked at every car in the lot before she turned the key. Then she walked to her door with the long key already standing out between her fingers. She did the knob lock and then the deadbolt, and he heard the deadbolt go home from across the lot. Then the chain.

He went back the next night, and the night after.

She kept a schedule the way the fountain did. Her car was always in its place by the time he came, because she came home in daylight, and daylight was not his. The bulb over her door was brighter than the ones over her neighbors' doors, newer, a white light where theirs were yellow. The lamp in her front room went off at eleven. Some time after that a single slat in the upstairs blind would bend down under one finger and stay bent while she looked out at the lot. A minute, or two. Then it closed. Around one o'clock it bent again.

The security car came through every forty minutes or so. The guard was a heavy young man who drove the lot with his window down and his radio talking to itself on the seat beside him, and he swung his spotlight across the windshields and never once across the trees.

He stood where she could have seen him if she had been looking for a man. By the dumpster enclosure. Under the ornamental pear trees at the mouth of the lot. The slat came down. She looked at the cars. She never looked at the pears or the dumpsters, and he decided that was the cleverest thing about her. She had learned that he was never where you looked, and so she looked everywhere else and kept from giving him anything.

One night he crossed the lot and stood on her step. He laid his palm flat against her door, low, by the knob. The paint was cold. Upstairs he could hear her moving, a drawer, water running in a sink. He could have stood there until morning. The door would not let him through until someone on the other side of it asked him in. He took his hand away and was back under the trees before the security car came around.

On the fifth night she went out after midnight. She drove to an all-night grocery and bought one gallon of milk and stood at the register with it on the belt, looking out the big front window at the parking lot, until the boy at the register said the total to her a second time. Driving home she did not go the way she had come. She made three right turns that put her back where she started, and then took the long way through a subdivision, braking at every stop sign longer than the sign asked.

He had not followed her. He was already under the pear trees when she pulled in, and he watched her sit with the engine running and check every car in the lot. He knew what that was. She was trying to lose him, and she had to know by now that she couldn't.

Most of them he took the first night, on a sidewalk or in a parking deck, and they were gone before they understood that anyone had been there. He had never once been looked for. He did not hurry her. He came every night to watch her look for him, and he let the fountain tell him when to come.

On the last Saturday in October the man with the tripod was on the Belvedere again, with a woman this time, and while they waited for midnight he told her the clocks went back tonight. They'd get back the hour they lost in the spring. She said she never could keep straight which way it went. He told her. At two o'clock in the morning it would be one o'clock again, and everybody would get to live that hour twice.

He stood at the rail and watched the spray go from red to gold. He had been through the change many times. Every year it handed him the same hour a second time, and every year he had spent it on nothing in particular.

At midnight the column fell. He was already walking.

The lot was quieter on a Saturday. Half the spaces were empty. The security car sat in its place by the office, and the guard was inside with a little television going, blue light moving on the glass. Her front lamp was still on. It was past eleven, and her lamp had never been on past eleven.

There was a car in the lot he didn't know. A dark sedan, parked two spaces from the mouth of the lot, nose in toward the buildings, engine off, a parking permit hanging from the mirror on a plastic hook. A woman sat behind the wheel. He walked past close enough to touch the fender and she never turned her head. She had both hands laid on top of the wheel, one over the other, and around the ring finger of the top hand was white tape, wound thick and neat, the way a coach tapes a finger that's been jammed. She was looking out the windshield the way people do in parking lots at midnight. At nothing. Waiting on somebody who was late.

He had passed a thousand of them. Women in cars outside bars and hospitals, with the heater ticking and a man somewhere who hadn't come down yet. He had no use for her. She had nothing to do with him.

He went to the pear trees.

The slat came down a little after twelve-thirty. It stayed down. A minute went by and then another, and it stayed down, longer than he had ever seen it, and he stood in the trees and let her look. She was looking at the lot. He believed she was looking for him at last, and harder than she ever had, because some part of her had worked out that tonight was the night.

Then the slat sprang back. The bedroom light came on behind the blind, and the light at the top of her stairs, and he watched the lights come down through the house one at a time toward the front door.

He came out from under the trees. It was twelve-forty. He had the hour before two, and after two he would have it again.

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