Tony and Susan by Austin Wright Read Free Book Online

light is out in the upstairs hall, it requires the ladder from the basement. Not tonight. Across the room Henry lies on his back, sweater lifted, scratching his stomach, ruled out of the game, while Mike spots his marker around the board with a villain’s laugh. Henry is crooning: ‘Who cares, whooo cares?’
    ‘Don’t be a brat,’ Dorothy says.
    Martha has moved onto the manuscript, makes herself heavy when Susan tries to move her. Susan remembers a graceful stretch of summer highway, the road bending from one hillside down into a valley of farms and up another long curve to a ridge of woods. Herself, she loves that wilderness, she loves the woody ridges and long valleys and comforting snack stops in small friendly restaurants off the highway, especially after the pounding long day of driving across flat Indiana and Ohio. It rests her soul. She remembers the singing in the car, Dorothy, Henry, and Rosie in the back, Jeffrey moving from one lap to another and Martha hidden below. ‘Tell me why, Camp Hazelnut.’
    Dump Martha, who shakes herself, offended, then dashes out to the kitchen. Susan remembers the lake, morning light flashing spider lines under the tree leaning over the water while Arnold and Henry wade out to the float, Arnold up tohis collarbone, his red freckled shoulders soft and plump, holding Henry in the water by his two hands under the stomach, while the boy sticks his chin up like a loon and Dorothy submarines twenty feet further out.
    She remembers Edward’s cabin in the woods when he wanted to be a writer. Soft impressions. Short confessional poems with everything unsaid. Nostalgic sketches, loss and grief. Father deaths. Haunted harbor scenes. Melancholy sex in the pastoral woods. It was not easy to read Edward in those days.
    This is different. She admits it, Susan, this capture is power over her and Edward wields it, whether she likes it or not. As she follows Tony Hastings down his trail of terror she knows she sees what Edward wants her to see, feels what he feels, without a trace of Edward’s offenses as she remembers them. Edward stiff and nervous, prissy and cranky, has yet to appear in this lonely Pennsylvania landscape, where she and Tony face with him the unambiguous horror of what these evil men (conceived by him) are doing. There’s no ground to quarrel with him yet, and she’s grateful for that.
Nocturnal Animals 5
    Tony Hastings stood there a long time, looking where the car had gone, now all dark. The night was thick, he tried to see, vaguely aware of differences in the shadows, but he could not distinguish, he felt blind. My God, he said, they went off and left me. What kind of a joke is this?
    Now the woods in the night were silent, he heard nothing. After a while the darkness began to clear, not much but some, clearer than before anyway. He was in a small open space between the trees, he could see the sky overhead. He saw afew stars, not many, not brilliant, not what they should be in the mountains. He could distinguish the treetops from the sky, but all below was still unpenetrated black, a curtain around the arena.
    Surely they don’t expect me to get out without a flashlight, he said. Some joke.
    The silence began to sort out. He distinguished a remote process, not a sound but the copy of a sound, recognized as trucks on the Interstate, miles away. He could not tell whether the faint whistling noises were insects in the grass or in his ear. Around the arena the curtain yielded shapes. He saw tree trunks and open spaces between the trees. He could see a black hole where the car had gone. He could see the road.
    What are you waiting for? he said. It was stupid to suppose they would come back. Actually he had never supposed it. The problem was clear, he had been dumped in the wilderness in a prank a college sophomore would think of, and he would have to find his way out. So much for getting to Maine in one night.
    The only question was whether he could find his way in the