Read Lights Out for Free Online

his shriveled forearms. He was a con; Eddie knew it at once.
    “Where to?”
    That was the question. The answer depended on his plans— what you’re going to do tomorrow, next week, next year . Eddie scanned the destination board on the wall behind the agent. He thought of going down to the Gulf, finding work on a fishing boat. He knew, had known, a little about boats. There was a bus to Baton Rouge at four-thirty. Eddie moved to look at his watch, but of course it was gone. “What time is it?”
    “Two hairs past a freckle,” said the old man. “C’mon, buddy. We’s on a tight schedule here.” He tried drumming his fingers aggressively on the counter, but they were too arthritic for stunts like that.
    Home, Eddie thought. That was a laugh; but why not? Had he known it all along? “Any buses going north?”
    “All the ways to Beantown.”
    Close enough. “When?”
    “Two minutes ago. You can catch it if you’ll just kindly the hell move.”
    “How much?”
    “One way or return?”
    “One way.”
    The ticket cost Eddie almost a third of his gate money. He hurried out into the yellow, past the cop still watching from his squad car, and knocked on the door of the Americruiser. It opened. “Luggage?” the driver said.
    “Nope.”
    “Lez go.” The driver’s hand was out, fingers gesturing for something to be laid in it. Eddie climbed on and gave him the ticket. Outside, in the real world, as the C.O. had put it, he was a step or two slow, like a visitor from another land.
    The bus wasn’t crowded. Eddie found a window seat halfway back. The bus rolled across the lot, past the squad car, onto the open road. Eddie watched the real world go by, all yellow. Then the motion got to him. I can’t be tired, he thought, not after a lifetime on that bunk. But his eyes closed anyway.
    He dreamed a familiar dream, of the banana-shaped island and the shed beside the tennis court. It was dark inside, despite the summer afternoon heat, and smelled of pig blood and red clay. Mandy smelled of red clay too, red clay and fresh sweat. Her tennis clothes clung to her body. She slipped her hand between his legs, under his shorts, around his balls. “Shh,” she said. They had to be quiet. He couldn’t remember why.
    Eddie awoke with a dry throat and an erection. The bus was stopped and full of people moving around. A slight man in a cheap black suit said: “Excuse me, sir, is this seat taken?”
    Eddie straightened, shook his head. The man sat in the aisle seat, opened a Bible. The bus started with a jerk and picked up speed. Eddie looked out. A long line of leafless trees went by, then a billboard that said “Christ Is Love” and pictured a garish Jesus on the verge of tears. Eddie glanced at the man in the black suit. With a kind of grease pencil Eddie hadn’t seen before, he was highlighting a passage. Eddie leaned closer.“Whoever perished, being innocent? or where were the righteous cut off?” The man felt his presence and made a wall with his hand between Eddie and the text, like an A student stopping an unprepared one from cheating on a test.
    Eddie gazed out the window. The sun was low in the sky now, everything still yellow. He removed the glasses to see if the glare had gone, but it had not. He put them on and was soon asleep.
    When he awoke it was night and the man with the Bible was gone. Eddie felt in his pocket and found that his gate-money envelope and its contents, all but the $5.05 in change from the sunglasses, were gone too. He got down on the floor, peered under the seat, felt behind the cushion. He found Prof’s cardboard tube, a book of matches, Kleenex, a used condom, but no gate money. He sat up, looked around. There was no one else on the bus, except the driver and a gum-chewing woman wearing hair curlers the same shade of green as his shirt. Not yellow: green. That’s when he realized that the sunglasses were gone as well, snatched right off his sleeping face.
    Eddie strode to the front of