The Neighborhood Night Walker

The hour the streetlights Fail Oakmont went to bed early, and it went to bed unafraid, and the night came down over it the way a lid comes down over a jar. It was the tail of October and the air had finally turned, and it moved through the subdivision in slow cool currents that carried the smell of the season, cut grass gone slightly sour where the Thursday crews had left their clippings, woodsmoke from the one family on Sycamore that had lit the year’s first fire, the wet mineral breath of the pond, and under all of it the faint green rot of the leaves that had begun to pile in the gutters and against the base of the fences. The maples had started to go. In the daylight they were a show, gold and rust and blood red, the reason half these streets were named for them, but at night the color drained out of everything and the leaves were only a dry sound, a papery scrape and tick as the currents moved them across the pavement and pushed them in little drifts against the tires of the parked cars. The houses stood shoulder to shoulder up the long curved streets, brick and stone and painted clapboard, dark now, most of them, the big windows black or holding the blue underwater flicker of a television behind a drawn shade. Coach lamps burned at the ends of the driveways, soft and gold and tasteful, little fires in iron cages, and they lit the first few feet of each lawn and no more, so that the grass nearest the light was a vivid chemical green, blade by blade distinct, each one edged and perfect and beaded now with the first cold sweat of the coming frost, and then the green failed into gray and the gray failed into a black that the eye could not read at all. That was the thing about Oakmont after midnight. The light did not travel. It sat in small proud pools at the driveways and the porches, and between the pools lay the true dark, the long unlit stretches where the sidewalk ran under the overhang of the maples and the streetlights were set so far apart and so low among the landscaping that they might as well not have been there, and in those stretches a man could stand six feet from you and be nothing, be a piece of the hedge, be a darker thickness in the dark. He moved through the pools and the dark between them without changing his pace for either. The soles of his shoes made no sound on the concrete. The body seemed to know how to do it without ever having been taught, heel first and then the ball of the foot, the weight set down soft, so that even the dry leaves did not speak under him. Where a coach lamp caught him he was a man in a dark coat, collar up, hands in his pockets, unremarkable, the kind of shape you would take for a neighbor walking off a bad dinner, and where the dark took him again he was nothing at all. A cricket sawed away somewhere in a flower bed, steady, and went silent as he passed, and started again behind him. Far off toward the highway a dog worked itself into a fit of barking at something and then thought better of it, and the quiet came back and sealed over the place where the sound had been. A sprinkler system woke on its timer three lawns down and began to tick and hiss, throwing a fine cold mist that drifted and caught the lamplight in a small hanging rainbow no one was awake to see. No cars moved. That was the deepest strangeness of the hour, to anyone who had ever known a city, the total stillness of the roads. The cars all slept in their driveways and their open garages, dark hulks ticking as their engines cooled, dusted already with the first fur of frost on the windshields, and the wide streets ran empty between them, curving away under the trees toward the cul de sacs, lit and dark and lit and dark, going nowhere, holding no one. Once in a long while the main road that ringed the subdivision would carry a single pair of headlights, slow, a sheriff’s cruiser or a teenager creeping home past curfew, and the light would sweep across the fronts of the houses and slide over the parked cars and he would step, without hurrying, into the black seam between two hedges and let it pass, and the red taillights would shrink and wink out around the curve and the dark would come back and he would step out of the hedge and go on.