After the People Lights Have Gone Off by Stephen Graham Jones Page A

Jonathan isn’t crying, is not going to give that to Lucas, and the boy sitting in the little folded-out shelf of the pop-up camper parked longways by the curb, the soles of his shoes barely scraping the ground in a rhythm Jonathan is having problems looking away from, he’s just staring, like waiting for something to happen.
    Jonathan nods to the boy, gives him some of the fakest cheer ever in the history of roadside camaraderie—not the boy’s fault, any of this—and turns away, walks out to the farthest part of the pavement, where he can see the river.
    It’s high, rushing. From some impossible distance away, probably. From the mountains they’re supposed to be going to.
    And, out in the woods—looking back yet, to see if Jonathan’s following?—Lucas, still committed to the gesture of leaving, Jonathan knows, but already getting lost, too. Just to show Jonathan how serious he is about all this. Jonathan not going after him because he’s serious too. He’s committed, here.
    Their new tent and telescoping walking poles and thick socks are all organized in the trunk, even, waiting for them. Marks on the map to show the last places to fill their two five-gallon water jugs. A note on the dash about sunblock, for Jonathan’s nose. Written in Lucas’s scrawly hand.
    Jonathan closes his eyes tight. Throws a useless handful of gravel out towards the river. Most of it turns out to be dirt, grime, dust. It sticks to his face but that doesn’t matter, it can’t stick, because he’s not crying, he’s just going to look back to that boy sitting half in the pop-up and try to remember trips with his own family, back before everything, the six of them crawling across the map, taking pictures, mailing joke postcards to each other on the sly, so they’d be waiting at home when they got back.
    The boy’s not there to cue all this up for Jonathan, though. Like the camper just popped up and ate him, has him in its innards now, is going to deposit him in pieces on the road at seventy miles per hour, for the badgers and possums to lick up between headlights.
    No, though.
    No bad things.
    Jonathan taps his index finger against his thumb tip in quick succession, a private pattern, part of his secret conditioning, the big effort to start controlling his thinking, to not let it go directions he doesn’t want anymore. A drumbeat to keep the shadows away.
    Like always, it doesn’t work, just gives the darkness a rhythm.
    If he opens his eyes, though, then the boy has to be in the rumble seat of his family’s supercab Ford, doesn’t he?
    Yes. Yes yes yes.
    Enough that Jonathan really doesn’t even have to look.
    The world is a normal place, where normal things happen.
    The boy will still be looking back through the sliding glass, around a bumper sticker maybe, looking back and trying to shape the question in his mouth for his mom, about the strange men who had been yelling at each other, sputtering and spluttering their feelings, one of them holding his hands over his eyes, the other biting his upside-down thumb to try to focus the pain.
    Good luck explaining that, Mom, Jonathan says in his head, in farewell, and takes the most mournful posture he can on the picnic table, sitting up on the eating part, trying to cut the perfect spiteful silhouette, just looking out from under his eyebrows at the pop-up camper still just sitting there—this is how the photographer would pose the model, if this were a shoot (black and white, the river a torpid grey slate)—but then balls his hand and doesn’t hit anything.
    “Petty,” he says aloud. About himself. About this. And how he’s not going to be like that anymore. How it never helps anything, trying to stage the scene.
    To mess it up as best he can, he ducks into the foul, cinderblock, nearly-all-the-way-to-the-roof restroom, and unrolls a single paper towel, isn’t just real sure what he wants to do with it. All over the stalls are scratched-in names, imprecations, rhymes,