BOX OF LIGHT by Warren Slesinger
Late in the afternoon, he drummed his fingers on his desk, and placed his hand against the wall. He liked his little cubicle and felt safe inside it. He liked the size and weight of the filing cabinet at his side because he could rest his arm on top of it. In fact, he liked the office life because it was predictable. With each tick of the clock, he followed a routine from the staff meeting in the morning, to lunch in the cafeteria, to beer with the boss after work.
He watched the woman who plopped a folder on his desk, and walked into the office across the hall because she looked like his ex-wife, and he was glad to see her go.
“She shopped,” he thought, “while I fought.”
Even so, he tipped back in his chair, and told himself he didn’t care about the baby and divorce. The point was self-protection, and he got it on the job. Each day, he came to work on time, stayed at his desk, and did what he was told because his boss had given him a good evaluation, and his boss was another vet.
So he was not worried when his boss walked in with another man until he said,
“He wants to take a second deposition.”
“Why?”
“To solve the case.”
His boss rolled his eyes, and looked at the clock. It was after five. He heard a chair bump against a wall, someone rummage in a drawer for keys, and the laugh of the woman when she left the office.
There was cunning in his coming as it was getting dark, and the office closed with the man standing in his personal space. He switched on the light. As soon as the man came forward, he knew that he was not looking at another empty suit from the same department because he moved with a surprising quickness for a big man, and stared with an intensity that made it hard to hold his gaze.
“You’re divorced.”
“That’s right.”
“Whose fault: yours or hers?”
“Depends on your point of view.”
The man dragged the other chair across the carpet, and placed his hard-knuckled hands on the desk.
“What was the problem?”
“We fought.”
“About what?”
“I had a hard time sleeping.”
And that was the problem before the divorce. His wife would turn out the light and tell him to settle down, but he could not go to sleep. Even the soft bump of her behind would make him mutter, jab the pillow with his elbow, and move his feet as if to find more solid footing in the sheets, and soon they were arguing in the middle of the night about his “inability to adjust to civilian life.” He was easily startled by the creak of a board when his wife went to the bathroom, and came back to bed. He would lie in the dark, and listen as if something intangible were there.
One morning, she slammed a drawer when he came into the kitchen.
“A drawer of knives,” he thought.
She faced him with an exhausted look.
“Another one of your damned nights!”
“I’m afraid so.”
“What about me?”
“I’m sorry.”
“Me too!”
The high pitch of her voice came down hard on his nerves, and he raised his hand, but his threat was met with sarcasm.
“What’s that?”
He made a fist, and lightly tapped her on the chin with it.
“You’d better not,” she said, and went into the bedroom to get dressed.
The man at the office was waiting for him to come back to the present moment in the office, and met him with a curious smile.
“You’re not hard of hearing?”
He shook his head. The man sat back and studied him.
“And you live alone?”
“Now and then.”
The man moved close enough for him to smell the tobacco on his breath.
“Which is it?”
“Not if I find another woman.”
Of course, he could. The last woman that he brought into the bedroom only laughed when he locked the door, and asked him if he expected someone else. While she undressed, he looked out the window at the street. That was when he knew it wasn’t a woman that he wanted, but a safe place to sleep.
And it wasn’t going to be easy to find it, if the man made it hard to forget what happened. He kicked back the chair, and stood up.
“You said that you had a hard time sleeping, but according to the other deposition, you slept through the beating of Sgt. White.”
“I didn’t sleep through it, but I didn’t see it either. It was dark, and I was too damned tired to get up.”
“And you didn’t hear a thing?”
“I heard the shovel hit something – someone, and then a body in a sleeping bag dragged through the sand.”
The man’s eyes moved as though going over the same old ground.
“What else?”
“In the morning, I saw blood on the shovel.”
“And?”
“That’s all I remember.”
But he remembered much more: the weight of the body in the sleeping bag, and the sound of nylon as it slid through the sand; the sand in the shovel, the heat of the mid-morning sun; the blood that seeped through the bag; how the body was beginning to smell, and how the handle of the shovel was wet with sweat when they were finished.
“What happened to the shovel?”
“We buried him, and left it on the ground.”
“With all of your fingerprints on it?”
“Yes.”
The man stepped back from the desk.
“Would anyone in your platoon want to kill him?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Why?”
“He’d come from another unit.”
The man seemed to measure the distance between them.
“Think he had it coming?”
“I wouldn’t know.”
With that the man moved toward the door, and stood for a moment as if confronted with something he couldn’t leave behind.
“Think about it.”
“Are you coming back?”
The man smiled as if amused with himself.
“Perhaps.”
Left alone, he felt no compulsion to go home to an apartment that was furnished with what his ex-wife hadn’t wanted: a formica table, shag rug, and a sagging bed. So he stayed in the office, and drew on a piece of paper, a diagram of what happened in the sand.
That night he lay down late and did not dream until the early morning. He had pushed his unmade bed against the wall, and once again, a heavy chair against the door. He lay on his right side like he did in the service, and closed his eyes against the growing light. He saw himself inside a house with bars on the window and a bolt in the door. It was on a hilltop without a tree or a bush to block the view. He would take up a position on the rug in the living room with his rifle in the cradle of his arm, and wait for whatever came his way on the only road.
Warren Slesinger’s work has appeared in The Georgia Review, South Carolina Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Iowa Review, and New Letters.