All I Have in This World (18 page)

Marcus was silent. Before, she had craved his silence, but now she wanted him to talk to her. Had she said something to upset him?

“I kind of got the feeling you liked it here,” she said.

“Oh, I do. I really like it. I like Texas, what I've seen of it.”

“What have you seen of it?”

“Just what you see from I-10.”

“Like Houston? San Antonio?”

“I didn't see much. I mean, I didn't stop. The interstate loops around them. All I saw were warehouses and apartment complexes.”

“What would you
like
to see in Texas?”

“I don't know. The Hill Country? The Alamo?”

“The Alamo would disappoint you. It's tiny. And crowded. Not to mention a lie.”

“How is it a lie?”

“Well, I would say that the view of history you learn there is definitely skewed.”

“That's not surprising. History is always skewed. I can't be disappointed by something I expect. Plus, hagiography is the modus operandi of shrines. I know this because I built a shrine myself. It wasn't like I was going to emphasize the negative qualities of carnivorous plants in the exhibits.”

“What are the negative qualities?”

“One could argue that they're cold-blooded killers,” he said. “Sitting around with jaws open waiting for unsuspecting insects to light on them and then eating them for lunch.”

“That's what's cool about it, though, right?”

“It is what's
unique
about it,” Marcus said, in a way that made her feel foolish for using the word “cool.”

“There's nothing unique about the Alamo. But if that's what you want to see, you should see it before you leave Texas. You should see Texas before you leave Texas.”

“I guess you're right. I wasn't really in the position to stop a lot on my way down.”

When he did not elaborate, Maria did not ask him to. She figured he'd talk when he wanted to talk.

“Once I open my place, I'll be working eighty-hour weeks,” she said. “I haven't been anywhere in this state for years. Since you're leaving and you won't have a car, we could take a short trip. See a little Texas.”

“You mean now?”

“I do mean now. I can drop you off at your hotel and you can get what you need for a few days. That is, if you think the car will make it that far.”

Marcus pushed a button and water sprayed the windshield. Wipers obscured her view of the black line of highway ahead. Though there were, as always in West Texas, bugs crusting the windshield, she decided he was only feigning deliberation. She decided he did not really want to go to Mexico today, for otherwise he would have said, immediately, No, thank you, I'm headed south instead of east.

“Long as we keep her topped off with oil and don't run her off-road, we could drive this crate to Alberta and back.”

“This is a hovercraft, not a crate,” said Maria. “And we don't want to go to Alberta. We want to go to San Antonio.”

Dr. Brock bought the Buick because his father had played golf with the owner of the Buick dealership and Dr. Brock had always worked hard to please his father, who before his death had worked in the physical plant of the University of Kansas in Lawrence. His father had bought Buicks from this man because he had known him all his life. His father was a townie and the Buick dealer was also a townie and for this reason Dr. Brock's father drove Buicks.

Despite the fact that his family had been in Lawrence for generations, most of them within a square mile of the university, Dr. Brock was the first in his family to attend college. He lived at home and rode his bike the two blocks to the university and he worked summers in the physical plant and saved his money for med school. After a residency in Ann Arbor, Dr. Brock came home and married and bought the first of his Buicks, a LeSabre that, after he and his wife had three children in five years, took on the ragged and vaguely odiferous air of a car used to haul around toddlers. Dr. Brock bought his wife a Volvo and kept the LeSabre for himself until he traded it in for a slightly used Electra.

The Electra was light blue and clean and he was perplexed as to why anyone would want to part with it, seeing as how there were only sixteen thousand miles on the odometer. His father's friend the car dealer had tried to sell him a new Buick, but Dr. Brock had wandered over to the Electra, as he was drawn to its sky blueness and its general cleanliness. He assumed at first it was brand new. Because Myron Brock, the doctor's father, had been such a good customer, and because the Buick had been so long on the lot that he had twice reduced the price, the Buick dealer had quickly conceded to selling him the used Electra, though of course he would have preferred to sell him a new vehicle. He told Dr. Brock that the car had come from a dealer in Cleveland who had trouble moving it since that area of the country had suffered much during the recent economic downturn. When Dr. Brock, during the test-drive, asked the dealer why anyone would opt to sell such a car, there must be something wrong with it, the dealer assured him that all his pre-owned vehicles were subject to rigorous examinations. “Just like you'd do on me, Doc,” he added, laughing. “Just think of it this way: all the bugs have been worked out, the car's broken in good now.”

Dr. Brock lived only six blocks from his office and on all but the wintriest or rainiest days he walked to work. The Buick sat in the drive. His children were getting older—he had two boys and a girl—and in a year his oldest son, Matthew, would have his license. He was not about to give Matthew a car. He himself had not owned a car until he got out of med school, and he felt it prudent to wait and see how the boy handled himself before conferring on him even the occasional use of the car.

But Matthew was a good boy. He'd always been good, if quiet, the type who read on long car trips and could be counted on to entertain his younger siblings if need be. His freshman year he had gone out for the track team at his father's suggestion—his father had run some in high school but worked after school at a downtown hotel and was not able to join the team—but it was not until Matthew gravitated toward cross-country that his talent emerged. Dr. Brock took off a couple of afternoons when the meets were in town, for he loved to watch his son run, and he was impressed by the boy's training regimen, which included long runs in the early morning, well before breakfast, out past the river onto the levee that ran above the misty, moonlit fields.

And then something happened. Dr. Brock was never sure what it was. It might have been nothing, for even though Dr. Brock was by nature and training a scientist, and diagnosing even the most niggling illness involved isolating symptoms and ascertaining, through questioning the patient, how long the symptoms had been noticeable, he also knew, from dealing with the depressed and anxious, for which he was only minimally trained, that there is not always a single event that causes someone to plummet. And yet he would always wonder if something had happened to cause his boy to retreat. He was so busy that he barely noticed how withdrawn the boy had become, and he did not even remember his wife's alarm, nor did he remember trying to calm her alarm with rote banalities about the moodiness of teenagers, hormones, burgeoning emotions.

Matthew's grades slipped. He stopped going out with his friends. He kept his door closed, and from that closed door, walking down the hallway at night, his father heard music he did not like the sound of, music so slow and thick it reminded him of a morphine drip. No more morning runs. In fact, it was hard—according to his wife, for Dr. Brock was up and out of the house early—to get Matthew out of bed.

Dr. Brock was reading the paper one Saturday morning when Matthew emerged sullen and disheveled, smelling of sleep and stale bedroom. He sat down at the table, his arms crossed, his eyes glassy and trained on his lap. Dr. Brock was reading the sports page. He came upon the results of the cross-country invitational held the week before and did not see his son's name. He assumed the boy had had a bad day—inevitable, given how sporadically his son had been training—so he asked what had happened.

“I quit the team.”

“When?”

“Weeks ago, Dad.”

Then it was Dr. Brock's time to snap. He was not like the boy—he needed for something to happen before he felt one way or the other—and this was enough of an event for him to yell at his son in a way he never had before. And when his son said nothing at all in his defense, when he just sat there, looking so glum, as if he had not a roof over his head nor parents who bought him clothes and fed him, as if he had reason to feel sad about something, Dr. Brock yanked the boy out of his seat and told him to get his act together and quit feeling sorry for himself.

Matthew fled to his room. Dr. Brock's wife came in the kitchen, looked at Dr. Brock for a while, waiting for an explanation. Finally she said she was taking the younger kids shopping with her. Dr. Brock took a shower and walked down to his office to catch up on paperwork. For the first hour he was too anxious and distracted by what had happened with Matthew to get much done, but he was unused to second-guessing his actions, especially at home, and in time he grew sluggish, as the emotional energy he'd spent worrying over what had happened had depleted him physically as well. He dozed in his chair. Around five his wife called him from home. The Buick was gone, she said, and so was Matthew.

Thereafter followed the hardest five weeks of Dr. Brock's life. He felt as if there were fans inside him, one where his heart ought to be, a couple of smaller ones in his head, just behind his forehead, down near the nape of his neck. Their blades whirred unceasingly, operating not unlike the fan in an engine, designed to switch on automatically to cool things down.

Everywhere Dr. Brock searched for answers. He spoke to Matthew's classmates, his former teammates, his teachers, the neighbor kids. Late one night he convinced himself that the Buick was to blame. He ought never to have bought a used vehicle. Someone else's misery seeped out of it.

He knew this was not rational. He was a man of science. Yet as he entertained the idea, the fans slowed to a chop and finally to a point where each blade was singly distinguishable. It helped to imagine the previous owner as someone too irresponsible to keep up the payments. Probably a drug addict or someone on welfare. Someone who did not learn from his mistakes and who had probably gone out and purchased another vehicle he could ill afford. Now his boy had taken off in a vehicle cursed by indolence and greed.

The police turned up nothing. Dr. Brock was outraged by their response, which ran from condescending to indifferent. How, he asked them, could a boy in a light blue Buick, a boy with only his learner's permit, disappear? Likely he switched the tags, said the detective in charge, or had the car repainted. But Dr. Brock said this was ludicrous. His son was not a criminal, he would not steal someone else's plates, and it was doubtful that he even knew how to unscrew the plates. And how could he afford to have the car repainted? Nothing was missing from his room, according to Dr. Brock's wife, but some clothes. He did not even have a job, his afternoons and weekends having been taken up with training. It made no sense that he had managed to hide out for five weeks.

Then Dr. Brock got a call from a detective with the Austin, Texas, police department. The Buick had been pulled over in the middle of the night for running a stop sign and the driver had fled the scene on foot and had evaded capture. Dr. Brock got off the phone and made a reservation and flew out the next morning, spare key to the Buick in his pocket. He would find his son and bring him home.

The car was impounded. Dr. Brock took a cab from the airport to the police station, assuming that the car would be nearby or that a policeman might drive him to fetch it, but in fact it was across town, on the outskirts of the city, which required another cab ride, a long wait, more money. At the lot he was met by a detective who looked at him with contempt. Why? Because his son ran away? Had he not encountered in his line of work children who do things their parents would rather they not? Were his days not filled with people who did not conform to the laws and statutes of the republic? Dr. Brock explained as best he could what had happened, which was difficult, as he had no idea what had happened. His son was fine, then Dr. Brock bought a used Buick, then his son became sullen and withdrawn, then he was gone. Five weeks passed. The car turned up in Austin. As a story it made no sense. But Dr. Brock could not elaborate, even though the detective stood in silence waiting for him to continue.

Dr. Brock decided he hated Austin, Texas. It was a little too pleased with itself for his taste. He had noticed scores of young people and perhaps this is why Matthew was here. He knew it was a college town and the state capital, but coming in from the airport, he had driven through neighborhoods of squat, low, ramshackle houses with badly fenced yards and stores peddling piñatas and Mexican food. What he saw seemed more like a struggling city than a college town. Beyond the lot where the car was impounded, the land flattened out and an unseasonably hot wind kicked up dust, and Dr. Brock found it deeply unappealing.

The detective was asking him for a description of his son. Dr. Brock did his best to comply, but it was not easy to describe someone you see every day of your life for fourteen years.

The detective was checking his details against a report on a clipboard.

“I will say this for your boy,” he said. “He sure can run. The officers who pulled him over said they'd never seen anything like that boy running.”

Dr. Brock never cried and he had never even come close to crying in public. The fans in his chest and head ran so high that it was hard to hear what the detective was saying to him. Something about some magazines? Dr. Brock nodded. The detective said, “Okay, but I'm just saying, we left them where we found them. Some deeply nasty shit.”

The detective led Dr. Brock to the car. Dr. Brock pulled out the spare key and was about to unlock the door when he noticed the back window was rolled down. The car was filthy, inside and out. The back floorboards were invisible beneath plastic bags and pop and beer bottles and across the seat stretched a couple of ratty blankets. Dr. Brock said to the detective, “Is it okay if I . . .?” and the detective shrugged and walked away to a nearby pickup. He turned and leaned against the truck bed and crossed his arms and studied Dr. Brock as he climbed into the back of the Buick. In the backseat Dr. Brock rummaged beneath the trash and found a backpack that seemed familiar, out of which he pulled a gray T-shirt he recognized and some socks and underwear. He reached under the seat and pulled out a stack of magazines. They had names like
Honcho
and
Mandate.
He opened one. He closed it. He was horrified but the horrified part of him was almost immediately blotted out by a voice faint but swiftly growing broken and loud. Is that all, Mattie? Goodness, Son, is that it? I would have learned to live with that in a matter of days. No, hours. That is nothing, Matthew. That is just . . . Matthew, why did you not just . . . ?

Dr. Brock sat in the car though he hated the car. He thought that he might never see his son again and he thought that it was not his fault. When he got out of the car he walked past the detective, whom he also hated. The detective said, “You're not going to take your car?” Dr. Brock said, “No. I never want to see it again. I don't care what you do with it. When you find my son, I want my son. You call me when you find my son. I want my son. I don't want that car. I don't want to ever see that car again.”