Boy Still Missing (9 page)

My teeth chattered. My ears felt numb. The only thing not frozen now was my mind. It burned and whipped. A wild comet landing on the same thought again and again: eight thousand some-odd dollars that I had stolen from my mother and would never get back. “What the fuck is wrong with you?” I shouted in a voice that came out weak and broken.

The only answer came in a wind that blew its way between my lips, past my teeth and down the dark hole of my throat, chilling me more. I have to get indoors fast, I thought. Wasn’t there a path through the woods that would save me a few miles? Then I remembered that it involved crossing Pegluso’s swamp on a log and some rocks. With one shoe and a slipper and all the ice, I’d never make it. If I could get to Cumby’s and hitch a ride home. But the place was long closed by now.

As I trudged along in the frosty darkness, I thought of my note to Leila:
I had to split. Thanks for the ride
. If I froze to death tonight, Leila and Leon might hold those words up as my farewell message, a suicide note. The thought of it made me laugh despite myself.

When I looked up, the Holedo Motel loomed before me, all those dark windows like dead eyes. Roget’s car was gone for once. Maybe he was actually doing some real police work instead of whacking off in the parking lot of this dumpy shithole. I could get a room, I thought as I stared at the even row of doors on the first and second floors of the place, if only I had shoved one of those Ben Franklins up my ass in case I’d be walking home half naked.

In the distance I could hear the faint gurgle of a stream bubbling from somewhere in the woods. Movement kept the water from freezing completely. I decided to do the same and lifted my legs in a sort of march. Only my slippered foot felt like it was being electrocuted whenever it hit the ground, so my march was more like a limp.

“Almost home,” I said, lying to myself.

From behind me a car moved in a fast whoosh around the corner. I could hitch a ride, I thought. But no one would pick me up dressed like this. I hopped off the road into the dark woods. The headlights moved past, and I held my breath.

Gone.

I stepped out onto the pavement, and another car came from the opposite direction, surprising me. When I moved back into the woods, my blanket snagged on a branch. I should have ditched the thing, but I panicked and crouched foolishly by the side of the road instead.

A squeak of brakes. The hum of a car stopping. Then a flash of bright lights on me. Keep on trucking, I thought. It’s just a half-naked kid on the side of the road in the middle of the night. Don’t mess with me. But the car didn’t budge, and the light was far too bright to be a headlight. I noticed red and blue shimmering against the trees when I lifted my head. My body shivered uncontrollably now.

“Stand up,” a voice said.

I turned to look. Mustache. Pouchy face. Roget. The thought of him escorting me home in nothing but my underwear and a sneaker and a slipper to face my mother made me run. I took off into the woods, leaving my blanket behind. Snow crunched. Sticks jutted up and poked at my numb foot. Branches snapped against my chest with a rhythmic slap-slap-slap followed by a sharp burning sting. But I kept on hauling ass. I would have made it away from him if it hadn’t been for a low-to-the-ground barbed-wire fence that sent me sailing.

“Dominick Pindle?” Roget called, catching up to me. He said it like a question. I was a shaking heap in the icy snow. “What the hell are you up to, kid?”

My tongue felt blue and frozen in my mouth. A stream of blood moved down my leg like the crooked red line of the interstate on a road map.

I didn’t say a word. This is Edie’s fault, I thought.

Roget must have realized he wouldn’t get an answer from me until I was warm. In one fell swoop he bent down and picked my body up from the cold floor of the woods. He carried me to the backseat of his car, cranked the heat, pulled a scratchy wool blanket out of the trunk, and poured me some coffee from his thermos. After he dabbed peroxide on my slashed leg and taped on two big Band-Aids, he sat up front in silence, shuffling papers for what seemed like an hour. Ten hours. Once in a while he looked in the mirror and fingered that mustache of his. Shifty or vain, I thought just as I did that day at the auction. A little of both. When I saw him looking down at his chest, straightening his badge like an impenetrable, golden heart pinned there, I decided he was probably one of those men who loved nothing more than being in charge. He
had carried me out of the woods not because he cared but because it made him feel like a hero. And taking that badge from him would be just like taking his heart, the thing that gave him power. He would be left almost lifeless, weakened without it. Like my gym teacher without his whistle. My father without his muscles.

The blue and red lights on top of the car were a rubbernecker’s dream. I must have been the most exciting thing to happen to Holedo in ages, because in no time a parade of cars was slowing down to check me out in the backseat. At first I gave every single one of them the finger behind Roget’s head. But when I couldn’t stand one more bug-eyed freak staring at me, I said, “Are you going to take me home?”

“Oh, so the little shit does speak,” Roget said from the front seat, turning to look at me. “I’ll drive you home when you answer me one question: What were you doing out there, running around almost naked in the middle of the night?”

I took in a long breath of the hot, dry car air, a sip of his bitter black coffee. I hated coffee, but it felt like a pool of warmth in my shaking hand, and I couldn’t stop drinking. “It was a dare,” I said.

He cocked his head at me. I thought maybe he’d get into some boys-will-be-boys type of story and probably want to share some of his own, so I came up with this: “There’s a guys’ club at school. To get in you have to do a dare. Mine was to run by the motel naked. My buddies took off when they saw you. They’re probably home asleep by now.”

Roget fingered his mustache. “Did it occur to you and your idiotic friends that you could cause a major accident? Or that walking around like that is what we call indecent exposure? I could arrest you.”

I wanted to tell him to cuff Edie Kramer instead. Then I thought, Arrest me. A jail cell was meant to be my bedroom after all. I wiped out a big chunk of my mother’s savings, not to mention shoplifting a pack of Juicy Fruit. But the thought of actually being arrested scared me so much that all I could manage was “Please don’t” in my weakest voice.

Roget clicked off the carnival lights and put the car in gear. I was as good as home now. I prayed he wouldn’t want to talk to my mother.

“I’ll make you a deal,” he said. “I’ll drop you off at home, no more questions asked, if you go easy on your mother for the next few weeks.”

“Deal,” I said without even thinking. The part about my mother must have been his hero routine—looking out for the ladies.

“You don’t sound like you mean it,” he said. “Your mother’s got a lot on her plate right now, so I want you to go easy on her.”

“How do you know what’s on her plate?” I asked.

He signaled and turned down Dwight Avenue, almost to my house. Finally he said, “I’m the sheriff. I know everything.”

At the corner of the lot to my apartment, Roget stopped the car. “You can keep the blanket,” he told me.

“Thanks,” I said, and he came around to open my door.

The cold air felt like pinpricks of torture all over again. I thought of my mother holding hamburger meat under a warm-running faucet, watching it break into fleshy pink chunks in her hands as it thawed. I stepped away from the car.

“Remember,” he said. “Take care of her.”

“You bet,” I said, waiting for him to drive away.

He stood there, though, and I got the point that he wasn’t going to move until he saw me walk up the stairs and into my house. So I limped up the steps and saluted to him from the top. He still didn’t leave. I turned the knob and stepped inside, closing the door behind me. When I peeked through the curtains, I saw his car door close. A moment later his taillights disappeared down the street.

“Dominick,” my mother said from behind me.

I turned around and noticed for the first time that the apartment was ablaze with lights. After what I’d been through tonight, the place actually felt warm. Marnie stood beside my red-faced mother in a tight tangerine sweater with a cat-whisker design by the neck. What the hell was she doing here in the middle of the night?

My mind raced with excuses. I fell asleep at Leon’s. I was playing strip poker.

“It’s gone,” my mother said before I could even speak.

“What’s gone?” I asked, pulling Roget’s blanket around me to cover up.

Tears rolled down my mother’s face when she opened her mouth again. “The money is gone.”

Part of me must have still been frozen, because I didn’t react. Statued and silent, I realized that I appeared confused, not at all suspicious. “What money?” I said.

“All my savings except for some coupons and a measly six hundred dollars.” She put her head in her palms and cried. Every choked and ragged sob left me drained.

“Calm down,” I said.

“Don’t tell me to calm down!” she screamed, whipping her head up to face me. Her hair was wild and matted. Her eyes opened wider than I’d ever seen. A vein bulged in her wrinkled forehead. “That’s our emergency money! And let me tell you, an emergency has come up!”

“What?” I said, confused. “Who?”

“Never you mind,” Marnie said. “Your mama’s just upset. Did you see your father take it?”

My father. It had never occurred to me that if she found the money missing, she’d automatically blame him. It was as simple as this: My father was the one who had gotten me into this mess in the first place. So fuck him.

“I didn’t know what he was looking for,” I said, taking a long, deep breath. It felt like my lungs were filling up with something, a thick and weighty substance that was barely breathable. “But I saw him fishing through your music box, then searching under your bed.”

I
woke up early and snaked seventy bucks from the last of my mother’s stash. The money would get me to New York City, where I planned to dump the whole story on Uncle Donald. My hope was that he would loan me the cash if I promised to repay him with the income from whatever crappy job I landed on my sixteenth birthday. When I got back to Holedo, I’d slip the bills into my mother’s hiding places—only under the left side of her mattress instead of the right, in her pink plastic music box instead of her wooden one, and so on.

“You see,” I would say, “Dad didn’t steal your savings after all. You just forgot where you put it.”

Okay, so the plan had its kinks, but blaming my father would last only so long. And once my mother saw the money, I knew she’d be too relieved to get hung up on the details. Besides, the trip would buy me time to figure out what to do about Edie, to deal with the shredded,
butchered feeling in me that wouldn’t leave. More than that, I would finally come face-to-face with my brother, Truman.

I pulled a duffel bag from my closet, smacked it around a couple of times to shake off the dust, and unpacked the contents from my sixth-grade hiking trip three years ago. Out with the baby binoculars and crumb-filled plastic Baggies. In with the socks, underwear, jeans. I threw in a flannel shirt, since my hooded sweatshirt had been abandoned at Edie’s. I didn’t plan on staying overnight, but I wanted to be prepared for just about anything.

Last night had taught me something.

The bus schedule I nabbed from the bottom of my mother’s stuffed purse said my ship sailed at 8:00
A.M
., so I had to move fast. I scribbled a quick note to my mother:
Gone for the day with Leon. Don’t worry. Things will be okay.
Another mini–suicide note. I dropped it on the kitchen table and stuffed a banana and two Ring Dings into the pocket of my father’s orange hunting coat, the only thing I could find to keep me warm, since my winter coat had also been abandoned at Edie’s.

On my way out the door I stopped to look at my mother, asleep on the living room couch. Eyes closed shut. Lips puckered and tight. Hair frizzed around her face in a branchy black web. Her black coat pulled to her chin with a clasped hand. A folded silver gum wrapper on the coffee table in front of her. Lying there with the tweedy couch arms raised above her small frame, she reminded me of a somber Sleeping Beauty in her glass coffin. I couldn’t look at her without hating myself for what I had done.

Last night after Marnie had said her kissy-face good-byes, my mother left a long, pissed-off message with my father’s dispatcher. I took the opportunity to bow out and drew a steaming bath in our midget-size tub. While my feet thawed under the hot faucet, I listened to my mother crying on the couch. The sound made me think of a kitten being squeezed too hard. A baby struggling for air. It killed me to know I had fucked everything up so miserably, and more than anything I wanted to get out of the tub and say something stupid to make her laugh. But I was too
worried she’d pick up some sort of guilty signal flashing above my head, and that would blow the lie about my father. So she cried herself to sleep while I soaked in the warm water, mentally rehearsing my plan to make things better.

Even as she slept on the couch, my mother wore that black wool coat—her body shivering anyway. I wanted to go to her, to pull a blanket up to her chin the way loving parents do to their sleeping children on
The Wonderful World of Disney.
But I was afraid she’d wake up. Instead I quietly walked over to the radiator in the kitchen to check on the heat myself. From deep inside its rusted rib-cage body, I could hear a steady ping and knock. The landlord obviously wasn’t going to get his ass up here anytime soon. For the hell of it, I twisted the knob by the cracked linoleum floor. Steam spit into the air like a miniature geyser. Heat pricked my face. Then silence. Again I twisted the knob and waited.

Ping.

Knock.

Ping.

A long, steady breath of steam sprayed into the room and kept coming. The piece of shit wasn’t broken after all—someone must have turned it off. Why hadn’t my mother tried giving it a good, hard twist like I just did? It didn’t make any sense. But with only twenty-six minutes to get to the station, I had no time to play detective.

I left the soon-to-be toasty apartment and hiked it downstairs to my bike. The chilly morning air smelled like a tire fire. Even though it had warmed up a bit, my body shivered—probably remembering what I had been through six short hours ago. Pedaling like crazy, I retraced part of my route from last night. Past Cumby’s. Past the motel. This time no Leila. No Roget. No Edie.

I made it to the bus station with five minutes to spare, dumped my bike behind a fence, and bought myself a ticket. It was my first time ever taking off to such a faraway place, and my stomach felt cramped and twisted when I thought about the crowded city streets of New York. A million faces as strange and scary as those newspaper stories.

NIXON ORDERS
90-
DAY PRICE FREEZE TO CURB

DOMESTIC INFLATION

BENGAL REBUILDS AFTER CYCLONE

POLICE STILL SEARCHING FOR SUSPECT ACCUSED

OF SLAYING TWO BOSTON WOMEN

I repeated the plan in my head to calm myself: find Uncle Donald’s apartment, explain the whole dirty deal, get the money, and head back home. With every passing minute my scheme sounded more far-fetched. But what choice did I have? The thought of going back to Edie’s made my hands shake and my breathing speed up. I was afraid that if I walked through her door, if I caught sight of her face, if I heard the sound of her raspy voice, then the dark tangle of feelings inside me would well up and overtake me. I was afraid I might hit her like my father did and that maybe I wouldn’t be able to stop there. I thought of the knife plunged into Sharon Tate’s pregnant stomach, and this is what came into my mind:
If a person could get that swept up in their anger and commit such an unthinkable evil, then maybe I could, too, simply because I’m human
. The thought came and went in a flash, leaving me feeling sick. I looked around the station, as if to make sure that no one had heard what I was thinking.

At two minutes to eight I spotted a walking skeleton of a man across the parking lot. He boarded one of the buses and drove it around to my gate. “All aboard,” he said when he swung open the door.

I climbed the rubbery black steps, and he ripped my ticket in half.

“Looks like it’s just the two of us until Hartford. Why don’t you sit up here with me?” he said when I took my seat three-quarters of the way back.

I could have told him to bug off, but I decided just to go with it. I dragged my duffel bag to the first seat and sat right in front of a sign that read
PLEASE DO NOT TALK TO THE DRIVER WHILE THE BUS IS IN MOTION
. Obviously my gummy-mouthed chauffeur didn’t give a dirty nipple about that rule.

We were about to shove off when someone outside screamed, “Wait! Hold the bus!”

The driver slammed on the brakes and opened the door. I looked up to see that skinny girl from the police auction and last night at Cumby’s. Again. This time she was carrying a sign that said
EQUAL PAY FOR EQUAL WORK
. She was dressed in a St. Bartholomew outfit—plaid skirt, dark sweater, and tights—which explained why I never saw her in my school. Leon always said that Bartholomew girls were starved for action, so he hit on them every chance he got. I didn’t think he’d go for this one, though. Not that she wasn’t pretty, because she was. Sort of. But her signs were a bit much.

“Thank you for stopping,” she said to the driver, breathless. “You saved me from Saturday services.”

The old guy must have thought she was a bit weird, too, because he didn’t invite her to join our party. She moseyed on down the aisle to the very back of the bus, clumsily balancing her sign, a duffel bag, and a giant black guitar case in her arms. No kids today. When she passed me, she smiled. This time I looked away, because I had too much to think about and didn’t want her chatting me up as well. When we started moving again, I turned to look out the window but couldn’t help stretching my neck a bit to see what she was up to.

“Damn it!” she said to herself as she stood by the bus bathroom emptying her duffel bag. “I forgot my boots.”

With that she took a bunch of clothes and went into the bathroom and shut the door.

“So,” the driver said after a long, long silence in which he steered the rickety bus out of Holedo and down the highway, “what’s your name?”

I had been staring out the window, thinking of my father out there, somewhere on a similar highway. A series of solid yellow lines connecting us in a complicated route. A stretched umbilical cord from my seat in this bus to him. “Leon,” I said, wanting just for this ride to be someone else.

“I’m Claude. What’re you going to do in the city, Leon?” Claude spoke in a too-loud, over-the-shoulder voice that he must have cultivated through years of trapping passengers in this seat as he drove with their
lives in his withered, hairy-knuckled hands. The high volume probably did the trick when the bus was jam-packed. But at that moment, in the empty belly of the beast, Claude’s voice sounded louder than necessary. Adult to child.

I glanced behind me to make sure the picket girl was still in her dressing room. She was. “I’m going to meet a girl who wants me to lick her crotch clean,” I said, giving him my best Leon. Served the guy right for not leaving me alone. After all, I had a mess of shit to sort out. Talking to him was a waste of time.

“Well, there’s nothing like some good pussy,” Claude shouted back.

Obviously my Leon tactic didn’t give him the leave-me-the-fuck-alone shock I had expected. We switched lanes, and a tractor-trailer passed. I thought of my father again. Driving. All those connections between us. I didn’t know why I was thinking about him, almost missing him right now. Maybe because we had both been burned so badly by Edie. And even though we’d never swap war stories, it might feel good to have him around as a silent partner in all this.

“Listen,” I said, wishing I had ignored Claude’s invitation to sit up front in the first place, “I need to take a snooze. So if you don’t mind, I’m going to close my eyes.”

“Sure thing,” he said. “May as well rest up. The city’s a tough place for a young fella like you.”

“I can handle it,” I said.

“I hope so,” he shouted back. “All those muggers, beggars, murderers.”

A flapping feeling swept through me. In my stomach I imagined an invisible embryo somersaulting and leaving me unsettled, the way Edie always described. But I wasn’t going to let this no-brain bus driver get to me. “I said I can handle it,” I told him.

“Good thing,” he said, taking his eyes off the road and looking at me in his big mother of a mirror longer than I liked. His eyes were set deep in his face, with barely any lashes. His cheeks were jowly. “Police are always finding young kids like you dead in some fleabag Harlem motel room.”

“I’m just going to visit my uncle,” I said, wanting to shut him up once and for all.

“What about the girl?”

“Girl?” I asked, then remembered. “Oh, I’m going to visit my uncle after I lick her crotch.”

“Right,” he said.

The picket girl emerged from her dressing room wearing flared denim jeans bleached blue and white like the sky and a long-sleeved tight black shirt with buttons down the front. No more schoolgirl.

I closed my eyes to put an end to all the distractions. In the darkness behind my lids I saw a blizzard of Edie images: Edie writing the Dominick-I-need-to-see-you note last fall when her face was black-and-blue. Edie tilting her head and lacing her fingers between mine as we lay in her bed. Edie tucking her stray hair behind her ear and leaning forward to kiss me. Edie walking into her bedroom and finding me gone last night.

As much as I hated to admit it, and as pissed off as I felt, I was going to miss my nights with her. Over and over I wished there were some sort of explanation. Maybe I had heard her wrong, I tried to tell myself. After all, she hadn’t said my name. For all I knew, she could have been talking about the paperboy. But I knew what she had done. What I didn’t get was how she could go through with it. How could Edie have faked all those nights at her house? Laughing with me? Holding my hand? Kissing me? It was a lot of effort just to get her claws on some cash. And there had to be an easier way to get back at my father.

To stop myself from thinking about Edie, I tried to conjure up everything I knew about my Uncle Donald. A few hours earlier, when I sneaked into my mother’s room to grab the bus fare, I dug up Uncle Donald’s number and gave him a wake-up call. When he answered—his fat-man’s voice, crackly with sleep—I hung up. Just a test to make sure he wasn’t off globe-trotting to get funding for one of his engineering projects. I wanted to be sure he would be present for my visit, since it wasn’t the type of thing I could blurt out over the phone. After all, since he trav
eled so often, and since my mother usually went to visit him instead of the other way around, I had only met my uncle a handful of times. From what I knew, he seemed like a cool enough guy—big and burly, always cracking some over-my-head joke and making himself laugh. I used to ask my mother why he didn’t invent something useful, like a remote control that would start her car in the morning so it would be warm when we got in, or a radio battery that didn’t die after a couple of days. But my mother said his inventions were not that gimmicky. He focused more on doodads for disease-research laboratories, more interested in curing cancer than warming my ass. And for that he made a bundle.

As far as I knew—which was not much—Uncle Donald didn’t have a girlfriend. Probably because his Santa Claus belly and gray beard weren’t exactly the type of thing chicks got hot for. Besides, between traveling and raising Truman, how could he have time for a love life?