Broken Monsters (9 page)

The old
bullet wound in the kid's armpit gives Gabi something she can work with. Six hundred and forty-seven nonfatal shootings in Detroit last year. But the city's not so soul-decayed that a six-year-old kid catching a stray bullet from a gang war doesn't make the news. Not yet, anyway. It helps that the ambulance broke down en route and the officers on the scene had to drive the kid to the hospital in a patrol car. Five years ago, which meant it took some digging, but there is a trail of paperwork that leads right back to him.

His name is Daveyton Lafonte. Eleven years old. He has been missing since Friday afternoon. The parents filed a missing persons report with the 10th Precinct, who were not answering their phones when Gabi had Sparkles calling around to every police station yesterday. Blame it on bureaucratic failures, lack of resources, lack of funding, lack of giving a shit.

They drive up to the house in Ewald Circle with the bad tidings. It's her and Bob Boyd, who is surprisingly good with grief (he credits the suit), and Sparkles, who is getting a crash course in terrible conversations you never want to have, but will, over and over again.

Gabi has found that small talk works like stepping stones to bridge the shock of the gap between “I'm sorry to inform you that your son has been killed. May we come in?” and the brutality of “I need to ask you some questions.”

The hows that come in between. Skirting around the issue. Using technical terms. “Lateral bisection.” “Possible hunting accident.” “There was a dead animal on the scene.” Testing them to see what they know, how they react, because the parents are suspects too. The paralysis of disbelief that she has to penetrate. The official script only gets you so far.

“Do you have a recent picture of him?” Gabi asks the parents as gently as she can. On the piano, next to a goofy candid shot of the boy peering through the grill of an oversize hockey helmet, and a school portrait, three-quarter profile, looking hopefully to a future he'll never see, there's a photograph of Daveyton with the disgraced former mayor, who is now doing jail time.

She picks it up. The kid looks worried by the attention, or maybe by Kwame Kilpatrick's expression, brow furrowed, mouth open, speechifying. Maybe his kid instincts told him the mayor was a rotten, corrupt thug.

“We were all real proud at the time,” Mrs. Lafonte says, taking the frame out of Gabi's hands and putting it back on the piano. She readjusts it, angling it just so. “He shook us all by the hand. Didn't mean so much to Davey, though. He wanted to meet Steve Yzerman. Always loved the Red Wings. Kwame promised he'd set it up. He wanted to play hockey, but all that equipment is expensive.”

“Mayor promised our boy wouldn't get hurt again,” Mr. Lafonte says. He is sitting bolt upright on a black leather recliner that's not designed for it.

Mrs. Lafonte makes a strangled bird sound in her chest. She doesn't seem aware of it, as if her body is something detached from her. Marcus looks down at his shoes, stricken. There's a dreadful pause.

“Can I get you some coffee?” Daveyton's mother asks, clutching at social ritual.

“No, thank you.” Jesus, she hates this part of the job. “Do you play?” She indicates the piano.

“Used to,” Mrs. Lafonte says, grateful for the question. “I performed with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra once. But that was before the arthritis. Always hoped Davey would pick it up. But he was more interested in those little fighting critters. What are they called?”

“Pokémon?” Gabi suggests. “My daughter liked those.” Layla was three or four, so they only caught the tail end of it, but she remembers hustling her past the toy aisle. There were so many things they tried to control, her and William. It was easier when Layla was little. When they could simply change the channel on Barney. They had long debates about whether to let her play with Barbie or toy guns, and why there wasn't a police officer Barbie
with
a toy gun. But then Layla started developing her own tastes and opinions, and the whole world came rushing in at her, and there was nothing they could do to shield her from it.

“Battle Beasts,” her husband says, dully.

“Battle Beasts! That's it. You get the toys, but you're supposed to have a fancy phone that they can interact with, to fight other kids. Are you sure you don't want something to drink?”

“This is too much,” Mr. Lafonte says. “I can't—”

“The first few days are critical. Why don't you point Officer Jones to the kitchen, and he can make us
all
some coffee. And maybe you could show us Daveyton's room?” They're looking for signs of an unhappy home, the markers of violence, hidden doors, secret rooms, locked basements, the smell of blood or bleach.

“No, no, I'll make the coffee. I think I should keep busy, don't you?” Mrs. Lafonte flashes them a brittle smile. “You get on without me. I'll be right back.” But she drifts up the stairs leading up to the second floor. Marcus moves as if to go after her, to steer her toward the sunlight coming in the kitchen windows down the hall, but Gabi shakes her head. Leave her be.

“Could we see his room?” Gabi tries again.

“Are you sure it's our boy?” Mr. Lafonte says, daring her to be wrong about this thing they have brought into the house.

“You'll need to identify him. I think maybe it should be you, Mr. Lafonte. No need to put your wife through that.” She looks him in the eyes. “But yes, we're sure.”

He lets go of hope like a helium balloon. It seems to have been the only thing holding him up. His shoulders hunch over and he tilts forward, his whole body crumpling. “We moved up here to get away from all that,” he says. “After the shooting. It's a good neighborhood. This isn't supposed to happen in
good
neighborhoods.”

“Bad things happen everywhere, Mr. Lafonte. Forgive me, but I have a list of routine questions I need to go through with you. You won't like some of them.”

“My son is dead, Detective—”

“Versado,” she fills in for him.

He waves the name away. “You think your questions can hurt me?”

So she goes through them, systematically. Where Daveyton was last seen. Who he was seen with. Did he have any friends who might have been a bad influence? Any gang-related activity? Any adults who showed a special interest in him? Did he have any hobbies? Had he mentioned any encounters with strangers? Any medical conditions? Was he on any medication? Or drugs? Any trouble at school or in the neighborhood?

“In this neighborhood?”

Behind him, Mrs. Lafonte plods down the stairs, carrying a plastic laundry basket, and vanishes into the kitchen. Routine, like small talk, to find your way back, because the most risible thing about death is that life carries on.

“You got any hunting buddies?” Boyd asks.

“No. Why would you ask that?” Mr. Lafonte is getting more and more confused.

“You ever take him out into the woods?”

“What is this?” Outrage jerks Mr. Lafonte's spine upright.

“We're trying to cover all the bases, sir. All lines of inquiry. It's possible it may have been a hunting accident.”

“What happened to my boy?” He stands up. “I want to see him.”

“You will, Mr. Lafonte.” Not like she has, of course. The Lafontes will get their son all cleaned up, with a plastic sheet for modesty to cover where his legs would have been. They'll be able to tell immediately though. The visibility of absence.

“I want to see him
now.
”

There is a screeching grinding sound from the kitchen. Marcus reacts before any of them, running toward the noise. Beat cop instincts. Gabi and Boyd are out of practice. He stops, frozen in the doorway at the sight of Mrs. Lafonte, her teeth bared, squashing a plastic dinosaur into the protesting garbage disposal. There are shreds of tiger-striped blue plastic around the sink. She's forcing it in, the protesting blades whirring near her fingertips. The toy grins idiotically with its bulging eyes, even as the soft plastic rips under the blades. The laundry basket is full of toys.

“Stop, Mrs. Lafonte.” Gabi pulls her hands away. “Please.”

“Oh, I'm sorry, honey.” Daveyton's mother turns to them, smiling vaguely. Shock makes people do strange things. Gabi remembers one woman who jumped off her porch and sprinted around her house three times as if she could somehow outrun the bad news. Mrs. Lafonte holds out the shredded plastic. “Did you want them for your little girl?”

Knock knock.
Who's there? Clayton. Clayton who? Clayton gone away not coming back, all eaten up on the inside by the dreaming thing he let into his head that didn't mean to get trapped here, drawn out by the raw wound of the man's mind, blazing like a lamp in one of those border places where the skin of the worlds are permeable,
exactly like
the walls of a cheap motel if the walls of a cheap motel can sometimes turn to a meniscus you can push right through by accident. It only wants to get home, and it doesn't know how.

The dream navigates the city in Clayton's body, pulling on his thoughts like strings in a labyrinth to guide it through the streets. His muscle memory manages the brute mechanics, shifting the stick, applying the brake, obeying the rules of the road.

All the rules. All the definitives. Car! Tree! Traffic light! Bus stop! Things are only one thing even if they are categories, species, of themselves, because the names lock them in even more specifically. Elder! Poplar! Oak! Black Gum! White Cedar! Basswood! It feels suffocated by the rigidity of the world. And yet…there is evidence of the dreaming everywhere. There is a world beneath the world that is rich and tangled with meaning. Clayton knew this.

Clayton's thoughts are fuzzy things, flickering beneath the surface, keeping them both alive. It has to hold on to them, to steer him through the world, to make the words in Clayton's mouth come out in the right order.

The ghost nerves sometimes fire in the reconstructed flesh, like when he passes by the corner café and his hand flies to his mouth in an automatic gesture for cigarettes. Or his head turns to watch a woman's hips rolling as she walks down the street ahead of him.

There are other places with strong personal associations, layers of meaning mapped onto the city that make it more navigable. They pass a hospital and the dream is struck by Clay's memory of the smell of the detergent. Bundled-up sheets, stained with shit or blood or urine. The fierce heat of the laundry and the rush of steam from the dryer doors. He got fired from the hospital for stealing a stained sheet, pinning it up at an exhibition. He called it “Sick.”

The dream takes comfort in Clayton's memories. It seeks them out, and that they are not exactly as the man remembered gives it hope, that perhaps the world
can
be twisted and bent.

It can sense the unconscious currents beneath the city, like the gas pipes that puff thick plumes of steam into the streets.

There are lines of associations. There are nested fears. The giant black fist suspended on cables in the square among the high-rise buildings, a monument to the boxer Joe Louis, but also to power and fear. The curved towers of GM's headquarters nearby, a cluster of glass dicks nudged up together for safety, every window lit up, thrusting defiantly into the darkness.

The currents are crude and subtle in the billboards shouting slogans that say one thing, but mean another, tugging at desires and anxiety, but also alive in the graffiti, the squiggled tags that writhe with look-at-me, acknowledge-me, I'm-here.

And art, most of all.

The dream and Clayton sit on a cool marble bench in the central courtyard of the Detroit Institute of Arts, which Clayton never visited because he didn't like the formality of it, when he thought art should be rough and ready, and they stare at Diego Rivera's giant frescoes of men and machinery and feel the churning beneath. All the galleries are like that, dreams seething beneath the surface of the paint, under the skin of the bronze statues. Clayton was so close. But he didn't know how to cut through.

The dream thinks it does. You need life to make life. “The birds and the bees,” to steal a thought from the man it is inhabiting.

Eventually it has to leave the art museum. The needs of the body are a nagging constant. So they are behind the wheel of the truck when it sees the boy, half-collapsed against the side of the bus stop, his head resting against the scuffed-up Plexiglas. It stops the car and watches the boy sleep. There is no one else around. The boy stirs and his leg kicks out, once, reflexively, like a rabbit or a dog. Or another kind of animal.

It climbs out and goes to get something out of the toolbox the man keeps in the back.

It remembers this from a dream Clayton once had.

“Get up!” Shaking the limp boy by his bare shoulders, his skin still clammy from overnighting in the freezer in the basement. The boy's head lolls back on his neck, and the dream weeps with frustration, its tears shattering like glass on the cement, among the detritus in the tunnel, the trash and condoms, the old tires, bits of chalk left over from a mural of a girl's face, smiling down on them with serene encouragement in the quiet and the dark.

It brought him here to unveil him, close to the physical border between Canada and the United States, in the hopes that borders overlap.

It can't understand what's wrong, why he won't get up, maybe wobbly at first on his new legs, like a faun, before he begins to bound and leap and fly, and then his very being, the fact of him, will rip through the skin between the worlds, let them slip away, back home. Or bring all of dream crashing in on them.

It has been so very careful, so patient. Flesh is messier, and has its own challenges, but it is not so very different from working in metal or clay or wood. It followed the instructions on the package of chemicals very carefully. A day to prepare, a day to bind. Maybe that was its mistake. The choice of materials, the freezer, keeping the deer in the refrigerator, the plastic wrap mummifying the boy, suffocating him. Perhaps he opened his eyes in the ice chest, battered his hands against the lid, perhaps he has already come and gone, and it missed its moment.

It strokes the bristly hair of the legs that run to the smooth skin of the boy's belly, the scoop of his navel. It cups one of the small, sharp hooves, takes one of the child's hands and laces his slim fingers between Clayton's clumsy ones. It squeezes, gently. An admonishment. Get up now. Stop playing. It's not funny. Words it knows from Clayton's head.

But the boy is a dead, empty thing. It has done it all wrong. This stupid head, these stupid hands. It tries to remember how it came through, the man in the woods and the lure of uninhabited spaces—a vacancy that dream can rush in to fill, a door to step through.

“I'm sorry,” the dream says with Clayton's mouth. And it is, for both of them.

About to climb back into the truck, it hesitates and picks up a piece of pink chalk from the ground. It draws the rough outline of a door, the chalk snapping in Clayton's thick fingers. But it is persistent. Because maybe, next time, the door will open, and the boy will climb unsteadily to his hooves and take lilting steps through.

The dream will try again.