Imaginary Men (21 page)

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Authors: Enid Shomer

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BOOK: Imaginary Men
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Page 131
must it be like for Fontane to climb into her bed tonight, Leila wondered. Mr. Whitley would pat her, turn over, and fall asleep. The house would be utterly quiet. All Fontane would hear would be the sound of her own breathing, the goddam regularity of it, and a prayer repeating in her head: Please, God, let Hiram be breathing, too. Eventually her eyes would grow accustomed to the dark. Visual purpleLeila remembered that phrase from somewhere. The room would take shape, the empty hallway beyond it like a bend in a river that leads nowhere.
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Leila had worked or lived next door to Fontane for seven yearstwo when the building was only a store and five more since Leila had moved into it. Colonel Pinkerton's Treasure Trove was a cracker cottage with Victorian touchesgingerbread trim on the eaves and porch gallery, a fancy iron fence. Inside, it was set up like a model house, the used furniture and collectibles for sale displayed in rooms organized around color themes. Leila had a knack for arrangement and for color. The attic playroom was a cartoonish blue and yellow. The kitchen bustled with green glass Depression-era mixing bowls, red-handled eggbeaters, and gingham.
At first, Fontane Whitley kept her distance. But when the Colonel died, six years ago, it was Fontane who noticed that something was wrong with Leila. Fontane liked old things; she regularly checked the new arrivals after a truck had been unloaded. She collected hand-embroidered pillowcases and anything made of copper. One day, Fontane parked Beckah, who was sleeping in her stroller, next to Leila's desk. The adding machine was plugged in and she was paying bills. Leila remembered staring at the small red "on" light. The baby dozed; the red light burned steadily. It was like a tiny traffic signal that made her want to stop doing everything. Time passedshe did not know how much timeand the baby's eyes were open. She was grabbing at a string of plastic keys suspended above her, drool running from the corner of her mouth. Her feet kicked and her eyes watered as she reached for the toy with her whole body. Once in a while she touched one of the keys, and it clicked against its neighbor. Otherwise, the store was quiet as a folded quilt.
"Leila, honey, you're not talking today. Something's wrong with
 
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you, you're not saying a word." The voice was Fontane's. "Can't you say something?" The silence had brought Fontane hurrying down from the third floor to the front room. Usually she could hear Leila's voice, uncurling tentatively at first, then climbing, as she chattered at Beckah. "You're not even talking to the baby?"
Leila looked at Beckah and then at Fontane and burst into tears, but still she couldn't talk. The red light burned. The baby slept, then played. The Colonel had been dead for six months.
The doctor said Leila's depression was "profound"as if, she thought, he were describing a symphony or a speech. He prescribed an antidepressant drug that gave her a great deal of energy after just a few weeks. She felt happiest in the store, each room of it like a bright nest she had woven for herself. The colors and textures suddenly brought shivers of delight, almost as if she could taste them, as if they satisfied some physical appetite. The doctor said not to worry about this odd joy; it was just her aptitude for pleasure coming back. But it was the reason she had decided to sell the house outside of town where she had lived with the Colonel and move into the store.
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The police visited the Whitleys three times on Tuesday. They brought a specialist from the Missing Children's Registry, who asked detailed questions about Hiram's playmates and habits and interviewed children in the neighborhood. The church auxiliary sent covered dishes. The Whitleys' phone rang continuously with calls from well-wishers, friends, psychics, and the parents of other children who had disappeared. Two camera vans stayed parked on the street.
By Tuesday afternoon, Fontane was under a doctor's care for her nerves. She took small yellow pills every four hours and received visitors from the striped sofa in her front room. Mr. Whitley had gone back to work, but not before posting pictures of Hiram all over the county: "Missing Reward," the fluorescent-green paper said above Hiram's seventh-grade picture. Newspapers in Valdosta, Tallahassee, and Jacksonville carried the story on the front page.
Leila brought lunch for Fontane that afternoona platter of chicken salad with sliced cucumbers and a pitcher of Crystal Light lemonade. The Reverend Dozier Jones was there, holding Fontane's limp arm as they prayed together in front of a silent TV screen where
 
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well-dressed white people moved through spacious rooms. Fontane had taken to watching a lot of TV since Beckah got sick. She still hadn't gone back to work. Mr. Whitley said she would never have to if she didn't want to.
"Ma'am," the Reverend said, rising to his feet, as Leila leaned down to place the food on the coffee table.
"You remember my neighbor, Leila Summer Pinkerton," Fontane said.
"What a pity we keep meeting under such trying circumstances," the Reverend said. For a second, Leila imagined his voice emanating from the afternoon soap unfolding in miniature behind him.
"Lemonade?" she asked.
Leila hardly watched television anymore. Her favorite programs in thirty-five years were the Milton Berle Show and the Bicentennial Minutes. She wished they would re-run Uncle Miltiethere was nothing funnier than a man dressed as a woman, pitched forward in high heels like a gawky bird.
After Beckah died, Hiram developed an interest in movies like
Frankenstein
and
The Shining
and
Alien
. His weekends were filled with gelatinous creatures, mummies trailing gauze, and body snatchers shaped like giant snow peas. Leila was happy to let Hiram use the Colonel's VCR. He talked a mile a minute while he watched movies. Leila had difficulty keeping up with him; her attention would settle on the film or be sidetracked by a bird at the feeder in the yard. Hiram talked mostly about school. Fontane bragged to anyone who would listen that Hiram was in the gifted program, and sometimes, in front of company, she had him recite the names of all the presidents.
After lunch, the Reverend followed Leila into the kitchen and stood running his finger along the Formica counter while she washed the dishes. "I'm certain we all appreciate your thoughtfulness to Mr. and Mrs. Whitley in this time of trouble," he said. His "t"s were little firecrackers going off in the middle of words. It was probably the way he preached, drawing the words out, making them sizzle and hiss.
"Don't you remember me from the shop?" Leila turned to face him. Sometimes she couldn't bear the way her black neighbors deferred to her, exchanging nothing more than pleasantries and homilies. She wanted to grab them and shake them and scream
It's me
. She often imagined the awkwardness dissolving: a door suddenly coming unstuck in a room full of people, every face furrowed at first
 
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with alarm, then softening as though a baby with wings had fluttered through the open doorway.
''The Colonel was a fine man, a fine man." The Reverend stayed behind his mask.
Mabidda thirty
,
I got thirty
,
mabidda thirty
,
who'll say thirty-five
,
bidda thirty-five where?
The Colonel used to stand at his auctioneer's podium, the walnut gavel in his hand, a cowboy hat on his head. His voice was a bullwhip, gathering the crowd in, circling, snapping in the air. Whenever Leila thought of him now, she had to remind herself of his bad traits as well as the good ones. That way she missed him less. He was too stuck on himself to adopt a child. Afraid he'd get a defective one. Being from north Georgia, he wasn't open-minded, and, if the truth be told, in the beginning he did business with his black neighbors only because there was money to be made off them.
"He was just a human being," Leila said. "You don't have to sweet-talk me."
The Reverend looked shocked. "I know he's with Jesus," he said, "the Colonel. And I hope you've taken Jesus. I've taken Him into my heart, and I am ready to go to Him whenever I'm called."
Leila picked up a knife in the sink and imagined brandishing it in his direction.
How about right now? Are you ready to go this minute?
Instead, she scrubbed the blade with a sponge until clear water danced off it. The Reverend waited as if for an "amen" from Leila, still unwilling to acknowledge her candor. "I'm in no big hurry myself," she finally said. She knew he'd find the remark too playful, but wouldn't take issue with it. A moment later, he left, promising to return the next day, urging Fontane to call him any time.
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The sheriff organized a search party. At dawn on Wednesday, deputies and citizens began combing Waccasassa and its environs. It made Leila sick to her stomach when she saw volunteer fire fighters going through the dumpster behind Video World. Soon Hiram's face would appear like a reverse cameo on milk cartons, and children throughout the state would compare his birth date to their own over bowls of breakfast cereal.
Leila would have liked to join the search, but her legs and back were not what they once were. She knew the local terrain wellfrom
 
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the sand-hill pines near the northern county line to the swampy sweet-gum woods that fringed the Waccasassa River at the western border. Bellamy County was full of creeks, dry creek beds, quarries, and dense forests, all of which now seemed threatening. It was still possible that Hiram had run off and gotten lost; Leila believed that. When he was in elementary school, he had gone camping with Mr. Whitley and his Boy Scout troop. He knew, presumably, the basics of survival: how to light a fire, find fresh water, and sleep in safety from the snakes, bobcats, and wild hogs that Leila knew roamed Bellamy County. Still, as the days passed, the vision of him that occupied her mind changed. On Sunday, he tromped in slow motion through a field like someone in a shampoo commercial, the wild phlox and rye grass waving him on. That night, he slept in the crotch of one of the huge live oaks that lined the old Bellamy plantation road to the black cemetery. By Tuesday, his clothes were ragged and his hair was starting to mat. She saw him smeared with mud to the elbows and knees, bent over a brook, catching crawdads. By Wednesday, every imaginary glimpse of him was terrifying; he was becoming wild, a feral child. He had taken on an existence in which ferocity alone could save him. Finally, it was impossible to picture him at allhe had regressed too far from the boy she knew. Hiram had become a complete mystery. And another mystery had been revealed: Leila loved him. She felt the love deep in her body and all the way out to its edgesin her teeth and nails, skin and bones she wanted him back.
The search teams quit at sundown, having netted two garbage bags full of what looked like shreds of clothes, newsprint, and beer cans, all of it described as potential evidence.
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Now, with Fontane's approval, Leila pawed through crayons and rulers and Magic Markers and gum wrappers and balled-up homework assignments. The disorder of Hiram's desk felt vital as it touched her hands, like the boy himself. "Nothing," she said when she was done. She walked to the closet and opened the two louvered bifold doors. Fontane nodded her agreement. "Help me," Leila said. "You know where things belong."
The two of them bent into the dark of the closet. Fontane was a good housekeeper. At home, when Leila opened a closet or looked
 
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under a bed, dust bunnies drifted in the small updrafts. Leila recognized a lavender-and-black plaid shirt and remembered a wisp of conversation, Hiram's head framed by hickory leaves. The shirt seemed ghostlike.
"Oh, my God," Fontane said. She had been squatting. Now she sat back on the floor. "My God, my God."
"What is it?"
Fontane pointed to the flamingo-colored high-tops lined up neatly at the back of the closet. "I put his sneakers there myself. They were alongside the bed on Sunday. But where are his dress shoes? Do you see his dress shoes? Black leather wing tips?"
The two of them pulled out everything on the closet floor. While Fontane pushed through the clothes on hangers Leila dumped the contents of a toy box on the bedroom rug. Legos, blocks, a small, deflated football, an old T-shirt. "I don't see them anywhere," she said.
"His good black pants," Fontane said. Her voice was shrill with excitement. "His dress clothes are gone. They're gone!" Fontane grabbed Leila around the waist and jumped up and down, holding on to her. Then she raced down the steps and into the yard, to the toolshed. Leila watched from the window as Fontane removed the padlock, ducked inside, and returned weeping and thanking God. "The BB gun's gone!" she shouted. By the time Leila made her way downstairs, Fontane was on the phone with her husband, her voice wobbly with excitement, then rushing out in a torrent. Leila hugged Fontane and sat next to her as she made one call after another.
That night Leila lay in bed thinking about the last time Dayton had visited. He had brought Hiram the BB gun against Fontane and Evan's wishes. Worse, he had taken the boy out to the Bellamy plantation road for target practice. It was a Sunday morning, and Fontane was furious and humiliated when she discovered that the gunfire that punctuated the Reverend's sermon was from Dayton's shotgun. He and Hiram were shooting mistletoe out of the live oaks. Several parishioners had seen the two of them resting in the culvert, their guns propped against a tree.
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On Friday afternoon, Leila donned her tattered straw hat and pink cotton gardening gloves. She knelt on the soft rubber mat she had

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