Prodigal Blues (2 page)

She leaned over and stared out the window.
 
"What?
 
What am I supposed to be looking at?"

I pointed toward the flier.
 
"The biggest part of the mess."

Y
ou see their pictures everywhere these days; they're so ubiquitous that, after a while, you force yourself to stop paying attention to them because they've become a perpetually sad and sick-making part of the background; this kid's face on a rectangular card lost amidst the rest of the junk mail—Have You Seen Me?—or that child's badly-photocopied picture on a homemade poster hanging inside the Post Office; maybe another kid's face stares out at you from a piece of paper thumbtacked to a cork bulletin board by the entrance and exit of your local grocery store; sometimes, if the parents and friends have exhausted all hope, you'll even see these fliers stapled to telephone poles or taped onto windows of abandoned and condemned buildings because, well, you never know, do you, who might have seen them in what god-awful parts of this city or the next?; if you're one of those who use the Internet like most people use oxygen, then you know there are websites dedicated to displaying these photographs along with their age-progressed counterparts (This is what Aaron may look like now, at age 10); whatever the source of your encounter, odds are you give the photo an at-best perfunctory glance (like I used to), then toss aside the card or look away from the poster or surf on to the next and less depressing website.
 
It doesn't make you a bad or unfeeling person; it only reaffirms your helplessness as an individual to do anything about it:
 
after all, how many kids do you see on a daily basis?
 
How many children do you pass at the mall, on the street, in the lobbies of movie theaters?
 
Every so often one of these kids might make a brief impression—a prolonged moment of eye contact, waving hello, giggling at a face you make because you want to see if you can get a laugh out of them—but most, if not all of them are in the company of an adult; so how are you supposed to tell if this adult is a parent, an aunt or uncle, an older sibling, or some monster who stole them away however many days, weeks, months, or years ago?
 
And in all honesty, how long does the image of that particular kid's face stay fixed in your memory?
 

Have You Seen Me?

Maybe, possibly, could be; but I'm damned if I can remember.

So you look away—if you look at all—and try not to think about it.
 
If you have children of your own, maybe you hug them a little tighter than usual when they go to bed that night, look in on them a couple of extra times while they're sleeping, and watch them go all the way through the school's doors when you drop them off the next morning on your way to work.
 
You try not imagine how you'd feel if it was their face on the cards, the fliers, the websites.
 
These are
your
kids we're talking about here, after all, not one of the missing, and while you might feel bad for the families of those card-, flier-, and website-children, you have to look out for your own as best you can, and you don't need these constant reminders in the sad, sick-making background that ultimately, like it or not, you have no control over what happens; that anywhere, anytime, under any circumstances, regardless of how careful and watchful you are, a hand could reach out of the crowd, take hold of your kid's arm, give it a tug... and you're out stapling homemade fliers to telephone poles before dinner.
 
So you look but you don't see because you can't think about it.

This does not mean you are a bad or unfeeling person.
 
It means you love them.
 
It means you are concerned.

It means you are afraid.

And you damned well ought to be.

I probably think about this far too much than is really healthy, but I can't help it.
 
Tanya says I need to "see someone" about what happened, and she's right... but I'm not sure I'd know where to begin.
 
I distract too easily these days; if we pass a car on the road and I see a crying child with their face peering out at me from the window, my first thought is always:
 
They're scared to death and need help
; if I see a kid in a store struggling to pull away from the adult who's got hold of them, I immediately wonder if they've only moments ago been snatched away from their mom or dad or other family member; if I hear a child yell or scream in the evening when our street is filled with children at play, it never occurs to me that the sound might just be one of glee or excitement or good-natured Let's-Scare-So-and-So because they're such a wuss—no; in my ears it is the sound of a terrified, helpless child being yanked into a stranger's car and shrieking for someone they love to come save them,
please, please, Mommy, Daddy, somebody,
anybody
please help me
.

I react this way because I am afraid, and when I tell this to Tanya she touches my cheek, smiles while trying to understand, and says:
 
"How could you not be, after what happened?"
 
Despite the strain it has put on our marriage (we were planning to have a child soon but now, I just don't know) she remains for me a rock, and I love her all the more for it, yet as soon as she says, "How could you not be...?" I snap back to that first phone call and it starts all over again....

H
is name was Thomas Davies and he was eleven years old.

He had been eight when Grendel stole him away.
 

During those three years, Thomas, one of the youngest children from the House of Heorot in the burg of the Scyldings, underwent one of the worst transformations afflicted upon any of them:
 
burned skin hung about his neck in brownish wattles; one yellowed eye, looking like a rotten boiled egg, was almost completely hidden underneath the drooping scar tissue of his forehead; his mouth twisted downward on both sides with pockets of dead, greasy-looking flesh at the corners; and his cheeks resembled the globs of congealed wax that form at the base of a candle.
 
His only normal-looking facial feature was his left eye:
 
it was a startling bright blue, an azure gemstone. Buried as it was in that ruined face, its vibrancy seemed a cruel joke.

He looked nothing like the smiling, pink-cheeked boy from his second grade school picture, the one his parents circulated after his disappearance.

Thomas rarely spoke; mostly he sang to himself, a lullaby his mother used to sing when he was very young:

"Sleep my child and peace attend thee,

All through the night.

Guardian angels God will send thee,

All through the night.

Soft the drowsy hours are creeping,

Hill and dale in slumber sleeping,

I my loved ones' watch am keeping,

All through the night..."

Except Thomas never once sang it correctly (I knew this because my mother used to sing the same lullaby to me when I was a kid).
 
He did fine until the "Hill and dale" line:
 
every time he got to it, he sang, "
Bill and Dale look dum-ber sleeping...
"
 
I asked him why he sang it that way when he knew the actual words.

"It was a joke.
 
Mom always laughed when we sang it together because I messed up the words on purpose."

When it came time to deliver him I was the one who remembered that, and as reward for my good memory found myself standing behind an oak tree on the opposite side of the street on which Thomas's parents lived.
 
It was three in the morning and there was a chunk of panic in my throat, a cell phone in my hand, and the glowing red point of a laser-sight scope centered on my chest; at the other end of the vein-thin infrared beam, hidden somewhere among the foliage garnishing this middle-class Midwestern neighborhood, a young man holding a .45-caliber Heckler and Koch USP Tactical pistol with a silencer attachment was watching my every move, steady and focused.
 

I stared at the phone in my hand as if it were some small, dead thing I'd picked up from the middle of the road.
 
In a minute or so I was to punch in a number, and hopefully someone on the other end would answer.
 
If I said anything other than what I'd been told to say, if I deviated even slightly from the context, if I so much as
hinted
that I was being forced to do this, the young man holding the pistol would squeeze the trigger and my torso would open up like some grisly flower.

I stood in silence, well out of reach from the streetlights' gleam, watching as a young woman named Rebecca came around the far corner pushing Thomas in his wheelchair.
 
Even from where I stood—some twenty yards away—I could see the seepage below Thomas's knees where his legs had been removed ten days ago.
 
Thomas's arms were shaking and he kept reaching up to rub his eye.
 
Rebecca pushed him past several darkened homes, then turned up the walk to an old but impeccably-maintained Victorian.
 
She stopped, bent down, set the brakes on the wheelchair, and then came around to face him, setting two large brown grocery sacks in his lap.

I couldn't hear what they were saying to one another but her body language told all I needed to know.
 
The flicker from the streetlights glinted from Rebecca's eyes and the tears running down her cheeks.
 
She knelt down as best she could and took hold of Thomas's trembling hands, then leaned in against him, whispering in his ear.
 
After a moment Thomas freed his hands and wrapped his arms around her.
 
Rebecca began to return the embrace, hesitated a moment, and then gave in.
 
They held each other in silence.
 
I could not even begin to imagine what was passing between them.
 
I can imagine better now, but I try not to.

Rebecca was the one to break the embrace.
 
She stood, wiped her eyes, tried to smile but didn't make it, and then simply walked away, leaving him parked halfway up the walk.

The beam from the laser-sight jumped up and down against my chest.
 
Twice.

This was the first signal.

As soon as Rebecca was out of sight I was to count to sixty, then make the call.

She rounded the corner and paused.
 
Her head made a slight half-turn as if she were about to take a last look at Thomas, but she stopped herself and resumed walking.
 
Our transportation was parked farther down that street, in an area where there was not a streetlight; by the time I reached sixty she would be back inside the vehicle, waiting for the rest of us.

Hidden somewhere near the young man with the pistol was another kid named Arnold.
 
He was wearing a set of headphones and was pointing a twenty-inch parabolic dish in my direction.
 
Grendel had ordered it through some online surveillance equipment company.
 
It ran on three AAA batteries and could listen in on any conversation within three hundred yards with pinpoint accuracy.
 
He wouldn't need to hear what was said by the person I was about to call, he was listening only for my side of the conversation; one mistake, and he'd tell the young man with the pistol and that, as they say, would be that.

They were an organized bunch, no argument there.

When I counted forty I thumbed the "
talk"
button and—

—and this isn't right.
 
Not at all.
 
Sorry.
 
Dammit.
 
I said I wouldn't know where to begin.

The biggest part of the mess
.

Not always so obvious at first glance, I'm afraid....

I
was stranded at a truck-stop near Jefferson City, Missouri.
 
It happened like this:

The drive from Cedar Hill to Topeka had taken the better part of eighteen hours because the car I was driving (borrowed from my brother-in-law's used car business—he'd assured me it was "...in top-notch condition!") kept overheating and frequent service-station stops were required.
 
The list of ailments it suffered from kept growing exponentially the farther I traveled, and one mechanic even went so far as to say, "
Please
tell me that you didn't actually walk onto a lot and
buy
this goddamn nightmare from someone.
 
The only things holding that engine together are spit and wishes, and I'm not all that sure about the spit.
 
I've done all I can.
 
I hope you make it home.
 
I'll remember you in my prayers."

I decided something along that line would be a good slogan for my brother-in-law's business: