The Missing Person (17 page)

“Excuse me, Lynn,” he said. “May I see you outside for a moment?”

I walked out on insubstantial legs. He held the door for me, closed it behind us, and then gripped me by the upper arm, hard, and marched me out of the house and to my car. I felt like a juvenile delinquent with an angry high-school principal. The sun outside was so bright it made my eyes water, and I must have looked for all the world as if I were crying. David stood with his hands on his belted hips, examining my face in a measured, leisurely fashion, like the lawyer he was. He smelled like sweat and men's deodorant, that fake, pungent musk.

“Why are you always here?” he finally said.

“I think ‘always here' is overstating the case a little.”

“You've been here several times.”

“I've dropped by once or twice to say hello,” I said.

David snorted at this response, and I couldn't blame him for it, really. He shook his head and tried again. “Why do you keep coming over to my house?”

“I didn't think you'd mind,” I said slowly, “since you're always coming over to mine.”

He breathed in sharply, his mouth open, and I could see his small, even teeth. Glancing away, I saw Donny and Darren watching us through the living-room window. Darren had an orange Popsicle in his hand; Donny grinned at me and waved. I waved back.

“Is that what this is about?” David said. “You don't like my relationship with your mother, so you're coming over here as some sort of revenge?” The words “my relationship” sounded very strange coming from him. “Again, possibly you're overstating the case a little,” I said.

He sighed and looked off into the distance for a moment. I thought I saw a glimmer of wetness in his eyes, but it could have just been the glare. “My wife is a very sick woman,” he said. “She doesn't live in the same world you and I do. But that doesn't mean she can't be upset by things. I don't like for her to be upset.”

In the house next door, the house where my mother answered the phone on the day my father died, staring at the receiver afterwards for a long time, as though it had grown utterly foreign to her—as if the world itself had grown foreign—a woman opened the front door and walked down the driveway carrying a large plastic cup with its own plastic straw. She opened the door to her SUV and waved in our direction. “Beautiful day, David!”

“Sure is, Marlene,” he called back.

I took advantage of this break in the conversation to walk around to the driver's side of the Caprice.

David looked at me over the hood, squinting.

“I care about your mother,” he said, “and you should be better to her. You and your brother both.”

I was stuck to the ground, paralyzed. What saved me was a blur of orange Popsicle in the window, which somehow reminded me of Angus: the smoothness of his warm skin, its ammonia smell, its sweet, abundant freckles. As soon as I saw him again I could forget all of this existed; I would be calm. Was that a definition of love: a force that can drug you with calm and help you forget all the sandpaper realities of the world? Why not? On the force of this question I was able to get in the car and drive away, leaving all the Michaelsons behind.

Sixteen

Almost as much as the condo or Wylie's apartment or the motel rooms I'd shared with Angus, the Caprice had become a kind of home. Feeling at ease on its cracked vinyl seats, surveying its dark-red dashboard and ivory paint, I'd come to think of it as mine. So when I left the Michaelsons' I spent a while just driving around the August-dead city, the flowers dry and nodding, the grass in lawns gone halfway to dirt. The white rocks in other yards looked skeletal in the sun, each one a bleached, miniature landscape worthy of O'Keeffe. At an Allsup's I stopped for gas and a bucket-sized soda, its sweet cold shooting straight to my brain. At the counter, a middle-aged couple was arguing about the nutritional value of the fried, crusty burritos that lay baking under the orange heat lamps, while the teenaged clerk batted her long, fake eyelashes in boredom.

At a pay phone in the back by the restrooms, I called information and asked if there was a listing for Plumbarama. There was, but the phone rang almost ten times before a man answered.

“Yeah,” he said. It wasn't Angus.

“Is this Plumbarama?”

“Who wants to know?” he said.

His voice, growling and a little bit slurred, sounded vaguely familiar, but I couldn't quite place it. “I'm sorry,” I said. “I must have the wrong number.”

There was a pause. “I'm sorry too, lady,” he said, then hung up.

I stood there for a moment sipping from my enormous drink, the sugar singing in my blood, and then called back. This time, the phone rang for almost a full minute.

“Yeah,” he said.

“Is this Gerald Lobachevski?”

“Who wants to know?” he said again.

Now I was sure it was him. In the background, I could even hear faint trills of slot machines and country music. “This is Lynn Fleming,” I said. The only reaction was silence. A boy in a red uniform came toward me swiping a dirty mop over the dirty floor, and I flattened myself against the wall to let him by. “Wylie's sister,” I added. “I'm looking for Angus?”

“He's not here,” Gerald said.

“Where can I find him?”

“I don't know.”

“Can you tell him I'm looking for him?” I said.

“No.”

The conversation reminded me of the first time I met Angus, a memory that was dramatic and sensual in my mind: the dark, bare apartment, Angus bare-chested and heavy-lidded with sleep. The beginning of things. Angus then was every bit as unhelpful as Gerald was now; all he said was that Wylie had gone to the mountains, to grapple. Maybe Angus had some grappling of his own to do, or maybe his location couldn't be discussed over the phone.

“If you see him, tell him I have a plumbing job for him.”

“I won't see him,” Gerald said flatly, and hung up.

I left the Allsup's and kept on driving. Where do you look in a sprawling city for an eggplant-colored van? Nowhere in particular. I went back to the foothills, where Angus saved me from heat stroke, and drank the rest of my Coke and dozed a little in a shaded picnic area. I was half-convinced that he'd automatically know where to find me, because he had a knack for showing up at the right place at the right time, and half-convinced that I'd never be able to find him again, a possibility that crashed inside me with dread. Inside the park restroom was a scrawl that read, JODI S. WILL SUCK YOUR COCK FOR FREE, ASK AT ALLSUP'S ON CANDELARIA, which was where I'd just been. I thought of the bored young woman watching the burrito argument from beneath her long fake eyelashes, and wondered whom she'd antagonized and how.

No one was home at Wylie's. Turn your back on these people for more than ten minutes, I thought, and they completely disappear.

I tried to think this through, from Angus's point of view. Say he was looking, what did he know about where to find me? That I was uncomfortable at my mother's, that I drove around a lot, and occasionally rifled through books at the library. So I headed to UNM, to the fine-arts section, and spotted a redhead asleep in a carrel next to the books on Southwestern art of the latter twentieth century.

“Hey,” I said, shaking him. “Hey.” I wasn't even going to pretend I wasn't happy to see him. He woke up and pulled me onto his lap all in one second. Feeling his skin against mine was like coming home; it was like having questions only he could answer. He kissed me, his hands on the back of my neck. I moved around so I was straddling him. His hands moved down my sticky back, his mouth all over mine. We were jigsawed, meant to fit together, making a whole picture. He tapped on my shoulder, hard, and I leaned back to ask what he was doing. But it wasn't Angus who had tapped.

“Excuse me,” a young woman said, “but you can't do that in here.” A student worker with a cart of books to reshelve, she looked dismayed in the extreme.

I reached a hand up to wipe my mouth. My whole face was wet.

Angus said, “We were just leaving.”

So it started again: long hours in a motel room, the Nalgene bottle full of gin, the sweet delirium of sex, the TV on low. Midnight found us lying together hip to hip, the sheets disheveled, and Angus said, “We've got a real rapport.”

“If that's what you want to call it,” I said.

“We don't have to call it anything.”

“True enough,” I agreed, and fell asleep, breathing the smell of his skin.

Angus woke up laughing, which I'd never seen anybody do. He sat up and put his arms and legs around me from behind, my back to his chest, still laughing.

“What's so funny?”

“I was dreaming,” he said in my ear. “I was dreaming
this.
”

It was another hour or two before we left the room. Angus suggested we go past Wylie's and check in there; they needed to plan their next move, he said, now that the mountain project was over.

“No plumbing today?”

“I'm on a hiatus,” he said vaguely, and started the car.

“You know, I called Plumbarama yesterday, looking for you, but they wouldn't pass on a message.”

“You did what?”

“Called Plumbarama. I didn't know how else to get in touch with you, short of calling all the motels in town.”

He was staring at me. “How'd you get the number?”

“It's listed.”

“What did you say when you called?” He looked worried, for the first time that I'd ever seen.

“Why do you list the number if you don't want people to call?”

“Unlisted costs extra,” he said, leaning his forehead against the steering wheel. “Nobody ever calls.”

“Maybe you should look into advertising,” I said.

“What did you say?”

“I said I was looking for you. I said I needed some plumbing done.”

“You didn't.”

“I told him who I was.”

“Told who?”

“Gerald.”

“How'd you know it was him?”

“I guessed,” I said, “on the basis of the fact that it sounded just like him.”

A smile broke over him then, and he shook his head and turned on some music. Frank asked luck to be a lady tonight, and Angus sang along.

I was nervous about going into Wylie's apartment—having ducked out of their tunnel—and stuck my hand in Angus's when we walked inside. He squeezed, then let go. Stan and Berto glanced up, looking unaffected by their stint in jail. I asked how they were doing, and Stan said, “We're out on our own recognizance.” Sledge dutifully licked my hand. Irina smiled at me and said, “Look who's here, Psyche,” and the baby stared at me as if I were a stranger. So, for that matter, did Wylie. Everybody was sitting around talking, and to my surprise nobody seemed distressed by their failure to keep people off the mountain for very long. They wanted to know if I'd seen their “event” on the news and made fun of Panther for being such a media hog. Every face had a rosy glow. Even Wylie looked happier than I'd seen him in ages.

Now they were talking about whether to take the day off. Wylie was against it, arguing that “the revolution doesn't come with
vacation time,
” but was outvoted and backed down with little protest, which I took as a sign of how good he was feeling. Stan and Berto wanted to hang out and drink beer, and the rest of us decided to go for a hike.

Angus drove. The sun shone with a riotous purity, picking out sparks of bright metal in the streets and glinting off cars, the world seemingly lit and mineral, rampant with gems.

We stopped at a grocery store near the university, where shopping carts were scattered across the asphalt expanse of the parking lot. Angus and Wylie got out. A man in a cowboy hat was leaning against the Pepsi machine outside the sliding doors, panhandling. I watched Irina change Psyche's diaper in the backseat, putting the dirty one in a plastic bag from the back of the van.

“I take it you don't use disposables,” I said.

“Goodness no! I'll clean that one when we get into the mountains.”

“Oh,” I said.

“Lynn,” Irina said gently, “there is shit in nature. Humans shit. Animals shit.” In her accent it sounded like “sheat,” and somehow more elegant.

“I know, I know,” I said, leaning back in my seat and closing my eyes.

“What we have to get away from,” Irina said, settling herself and the baby in the back, “is this idea that we are separate from nature. We are natural too, with bodies and smells, just like the animals do.”

I kept my eyes closed and listened to her lilting European intonations while ignoring the words of her harangue. Eventually I heard the car door open and felt a breeze rush into the van. “You should've seen that dumpster,” Wylie said. “A cornucopia of provisions. Cheetos, day-old muffins, melted cheese on pizza boxes.”

“Please say you didn't get our picnic from a dumpster.”

“I was going to,” he said. “But Angus thought you'd prefer some first-time-use food.”

“Angus,” Irina said, “I think you are getting soft.”

“I know it,” Angus said, and started the car. Before long we were in Tijeras Canyon, the road winding between the mountains, Angus humming as we drove, Wylie and Irina chatting quietly in the backseat, Psyche gurgling along with them. I felt a tightening in my chest, heat and air compressing in my lungs, then realized what it was: I was happy.

On the road to the Crest the traffic was thinner and we swung around to the east side of the mountains, the trees now thick and green. Angus parked at a trailhead, and we started hiking.

Tiny brown birds flitted in the juniper scrub. Rustles in the underbrush, scissors of movement far ahead, glimpsed only out of the corner of your eye: the world narrowed to things like this. The sun beat down on the steep, rocky trail. I started to sweat, and my legs hurt. Irina was in front of me, her legs flexing with muscle as she climbed, and gradually she got farther and farther ahead. At a small lookout point I stopped to catch my breath, the mountain falling below me, banded with the switchback curls of the trail.

Then Angus stepped up beside me, holding out his Nalgene bottle. “You look like you could use some water.”

We smiled at each other, and I had a long drink. In the sunlight his skin looked blanched, white and shadowless, overexposed. I handed the bottle back and said, “I thought you said you always wear a hat.”

“Always,” he said, “except right now.”

“Hey!” Wylie shouted from up ahead, and we started back up the trail, which soon sank into shadow and was carpeted with pine needles. After a minute or two I saw bright swatches of clothing through the trees. Wylie and Irina were standing off the trail, looking at a washing machine, square, white, half-rusted, suspended on its side in the act of falling downhill. Its chrome dials were black, absent any markings or instructions. A word I'd always liked in high school ambled into my brain: “erratic,” the word for boulders swept into new territories by the movements of glaciers.

“How do you think it got here?” Irina said.

“Somebody dumped it,” my brother said. He tried opening the lid, but it wouldn't budge.

“Litterbug,” I said.

Wylie found a stick, wedged it under the lid, and lifted it, releasing a terrible, thick, sick-making smell. I backed away and covered my mouth with the tail of my shirt.

“Oh, no,” Irina said. She covered up the baby and moved well up the trail, and I followed. But the smell was still with us, so I motioned for her to keep going. I didn't know what Wylie and Angus were doing back there, and didn't care. Finally we stopped in a sunny place where the air smelled fresh and waited for them.

“What was it?” Irina asked when they caught up with us.

Wylie was looking at Psyche. “It was a cat,” he said.

“With kittens,” Angus added.

“What? How did a cat get in there?”

“I think it got dumped with the machine,” Angus said. “At the same time.”

“But that machine's all rusted,” I said. “Wouldn't the cat already be, you know, disintegrated?”

“Oh, dear,” Irina said.

“That's what I said,” Wylie said.

“But with the door closed,” Angus said, “it's almost a seal. That would slow down the process.”

“But it wasn't a seal,” my brother said, “because there was rotting.”

“I said almost.”

“I don't know, Angus,” Wylie said. “I think the cat was feral. It just climbed in there to have its kittens, then the door slammed shut and trapped them.”

They stood there for a few minutes, calmly discussing the chemistry of rot, the population of feral cats in the Sandias, recent weather patterns and their likely effect on corpses in the wild. I started to feel sick again, and, without speaking, I took off up the trail, my stomach churning.

Wylie caught up to me and we hiked together without saying anything.

“What did it look like?” I asked him after a while.

“You don't want to know,” he said.