Untouchable (21 page)

“Is he friendly?” Darby said. “I didn’t see any warnings on his sheet.”

“He’s a sweetheart. He’s a little scared, a little testy, but he’s a sweetheart.”

The dog took a tentative step toward the bars, issued a low growl.

“Don’t worry about the growling,” the officer said. “He’s friendly. Has to be. He’s got nothing left in the tank.”

The officer walked back up the corridor, her jangling keys setting off another wave of barking and howling. The sewer dog adjusted his stance, found solid footing. He looked at Darby and curled a corner of his mouth, just a little, showing a yellowed fang. Darby stayed in his crouch, holding the dog’s stare, admiring the sharp little warning. The dog motivated by the insult, maybe, the whole insult from sewer inlet to animal control van to pen at the pound. The dog showing teeth, making things clear, protecting the only thing he had left.

He’d been taken to the vice-principal and the vice-principal had sent him to Mr. Bromwell. Mr. Bromwell asked him why he’d done what he’d done. The Kid didn’t explain about the Halloween cards. He just shrugged by way of an answer and asked if Mr. Bromwell was going to call his dad. Mr. Bromwell raised his eyebrows and asked The Kid if he thought his dad should be called. The Kid didn’t know exactly where all this was going, if he was in trouble or not, but apparently no one called because when he got home at the end of the day his dad didn’t mention it, didn’t sit him down and give him one of those quiet talks The Kid used to get when he was in trouble, the talks where his dad told him that his behavior needed to change, and fast. Instead, his dad asked how the party went, how the cards and costume had gone over. The Kid wrote that it had been fine, it had been great. The cards and costume had been a big hit. His dad asked him if he wanted to go trick-or-treating that night, but The Kid said that he didn’t think so. The party at school had been enough.

His dad had bought a bag of small-sized Hershey bars and whenever some kids in Halloween costumes came up on the porch and rang the doorbell, he answered the door and dropped a couple of bars into their bags. The Kid sat by the living room window watching the trick-or-treaters come by, or he went up to his bedroom and watched out that window if he suspected he knew the kids in the costumes. He was worried that one of the kids would tell his dad about the ruined Halloween cards or what The Kid had done to Rhonda Sizemore. He was worried that a parent would see all his dad’s tattoos and start shouting that his dad was responsible for what had happened to Rey Lugo, that his dad was creating the blue stars out of illegal drugs.

He wondered if Arizona would come by, imagined her dad the military man taking her around the neighborhood, maybe carrying his machine gun for protection. If he had a machine gun. The Kid imagined her seeing his shabby house, imagined her dad and his dad getting into a fight like the fight his dad had gotten into at the mall. He kind of hoped she wouldn’t come by, but he also kind of hoped she would. He didn’t know which would be better or worse.

By nine o’clock or so, the trick-or-treating seemed to be over. Arizona hadn’t come by. Out on the street it was just older kids, most without costumes, some just with rubber monster masks or black ski masks, running around, roughhousing, shouting and swearing at each other, climbing fences, kicking empty beer cans down the sidewalk. The Kid went into the bathroom to get ready for bed. He held his toothbrush, looked in the mirror. He had a new haircut, but it was the same Kid, the same face everybody hated, the same B.O. and bad breath. He put his toothbrush down. Why even bother?

He got into his pajamas, got into bed. Before too long he heard his dad’s pager buzz. The Kid played dead while he listened to his dad getting his stuff together, felt him standing in the bedroom doorway, heard the front door locking, the pickup’s engine fading down the street. The Kid got dressed again, grabbed his backpack and went back downstairs.

He stood out on the front porch. It felt darker than usual, wilder, a strange night, a dangerous night. It was still Halloween, even though the trick-or-treaters were all home in bed. He couldn’t even imagine how mad his dad would be if he knew The Kid was outside.

He locked the front door behind him and walked up the street toward Sunset. It was colder than it had been in some time. There were shadows leaping everywhere, in the alleys between apartment buildings, in the yards behind houses. Big kids, high school kids with flashlights chasing each other, jumping fences and walls, running from yard to yard, vanishing behind buildings and then reappearing in the spaces between. Sometimes a few of them got caught in the flashlight beams, and The Kid could see rubber monster masks, fright wigs, white skeleton face-paint.

He tried not to be scared. He was on a mission. He tried to think of the burned house, the angel without her hand, the pages of hands he’d drawn in his notebook. He kept walking, heading across Sunset, past the strip mall, past the cardboard box and the raggedy feet.

He stood at the bottom of the hill, across the street from the burned house. It was still standing. They hadn’t torn it down yet. The question was, Was the scotch tape in place on the door? The question was, Had anyone else been inside and seen the angel? The Kid looked around, making sure there were no faces in the neighboring windows, then he ran across to the burned house’s yard, up onto the soft wood of the porch.

He crouched in the shadows, catching his breath. There was something attached to the front door of the house. He crawled closer. Four glossy photographs were wedged behind the metal slats of the security door. He looked at the photos in the glow from the streetlight. The red-haired woman was in each of them. In one photo she was standing beside a bald man. They were both holding up beer cans in a salute, smiling at the camera. In another she was sitting on a woman’s lap on a yellow couch. The red-haired woman was wearing the yellow dress and cowboy boots from the chalk drawing. Both the red-haired woman and the woman with the lap were laughing, heads back, mouths open, the white blast of the camera’s flash reflected in the window behind their heads. In another picture she was standing beside an older lady, gray-haired, stoop-shouldered. The red-haired woman was smiling and the gray-haired woman was trying to manage half a smile. They looked alike. They had the same eyes, those big green eyes with long dark lashes. Her mom, maybe. In the last picture the red-haired woman was standing alone at a gas pump. She was wearing the yellow dress and the cowboy boots again. She wasn’t smiling so much as smirking. Head cocked, hand on her hip, looking at the camera like, What are you going to do about it? That sort of look. Real tough.

The Kid couldn’t say that he thought the red-haired woman was beautiful, like he thought Arizona was beautiful, or even like he thought Rhonda Sizemore was beautiful. Perfect in the face. The red-haired woman’s head was too small, her nose was too big. He couldn’t say she was beautiful, but something about her was nice to look at. It seemed like she was the kind of person his mom would call A Good Egg. It seemed like she probably told pretty good jokes.

There were a couple of red roses on the porch by the door, petals dry and dark, stems brittle. The Kid picked them up, looked them over, careful not to poke himself on the thorns. Who had been there? Friends? Relatives? The people in the pictures, maybe. Maybe they’d had a memorial service and come back here after, like some people had gone back to Amanda’s house after his mom’s fake memorial service. Maybe they’d gone inside to scoop some of the cremated ashes out of the bedroom.

The Kid ran his hand up the doorjamb, feeling for the tape. It was still there, one-half affixed to the door, one-half to the jamb. No one had gone inside. The smell of the house was still strong. He dug into his backpack, pulled on the goggles and facemask. He peeled the tape off and opened the door, trying not to disturb any of the photographs. Then he stepped inside and turned on the flashlight.

The front room looked the same. The Kid didn’t know what he was expecting. That someone had snuck in and cleaned it all up? There was still glass all over the dining room floor, crunching under his sneakers. There were the little silverware meteorites, the sagging cabinets back in the kitchen. He stopped at the door to the bedroom. Everything was like he remembered, the skeleton of the bed frame, the burned mattress, the charred wall above the bed. He walked down to the living room, set the flashlight on the floor so he could see as much of the far wall as possible.

She was still there, the red-haired woman and her wings, lifting off the ground toward that hole in the ceiling, still missing a hand.

The Kid looked in his notebook at the drawings of women’s hands. He’d wanted to finish the drawing, but the hands he’d drawn just didn’t work, they just didn’t match. He knew that he’d make a mess of the angel if he tried drawing a hand. He needed more practice.

He wondered if the angel was scared or lonely. He knew it was a stupid thing to think of a drawing being scared, but he couldn’t help it. He thought of his mom in a place like this, hiding and waiting, and he knew that she would be scared, that she would wish there was something else to keep her company.

The Kid started to draw. He picked up one of the pieces of white chalk from the floor and started on the wall to his left, far away from the angel. He didn’t want to infringe on that drawing. He started drawing woodcut waves. He tried to picture what they’d looked like when they’d flooded the hallway at school, tried to draw the grain and the knotholes correctly, the depth to the sheets of wood, one wave in front of the other, some higher, some lower, rising and falling. He looked around on the floor for more chalk. Found a blue piece and a green piece, started to color the waves, swirls of both colors mixing, darker at the bottom where the wooden water looked deeper, lighter at the top where it was really just splinters of foam. He climbed up on what was left of an armchair and drew a wooden seagull in the sky, flying out from behind a woodcut cloud. There were holes in the wall, big spots where chunks of plaster had fallen or burned away, exposing the house’s wooden frame. He drew the waves crashing up and over the holes, treated those holes as giant rocks, even drew a seagull perched on top of one.

He worked from memory, what he had seen in the hall, what he’d seen on his dad’s arm a million times. He drew the pirate ship, the curving sides of the great hull, the canons poking through, the Jolly Roger flapping up top. He drew the tiny rowboat tossing in the waves, trying to outrun the pirate ship. The two desperate men bailing water, the disbelieving exclamation points floating over their heads.

He drew until he was sweating pretty badly in the muggy room, until the goggles were foggy and the facemask was wet. He stepped down from the armchair, looked at what he’d drawn. It filled almost half of one wall, the whole picture of what he’d seen in the school hallway, what he’d seen on his dad’s arm. Some company for the angel. He shone the flashlight across the drawing, feeling not too bad about what he’d done.

They took the sharp, quick curves of the freeway south, through the tunnels under the hills, the lanes gradually straightening, widening, the lit skyscrapers of downtown appearing on the other side of the last rise, the van finally drifting down the long slope of the off ramp into the streets of Chinatown. Red and green neon reflected in the windshield, across the broad hood of the van, Chinese characters, signs for shops and restaurants, the businesses all closed and gated, dark-windowed, their parking lots empty.

“What do you think?” Roistler said. “I want to know what you think.”

“I don’t think anything,” Darby said.

“About Bob. About what happened to Bob.”

“I don’t think anything.”

Roistler sat in the passenger seat, his flushed face lit by the orange glow of the dashboard radio, his knees jumping, over-amped and anxious.

“I’m trying to get this straight,” he said. “What I’m supposed to do and what you’re supposed to do.”

“It’s like any two-man job. Nothing’s different.”

“That’s not true. We’ve never done a two-man before. I’ve worked with Bob and you’ve worked with Bob. But without Bob, we shift a spot. You do his things, I do yours.”

The address on the work order was a seafood restaurant, the bottom floor of a three-story brick building. Darby parked the van at the curb. The neon sign in the front window was unlit, but a young man was standing outside the door, smoking a cigarette. He wore black slacks and a white dress shirt, a stained white apron folded down at his waist.

“Just give me a second,” Roistler said, “to get this all straight.”

“Nothing’s different,” Darby said. He opened the door, stepped out onto the street.

“Everything’s different,” Roistler said. “I’m you. I’m you and you’re Bob.”

They suited up at the back of the van. Darby approached the waiter, started to talk through the work order, but the waiter shook his head. He wasn’t the one Darby was supposed to talk to. He led them into the restaurant, through the main dining room. The chairs were turned up on the tables; the low-hanging chandeliers were dark. The only light in the room came from fluorescents in the fish tanks that lined the walls. There was movement in the water, eel and lobster and crab. In the center of the room was a host’s station, a wooden podium piled with menus. The waiter opened a door behind the podium, nodded Darby through.

It took a few seconds for his eyes to adjust to the darkness. An enclosed stairwell, steep and narrow, two flights up. At the top was an open door. In the light from the room beyond he could see the silhouette of a man sitting on the high landing.

Darby started up, the stairs creaking with his weight. Roistler stayed down at the bottom, holding his bucket of brushes and sprays. The waiter was gone. He’d left for the night, maybe, or stepped back outside to smoke. As he climbed, Darby could see more of the man at the top of the steps. He was thin, Asian, middle-aged. His hair was slicked back from his high forehead. He was wearing a dark suit. He sat with his head down and his wrists resting on his knees, his hands held up at a strange angle, as if he were protecting them, as if he were keeping them away from the rest of his body.