Untouchable (6 page)

“Whitley?” Mr. Bromwell pulled his ankle tight alongside his waist. He was watching The Kid, still waiting for an answer.

Brian once told The Kid that Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays were his favorite days of the week because at dinner those nights his father would tell Mrs. Bromwell and Brian and his brother everything The Kid had written in his notebook during their session at school. Brian said that at dinner those nights the whole Bromwell family would laugh and laugh at all the secrets The Kid told their father.

The Kid closed his notebook, returned it to his backpack. Mr. Bromwell dropped his leg, frowned.

The phone on the desk rang, a single red light flashing along with the sound. Mr. Bromwell answered, shook his head, hung up the phone.

“Your father’s here,” he said. “We’ll talk more about this on Wednesday.”

The janitor came out to the curb in front of the school, a tall, bearded black man with a blue bandana wrapped around the top of his head. He leaned his elbow into the passenger window of the pickup.

“You the father?”

Darby nodded.

“He wet his pants,” the janitor said. He was holding an empty paper cup, tapping it lightly against the door of the pickup as he talked. Darby had never seen him before, figured he was new to the school. Most everyone there knew Darby by sight due to his frequent visits.

“Vice-principal told me he wet his pants and put them back in his gym locker and then didn’t know what to do about it,” the janitor said.

“Who found him?”

“I found him. Standing there in his briefs.” The janitor dug into his back pocket, pulled out a tobacco tin, wedged a plug between his gum and lower lip, worked it in tight. “I went and got the vice-principal because your son had a look on his face like he wasn’t going to move from that spot without some assistance.”

“Did he say he wet his pants?”

“He didn’t say anything.”

The janitor lifted the cup to his lips, spat, rearranged the tobacco plug with the tip of his tongue.

“When does he talk?” the janitor said.

“He doesn’t.”

“Is he mute?”

“He made a conscious decision,” Darby said. “He made a conscious decision not to talk.”

“How long’s it been?”

“Ten months. Eleven months.”

The janitor spat into his cup, whistled long and low, impressed.

The Kid emerged from the front doors of the school. He was wearing clothes two sizes too big, stepping on his pant cuffs as he walked. He carried a plastic shopping bag in one hand, filled with his books and folders. In the other hand he carried his backpack, filled with what Darby assumed were the clothes the vice-principal had described on the phone as
urine-soaked
.

The janitor pulled the rest of his plug from his mouth, dropped it into the cup. He knocked twice on the door of the pickup by way of signing off and headed in toward the school. He nodded to The Kid as they passed.

The Kid reached the passenger window of the pickup, held up his backpack.

“You wet your pants?” Darby said.

The Kid shook his head.

“Then let’s get rid of them.”

They walked to a dumpster at the far end of the parking lot. Darby lifted the lid and The Kid tossed the backpack up, missing the shot. Picked it up and tried again. Picked it up and tried again, finally getting the pack up and over.

The Kid pulled his notebook and pencil out of the plastic bag, wrote a line and held it up for Darby to see.

How much do they cost?

“Don’t worry about the money, Kid.”

I’ll pay for new clothes. The backpack.

“Don’t worry about the money. The money’s not a big deal.”

Darby found a hose attached to the side of a small utility building, rinsed The Kid’s hands, rinsed his own. The Kid tucked his notebook under his arm to keep it from getting wet. They dried their hands on the fronts of their pants.

“Whose clothes are those?” Darby said.

Lost and found.

“They look like they itch.”

They do.

“You want to tell me what happened?”

The Kid ignored the question, stared at his hands.

“I’m not mad, Kid.”

The Kid nodded.

“But if you don’t tell me what happened, I can’t help.”

The Kid turned to a new page in his notebook, wrote a line, held it up for Darby.

Loose lips sink ships.

“I’m serious, Kid.”

So am I.

They went to the drive-thru of a hamburger place on Beverly Avenue for lunch, sat in the pickup in the parking lot with their burgers and fries. They ate fast food three or four times a week, ordered pizza or take-out for most of their other meals. The Kid was still toothpick-skinny, but Darby was starting to feel it in his gut, in his thighs, his shirts and jeans tight across his added weight. He knew their eating habits weren’t great, but he wasn’t much of a cook. That had been Lucy’s department, whipping around the kitchen, humming along with the country station on the countertop radio, slicing, chopping, pots and pans clanging, steam rising, smells forming, basil, oregano, garlic, onions, the aroma drifting out into the rest of the house, onto the front porch, drawing Darby and The Kid to the table where she’d turn from the oven and present the finished dish with a little flourish,
violá
, a magic show performed nightly.

In the last year, Darby had only attempted dinner once or twice, failing miserably, ham-fisted, inexpert at that particular job. Now they sat in fast food parking lots, ordered takeout.

The Kid set his notebook on his lap, flipped back toward the front of the book, pages from the beginning of September, hand-drawn scorecards from the final month of the Dodgers’ disappointing season. Darby looked over The Kid’s shoulder at the grids, the tiny diamonds, the lists of hitters and pitchers in The Kid’s rushed capital letters. This was something he’d taught The Kid, almost a year ago now. This was how he had taught The Kid to communicate once it was clear that The Kid was no longer going to talk.

It hadn’t seemed like much at first, but he wasn’t really noticing much at the time. Molina had told him to take a couple of weeks off from work, and The Kid was out of school. An excused absence, bereavement leave. It was probably a couple of days before he really noticed that The Kid’s silence was something more than quiet sadness. That The Kid’s silence was a deliberate thing.

He’d thought it would go away on its own. He’d thought that The Kid would get tired of the effort, that one night he would pick The Kid up at the Crump’s after dinner and The Kid would start talking in the pickup on the ride home, chirping away, just like before. But days went by, then a week. The Kid went back to school and nothing changed. The fifth-grade teacher sent him to see the school therapist once a week, then twice a week, then three times a week, but nothing changed.

A month into it, Darby stopped at the drugstore on his way home from work and bought the first notebook, a standard-issue black and white composition book. That night he sat The Kid down in the living room and dug through Lucy’s boxes of videotapes, ballgames she’d recorded, something to watch in the off-season when she was in serious withdrawal. He found a home game from a couple of seasons before, Dodgers-Padres, and as the lineups were announced, Darby drew a grid across the first two pages of the notebook, drew tiny diamonds in the squares, filled in the batting order, the pitching matchup, just like Lucy had showed him years earlier on their second or third date, when she’d told him that she watched or listened to every game the Dodgers played, something she’d done since she was a girl, and that she taped the games when she couldn’t watch or listen live. She told Darby that she rarely went to the stadium to see a game, maybe once or twice a season, though she loved the atmosphere, the history of the place. She preferred watching or listening at home, without all the people, the noise, the distractions. It was hard to concentrate in the stands, she said. It was hard to really see the game when you were actually there. Then she had showed him the binders on the bedroom shelves of her apartment. Each binder was full of hole-punched scorecards, 162 a calendar year, plus postseason games if things had gone the team’s way. Each binder was labeled on its spine in black magic marker, one for every season since 1969.

They played the videotape and Darby showed The Kid the shorthand for the movement of the game, how to fill in the frames with base hits and ground outs, runs batted in, the advance of runners around the diamond toward home. He showed The Kid the numerical designations for each defensive position, the fly ball out to left field recorded as F7, the grounder to short tossed to second and thrown to first marked as a 6-4-3 double play.

The Kid took to it quickly. He appreciated the logic, the consideration required, the concentrated pace of the game. His mother’s son. They watched more tapes over the course of the winter, one or two games a night when Darby’s pager didn’t buzz with a work call. Neither of them were sleeping much. The Kid got better at it, faster, keeping up with the games in real time, no longer needing to rewind and re-examine a play. The Kid took pride in his scorecards, getting the details right. Darby could see that he liked having a permanent record of the thing at the end of a game, a narrative in secret code. Darby asked questions during the commercial breaks instead of fast-forwarding, questions about the players, the teams, the division standings, the league leaders in various categories, and The Kid began answering in his notebook, true to form, always a show-off when he’d learned something new. He answered with numbers he’d copied down from on-screen graphics, batting averages and slugging percentages, runs allowed against left-handed batters, right-handed batters, the statistical inner engine of the game, the hard facts that represented the intangibles, the simplest, most difficult thing. Hitting a ball with a bat. And this was how The Kid learned to communicate again, game by game, tape by tape, sitting with Darby on the living room couch, answering questions about a prerecorded baseball season while the night deepened around them.

The school said that as long as The Kid got his work done, as long as he wasn’t a distraction to the other students, he could communicate in the notebook until he was ready to speak. This was fine, they said. This was okay for a while.

One notebook turned to two. Two turned to three. Three turned to the shelf Darby put up in The Kid’s bedroom, now ten notebooks long.

Darby finished his burger, wadded up the wrapper, stuffed it into the empty food bag. The Kid turned back to the pages he’d been using that morning. Darby could see a drawing of what looked like city buildings, a woman towering over them, arms spread wide.

Why didn’t you answer the cell phone?
The Kid wrote.

“It’s been temporarily misplaced.”

It’s lost?

“It’s been misplaced. I’ll find it, Kid. Don’t worry.”

He should have done more. He knew this. He should have pushed harder, should have taken The Kid to a doctor, someone other than the school therapist. His inaction had only added to the problem, had made permanent what might just have been temporary at the time. The notebooks only solidified The Kid’s silence, reinforced his resolve. He should have done more. The silence was so deep now, so entrenched, that Darby didn’t have a clue what else he could do about it.

He collected The Kid’s burger wrapper, his empty soda cup, stuffed it all into the food bag. Leaned out the window, tossed the bag into a nearby garbage can.

“If you give me the kids’ names,” Darby said, “I can stop this from happening.”

The Kid shook his head, kept his eyes on the scorecard. Darby started the pickup, put the truck in gear and pulled out of the parking lot toward home.

They crouched behind the large plastic garbage bins in the Crump’s backyard, listening for approaching footsteps, scanning the area for signs of trouble. When they were sure the coast was clear, Matthew counted to three and The Kid helped him lift one of the bins and move it over half a foot on the grass.

It was getting dark, would be time for dinner soon. A light switched on in the kitchen window at the back of the house, just a few feet away. The Kid could see Mrs. Crump passing back and forth as she set the table. They waited for her to pass again, then moved the garbage bin over another half-foot.

“I was supposed to throw them away,” Matthew whispered, “but I couldn’t do it. If they’re just going to be destroyed then I’d rather you had them.”

There was a small stack of comic books set into the mud where the plastic bin had been. Five issues of
Captain America
, the numbers on the covers all in order. An entire storyline hidden under the garbage.

“My parents asked me where Captain America got his powers,” Matthew said. “They asked me if he got his powers from God. I told them he got his powers from the army. That he was injected with the Super-Soldier Serum during World War II.” He peeled the comics out of the mud, rubbed the covers and spines clean with his hands. His skin was blacker even than his father’s and mother’s, but his palms and fingertips were lighter, almost pink. “My father didn’t believe a character could get those kinds of powers from the U.S. Government. He said that if Captain America didn’t get his powers from God, then he must have gotten them from the devil. And if that was the case, then there was no place for these books in our house.”

Matthew flipped through the comics, lingering on some of the more exciting panels, fights and chase scenes. The Kid kept watching the kitchen window, expecting Mr. Crump’s stone face to appear any second, catching them in the act.

They didn’t talk about what had happened in the locker room. They never talked about the incidents. Incidents had happened before, would happen again. They never talked about Matthew crying in class or other kids telling The Kid that he had bad breath or B.O. It was like if they said it out loud then that would confirm it, it had to be true, the other kids were right. So they never repeated what was said to them, and when one of them was being picked on at their lunch table the other looked away, pretended he didn’t see, didn’t hear. It was important to have at least one person not witness what was going on.