Untouchable (8 page)

“I know what they can do.”

“Get on the horn to their parents. Call their fathers. A phone call to the father yields fearsome results.”

“He won’t say who’s doing it.”

“Find out. Get a name and make a call. I’m telling you. These little kids can be fucking animals.” Bob tossed his napkin on top of his empty plate, let out a rolling belch.

A waitress came by with the check, set it on the table. Bob slid the check toward Darby.

“This is yours.”

“How do you figure?”

“The job took four hours this morning,” Bob said. “You bet dinner on three.”

The sleigh bells over the door jangled. Two young Mexican girls came inside, selling tissue paper flowers from an emptied coffee can. Bob signaled to them, dug into the back pocket of his jeans for his wallet.

“I’ll get one for Rhoda,” he said. “A souvenir from the outside world.”

He accepted a flower from the smaller of the girls, passed her a dollar bill, smiled.

“
Gracias, mijita
,” he said.

Darby picked The Kid up at the Crumps’ and they drove home in silence. At the house, they pulled the trash and recycle bins out to the curb. Garbage night. Something caught Darby’s eye out on the sidewalk, some movement under the twin holes set into the manhole cover. A trick of the streetlight maybe, something reflected. He saw it again, called The Kid over. The Kid crouched down next to the cover, looked into the holes. Put his ear to the metal, listening. Stood up and shook his head. He didn’t notice anything.

Darby still had remnants of the feeling from the job site that morning, the headache, the nagging tug. While The Kid got ready for bed, he sat on the living room couch with his eyes closed, pressing the heels of his hands to his temples.

The Kid came back downstairs in his Dodger pajamas. He stood in the kitchen for a moment, head down, taking deep breaths, composing his thoughts. Darby never knew if The Kid was nervous before he started, before he stepped through the threshold into the living room. Didn’t know if The Kid’s imaginary audience caused actual stage fright.

The Kid hosted a nightly talk show called
It’s That Kid!
He’d done this for a couple of years running. It was a highly successful show. It lasted about ten minutes—fifteen if The Kid had a particularly intriguing guest. He’d come up with the show as something to cheer Lucy up during the baseball off-season. Every night before bed, back when he was talking, he’d burst from the kitchen with a full-face smile and launch into his opening monologue, a few bits cribbed from the taped real-life shows he’d watched that morning before school, jokes he’d heard around the neighborhood, some real groaners from his book of knock-knock gags. Then he’d give a little intro where he told the audience about that night’s guest, their history and accomplishments. His guests were usually celebrities, sports figures, world leaders, people The Kid had seen on TV or heard about in school. Sometimes they were long dead; sometimes they were fictional. Past presidents were recurring guests, superheroes from his favorite comics, members of Dodger teams Lucy had told him about, men who played long before The Kid was born. The guest would come out and The Kid would stand politely while they waved to the audience, basking in the applause. Thank you, no, please, no, this is too much. The Kid sat on the other end of the couch from Lucy. His imaginary guest sat in the empty armchair a few feet away. The Kid asked questions about the guest’s current projects and past accomplishments, then answered in the closest thing he could approximate to the guest’s voice. The voice never sounded anything like the guest’s actual voice, but The Kid didn’t bill himself as an impressionist. He’d ask a question and alternate between his impression of the guest’s response and his reactions as host. When the guest told a joke, The Kid would laugh his ridiculous horse laugh, snorting and rocking like this was the funniest thing he’d ever heard, egging on the audience, finally taking a minute to pull himself together before moving forward with the next question.

When there was a particularly important or interesting guest, The Kid taped the show with a small cassette recorder Bob had given him for Christmas one year, using the microphone to interview his guests and deliver the opening monologue. When the tapes were full, Lucy marked them with the guests’ names and the dates of their original broadcast, and The Kid kept them in a shoebox up in his room. This allowed him to air occasional reruns, play a tape instead of a live show on nights when he didn’t feel like interviewing a new guest or when he wanted to revisit an especially successful episode. Lucy made requests sometimes, asked The Kid to replay a show with a guest she liked, a funny monologue she remembered. The Kid opened each pre-recorded show with a brief announcement to the audience, slightly apologetic for not having a live show to offer.

It’s That Kid!
had been the highlight of their night. Lucy would grade papers on the end of the couch, glasses slipping down the bridge of her nose, sipping a glass of wine, smiling at The Kid’s bad jokes, his ridiculous impressions. Darby would sit in the chair in front of the TV, looking at that morning’s paper, drinking his coffee, watching his wife, watching his son, their day ending, his just about to begin.

The show had changed in the last year. Now The Kid wrote the questions in his notebook, listened as the guests answered from the empty chair in a voice only he could hear. Darby had to sit beside The Kid on the couch and read the notebook to follow the half of the show that was available. The Kid no longer performed the monologue at the beginning, or made the flattering introductions. It was too much to write. The shows were no longer recorded, of course. The tape recorder and cassettes had been packed away in the garage.

The Kid’s guest that night was an artist of some kind, a painter. From what Darby could gather from the notebook, the artist painted murals under bridges. The Kid was asking him if he was worried that his murals were going to disappear under all the graffiti that was happening. If he was worried that one day he would walk under a bridge and find that his work was gone.

When the show was finished, The Kid thanked the painter, walked him off stage, giving a last wave to the audience. Darby followed upstairs. The Kid got into bed, switched off his light, set his notebook and pencil on the bedside table. Darby leaned down and kissed The Kid’s high forehead, whispered what Lucy had always whispered when she tucked The Kid into bed.

“Congratulations on a good show, Kid.”

It didn’t sound the same coming from Darby. He knew it, was sure The Kid knew it. But he said it anyway, every night. Congratulations on a good show, Kid.

He sat back down in the living room, flipped channels on the TV. It didn’t take long to find him, selling a steam-cleaning mop on one of the higher-numbered stations. Sometimes it was the mop, sometimes it was the car-finish repair kit. Sometimes it was the weight-loss program, two books and a series of videotapes. Earl Patrick, Lucy’s father, gone for almost a year and a half but still haunting the outer reaches of late-night TV.

Darby kept the sound off, watched Earl’s demonstration of the mop on a tiled kitchen floor. Lucy had looked more like her mother than her father, but she had his physicality, the strong, deliberate presence in rooms. Earl pushing a mop across a TV studio set; Lucy walking up and down the rows of desks in her classroom. Darby pictured her there clearly: insistent, determined, the students listening with varying degrees of interest, restlessness, teenage boredom. It is a day toward the beginning of November, a little less than a year ago. They are nearing the end of the unit on the 1960s, so she’s talking about Robert Kennedy and his run for the Democratic Nomination in ’68, his swing through California, his visit with César Chávez in the San Joaquin Valley, the famous photo, the two men sitting side-by side in a soybean field. A lesson he’d heard many times in various forms as she talked to herself in the kitchen, back at her desk. He pictured her asking questions in the classroom, looking to see if anyone remembered details from the lessons she gave the week before, poll numbers, troop levels, dates of sit-ins and marches.

She reaches the front of the classroom, stops, turns, asks a question, waits for an answer. Gets an answer, the wrong one. Waits again. Gets another answer, the right one, smiles, nods, keeps smiling, keeps nodding, too long, something strange happening, the students starting to notice, even the ones paying the minimum amount of attention. Lucy at the front of the room, smiling and nodding stupidly, stuck in some broken-record loop.

A student at the back of the class says, “Mrs. Darby,” a concerned note in her voice, and then Lucy falls, heavily, without her arms to soften the impact, face-first on the floor.

Shocked cries in the classroom, students standing, the scraping of desk legs across tile. She is well-liked, not that it matters, not that any person falling in such a way wouldn’t provoke a similar reaction, but she is well-liked, patient and wise and funny with these kids, not the best students in the world, and she’s one of the few teachers who treats them like they still matter, like they still have a chance, and there’s a rush to the front of the room, some screams, a crowding around her body, everyone afraid to touch her. Face down, fluid pooling out from under her nose and mouth.

The student who finally reaches for her is tall and solid, a football player on the varsity squad, one of a few in the class. It’s a Friday, a game day, so he’s dressed for the occasion in a crisp white button-down shirt. There is a brief discussion over whether or not she should be moved, but he acts before any conclusion is reached. He rolls her over, gently, and the students gasp at the first sight of her face. The football player slides his arms under her, unafraid or unconcerned with the fluid, and then he lifts her, getting to his feet, her weight not much of a burden to him, cradling her in his arms. Another student opens the door and the football player carries her out into the hallway. A few students run ahead to the nurse, but the others follow the football player, a careful parade down the hallway, the boy’s white shirt wet and red now, Lucy’s head resting against his chest. Through the halls to the office where the nurse waits with the phone receiver in her hand, an ambulance on its way.

Darby could never picture the football player’s face. It was just a blur above the boy’s game day dress shirt, the red stain spreading across the starched white as he carried Lucy down the hall.

The doorbell had rung and Darby had opened the door to find two cops standing on the porch, hats in their hands. He’d stood in the kitchen for a long time after they left, before The Kid got home from school, trying to figure out what he was going to tell The Kid, how he was going to say it. Unable to move. The clock on the microwave gaining minutes, a rain shower coming and going, the light outside shifting and fading. That endless afternoon. At some point, he noticed The Kid standing in the living room, watching him. At some point, The Kid asked him what was wrong.

He told The Kid the story. Lucy falling in the classroom, her students rushing to her side, the football player carrying her down the hall. He left out some details, possibly added others. It was hard to remember, exactly, what he’d said. If he’d talked about her face hitting the floor, if he’d talked about the fluid on the boy’s shirt. He hoped not, he hoped he’d spared The Kid those things, but it was hard to remember.

He’d only repeated the story a couple of times, to Bob, to Lucy’s friend Amanda, and once, the day after, over the phone to Lucy’s mother in Chicago. That was it. The story was sealed, finished, never repeated. But most nights in the quiet house it visited him. He couldn’t shake it. He imagined the look in her eyes before she fell, her cheek on the cold tile floor.

Darby wondered what he had said. The football player. If he’d said anything as he carried her down the hall. If she had said anything, if she had been conscious at all.

He felt like he was still inside that moment, after the cops had left, before The Kid got home from school. Like nothing had happened since then. Like that afternoon had never really ended.

He turned off the TV and went out onto the sidewalk to get some air. He heard sirens in the distance, fire trucks, ambulances. There was an orange smear just above the rooftops to the east, gray smoke rising against the black sky. A quick movement caught his eye and he looked down at the cement, the cracks and crevices, the buckling sidewalk beneath his boots, and it was there that he saw it again, beneath the two holes in the manhole cover, some trick of the light, the glow of the fire reflected, maybe, something flashing through the holes from the space below.

It was there and then it was gone.

The Kid was in and out of sleep. It was like that most nights. His dad would tuck him into bed and go back downstairs to the TV playing low in the living room or out to the pickup, the radio playing low in the night. The Kid would drift, dozing, trying to stay awake to hear the important things, the buzz of the pager signaling that his dad had to go to work, and the other sound, the sound he’d waited to hear for almost a year now.

His dad had a job where he helped people after something bad happened to their family. That was how The Kid’s mom had explained it once, although his dad wasn’t a doctor and he wasn’t a cop. The Kid imagined his dad like a character in a comic book, a detective or government agent who showed up after a villain had committed a crime. He didn’t have any superpowers, but he used his brains, he used his wits to figure out what had happened and how to fix what had gone wrong.

The pager buzzed when somebody needed help. The pager was his dad’s signal device. One o’clock in the morning, two o’clock, The Kid would hear it buzz, hear his dad gathering his change of clothes and thermos of coffee, hear him coming back up to The Kid’s bedroom to stand over the bed. The Kid pretended he was asleep during all of this. He closed his eyes and made his breathing slow and deep. The Kid had seen superheroes do this in a couple of comics, pretending they were sleeping or dead. Batman knew how to do this, Green Arrow, Captain America. Lower your heart rate, calm your breathing. The Kid learned from their techniques, pretended he was asleep while his dad stood over his bed with his hand resting lightly on The Kid’s forehead.