You Believers (11 page)

Down the street, Jesse unhooked the leash from his dog and let him run through the woods alongside the trail. He needed to run. He thought about the girl. Yeah, she’d seen him. And what was with that stopping and bending down to tie her shoes? He let the dog run and sniff and pee on just about every tree in those woods. Dogs did that. Marked turf. He loved that dog, his muscled chest, the way his fur glimmered in the light, loved watching him run through those woods like the wild thing he ought to be.

His cell phone buzzed. His mother. She’d been completely on his ass since he’d stayed at Mike’s that night. He answered. “I’m walking Luke; I’ll be right home. Yes, ma’am,” he said. He clicked off the phone. He’d forgotten to edge the sidewalk after he’d mown the grass. Everyone else in the neighborhood had a lawn service. But oh, no, his parents had him, not a good boy but the bad boy, the one they’d bought on sale and couldn’t take back to the store. He called his dog, and he came running and stood at Jesse’s side while he clipped the leash on. He crouched, patting the dog’s side with firm, loving smacks. He ruffled the dog’s ears, bent close, whispered, “We’ve got a job to do, Luke. Let’s go.”

Molly looked at the clock. Just after 5:00.
Perfect timing
, she thought. It was the last day for students to pay their tuition; as of 5:00, those who hadn’t paid would be purged.
Purged
, she thought. It was an ugly word, as if the great computer system vomited out the poor ones who didn’t have the money, whose financial aid hadn’t come. So they were purged from the classes they’d registered in—no money, no class.
The world isn’t fair
, she thought, and that really did strike her as a sad thing for a moment. It wasn’t fair, but at least now there was a chance she could get into that afternoon section of the pedagogical theory class she needed. She was already in the night class, but she wanted her nights free to spend more time with Matt: dinners, movies, tennis at the club. She was trying to talk him into ballroom-dance classes, but he was resisting that. What she really wanted to tell him was that they needed dancing classes so they could dance at the wedding, really dance, not just wiggle and bounce around the way so many did. She wanted a real wedding with real dancing, even though Matt hadn’t done anything like propose.

She clicked on the website for course options and started scrolling down the list of classes open and closed. She stared at the monitor as the list of sections rolled up on the screen: “Closed. Closed. Closed.” In her introduction to psychology class, Molly had learned something about mind over matter, a theory that thoughts had energy, could actually change things in the physical world.
Visualize
, she thought, even though she didn’t really believe in such things. Magical thinking, she called it. But what the hell, she’d try it. She sat back, sipped her water, and closed her eyes, saw names blinking off enrollment lists. Blink. Blink. Blink. Students were being purged, names blinking out one by one as the system’s program sought out the ones who hadn’t paid. “Amount due” meant blink, gone.
Sorry
, Molly thought, then sat up, watched the screen.

She glanced up at Matt’s picture on her desk. He looked goofy
with the snorkeling mask shoved on top of his head. But what a smile, a Brad Pitt kind of smile, just a little bit mischievous and sweet. She whispered to the picture, “I dare you to like ballroom dancing.” It was a game they played, getting each other to try out new things. She had learned kickboxing, and he’d learned just a little bit of French, just enough to get by when they went to Paris one day. They took turns choosing things they’d never done before. Her mother worried sometimes about just how far Molly would go, had made her promise to always ask permission before she did anything too crazy like bungee jumping or leaping out of planes. Molly didn’t know where she’d draw the line at too much risk. Molly had a belief, another thing she’d learned from her mother:
Never let fear keep you from what you want
. That was what she wanted to teach her students one day, fearlessness, faith in your own strength, curiosity—these were the things she wanted to teach the world, along with long division, and reading, and writing, and geography.

She stared at the computer screen, thought,
Come on, come on
, feeling like a gambler watching the balls whir around a roulette wheel. The unseen programmed intelligence was playing God now, choosing who was in and who was out while Molly sat in purgatory, eyes fixed on the screen, waiting for the word
Open
to appear. She stared at the line with the section she wanted: Tuesday/Thursday, 4:10 to 5:25. She stood, paced, waiting. She wanted dance lessons with Matt on Wednesday nights, not some pedagogical theory class. She wanted Matt to twirl her, dip her, lift her, her legs flying through the air. She wanted—that was her problem, her daddy had told her—sometimes she wanted too many things.

Molly stopped. She could feel it. She turned and looked toward the screen. “Open.” She sat and signed into the course, then clicked for her registration list to see if the course was really there. Yep. Done. She stood as the printer clicked and hummed out proof of her new
schedule.
Perfect
, she thought as she glanced out the window of her bedroom to the sunny day. Her mom would be happy. Since the divorce her mom had come to believe in grabbing pleasure. Now she was doing it with tennis lessons, yoga classes, book clubs. They lived together more like roommates than mother and daughter, but her mom still played the mom three nights a week, making supper for Molly, good-mom suppers like baked chicken and fried pork chops. Sometimes Molly felt she was the luckiest girl in the world.

Then she saw him, with that dog. Coming back down the sidewalk. She thought,
You don’t even live on this street
. If she could get the double-paned windows open, she’d lean out and give him the finger. But instead she moved back from the window, stood to the side so he couldn’t see her. He paused in front of her house, looked at her car. Lots of guys liked to look at her car—that was one reason she’d picked it. She knew she looked good in it, her red hair flying all around when she drove with the top down. He bent and spoke to his dog while he looked at the house, and Molly had a sudden urge to duck away from the window. She thought she really ought to listen more to her mother sometimes. Lock the door. Park the car inside the garage. Be a little more careful.

He gave the dog some quick, hard pats, then stood, walked on. Molly watched until he disappeared down the street.
Geez
, she thought,
lighten up. He’s just another horny guy after your ass
. He was a neighbor, just a neighbor. She’d seen him help his daddy, working out in their yard.
Just a guy
, she thought.
Just a jerk
. But there was something in the way he studied her house. She felt a chill, pulled on her sweat-pants over her shorts. The guy with the dog was gone, but something made her walk downstairs and lock the door. She glanced at the blinking lights of the security system she and her mother never used. Her mother was from rural Pennsylvania, where no one locked doors, where no one had anything worth stealing. Her daddy used
to yell about their indifference to security: “I work my ass off to buy all these things, and you two don’t care enough to lock them up.” Her mother would just shrug and respond: “We live in a gated community. We have a security guard by the road who keeps an eye on every license plate that goes in and out of this place. What can happen here?”

Dubious Designs

Ominous, you might say, if you believed in things like portentous events, connections between random things. Let’s say you pull into the post office parking lot to pick up a certified check, a donation in honor of a dead boy named Jimmy Reed. Okay, you’re not likely to get a check in honor of a dead boy you found—this is my story. So let’s say you get out of your car at the post office to do any of those mundane things you do and you step straight into a pile of bones. Rib bones, but bones nonetheless, baby-back pork ribs to be precise. So let’s say you bend to look at them, gnawed, sucked clean, and you think—well, first you think
yuck
or
shit
or
what the fuck
or something like that. And then, especially if it’s your first event of the day and you’re still digesting your cup of coffee and toast, my guess is most of you couldn’t help but think that stepping into a pile of bones first thing in the morning has to be a sign of something bad. It can’t be good. And it wasn’t good for me, with my foot pretty much bare in strappy flat sandals, my skin getting poked by the bones of some pig raised for slaughter. Nothing good in that, except maybe for the person who sat in that car at God knew what hour and ate those ribs, threw the bones to the pavement. I looked around, saw a paper plate
and a wad of napkins blown against the chain-link fence along with leaves and all kinds of fast-food trash at the edge of the parking lot. And I was thinking if this were New Orleans, some old black woman might bend over to read those bones the way they read cards and palms and cat bones collected in a little leather pouch to be shaken loose to tell someone’s fortune in the moonlight.

People believe in all kinds of things. Me, I see bones on pavement and I just think,
How rude
. I think about the indifference of appetite, especially when it comes to humans and pigs. I mean some animals eat with delicacy—raccoons, squirrels, gorillas, and birds; I love the birds. But humans, we’re right there with the jackals and the crocodiles and the pigs. So I was standing in the hot morning sun, thinking about how someone ate the back meat of a pig, no doubt drizzled with hot sauce, then just dropped the remains out the window of a car. Then, satisfied, the careless carnivore drove off, leaving the bones for the ants, or flies, or rats, or me, the skin of my instep.

I told myself it was no sign of anything, but it didn’t feel good, I can tell you that. I had Katy Connor pressing on my mind. I was meeting her mother the next morning, and I had to get ready for that. And then there were those two kids stolen from Ohio; their mom’s boyfriend took them, and, being a fool, he was using her credit card to buy gas, so it was easy to track him. The mother said he was probably heading to Miami, and that would have him going down I-75, but they were tracking him on I-40 and heading south, which meant he could have been heading my way. So it was heads-up time to spot a blue van with Ohio plates. And that was just the top of my list for the moment—who knows what awful thing can rise up when my cell phone rings. There was a knot in my chest where a heart’s supposed to be, and my things-to-do list sat ready on the dash. I was thinking post office, bank, then Whitey’s Barbecue to get pulled-pork sandwiches for the staff. My crew deserved a treat after the case of
Jimmy Reed. He was a good boy, handsome, a star on his high school track team. I remembered the flyer:

MISSING
from Wilmington, North Carolina:
Jimmy Reed.
19, blond hair, brown eyes.
Last seen in a red Honda Civic with a spoiler,
red running lights, mag wheels.
If you have any information, please . . .

We had found the wheels at a used-parts place, asked questions, and searched. It took a couple of weeks, but we found him dumped in the woods behind an abandoned garage, head bashed in with a tire iron, car stripped of anything the dealers could sell. He owed them money, so they felt justified. We found Jimmy, and the cops busted an oxycodone ring. One detective put it this way on the evening news: “It’s a tragedy but not a waste. Jimmy’s death lead to the arrest of . . . his death will help prevent . . . blah blah blah.” That was when I clicked off the TV. Cops love to grandstand on any dead body when the killer is caught. So REV made the news again, and we got this donation. But I didn’t really want the donation because I didn’t really want this business I’m in. I didn’t want anything but Jimmy Reed alive. I wanted to see a lot of things, not pig bones licked clean and left on the pavement. I still think sometimes why don’t I just go be a hairdresser like my momma wanted me to be? She said I’d always have a job doing hair. But you can also always have a job searching for the missing. Some days I’d give anything to have the peace of a hairdresser’s dreams. And I was thinking after this one, I’d quit. One more grieving momma was still about all I could stand.

So I got back in the car. That would be your instinct too. You step into a pile of bones and it’s only natural to think,
Do not go forward, step back, get that check another day
. I started the engine and sat thinking what to do next, and I decided I was in no mood for barbecue. I would take the staff Chinese. So I turned left at the light instead of right. Sometimes a left instead of a right can make all the difference in a day.

The traffic was backed up the way it always is on Oleander Boulevard. We were stopping and starting as the light let its little clumps of traffic through one bit at a time. I was in the right lane when I should have been in the left because just ahead I’d need to make that left, but no one would let me over because everyone always has someplace so important to go, and I looked over at the Calvary Cemetery there and thought of how a lot of bad shit goes in there once the sun goes down, and I’m not talking ghosts. Momma always said, “Don’t worry about the spirits of the dead, Shelby; it’s the living ones you’ve got to look out for.” I’ve always had a fondness for graveyards. The peace and the green and all those silent markers of lives gone by. I looked over, and I was glad for the green of that cemetery in a part of town all littered with strip malls, wig stores, pawnshops, and carryouts. It seemed a good thing to me.