Zero at the Bone (12 page)

Her tone surprised me. I had assumed that my mother would appreciate Detective Waterman's efforts, and admire her as a fellow professional, a woman in a tough line of work. “I thought Detective Waterman seemed pretty nice,” I said, hating my feeble choice of words.

My mother was about to say something ironic, but she stopped herself. She put her hand over mine. “This happens all the time,” she said.

I knew what she was saying, but maybe it was my turn to play stupid.

My mother softened her voice even further, as though we had been disagreeing and now were getting back to normal. “Anita is missing. She might come home right this minute.” She couldn't keep from pausing, to see if the front door was opening, steps hurrying into the living room. “We have to do what we think is right.”

One of the thick magazines was open to an article, “Earthquakes and the Geologic Record.” The author was Frances Tilling Buchanan, my mother. I knew how pleased she would have been on an ordinary day, how we all might go out to dinner at Jack London Square to celebrate. Now she folded a Post-it and put it into place, closing the magazine so she could look at it later.

“That's great,” I said, my voice a feeble copy of the congratulations I would usually have given her.

“The article explains that some of the Bay Area hills are upside down,” she said. Sometimes she does this. She'll be walking along a hillside and suddenly say, “What an explosion!” She's referring to something that happened ten million years ago, the debris, eroded lava at her feet.

“One big earthquake and a whole mountain flipped?” I heard myself ask. I was using the voice of a much younger person, trying to stir up her mood, trying to get her thinking.

“More or less,” she said.

I called Detective Waterman and left a message after the beep, telling her I would be at the factory most of the day. I felt like my father, briefly. He never leaves a simple message. His messages say he'll be at the factory until noon, in L.A. until seven, and in Chicago tomorrow.

Then I took the bus down to the factory. It was Saturday, but a half crew was laboring, and the shipping department was crazy, two trucks waiting. The standard-sized boxes ran out, and so the shipping people had to make cartons out of great sheets of cardboard.

They cut the cardboard with a grip-razor, a handle with a dazzling-sharp edge sticking out of one end. One slash and half the cardboard fell away. A bend or two, and a nearly entire box stood there, waiting to be taped up. They sealed a carton around each night-stand, with padding at the edges, strips of a new kind of foam rubber, biodegradable. Although I wasn't as fast as some of the workers, a little nervous about cutting myself, after a while I picked up speed.

The buzzer sounded for lunch break and I headed for Dad's office. He was not there. Barbara was in the office, tapping the eraser end of a pencil on the computer screen. She had arranged the pink while-you-were-out slips into rows. She waved a pink message slip at me, and I took it.

Detective Waterman had returned my call. There were two numbers where I could reach her, and I tried both of them, trying not to disturb any of the papers on my dad's desk.

“Waterman,” she said when she answered the second number.

Something about answering the phone like that sounds so impressive. No “Hello,” no “Can I help you?” Just a last name. I explained who I was and why I had called.

“Diaries can be the key,” said the detective.

As I described the words, the few phrases, she said, “Uh-huh” and, “Is that right,” but she didn't say, “I have to get my hands on that diary.”

“It's good to keep our minds open,” she said at last. She was starting a car and releasing the parking brake as she talked; I could tell by the background noise.

“Ask if anyone saw her getting into a car,” I suggested. “Walking along the street with a man.” I almost added: holding hands. “She must have gone someplace with whoever it was.” She must have loved him.

I knew it sounded lame, and I couldn't keep the frustration and disappointment out of my voice.

“If you come up with a name,” said the detective. “A phone number. An address. You are not wasting my time, Cray. And you aren't wasting yours, either. Keep thinking.”

20

Jesse was showing one of the new workers where he should keep his lunch next time, not on top of the glue press, where it had fallen behind the equipment and would be eaten by mice during the night. Jesse's body language was easy to read; there was still hope, his gesture said, indicating the outdoors where a lunch wagon had pulled up beside the shipping room.

Beside the factory is a yard of piled-up lumber, some of it just arrived and pale, leaking sap from the ends, little amber blisters, some of it weathered and gray, warped, two-by-fours tumbling off the stack because they won't stay straight. The first time my dad had shown me this open-air storage he had said only two words. He had nodded in the direction of a stack of cracked plywood and said, “Black widows.”

The spiders were easy to find. I discovered one just then, over by a bucket of tar. The bucket was unopened, but I knew what was inside. Dad sent a crew up every year before the rainy season. They would pop open a bucket like this, hammer on the bottom until the black cylinder of glassy tar fell out, and they would melt tar down and use it to seal cracks in the roof. They never got them all. Every time it rained, drops found a way in, a whisper of water.

I knew there must be another ladder around somewhere, but there was only this one, the rungs over-scribbled by the messy web of a spider. She hung in the shadow, a glittering ebony creature in mid-dark. Only when I stepped to one side did her forgetful-looking web catch the light again, a tangle, hairs left in a brush.

Anita would wonder why I had to do it harm. I would argue how dangerous it was, and I would be right. But I stood there making noise, kicking the ladder, clearing my throat, and actually talking out loud, telling the spider that I was sorry but I had to ruin her web.

The ladder was wood, each rung cobwebby, dangling a moth cocoon or a wisp of trash. I leaned it against the roof and began to climb. Each rung creaked. All the way up I told myself that the ladder was strong enough to hold my weight.

The factory roof is paved with tar paper. Wherever a skylight gleams, the roof is scabby with extra tar, all the way around the frame of the skylight. Ventilation pipes murmured, the voice of someone singing in Spanish erupting eerily from a pipe as I passed it.

The places where the fire ax had broken open the hopper were sealed over with bright yellow tin, the tin nailed into place. I clambered up to the edge of the hopper and opened a trapdoor. There was only a little sawdust, at the bottom, and the bitter smell of cottonwood told me that the light glaze of sawdust was fresh.

I turned to go back, and stopped. A big man, a silhouette against the sunlight gleaming off the foundry windows down the street, was making his way up the ladder. Only his head and shoulders were visible as the ladder shook and the man grew cautious.

“I think this is the ladder OSHA told us to destroy,” said Jesse.

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration inspected the factory from time to time. Dad complied quickly with their recommendations, and I knew that, somewhere in the factory, there were at least two strong new aluminum ladders.

I didn't know what to say to Jesse. “Be careful. You weigh more than I do,” I said.

“This thing is making all kinds of groans and moans,” he said, not moving.

“I just had to see,” I said, after debating inwardly how to explain myself.

“You just had to see if I was lying,” said Jesse, easily, as though he was saying something pleasant.

“You weren't,” I said.

“But you didn't believe me,” said Jesse.

I told him I was sorry.

“That's all right,” he said.

Some people want to make you apologize twice, just so they can enjoy it the second time.

“No, I mean it,” he said. “It tells me something.”

Roofs shouldn't be so ugly. Nobody ever sees them, so they are ignored when it comes time to paint window frames and plant flowers by the sidewalk. I found myself thinking just then that if I ever owned a factory I would put pink shingles on the roof, or nice gray gravel.

Jesse made me nervous. I liked him, but he knew things I didn't, and he was used to telling people what to do. He was taking advantage of me now, keeping me on the roof, squinting into the sunlight, while he stood on the ladder looking around, the freeway off toward the Bay, and the railroad tracks, our own railroad spur empty now. The two of us paused to take in the view, rust red boxcars in the distance, the plume of white steam from the tomato cannery.

“We're three days ahead of schedule,” he said.

“That's good to know.”

“You can go home now, if you want,” he said. “Tell your dad I'm keeping my eye on the production chart.”

There was some meaning behind his voice, something I could not figure out. “No, I think I'll stay,” I said. “Maybe break up that ladder, make sure nobody ever uses it again.”

Maybe I expected Jesse to be annoyed. He was telling me I could go home, and I wasn't going.

He smiled. Gold flashed somewhere in his mouth. “That's good, Cray,” he said, like I had passed some kind of test.

Every time I stepped into his office, I knew he would be there, phone to his ear. But he wasn't. The trouble was that, as soon as I stopped working, I remembered her, and that hurt too much.

We weren't three days ahead of schedule. Whenever there was a shipment a square was shaded in on the big sheet of graph paper in Dad's office. There was a line in ink, where we had to be by the closing buzzer every day in order to stay on schedule. We were one day ahead, at best. Maybe two, I reasoned, if you counted today's shipment. That was the point of shipping nightstands on a Saturday—we picked up a day on the chart. And then tomorrow was Sunday, when the factory was always closed.

My dad never said the factory was closed, or open. He said the factory was “down.” The factory was always down on Christmas Day. The factory was always up on a weekday. I left the office and went out to the lumber lot and broke up the ladder. I expected it to take half an hour, but sometimes I forget how strong I am. In five minutes the ladder was broken scrap. As old as the wood was, it was white inside, where the sun had never touched. I tied it into a neat bundle and tossed it into the Dumpster.

When I was done with the ladder, I went into the finishing room and grabbed a paint gun. We weren't just making nightstands. We were making chairs and children's furniture and dressers. Pink and yellow chairs hung from hooks. I worked the lever of the hose, like the lever of a garden hose, only what came out was a blast of blue, sky blue, Florida blue.

Someone handed me a mask, and I put it on, and after five or ten minutes, I was almost as fast as anybody there. I sprayed nineteen chairs myself, and by the time the buzzer sounded, fifty-three bentwood chairs hung overhead, turning slowly as though they were living creatures, all those brilliant colors.

When I got home that evening, there was a white van parked at the curb. Another van, I thought. No big deal, I tried to tell myself. I thought maybe it was another television station, but I stopped to read the lettering on the door, two big red letters: FC.

And beneath that: Find the Children: The National Center for the Missing

I told myself that this was simply more help. And we needed help—I knew that. But another part of me went cold.

21

“I can't believe it,” said Paula.

It was only the third Dumpster, and I didn't feel like apologizing or explaining.

“It's sick, Cray,” she said. “And it's sad.”

“Just wait here.”

She sighed, a show of patience. But when I felt back to get the flashlight off the floor she reached down and gave it to me. “Be careful,” she said, opening my hand and slipping the flashlight into it.

The alley expanded. The farther I walked from the headlights, the emptier the place became, my footsteps echoing in whispers. I approached the Dumpster and froze. If it was there, I didn't want to see.

Look what you're putting me through, Anita, I told her in my mind.

Look what you're making me do
.

I reassured myself that I was looking for her shoes, one of her books. And that maybe she would be alive, squirming, tied up.

Sour smells, decay. Bread, lettuce, old lunches. The sodden, pleasant smell was wet cardboard. Even the steel of the big Dumpster gave off an odor—cold, rust and iron. I told myself not to look. I found myself wanting to call her name. This was the employee entrance, the back way into the shelving factory. The place was silent, Saturday night, nothing happening.

The flashlight made everything look cheesy, ancient. The ribbons of plastic shippers used to confine bales of cardboard scuttled underfoot. This Dumpster was empty, too, only a few scabs of squashed cardboard sticking to the interior. The back of the factory was shut tight, steel doors that pulled down and locked. At one end of the alley, a Doberman was going insane at the sight of me, throwing himself against the chain-link fence.

Paula was waiting just as I had left her, calm, like a cat or a Buddha, in a place that would make most people nervous. I swung back into the Jeep, and she offered me a stick of gum. I took it and chewed for a while. One of her feet was hooked on the dash, the other knee over by the gearshift. Looking out at the alley behind the shelving factory where Anita had worked, Paula looked relaxed, as though she was looking out at a beautiful shoreline, waves, white sand.

I had pulled by her house, not even killing the engine, run up to her front door, and asked her if she wanted to go for a ride.

I left the alley, the clutch not slipping, the Jeep running well. I kept it in low gear, cars passing me on the left, headlights bright in the side mirror. This part of town looked better at night, the empty shops still and dark, the paint store looking cheerful, all the different shades of gray and brown we could paint our interiors.