“Benton,” he said, “you are a bright boy.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“You’re what, nineteen?”
“Eighteen, sir. I graduated early,” Benton said proudly.
“Ah, yes. I seem to remember that. Anyway, what I was saying was that you are such a bright young boy that I think we might need to reconsider your duties for this church.”
“I’m sorry?” Benton asked.
“I believe we have perhaps chosen you too quickly to be a missionary. What I thought was great potential to spread the word of God turned out to be, well …”
“Reverend,” Benton interrupted, “I want to do this. I want to go out there and change people. It just wasn’t possible where you sent me. That’s not the way it worked.”
“I know the way it works, Benton. I’ve been on nearly fifteen missions myself. I’ve been all over the world. I know how these things go.”
“Then you know that Rameel’s ministry consists of more talk about rice and grain than about Jesus?” Benton was beginning to get flustered.
“I know that Rameel was chosen by God to help all those people.”
“But he’s not helping them. He’s just prolonging their lives. They are still damned when he leaves them. They are fed, but still damned!” Benton began to raise his voice.
“Benton, you have somehow lost sight of your mission as a Christian. I’m sorry, but we will not be sending you anywhere else.”
Benton Sage had, since he was a young boy, one ultimate goal in mind at all times: to make his father proud of him. He also learned as a young boy that doing this required a strict and sometimes exhausting devotion to religion. At eight, Benton had learned to impress his father by reading scripture at the dinner table. This, as it turns out, often saved him from the beatings received by his two sisters. At nine, he learned to remember scriptures by singing them in his head. At ten, he was asked to recite a scripture during an Easter Sunday church service. When he messed up on two words, his father glared at him from his seat. Benton thought of running away that afternoon, of never going home to be punished. But he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t leave his siblings and his mother behind to bear the brunt of “Reverend Rambo,” as he and his sisters jokingly called him.
“Benton,” his father said that Easter night, sitting on the edge of his bed.
“Yes?”
“You disappointed your mother and me today, son,” he said in a somber voice.
“I know, and I’m sorry. I really tried,” he defended himself.
“Don’t make up excuses. It isn’t worth it. You said you knew the scripture and you didn’t. Tomorrow, when your sisters are out playing, you’ll be up here reading that scripture over and over until you know it.”
“But I do know it. I just got nervous,” Benton began to whine.
“You got nervous because you were ashamed of yourself. As well you should have been. I was ashamed of you and so was God,” he said as he walked out of the room, switching off the light.
Benton Sage, bathed in complete darkness, whimpered and cried like an injured animal left for dead. He repeated the scripture aloud for no one to hear. He repeated it again. And again. He did this until sleep finally took him, and as soon as he woke up the next morning, he began to recite the scripture once more. He said it while brushing his teeth, his speech muffled by the toothbrush and toothpaste. He said it in the shower, water shooting into his mouth with every word. He spoke it to himself on the school bus, causing three different kids to move farther away from him for fear he had lost his mind.
At sixteen, Benton asked a girl named Susie to the Home-coming dance at his school. That night, as he adjusted his tie in the bathroom mirror and made his way to the door, he was stopped by his father. He ordered Benton to sit down.
“I have bad news,” his father said.
“What? What happened? Is everyone all right?”
“Yes. Everyone’s fine. It’s your date. It isn’t going to work out,” said his father, sitting down across from his son.
“What? What are you talking about? I’m on my way to pick her up now.”
“No, you aren’t. I just got off the phone with her mother, who was quite displeased to hear what I had to tell her about little Susie.” He shook his head.
“What did you have to tell her?” Benton asked.
“Well, it turns out that, and I have this on good authority, little Susie was seen kissing and hanging all over that pathetic and sinful kid of Stanley Baker’s.”
“Chip? Chip Baker? Yeah, they used to go out. Not anymore.” Benton looked down at the floor. He knew what was coming and wondered why he was even slightly surprised.
“So you thought it was okay to go gallivanting around with some little harlot? I really thought better of you, Benton. Oh well. It’s no matter now. Date’s off. You can take off that tie.”
With that, his father left the room, and Benton, anger boiling up from places he hadn’t known existed, clenched his fists tightly and, for a few moments, forgot how to breathe. He wanted to get up, walk out, and pick up Susie at her house; continue with the plans he’d been excited about for weeks. But he couldn’t. His father wouldn’t have it. He couldn’t disappoint him. He couldn’t be with some skanky girl like that. He was better than that. He knew better. And as he wiped a tear out of the corner of his eye, he stood up, pulled at the tie around his neck, and headed back to his bedroom. The next morning, at breakfast, Benton sat across from his father with the hope that the date wouldn’t be brought up; he wanted the entire thing to just fade away. Just as he went to sip his orange juice, his father, never looking up from his plate of food, said slowly, “I’m proud of you, son, for trusting that I know what’s best.” Few times in his life had Benton felt that good. He couldn’t explain it, not even to himself, but just those few words from his dad made all the anger and worry seem worth it.
But at eighteen, Benton had failed to live up to his father’s standards once again. He had traveled halfway around the world, slept in dirt-floor huts, given food and water to the poor and dying, but still hadn’t impressed Mr. Jackson Sage. Upon his return home and after hearing of his conversation with Reverend Hughes, Benton’s father chose to stop acknowledging his son altogether. As if this wasn’t bad enough, Benton was nearly shunned by his entire family, who, save for the occasional “How are you?” or “Could you pass the salt?” seemed oblivious to his very existence. They wanted the same thing he wanted: to know they were doing something that pleased their father. Nothing else in the world seemed to matter above that. He watched his father discuss school with his sisters and cooking with his mother. He watched them all gather in the dining room for Bible study and laugh through television shows in the living room. He wasn’t angry with his mother and sisters, because he’d have done the same thing. He would have sacrificed any one of them to know that what he was doing was making his father happy. He had worked for years to earn another moment like that one at the breakfast table—that moment when his father was proud of him. But he had failed. Feeling as if he could take no more, Benton began making phone calls to each university to which he had applied the previous year, before he went to Ethiopia and before he let his father down for the last time. Surely, he thought, one of his scholarship offers was still good. He could just go away one day.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Neighbors
My aunt Julia had been in piss-poor shape since Gabriel left, only adding to the stress and worry of my mother, whom I sat watching one afternoon in the third week of our search. In an attempt to take advantage of our town’s recent foray into national fame and to distract herself from the thought that my brother was lying dead in a barn somewhere, she had introduced the Woodpecker haircut. It was for young boys, mostly, and consisted of a Mohawk-style cut with the tips of the standing hair died a bright red, in honor of John Barling’s imaginary friend. I thought it was ridiculous but couldn’t help watching her every time she completely destroyed a kid’s
head with her clippers and dye. Duke Lister was the first one to get the haircut, and as soon as all the other twelve-year-old boys in town saw him posing for pictures in front of the huge wooden cutout of the Lazarus, which had replaced an old dogtrot cabin as the main attraction of the city park, they all filled my mom’s salon with ten-dollar bills in hand.
“Have you ever seen such a thing, Cullen?” my mom asked me as she massacred Caleb Cooper’s seven-year-old head of hair.
“Sure haven’t.”
At what point my mother decided it was appropriate to pretend to be okay, I had no real clue. What I assumed was that she was trying her best to go about life in as normal a way as she had three weeks earlier in the hopes that Gabriel would reappear just as easily as he had vanished. My father, on the other hand, stayed on the phone pretty much all day long. He talked to sheriff’s departments all over the state. He contacted newspapers to print missing ads, but few would agree to publishing articles about a possible runaway. His plan was to make sure that Gabriel’s picture was in every newspaper in the state. He was also working on setting up a website, with the help of the kid who fixed computers at Wilson’s Furniture Store.
It is hard to explain why, after only three weeks, I had lost all hope that my brother would be found. It did go in phases, though. One day I would wake up thinking, This is it. He’s coming home today, and the next day it would be more like, They’re going to find his body today. The only way I could comfort myself was to imagine that my brother had, in fact, just gotten fed up with us and run away. I pictured him in New York City, getting a job as a mail boy in a big company and working his way up to a management position after going to night classes. I saw him in a coffee shop asking a girl to marry him and becoming a father soon thereafter. I saw him looking at a framed pictured of him and me and replacing it with one of his new family. I saw him smiling. He was endlessly smiling.
I was getting tired of my parents hugging me every night. I was getting tired of Lucas Cader sleeping on my floor. I was tired of Aunt Julia’s crying every single day, whether I saw it in person or heard it through the phone. Mostly, though, I was getting sick and damn tired of hearing and reading and seeing shit about that damn woodpecker. And sitting up one night in my bed as Lucas flipped through channels on my TV, I wrote this sentence down in my book, the same one I keep my titles in: If I had a gun, I would shoot the Lazarus woodpecker in the face.
Fulton Dumas gave me the creeps. It wasn’t only because I’d caught him giving me the odd stare-down on more than one occasion, but also because of the way he would say a sentence and then repeat it back to himself under his breath. He also gave Lucas Cader the creeps, so much so that Lucas had developed a theory that Fulton should be investigated in my brother’s disappearance.
“They questioned him and his mom the same way they did us, Lucas.”
“It doesn’t matter. People who do things like that know how to hide the truth. I don’t trust him.” Lucas stared through my bedroom window at the Dumases’ house next door.
“I think you’re just getting paranoid. Why would he be so stupid? Who takes someone from the house next door?”
“Exactly. It’s the perfect plan: kidnap the next-door neighbor. No one would ever be so dumb as to put themselves so close to the crime scene. And no one would ever suspect the neighbor, either. That’s why he did it. He’s sitting over there right now, doing God knows what.” Lucas shivered.
“You’ve got to calm down.”
“No. I can’t. Let’s go over there.”
“What? No.”
“Yes. Come on.”
Lucas Cader stormed down my hallway and out the front door. His long, serious stride let me know quickly that he had the full intention of going into Fulton’s house. I ran after him.
“Lucas, this is ridiculous.”
“No. I have to do this.”
He rang the doorbell.
Ding-dong.
He rang the doorbell again.
Ding-dong.
And again without pause.
Ding-dong.
The door opened slowly, the way it would in a horror movie. Shirley Dumas stood before us.
“Can I help you boys?”
“Have you seen Gabriel Witter, ma’am?” Lucas asked without any hesitation.
“No. Is he back?”
“No. Is he here?” Lucas was not letting up.
“What are you talking about, boy?” she asked, confused.
“Is your son here, ma’am?” Lucas asked, stepping into the house and walking past her. I stood on the porch, eyes and mouth wide open.
“Yes, can I help you, Lucas?” She was beginning to get agitated. I stayed on the porch.
“Fulton!” Lucas shouted, and began to walk down the hallway to Fulton’s bedroom.
“Well, go on with him, I guess,” Shirley said, waving me past.
In Fulton’s room I became fully aware of why I had never dared to set foot into that house before. His bed was covered by a G.I. Joe blanket, and on top of it sat what had to have been some forty or fifty stuffed animals. The walls couldn’t be seen for the many posters that had been tacked and taped and glued up. The posters were of things like kittens and monkeys and bears. Fulton was sitting at his computer with a pair of headphones on. He was singing an eighties song out loud when we entered.
“FULTON!” Lucas shouted, tapping him on the shoulder.
He turned around quickly and took off the headphones. He looked up at Lucas and over at me. He looked at Lucas again, and then back at me. He did this two more times before Lucas began.
“Fulton Dumas, do you know where Gabriel Witter is?”
“No,” he said, his expression changing suddenly from surprised embarrassment to sadness.
“Are you sure?” Lucas asked.
“Why would I know where he is?”
“I don’t know, Fulton. Why do you need a thousand stuffed bears? Have you seen Gabriel Witter?”
“NO!” Fulton stood up. He was getting angry now as Lucas continued his interrogation. I didn’t try to stop him because I couldn’t think of anything to say. Also, after seeing the room, I figured I’d give Lucas a chance to prove me wrong. I couldn’t watch, though, so I turned around and pretended to admire one of Fulton’s many posters.
“Were you in love with Gabriel Witter?”
“Lucas, come on,” I had to interrupt, still too uncomfortable to watch.
“Shut up, Cullen. Were you, Fulton?”
“NO!”
Suddenly the room was quiet, and someone was grabbing my shoulders from behind. It was Fulton. He turned me around and looked me dead in the eyes.
“Cullen,” he began, “I am so, so sorry that your brother is gone. He was a good one. Very nice and very forgiving and very much like you.” With that said, and then whispered back under his breath, he wrapped his arms around me and hugged me tightly. I looked at Lucas, whose anger had turned to remorse as he witnessed Fulton Dumas beginning to cry with his head buried into my shoulder blade.
“It’s okay, Fulton,” Lucas said.
“Yeah. Everything’s fine. He’ll turn up,” I added.
“I was just messin’ around, really,” Lucas said.
Fulton let go and walked out of the room. We walked down the hall and out of the house in silence. In the front yard I looked over at Lucas, and he was chewing on his bottom lip. He was doing that look that he did when he was overthinking something.
“It wasn’t Fulton. I was wrong,” he said.
“You think?” I joked.
“It was John Barling,” he said confidently as he walked into my house.
The Lazarus woodpecker was last seen in a forest in North Louisiana known as the Singer Tract. Despite pleas from the National Audubon Society and a collection of southern governors, the Chicago Mill and Lumber Company, which held sole logging rights to the area, clear-cut the forest in 1944. It was then that the last known Lazarus woodpecker, a female nicknamed Gertrude, was officiall
y not-to-be-found. The Lazarus was the world’s largest woodpecker, beating out the imperial woodpecker by just one inch in length. John Barling claimed to have had a gut feeling that if he left his job at the University of Oregon and moved to Lily, Arkansas, he would be able to rediscover the Lazarus and prove that it was never extinct at all. In doing so, he left behind two children, a wife who had no college degree or work experience, and a mortgage. These are the things that Fulton Dumas had discovered about him. One day, some months after he had moved to Lily and bedded Fulton’s mom, John Barling went canoeing for the umpteenth time down a small stretch of the White River that flows right on the edge of town. On his canoe trip that afternoon, John Barling claimed that he saw a Lazarus woodpecker fly quickly over his head and land on a huge oak tree. He quietly took out a camera but hesitated, knowing that the sound would scare the bird away. He opted instead to record the bird as it knocked its long bill repeatedly into the tree. He then got just what he needed: The bird let out a loud call that, according to the National Ornithological Institute, is unique to that particular species. So, with just a small digital recording in hand, John Barling contacted the NOI, and soon my hometown was filled with people who had devoted their lives to the study and viewing of birds.
On the fourth week after my brother had gone missing, there was still no sign of him to be found. During that same week, there was still not one single picture of that damn woodpecker. Yet my town was overrun with more people than it could manage. Every bed-and-breakfast was full for the first time in nearly a decade, and the Lily Motel changed its name to the Lazarus Motel, which made me angry as I passed it one particular afternoon on my way to work.
Aside from tourists and birdwatchers, all of whom I refused to talk to, most of the people who came into the store that day were truck drivers who needed to stock up on energy drinks and use the bathroom for longer than I felt was necessary for any human. As I was spraying the bathroom key down with Lysol, a tall man walked in (ding-ding) wearing khaki from head to toe. It was John Barling, the damn bird guy. He walked around the store, whistling, hands in pockets, stupid safari-style hat on his fat head, and I wondered what it would be like to sit in a college class with him as the professor. He picked up a candy bar. He put it back down. He picked it up again, read the back, and put it down again. He did the same thing with about three other candy bars until he finally just grabbed a random one from the shelf, walked up, and set it on the counter.
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