She was hesitant. “Yes, I am,” she said. “What’s this about?”
“Ms. Funicelli, we’re reporters for the Post and we’re doing a story on a man named Clarence Pym. We ran his telephone number and it came back to this address. We were wondering if you knew him.”
“Clarence is my son,” she said. She was looking at him hard now. “What could you possibly want with Clarence?” she asked.
Bob looked to Amy for help. She said, “Ma’am, do you have a computer?”
Her face clouded. “I’m afraid I’m not much for computers. Clarence has one, but he has it with him. Why would I need a computer?”
“Well, I can probably show you on my cellphone,” said Amy. “Is it all right if we come in?”
And this was when Irene Funicelli noticed for the first time that Amy’s mouth was wired closed. “My goodness,” she said, “what happened to you?”
Amy said, “I got punched in the mouth today by a man named Dwayne McLarty. I suspect you know him, too. Am I right?”
The dumbfounded woman nodded.
“May we come in?” repeated Amy. “I can show you on my cellphone.”
She regarded them for a wary moment. Finally, with a dubious nod, Ms. Funicelli stood aside to admit the two strangers to her home. Inside, she offered them her couch. Amy sat and began bringing up the Post’s website on her phone. Bob sat next to her and took the opportunity to look around.
The inside of the house mirrored the outside. The furniture was traditional, not expensive but not cheap, either. In one corner stood a lighted display case full of porcelain figurines and whatnots caught in frozen capering and soundless laughter. Through an archway Bob could see the dark wood of a dining table, watched over by a cabinet full of china and wine glasses.
On the mantel there were perched, in chronological order, a series of school portraits tracing the growth of Clarence Pym. In each picture he was the same, a doughy-faced boy facing the camera with a dour expression—indeed, facing it as a condemned man might face a firing squad. As the pictures marched across the mantel, he grew older and bigger but never any happier.
Above the mantel hung a large framed portrait of mother and son, dominating the room. Irene Funicelli stood behind the seated Pym, arms crossed protectively in front of him. She was glowing as if lit from within by candles. Pym seemed no happier in this photo than in any of the others.
Ms. Funicelli caught him looking. “That’s my Clarence,” she said.
“Yes,” said Bob, “I know.” And then, because saying something else seemed somehow necessary, he added, “You have a very nice home.”
“Thank you, Mr. Carson,” she said, “but I must confess I’m still confused as to why you’ve come here. What interest could two newspaper reporters possibly have in Clarence?”
Amy’s phone started speaking then and it answered the question. “Those who have ears, let them hear,” said Clarence Pym, as Amy passed his mother her phone. “We are the White Resistance Army.” Irene Funicelli’s right hand clamped itself over her mouth as the video played. By the time it was done, two minutes later, that hand was damp with tears.
She looked from one to the other and the expression on her face was so naked in its needfulness and helplessness that Bob almost turned away. “Is this real?” she asked. She stared at the phone, then remembered belatedly to return it to Amy. “This can’t be real. This can’t.”
“It’s real,” said Bob.
“Oh, sweet Jesus,” she breathed. “Oh, God, help my poor son.”
“We’re sorry,” said Amy.
“When was this done?” she asked.
“This morning, apparently,” said Bob.
“Where is he? Can I talk to him?”
“We were hoping you’d be able to tell us.”
She shook her head and began moaning again. Finally, Bob did turn away. This was getting them nowhere. He gave Amy a let’s-go look. She gave him back a look that told him to wait. Bob sighed and tried not to think of Janeka.
Ms. Funicelli was sitting across from them. Amy reached to touch her knee and said, “Tell me about your son.”
There was something of gratitude in Irene Funicelli’s eyes when she looked up, and Bob guessed that after the video, this mother was simply grateful someone was willing to listen to her explain that her son was not a monster. Although, of course, he was.
“He’s always been a good boy,” she said in a wondering tone. “Always a good boy.”
“So you’re surprised by this?” Amy was leading the woman gently.
“He’s a good boy,” she insisted.
“Then how did he get mixed up in all this?”
“It had to be that other one, McLarty.” Ms. Funicelli spat the name as though it had a foul taste. “He came to stay with us a few months ago. He sleeps in Clarence’s room. Clarence said he got turned out by his family and had nowhere else to go.”
She grimaced as if the memory of it brought her pain. “It was against my better judgment,” she said. “I didn’t like him. Something about him just seemed bad. He was nice enough to me, very polite, but sometimes you get these feelings about people, you understand?”
Amy nodded that she did. Somehow, she was taking notes without her eyes ever seeming to leave Ms. Funicelli’s. At some point, without Bob even noticing, she had set up her little digital recorder on the table.
Unfortunately, none of this was getting him any closer to finding Janeka.
“So,” prompted Amy, “you let him stay here even though you didn’t like him.”
“Clarence likes him,” she said. “And more importantly, he seemed to like Clarence. They sit in that room til all hours, laughing and talking together.” She hesitated. Then she said in a confiding tone, “Clarence has never had many friends.”
Amy spoke carefully. “Is that because of his size? Kids teased him, I assume?”
Ms. Funicelli nodded. She said, “Have you ever heard of gigantism?”
The hand that was somehow writing without Amy appearing to look down froze now, midstroke. Then it went back to work, furiously. “Yes,” she said. “I think I have heard of it. That’s that condition where the body doesn’t stop growing, correct?”
“Yes,” said Ms. Funicelli. “It’s a disorder, a tumor on the pituitary gland that causes people to just keep on growing. Clarence has that.”
“That’s very rare, isn’t it?”
“It’s not rare enough,” Ms. Funicelli said.
“And I assume that when he was in school, the other children were not very understanding.”
Ms. Funicelli gave her a cutting glance. “The other children were cruel,” she said. “But of course, you already knew that.”
“It’s an old story,” said Amy.
“Perhaps. But that doesn’t make it any easier to bear when it’s your child. You have children, miss?”
“Yes.”
“Then you know.”
“He and McLarty met in high school?”
Ms. Funicelli nodded. “I was so happy Clarence had a friend. I suppose that’s why I overlooked what my instincts told me about him. Sometimes, I would overhear him say disparaging things about the blacks or the Jews, using the kind of words I don’t allow in my house. I told him I didn’t appreciate that sort of language, but I didn’t think any more of it. I see now that I should have listened. Sweet Jesus, what has he gotten my son mixed up in?”
“You blame yourself.” Amy didn’t bother making it a question.
“You have to understand. Clarence was such a lonely boy. He spent hours in his room, just him and his books, him and his video games and his basketball trading cards. I wanted him to know what it was to have at least one good friend before he died.”
Amy’s gaze sharpened. “Beg pardon?”
“I thought you knew,” Ms. Funicelli said. “Some people with gigantism, they can remove the tumor. But Clarence’s is inoperable. This means he will simply keep growing. Six feet, seven feet…one poor man was a
lmost nine feet tall. The disease itself is not fatal. But the stresses it puts on the body—enlarged organs, heart disease, joint ailments, diabetes, weakness—eventually, it just wears you down. They tend to die relatively young.”
“I’m sorry,” said Amy.
And somehow, for Bob, that was finally too much. “Do you mind if I have a look in his bedroom?” he asked. The question was abrupt, he knew. He didn’t quite care. He would not sit here and feel sorry for one of the men who had kidnapped Janeka and Malcolm.
Ms. Funicelli looked startled. Then she said, “Well, I don’t know…”
Bob was standing now. “I just want to see where he lives, get a sense of what sort of man he is. We’re not the police, Ms. Funicelli. We’re just two reporters looking for information that will help us humanize your son when this story comes out.”
Humanize. He had chosen the word quite deliberately, certain that a distraught mother desperate to show people her child was not the racist, mastodonic freak he seemed would cling to it like debris in a flood. Sure enough, her face brightened. “Well, it’s right through there,” she said, pointing to the dining room. “Down the hallway, second door on the right.”
“Okay,” he said, “I’ll go take a look while you and my colleague finish chatting.”
His eyes snagged Amy’s then, and he thought he saw some faint accusation. But that was probably just his imagination. Or maybe it was his conscience.
Whatever it was, Amy quickly returned to her interview. “So,” she said, “I notice you and your son don’t have the same last name. How did that come about?”
Bob was out of the room before Ms. Funicelli began to answer. Down the hall, second door on the right, and he entered the room. And stopped. He did not know what he had expected, but whatever that was, this wasn’t it.
The room seemed not the lair of a crazy person. Granted, the decor was a little on the young side for a man who had to be in his 20s. You wouldn’t expect a man that age to have a family of action figures posed on top of the desk, or a poster of Michael Jordan on the wall, tongue wagging as he dunked on some hapless defender. And the furnishings had all been chosen—probably custom made, Bob decided on second thought—to accommodate Pym’s prodigious frame. The bed crowded the room. The desk chair was big enough for an NBA center to repose comfortably.
In fact, the entire room, now that he looked, appeared to have been remodeled for Pym’s comfort. The ceiling was higher than elsewhere in the house and the room itself seemed larger than you’d expect in an otherwise modest-sized bungalow.
Irene Funicelli had spared no expense to provide her son with one space in the world where he might be at home. Still, the room was, for Bob at least, disappointingly ordinary after the pit of hell where McLarty had once slept.
The books shelved neatly in a tall case at the foot of the bed included The Catcher in the Rye, 1984, The Shining, and Of Mice and Men—a far cry from the literature of bigotry that crowded McLarty’s room. The poster of Jordan—sweat gleaming on his unmistakably dark skin—suggested that whatever racial hatred McLarty had managed to inculcate in his pupil’s mind was selective at best.
Bob kept looking. He paged through a sheaf of pamphlets and magazines on the corner of the desk. This, too, was not incriminating: Marvel comic books, copies of Playboy and Sports Illustrated, pamphlets on gigantism. He examined the figures on the desk. They were all of Action Jones, a superhero character whose TV cartoon had been briefly popular in the greater Chicago area in the late 1970s, but who never caught on nationally. “It’s time for Action!” went his uninspired and uninspiring battle cry. It was surprising that a character so forgettable had merited an action figure.
Bob sighed.
There was nothing. Still, he kept looking. What else could he do? He rifled through mail on the desk. Most of it was junk, not even bills. That made sense, he supposed. Given his condition, Pym likely couldn’t work, so his mother probably paid his cellphone and cable bills. It was, he reflected, a miserable existence.
Bob opened the closet. It was filled mostly with shapeless, oversized T-shirts and jeans of the type Pym had worn in the video. More from a sense of morbid curiosity than any expectation it would prove helpful, Bob checked the waist size on one pair of pants. Fifty-four.
On the closet floor was an open suitcase, which likely belonged to McLarty. This made Bob briefly hopeful, but upon a quick examination, he saw that the suitcase contained only clothes. Indeed, it and an air mattress leaning against one wall were the only signs McLarty even resided in this room. After cocking an ear to make sure Amy and Irene were still talking in the living room, Bob went quickly through Pym’s underwear drawer. He felt he owed as much to McLarty’s mother, given that he had subjected her to the same indignity.
Not that it mattered. Once again, the search proved fruitless.
Bob was defeated and discouraged by the time he wandered back through the house to the front room. Both women looked up as he entered. “Did you find anything helpful, Mr. Carson?” asked Mrs. Funicelli.
Bob shook his head. “No,” he said, “I’m afraid not.”
He implored Amy with a look and was gratified when she nodded and closed her notepad. “Well, Mrs. Funicelli, thank you very much for your time,” she said, extending her hand.
The woman grasped it like a lifeline. “Please, Miss Landingham,” she said, “try to understand: I know how awful that video is. But my son is not a monster. At least, he wasn’t before he met that other boy. Promise me you will remember that when you write this story.”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Amy, “I will.” Her voice was grave, and Bob realized with a sour jolt of consternation that she wasn’t just saying this to placate a distraught mother. She meant it.
The older woman gave one last penetrating look and apparently came to the same conclusion, because she finally returned Amy’s hand. “God bless you,” she said.
Moments later, Bob and Amy were standing together on the porch, the door having just closed behind them. Bob said, “Please tell me you’re not going to write some tearjerker about the poor, misunderstood giant.”
Amy’s glance speared him. “I understand how you feel. But this woman and her son have a story, too.”
“Oh, my God,” he said, “you’re going to do it. You’re going to write some touchy-feely garbage about this. You’re going to ask people to feel sorry for this guy.”
“I’m going to tell the story,” said Amy in a measured tone. “That’s the job description, remember?”
“And we wonder why people hate the media,” said Bob. He felt anger growing large in him, couldn’t make it stop. Didn’t even want to. “He’s got a bad disease? Boo hoo. That’s tough. Can’t you see that if you use that as an excuse, you perpetuate a mindset that says nobody is ever responsible for their own actions? It’s always a bad childhood or a mean father or some terrible illness that’s to blame, and we’re supposed to sympathize with them because they’ve had this hardship. And never mind that a million other people go through the same hardships and worse, but somehow, they never end up joining some white supremacist gang or kidnapping innocent people who never did a damn thing to them! I don’t blame people for hating us when we do this kind of shit! I’d hate us, too! This story you say you want to write? It’s crap, Amy! It’s pure, unadulterated—”
He stopped all at once, surprised to hear himself yelling. Screaming. He looked at Amy. Amy looked at him. Abruptly, Bob pivoted on his heel, stormed off to the van and slammed the door behind him. It was a moment before Amy joined him. She didn’t say a word. They sat in silence, both staring straight ahead as twilight gathered itself.
Then Bob said, “I’m sorry.”
“Forget it.”
“No, seriously,” he said. “I apologize. I don’t know what that was about.”
“You’re scared.”
“I’m terrified,” he corrected.
“I understand that,” she said.
“Thank you for that
, then.” Bob blew out a defeated breath. “So,” he said, “where to?”
“I was hoping you might have some idea,” she told him. “I take it you really found nothing in his room?”
Bob shook his head. “Except for the fact that everything in it is scaled for a giant, it’s a perfectly normal room. At least, it’d be a normal room for a 16-year-old boy.”
Amy questioned him with a look, so Bob briefly described the Michael Jordan poster and the figures of Action Jones. She knew Jordan, but had never heard of Action Jones.
“Cartoon hero,” said Bob. “Real big on local television for a year or two back in the late ’70s. My kid was crazy about him.”
Amy’s brow wrinkled. “Late ’70s? Pym is 26, according to his mother. Why would he know or care about some second-rate cartoon that was cancelled before he was born?”
Bob shrugged. “Good question,” he said.
“Well,” said Amy, “I’m afraid I came up pretty empty myself, at least insofar as anything that might help us find this guy.”
“Let’s hear what you got.”
She cut him a glance. “You sure? Most of it’s touchy-feely crap.”
“Yeah,” he said through a smile full of regret. “Not like I have a bunch of other ideas.”
Amy referred to her notepad. “Okay,” she said, “well, let’s see. You heard all the stuff about the other children taunting him and McLarty befriending him. Mom is originally from Lawrence, Kansas. Came here after college, found work as an executive secretary at a law firm. That’s where she meets her first husband, Darrin Pym, and she thinks she’s hit the husband lottery, snagging herself an honest-to-God lawyer. But it turns out he’s a lawyer on the fast track down, a loser whose career is in the toilet, the firm just waiting for an excuse to get rid of him. They get their chance when he’s arrested for a hit and run and it comes out he’s heavy into drugs and alcohol. He’s been shopping resumes for weeks without a nibble when she learns she’s pregnant with Clarence. This does not please Mr. Pym, whose mood only grows more sour as the job offers continue to not come in and Clarence gets older and becomes this abnormally large little boy. Mom says dad used to beat the boy like an animal over the slightest thing. Hated to see him eating, insisted the boy be put on these starvation diets, little more than leaves and berries, by mom’s accounting. Apparently, he had a real issue about Clarence’s weight. He nicknamed him Glutton. Then, when Clarence is 11, his mother takes him to see a specialist and they learn the weight is not just a self-control thing, but this actual, serious illness. That same week, Mr. Pym decamps for his native Canada. Divorce papers arrive in the mail shortly after. Mother and son have heard nothing of him since. Not so much as a postcard.”
Grant Park Page 38
