Candy from a Stranger

by Buckner, Daryl;

  No one except the girls…

  *

  It’s dark and it’s late, the heat of the day finally shrinking to a level I can live with; aided by the slightest hint of a breeze that I stir up as my legs kick the playground swing back and forth, the chains holding it making a moaning sound like creaking floorboards. My hands are occupied. In one hand I have the sunflower seed bag that I finally found in the panel that hugs the passenger door of my car; in the other is the bottle of scotch that I smuggled from the house, hidden under my blazer so the neighbors won’t see it as I stumble to the schoolyard.

  The grass is new-mown. It smells exactly like the day that Lucas disappeared and the squirrels are overjoyed because they recognize the pattern that I’ve recently neglected: sit in the swings, drink until I’m numb, and slowly throw the seeds one-at-a-time at the furry beggars so that no one rodent can claim favoritism.

  In the last hour-and-a-half, not one person has walked by – much less a patrol car.

  When you imbibe in alcohol, the very first thing that’s affected is your judgment. I take my cell from my breast pocket, balance it awkwardly with my bottle hand against my shoulder and chin and enter the 206 area code numbers.

  “Hello?” Perfect. It’s the Wicked Witch of the Pacific Northwest.

  “Hello, Maggie. Is Jeanie there?”

  I can hear her contempt before she even says a word. “Benjamin? I’m sorry dear; she’s not here right now. Are you alright?”

  It’s two hours earlier there. That would make it just late enough for a late dinner out. My mind thinks bad thoughts.

  “I’m fine, Maggie…” I lie, “Where is Jeanie?”

  There is way too much hesitation. Finally, “I think she’s out shopping with some old friends. I don’t know, I just got in myself. Henry would know... do you want me to ask him? I…”

  “No.” I interrupt, “Don’t bother him. I was just calling to check in with my wife.” The emphasis I put on “wife” proves to the Sea Hag that I’m three-sheets-to-the-wind. Donny Stroud’s face swims before my eyes and I toss another seed to my loyal subjects.

  Mother-in-law says, “Now Benjamin, you’re a grown man and I can’t tell you what to do but I really wish…” Long pause as she tries to think of a polite way to tell me to go screw myself, “…I really wish you’d – take better care of yourself.”

  Bull’s-eye. You’re drunk, you’ve lost everything, and... there’s nothing I can say back to her to disprove it. Looking at my audience, if I could get out of the swing I’d probably throttle one of the furry bastards.

  I retreat. “I know.”

  As I throw another seed “Mommy Dearest” says, “Can I give her a message for you... or have her call you at a better time?”

  “A better time.” Jesus! It’s not that late and I’m not that drunk. Like I said, judgment is the first thing to go.

  “Please tell her that while she’s been ‘shopping’ up there in beautiful Seattle... there’s been another one, this time in Plum.”

  She’s speechless, which is a first. I hurriedly say, “Thanks Maggie. Gotta go,” and hang up.

  It’s unnaturally quiet, graveyard silent save for the croak of the iron chains as I peddle back-and- forth. Our favorite squirrel, the one Lucas and I named Rocky, takes the last of the seeds as I give him my best “That’s all Folks!” look. Looking at Rocky I said, “Sorry, big guy – I should have bought the bigger size.” The squirrels are so trained (or they’ve trained me) that they recognize the empty rustle of the plastic bag and start heading off to wherever it is squirrels go late at night. I stop swinging.

  The bigger size.

  The plastic bag.

  I stare at my open hands, the bag sitting lifeless and wrinkled and staring back at me. In bold blue letters it proclaims them to be the freshest sunflower seeds in the whole USA. Sold all over the whole USA.

  Keeley’s sunflower seeds.

  Alcohol can be bad for judgment but sometimes good for creative planning. The almost-beard stays – I am building a disguise. Sunflower seeds. A seed of an idea has just taken root.

  The bigger size.

  Chapter Thirteen

  On my car’s rear bumper is a sticker that reads: “what do you think it means?”

  Presented to all members of my graduating class, it refers to an old Psych joke that is probably only funny to Psych students.

  Q: How many Psychologists does it take to screw in a light bulb?

  A: What do you think it means?

  Every time the line caught my son’s eight-year old eye, he laughed outrageously. I miss him so much.

  *

  “Really Benjamin,” Horowitz said, “I thought I taught you better. I thought your perceptions of abnormal behavior were solidified... not confused. Perhaps I graded you too highly.”

  I have a few far-flung cousins, having never set foot in the great state of Texas, that have the impression that the whole of the Lone Star State is inhabited by rednecks in pickup trucks that travel dusty roads, keeping an eye on the cattle, eating barbecue as they play Willie Nelson or Stevie Ray Vaughn on their eight-tracks as loud as it will go. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Austin is San Francisco without the ocean. Here, we have Mexican farm workers mingling with Dell computer geeks, heavy-metal enthusiasts catching a bluegrass festival, and thousands of collegial students studying everything from Asiatic poetry to the inner mechanics of how the solar system works.

  When Lucas was taken I went through the motions with the police for a few months but eventually, in order to keep my sanity, I consulted my old professor, my mentor really, Abraham Horowitz – head of the psychology department at my alma mater, the University of Texas. He had agreed to meet me at a funky little taco bar on Guadalupe. Abe fitted in with the college crowd better than I, with his old jeans and sandals – an aging hippy still sporting a frizzy gray fog of Afro-like hair and favoring a faded old Karmann Ghia over the more common Lexuses and Audis.

  It was loud enough in the bar that he had to lean over the table to be heard.

  “Benjamin, there are no words that I can say about this tragedy that has befallen you and Jean. No words! But you must remember: Our understanding of the delusional mind hasn’t really advanced that much in the last fifty years. You do understand what I’m saying, don’t you?”

  Of course I did. Although the medical community has doggedly performed the equivalent of throwing everything against the wall to see what sticks, from new drugs to new procedures, very little has been achieved as far as the truly disturbed are concerned. I understood what Abe was saying – I just didn’t want to hear it.

  “Back in the early days of psychological thinking, we thought, or I should say we prayed – that there was something physiologically wrong with these kind of people. We’ve carved up John Wilkes Booth’s brain hoping that he had lesions, or cancer, or some kind of physical abnormality that would explain why he would kill Abraham Lincoln. It couldn’t be that he just disagreed with Lincoln’s policies or he didn’t want to see the South lose its state’s rights! I mean, no sane man kills for that, right? Murder is our greatest taboo. While it’s true that Whitman had a tumor on his brain the size of a baseball – he’s the exception. No other murderer or kidnapper or deviant has been shown to have a ‘smoking gun’ illness that generated these unspeakable acts.”

  Charles Whitman had mounted Austin’s very own UT Tower to fire down on passers-by and had ended up killing seventeen back in 1966. Horowitz was nervously peeling the label off of his Dos Equis bottle. I didn’t like the sad way he was looking at me.

  I said, “Some of the more famous criminals have had epilepsy symptoms.”

  “True, but you know what we say – ‘one sample makes poor proof’.” Abe frowned and took a long swallow of his drink. “I know what you’re thinking: if I can get inside this man’s mind, I can assist the police in catching him, no?”

  Assist? Not hardly. I said, “The police are doing nothing.”

&nb
sp; “Benjamin, I know what you are saying but your anguish is making you not see clearly. I’m sorry my friend, but if it is a man who took your son, then he is delusional. He is delusional and he is reacting to the outside world in a delusional manner. He may not show it, he may hide it, but he is filtering everything he experiences through his own warped lens. Nature or nurture? It may be because he’s dramatically confused sexually. It may be because he was abused as a child, or has had a series of life-altering disasters, or maybe he has some deformity that makes him feel apart from society, but he is delusional.”

  I said, “Crazy is crazy?”

  Abe touched his bottle to mine. “Crazy is crazy.”

  Abe looked at me, seeing lines in my face and a sag in my posture that wasn’t there seven years ago when I was his prize pupil. He said, “I wish I could ease this burden. You know, I was very happy when you decided to teach. Now tell me – how is Jean holding up?”

  “She’s gone to stay with her parents up in Seattle.”

  His eyes clouded over. “Have you been in therapy?”

  “Some.”

  A couple of young people came through the door and a hot knife of air cut all the way back to the booth we were sitting in. All of a sudden I wished that I hadn’t come; hadn’t called the professor, hadn’t asked for what I already knew.

  Abe said, “You’re going to kill him?”

  His bluntness was typical Horowitz: what is... is.

  I answered, “Wouldn’t you?”

  Abraham Horowitz stood up. Throwing some cash on the table and taking a final swallow of his drink, he said, “Benjamin, I am a Jew and we Jews have a fine perception on death – we’ve seen a lot of it. If you are asking me how I would proceed if I was in your shoes?” Horowitz set his empty bottle on the table.

  “Good hunting.”

  He put a brief hand on my shoulder, gave it a little squeeze, and walked out the front door into the Texas heat. I sat, finishing my beer and thinking about ordering another. My thoughts ran to our conversation and I realized that I really only wanted him to echo what I was already thinking.

  Crazy is crazy.

  *

  The department of the Austin Police that handles the Northwest Division is on Springdale Road, the name being a sunny contrast to a building devoted to resolving the worst kinds of human behavior. Springdale is right off the 183/McNeil junction and the Metro Civics Building sits nestled quietly in a small cluster of Prairie Sumac trees. Sporting a stubbly growth, disheveled hair and clothing, I’m sure I look like I should be going into the building through the back entrance, hands chained in plastic restrainers, but I park neatly in the assigned visitor space. As many times as I’ve been here, they should have painted my name on one.

  I make my way past Robinson and Williams at the check-in desk and park myself in an uncomfortable plastic and chrome chair. Usually there are one or two hookers/snitches/drunks occupying the other chairs in front of Perez’s office door, but today I am mercifully alone. Back near the reception area I can see Harriet Robinson, who doubles as receptionist/secretary for Perez and the other detectives, pick up the phone and I read her lips as she says “He’s here again.” We’re on the first floor and the summer sun streaming through the entrance door frames her from behind, transforming her into a husky, blue-uniformed angel with a halo. By contrast, the end of the hall where I sit is a darkened hollow made depressingly more-so by ageing grey-painted walls.

  Perez opens his door, catches my eye and says, “Cain…”

  That’s it. No “Mr. Cain, please come in”, no “Ben, good to see you.”

  Perez has a thing for brown. Brown suit, brown boots, tan tie, and he wears those half-moon eyeglasses with oxblood/brown frames. I have more history with Louis Perez than I have with Stephan Conklin, the dean at the college where I’ve taught for years. I should have: until recently I’ve sat in this hallway, tugged at his elbow, called him on the phone, and even disrupted his Sunday home barbeques seeking my son.

  Lieutenant Louis Perez loathes me.

  Before I’m fully seated in his box-like office, Perez says, “Your file is still fully active, we’re exploring every avenue we possibly can, and you really are wasting your time and mine waiting here. We’ll call if…”

  The miserable prick. I interrupt him with, “Louie, we’ve been through this before: ‘exploring every avenue’…just what avenues are those?”

  Perez lets out a staged sigh. I want to strangle him.

  “Avenues, Mr. Cain. Meaning any and all items of interest that come up in the course of this investigation.” He fiddles with his tie.

  I shouldn’t rise to the bait but can’t help myself. “‘Items of interest’? What exactly are those?”

  Perez is not exactly a handsome man. Short, pudgy, he smoothes his sparse, oiled hair back as if he were preparing for his photo shoot.

  He deadpans, “Items. Of interest.”

  Screw him. I know Perez is a family man. In fact, I know a great deal about him: Married, Catholic, top-of-the-totem-pole with the division bowling league. I can only hope I’m wounding him in a vulnerable place when I say, “If this was Roberto we were talking about, you wouldn’t be here nursing a shitty cup of coffee and shuffling papers.” Roberto is his six-year-old and if there’s anything that’s going to piss a Hispanic Catholic father off, it’s his little bambino. I want to piss him off. I want to be such an irritant that he’ll give me what I want just to make me go away. I’m a freakin’ good psychologist.

  He angrily says, “What do you want?”

  “The wrapper.”

  “Jesus tap-dancing Christ! We’ve been over this a hundred times! There’s got to be more stores that sell these freakin’ candies than there are chopsticks-in-China. What do you expect me to do... stake out every one of them?”

  “What sizes?”

  “What…?” It takes a minute but I see something behind Perez’s eyes change. Perez fully expected me to rehash old business but I’ve caught him with his pants down.

  “What sizes?” he says, “What do you mean ‘what sizes’?”

  Jesus, this guy is dumb as…

  “What size was the wrapper, the Keeley’s Red Hots wrapper – that was found at my son’s school playground?”

  His expression tells me that he doesn’t know. He stutters slightly as he says, “The same. The same size as all those other candies the stores sell.”

  And the same size as the sunflower seeds they sell, too.

  “And what size is that?”

  Perez mutters, “What the F…” and pulls his antiquated computer in front of him. Perez tapped a few buttons, swore a few times, and then swiveled the machine so that I could see.

  “There. Satisfied?”

  The evidence recovery team had placed the wrapper between two thin plates of glass after it was checked for prints. The compressed, flattened surface made it easy to read its contents and weight: 1 and 7/8th ounces.

  Perez said, “Again, we’ve been over this before. There are no discernible prints on the wrapper – only smudges.”

  I said, “Smudges that could have been caused by the kidnapper wearing gloves.”

  Perez said, “Or could have been caused by the wrapper lying out there in the wet grass for days... weeks.”

  “It wasn’t.”

  Perez sighed and turned the computer screen back towards him.

  I wanted to fly out of the depressing office but I said, “The little boy in Plum, Josh Herndon, his prints were on a Keeley’s wrapper.”

  Perez looks at me over the half-lenses perched on his nose. “And how would you know that?”

  I say nothing. We both know that he and Craig have communicated about the two disappearances and if they haven’t put two and two together about the wrappers – well, idiots abound on this planet.

  I said, “You’ve got to bring the FBI in on this.”

  “You know this is a state matter. Federal has to cross state lines and there’s no evidence that
anybody has crossed state lines in this situation.”

  This situation. I want to scream at him and he sees it in my face. Perez puts his glasses on his desk and leans back in his chair, fingers laced behind his head.

  “Mr. Cain, we are pursuing every avenue of investigation available to us. I understand how you feel but it really does no one any good to come down here and roost in our hallway and rehash the information that we have at this date.”

  I stood up and said nothing. I’m sure he felt some victory from thinking that he was making me leave but Louis Perez is wrong. “No good from rehashing information?” Perez is way wrong. As I exit his office door only one thought is on my mind.

  1 and 7/8th ounces.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Every freeway that runs through Austin is bordered by foundation roads and Highway 183 is no exception. Even from the steaming parking lot I can see across “183” and I spy the businesses I need on the eastward foundation road. I navigate the Volvo through the stoplights and underpass and find two businesses side-by-side that caters to the low-cost needs of the greater American public: Wal-Mart and the Dollar Tree.

  Dodging the elderly guy at the door (Greetings! Welcome to Wal-Mart!), I rush to the candy aisle and find what I need: rows and rows of candies, mints, nuts, and gummy treats and they all appear to be in generic-sized plastic bags. Only the lettering, varying from manufacturer to manufacturer differs. I only care about one. Keeley’s. Right in front of my face, sitting side-by-side on short metal hooks are bags of Keeley’s Red Hots and Keeley’s Sunflower Seeds... the seeds almost like the ones I fed to the squirrels the other night. Almost. The difference is these bags are weighted at 4 ounces. In fact, every bag by every manufacturer is the same size varying only by fractions of an ounce depending on the product. The goddamn Red Hots are 4 ounces.