by David Levien
Paul and Carol stand static amid the bureaucratic swirl of the busy police station. Things move slowly for them, incoherently, like a warped videotape caught up in the machine.
They stand and gesture with the beefy desk sergeant.
Later, they sit at the desk of a concerned-looking patrolman, filling out forms, giving him photographs.
Now, waiting, silent, on a wooden bench, Paul holds a dead cup of coffee in one hand and Carol’s cold palm in his other. Her features have begun to tighten — it’s not possible to see it yet — but she’s begun to desiccate and wither on the vine.
Finally. Finally, the concerned-looking patrolman shows them into Captain Pomeroy’s small, glass-walled office. Pomeroy, a soft, pillowy man with a prominent nose bone, sits behind his desk. His tie has a silver bar across it. A silver pen and pencil set rests in his shirt pocket. His hair is swept back with Vitalis, his face full of Aqua Velva, his mouth full of nicotine gum.
“Mr. and Mrs. Gabriel, I’ve looked over your paperwork here, and I just want to assure you that this office will do everything it can to assist you in locating your boy, ahh, James.”
“Jamie” comes through Carol’s clenched jaw.
“Jamie.” Pomeroy makes a note. “Thought it was short for—”
“No, that’s his name. It’s on his birth certificate.”
“But before we do, before we open this thing up wide, I just want to be sure that this is … That is, that your boy didn’t run off for a—”
“He’s missing. I know it. You hear about these things.”
“Ma’am, most mothers … Look, all I’m saying is to be sure. It’s just that boys are known to be boys.”
“What?” It comes out a hoarse croak, as if Paul hasn’t used his voice box for years.
“What I’m saying is, often in these types of situation, maybe he had a math test he didn’t want to show up for. Or he got a bad grade on that science project and didn’t want you to—”
“Not Jamie.”
“Mrs. Gabriel …” Pomeroy leans back and shifts his holstered automatic against his hip. He looks to Paul in muted demand.
“Honey, I’m sure that’s what everybody says about their …”
“Exactly,” Pomeroy breathes in gratitude, taking over from Paul. “Hell, he probably just …”
Hope is a slim branch, and the men do their best to grasp it, but it’s a bit overweighted for Carol. Her expression stops Pomeroy.
“I suggest you talk to his teachers.” He manages to start again. “See if everything was jake at school. Ask his friends …”
“Fine, we will, but …” Paul offers.
“Anything you do along those lines will save us legwork.” Pomeroy taps a silver pen against the edge of the desk.
“What are you going to do? What about issuing an alert?”
“We have. We’ve passed around the information. Okay, ma’am. We’ll open it up wide. We’ll set up on your house. Your place of business, too. I’ll put officers out in the neighborhood canvassing door to door. And I want you to call in the minute your son shows up” — Pomeroy leads them out of the glass-walled office—”because he’s going to.” Pomeroy smiles reassuringly. “He’s going to.” And he shuts the door behind them.
“That man is not going to help us.” Carol’s words come, grim. Paul says nothing.
Darkness comes early this time of year. The Buick drives up. After long hours of looking, of hanging flyers, Paul steps out of the car, the way he has so many times after picking Jamie up from soccer practice. Paul stands on the driver’s side. Carol, after an afternoon of waiting by the phone, appears in the front door. She shakes her head. In the setting sun, Paul is a handsome, still-young father. He appraises his home of comfort, his still-young wife before it. A police cruiser is parked at the curb. He walks toward the house and she crosses toward him. They come together and cling to each other in the driveway, neither sure what they’re holding on to now. The sun drops below the trees.
Paul eats a bleak dinner of cold cereal. Rigged to the phone is a trace/recording device monitored by the two patrolmen outside in their cruiser. Carol sits in a trancelike state next to him. A scratching is heard at the kitchen door. Carol gets up and lets Tater in. His mouth drips blood. She gets a dish towel and wipes him clean. He is uninjured — the blood belongs to something else — and he rumbles off into the living room, excited at the smell of the police sniffer dogs that have been through the house all afternoon. Paul shakes more Lucky Charms into his bowl and the prize falls out.
“He was waiting for this. I’ll save it for him.” He puts it aside on the table and breaks down, his shoulders shaking with sobs.
Carol stands across the kitchen. She doesn’t go to him. After some time he stops.
“Let’s just go up to bed.” He stands. Maybe we’ll wake up tomorrow and find out this was all a bad dream, he wants to say, but does not.
Paul crosses to the staircase. Carol goes to the wall and turns on the living room and porch lights.
“Let’s leave these on in case.” She follows him up the stairs.
The door swings open, throwing light onto the mattress, which the boy has pulled off the bed and angled against the wall over himself like a protective lean-to. Rooster offhandedly tosses a grease-soaked fast-food bag into the room and sniffs to himself at the attempted defense. Never seen that one before. As if it’d work. He slams the door behind him. Again the room is awash in darkness.
Paul lies on his back in the darkened bedroom, unfeeling of the mattress beneath him. He floats in space defined only by his misery. Grief that he could never have imagined surrounds him and tears at him from every direction. Circumstances pulverize him, sap him motionless in the dark. A dull rumbling sound filters in from the bathroom. There, sitting in a filling tub, Carol thinks of Jamie when he was a three-year-old playing the Down the Drain game, an amusement of his own invention. Better get the plumber, Mommy, I’m gone. I’m down the drain. … Carol’s pale back shakes. The water pounds and thunders. She realizes the sound isn’t the water but her screams.
Rooster and Tad sit at the cluttered dinette table. Heavy feedback music is in the air and Tad drums along to it.
“So’s he gonna be ready?”
Rooster looks at his partner. Tad’s recently started smoking meth, and he’s on it now. Rooster can tell because Tad has that filthy sheen. It’s a dirty drug that opens the pores and seems to suck in airborne dirt and debris. He must’ve smoked up the last time Rooster was in the room down the hall. Disgusting. “Of course he’s gonna be ready, bitch.”
“Because it’s first thing, like fucking dawn on Thursday, you know, asshole?”
Tad has a wild, risky look in his eyes. Wouldn’t be there if not for the meth, Rooster thinks.
“Yeah, I know, douche bag.” Rooster flicks a bottle cap at him. Just misses the fat fucker.
“Watch it.” Tad moves evasively and too late. “Just so you’re sure, dickhead.”
“I’m a professional, fuck face.” This taunt catches Tad, and he isn’t sure where to go next, how to escalate.
“Listen, faggot,” he begins, and then there’s a click and a knife blade’s at his throat. Rooster’s pulled the four-inch Spyderco he carries in his back pocket and locked it back. Just like that. Tad feels the pressure of the blade against his Adam’s apple, a hard thin line.
“Don’t even say another word. Not sorry, not spit. Hear me?” Rooster’s face radiates blood.
Tad Ford nods slowly.
Class has just ended at JFK Middle, and kids stream out toward buses and their parents’ cars. Carol Gabriel walks opposite the flow toward the low building and wonders why she’s done this to herself and not come later in the afternoon. It has been four days. The police have left her house. Every backpack she sees, every jacket, screams Jamie for a moment before dissolving into a different child. Alex Daugherty walks by her and stops.
“Hi, Mrs. G,” he says.
She bends dow
n. “Alex. Hi, Alex.” The boy seems to know something’s going on but not exactly what. “You know that Jamie’s been away for a couple days?” she goes on. She can’t hold herself back from touching him. Her hands reach out and smooth the boy’s sleeves, his hair. Her hands, disconnected from her mind, need to know that this boy at least is real.
“Yeah.”
“Do you know if he was … upset? Was everything okay at school and stuff?”
“Yeah. Did he run away?” the boy wonders.
“We don’t think so.” The conversation is already taking a toll on Carol. “He wasn’t having any problems that he told you about? He hadn’t met anyone? Any secret stuff? Because you should tell me if he did, it’s important.”
Alex shakes his head and begins digging at the sidewalk with a toe, when a little way off at the curb his mother honks and gets out of her station wagon.
“There’s my mom.”
Carol straightens up and trades a glance with Kiki Daugherty, who waves. She’s told Kiki and Kiki’s said all the right things. Carol watches jealously as the other mother collects her child. If there’s any accusation in Kiki’s stare, any “What kind of a mother lets this happen to her son?,” she keeps it to herself so Carol can’t see it. Carol hurries toward the school.
Inside Jamie’s homeroom, his teacher, Andrea Preston, a twenty-seven-year-old black woman, hands Carol a cup of coffee.
“We have assemblies where we teach the children not to talk to strangers or accept rides. And we had one yesterday to redouble—”
“Yes. Yes.” Carol’s words echo, disembodied, against the linoleum. “Really, Jamie’s old enough to know all that. I just wanted to check again and see if everything was all right here. He was doing fine, wasn’t he?” There is panic in her voice now. Perhaps nothing was as she thought.
“He was doing fine. Really well,” the teacher says slowly, and gives a pained smile, as if to invest the empty words with hidden meaning. “A few problems with fractions, nothing out of the ordinary. I wish there was something more.” Preston’s face searches hers.
Carol realizes how young the teacher is and that she is shattered, too. She feels she should try to comfort the woman, but how? “Can I get those things out of his locker?”
The teacher nods.
What passes for lawn in front of the seedy house is purple gray with Thursday-morning frost. Tad sits behind the wheel of a van, an aging Econoline with covered rear windows, listening to wacky morning radio. He’s been keeping his distance from Rooster, who’s up on the porch walking back and forth and smoking a cigarette.
An immaculate black Cutlass Supreme with smoked windows and custom t-top rolls up to the house. Out steps a stout man in a slightly shiny, several-hundred-dollar suit. He wears gold and sunglasses and has a bald head. He’s Oscar Riggi. He’s the man.
Rooster stops pacing.
Tad jumps out of the van and crosses through a cloud of Econoline exhaust. “Mr. Riggi, how you doin’?”
Tad kisses ass, but Rooster doesn’t go for that. He knows he’s not so easily replaced.
“Rooster. Tad. How are things? How’s our package?”
“Everything’s all fine and loaded, sir,” Tad answers, looking involuntarily at the van and thinking instinctively of the carpet-lined cut in the floor. He pats the van’s side.
Riggi looks through Tad as if he’s an exhaust cloud. “Things went well, I trust, huh, Rooster?”
“Yeah, you can trust, Captain.” Rooster flicks his cigarette butt in Tad’s direction. Not at him, but in his direction. It’s just far enough off so that Tad can’t say anything.
Riggi climbs the few steps up to the porch and flips Rooster a fairly thick roll of small and medium bills rubberbanded together. Rooster thumbs it nonchalantly and tucks it away. Riggi cuffs him behind the head, not without affection.
“Hey, I can count on you, huh?”
“That’s right, Oscar.”
Tad comes up to join them, much larger than both men, yet feeble and intimidated in their presence. Without taking his eyes off Rooster, Riggi reaches into his jacket pocket and produces a packet of papers that he hands to Tad.
“There’s the address of the other pickup. Instructions on what roads to take. Your destination is in there, too. Memorize it, write it in code, whatever, then destroy it. There’s travel money in there also.”
Tad stays with it, endeavors to look keen, on top of things. “Okay, okay.”
“Call me every eight hours regardless of where you are. Got it? I want my phone ringing every eight hours.”
“Got it.”
“Where you gonna call me?”
“Wherever I’m at, eight hours.”
Riggi gives a pinched smile, like he’s tasting bad jelly. “You get the rest of your money when you’re back.”
“Yes, sir.”
Riggi nods and turns to him. “You’re still here?”
Tad hustles into the van and drives off. Riggi turns back to Rooster. “You have breakfast yet?”
THREE
Fourteen Months Later
PAUL GABRIEL POURS a second bowl of cereal. He reaches in and fishes out the prize. It’s a rubber astronaut that dropped in water grows to eight and a half times its original size. He puts it with the rest of the prizes he’s been saving for his son. There are more than a dozen now. Paul rubs a circle at his temple with his fingertips. He’s graying there. He’s pale. Tired looking, too.
Paul lowers his spoon. “Carol? Carol? Are you ready? We should get going.” A moment later she enters the kitchen. Her outfit doesn’t do much for her. No makeup; dark circles under her eyes. She crosses the kitchen, which is looking shabby. She pushes a sponge around the countertop and tosses it into a sink full of dishes. Carol stands next to Paul as he changes his mind about the cereal and pours it in the garbage. He has the sensation that he sees the two of them there, as if from above. They look shitty together, the house looks shitty, everything is shitty.
“Okay, let’s go.” He sweeps up his keys. She takes a thin folder with Jamie’s picture stapled to it, reports and forms protruding slightly from the bottom, and they leave.
The station bustles around them as the Gabriels sit stonelike on their bench outside of Captain Pomeroy’s office. Across the room the concerned patrolman who took their statement so long ago looks over at them. He snaps off the sad look and turns away guiltily. Paul and Carol sit inches apart, but it may as well be light-years. They dwell in private capsules now, each alone, unable to reach out for the other. The only thing they share now is great failure.
They can see Pomeroy in his office, feet up on his desk, conversing with a colleague. The colleague is not a cop, at least he wears no gun, and when he notices the time, he gets up. Pomeroy shows him to the door, and as it opens, his hearty laugh escapes into the waiting area. The Gabriels eye him accusatorily; they haven’t laughed like that in some time. Upon seeing the Gabriels, Pomeroy claps up.
“Okay, Jase, we’ll finish this later. Mr. and Mrs. Gabriel, how are you? Come on in, let’s review.”
They enter his office. Paul and Carol take seats and Pomeroy plunks himself down, wearily now, behind his desk, sighing deeply. “I tell you, things are not quiet around here. Never too quiet.”
He riffles through several manila folders and comes up with his copy of the file with a picture of Jamie Gabriel stapled to the cover. Pomeroy dons a pair of plastic-rimmed reading glasses and skims the case much like a merchant reviewing an account. His lips skip and mumble along with his eyes, his volume low. “Case estab’d Oct. 24 … Fourteen months … Last seen, night before … No evidence struggle. Area disappearance: Auburn Manor neighborhood, Wayne T’ship. Exact unknown. Listed: Miss Pers Bureau, Nat Cent of Missing and Exploited … Children of Night … Proj Shelter … Runaway Hotline … Angel Find … Cross-listed with State Police, Sheriff’s Dept., and Federal Bureau—”
“Do you have any new information? Anything?”
Pomeroy doesn’t ack
nowledge hearing the question and continues to scan for another moment. He pushes up his glasses and gives a finger massage to the bridge of his nose. “As you can see by your copy of the report, we haven’t been able to develop any hard leads yet.”
“What are you people doing about it currently?”
“I want to assure you, the case is still active. In these situations, missing youths, runaways …”
“He’s not a runaway.” Carol’s words come out weak, nearly exhausted. Only thin anger fuels them along. “Can’t you just understand that? All you’ve done is send his picture to shelters. He knows his way home if he had run away. But he can’t get home, because somebody took him. He’s been taken.” The last word still cuts through Paul like a dentist’s drill finding a nerve.
“We haven’t found evidence to suggest that. Neither has the Federal Bureau. Yes, it is a possibility. A probability. These things happen, but often these youths don’t want to be found.”
“Bullshit,” Paul says. He can’t believe he’s said it aloud to a policeman.
Pomeroy looks at him in surprise. Behind Carol’s pain-glazed eyes there is a stirring as she looks at her husband, a spark. She glimpses what she’s been missing for so long. But it fades too quickly.
“Look, Captain Pomeroy, I’m sorry. … I know you’ve been working on it, it’s just …” Paul runs out of what to say.
Pomeroy’s mouth spreads into a sickly crescent as his customary control drifts back across the desk to his side.
“I understand what you’re going through. We’re using best efforts to—” He is cut off by a female detective poking her head in.
“Scuse me, Captain, A-2 task force needs you to sign off on this watch so they can go home.”
Pomeroy leaps up, grateful for the interruption. “I’m sorry, folks, this will just take a minute.” He follows the detective out into the main squad room.
As he exits, Carol looks after him and then gets up and goes behind his desk. This makes Paul nervous.
“What are you doing?”
She opens Pomeroy’s file on Jamie and starts looking through it.
