Now, in her sleep, what she saw most clearly was the face of the dog, worn, fatigued by the chase and unable to understand why it was being pursued. Whom had it offended? In her dream she could see its tongue flopping as it ran, a pink flag, the small head, the black eyes.
Three days passed. She was in the part of town where Timpanica Gardens could be seen. She left her hand inside her purse, lightly touching the metal cannister, remembering it was there for her. She walked close to walls, moved discretely around corners, and she allowed her back to hunch. She’d thought she saw Eaton Slavin a few blocks back, but kept to herself. She tried hard to disappear.
A few people sat on stoops, smoking, a mother yelling to her two small children who were in the street. Behind them was the Timpanica compound, absorbing an entire square block. When Sharon passed the tenement she turned into an alley that cut left at its end, and she stopped in front of an overturned plastic garbage bin. She stared at a red brick wall.
The most distressing thing during Adam’s disappearance was her powerlessness. There was no action for her to take, nothing she could enact that would bring him back or even allow her to know where he’d gone. Until this morning. Her idea this morning had been a communion, a sharing, a sympathetic fellowship. Perhaps in a bad moment he might see one of her symbols and come home. That was the part that kept returning to her mind. She imagined him destitute, sick, perhaps robbed, and in his moment of greatest doubt he might chance to look up and see her mark, like a divine sign, and know that she was still here, still loved him, and he would return. The bottom line was that she had to do something.
She looked over both shoulders and slid the stencil from her purse. She stepped close to the bricks and laid the stencil flat, holding its edge. She turned her back to the street, to block any view of what she was doing. Then she pulled the metal can out of her purse, fixed her finger on the nozzle. She’d chosen red.
She’d hardly had to move her hand, and it was done. She lifted the stencil and now the tank and the words were hers, her mystery glowing red on an alley wall. Sharon had used an X-Acto knife to add the word Mom into the cardboard, below its original message. She wiped the stencil with a tissue, turned around to the street and saw him at the mouth of the alley. Eaton Slavin stood directly in front of her, blocking the street, his yellow shirt risen above the tiny gut.
“Oh,” she said. “Eaton?”
The boy walked toward her, slowly, dragging his hand along the side of the wall.
She fought an urge to retreat. He kicked at the ground with his oversized sneakers. Sharon moved her purse to the crook of her arm and clutched it tightly. Behind Eaton a tall strip of daylight hung beyond the alley.
“Eaton?”
He didn’t answer, and didn’t seem to really be looking at her. His eyes lolled down to the corners behind her feet.
When he was a few yards away he stopped, twisting a heel, and looked up at the wall. He reached out and touched the red paint, came away with a wet finger. Finally he looked up at Sharon, who didn’t know what to expect in this confrontation.
Eaton said, “You was one of them?”
His voice was so childlike, she exhaled relief. “One of who, Eaton?”
“Them in camouflage.”
“I don’t know—are you saying the people that paint these wear camouflage?”
He nodded his head vigorously.
Sharon winced as she bent toward him, her back full of needles. “Eaton? Do you know where these people are?”
He shook his head and stared at the ground.
“What are they called?”
He shrugged. “I can show where all they do this.” He motioned to the paint on the wall. “Ain’t you one of them?”
“No, dear,” she said. “I’m looking for one of them.”
She turned him gently toward the street, and kept her hand on his back as they walked out the alley. Their forms were as insignificant against the buildings as insects in a canyon.
She stayed close to him as he led her up the cracked sidewalk. Sharon could feel the people on stoops staring at her, but kept her eyes forward with stiff resolve. Her ankles were swelling, she could tell, and worried what her feet would look like when she got home.
They walked less than two blocks. Eaton led her through a maze of interconnecting alleys. She could see the boy playing here, searching and mapping each strange new road in the warren of brick and glass, entire summers spent alone, navigating these inner channels. She knew that he might only have seen one person in camouflage spray-painting something, once. Adam had a camouflage shirt, but she couldn’t remember if it was among the clothes he’d taken.
They came out near a Thai grocer’s, and Eaton pointed up to the wall beside him. At least twenty copies of the stencil had been painted in close succession along this wall. Blue.
The first tank was a bit runny, blue tears stretching down from its treads, flowing into the words Police State. The next two were lighter, fading at their edges, created with quick bursts of the nozzle. Eaton stood beside her, kicking the wall with his toes. The entire front half of his shoe now appeared to be empty. The last two tanks were the clearest and best defined. All of them had been set on a fairly straight line. He always could draw a straight line.
She turned around. The street was more narrow over here, a few tiny houses set beside quiet stone buildings, fewer people around. She looked left and right, the lean sidewalk empty, a dusky white sky set low over the roofs. She took the can and stencil up and moved close to the wall, laid the first stencil under the blue graffiti.
Eaton said, “What you doing?”
She’d almost forgotten about him. “I’m looking for someone. You wouldn’t understand, Eaton. But it’s very important. Go play.”
“Who you looking for?”
“Eaton, please! Be quiet. I’m trying to find someone, and I need you to be quiet. This is very, very important. Go play. Run home.”
She turned back to the wall and touched the nozzle lightly twice, two poofs of paint dusting the wall through the stencil, a little freckling her hand. Her sign sat just below the blue ones.
She moved back to Eaton, who was standing near her, still watching.
She was bending forward again, her shoulders tight now, to insist the boy promise to keep her secret. She was going to offer him all the comic books she’d taken from him and his two friends. But as her face lowered, over Eaton’s shoulder she saw a policeman exit the alley. In five steps he was next to them.
The policeman was short and stocky, his dark blue uniform tight across his chest, red hair visible below his cap. He nodded to her and stood close behind Eaton, who’d been staring at Sharon. Then Eaton turned around and saw the cop.
“So what’s this? You’re tagging again, Eat?” The policeman pointed to the can and stencil in Sharon’s hands. He shook his head with disappointment. “I don’t think your mom’s gonna like this. I don’t think your case officer’s gonna like that.”
For the first time she could remember, Eaton showed a dramatic emotion, his eyes wide like lanterns, head shaking furiously. “I didn’t! I didn’t do anything!”
The policeman looked at the fresh paint on the wall and back to the can in Sharon’s hand. “Then what’s all that?”
“She did it! She was doing it!”
The policeman surveyed Sharon, her lumpy form. Her glasses inflated the appearance of her eyes, and the brown dye she used on her hair made it dry, so she kept it in a short, feathered style. She herself thought that with age her face resembled a softball. Her cardigan was clean and her big purse was a yellow quilted bag she’d made over three decades before.
“Who are you?” the policeman asked. The uniform, its authority, caused a panic she’d never felt before.
She could feel her eyes welling up, her voice choked. “I’m his schoolteacher.”
The cop looked back and forth at Eaton and the can in her hand. He adjusted his hat, seemed to understand something.
“She did it!”
“Uh-huh. Let’s go talk to your mom, Eaton.” The cop nodded to her. “Don’t worry. I’ll get him home.” He reached out and took the paint can from her hand, and took the stencil. She let it pass out of her fingers without resistance, her open mouth offering no voice.
The policeman showed the objects to Eaton. “Think your mom might want to see these.”
Eaton was almost howling now. “Tell him! Tell him! It wasn’t me!”
A few people had opened their doors and were looking out on the scene. Their faces stayed hidden in the doorways, the barest glint of eyes. Out on the street a gray light prevailed. Eaton pleaded as the policeman guided him down the sidewalk. She felt terrified, needing so badly to take action that she was stuck with only the need. Her feet had not moved from the spot, and her mouth only gaped a little. The policeman turned a corner with Eaton, and the two of them disappeared. She looked down at her spotted, knotty hands, flecks of orange along the fingertips, and she heard him once more. “She did it! She did it!”
She realized, again, that the stencil was gone.
School became strange after that. Eaton was absent for two days, and when he returned he was quiet and didn’t speak in class. She’d seen him talking to Lester and DeRay, but that was the only evidence that he was not mute.
She returned the stack of comic books she’d taken from the boys, placing them on Eaton’s desk. He didn’t touch them, and he didn’t look her in the eyes. He just stared around her, toward the chalkboard in the front of the room. His two friends raided the comics and Eaton did not complain.
Her hair had been thinning lately, and her feet became numb and tingly during the day. The boys stared at her during recess, from across the soccer field, and she felt that now when they saw her, they knew her, knew her in a way she didn’t yet understand. Above all, she could not abide the idea of an unearned fate.
She’d closed the door to Adam’s room and left it that way, feeling the space had become accusatory, and she felt guilty when she passed it, as if she’d lost something that had been entrusted to her.
Fall arrived. The leaves on the scant trees became a luxuriant, glossy collage of intense color. The streets became wet. Flyers were pulled down, walls were repainted. Eaton did not come back to class after Christmas break.
The final trial happened in early February.
She’d been sitting in front the television, next to an electric heater, eating a bowl of soup. She now kept her hair in a shower cap whenever she could. Her feet were soaking in Epsom salt and baking soda.
The lead story on the news was about a bomb that went off in the city that day. The screen showed shaky footage of a department store, one she’d used to shop at, and its whole frontispiece had been obliterated, with small fires dancing in the wreckage of glass and brick. The video was fuzzy, people screaming, crying. She listened closely, already feeling a nearly imperceptible twinge at the base of her neck. She set her spoon in the bowl, and set the bowl down. She put on her glasses.
The reporter was a deeply tanned woman of that vague ethnicity Sharon was starting to see more and more. The reporter spoke about a message given to authorities, a message wherein a group of terrorists claimed responsibility for the explosion. The group called themselves The Freedomists. They alleged that this chain of department stores was owned by Saudi Arabian interests that had contributed significantly to the president’s re-election campaign. Four people died in the explosion. Eleven more were injured. Sharon’s face hovered in the green glow of the television.
The reporter’s face gave way to three portraits, black and white drawings of men whom the police were trying to identify. The sketches were crude in some ways, but she still gasped in recognition. The third sketch depicted a young man with longish, light-colored hair, his eyes intense, his features familiar, gaunt, projecting.
No, she told herself. That was her imagination.
A phone number was posted at the bottom of the screen, telling viewers to call if they recognized any of the men. It was ridiculous, she thought, lifting her glasses off as she looked back at the screen. No, definitely not, she could see now. But still. Her heart was hurting its chamber, pounding away at its walls of tender bone. She turned off the television.
She took her bowl to the kitchen, rinsed it out, and set it aside. Through the window above the sink, the night was black, faintly whistling. Light rain pattering. She imagined the people in the explosion, the pockets of flame, the force of the blast.
Outside the window, she began to hear a dog barking. She thought of Eaton chasing the dog. She still saw the limping creature avoiding their rocks. She heard the barking again, different, higher, quickening as if in distress.
If there was an unearned fate, she nevertheless had to believe that somehow this had been deserved. A vague guilt had replaced certain parts of her will, but not, so far, her faith. Her faith she kept intact. She could not say why over the years things should flee her, why she should be allowed so little, but she practiced accepting this as part of a just and far-reaching plan. And her guilt was not the kind she could atone for; she wouldn’t let herself understand it.
The dog outside continued to bark, and the wind tightened its soft whistle. In her thoughts, she could clearly see the dog resting beneath a tree, wounded, nestled beside a stone, a dry place. She could feel the animal curled somewhere with its injuries, waiting out the night, unable to recall how it had arrived at this shelter.
HAUNTED EARTH
My fingers slip under Tsuny’s blouse and pick at the clasp on her bra. She sinks under me, down in high cordgrass, and the stalks crackle beneath us as my hand maps her ribs, follows her smooth back to the dampness at the base of her spine. Outside this stand of tall grass is the open lawn where they say aliens landed two weeks ago. I’m trying to undress Tsuny during an autumn when our town, Big Lake, is buzzing with reports of demons and UFOs. One group in a Buick said they were chased by flying lights on the highway. A guy at my school has an aunt who moved to Houma because she saw a dark, hairy man-thing staring at her from the backyard, two nights in a row while she was washing dishes.
None of that matters, because it’s all on the other side of the cordgrass, not down in here. Our breath is hot and my hands keep shifting, searching for an open pathway. She moves with me, blocking the waistline of her skirt. This is our conflict, and we repeat it with frustrated, fading spirit, like an argument we’re tired of having.
Before she spread the black blanket today, Tsuny stood beside me and we saw past the tall grass, to the other end of the rice field. Over there a circle got scorched into the ground of Leon Arceneaux’s farm, where he says a spaceship landed. Everybody’s seen that. But today, before I tangled my hand in Tsuny’s heavy black hair, we both saw that Mr. Arceneaux had gotten a couple boys to help him lay a banner across his roof that reads WELCOME in tall, red letters. Mr. Arceneaux doesn’t work since City Services shut down the oil refinery in Big Lake. I know that because he used to work with my pop. I figure with the banner and the spaceship he’s trying to get interested in something, which is good, because if you don’t stay busy in the prairie slums, time and the sun will make you crazy.
I’m busy with Tsuny. I watch where our skins meet, my white arm against her rich brown. Her color mixes her mom’s Vietnamese and her dad’s black. She has plump lips from her father, a tiny nose and slivered eyes from her mom. Her skirt is from Our Lady of Lourdes, the Catholic school she goes to, and it bunches in my fist. The wool in my hand, its plaid pattern of navy and gray and yellow are a charged sensation to me, like her skin, and I want to be changed by it.
She goes to school with uniformed boys in khaki slacks and blue oxfords and I’m wearing the same jeans I always wear, today with my jungle fatigue OG 107 Utility Shirt from Army Surplus, where I spend a lot of the money I make recycling. My shoes are unissued FG combat boots, and I gave up taking them off when I’m with Tsuny. I’v
e gotten afraid that the effort of unlacing them ruins the momentum, and if that happens she’ll never get carried away by passion. Then, together, in shrinking motions we stop with no real advancement made into the disputed territories. We breath rough. A silver dolphin gleams on Tsuny’s neck, and under it rests the paper tag of her scapular.
“What are we doing?” she asks me.
I don’t know how to tell her what we’re doing. She might be asking me why we do these things down here in the grass, but we don’t go to movies or hold hands in the mall.
It’s 1983, and I have a map of Vietnam on my wall. I took it from a National Geographic when I was eight, and the sickle shape of its coast has become as familiar to me as sky. Pop got back from Vietnam when I was six, but I’d been seeing it on TV before that. Vietnam is fire and prehistory to me, the reason Pop isn’t good at numbers and why my mom first got her job at the Shetler Insurance Agency. My name is Neal Lemoine and Vietnam is part of me in a way I can’t understand, an inherited way, like a middle name. There’s been lots of talk here lately about this movie, Close Encounters, but I’ve never seen it. The new movies bore me, and everyone looks ugly. I don’t play Pac-Man, Dungeons & Dragons, or sports. I have a good handshake.
I trace a finger across the brown shore of Tsuny’s stomach, and she stops it at the top of her skirt. I picture her on my bed, where she’s never been, under the mosquito netting that overhangs my mattress. Scraps of camouflage are scattered on this canopy, and at night I’ve imagined choppers breaking the stillness of marshes, big machines floating down weightless, blowing grass flat. This electric god voice speaking staticky, arcane words—Bravo, Echo, Alpha, Charlie.
We’re fifteen, and I’m thinking Tsuny is on the verge of surrender, that soon this fight will end and the terms of cease-fire will mark an ultimate transformation in me.
We rise and straighten our clothes. We watch buttons and zippers and when our eyes meet, we look away.
“I can stay longer tomorrow,” she says. “My parents have a party.”
Between Here and the Yellow Sea Page 13
