Bad Man

by Dathan Auerbach

  Ben extended his hand toward the trees and then slowly withdrew his grasp. Nothing moved. But nothing felt still.

  18

  Ben was ten years old the first time he had to repeat a grade. None of his friends had been held back, so as far as Ben was concerned, he may as well have been at a new school in another state. He didn’t know any of the other kids, and now he was a year older, a foot taller, and thirty pounds heavier than everyone but the teacher. No one made fun of him. He wasn’t a pariah. It’s just hard to make friends when you can’t do what friends do. Ben couldn’t play. He couldn’t run or skip or jump. Thanks to the car accident, he could hardly even walk.

  His class had recess every day, and twice a week was “free play,” where the kids could do whatever they wanted. These were Ben’s favorite days, because he would stay inside and play checkers with his teacher or read from a children’s book that told softened versions of Greek myths. The other three days, Ben walked the track and watched Daniel.

  Daniel didn’t seem to know or care what free play was. He ran every day and went faster and farther than anyone Ben had ever seen. He and his two friends blew past Ben like bullets, racing one another, lapping Ben as he hobbled on the inside ring of the dirt circle. The other boys were quick, but Daniel was a force of nature.

  Physically, Ben was incapable of running. He’d been heavy before his accident, but now he was obese. Even walking took a lot of concentration, and it hurt. It hurt a lot. He wasn’t even able to stand without his leg brace, and it sometimes took two people to steady him without it because of his size. Once a year, he was evaluated and measured for a new brace, though he would get a new one only when the knee joint no longer lined up right; his father’s insurance paid for the doctor’s appointments but not the equipment. The brace rattled and squeaked when he walked, a sound that became so habituated by Ben’s mind, he noticed it only when it wasn’t there.

  Ben wasn’t jealous of Daniel. Not really. He watched him with the kind of awe that someone might have for a bird banking and diving, soaring and arcing—enamored of abilities you not only lacked but couldn’t even comprehend. Ben wasn’t racing Daniel. Ben wasn’t competing with anyone other than himself. And while it might not have actually been true, the whip-strike pain through the muscle of his left thigh made it feel an awful lot like he was losing. He tried for a long time to ignore the pain, but that was impossible. What he could do, however, was pay attention to something else.

  As Daniel and his friends made their rounds, Ben concentrated on the whining of his brace. A mild and rhythmic screech, like a swing whose bracket needed oil, sounded with each careful and uneven step. The slower the gait, the more pregnant the pause before each protracted cry from the metal hinge against his knee. He didn’t try to walk faster, not consciously. That was hard. So Ben focused on the noise and tried to make it move faster. It worked so well that for weeks Ben tuned everything out except for the sound of his progress. Then Daniel sprained his ankle.

  He’d tripped playing in “the Ditch,” he’d said. Just slid right down the side of the dirt valley and landed wrong. The sprain wasn’t too bad. At least not until Monday, when he tried to run on it. When he did, he twisted up his leg bad enough that Ben was actually walking faster than him come Wednesday, though Ben hadn’t noticed right away.

  Ben was so fixated on the cries of his brace that he barely heard Daniel speak as he passed him and his friends. Daniel asked if Ben wanted to walk with them. Ben had to slow his pace, but he did so gladly and circled the track step for step with a group for the very first time.

  It was nice—nicer than walking alone in a lot of ways. And it was helpful. Carrying on a conversation was even more effective than listening to the squeaks and screeches of his brace. It was a little difficult to think of things to talk about sometimes, but he managed. After a few days, Ben started walking the track during free play. His leg hurt like hell, but it was worth it.

  After about two weeks it started growing more and more difficult for Ben to keep pace with the boys. They were moving faster—fast enough that Ben had to swing his arms to propel himself forward, wincing against the pain in his leg. He matched them step for step for as long as he could. But then, one day, Daniel was all better.

  Ben tried once to slow Daniel down with a question as he ran past, but the boy didn’t stop, didn’t slow, didn’t answer. They never really talked again after that. It was like the whole thing had never happened, and maybe that would have been fine, but Ben couldn’t remember how to do his trick anymore, how to focus on the squeals of his brace and make them move faster. Or maybe he just missed the talking.

  It wasn’t that hard to see what had happened, to see that while he’d never been competing against Daniel, Daniel had been competing against him. And he didn’t want to be slower than Ben. Not for three weeks. Not for one day.

  When Ben thinks of that year, he remembers the time he and Daniel were equal. How he was as fast as the fastest kid. He doesn’t think about Daniel’s trick, even though it’s part of who he is now. Every person has a day that transforms trust into a choice, when he learns that people lie for reasons all their own. That day on the track was Ben’s.

  And Ben had made his choice about Marty, though he tried to steel himself against it. Marty was a liar. There was really no way around it. Ben had told Marty about Eric, and then over two months later it just so happened that Marty had seen him? Before Ben even started working at the store? The only person in the last five years, and it was a person who wasn’t even looking. A person who said he’d called the hotline, despite the fact that there was no record of it with the police. Marty lied and Marty played games. He’d found Stampie, put him in the lost and found box, waited for it to be funny, and then when it wasn’t, he made up a story.

  Marty was a liar, and it didn’t matter. Because Ben wanted to believe him.

  There had been a fire in Ben. A long time ago, the same breath that had first carried the words “Have you seen my brother?” had blown ember to flame, and that flame had endured for a while. Kept alive by dreams and wishes, it lived longer perhaps than Ben was capable of bearing, so when its flicker finally started to dull, Ben didn’t fight it. He couldn’t; he had nothing left to fight with. Starved of life by every stranger’s indifferent shrug, every disinterested response from James Duchaine, Ben could only let the fire die in the vacuum of his heart.

  That fire, Ben now knew, had been hope. He’d felt it the very instant Marty had told his liar’s confession. More than anger, more than confusion, Ben could feel hope swelling in him with every breath, even if he didn’t like it.

  Hope had exchanged Ben’s delusion of peace for the mocking whisper that told him he would never have any. Good. Keep whispering then. Go on and yell if you’ve got a mind to. Eric is alive. Ben could feel the urgency of that fact each time he handed out a flyer, and he’d handed out hundreds.

  For a whole month, it was practically his second job. Every day after work, Ben would pull his stash of flyers and his sketchbook out of his work locker and walk somewhere either very old or very new, updating his list until he absolutely had to rest, sometimes ignoring even that. He stapled papers to telephone poles and put them in and on newspaper vendor boxes. Day in and day out, until he was well into his second batch.

  When Ben worked alone, he’d sometimes walk the aisles not touching anything, but trying to feel something all the same. And sometimes he would just close his eyes and listen to the store, in case it had something to say. Almost every other night Ben checked the lost and found. He didn’t tell Marty about those things. They didn’t talk about what had happened.

  All that mattered was that Eric was somewhere to be seen, and the more eyes that knew to look for him, the better. Every “no” that Ben heard was one “yes” that he might hear in a week, or even a day. And Ben heard a lot of “noes.”

  He didn’t mind, though. He hardly
noticed at all. Because that’s the thing about hope—when it seems that there’s no point in moving, it pushes us so forcefully that we come to feel like we need it to keep going. It was out of that very need that Ben decided to believe Marty. Even if what he said seemed implausible, even if it was the cruel tale of a liar, it had given Ben hope and he embraced it like an old friend. Because it felt good.

  And that’s what hope really is, after all. An anesthetic. Something that takes the sharp edges of reality out of focus just enough that we can keep looking at it, keep moving forward with steps that are guided by the assurance that every inch of ground can’t possibly be covered in broken glass. And then when it is—when your feet are left as coiled ribbons of wet skin—you forget what guided you there in the first place.

  It’s a kind of sneaky narcotic, one produced by thoughts and words and refined by time. It doesn’t fix anything. It just numbs and reassures, until it can consume the desperate for the sake of its own brilliant incandescence. And as hope comforts us, it becomes easier and easier to forget that it too was in the jar that Pandora carried. It’s the one horror of the world that wasn’t loosed when she opened the lid.

  It’s the one horror that lives in us.

  But wuh-with his hands and feet quittin ah-out on him, well, there weren’t muh-much he could do. So huh-he thought, Muh-maybe I’ll be good.

  And he tried.

  But there weren’t nuh-nothin good in him. He had to find somethin good.

  So he crawled to it.

  19

  “It’s called pride,” Frank said, yanking a box open. “Everything you throw looks like garbage. Look at that. Sloppy as hell. Now look at this. Magazine.”

  “Yeah, okay,” Ben said, unloading a heap of marshmallow bags onto the bottom rack.

  “What fuckin magazines are you readin that got pictures of grocery shelves, Frank?” Marty grunted as he flung an armful of pie crusts onto the shelf.

  “I’m sayin it could be in one. Because it looks good.” Frank spun the evaporated milk cans he’d just shelved so the labels faced outward.

  “And I’m sayin that it couldn’t be in one, because no one gives a shit so hard that the magazine it was in would go out of print and everyone at the printing place would kill themselves.”

  “You care more than me,” Frank said as he slid some cans around on the shelf. “You’re throwin twice as much because you keep givin me the shitty tags. Keep hustlin. I’m gonna take my time on these cans.”

  Marty looked around at the division of labor and cursed.

  “I just wanna know who scheduled the holidays. Bustin ass to fix the store after Thanksgiving when Christmas is right around the corner don’t make no sense,” Frank moaned.

  “You think we oughta just wait until next year?” Ben asked, ripping open another box.

  “No,” Marty cut in, “Frank thinks everything should all just be in one big bin. Just a big-ass cage with everything all piled up.”

  “Lower people in on ropes. They get whatever’s on top,” Frank said.

  “Goddamn idiot.”

  “You can have your own bin, white boy,” Frank snapped playfully. “Full of cigarettes and clam chowder and fuckin sherbert.”

  Marty laughed hard. “That what white folks eat? Clam chowder and sherbert?” He laughed again, and then Frank and Ben followed.

  “Oh, Christ.” Marty sighed. “Well, boys, I can’t really take any more of this goddamned aisle. Feels like lunch to me.”

  The three of them each dropped his box.

  “I got leftovers.” Frank smiled, dusting his hands together.

  “So do I,” Marty said, slipping a cigarette between his lips and gesturing to the miles of food that surrounded them. “See you out front.”

  “You have a good Thanksgiving?” Ben asked, pushing open the doors to the back room.

  “Yeah,” Frank replied, patting his stomach with his hand. “Too good. Turkey, mac ’n cheese, sweet potatoes. My pops can cook, boy.”

  “You know our folks work together? My dad and yours?”

  “That’s what he said! They known each other for a long time, huh?”

  “Seems that way. That where they met, you reckon?”

  “Oh, I dunno. He’s worked there…” Frank tapped his hand on the fridge handle. “Eight years?”

  “My pop’s been there for longer, I think.”

  “Before the papers, he was at the mall, doin cleanup-type stuff.”

  “Like a janitor?”

  “Yeah. That’s what he done for a long time at different places, way back when he was still young. Schools like Blackwater and then Bradley Park.”

  “That’s where I went to elementary,” Ben said. “Bradley Park.”

  “Long as you never pissed on the floor, then we good.” Frank laughed.

  “Blackwater like a private school or somethin?”

  “I dunno exactly. It ain’t around here. That was back when my daddy lived up in Alabama, and he don’t reminisce too much about when he was younger. Don’t know why he stayed doin stuff like that for so long. You can bet my next job ain’t gonna be in a place like this.

  “Y’all should come over sometime,” Frank said, reaching into the refrigerator. “We live just over on Chemstrand, behind the theater.”

  “The old busted one?” Ben spun the combination dial on his locker.

  “Busted?” Frank huffed. “You can move the tables and chairs, man. Ain’t nothin busted about that.”

  “True enough,” Ben said, reaching for his chips and pulling them out with a folded note. “Motherfucker. Marty still leaving you them pecker drawings?”

  “Near every night. One day it’s gonna be a real picture and then I’m gone for good. I mean that’s gotta be it, right? A man putting a goddamn picture of his dick in my locker. I can get unemployment for that.”

  Ben laughed and slipped the note into his pocket. He and Frank carried their food out of the break room.

  Outside, Marty chewed an enormous sub sandwich he’d constructed out of a whole loaf of French bread and deli meats. Crumbs covered his cheeks and shirt. There was a chill in the air, but nothing too biting.

  “Frank said he’s jealous, thought he was your dick buddy,” Ben said, tossing the folded paper into Marty’s lap. Marty pinched it between his index and middle fingers, the only two not covered in condiments and ham water.

  “Butt buddy,” Marty mumbled through his food. “What’s this?”

  He wiped his hands on his pants and unfolded the piece of paper. Marty’s brow furrowed and he looked at the paper for a long time, running his fingers over the frayed corners, glancing at Ben once and then again with intense uncertainty in his eyes.

  “You disappointed in your work?” Frank asked, prying the lid off his container of leftovers.

  Marty refolded the paper and tapped its corner against his knee. Then he handed it back to Ben. “This ain’t anything I did,” he said to Ben intently. “You understand me?”

  A car shambled up the road as Ben opened the note.

  “That ain’t anything I did,” Marty repeated.

  Ben flattened the page and felt his stomach turn. It was Eric’s flyer.

  “C’mon, man,” Ben moaned. “C’mon. What’re you doing? What the fuck are you doing?” he screamed.

  “Fuck this,” Marty snapped, standing and lighting a cigarette.

  “Oh, Jesus,” Ben yelped as he stood, still clutching the paper. “His face. What’d you draw? Why’d you draw on his fucking face like that?”

  “I coulda kept it, you fuckin idiot! You didn’t even know what it was. I coulda just thrown it away, but I gave it back to you, because I didn’t do it. You can’t just keep accusing me of every goddamn thing that happens.”

  “Yes!” Ben shouted. “I can!”

  “I s
pent the last month passing out those fucking things. Why would I put one in your locker when I been handing them out?”

  “The same reason you’d put his stuffed animal in the box and then lie about seeing him! What the fuck is wrong with you?”

  “What stuffed animal?” Frank asked.

  “What exactly do you think my plan would be here?” Marty yelled. “To taunt you until you decided to just beat me to death? Think about all this for one goddamn second! Why would I even have that fucking toy? How would I know that you’d find it? I’m not the fucking bad guy here!”

  “Are you guys talking about the little rhino?” Frank asked uneasily. Ben and Marty stopped shouting and stared at Frank.

  “You told him?” Ben asked, but Marty only shook his head.

  “That was me,” Frank said. “I put it in the box.” He shifted in his chair, picking through his sweet potatoes with a plastic fork, then pressed the outside knuckle of his index finger on his glasses to push them up his nose.

  “Where did you get it?” Ben asked.

  “I found it,” Frank replied.

  Ben’s whole body tensed, flinching against what he knew Frank would say next.

  “In the bathroom.”

  * * *

  —

  The crew walked inside and toward the back of the store.

  “I don’t know what I can show you,” Frank said. “Like I said, I just found it is all.”

  The smell of bleach and urine choked the air inside the bathroom.

  “There,” Frank said, “in the sink.”

  Ben’s cheeks flushed, and the vandalized flyer burned in his hand.