Vanished

by Mary McGarry Morris

  Soon after, Dotty apologized to Alma, who said it wasn’t her fault, but Jiggy’s. That night she and Jiggy went at it all through dinner. It finally erupted with Kelly’s constant whining for milk. Alma told her to look at her daddy’s beer belly if she wanted to know how come there wasn’t any milk. At that, Jiggy threw his plate off the wall. Alma threw her fork at him. “Bastard!” Kelly screamed at her father. Huller hit Kelly, and Alma hit him, and in a flash, Dotty wedged herself between the two of them, then pushed and dragged Jiggy outside to his truck. Then she ran back inside, haggard and breathless, to tell Alma not to worry; Jiggy just needed to cool off, and she’d see to it he didn’t get in any fights or go very far.

  Alma looked at her. “Have him go too,” she said, meaning Wallace.

  They ended up at the Angle Iron Café, where the band, two skinny guitarists and a drummer, were pushing together the large overturned wooden crates that would be their stage. Wallace kept yawning. The haze of cigarette smoke and the flickering webbed light of the citronella candles on each table made his eyes water. He was sitting alone at a small rickety table near the pay phone on the back wall. Dotty had been in the ladies room for a long time, but he was used to that. Flying as high as she’d been all day, she might be doing any number of things in there—smoking a joint, or putting on fake fingernails, or even sleeping. Huller was still at the pay phone, with his back to Wallace. The person he kept calling either wasn’t home or wouldn’t come to the phone, and with each try he grew more sullen. Wallace sipped the warm, flat beer Huller had ordered for him an hour ago.

  Dotty had just emerged from the ladies room, her drug-bright eyes forced wide. Stiffly, on high golden heels, she made her way through the crowded tables. Wallace noticed how each man stared as she passed by.

  “She’s still not back,” Huller muttered, wheeling around to the table. He swung his leg over the back of the chair and sat down. “Hell with it,” he muttered. He looked up and smiled at Dotty’s approach. The band had just completed the final screechy adjustment of their sound equipment. As they began to play, Dotty sang along with them. It was a loud song with words too fast for Wallace to make out. Huller was laughing now. With her arms over her head, Dotty’s hands flew in the air and her shoulders shimmied and she shook so in her chair that she soon had it jumping and dancing out from the table.

  “Poor little girl,” said a stocky man with big white ears, a large pitted nose, and slicked-back hair as he came toward her. “Poor thing wants to dance. C’mon, you poor little thing,” he said, holding out his hand. As she got up, a slow, lazy ballad began to play. The man held her close, his mouth at her ear, and as they danced, her eyes closed and her face seemed to grow smaller and smaller.

  “Shit,” Huller muttered, watching them. “Of all people.…”

  He looked at Wallace. “She’s got a magnet for trouble, doesn’t she?”

  When the song ended, Dotty turned away, but the man swung her back. She said something and the man glanced at Wallace and Huller.

  “Holy shit,” Huller muttered again. As they came toward the table, he took a pill from his pocket and washed it down with a slug of beer.

  “Hey!” the man said, standing over them now, grinning, his hand out to Huller.

  “Hey!” Huller nodded, kept nodding, as he shook hands.

  “You’re out!” the man said, belching softly into the fist he kept rubbing his nose with.

  “I’m out!” Huller said, nodding. Sweat glistened on his upper lip.

  “So what’s up?”

  “Not much,” Huller said, the nodding now a kind of rhythmic rocking. “You know. Just getting the feel back.”

  “Well, I’d say you’re on your way,” the man said, putting his arm over Dotty’s shoulder. She laughed and stumbled against him, then eased into her chair. She looked dizzy. Before the man returned to his table, where three swarthy men waited, he told Huller to be sure and keep in touch.

  “That’s Wipes Callahan,” Jiggy said. “What the hell’s he doing here?

  “Who’s Wipes Callahan?” Dotty asked. She kept looking back over her shoulder.

  “He’s big,” Huller said. “I mean big!”

  “He don’t look so big to me,” Dotty said, looking over at Callahan, who winked at her. “Just ugly as piss,” she said, with a grin and a little wave back.

  “Jesus Christ, turn around. A guy like that … you don’t know … shit,” Huller muttered as Callahan got up, his beer bottle dangling from two fingers as he came to their table.

  “Hey,” he said to Huller, “I just got thinking, uh, you need any, uh,” he belched softly with a sour face, “you know, help or anything, just uh, you know.” He shrugged modestly. “I’m around.”

  “You live around here?” Dotty asked, her eyes fixed now on the man’s face.

  “More or less,” Callahan laughed. “Maybe next month, less.” He rolled his eyes. “I got a hearing,” he said in disgust, his hand raised as if in oath. “If I want!” he added. “I still ain’t decided yet.”

  Wallace’s narrowed eyes slid between the thick-featured man and the fevered sheen of Dotty’s face and Huller’s numb expression. They had lost him. He had so little idea of what they were talking about that they might as well have been speaking another language.

  At the far end of the café, the door opened onto a young woman with waist-length dark hair and inky black eye makeup. She stepped inside and peered through the smoky shadows. The band was singing the sad tale of a wandering husband.

  “You don’t say,” Dotty kept saying, as Callahan leaned over the table, sharing some confidence out of the corner of his mouth. His face twisted with that look of bitter inner juices rising in his gullet. The bartender had come around the bar to the young woman at the door. He was shaking his head. She craned her neck, trying to see past him.

  Wallace sipped his beer. Actually, his favorite was root beer, sweet with a sting the way Hyacinth’s mother made it up every summer in ribbed brown bottles she always sent over to Answan and Arnold.

  “Place is loaded. Crawling with antiques,” Huller was saying, suddenly very eager.

  “Where’s that?” Callahan asked.

  “The old Bass place. Old lady Bass, she’s dead,” Huller said.

  “Sure,” Callahan was saying. “Whatever. Hey, I can give you names.” He leaned inches from their faces. “I mean this is so specialized now, I got guys that only do periods. You know, like history? Like we’re all gonna end up needing fucking degrees!” He shook his head. “It’s come to that! Believe me or not! Really! I know these things! That’s what I do!” He tapped his temple. “Know things.”

  Something had slipped from Dotty’s face, the veil of flesh containing color and moistness and life. She questioned Callahan in a sharp probing tone.

  “Shit!” Huller said, standing suddenly and gesturing toward the bartender, who was easing the young woman by her elbow to the door. “Ellie!” he called, then hurried to the door.

  “… from this real big house,” Dotty was saying. “You ever heard of anything like that?”

  Huller had returned with the young woman, who was obviously only a teenager. Arms folded, the bartender stared at them, waiting.

  Callahan said, “Yah, something like that. Maybe five or six years ago, and the kid was one or two, and she disappeared from her own house. Just like,” he snapped his fingers, “gone!”

  “Yah! Yah!” Dotty said breathlessly. “Yah!”

  “Yah, and I think the mother was right in the house even,” Callahan mused. “Something like that.”

  “We gotta go,” Huller said.

  Still regarding Dotty, Callahan shook his head. “Big commotion! Lotsa people got called. Not me. I mean, they knew that shit wasn’t my … my … you know, my thing.”

  “C’mon!” Huller said, jiggling the table for their attention. “Ellie’s under age. She’s not supposed to be in here.”

  The girl glanced nervously at him.

  “So let
her go,” Dotty said, shooting Ellie a look of disdain.

  “I can’t. She’s Alma’s sister,” Huller said, gesturing to the bartender that they’d be right along.

  “You said to meet you,” Ellie whined. “I saw the truck.”

  “But not here! I been calling you,” Huller said, through clenched teeth. “C’mon!” he said to Dotty, who was again talking to Callahan. “Hey look, Pops,” Huller said at Wallace’s ear. “I’m leaving! Right now!”

  “So you been what, following it? Or you know somebody or you heard something?” Callahan asked.

  “C’mon!” Huller said, turning abruptly, with Ellie hobbling behind him on high heels, her tight black skirt binding her knees together.

  Dotty jumped up and so did Wallace, both trailing him to the door. Callahan called after them: “I can find out! That’s my business! I can make a call!”

  With Ellie in the middle and Dotty on Wallace’s lap, they drove around a while after they left the café. Dotty had her arm around Wallace’s neck, fiddling absently with his earlobe while she made a point of telling Ellie how much she resembled her sister Alma. Same eyes. Same nose. Same skin. Same figure.

  “No, I don’t!” Ellie said finally.

  Wallace shivered with goose bumps from Dotty’s touch. Her soft breasts grazed his cheek.

  “Take my word for it,” Dotty said, looking Ellie up and down. “You sure do.”

  Ellie made a face and turned back to Huller. “I gotta tell you something,” she whispered.

  Huller glanced at her sharply and made some gesture with his head.

  “I only got a half hour before Ma gets back,” she whined.

  At that, Huller turned abruptly, and in a few minutes they were in his driveway. Wallace and Dotty both climbed out, but then suddenly Dotty jumped back into the truck.

  “I gotta bring her home,” Huller said.

  “I don’t mind,” Dotty said, with a sweet smile for Ellie. “I like kids.”

  They left, and Wallace went into the house to get Canny, but she was trying to play Barbie dolls with the two little girls. Kelly kept hiding her sister’s doll. Alma was sprawled on the couch watching “Love Boat.” She said she’d send Canny over after the show.

  In the cabin he lay on the sagging bed. The raspy cry of crickets filled the night woods. He knew it was important to try and remember what Dotty had said to Callahan, but the harder he tried, the stranger were his memories; faces and names and places he hadn’t thought about in years. He kept thinking of the two thumbs on Camelia Crebbs’ right hand and the story of how one night her husband came home drunk and cut off one of the thumbs and threw it on the floor, where the dog found it and ate it, and how after that Camelia Crebbs couldn’t turn her back on that dog for the hungry way it was always sniffing around her ankles.

  His father had told him that story on the long snowy ride to Burlington, told it in a cold, toneless voice as if it were just a thought he was sounding aloud, so that when he turned down the gravelly drive and passed under the iron archway and pointed up at the big brick house on the hill and said in that identical voice, flat and colorless as an ice pond, “Up there’s the Home, boy,” Wallace hardly even lifted his head to look, much less to cry or protest in any way, so easily lulled had he been, and still was, by certain voices.

  At first, his daddy came every Sunday. Then it narrowed down to every few months. Then Christmas—if the roads were good, which they usually weren’t. And then his daddy died.

  He jumped up and turned on the light. Remembering was too much like grave digging. Every stone-clang on the shovel struck cold and hard through his bones. You never knew what you might turn up. After just one day on the job, he had quit. Just like he’d quit remembering all these years. Too hard on the nerves. Too spooky.

  For remembering he relied on Dotty, who always knew the right roads to take and which diner had the best prices and which grove paid their pickers minimum plus housing, and which crew boss not to sign on with. If he said, “Dotty, where were we May of ’82?” she’d know—the city, the weather, the people, and who said what and to who. And if she wasn’t sure, she’d rummage back as if she were turning the pages of a book in her head, murmuring, “March ’82 was the cold snap and then April was Canny’s scarlet fever and after she got better, we got that place near Tampa.…” It had been almost the same with Hyacinth. All he ever had to worry about was the present. If he could just take care of that, they kept track of the past and presided over the future.

  He sat down on the edge of the bed. An owl hooted. Moths beat at the screen door. Hyacinth said moths were all the dead souls that were too bad even for hell. Taking care not to look at the moth-covered door, he got back up and turned off the light. He wished Canny would come over.

  A few minutes later, he heard footsteps cross the driveway. Alma Huller’s white face rose behind the screen. “Canny’s asleep, Mr. Wallace.”

  “I’ll come get her,” he said quickly.

  “That’s okay,” she sighed. “She can sleep with the girls tonight. Besides, she’s gotta get used to us.” She peered through the screen. “You’re gonna miss her, huh? Well don’t worry, she’s gonna be treated just like one of my own. And every penny Dotty sends’ll be spent on just her. And that’s a promise! Course it’s too bad the welfare thing didn’t work out. But they’re just so damn picky over birth certificates and whose kid’s whose. Jeez, they don’t even know Jig’s here. They say, ‘Where’s your husband?’ and I say, ‘Who the hell knows!’”

  She looked over her shoulder toward the road and her voice dropped. “I hope he don’t mouth off someplace. That’s how he got in the last trouble. I just hope he don’t give Dotty a hard time.”

  She opened the door and came in. She sat down heavily on the wooden chair. A dreamy look floated across her face and she sighed. “You must be real proud. Not just of Dotty’s looks acourse, but her being such a nice person.” She clasped her hands and rocked forward a little. “Oh, I hope she passes that screen test. That’d really be something, having a real, honestaGod movie star for a friend.” She bent forward, her belly ripening over her thighs. “You feeling all right, Mr. Wallace?” When he didn’t answer, she got up and stood by the door. “You’re just the quietest man I ever saw, you know that, Mr. Wallace?”

  7

  Dotty snored loudly, her mouth open, her nostrils flaring. Her makeup had run to black half-moons under each eye. The cabin reeked of sour booze and cigarettes. Wallace stood over her bed. Her dress was tangled around her thighs and as he nudged her awake, he saw the grapey love bite on her soft white throat. She opened one eye and swore at him.

  “I gotta talk to you,” he whispered.

  “I’m sleeping!”

  “Wake up, Dotty. It’s about Canny.”

  “She’s all set,” Dotty murmured, turning on her side. “The Hullers are gonna keep her.”

  “Nossir!”

  She turned and looked up at him through dull mucousy eyes. “Aubie!” she warned.

  “I’ll go get her,” he said, opening the door.

  “Aubie!” she called, scrambling out of bed. She chased him across the driveway and threw her arms around his neck and flicked her body against him as she spoke. “Please, Aubie—nothing’s definite! We were just talking!”

  He looked toward the sleeping house.

  “Listen to me!” Dotty insisted, with her strong arms encircling his neck. She drew back her head and looked at him. “We’re only ten miles from Stonefield, Aubie!” She smiled brightly and kind of shook him against herself. “Just ten miles!”

  “What’s that?”

  “That’s where she’s from! From Stonefield!”

  “How do you know?”

  She looked at him. “The guy last night said it.”

  “Why’d you tell him?”

  She squeezed his arms. “Look, Aubie, the important thing is, she’s close to home and maybe in a year or two after we get settled someplace far away, we can send her a
letter telling where she came from and that way, she can get back herself and there’ll be no trace of us. Aubie? Listen to me.…”

  He looked down at the ground.

  “It’ll be a whole new life.” She laid her hand on his whiskery cheek and grinned. “Okay?” she asked softly.

  He nodded.

  She pinched his sideburns and sighed. “My scaredy cat little old man. Afraid of his own shadow and everybody else’s.” She blinked and the gold flecks in her eyes burst with light. “You’re such a sweet guy, Aubie. What would I’da done without you all these years? Christ, I’d probably be dead somewhere by now.…”

  He nodded dumbly.

  “C’mon,” she said, leading him by the hand back to the cabin.

  When it was over, she was all business. She stood by the bed wiggling her jeans over her hips. “Jiggy’s gonna ask you to give him a hand with something,” she was saying, as she struggled to close the zipper. “And you be nice now; poor guy hasn’t made a dime since he got outta jail.”

  He nodded dazedly up at her, his body spent and sore beneath the coarse woolly blanket that lay like sandpaper against his raw, wet groin. Her image was ringed with dazzling light. She looks like a fairy godmother, he thought. Just like the most beautiful fairy godmother he had ever seen. She was putting on her bra. She leaned forward and adjusted each breast in its cup.

  “When’re we going?” he asked in a small voice.

  “In a coupla days,” she said, slipping a gauzy red shirt over her head. “Soon as I get the details worked out.”

  He closed his eyes and turned his head to the wall.

  A little while after Dotty left to go next door, Canny burst into the cabin. She closed the inside door and locked it.

  “She wants me to get in the tub with her kids!” she cried indignantly. “She said I stink and I probably got cradle cap the way my head’s so itchy. I hate her, the fat pig! Thinks she can boss me around all of a sudden!”

  He took her into the bathroom and had her kneel on a chair in front of the sink so he could wet her hair, which he lathered with bar soap. He rubbed her scalp gently until her head was a fuzz of bubbles. Her slender back was gritty and flecked with grime. From her shoulder blades to her hairline ran a trail of scabby scratches.