Vanished

by Mary McGarry Morris

  “C’mere … c’mere.…” He gestured in Wallace’s face. “I won’t hurt you, little man. I just wanna see your balls.”

  “Bastard,” Dotty moaned, getting to her feet.

  Huller had Wallace by the front of his shirt again. With his fist jammed into Wallace’s chin, he backed him toward the line of dark trees where the woods began. Dotty ran toward the truck and grabbed the two unopened cans of beer from the floor. Wielding them by the plastic connecting circles, she swung them at Huller, hitting him on the back of his head and his shoulders. “Let him go,” she cried. “He never did anything to you,” she panted. “He never did anything to anybody.…”

  16

  The next morning, Wallace waited until Jiggy drove off before he left the cabin. When he came into the kitchen, Alma was sitting at the table. The dark hairs of her upper lip were flecked with potato chip crumbs. She crumpled the empty bag and threw it at the paper trash bag. It missed and rolled across the floor by the stove.

  “I gotta talk to you,” she said. She took a wad of toilet paper from her breast pocket and blew her nose. “I gotta know what’s going on.”

  He could barely hear her. There was still in his ears the child’s sibilant lisp, as familiar and comforting a sound and yet as startling to consider as the pump and flow of one’s own arteries, as one’s own heart.

  There had been the man’s voice. Canny’s father, Dotty had said. His eyes were wide, filled with an image of Mr. Bird, tall and thin with a gold watch chained across his dark vest. Caroline was a pale golden child in white with her arms raised toward Mr. Bird’s narrow shadow. Caroline was the child of Mr. Bird, Canny’s father, Dotty said. But he was Canny’s father. That’s why Mr. Bird hadn’t cared or understood last night. They had been talking about two different children. Mr. Bird didn’t know Canny; that was it. It was almost clear to him. Almost. Alma’s voice kept trampling through his brain and muddying his thoughts.

  “I woke up with this awful feeling,” she was saying. She was spooning grape jelly onto sugar cookies. With quick, covetous movements, she piled her dish with them. “Like something bad’s gonna happen.” She shivered. “Like there’s evil in the air,” she said, licking a tremble of jelly from the back of her hand. “It’s something bad. I can feel it. He’s so weird-acting. Like last night, he got up out of a sound sleep and started cleaning his gun. I could hear him, whistling and kinda laughing to himself.” She looked at Wallace. “Where’d you go last night, you and Dotty and him? What’re them maps about? And what’d that guy in the white Lincoln want? You gotta tell me! Please!”

  Huller’s truck could be heard rattling down the road. Alma got up and hurried to the door. “It’s him,” she said. She shaded her eyes with her hand. “Oh shit! He’s got Ellie with him again.”

  All day long Wallace stayed close by Dotty and Canny. Ellie lay on the couch. There was a large wet stain on the pillow where she had drooled in her sleep. She shuddered as the front door opened and banged shut. Dotty had just come in from sunbathing. She wore tight black shorts and a man’s tee shirt with the sleeves rolled up. She and Alma took out their cigarettes and sat down at the table. With Ellie back, both women had forgotten their harsh words of the day before. They sat with their heads bent close. From the confusion on Dotty’s face and then the quick shake of her head, Wallace guessed that Alma had just asked her the same questions about last night.

  “Get off me,” Ellie suddenly groaned, as Krystal climbed over her curled legs.

  “Not until you get up,” Krystal said.

  “I don’t feel good,” Ellie warned. “I’m gonna puke.”

  “Go ahead,” Krystal laughed.

  With that, Ellie sprang up, catapulting Krystal onto the floor, and, with her palm cupped to her mouth, she raced wide-eyed past the two women, into the bathroom.

  “I hope I don’t get it,” Dotty said, holding the back of her hand to her brow. “I feel like I’m burning up.”

  Just then Huller bounded onto the porch and into the house. He was wiping his hands with a greasy rag. He banged on the bathroom door, then stepped back quickly when he heard Ellie moan.

  “She’s sick,” Alma said, with a narrow stare. “Me and Dotty were just saying we hope we don’t get it.”

  Huller made a quick move toward the stairs.

  “Don’t tell me you’re sick,” Alma said. “Don’t tell me you and her both got the same bug now.”

  His head jerked around, but he smiled and said, “I’m too mean to be sick.” He flipped the oily rag at her. She ducked and it caught on the door screen.

  “Bastard,” she muttered, and Dotty laughed.

  It was mid-afternoon and Huller still wasn’t back. He had left at noon, refusing to tell Alma where he was going.

  From the bathroom, Wallace could hear the two women talking.

  “I oughta call his probation officer,” Alma said.

  “What good’ll that do?” Dotty said nervously.

  “Maybe that way I’ll know what’s going on.”

  “I told you,” Dotty said. “He’s just tryna help me and Aubie out of a mess. Well, tryna help Aubie,” she said, in a low voice. “It’s real bad. I mean, he’s in some real bad trouble.”

  Dotty winked at him as he came out of the bathroom and sat at the table. She was working Alma’s lank, dull hair into a crown of thin, wet-looking braids. Next, she curled Alma’s eyelashes, which were so short the curler only caught the tips of them.

  The three little girls had come in and they sat at the table, each waiting her turn to be made up. Canny opened her eyes wide as Dotty gently eased the curler’s rubber base pad to her pale lashes.

  Watching Dotty, he could almost believe that nothing was wrong, that last night hadn’t happened.

  “I probably would’ve had my own shop by now,” she was saying, in that soft, distracted voice of women in the midst of making something. She was curling Krystal’s lashes now. “After I got Miss Florida, my head got so swelled, I couldn’t buckle down,” she sighed, wetting her little finger and lifting the corner of Krystal’s lash to the curler.

  Wallace smiled, squinting a little in the bright blur of her voice.

  “And now’s the blush,” she said, dipping a brush into a little glass pot of glossy pink cream. “Smile!” she commanded, then drew the brush in bright dabs high on Alma’s flat, round cheeks. She went on to each of the girls.

  “If they let me use my own, this is the shade I’m wearing in the screen test,” she said, working the color into Kelly’s hairline. The little girls were so pleased with all this attention they could barely speak. Their eyes shone.

  Canny lifted one cheek to the tinted brush and then the other. “Oh,” she said softly, as Krystal passed her the round, frameless mirror. “I look like a teenager,” she sighed.

  “Now, who’s this ugly broad?” Dotty laughed and pretended to study Wallace. “Lemme see what I can do,” she said. “A little color here,” she said, drawing bright circles high on his stubbly cheekbones before he could push her hand away.

  The little girls giggled.

  “Oh Poppy!” Canny cried. “You look just like a clown!”

  Dotty turned back from her assortment of makeup and looked at him. “He does!” she said, unscrewing a tube of red lipstick. “You know, Aubie, you do!” she said, bending close and slashing a ring of lipstick around his mouth. “You’re perfect,” she said under her breath. “Just perfect.” She dragged deeply on her cigarette. “You’ve got that look,” she said, in a rush of hot smoke that blinded him.

  With eyeliner, she drew broad eyelash strokes, and out from both corners of his red-circled mouth, she penciled long, thin cat whiskers. “Just like clowns do. You know, happy and sad all at the same time. Like any minute your heart’s gonna break.…”

  Alma couldn’t stop laughing. She hung on to the edge of the table. “Oh my God … oh my God,” she wheezed. The Huller girls were also laughing. Canny’s smile had weakened. Now Dotty was drawing a brigh
t blue star, which glittered on his forehead.

  In the other room, Ellie began to stir with all the laughter and the stench of the women’s cigarettes. “Put out them butts,” she called. “I told you the smoke makes me sick.”

  “Go sit on the porch if you don’t like it,” Alma hollered back.

  Again, Ellie begged them to put out their cigarettes. “I’m gonna throw up,” she warned.

  “Go ahead,” Alma yelled. Dotty had just lit another cigarette. Wallace looked up as he heard Huller’s truck outside. Smiling, Alma also lit a cigarette. Ellie began to swear and call her sister names. Both women inhaled deeply and blew their smoke directly toward the living room. Ellie screamed and flung one of the girl’s sneakers into the kitchen.

  “Goddamn it,” came Huller’s voice from the porch.

  “Please don’t smoke,” Ellie moaned.

  “Put it out,” Huller said first to Dotty, then to Alma. Outside, the truck’s engine raced.

  “Tell her to sit on the porch,” Alma sniffed, with a conspiratorial glance at Dotty.

  “I’m telling you to put it out,” he snarled.

  Again, Alma looked to Dotty for support. “Nobody cared when it made me sick. You smoked all the time I was pregnant.”

  At that, Huller snatched the cigarette from her lips. He threw it on the floor and ground it out. There was a brief hiss as Dotty doused hers in her coffee.

  Alma stared up at her husband, her face not only white under all the makeup, but waxy. She shuddered and looked as if she were the one who was going to be sick. She kept staring at her husband.

  Huller had taken a piece of paper from his hip pocket. He gestured to Dotty with it. “C’mon,” he said. “You too, Pops …,” and then his mouth fell open at the sight of Wallace’s painted face. “For Chr …” He looked in amazement at Dotty. “Will you tell him to do something about it? Please?” He went to the door. “Please?” he said again, and the door slammed after him.

  “Wash your face!” Dotty snapped, and suddenly Wallace felt foolish.

  “He did that to me,” Alma said in a small voice. She looked toward the darkened living room at the thin form that huddled on the sofa, Ellie with her knees drawn to her chin, her ragged hair blunt-ended and thickly capped over her ears.

  “It ain’t fair,” Alma said. “It just ain’t fair to go through all I been through and then have it end up like this.”

  “Alma …,” Dotty started to say, but the horn was blaring outside.

  “It ain’t fair,” Alma was still saying when Wallace came out of the bathroom and ran out to the truck. Traces of the makeup clung to the rough hollows of his cheeks and his eyes were smudged with black.

  “I want some questions answered,” Dotty was saying as he climbed up into the truck. “And I want them answered now!”

  “You know all there is to know, doll,” Huller said, pulling onto the road and shifting into gear. “Tonight’s the call. In a few days they go away for vacation.” He held out the paper. “Have him read …”

  “No!” she said, pushing the paper back. “You know what the hell I mean.”

  “There’s nothing to say, dammit!” The heel of his hand hit the steering wheel with a thud. “Now make him read it. This time he does it right! I’m warning you.…”

  Dotty flipped the paper onto Wallace’s lap. He stared at it. Sweat began to bead on the bridge of his nose.

  “Nobody warns me,” she said. “And nobody, but nobody, screws me either.”

  “Aw c’mon,” Huller said, clamping his hand over her knee. She batted it away.

  Huller wet his lips and smiled at her. “Read it to him, will you, doll? C’mon,” he coaxed when she still didn’t move. “We got big fish to fry.” He winked. “Look, relax. This time it’ll be easier for him. This time I did a little scouting around first.”

  “What do you mean?” she asked.

  “I called him myself,” Huller said. He flicked on the directional. “Just to set it up. So Pops won’t blow it again.”

  “I thought you weren’t going to make any moves on your own,” Dotty said. “I thought we agreed on that.”

  “Look, I’m sorry,” said Huller. “It was just an idea I got when I was out.”

  “I get ideas, but I don’t just go do them,” Dotty said, her voice rising.

  Wallace was trying to pay attention now. Blinking, he tried to focus on what they were saying, but the fear he sensed in Dotty caused his own to stir.

  Huller was telling her that all Wallace had to do was give Bird a few details. For this, Wallace was glad. He didn’t understand Dotty’s anger.

  “What details?” Dotty was asking.

  “Like what the baby had on and where you went after.…”

  “What the hell’s that got to do with anything?” she asked. “That’s none of his business where we went.”

  “I know,” Huller said. “I know, but we just have to humor the guy. We have to convince him. I mean, why should he leave twenty-five thousand bucks out in a bag somewhere just because we say we’ve got his kid. Mr. Louis Bird wants to be convinced. And believe me, I could tell, he’s ready to be convinced.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He just sounded tired. You know, like he’s been through this a million times before and now he just wants it over.”

  “So do I,” Dotty sighed. She lit a cigarette and sighed again. “I’m tired too.”

  Huller lit a cigarette. He took three quick drags and then he flipped it out the window in a trail of red sparks. When he came to a small grocery store, he pulled off the road and parked beside the telephone that stood at the far end of the parking lot.

  “One more thing,” Huller said, turning off the motor. “Bird wants to talk to you too.”

  Dotty grabbed his arm. “Why? Why’s he want to talk to me? How’s he know about me? What the fuck did you tell him?”

  Huller snatched her hand from his arm. “He said he wants to talk to the one that actually took the kid, the one that went in the house.” He shrugged and tried to smile, but the smile stayed small and cold.

  “Why? What’s that going to prove?”

  “Do I know?” Huller said, his voice tightening. He drew his hand across his greasy forehead. “But that’s what he said.”

  “No,” she said, her eyes wide. She was smiling. “I’m not talking to him.”

  “Yes, you are,” Huller laughed. “Oh yes, you are.”

  She turned to him and lowered her voice. “You said he didn’t have to know there was more than one. You’re the one that made such a big thing out of it!” Her voice was a whisper, scratchy and insistent. Wallace imagined he was hearing her through a window screen. “You said Aubie’d do all the talking. You said it had to be that way.”

  “Well, now it’s gotta be this way.” Huller pinched her chin and drew her face close to his. “First he talks to you. And then he talks to Pops. All you tell him is what happened. That’s all.”

  She jerked away. “I’m not talking to him, Jig!” She stubbed out her cigarette and lit another.

  “You b …,” Huller started to say.

  “Don’t push!” she spat, pointing the cigarette at him. “I mean it! Don’t!”

  He grabbed her wrist. “I’ll push,” he snarled. “I’m in so fucking deep now, it’s all I can do!”

  Wallace stared out the side window.

  “Get your fucking hand off me,” Dotty warned, her voice cracking with pain. “You don’t fool me. I know what you’re doing! You think you’re fooling me; well, you’re not!”

  Huller’s hand fell away. His tone softened.

  “Course you know what I’m doing, Dot. Course you do. It’s what we planned. Only sometimes we got to make a few changes.” He smiled.

  A half hour had passed. Because Dotty would not speak on the phone, Huller had to rewrite everything. He seemed desperate to appease her. She watched him write and she smoked and said nothing.

  Wallace twisted the button on his baseb
all cap. He felt as if he should also be mad, but all he could really feel inside was fear. When Huller had finished, Dotty went over the speech with Wallace, pointing to each word as she read. He nodded and continued to turn the frayed button.

  Dotty and Wallace were squeezed inside the telephone booth. Huller stood outside with his hands on the frame and his head hung. His faded jeans sagged low on his hips and the thick hairs of his chest were matted with sweat. When Dotty had dialed the last number, she listened, then quickly put the phone to Wallace’s ear. It was answered on the first ring.

  “Hello!” cracked a man’s voice like a gunshot, resounding over the line (distantly, “hello … hello … hello …”) “Hello!” he said again, almost shouting.

  “Hello,” Wallace muttered softly, reading with Dotty’s finger under each word. “This is the same person you talked to before,” he read hesitantly. “I have your little girl.…” He pulled the paper closer.

  “Caroline!” Dotty whispered.

  “Caroline,” he said. “And I want to give her back. She is.…”

  “What does Caroline look like?” Bird interrupted.

  Wallace bent close to the paper, searching for the answer. Dotty pressed her ear to the receiver, listening.

  “What does she look like?” Bird asked again.

  Dotty flipped her hand at him to speak. “Tell him,” she mouthed. But he was blank.

  “Tell him what Canny looks like,” she whispered.

  “She’s little. And her hair’s long now, and her eyes’re blue.”

  “What color is her hair?” asked Bird.

  “It’s … it’s …” Wallace couldn’t think of the word. He squinted at the hairs on Huller’s chest. “Yellow!” he said, as suddenly as it came to him.

  Huller nudged Dotty and whispered in her ear and then Dotty shook the paper at Wallace. Again, he began to read.

  “The day I took her was August 30, 1980. On a Saturday. It was just about noontime. I went right in the front door and through the house and in the kitchen. She was in her playpen in the back room. I took a loaf of bread out of the refrigerator and a blue mason jar of dimes off of the counter and then I heard the phone ring. That’s when I took her. When the phone stopped ringing. I took her and I went out the front door.…” He kept glancing entreatingly at Dotty. This was her part to read, not his.