In the Mean Time

by Tremblay, Paul

  Now it’s the night before Joe is to return to active duty. He is again at their booth at Zula’s. He sits, a tumbleweed without a breeze, and he stares at his empty screwdriver and empty cup of coffee.

  Jody isn’t coming so he leaves the restaurant and walks to her apartment. This night is hotter than all the previous nights, and Joe sweats through his white T-shirt. Her door isn’t locked and he lets himself in without knocking. Inside, the apartment is dark and a disaster of clothes and food and trash. It’s as though the spotless apartment he saw two weeks ago never existed, or maybe the duration between visits was longer than those arbitrary and government-assigned weeks, time enough for the apartment to fall into such an advanced state of decay, maybe a collection of years, lost years, had passed, or epochs only measurable by fossilized bodies, bones, and teeth.

  “What are you doing here?” Jody’s voice is frayed, an exposed wire, quick with its electricity but weak enough that it’ll break or flame out at any moment.

  Joe steps over the rubble of her apartment. The place smells of sweat and burnt chemicals. Joe walks inside the study. Jody sits on the floor, cross-legged, huddled next to a small fire, a mini-pyre set up on the hardwood floor stained black. Mounds of papers, books, and photographs surround her and the fire. She wears a white bra and black underwear along with black marks that are either bruises or smudged ash. She’s too thin. Her bones are a story written in Braille, but the story is too big and horrible to be contained by her skin. Joe puts a hand into his jeans pocket, touches the tinfoil, and he knows how she spent their time apart, and he knows this is all his fault.

  Jody’s eyes can’t focus, and they roll around the room. Her breaths are fast and irregular, as are her twitchy movements. She says, “You still have it, don’t you, Joe. You still have it. . . .” Her voice trails into whispers, and the words come too fast, fumbling over each other, letters placed inside of letters, making new sounds.

  He says, “I do.”

  She says, “You didn’t forget to give the tooth back, you kept it on purpose, you made it all up, that story you told me is bullshit, all bullshit, you kept it on purpose. You didn’t forget, no way, no way you forgot.”

  “I did forget, Jody.”

  She laughs. Then says, “Look at this. Another note. Misery is manifold, Joe. It’s true. Steve wrote that on this letter over here, and stuck it in my English Lit book. It’s right over here. There. You wanna read it?” Jody picks up a slip of paper and drops it into the fire. Jody turns toward him, and her hair is frayed thread. She smiles, shows her meth mouth, her teeth, blackened and decayed, pieces missing, an incomplete jigsaw puzzle, jagged and eroded canyon boulders, each tooth or what was a tooth is a bombed and burnt-out building that cannot be repaired.

  “You know what? A tooth fell out last night, Joe. It was cracked and loose, and I played with it, wiggled it around with my tongue and fingers, like we did when we were kids, I wiggled it, pulled on it, and it hurt a little but not much, nothing I couldn’t take, nothing I couldn’t deal with, and it just kinda popped out. Do you wanna see it, Joe? I saved it for you because you’re collecting teeth now, right?”

  Joe needs to do something, say something, anything that will close her terrible mouth. “I don’t know why I kept the tooth. I don’t know why I do what I do, anymore. Don’t know if I ever did.”

  “You’re a junky, just like me.” She smiles again, flashes her intimate, private devastation. “Like me, Joe. See? Get that fuckin’ tooth out of your pocket, you fucking junky. Misery is manifold, Joe, and you’re a junky, the worst kind, the one who won’t ever admit there’s a problem even when the signs, the signs, the signs are there, big as fucking billboards, billboards in your pocket, not a billboard, a headstone, headstone in your pocket, Joe, you have a headstone in your pocket, Joe. Joe, fucking, Joe, take it out, tell me what is says, what does it say? I know what it says but I want you to tell me, Iwantyoutotellmetellmetellmetellme . . .”

  Joe says, “I’m sorry, Jody. I didn’t mean to do this to you, to us. I’d forgotten about him. Really, I did.”

  He isn’t strong enough to tell her that he forgot on purpose and that he worked at it and that he was good at it, better than she was, and it’s why she’s like she is now and it’s why he’s like he is now. He wants to run out of her apartment, to run away, as he’s always been running away even if he never left home, where there’s still room enough to hide, there’s an all-encompassing desert in which to hide.

  At the southwest edge of Nogales, there was a stretch of desert near the border—and at the time, almost twenty years ago, a generally unsupervised border—where local teens would ride their dirt bikes and mountain bikes during the day and then later reconvene at night to light fires and bottle rockets and drink cheap six-packs. Joe and Jody were only eight and not allowed to go to there, but they went anyway. They told each set of parents they were riding to the playground for the afternoon and then would ride their bikes to the edge of the desert.

  It was late afternoon, the sun low and lazy in the west, a half-shut eye, and they were knee deep in their summer routine; climbing on rocks, turning over smaller stones looking for scorpions and small lizards, filling small burrows with sand and dried grass. Two high-school-aged kids on dirt bikes showed up in their desert, kicking up dirt and filling the air with their engines’ whine. Jody pulled Joe behind a rock, their roles shifting from desert explorers to spies, skulking around and hiding behind boulders and saguaro cactus.

  The dirt bikes were chipped paint and dented metal. The riders didn’t wear helmets. One kid was white, short and pudgy, wore a sleeveless black T-shirt with a bald eagle that was all talons and beak, and he had a mop of unkempt, dark hair, like a dead tarantula on his head. The other teen was a blond beanpole with a crewcut, wearing a baggy white T-shirt with large, slashing letters and baggier shorts that hung down to his shins when he stood up on his pegs. The teens rode up a ridge that was 100 yards or so away, a ridge that may or may not have been a part of Mexico, and then back down.

  Joe and Jody didn’t say anything or do anything, afraid of the teens, but both secretly wished for the thrill of being caught, of having to jump on their bikes, and then somehow outrunning the dirt bikes, cutting through yards and short cuts that only they knew. They moved carefully, exchanging cactus for boulder, and crept closer to the ridge.

  While tearing through another run, the chubby kid grabbed his left shoulder like it’d been stung, then swerved, and jumped off his bike, which landed on its side and slid halfway down the ridge. Three Mexican boys popped up from behind a boulder at the ridge’s crest; two kids threw rocks and a third pointed and shouted something, then they all took off running down the other side of the ridge. The blond sped over and helped get his friend’s bike back on its wheels. Their conversation was animated and brief. The high-pitched whine of engines was too loud for Jody and Joe to hear anything.

  The teens went over the ridge. Jody pulled Joe from out of their hiding spot and said, “Come on!” She ran ahead, and he followed her up the ridge. They stopped at the top and could see everything below.

  The three boys alternated fleeing with throwing their small stones at the circling dirt bikes. The teens swore and shouted epithets from the top of their mechanical steeds, and they both cradled a rock in the crook of one arm. The smallest and presumably the youngest trailed far behind the other two retreating boys. The teens focused on the straggler, tightening their circle, revving their engines and spraying dirt on the boy with their spinning, angry tires. The boy was trapped and crying, and scrambled onto a large, jagged boulder. He shouted to his friends, cupping his hands over his small mouth, but they hadn’t stopped running, were too far ahead to hear his pleas. The chubby kid, the one with the eagle T-shirt, threw his rock and hit the boy in the back of his thigh. There wasn’t much behind the throw, but the boy lost his balance, windmilled his arms, and fell off, behind
the craggy rock, out of view of Jody and Joe.

  The teens didn’t stop to investigate. They tightened their formation, parallel to each other, shared an awkward high-five, and rode triumphantly back up the ridge. Joe and Jody crouched, praying they wouldn’t be seen, or they’d be next, chased down the ridge, into Mexico, and then knocked off a boulder, but the teens didn’t see them and didn’t stop. They sped away, out of the sand, and onto the main drag and out of sight.

  Silence, the voice of the desert, replaced the screaming boys and dirt bikes. Joe and Jody listened and watched for a sign from the boy who fell and there was none. They waited. The sun drooped lower in the west. The other two boys did not come back for their friend.

  Wordlessly, Jody and Joe climbed down the ridge. They crept behind the jagged boulder and found his body, lying adjacent to the flat rock upon which he landed. The boy looked like Joe and the boy looked like Jody, but only smaller, younger. The left side of his head was dented, caved-in, and was missing a flap of scalp. His left arm was held out stiffly and twitched, beating like one wing of a broken hummingbird. The lower half of his face had crumbled, ice cream melting over a cone. He was breathing, but irregularly. They crouched, hands over their mouths, but not over their eyes. His chest inflated sharply, then deflated slowly, a sagging balloon. The right side of his face was perfect, asleep. His left eye was swollen shut, or missing. It was hard to know for sure with the orbital socket broken, pushed in, along with the area around his temple. Everything leaked slowly. There were too many colours on his face. And his teeth, his teeth, they were baby teeth, as small as seeds, and they peppered the sand and dirt around his head, those miniature headstones in the sand. Then there was one long sigh and the boy stopped breathing and his arm stopped moving.

  His suspension is over but Joe does not report to the Tucson office in the morning. He manages to drive his Jeep into the Tohono O’odham Reservation and into its desert despite his near total exhaustion, his being purposefully drunk, and the pain that fills his head. He deposits a mix of aspirin, ibuprofen, and little blue pills he took from Jody’s apartment into his dry, copper mouth, and grinds them up as best he can. It hurts to chew, but he won’t use his water yet; he needs to conserve it.

  He stops the Jeep in approximately the same area where he helped rescue the Nicaraguan woman, but he didn’t save her. He knows he hasn’t saved anyone and can’t save anyone. This trip into the desert isn’t about saving anyone. He’s going to find Guillermo and give the man back his son’s tooth. Joe crawls out of his Jeep and walks, slowly, due south, toward the border. He doesn’t have a compass, but he thinks he knows where the border is.

  Joe allows himself to remember that day in the desert. He remembers the slow walk back to their bikes, their pile of metal and chains, and the ride home. They didn’t tell anyone about what had happened, didn’t tell anyone about the boy. They were afraid of the teens, afraid people would think it was their fault, afraid because they were only eight and didn’t know what to do. They didn’t tell anyone about their desert silence.

  The sun is only beginning its climb in the east, but it’s midday hot. Joe’s pulse throbs in his temples and inside his cheeks. His backpack of meagre supplies already feels too heavy.

  There was never any word or news about the little boy. They did not go back over the ridge and to that boulder. They didn’t talk about it, didn’t make up stories about coyotes dragging the boy away, didn’t fool themselves into believing he was alive, didn’t discuss the possibilities or probabilities of the police finding him or the teens coming back for the body or the boy’s friends and family laying belated claim and bringing him back to Mexico. They didn’t turn the boy into a legend for the neighbourhood kids, didn’t tell anyone that the boy might still be there. They agreed to forget, their secret, bury it inside themselves, beneath as much passed time as they could.

  Despite the heat and his headache, which is a fire inside his brain, Joe walks for hours until the sun is directly above him and discerning direction becomes impossible. He finds a Desert Ironwood and sits under its thin canopy, desperate for shade. He has drunk half of his water supply already. Joe takes off his small backpack, drinks, and again goes back to that day all those years ago in another part of the same desert. Joe remembers the urge to pick up the boy’s teeth, those headstones, and put them in his pocket, an urge as inexplicable now as it was then.

  There are teeth in his pocket now: a small one lovingly wrapped in tinfoil, and another tooth, adult and big and ugly with roots like talons. That tooth is not wrapped in tinfoil or anything that would protect it. Neither tooth is his.

  Joe fights waves of dizziness and nausea. His fistful of pills isn’t helping. His gums are still bleeding and his right bicuspid is loose. If he pushes on the tooth with enough force there’s a wet sucking sound inside his mouth. There are pliers in his backpack. Earlier this morning, the pain was too much, unlike Jody, he couldn’t deal with it, and he stopped pulling on the tooth, but he’ll try the pliers again later, maybe when the sun goes down and when the pills kick in.

  Joe falls in and out of sleep throughout the afternoon and the temperature begins to drop. Maybe a quarter of a mile beyond his tree is a ridge, and just beyond that ridge is Mexico, he’s sure of it, and despite everything, he’s sure he can make it over that ridge. And maybe he’ll be strong enough to make it through the desert, his desert, and give back the teeth.

  It's Against the Law to Feed the Ducks

  Saturday

  Ninety-plus degrees, hours of relentless getaway traffic on the interstate, then the bumps and curves of Rural Route 25 as late afternoon melts into early evening, and it’s the fourth time Danny asks the question.

  “Daddy, are you lost again?”

  Tom says, “I know where we’re going, buddy. Trust me. We’re almost there.”

  Dotted lines and bleached pavement give way to a dirt path that roughly invades the woods. Danny watches his infant sister Beth sleep, all tucked into herself and looking like a new punctuation mark. Danny strains against his twisted shoulder harness. He needs to go pee but he holds it, remembering how Daddy didn’t say any mad words but sighed and breathed all heavy the last time he asked to stop for a pee break.

  Danny says, “Mommy, pretend you didn’t know I was going to be five in September.”

  Ellen holds a finger to her chin and looks at the car’s ceiling for answers. “Are you going to be ten years old tomorrow?”

  “No. I will be five in September.”

  “Oh, wow. I didn’t know that, honey.”

  Tom and Ellen slip into a quick and just-the-facts discussion about what to do for dinner and whether or not they think Beth will sleep through the night. Danny learns more about his parents through these conversations, the ones they don’t think he’s listening to.

  It’s dark enough for headlights. Danny counts the blue bug-zappers as their car chugs along the dirt road. He gets to four.

  “Daddy, what kinds of animals live in these woods?”

  “The usual. Raccoons, squirrels, birds.”

  “No, tell me dangerous animals.”

  “Coyotes, maybe bears.”

  Their car somehow finds the rented cottage and its gravel driveway between two rows of giant trees. Beth wakes screaming. Danny stays in the car while his parents unpack. He’s afraid of the bears. They don’t celebrate getting to the cottage like they were supposed to.

  Sunday

  They need a piece of magic yellow paper to go to Lake Winnipesauke. Danny likes to say the name of the lake inside his head. The beach is only a mile from their cottage and when they get there Danny puts the magic paper on the dashboard. He hopes the sun doesn’t melt it or turn it funny colours.

  Danny runs ahead. He’s all arms and legs, a marionette with tangled strings, just like Daddy. He claims a shady spot beneath a tree. He doesn’t know what kind of tr
ee. Ellen and Beth come next. Beth can only say “Daddy” and likes to give head butts. Tom is last, carrying the towels and shovels and pails and squirt guns and food. Danny watches his parents set everything up. They know how to unfold things and they know where everything goes without having to ask questions, without having to talk to each other.

  Danny likes that his parents look younger than everybody else’s parents, even if they are old. Danny is a round face and big rubber ball cheeks, just like Mommy. Ellen has a T-shirt and shorts pulled over her bathing suit. She won’t take them off, even when she goes into the water. She says, “You need sunscreen before you go anywhere, little boy.”

  Danny closes his eyes as she rubs it all in and everywhere. He’s had to wear it all summer long but he doesn’t understand what sunscreen really means. Sunscreen sounds like something that should be built onto their little vacation cottage.

  Danny is disappointed with the magic beach because there are too many other people using it. They all get in his way when he runs on the sand, pretending to be Speed Boy. And the older kids are scary in the water. They thrash around like sharks.

  Lunch time. Danny sits at the picnic table next to their tree, eating and looking out over Winnipesauke. The White Mountains surround the bowl of the lake and in the lake there are swimmers, boats, buoys, and a raft. Danny wants to go with Daddy to the raft, but only when the scary older kids are gone. Danny says Winnipesauke, that magical word, into his peanut butter and jelly sandwich. It tastes good.

  A family of ducks comes out of the water. They must be afraid of the older kids too. They walk underneath his picnic table.

  Ellen says, “Ducks!” picks up Beth, and points her at the ducks. Beth’s bucket hat is over her eyes.