Providence Noir

by Ann Hood

  Once, after he’d watched her race, she’d explained that her power came from her thighs, and she let him touch the muscles that bound her femur. The longest bone in the human body, she’d said, perfectly constructed, my secret weapon. The bone he’d found that afternoon: a femur. He knew it now. He shivered at the confluence of bones. Ahead of him a tunnel of black branches hung over the street, and he picked up the sad dog and ran.

  * * *

  In the morning, his father kissed the top of his head and asked, “Scrambled or fried?”

  The sun was a false beam of light in the kitchen; his father, as usual, was not the man he’d been the night before. Gordon hated this daily confusion, but allowed himself for those brief morning moments to love his father just a bit, even though it was a weakness, even though it was a waste. He couldn’t help himself; he would die if there were no one at all he could love. By evening, though, the man would be an asshole all over again. Sleep washed his mind clean, but the day’s patients, the fuck-up son, the runaway wife and deserting girlfriend, would dirty it once more.

  “Fried, please,” Gordon said. Every morning he made the tentative decision to be his father’s son once more.

  They talked about Gordon’s day ahead, conversation as seemingly benign as a baked potato. His father slid the eggs out of the pan onto Gordon’s plate and then brought last night’s untouched chicken to the table. He surgically sliced the meat from the breast without ever nicking the bone, peeled off the skin and draped it on his plate. The wishbone was a mysterious bracket waiting to be filled. Runny yolk clogged Gordon’s throat and he couldn’t swallow.

  His father looked over at him, grease winking on his upper lip. “Everything okay?” There was something different about the man this morning, his knife poised in the air stilled with fierce intent. “Something you want to talk about?”

  Gordon shook his head.

  “You do know Ellen doesn’t live in Providence anymore, right?”

  Gordon’s voice was strangled. He nodded. He thought he might be sick, the food beginning to rise. It was likely last night’s scotch revisiting.

  “Good. Because last night you mentioned looking for her on the river, so I wanted to make sure.”

  His father’s words hung over the table, a caution to not confuse desire with reality, because where would that lead you except straight to the loony bin? Gordon knew his father was examining him, but he couldn’t look back. He made a show about not being late for school, and as he left the room he had the chilling sense that his father knew everything about where Ellen had gone, and that he, Gordon, should know nothing, ask nothing, think nothing. Forget everything. But there it all was—the woman gone, his father still there, the unexplained. And the femur he couldn’t stop thinking about. It knocked against his head, his chest. Yes, he was sure his father knew all about the bone. But what about it?

  * * *

  After school, he rode across the highway, through downtown, and over to the boulevard. A bike lane had been put in the previous spring, but he still rode provocatively down the center of the street, comforted by the train of irritated drivers stacking up behind him. Let them wait, be late, be pissed. When he went to the maintenance building for his work assignment, a few of the regular guys were standing outside—not by choice, it appeared, given their glares and how they slapped the cold off their biceps. Fat John was waiting for him, his soccer-ball face pulsing with rage.

  “You got me into a shitload of trouble with your father last night,” Fat John said, slamming a clipboard against Gordon’s chest. “He ripped me a new one. Called me late and I was asleep. Do I need this? No, I do not need your father on my case.”

  “What the hell did I do?” Gordon asked. His chest stung from where it had been whapped, but he’d grown a skin so thick he wondered if anything could ever really penetrate him anymore.

  “Didn’t I tell you to keep your mouth shut about that goddamn bone?” Fat John said.

  “I just asked him—”

  “I was looking out for you before, but I’m done now. I have one piece of advice for you: don’t ask questions and do what you’re told.” When the man’s weight plummeted to the chair, he seemed, for a moment, defeated.

  “That’s two pieces of advice,” Gordon mumbled.

  He was sure that for once, just once, he hadn’t done anything wrong—or not very much wrong, in any case—but the indictment was simpler and bigger than that: he was wrong. And clearly everyone knew it. He imagined his unattached heart out bobbing on the Seekonk River’s surface, tepidly hopeful air keeping it afloat for a minute before it sank, the people in the loony bin watching the drowning without emotion. Fuck them. He looked at the clipboard. His assignment for the day was to pick up the goose shit on the side of the main entry road. There were always geese hanging out there, convincing the people arriving that they were entering serenity. Convincing people leaving that life was a scene out of a children’s book.

  “You’re kidding, right?” Gordon said. “I clean it up and the geese just come back and do it again? Is there a point?”

  When Fat John didn’t look up, Gordon gathered the wheelbarrow, a shovel, and an empty garbage can and made his way down the long drive. He parked his equipment on the swooping land by the side of the road. At first glance, there didn’t seem to be much goose shit, but the more he looked, the more there was, until it seemed that the stiff grass was dotted with a billion frozen pellets. Five geese eyed him warily.

  Soon, his gloveless hands throbbed from shoveling, and his knuckles cracked and ached from the cold. He leaned on the shovel to watch cars entering and leaving. The security guard who had caught him the night of the graffiti slowed his prissy electric car as he passed, and then spoke into a cell phone. Gordon gave him the finger, and didn’t go back to work. He felt conspired against, watched from every branch by his father’s agents. When he stopped to zip his windbreaker against a sudden dampness, he spotted a group of patients his age leaving the low building set back in the trees. They followed a man, straggling alone or in pairs, toward the main building. He knew they’d given in, these kids, they’d given up, and he winced in envy. For some, their thinking was out of their control, and that was okay too. That was real bravery, not this fake bravado of his, his smart-ass-ness.

  A girl who had been at the back of the group veered off into the deeper pines unnoticed. She crouched low, then ducked behind trees while the others continued on. When she emerged onto the side of the road, she looked right toward the boulevard and her escape. As if she were unsure what she wanted now that she saw her way out, she peered ahead, maybe hoping to see the bucolic geese and some comforting meaning in the ancient stone walls, maybe to take a deep breath and decide what to do next. She saw Gordon instead. He was shocked to find that they knew each other, not by name, but from the hallways at school. She was perfect, pretty but gaunt now in the dim afternoon light, untouchable by boys like him, and if she recognized him, she wasn’t going to show it. By the way she wiped her implacable eyes with her sleeve, it was as if she’d seen no one at all and nothing but the troubled and frightening minutes ahead. She pivoted and hurried back through the trees to join the frayed end of the group again.

  He wanted to tell her that he knew how confusion sometimes felt like the deepest sorrow—and hadn’t she been abandoned too?—but the words my father and femur agitated in his mouth like prisoners clawing to get out and tell their version of the truth. Behind him, the hissing geese advanced, urging him to find her, and he grabbed the shovel, crossed the road, and slipped into the tensely hushed grounds. It was almost dark by then and he’d lost the last glimpse of her red coat. He crept through the rose garden, all thorns and stubs in the cold. The grounds were a maze, each building he passed named for someone—Sawyer, Kane, Lippitt—whose life had been saved or destroyed here. It amazed him to realize that he didn’t know which building his father worked in, and that instead he’d pictured him in all of them, the harsh fluorescent lights in the hall
ways and rooms his own private and blameless guidance.

  Gordon had stayed away from the cafeteria since the graffiti episode, not sure if he wanted to see his drawings gone or still there, but now he crouched below the large windows that faced the woods. It was blaringly light on the other side of the spotless glass and he knew he couldn’t be seen. Inside, a few people ate at tables, while the woman at the register slept with her mouth open. Light rain made a whisking sound against his windbreaker and the cold rose up from beneath his sneakers. When he blew on his hands to keep them warm, he smelled blood on his knuckles. He smelled macaroni and cheese and the unmistakable muck of fish sticks from the exhaust fan. He hadn’t remembered until then how he’d eaten dinner there with his father in the months just after his mother had fled—hadn’t remembered even as he’d drawn such distress on the windows weeks earlier. He hadn’t thought about the metal tracks you pushed your tray along, a kind of consoling roller coaster for a seven-year-old. One night, looking back at the table where his father sat moving food around on his plate, Gordon had seen the man’s deadened expression, and it had entered his body and never left him. It was the same expression he’d seen when he asked his father about Ellen—why she’d left, where she’d gone—and had gotten no answer. His father was not grieving then—or now, Gordon suddenly understood with a sickening recall of the warmth he’d felt in the femur—but was the source of all grief itself.

  He left the cafeteria window and ran to the back of the farthest building, tumbling down the slope where he’d cleared the brambles. At the bottom, he retraced his steps along the river’s bank to the woods where he’d found the bone. He’d left the earth exposed the day before, but even in the near dark he could see that someone had filled in the bone’s shallow grave and scattered leaves to hide it. He aimed the shovel at the dirt, turning over clods and rocks and roots, the smell of wet nature like his father’s breath hanging over him. Pearlescent blisters appeared on his palms. There was a condom shed like snakeskin, and a piece of torn cotton, rusty with dirt, one edge puckered with elastic. He could pretend once more that he didn’t know exactly what he was seeing, but he knew. He stopped digging; he didn’t want to find anything else. When he reached the parking lot and the last building, he saw a body move behind a window, maybe the girl. Maybe she’d been watching him, waiting for him.

  It was dark when he approached the maintenance shed. Despite the cold, the front door was open and Fat John was bent in the light, sweeping the floor in a rhythm of subjugation, just as he’d been raking leaves in Gordon’s backyard years before.

  “You weren’t over by the main road where you were supposed to be.” His father had come up behind Gordon, and clapped a hand on his shoulder.

  The shock made his legs go watery. In the doorway, Fat John had stopped sweeping.

  “Yes, I was.” Gordon’s hand tightened on the shovel. He didn’t turn around.

  “No, that’s not true. I was just there looking for you.”

  “Then you didn’t look hard enough. Why don’t you ask the security guy you sent to check on me? He’ll tell you I was there.” He walked away from his father to the side of the building, and with his mouth now almost pressed against the brick siding, he realized he was trapped, hemmed in by equipment and his father.

  “You’re cold,” his father said. “You’re shivering. You should wear a coat. You’re too old for me to have to remind you about these things.”

  “I found the bone.”

  “What bone, sweetheart? I still don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Yes, you do.” His heart pounded monstrously. “What happened to Ellen?”

  “Happened? Why do you think something happened to her? Let’s go inside. I’m worried about you.”

  “The bone. Ellen’s bone. You know all about it.”

  When he turned to face his father, it seemed that they both realized at the same instant that Gordon was now the taller and stronger one.

  “I’m not going crazy,” Gordon said. “I’m not going crazy.”

  “No, you’re just confused. And sad. I understand, it’s okay. You’ll be okay.” His voice was so soft Gordon wasn’t sure he hadn’t imagined those words.

  “You killed her,” Gordon said. “You know it and Fat John knows it and I know it. You killed Ellen.”

  His father inhaled sharply. “Stop it, Gordon. Stop it now.”

  “Then where did she go?” he demanded. “She left you, she didn’t leave me.” He lifted the shovel above his head, forcing his father to walk backward toward the trees. His father said his name, and his gaze slid for a second to the white-black sky and the rain. Gordon wanted to walk his father all the way to the river, but he also wanted to lean against his chest and blubber. His hands burned at the shovel’s handle. They’d both been left, deserted and unloved by women, but they were nothing alike. His father was telling him to stop, to put the shovel down.

  Something yanked Gordon from behind and, with effortless power, threw him onto the ground several feet away. His head smacked the dirt and he bit his tongue.

  “What are you doing?” His father charged Fat John, a small body against a bigger one. “What the hell is wrong with you, Baranek?”

  Fat John appeared stunned by his own action, a dumb animal trained to save his master. Both men looked down at Gordon. His head felt split open and he wanted to sleep there on the cold ground, but he got to his feet and ran. He could save himself, even though he was stumbling, bumping into things, his father calling after him.

  Every building he tried was locked, but the back door to the cafeteria was propped open with a can of tomatoes. He slipped inside, the sound of the rain fading behind him. To the few people at the tables, he probably looked no different from the friends or relatives they were there to visit—confused, sick, grieving, terrified, sad. Maybe there was nothing strange to anyone sitting there about a wet, shivering boy who’d bitten his tongue, who was wandering through, then wandering out, shuffling up and down stairs, trying every door. Gordon knew that if he were asked who or what he was looking for, he might say femur, but he might also say father, mother, girl, or even future.

  MISSING SRI

  BY MARIE MYUNG-OK LEE

  Brown University

  “Sussannah!”

  The sun glinted off the awnings on Thayer Street, temporarily blinding her. Bead Store, hookah bar, Urban Outfitters, movie theater—practically a movie set of a college town.

  Brent was running from across the street. He was a big goof, did things like call her Soo-JZAH-nah after he noticed that’s how her Korean immigrant parents pronounced it (and probably why they accidentally put an extra s in Sussannah when filling out the birth certificate). But right now he looked dead serious.

  Brent had to pause, hands on his knees, and catch his breath next to a sign that said, Congratulations Brown seniors! We have mango bubble tea!!!! “It’s Sri . . .” he panted.

  Sri? Her heart jumped. “Is he okay? Did something happen?”

  “He’s missing.”

  “Missing . . .” She paused. Sri was always missing. As recently as Friday night, in fact. His best one so far. They’d all gone to a campus party. Only he’d left without telling anyone, sidled into the Rock—dead drunk—right before closing, curled himself like a chipmunk into a carrel, and somehow slept undetected by library security until morning. In the meantime, they couldn’t find him, panicked, called Brown security, fanned out looking for him all night, yelling his name—they’d done everything but dredged the shore off India Point Park. “Don’t you have any consideration for others’ feelings?” she’d screamed at him when they found him (adorably, she had to admit) disheveled, stumbling into the bright sunlight of day out of the world’s ugliest college library. “I got bored,” he had replied, as if that were a perfectly reasonable explanation. “I ran out of pot, and I couldn’t find any of you, so I left.”

  Sussannah disliked poseurs who used their so-called artistic proclivities and vic
es as a lazy excuse to forego basic social niceties, but Sri really was moody, mysterious, easily absorbed and distracted, exactly the kind of person who might follow a butterfly for miles, miss lunch and dinner, just to see where it would end up. (That, and he was also a pothead.)

  “Text someone next time,” she’d said, as if that would help. Sri hated technology and was convinced cell phones cooked your insides like microwaves. So even if he had his phone, he’d never turn it on. Not helpful. But very Sri.

  So she wasn’t panicked now. Not yet.

  “I had dinner with him at the Ratty yesterday”—and she had actually seen him later than that, but not in a context she wanted to mention.

  “April said she didn’t hear him come in last night.”

  “April,” Sussannah groaned. “Great.” April, the old lurker of Environmental House.

  Sussannah and her best friend Marla had ended up at Environmental House only because they’d gone into the junior housing lottery together and were awarded the worst—the worst—numbers probably in the history of the lottery. This meant the old janitor’s closet in Pembroke or something. Then Marla, who had a campus job in admissions, was tipped off from her friend who worked in housing that Brown was opening up a new residence: Environmental House. A refurbished Victorian that had once been the Slavic Studies office. It would mean a real bedroom in a real house. Some shared housework, but they could still be on the meal plan and cook if they wanted to avoid “Jambalaya Nite” at the Ratty (there was a reason students since the 1800s referred to the Refectory as the RatFactory, Ratty for short). So attractive an option that they talked Sri and Brent into joining them in the coed house. The only problem was none of them were particularly environmental. But no one asked them to swear on a Bible that they would devote their lives to Greenpeace (“I don’t club seals,” Sri affirmed), and they got in.