Citrus County

by John Brandon

  Toby backed into the woods and rounded the house and advanced to the edge of the yard. He would either get caught red-handed or he wouldn’t. He stood tall while he strode, bracing for motion lights. A hot coal had been burning in his guts for years and it was about to be doused. He passed a rusted grill that had been turned into a birdfeeder. A kiddie pool. Still no lights. Toby donned his mask and it fit superbly. It made him feel skilled. He watched, through the eyeholes, his fingers come to rest on the handle of the sliding-glass door. He watched, through the eyeholes of the snug black mask, the door budge. Toby slid the door inch by inch. He wouldn’t have to jimmy a window. He was going to walk right in. He stuck his head inside first—a flat, oaty smell. It was the dining room. He breathed the baked-hay scent. He could hear Shelby’s voice from the porch, but he couldn’t hear what she was saying. It sounded like the voices that came to Toby in the bunker. He could hear Shelby’s voice and he could somehow hear that the father was listening to her with care, leaning in. One of them could get up to use the bathroom or get something to eat or something to drink or get a sweatshirt at any time. Toby could hear the scrape of a chair on the wood porch at any moment. He could hear it now, or now. But he didn’t. He heard the refrigerator humming in the next room. All of Shelby’s things were in this house, all her army pants and all the books she read. And her sister. Her sister was in here, eyes drawing closed under her red bangs.

  Then everything went fast. Toby slipped down the hallway toward Kaley’s room. He hung strips of duct tape from his forearm. If someone came in from the porch now he was cornered. He pulled the door open and Kaley lurched in her bedding. She seemed to know what was happening, that she was becoming part of something. She tried to collect a breath, but it took her too long. Toby had the tape around her head. He had her dumped in the rucksack, her top half first, her kicks thudding mutely against the mattress and then the carpet. She was a real child. She was a person made of flesh, her terror pure and clumsy.

  Toby zipped the pack and shouldered it and its lightness exhilarated him. He was strong through the hallway, strong through the dining room. He heard nothing but his own blood. The wholesome smell was gone. Toby didn’t bother to close the sliding door. Patio. Patchy lawn. Woods and woods. The breeze was at his back, the ground under him firm. He ran and then he jogged and then he walked and then he felt the gnarled roots under his feet and then, halfway to the bunker, he rested under a giant fern. He had to open the pack and tape Kaley’s ankles because she was kicking the hell out of his back. His saliva was foamy. His feet were sloshing in sweat from all the socks. He’d done all of it. He had put a cot and a blanket and a pillow and a bunch of water and snacks and a flashlight and some clothes and a tight-lidded bucket in the bunker and now he’d snatched a little girl. From the moment he’d seen Kaley on the playground to now had been one long afternoon, and night had finally fallen.

  Toby strode toward the house on a wanton trajectory. He would be proud, he knew. Soon enough. The mission was accomplished. He was tired in a buoyant way, like for once he would be able to really sleep. He yanked sharp breaths in through his nose, smelling every hidden thing in the woods, trying to get ready to return to his regular life and act regular. All he could think of was lying in bed with his secret. All he could think of was the very near future.

  When Toby got to the house, Uncle Neal was on the porch in his rocking chair. He was slugging from Toby’s thermos of soda, making calls like an owl. The ashtray on the floor next to him was overflowing. Toby could hear the police radio from inside, the station his uncle listened to at night—the uncondensed blotter, he called it. He couldn’t make out the words. His uncle said knowing what the cops were up to helped him relax. Toby had listened to it before, and it was mostly boring. It was a bunch of speeding tickets and the occasional disturbance at a party, and when something important did happen, it was told in codes and jargon, in voices trained to be calm. Hell hadn’t broken loose yet, it didn’t sound like. It sounded like the same old chatter.

  Toby stretched out on a lounge chair with no cushions.

  Uncle Neal rotated his head without moving his shoulders. “Hoo,” he said. “Hoo.”

  Toby’s eyes wandered to the ashtray.

  “Dried banana peels,” Uncle Neal told him. He peered into the thermos. “There’s something in this shit. Did you put anything in this soda?”

  Toby said, “Like what?”

  “Something for the memory.”

  “The memory?”

  “You’re not poisoning me, are you?”

  Toby didn’t answer.

  Uncle Neal dug something out of his nose. “Some kid introduced me to banana peels when I was your age. I was in gifted. Our teacher was hot.”

  Toby couldn’t imagine Uncle Neal being a different age, being a kid or an old person. He couldn’t imagine anyone different than they were. Toby was meant to be in eighth grade, pretty much an orphan. Kaley was meant to be kidnapped, meant to be stashed in the bunker. Everyone he saw every day was meant to be in Citrus County, fated to be carrying out whatever fruitless act they happened to be engaged in.

  “There were twins in my gifted class. They teach college now.” Uncle Neal hoisted the thermos and paused. “And this ugly Chinese girl, she writes for a newspaper in Boston. This guy Rob said he wanted to be a rocket scientist—works for NASA.”

  “Can I have some of that?”

  Uncle Neal handed the thermos to Toby, who glugged its contents until his throat burned.

  “What were you supposed to do?” Toby asked.

  “I don’t know anymore.”

  Toby took a few more sips of the soda. It was making him thirstier. He was glad he’d done what he was supposed to. He’d filled the bunker. He wasn’t like Uncle Neal.

  “They kicked me out of gifted,” Uncle Neal said. “I got caught leaving fake suicide notes. Kicked me right out.”

  Toby could still perform his end of a conversation with his uncle. He was the same person, just with a big secret that would give him strength. He could still do everything he had to do. “Were the notes supposed to be from other students?” he asked. “Kids you didn’t like?”

  “I’d make the person up and leave the note at the bus station or a motel.”

  “How come? Why suicide notes?”

  Uncle Neal cut an eye at Toby. “Think I know? You think that’s the kind of thing you do for a known reason?”

  “Well, how’d you get found out?”

  “Not by telling anybody. The school cop just figured it out. I guess they do that now and again—crack a case.”

  Tomorrow, Toby knew, every cop in the county would be scurrying around looking for Kaley, looking for Kaley’s abductor, and this didn’t worry Toby in an immediate way. The cops didn’t seem a part of any of this to Toby. They were strangers. What Toby did was none of their business. What came over their radio might as well have been transmitted from the moon.

  Toby heard a clap of thunder and then raindrops panned the roof.

  He looked over at his uncle, whose shoulders had gone limp. His head was sagging to one side. After a minute, Toby said his uncle’s name and got no response.

  The next morning, Toby began the walk to the county line, to an immense bookstore where he could watch the news away from Uncle Neal. The few kind slaps of winter had landed and the red marks were fading. Now it would be summer again. Before long, Toby would have to put an air conditioner in the bunker. He’d have to get a little air conditioner and a little generator and he’d have to lug the generator back to the house and sneak it into his bedroom to charge it every, what, couple days? He probably didn’t even have enough money saved. Toby’s mind was blundering. He’d concocted the kidnapping and looked forward to it and executed it, and now he felt unconvinced that it had occurred. It hadn’t sunk in, was all. He felt like if he went down in the bunker right now there’d be nothing but his folding chair. There was weight in Toby’s joints as he put one foot in front of the other. He h
ad to grit his teeth and walk through his doubt like it was a cloud of car exhaust.

  Toby stayed east of Route 19, tacking northward behind stores selling above-ground pools, used tires. A defunct dance studio. Toby had no clue how Citrus County stayed afloat. The roads were cracking and pine trees were toppling onto buildings. Toby hoped that when the manatees gave up the ghost or a hurricane finally got a bead on Citrus County, trucks of guys would come down from Tallahassee and dynamite the place and slide it off into the Gulf of Mexico to sink.

  The bookstore was cavernous and had few customers. It was past lunchtime already, the lazy hours. Toby hurried past the bank of registers in the front, where he was smirked at by a college-aged girl with a dark front tooth. The TV was nestled back among the periodicals and was always tuned to the news from Tampa. Toby positioned a bench. He waited through patter about the nation’s top companies to work for, about the poaching of rare orchids. The anchorman grew serious and spoke the words “Citrus County.” He spoke Kaley’s name. Photos of her appeared next to the anchorman’s head. There were those eyes, just as they’d been when Toby nabbed her, round as saucers. The anchorman outlined the search efforts, just getting underway, led in large part by Kaley’s father, a mosquito control worker. There had been hopes, when the girl had first been discovered missing, that she’d left the house on her own and wandered into the woods, sleepwalking or something, playing a game, but overnight those hopes had lost steam. Now churches were pledging help, along with Little League teams and off-duty cops from surrounding counties. The FBI bloodhounds were on their way, but the woods were fouled with ATV tracks, the personal effects of vagrants, the droppings of stray mutts, abandoned appliances, the remains of bonfires, beer and liquor bottles. Pictures of Kaley were to be tacked to every power pole for miles. There was talk of roadblocks. Toby didn’t know if the response to what he’d done was so swift because this type of thing never happened or because it happened a lot. The kidnapper, according to the authorities, was likely a white male between thirty and fifty-five.

  Toby was in one spot, still, while the world rushed around him. He felt powerful. He’d thrown the county into a commotion, had given everyone something important to do. He’d dealt a blow to the wonderful Shelby Register, the only person in the whole county worth injuring. He’d probably made her a different girl. She wouldn’t be so sure of herself now. She’d be lost like everyone else. And the searchers were looking for the wrong culprit. They were looking for a dime-a-dozen perverted old man when they should’ve been looking for an adolescent the likes of which they’d never fathomed.

  The bookstore smelled like dust. It didn’t smell like books. Racks and racks of magazines stared out at nothing. The anchorman took a moment to regain his solemnity. He informed the viewers that Kaley’s father’s plea to the kidnapper would be re-aired in a matter of minutes. Toby imagined all the news crews crawling the perimeter of the Registers’ property, spying just like he had. He could see the reporters picking at their hairdos in car windows, the women stumbling in their pumps and the men pulling their jackets on and off. It was the news crews, not the cops, who’d found Toby’s footprints, the big Velcro shoes. They knew where Toby had crouched. They thought Toby was a dirty old man. They thought he was in Alabama by now. Still, Toby had to worry that through dumb luck someone would happen on the bunker. There was plenty of dumb luck in the world, even if none of it ever alighted on Toby.

  Shelby’s dad slumped forward, his hands clutched loosely in front of him. He introduced himself as Ben Register. He seemed okay. He was a man in charge of a huge project he strongly believed in. He knew Kaley was still alive, he said. He instructed the kidnapper to drop his daughter at a mall or restaurant or school and speed off, drive somewhere and let the girl go free. She was a problem that was easy to get rid of. Kaley’s dad stressed the fact that the kidnapper, at this point, could still get away with this, but the longer he kept Kaley the more chance he’d get caught. Kaley’s dad didn’t blame the kidnapper for whatever evil he was in the grips of. He took time to look into several cameras. “Every wrong thing you’ve ever done can be in the past. Now you’ve got a chance to do something right.”

  It felt strange to Toby, knowing that this man was talking to him. The man didn’t know it, but everything he was saying into all those cameras and tape recorders was meant for Toby and Toby only. Ben Register’s words were going to float away on the wind and land in the Gulf somewhere. They meant nothing. Every wrong thing Toby had done was in the past. He’d finally done something he was meant to do.

  The news people, after only a couple days, were showing the effects of spending their nights at the Best Western, eating their dinners at the Chinese buffet, drinking gallons of cheap coffee. Out the window, Shelby caught the cameramen playing cards. They were like actors paid to play cameramen. Nothing Shelby saw seemed genuine. Colors seemed too vivid, the air charged. The sky above was in disarray. There was no sun, as if the sun had been a bomb and it had gone off and blown shreds of cloud into every corner of the world.

  Shelby did not want false hope. She did not want to be in shock or denial. She did not want to wait around while her heart hoped and hoped until it was too tired. Shelby wanted to open the front door and scream at all the people out in the road in front of her house. She wanted to tell them to take their decorum and concern and indignation and go the hell home. She wanted the jaded cameramen to go film something else. She wanted to tell the cops who kept coming into her house to check on her and to get themselves glasses of water that they weren’t welcome. She wanted to tell all the searchers that her family wasn’t one that had a scare and then had it turn out all right. Her family was the type that got it right between the eyes. She wanted to tell the reporters that there’d be nothing further to report, that her father would not do an interview and she would not do an interview and her sister would not be found. Shelby’s chest was tight as a fist. She didn’t want to be here. She wanted to be out in the middle of a desert, or out on a vast tundra somewhere.

  She could already see what this meant for her and her father, but she could not understand that her sister was gone. She could see that for the rest of her life she would be forced to imagine what Kaley would’ve been like at this age, at this age, at this age, but she could not shake the feeling that her sister was hiding somewhere in the house, that Shelby would open a cabinet in the kitchen to get dishwashing liquid and Kaley would be crouching under there, grinning. Shelby could not grasp that this had happened to her family, her family which, if anything was fair, should’ve been immune to more tragedy. She would never grasp it.

  When Shelby had come in from the porch to get her father some crackers and had walked into the kitchen and opened the fridge, she’d known something wasn’t right. Before she’d looked through the archway and seen the open back sliding door, she’d known that something didn’t smell right in the house. Smells were missing and there were extra smells. She’d thought of all the mosquitoes that must be coming in. She’d walked over and put her hand on the handle but she hadn’t slid the door shut. She had extended her arm out into the humid night air, which was moist but was the exact same temperature as the air in the house. Inside, the house was a wilderness. The walls and roof and foundation meant nothing. They encased a wilderness.

  Shelby had been through this in Indiana. She knew that eventually she would go back to school and when she did everyone would be cautious around her, every teacher and every coach and every student. They would all be scared to say the wrong thing. Shelby would be like a bully in the hallways; everyone would hush when she neared. She would be expected to fall back into a regular routine, but her routine would have no chance at feeling regular. And then there was the time between now and then. There was today. Shelby wanted to find her sister hiding in the hamper, but her sister was not in the hamper. Shelby wanted to be spared this. She wanted everyone to get away from her house and for the world to be different than it was.

  It had quit r
aining but the sun had not returned. Leftover drops fell ponderously from tree branches and the spider webs looked like strings of dull crystals. Everyone milled about on the edge of the woods. There were a couple bumbling dogs—not trained hounds by any stretch, just lazy mutts who wouldn’t know their asses from a drumstick. Toby was going out with one of the baseball teams, a JV team or something, on a search. He wanted to see this firsthand, to see what was working against him. This was what everyone else was doing—the normal people, the innocent. They were helping with the search.

  The other kids were about Toby’s age. The guy who appeared to be the coach, a guy with long sideburns who wore a jersey that said new zealand, stood to the side of the crowd talking in low tones to a woman in fancy shoes. The woman shifted her weight gingerly, her heels scraping into the pebbly ground. No one paid attention to Toby. He stood by and observed as the team, in a graceful fashion that didn’t seem intentional, split into two groups. Toby didn’t know if it was the infield separating from the outfield, or pitchers from position players, or whether, like a middle school, a baseball team contained cliques. He was surprised at how disorganized and lax an affair this was. He was surprised, also, that the kids were wearing regular clothes. He’d pictured all the baseball teams picking through the brush in their uniforms and cleats. He’d pictured the Boy Scouts, whose searches were being held in a different part of the county, covering ground in those humiliating outfits with the red scarves.

  One of the groups abruptly mobilized, and Toby hurried over and joined their ranks. They didn’t have an adult with them. They slipped into the woods with no fanfare or goodbyes, leaving the other half of the team and the dogs behind. These kids didn’t seem surprised by Toby’s presence at the rear of their procession, didn’t say anything to him or give any strange looks. There was no plan to the turns the group took, no leader, no discussion. They cut through the woods on the path of least resistance. This was another activity, like church or school, something expected of them that they weren’t going to complain about. Toby recognized a few of the kids. He’d gone to grade school with them. He could remember when he’d been more or less the same as everyone else. It seemed a very long time ago. That was before every kid Toby had known became a straight-backed kiss-ass or a troublemaker. These were the choices. They all had to study and eat their green beans and jump back in line at the slightest throat-clearing, like these baseball kids, or they had to vandalize Green Key Beach and shoplift and give old security guards a hard time.