All I Have in This World

by Michael Parker

  Dr. Brock lived only six blocks from his office and on all but the wintriest or rainiest days he walked to work. The Buick sat in the drive. His children were getting older—he had two boys and a girl—and in a year his oldest son, Matthew, would have his license. He was not about to give Matthew a car. He himself had not owned a car until he got out of med school, and he felt it prudent to wait and see how the boy handled himself before conferring on him even the occasional use of the car.

  But Matthew was a good boy. He’d always been good, if quiet, the type who read on long car trips and could be counted on to entertain his younger siblings if need be. His freshman year he had gone out for the track team at his father’s suggestion—his father had run some in high school but worked after school at a downtown hotel and was not able to join the team—but it was not until Matthew gravitated toward cross-country that his talent emerged. Dr. Brock took off a couple of afternoons when the meets were in town, for he loved to watch his son run, and he was impressed by the boy’s training regimen, which included long runs in the early morning, well before breakfast, out past the river onto the levee that ran above the misty, moonlit fields.

  And then something happened. Dr. Brock was never sure what it was. It might have been nothing, for even though Dr. Brock was by nature and training a scientist, and diagnosing even the most niggling illness involved isolating symptoms and ascertaining, through questioning the patient, how long the symptoms had been noticeable, he also knew, from dealing with the depressed and anxious, for which he was only minimally trained, that there is not always a single event that causes someone to plummet. And yet he would always wonder if something had happened to cause his boy to retreat. He was so busy that he barely noticed how withdrawn the boy had become, and he did not even remember his wife’s alarm, nor did he remember trying to calm her alarm with rote banalities about the moodiness of teenagers, hormones, burgeoning emotions.

  Matthew’s grades slipped. He stopped going out with his friends. He kept his door closed, and from that closed door, walking down the hallway at night, his father heard music he did not like the sound of, music so slow and thick it reminded him of a morphine drip. No more morning runs. In fact, it was hard—according to his wife, for Dr. Brock was up and out of the house early—to get Matthew out of bed.

  Dr. Brock was reading the paper one Saturday morning when Matthew emerged sullen and disheveled, smelling of sleep and stale bedroom. He sat down at the table, his arms crossed, his eyes glassy and trained on his lap. Dr. Brock was reading the sports page. He came upon the results of the cross-country invitational held the week before and did not see his son’s name. He assumed the boy had had a bad day—inevitable, given how sporadically his son had been training—so he asked what had happened.

  “I quit the team.”

  “When?”

  “Weeks ago, Dad.”

  Then it was Dr. Brock’s time to snap. He was not like the boy—he needed for something to happen before he felt one way or the other—and this was enough of an event for him to yell at his son in a way he never had before. And when his son said nothing at all in his defense, when he just sat there, looking so glum, as if he had not a roof over his head nor parents who bought him clothes and fed him, as if he had reason to feel sad about something, Dr. Brock yanked the boy out of his seat and told him to get his act together and quit feeling sorry for himself.

  Matthew fled to his room. Dr. Brock’s wife came in the kitchen, looked at Dr. Brock for a while, waiting for an explanation. Finally she said she was taking the younger kids shopping with her. Dr. Brock took a shower and walked down to his office to catch up on paperwork. For the first hour he was too anxious and distracted by what had happened with Matthew to get much done, but he was unused to second-guessing his actions, especially at home, and in time he grew sluggish, as the emotional energy he’d spent worrying over what had happened had depleted him physically as well. He dozed in his chair. Around five his wife called him from home. The Buick was gone, she said, and so was Matthew.

  Thereafter followed the hardest five weeks of Dr. Brock’s life. He felt as if there were fans inside him, one where his heart ought to be, a couple of smaller ones in his head, just behind his forehead, down near the nape of his neck. Their blades whirred unceasingly, operating not unlike the fan in an engine, designed to switch on automatically to cool things down.

  Everywhere Dr. Brock searched for answers. He spoke to Matthew’s classmates, his former teammates, his teachers, the neighbor kids. Late one night he convinced himself that the Buick was to blame. He ought never to have bought a used vehicle. Someone else’s misery seeped out of it.

  He knew this was not rational. He was a man of science. Yet as he entertained the idea, the fans slowed to a chop and finally to a point where each blade was singly distinguishable. It helped to imagine the previous owner as someone too irresponsible to keep up the payments. Probably a drug addict or someone on welfare. Someone who did not learn from his mistakes and who had probably gone out and purchased another vehicle he could ill afford. Now his boy had taken off in a vehicle cursed by indolence and greed.

  The police turned up nothing. Dr. Brock was outraged by their response, which ran from condescending to indifferent. How, he asked them, could a boy in a light blue Buick, a boy with only his learner’s permit, disappear? Likely he switched the tags, said the detective in charge, or had the car repainted. But Dr. Brock said this was ludicrous. His son was not a criminal, he would not steal someone else’s plates, and it was doubtful that he even knew how to unscrew the plates. And how could he afford to have the car repainted? Nothing was missing from his room, according to Dr. Brock’s wife, but some clothes. He did not even have a job, his afternoons and weekends having been taken up with training. It made no sense that he had managed to hide out for five weeks.

  Then Dr. Brock got a call from a detective with the Austin, Texas, police department. The Buick had been pulled over in the middle of the night for running a stop sign and the driver had fled the scene on foot and had evaded capture. Dr. Brock got off the phone and made a reservation and flew out the next morning, spare key to the Buick in his pocket. He would find his son and bring him home.

  The car was impounded. Dr. Brock took a cab from the airport to the police station, assuming that the car would be nearby or that a policeman might drive him to fetch it, but in fact it was across town, on the outskirts of the city, which required another cab ride, a long wait, more money. At the lot he was met by a detective who looked at him with contempt. Why? Because his son ran away? Had he not encountered in his line of work children who do things their parents would rather they not? Were his days not filled with people who did not conform to the laws and statutes of the republic? Dr. Brock explained as best he could what had happened, which was difficult, as he had no idea what had happened. His son was fine, then Dr. Brock bought a used Buick, then his son became sullen and withdrawn, then he was gone. Five weeks passed. The car turned up in Austin. As a story it made no sense. But Dr. Brock could not elaborate, even though the detective stood in silence waiting for him to continue.

  Dr. Brock decided he hated Austin, Texas. It was a little too pleased with itself for his taste. He had noticed scores of young people and perhaps this is why Matthew was here. He knew it was a college town and the state capital, but coming in from the airport, he had driven through neighborhoods of squat, low, ramshackle houses with badly fenced yards and stores peddling piñatas and Mexican food. What he saw seemed more like a struggling city than a college town. Beyond the lot where the car was impounded, the land flattened out and an unseasonably hot wind kicked up dust, and Dr. Brock found it deeply unappealing.

  The detective was asking him for a description of his son. Dr. Brock did his best to comply, but it was not easy to describe someone you see every day of your life for fourteen years.

  The detective was checking his details against a report on a clipboard.

  “I will say this for your boy,” h
e said. “He sure can run. The officers who pulled him over said they’d never seen anything like that boy running.”

  Dr. Brock never cried and he had never even come close to crying in public. The fans in his chest and head ran so high that it was hard to hear what the detective was saying to him. Something about some magazines? Dr. Brock nodded. The detective said, “Okay, but I’m just saying, we left them where we found them. Some deeply nasty shit.”

  The detective led Dr. Brock to the car. Dr. Brock pulled out the spare key and was about to unlock the door when he noticed the back window was rolled down. The car was filthy, inside and out. The back floorboards were invisible beneath plastic bags and pop and beer bottles and across the seat stretched a couple of ratty blankets. Dr. Brock said to the detective, “Is it okay if I . . .?” and the detective shrugged and walked away to a nearby pickup. He turned and leaned against the truck bed and crossed his arms and studied Dr. Brock as he climbed into the back of the Buick. In the backseat Dr. Brock rummaged beneath the trash and found a backpack that seemed familiar, out of which he pulled a gray T-shirt he recognized and some socks and underwear. He reached under the seat and pulled out a stack of magazines. They had names like Honcho and Mandate. He opened one. He closed it. He was horrified but the horrified part of him was almost immediately blotted out by a voice faint but swiftly growing broken and loud. Is that all, Mattie? Goodness, Son, is that it? I would have learned to live with that in a matter of days. No, hours. That is nothing, Matthew. That is just . . . Matthew, why did you not just . . . ?

  Dr. Brock sat in the car though he hated the car. He thought that he might never see his son again and he thought that it was not his fault. When he got out of the car he walked past the detective, whom he also hated. The detective said, “You’re not going to take your car?” Dr. Brock said, “No. I never want to see it again. I don’t care what you do with it. When you find my son, I want my son. You call me when you find my son. I want my son. I don’t want that car. I don’t want to ever see that car again.”

  Pinto Canyon, Texas, 2004

  During Maria’s silence, after she stopped in the middle of the street and slid across the seat, leaving Her Lowness unmanned, Marcus, driving them out of town, went from one hand to the other. On the one hand, dirty mop water rose beneath the streets and would any minute bubble up from the grates and career the Buick into a thirsty wash. Marcus must have summoned the surge, even though he had taken action to redress not only his present predicament but a deep rent in his psyche long in need of repair: He had testified on the back of a bloodstained bag in order to avoid another folly. He had rejected impulse and the present tense for forethought and prudence. He had outwitted stasis, only to have it swamp him less than a half mile from the scene of the crime.

  The other hand wasn’t so much a hand as a finger that he could not quite put on the way he felt, driving into the country, Maria riding shotgun. It had to be Her Lowness because Marcus, when out for a ride, had always preferred male company to female. Men just put their elbows out the window and either smoked or didn’t. It never occurred to them to switch on the radio and waste good wayside scenery mashing buttons that made different voices and instruments spill tinny from the speakers. The countryside flashing past was enough to occupy their minds. No need to talk small or wag chin.

  Women—whose company Marcus in all other respects preferred overwhelmingly—did not understand the concept of an aimless drive. When he said to a woman, Let’s go to ride (for that is how they said it back in Silt, not, Let’s go for a ride) she would say, Why? Where are we going? How long will it take?

  Driving around with Maria was different. Maybe coming from a place so vast and open and unpopulated, where one had to travel more than a hundred miles to attend a high school football game at the home field of the closest rival, had made Maria so uncharacteristically talented at going to ride.

  That was what Marcus was thinking during the first few miles out of town: that it was the car plus the girl that made the ride so pleasurable. Curiously, her lack of explanation—for it was a little odd, her pulling over in the street and abandoning the wheel to him after he had left her a note relinquishing his rights to the Buick—did not make him anxious or impatient. Clearly she needed him in a way that she both had not before and could not yet articulate.

  Then, twenty minutes into it, Maria asked him for a favor. “Sure,” said Marcus, as was his wont when asked for favors. He had not been raised to ascertain the nature of the favor before agreeing to it. In this case Maria’s request for him to keep the car annoyed him. He found it rote and insincere. He had relinquished his rights, and here she was, responding in kind. You go. No, you go. Was this what passed for partnership? For co-ownership? Theirs was not a democracy; how could it ever be equitable? He’d claimed Sunday mornings because of his love of a Sunday morning cruise, but he had lied to her when she asked if he was a churchgoer. Therefore the partnership was tainted from the get-go.

  Marcus was distressed by the notion that, having taken the great risk of buying the car together, they were now fighting to give it away. That a part of him wanted to take her up on her offer distressed him even further. He tried to remember how he’d felt just an hour ago in the parking lot of the Dairy Queen. Monte Gale was a mistake, but it took only his signature to redress his error. Was it even plausible for him to think that he would never again act on impulse?

  As for their partnership, the equality of it: no relationships, business or romantic, were free from the manipulations of desire. So when, so quickly after offering him the Buick, she suggested a sightseeing trip around Texas, Marcus did not allow himself to say what he was thinking: that she offered the car only so he would refuse it again and she could, with impunity, ask him to turn around and then dump him in front of his hotel and take off to wherever it was she really wanted to go.

  When he was a kid, Marcus had favored, above comic strips and the sports page, the district court docket of the local newspaper. Only documented trouble engaged his eleven-year-old interest. He had no idea what many of the charges were, and he did not want to reveal his secret passion to his parents, so he came up with his own definitions. Uttering he confused at first with muttering, mumbling. He imagined a sheriff’s deputy leading him handcuffed from his social studies class, his mouth trembling with muffled oath and supplication. Though he was old enough to know better, when he saw someone charged with check kiting he imagined wings of checks Scotch-taped to a stick, soaring skyward, and a criminal dangling one-armed from the line, laughing at the cops in hot pursuit on the ground below. Breaking and entering, though less metaphorical, scared Marcus no less, for it seemed every place he wanted to be was locked, and he possessed neither key nor combination.

  What was in his heart that drew him to such fascination with broken law and due punishment? He understood even then that his sin was not original, that it was a cliché, that he was born with it like the rest of the world, and that he would live with it always. And yet there was one phrase that seemed to apply specifically to Marcus and that kept him up nights: failure to appear. How it terrified him, as all he wanted then and had wanted his whole life was the one thing he thought himself incapable of: to be present, to show up, to participate.

  Maybe she wanted him to say, Okay, you win, you can have the car. But it felt just as likely, as they took the ramp onto the interstate, that she needed him to show up.

  “That is, if you think the car will make it that far,” Maria said, and Marcus, one hand outweighing the other, understood that walking away from the Buick and its co-owner was far worse than committing another Monte Gale. When Marcus replied that, with proper maintenance, Her Lowness could get them to Alberta, Maria did not say that she wanted to go to San Antonio, not Alberta. Marcus relaxed his grip on the wheel of what seemed not a car but a pronoun made plural so that he might remain present, if not a willing participant.

  THEY WERE IN OZONA, three hours east of home, before the guilt Maria felt for no
t telling Marcus the truth about this trip outweighed all the rationalizations she’d concocted to keep it a secret. Showing him Texas—especially the Alamo—would never have motivated her to leave town. Offering him the car was also calculated, for she had read his note and she knew he would refuse her, but she banked on her offer making him more inclined to go along.

  Yet telling him to take the car after he had tried to give it to her seemed almost obligatory; she would have taken the car had she not been keeping something from him. Pretending to be some sort of tour guide for the state of Texas, however, was ludicrous. She lacked both the knowledge and the enthusiasm, having been gone for so long and having missed not the state itself but her corner of it, the only part that was real. Sand, rock, creosote, agave, and sunsets so brilliant, due to much dust and little humidity, that she used to make Randy pull onto the shoulder so they could watch them as they would a drive-in movie, the horizon their own endless screen. The way the train sounded in the night, no trees or towns for miles to mute its whistle. The things that were real to her, that were hers, would not be real to Marcus, for they were images, not facts. He had said he had his degree in history. He would depend on her for dates and the names of things.