“What do you mean?”
Marty cleared his throat, trying to pick his words discriminately. “I don’t know how to put it exactly. His face was just blank—like he was wearing a mask or something, but it wasn’t no mask. It was like he was staring at something really far away, like he wasn’t even looking at me. It was like a doll’s face…”
The pit in Ben’s stomach deepened.
“It all felt real weird, him just standing and staring like that. I didn’t know what to do really, so I just kinda waved at him.” Marty raised his hand and Ben watched his palm rock slowly back and forth. “He stuck his hand up a little and waved back, and I said, ‘What’re you doing out here?’ But he didn’t answer. I asked him if he was alright, if he needed help, but he didn’t answer me still. Then I asked where his momma and daddy were. I took one step toward him, and he just ran off into the woods yelling for his momma.”
“You didn’t go after him?”
“No…No, I didn’t want to chase a little kid through the woods, ya know? He was calling for his mom, and I figured it wouldn’t look too good for me if she seen me running after. So I just shrugged it off and kept walking home.”
Ben exhaled with exasperation, his fingers interlaced and crowning his head.
“But I kept picturing the kid’s face. It looked real familiar to me, but I couldn’t pin it down. Got weirder and weirder the more I thought about it. Why would he be out there? Why would a mom have her little kid out in the woods? He was so filthy. My momma would beat my ass when I came home that filthy as a young’n…
“I thought he maybe was homeless. You know that shelter up the road?” Marty gestured and Ben nodded. “I thought he might be from there or something, but homeless people still look after their kids and all, so that didn’t seem right. Still, he looked so familiar. I kept thinking that maybe I’d seen him bumming with his parents somewheres. It was the only thing I could figure.”
Marty chained the old cigarette to a new one and held the smoke in his lungs before continuing.
“But right before I got home, it just hit me like a goddamn sledgehammer.” He pounded his fist against his upturned palm. “ ‘That’s the kid from one of them flyers at the store!’ So I turned around and ran my ass back here…”
“And?”
“And he was gone. Shoot, he was long gone almost as soon as he started running back when I left him. I thought about going after him, about going into the woods, but I figured if I couldn’t see him from here, I wouldn’t see him at all.”
“So you went back home?”
“No.” Marty shook his head rapidly. “No, I went back to the store. It took me just a second to pick out his poster, and I snatched it off the board and went inside to call the number. I told them that I seen the kid, and they were like, ‘Are you sure?’ and I was like, ‘Yes, I’m fucking sure!’ ya know? They took all the information and told me to hold tight.”
“Why?”
“In case the police needed to talk to me? Shit, I don’t know. I didn’t really ask.”
“You didn’t keep looking for him?”
“The fuck you want from me, man? They told me to stay put, so I stayed put. Weren’t no one in the store hardly, but I damn near tackled a kid that was leavin just for movin too fast. I had that place locked down…Anyways, the cops never did come. I figured they’d gotten all they needed from me and were off doing whatever cops do.”
Ben ran his fingers over his head, his hair flinging droplets of sweat like thousands of miniature catapults.
“They didn’t have a record of any of this,” Ben said painfully. “If all this really happened, then why don’t they have any record of it?”
Marty ran his index finger over the faint scar on his lip. “I don’t know. I mean, I really don’t have any goddamn idea. Maybe you talked to the new guy and he was looking in the wrong drawer. Or…or maybe they do got a record and they can’t tell you because you’re not the dad?
“I never heard anything more about it. I started thinking that maybe I was wrong. The picture on the flyer is all fucked up, and what are the odds, anyway? I started figuring that it wasn’t the kid from the flyer. I spent months making myself think that. Then you told me what you told me, and what the hell was I supposed to say then? Tell you somethin I didn’t even believe was true?”
“But you think it’s true now?”
Marty nodded. “I…I wanted to say something when you found the toy. I knew I needed to, but you scared the hell out of me that morning. I’m really sorry, Ben.”
Ben exhaled a trembling breath. The last vestiges of his counterfeit peace slipped through his fingers like silt from a dead river. As false and fleeting as that peace had been, as Ben stood there in the darkness, he was somehow sure that it would also be as close as he’d ever come. It was a state now lost to him forever, as alien to Ben as a brand-new emotion would be to the whole of humanity. Warm wind rattled through the trees, and Ben turned back toward them.
“C’mon,” Ben said as he walked toward the tree line.
“No way.” Marty took a step back toward the road. “I ain’t going in there.”
“I need you to show me where he ran to.”
“I got no idea where that might be.”
Ben grabbed Marty’s arm, and Marty snatched it away angrily. “I’m not fucking going in there, Ben. It’s pitch black, and we can’t see shit.”
“I have to look.”
“He’s not out there. Not now.”
Ben turned back toward the trees and moved. He felt Marty’s hand on his shoulder.
“Have you lost your goddamn mind? You’re not gonna find anything out there. Not tonight. Not like this,” he said, gesturing to the darkness that enveloped them.
Ben jerked his shoulder away from Marty’s grasp. “You don’t know that. How could you? You saw him, and you didn’t do anything. No one has done nothin at all. Not the cops. Not my parents. Not anyone in this whole damn town! Nobody looks at them flyers. You said it yourself, man. No one ever looks. They may as well put that board behind the fucking wall! I’m his big brother. I was supposed to protect him, man. But I didn’t do that. I didn’t protect him, and now I can’t do nothin at all for him. No one can! I can’t do this by myself anymore!” Ben’s voice echoed in the darkness for a moment before being swallowed up by it.
“Your momma and daddy can help. It ain’t all on you; doesn’t have to be.”
“No,” Ben said, shaking his head, thinking about his stepmother. “This is just a story. You understand? This is just a story, and a story won’t do nothin good for them.”
“I…I’ll help you, Ben. I promise I will.” Nervousness tugged at Marty’s vocal cords. “But you goin out there now? That’s not gonna help anything at all.”
“I have to find him, Marty.” Ben’s jaw tightened as he failed to stop himself from crying.
“We will, Ben.” Marty’s eyes glistened briefly in the dim light before he wiped them against his forearm.
“I’ll kill ’im,” Ben said, his eyes lost in the gloom of the forest. “I swear to God I’ll kill whoever took ’im.”
And his hhhands said, “Okay, wuh-we’ll help you here, but we’re not bad.” But they SSSQUEEZED. And SQUEEZED.
And SQUEEZED until they cuh-couldn’t squeeze no more. But was he done?
Of course he wasn’t done.
16
“Yeah, thanks a lot,” Ben snapped. He slammed the phone back on the hook and tried to steady himself. He tapped his palm against his brother’s flyer and looked at his face, tried to use it for balance in the bland lighting of Customer Service. But his eyes kept creeping back toward the phone number.
For the first time in years, Ben had called the North Florida Missing Persons hotline, and the woman who answered was about as unhelpful as fucking possible. She wouldn’t even
say whether Marty had called, because “they couldn’t give out that kind of information.” The only information Ben had managed to coax out of her was that the hotline kept a record of each call and that everything was forwarded to the police. Everything.
Police? Well, that meant Duchaine. How nice. It would be hours before he’d be at his desk, and Ben wasn’t even sure it would be worth the time and aggravation to call the man. Six months and not a word.
Eric’s face was an inky ruin of poor contrast passed down one too many times. The boy’s smile seemed more like a sneer now, and the longer Ben looked, the more he saw the thing from his dreams staring back at him, rattling its jaws as it shambled through the mist, chattering, IT’S ME. Ben blinked the image away and slid the photograph out of his back pocket to compare the two faces.
The photograph was larger than its deformed twin on the sheet. Ben thought for a moment, then used his shaking hands to slip it from its case and crease folds into the rounded edges of the picture until it would fit the same space. Then he thought for a long while as he looked at the photocopier.
Faceup on the glass, Ben laid the flyer down and placed Eric’s photograph on top. Then he wrote his own phone number on a slip of paper and added it to the collage of Eric’s flyer. The new numbers fit squarely in the frame, as if they belonged there, positioned over the digits that had done fuck all. Flipping the stack carefully, Ben lowered the lid, set the machine for 250 copies, and punched the button. A column of white light fused the scraps together.
Ben grimaced while he put the original flyer back on the board, but he wasn’t going to let Duchaine string him up on some kind of technicality. It was fine. The police could keep this one. Ben jerked the transparent screen closed and walked back into the store.
Come morning, Ben carried his stack of flyers back to the spot Marty had shown him. There was nothing in the woods—nothing but trees and dirt, anyway. At night, with the space between the trees clogged with darkness, the plot of land had seemed immense, unending. But as he stood among the trees, with the singular and all-consuming shadow from the night before reduced to splotches under the power of the morning sun, he saw that it was nothing but a patch. The trees on the opposite side of the road, past Ben’s neighborhood, the store, and everything else for that matter, looked as if they might actually stretch on endlessly, but the woods he was standing in now, the woods where Marty had seen Eric, did not. Almost as soon as Ben entered the woods, he could see his way out. That was fine. He would just keep walking, day after day, until he’d handed out and hung every last goddamn flyer. Fuck Duchaine.
Ben could see other shapes beyond the trees: houses and sheds. Yellowed vinyl siding and horizontal planks of dead wood moved from background to foreground as trees whispered in the wind behind Ben’s back.
The houses in the neighborhood were old: slouched and rotten, the buildings sat defeated in the same orange dirt that seemed to be a part of the atmosphere here. Nothing stirred behind their hazy glass windows. A collapsed porch awning was held aloft by a vertical piece of lumber. A few houses down, chickens squabbled in their pen.
Ben had been here before. He couldn’t remember when, but it would have been at the very beginning, before there were any addresses in Ben’s sketchbook, before Ben could have even imagined that things would go on for so long he’d have to make a distinction between old and new neighborhoods and neighbors. He hadn’t been wrong to focus on the new residents. That wasn’t quite it. But he had been wrong to ignore the old ones. There were dozens of doors to knock on. Ben wrote addresses down on the back of one of the flyers.
By the time Ben saw the large man hunched over the engine of his truck, he’d been walking the neighborhood for a few hours. Another, much younger man sat in the driver’s seat with his foot resting on the gas pedal. Ben could see the orange fenders shaking as the vibrations from the engine shook the chassis. When the truck began to lurch, the older man raised his hand and the mechanical bellow subsided, taking the seizures with it.
Placing his fingers as close as possible to the base of his spine, the large man bent backward, cracking his back like a plastic water bottle, then pausing when he saw Ben approaching. Ben raised his hand near his stomach and waved. The truck’s engine idled, and the man at the wheel put one foot on the dirt and leaned back in the seat.
“Afternoon,” Ben called over the thudding of the truck. With hands stained by dirt and grease, the large man made a gesture and the vehicle was silent. “Problem with your truck?”
Coarse gray hair spilled out of the top of a shirt that might have been white at one point, intertwining with the man’s long beard. “Problem? Just put a new engine in ’er.”
“Is that right? Sounds real nice.”
The two men laughed. The older man pulled a dirty rag out of his back pocket and wiped the beads of sweat off his hairless head.
“Where you come from, boy?”
“Up the road a ways. Ben.” He extended his arm to shake the older man’s hand, whose thick fingers squeezed like a vise.
“Jacob,” he said. “This’s my boy Eddie.”
“Good to meet you both.” The air hung still, without noise from man or machine, while Ben wondered if he should try to make more small talk.
“You just come to shoot the shit, biggun?” Jacob asked.
“Nosir,” Ben said, smiling, appreciating the man’s candor. “Nosir. I’m out asking about my brother.” Ben pinched a flyer off the top of his stack and handed it to Jacob. “He went missing years back. I got reason to believe that somebody might have seen him sometime recent.”
“This paper says it was five years back?” Jacob said.
“Yessir. I came through here once or twice before around that time. We might have spoken then?”
Jacob shrugged and ran his dirty fingers through his brown-and-gray beard and tugged on it lightly, an action so perfunctory the man probably didn’t even know he was doing it. “I can’t say I seen him.” Jacob handed the flyer to Eddie, who pushed his tobacco deeper between his lip and gum. He looked at it for a moment before shaking his head and stretching to hand the flyer back to Ben.
“You can keep it, if you don’t mind. Someone said they seen him around here a few months ago.”
“That right?” Jacob said, casting a look back at Eddie. “Only kids I seen around here are the Cotter girls and Darlene’s boys. You might could check with them.” As Jacob said each name, he pointed to two different houses that hugged a thick, untamed copse.
“I will. You live here a long time? The neighborhood, I mean.”
“All my life,” Jacob said.
“Any cops come ’round here in the last few months? Asking after a missing kid?”
Jacob ran his dirty rag over his head again, soaking up the sweat that had reappeared. The two men looked at each other before Jacob turned back to Ben. “The only time the po-lice come out this way is because of Ty Cotter,” he said. “And that’s just to make sure he don’t do nothin too stupid, which is just about the only thing he knows how to do. His lady’s okay, but you don’t talk to him, you understand me? You knock and he answers, you just walk back into the yard.”
Ben glanced at the Cotter house and nodded. “You’ll call that number if you see anything? Or hear anything?”
“We will,” Jacob said, folding the photocopy and sliding it into his back pocket. “Check with the Cotters and Darlene. Might be a bigger help than we been.”
“I’m fixin to do just that,” Ben said. “Thanks for your time, the both of you.”
The Cotter home looked like a prison from head-on, unchecked hedges obscuring where the windows might have been. Dirt and mildew bent the light reflecting off the yellow paint, making it appear a dull greenish brown. Children’s toys lay like hidden relics, forgotten by everything but the overgrown grass.
The screen door whined as Ben pulled it o
pen. His knuckles struck the splitting wooden door three times, then twice more, before he could hear movement in the house. The door cracked just enough that Ben could see a tired eye behind it.
“Yeah?” the woman asked softly.
“Mrs. Cotter?” Ben was relieved that the right person had answered the door, but that relief was short.
“Who is that?” called a nasally voice from behind the woman.
“Mrs. Cotter, I’m sorry to bother you,” Ben said quickly. “My brother was seen around here a few months back. I was just wondering if maybe you’d seen him.”
“Who is that?” yelled the voice again.
“I’m sorry,” she said, “you gotta go.”
“Here, just—”
With a gasp the woman was jerked to the side and the door opened wider. A man with heavy, burning eyes gripped the doorway and snatched the flyer out of Ben’s hand. His lips moved and chattered as he read broken pieces of the text aloud.
“Mr. Cotter? I—”
“I don’t know you,” the man snapped with ugly teeth. “Why are you on my porch? I don’t know you.” He rattled the paper. “Is this a trick? You can’t come in here. You can’t come in here! You fuck! You big fuck! Go away!”
Suddenly, the man lunged at Ben, reaching for his stack of flyers. When Ben turned to the side, the man struck Ben’s shoulder and lost his footing, tumbling onto the old wood of the porch.
“You motherfucker!” the man screamed, and squeezed the paper in his hand. He squinted into the sun, his teeth like pebbles as he snarled. “Oh. Oh, I do. I know you. You big fuck. I remember what you did. I’m glad he’s gone. You motherfucker! Me and Bobby Prewitt are both glad.” The man laughed and crushed the paper into a ball, flinging it into the grass. “Get the fuck on outta here!”
“Get back in the house, Ty,” Jacob said from the yard behind Ben.
“It’s alright,” Ben said.
“Eat shit,” Ty growled as his wife hooked her arms under his and helped him to his feet. “I’m glad he’s gone!” the man screamed emphatically. “I’m glad!”
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