Boy Still Missing

by John Searles

  As we reached the top of the hill, my mother slowed down, and the car made a slight squeaking noise in the night. We chugged by the place, staring out the car windows. The house was pure faded glory, a majestic frame naked with tired paint. Suddenly the idea that my father was on a drinking bender didn’t seem so bad. If he wasn’t here, we would drop off Marnie and head peacefully back to our apartment until he rolled in.

  “Do you see his truck?” Marnie asked.

  Edie’s circular gravel driveway was empty except for a white Cadillac.

  “He’s not here,” my mother said, letting out a sigh of relief. “He’s not here.”

  At the end of the street she turned the car around and made one more pass on our way home.

  “Wait,” Marnie said. “Slow down. Slow down.”

  My mother hesitated, as if she didn’t really want to stop. It was fine with her to believe my father wasn’t there. He was drinking with his friends. He was playing poker. He was asleep in the factory parking lot. At the same time Marnie and I spotted his GMC on the other side of the house in a driveway that led to an old barn.

  “There’s his truck,” we said in unison.

  My mother stopped the car dead in the street. She stared at the truck, and the dark headlights glared back. A dozing giant, lifeless in the night.

  “Honey pie,” Marnie said. “You can’t just sit in the middle of the road. We might get hit by a car.”

  My mother leaned her head back, and I could see that her cheeks were wet with tears.

  “It’s okay,” I said, trying to calm her. “There’s probably an explanation.”

  “Yeah,” my mother shouted. “Like, maybe he’s screwing her.”

  She seemed to fold in on herself, and the tiniest croak came from her mouth. A moment of nothing, then a fit of sobs. The sound made me think of dark birds frantically escaping the wet nest of her stomach. Flapping and flapping. Marnie stroked her shoulder.

  “Do you want me to go in and get him?” I asked.

  My mother coughed. “I couldn’t make you do that, Dominick.”

  “Really, I don’t mind.” My voice sounded too high and stretched, the way it did when I consoled her. Crack, I thought. Deepen and change.

  “All right,” she said, and her crying stopped. “Go get him.”

  “Wait a minute,” Marnie said, holding her hand out, flat and even, a mime against an invisible window. “If you want Roy, just march right up to that door and knock. Don’t send Dominick to do your dirty work, Terry.”

  “I am not facing that woman. Dominick will simply get his father and we’ll be on our way.”

  “But—”

  “Marnie,” my mother said. “Trust me. Dominick doesn’t mind coming to his mother’s rescue.”

  I was a pro at fetching my father from bars, but I was beginning to realize that his girlfriend’s house was a whole new deal. What if I interrupted them in bed? What would he say to me? There’d be none of his pals to introduce me to. No cherries. No straws. I put on my Sox hat and tried to look brave.

  As I walked the driveway, tiny white stones crunched under my feet in the swell and hush of a breeze moving through the willow trees like a whisper. I went slowly around to his truck and, even though I knew better, peeked inside to be certain he wasn’t there. I could hear it now: “I gave Edie a ride home, then fell asleep as I was backing out of the driveway.” Maybe he did have a sleeping disease like Marnie said. But he wasn’t inside, so I turned toward the house. In the corner of the lawn a red maple shimmied like a cheerleader’s bushy pom-pom against the black sky. The air smelled like jasmine and reminded me of a sense exercise I did the one year my parents bothered to send me to catechism. Blindfolded, every kid had to guess what they were smelling. Chalk. Shampoo. Dirt. The game was simple until you reached a strip of cloth Gritta Alexander had brought in. “Jasmine,” she had said proudly when no one could guess. The nun said, “All these are smells God created.” But it didn’t seem God would ever create a fuck-me smell like that. Now something like jasmine lingered around me and mixed with the lemony scent of summer grass. I thought of Gritta, who was all breasts and belly now, with a big curvy ass. I checked my watch, almost twelve. When I reached the front porch, I looked back at my mother and Marnie in our bubble-shaped car. In the shadows I could see Marnie fixing her makeup, my mother with her head bent against the steering wheel.

  I padded up the steps, took a breath, and knocked—soft at first, then louder. No one answered. I stood in the silence, wondering what to do next, and Leon came to mind. All year he had been after a girl named Jennifer Bilton. When her parents were away in Acapulco, Leon found her house key taped inside a wind chime on the back porch. He claimed to have let himself in and walked right into her bedroom. “Where there’s a will,” he told me, “there’s a key to get in.”

  I lifted Edie’s mat, then checked under a rusted milk box and behind a barren cement planter. No key. I put my hand on the knob and turned. The door opened without the slightest creak. In front of me a long hall led into the heart of the house, the walls lined with shoes. High heels in dozens of colors. Flats. Sneakers. I closed the door behind me and stood for a moment, letting my eyes adjust to the dim light. Not knowing where to go next, I decided to follow the path of shoes. The flowered wallpaper seemed alive with more jasmine and summer scents drifting in through the tall windows. A clanking sound came from the back of the house. I walked toward the noise, and the farther I went, the more shoes I found. Only now there were work boots and cleats, bowling shoes and ballet slippers, all resting in shoe boxes with tissue paper and price tags. When I rounded a corner, I spotted a crack of light beneath a door. I paused, then pushed it open.

  At the stove Edie stood stirring a pot. My father was nowhere. The room smelled like warm milk and cinnamon.

  “Mrs. Elshki,” I said. Then, remembering her divorce, “I mean, Miss Kramer.”

  Edie gasped and whipped around, holding a wooden spoon in front of her like a weapon. “Who the fuck are you?”

  Her blond hair hung straight down to her shoulders, where it broke into thick chunks of curls. She wore a lacy nightgown that stopped just below her ass. Her long legs were a bit dimpled, something I never noticed when she stood in line at the Doghouse. Her breasts hung full and round, with quarter-size nipples pressed against the soft material. In the bright light of the kitchen, I could see that her eyes were red. She had been crying like my mother. Or drinking like my father.

  “How the hell did you get in here?” Edie said.

  “The front door,” I told her, deepening my voice and trying to sound businesslike. “I knocked, but you must not have heard me. I’m Dominick Pindle, and I’m looking for my father.”

  With that explanation she seemed to calm a bit. She lowered her spoon. “You scared the shit out of me. And your dad’s not here.”

  “But his truck is parked outside.”

  “Aren’t you a Sherlock? Just because his truck is here doesn’t mean he is.” Her voice had a raspy sound to it that made me think of a singer in an all-girl band, the way she might sound the morning after a killer show. Edie turned back toward the stove and started stirring again. Her arms were long and lean, and I could see her muscles as she moved that spoon around and around.

  “Do you know where I can find him?” I asked.

  “Try Hanover Street. Maybe he crawled inside a beer can and died.”

  “That’s my father you’re talking about,” I said, my voice still low. It felt odd to defend him, but I wasn’t sure what else to say.

  Steam rose from the pot and licked at the curls of hair that rested on her shoulders. Edie turned to me, and her expression softened. She had eyes that pulled up at the corners like a cat’s. A thin nose. When she smiled, I could see that her teeth were small and even, framed by her thick lips. She reminded me of that pregnant actress who had been butchered to death a few years back in those Manson murders. I couldn’t remember her name, but Edie was a dead ringer for her.
“Forget it,” she said. “I’ve had a rough night.”

  We stood there a moment, not knowing what to do next. I suppose she was waiting for me to turn and leave, but I found myself thinking of all the things Leon imagined about her.

  She likes it doggy-style.

  She likes it every night.

  She’ll do it with anyone.

  “Well, I guess I should go,” I said finally, even though I wished I could stay longer. I walked toward the kitchen door, that hallway of shoes.

  “Dominick,” Edie said. “Wait.”

  I turned back to look at her. Leon was right. Everything about Edie was beautiful. Her tan arms. Her long nails. And especially her tits. I could just hear him when I announced that I’d met Edie Kramer and she was wearing nothing but a skimpy nightgown. He’d flip. “Yeah?” I said.

  “You could stay a minute,” she said, her voice still raspy. “We could talk.”

  My mouth went dry. “You want to talk? About what?”

  “Anything. The weather. The news. You.” She paused. “Your parents.”

  Even if she was the most fuckable woman on the planet, my lips were sealed when it came to spilling info on my parents. “What about them?” I asked.

  “Nothing in particular. Actually, I don’t know why I even said that. We don’t have to talk about them at all. Why don’t we just get to know each other instead?” Edie crossed her arms in front of her and rubbed her elbows, smooshing her tits together so they grew even larger. “There’s nothing lonelier than waking up in this big old place with no one to keep me company.”

  I looked from her perfect chest to her perfect face and decided that maybe she didn’t want dirt on my parents after all. Maybe she did just want to talk, like she said. I thought of all the times I woke in the middle of the night and listened to my mother carrying on with my father in the next room, when only a few hours before she had been bawling to me about him. Her panting always left me feeling betrayed, lonely, too. I thought of all those times my mother talked about starting a new life, the way I used to wake in the morning and wonder in the silence of our cramped apartment if she had left, deserted me.

  “Do you want some warm milk?” Edie asked.

  Now I was the one betraying my mother, but I sat at the kitchen table anyway. In my head I still heard scraps of Leon’s gravelly voice—three fingers, all night long, blow job. Afraid Edie would catch on somehow, I pushed his words from my mind. “Why do you live in such a big house if it makes you feel lonely?” I asked.

  She poured our milk into two thick mugs. As her fingers gripped the pot handle, I noticed that her pinkie nail was broken and chewed, unpainted. Instead of being taken in by her nine other red nails, I found myself staring at the short, imperfect one. “I was raised as an army brat,” Edie said. “My dad was an officer, and I lived in something like twenty-six different military apartments growing up. So I like the feel of a big house. The security. Even if it’s lonely sometimes, neither me or the house are going anywhere.”

  “You like Holedo?” I asked, curious because no one else—especially my mother—ever seemed to have a nice thing to say about the place.

  “I’ve lived all over the world,” Edie said, putting a mug in front of me and giving me a closer look at that one undone nail. “Holedo is just as good a place as any. It’s quiet here. Peaceful.”

  I decided she was right. Who needed canyon walks and secret trips to New York? Holedo was just as good a place as any.

  Edie pulled a bag of Chips Ahoy! from the cabinet and settled next to me. Her smell was milk and skin. She was Gritta Alexander all grown up.

  “So what’s with all the shoes?” I asked.

  “Oh, those,” she said, waving her hand toward the hallway. “I guess you could say it’s a moneymaking scheme.”

  “What kind of scheme?”

  “Well,” she said. “I want to start designing shoes.”

  The cinnamon and sugar turned Edie’s concoction too sweet, but I drank it anyway. “You made all those?”

  “No. I bought them. It’s a good idea to know the whole playing field before you get in the game. Right now I’m just buying up every shoe I see. I’m still trying to figure out what kind I want to make.”

  She’ll make you hard, Leon said. Make you come.

  “What kind do you think?” I asked, shutting him up. Something about her business plan didn’t sound quite right, but what the hell did I know?

  “Actually, I’m partial to men’s shoes. They’re so sensible. It’s not fair that women have to clomp around, teetering on heels all the time.”

  I thought of my mother’s white sneakers—the hushed, shuffling sound they made against the cracked linoleum in our kitchen. “Women don’t have to wear those things.”

  “If they want to get somewhere, they do,” she said. “I have to wear them.”

  I dipped a cookie and took a bite. The milk was making me sleepy, and I knew that my mother and Marnie were probably getting anxious, that was, if Marnie could stop looking in the mirror long enough to wonder what was keeping me. Thinking of them waiting outside guilted me into steering the conversation back to the reason I was here. “So why is my father’s truck in your driveway?”

  Edie blinked her cat eyes and looked away without answering. The question seemed to have flown from my mouth up to the ceiling, somehow missing her ears. “Let me see your feet,” she said, changing the subject.

  “My feet?”

  “Don’t be shy,” Edie said with a sudden giggle to her rock-star voice. “Let me see them.”

  I decided to let go of the whole thing about my father and put my sneaker on the table, because I didn’t really want to think about his truck outside anyway. Edie loosened the laces, tugged at the heel, and pulled it off. I had taken to not wearing socks lately, and my toes wiggled before our faces. Never before had my feet felt so private.

  “Footwear can transform you,” she said, pinching my big toe, then brushing her fingers along my arch, making my leg go stiff as I fought my ticklishness. She held up my sneaker and shook it. The once-white tongue kept still, but the laces dangled at her wrist. Baby snakes slithering around her soft skin. “Take a look at this. How old are you anyway?”

  “Seventeen,” I said, adding two years to see if I could pass.

  “I thought so. You’re not a boy anymore. You’re a man. And a decent pair of shoes can help you look like one.”

  I nodded and pushed the mug and Chips Ahoy! bag away.

  “I want you to come with me. I’ve got just the right shoes for you.”

  With one sneaker still on, I walked behind Edie to the hallway lined with shoes, staring at her ass the whole time and memorizing details. I could touch it, I thought. I could lift her gown and run my hands along her skin. Edie bent over and dug around. She tossed aside a clear plastic shoe that reminded me of a glass slipper. Cinderella. “Hmm,” she said. “They must be downstairs.”

  We walked to the basement, where unmarked cardboard boxes filled the room. A flickering bare bulb hung from the ceiling, dizzying itself in a circle after Edie had yanked the string. The walls were constructed from round gray rocks that made me think of skulls, dull crowns showing, hollow faces sealed into the cement forever. A single sketch of a strappy sandal was taped to one of the round rocks that jutted from the wall. In the far corner sat a tattered mattress, striped orange and yellow like a circus tent and covered with fluffless pillows. The air smelled of earth and cobwebs, water underground.

  “Is this your work?” I asked, pointing to the drawing of the sandal.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “It’s beautiful,” I told her. “But not as beautiful as you.”

  It was something Leon might say, not me. But it actually sounded pretty good. For all she knew, I was a lady-killer.

  Edie looked at me and smiled. She touched my cheek with her hand. “Like father, like son,” she said, then caught herself.

  My father. I could have called her on that, bu
t being with her was too much of a good thing. After all, if Edie were a girl my age, she would never even notice me. But in her dark basement, in the middle of the night, I started to think I had a chance. Again I thought of Leon and the way he asked girls if he could kiss them. “You ask, and they say yes or no. What’s to lose?”

  I cleared my throat and said, “Edie?”

  “Yes?” She was standing in front of me with her head tilted, lips together.

  “Can I kiss you?”

  Edie laughed. Things like this worked for men like Leon and my father. Not for me. Then she said, “Why would a handsome young man like you want to kiss an old woman like me?”

  There was that word again. “Man.” It was my chance to be one. “You’re beautiful,” I said.

  “I’m trouble,” she told me. “Besides, you must have dozens of girls chasing after you.”

  “Not really. Actually, none at all. I’ve never even kissed a girl.”

  “Never?”

  “Never.”

  Edie looked at me, thinking. “Well. One little kiss wouldn’t hurt. But if I let you, you have to do something for me.”

  I could see it now—mowing her lawn, scraping the dried yellow paint off this big fucking house. Still, it was worth it. “What do you want?”