Boy Still Missing

by John Searles

  “I’m not going anywhere, Dominick. I just want you to know I have a little security blanket for you and me in case of an emergency.”

  We were pulling onto our street, Dwight Avenue. Row after row of rented three-story houses with jigsaw-puzzle roofs and torn-screened porches. Our apartment was in the only five-story complex on the block, built on an old neighborhood baseball field. Outdoor stairways led to each floor. The brown aluminum siding was streaked and stained from the leaky gutters. For the first time I saw this place the way my mother must have. Mustard instead of sunny orange. The muddy brown of a pond when she wanted the blue of a sea.

  I’ve lived all over the world, Edie said in my head. Holedo is just as good a place as any.

  “Why did you come here?” I asked my mother as she scoped out a spot in the lot behind our building.

  “What do you mean? I married your father, and we moved here together.”

  My next question could have pushed her secret sharing session a bit far. Still, I asked, “But why did you marry him?”

  We parked in front of an overloaded Dumpster, and my mother turned off the car. A sign said NO PARKING, but we could get away with it until Monday. There were empty milk cartons scattered at our wheels. Cream soda and RC cans. A flattened bag of chips. A pigeon clenched a thin disk of potato in its beak, complete with green slivers of chive. My mother sighed. Her exhalations were often heavy, weighted things, the sound an old woman might make if she looked back unhappily on her life with no more time to make things right. “It’s like those breakfasts in New Mexico,” she said.

  Here we go again, I thought.

  But then she said, “When I met your father, I thought he was the most handsome man I had ever seen. He loved to have a good time. Driving around on his motorcycle together. Staying out all night. Before him my life was such a tangled mess, and everything with him was one big party. I guess that’s exactly what I needed.”

  I tried to wrap my mind around the image of my mother on a motorcycle, staying out till the sun came up. It made me wonder if she changed personalities when she changed lives. After all, she was always warning me to be careful on my ten-speed. I asked her what any of that had to do with those breakfasts.

  “I only mean that your father was perfect for a certain time and place in my life. But taking it further didn’t exactly work the way I had hoped. We had you, which was the best thing that ever happened to me. But I thought your father would change when our lives did. Settle down. I thought we’d buy a real house—”

  She stopped, and I knew she must have been thinking about the police station, on its way to being a pizza place instead of her dream home.

  “Looking back,” she said, staring out the car window past the metal Dumpster, spilling over with its dirty insides, “looking back, I realize I should have paid attention to the signs.”

  “Signs?” I said, not getting her.

  “Signs. Life lays them right in front of you. One. Two. Three. All you have to do is look, Dominick. You’ll see as you get older. If you step back and take in the world around you, there’s always some sort of guidepost. Something telling you which way to go. He drank too much then. He lied then. But I ignored it all because I was so. . . so. . . hungry for him. It was like a voice from the future telling me how our life would be, but I didn’t want to hear. So I tuned it out, and here I am.”

  Her voice had dropped to a whisper, and she fingered her car keys that still hung from the ignition. Her key chain was a miniature globe, and she shook the world from side to side.

  I was going to ask her about the tangled mess before my father that I assumed was code language for Truman, when outside the car a pigeon flapped its wings in a scurry of noise and feathers. The motion startled my mother, and I could tell by the look on her face that the sharing spell was broken. She wasn’t going to tell me any more about following signs or Truman. “I’ll find a way to make things better,” she said, patting my knee and putting an end to our discussion. “You’ll see.”

  Even with her hopeful words, I could tell she felt lost in her life as she put her gum back in the wrapper and stuck it in the ashtray again for later. We got out of the car and made our way up the stairs to our second-floor apartment. I thought of the sappy eight-tracks she sometimes played when she was down. The singers were nameless to me, but one of their rhymes drifted to mind now. “I looked at my life today. I wish I was happy living this way.” The words were hopelessly melodramatic, enough to make me want to snap her out of it. “Which jail cell would I have slept in?”

  “Well,” she said, jumping right into the joke despite herself, “I would have taken the master cell. And you would have the one down the hall.”

  “Don’t forget the guest cell,” I said as she fumbled with the keys.

  “Of course, we’d have to fingerprint any overnight visitors to protect ourselves.”

  By the time my mother got the door open, we were both laughing. The apartment smelled like the inside of a defrosted refrigerator. Cold metal and old food. “Maybe it was a little half-baked,” she said. “But you can’t blame me for trying.”

  “What was half-baked?” my father asked. He was sitting at the kitchen table with the Holedo Herald and a beer, his aviator glasses halfway down his nose, like he was too cool to bother taking them off.

  Since he had been on the road during the week, my mother and I had developed new personalities for when he was and wasn’t around. The two of us were downshifting, fast. “Oh, nothing,” my mother said. Lately it took her longer to switch from my side to his when he showed. But she always made it there. “I thought you were away until Sunday.”

  Before he could answer, the phone rang. The noise mixed with the sound of the football game droning from the television. Rather than leaving the black-and-white on the shelf in the living room, my father had a habit of carrying the TV with him to the kitchen. Sunday mornings he liked to plug the thing in the bathroom and disappear in there with the newspapers. At the moment it was perched in the middle of the table, aluminum foil dangling from the bent-hanger antenna. His idea of good reception. On the second ring my father stood to answer the phone. “It’s for you, Terry.”

  She took the receiver. After a pause she said, “Win some, lose some.”

  Probably the Bingo Lady herself, just off the set of her prime-time show. This was my chance to cut out. Headphones and The Who were waiting in my room. Leon and I always played “The Acid Queen” and “Pinball Wizard” at top volume.

  “How you doing, son?” my father said.

  I turned back, snagged into a conversation. The smell of his trip was all around him—rest stops and diesel fuel, too long behind the wheel of a truck. A voice in my head told me he was the visitor we needed to fingerprint.

  “Fine,” I said.

  “School?”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Job yet?”

  “I’m fifteen,” I said. “Not old enough.”

  Since our little chat was going nowhere fast, he gave me a light punch in the arm, hoping for a wrestling match like we used to have. I thought of all those times when I was a kid and he’d let me pin him to the floor. When I least expected it, he’d break free and tickle me until I laughed and screamed in surrender. It seemed like years since we’d done that routine. But I was in no mood for a fake fight when so many real ones were happening beneath the surface.

  “That was Officer Roget,” my mother said when she hung up. She gave me a nervous look. Like her secret stash, her plan to buy the station had been hidden from my father as well. “He called to thank me for the volunteer work I did last month.”

  “Volunteer work,” my father said. “What did you do for that crook?”

  “You know,” my mother said, her voice lilting the way it did when she lied. “This and that.”

  I could tell by the way she busied herself in the kitchen—wiping the circles of dried coffee from the stove top, untangling the crimson balls of fringe that dangled from
the curtains—that she was still having trouble adjusting to his unexpected arrival.

  “Well, then,” my father said. “Since everybody is doing a lot of nothing around here, you’ll both be glad to know the reason I’m home.”

  My mother tugged on the sleeves of her cardigan and made her way across the kitchen. She was forever moving cereal boxes and soup cans from one shelf to another, trying to find the best fit. Now she pulled down tomato soup and sank the sharp tooth of the can opener into the lid, twisting it open. She dumped the rust-colored blob into a pot on the stove.

  “How come you’re home?” I asked.

  He looked at me and grinned. “I quit my job.”

  “Quit?” my mother said.

  “What’s the matter?” My father stretched his stomach out into a hard balloon and scratched, teasing her. “Can’t I stay home and freeload, too?”

  “Very funny,” she said.

  The thing was, it could have been funny. Not fall down, but a Partridge Family sort of laugh. My father didn’t understand, though, that his benders and trips away muffled things somehow. It was difficult for my mother and me to relax and act natural when neither of us knew when he’d vanish again.

  “Let’s just say that Kramer woman is one fucked-up broad.”

  At the mention of Edie, my mother turned toward the sink. She poured out the last of his beer and tossed it in the trash by the stove. I would have pulled the can out and stomped it flat the way I used to like to do, but I was dying for the Edie story.

  “Please stop talking like that in front of Dominick,” my mother said.

  “He’s heard it before. Right, son?”

  I nodded yes to my father. But when my mother looked, I shook my head no.

  She asked, “What about money?”

  “I’ll find something. Maybe one of those cross-country driving jobs.”

  I saw my mother’s face wilt, and I knew she must have been thinking about all those signs she had ignored so many years ago. But there was nothing I could do. Their conversation would loop round and round for hours. My mother would keep asking her tentative, worried questions but never get the real deal. In a week or so he’d be on to some better-than-ever dream job. There would be no news about Edie. I was ready to retreat to my room when I spotted an envelope among the empty fruit bowl, the newspaper, and the television set. My name written in block letters across the seal. “What’s this?” I asked.

  “In the mailbox when I got home,” my father said. “It must have been hand-delivered, because there’s no stamp. Maybe you’ve got an admirer.”

  I peeled it open, splitting my name in two.

  Dominick,

  I need to see you.

  E.

  “Well,” my father said. “Who’s it from?”

  I tried to fold the paper but nervously crumpled it instead. “Gritta,” I said, shoving it into my pocket. “Gritta Alexander.”

  “Well, Terry,” my father said, “it looks like our boy’s got a girl.”

  I left my mother to deal with him and headed for my room. Door locked, I unfolded the paper—already creased from the short time in my pocket. “Dominick, I need to see you. E.” No doubt that the “E.” was Edie. I held her handwriting to my nose, hoping for that milk-and-skin smell, the jasmine of her house. Instead I breathed in the first day of school, homework. I puckered my lips against the E of her name. I stuck out my tongue and licked the tiny dot beside it. I couldn’t believe she had finally made contact with me—actually driven over to my apartment and put a letter in the mailbox—after all the months I had spent swelling with thoughts of her and of our kiss, wondering if there could ever be more between us. Maybe she had been waiting for my father to be gone from her life before coming to me. Maybe now that he’d quit, things could begin with us.

  All that mattered now was that she wanted—needed—to see me.

  In my drawer I kept a tightly rolled joint I had sneaked from Leon months back. Most of the time we stuck to booze, mixing our own lethal concoction from his mother’s black-lacquered liquor cabinet. A few weekends before, it was rum, vodka, whiskey, vermouth, a bit of Dr Pepper, and a splash of OJ. We called it the Holedo Hell-Raiser and promptly puked our guts out after chugging the whole thing from an old milk carton. Whenever we wanted to raise hell but thought our stomachs needed some R&R, Leon scored a dime bag of pot. I had been saving some for just this occasion, in hopes that if I ever got the chance to be alone with Edie, a few puffs of a joint would help open her up again. Before closing the drawer, I caught a glimpse of a stack of baseball cards I used to collect with my father. Something made me pick them up, flip through the stack. Once upon a time I was pretty good at remembering the players and their stats. Wilbur Wood: relief pitcher for the Chicago White Sox, 22 wins, 13 losses, 1.91 ERA. Brooks Robinson: third baseman for the Baltimore Orioles, 2 homers in the ’70 Series, .429 batting average, .810 slugging percentage. Billy Williams of the Chicago Cubs, lead player in the National League a few seasons back, 42 homers, 129 RBIs. When I used to whip out those names and numbers, I knew it made my father proud. But remembering all those stats was as pointless and dull to me as doing math homework. And somewhere along the way I stopped bothering to keep up. The players and their numbers became a blur in my head, just some faces on a bunch of cards that still smelled like bubblegum. I tossed them back into my drawer and was about to close it again when I spotted the return address I had copied from Uncle Donald’s last letter to my mother.

  DONALD F. BIADOGIANO

  97 BLEECKER STREET, APT. 3B

  NEW YORK, NEW YORK 10014

  Every time I saw it behind my gray sweat socks and blue-banded underwear, I thought of Truman. He was part of me, really. A half brother living almost two hundred miles away, and I had made up my mind to find out more. For the moment, though, I wanted to focus on Edie. I closed the drawer and went back to the kitchen.

  “Shoes,” my father was saying. “I’ll give that lady shoes. She’s lucky she doesn’t get my size ten right in her teeth.”

  He wrapped his arms around my mother’s waist as she stood at the stove, filling a bowl with soup. She was still trying to pry out the details of his job, not realizing I was closer to the answer. “Where’s my girl?” he asked her, kissing the back of her neck. “Where’s my girl who used to like to have fun?”

  “Later,” I said and headed down the stairs to my ten-speed.

  My mother opened the kitchen window and called to me like I was a little kid. “Do you want something to eat?”

  I stared up at her soft face, a burst of white against the brown, BB-punctured aluminum siding. This was the choice my father must have faced all the time. My mother and her warm food, quiet voice, and careful movements. Or Edie and her big house, big tits, and big money.

  “I’ll grab something later,” I said, climbing on my bike and pedaling away in the damp air.

  As I rode toward Edie’s, I wondered if it would be as easy to kiss her this time as it was the first. The pot would help. I looked down at the black shoes she had given me. Day after day I slipped my warm feet into their soft leather. Now they were scuffed from so much wear. Part of me wanted to turn back and give the shoes a quick polish before showing up at Edie’s. But my heart was beating too hard to turn back. I pushed the shoes out of my mind and thought of licking the teeth my father wanted to kick. The image of my wet tongue against Edie’s hard white smile kept me pedaling up and down side streets until I reached the top of the hill near her house.

  In daylight the Victorian looked even more decrepit than last time. Leaves from the red maple had dried, curled, and fallen to where they lay unraked on the dead hairs of grass. The once-white rocks of the driveway were speckled with black, like hundreds of cavitied teeth crunching beneath my bicycle tires. I stopped pedaling and caught my breath. When I took a step toward her porch, I felt choked with nervousness. I wondered if I should have rushed over here like this, if crossing enemy lines like my mother always did with my fath
er was a mistake. After all, Edie had lied to me that night about my father not being in her bed. Every time I thought of that, I told myself I should be pissed at her.

  But she needs to see me, I reminded myself. With those words in mind I walked to the door, kicking at the shavings of yellow paint that littered the porch. Against the dreariness of everything else, it looked as if pieces of sun had fallen and landed at Edie’s doorstep for her to sweep away. A lion’s-face knocker had turned red with rust and blank in the eyes. I gave the sorry-looking guy a clank or two, then waited.

  “Edie,” I called when no one answered. “It’s me, Dominick Pindle.”

  A bird squawked in the sky, but no noise came from the house. The place had the feeling of people coming and going. Wandering in and out, like I had last summer. A rest area off the highway. A cheap motel.

  Finally I put my hand on the knob and turned. It wouldn’t move, so I walked around back to where my father’s truck had been parked that night. This time there was Edie’s Cadillac. Edie was turned away from me, loading a tiny red Chiclet of a suitcase into the trunk. After all these months apart, I couldn’t believe the sight of her. She wore a long-sleeved T-shirt that hung down to her knees. Under the blue material she could have been naked, since all I could see were her bare legs and flip-flopped feet.

  “Hello, Edie,” I said, using a voice I had been practicing. It was the well-honed deep echo of a cave. The sound of a solemn male soldier.

  “Dominick,” she said, turning around. She reached out and hugged me. I felt her arms slip under my arms, wrap around my back, and pull me to her. Her tits and stomach pressed against me. “You’re here sooner than I expected,” she said, and I could feel the heat of her breath against my neck.

  My body went into overload—my chest burned, my mouth felt sticky, my dick went hard. I had hoped and hoped that Edie would want to be near me again but was never really sure how she would act when we met a second time. In that moment I knew our kiss had changed her, too. And this is what I told myself: Edie had come to her senses and realized my father was a fuck-up.