by John Searles
I sat up and reached for the floor in search of my pants and shoes.
Nothing.
I felt under the bed, and here’s the weird part: I pulled out that old sneaker I had left behind last summer, dust-balled and curled from no use. I stared at the thing like it was a museum relic. A body part I had amputated and left behind. In my misty afterbirth of sleep, I put the thing on and laced it up. My foot must have grown, because the fit was almost too tight to wear. I shoved one of Edie’s oversize pink furry slippers onto my other foot to keep warm on the cold floor. Then I grabbed a thick blue wool blanket off the chair and draped it around my shoulders, and made my way down the hall in pursuit of her.
After all this time the hallways and wooden doors in the old place still puzzled me. The sunny room with ivy wallpaper was over there? No, over here. The back staircase led to the pantry? No, the main hallway. It didn’t help that Edie had emptied most of the rooms of furniture, so each vacant room looked the same. I was about to call out to Edie and ask her why she hadn’t woken me, when I heard her voice. I followed the soft murmur until I was outside the kitchen door. I opened it just a crack and could see her reflection in the picture window, broken and fractured in the six different panes at each side. Her back was to me as she talked on the telephone. From behind, no one would have ever guessed she was pregnant. It seemed weird to me that she’d be on the phone in the middle of the night, so I stood there longer than I should have, without going in. I listened as she talked about selling a bunch of her ex-husband’s shitty furniture to a woman from Buford. Then she went on about some sort of shipment that had never been delivered. Finally, she was silent for a moment and I worried she had spotted me. I realized, though, that she was just listening to the person on the other end of the line.
“We’ll leave in the morning,” she said quietly after a moment. “Then we’ll check in to the room together.”
Something told me to interrupt her, that I wasn’t going to want to hear the rest of this call.
“Thank God for that,” she said.
“I’ve got the money,” she said.
“Of course,” she said.
Then she said this: “I started off not caring. But now I feel bad.”
Silently I tugged in a breath and felt my heart drum.
Move your legs, I thought.
Too late.
“Stop bugging me about it,” Edie said. “He’s just a kid. A harmless boy.”
Me.
My breathing seemed to stop. Her words raced around my brain. Before I could move, she giggled, and I heard her say, “I just want to be nice about it. Don’t worry, I’ll find a way to get rid of him.”
From somewhere inside me another voice came with a message that had been waiting there all along: She has been tricking you. For a flash I considered storming my way into the kitchen and raging. But that was something other men would have done. I found myself stepping back. I felt not the whole of myself but the parts. My feet—one sneakered, one slippered—moved to the foyer. My hand gripped the diamond-shaped knob of the front door. My back, covered only by the blue wool blanket, stiffened as I stepped onto the crooked porch and into the night. That plastic bird was still spinning its broken wing, though the sound seemed to come from inside my head now. A dull creaking, then a steady scrape of metal and old parts.
In my mind I heard a car crash.
Screech of brakes.
Ambulance sirens.
A woman’s shrill scream without inhalation.
Then silence.
I was walking across the snowy lawn, away from Edie’s house. When I was far enough away, my brain returned. Given what I had just overheard, it was funny that my first thought was numb and practical: You will never make it home without freezing. I kept walking because I couldn’t turn back. Edie’s voice came and went, came and went.
He’s just a kid.
A harmless boy.
I’ll find a way to get rid of him.
Her giggle jumped around my head and worked itself into a cackle. As evil as one of those green-faced witches from one of Edie’s fairy tales.
“You have been so fucking stupid,” I said, my voice croaking into the blue-black darkness. My eyes weighed heavy at the corners, and tears slipped out. Their warmth on my wind-burned cheeks made me cry harder. “So motherfucking goddamn stupid.”
I stared down at the steady white line on the side of the road. My slippered foot slapping and stinging against the salt and chunky scraps of ice on the pavement.
My teeth chattered. My ears felt numb. The only thing not frozen now was my mind. It burned and whipped. A wild comet landing on the same thought again and again: eight thousand some-odd dollars that I had stolen from my mother and would never get back. “What the fuck is wrong with you?” I shouted in a voice that came out weak and broken.
The only answer came in a wind that blew its way between my lips, past my teeth and down the dark hole of my throat, chilling me more. I have to get indoors fast, I thought. Wasn’t there a path through the woods that would save me a few miles? Then I remembered that it involved crossing Pegluso’s swamp on a log and some rocks. With one shoe and a slipper and all the ice, I’d never make it. If I could get to Cumby’s and hitch a ride home. But the place was long closed by now.
As I trudged along in the frosty darkness, I thought of my note to Leila: I had to split. Thanks for the ride. If I froze to death tonight, Leila and Leon might hold those words up as my farewell message, a suicide note. The thought of it made me laugh despite myself.
When I looked up, the Holedo Motel loomed before me, all those dark windows like dead eyes. Roget’s car was gone for once. Maybe he was actually doing some real police work instead of whacking off in the parking lot of this dumpy shithole. I could get a room, I thought as I stared at the even row of doors on the first and second floors of the place, if only I had shoved one of those Ben Franklins up my ass in case I’d be walking home half naked.
In the distance I could hear the faint gurgle of a stream bubbling from somewhere in the woods. Movement kept the water from freezing completely. I decided to do the same and lifted my legs in a sort of march. Only my slippered foot felt like it was being electrocuted whenever it hit the ground, so my march was more like a limp.
“Almost home,” I said, lying to myself.
From behind me a car moved in a fast whoosh around the corner. I could hitch a ride, I thought. But no one would pick me up dressed like this. I hopped off the road into the dark woods. The headlights moved past, and I held my breath.
Gone.
I stepped out onto the pavement, and another car came from the opposite direction, surprising me. When I moved back into the woods, my blanket snagged on a branch. I should have ditched the thing, but I panicked and crouched foolishly by the side of the road instead.
A squeak of brakes. The hum of a car stopping. Then a flash of bright lights on me. Keep on trucking, I thought. It’s just a half-naked kid on the side of the road in the middle of the night. Don’t mess with me. But the car didn’t budge, and the light was far too bright to be a headlight. I noticed red and blue shimmering against the trees when I lifted my head. My body shivered uncontrollably now.
“Stand up,” a voice said.
I turned to look. Mustache. Pouchy face. Roget. The thought of him escorting me home in nothing but my underwear and a sneaker and a slipper to face my mother made me run. I took off into the woods, leaving my blanket behind. Snow crunched. Sticks jutted up and poked at my numb foot. Branches snapped against my chest with a rhythmic slap-slap-slap followed by a sharp burning sting. But I kept on hauling ass. I would have made it away from him if it hadn’t been for a low-to-the-ground barbed-wire fence that sent me sailing.
“Dominick Pindle?” Roget called, catching up to me. He said it like a question. I was a shaking heap in the icy snow. “What the hell are you up to, kid?”
My tongue felt blue and frozen in my mouth. A stream of blood moved down my leg li
ke the crooked red line of the interstate on a road map.
I didn’t say a word. This is Edie’s fault, I thought.
Roget must have realized he wouldn’t get an answer from me until I was warm. In one fell swoop he bent down and picked my body up from the cold floor of the woods. He carried me to the backseat of his car, cranked the heat, pulled a scratchy wool blanket out of the trunk, and poured me some coffee from his thermos. After he dabbed peroxide on my slashed leg and taped on two big Band-Aids, he sat up front in silence, shuffling papers for what seemed like an hour. Ten hours. Once in a while he looked in the mirror and fingered that mustache of his. Shifty or vain, I thought just as I did that day at the auction. A little of both. When I saw him looking down at his chest, straightening his badge like an impenetrable, golden heart pinned there, I decided he was probably one of those men who loved nothing more than being in charge. He had carried me out of the woods not because he cared but because it made him feel like a hero. And taking that badge from him would be just like taking his heart, the thing that gave him power. He would be left almost lifeless, weakened without it. Like my gym teacher without his whistle. My father without his muscles.
The blue and red lights on top of the car were a rubbernecker’s dream. I must have been the most exciting thing to happen to Holedo in ages, because in no time a parade of cars was slowing down to check me out in the backseat. At first I gave every single one of them the finger behind Roget’s head. But when I couldn’t stand one more bug-eyed freak staring at me, I said, “Are you going to take me home?”
“Oh, so the little shit does speak,” Roget said from the front seat, turning to look at me. “I’ll drive you home when you answer me one question: What were you doing out there, running around almost naked in the middle of the night?”
I took in a long breath of the hot, dry car air, a sip of his bitter black coffee. I hated coffee, but it felt like a pool of warmth in my shaking hand, and I couldn’t stop drinking. “It was a dare,” I said.
He cocked his head at me. I thought maybe he’d get into some boys-will-be-boys type of story and probably want to share some of his own, so I came up with this: “There’s a guys’ club at school. To get in you have to do a dare. Mine was to run by the motel naked. My buddies took off when they saw you. They’re probably home asleep by now.”
Roget fingered his mustache. “Did it occur to you and your idiotic friends that you could cause a major accident? Or that walking around like that is what we call indecent exposure? I could arrest you.”
I wanted to tell him to cuff Edie Kramer instead. Then I thought, Arrest me. A jail cell was meant to be my bedroom after all. I wiped out a big chunk of my mother’s savings, not to mention shoplifting a pack of Juicy Fruit. But the thought of actually being arrested scared me so much that all I could manage was “Please don’t” in my weakest voice.
Roget clicked off the carnival lights and put the car in gear. I was as good as home now. I prayed he wouldn’t want to talk to my mother.
“I’ll make you a deal,” he said. “I’ll drop you off at home, no more questions asked, if you go easy on your mother for the next few weeks.”
“Deal,” I said without even thinking. The part about my mother must have been his hero routine—looking out for the ladies.
“You don’t sound like you mean it,” he said. “Your mother’s got a lot on her plate right now, so I want you to go easy on her.”
“How do you know what’s on her plate?” I asked.
He signaled and turned down Dwight Avenue, almost to my house. Finally he said, “I’m the sheriff. I know everything.”
At the corner of the lot to my apartment, Roget stopped the car. “You can keep the blanket,” he told me.
“Thanks,” I said, and he came around to open my door.
The cold air felt like pinpricks of torture all over again. I thought of my mother holding hamburger meat under a warm-running faucet, watching it break into fleshy pink chunks in her hands as it thawed. I stepped away from the car.
“Remember,” he said. “Take care of her.”
“You bet,” I said, waiting for him to drive away.
He stood there, though, and I got the point that he wasn’t going to move until he saw me walk up the stairs and into my house. So I limped up the steps and saluted to him from the top. He still didn’t leave. I turned the knob and stepped inside, closing the door behind me. When I peeked through the curtains, I saw his car door close. A moment later his taillights disappeared down the street.
“Dominick,” my mother said from behind me.
I turned around and noticed for the first time that the apartment was ablaze with lights. After what I’d been through tonight, the place actually felt warm. Marnie stood beside my red-faced mother in a tight tangerine sweater with a cat-whisker design by the neck. What the hell was she doing here in the middle of the night?
My mind raced with excuses. I fell asleep at Leon’s. I was playing strip poker.
“It’s gone,” my mother said before I could even speak.
“What’s gone?” I asked, pulling Roget’s blanket around me to cover up.
Tears rolled down my mother’s face when she opened her mouth again. “The money is gone.”
Part of me must have still been frozen, because I didn’t react. Statued and silent, I realized that I appeared confused, not at all suspicious. “What money?” I said.
“All my savings except for some coupons and a measly six hundred dollars.” She put her head in her palms and cried. Every choked and ragged sob left me drained.
“Calm down,” I said.
“Don’t tell me to calm down!” she screamed, whipping her head up to face me. Her hair was wild and matted. Her eyes opened wider than I’d ever seen. A vein bulged in her wrinkled forehead. “That’s our emergency money! And let me tell you, an emergency has come up!”
“What?” I said, confused. “Who?”
“Never you mind,” Marnie said. “Your mama’s just upset. Did you see your father take it?”
My father. It had never occurred to me that if she found the money missing, she’d automatically blame him. It was as simple as this: My father was the one who had gotten me into this mess in the first place. So fuck him.
“I didn’t know what he was looking for,” I said, taking a long, deep breath. It felt like my lungs were filling up with something, a thick and weighty substance that was barely breathable. “But I saw him fishing through your music box, then searching under your bed.”
FOUR
I woke up early and snaked seventy bucks from the last of my mother’s stash. The money would get me to New York City, where I planned to dump the whole story on Uncle Donald. My hope was that he would loan me the cash if I promised to repay him with the income from whatever crappy job I landed on my sixteenth birthday. When I got back to Holedo, I’d slip the bills into my mother’s hiding places—only under the left side of her mattress instead of the right, in her pink plastic music box instead of her wooden one, and so on.
“You see,” I would say, “Dad didn’t steal your savings after all. You just forgot where you put it.”
Okay, so the plan had its kinks, but blaming my father would last only so long. And once my mother saw the money, I knew she’d be too relieved to get hung up on the details. Besides, the trip would buy me time to figure out what to do about Edie, to deal with the shredded, butchered feeling in me that wouldn’t leave. More than that, I would finally come face-to-face with my brother, Truman.
I pulled a duffel bag from my closet, smacked it around a couple of times to shake off the dust, and unpacked the contents from my sixth-grade hiking trip three years ago. Out with the baby binoculars and crumb-filled plastic Baggies. In with the socks, underwear, jeans. I threw in a flannel shirt, since my hooded sweatshirt had been abandoned at Edie’s. I didn’t plan on staying overnight, but I wanted to be prepared for just about anything.
Last night had taught me something.
&n
bsp; The bus schedule I nabbed from the bottom of my mother’s stuffed purse said my ship sailed at 8:00 A.M., so I had to move fast. I scribbled a quick note to my mother: Gone for the day with Leon. Don’t worry. Things will be okay. Another mini–suicide note. I dropped it on the kitchen table and stuffed a banana and two Ring Dings into the pocket of my father’s orange hunting coat, the only thing I could find to keep me warm, since my winter coat had also been abandoned at Edie’s.
On my way out the door I stopped to look at my mother, asleep on the living room couch. Eyes closed shut. Lips puckered and tight. Hair frizzed around her face in a branchy black web. Her black coat pulled to her chin with a clasped hand. A folded silver gum wrapper on the coffee table in front of her. Lying there with the tweedy couch arms raised above her small frame, she reminded me of a somber Sleeping Beauty in her glass coffin. I couldn’t look at her without hating myself for what I had done.
Last night after Marnie had said her kissy-face good-byes, my mother left a long, pissed-off message with my father’s dispatcher. I took the opportunity to bow out and drew a steaming bath in our midget-size tub. While my feet thawed under the hot faucet, I listened to my mother crying on the couch. The sound made me think of a kitten being squeezed too hard. A baby struggling for air. It killed me to know I had fucked everything up so miserably, and more than anything I wanted to get out of the tub and say something stupid to make her laugh. But I was too worried she’d pick up some sort of guilty signal flashing above my head, and that would blow the lie about my father. So she cried herself to sleep while I soaked in the warm water, mentally rehearsing my plan to make things better.
Even as she slept on the couch, my mother wore that black wool coat—her body shivering anyway. I wanted to go to her, to pull a blanket up to her chin the way loving parents do to their sleeping children on The Wonderful World of Disney. But I was afraid she’d wake up. Instead I quietly walked over to the radiator in the kitchen to check on the heat myself. From deep inside its rusted rib-cage body, I could hear a steady ping and knock. The landlord obviously wasn’t going to get his ass up here anytime soon. For the hell of it, I twisted the knob by the cracked linoleum floor. Steam spit into the air like a miniature geyser. Heat pricked my face. Then silence. Again I twisted the knob and waited.
