Untouchable

by Scott O'Connor

  “Did you see the fire last night?” she said.

  The Kid shook his head.

  “I did. It was a white house right down the street. I went out and watched it burn, watched the firemen shooting water. The news trucks were there. That woman from Channel Two was there, standing at the corner talking on TV. I saw the whole thing. I watched it in real life and then I watched it on TV. Then this morning I saw the house on the way to school. Completely burned. It looks like a tooth with a cavity. No one lived. The person who was in the house died in the fire.”

  The Kid took his notebook out of the grocery bag.

  How do you know that?

  Michelle coughed loudly, didn’t cover her mouth, letting the cough fly out into the hallway. It looked to The Kid like she didn’t feel the need to answer his question. She had been there, The Kid hadn’t. She knew what she knew.

  “Are you and Matthew still making that comic book?”

  The Kid nodded.

  “It’s been a long time since the last one came out. How long’s it been?”

  A couple of months.

  “Why’s it taking so long?”

  The Kid shrugged, didn’t bother writing the obvious answer: What’s the point?

  “I thought it was pretty good,” Michelle said. “Not as good as a real comic, but it was pretty good to read sometimes.”

  Michelle smelled bad, even from that distance. Like fruit that was too ripe. Michelle had B.O. and bad breath, but the other kids rarely made fun of her for it. She was too big, too wild, too mean.

  “I go in and see Dr. Bromwell, too,” she said. “Twice a week. Tuesday and Thursdays, right after lunch. I bet you didn’t know that.”

  The Kid knew that. He’d gone down to Mr. Bromwell’s office on those days to call his dad and found the door closed, heard Michelle’s deep voice on the other side.

  “We talk about my real dad,” Michelle said. “He lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Minneapolis and St. Paul, those are the twin cities. He moved out there a few years ago because he hates my mom. He took a bus out there, I think. He didn’t take the car, because my mom’s still got it. My mom’s boyfriend takes it to go buy beer. I tell Dr. Bromwell about how when I save up enough money I’m going to take a bus to Minneapolis to live with my real dad.”

  He’s not a doctor.

  “Who?”

  Mr. Bromwell. He’s just a Mr.

  “He’s a doctor. He’s like the nurse, except he’s even higher up than the nurse. He’s got diplomas on the wall.”

  I think he’s just a Mr.

  “If he isn’t a doctor, then why the fuck do we go talk to him, Kid? Why the fuck would they send us here?”

  Michelle’s face went red, redder than her fruit juice mustache. She got angry so fast. The Kid closed his notebook. He didn’t want to make her any angrier.

  “Whatever, Kid,” Michelle said. “He is who he is. You don’t have to tell me what you talk about in there. I don’t really give a fuck.”

  She shoved off past him, swaying down the hallway, walking with that bad-guy shoulder roll. The Kid wondered if she had a hall pass. Thought that the answer was probably no.

  Rhonda Sizemore was the prettiest girl in sixth grade, maybe even the whole school. She had clear blue eyes and long blond hair and nice clothes, fancy clothes. The kids who were her friends were like celebrities and the kids who weren’t her friends wanted really badly to be her friends.

  The Kid was not one of her friends. No way, no how. She looked at The Kid like he was something she’d stepped in, like he was something stuck to the bottom of her shoe.

  Rhonda had drawn a picture of The Kid sitting in a garbage can with squiggly fume-lines flying out from his tongue and under his arms. In the picture, he was holding his notebook open to a page that said, I Stink. Rhonda had given the picture to the girl who sat in front of her and that girl had passed it to the girl in front of her and so on. The drawing went around the room during Independent Reading Time, while Miss Ramirez graded quiz papers at her desk.

  The Kid saw the drawing because it was passed down his row, and when it reached his desk there was really no way to pass it around him. The kid in front just passed it back to The Kid. When The Kid had the drawing in his hands he wanted to tear it up, but Razz grabbed the back of The Kid’s seat and shook his desk and whispered Come on, come on, until The Kid passed it over his shoulder.

  There was a new girl in class. The Kid hadn’t even noticed her. She must have arrived while he was in Mr. Bromwell’s office. When Independent Reading Time was over, Miss Ramirez called her up in front of the dry-erase board and introduced her to everyone. The Kid didn’t hear her name. He was watching the drawing make its sneaky way around the room.

  The new girl was small and pale and incredibly skinny. She wore a plastic barrette in her blond hair, a little blue flower. She said she had moved to Los Angeles from Arizona. She said her father was in the military. The class began introducing itself, one kid at a time, and after each kid the new girl said, Hello, and then that kid’s name.

  The Kid knew where Arizona was, but he’d never been there, and he wondered if everyone in Arizona looked like her, sun-kissed and slight.

  “Hello, Rhonda Sizemore,” the new girl said.

  The Kid wished he’d held onto the drawing. He didn’t want the new girl to see it. He thought that this was someone who didn’t know anything about him, who didn’t know how disgusting he was. He thought that if he could get a hold of the drawing again, he could maybe keep her from seeing it and thinking those things about him.

  “Hello, Matthew Crump,” the new girl said.

  Arizona, The Kid thought. That should be the new girl’s name. He thought of the desert, bright white sun, clean sand stretching to each horizon. Images from a cowboy comic he’d once read. A new place, it seemed like. No buildings, no people. A place where nobody knew anything about anybody.

  The drawing was making another circuit, moving from desk to desk every time Miss Ramirez looked at Arizona instead of the rest of the class. When it reached The Kid he grabbed onto it, folded it once, twice, three times into a small, tight rectangle. Razz shook the back of The Kid’s seat again, Come on, Come on, and when The Kid didn’t pass it back he heard other kids whispering too, Come on, Come one, Razz whispering the loudest, an undisguised threat in his voice.

  It was The Kid’s turn to say his name, so Miss Ramirez said, Whitley Darby, to keep things moving along, to avoid the awkward delay of The Kid writing in his notebook and holding it up for the new girl to see. The other kids laughed, but The Kid was grateful that she’d saved him the embarrassment of explaining the notebook to a new person.

  The Kid’s desk was really shaking now, Razz trying to jar The Kid loose so he’d drop the drawing. The Kid didn’t want the new girl to see the drawing, but he couldn’t think of a place he could hide it. The shaking got worse, Come on, Come on, and when he felt the kicks starting, the kicks trying to knock over his chair, he folded the paper again, Come on, Come on, making it as small as he could and then he popped the drawing into his mouth, chewing fast. The kids around him erupted in angry yells, drawing a stern look from Miss Ramirez. Razz giving him a final hard kick. The Kid swallowed.

  “Hello, Whitley Darby,” the new girl said.

  The Kid took different routes home from school, alternate routes, attempts to confuse the enemy, to get home without incident. He had four of these routes, one for each of the first four days of the week. He followed them in sequence. On Fridays, he went back to the Monday route, which meant that the next week he would start with the previous Tuesday’s route, and so on. He kept track of all of it in his notebook. It was a complex safety system. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t. Sometimes he turned a corner and there they were, Razz and Brian Bromwell, waiting for him.

  Sometimes The Kid came up with different routes when an incident had occurred, or when there was something he wanted to see. Then he would take another way home, circuitous
, his mom’s word, meaning a route that went way out of its way to get him home. This was one of those days. He made a new route through the neighborhood where the fire had been. He wanted to see what all the commotion had been about, the sirens and the glow in the sky. He wanted to see if Michelle’s story was true, wanted to see what was left of the house after the fire.

  At the traffic signal at the top of the hill he took a left and doubled back, away from Sunset, the opposite way from the way home, down the hill along the cinderblock wall at the backside of the strip mall. High up on the wall were signs for the donut shop, the nail salon, and then the main store, Gift 2000, where they sold a little of everything, school supplies and cleaning supplies and boxes of cereal with brands The Kid had never heard of. Everything in the store was supposed to cost 97 cents. The store used to be called 97¢ Gift, but they’d recently changed the name and hung new signs on the outside of the building in anticipation of the new year. The Kid thought that was just as well, because 97¢ Gift was misleading. After tax, everything in the store actually cost $1.04.

  It was hot again, bright afternoon sun in his eyes. A rickety van rumbled by, what Michelle Mustache called a roach coach. There were placards on the side of the van with a menu in Spanish, pictures of tacos, burritos, tostadas, hand-drawn logos for soft drinks and juices. The vans stopped at construction sites at break times, and workers lined up to buy breakfast and lunch from the back. Michelle said that she bought food from roach coaches all the time. She said that the tostadas were really good, you just had to be careful that you knew what you were biting into.

  There was a large cardboard box on the sidewalk halfway down the hill, the box for some sort of major appliance, a stove or a giant-screen TV. Two dirty, shoeless feet were sticking out. The Kid almost stopped to check if the person was okay, but then he heard snoring from inside the box, so he moved quickly away.

  Every few seconds he checked back over his shoulder, half-expecting Brian to be gaining ground at a full sprint, impossible to outrun, to get away from. He scanned the street ahead of him, the corners of houses and apartment buildings, ready to change direction and run like heck if need be. When he saw something that he wanted to write down in his notebook, he stepped off the sidewalk and crouched down between cars in a driveway to hide while he was most vulnerable, while his eyes were on the page.

  He walked down the final slope onto the street where he figured the fire had taken place. He wasn’t exactly sure what he had expected, but this wasn’t it. No fire trucks, no police cars, no dead bodies, no smoking craters. The street looked the same as it had ever looked, small houses in ramshackle rows stretching out to the base of the next hill, cars and trucks parked at the curbs, dogs sleeping on porches. Like nothing had ever happened. It didn’t seem likely that he’d gone down the wrong street. He had a very keen sense of direction. He continued along, looking for any evidence of what had happened the night before.

  He smelled it before he saw it. Charred wood and stale smoke, like the morning after a barbeque. It was a small house near the end of the street, wedged in tight between two larger houses. One level, maybe a few tiny rooms. There was a cement porch in front and two thin strips of concrete running through the dirt at the side of the house to function as a driveway. The Kid couldn’t remember ever noticing the house before, couldn’t remember what it had looked like before this.

  The house was burned to a crisp. The two front windows were nothing more than ragged black holes, the wood frames blown out around the edges. Whole sections of the low roof had collapsed, and long fingers of black sear-stain shot out of the holes and down the front and sides of the house. The walls and roof were soaked from the fire hoses, the wood still wet even in the afternoon heat. It looked like a piece of soggy charcoal in the shape of a house. The Kid held his nose. The closer he got, the more powerful the smell was.

  He didn’t know if there had ever been grass in the small patch of front yard or if the grass had burned up or what. It was just dirt now, rutted with tire tracks and boot-prints, slithery snake trails from fire hoses. There was a big plastic garbage bin overturned in the front yard, melted almost perfectly in half. The front door of the house was missing, maybe burned down or kicked in by the firefighters, but there was a heavy steel security door still in place, closed tight. It looked ridiculous with the blown-out windows and the holes in the roof. Who would want to break into the house now? The Kid thought of somebody closing the security door when they left, a policeman or fireman, which he guessed made sense. What did you do when you were the last person to leave somebody’s house, even if it had burned down? You closed the door behind you.

  The houses on the street were so close together that it was hard to believe the entire block hadn’t caught fire, that the flames hadn’t leapt across the street, shot out up the hill toward Sunset, toward The Kid’s house. The Kid tried to imagine the scene as Michelle had described it, the satellite trucks, the newswoman from Channel Two. It seemed impossible that the fire had been contained in such a small space.

  No one had survived. The Kid knew this. Michelle had been right. No other conclusion could be drawn by looking at the house. Someone had been inside and hadn’t gotten out. He just had to look at the house to know.

  He wondered what would happen to the house next. Somebody would come and tear it down, he guessed. Bulldozers, dump trucks, men with shovels. They’d knock over what was left, haul it away. Spread new dirt across the lot, build another house. Once the smell was gone, once the people on the street had moved away or died, no one would know the house had even been here. No one would know what had happened, what had been left.

  He looked around to make sure that no one was watching, then he stepped to the side of the house, placed his hand against the outside wall. He wasn’t sure why he was doing this, what he expected. What he thought it would feel like. It was strange, what it felt like. It felt like a body, like a human being, like a person’s side, their ribcage, breathing slowly, in and out, settling down after something scary, something awful. It felt soft, it felt fragile. It felt warm.

  Midnight in Van Nuys. The flat, still depths of the San Fernando Valley. They drove the vans down the narrow aisles of a vast public storage facility, between rows of low, identical garages, their headlights sweeping across the steel doors, gravel crunching under their tires, deeper in, down rows with more garages, through long stretches of darkness between security lights, peering out the vans’ windows, looking for numbers above the doors. Bob was in the first van, following a makeshift map Mrs. Fowler had drawn on the work order, as per the caller’s directions. Darby and Roistler were in the second van, trailing close behind.

  Their headlights found him standing in front of a garage door in the middle of a row, smoking a cigarette, coughing into the crook of his elbow. Young guy, dark-featured and heavy-lidded, wearing a baggy gray jogging suit, a thick gold chain around his neck, a Yankees ball cap pulled low over his eyes. He did this weird thing where he slapped the hood of each van as it came to a stop in front of the garage, a quick blast with the heel of his hand as if he were congratulating them for winning a race.

  “It’s about fucking time,” he said. “How long have I been standing here? Two hours, at least.”

  Bob checked the work order on his clipboard, turned his wrist to look at his watch. “You Tino?”

  “You Bob?”

  “Forty-seven minutes,” Bob said. “Call placed to our dispatcher just after eleven pm.”

  “Look, Bob, give me a break, okay? I’ve been standing out here for I don’t know how long with this fucking thing back there in the unit.”

  “The coroner didn’t take the body?”

  “The coroner took the body, Bob, but there’s still a hell of a lot of him in there.” Tino tossed his cigarette, knelt down next to the padlock on the door. “I locked it back up,” he said. “I locked it back up, and then I thought, Why am I locking it back up? That mess isn’t going anywhere on its own.”

&
nbsp; “Have you been in contact with the owner of the facility?” Bob said.

  “The owner of the facility’s my father. The owner of the facility’s on vacation. Cops wanted to know that, too. Can we get in contact with the owner of the facility?” Tino unlatched the padlock, pulled it from the door. “I told them to come back in a week, he’ll be here. In the meantime I’ve got to get this shit cleaned up. I said, What do I do? Go get a mop? The cops said, Try the Yellow Pages. Contaminated Waste Disposal. I thought they were fucking joking with me. Then I saw your ad.”

  Tino lifted the garage door, flipped on the overhead light, covered his nose with the sleeve of his jogging suit. Bob stepped inside the unit. Within a few seconds, Darby could see the flash of the Polaroid.

  “The coroner said it happened a week ago, at least,” Tino said. “Told me before he even saw the body.”

  “Thank you,” Bob said. “That’s fine.”

  “He said he could tell by looking at the flies. He could tell by looking at the number of maggots, at the generations of maggots, if you can believe that shit.”

  “That’s fine,” Bob said. “That’s all the information we’ll need.”

  They suited up and walked through the site. There were two connected units, and there had been some movement back and forth. Things had spread, dripped, dragged. The units were set up as an apartment almost, a living room with a thrift store couch and coffee table and TV, a bedroom with a small army cot, an exercise bike, throw rugs on the cement floor. Tino said this happened sometimes, even though it was against the rules of the facility. People came to live, quietly, kicked out by their wives or landlords. They set their stuff up in their units and went on with their lives, went to work, went to the gym, came back here to watch TV and sleep. Tino said it wasn’t common, but it wasn’t exactly uncommon, either.

  They started with the second unit, the bedroom. Bob turned on the TV, all night news, something to drown out the spraying and scrubbing and Roistler’s incessant chatter. There was more footage of the Tehachapi compound, a shaky, long-range shot of a pair of sheriff’s deputies walking the dirt road up to the fence, speaking with two men on the other side. After a minute the camera moved away from the conversation, panning the compound, searching the spaces between structures, hastily focusing and unfocusing, looking for something more interesting, finally coming to rest on a spot beside one of the smaller buildings, a swing set and slide, a short row of childrens’ bicycles.