Untouchable

by Scott O'Connor

  Tino paced outside the unit while they worked, in and out of the glow of a security light, kicking the gravel, chain smoking, talking loudly on his cell phone about what he’d found.

  At about four in the morning, they took a meal break, got breakfast at a diner near the freeway onramp. Bob and Roistler debated the Tehachapi situation, armchair quarterbacking the authorities’ next move. Roistler said they should just leave the survivalists alone, they had rights, let them do what they wanted. Bob said that was all well and good, but he’d seen the TV shots of the bikes and if it turned out that kids were inside the compound then the state was going to get involved, there were no two ways around it.

  Darby half-listened to the debate, ate his pancakes, sipped his coffee. Barely any traffic outside, just a few headlights on the freeway. This was the time of night he’d often come home to find Lucy sitting at the kitchen table, unable to sleep. She’d have made instant coffee, standing by the stove, ready to pull the pot before it whistled so as not to wake The Kid. She wrote out lesson plans or read a magazine or just sat at the table, hands around the warm mug, waiting for him to get home.

  They’d sit and talk in low tones, in whispers. She’d ask him about the night, about everything other than the details of the job, about Bob and Roistler and Molina, the whole strange crew. About where he’d been, out in the sleeping city. There wasn’t a part of town he hadn’t been to, a neighborhood he didn’t know. His easy intimacy with the place fascinated her. She still felt like a visitor after a decade and a half, still got turned around in the stretching maze of streets and freeways, kept a gaggle of maps in her purse, stopped and asked for directions more often than she liked to admit. The names of surrounding towns still sounded beautiful to her Midwestern ears, exotic and bright: La Mirada, La Cañada, Montebello.

  She talked about everything other than why she wasn’t able to sleep. She didn’t like to recount the dreams that had woken her, the thoughts that kept her up. At the kitchen table she wanted to be distracted. She wanted him to talk, to guide them both to morning, to sunrise and safety, the start of a normal day. He’d ask what was bothering her and she’d shake her head, smile tightly, request a story about the desert, another of his stories about growing up in what she thought was the strangest place of all.

  He’d tell her about the one-gas-station-town, the dusty trailer park, the freezing nights, the daytime heat so unrelenting he’d had to wear gloves to open the tin mailbox at the end of the road. He’d tell her about the sight of vacationing families on their way to Vegas, motoring through town without slowing, without so much as a look out their windows. About the brave few who pulled over to the side of the road to admire the heat, stepping out of their air-conditioned station wagons just long enough to snap a quick picture of the bleak Martian landscape, the mirages in the dips in the asphalt that shimmered like standing water. He’d tell her about the mysterious blue mountains in the distance, an hour’s hike away, the borax mines and relay antennae. The abandoned Air Force base where he and his friends hopped the fence and rode their bikes up and down the crumbling cement stairwells. Hours spent this way, entire days, skipping school, exploring the vacated barracks, looking for rattlesnakes and scorpions, drinking pilfered booze, smoking contraband Kools.

  He’d tell her about his grandmother, Eustice, a tough, leathery old bird who drank too much, smoked too much, carried a wireless radio everywhere, room to room in the trailer, out to visit at neighboring trailers, out in the car, to the grocery store ten miles east, always tuned to the Country & Western station out of Barstow, humming along with Waylon Jennings, Jim Reeves, Patsy Cline. About her insuperable pride, how she made every repair to the trailer herself, every repair to their rusted-out Dodge Dart, repairs to all the neighbors’ places. How she shepherded him in one end of childhood and out the other in relative safety, with a minimum of broken bones, no head trauma, no time in juvenile hall.

  There was no father. There was no mother. He had no memory of either. When Lucy pressed a little, he told her of the two short, sun-streaked flashes he still had, the only recall, two hot desert afternoons when he was five, six years old.

  The first, of a tall man with calloused hands, a mustache and mirrored sunglasses. He wore army boots caked with old mud. The rough feel of the man’s hand on the back of Darby’s neck. The man leans down and says something in Darby’s ear. The smell of cigarettes on his breath, his teeth yellow and broken. There was no memory of the man’s voice. He’s there and then he’s gone.

  The second flash, at the diner on the other side of the road from the trailer park. Darby sitting in a booth with a woman in a white halter-top and blue jeans. She’s smoking instead of eating, filling the plastic ashtray on the table while she picks at a plate of fat yellow French fries. She wears her sunglasses inside the diner. There are little cuts on her hands, scars and scabs on her forearms. The red polish on her fingernails is chipped. Darby eats a bowl of Frosted Flakes and milk. The Frosted Flakes came in a fist-sized single-serving box that was an exact replica of a real-sized box. The waitress brought the box and a cup of milk to the table and Darby was amazed by this. He looks at the box more than he looks at the woman beside him. The woman looks like an old photograph of his grandmother that hangs in the front room of the trailer. His grandmother as a young woman. She talks non-stop in a voice that’s a smoother, higher version of his grandmother’s gravelly twang.

  After he finishes his cereal, they walk back across the road. The woman holds Darby’s hand as they cross. She goes inside the trailer to use the bathroom and has another argument with his grandmother. Darby sits on the bumper of the woman’s brown Camaro, looking at the miniature cereal box he has kept, this amazing thing, pretending that it’s a normal-sized box and he’s a giant. How big his hands look. After a while, the woman comes out of the trailer, angrily wiping at her eyes under the sunglasses. She lifts Darby off the bumper, sets him down on the trailer’s front steps, drives away in the Camaro, wheels spitting sand as she pulls out of the driveway and off down the road.

  That was it. That’s all there was. Not memories, really, just flashes of heat and dust, light reflecting in sunglass lenses, cereal and cold milk. Lucy would ask if he was curious at all, if he ever wondered about the rest of it, and he had to admit that he was, curious and angry and a little sad, but there was nothing he could do about it, there was nothing to look for, nothing left behind. Except for the cereal box. He kept the cereal box all throughout his childhood, kept it as a teenager, took it with him when he finally drove west into the city. It sat in the bottom of his toolbox, filled with a small block of wood so the sides wouldn’t get crushed under the weight of the tools piled on top. One night he brought it out to the kitchen table. Lucy held the box, smiled slowly at the outdated package design, the thought of Darby as a little boy holding the box years ago.

  That’s it, he’d said. That’s all there is. It’s not a memory. It’s just a cereal box.

  She smiled like she didn’t quite believe him.

  They both wished like hell for a cigarette on nights like that, just one. They thought about how good it would feel to stand on the porch in the cool air, passing it back and forth, hands touching at the warm exchange. They hadn’t smoked since Lucy got pregnant with The Kid, but it still pulled at them on nights like that, nights with long whispered stories and instant coffee at the kitchen table. They came close to giving in, talked resentfully about ease and convenience, the insidious temptation of 24-hour gas stations. They rushed to change the subject, to get the delicious thought out of their heads.

  Some nights Lucy would tell him about Chicago, her parent’s house in the northwest suburbs. About going to the sets of her father’s early infomercials, a warehouse in Skokie converted to a bargain-basement soundstage. About the visits from the IRS, the FTC, other government agencies, local and federal, about the constantly shifting corporate names, front companies, holding companies, the late night phone threats from irate customers, husbands of
customers, husbands of secretaries and call center operators. The evenings her mother sat expressionless at the dining room table with glass after glass of white wine, Lucy’s father doing battle on the phone in the other room, his voice rising and falling, bellowed threats and hushed whispers. Her mother’s thin fingers finding the stem of the glass, lifting the glass to her lips.

  She’d tell Darby about Wrigley Field with her father, Dodgers-Cubs games, great seats procured from some business contact, field level, eight or ten rows back from the visitor’s dugout. Two Dodger rooters among the Ron Santo and Fergie Jenkins fans, hooted at for their ball caps, their cheers for the opposing team. Her father recognized in later years, when she was twelve, thirteen. Her father known by name to many of the fans around them, Earl Patrick, the late-night TV sales guy, or known to some as the snake-oil man, the confidence man, the huckster. Earl sucking in the warm greetings and bristling at the insults, skin as thin as a Cubs lead in the bottom of the eighth. He had dreams of throwing out the first pitch, of being asked to partake in the ceremony; he had a wild imagination which he shared with her in the moments between the pitcher’s windup and delivery to the plate, the runner taking a short lead off first, the pauses, the breath in the game. He had dreams of national celebrity, of respect, of finally being appreciated as a visionary of the future of televised commerce, moving Lucy and her mother to Los Angeles to produce legit television, situation comedies and hour-long dramas, awards shows, variety specials. He kept a color postcard tacked to the wall of his office in Skokie: Sunset Boulevard circa 1970, gleaming headlights and taillights, theatre marquees, yellow spotlight beams crossing the night sky. This was the dream. Between pitches, he leaned over and shared it with her in a conspiratorial hush that sent a chill from her tailbone to the nape of her neck. Her father’s beery whisper in her ear. This was the dream, he’d say, and it was within reach. A few more years here and then they’d take off west. They’d all live happily ever after, Lucy and her mother and the great Earl Patrick. No more angry phone calls, no more insulting greetings at ball games from mouth-breathing drunks, just swimming pools and sunburn, everybody happy, everybody getting what they deserved.

  The sun would start to show out the kitchen windows, the morning finally arrived, and Lucy would sip her coffee and Darby would ask again what the dreams were about, the dreams that made it impossible for her to sleep. She’d give her small, deflecting smile and shake her head and say that they were nothing. They were about nothing. They were about baseball.

  Bob paid their bill at the diner, the result of some previous lost bet with Roistler. They drove back to the storage facility. There was a good deal of fluid sprayed around the first unit, the living room. The couch had to be disposed of, a pair of rugs, piles of newspapers and magazines, freestanding racks of clothes. Darby worked on his knees on the cement floor, spraying and scrubbing underneath crates and boxes, into cracks and crevices where fluids had spread and dried. The day grew, lengthened, the sun pouring into the unit through the open doors, the heat getting bad, worse. Game shows played on the TV. Tino returned in a fresh red jogging suit, a matching Cardinals ball cap, resumed pacing outside the unit, smoking and talking on his cell phone.

  About noon, the wife arrived.

  Roistler noticed it first, an angry female voice outside the unit. He whistled until he got Darby’s attention, nodded toward the doorway. Bob was out at the vans, loading up for a run to the disposal site. There was a woman out there with him, petite, short-haired, dressed like she was on her way to work, a prim suit with a pleated gray skirt. She was yelling at Bob, jabbing her finger at his chest. Bob listened, nodded, moved slowly back toward the doorway, positioning himself between the woman and the unit. Tino paced in the background, eyes on the situation, whispering excitedly into his phone, a hand covering his mouth for privacy.

  The woman gasped for breath as her voice rose. It had taken the police this long to find her, she said. It had taken her this long to find the storage facility, to find Van Nuys. They weren’t from there, her and her husband. They were from Costa Mesa, an hour and a half away. She’d driven up alone, as soon as the police had given her a location, even though they had told her not to come.

  Bob pulled back his hood, removed his goggles and mask. He listened and nodded, kept himself between the woman and the unit.

  Darby tried to ignore her. This was Bob’s job. Bob would handle it. Darby moved deeper into the corner. Some fluid had spread under the couch, drying on the concrete, filling the cracks. He sprayed the area, watched the enzyme bubbling.

  The noise from the TV was gone, suddenly. Roistler had turned it off so he could hear the conversation outside. Darby waved his hand, trying to get him to turn it back on, snapping his fingers ineffectively in the rubber gloves. Roistler ignored him, watching the woman, crying now, hysterical, jabbing her finger at Bob’s chest.

  “We’re not at liberty to discuss that, ma’am,” Bob said. “That’s something you should discuss with the police.”

  “The police said it was some sort of knife.”

  “We’re not at liberty to discuss that.”

  “The police said it was some sort of large knife but I want to know for sure. You have to understand that.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “I have to know if it was a knife from our home. If he took a knife with him when he left. If he intended to do this all along.”

  Darby focused on his immediate area, the cracks beneath the couch, scooped up the liquefied fluid with a fistful of paper towels.

  “You can’t keep me out,” the woman said.

  “I can’t let you in, ma’am.”

  “The police said he was living here. Is that true? Why would he live here?”

  Darby moved deeper into the corner. This was Bob’s job. Bob would handle it. He sprayed another crack in the floor, coughed into his mask. It felt like there was something caught in his throat.

  “Who else is in there?” the woman said.

  “Ma’am, if you’d just go back to your car.”

  “I heard someone else in there. I heard someone cough.” Her voice gone ragged, shrill.

  Darby coughed again. There was something stuck in his throat, a little piece of something, a speck, a fleck. It was next to impossible that a contaminant could pass through the mask. The mask was thick rubber and plastic. He coughed again. It had to be a piece of the mask, a little speck of plastic or rubber that he’d inhaled.

  “Who else is in there?” The wife was almost screaming now.

  “We have a team of technicians, ma’am,” Bob said. “We’re trained to deal with situations like this.”

  And then she was past him; then she was inside. She ducked under Bob’s arm, pushed past, punched, kicked, something. She stood in the center of the unit, between Darby and Roistler, looking at what was left, what was yet to be cleaned up, the fluid and matter and dead vectors and these men in their masks and moonmen suits, one standing not far from her, watching, one kneeling in the corner, clutching a handful of red-soaked paper towels, turning as if caught, as if discovered doing something unspeakable.

  She put her hand over her mouth. “Oh you cocksuckers,” she said. “Oh you dirty cocksuckers.”

  Bob was at her side, had her arm, leading her back out of the unit. She was sobbing and he had his arm around her shoulders, was saying something to her, low and soothing, steering her back out into the fresh air, the sunlight. Tino had dropped his cell phone in the gravel, was watching incredulously, his hands up at the sides of his head, pulling at his ball cap.

  They could hear the woman wailing now, the familiar soul-deep keen, a sound they’d heard a hundred times, the call of inarticulate loss.

  Darby coughed again. It was still caught in his throat, a speck, a fleck. He coughed into the mask, trying to get it loose, get it out.

  Once the woman’s moan had faded, Roistler poked his head out the door, looked one way, the other.

  “Where’s Bob?”

/>   Darby tossed his redbag into the center of the room with the others, pulled off his gloves and goggles, turned up the volume of the TV as he exited the unit. Tino was still outside the door, trying to fit his cell phone back together, the battery and the miniature antennae. A trail of dust from the woman’s car stretched down to the end of the gravel row. Bob was nowhere to be seen.

  It was the high heat of the day. The sun pounded Darby’s forehead, the back of his neck. He walked down the gravel drive to a narrow shady space between the buildings. He heard something from the other end of the space, gagging sounds, coughing. He followed the sounds, gravel crunching under his boots, through to the other side, the back of the storage unit, bright sun again, where he found Bob doubled over by the fence, retching into a patch of high weeds.

  “Christ, what the hell did I eat?” Bob spoke between heaves, gasping for air. A long strand of saliva dangled from his lower lip.

  “Let’s go,” Darby said. He put a hand on Bob’s arm. “Let’s go. Let’s get back to work. It’s over.”

  “Something didn’t agree with me.” Bob sounded a little wild, spitting into the brush. “What the hell did I eat?”

  “It’s over,” Darby said. He struggled to pull Bob to his feet, steer him back around toward the storage unit. “Let’s get back to work. It’s over and done.”

  He stood alone in the second unit, the bedroom. Bob and Roistler were out packing the vans. He held the camera, tried to shake the woman’s voice from his head, the look on her face when she’d seen what they were doing. He lifted the camera to his eye, looked through the viewfinder at the unit. Just some boxes left, some crates that had escaped the mess. The frame of the cot, the exercise bike. The room was clean. The job was finished.