Walking the Bones

by Randall Silvis

  No wonder Da Vinci was fascinated by birds, he thought. How magical they must have seemed to him. How magical they are.

  As a boy he used to spend hours sitting beside a river deeper but not much wider than this stream. Slow-moving water calmed him, the drift of a twig or leaf on the current, the hush of movement as water moved back and forth along the shore.

  Why had the sight of Jayme talking to Richie upset him so much? He hadn’t been vulnerable to jealousy since high school. Such an immature emotion. He was embarrassed by it, and could not understand why it had assailed him out of nowhere, a hot wind that made his skull tight, his lungs incapable of holding air. To discover this weakness in himself—he blushed hot just remembering it.

  He slipped a hand into his pocket, closed his hand around the disk of cool metal. He wished he knew of a cemetery nearby. Could probably find one by GPS if he wanted to. But it wouldn’t be the same. No one but strangers there. How many Sundays had he missed? Was his little boy aware of his absence? Or was it all darkness and silence where he was? All nada y nada.

  For some reason a memory came back to him then, himself as a boy. He was eleven years old, a hot midsummer day, walking through an unfamiliar neighborhood. A fairly new housing development of neat two-story homes, all with new vinyl siding of soft yellow, cream, gray, or white. Blue or maroon or sage-green shutters on all the windows. Wraparound porches. Two-car garages. Wide, lush lawns of manicured green.

  He walked up one street and down another. Tried to picture his mother and him living in one of those homes. He liked the yellow one with green shutters. The basketball hoop on a black metal pole on the edge of the concrete driveway. He would practice there every night, perfect his dribbling, his shooting, learn to jump high enough to touch the rim. His mother would watch from the kitchen window while making dinner, a pot roast, macaroni and cheese, and a chocolate cake. She would be dressed in a yellow summer dress and have a string of pearls around her neck. His father would be nowhere.

  But he could not stand there and stare like a homeless boy and so kept walking, up another street, down another. A sign in a yard said Free Puppies!

  A long-limbed boy maybe seventeen years old came out of the garage carrying a puppy in his arms. The boy was barefoot, wore cut-off denim shorts, no shirt. The puppy was white with black splotches, short-haired, its dark eyes alert.

  “This is the last one,” the boy said, and held the puppy out to him. “It’s yours if you want it.”

  Ryan petted its snout, felt the coolness of its nose. “I don’t know,” he said.

  “Sure you do,” the boy told him. “Go ahead and hold him.” He pressed the puppy into Ryan’s arms.

  Its body was warm against him. It looked up at him, squirmed to lick his face. He could feel the quickness of its heart against his own.

  “I’m supposed to get rid of them before my dad gets home,” the boy said. “This is the last one. Go ahead and take him; he likes you.”

  Ryan held the puppy and felt its love and his love for it and knew he would not be allowed to keep it. But the boy was already walking away, crossing into the green yard and toward the wide, clean porch. “He’s a great little dog,” the boy said. “You’ll see!”

  And he was a great little dog for the few hours he was Ryan’s. Until his father came home in the middle of the night and heard the puppy mewling and found it under a bundled blanket atop Ryan’s bed, then seized it by the scruff of its neck and carried it outside with Ryan pleading and pulling at his father’s shirt until his father slammed the puppy’s head against the side of the trailer and then threw it into the weeds behind the neighbor’s place.

  And now DeMarco watched the birds and the water and tried to push down his anger. Tried to ride the air like a hawk. Tried to move like the water, slow and soundless against the shore, and then away and then back and always drifting downstream, always the same and always new, elusive and cool and untouchable.

  SIXTY-FOUR

  On his way back to Jayme’s grandmother’s house, DeMarco decided a peace offering was in order, but after spotting not a single liquor store, he discovered through his phone’s voice search function that the nearest alcohol was twenty miles north in Ballard County. He returned to the house empty-handed except for the folded map, which he carried into the house. He found Jayme lying atop her grandmother’s bed, fully clothed.

  He paused on the threshold, waiting to be invited inside. “I was hoping to find a bottle of pinot grigio for tonight. Turns out the county is dry. Feel like going out for dinner? There’s a restaurant in Mayfield that serves wine.”

  She sat up, feet together, knees splayed out, hands clasped and resting atop the mattress. She said, “How many years have you and your wife been separated?”

  “Thirteen,” he said.

  “Do you get jealous knowing she’s sleeping with other guys?”

  “No,” he said.

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Maybe you ought to think about that.”

  “I will,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  “Why don’t you come right out and ask me if I ever fucked him?”

  “I don’t need to know that.”

  “You don’t want to know.”

  “Maybe I don’t,” he said.

  “So instead you just get jealous and all pissy and ruin the day.”

  “I am sorry,” he told her. “It just hit me, is all. I can’t explain why.”

  She said, “You can’t explain much of anything lately, can you?”

  He looked at her a few moments longer, then stepped into the room and laid the map on the corner of the bed. “Maybe you can see something in this I can’t,” he said, then turned and walked away.

  She leapt off the bed and went to the threshold. “There’s plenty of beer and wine left from the funeral,” she called. “Knock yourself out!”

  Then she closed and locked the bedroom door.

  DeMarco went into the living room and sat on the brocaded sofa. Except for the furnishings, he felt he had returned to a familiar place. All the old anger and guilt and self-pity were there with him again, all the suffocating darkness despite the sunlight through the curtains. He wished he knew how to make it all go away.

  It wasn’t her fault, no matter what she had done or not done in the past. He was wholly to blame. His problem was that he either kept everything locked up tightly inside, or he opened himself to emotions over which he felt no control. Nor did he know how to remedy the affliction.

  SIXTY-FIVE

  The second time Ryan saw his grandparents he was almost twelve. Nip was dead then from a bad heart from the polio, his mother said. Everything else including the buckled linoleum and sagging ceiling was pretty much the same except that he wasn’t allowed to go investigating upstairs this time because the floors up there weren’t safe anymore. His grandmother, during their visit, uttered only a few quiet words, but mostly just sat there small and silent in a worn-out stuffed chair covered with a striped bedsheet. This time she looked tiny to him, no bigger than a little girl.

  Ryan thought about asking his grandfather what had happened to Nip’s magazines but that didn’t seem like a very good idea. It was hotter inside the house than outside so he sat as motionless as possible on a little footstool beside the torn cloth chair his mother was sitting in. Paul stayed outside in his car, same as the first time, except this time he was listening to an Indians game on the radio.

  This time his mother asked her father if he had a little to spare, and all of a sudden the old man was angry. Does it look like there’s anything to spare around here? he said. And he said, Where’s that husband of yours anyway? What’s he doing if you need a little help so bad? And Ryan’s mother said, He works when he can. He had a roofing job last May but work’s been scarce since then. And his grandfather said, What’s he ever known about pu
tting on a roof? And Ryan’s mother said, It was a factory job. Just a tar and gravel roof is all. His grandfather said, That sounds like his speed all right, and for a while then nobody said much of anything. Then Ryan’s mother took his hand and said, Come on, I’ll get you a glass of nice cold spring water, and as they were getting up his grandfather said, Just empty out a bucket of tar and push it around for a couple hours. That’s all he’s ever been good for, you want to know the truth of it.

  Out in the kitchen Ryan’s mother bent down and whispered to him. There’s a coffee can beside your grandfather’s bed that’s full of silver dollars. Do you think you can sneak in there and get it and take it out to the car without anybody seeing you do it? It’s going to be heavy, and I’m not sure you’re strong enough yet. He straightened up and stood a little taller and told her, I’m strong enough. She said, If you can do that for me I’ll be awfully proud of my big little man, and he said, What if he sees me doing it? and she said, I’ll yell at you a little bit and drag you out to the car and we’ll get our sweet asses out of here.

  So when his mother went back into the living room and started bragging about how well he was doing in school, which wasn’t true at all, Ryan peeked around the doorjamb and saw his grandmother sitting there looking at her little birdlike hands and his grandfather staring at the wall like he wanted to put his fist through it the way Ryan’s father sometimes did. Then Ryan scurried down the short hall and into the bedroom and there was the yellow-and-black Chock full o’Nuts coffee can with its yellow lid right there pushed up tight beside the bed.

  Ryan peeled the lid back and darn if it wasn’t crammed almost to the top with big silver coins just like his mother had said. He snapped the lid back on and picked up the can with both hands and wasn’t sure he could get it out the open window and onto the ground without dropping it. For one thing there was a screen on the window. So he stood there thinking about it and then he told himself, The first thing to do is to get the screen out. So he studied the screen and saw it was held in place by two buttons, one on each side of the frame. He could pull the buttons out of the metal screen frame but not all the way out, but far enough that they came out of the wooden window frame. Then there was the problem of getting the coffee can down onto the ground without dropping it.

  So he thought about that awhile and decided maybe if he took his shirt off and wrapped it around the can, he could lean out over the sill and lower the can most of the way to the ground. He was surprised but proud when it worked with only a dull clunk from the can being dropped the last foot or so. Then after putting the screen back in place he sneaked back to the kitchen and outside and went around to the side of the house and picked up the can with his shirt still wrapped around it, and he walked hunched over and knees bent as fast as he could to the car.

  He got into the backseat and set the can between his feet. Paul had been sleeping with a cigarette burning in his hand and the Indians still on the radio, but he woke up when Ryan set the can down with another dull clunk. He looked back over the seat and said, What’s that you got wrapped up in your shirt? Ryan looked out in the yard and didn’t see any chickens, so he said, It’s a chicken in a can my grandmother made for us.

  Paul sucked on his cigarette then blew the smoke out the window and said, Is your mother making any headway in there or not? Ryan didn’t know what to say to that so he didn’t say anything, and then there was his mother coming out the door at a quicker pace than she usually walked. Before she climbed into the front seat she looked at Ryan through his open window and asked him with her eyes if he had the can or not. He answered with a smile and then his mother smiled too and he felt very proud of himself for making his mother happy for a change.

  Then they were driving back into the city and Paul said, Is that like a boiled chicken she gave you? and Ryan’s mother looked at him and said, What are you talking about? Paul said, In that can between your boy’s feet. My mother used to can chicken too. Though she’d put it up in Mason jars. I never heard of nobody canning chicken in an actual can of any kind. I don’t see how it could go long without spoiling canned like that. Ryan’s mother told him, Oh, we’ll have it eaten long before it can spoil, and then she turned and looked back at Ryan and said, Won’t we, baby?

  They drove a while longer and then Paul looked at her and said, Well? Did you do any good or not?

  She shook her head no. That man’s so tight he stinks.

  Then Paul looked angry for a while too, so Ryan settled back against the seat and tried to move out of the rearview mirror. Ryan’s mother leaned over close to Paul and touched him somewhere Ryan couldn’t see and said, Don’t worry. At least I still have what I owe you. That made Paul smile a little, and for the rest of the trip he kept looking over at her every now and then and giving her more of that smile.

  After Paul parked in his driveway Ryan’s mother went inside Paul’s trailer to pay him for the ride, she said, so Ryan carried the can over to their own trailer and into his bedroom where he stood by the window, hoping a car wouldn’t come along anytime soon with his father in it.

  After what seemed a long time his mother came rushing into the house grinning and laughing and found him there in his bedroom and she said, Where is it? He had it hidden under a pile of his dirty clothes. She knelt beside it and dug her hands into the coins and said, How many do you think are in here? He said, A couple thousand at least, and she said, Oh, I doubt that much. But it’s a lot more than we had yesterday, isn’t it? Ryan looked out the window again and said, What if Grandpa comes looking for it? And she said, For one thing, he doesn’t have a car anymore. And for another thing, he’s too damn cheap to pay anybody to drive him.

  Ryan said, How much did you have to pay Paul? And she said, You don’t worry about that, my little hero. You’re a regular Clyde Barrow, aren’t you? He didn’t know who Clyde Barrow was but he liked the way she squeezed him and how happy she was. She took the can outside to hide it underneath the trailer where his father would never look.

  When she came back in, she had two silver dollars in her hand, and she put one in each of his hands and said, Whatever you do, don’t let your father know anything about that can. You promise? He did and never broke the promise, not even when his father slapped him hard a couple weeks later when he saw the necklace Ryan had given his mother. It was just a cheap little heart on a cheap chain but his father demanded to know where Ryan had stolen it and Ryan said, I bought it at Goodwill with the money from picking up bottles along the road.

  His father slapped him and bloodied his lip and called him a lying little bastard. Then he made Ryan’s mother give him the necklace so he could return it to the store. Ryan was sure the store would tell his father the necklace wasn’t stolen, but after his father left that night, they didn’t see him for the next three days, until there wasn’t anything in the house to eat, so she sent Ryan around to the bars to find him, and when he did his father was sitting on a stool beside some woman who looked old and not half as pretty as his mother and was wearing his mother’s necklace.

  His father told him to get back where he belonged if he knew what was good for him, but the woman reached into her purse and brought out a five-dollar bill and gave it to Ryan to buy some food. He bought a carton of orange juice and a loaf of Wonder Bread and half a pound of chipped ham, and he gave his mother the rest of the money, and so she wouldn’t start crying again he told her it was from his father, and he never once asked where all the silver dollars had gone.

  SIXTY-SIX

  Jayme spread the map over the foot of the bed and stood for a while looking down at it, her gaze disregarding chronology to move clockwise from the nearest victim to the farthest. At first her head was still full of DeMarco, such a frustrating man, a thick, steel vault that refused to open. But then the names on the map began to displace her annoyance, made room for empathy, the slow, sad music of sorrow.

  Jazmin from Owensboro.

  Ceres
from Louisville.

  Keesha from Lexington.

  LaShonda from Nashville.

  Tara from Memphis.

  Crystal from Memphis.

  Debra from St. Louis.

  Jayme’s breath grew short, her body heavy. She moved to the bed and sat cross-legged with the map spread before her. How desperate a girl must be, she thought, to run away from home and all she knew! How frightened. How steeped in despair. But not, the eyes in the girls’ photos had told her, without a lingering glimmer of hope.

  Most of the photos in Vicente’s packet had been taken well before the girls abandoned or were chased from their homes. Therefore missing were the probable bruises, the needle marks, the sunken cheeks, the hollow eyes they would later acquire. They were still girls in the photos, children of poverty, children of abuse of every type imaginable, yet each still clinging to aspiration, to the slippery tail of a dream. How had they looked on the days they disappeared? Had they given up their dreams of being starlets, pop stars, teachers, mothers? Had they been stripped of all hope for a life just a little bit better?

  “Better” for those girls would not have been more of anything, but less. Not more clothes or more cars or more dances or jewelry or boyfriends or plush pillows for the bed. But less violence. Less fear. Fewer beatings. Less ugliness and pain.

  And so they’d fled. Not far; just a few blocks was all. Out of the projects and onto the street. Where had they slept? With a friend? In somebody’s car? Under a viaduct? Had they prayed for a bed in a shelter?

  Did they stand in line at soup kitchens? Scavenge from Dumpsters? Steal? Shoplift? Beg?

  When you run from your family, feel safer as an orphan on streets filled with junkies and wolves and vampires of every ilk, how much are you worth? Twenty dollars? Maybe fifty if you don’t have needle tracks up and down your arms. If your nose isn’t red and scabbed. If you have a place to wash up. If you don’t smell of the filth you now consider yourself to be.