Riley craned his neck to watch the man’s heavy shoulders recede down the length of the car behind him before the door to the restroom swung open to block his view and the man disappeared inside. He turned to the boy, more baffled and irritated than anything else, and simulated a smile. He’d never done well with children—to him they were alien beings, noisy, hyper, always scrabbling and shouting and making incomprehensible demands, and he thanked God he’d never had any of his own, though his second wife, Crystal, formerly one of the students in the itinerant workshops he’d given over the years, had twice been pregnant and had actually thought of giving birth before he’d managed to make her see the light. But here was this boy, lost in a nylon ski jacket two sizes too big for him, his eyes fixed on the floor and a cheap tarnished cross suspended from a chain round his neck. Riley turned back to his book, but he couldn’t focus. A minute passed. Then another. Scenery flashed by. And then, over the rattling of the wheels and the shrieking metallic whine of the brakes—were they already coming into the Schenectady station, the stop before his?—he heard the boy’s voice, whispering, a voice no louder or more forceful than the breath expelled from his lungs, and turned to him.
The boy’s eyes jumped to his. “Socorro,” he whispered, then glanced over his shoulder before dropping his gaze again. Very softly—the screeching brakes, the shudder of the car, the rafters of the station fixed in the window—the boy repeated himself: “Socorro.”
It took him a moment—French had been his language, both in high school and college, though he recalled little of it now and had no access to Spanish whatever, if this was Spanish the boy was speaking—before he said, “Is that your name? Socorro?”
The boy seemed to shrink away from him, down, down into the depths of his jacket and the scuffed vinyl of the seat that loomed over him as if it would swallow him up. He didn’t say yes, didn’t say no, didn’t even nod—all he did was repeat the word or phrase or whatever it was in a voice so small it was barely audible. There was a whistle, a shout, the train lurched and the wheels began to revolve again. Riley wasn’t slow on the uptake, or not particularly—it was just that he wasn’t used to people, to complication—but an unraveling skein of thoughts began to suggest themselves to him now. He glanced up at the rack above the seat the big man had vacated and saw that the valise was no longer there and then he thrust his face to the window, jerking his eyes back to the platform and the receding crowd there—men, women, strollers, backpacks, luggage, the nuns, a seeing-eye dog and a woman in dark glasses, all that color and movement, too much, way too much, so that he couldn’t be sure what he was seeing even as the checkered sport coat flickered suddenly into view and vanished just as quickly.
—
What went through his head in those first few ruptured moments as he turned away from the window? That his eyes had deceived him, that the big man was in the restroom still and would be back any second now to claim the boy, who must have been his nephew or an adopted son or even his own natural child by a Hispanic woman, a Latina, an immigrant maybe with a green card or even citizenship. Wasn’t that how the Russians did it? Marry a citizen and get a free pass? He glanced up and down the car but no one had got on and the conductor was nowhere to be seen. The boy was hunched inside his jacket, absolutely motionless, his eyes on the floor. Riley saw now that he wasn’t wearing a shirt under the ski jacket, as if he’d dressed—or been dressed—hurriedly. And his shoes—he was wearing only one shoe, a scuffed and dirt-smeared sneaker. His socks were wet, filthy. He looked—and here the awful truth slammed at Riley like a ballistic missile—abused.
He came up out of the seat so suddenly he cracked his skull on the luggage rack and for just an instant saw lights dancing before his eyes. “Stay here, I’ll be right back,” he breathed, and then he was out in the aisle and heading for the restroom, the skirts of his coat flapping behind him like great enveloping wings. He seized hold of the handle, flung open the door. There was no one inside.
A quick glance into the car beyond—nothing, nobody—and then he was easing himself down beside the boy and the boy was shrinking, getting smaller by the moment. The boy’s limbs were sticks, his eyes two puddles gouged out of a muddy road. Riley bent his face toward him, fighting to control his voice. “Where’s your father?” he said. “Where’d he go? Votre père? Papa? Where’s your papa? Or uncle? Is he your uncle?”
The boy said nothing. Just stared down at the floor as if Riley were speaking a foreign language. Which, in fact, he was.
“Where are you going? What town? Where do you live—do you know where you live?”
More nothing. Advanced nothing. Nothing feeding off of nothing.
What he had to do, right this minute, was find the conductor, the engineer, anybody—the nuns, where were the nuns when you needed them?—to take this, this situation off his hands. He’d actually started to get to his feet again before he realized how sketchy this all was—he couldn’t very well leave the kid there. What if the big man came back? What if somebody else—? What if they thought he was somehow responsible? He shot his eyes round the car. Something came up in his throat. It was then that he thought of the phone, Caroline’s phone, this miracle of instant communication secreted in his pocket for just such a moment as this.
He eased to one side to slip it from his pocket, a hard mute monolithic thing, cold in his hand, its screen decorated with the imprint of his wife’s fingertips. He’d call Amtrak, that was what he was thinking—the emergency number. There had to be an emergency number, didn’t there? Or 911. He’d call 911 and have the police meet him at the Albany station. All right. But how to turn it on? He’d seen Caroline do it a hundred times, her fingers flicking lightly over the screen as a steady stream of colorful icons rolled dutifully into position. He pressed the screen, expecting the thing to jump to life, but nothing happened. Again he pressed it. The kid was watching him now out of the reddened pools of his eyes—had he been crying, was that it? “It’s okay,” he heard himself say. “Everything’s fine. Just give me—give me a minute here.”
The car rocked. Bleak dead trees flailed at the windows. The sky was made of stone. Finally—and he felt a surge of satisfaction so powerful he nearly sang out in triumph—he found the on/off switch hidden in the frame and indistinguishable from it, as if the manufacturer, clearly a sadist, had put all the company’s resources into making its function as obscure as possible. No matter. The screen flashed at him, a parade of icons there, and they shimmied at the merest touch of his finger. But where were the numbers? How did you make a call? Why were—?
And now the train was slowing and the loudspeakers suddenly crackled with a mechanical voice announcing Station stop Albany/Rensselaer even as he shoved the phone back in his pocket and sprang up to jerk his bag down from the overhead rack, the decision already forming in his brain because it was the only decision he could have made—anyone in his position would have done the same thing and you didn’t have to be Albert Schweitzer to weigh the moral balance of it. He took the kid by the hand, pulled him up out of the seat and down the aisle to the door, which at that moment clattered open on the platform in a burst of noise and confusion, people swarming everywhere, and where was a cop? He needed a cop.
A dirty white pigeon fluttered into the air. Somebody said, “Laura Jean, you look terrific, I hardly recognize you,” and a pair of policemen surfaced amidst the crowd, moving toward him now, and here was a too-thin vaguely blondish woman rushing for him with her hands outstretched and the light of redemption in her cracked blue eyes, and she was going to say, “Mr. Riley?” and he was going to say, “Ms. Trumpeter?” but that never happened, because the policemen wrestled him to the pavement even as he felt the cold metallic bite of the handcuffs gnaw into his flesh.
—
Sometime later—he didn’t know how much later because they’d taken his watch—he found himself in a desperate place, a place even the wildest of his wild years couldn’t
have begun to prepare him for. There were strange smells, unsettling noises, the rhythmic tapping of heels on linoleum. Cold steel. Corridors within corridors. Here he was in the midst of it, his hands shaking as if he’d had a hundred cups of coffee, and he couldn’t stop pacing back and forth across the stained concrete floor of the solitary cell they’d put him in, the guard or deputy or whatever he was giving him a rude shove and announcing in an overheated voice that it was for his own protection. “The people we got in here, they don’t like creeps like you. And you want to know something? Neither do I.” And then he added, as a kind of oral postscript, “Scumbag.”
Donna Trumpeter, aflutter with righteousness, had tried to explain that they’d made a mistake, that he—Riley, the man in handcuffs with the heart rate surging like Krakatoa—was a famous writer, a celebrity, an award winner, but the cops wouldn’t listen. They produced a blanket for the boy, as if he were cold, as if that were the extent of his problem, and another cop—a female with a face like a blazing gun—wrapped the boy up and led him away. Riley talked himself hoarse. He protested in a high buzzing whine while they led him in cuffs through the cavernous station, and everybody, even the crackheads and bums, stared at him; fulminated while they strong-armed him into the back seat of the cruiser and drove him down the bleak cold street; alternately raged, threatened and pleaded as they read him his rights, took his fingerprints and photo—his mug shot!—and booked him. Was he allowed a phone call? Yes. On a real phone greased with the slime of ten thousand penitential hands, a phone attached to a wall with an actual cord that disappeared inside it before connecting with a vast seething network of wires that ran all the way to Buffalo and beyond. It took four rings for Caroline to answer, each one an eternity, and what was the name of that attorney they’d used when the neighbor’s pinhead of a kid set fire to the fence?
“Hello?” Her voice was guarded, caller I.D. alerting her to the suspect number. Absurdly he wanted to throw his voice and pretend to be a telemarketer, make her laugh, goad her, but things were too desperate for that.
“It’s me,” he said. “I’m in trouble.” He felt as if he were in a submarine deep under the sea and all the air had gone out of it. The walls were squeezing in. He couldn’t breathe. “I’m in jail. I’ve been arrested.”
“Listen, I’m just sitting down to a salad and a glass of wine and I really don’t have time for whatever this is—humor, is that it? You think you’re funny? Because I don’t.”
He dredged something out of his voice, something real, that stopped her. “Caroline,” he said, and now he was sobbing—or almost, right on the verge of it—“I’m in jail. Really. It’s crazy, I know, but I need you to . . . I need your help. That lawyer, remember that lawyer, what was his name?”
“Lawyer? What are you talking about?”
He repeated himself for the third time, angry now, the humiliation burning in him, and what if the papers got hold of this? “I’m in jail.”
Her voice tightened. “For what?”
“I don’t know, it’s all a mistake.”
Tighter yet: “For what?”
There was a deputy right there, pointing emphatically at his watch. The corridor smelled of cleaning solution, vomit, bad shoes, bad feet, bad breath.
It took everything in him to get the words out. “They’re calling it”—and here he emitted a strained whinnying laugh—“child abuse.”
“Jesus,” she snapped. “Why don’t you get a life? I told you I’m trying to have a bite of dinner here—in peace for once? Go try your routine on one of your groupies, one of the literary ladies of where is it? Greater Stuyvesant. I’m sure they’ll all love it.” And then, because Riley must have committed some sin he wasn’t aware of in another life and another time, something truly heinous and compoundedly unforgivable, the phone went dead.
—
Four hours later—half-past eight by the watch they’d returned to him, along with his wallet, his belt and the flat inanimate slab of Caroline’s iPhone—he was sitting across from Donna Trumpeter in a booth at the bar/restaurant of the Stuyvesant Marriott, trying to nurse his pulse rate back to normal with judicious doses of Johnnie Walker Black. He’d ordered a steak, blood-raw, but it wasn’t there yet. Donna Trumpeter flipped the hair away from her face. She leaned into the table on both her elbows and cupped her chin in her hands. She’d just finished telling him, for the tenth time, how very sorry she was about all of this and that of course the ladies of the service club and her book group and the mayor and all the citizens of the Greater Stuyvesant area who’d driven who knew how many miles to hear him speak all understood that the circumstances were unavoidable. They’d held the ceremony anyway, apparently, the mayor’s wife reading aloud from Maggie of the Farm in the booming tones she’d employed as a high school thespian a quarter century earlier, and everyone—at least at last report—had been satisfied with the evening, the high point of which was the turkey schnitzel, garlic mashed potatoes, brown gravy and peas provided by the high school cafeteria staff doing overtime duty. “But,” and here she drew in a vast quavering breath, “of course, they all wanted you.” Her eyes, giving back the nacreous sheen of the overhead lights, fluttered shut and then snapped open again. “There’s no substitute for genius.”
This last comment, coupled with the tranquilizing effect of the scotch, made him feel marginally better. “I guess that’ll teach me,” he said, sounding as doleful and put-upon as he knew how.
“Oh, no,” she said, “no. You did the right thing. The only thing.”
“If I had to do it again—” he began and then trailed off. He’d been trying to catch the waitress’ eye for a refill, and here she was—a huge woman, titanic, as slow on her feet as mold creeping across a petri dish—backing her way out of the double doors to the kitchen, his steak balanced on one arm, Donna Trumpeter’s Cobb salad on the other. The cops had realized their mistake after an interpreter was brought in to question the boy in Spanish and then they’d hurried to release him, their apologies rattling round the station like a dry cough. They didn’t care. He meant nothing to them. They’d branded him a pervert and a pervert he remained, just another perp, another scumbag, innocent or not. He could go ahead and sue. They were just doing their job and no jury was going to give him a nickel. If anything, he was at fault—for interfering, for letting the real abductor get away when all along they’d been waiting to take him at the station.
The waitress, breathing heavily—puffing, actually, as if she were trying to keep an imaginary feather afloat—set the plates down on the table and as the smell of the steak rose to him he realized how hungry he was. “Another scotch,” he said, and because he was calming down now, the earth solid beneath his feet the way it always had been and always would be, he added, “please,” and then, “if it’s not too much trouble.” He cut meat, lifted it to his lips, sipped scotch. Donna Trumpeter kept up a soft soothing patter which revolved around what an honor it was to be in his presence—she couldn’t believe it; it was like a dream—and how deeply each of his books had moved her, Maggie of the Farm most of all. “Really,” she said, “the way you portray day-to-day life—and the insight you have into women, my God!—it’s almost Tolstoyan. Or no: better. Because it’s real. In the here and now.”
He gently reminded her that the book was set in the nineteen thirties.
“Of course. What I mean is it’s not nineteenth century, it’s not Russia.”
“No,” he agreed, “it’s not.” It was about then that he noticed she wasn’t wearing a wedding ring. And that her eyes, for all the coiled springboard of theories and embroidery, vegetarian cookery, cats and poetry he saw lurking there, were really quite beautiful. Stunning, actually. And her mouth. She had a sensual mouth, full-lipped, just like the one he’d imagined for Maggie. And though she was thin, too thin for his taste, she had a pair of breasts on her. There they were, clamped in the grip of the tight pink angora sweater she w
as wearing, and what was he thinking? That skinny women, skinny literary women with full lips and syntactical adulation shining in their eyes, could be lavishly receptive in another arena altogether. And further: that he’d had a scare, a bad scare, and could do with a little soothing.
He was about to lay his hand on hers when she suddenly pulled back to pantomime a smack to her forehead. “Oh, my God, I almost forgot,” she said, and then he was studying the crown of her skull, the parting there, as she bent to her purse, which she’d tucked away beneath the table when they’d sat down. In the next moment she was straightening up, slightly flushed from the effort, and smiling so forcefully her teeth shone. “Here,” she said, and she was handing what he at first took to be a breadboard across the table—the plaque, the plaque, of course—and along with it an envelope embossed with the logo of the Greater Stuyvesant Chamber of Commerce. “God, if I’d forgotten . . .”
He must have looked surprised—he’d been through an emotional wringer, but not, he reminded himself, anything even close to the sort of horror that poor abused kid must have endured, and he didn’t give a damn what anybody thought, whether it was random chance that had put him there or not, he was a hero, he was, and he’d suffered for it—because she said, “I know it’s not much. Especially, well, considering.”
“It’s plenty,” he said, and was he tearing up? “And I want to thank you, all of you, but you especially, you, Donna, from the bottom of my . . .” He lifted his head, cast a watery eye on the shadow of the waitress drifting by on the periphery. “But what I’d really like, what I need, that is, I mean after all we’ve been through together—oh, hell, let me just come out and say it. Do you want to come up to the room with me?”
T.C. Boyle Stories II: The Collected Stories of T. Coraghessan Boyle, Volume II Page 128
