The door opened and a young black woman, toddler on her hip stood before him. She did not open the screen door.
“What you want?” she demanded, furious and barely constrained. “You here for the TV? The washer? Maybe the furniture? Maybe the baby’s bottle? What you gonna take this time?” She looked past him, out to the street, her eyes searching for a truck and a crew.
“I’m not here to take anything,” he said.
“You with the electric company?”
“No. I’m not a bill collector and I’m not a repossession man, either.”
“Who you be, then?” she asked. Her voice was still aggressive. Defiant.
“I’m a man with a couple of questions,” he said. Ricky smiled. “And if you have some answers, maybe some money.”
The woman continued to eye him suspiciously, but now with some curiosity as well. “What sort of questions?” she asked.
“Questions about someone who lived here once. A while ago.”
“Don’t know much,” the woman said.
“Family named Tyson,” Ricky said.
The woman nodded. “He be the man got evicted before we move in.”
Ricky took out his wallet and removed a twenty-dollar bill. He held it up and the woman opened the screen door. “You a cop?” she asked. “Some sort of detective?”
“I’m not a policeman,” Ricky said. “But I might be some sort of detective.” He stepped inside the house.
He blinked for a moment, his eyes taking a few seconds to adjust to the darkness. It was stifling in the small entranceway and he followed the woman and the child into the living room. The windows were open in this space, but the built-up heat still made the narrow room seem like a prison cell. There was a chair, a couch, a television, and a red-and-blue playpen, which is where the child was deposited. The walls were empty, save for a picture of the baby, and a single stiffly posed wedding photo of the woman and a young black man in a naval uniform. He would have guessed the ages of the couple as nineteen. Twenty at most. He stole a look at the young woman and thought to himself: nineteen, but aging fast. Ricky looked back at the picture and asked the obvious question: “Is that your husband? Where’s he now?”
“He shipped out,” the woman said. With the anger removed from her voice, it had a lilting sweetness to it. Her accent was unmistakably Southern black, and Ricky guessed deep South. Alabama or Georgia, perhaps Mississippi. Enlisting, he suspected, had been the route out of some rural world, and she’d tagged along, not knowing that she was merely going to replace one sort of harsh poverty for another. “He’s in the Gulf of some Arabia somewhere, on the USS Essex. That’s a destroyer. Got another two months ’fore he gets home.”
“What’s your name?”
“Charlene,” she replied. “Now what’s those questions that’s gonna make me some extra money?”
“Things are tight?”
She laughed, as if this was a joke. “You’d best believe it. Navy pay don’t go too far until your rating get up a bit. We already lost the car and be two months slow on the rent. The furniture, we owe on, too. That be the story for just about everyone in this part of town.”
“Landlord threatening you?” Ricky asked. The woman surprisingly shook her head.
“Landlord be some good guy, I don’t know. When I got the money, I send it to a bank account. But a man at the bank, or maybe a lawyer, he called up and told me not to worry, to pay when I could, said he understood things were hard on military sometimes. My man, Reggie, he just an enlisted sailor. Got to work his way up before he make any real money. But landlord be cool, nobody else be. Electric say they gonna shut off, that’s why can’t run the air conditioners or nothing.”
Ricky moved over and sat on the single chair, and Charlene took up a spot on the couch. “Tell me what you know about the Tyson family. They lived here before you moved in?”
“That’s right,” she said. “I don’t know all that much about those folks. All I knows about is the old fella. He was here all alone. Why you interested in that old man?”
Ricky removed his wallet and showed the young woman the fake driver’s license with the name Rick Tyson on it. “He’s a distant relative and he may have come into a small amount of money in a will,” Ricky lied. “I was sent by the family to try to locate him.”
“I don’t know he gonna need any money where he be,” Charlene said.
“Where’s that?”
“Over at the VA nursing home on Midway Road. If he’s still breathing.”
“And his wife?”
“She dead. More ’n a couple of years. She had a weak heart, or so’s I heard.”
“Did you ever meet him?”
Charlene shook her head. “Only story I knows is what I was told by the neighbors.”
“Then tell me that story.”
“Old man and old woman live here by themselves . . .”
“I was told they had a daughter . . .”
“I heard that, too, but I heard she died, long time ago.”
“Right. Go on.”
“Living on Social Security checks. Maybe some pension money, I don’t know. But not much. Old woman, she got sick with her heart. Got no insurance, just the Medicare. They suddenly got bills. Old woman, she up and dies, leaving the old man with more bills. No insurance. He just an old, nasty man, got no neighbors like him none too much, no friends, no family anyone knows about. What he got same as me, just bills. People who wants their money. Up one day, comes late with the mortgage on the house, finds out that it ain’t the bank he thinks that owns the note anymore, it be someone who bought the note from the bank. He misses that payment, maybe one more, the sheriff’s deputies come with an eviction notice. They put the old guy out onna street. Next I hear, he’s in the VA. I’m not guessing he’s ever gonna get out of there, neither, except maybe feetfirst.”
Ricky considered what he’d just heard, then asked: “You came in after the eviction?”
“That’s right.” Charlene sighed and shook her head. “This whole block be a whole lot nicer just two years back. Not so much trash and drinking, people fighting. I thought this be a good place to get started, but now ain’t got no place and no money to move. Anyway, I heard the old man’s story from folks across the street. They gone now. Probably all the folks knew that old man be gone now. But it didn’t seem like he had too many friends. Old man had a pit bull, chained up in back where we got our dog now. Our dog, he just bark, make a commotion, like when you come walking up. I let him loose, he likely to kiss your face more than he be like to bite you. Tyson’s pit bull, not like that none. When he was younger, he likes to fight that dog, you know, in those gambling fights. Those places, they got lots of sweaty white men betting money they don’t have, drinking and swearing. That be the part of Florida that ain’t for tourists or the navy folks. It be like Alabama or Mississippi. Redneck Florida. Rednecks and pit bulls.”
“Not a popular choice,” Ricky said.
“There’s plenty kids in the neighborhood. Dog like that a threat to maybe hurt one of them. Maybe some other reasons folks ’round here don’t like him much.”
“What other reasons?”
“I heard stories.”
“What sort of stories?”
“Evil stories, mister. Mean, nasty evil, be all wrong and bad stories. I don’t know they’s the truth, so my mother, my father, they tells me not to go repeating things I don’t know for certain, but maybe you ask around somebody not as God-fearing as me likely to talk to you some. But I don’t know who. No folks left from that time.”
Ricky thought another moment, then asked, “Do you have the name, maybe the address of the guy you pay rent to now?”
Charlene looked a bit surprised, but nodded. “Sure. I make the check out to a lawyer downtown, send it to another guy at the bank. When I got the money.” She took a piece of crayon from the floor, and wrote down a name and address on the back of an envelope from a furniture rental outlet. The envelope was stamped in red wi
th the phrase: second notice. “I hope this helps you out some.”
Ricky pulled two more twenty-dollar bills from his wallet and handed them to the woman. She nodded her thanks. He hesitated, then pulled a third out. “For the baby,” he said.
“That’s nice of you, mister.”
He shielded his eyes from the sun as he walked back out onto the street. The sky above was a wide determined expanse of blue, and the heat had increased. For a moment he was reminded of the high summer days in New York, and how he’d fled to the cooler climate of the Cape. That was over, he thought. He looked toward where his rental car was parked by the curb and he tried to imagine an old man sitting amid his meager possessions by the side of the street. Friendless and evicted from the house where he’d lived a hard life, but at least his own life, for so many years. Cast out quickly and without a second thought. Abandoned to age, illness, and loneliness. Ricky stuffed the paper with the lawyer’s name and address into his pocket. He knew who had evicted the old man. He wondered, however, if the old man sat in the heat and despair of that moment and understood that the man who had cast him out on the street was the child of his child who so many years earlier he’d turned his back upon.
There was a large, sprawling high school less than seven blocks away from the house that Claire Tyson had fled from. Ricky pulled into the parking area and stared up at the building, trying to imagine how any child could find individuality, much less education, within the walls. It was a huge, sand-colored cement building, with a football field and a circular track stuck on the side behind a ten-foot-high link fence. It seemed to Ricky that whoever had designed the structure had merely drawn an immense rectangle, then added a second rectangle to create a blocklike T, and then stopped, his architecture completed. There was a large mural outline of an ancient Greek helmet painted on the brick of the building, and the slogan home of the south side spartans! beside it in flowing, faded red script. The entire place baked like a pound cake in a pan beneath the cloudless sky and fierce sun.
There was a security checkpoint just inside the main entrance, where a school guard, wearing a blue shirt, black patent leather belt and shoes, and black pants, giving him if not the same status as a policeman, at least the same appearance, manned a metal detector. The guard gave Ricky directions toward the administrative offices, then had him walk between the twin posts of the machine, before pointing him on his way. His shoes clicked against the polished linoleum floor of the school hallway. He was between classes, so he maneuvered more or less alone between rows of gray-colored lockers. Only an occasional student hurried past him.
There was a secretary at a desk inside the door marked administration. She steered him to the principal’s office after he explained his reason for visiting the school. He waited outside while the secretary had a brief conversation, then appeared in the doorway to usher him in. He stepped inside and saw a late-middle-aged woman, wearing a white shirt that was buttoned to her chin, look up from where she worked at a computer screen, peering over glasses, giving an almost scolding, schoolmarmish look in his direction. She seemed mildly discomfited by his intrusion, and gestured toward a chair, while she swung around and sat behind a desk cluttered with papers. He sat heavily, thinking that he was taking a seat that had probably mostly known squirming students, caught in some malfeasance, or distraught parents, being informed of much the same thing.
“How precisely is it that I can help you?” the principal asked briskly.
Ricky nodded. “I’m searching for information,” he said. “I need to inquire about a young woman who attended school here in the late Sixties. Her name was Claire Tyson—”
“School records are confidential,” the principal interrupted. “But I remember the young woman.”
“You’ve been here a while . . .”
“My whole career,” the woman said. “But short of letting you see the class of 1967 yearbook, I don’t know if I can be of much help. As I said, records are confidential.”
“Well, I don’t really need her school records,” Ricky said, removing his phony cancer treatment center letter from his pocket and handing it to the lady. “I’m really searching for anyone who might know of a relative . . .”
The woman read the letter swiftly. Her face softened. “Oh,” she said apologetically. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t realize . . .”
“That’s okay,” Ricky said. “This is kind of a long shot. But, then, you have a niece who’s this sick, you’re willing to take any long shot there is.”
“Of course,” the woman said rapidly. “Of course you would. But I don’t think there’s any Tysons related to Claire left around here. At least not that I recall, and I remember just about everyone who passes through these doors.”
“I’m surprised you remember Claire . . . ,” Ricky said.
“She made an impression. In more ways than one. Back then I was her guidance counselor. I’ve come up in the world.”
“Clearly,” Ricky said. “But your recollection, especially after all these years . . .”
The woman gestured slightly, as if to cut off his question. She rose and went to a bookcase against a rear wall, and returned in a moment with an old, faux leather–bound yearbook from the class of 1967. She passed it across to Ricky.
It was the most typical of yearbooks. Page after page of candid shots of students in various activities or games, buttressed by some overly enthusiastic prose. The bulk of the yearbook was the formal portraits of the senior class. These were posed shots of young people trying to look older and more serious than they were. Ricky flipped through the lineup, until he came to Claire Tyson. He had a little trouble reconciling the woman he’d seen a decade later with the fresh-faced, well-scrubbed almost adult in the yearbook. Her hair was longer, and tossed in a wave over her shoulder. She had a slight grin on her lips, a little less stiff than most of her classmates, the sort of look that someone who knows a secret might adopt. He read the entry adjacent to her portrait. It listed her clubs—French, science, Future Homemakers, and the drama society—and her sports, which were varsity softball and volleyball. It also listed her academic honors, which included eight semesters on the honor roll and a National Merit Scholarship commendation. There was a quote, played for humor, but which to Ricky had a slightly ominous tone, “Do unto others, before they have a chance to do unto you. . . .” A prediction: “Wants to live in the fast lane . . .” and a look into the teenage crystal ball: “In ten years she will be: On Broadway or under it . . .”
The principal was looking over his shoulder. “She had no chance,” she said.
“I’m sorry?” Ricky replied, the words forming a question.
“She was the only child of a, uh, difficult couple. Living on the edge of poverty. The father was a tyrant. Perhaps worse . . .”
“You mean . . .”
“She displayed many of the classic signs of sexual abuse. I spoke with her often when she would have these uncontrollable fits of depression. Crying. Hysterical. Then calm, cold, almost removed, as if she were somewhere else, even though she was sitting in the room with me. I would have called the police if I’d had even the slightest bit of concrete evidence, but she would never acknowledge quite enough abuse for me to take that step. One has to be cautious in my position. And we didn’t know as much about these things then as we do now.”
“Of course.”
“And, then, I knew she would flee, first chance. That boy . . .”
“Boyfriend?”
“Yes. I’m quite certain she was pregnant and well along at that, when she graduated that spring.”
“His name? I wonder if any child might still be . . . It would be critical, you know, with the gene pool and all, I don’t understand this stuff the doctors tell me, but . . .”
“There was a baby. But I don’t know what happened. They didn’t put down roots here, that’s for sure. The boy was heading to the navy, although I don’t know for certain that he got there, and she went off to the local community college
. I don’t think they actually ever married. I saw her once, on the street. She stopped to say hello, but that was it. It was as if she couldn’t talk about anything. Claire went from being ashamed about one thing right to the next. The problem was that she was bright. Wonderful on the stage. She could play any part, from Shakespeare to Guys and Dolls, and do it wondrously. Real talent for acting. It was reality that was a problem for her.”
“I see . . .”
“She was one of these people you’d like to help, but can’t. She was always searching for someone who could take care of her, but she always found the wrong people. Without fail.”
“The boy?”
“Daniel Collins?” The principal took the yearbook and flipped back a few pages and then handed it to Ricky. “Good-looking, huh? A ladies’ man. Football and baseball, but never a star. Smart enough, but didn’t apply himself in the classroom. The sort of kid who always knew where the party was, where to get the booze, or the pot or whatever, and he was the one who never got caught. One of those kids who was merely slipsliding through life. Had all the girls he wanted, but especially Claire, on a string. It was one of those relationships you are powerless to do anything about, and know will bring nothing but sorrow.”
“You didn’t like him much?”
“What was there to like? He was a bit of a predator. More than a bit, actually. And certainly only really interested in himself and what made him feel good.”
“Do you have his family’s local address?”
The principal rose, went over to a computer, and typed in a name. Then she took a pencil and copied down a number onto a scrap piece of paper, which she handed over to Ricky. He nodded a response.
“So you think he left her . . .”
“Sure. After he’d used her up. That was what he was good at: using people then discarding them. Whether that took one year or ten, I don’t know. You stick in my line of work, you get pretty good at predicting what will happen to all these kids. Some might surprise you, one way or the other. But not all that many.” She gestured at the yearbook prediction. On Broadway or under it. Ricky knew which of those two alternatives had come true. “The kids always make a joke along with a guess. But life’s rarely that amusing, is it?”
The Analyst Page 35
