Zipped

by Laura McNeal

  He drove his black, heavily modified Accord—low-profile tires, lowered suspension, loud exhaust, tinted rear and side windows—and he loved crawling along Jemison’s back streets this time of night, feeling hard and tight and powerful, chewing his gum, blowing slow patient bubbles, driving with one hand on the steering wheel, the other in his lap, leaning back, peering into the houses that were still lighted, heading only indirectly back to his place, an old caretaker’s cottage in Village Greens.

  Bor-Lan Plastics. Spruce Bough Restaurant. Narrow houses with gold lights in the upstairs windows. A line of freight cars going nowhere. He eased the Accord over three sets of railroad tracks, under a trestle bridge, and up the hill into more prosperous, tree-lined streets. Up ahead two dark figures jogging along the sidewalk passed under a streetlight and again into darkness.

  Misses, probably, running in twos like that, but it was hard to tell if they were youthful misses.

  Maurice let the Honda creep behind them. They weren’t big, and one carried a flashlight. The other had something gripped in one hand, a can of Mace probably. One of them glanced back at the Accord. Misses, he was sure of it.

  Okay, then.

  He flipped on the Honda’s interior lights and accelerated slightly. When he’d caught up with the joggers, he kept the car at their pace, moving alongside until they turned to look at him. They were wearing their sweatshirts hoods up, so Maurice couldn’t see their hair, but he stared evenly from his lighted car, just staring and grinning. Then he slowly inflated a pink gum bubble to real size before bursting it and sucking it neatly back into his mouth.

  Okay, then. He didn’t know those little misses, but now they knew him.

  Freezing his grin, he switched off the overhead light and gently eased the Honda ahead. None of that music-blasting clutch-popping tire-squealing teenage shit for him who was Maurice.

  He ramped onto the highway so he could let the Accord feel her oats a little before taking Leverwood Road past the Moose Lodge, the Jewish cemetery, Pipsissewa Wood, and a white farm-house to the lilac-hedged border of Village Greens.

  When he got to the entrance, he could’ve remoted himself on through, or even entered the property through one of the maintenance gates, but he liked to establish his patterns with the security guards. He wanted them to think they knew what to expect of him. So he did tonight what he always did—he used the visitor lane, pulled up alongside the security kiosk, and rolled down his window.

  “How’re they hangin’, Alvin?” he said.

  Alvin was a bald, dapper man who was himself a resident of Village Greens. He said, “About the same as yesterday, I imagine. You get my age, Maurice, and you don’t check that often.”

  Maurice gave this a big grin and changed subjects. “Lots doin’? Any more big-time security breaches?” There had been a couple of break-ins last week with small valuables stolen, what the police investigator had called typical examples of walkaway crime.

  “Nope,” Alvin said. “All quiet as far as I know. Guess you heard Mrs. Hartwell claimed to see a prowler night before last.”

  Maurice said no, he hadn’t heard that. “Any idea who?”

  Alvin shrugged. “Dark-complected male. Afro American, she thought.” He shook his head. “That didn’t make folks feel any better.”

  Maurice started to smile but blew a quick golfball-sized bubble instead. It was true, though. Nothing scared the old white folks more than a black dude. “Well, pretty soon whoever it is will go away or get caught and then we’ll go back to being our sleepy little village again.”

  Alvin turned serious. “I’ll tell you what, he better go away. Or one of these old vets will get out the live ammo.”

  A laugh slipped from Maurice. He couldn’t help it—“live ammo” had a comic flavor to it. Then he said, “Think these old vets can still shoot straight?”

  Alvin grinned. “Well, that’s another question.”

  Maurice said, “I’m thinking that with those vets after him, our bogeyman just may be the safest guy in town.”

  Alvin kept his grin and said, “Then again, you might be surprised.”

  Maurice didn’t believe this but nodded as if he did. He snapped a bubble and said he’d better keep moving. It was late and he still had Mrs. Kinderman’s cats to feed.

  “I’ll tell the patrol you’ll be over that way,” Alvin said. “We wouldn’t want ’em taking you for the wrong guy.”

  “No, we wouldn’t,” Maurice said, and gave a nod before driving on.

  Maurice cruised by Mrs. Hartwell’s house (new low-sodium lights shone from both porches), then turned down Elysian Lane and let the Accord creep along the street. He pulled his little reporter’s notebook from his glove box. Elysian Lane was a good street, in his view, an eight on a one-to-ten scale. Most homes were dark. Within a few houses—and he noted the addresses—a single security light shone, and from a few others you could see the flickering bluish light of a TV (he noted these as “night owls”). But nobody was out. Nobody was out except him. He loved this place when it was dark and fenced and quiet and nobody was out but him who was Maurice.

  When he’d finished canvassing Elysian Lane, Maurice took two rights to Fairway Place, cut the lights, pulled into Mrs. Kinderman’s driveway, and remoted open the garage door. Mrs. Kinderman was one of the few residents of Village Greens Maurice could think of with anything like affection. Soon after he’d started working here three years ago, on a hot summer day, she’d seen him on the fringes of the seventh fairway working in the sun, trying to get the three-reel mower going again, and she’d brought him iced root beer in a tall glass. When he’d gulped that down, she brought another, this time walking a harnessed black cat on a leash. “This is Harriet,” she’d said, nodding at the cat, “and I’m Mrs. Kinderman. Who are you?”

  Maurice gave his name and bent to scratch the cat.

  Mrs. Kinderman said she had two more cats back at the house, both marmalades, and she invited Maurice home to meet them. Then she invited him to dinner the next week, and even though he didn’t like seeing cats roaming the kitchen counters, he’d enjoyed the home cooking and, a surprise, he hadn’t minded her company. She was a tiny, tidy woman, with her slacks neatly pressed and her cardigan buttoned to the throat, but what caught him by surprise was how open she was in her conversation. She said that seeing Maurice working on the mower, blowing a bubble and “scowling at that miscreant machine,” had reminded her of her son, William, “who loved taking things apart and putting them together again. Or at least trying to.” By dessert, Maurice had learned, among many other things, that William had died of meningitis when he was eleven, and though she had two other children, he’d been her only son. Mrs. Kinderman smiled at Maurice. “I thought it was going to kill me. I honestly did. But I had the girls to look after and then my husband got sick and I had him to take care of and strangely enough while he got worse, I got better.” After that first meal, Maurice had come to dinner at Mrs. Kinderman’s the first Tuesday of every month, but this past winter she’d had a series of small strokes, and her daughters had moved her to a place described by its brochure as “an assisted-care facility.” Mrs. Kinderman believed she would be coming back to Village Greens and had asked Maurice to take care of her cats.

  Maurice was glad to, and stopped in once a day. What was interesting was how the two marmalade cats scissored through his legs waiting for him to fork out the tin of fishy byproducts, but Harriet, the black cat, always stayed back until the moment he seated himself at the kitchen table, and then she would leap into his lap, more anxious for petting than food. Maurice liked the cat, liked the way, with just a few strokes along her back, she fell into a murmuring purr. When the two marmalades had finished the first tin, and were stationed here and there licking their paws, Maurice always put out a second tin for Harriet before cleaning the cat box and heading home.

  As he turned up his gravel lane tonight, Maurice lowered his window, letting the cold come in, and the sound of the rough, rolling
crunch of the gravel under the tires. The caretaker’s cottage Maurice lived in was separated from the maintenance shed and other outbuildings by a small gully spanned by a footbridge. The cottage had its charms—it was brown shingled and surrounded by ferns and dogwoods—but its interior was nothing more than a large single room with adjoining alcoves for kitchen, closet, and bath. The cottage’s three windows were covered with yellowed shades that Maurice kept pulled. The furnishings were mismatched discards passed on by residents of Village Greens—a painted brass bed, a chipped antique chest of drawers, a worn wing chair. A bar heavily weighted with barbells rested on a padded weight bench and stood before a wall covered with mirrored squares that Maurice had installed himself. A rusty wood-burning stove at the other end of the room provided the only heat. The room’s single expensive element was a clock given to him by his father on his third birthday, less than a year before his father had died. It was a fine-grained, three-arch mantel clock that rested on a secondhand chest of drawers and at each quarter hour sounded the appropriate fraction of the sixteen-note Westminster chimes. Behind the clock, at the edges of the mirror frame, Maurice had wedged five or six photographs of his father in combat fatigues, his eyes shaded by a brimmed khaki cap.

  When Maurice came in tonight, he banked the coals in the stove and set two logs across them. He took a bottle of Rolling Rock beer from the refrigerator, then went to the bed and pulled a small plastic folder from its hiding place between mattress and box springs. The case folded open to display photographs of eight or nine girls. He flipped over the last of this lineup to see where he’d written ISABELLE SHIFF, along with her telephone number. He sat on the edge of the bed and dialed the number. When a woman answered, he said in a low voice, “Hello, Miss Iz.”

  “Hi, Maurice.”

  He said, “Can you come over here right now?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Good,” Maurice said, and gently set the phone into its cradle. He lay back on the bed smiling. The clock on the bureau began to chime. It was midnight, straight up, in Village Greens.

  PART TWO

  The king was in the counting house,

  Counting out his money;

  The queen was in the parlor,

  Eating bread and honey.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Passer Domesticus

  It was a Sunday evening. A female bird was building a nest in the small alcove of a missing brick beneath the eaves of Mick’s garage. The hoarse, insistent song of her mate could be heard from the kitchen, the living room, the yard, his bed. Fee-bee. Fee-bee. Fee-bee. Which turned out to be the bird’s name. After scanning Nora’s bird books and peering through her binoculars, he decided the bird was an eastern phoebe. As he patched together his history paper for Mr. Cruso, Mick positioned his chair by the window where he could watch the bird’s comings and goings.

  Nora and his father were downstairs. They’d called Mick down for supper—he’d declined—then Nora had offered to bring sandwiches up, and he’d declined that, too. Now they were down there listening to Dire Straits. The only singers they could agree on were Frank Sinatra, Dwight Yoakam, and Dire Straits, all of which, to Mick’s way of thinking, were only slightly better than polka bands.

  “Males precede females by a week or two, returning to their previous breeding territories and quickly announcing their arrival by repetitive song,” Nora’s book said. “Females build the nests, then frequently disappear for up to three weeks before returning to lay eggs.”

  So the male was making the noise, and the female was making the nest. Sometimes she came with clumps of moss, other times a twig or snatch of cloth. Once she came with a cigarette wrapper. Mostly she pulled strands from the frayed basketball net that hung from the basket his father had installed in hopes of fanning his interest in the sport. That’s where she was now when the music stopped downstairs.

  In the silence Mick could hear low voices, low earnest voices. Again.

  Mick crept to the head of the stairs. Nora and his father were in the kitchen, and their words were muffled. Mick eased down the stairs until the murmurings turned into words.

  “Sugarloaf, listen to me,” Nora was saying. “Mick’s going through a phase. It’s a dark phase, but it’s only a phase. It’s like a long tunnel. One day he went into it, and one day he’ll come out of it.”

  His father’s lowered voice was like a tight whisper. “A week ago we were one unit, all three of us, and then—bam!—he’s gone. Departed. It’s like he seceded from the Union or something. What kind of phase is that?”

  “An independence phase,” Nora said. She was using her teacher’s voice. “He’s almost sixteen. He’s flexing his muscles.”

  “But why all of a sudden? What caused it?”

  Nora didn’t even hesitate. “It could be anything. Some imagined slight. Or something he picked up at school. I can tell you firsthand that parents don’t get a lot of good PR in the hallways of Jemison High.”

  Mick had heard enough. He quietly slipped back upstairs, grabbed his pack and jacket, then came trouncing heavily back down. When he entered the kitchen, Nora and his father had fallen silent. Mick grabbed a can of Mr. Pibb from the refrigerator.

  “Going somewhere?” his father asked softly. He looked miserable. It reminded Mick of when his mother had left.

  “Just over to Reece’s, Dad. We’ve got a test in English. On intransitive verbs.” He could see that his father had no idea what he was talking about. “Anyhow, I’ve got some clothes, so I’ll just sleep over there.”

  His father didn’t say anything. He kept sitting there looking forlorn.

  “You cleared all this with Reece’s mom?” Nora asked.

  In the instant his gaze shifted from his father to Nora, Mick’s expression hardened. “Yeah, but you can call and check for yourself if you don’t trust me.”

  His father came slightly back to life. “Hey, c’mon, Mick,” he said. “This is us. Nora and me. We’re not the bad guys.”

  Mick turned to his father. “I didn’t say you were.”

  His father dropped his eyes. Nora, who’d been standing, moved close to her husband and began massaging his shoulders. From behind him, she glared at Mick.

  Mick stared right back. I see you, he thought. He said, “I smell something. Is something burning?”

  Instinctively Nora turned to check the stove, and Mick used that moment to exit.

  It was a bad week. Mick didn’t sight Lisa Doyle all day Monday, and Tuesday, when he didn’t see her with the field hockey team, he stopped to peer through the chain-link fence.

  “She’s not here!” one of the girls yelled—was that what she yelled? Mick’s face burned red. “She’s sick!” the girl yelled, and Mick suddenly recognized her. Janice Bledsoe. Lisa’s friend. Standing there, grinning at him.

  Stiffly, without a word, Mick turned and walked away.

  Very impressive.

  Lisa Doyle was off the absence list on Wednesday, but it didn’t matter. On Wednesdays he had to hustle to get to his piano lesson by 3:30, and anyway Mick was too embarrassed to appear anywhere near the normal sighting places, especially the practice field. Every day after school, he just went home, fed and ran Foolish, checked incoming e-mail as well as the trash for more secret messages (there had been no more), then headed for Reece’s, where he would study and spend the night.

  “So what’s this book blitz all about?” Reece asked Wednesday night.

  They were sitting in the Reece basement, thickly carpeted and furnished with leather sofas, a Ping-Pong table, and an upright piano.

  Mick looked up from his grammar book. It was true. He had been doing the books full tilt all of a sudden. Nora might screw his father out of his life, but she wasn’t going to screw him out of his. He needed his diploma. He needed a few diplomas. “I don’t know,” Mick said. “I just want to get somewhere, you know? Somewhere different than where my dad is. I mean, look at my mom. She was a minimum-wage filing clerk while she was getting her M.B.A.,
and now she’s got like three assistants and the company sends a limo to pick her up every morning.”

  After a second or two, Reece said quietly, “I didn’t think your dad had it so bad.”

  There was something different about this conversation, Mick could feel it. It was as if Reece was after something. He said, “What my dad does is all right, I’m not saying that. It’s just not what I want to do.”

  Reece was quiet for a few seconds. “Okay,” he said, “I should tell you. Nora talked to Mrs. Reece. She said your dad’s freaking out over you. Not talking to them, not eating there, not sleeping there.” He waited. “So what’s the matter, man?”

  “Nothing.”

  Another silence. “Then why can’t you stay at home?”

  “Just can’t.”

  Reece grinned and went into robot talk. “Human unit in question may need probing to reveal contents of data bank.”

  Mick ignored him.

  Reece stared at him for a while, very still, then finally shrugged and made an audible sigh. “Okay, chief. You get to make all the big decisions.”

  Mick went back to his grammar book, but the predicate adjectives and nominatives kept slipping away from him. He couldn’t stop thinking of Nora and Alexander Selkirk. He went over to the piano and played a few chords of the zip-a-dee-doo-dah song, quickly at first, but then gradually slowing the tempo, turning a happy song sad.

  Nora hadn’t dumped any more e-messages in the trash, so Mick had begun trying to get into her e-mail. During the school day he would make a list of hunch words that might be Nora’s password—her middle name (Abigail), her mother’s maiden name (Bosworth), her favorite vegetable (snow peas)—and then when he got to the house in the afternoon, he would see if any of the words would open her e-mails. None did.

  Thursday afternoon, however, Mick himself received an unexpected e-mail. How’s my Frisbee-fetching hound? it said. And how is you?

  It was from Myra Vidal.

  Mick felt the slightest acceleration of his heartbeat.