by Jon Pineda
A woman, before beginning her breakfast shift, had dropped off her infant daughter at daycare. The daycare center was at an intersection near the service road entrance to the Pinewood Meadows site. When she was leaving there, the woman had seen a man coming down the road.
He was carrying a shovel, which didn’t strike her as odd, but it was the way he carried himself. He was dragging his foot behind him. Lurching. She thought he might be having a heart attack. He was tugging at his shirt, then bending over, trying to steady himself with the shovel. She did not drive off just then. Instead, the woman kept watching him, to see if he was all right. If she explained it correctly, her boss would understand.
She turned her car and drove toward the man. He stumbled in the direction of a newly constructed drainage ditch. Before he vanished into its surrounding brush, she saw his face clearly. The look was of one about to slip entirely underwater, but willingly so. There was no hint of panic in his eyes. His movements were almost graceful.
She didn’t dare stop the car. As she continued on, she felt foolish for having thought she could have been of any help. She could hear her ex-boyfriend, as if he were sitting beside her in the passenger seat, his painfully pointy cowboy boots on the dashboard.
“What the fuck kind of thing is that to do?” he would have said.
She could see him sneering at her intent. Laughing even, remarking the guy was just looking for a place to piss in peace.
The very next day, after she had seen the man disappear, she took her daughter on a road trip to her sister’s, a few hours south in Raleigh. Not that her ex was still calling the house, but she needed time away. She had saved up money. It would allow her a nearly two-week break from having to come home each evening smelling of sausage and coffee.
And rarely had there been time to spend with her daughter outside of the usual schedule; by the time the two made it home, it was dinner for the daughter, then a bath, and then maybe a small block of quiet when they both would lie on the bed and the little girl would grab at the footies of her pajamas and rock back and forth and blow wet raspberries in the shared air between them.
The time with her sister had been welcome. The woman managed to catch up on sleep, which she hadn’t realized she needed until she got large doses of it, her sister waking to tend to the daughter, and the woman breathing a sigh of relief into the pillow.
When she finally came back into town, the woman found the rest of the waitstaff at the restaurant talking about the manhunt that had been going on since she had left. No arrests had been made, they said. Her boss mentioned the description of the person the police were hoping to find.
That night, with her daughter on the bed, smiling, the wet gurgling of the child’s laughter warding off the drudgery of the day, the woman talked to her daughter and told her the wanted person was not a black man. She went on to describe the shovel he’d held and the strange way he’d walked. The little girl cooed, and the woman nodded.
“Yes, that’s right,” she said. “He wasn’t wearing a baseball cap, and he wasn’t black, and he had a nose that looked like this . . .” She made a honking sound as she playfully squeezed her daughter’s nose.
The little girl squealed.
I have seen him, the woman thought, and I could set this thing straight. She knew her ex would talk her out of it, and because of that, she was glad he was gone. Besides, how often were there chances to make things right in this world?
Tom went outside to get the paper for his father. His father could not start his day now without trying to finish the paper’s crossword puzzle. He would roll it up and carry it with him to the naval operations base, where he would keep it on his desk and glance at it every now and then.
If he had to go to the piers and inspect one of the ships, he would bring the crossword puzzle with him. The air would be laced with diesel and other noxious fumes, and he would care only for the answer that would allow him to fill in blocks going either up and down or side to side. He checked off the inventory of one delivery in supply, and then had a sailor, newly assigned, drive him to the next destination along the bustling piers while he reassessed the answers to the puzzle so far, thinking perhaps he had chosen wrong letters, which would have sent him guessing in the wrong direction. Sometimes he asked the sailor driving, who was usually a kid from the Midwest. More often than not, the sailor wouldn’t have a clue.
Tom usually didn’t care for the news, but with the manhunt on, he found he wanted to scan the front page of every paper, in hopes of being the first to learn of an arrest. An arrest had the power to change everything. He had been scared, had not been able to go out and play with friends these last weeks, and at school, the other kids wouldn’t talk to him. As if doing so, he thought, would make them a target like Teagan.
When Tom unfolded the morning paper, he found the revised rendering. It was a sketch of an entirely different man. Tom couldn’t believe it. He looked at the face and laughed uncontrollably for a few seconds, all while confusion swirled in his head. Then he felt sick. It was him. Tom knew it. He ran into the house so the others would know it too.
It had been at least a year since they had tried assembling another model.
“I thought you wanted to put this together?” his father said.
Tom folded the directions and placed them on top of the small cardboard box. Sheets of gray plastic parts rattled inside like pieces in a board game. Normally, he would have gone straight for the colorful decals. Red, white, and blue emblems. Elaborate insignias. Now he just wanted to see the plan written out in English, alongside the other languages. Within this collection of words was a sequence they could use.
“Do I have to talk to myself today?” his father said.
Tom smirked.
“Where did Mom take Sissy?”
“Don’t worry about it. It’s just for the day.”
His father rummaged through the bag from the hobby store and pulled out a fresh metal tube of Testors glue.
“To that new place?” Tom said.
His father liked to use a balisong. The butterfly knife. He spun the handle until it split open. His hand blurred as the blade emerged within the practiced twirl. Once he locked the handle at the end, he used the blade to slice each plastic piece free. He started with the largest parts, the halved fuselage, the wings, working his way down to the wheels of the functionless landing gear.
“Don’t you want to do this? I thought you wanted to do this?”
Tom shrugged. He focused on the tiny bottles of paint his father was lining up in a spectrum, from dark to light colors.
“We’re missing yellow for this part here.”
Tom touched the picture on the side of the box. The artist’s rendition of the WWII bomber had it floating among a wisp of clouds.
“We don’t have to use the same color just because they did,” his father said.
“Oh,” Tom said.
Tom looked down at his hands. They were open, with the palms facing up, resting in his lap. He counted his fingers. In a few days, he would be eleven. So would Teagan.
Behind them on the refrigerator was a drawing. It was covered in creases that had been smoothed over. Teagan had made it in school earlier that day, the night she had gone missing.
After the police had shown up and his father had left with others in search of her, the house was eventually held in the steady breathing of his mother and the few who had come to hold vigil. Tom, unable to sleep, had crept into the kitchen, where he grabbed the drawing, scooting away the refrigerator magnets, and carried it back to bed, where he slept with it.
In the morning, it, too, had disappeared. Frantic, he tore through his covers. He eventually found it mashed at the bottom of the bed. It would be years before he would picture the way he must have kicked at it in his sleep, how he must have secretly wanted it gone for good.
The bomber took them most of the day to finish because his father decided they should try to make it as close to the real thing as possible. The switch confused T
om.
“You know, that’s what’s important, Tommy.”
Tom didn’t remind him their model would look different from the one in the picture.
When his father left the room, Tom touched a bright ring of color near one of the engines. It was just to see if it had dried all the way. His fingertip caught briefly in the tack. He stared at the spot, his fresh red print. Lines ran parallel and others converged.
He remembered one of the courtroom exhibits, the photograph of the ball, blown up to show the blotted dots of his sister’s blood. Mario’s uncle had sat quietly while the easel was adjusted and the photograph on foamboard was replaced with another, the next one displaying the shovel’s blade alongside the zipper-like gash on Teagan’s shorn head.
One of the lawyers brought out the actual shovel, which had been wrapped in heavy translucent plastic and taped at each end. The woman, dressed in a dark-gray business suit, grabbed the long handle just under the head and held it out to the jury. Tom remembered she had simply asked, “Can you even imagine?”
She raised the weapon high.
It was as if a string had been connected from the end of the blade to the eyelids of those jury members, for their eyes grew wide as the raised shovel approached them, their necks cast back in dramatic choreography.
Tom had started talking under his breath. It was uncontrollable.
Mario’s uncle had not moved once, his head fastened in place so that his gaze fell squarely on the judge in front of him, a man whose own face was comprised mostly of large, whitish eyebrows and a matching mustache.
Shoe had seen this man before. Not this particular man, but one who inhabited a similar space in his life. Hadn’t he felt the identical eyes of judgment long before now? He watched the bristling expression, the black velvet robe mirroring the shadows of a lost country. Its memory threatened to envelop the man’s face altogether.
He would let the chaos come in the form it would take. As it always did. And what was that voice, barely audible now, a boy speaking behind him, trying to get his attention, whispering, “I hope you . . .,” and then so clearly now, “die . . . I hope you die!” That voice seemed to be the one living inside his head as the woman lawyer, out of the corner of his eye, kept swinging the shovel skyward, as if she were the only one trying to escape this pit where the floor, made now of sand and then wholly of light, fell as soon as it formed.
Nights, Tom lay in bed and glanced over at the B-52 that was forever grounded on his dresser. He could imagine, as the lawyer had posed the question that day, but when he did now, parts of his life pulled away. Were swept up and scattered. He thought hard for Teagan, too.
The future had become a distant, unattainable target.
Sometimes he would hear her down the hall. From her room, she would be yelling and, if she was especially upset, beating one of her dolls against the wall.
In the morning, at breakfast, he would find her at the table crying over the doll’s broken face. Inevitably, their father would come home later in the evening with a wrapped present, and she would never be able to guess what was inside. Until the paper was finally torn back and her face grew bright, full of such honest surprise, it made Tom catch his breath.
Her one wish was to see the geese and so they went to Mount Trashmore in Virginia Beach. At one of the picnic tables by the lake, their mother strewed twisted pink and blue rolls of crepe paper, frozen in waves. It was just them.
After a while, Teagan tore off some of the decorations and fashioned the pieces into a headband. She danced around the table while she helped her mother finish setting up. Manny had gone to the top of the hill and was looking past the picnic area to the fleet of paddleboats dotting the man-made lake.
Tom took a seat beside him, breathing heavily.
“Are you an old man now?” Manny said, smiling.
“Not as old as you,” Tom said.
“That’s true. It took me much longer to get here.”
He laughed to himself.
“Gross, what’s that stuff there?” Tom said.
“Where?”
“Those spots along the side.”
He pointed to the rivulets of rust-colored liquid oozing from the ground.
“Trash,” Manny said. “Loads of it right under us.”
Tom tried to imagine the accumulation of other people’s things. Diapers. Baseball gloves. Crushed globes.
“It’s disgusting.” He shook his head.
“It has to go somewhere, Tommy,” his father said.
They both regarded the lake. People were pedaling the little boats across the white surface. Tom wanted his father to say something, but Manny was already thinking about another time, a life long before this one.
. . . .
“Did you know we used to play a game about you?” Tom offered.
“Who?”
“Me and Teagan.”
“What game? What was this game?”
“When you were out to sea . . .”
“You were too young to remember those times.”
“That’s not true. We’d play BATTLESHIP. Except we changed the rules. We had to choose a piece and say that’s where you were. You were inside that little boat. We’d put it back on the board and both of us would start praying out loud.”
Manny smiled.
“You wanted to sink it, yes, Tommy? You wanted to drown dear old Dad.”
“No,” Tom said, shaking his head. He was suddenly serious. “The object was to miss it.”
“Miss?”
“That way you’d stay alive.”
Manny didn’t look at his son. He watched Teagan chasing one of the speckled geese that had wandered over near the picnic area. She was flapping her arms like she had become one of them, like she could take flight at any moment.
Elinor had found a place about an hour and a half drive from Norfolk. It had a reputation for being one of the best rehabilitation centers in the state. Manny liked the idea of Teagan receiving specialized care, but the location meant she would have to stay at the facility throughout the week. He wasn’t ready for that just yet.
This thought of separation had become increasingly difficult, and yet imagining it sometimes filled him with such relief he was immediately stricken with guilt. Elinor did not understand it. She said he of all people had no right to be so protective, let alone feel guilty. His naval deployments had left a huge hole in their family life, she had said once. He had never forgotten it.
. . . .
At one of the centers they had visited, there had been a girl. He had seen her sitting alone in the cafeteria. Elinor and the kids were exploring the courtyard. He spotted them through the main facility windows, Teagan holding out her arms straight now and pretending to be an airplane. Tom stood around with his hands in his pockets.
The girl in the cafeteria slumped forward in her wheelchair, and Manny noticed, as he neared her, that she was mestiza. A part of him felt it was his duty to stop and talk to her, even though he didn’t know if she could speak, let alone understand him.
“How are you today?” he said.
The girl in the wheelchair looked up at him.
One of her eyes had a blown pupil. He had seen this before, back when he was a child in the islands, walking through the marketplace with his lola. There had been a man selling an assortment of fish. Beside the man had been a boy holding a cigar box filled with coins, looking oddly like the parent, with an authoritative smirk. The man’s face had fallen on one side, the eye, nearly black in its entirety, trying to hold it up.
The girl in the wheelchair could have been Manny’s daughter.
Manny shook his head. She was someone’s daughter.
Or had been.
“Was your lunch good?” he said to the girl.
She smiled at him with her broken face. She raised her hand and moved her fingers in the air. She waited for him to respond.
For a moment, he was a boy again and whatever had made this girl who she was to become had
yet to occur. He could hear his lola telling him not to stare. The sound of her voice came to him from a great distance, across a ghost ocean, and now he waded out into it.
At first, I thought you were my dad. You kind of look like him. He comes to visit when he can, but he lives so far away, you understand.
The janitor tells me it’s okay. The janitor is nice. He cleans the floors and fixes things. I hear some of the nurses talk about him, but I don’t care. I think they’re just jealous because he checks on me.
Sometimes he’s like an older brother, but lately, he’s been telling me that I’m his girlfriend now. That when I get old enough, he’s going to marry me and take me away from this place. I tell him, “Yeah right, Buster.” He doesn’t understand me, doesn’t understand sign language.
No one here seems to understand.
three
They had gathered in the old football stadium. Tom was already sitting quietly with other boys from his grade. Mr. Rochambeau, the vice principal of their junior high, was busy berating the students who had yet to settle. Most of them, a mix of the school’s seventh, eighth, and ninth graders, raced up and down the wide metal bleachers.
Mr. Rochambeau’s plaintive voice vanished into the afternoon air. No one seemed to be listening. His voice grew higher in pitch, forcing a clip of feedback on the already stressed PA system. Tom ducked his head and mimicked the man’s slight lisp. He had studied this trait to some degree these last few years, and was known in certain circles for doing a pretty decent impersonation.
Tom’s friends nodded in approval.
“Good one, Fino,” they all said.
Normally a tall, stooping figure in the school’s hallways, Mr. Rochambeau looked tiny, his stature diminished where he stood next to a podium someone had placed directly on the fifty-yard line. “People, please,” Mr. Rochambeau pleaded into the microphone. His voice echoed briefly over the field.
