The porch is jammed with summer junk. She runs around the last side of the house, fingers cold now, looks up and down the road, the ditches, calling, then sprints inside. Putting on her own boots, she calls her nearest neighbor Melvina and explains the situation. It calms her. Melvina has the car today because it is Thursday, and Thursday her mother visits her friends at Overlook. She will bring her mother along, and they can check the fields and woods, and then if they haven’t found her, drive around looking. Annie does not have a better plan. She runs through the house with her coat on, calling —throwing Barbie’s blouse into the sink —then runs outside.
The car stalls on Melvina.
“Diesel has to warm,” her mother says, pointing to the lit coil on the console. Annie’s is only around the corner, the woods cutting the one house off from the row of ranches. The road used to go to Saxonburg until they put the reservoir in. Sometimes Melvina thinks she would like the privacy, except the county doesn’t plow it. She turns in, and the water tank looms, giant, blue.
“Mother, you’re going to have to sit on the hump.”
“Is that her?” her mother asks.
Melvina sees her waving by the mailbox, coat half-zipped, hair a tangle, flat on one side. Jerrell is always asking Melvina why she bothers, the girl is trouble, anyone can see that.
“Oh,” Melvina says, “and how do you see trouble?”
“Shit,” Jerrell says, “you just look. There it is —trouble.”
“You don’t even know her,” she says. “She’s very nice.” But Annie is not very nice, is not a friend like the one Melvina imagined when Mrs. Peterson’s family decided to take her to Florida with them. She is young in all the wrong ways; she never knows when to stop. She treated Glenn like trash, for Brock, and from what Melvina has seen (and sometimes she likes what she sees: Brock doesn’t worry about the oil bill, he likes the night life, the strip above the old Armco works), Brock isn’t the marrying kind. Like Jerrell, she asks herself what Annie could possibly be getting out of it. Her answer changes when Jerrell collapses on her, sour-breathed from his three beers watching the Penguins, musky from climbing all day. He is a lineman for the phone company, and at times Melvina dreams of dialing a fatal number, a bolt of energy that will reach him wherever he is around the county and knock him, safety belt and all, senseless through the wires. She loves him, she supposes, or else why would she still be here —and where else would she go? But thinking like this is silly; she is not going anywhere. She does love the idiot. She is not perfect. She would have settled for Glenn.
Amy stands over the spillway, watching the pond seep beneath the ice, the dark, caught bubbles. Where do the fish go? She reaches down and feels how hard the ice is, how stuck. But on the other side of the plank, water splashes cold over the sluice. It is snowing and she sees she has lost a mitten. From the hill comes the shudder and whine of trucks on the highway. She takes her other mitten off and drops it over the edge, where it disappears under the silver gush, then forms again, pink, beneath the ice.
Hot August, Annie’s father would take her fishing out at the reservoir. He had a glazed ceramic jar with a lid she’d made for him in art in which he’d grind out his Lucky Strikes. When the jar was full they called it a day. She has pictures stuck in her mirror of herself standing on the concrete launch, holding a stringer of perch, crappie, a lucky trout. Just her, her brothers were too old for that. “The hell with them,” her father used to say, lounging on the cooler, an orange life preserver behind his head, “they wouldn’t know a good time if it bit them square in the behind.”
She refused to see him in the hospital; on the phone she said she would see him when he got home.
“Don’t wait too long for me,” he said, his voice rags.
“Do you want me to come in?” she asked.
“I think you’d better,” he said.
“Did you hear that?” her mother said from the kitchen extension.
“I heard it!”
“I don’t want you two fighting,” her father said, so they fought in the car.
Melvina takes the dirt road down along the tree line, bumping over the frozen, rutted mud.
“I don’t think the car is built for this,” her mother says.
“Look don’t talk,” Melvina says. The fields are empty, last year’s late corn cropped in rows, a few bent and bleached survivors waving limply. The radio is on to get the weather; the real snow is still holding off, it is too cold yet. At the corner of the field, a dirt mound sprouting a few old fenceposts blocks the road.
“Too many parties,” Melvina says, and puts it into park.
“I’ll stay here,” her mother says. Annie is already out and headed down toward the pond.
“Give a honk every few minutes. That way we can’t get lost.”
“Roger wilco.”
Melvina runs to catch up.
For the third time that week Glenn is late, and Wetmer calls him in at break. It is not really an office, just four partitions set down in the middle of the shop. Steel banging into scrap bins and the crackle of welding come through the open top. Wetmer has his jacket off and his sleeves rolled up like he is working, but he has the Bradford Era laid out on his desk, a cup of coffee sitting in the funnies. He doesn’t look up while he talks.
“I hope this late thing has nothing to do with personal problems,” he says.
“No, sir.”
“You’re paid to be here at seven sharp, you understand that.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You drink a little.”
“No, sir.”
“Let’s keep it that way.” He raises a hand to dismiss him.
Later, in the bathroom, Glenn slams the towel dispenser. “Fucking prick!”
“Who,” Rafe asks from a stall, “Wetmer?”
“How come he’s not busting your balls? You’re late every time I am.”
“It was your turn. Last time it was mine; next time it’ll be mine again.”
“Wrong,” Wetmer says from another stall, “there isn’t going to be no next time. Both of you dumbfucks are going to be out on your asses.”
Regina, Melvina’s mother, looks at her watch. They have only been gone a few minutes, but she expects them to appear at the end of the trail at any second, carrying a tearful Amy. It is amazing to her that something like this hasn’t happened already, the way the girl lives. Cast the first stone and all, but in this case, the woman is an outright tramp, sleeping around on her husband and then taking up with a no-good. And from a perfectly nice family, that’s the terrible thing. What her mother must go through every time she thinks of her. She knows May Pratt for a good woman. How her daughter turned out this way is a mystery, an honest-to-goodness shame. Regina hopes it is a black sheep thing, a wild gene, that Amy will turn out a Pratt. And who knows, this thing could teach Annie a lesson, turn her around. It is not the just man but the sinner God rejoices in saving. The forecast calls for 3 to 6 inches, 6 to 8 in the mountains. Regina checks her watch, reaches over, and honks the horn.
“Mom?” Amy calls from the kitchen, “can I have a red jelly bean?”
“No.” Annie and Brock are watching “Wheel of Fortune.”
“Please can I have one?”
“No, because you didn’t finish your dinner.”
“Oh, give her one.”
“No. She didn’t eat her dinner, why should she have candy?” She scans the letters and spaces but nothing comes. “You better not be eating jelly beans out there.”
“Would she?” Brock asks.
“In a minute. Amy?” she calls, “Amy?” She gets up and finds Amy under the kitchen table, her cheeks crammed, a black string of drool on her chin. “Come out here now,” Annie says. “Now! You come when I say!” She yanks her out by the arm, and Amy’s head hits the bottom of the table. Amy begins to bawl, red-faced, showing the black candy cud. Annie spanks her and she chokes, then in one heave vomits everything she has in her stomach. “Goddammit, you little fuck.”
“Hold on,” Brock says, “hold on.”
“You stay the fuck out of this,” she says, pointing. Amy’s face is red and ugly with fat tears. Her lip quivers as she tries to get her breath back. “Go watch your goddamn show,” Annie says, and he does.
The path turns as it climbs. It is icy, and several times Annie falls hard. She looks back over the pond, the water tower rising over the wood, the fields to the north. Flakes drift down, drawn sharp by the dark, solid sky. Far off, white ranches shine, barns lean. The tamed fairways of the country club surround the turreted stone clubhouse, the emptied pool a blue dot. She has never been this far back, though she has known of the shortcut since middle school, and the view makes everything seem even stranger. She spots Melvina’s green-and-black mackinaw in the brush below the spillway. The horn sounds, distant through the trees. There is no way Amy could make it up this, she thinks, but she keeps climbing, falling and getting up again as the whoosh and rush of the highway nears.
“Want to watch HBO?” Alicia asks, naked, sipping wine from the tiny sanitized glass. They have the beds pushed together, the heat blasting, and the lights out; sun sneaks in around the blinds, and when someone passes outside, shadows ripple across the back wall.
“There’s never anything on in the day,” Brock says. He tongues her navel, trying to get her to spill. She throws the cupful over him, and he yelps, then, laughing, dives across her and grabs the bottle off the nightstand.
“Don’t waste it.”
“We’ve got another.”
“Let’s not make a mess,” she says. “Someone has to clean these rooms.”
“How about the tub?” Brock suggests.
Annie scissors over the guardrail. A shred of truck tire lies on the gravel berm. The two sets of lanes are salt-stained, the snow in the dip of the median gray but virgin. She walks against traffic toward an overpass —Burdon Hollow Road, likely. A semi passes in the right lane, and the wind following knocks her back a step, gravel peppers her shins. A bleached beer case, a few wrenched and flattened pipes, rusting. Over the guardrail, the embankment is sheer now, the treetops at eye level. Annie looks down. Twenty feet below her, stuck in a crotch, sags a dead deer.
“What about taking me to Overlook?”
“I can’t leave her alone like this,” Melvina says. “I’ll run you over when her young man gets here.”
“Her young man,” Regina mocks.
“Mother, don’t you understand what is happening?”
“Yes, I’m missing my Thursday. But don’t mind me. Maybe one of these policemen could ride me over.”
“I think they have something a little more important to do.”
“Excuse me, sir?”
“Mother, please.”
“I’m just asking the young man.”
“What can I do for you, ma’am?”
“See, he’s not too busy for an old lady.”
Wetmer calls him on the horn, and Rafe looks over from his rollaway like this might be it. Glenn leaves his gloves on the bench, wipes his hands on the backs of his thighs as he heads for the office. He answers a few stares with a shrug. It’s not going to be a raise.
Wetmer looks him in the face and asks him to sit. “I got a call from the police,” he says, and explains what they said. “You’d better get home now. Get one of your buddies to lock up for you, I’ll punch you out.”
Glenn sits there shaking his head. It is some kind of prank.
“Marchand, you all right? You gonna need a driver?”
“No.”
“Then go,” Wetmer says, “get home. Your wife needs you.”
May grabs a tupperware carton of barley soup from the deep freeze in the basement, two twenties she keeps in her old teapot, and her purse, and is out the door and on the road. She pictures Amy in her powder bluejacket with the fur-trimmed hood, wandering in a wood —when that is the best thing that can happen. She tries not to think of a van slowing and stopping, a pair of hands. Or Amy on the ground, twigs caught in her white tights. “Goddammit,” she yells at a red light, “let’s go!”
Annie wakes on her bed with her clothes on, her boots off. Gray light fights through the plastic; the room looks tired, the clothes in a heap, the scattered toys. Talk seeps in from the kitchen.
“Brock,” she calls.
There is a knock, and then a policewoman looks in. “Your husband is on the way. Can I get you anything?”
“What husband?” she says. “Where’s Amy?”
“We have people out, and we’ll have the Lifeflight helicopter from Kersey in a few minutes. We’re trying to do everything. Do you want to go out? I’m supposed to accompany you if you do. My name is Officer Scott.”
“Where’s Brock?”
Roy Barnum walks into the Marigold, takes a stool and orders decaf, milk and sugar. He’s on duty and it’s free, Grant’s rule. Karleen draws it off the urn, clanks it down. Roy slides a flier across the counter, a Polaroid print taped to the paper, a little girl in a snowsuit, puffy cheeks, devilish smile. “Put this up in a good spot for me?” Roy asks, but Karleen has seen the name, and one hand covering her mouth, stands speechless.
The road is lined with police cars —some state, Brock sees —and, quickly weighing turning around, he parks under the water tower and hurries over the snow. A burglar maybe. He imagines he will be heartbroken if Annie is dead, but in time recover. The house is full of cops. Glenn is there, and asks where the fuck he has been.
“Work,” Brock says.
“Amy is missing,” Annie’s mother says as if it is his fault. He wonders if they can smell the soap on him, the wine through his gum. Amy is missing. Nothing in the world goes right for him.
“Are you the boyfriend?” a cop asks.
“Where’s Annie?” Brock asks.
The snow comes down sideways, blowing, smoothing over footprints in minutes. The Lifeflight is grounded. There is only another hour of light, and it is already poor. The woods crackle with volunteers —the Thursday AA meeting is here, the Methodist Women’s Alliance. Melvina and Jerrell search the cannibalized pickups and tractors at the north edge of the cornfield; Annie, Brock, and Glenn are with the sheriff down below the pond. May and Regina talk in Annie’s living room, the weather channel on silently beside them. Grant has taped Amy’s flier to the front door of the Marigold, closed up, and driven out with Karleen —him in his apron under his jacket, her in uniform, bare legs, heels and all. The hunt has spread across the interstate to the middle school grounds; trucks file by the flares, the troopers’ orange-coned flashlights. The Army Reserve has promised several squads if this should go till tomorrow.
Yet it will not be any of these searchers who finds Amy, but a fourteen-year-old Boy Scout, small for his size, generally picked on, named Arthur Parkinson, who, because she is dead, will not be a hero —will not, years from now, even be mentioned around town as the one who found her —but who, with Annie and Glenn and Brock and May and Melvina and Karleen, will find Amy again and again throughout his life and never ever lose her.
Mr. Wu Thinks
This is what I think, Mr. Wu thinks, because he is thinking in English, an exercise his night-school instructor suggests at the end of each class. This is what I think, he thinks, as if preparing an essay, sliding cigarettes into their slots, his hands dancing sure between boxes and cartons and packs. He thinks it again, a phrase longing for clauses of insight; but when Mr. Wu really thinks, he thinks in Cantonese with English brand names inserted. There aren’t enough characters for his merchandise. Popular brands —Marlboro, Michelob —have their own invented characters, but even these he marks with proper names on invoices and order forms.
Lately, when serving customers, he grades his remarks and tries to catch mistakes. The regulars —some college students, Mr. Ridley, Mrs. Winningham and her dog Bugs —encourage him, praising “Right away” and “It is not here today” with polite, childish wonder. Mr. Wu understands their concern while noting in it a kind condescens
ion. None of them says, “Learn the language,” but he has overheard others. He realizes the importance of mastering this new system of communication and the effort he alone must make. When business is slow, he reads magazines, and twice a week, Wednesdays and Fridays, he attends “English as a Second Language” at Brighton High. Friends coaxed him to the class a year ago, and though some have passed and joined more complex courses given by local universities, they still get together and read Thursday nights.
Mrs. Wu thinks he’s crazy, a grown man picking through a third grader’s spelling book, mouthing words, coming home with his pockets full of paper scraps, asking his sons schoolboy questions. She tells him, “Let the children take care of it. In a year you’ll retire, you’ll never have to speak English again.” But he continues with his studies, sometimes late into the night at the desk in their room.
His sons, Lee and Tommy, approve. We’re Americans, they both say, and considering their lives, Mr. Wu agrees. Twenty years in Boston, Lee three years at Digital, wife, house, new car; Tommy at U Mass-Harborside, majoring in sociology. Mr. Wu remembers childhood episodes: Lee at twelve playing in his first snow, Tommy bicycling around the parking lot. In the back closet, Mrs. Wu has organized their old toys —primary-colored plastics, fluorescent tennis balls, day-glo skateboards. When he opens the door, the past jumps out with cartoon clarity. But Mr. Wu knows the problems they have had, the “gooks” and “dinks” and “chinks.” Huddled over his spelling book, he sometimes sees them as heroic, besieged by troubles. Although Tommy has been out of the apartment only a year, he has grown into a legend, a bright memoir Mrs. Wu is tiring of.
In the Walled City Page 8
