Home Body, page 7
I parked and went in, saw the answering machine light flashing on the counter. Four messages: Roxanne, saying she’d try me later; Divan, saying she’d try me at the other number; Marna, saying a lady named Joelle or something like that had called me at the newsroom; a lady named Joelle Duguay, saying she was from the Department of Human Services in Bangor, and she’d try to reach me at the office.
I could run, but I couldn’t hide.
I went up the stairs slowly, my knees creaking, untied my boots, and fished in the bureau for clean khakis, and in the closet for an ironed shirt. The only shirt was white oxford cloth, which seemed dressy for the Clarion newsroom, or at least for me. The officious, obsequious ones dressed up, like Randall in his silly suits and power ties. I covered the shirt with a drab blue sweater.
Dressed, I came back downstairs. There was a streak of black grease on my left wrist, and I went to the bathroom to scrub it off. The door was half closed. I pushed it open, hit the light, and there they were, askew on the floor.
Two black legs.
It was Rocky’s jeans. I paused, startled, then picked them up. I held them for a moment, then reached for the shower curtain and yanked it open. He wasn’t there. The jeans were Lee brand, beltless, with a thirty-inch waist and twenty-eight-inch length. They were still damp around the ankles. Damp and cold.
I walked back to the living room; the pillow was on the couch, the blankets tossed off on the floor. I picked them up and shook them. Nothing fell out. I got down on my knees and looked under the couch. There was nothing there but dust. I got back up and lifted the cushions. Cracker crumbs. A Ballantine Ale cap. One of Roxanne’s socks, lost during one romp or another. For a moment, I pictured her, sockless and in other states of abandon, but then those images faded away.
I was left with the jeans.
They were dirty, smelled like boy. In one of the front pockets was seventy-five cents and a book of matches from a Portland restaurant. The other front pocket was empty, with a hole. The back pockets were empty, too. I turned the jeans again, reached inside the legs, then into the pockets again, one by one.
And then I fingered the watch pocket, the little one in front, on the right. I felt a piece of paper and fished it out. It was white, folded until it was the size of a sugar cube, and hardened, as though it had gone through a washing machine. I picked at the corners and bent them back, and it slowly unfolded.
It was a piece of paper, half of a page, white and lined and starting to tear at the folds. On it, someone had written:
April 7, 1987. Kitty Kitty Kitty. How can you live?
The words were written in the schooled hand of a child. And then there were doodles. Squiggles and slashes, and cubes piled one on the other, like a city skyline.
I turned the paper over. The other side was part of what looked like a test or a homework assignment. In this novel, Johnny Tremain shows his character, because even though his hand was burned . . .
That was all, at least on this half of the page. Someone—Rocky?—had grabbed this piece of paper and scribbled the note on the back and saved it. He was carrying it in a safe, relatively well-hidden place. Rocky considered it important for some reason.
April 7, 1987 . . . Kitty . . . How can you live?
In 1987, Rocky wasn’t born. Did the parents have a cat? What happened on April 7? How can he live? Who, the cat? Kitty Kitty Kitty. Like someone calling a cat. A cat ran away? But why would Rocky care about that?
I turned the paper over, then back again. I read it over and over: Kitty. April 7, 1987. How can you live? It was strange, but probably made perfect sense to Rocky. Maybe it was a song. Maybe he’d written it himself.
Kitty Kitty Kitty. How can you live?
But the date? Somebody’s birthday? Who knows, I thought. Rusty Clement had said his son had psychological problems. Maybe this was an indication of something like that. I’d had a running conversation with a man in New York who’d seen my byline on a story about a murder on East Seventieth Street. A madam had been shot in some sort of turf fight. The story was on page 24, and he was twenty-four. His mother was seventy.
“So you can see how it all fits,” he’d say.
And this Rocky story probably all fit, too, but I didn’t see how. Was he nuts? Behind the store, in the truck on the way to the hospital, Rocky had seemed perfectly sane. A little troubled maybe.
April 7, 1987 . . .
I folded the paper to its original size and shape and put it in my wallet, then went to the kitchen. There was tuna salad left from Rocky’s midnight snack, so I spread some on stoned-wheat crackers and ate them with a glass of orange juice as I stood by the window. The chickadees and nuthatches and finches had gone, but a lone female cardinal was huddled reluctantly in the old honeysuckle, like some troubled person who’d stayed after mass to see the priest. The cardinal came forward warily, hopping from branch to branch, then onto the step of the deck and then up onto the deck itself, where it ate hurriedly, head rocking up and down. I thought of Rocky, the kid who came in from the cold and ate sandwich after sandwich with that same jerking movement.
The cardinal was worried about being eaten. What was worrying Arthur “Rocky” Doe?
I finished the tuna and put the dishes in the sink, then put a travel mug of water in the microwave, spooned China Black Tea into the mesh strainer, and dropped it into the mug. One mug would get me to Bangor, or at least close. At my “workstation” in the newsroom, I had another canister of tea, another strainer. The coffee guzzlers at the Clarion eyed me suspiciously when I poured my zapped hot water through the strainer, as though I were performing some mysterious religious rite. After the news meeting, we could all chant.
When the tea had steeped, I jammed the cover on the mug, grabbed my keys and leather jacket, the one I wore in the big city, and went out to the truck. The sleet rained down and the sky was gray, the road slashed by a single track. I followed it down to the main dirt road, and as I turned, a buck deer loped across the road in front of me. It was odd that a deer would be moving at this time of day, unless something had frightened it. Somewhere back in that range of woods, Rocky had passed, and then his father, on his trail, tracking his son like a hound.
As I drove out to the main two-lane road that wended its way northeast, I thought of Rocky and his dad: the hunter and the hunted. There was something odd about the father, a lack of despair or worry. No, he seemed worried, but not in the way I would have expected. Was he worried that his son was cold and hungry? Or was he more angry at the inconvenience of having to be worried? Rusty Clement was a very hard guy, it seemed, and yet the son seemed so soft.
“Mom must be a real cream puff,” I said aloud. But was her name Kitty?
I pondered it as I drove, following the ridgeline to the northeast. The road split farms, big dairy operations where yellow loaders were poised in front of the gaping brown manure pits, torn open like strip mines, ballasted with tires and black plastic. And then there was the bustling little town of Unity, and that left behind, there were fields and woods and houses with peeling paint like flayed skin, and sagging stairs, and satellite dishes mounted on posts aimed skyward as if to receive communications from another planet, orders beamed to outposts on the frontier.
The road climbed and the land fell away steeply to the west, and the houses were scattered and solitary. Trailers sat next to rotting homesteads, vans on blocks served as storage sheds, cars and trucks sat in dooryards in states of both decay and disrepair.
It was tough, living on these ridges, and it took a certain optimism. I’ll get that car running one of these days. I’ll get a hundred dollars ahead. I’ll win the Megabucks. It was a fine line that separated hope and despair. My son will straighten out.
The sleet turned to snow and the tire cracks in the road turned to narrow black lines. And then a sign said Dixmont, and I slowed and eyed the shoulder of the road, looking for something to show where Rocky had been hit. I eased along, one eye on the rearview mirror, but nothing showed on the roadside. Then I was at the crossroads, with a store and a scattering of houses, and then back in the woods, and it seemed there should be footprints or something, but the snow apparently had covered any sign of the accident. No evidence that it had happened at all, and for a moment, I pictured Rocky faking his own mishap from some shopping-center pay phone.
That would get them worried, wouldn’t it? Run over and spirited away. How do you like that one, Dad?
I sped up after the Dixmont town line, into Newburgh, where I’d turn northwest toward the interstate. Or I could turn east, toward the town of Woodfield, seven miles away. I looked at my watch.
16
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Woodfield was a neat little town with an odd prosperity, gleaned from a couple of small electronics plants and a home-grown construction company that had mushroomed into a big player in New England. On the edge of town I passed a subdivision, “Woodfield Meadows,” that looked like a ranch-house version of a Civil War encampment. It flanked a strip mall with a video arcade and styling salon. Then there were some older houses, overlooked in the town’s makeover, and in the downtown were a pretty old church, a couple of brick banks, and a restaurant. Cars and trucks were parked around the restaurant like animals around a watering hole.
I figured I’d find a phone booth and look up Rusty’s address, then take a spin by his house and his business. If a guy threatened to kill you, it was wise to know where he was coming from.
I parked and got out of the truck and walked up the sidewalk toward the restaurant, past an insurance office, a gift shop, a bookstore. Everything had an air of, if not affluence, then comfort. I looked in the windows, at the secretaries, the ceramic chickadees. I was passing the bestsellers when I heard a familiar sound, a roar and a clatter.
A diesel.
I turned and saw a minivan backing out of its space in front of the restaurant. Behind it, Rusty’s truck waited, its blinker on. Rusty was at the wheel.
He waved to the blonde woman driving the van. She smiled and waved back. Rusty wrestled the big green pickup in and climbed out, like a cowboy easing down from his horse. He left the truck running.
Rusty went into the restaurant, the Downtown Diner; I eased my way along until I could see inside the restaurant. I passed once, squinting in. There was a lunch counter on the left, tables on the right. Behind the tables was a deli counter. The lunch counter was full, the tables a third occupied, a couple of people at the deli. I hesitated for a moment, then walked back, pushed quickly through the door, and sat at a table by the window. I looked out.
He was behind me, at the lunch counter.
“Hey, Mandy, honey,” Rusty was saying. “There’s a man down here needs your services.”
“Oh, he does, does he?” a woman’s voice said.
“Better watch what you say, Rust,” a guy called from one of the tables. “She’s feeling feisty, today.”
“Hey, I like ’em feisty,” Rusty said.
“Oh, yeah,” the woman said. “What else would you like?”
“I’ll tell you later. When we’re alone, and Harold isn’t listening in. Harold’ll get all jealous. Isn’t that right, Harold?”
“Jealous of you? That’ll be the goddamn day.”
“Whoa, I think I rubbed Harold the wrong way. Speaking of rubbing, Mandy, I got this stiff muscle.”
“That’s not what she said,” Harold said.
Everybody guffawed at the counter. Harold cackled. I turned slightly and looked.
Rusty was hunched over the counter, his big boots perched on the foot railing. Mandy, blonde and pretty in a weathered sort of way, poured coffee in Rusty’s mug He said something and she said “In your dreams,” and started in my direction. She was fortyish and sturdy. Her jeans were tight and there was a confident swing in her walk. I turned toward the window and put my right arm up in front of my face as she approached.
“How are you doing today?” she said, putting the mug down and starting to pour.
“Good,” I said quietly.
“You did want coffee?”
“Sure.”
“Need a menu? We have homemade vegetable-barley soup, and meatloaf with gravy and mashed potatoes.”
“No, thanks. Coffee’s fine.”
I gave her a quick glance and a smile. She smiled back, and seemed to give me an extra look. I was a stranger.
“Just sing out if you change your mind,” Mandy said, and she headed back to the counter.
“What do I have to do to get service here?” Rusty bellowed. “Can’t you hear my stomach grumbling?”
“Not when you’re flapping your gums,” Mandy said.
I glanced as she circled the end of the counter. Rusty’s gaze followed her rear end, his radar locked in. I sipped the coffee and listened as he joked with Harold, then ordered lasagna and garlic bread. Harold pulled a houndstooth sports coat on over his shirt and tie, made his way to the counter. He punched Rusty on the shoulder as he passed.
“Thought I felt a mosquito,” Rusty said. “Oh, no; it’s just Harold, giving me his best shot.”
Everybody laughed. This was dinner theater, and Rusty was onstage. Finally the lasagna came. Mandy put it on the counter in front of him, then leaned in confidentially. I strained to listen.
“Flossie isn’t feeding you?” Mandy flirted.
“I haven’t been home,” he said. “Been chasing the goddamn kid around half the state.”
“He still hasn’t come home?”
“Hell, no, why would he? Must think I got nothin’ better to do than drive around the puckerbrush, huntin’ him.”
“Where the hell does he go?”
“Where doesn’t he? This morning he turns up with some guy in Prosperity. Guy says he met him in Portland. I said, ‘Mister. Let me tell you something. You touched my boy, I’ll be back here to kill you myself.”
“Who was he?”
“I don’t know. Some goddamn flatlander.”
“These people are sick,” Mandy said. “So you didn’t bring Rocky home right there and then?”
Rocky, I thought. Not David.
“Kid took off in the woods. I’m out there in the goddamn snow, like I’m tracking deer. I mean, I got jobs going. I can’t be chasing the kid all day.”
“ ’Course not,” Mandy said.
“Now I got messages to call the cops in Belfast or something. I call back; the cop ain’t there. I mean, I gotta be the other side of goddamn Skowhegan in an hour. Explain to some wingnut from New Jersey that I can’t cut every third tree.”
“Thinks you cut wood with tweezers.”
“You said it.”
“Well, maybe the cops picked him up.”
“Who?”
“Rocky.”
“If they did, I hope they talk some sense into him. He was a pain in the ass before he took off.”
“It’s that age. When Eric was fourteen, fifteen, he was a miserable little punk. They grow out of it.”
A bell rang and Mandy turned to a shelf with a window to the kitchen, brought a plate to a table, and came back to Rusty. She put both elbows on the counter and leaned close.
“So, this must be always on Flossie’s mind. Paying any attention to you?”
I could see Rusty’s jaw muscles flex as he chewed. Mandy waited. He shoveled another load into his mouth and she waited some more.
“She’s too easy on the kid. Always has been. I know she’s been sick and all, but I think that’s half the problem. He hits the real world and he’s dead meat. I figure in two years I could have him on a crew. Christ, I started working when I was fifteen, shoveling shit for Old Man Haskins. I’d pay him good money, put him with some good boys. But he wouldn’t last an hour. Hell, wouldn’t last fifteen minutes.”
Mandy shook her head.
“Now I get home, it’s all I hear about. Call here, call there. Hey, he wants to see what it’s like out there, let him.” Rusty chewed some more. “ ‘Talk to him,’ she says. Friggin’ A, my old man would’ve tanned my ass. He said, ‘Jump,’ you said, ‘How high?’ Now there was one tough old bastard. Said ten words to you a day, but, boy, you listened.”
He tore at the bread. I sipped my coffee and looked out the window. At the next table, two white-haired men were talking about ice fishing. Beyond them, three stolid women were slurping their soup.
“You all set?” Mandy asked me suddenly from the counter.
Rusty started to turn my way. I nodded and put my hand alongside my face.
“Hey,” he said. “That’s the guy.”
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I turned, saw him facing me, still on his stool, fork in his hand. I tried to appear surprised.
“Hey,” I said. “How you doing?! thought I’d heard that voice before.”
“What the hell you doing here?”
“What are you doing here?” I said.
“I live here. What are you doing here? I thought you worked in Bangor.”
I sipped my coffee and smiled. Mandy smiled back, unsure how to place me.
“That’s right. For a newspaper. I had to stop and talk to somebody on the way up there.”
“Pretty weird. I’m in here every day. I never seen you in here before.”
“Never been here before. Nice place.”
Mandy smiled again.
“Friend of yours, Rust?” she said.
“No,” he said. “This is the guy I was telling you about. The guy with my kid.”
“Ucck,” she said.
“Nice to meet you too,” I said.
“So what the hell?” Rusty said, gesturing toward me with his chin.
“What the hell what?”
