Home Body, page 8
“What the hell you doing?”
I looked in my cup.
“Drinking coffee,” I said. “How’s the lasagna?”
The fishermen had stopped talking. The three soup-slurping ladies were watching, eyes glittering at this unexpected diversion. Entertainment was sparse since they’d banned bear baiting.
“Don’t make no difference,” Rusty said. “What’re you doing? Following me?”
I snorted.
“No. Just a pleasant coincidence.”
“Don’t give me your coincidence shit.”
“Trust me. I spent more than enough time with you this morning for one day.”
“Hey, asshole, you remember what I said,” Rusty said, his voice lower, meant to be menacing.
“Which pearl of wisdom was that?”
“Jeez,” Mandy said. “Who does this guy think—”
“I’m warning you. You laid a finger on my kid, you’ll regret it. And I want to know if he came back. I didn’t see a goddamn sign of him out in those woods.”
“You didn’t hear?”
“Hear what?”
“The deputy called me this morning. They think he was hit by a car.”
“Oh, my God,” Mandy gasped.
“You son of a bitch,” Rusty said, coming off his stool.
“Whatever,” I said. “Don’t you want to know how he is?”
He didn’t answer, just moved toward me, all big boots and red-faced glower.
“They said whoever hit him put him in their truck and kept going. So maybe he’s okay.”
Rusty stood over me and pointed a big finger in my face.
“You better goddamn hope so, ’cause if he isn’t, I’m gonna take you apart piece by piece. He wouldn’t’ve been up there, if it wasn’t for you.”
“He wouldn’t have been there if he’d been happy at home,” I said.
“I could make you eat that, you piece of shit,” Rusty said. He shoved my shoulder and his palm was hard as lumber.
I raised my cup and took a sip. Then I shoved my chair back and stood and squared around and faced him.
“You know, all this may make you feel better, but it doesn’t have anything to do with your son.”
“Stepson,” Mandy murmured.
“You stay away from him,” Rusty said, his eyes narrowed, teeth clenched, cheeks flushed. In the corner of his mouth, there was a spot of red sauce from the lasagna. “Last warning.”
“No problem. Personally, I wish I’d never heard of the kid.”
“You better watch your mouth. Or I’ll be asking you to step outside.”
“Ask away.”
“So where the hell is he?”
“I don’t know. Call the deputy. I hope he’s okay.”
“You better do more than hope,” Rusty said.
“I’d better go to work. And you better ask yourself why it is when Rocky heard you were coming to get him, he took off like a rocket. Why is he so afraid to come home?”
“None of your goddamn business,” Rusty said.
“Rocky made it my business, when he showed up half-frozen to death.”
“You shoulda called.”
“I called the cops and he took off. They called you and he took off again. And now who knows where he is.”
“That’s what they probably wanted, Rust,” the waitress said. “To tell you about this accident.”
I took two dollar bills from my pocket and tossed them on the table.
“If it were me and my son were missing, I’d return a call from the police,” I said.
“Hey, I’ll be talking to them. And I’ll be telling them about you.”
“Why don’t you get out of here,” Mandy said.
“Gladly.”
“Before I toss you out,” Rusty said, but there was just the faintest hint of hesitation in his voice, and I wondered why. My bulging biceps? An allergy to cops?
“Go,” Mandy said. “We don’t serve perverts.”
I glanced around the place, the cold staring faces. I smiled.
“Now that,” I said, “I find very hard to believe.”
18
k
I drove up the block and turned into a convenience store lot. There was a phone on the wall of the store and a rain-swollen phone book hanging on a cable. I pulled up and hopped out, leaving the motor running. There were a dozen Clement listings, but only one in Woodfield, on Orchard Field Terrace. I dropped the book and went inside and asked the expressionless guy behind the counter where that was. He pointed back the way I had come.
“Left at the light, two miles up, on the right.”
At the light, I took the left, and then sped up, all the while thinking how strange the encounter in the restaurant had been.
The guy hears that his son, or stepson, has been hit by a truck, and he lashes out at me. His reaction was all anger, no concern. His reaction to his son running away was annoyance, not worry. And yet he’d driven right over when he’d heard Rocky was in Prosperity. It was as though he wanted Rocky back, but for all the wrong reasons. There was no love there, certainly none that you could see. Was it all for his wife? And what kind of marriage was this? I wondered what poor ailing Flossie would have thought of their little banter over the counter. I wondered what Rusty did when he really had a chance to step out.
And then there it was, Orchard Field Terrace, denoted by a short fieldstone wall with a white wooden sign set into the stones. I turned in.
It was a wide street with new houses set on treeless lots. The lots were big and the houses were, too, set away from the road and each other. The intent probably had been for the homes to appear stately, but in the snow and the cold, they looked temporary and out of place, like they were going to be dismantled and loaded on trucks.
I drove slowly, peering at the names on the roadside mailboxes. Other names, some with no name at all. And then, on the side of the mailbox, rusty clement, logging.
I looked up at the house. It was white, a raised ranch with a two-story addition coming off the back. There was a two-story garage on the far side of the house. Next to the garage was a snowmobile trailer with one machine sitting on it, wrapped in a black cover. The cover said, skidoo. Parked next to the trailer was a black rack truck with a plow attached.
I drove past and then pulled into a driveway and turned around. As I approached the house again, I slowed almost to a stop as the side door swung open and a woman crept out.
She was wearing a long, quilted black coat that came nearly to the ground, and she moved monk-like down the driveway toward me and the mailbox. I stopped the truck but looked down at the passenger seat, as though checking an address, and the woman came closer.
I looked up. She did, too.
She was small, with blonde hair pulled back tightly and a round, snub-nosed face that once might have been cute. It was a look that was sometimes called perky, but this woman had set her mouth in a baleful, permanent sort of frown that grew taut as she approached. I smiled and nodded, and she gave me a barely perceptible nod, and pulled the little door down on the mailbox and slid a sheaf of envelopes out. Standing there at the edge of the street, she quickly flipped through them.
Then, even under the shroud of a coat, I could see her body sag. Her thin-lipped scowl opened into an anguished gasp. “Oh, my God,” she mouthed.
What had she been looking for? Was it news of Rocky? I quickly rolled the truck window down.
“Mrs. Clement?” I called.
She looked over at me, startled.
“I’m Jack McMorrow. I can tell you about your son.”
19
k
“You’re the man?” Flossie Clement said.
“Yeah,” I said. “Rocky stayed with me last night.”
“My husband, he—”
“I wouldn’t hurt him. I know what your husband thinks, and that’s one reason I’m not going to talk to you long. I don’t have that much to tell you anyway.”
We were standing beside my idling truck, in the street. She was looking up at me. Her eyes were big and dark like her son’s; her expression was like his, wounded and mistrustful.
“Where is he now?” Flossie Clement said, her tone more desperate than demanding.
“I don’t know where he is. I know where he’s been.”
“Why didn’t you bring him home?”
“I didn’t know where home was, Mrs. Clement. And Rocky wouldn’t tell me. He wouldn’t tell me anything.”
“Well, what are you doing here?”
“The police told me where Rocky lived. Early this morning, before they called your husband. Or you.”
“No, Rusty is handling it. I didn’t talk to them. He told them to call him on his car phone, and he’d go get Rocky. He . . . well, I’ve been sick and . . . So is he okay?”
“He was all right. Not great.”
She nearly gasped.
“What do you mean, not great?”
I told her about the fight in Portland, that Rocky might be hurt; I told her about Rocky standing out in the cold. I started to tell her about the accident, but stopped. I asked her if she or her husband had talked to the Waldo County Sheriff’s Office yet.
“I don’t know. I haven’t. Maybe Rusty has. Why? Why should we talk to them?”
I hesitated, looked down at my feet and at hers. I was wearing tan work boots. She was wearing white sneakers, with pink designs on the sides and pink laces. I thought of Rocky. One lace red, one lace white.
“I don’t know. I don’t think I should be the one to tell you,” I said.
Her face went as white as the snow on the street, and a shiver seemed to go through her.
“Tell me what?”
This wasn’t what I had planned. This kid had turned into a vortex, and I could feel myself being sucked in. I looked at Flossie Clement, shaking with fright and cold.
“What is it? What is it?”
I took a deep breath.
“They said this morning that somebody fitting Rocky’s description was struck by a truck—”
“Oh, my God,” she wailed.
“But he might be fine. He went in the truck. Maybe he’s okay.”
“Oh God, oh God,” she cried. I stood there helplessly.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t want to upset you. You should talk to your husband and—”
“He’s up north. He’s got jobs going. They’ve got to get all the wood out before mud season, so he’s straight out for—”
“I just saw him in town. At that restaurant. I think he said he was going to a job, but he hadn’t left yet.”
She looked bewildered.
“Oh. Well, then I’ll try him in the truck. Oh God, he’s got to be okay. Please, God. I’m going to go call.”
She started to turn away.
“Mrs. Clement. Your husband, he thinks, well, I don’t know why, but he thinks I molested your son or something. But I didn’t. I wouldn’t. I just tried to help him. My girlfriend works for DHS and she knew him and I just happened to be there. He seems like a nice kid and—”
“He is,” she said. “He’s the nicest boy you’d ever find.”
“Well, I won’t keep you. But if I see him again, if he comes back to my house or whatever, what should I tell him?”
She turned toward me. She was crying, alternately wiping her cheeks and pressing her hand over her mouth.
“Tell him I love him and want him to come home. I just don’t understand why he won’t come home. I don’t understand why he left.”
“It’s not something he’s done before, I don’t know, even for a day or two?”
“No. Never. Never ever. He liked it here. He liked it. He was always home. Always in his room. Just hanging out, reading or doing his models. Model planes and things. Just liked to be indoors. And I know it was kind of frustrating for his stepdad, but he’s a good kid. He really is.”
“Why was it frustrating?”
“Rusty played football,” she said, as though that explained it.
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“I mean, he tried, marrying somebody with a baby already. We went out in high school and then he graduated and we didn’t see each other and then I had Rocky, and then he came back and we got back together, but he didn’t know much about kids. And Rusty works a lot, I mean, half the time I don’t know where he is, and before car phones it was, like, who knows where he is?”
She looked away and seemed to be reliving something, and then she gave a little shake and gathered the coat around her and looked at me again.
“So you’ve got to understand. He didn’t see much of Rocky when Rocky was real small. But when he got older, he bought him his own four-wheeler, his own snow machine, and Rocky used it, like, twice, and then it sat. Rocky said it was too loud.”
“Not his thing?”
“Nope. But what can you do?”
“Nothing.”
I looked at her, helpless and small, a well-intentioned handwringer with a small-town bully for a husband.
“Okay,” I said. “Now this isn’t my business, but I feel like I have to ask. If I’m going to talk to him. Do you really know why he left? Can I tell him whatever it is, it’s okay now?”
“I don’t know what it is,” she said. “I don’t know. He just left. He just left this house and didn’t come hack. He and Rusty, they don’t get along great, but there was nothing that happened.”
“Nothing at all?”
“No. I mean, they bicker. Rocky, he was—”
She hesitated, wrapped her arms around herself, shuffled her feet on the frozen pavement.
“I’ll let you go.”
“No, it’s okay. See he was playing with—this sounds funny, but it isn’t—he was playing with Legos. He’s always liked Legos. Building whole cities, with little streets and everything—oh, my God—he’s been hit by a car? I’ll call the hospitals and see. Where would they go? Bangor?”
“Probably,” I said, but Flossie didn’t seem to hear. She seemed distracted, her mind wandering. I wondered if she was medicated.
“Oh, God, and anyway, the Legos, I was telling you about the Legos. They were all over the place, and Rusty, he, well, Rusty just doesn’t like that sort of thing, and he says Rocky is too big to be playing with blocks, and once he threw them all away; but Rocky went and he just dug them all out of the trash, and oh, God, but Rusty doesn’t mean anything. He says Rocky has to get ready for the real world and I baby him, but if he likes to do these things, build stuff with Legos, I say let him be, you know? But he’s never left. Oh, God. I mean, if there wasn’t any ambulance or anything, he’s probably okay, right?”
“I’m sure,” I said, though I had no reason to be.
“Well, tell Rocky, come home to us, baby. We’re right here. Everything’s okay. Everything’s fine.”
Flossie Clement closed her eyes and shuddered, and her face flushed. She looked suddenly unwell and unsteady, wavering on her feet, clutching the mail to her chest.
“You all right?” I said.
“I gotta sit down. You can . . . you can come in if you want. I’ll make coffee and you can tell me. You can tell me more about Rocky.”
I considered what Rusty would think if he came home to find me parked on his couch, chatting up his wife.
“Thanks, but I’ve got to go to work.”
“Oh. Okay. What do you do?”
“I’m a copyeditor at a newspaper.”
She looked at me and brightened.
“So you could put a write-up in the newspaper, saying for Rocky to come home, or to call.”
I thought of Tippy Danforth. She had stray cats. I had a stray boy.
Flossie took another step to the house. I hesitated, then said to her half-turned back, “Mrs. Clement, do you know somebody or something named Kitty?”
She froze in the cold. Turned back to me, her pale hands clenched.
“Kitty?” she said.
“Yeah, like a cat. Rocky had a piece of paper stuck in his pocket, all folded up, so it was about this big.”
I held my thumb and forefinger out, an inch apart.
“It had a date, in 1987. And it said, ‘Kitty Kitty Kitty. How can you live?’ Does that mean something?”
Flossie looked at me and her mouth opened. She gasped softly and then she made a guttural sound, something between a sigh and a cry of pain. She turned away and, in the long black coat, walked up the driveway and into the side door of the house. The door clicked shut. The street was quiet. I got back in the truck, knowing that what I’d suspected was true.
When Rocky had run, he’d taken a family secret with him.
20
k
The microfilm machine was in the news library, a cramped, windowless room lined with gun-metal-gray file cabinets and yellowing stacks of newspapers. I’d skipped out after the news meeting and turned on the lights and the microfilm viewer, which whirred reluctantly to life. The microfilm reels were in a cabinet at the end of the room, and I fingered the drawers until I found 1980 to 1989. April 1987 was in the back of the drawer. I pulled it, wiped the dust from the box, and took out the film reel. Pushing the door almost closed—reporters were a nosy breed, even at the Clarion—I threaded the film into the machine and onto the reel, and turned the knob. First there was a blurry white light, then newspaper pages whirred across the screen like one of those time-passage devices in old movies. I stopped, but I was on April 13. I reversed the film and it ground to a halt on April 5. I eased the film forward and bits of history strolled past.
On Tuesday, April 7, the day in question, AIDS was reported to be the hot topic in Los Angeles—not because it was a terrible disease, but because it was a terrible disease that could kill heterosexuals, too. In Washington, John Hinckley, locked up for six years after he shot Ronald Reagan, was saying he, Hinckley, wanted to live with a woman who had killed her sleeping daughter. In Central Maine, the Clarion editorial decried the Soviet bugging of the US Embassy in Moscow. The rest of the state was recovering from its worst floods in a century.
