Collected Short Fiction, page 185
Not a good sign—the longer it took, the more trouble I would probably be in later, whether we found Jimmy or not. Hoping I wouldn’t have to talk to my mother myself, I stayed by the counter with the skinny guy, who had told me he was Mrs. Beauvais’s assistant.
The conversation went on and on; I couldn’t imagine what they were saying to each other and I didn’t want to. The candy-store guy had flipped around the dial six or seven times when Mrs. Beauvais suddenly looked up and beckoned to me, pointing at the receiver. My heart sank but I went over anyway.
“—absolutely right, Janet, I don’t know what it’s like to bring up a child as a single parent,” she was saying. “But you’ve known me for years and I would hope you know that I would never let any harm come to a child in my care. There is absolutely no danger and if I thought there were—”
Long pause. Mrs. Beauvais patted my shoulder reassuringly and then held on to it to keep me from walking away.
“I highly doubt that anyone would think anything bad about you or your daughter just because they saw her in my car, and if anyone ever did say anything, you have my assurance that I would correct them—”
Pause again.
“Well, then, how about just until four thirty? No matter what, I will drive her home at four thirty on the dot.” Pause. “Yes, I promise. Four thirty on the dot. Yes, she’s right here—” Mrs. Beauvais put her hand over the receiver and held it out to me. I took it from her, thinking that JFK had been lucky to have a quick death.
“Hi, Mom,” I said miserably.
“Why does Social Services think you know where that boy is?” she demanded. “Where on earth would they get an idea like that?”
“I don’t know,” I said even more miserably.
“However you managed to get involved in this, you’d better be home at four thirty on the dot. Because I’m going to call the house at four thirty-five and you’d better answer by the third ring.”
“I will—”
She went on but the social worker took the phone away from me and talked over her, thanking her profusely for allowing me to help a child who through no fault of his own was in trouble and what a day this was with one thing and another, isn’t it just awful what happened and again, thank you so, so much. I was pretty sure my mother was still talking when Mrs. Beauvais hung up and turned to me with a bright, professional smile. “I guess we’d better get a move on if I’m going to get you home on time.”
“Four thirty on the dot,” I reminded her. My mother was going to kill me.
“Where are you two going to look first?” the skinny guy asked Mrs. Beauvais as we left the store.
“Well, where do you think we should look?” she asked me brightly. “Is there any special place Jimmy likes to go that only he knows about and nobody else does?”
I wanted to laugh in her face. If only Jimmy knew about it and nobody else, then I wouldn’t know about it, either. Then I thought of the embankment and the area under the Fifth Street Bridge.
“Maybe,” I said. “There’s this place where we go sledding when it snows.” I looked down at her feet. She was wearing boots but they had heels and looked dressy and expensive. “It’s over by the playground. The one near the bridge.”
“That’s where we’ll be,” she told the skinny guy.
“I’ll go uptown, then,” he said and headed for his VW. I almost called after him not to bother—Jimmy never went uptown if he had a choice—but Mrs. Beauvais was stuffing me back into the front seat of the Oldsmobile like she was afraid I’d change my mind.
Back then, the Fifth Street Bridge was one of the longer bridges in that part of the county. It connected the main part of town with the more suburban south side, stretching over the railroad tracks that went to and from the state capital and, parallel to the tracks, the Nashua River, which in those days wasn’t so much a river as a waste runoff from the paint factory and a couple of paper mills. You could tell how good business was by the color of the water—bright red, ink blue, puke green, or milk of magnesia white were all signs of an economic upturn, more so if there was a particularly bad stench.
Mrs. Beauvais parked the car across the street from the playground and peered through the windshield, worried. “Do you think Jimmy is on the bridge?” I knew she was looking at the concrete arches on the near side. The more daring high school boys showed off by walking all the way up and over them. Occasionally, the fire department would have to come out and rescue someone who’d reached the top and then lost his nerve, and everyone knew someone who knew someone who had seen the kid who had fallen off and splattered all over the road, although no one seemed to know exactly when this grisly event had occurred. I knew Mrs. Beauvais was wondering if Jimmy planned to walk over.
“No,” I said, “he’s not on the bridge. He’s under it.”
She looked at me, horrified. “But it’s dangerous down there. The railroad tracks—he could get run over by a train. Or he could fall in the river—God only knows what would happen to him if he did!”
I shrugged. Getting hit by a train seemed to be a lot more difficult than avoiding it—it wasn’t like a train could sneak up on you, after all, you could hear it coming for miles, which gave you plenty of time to get out of the way. The river we gave a much wider berth. It was generally accepted among kids that if you stuck your finger in the Nashua, all the flesh would dissolve off it, leaving the naked bone. But that was pretty easy to avoid, too—you just stayed far away from the water’s edge. Not hard to do—there was a lot of land under the bridge, overgrown and wild, a jungle in the middle of town.
As if Mrs. Beauvais caught a sense of my thoughts, she said, “You know, sweetheart, sometimes bad people hide down there. Tramps passing through, criminals on the run from the police. If Jimmy ran into someone like that—well, there are people so bad they do that, you know. They hurt kids.”
I didn’t say anything. I had a vague idea of what she was talking about but as far as I knew, bad people like that didn’t hide in the undergrowth beneath bridges—they lurked around outside schools with bags of candy.
“Do you and Jimmy spend a lot of time down there?” she asked, looking into my face seriously.
“Everybody goes sliding here when there’s enough snow,” I said. “There’s a steep part and a part that’s not so steep. Sometimes if it’s slippery enough you can build up enough speed to go all the way to the tracks, practically.”
“That’s very dangerous,” Mrs. Beauvais scolded. “A train could come along at exactly the wrong moment and there’d be nothing left of you.”
“Nobody’s ever slid onto the tracks,” I said. “I don’t think you could go fast enough.”
She sighed heavily and looked toward the bridge again. “You think Jimmy’s down there now?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “We’d have to go down and see. If you want, I’ll go down by myself and come back and tell you.”
Mrs. Beauvais shook her head so emphatically, the little net veil on her hat wiggled. “Didn’t you hear me just tell you it’s dangerous? Besides, I don’t just want to know where he is. He has to come with me.”
“Why?” I asked.
She looked startled at the question. I was startled myself at my sudden and hitherto unsuspected nerve. Never in my life had I ever asked an adult to explain herself.
“His aunt kicked him out, didn’t she,” I said.
“I’d rather you didn’t put it that way,” Mrs. Beauvais said and I realized she was embarrassed, which startled me even more.
“Where’s he going to go now?”
She tapped her gloved fingers on the steering wheel. “That’s a good question. I think Jimmy may have finally run out of relatives.”
“Why can’t you just make his mother take him?” I said. “Isn’t it against the law or something for a mother to refuse to take care of her own kid?”
Mrs. Beauvais gave me another startled look. “I’m sorry, that was indiscreet. I shouldn’t have said anything about Jimmy,” she said in that brisk way grown-ups use when they’ve done something wrong and a kid bags them right in the act. “It’s nothing that concerns you. These are matters that you’ll never have to worry about, God willing. Now let’s see if we can find Jimmy.”
We got out of the car and Mrs. Beauvais followed me over to the easier way down, which wasn’t all that easy for her in those boots and her dress and her nice tweed coat. I thought she probably would have had a hard time anyway at her age; I had no idea how old she was but all grown-ups seemed to be too old for everything kids could do. Every time I looked back at her clambering down the uneven slope after me, I was tempted to tell her to forget it, Jimmy probably wasn’t down here, it was too cold.
I guess she knew from the look on my face because she kept telling me to keep going, she was doing fine, she had actually been a kid once herself, even if I found that hard to believe. What I found hard to believe was that I would get her back up the hill to the car fast enough so she could drive me home in time for my mother’s four thirty-five phone call. How could I have been so stupid, I thought furiously. If I’d been with another kid, it would have been simple: I could just say I had to go home or my mother would kill me and then leave. The other kid wouldn’t have blamed me for taking off. But if I left Mrs. Beauvais here, I would somehow end up in worse trouble when my mother found out. And she would find out, because Mrs. Beauvais saw her several times a week. She’d make a point of telling her.
That was grown-ups for you—do them a favor and they’d end up making stuff that should have been simple into something so complicated you ended up in trouble no matter what you did. Maybe that was why Jimmy’s life was all messed up, I thought—he’d done some adult a favor once and he’d been paying for it ever since.
Finally we reached the bottom of the hill where the land sloped gently toward the railroad tracks. Mrs. Beauvais stood there for a few moments, swaying on her high-heeled boots, her pocketbook swinging from the crook of her elbow. Jeez, why hadn’t she hidden that under the front seat, I wondered as she grabbed my shoulder to steady herself.
“I don’t suppose there’s an easier way back up?” she asked, puffing a little. I shook my head; I was doomed.
After she caught her breath, we continued down the slope and I led her toward the patch of land directly under the bridge. In the summer, big weeds grew up around the bridge support, overgrowth tall enough to hide in. I had thought most of it would have been gone now, killed off by the cold, but a lot of the thicker stalks were still there, yellow and dry as old corn husks.
“Jimmy?” I called softly, moving ahead of Mrs. Beauvais. “It’s me, are you down here?” I glanced back at the social worker picking her way along the frozen ground, both arms out for balance as if she were walking a tightrope or something. I should have made her wait in the car, I thought, watching her pause to frown at her right boot. She’d stepped in something.
Without waiting for her, I plunged into the thickest part of the tall dead weeds close to the bridge support, both arms out in front of me so I wouldn’t go face-first into the cement if I tripped. Abruptly, one of the stalks tilted down and hit me right on the bridge of my nose. Tears sprang into my eyes even though it wasn’t quite as bad as the time the army brat who lived upstairs from us punched me in the nose. I staggered sideways, my hands grabbing for something, anything. Weeds broke off in my left hand; what felt like several jets of warm, humid air hit my right palm, and then I was sitting on the ground with Jimmy standing over me. He was wearing only a light, threadbare brown plaid shirt and jeans, but he didn’t look cold.
“What’re you doing here?” His voice sounded tired and old.
“Looking for you.” I got up and brushed myself off. “Just like everybody else in town, I think. Well, your social worker and her assistant, anyway. The one who drives the red VW. They made me help them.” I spotted Mrs. Beauvais about twenty feet away, turning around with a desperate, bewildered expression on her face. I waved at her. “Hey, over here!”
Jimmy pulled my arm down. “Don’t bother. She can’t hear you. Or see you.”
I twisted out of his grip. “What are you talking about? She’s just right there—” I raised my arm to wave at her again and saw the air in front of me ripple, as if it were shimmering in intense heat.
“Okay, go ahead—wave, yell, yodel for all I care.” Jimmy chuckled. “Can you yodel?”
I couldn’t but I tried waving and yelling some more. Mrs. Beauvais didn’t even look in our direction as she stumbled around in her expensive boots.
“Jeez, Jimmy. How are you doing it?”
“I’m not doing anything. They are.” He jerked his thumb upward. I looked. Instead of the underside of the bridge, there was—
Well, I don’t know what it was; I still don’t. That might have been because only part of it was visible, as if someone had torn a strip out of the world overhead so it could show through, like a hidden attic between a ceiling and a roof, but I don’t think so. It did remind me of an attic but it also made me think of a submarine. Or, strangely, a cross between Mrs. Beauvais’s pocketbook, still swinging from the crook of her arm, and the roof of my mouth.
Too weird; I wanted to lower my head but my neck wouldn’t move and closing my eyes made me feel dizzy. There was another, worse feeling creeping up on me as well, a strong sense of not mattering, of being so small next to everything else that I might as well not exist. It was horrible and scary but at the same time I also felt oddly relieved to know where I stood in the universe of things. But not happy; definitely not happy.
“Jimmy?” I said weakly.
“I know,” he said. “This is my dharma.”
I’d never heard the word before; it lodged in my brain like a barbed hook. “Who—or what—is up there?” I asked. I thought I saw faint shadows moving in the vaulted darkness. Later, much later, I thought of a church or a cathedral, but it wasn’t like that at all.
“I just told you—my dharma. That’s what they said, anyway. It means this is how it is for me.”
“Oh.” I wanted to tell him that my neck wouldn’t move but I couldn’t remember how to say something like that.
“I don’t know if that’s really the right word, considering they’re doing it to me,” Jimmy went on. “Probably doesn’t matter—I can’t stop it. They’re just gonna keep doing anything they want to me.”
“What are they doing?” I asked.
Jimmy hesitated. “They’re still trying to find a word for that. If they ever do, it’ll probably be a bad word. Really bad. But what it is, they make me know things.”
My neck was starting to hurt. “They tell you stuff?”
“No, they make me know things.”
“That’s what I meant—they tell you things.”
He made a frustrated noise. “No. It’s not the same thing. I could tell you something but that wouldn’t mean you’d know it.”
“What’re you talking about?” I said, getting frustrated myself, both with the argument and not being able to move my head. “If you tell me something, I’ll know it.”
“Oh, yeah? I can tell you I ran a mile without stopping and got tired but you won’t know my feet hurt and my legs were wobbly and my lungs burned like fire. Even if I told you that, too, you still wouldn’t know it, because it didn’t happen to you. Unless I could make you know it my way.”
“Oh.” I managed to get both my hands up behind my neck and started rubbing it, pushing on the base of my skull as I did. After a bit, I could feel my head tilting down again little by little. Finally I was looking straight ahead instead of straight up. Mrs. Beauvais tramped back and forth in front of me and although I could see her mouth opening and closing, I didn’t hear her. I didn’t hear anything except Jimmy’s voice and under that, a soft rushing noise, like when you put a seashell to your ear.
“Is that why you weren’t in school today?” I asked. “Because someone was making you know something?”
“I didn’t want to,” he said. “I tried to run away but I ended up here.”
“Have you been here all day?”
“Not exactly here. But all day, yeah.”
“Mrs. Beauvais’s assistant thought you might be stuck somewhere, like lying hurt in a ditch and unable to call for help. He said you probably didn’t even know about what happened to the president.”
“Oh, I know,” Jimmy said. “I know all about it. I know everything.”
“You do?”
“Yeah. They made me know.”
The pain in his voice made me turn toward him. In the same moment, I suddenly noticed that the daylight was all but completely gone. Everything of the day seemed to rush down on me like an avalanche—Jimmy’s empty desk, Mrs. Barnicle, Judy and her Beatles magazine, hearing that Kennedy had been shot, Jimmy’s aunt and his cousins, Mrs. Beauvais and her assistant, the phone ringing in our empty apartment with my mother on the other end of the line getting madder and madder. Then I felt Jimmy’s hand take hold of mine.
A riot of new images bloomed in my head.
I saw the presidential motorcade from several different angles and people lining the Dallas streets; sunlight gleamed off the shiny cars as JFK smiled and waved until part of his head exploded into red mist; Jackie Kennedy, slim and angular in her refined pink suit and pillbox hat, elegant face twisted in anguish, crawling onto the back of the car, not to get the attention of the bodyguard there but to grab up something that had landed on the trunk—part of her husband’s skull. People screaming, sirens screaming, the air itself was screaming, electric with the fear that came with the breaking of the social compact we made not to kill each other.
Only I didn’t know about things like social compact, not the words, not the concept. Well, yes, I knew but I didn’t know that I knew. As brainy as I was, I was still supposed to be safe from knowing that for a long time.
