Among the Missing (7 page)

“You piece of filth!” she cried. Tears came to her eyes as she tried to shake loose, but he kept his beak clenched, and his claws raked her arm. He was squawking angrily, small feathers flying off him, still molting as he beat his wings against her, the soundtrack of some old movie swelling melodramatically from the television. She slapped his body against the frame of the kitchen door, and he let loose for a moment before biting down again on her other hand. “Bastard!” she screamed, and she didn’t even remember opening the door until the cold air hit her. She struck him hard with the flat of her hand, flailing at him, and he fell to the snow-dusted cement of the back porch, fluttering. “Smell my feet!” he rasped, and she watched as he stumbled through the air, wavering upward until he lit upon the bare branch of an elm tree in their backyard. His bright colors stood out against the gray sky, and he looked down on her vindictively. He lifted his back feathers and let a dollop of shit fall to the ground. After a moment, she closed the back door on him.

•   •   •

It took a long time for him to die. She didn’t know what she was thinking as she sat there at the kitchen table, her hands tightened against one another. She couldn’t hear what he was saying, but he flew repeatedly against the window, his wings beating thickly against the glass. She could hear his body thump softly, like a snowball, the tap of his beak. She didn’t know how many times. It became simply a kind of emphasis to the rattle of the wind, to the sound of television that she was trying to stare at.

She was trying to think, and even as Wild Bill tapped against the glass, she felt that some decision was coming to her—that some firm resolve was closing its grip over her even as Wild Bill grew quiet. He tapped his beak against the glass, and when she looked she could see him cocking his eye at her, a blank black bead peering in at her—she couldn’t tell whether he was pleading or filled with hatred. He said nothing, just stared as she folded her arms tightly in front of her, pressing her forearms against her breasts. She was trying to think, trying to imagine Tobe’s face as he came home from work, the way he would smile at her and she would of course smile back, the way he would look into her eyes, long and hard, inscrutably, the way Wild Bill was staring at her now. Are you okay, he would say, and he wouldn’t notice that Wild Bill was gone, not until later. I don’t know, she would say. I don’t know what happened to him.

The rich lady on television was being kidnapped as Wild Bill slapped his wings once more, weakly, against the window. Cheryl watched intently, though the action on the screen seemed meaningless. “How dare you!” the rich lady cried as she
was hustled along a corridor. Cheryl stared at the screen as a thuggish actor pushed the elegant woman forward.

“I demand to know where you’re taking me,” the elegant woman said desperately, and when Cheryl looked up, Wild Bill had fallen away from his grip on the windowsill.

“You’ll know soon enough, lady,” the thug said. “You’ll know soon enough.”

I
t all started when I was twelve years old. Before that, everything was a peaceful blur of childhood, growing up in the small town of Beck, Nebraska. A “town,” we called it. Really, the population was just less than two hundred, and it was one of those dots along Highway 30 that people didn’t usually even slow down for, though strangers sometimes stopped at the little gas station near the grain elevator, or ate at the café. My mother and father owned a bar called The Crossroads, at the edge of town. We lived in a little house behind it, and behind our house was the junkyard, and beyond that were wheat fields, which ran all the way to a line of bluffs and barren hills, full of yucca and rattlesnakes.

Back then I spent a lot of time in my mind, building a city up toward those hills. This imaginary place was also called Beck, but it was a metropolis of a million people. The wise though cowardly mayor lived in a mansion in the hills above the interstate, as did the bullish, Teddy Roosevelt–like police commissioner,
Winthrop Golding. There were other members of the rich and powerful who lived in enormous old Victorian houses along the bluffs, and many of them harbored dreadful secrets, or were involved in one way or another with the powerful Beck underworld. One wealthy, respectable citizen, Mr. Karaffa, turned out to be a lycanthrope who preyed on the lovely, virginal junior high school girls, mutilating them beyond recognition, until I shot him with a silver bullet. I was the city Detective, though I was often underappreciated, and, because of my radical notions, in danger of being fired by the cowardly mayor. The police commissioner always defended me, even when he was exasperated by my unorthodox methods. He respected my integrity.

I don’t know how many of my childhood years existed in this imaginary city. Already by the age of eight I had become the Detective, and shortly thereafter I began drawing maps of the metropolis. By the time we left Beck, I had a folder six inches thick, full of street guides and architecture and subway schedules. In the real town, I was known as the strange kid who wandered around talking to himself. Old people would find me in their backyard garden and come out and yell at me. Children would see me playing on their swing sets, and when they came out to challenge me, I would run away. I trapped people’s cats and bound their arms and legs, harshly forcing confessions from them. Since no one locked their doors, I went into people’s houses and stole things, which I pretended were clues to the mystery I was trying to solve.

Everyone real also played a secret role in my city. My parents, for example, were the landlord and his wife, who lived downstairs
from my modest one-room flat. They were well-meaning but unimaginative people, and I was polite to them. There were a number of comic episodes in which the nosy landlady had to be tricked and defeated. My brother, Mark, was the district attorney, my nemesis. My younger sister, Debbie, was my secretary, Miss Debbie, whom I sometimes loved. I would marry her if I weren’t such a lone wolf.

My family thought of me as a certain person, a figure I knew well enough to act out on occasion. Now that they are far away, it sometimes hurts to think that we knew so little of one another. Sometimes I think: If no one knows you, then you are no one.

In the spring of my twelfth year, a man moved into a house at the end of my block. The house had belonged to an old woman who had died and left her home fully furnished but tenantless for years, until her heir had finally gotten around to having the estate liquidated, the old furniture sold, the place cleared out and put up for sale. This had been the house I took cats to, the hideout where I extracted their yowling confessions. Then finally the house was emptied and the man took up residence.

I first saw the man in what must have been late May. The lilac bush in his front yard was in full bloom, thick with spade-shaped leaves and clusters of perfumed flowers. The man was mowing the lawn as I passed, and I stopped to stare.

It immediately struck me that there was something familiar about him—the wavy dark hair and gloomy eyes, the round face and dimpled chin. At first I thought he looked like someone I’d seen on TV. And then, as I looked at him, I realized: He looked
like me! Or rather, he looked like an older version of me—me grown up. As he got closer with his push lawn mower, I was aware that our eyes were the same odd, pale shade of gray, that we had the same map of freckles across the bridge of our nose, the same stubby fingers. He lifted his hand solemnly as he reached the edge of his lawn, and I lifted my opposite hand, so that for a moment we were mirror images of one another. I felt terribly worked up and began to hurry home.

That night, considering the encounter, I wondered whether the man actually
was
me. I thought about all that I’d heard about time travel, and considered the possibility that my older self had come back for some unknown purpose—perhaps to save me from some mistake I was about to make, or to warn me. Maybe he was fleeing some future disaster, and hoped to change the course of things.

I suppose this tells you a lot about what I was like as a boy, but these were among the first ideas I considered. I believed wholeheartedly in the notion that time travel would soon be a reality, just as I believed in UFOs and ESP and Bigfoot. I used to worry, in all seriousness, whether humanity would last as long as the dinosaurs had lasted. What if we were just a brief, passing phase on the planet? I felt strongly that we needed to explore other solar systems and establish colonies. The survival of the human species was very important to me.

Perhaps it was because of this that I began to keep a journal. I had recently read
The Diary of Anne Frank
, and had been deeply moved by the idea that a piece of you, words on a page, could live on after you were dead. I imagined that, after a nuclear
holocaust, an extraterrestrial boy might find my journal, floating among some bits of meteorite and pieces of buildings and furniture that had once been Earth. The extraterrestrial boy would translate my diary, and it would become a bestseller on his planet. Eventually, the aliens would be so stirred by my story that they would call off the intergalactic war they were waging and make a truce.

In these journals I would frequently write messages to myself, a person whom I addressed as Big Me, or The Future Me. Rereading these entries as the addressee, I try not to be insulted, since my former self admonishes me frequently. “
I hope you are not a failure
,” he says. “
I hope you are happy
,” he says.

I’m trying to remember what was going on in the world when I was twelve. My brother, Mark, says it was the worst year of his life. He remembers it as a year of terrible fights between my parents. “They were drunk every night, up till three and four in the morning, screaming at each other. Do you remember the night Mom drove the car into the tree?”

I don’t. In my mind, they seemed happy together, in the bantering, ironic manner of sitcom couples, and their arguments seemed full of comedy, as if a laugh track might ring out after their best put-down lines. I don’t recall them drunk so much as expansive, and the bar seemed a cheerful, popular place, always full, though they would go bankrupt not long after I turned thirteen.

Mark says that was the year that he tried to commit suicide, and I don’t recall that either, though I do remember that he was in the hospital for a few days. Mostly, I think of him reclining
on the couch, looking regal and dissipated, reading books like
I’m Okay, You’re Okay
, and taking questionnaires that told him whether he was normal or not.

The truth is, I mostly recall the Detective. He had taken an interest in the mysterious stranger who had moved in down the block. The Stranger, it turned out, would be teaching seventh-grade science; he would be replacing the renowned girl’s basketball coach and science teacher, Mr. Karaffa, who’d had a heart attack and died right after a big game. The Stranger was named Louis Mickleson, and he’d moved to Beck from a big city: Chicago, or maybe Omaha. “He seems like a lonely type of guy,” my mother commented once.

“A weirdo, you mean?” said my father.

I knew how to get into Mickleson’s house. It had been my hideout, and there were a number of secret entrances: loose windows, the cellar door, the back door lock, which could be dislodged with the thin, laminated edge of my library card.

He was not a very orderly person, Mr. Mickleson, or perhaps he was simply uncertain. The house was full of boxes, packed and unpacked, and the furniture was placed randomly about the house, as if he’d merely left things where the moving men had set them down. In various corners of the house were projects he’d begun and then abandoned—tilting towers of stacked books next to an empty bookcase, silverware organized in rows along the kitchen counter, a pile of winter coats left on the floor near a closet. The boxes seemed to be carefully classified. Near his bed, for example, were socks—underwear—white T-shirts—each in a separate box, neatly folded near a drawerless
dresser. The drawers themselves lay on the floor and contained reams of magazines that he’d saved,
Popular Science
in one,
Azimov’s Science Fiction
magazine in another,
Playboy
in yet another, though the dirty pictures had all been fastidiously scissored out.

You can imagine that this was like a cave of wonders for me, piled high with riches, with clues, and each box almost trembled with mystery. There was a collection of costume jewelry, and old coins and keys; here were his old lesson plans and grade books, the names of former students penciled in alongside their attendance and grades and small comments (“messy”; “lazy”; “shows potential!”) racked up in columns. Here were photos and letters: a gold mine!

One afternoon, I was kneeling before his box of letters when I heard the front door open. Naturally, I was very still. I heard the front door close, and then Mr. Mickleson muttering to himself. I tensed as he said, “Okay, well, never mind,” and read aloud from a bit of junk mail he’d gotten, using a nasal, theatrical voice: “ ‘A special gift for you enclosed!’ How lovely!” he mocked. I crouched there over his cardboard box, looking at a boyhood photo of him and what must have been his sister, circa 1952, sitting in the lap of an artificially bearded Santa. I heard him chuckling as he opened the freezer and took something out. Then he turned on the TV in the living room, and voices leapt out at me.