Boy Still Missing (7 page)

“So,” I said to Leila, the smoke from her cigarette warming my insides. “What’s Leon up to?”

She was too busy exhaling an endless stream of smoke through her nostrils to answer. It had to be one of the ugliest sights I’d ever seen. Then she said, “Flunking school. Messing up his life as much as possible. He wants to guarantee a future as pathetic as that deadbeat father of his.”

Believe it or not, her answer surprised me. The last time I had been
down to see Leon, I found him in his room surrounded by books instead of motorcycle and stroke mags for once. “Check it out,” he said, pointing to the wood-paneled wall beside his bed. I stared at a bunch of notes taped up there, all of them in Leon’s crooked handwriting.

This is where I get off.

Absolutely no reason except I had a toothache.

I can’t struggle anymore. Good-bye.

Do not notify my mother. She has a heart condition.

“I don’t get it,” I said. “What are they?”

“Suicide notes,” he told me. He lay back on his bed and clasped his hands behind his neck. He wore gray cords the color of a battleship, tight and faded in the crotch. Not only had his mustache fully grown in, but the sides of his face and chin were sprouting hair, too. He obviously didn’t plan on shaving anytime soon. I imagined that dark, coarse hair growing and growing until all I could see were his squinty brown eyes, thick nose, and fat red lips.

I stared back at the wall and wondered about someone ending his life with nothing to say but
The survival of the fittest.
Adios,
Unfit.
“For real?” I said.

“I’m doing a term paper on suicide. I found those in a chapter on the shortest notes ever written. Imagine,” he said as we gazed up at his collection, “scribbling some bullshit like that on a piece of paper, then blowing your fucking head off.”

“Weird,” I said, glancing at a note that read
I’ve had enough. See you on the dark side.

“After that, Pindle, there’s nothing. You’re dead. No more.”

“Okay,” I said to him. “I get the point.”

Leila wrestled with the steering wheel and managed to score a bonus spot right in front of Cumberland Farms. When we got out of the car, she had a coughing fit outside by the ice machine. For a moment I thought she was going to blow a lung. “Are you all right?” I asked.

She hawked up a wad the size of an egg yolk and spit through the cloud of breath that surrounded her head. Make
that
the ugliest thing I had ever seen. “It’s just this piss-ass cold,” she said.

Did she mean
her
cold or
the
cold? Either way, she finally swung open the door, and Cumby’s heater blew out air hotter than a Bunsen burner. Compared to my subzero apartment, this place felt tropical. I ditched Leila and made my way up and down the aisles, grabbing a six-pack of Dr Pepper and two TV dinners. One chicken. One turkey. Both with mashed potatoes and chocolate cake.

In front of me at the counter was that skinny girl who had been picketing the sale of the police station last fall. She was carrying a kid in a snowsuit, and there were two boys at her legs, pushing each other and grabbing at the candy. “Stop it, you cretins,” she said. “Or I’ll burn you at the stake.”

She looked at me and smiled, rolling her brown eyes. I smiled back, even though something about her seemed a little odd. The kids must have been her siblings, I figured, since she looked only about my age. But why hadn’t I ever seen her in school? She took one of them by the hand and said, “Okay, midgets. We’re finished here. Let’s go.”

“Do you have anything smaller?” the pock-faced guy behind the register wanted to know once she split and I stepped up and handed him a Benny.

I shook my head no. He bent down to break the bill in a drawer beneath the counter, and my hands went for a pack of Juicy Fruit, shoving it in my pocket to help my mother through the international gum shortage. Welcome to the wonderful world of shoplifting, I thought. It was my first time stealing anything outside of my mother’s money, which technically I was only borrowing. But more and more I realized that if you acted like you owned the world, you got away with whatever you wanted.

Look at Leon.

Look at my father.

Mr. Cumberland Farms popped his head up and counted out my
change with a lick-lick of his thumb between bills. Leila was still in the back by the soda. Probably choosing between Tab for her rum or tonic for her vodka. I grabbed a pen off the register and wrote a note on the back of my receipt:
I had to split. Thanks for the ride. Dominick.

“Can you give this to that lady when she pays for her stuff?” I asked. He barely nodded, but I figured he’d follow through once Leila started bugging out and asking for me.

Outside, I rolled up the top of the bag with my gloveless fingers, tossed it over my shoulder, and clomped off down the road. I was within walking distance of Edie’s now and didn’t want Leila to find out where I was headed. I was smart enough to know about secrets and the way things got around. Once you let one person know what you’re up to, you might as well tell the whole fucking world. Say I let Leila drop me. Once she got tanked up, she’d mouth off about it to Leon, and Leon, after getting over his shock that I wasn’t bullshitting all those times when I told him about Edie, might run off about the whole thing to some chick he was trying to lay, and that chick might mention it to her mother who worked at the hospital with a bigmouth named Marnie Garboni, and she would definitely blab to Marnie because they had nothing better to do than talk about other people’s lives, and before I could say “Bingo!” Marnie would practically climb through the telephone wire and spill the dirty beans to my mother. Basically, I’d be in a lot of hot shit.

So no thank you, I’d walk the rest of the way.

I reached the Holedo Motel, only a mile or so from Edie’s. Old Man Fowler, the guy who owned the place, had his office light off for the night. Officer Roget’s car was parked in the lot, probably waiting for a speeder to whip around the curve so he could write a whopping ticket. I crossed over the solid yellow line and walked along the edge of the woods, away from the buzzing streetlight where he couldn’t see me. In the summer, stock-car races at Hogway’s Racetrack drew a major crowd, and the dilapidated motel was packed every weekend. Fowler dragged out a two-dimensional wooden race car and set it up on the front lawn every year along with a sign:
HOLEDO GOES HOGWILD
! Summer after
summer, tourists bunched up in front of that race car like it was the real thing, like it could take them somewhere fast. During the winter the place stayed empty, except for maybe the occasional truck driver like my father, who pulled in, paid for a room, slept, shaved, took a shit, maybe jerked off, then hit the road. Other than that, just Roget’s car waited silently under the streetlight.

At the top of the hill I spotted Edie’s house. When I arrived at night, the silhouetted roof and bare branches always made me think of Norman Bates’s house on the hill. A gust of wind lifted my overgrown bangs off my forehead and played with the arrangement, leaving me shivering. I couldn’t wait to get inside.

My feet crunched across the snow-covered lawn and up the porch steps. I turned the doorknob. Locked, so I banged the lion clanker and waited. A plastic bird—Edie’s or maybe her ex-husband’s lawn decoration stuck in the grass and long forgotten—swung one broken wing round and round. The sound made me think of creaking bedsprings.

Old parts. Plastic and metal.

Still no Edie.

I knocked again, this time harder. More silence. More wind. More shivers. Finally, from the deep belly of the house, I heard footsteps. A moment later the outside light clicked on, and Edie swung open the door. “Sorry,” she said. Her stomach between us like a basketball-under-the-shirt type of deal.

Edie had managed to stay beautiful during the course of her belly-busting pregnancy. No puffed-up face. No flabby arms. Right now, though, her eyes looked heavy, her shoulders slumped. Usually I got a “Hey, handsome” at the door. “Is something wrong?” I asked.

“Just tired of carrying this load,” she said, straightening up in the doorway. “But I’m better now that you’re here.”

I stepped inside, squeezing the grocery bag to my side and smiling despite my numb fingers.

“You must be freezing,” Edie said. “I would have picked you up somewhere.”

I had never come clean about being the ripe old age of fifteen, though sometimes I got the feeling Edie suspected. Just in case, I reminded her again and again that the only reason I never drove was that my mother needed the car every second of every day. I didn’t mention my father’s truck, but I’m sure she knew that would be off-limits. Since I didn’t want to settle for some hippie machine like a VW Bug or a lousy Pinto, I told her I was holding out for just the right ’70 ’Cuda. One with mag wheels and a supercharged Hemi. I didn’t have a clue what a Hemi was, but Leon always mentioned it when he spotted a hot car. A Barracuda was his dream machine. Tonight, since it was freezing and I was without my bike, I might have to let Edie drive me home. We could work it out later.

“This is nothing,” I said, sounding rugged and durable, like one of those baseball players from my old collection might sound. Wilbur Wood. Brooks Robinson. Billy Williams. “A little cold never hurt anyone.”

Edie smiled and gave me a peck, not really on my lips but not on my cheek either. I loved when she did that. It seemed to make my wind-whipped face warm. She took the food to the kitchen, and I went to the bedroom and stripped off my coat, sweatshirt, the same black shoes she had given me months ago, and lay back on her bed. All part of our routine.

One more thing.

I picked my sweatshirt off the floor and pulled out the money, including the change from Cumby’s, and set it on her nightstand where I always left it. It felt a little like paying a hooker, only without the good stuff. Whenever I slapped down the bills, I wondered about the sex thing with Edie. Strange the way those I-want-to-fuck-you feelings for her surfaced only when I pictured the woman I used to see at the Doghouse, back before I really knew her. When I thought about the Edie I knew now—pregnant, poor, my fish-stick-and-TV-dinner buddy—all I wanted was to take care of her.

While the food cooked, Edie popped in and out of the room making small talk. She liked to get going about newsy things some nights. And
this was one of those times. “I can’t believe Nixon today,” she huffed, her oven-mitted hands on her round waist. A few minutes later she was back with “They still haven’t found out who killed those two women in Boston last week.” Since Edie and I had been together, I had taken to reading the newspaper to keep up. I didn’t admit this to her, but the more I read, the more botched-up and confusing the world became for me. Whenever I put the paper down, headlines like that one about Sharon Tate swirled in my head for the rest of the day.

MAO’S HEIR APPARENT LIN PIAO DIES

IN MYSTERIOUS PLANE CRASH

U.S. AND U.S.S.R. SIGN TREATY BANNING NUCLEAR WEAPONS

ON THE OCEAN FLOOR

CYCLONE AND TIDAL WAVE KILL
10,000
IN BENGAL

I didn’t even know where the hell Bengal was. I did my best to keep up anyway and acted like I cared about people like Lin Piao. Later I’d try repeating some of Edie’s opinions about the world to my mother as if they were thoughts all my own.

Me: “Lin Piao’s death must have had something to do with his unsuccessful coup attempt.”

My mother: “Lin who?”

Obviously she knew as much about world news as I did.

When Edie was gone for a while, I flipped channels and left it on
Here’s Lucy
for lack of a better choice. It was such a raging bore that I stared over at the stack of children’s books on Edie’s bedside table. She had picked up a pile of old fairy tales from a tag sale for only thirty-five cents apiece.
Jack and the Beanstalk. Cinderella. Thumbelina.
Some nights while she fussed with dinner in the kitchen, I read a story. My favorite thing about fairy tales—or at least the ones I had read so far at Edie’s—was that no matter how shitty these people’s lives got, things always seemed to work out. Cyclones never wiped out ten thousand people on the last page. Fathers didn’t disappear in the end. Mothers didn’t leave.

I slid
Sleeping Beauty
out from the bottom of the pile and flipped pages. The book practically had museum paintings for illustrations. Loads of bright colors. Tiny wrinkles drawn around the characters’ eyes. Dark forests that were more frightening and haunted than the real thing. On the first page Sleeping Beauty was set out in a sparkling glass coffin in the middle of the forest between two thick willow trees. I flipped some more and stopped on the page where the Prince awakens her with a kiss. When I looked up, Edie was standing with our TV dinners on a tray.

“Do you want to watch
Here’s Lucy
?” I asked, closing the book. “There’s nothing else on.”

Edie put the tray on the bed and waved her hand at the television. “She was only funny in black and white. The color makes her seem crazy instead of cute.”

I got up and clicked off the TV, then sat with my back at the headboard to eat my turkey dinner. I forked out my string beans and put them on Edie’s tray. “They’re good for the little guy.”

“Little girl,” she said and smirked.

Edie had all sorts of reasons for her it’s-a-girl hunch—a needle and string that swung in a circle over her stomach, a dream about an old woman holding a pink basket. But something told me it wasn’t a girl.

“If it is a boy, maybe I’ll name him after you,” she said.

I acted surprised, but really the thought had occurred to me more than once. After all, I wanted proof that I meant more to Edie than a loan and some company. “Dominick Kramer sounds pretty good to me,” I said.