Girls (18 page)

Was this how children were rescued? By men baring their teeth in illegally used vehicles, chasing alleged students who, if they wore suits and sold tobacco, would be called businessmen? By men who waited in ignorance and pursued in reflex? By hook, crook, luck, and mostly mistake? Was this how children were saved? Could we find no surer way to protect them?

I was going too fast for the surface conditions, but I was worried about getting back to work and worried about Janice Tanner. I mean this: I knew she was dead, and I wanted this apprentice merchant to prove me wrong.

Prayer, Mrs. Tanner would call it.

We were on a long, empty stretch with no houses in sight. I thought to get to the end of it all instead of waiting. I put my brights on, hit the blue light on top, sounded my horn in long, even blasts, and went in behind him. I couldn’t see his eyes in his rearview mirror because my car was higher than his. His legs must have been nearly parallel to the ground, I thought.

I decided to touch him a little, so I went in until we kissed fenders. It was enough to send him off the road, almost. I did it again. He pounded his horn. I hit the accelerator and did a little damage, I thought, to both cars. He skidded, he recovered, and then he lost it again. The snowbanks were high enough to keep him on the road, so what he did was slide at an acute angle, nose of the car in the ice, until he hit a soft patch and laid out on the angle. The Trans Am went over the bank and got stuck partway through it, rear wheels racing, but in the air.

I parked behind him and waited until he decided to take his foot off the gas. He tried to push the door out, but apparently he couldn’t because of the snow wedged against it. He must have leaned back along the seat and kicked the door. It opened partway, and he edged
out, falling into deep snow up to his elbows. His lip was bleeding. He might have bitten it through in the impact, or in anger. Because he recognized me, of course, and he was preparing to deal out some punishment.

“You ain’t no police, you civilian motherfucker.” He got himself up by pulling on the frame of his door. He was coming for me. “You got less rights here than fucking
cows
, you cow college rent-boy.”

By the time he was out of the snowbank, stumbling on the road, I had the roll of dimes out of my pocket and in my right hand.

I held up my left, saying, “Sorry you had that skid, William. I was running an errand and I saw you lose it. I stopped to see if you needed any help. How’s that bloody lip?”

He walked through my outstretched left hand and threw a long, clumsy punch at my head. I moved aside and slammed through his unzipped leather jacket and into his gut. The dimes would have broken his jaw. For the solar plexus, they were almost too much. He lost all color, he went double, tried to recover, couldn’t, knew enough to make his legs take him sideways a few paces so I couldn’t reach him again, and then he worked his lips like a fish as he tried to breathe.

I went after him. “Are you all
right
?” I put the dimes back in my pocket. I wouldn’t need them anymore, and I didn’t want to cut him a lot. I smacked his face with my gloved hand. In that cold, it must have stung the skin as well as rocked his brain. Before he could talk, I smacked him again, harder. He sat down.

“Let me help you,” I said.

A big orange county work truck passed, slowed, stopped, then backed up, its warning buzzer hooting. The driver, a man with a light brown beard smeared with tobacco juice, said, “You folks all right?”

“Kid skidded off. I’ll see he gets his wind back—he was scared, you know—and then I’ll tow him out. No problem.”

After a pause, the driver said, “Yup
per.
”

“Thanks a lot.” I kept my hand on Franklin’s shoulder and leaned so he couldn’t clamber up, and when I’d waved with my other hand to the driver of the truck, I bent as though to give help. With the hand that had waved, I smacked him, hard, on the side of the jaw.
There’s a nerve there, vulnerable to pressure, above the muscle in the back quadrant, and you don’t want the edge of an angry man’s hand coming down on it.

He lay in the road.

“Let me give you a hand,” I said. I dug my thumb into the nerve bundle under the point of his jaw. He almost leapt to his feet. “Now,” I said, “I want to ask you a question.”

In spite of my anger, in spite of my urgency about finding Janice, I knew, and I think I knew from the beginning, that he was a dead end. He knew nothing. He sold drugs. He was in the hands of larger dealers, just as college kids horny for weed or maybe pills were in his. He knew nothing, he was nothing, and I knew it. But I didn’t know what to tug on. There was nothing that led anywhere. There was this narrow county two-lane road going to no place and all I could do was ask him. “A little town near the college called Chenango Flats. You were seen there. Your car was seen in it on the day a little girl went missing. You know who I mean, because her posters are all over everyplace you go.

“Nod your head and tell me you know the girl.”

“From the poster,” he said, after drawing in a deep breath.

“You ever see her?”

“No.”

“You ever drive through her town?”

“I don’t know what town she lives in, man. And I don’t need to steal no pussy.”

I raised my hand and he flinched.

“No,” he said. “I never seen her except the picture.”

“You feel all right now?”

“Why?”

“Are you recovered from your accident? You were a little breathless when I came down the road and found you.”

“Motherfuck,” he said.

I raised my hand, then dropped it. I hadn’t been this bad in a while. And he knew nothing. Then I thought, Who are you to say what he knows? So I did hit him. I slammed him in the sternum with
the heel of my hand. He went gray at once. His eyes bulged. I thought for a second I’d killed him. He went over sideways and lay in the road, his legs moving very slowly. He looked like a kid making angels in the snow.

I waited. His head moved. I was afraid to hit him again, but I didn’t show it. I came in closer. I said, “You can imagine what I know how to do with my feet.”

He wheezed out a sound that might have been a word.

“Did you see the girl? Hear a single word about her?”

He made a sound.

“When you talk to your wholesalers, you might mention this conversation. I want you to understand: You stay off of my campus. I want
them
to understand I want to know anything they know about this girl. Who’s doing what to girls, where, when, anything. You call security and have them find me and I’ll come where you are and I will drop some reward on you. Otherwise, I drop the rest of me on you for ten, fifteen minutes, and you’re done. You’re all over. Tell me you understand.”

He said, “ ’Kay.”

“ ’Kay,” I said. “Good luck with your vehicle. It seems to be stuck in the snow.”

I walked back to the Jeep, and I got inside with casual movements. I drove carefully away, relieved to see, in the rearview mirror, that he was on an elbow and was moving his legs, preparing to stand. I took the first turn I came to, and I went for maybe a mile, then I parked. I let myself shake. I hadn’t seen action in a long time—if you can call it action, using old skills and long training and a half-buried craziness to beat up on a wild child who made his living in sales.

Someone authentic, like Sergeant Bird or even Elmo St. John, if they had seen me, would have called me a mindless vigilante and knocked me over with a sap or just put a bullet in my leg. I was disgusted. I thought of leaning out the door and vomiting. I also thought of Janice Tanner, and the other faces on the brightly colored sheets, and I settled for standing by the front of the truck and peeing
into the snow. Then I got in. I called myself a bully. Without trembling now, I drove quickly to get back to work.

After a little double-talk with the dispatcher, I spoke to everyone on duty and caught up, then started to patrol. It was snowing again, not heavily, and I had the wipers working in a very slow beat. Kids trudged into and out of classroom buildings and one tall woman, with dark hair trailing out behind her, ran. She was wearing a patterned dress and high heels as she went along the broad alley that connected the lots behind the academic buildings. I gestured her to get in the Jeep and I gave her a lift. She had a wide, shy smile and she left a smell of perfume in the front. I flexed my hands and took a breath and felt lonely.

I saw my English professor at the front of his long, low gray car, a new one, a Cadillac de Ville. He seemed to be puzzled, so I stopped and said hello and he gave me a little salute. His smile was embarrassed. I’d have been embarrassed, too, wearing puffy-looking sneaker things with leather trim on khaki cloth with thick soles under pea green corduroys and a kind of quilted slicker with a long-brimmed hat the color of the shoes.

“They’re a new development in thermal footwear,” he said. “The insulation is very lightweight, and the cloth is Gore-Tex. It repels moisture and keeps the heat in, but your feet breathe.”

“Lucky feet,” I said. “Is there a problem here?”

“I thought you might be coming up one of these days to talk about your grade for last semester’s course.”

“No,” I said, “I was able to read the letter. It said C.”

“Plus,” he said.

“Plus.”

“I was afraid you might be disappointed.”

I shook my head. “I get credit for the course,” I said.

“Well.”

It seemed to me he was trying to figure out whether I could
understand the subtleties of all his very interesting emotions. I didn’t want to name them for him, but I knew they included smugness, condescension, and superiority over the semiliterate. He looked around for a translator.

“I don’t worry about my grades,” I said.

He said, “
There
you go.”

“Can I help you with your car?”

“I guess I popped the hood open this morning when I checked the oil and then left it open. I can’t seem to close it.” I found a heavy screwdriver in my toolbox and then I lifted the hood partway up. I asked him to hold it in place. The snap latch above the grillwork was closed. I used the shaft of the screwdriver to pry it open. Then I gestured him away from the hood and dropped it shut. It fell into place.

“It must have been this way awhile,” I said, thinking of the witnesses in Chenango Flats, wondering if an old woman at her window at dusk might mistake the jammed-open hood for something bulbous on the front of the dark car.

“Yes, I expect,” he said, ready to be rid of me now.

I tried the subtle approach. “You get to Chenango Flats a lot? I think I might have seen this car there and didn’t know it was yours.”

He said, “Why’s that?”

“I don’t know. Just wondering.”

“Just wondering about me and Chenango Flats? I see.” He opened his door and positioned himself to sit behind the wheel. “I appreciate your coming to the rescue,” he said.

“Sure,” I said. “Nothing to it.”

“Why in hell would you ask me questions about Chenango Flats, Jack?”

His big strong head was ducked, as if he was trying to read his instruments. Then his head came up and he stared into my eyes. I tried to read anything there besides amusement, a little confusion, the idea that I was no longer very interesting to him. It occurred to me I wouldn’t mind learning he was the one.

He took his eyes off me and started the car. I let go of the door
when he pulled it to. As he backed away and drove off slowly, with no further word or gesture for me, I realized his car had done the talking for him. Its insignia said I could never afford it, and the soft-suspension trundle of its rear end had said, I turn my back on you.

There was no reason, really, to suspect him, and stretching a hood left ajar into a bulbous protrusion was probably silly. I wasn’t much of a cop. I knew that. Beating up William Franklin was like beating on the world in general. My life, before I was done with him, had shrugged and picked its teeth and waited for me to get back into it. I was going to have to straighten up, I thought. I was going to have to straighten everything up.

In the service, working a case was easy. It was always clear, except for suspected theft of company funds, and one case of suspected spying, when I went no place with either one. Usually, the guy was in stockade for me, waiting to scrounge a cigarette and tell how scared he was. Here was his knife. Here was the picture of the civilian male or, sometimes, American soldier or, often enough, whore in the hospital or medical examiner’s, and here was the wound. I talked to the prisoner, he told me what I knew, including his fear and often enough his regret, and then I attached the transcript to the incident report and wrote my own report, and I moved on. They always confessed to me. I was good at that part. And they were stupid. And there wasn’t anyplace a soldier could hide.

The one we thought went over to the NVA was Chinese-American, a scared young kid who was educated and intelligent, and we were racists and he was innocent. Everyone figured all the guys with slanted eyes were on the same side. I wrote that in my report when I said he was innocent. They told me I might have made a field-grade promotion to second lieutenant, at least for the duration of the action, except for that report. I told Fanny I thought it was the warrior lieutenants from VMI disliking it that a guy who didn’t go to college and who seemed a little hard might get to attend their briefings. I came out a sergeant at twenty-four and that was all right, and I had some skills. But I didn’t know what to do about Janice
Tanner, and I was afraid of making a mess. I didn’t want anyone hurt because of me. Except, I told myself, William Franklin of Staten Island, New York.