Hearts Left Behind (11 page)

“Vicky, hi.
  Have you
seen Katie?  She’s been gone for hours.  It’s just not like her.”

“No, I’m sorry, I haven’t seen her.  Maybe she’s
at the
Welps
?”

“No, I saw them all drive off somewhere
together.  I was hoping I could talk to Tucker.  Even if he hasn’t
seen her, maybe he’ll have an idea where to look.”

“Sure, Betty.
  Sure, you
can ask him.  But Tucker’s been gone most the afternoon.  The kids
went shopping in town with their Grandma.”

“Can I ask him at least?  I’ve been
everywhere,
I’m just running out of ideas.”

“Of course, Betty.
 
Tucker, come here please.”

I had been listening to the entire conversation but it
had not lasted long enough for me to come up with a story to replace the real
one, in which I had been unable to protect either Katie or myself from Edie and
Son.  I made a slow walk to the door.  “Hi, Mrs. Cooper.  I was
in town with my Grandma all afternoon.”

Mom and Mrs. Cooper exchanged glances.

“Tucker, do you know where Katie might be?” my mother
asked with that
tell the truth and
stand up straight while you’re doing it
tone of hers.

“Well,” I said.  “She might be at the
playground.  She likes going on the swings, have you looked up there?”

“Yes, Tucker.  There’s nobody up at the
playground.”

I looked down at my feet and scrubbed my chin in a
thinking fashion. 
“Hmm”.

“Tucker,” my mother said.  “What is it you’re not
telling us?”

“Nothing,” I said with all mustered sincerity, but not
even convincing myself.

“Tucker?”

“Well, it’s just that…”

“Yes?”

My mother grabbed me hard by the ear and twisted.

“Tucker Merrill Gaines!
 
You stop fiddling around right now and you tell us if you saw Katie with that
lowlife.”

I came up for air. 
And the
truth.
  I told them about our encounter that
afternoon at the basketball court with Andrew Dales
and Son Settles.  How I had runaway without looking back, leaving her
there.  I also mentioned how I passed Slim Jim on my way home.  And
as I told them the story, my right hand wandered to my back pocket where it
flicked at the corners of the poem I had written for Katie. 
A poem that she would never read.

While looking for Katie I ran into
Charlie down at Moose Thornton’s place, sitting on the
front steps with Moose, Edie, and Son.  Bob and Woody James were there,
too – a couple of hyena brothers whose only purpose in life was to laugh at
Moose Thornton’s jokes.  As I approached, they were already laughing in
their usual up-to-no-good sort of way.

Hey, look!  Here comes Mr. Goody-Two-Shoes!”
Moose had probably said.

Yeah, Mr. Goody-Two-Shoes!  Good one, Moose!”
Bobby and Woody had probably said in back-alley
accents like the backup muscle in old tough-guy movies.  And then the
cackles and howls, laughing open-mouthed and staring wide-eyed at each other
and competing to see who could laugh the loudest.

“Well hello again, Sassafras,” Edie said.  He was
flicking dried paint chips off the porch steps with a jackknife and didn’t
bother to look up at me.

I ignored him and turned to Charlie, who smiled at me
through cheeks swollen with tobacco.  He gave me a truth-or-dare stare as
he lifted a can of RC Cola and oozed thick, brown tobacco spit into it,
squeezing it through tightly pursed lips.  Still, somewhere inside his
look I saw a hint of uncertainty.  Like he hadn’t entirely settled upon
becoming this new Charlie, but was just trying him on for size.

“Hey.” I said.

He spit again into the RC can, looking more like Son
Settles than I ever would have believed possible.

“Hey yourself,” he tossed back.

“Have you seen Katie?”

Again it was Edie who spoke up, lifting his eyes to
look at me this time.  “Oh,
we seen
her,
Sassafras.  You know that.  You were there.”  Then with a long
serpentine lick of his lips, he asked, “Why, she looking for me?”

Edie laughed at himself and then yelled inside the
house for Moose to bring him another beer.  I turned back to Charlie.

“How about you?”
  It
came out like an accusation.

He kept his eyes on me as he spit into the can again
and in that moment he seemed miles and years away from me.  I felt like I
was witnessing a new birth and that my once best friend was fading into the
background of this new Charlie.

“It’s just that her mom can’t find her.  I
thought maybe you might know where she was.”

Charlie smirked and said, “Nope.  Sorry,
dude.  I don’t know where your little girlfriend ran off to.”

The hyenas laughed.  Son and Edie went inside for
a beer and
Charlie followed them. 

I wish that the visual imprint of Charlie that has
lasted in memory was of him and his dad bike riding past my house that first
day.  Or of his giggling face shining above a flashlight inside a tent
during one of our backyard sleepovers.  But the image that goes with my
Charlie memories is the one of him that day on Moose’s steps.  His
menacing
face
all full of smile and spit. 

And nothing at all innocent about
him.

The lights atop Sheriff Buck’s black-and-white flashed
as he trolled the streets of Willow Grove, a robotic and repetitive message
coming from a loudspeaker atop the car.

“Citizens of Willow Grove, Katie Cooper is
missing.  She’s wearing blue jeans and a yellow t-shirt.  If you have
seen her please contact the Coopers or the Sheriff’s Office immediately.”

I begged Mom to let me help look for Katie, but she
made me stay in with Gavin and Heather.  She said that Katie might come
looking for me and that I should be here if she did.  She didn’t say it,
but I also knew that she was afraid to let me go out into the night. 
Into this new kind of dark night for Willow Grove.
 

Grandma Gaines came over to stay with us while Grandpa
joined the searching crowd.  As he walked out the door, I thought about
that day when Grandpa had chased Slim Jim off of our porch and how strong he
had seemed to me then.  Tall and imposing enough to scare off the likes of
Slim Jim.

“Grandpa,” I called.  He turned around and
wondered a look at me.  Furrowed brow, mouth turned down sharply, eyes
somewhere else altogether.  His nose twitched like some hard-sniffing
animal preparing to attack.  It was a wolf that I saw in him.

“Grandpa, they’re going to find her, right?  I
mean, you’ll find her?”

Everything about the man sank and he suddenly seemed
very old. 
Too old for this kind of world.
 
He opened his mouth to say something, but didn’t.  He tapped the bottom of
his flashlight a couple times, flicked it on, and walked out the door.  I
ran to the window and watched him march out toward the street where he pulled
something from his back pocket.  He lifted it to his mouth and threw his
head back.  I knew what it was.  I had seen him do this many times
before.  He put it back in his pocket, pulled down the bill of his cap and
headed to the street.

Minutes rolled up into an hour, one hour became two,
two
became three.  And still the streets and sidewalks
twinkled like stars in the night sky with flashlights and lanterns.  The
chorus of calls for Katie echoed from every corner.

“KA-TIE!
 
KA-TIE! 
KA-TIE COOO-PERRR!”

“What about the park – has anybody checked at the
park?”

“Yes, they checked the park. She’s not there.”

“What about Ike’s?  Anybody look up there?”

“Ike’s closed two hours ago.”

“Well maybe she got locked inside somehow. 
Somebody should go check.”

I stayed up most of the night waiting to hear where
they had found her.  At some point, I fell asleep on the living room
couch, which is where I was when Mom nudged me awake in the early darkness of
the next morning.
  She didn’t
speak.  She didn’t have to.  A mother can tell her child a lot of
things with just a look.  And my mother’s look told me that Katie Cooper
was dead.

When one child dies a little bit of all youth dies
with them.  And a little bit of innocence.  And a little bit of
hope.  And a little bit of faith in mankind.  All things pure and
good become a little tainted and a little tarnished.  There were things
inside me once that are gone forever now, they’ve been replaced by something
harder. It started that day.  That was the day I started to die.

When Mom told me how they had found Katie’s body by
the railroad tracks, I couldn’t stop thinking about that first afternoon in the
Garden of Eden and how it seemed as far away as Genesis itself.  I
pictured Katie’s sparkling green eyes and imagined them opened wide and
frozen. 
Empty eyes staring into emptiness.
 
Her soft body contorted across jagged rock.

It was a sadness that I would not have thought
possible. A sucker punch from Son Settles can steal your breath, but
sadness
? 
The flu can make you vomit, but
sadness
?   You can scream in sadness?  I
learned a lot about sadness that day.

“The police are looking for that hobo Jim,” Mom told
me. “Somebody saw him walking down the railroad tracks with Katie.”

We all wonder about it - fear it to varying degrees, I
suppose – but none of us truly believes that bad things will happen to us or
those we love.  In a strange way, we believe it even less after those bad
things do happen.  As a child, I had difficulty dealing with the fact that
Katie
Cooper once did exist and then did
not,
and often found myself imagining otherwise.  There
was strange comfort to be found in pretending that Katie had never existed at
all, that all those wonderful memories never were.  With Ethan, the pain
came from imagining all the memories we would never have.  They were
exactly opposite pains in that way, Katie and Ethan.

Would if I could

Paint you a rainbow.

Would if I could

Hand you a star.

Will if I can

Make it all better.

Will if I can

Whenever we are.

Would if I could

Write you a lifetime.

Would if I could

Hold you right here.

Will if I can

Lift your soul higher

Will if I can

With a prayer and a tear.

Slim Jim’s parents had abandoned him shortly after he
had graduated high school in northern Iowa.  He had no other family to
turn to and was too old for foster homes.  Not that people would have been
lining up to take on a kid with such emotional problems.  He got a job at
the local lumberyard and did okay on his own for awhile.  Feeling normal,
and without his parents around to remind him that he wasn’t, he stopped taking
his medication.  His behavior became increasingly erratic and he was fired
after an altercation with a co-worker. He went home and packed a single small
duffle bag with an extra change of clothes and a toothbrush and left that small
Iowa town where he had spent his entire life.

The record from there is spotty, as he spent the next
few years homeless and hitchhiking across the country.  He took odd jobs,
slept under bridges, ate what he could when he could, and never stayed in one
place for more than a couple weeks
. 
Sometimes leaving by
his own
volition. 
Sometimes not.
 
Shoplifting from a
small grocer in Leland, Ohio.
 
Passing out in
someone’s front yard in Oakland, Michigan.
  In Muncie, Indiana the
sheriff drove him out of town after teachers at a local elementary school had
complained that Jim had refused to leave the playground where the school
children were having morning recess.  Eventually, Jim meandered his way to
Willow Grove where his wandering ways came to an end.

The theory went that Slim Jim lured Katie into walking
with him down the tracks toward Glidden, the next town over.  That never
sat right with me, though.  Katie was too smart to have gone off with Slim
Jim like that.  I always figured he must have forced her to go with him.

Slim Jim never confessed to the crime, but he couldn’t
provide an account of his whereabouts either.  Before his case ever got to
trial, Slim Jim Johnson was found guilty by a jury of his incarcerated
peers.  The sentence was death and it was carried out immediately. 
Prison justice.