Taft (8 page)

"Not there," I said to Fay. She was pretty pale when I opened the door and I wondered if somebody'd come by and banged on the window trying to scare her. She didn't ask if I'd looked hard enough.

"Where's his school?" I said.

"Why?"

"Kids'll go over to their school sometimes, looking for trouble." I wanted to get out of this neighborhood altogether. "I used to do that. We liked to pry open a window and walk around at night. Sometimes a bunch of kids'll get together and write things on the blackboards, turn over trash cans."

"Carl wouldn't do that."

"Well, chances are you'd say Carl wouldn't disappear in the middle of the night either, which leads me to wonder what in the hell we're doing driving around."

She dug her hands into her pockets and pushed herself down into the seat. "East," she said. "East High School."

It was a relief, driving back out towards Chickasaw Gardens. We were at the school by quarter of four, but there was no sign of his car, no lights on inside. I pulled over anyway. I was past being tired. Things were starting to get that blurry glow, the way they will when you stay up too long. Fay walked behind me, wrapping her arms around herself to try and keep from the cold. We went around the chain link fence, which had been stuffed full of leaves by either the wind or children. "Look in the windows," I said.

Fay walked over and cupped her hands around her eyes to peer inside. "There's nothing there," she said. "I told you he wouldn't come here. Carl hates this place."

"Every kid hates high school," I said. "That's just normal." I looked around a little to make her think the trip was worth the time. I knew he wouldn't be there as much as she did. After a while I turned back towards the car.

Fay wasn't following behind me. She was standing there, her back up against the low window. "Carl was good in school," she said. Her teeth were chattering lightly from the cold. "He was on the wrestling team. He was state-ranked. They don't even have wrestling here. Idiots."

"I don't know a thing about wrestling," I said. "It's cold. Come on back and get in the car."

"He did good in most of his classes. He was good in MATH," she said, saying the word math so loud that it made me nervous somebody would hear her. "He was number three in the whole state in wrestling and he was good in MATH. Goddamnit. Goddamn all of it."

"Hey Jesus, quiet yourself." I put my hands on her shoulders and steered her back towards the car. "You want to find him, don't you? This is how you're going to find him? You need to grab hold here. Stop it with this craziness."

Fay straightened up her back. She was breathing hard, like she was looking to fistfight with somebody. "I'm fine," she said.

"All right, then. Let's go."

She nodded her head. She was trying to settle herself down. "Just drive around a little while more," she said. "I know I've been asking way too much, but if you can, for just a while."

"Sure," I said. "I can do that."

I had never in my life heard of somebody setting off to find a person in a city and then actually coming up with them, but we kept driving. At one point I made a wrong turn and wound up on the bridge over to Arkansas. That phrase, "transporting across state lines" came into my head. "This is Arkansas," I said, then turned around and came right back. Then we were downtown again, past the Ramada and the Peabody. I don't know if I meant to drive to Beale, or if I'd just been out so long I'd run out of places to go. But something did occur to me for the first time all night. Carl loved his sister, and as late as he might ever be, he wouldn't forget about her altogether. I parked on Union and got out. Fay got out without asking me anything. All the bicycle police had ridden off and the bums had settled in for the evening to sleep in the doorways. The one sleeping in the doorway to Muddy's was Carl.

Fay started to cry a little then, though from what combination of things it would have been hard to say. She got down and shook him hard. Maybe she wanted to see if he was dead.

Carl batted her hand away before he ever opened his eyes. "Hey," she said to him. "Jesus Carl, wake up."

He was about as white as a white person could have been. I do not believe that a black man can ever look as completely fucked up as a white man. Even his eyes didn't have color to them anymore. Still, he was probably better off now than he would have been if we'd found him right off the bat. "It's cold," Carl said.

I leaned over and tried to help him up, but I could see pretty quick that that wasn't going to work. Carl wasn't walking. The only way to do it was to actually pick him up. He was small, maybe just five foot eight and awfully, awfully thin, the way boys with a predilection for drugs will be. I put my hands up under his arms and felt the skinny joint where the bone went into the socket. This boy had no means of protection in the world. He was small and not especially sharp. He had a naturally sweet way about him, which would do him a lot more harm than good. The way I saw it, the only thing he had standing in front of his destruction was Fay, and she was not such a big person herself. I wanted to get him in the car as soon as possible. I was thinking like Fay by then, better to keep this quiet. I reached down and took his legs in my other arm and carried him to the car the way I used to carry Franklin when he fell asleep at his grandparents' house after supper. Fay pushed her brother's head up against my chest so it wasn't just wagging around out there. It isn't good for a man to be carried by another man, like he was a baby. I was sorry for having to do it, but I couldn't see any other way.

I put him in the back seat and Fay did her best to arrange him so that he looked comfortable. Then she got up front. "What do you suppose did it?"

I told her it was drugs.

"I know that much," she said, a little irritated.

"You're asking me what kind of drug?" I looked in the rear-view mirror at the boy crumpled up in the back seat of my car. "You think I know things I don't know." It may have just been Southern Comfort and a couple of Valium, things that make you stupid and then kill you in your sleep.

"You don't think he needs to go to the hospital," she said, watching him breathe.

"If he's not dead now, I doubt it's going to kill him."

"I should have stayed at the bar," she said. "He was just late was all. He could have frozen to death out there."

"It isn't that cold."

In late February the sun didn't rise until it was good and ready. I looked at my watch, thinking it must be getting on seven o'clock, but it was only four-thirty. Four-thirty in the morning and I was driving around with this waitress and her brother.

"Don't think too bad of him," Fay said, looking in the other direction so that I could barely hear her voice. "Carl's had a real hard time. This move's been tougher on him than anybody. You'd never believe this, but it used to be before things happened that I was the one everybody thought was wild. I mean, not wild like
wild,
but if somebody said one of the Taft kids was in trouble you could bet it was going to be me. Carl, he was like a dog, go where you tell him, stay where you tell him. Now we're here and it's gotten to where I can hardly talk to strangers and Carl's all over the place. He thought we should've stayed in Coalfield. I don't know, maybe we should have. I don't know how we would have done it. There was no money. I mean that. None. You wouldn't think that two people could work for all those years and come up with nothing, but that's the story."

I got back on Union one more time. I wondered why there were so many cars, where everybody could be going this time of the morning. "So something happened to your folks," I said.

"No, not my mother. She's here. This is the turn," she pointed to the left. "My father died is all."

I nodded my head and turned off.

My car had a good heater on it and Fay cranked it up to high in hopes of thawing Carl out some. But the warmth seemed to put him in a deeper sleep and when we came back to that driveway neither one of us could rouse him at all.

"Carl," Fay said. She slapped him a little, not as hard as she should have. "Come on now."

I rested my head against the frame of the car door. It was all going bad to worse.

"Wake up," she said. His mouth dropped open. I could see his pink tongue resting inside. "He's not waking up."

I reached past her into the car, grabbed the collar of his sweatshirt and shook him hard. His mouth clicked open, shut, open again. "Get up!"

"Don't break his neck," Fay said. When I let go he folded right back into his spot. I checked over my shoulder. I didn't like being outside there.

She was quiet for a while, looking at Carl and then the door and the length of the driveway. "You're going to have to carry him in," she said.

"No."

"There's no other way."

"I can't go inside," I said.

"Nobody's going to know."

She didn't understand. If she was wrong, just a little wrong, if only one person saw me that would be enough. I shouldn't have been in that neighborhood, parking my car on that asphalt. "No."

"Please," she whispered. I could hear the word after she stopped saying it.

Such quiet on that street, like they'd paid off every living thing to keep it that way. "You can't carry him, can you?"

"I'm sorry," she said, and she put her hand on my arm. She was so sorry I could feel it through my jacket. "There's no other way."

Leave him outside. That's where he wanted to sleep. Leave him in the grass, in the forsythia beside the house. "Anybody awake in there?"

She shook her head. "They sleep like rocks. All of them."

Be right, I was thinking. My hands were sweating as I leaned into the back seat and pulled her brother out. I was good at this. I'd done it a million times. Had Franklin been this light? A boy of nine wasn't heavier than this. Though Franklin smelled better, not just because he hadn't been spending nights outside, sleeping in his clothes, but because he smelled healthy, like a boy. Carrying her brother in my arms, I followed Fay up the driveway, past the thick line of hedges. I didn't have to worry about the people on either side seeing me, only the ones across the street. I was worried about them. They wouldn't look long enough to see if I was carrying Carl into the house or away from it. They wouldn't look to see Fay. They would only see me while they were punching out 911 and calling to their wife to get the shotgun out from under the bed.

Fay reached inside her shirt and pulled out a house key on a chain around her neck. The chain was too short, and she had to lean down to the lock to open the door. She practically had to press her face against it. I shifted Carl's matchstick bones in my arms and tried to step out of the porch light. Fay looked at me and put a finger to her lips. Like I didn't know to be quiet. We went inside the dark house. I was inside somebody else's house, holding their son, following their daughter. My feet were sinking into somebody's thick carpet. I saw the dark outline of their things. Flowers on small tables, the backs of sofas and wing-backed chairs. I wanted to close my eyes. Everything I saw incriminated me, proved I was there. Panic came up in my throat and turned my mouth bitter. Fay ran her hand along the wall until she came to the thermostat box. A second later the heater came on with three clicks and a groan and then sound poured up from every vent to help cover us. She walked over to the staircase. Upstairs would be worse. Harder to get out from there, fewer places to go. She moved without noise, but I heard everything: the heaviness of Carl's stoned breathing, the sounds the stairs made under our feet, under my heavy feet. I tried to breathe. The house smelled too clean, a little bit perfumed even. It smelled like a woman. I was inside the house. All doors shut, windows locked. The last stair made a loud, animal sound when I took my foot away and I felt the sweat beading up at my hairline.

I followed Fay down the hallway, past what looked to be an endless row of closed doors that held beds and sleeping people. I didn't know who or how many. I was trying to count them as a way of steadying myself. Then I heard something from behind the second door. I stopped and held Carl tighter to my chest. A bedside drawer being pulled open? Someone rolling over, reaching into a drawer? There are no questions they would have to ask. Seeing me was reason enough to shoot me. It would be reason enough for the police who would come later to fill out the paperwork. All of the neighbors would buy better alarm systems. At parties they would tell the story again and again. They would take Fay's aunt by the arm and say,
It must have been so terrifying for you, I can't imagine.
Fay turned around, followed my eyes to the door and shook her head. She made a motion with her hand that I should keep going. I stayed behind her, keeping my eyes on her back, on her hair, which stopped in a razor straight line just past her shoulders. She opened the last door on the hallway and I followed her inside. Neither of us said a thing. She pulled back the blankets and I lay the boy down on blue striped sheets. She took off his shoes and covered him. He had been so light that I barely felt the difference when I stood up without him. In the bed he rolled over and took hold of a pillow with both his hands.

Fay took the same path out of the house. I wondered about my footprints showing in the carpet. Going out felt easier and it was all I could do to keep myself slow. I was relieved Fay saw me all the way out, that she didn't just wave at me from his bedside. My eyes had adjusted some to the dark and I could make out pictures on the walls now, though I couldn't make out the people in them. She came outside with me. When I heard the door close I vowed to never be stupid again. Never. The air smelled like it might rain. I put my hands against my thighs and leaned into it.

When we got to the car she went around to the other door and got in, like we still had a couple more stops to make on this never-ending ride. "I can't believe we got him inside," she said.

I just nodded.

"Tomorrow is Sunday. Carl always sleeps late on Sunday. He won't go to church with them. Nobody'll even think anything about it."