Taking Lives (2 page)

Some guys stare ahead and gun the engine coincidentally. Some look disapproving, as though they wished for the courage to stop and deliver a proper sermon. Two stubbled men in a pick-up swerve towards Goodman where he dances on the road, and swerve back at the very last minute. He feels a hot metal wind.

Arkenhout watches. He savours the heat, the extreme, the sense of being lost: which means anything is possible. He slips out of sight a minute to piss.

He hears nothing on the road. Then:

‘Hey,’ Goodman is shouting, ‘Hey!’

Arkenhout buttons his fly. From the gully he hears a soft slamming sound, a car diverted for a moment from its smooth progress, then the car carrying on, but faster. Goodman isn’t shouting any more.

Arkenhout liked being able to hear Goodman. The quiet makes him anxious. He strides back out of the gully.

He looks down the road. A scorch mark leads to Goodman, a pointer of black rubber. Goodman lies, one eye shut and black, one eye staring open. His mouth is bloody, frothing a bit. His legs are cracked and bruised, bone and sinew poking through bare skin. It seems as though someone was furiously angry that he dared to stand on this road at this time, angry at the very existence of people like him.

The road is silent. The little rickety movements in the bush are held down by the sheer weight of the sun.

Arkenhout feels in his own pockets and tugs out money, passport, postcards for his parents. He’s fine. He’s fine, he tells himself. He’s grown-up so the spasms in his stomach, the taste of eggs and old cola in his throat, can’t be happening.

He doesn’t want to look more closely, but he thinks that Seth’s eye, the open one, moves a little. Maybe it’s some mechanical reaction in a dead body, like current through a lab frog. Maybe he’s alive.

Arkenhout tries to remember things learned in the Scouts: bandages, moving the injured, CPR. You don’t move a body that’s cut and broken like Seth’s. But the body is out there on the blacktop, and soon there will be traffic. Arkenhout feels obliged. He darts out and he tugs Goodman back to the scrappy crabgrass at the roadside. He acts like Goodman is a stranger, and checks his pockets: money, credit, I.D.; Arkenhout has a Timex, fake gold; Goodman has a Swiss Army watch.

He feels himself in a still, cold state where thinking seems to be peculiarly clear. He knows this can’t be right. He’s here with a boy he doesn’t know. He’s a foreigner, and people don’t like foreigners around here, not even Seth Goodman. He’s seen the movies, and the TV. He’s panicking.

Cops do not understand what’s improvised in life. A cop will think that riding the bus, hiring the car, lead inexorably to this broken body on a roadside.

A foreigner and an all-American boy, and the all-American is dead. Or dying.

He listens. There is no sound of an engine in either direction. He puts his head down to Seth’s heart, which is struggling away.

Then there are Dr and Mrs Arkenhout to consider. They’d hate the idea of something so sensational happening to their son. They might even bring him home, and he couldn’t stand going back to all those empty manners.

He picks up a heavy, faceted stone and hits Seth’s head, two times, and then throws the rock into the ditch. This is mercy, because there’s no way to call help, let alone make it come. He holds the head in his hands for a moment, checking it impersonally. The teeth are loose, he sees. The face is so spoiled it could belong to almost any boy the same build, age, colour.

A truck goes by, a high chrome train on twenty-four wheels. For a moment, Arkenhout thinks the truck will stop, but it barrels on. He wonders how long it takes to stop a monster like that.

He holds Goodman’s hand. The nails are unbitten. He bites them.

*

Three miles, four miles down the highway, which once seemed so straight and now bends and shimmers, he’s dry and almost out of breath. Nobody’s moving, nobody’s passing. He has the whole damn world to himself.

The sky rumbles and blackens behind him.

He has two sets of papers in the jacket that trails in his left hand. He has Martin Arkenhout, who’s a kid and a visitor. He has Seth Goodman, who’s already at college and can do what he wants. He has blond hair, the proper height. Easy. The watch on his left wrist is now a Swiss Army watch.

He could be Seth Goodman better than Seth Goodman ever could. He can make Seth Goodman anyone he can imagine.

There is a diner, finally: a yellowish smear of brick between pines. He says there’s been an accident, asks for a phone.

A waitress gives him coffee when he wants water and points him to the phone. He can see the waitress wants to be sympathetic, wants to mother the boy and believe him; it’s natural. But she’s experienced, so she also wants proof of his story.

‘College boy,’ she says.

‘Yes,’ he says, ‘Ma’am.’

She beams, so close he smells the metal of old coffee on her breath.

But the smile is for the other diners. To Arkenhout, she says, softly, ‘Where’s your freaking car then? Where is it?’

‘We broke down,’ he says. ‘By the alligator farm. And then we tried to get someone to stop on the highway.’

It’s all true, but still she snorts.

‘He was Dutch,’ Arkenhout says. ‘He thought they’d stop for us.’

‘Foreign. What were you doing with a foreign boy?’

‘Just travelling.’

She skims about the diner for a bit, ferrying salad to a pasty couple by the window, more coffee to a pencil-thin black queen, a plate of meat and French fries to the middle-aged couple in plaids.

‘It sounds terrible, sugar,’ she says.

He has never gambled before, but if he had, he’d recognize his bright concentration on a single chance.

He watches rain come down in clots, rain with the force of hammers picking at the road and scouring the roadside. Just for a moment, hail makes the air rattle.

He can’t eat, although the waitress says he should eat.

He knows when the sun comes back from all the brilliance that lies about on the ground.

He has the phone in his hands at the police station. He’s not at all sure that this can work.

‘You sound different,’ this woman’s voice says down the phone. She’s Mrs Goodman, mother.

‘I did what I could,’ he says. Say as little as possible. Mimic Seth’s particular flat language with your clever mouth.

‘It must be shock, dear,’ she says. Then it’s as though she remembers the boy doesn’t tolerate endearments any more. ‘Seth, I mean,’ she says. ‘They’ll find the body when the storm stops, all that rain. I know you did all you could.’

Arkenhout is dizzy, falling down all the implications of what she says: that he is going to be found.

‘Come home. We’ll take care of you,’ the woman says. ‘Until you’re yourself again.’

He hears the father snapping and hawking in the background. He thinks he should say something, but the silence, he guesses, only helps his credibility.

‘The cops,’ he begins, tentatively.

‘Police. Police, Seth.’

‘The police said bodies do get moved. There are alligators round here. I left him on the roadside because I couldn’t just leave him on the road -‘

‘It doesn’t bear thinking about,’ says Mrs Goodman, and she means it. ‘You can come home now. You know that. If you want to.’

He’s guessing: that she longs for him to rush home at once and forever, that the real Seth would pose as a man and refuse. They’re not used to separation, he can tell; so they’re trying very hard to do it properly.

He knows that much, but he doesn’t even know what Seth calls his mother: Mum, Ma, Mother, by her Christian name, by some nickname, and whether she’ll notice if he never calls her anything at all. Then he remembers that she expects him to sound, very slightly, not himself.

‘I’d rather carry on to New York,’ Arkenhout says. ‘I want to get started.’

Mrs Goodman breathes hard. There is a pause, a bit of talk and Mr Goodman says down the line, ‘We’ll get you a ticket, Seth. It’ll be waiting at the airport. You’re all right, are you? You have seen a doctor, haven’t you?’

‘I’m all right.’ So they don’t parade feeling, either; like his own family, they think they can park emotion like a car until it’s needed. ‘I’ll call you from New York.’

He puts down the phone. He’s very aware, on his skin, that three cops are watching him.

An older sergeant, black, takes him into an interview room.

‘Son,’ he says. ‘You should know we still didn’t find your friend.’

Arkenhout thinks they’re questioning his story. He sets his face blank.

‘There’s tyre marks, nothing else. The rain and the hail just mashed down the ground and there wasn’t a body to see.’

Arkenhout says nothing.

‘I know this is hard. You want,’ and here the cop fishes up a word from chatshows, ‘closure. I promise you. We find him, I’ll call you. I’ll be in touch straight away.’

*

He stretches on the dorm bed, chilled down by the air-conditioner. He’s early for the semester; his roommate will not arrive for another week. Everybody seems to know there was an accident, so he has a brief buzz of glamour. Everyone is also very kind. Counselling is offered.

But he’s thinking: it can’t work. They’ll find the body. You can’t ruin a body enough to escape all those medical records, dental charts; what if Seth Goodman was fingerprinted once, or had his appendix or his wisdom teeth out? He should have inventoried Seth’s body while it was alive.

Then: if they find the body and send it back to Holland, what if his parents decide it’s not him? The possibilities run about his skin like sweat.

It’s only when the call comes from Florida - boy found, badly cut up and smashed, major injuries compatible with car accident and the rest from being tugged about and mauled by gators, everything rotted down by weeks in warm, sluggish water; some contusions that might be from the head going downstream against a sluice; the body photographed, catalogued, identified as Martin Arkenhout because that was the name it ought to have, then burnt in a plywood coffin because the remains were too foul to be shared with the grieving parents, and the ashes sent back to Holland - that Arkenhout stops seeing the kind black Florida cop on guard over his bed. He punches the air, once. He’s rid himself of a skin. He can take up a new life, know people he shouldn’t know, invent himself.

At this moment, Fifth Avenue shining with the dust in the air on a brute summer’s day, he owns the city.

*

And for a time, he is blessed: fearless because he doesn’t know quite what he ought to fear.

He does Seth Goodman, student, just right. He cracks books at midnight with a pencil light on his desk, and gets to the great vaulted emptiness of the library at opening time and wades through his courses purposefully. His roommate likes the peace. He signs up for physical anthropology, all that measuring and reading of bones.

But he also hangs out just a measured amount - sprawled on sunny benches in the sun in Washington Square, out in a posse for a couple of beers, coinciding at the gym so he can spot his roommate. There’s nothing missing.

The Goodmans call. But he’s never in his room when they call. ‘He’s out a lot,’ his roommate says. ‘At the library.’ The Goodmans want to know if he’s well, if he’s working. ‘No problems,’ his roommate says, expecting Goodman would do the same for him.

‘We didn’t want to bother him,’ Goodman’s mother says. She doesn’t mean it.

Arkenhout calls back. Mrs Goodman says they’d love to come to see him in New York, but Seth knows what his father feels about the city. Arkenhout gives a sage, brief ‘Uh huh.’

Since he doesn’t know anyone, he decides this means he can know anyone at all. He cruises SoHo on the nights the art season opens, the galleries open out like souks and people spill out of them on a tide of thin white wine. He gets talked to, invited: he is eighteen, a personable volunteer. He remembers enough names from trips to the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam - Haring, Nauman, Koons, that kind of name - to sound a bit informed. He doesn’t worry people by mentioning his favourite: Malevich. He’s smart enough to know these people don’t like true disturbers of the peace.

Out of this drifting come offers. He’s useful, so the galleries have him around like furniture. He’s helped shift glass snails, jokes on paper, brass pornography. That leads to parties; he samples a whole social round. He’s inscribed in this group and that group, but people single him out because he has a party trick. He’s blank like someone his age, a surrogate son, a potential lover, someone to mould, but he gives great attention. He doesn’t mind egos spilling out their stories. He’s hungry for the information they let slip in between their words.

In class, he’s the one who doesn’t ask the dumb questions, who knows not all the world is green-grass suburbia; he was taught that at school. He clatters ineffectually at the gym, but he’s helpful. He goes his own private round among the galleries, now down on West Broadway helping shift boxes, now hanging out in some remote Chelsea space to make it look peopled. His roommate finds a girlfriend for the afternoons when Goodman is reliably never there.

Then there’s Thanksgiving.

Arkenhout is Dutch. He knows about St Nicholas, about Christmas, maybe New Year. He doesn’t know about Thanksgiving, this late November roadblock to his life; so he’s startled when the Goodmans leave a message that they’ll send him the ticket to come home for Thanksgiving and how long can he stay?

His roommate says, ‘It’s lame. You got to let the parents know they don’t rule you.’

Arkenhout sees Christmas loom behind Thanksgiving on the calendar and a full month of vacation behind that. He needs alibis.

‘You going home?’ he asks his roommate.

‘No way.’

He has six weeks before Thanksgiving, maybe four before he has to call and say precisely when he’s coming; or so he thinks.

His luck is cracking.

But then he’s down one brilliant day on West Broadway, just hanging out in the big white back office of a gallery, and David Silver walks through: a name off museum banners. Silver has an impassive face, like he’s Saran-wrapped his feelings. The two see each other very briefly, but very clearly.