The Sweet Relief of Missing Children (23 page)

R
icky ruined the couch. It was an accident, he said. He must have dropped a hot cigarette butt between the cushions. The couch smoldered all afternoon; it smelled poisonous. They dumped water and baking soda on the cushions.

“I guess I'll sleep on the floor,” Pax said.

“Naw, I've got a big old island of a bed.”

Pax hesitated.

“I insist,” said Ricky. His grin revealed his gums.

Pax dreaded the wafting smell of dandruff shampoo. He feared Ricky's hand alighting, in the brief incidental manner of an insect, on his hip. At the same time, it had been years since he'd slept in a bed with a person, since he'd lain with another human being on a proper mattress, on a set of sheets, in a room designated for sleep. He was touched by this man's generosity. He remembered his namesake, the Pax on the bus, placid, stoic Pax, who would have accepted the invitation.

They lay on their backs, untouching. The heat wave was crippling the city. It was a couple hours past sunset. The delicately oppressive scent of ozone lingered. Through open windows they heard traffic in the distance, the bullfrog bleat of tractor-trailer horns, and, closer, electric guitar music. There had been a baseball game on the radio; the city's team beat their rival by a landslide. Intermittently a gloating cheer rose to meet them from the street below. It was a queen-size bed, with soft, threadbare blankets, though it was too hot to lie under them. Ricky wore his cutoffs. Pax wore jeans and a damp t-shirt, which he'd run under the faucet. They'd each had several beers. Pax felt slackened, clammy, and loosened by these drinks and by the landslide victory and by the dim noise of the city. He said, “I'm kind of thinking a lot, quite a bit actually, about that missing girl.”

Ricky grunted. “Who's that?” He was chewing on a toothpick.

“That girl, Leonora. Leonora Marie Coulter. That one.”

“Pretty thing, right? They say she's probably dead. Nine out of ten, they're dead.”

“That's what they say?”

“That or smuggled to Thailand. But then again, kids run off. You know, my sister Trish ran off for a while. They come back. Or they don't.”

An ambulance sped down the street. Its siren, the inconsequential dire nature of it, triggered a seizing in Pax's gut.

“Mexico maybe. Caught up in one of those rings, high on smack. My sister went to California with her dumbass boyfriend. She called a couple weeks later.”

“Smack. I hope not. I don't think she's in Mexico.”

“Or some kind of pills, maybe, uppers. Get more work out of the girls. My sister called from a phone booth. She was pregnant. She called when her boyfriend ditched her. My dad wired her money for a train back home, but she used it for an abortion instead.”

“Huh.”

Ricky snickered. “My idiot parents.”

“She's just a kid.”

“Naw, she was nineteen.”

“I mean Leonora. She's twelve. That's all.”

“It doesn't really matter how old. You're never too young to get chewed up.”

“I feel like I'm meant to do something. Why do I feel that way?”

“Because you're a big old softy. You feel for all people. I used to be like that, but I quit. I quit it for poetry.”

“What if she was the one? The girl I was meant to marry.”

Ricky flicked his toothpick across the room. “You believe in that kind of thing?”

Pax didn't know. He wanted to see what would happen if he said it.

They were silent then. The siren grew fainter and fainter. Pax wondered what person was lying in the back of that ambulance. Perhaps they'd found Leonora—trapped in an elevator shaft, legs broken. Or sooty, beaten, crawling out of the subway on her hands and knees. Of course it wasn't Leonora, just another soul hurtling through the city.

“I've been thinking about talent,” Ricky announced. “I'm a poet, right. But do I have talent?”

“Sure you do.”

“It was a hypothetical question.”

“Sorry.”

“You're right, though. But it doesn't matter. Talent's just a platform. The question isn't can you find the platform but: Are you willing to jump? I'm standing on the platform. I've got that far. But that far is trivial. That far means nothing…What are you doing?”

Pax gripped his hands together. He tensed his legs. “I feel like I'm meant to save her.”

“The girl? Oh man. That's rough. You're a wounded little pilgrim, aren't you? But don't blame yourself. There are far worse things to be.”

“What's worse?”

“A poet.” He faked a laugh.

Maybe she was in an elevator somewhere. Maybe she had starved to death in a broken elevator, the bones in her hands fractured from pounding. Maybe she was stuffed in a garbage bag, in one of the millions of dumpsters of this city, or sleeping soundly in the back of a station wagon under the country stars. Maybe she was happy. On safari, binoculars strung around her slender neck, a zebra grazing nearby. Or sitting by some harbor. Maybe she was eating clams from a plastic basket. Maybe Pax had taken her himself. Maybe she was in a river. Pale fish nosing her knees. Maybe he'd put her there.

Ricky said, “Will I jump from the platform? That's the question. Do I dare jump?”

“You will,” said Pax, not caring at all.

When Pax had disappeared, his mother had not hung signs. His mother had not gone to the news stations. She'd done nothing. He was gone. He had vanished. He became, immediately, a ghost, for what is a ghost but a being no one expects to see walk the earth again? It is a shock, a sign of ill nature, when one sees a ghost. No one expected to see Pax, and so no one did. Maybe he'd done it. This would explain his shame, the little knife of guilt he'd carried with him all along, on all those buses, all those roads, state by state. Our acts are waiting for us.

“I need a cigarette,” Ricky said. “Did I hurt your feelings? You're a wounded pilgrim. A bleeding heart. So what? I like that about you.”

Pax said nothing. The lighter clicked and rasped. Ricky puffed.

Had she seen fit to report his disappearance, what would his mother have told the newscaster? He was last seen wearing jeans, a plain white T-shirt. Tube socks with orange bands at the calves. An expression of the faintest concern, always. A fisherman's bracelet of braided rope, on his left wrist. His hands were soft, slender, a bit girlish. He liked books about aliens. He liked books about unsolved mysteries, vanished ships, ESP. He liked cheesecake. He liked spice gumdrops. He was a good baseball player. He had a white scar at the base of his ribs, shaped like a dagger, from falling into a rosebush as a small child. He enjoyed sour cream and bananas. He was too skinny. He was polite. He was last seen. He is prone to. He should be approached with. He may be. But his mother made no report.

Ricky said, “Maybe she just ran away.”

“I think she was taken.”

“Who knows? No one. It doesn't matter anyway. In the long run, there's not much difference.”

“There's a big difference.”

“In the long run it doesn't matter, I'm saying.”

“In any run it matters.”

Ricky blew smoke through clenched teeth. “It amounts to the same thing. For the people left behind. Not for the girl, I suppose. Yes, for the girl there's a difference. But for the rest of us it amounts to just about the same thing, I'm afraid.”

“You're wrong,” said Pax.

Ricky touched Pax's ribs. He walked his fingers up Pax's side, pushed his fingertips into the wet hollow of Pax's armpit. It was what Pax feared, but it made him sink into his joints. He said Ricky's name.

“Yeah?”

“Ricky,” he said it again, louder.

“I'm right here, man.”

Pax said, “I might need a little help figuring some things out. I don't know what's going on.”

“Nothing's going on, my friend. Nothing at all.” And with a yawn, “It's hot. It better rain. Nothing else.”

It all felt real, all of it. That was the problem. Everything felt real, including what he knew for sure wasn't: graduating high school, the party his mother might have thrown him, a barbecue, balloons, a handful of guests complaining about mosquitoes, his loudmouth stepfather and that dude from the bar with his accordion and gym shorts and Jade Grant—why not?—in a cotton sundress, a boom box playing songs of love and good news. But there hadn't been a party. Some things had happened and some things had not. He knew the difference.

His skin was slick, and Ricky was touching him.

R
icky wanted, for all intents and purposes, to fuck him. On first glance, Pax wasn't his type. But as you got to know him, his overcompensating manners, his weird, almost senseless patience—it changed your mind. He was handsome, as it turned out. He had a strong nose. He was thin, sinewy.

They lay in silence, Ricky's gut bloated from the beer. Electric guitar licks rang out, faded, rang again, an adolescent's talentless tirade against his parents who would not be able to sleep in the room next door, whose father would finally rise from bed, unplug the guitar, threaten loss of allowance or love or some other privilege. Ricky wanted to fuck Pax, but he hadn't taken Pax in for this reason. The desire had risen slowly. He'd been here five weeks. It happened over time. So many languorous evenings drinking beers and listening to ball games, so many glimpses of Pax biting his thumbnail with pinched-faced concentration, or blathering about the dead girl, or drooling on the arm of the couch in his sleep—they had the effect of softening Ricky to him, and also, conversely, making him want to throttle the guy. Pax was strange. He was rootless. He had weird fixations, and he knew nothing about himself. This endeared him to Ricky, and it annoyed him too, Pax's lack of insight, his superhuman naïveté. The guy had to be nearing thirty. He was a grown person, bright, he'd read the right books. Age certainly doesn't predict self-knowledge, but it usually predicts some awareness of lack of self-knowledge. Pax wasn't aware of the fog, of that dense, ever-gathering cloud, enclosing his very head. Ricky both admired and feared this. Ricky wanted to kiss his neck, his honker of a nose, possibly his mouth.

He regretted speaking of his sister. Why had he done that? He had not spoken of his sister in years. He had not written about her either, even when a poem seemed to demand it. He was afraid of the images that would emerge. The poem about her would be bad or, worse, it would be good.

“You awake?”

Pax didn't respond.

Ricky said, “It does matter, all right? What happens to the girl—what happened—it matters enough. Also, forget I said anything about my sister. Can you do that?”

“I'd already forgotten.”

“And forget about that girl while you're at it. You want to torment yourself. You look for avenues of torment. She doesn't exist. She can by no means be saved.”

Pax said nothing, but Ricky perceived new gravity in his breathing, a meaning in its rhythm that wasn't there before. Ricky put his hand on Pax's stomach.

He said, “I'm going to write a poem about you, but I'll give you a different name. Yours is very cool, man, and loaded with meaning and strong and all, but it doesn't quite fit. You're a Jack, maybe, something classic. In my poem, I'll call you ‘Jack,' and I'll say:
He held his sadness the way big men hold their booze,
something to that effect. And I'll get your mouth in there too. Your chewed thumbnail. Your suitcase, I may conclude with that; it's a strong image, that beat-up suitcase, old clothes, everything mismatched, worn to the nub. Or your fantastic shoes. Your shoes are ridiculous, by the way, with all that tape. They may really be too much for the poem. I have an old pair you can have. I may say:
He was a man without a razor.
I know you use my razor, Pax, and that's fine, I don't have a problem with that.
He was a man without a razor or a bar of soap or a scrap of history.
It's fine that you use my soap as well. What's mine is yours. But what I'm trying to get at is that I won't mention this girl. You're stuck on her because it suits some unwell purpose. It's a kind of elaborate distraction. She's a red herring. I'm saying she doesn't belong in the poem.”

Pax rolled over to face Ricky and, in one impulsive motion—the motion of one who's suddenly flattered, who feels the thrill and burden of flattery, who must act in this moment if it's to happen at all—Pax kissed Ricky on the mouth.

For a second Ricky felt surprised, but then he thought:
Why are you pretending to be surprised?

Their teeth clicked. The sound to Ricky's ears was the click of two glasses, the chime of a toast. Their kiss felt like that, a toast, awkward and full of appetite.
Oh man,
thought Ricky,
oh man oh man.
But he was surprised. He knew it would happen, hoped it would happen, but the Pax who was kissing him, the Pax who had made this sudden move, was not the same man who'd been whimpering next to him five minutes ago. Something had shifted between then, and Ricky was glad, but he was also aware that it could shift back just as fast. The kid next door who before strummed meaninglessly now played a hit by Roger Ranger. Pax was making these high, churning sounds, similar to laughter, close, but not laughter, Ricky realized, not laughter at all.

“I've done this before,” Pax said.

Ricky pulled away, chuckled warily. “I thought so.”

“With a boy.” Pax pressed his face into Ricky's neck. “I've done this.”

“I had a hunch.”

Pax burrowed further into Ricky's neck. Ricky thought he was trying to get closer, to declare some kind of intimacy, but then Pax said, again, sorrowfully, “I've
done
this,” and Ricky realized that he was trying to hide.

“All right already,” Ricky said. “We've done it. We're sick. We're delicious.”

“With Gideon Booth.”

“Yes,” said Ricky. “I've done it before too. It's okay.”

He patted Pax's back in what he hoped was a friendly, assuring manner, rubbed his ropy spine, his narrow waist.

“My mother came in.” Pax spoke hotly into Ricky's neck. “She found us. Me and Gideon. He had a rat-tail. His hair had a rat-tail I mean. He was a kid. He was a nice kid. No, he wasn't nice. He was cruel.”

“My mother saw me once, too,” Ricky said. “She was a spy. She looked. She asked for it. She wanted to see, no matter what she says.”

“And Gideon said, ‘Hello Missus—' but he didn't know my last name. He said ‘Hello Missus, uh, Missus.' I thought he knew my name. My mother did something stupid.”

“Yeah, what's that?”

Pax rammed his lips into Ricky's chest. “She called my stepfather in.”

“Shit, kid. Stop biting me.”

“My stepfather came. My stepfather broke Gideon's neck.”

“His neck! No shit.”

They were still for a moment.

Ricky said, “No he didn't. I don't believe you.”

“His collarbone.”

“Fine, his collarbone. I'll buy that.”

Ricky felt bracingly alert, a little nervous. He listened to Pax's startled breath.

Ricky said, “My mother pretended it never happened. Fine. Fine with me. My dick in Claude Sullivan's mouth, there's an image for the mama. There's one for the scrapbook. But it never happened, she says.”

“It never happened,” Pax said.

“Never.”

Ricky extricated himself from Pax's hold. The air hosted a new smell: Pax's sweat. Ricky recognized it as fear sweat, that peculiar spikiness belonging to fistfights and alleys and fucking in bars and under bridges with people whom one isn't supposed to fuck. It was a sour, ringing smell. Ricky inhaled, pleased that he could inspire that kind of perspiration.

“I once had a rat-tailed haircut, too,” Ricky said. “Ugly as sin.”

The boy next door was not really playing Roger Ranger. He had turned on his stereo and, in the mirror, mimed the lead guitarist, fingers hovering above the strings. He was growing his hair out. Soon his father would confiscate the stereo. The losing baseball team's bus was rumbling down a dark highway, moving further from the city. In dark windows the players pretended not to look at themselves.