Authors: Lisa Howorth
“Stevie’s gone,” her mother said. “We can’t find him.” She turned to her sister, Marie, who wrapped her arms around Marisa and looked up at Mary Byrd with wide, blank eyes.
“Where are the babies?” asked Mary Byrd, looking around the room. “Is Kath here?” She desperately wanted her to be. She was glad she didn’t have any sisters; her cousin was her closest friend.
“The babies are asleep,” said her aunt. “The girls didn’t come.”
Nonna, Mary Byrd’s grandmother, solemnly smoked a Viceroy with the usual long, drooping ash. If only it were one of those afternoons when her mother and aunt and grandmother sat at the kitchen table, smoking, sipping Cutty, and laughing at the new Frederick’s catalog. “Daddy Sam and Angelo and the big boys and Nicky are out looking,” she said.
The warm evening and the making out had made Mary Byrd hot and sweaty but now she shook.
“I’m going, too,” she said, but before she could move, a man stepped in front of her. He introduced himself as detective somebody, Richmond police, and in a low, quiet voice said that he needed to ask her some questions. He wanted to know if there were secret hideouts or forts or gathering places in the neighborhood where kids liked to go. Had Stevie mentioned any plans he had that day? When had Mary Byrd last seen him? Where had she been since dinner? What was the boyfriend’s name? Where was the boyfriend now? Mary Byrd blushed. She wasn’t telling this guy she’d been parking, not in front of her family. She just said, “Riding around. He dropped me off and went home.” She said his name. The detective took notes and, without raising his head, looked her up and down. She shivered again, the wet spot in her underwear cold as ice.
“On Mother’s Day?” he asked.
She ran down the street toward the woods and the creek, calling Stevie’s name, which seemed so dumb. He had to be somewhere. He
was
somewhere, but where? Accidentally locked in a shed or a basement. Dopey kid. Rode his bicycle too far away and was lost. At the worst, maybe was hurt, had been knocked out and couldn’t yell back. A logical dumb-kid explanation for which he would get his butt beaten by Pop when they found him.
When she got to the end of the road and crossed to the woods, she was stunned to see, in the streetlight, her grandfather’s small, shadowed figure dragging the deep part of the creek with a rake—the rake he used when he came to get their leaves up in the fall. He painted all his tool handles acid green, and the rake seemed to glow. They looked at each other but said nothing. Her grandfather’s pants were rolled up and he wore his goofy summer straw hat to keep the rain off. He looked like he looked when they went crabbing at the bay every summer. Mary Byrd stifled an abrupt urge to laugh and the laugh stuck in her throat and burned. She watched her grandfather, wondering why the sight seemed dreamlike but familiar—not the crabbing, but something else—and she remembered a painting they’d talked about at school. Charon, rowing his boat across the River Styx into the unknown dark. How could she possibly be watching her grandfather dragging the creek, looking for her brother’s body?
Daddy Sam said to her, “Go look in the creek on the other side of Willow Lawn.”
“But he’s not allowed to cross Willow Lawn,” Mary Byrd replied stupidly.
Daddy Sam looked at her like she was an idiot and said, “Go look. Look every single place you can think of, or that
he
might think of, even if he wasn’t allowed, chooch.” He wouldn’t be calling her a dumbass if he was really worried, would he? She was heartened that her grandfather would say something so ordinary, one of his Sicilian epithets, as if she’d left a door open or water running.
She crossed Willow Lawn to their school bus stop on the bridge and looked down into the black water. The creek was rocky and shallow. Someone lying there would be easy to see. Stevie wouldn’t have gone any farther up the creek because he was afraid of the dark culvert. They had always told him that a thing like the Loch Ness monster from the
World Beyond
had been sighted there. She wasn’t going in that slimy thing by herself, either. She was wearing her new Villager dress with pink and green flowers. But it wasn’t that; she was afraid
of the culvert, too. The red-headed twin hoods from the Horseshoe Apartments had covered the culvert walls with alarming sex graffiti and drawings. She took a deep breath and smelled the rain and the light sewage funk of the creek, and she smelled the boyfriend’s dried saliva around her mouth. In the morning she would be standing in this same spot, waiting for the school bus, talking excitedly with the other kids about what had happened the night before, how Stevie had gotten lost but had been found safe and sound, dumb kid, man, was he in trouble, my stepfather almost killed him! It would be that way. It had to be. For now, all she could do was keep looking and calling, like it was just one of the games they all played on summer nights, Sardines or Pushy-in-the-Bushy, or Freeze Tag.
She turned from the creek and looked around the big, wide intersection. Deserted late on a rainy Sunday night, the usually busy streets seemed sinister and forbidding. When they were younger, it had been a fun spot on the predawn mornings she had helped Nick do his paper route. A bunch of them would get up in the dark and meet here where the paper bundles of the Sunday
Times-Dispatch
were dropped. It had been exciting; they were being allowed out in the dark—practically the middle of the night. They’d serve the papers but they’d also make the traffic lights—they seemed like party lights—change by jumping on the sensor plates. They’d lie in the road, they’d yell cuss words, they’d moon each other. Now the lights were warnings, like something to do with the emergency, signaling on and off, on and off, and reflecting their colors in an eerie way on the wet, empty street, revealing nothing.
She found Nick, who was searching with their older cousins. They went around the elementary school, and behind the Horseshoe. They searched King Stalks, the big bamboo forest that stretched from the Nicholsons’ backyard to the Fleshmans’. They spread out, calling and walking, and then they’d go somewhere else. Off and on it rained and they were soaked and cold. They’d straggle back to the house, sure they would be greeted by happy shouting and police cars driving off. Then, stunned more deeply that nothing had changed, they’d go back out into the night.
Mary Byrd did not see her mother or her stepfather. She didn’t want to. She didn’t want to know what they were doing, either. Finally, one of the detectives said that everyone should stop for now and start looking again at first light, which was only a few hours off. Then, he said, they’d have to notify the media and widen the search. Everyone would need some rest.
Mary Byrd knew she’d need to help with the babies, who’d be getting up before long, so she went to her room and lay on her bed. Never had she wanted anything more in her life than to wake up to a Monday morning as usual, babies crying, chaos in the bathroom and the kitchen, she and Nick and Stevie bumbling and flailing around, rushing to make their buses and avoid their mother’s wrath if they missed them. She’d go to school and have a good excuse for not having her homework, and then the boyfriend would pick her up after school and put the top down and maybe they’d go out to Kentdale Road or even farther, and just drive and drive and drive and drive. Mary Byrd opened her eyes suddenly and from the slow movements and murmuring downstairs she knew they were all still in the nightmare. Something inside her, her heart or her stomach, seized up, her mouth watered, and she thought she was going to throw up.
At her window she saw that two TV trucks blocked the driveway. What little light there was outside was gray with fog. The rain had stopped, though. She supposed that was good, but she wasn’t sure what anything meant anymore. The ordinary touchstones of daily life seemed to mean nothing. Yesterday’s pair of spotted underwear was balled up in an old potato chip bag at the bottom of her trashcan. She pulled on clean cutoffs and a sweatshirt and went downstairs, realizing she’d again forgotten her glasses when she saw all the people who’d assembled in the living room. Relatives, some police and other official people, she guessed. She was glad she couldn’t really make them all out, she was so blind.
Her mother seemed almost normal and was in the kitchen feeding the babies. Nick had gone back out with Pop and the searchers and Mary Byrd was relieved not to see him. There wasn’t anything to say. She stood watching the babies and eating a Pop Tart while her mother did the dishes. Only she and Stevie liked Pop Tarts. There were two in the box and she left one.
James, who wasn’t really a baby anymore, struggled off his chair at the table and took his juice beebah to the bedroom to watch cartoons. He was old enough to be ashamed to have a bottle and would hide it if someone came into the room. The real baby, Pete, banged loudly on his high chair to alert everyone that he was finished pincering up his Cheerios one by one. Mary Byrd freed him from the high chair and set him down. He had recently started walking and wore blue corduroy overalls that were almost white from many washings and handing-downs. They hadn’t been snapped up the legs, so it looked as if he were wearing a tiny evening gown. He staggered around like Frankenstein, going to the drawer where he had his own set of miniature pots and pans to play with. Mary Byrd took a deep breath with the rush of love she felt for him, and also envy. For him nothing had changed. The world was still a good place.
While she and her mother cleaned up after the babies and dealt with all the doughnuts and coffee and cigarette butts in the kitchen, Mary Byrd heard her stepfather’s familiar, heavy tread, a sound she never liked hearing, in the hall. She and her mother turned and there he was, his bulky body filling the doorway. He stood there with his head to one side, hands hanging down, smiling a big smile, she thought—she still wasn’t wearing her glasses—the identical pose he’d strike when he came home from work and spied the babies eating dinner and he’d laugh and say, “I see monkeys!,” making them squeal and chuckle. She held her breath, but he didn’t do that, and instead he brayed loudly, “He’s dead.” Her mother leapt to him and they sobbed, and Mary Byrd scooped up Pete and ran out of the kitchen—where was James?—and flew up the stairs, taking them by twos even with the big, fat baby in her arms.
It seemed to Teever that he’d been leaning in front of the JFC for an hour with the weather and his foot getting worse by the minute. Some city trucks passed, Solid Waste guys throwing out sand; nobody was going out now unless they had to. He knew them, but they just lifted a finger off the wheel and went on by. If he couldn’t catch a ride soon, he decided, he was going to fall down and just lay there, he was feeling so poorly. Mr. Johnny might come out and pick him up, but where would Mr. Johnny carry him? All the phones were out, he couldn’t call Mudbird or Charles, couldn’t reveal his hooch in the graveyard, couldn’t even
get back
to the graveyard with this foot. He’d made just enough cash working for Mr. Johnny to get some food and beer. The night before, a little loaded, he’d jumped down from the loft in the graveyard shed in his sock feet and had landed on an adze, tearing his foot wide open. He’d packed it with clay the way his grand had done with cuts—but he didn’t have her special clay—and now it was bad. He needed to get it seen about.
As Teever was thinking about what it was going to be like lying there in the muddy ice with tobacco cuds and cigarette butts, a gold Dodge pickup came slowly down Lamar and pulled over to where he had propped himself. The window slid down, the ice on it cracking off and falling to the street, revealing a wizened red face with a cigarette hanging from it. Loud music blasted from the dashboard. It was L. B., a local fireman.
“Man, Teever, you look terrible. You all right, bro?”
“Ayyy, L. B.,” Teever said weakly. “Not too good, not too good. Can you carry me out to the Mexicans?”
L. B. looked disapproving. “Why the hell you need to go out there?”
“My foot gone bad, man. They can take care of it, fix themselves all the time. I seen it,” Teever said. “Can’t call nobody anyway, phones all be out.” As if he had somebody to call.
“Why don’t I just take you by the hospital? Don’t that make more sense?” L. B. said. “What about the V.A. hospital?”
“Hospital—that just axing for trouble. Lost my V.A. card last time I was down to Parchman, got to go to Tupelo or Memphis or somewhere to get a new one. Come on, man. This thing
killing
my ass.”
L. B. tossed his butt aside as he got out of the truck. “Okay, dude. Get your sorry self in the truck.” He helped Teever off the wall and to the passenger side and half-lifted him in. L. B. was an ex-Marine, and like a lot of jarheads Teever had known, he was a little scrawny guy, but strong as an ox. His mama and Teever’s sister had worked the C-shift together out to the Retard, as the state home was uncharitably known. Inside the cab it was wonderfully warm and smelled of scuppernong jelly, or toilet cake.
Driving slowly down the slippery street, L. B. looked Teever over and asked, “What did you do to that foot?”
“Stepped on a adze, working,” he said.
“Yeah?” L. B. said. “An
adze
?
What the hell you doin’ with an old-school thing like that?”
“Just bustin’ some shit up,” Teever lied. To change the subject he said, “What
you
doin’ out in all this mess?”
“Just low-ridin’, checking things out. I got to go in to work in about an hour. There gonna be plenty of fires to put out tonight.”