by Dan Chaon
——
Still, he did want to keep Loomis separate from it, and that was another reason he knew he needed to stop selling. He tried to complete most of his transactions at night, when Loomis was asleep, or, if during the day, when Loomis was out in the backyard, playing. But the time was coming when Loomis would begin to figure things out, if he hadn’t begun to already. There had been a night, a few months after Loomis arrived, when the child had awakened and come into the kitchen where Troy and Lonnie Von Vleet were in the process of trying out some of the produce.
“Hi, Dad,” Loomis said, standing in the doorway in his Batman underwear, and Troy had taken the bag of marijuana off the table and put it back in the old valise where he kept all his drugs.
“I woke up and I smelled a lot of smoke. I thought the house might be on fire.”
“Well, it’s not,” Troy said. “You should go back to sleep, buddy.”
“What’s that?” Loomis said, pointing to the bong in the middle of the table.
“Oh,” Troy said. “It’s nothing. It’s a water pipe that Mr. Von Vleet was showing me. That’s where the smoke was coming from.”
“You were smoking from it?”
“Yes,” Troy said. “It was just . . . kind of a dumb thing we were doing.”
“It’s not very good for you,” Loomis said.
“You’re right.” Troy glanced at Lonnie Von Vleet, who smiled.
“Hey there, Little Man,” Von Vleet said. “Do you remember me?”
“Yes,” Loomis said, seriously, and he shook Lonnie Von Vleet’s hand when Lonnie held it out. “You do magic, right?”
“You’ve got a great memory, Little Man,” Lonnie said, and though he was a bit small-eyed from the samples of produce they’d been smoking, he was still deft. “What’s that behind your ear?” he said, and reached out, seemingly pulling a quarter from the shaggy hair that Loomis had tucked behind his ear. He offered it to Loomis, who took it, impressed. Back when Troy and Carla were together, Lonnie Von Vleet had shown a number of sleight-of-hand tricks to Loomis—pushing a pencil in one ear and out the other, making a coin disappear and reappear in his palm—and he seemed pleased that Loomis remembered him.
“You need to go off to bed now,” Troy said, after Loomis had taken the quarter and thanked Lonnie Von Vleet. “I’ll turn on the fan, so the smoke won’t bother you.”
“Okay,” Loomis said, agreeably, and both Troy and Von Vleet had watched as Loomis disappeared down the hall and into his bedroom.
Troy cleared his throat. “Shit,” he said, “I hate being a bad parent,” and Lonnie grinned, patting him briskly on the back of his palm.
“What are you talking about?” Lonnie said. “He’s a great kid. You must have done something right.”
——
He thought of this again that night, as he and Ray and Mike Hawk sat around the kitchen table. He turned on the exhaust fan in the window above the kitchen sink, and opened the back door, and after they’d smoked a couple of bowls he wandered down the hall to check on Loomis. He felt uncomfortable as he stood in the doorway. Loomis lay there, his arms folded around his chest, a sheet covering the lower half of him. The pictures of dinosaur skeletons that Troy had drawn hung over the bed, as grim as gargoyles. Troy thought about adjusting the covers, but then thought better of it. Loomis was peaceful.
When he came back into the kitchen, Ray and Mike had taken out the old black leather valise that he uses to store his stash—the drugs he’d just bought from Jonathan Sandstrom. The valise was a memento that had once held his father’s important papers—deeds, insurance, birth certificates, marriage license, will—all the formalities that made up a person’s official life. Seeing Ray and Mike digging through it, he realized that it was probably reprehensible that he had used the valise to store his drugs in.
“Jesus Christ,” Ray said, looking up. “Where have you been? We’ve been sitting here for, like, twenty hours.”
“Just checking on the kid.”
“You’re such a mama,” Ray said, and picked up the baggie of mushrooms, holding it up to the light critically. “Do you ever get any Ecstasy?”
“No,” Troy said.
“Well, you should. It’s a really cool drug.”
“I’ll take that under advisement.” Troy took the bag of mushrooms from Ray’s hand and put it back in the valise, then packed the rest of the new drugs on top, leaving only a small black film container full of pot, which Mike was going to take home with him.
“Let’s go outside,” Troy said. “I’m in the mood to play Frisbee.”
——
It was around midnight when the police showed up. An ambush. Some kind of tip-off, a narc of some sort, and Troy wasn’t prepared. He opened the door and three cops were peering back at him, standing broad-chested on the porch under a halo of insects—june bugs, millers, mayflies—that were circling ecstatically around the bare lightbulb. “Troy Timmens?” the first cop said, and Troy began to gesture behind his back at Ray and Mike, who were sitting at the kitchen table. Hopefully, they would recognize the desperation of his hand signals.
“Yes,” Troy said to the cop. “Present. That’s me. What can I do for you?”
“Mr. Timmens,” the cop said, and put a thick hand on the edge of the door, as if to prevent Troy from closing it. “I have a search warrant for this home.” He offered forth a folded sheet of paper, like a brochure, and Troy took it gingerly. He could feel himself blushing. He was very stoned, and he knew that the smell of marijuana smoke was rolling sleepily through the half-open door.
“Oh, shit,” he whispered. He was aware that the amount of drugs in his house would almost certainly lead to a prison sentence. His chest tightened. There had to be a way out, of course there had to be, and he tried to make his mind move quickly as he stood there staring at the grim faces of the policemen. “Wow,” he said. He felt like he could start crying.
——
Troy thought he knew what it would be like to die, what it would be like in that moment when you heard the retort of a gun someone had pointed at you, when your parachute didn’t open, when you sank toward the bottom of the lake with something heavy attached to your foot. Even then, Troy thought, there would be a long, dreamlike pause where you imagined that there was still some way to escape. Wait, he thought. His mind moved rapidly through the hallways of a maze. Even as the walls grew narrower, even as the passage sealed in front of him, his mind yearned for that diminishing chink of light, still hoped for mercy, for wild luck, for reprieve or intervention.
“Look,” he said, still trying to grasp at that alternate reality that existed before he opened the door, when he might have done something differently, trying to imagine a path into a future in which he might somehow escape. “You guys,” he said to the cops standing there. He was aware that his life—the life he had been living, and the life he had been expecting for himself—was disappearing and there was nothing he could think of to do about it.
“Let me think for a minute,” he said. But the cops were already pushing past him, with a jingle of keys and handcuffs. Two cops, then three, disappearing into the kitchen and down the darkness of the hallway. There was a clatter of dishes, as cabinets were opened, and one of the men pulled his hands behind his back and put a plastic tie around his wrists, reciting the Miranda rights. In the distance, he could hear one of the policemen shouting: “Come out from under the bed, sir. Come out from under the bed, sir! Sir, I order you to come out from under the bed!” Ray, he thought. What an idiot. And then he remembered Loomis.
“You guys, wait a minute,” he shouted. “That’s my kid. That’s my kid! Don’t hurt him!”
——
It was the worst moment of his life, and it wasn’t until much later that he was able to make sense of the sequence of events, since everything seemed to happen at once.
The first was the sound of Loomis screaming as he was pulled by the leg out from under the bed, where he was hiding. “Loomis,” he
yelled, and tears sprang to his eyes, his voice cracking. “It’s okay, buddy! It’s okay, don’t be scared!”
The second was the discharge of a pistol, an overanxious young cop, and Troy let out a cry.
And then there was silence. He didn’t know at the time that Loomis had fainted at the sound of the shot, had curled up into a ball and gone rigid. He thought Loomis was dead, and the room distorted around him. He was weeping in a way he never remembered having done before, the way Loomis cried when he fell out of the tree: soundless, his contorted mouth trying to suck in air as tears ran down his face and out of his nose. His eyes wide as he tried to choke out words.
——
Dimly, in the distance, was the noise Ray made as he tumbled over the backyard fence, carrying Troy’s valise. Oof! Ray grunted loudly, and he and Mike Hawk were running flat-footed up toward the hills behind Troy’s house, leaving Loomis’s screams, and the ricocheted gunshot, and Troy’s weeping far behind them.
12
June 4, 1997
After she has searched for a little over an hour, Judy tries calling some of her neighbors. Her voice is hoarse from yelling, and she is extremely agitated. The presentiment that Loomis has been kidnapped has frightened her badly, and she is aware of a sharp thrum of panic at the edge of her perceptions. Something about her own, ordinary kitchen seems animate and watchful, as if the objects there might suddenly begin to breathe. Her forehead is wet with perspiration.
Nevertheless, her telephone voice remains, in the iron-clad custom of the Great Plains, pleasant and laconic, even as drops of sweat trickle from her forehead into her eyes. “Hi, Dawn?” she says brightly. “This is Judy Keene. How are you? . . . Well, I’m glad to hear it! . . . Listen, Dawn, I seem to have misplaced a youngster over here . . . little brown-haired fellow, six years old. A little small for his age. Wearing a red T-shirt and jeans? . . . No? Well, if you happen to spot him . . . All right . . . Thanks, I will . . . No, I’m sure he’s around here someplace. These kids, I’ll tell you! . . . Okay, then . . . Well, I’m sure I’ll be talking to you soon . . . Yes . . . Okay, then. Good-bye, now . . .”
Her hands are shaking. Of the five neighbors that she is able to reach, none report any sightings. Dorothy Draper says that she heard that dog over at the Woodwards’ barking and barking, but of course Judy knows that—she’s the Woodwards’ neighbor, after all.
“That’s Carla’s boy, is it?” Mrs. Draper says, and Judy has to suppress the urge to hang up the phone.
“Yes,” Judy says. “That’s right.”
“Well, I haven’t seen Carla in so long!” Mrs. Draper says. “How is she doing?”
“Oh,” Judy says. “Fine! Just fine!”
“She was always a sweet girl. I remember when she used to come over here to play with Donald. She always had the most unusual games. Very involved. And I’d listen to them and I’d think to myself, ‘she ought to be an actress.’ Wasn’t she in Los Angeles for a while?”
“No,” Judy said, and cleared her throat. “Las Vegas.”
“Oh,” Mrs. Draper said. “Well, it must be good to have her home. Donald is in Saudi Arabia, can you imagine? He’s in the navy, and that’s where they sent him. I don’t understand it, why they have to be over in those places. Has Carla been back in town for long?”
“No, no,” Judy said, and pressed her hand to her chest, where another soft firework had erupted. “She’s not in town. I’m just watching her boy. He’s staying with me. For the summer.”
“Is that right?” Mrs. Draper said. “Well, that really must be a treat for you. Do you know, I haven’t seen my granddaughter since she was two—and now she’s five! And I have said to Donald: Why don’t you just send her to stay with her grandma for a few weeks? It would mean the world to me, I tell him. But to fly a child from the Middle East to the United States, and then to Denver, and then for me to drive over there to pick her up. It’s very complicated.”
“Yes,” Judy says. And then she lightly presses down on the lozenge where the earpiece of the phone rests. Disconnecting. She hopes that Mrs. Draper will assume that they have been disconnected accidentally. She has rarely been so rude to another person in her life, but she is certain, at this moment, that she needs to call the police.
——
The dispatcher, Connie Cruz, answers on the first ring. “Communications,” she says, and Judy tells her that she would like to speak to someone about helping her find a little boy.
Connie Cruz takes down the vital statistics. She asks for Judy’s name and address, and leads her through a description of the child. “He’s got brownish hair and blue eyes,” Judy says. “He’s wearing a red shirt and blue jeans. About three-foot-five or six. Maybe forty-five pounds.”
“And he’s a white male?”
“Yes.”
“How old?”
“Six.”
“Oh,” says Connie, who has a six-year-old of her own. “A little guy.”
“Yes,” Judy says, recalling the repulsive nickname Loomis’s father had for him. Little Man. “Yes,” she says. “He is.”
——
Like the rest of the country, St. Bonaventure had gone through a brief period of “missing child” obsession in the mid-eighties. This was the time when pictures of missing children began appearing on the backs of milk cartons, green-and-white photos of children with their vital statistics printed underneath: name, age, date of birth, hometown, weight, height, hair and eye color, last seen at _____. The photos themselves had a grainy, tabloid quality, the dots that made up the images clearly visible. Judy remembered being unnerved once while shopping, passing the dairy aisle and coming upon rows and rows of these faces staring out at her. Around this time the police department instituted a fingerprinting program in the grade schools, and she recalls the day her second graders had been lined up in front of a table where a sullen, elderly policeman sat with inkpads and thick paper cards. The children were thrilled.
But she herself had thought it was ridiculous. A kind of hysteria. No one she had ever met had actually known of a child who had been abducted. The supposed missing children were always from distant places—California, mostly, Judy noticed—and it was generally assumed that this was a problem in cities. Judy remembered hearing somewhere that ninety-five percent of these children had been taken by one of their own parents, the children mere victims of custody disputes rather than evil-minded strangers. By the time Loomis was born, the urgency of the syndrome had died down. The milk companies no longer printed the photographs, which apparently gave kids nightmares and hurt sales, and the disturbance seemed to fade away. By the time she retired from the elementary school, they were no longer fingerprinting children. Loomis had never been fingerprinted, as far as she knew.
——
The police car arrives at Judy’s house a little more than five minutes after she calls 911. It has been a slow day, and Kevin Onken, the officer who answers the call, has had no reports to file since his shift began at nine A.M.
On a map, the town of St. Bonaventure vaguely resembles a pear or gourd. It is split down the middle by the railroad tracks and the main street that runs parallel. The police department has divided this pear-shaped collection of streets into fairly equal sixths, so that Onken’s beat that afternoon is the upper eastern portion. It is primarily a residential area, framed on the south by the main street and to the west by a fairly well-traveled avenue called Old Oak Boulevard. To the north and east, houses trickle like ellipses into the open prairie.
Police Officer Onken, aged twenty-six, listlessly drives in slow concentric circles through this territory. He pulls down his stretch of main street—two gas stations, a motel, Discount Mart. A bit farther down there is a photography studio, a bank, and an old man’s bar, The Green Lantern. If he waited outside the bar long enough, one of the patrons would stumble out, blinking in the summer daylight, and clamber unaware into his vehicle. Bam! An easy DUI. But Onken isn’t in the mood for waiting. It reminds him, for some r
eason, of the many unpleasant early-morning autumn weekends he was forced to spend with his father, crouched with their shotguns in chill muddy duck blinds that smelled of dead earthworms and leaf-sludge, his father silently drinking Miller Lite and staring at the sunrise. The men who come out of The Green Lantern—divorced, unemployed, rapidly decaying through their forties and fifties—remind him of his father, and catching them brings him no more pleasure than it did to shoot a duck out of the sky.
And so he merely eyes the bar as he drives past. At the traffic light on the corner of Euclid and Old Oak Boulevard, he turns left and drives past more storefronts, past turn-of-the-century houses that have been converted into insurance and real estate offices and funeral homes, headed west toward the edge of town. He is bored enough that he almost stops to buy lemonade from a pair of little girls who have a stand set up on the sidewalk. They are also selling iced tea and “pretty rocks,” which they’ve apparently picked up out of someone’s gravel driveway, and this makes Onken smile. Though he is not married, not even close, he still has hopes to have a lot of children. Five at least. He especially would like to be the father to twin girls, he doesn’t know why. He just likes kids, is all.
So when Connie calls in over the radio to report a missing child, the day suddenly seems more interesting. He responds in the affirmative and repeats the address. He imagines himself finding a frightened, weeping kid under a bush somewhere, picking him up, letting the kid wear his cap, letting him ride on his shoulders as he carries him back to his overwrought parents. The kid would hold tightly to him and give him a big hug. He’d be a hero for a moment or two. What other reason is there to be a cop?