Mary Neary had always helped. Now she realized that by giving her ten dollars to the Bishop's Relief Fund and Peter's Pence she had been comfortably placing herself outside the victims' pain. Looking at them—the bald man with the crooked glasses, the black woman's smiling welcome, the elaborately overdressed social mother—she realized that she bore a prejudice against life's casualties that until this moment had been entirely unconscious. She had been counting the victims as less—less lucky, less intelligent, less competent—than the golden many.
They took their seats and Mary thought, 'Now me.' Then they all pulled out pictures. Small snapshots, folded "Missing Child" posters. A ritual began, the silent passing of these pictures to the Nearys.
"Where's your picture?" a mother asked.
"I have my snapshot in my wallet," Mark said.
"Listen to me," the bald man said. "Here's what I say, 'My name is Harry Vreeland. I am the father of a missing child named Robbie Vreeland. This is his picture. Have you seen this child?' " He held out a poster of a smiling little boy of about seven. "You got to not only have your pictures with you at all times, you got to have them ready."
The overdressed woman regarded Mary with her coal-black eyes. She was smoking, and her fingers and teeth were yellow from the stains. "Our boy ran away." She raised her hands, a gesture of defense. "I admit it. There were problems." She looked straight into Mary's eyes. "He decided he wanted to make his own way." Her voice cracked. "He tried, but he was just too young This country has a dark side, don't ever think it doesn't. On the dark side of America, children get eaten."
The black mother spoke up. "I'm Jennine Gordon," she said in a soft, precise tone of voice. "We all want to tell our stories, but first we want to hear yours."
Mary heard Mark exhale. How exhausted he sounded.
"We'd like to hear a few other stories first," Mary said. "We need perspective." She wanted Jennine to help her, it was like drowning.
"I know," Jennine said. Mary thought, 'She could become my friend for life.' Jennine continued, "First, we have children here that are classed as runaways, but they are really abductions. They run away and then get abducted off the street. Or the perpetrator is clever and makes it look like a runner."
"Ours tried to do that," Sally said.
People nodded.
"I just want to say that the parental abduction is just as painful as the stranger abduction. Maybe it's more painful, because you know how bad it is for your baby." Her voice grew heavy and low and Mary thought, 'There is a terrible mystery here.' But she could not even put a word to it. "My Amelia is fourteen. Her daddy died in 1986 and I married again. My new husband loved my daughter." She stopped, jutted out her jaw. "Oh, how he loved her! I was too stupid and too in love to see!" She shook her head, anguished. Mark's hand found Mary's and she was glad to feel his shuddering touch. Now Jennine's voice went very small and high. "I let him adopt her. The very day we signed the papers, my life became hell. He hit my baby! He beat me up when I told him no. Within two months he was spanking her every day. She was walking humped over. At school she would throw up when it was time to come home." Now, a whisper: "He locked them up together in the garage at night."
Her voice became loud. "I didn't stand for it. No way, baby! I divorced the bastard! Damn right, and got custody with no visiting rights and saw the backside of that man! Then, a month later all of a sudden, Amelia is gone. And I feel—I feel—"
Father Turpin said, "We have an excellent recovery rate in the group. In the ten years we've been going, about thirty percent of our kids have been located."
"What do kids do?" Sally asked.
"Get into it with your friends," said a boy a little older than she. "You never know. Kids hear stuff, especially when school starts up. There might even be somebody who knows."
Mark was looking down at his feet. Mary imagined sand in motion, hopes drowning. Maybe, though, she was projecting her own feeling of helplessness onto her husband. Mark spoke. "What is the single most important thing we can do?"
Vreeland spoke. "Publicity, pure and simple."
"You can hunt for your child. The odds are long, but most of us do it," the overdressed woman added.
It seemed so pitifully little!
The group in its pool of dim light now appeared to Mary like survivors in the tireless ocean. Their raft was hope, but the sea is forever.
Father Turpin handed around a booklet of pictures from the Vanished Children's Alliance. Some of them might like to try to get their kids in this publication, he said.
When Mary glanced at it a sentence stopped her. It was like hearing Dr. Kingsley say of her mother, "We're talking about dying." It read, "Stranger abductions as well as nonrelative abductions are proportionately the greatest risk of life-loss of any missing group."
Her mouth went dry, the voices in the room faded. "No!" Mary was astonished at herself. All eyes were on her. She realized that she'd spoken aloud. She smiled, tried to cover. Nobody smiled back. Maybe the Nearys were the worst off. Maybe they had no chance. Maybe Billy had already died a horrible death. The thought made her very soul ache. She threw back an errant curl. "Our boy will come home."
Jennine Gordon nodded. "When I think of what he's doing to my baby, I'd like to put lead between his eyes. Lord Jesus forgive me! When I'm really goin' nuts—when I can hear my baby screamin' for Momma—oh, God—you want just somebody to hold you. But you are alone. And you think, I did this. I married this fool!"
The mystery was there again, a silent force binding them by their torments.
One by one Mary caught their eyes, and one by one they looked away. She respected this because she understood it. They could not meet her eyes because of what they shared— not the hope, but the tragedy.
These people with their nervous smoking, their clenching hands, their tattered pictures and little sheafs of records—they were really not here at all. That was the essence of the mystery that had enveloped them.
When a child was stolen, a part of each parent was also stolen. Without that essential part they would never again be whole; no matter the beauty of the day, they could not see it, nor could they enjoy the touch of love, for it might corrupt their vigil with an instant's transport. They do not hope and they do not laugh. Night and imagination are their curses. Mary saw it all.
"We will get him back," she said. How thin was her voice, how weak! She felt Mark's hand come into hers, and Sally beside her shook like the leaf of the aspen. "You'll see. We will."
Soon thereafter the meeting ended in a flurry of information passing: how to find social workers who care or a psychologist who was good but not too costly; where to get a new device that told you the number from which you were receiving a call.
At the side of the cafetorium a spectacularly aged parish volunteer offered coffee, and there was a box of Hostess doughnuts opened on the table beside her. She smiled when Father Turpin took one.
Mark insisted that Mary drink some coffee. "You'll want it," he said. "It's a long trip home, and we both need your strength. This time you do the driving."
14.
They were sailing across the desert on a clear blue afternoon. In a massive feat of endurance driving Barton had gotten them past Las Vegas before he had finally left the interstate in order to sleep. His only stop had been to ditch the bicycle.
Afterward he had at last been able to stretch out on the cot beside Billy's and close his eyes. The air had been fresh and desert-cool. The sun was just rising. As its light slowly filled the van, Barton had taken Billy's hand in his own.
The warmth that filled his heart reassured him that he had not sinned in taking the child. "Every act on behalf of love is heroic." Who had said that? Some poet, Barton thought, the name forgotten since high school and Gen. Lit.
Then he had slept. He had dreamed of a little man following him in a comical midget car. The dream had awakened him to high sun and left him with an urge to get rolling again. Now it was nearly noon and the next thing
on the agenda was a drive-through restaurant and some much needed sustenance. Too bad you couldn't get decent food from chain outlets, especially as celebration was presently suggested.
"Good old Route 15," he sang out. "You know what I see?" He was about to point out the Devil's Playground, but thought better of it. Once they were home in L.A. he might be able to prevent Billy from finding out where he was, maybe for a long time. That was always best.
"Where are we?" asked a breathy voice. It made Barton sit right up; this didn't sound like Billy. Rather, it recalled Dad on his deathbed, his lungs full of cancer and emphysema. Why would Billy sound like that? Then he remembered: he'd punished him by tightening the chest strap. That was a long time ago. Hours and hours—at least twelve hours, probably more.
He pulled the van over. Throwing back the quilt, he saw that the boy's gut was sucked in, his chest distended. There were ridges of paper-white skin pushing up around the thick strap, purple welts bulging through the buckles. A froth of mucus made Billy look like he was exhaling bubble bath. His face was gray. "Oh, son!"
When Barton touched the buckles Billy shook his head from side to side and shrieked. Instinctively Barton glanced out the windows, but they were alone on an empty desert road.
"OK," Barton said. Again he touched the buckles. When Billy started shaking his head again and pulling against his wrist straps, Barton felt something else inside himself. This something made him slow and careful.
He laid his hand on the row of three buckles, pressed. Billy grew frantic. He looked down at Billy's naked body and he found that he could not stop pressing on the buckles. His legs were weak with the pleasure of the moment. "I love him," he told himself, "that's why I can't stop touching him even though it hurts him." Billy's eyes searched his face, pleading. "We'll have to do this for some little time," Barton heard himself say.
No, this was vicious! He had to release the child at once. But his hands were heavy. He imagined the struggle to breathe across hours and hours. A hideous struggle. He had experimented with suffocation, and he knew how awful it was. Next to burning, slow suffocation was the worst death.
Billy's screaming stopped. His twisting and turning stopped. His body seemed to sink into itself. He made a fragile, discontented gabbling sound. It was like a baby.
This unexpected surrender shattered the moment. Barton saw himself, saw what he was doing. 'Disgusting creature, you're the one who ought to be suffering. Imagine, forgetting for twelve long hours what was supposed to be a fifteen-minute punishment! You fat pig! Fat Royal!'
He remembered the little dove he had found under the honeysuckle hedge, the poor thing scuttling along with its wing broken. He had caught it in his hands and taken it to his room and splinted the wing with drafting tape and a Popsicle stick.
He'd fed that dove with his own hands and nursed it and kept its box warm with a light. In the end the splinting had worked and his mother had put her arm around his shoulder and said, "You have such fine hands, maybe you'll be a surgeon."
He could nurse a dove back to health, but he could not remember to alleviate a magnificent child's suffering. His fingers fumbled with the buckles while Billy shrieked.
"My dove flew away," he shouted over Billy's noise. "I healed it and it flew away."
He had to push the swollen skin through the buckles. It was rubbery and hot and when he finally lifted the strap Billy started taking deep breaths and coughing up great gobs of mucus.
Quickly he unstrapped his ankles, then his hands. "No more," he said. "No more, Billy."
Billy sat up. Barton grabbed the sheet from his own cot and tried to clean Billy's chest. But the boy coughed again, the sound rattling the whole van, and more came up. Then he vomited froth, which Barton swept away in the sheet.
Through even this loathsome ordeal a part of Barton remained calmly objective. It told him he had really done what he had done because it was necessary to break the boy's will.
There was no use pretending that Billy loved or even liked him. It was much too soon. What he had to do was get Billy to quit fighting and accept his new situation. That required strong medicine, yes, but it had to be tempered with gentleness or it would lead to nothing but fear.
"My chest—" Billy put his hands on the marks. They were deep and now the line where the strap had cut into him was turning purple like the skin that had been compressed under the buckles.
Barton pulled his first-aid kit out from under the bed and produced a tube of antiseptic cream. "Lie back," he said. "I'll tend to it."
Billy turned his head. Barton remembered the time Duke had trapped that kitten in the tree. Its face was full of fear and it was so helpless. Barton had climbed the tree with Duke clawing the trunk and moaning. He had gotten the kitten, but then he'd slipped, and Duke—
No. He hadn't slipped. He'd held the kitten squirming in his hand, held it over Duke's head while Duke went mad, leaping and snarling, and the kitten had hissed and writhed and bitten at the hand, until his fingers loosened their grip . . .
Barton shook his head. Those memories, they would come and take him over, he was back there again and he had to be here. What if Billy just walked right out of the van right now? Began running like in the mountains?
Oh, that had been horrible! His heart had practically burst, exerting himself like that. The damned kid—but Barton had turned it into an effective display of dominance and power. On the way back to the van Billy had lain in his arms, surrendered to the greater power of the adult.
He'd read a lot about brainwashing. One of the techniques the Chinese used in Korea was to allow men to escape, only to bring them back with an overwhelming show of power. They would put the men in coffins and pretend to bury them alive, all the while feeding them just enough oxygen to prevent them from losing consciousness. They would go mad in the coffins, dying and yet unable to die. When they were released they would be so surprised and grateful that fine young men from Cincinnati and Bakersfield would crouch like coolies and place their lips against the scuffed boots of sneering Chinese teenagers.
The key thing was the element of surprise. Barton thought he probably needed some of that now. He could not provide the overwhelming sense of deliverance that was the genius of the coffin torture. But wasn't there something he could do, some little softening that might make Billy revise his opinion of his captor?
He brushed Billy's cheek with a kiss. The boy's eyes flashed, and Barton was disappointed to see that his expression was one of disgust. "I know you hate me," Barton said. "But I love you. I love you more than you have ever been loved before."
"You're a dirty queer."
"The word is 'homosexual,' son. Think of their feelings. Anyway, I am not a homosexual."
"You're not?"
"I want to see you grow into the best of the best. I'm rich. I can give you everything you want. I want to be more a father to you than anybody else could ever be."
"My chest hurts."
He gave Billy a double dose of the children's aspirin he had packed in the first-aid kit.
"My feet hurt too," Billy said. He coughed, long and hard. "They sting."
Barton looked at them. "They seem better than they were," he said hopefully.
"The circulation was cut off. I'm likely to get an infection."
"I used lots of Mycitracin."
"I was in my pajamas. Where are they now?"
"They were a mess. From what you did."
Billy gave him a long, appraising look. "I'd like to have some clothes on."
Barton got the duffel he'd packed in Billy's bedroom. It seemed an alien object, beautiful and enigmatic. Boys' things always appeared that way to Barton, as if they were charged with potent and heartbreaking magic. When he unzipped the bag the clothes he'd pushed in came fluffing out. "That's my stuff," Billy said, his voice cracking. He grabbed the clothes, held them to his face, inhaled their smell as if seeking to recapture whatever element of home he could. He moaned with pleasure. "My Kafka T-Shirt. You got m
y Kafka T-shirt!"
Barton laughed, delighted that his random choices were such a success.
Billy put down the clothes. His eyes were full of anguish. "Didn't my Garfie get to come?"
"The stuffed toy?"
"Garfield is hardly a stuffed toy." His hand fluttered across his chest. "You really hurt me," he muttered.
Barton wished he'd thought to bring some Benadryl cream to mix into the antibiotic, but he hadn't considered injuries this serious. He'd gotten his other boys much closer to home, and it had been a simple matter to take them to the house.
He hadn't thought ahead about this journey, at least not well enough. Somehow he'd visualized Billy sleeping the whole way. But they'd started out on Sunday night and it was now Wednesday. If he'd drugged the boy heavily enough to keep him out all this time there might have been brain damage or even death.
As Barton thought, he selected clothes for Billy. Shorts, a T-shirt. No shoes, though—that was one of Barton's smartest rules. Bare feet were no big deal in his time, but they slowed these modern kids down considerably. "We're going to go to some fabulous stores," he said. "You'll be able to dress in absolute fashion."
"My mother buys my clothes."
"But you like style, you like to look your best."
Billy pushed aside the blue T-shirt Barton had given him. "I want to wear my Kafka shirt." Wincing, he raised his arms to drag it over his head.
"Let me help you."
"I can do it!" Then he grabbed the briefs that were in Barton's hand and drew them up his smooth legs. He put on the shorts.
The T-shirt was odd. If Barton had realized what was on it, he wouldn't have brought it. The shirt was light gray, and on the front there was a photograph of a hollow-eyed young man in what appeared to be a cheap suit and striped club tie. Under it was the caption KAFKA LIVES.
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