Between Here and the Yellow Sea

by Nic Pizzolatto

  It was September now, and she’d begun carrying the stencil in her purse. She was walking more, foregoing the bus in the mornings, taking odd routes into the city, searching alley walls and the sides of Dumpsters for the orange silhouette of a tank. Her legs began acting up, and her back ached. When she got to school in the mornings she was often hunched, too tired to properly control the children before noon. She taught fourth grade at a public school largely composed of low-income kids, most black, some Hispanic. What the state referred to as “at-risk” children. Lately she’d let them do whatever they wanted until lunch.

  It was the stencil’s fault. Among the trappings of adolescence her son had left behind, the stencil was the only one that possessed this hypnotic gloom. The other objects in his room had their place; though abandoned, sad, they were understandable, they belonged. The mystery of the stencil became the mystery of her son himself, his incomprehensible desertion, his anger. She never understood his anger.

  “Why you gone paint stuff?”

  Sharon looked down. Eaton Slavin was beside her desk, staring into her purse where the cardboard stencil stood out among the tissue, prayer books, cosmetics, and wallet. The rest of the kids were at their desks, trying to complete a coloring project.

  “Excuse me?”

  His shirt, crusted with stains, rose up over a small brown belly. He lifted the cardboard sheet with a tiny hand. “You paint the telephone pole?”

  “That? That’s not mine. What are you doing out of your desk, Eaton?”

  He held the stencil and looked at its picture. “I seen you paintings on the phone poles.”

  She snatched the stencil from his hand.

  He jumped at her gesture, but his surprise immediately vanished, his face returning to its placid, slack-jawed expression of inquiry. “Can I go th’bathroom?”

  “Yes, go.” Sharon felt bad at the hardness with which she’d grabbed the stencil, felt that she’d frightened the boy. But she recalled his reaction—shock, followed by instant reconciliation. She’d seen that before, and many times, the bovine acceptance these children had for sudden, violent gestures.

  She’d never hit Adam, not once. Even when his ranting took the Blessed Mother and the Holy Church as its targets, Sharon had never struck him, only listened quietly, her mind reciting prayers that his anger might be relieved. Adam would talk about the church or the government as if some ravenous creature were standing right out in the street, waiting for them to leave the house so it could chew their bodies with razor-toothed jaws. He was six feet by age fifteen, with thick blond hair and an improbably attractive face, gaunt, projecting. This compounded her bafflement. Adam could have been the type of effortless youth that devastates the people around him. He’d let his hair grow long and stayed skinny as he grew, but she encouraged him to lift weights to correct that. The sounds of his harangues had become the jumbled noise of the children in her classroom.

  Mo’Nique and Yolanda were struggling over some scissors. Looking out at the classroom, Sharon marked two of the three—Lester Tuttle, DeRay Fauk, Eaton Slavin—almost surely headed for jail in a few short years. Sometimes they all stood on the front steps when school let out, watching their classmates depart and eyeing each backpack, trying to determine who had money on them, no doubt. She’d seen the boys chase a limping dog with rocks. Locked in her bottom drawer, she kept the stack of comic books she’d taken from the three boys a couple weeks ago. Behind her desk, she discretely slid off her shoes, her feet swollen from walking.

  She’d been teaching here for six years, after a professional absence of fifteen. Sharon had given up teaching once David’s dental practice was established, but she had to start again after the divorce. Coleman PHS was the only school that notified her of an opening, and it had had three. She was forty-six. In early October, Adam would be seventeen, if he were still alive. But of course he was, she knew, because someone would find his body, and because she did not feel he was dead, not at all. She felt him living so strongly that she’d wondered whether she could simply set out, with her heart’s thumping as a kind of homing device, and eventually locate him.

  When Adam had first disappeared, Sharon called David to see if the boy had run to him, but David said he hadn’t. He reminded her that she was to contact him through his lawyer. She remembered when she’d learned about his assistant. How unmoved David’s face had been when he packed the suitcase. That had been hard to endure, his face. It had shown no anger or regret, just a stoic determination to get away from her. Now he had another son.

  The stencil sat flat on her desk, the wood surface filling its inscription. She read it again. A tank. Police State.

  She did not like puzzles, never had. The door opened and Eaton strolled back in, picking at his nose on the way to his desk.

  “Eaton?” Sharon said, leaving the stencil on her desk.

  He paused, looked up with dull, bored eyes. The other children stopped what they were doing to watch. Mo’Nique had won the scissors. “Huh?”

  “Don’t ‘huh’ me. Come up here, please.”

  The children were quiet. They observed Eaton walk languidly to the front of the class, running his fingertips over the edges of desks.

  He stood before her twisting on his heel. She tapped the sheet of cardboard.

  “Eaton, did you say you’ve seen this painted somewhere?”

  He nodded his head, pulled his arm behind his back. His navel protruded like the tip of a brown thumb.

  “Where?”

  “I seen that on the poles at my house. An on the walls.” His eyes were wet, deep black, like the onyx in the class’s rock collection.

  “Where do you live?”

  He pointed behind himself. “Timpan’ca.”

  “All right. Thank you. You may sit down, now. Finish coloring your picture.”

  He almost sashayed back to his desk, giving one little foot a limp. His sneakers were too big for his feet. Timpanica Gardens was a housing project near the school, about eight blocks east. Many of the children lived there, and Sharon knew it from the day she had bus duty. The building itself was a large cube of apartments with a hollow center. Gray brick, paint stains on the plaque at the end of the sidewalk, a tall wall around it, she remembered. It had been raining that day. The neighborhood had looked broken. Everything from the walls of buildings to people’s legs seemed in the process of buckling, slowly, toward the ground. Her own street, Aster, had seen its better days. And the house was now coming into question.

  She hadn’t known about David’s loans until the actual divorce. Rather than the house being hers, it had liens against several outstanding loans, half of which were now hers to pay. She’d worked it so they took something out of her paycheck every month. Her fingernails slowly moved around the sides of the stencil.

  The stencil had creases down its middle, as though it had been folded around something. The children were all talking, a rumble of noise and movement in front her desk. They were laughing and arguing, making a racket.

  Without considering her own intentions, Sharon reached into her desk and produced a sheet of white typing paper. She slid it beneath the stencil, took a Sharpie pen and began shading in the picture. She didn’t notice that the children all stopped, briefly and as one, to watch her. Then they were making noise again.

  When she’d finished, she stared at the black sketch and the two words below it, and her eyes seemed to fall into those spaces, to descend into the ink, the bottomless shapes of letters. A few of the children were running in circles now. Someone pulled a reading poster off the wall.

  Gray buildings fenced her. This area of the city did not feel safe, though she saw several other, older women hobbling about on the streets. There was a block-long line of Arab vendors, and a few black men stood in front of a corner store and didn’t acknowledge her. Children, home from school, were tumbling into the streets shouting. To maintain her calm, she prayed a rosary silently, extending her prayers to the denizens of the chipped and patched bui
ldings around her. Boards over those windows. Big slabs of metal warehouses in line toward the river. She saw the walls of Timpanica ahead, and had to rest at a crosswalk before going the rest of the way. The air was warm and damp, heavy in her lungs.

  She saw one almost immediately, a blur of orange on a telephone pole that also had dozens of tattered flyers stapled to it. She peeled off some of the papers until the mark of the tank and the words were clear.

  She spread her hand over the graffiti, pressing into the splintery wood. There was such a pitiful homecoming in this gesture, she wanted to weep at her own stupidity. But she never cried anymore. All her life, she had been easily moved to tears, but for many months she’d been unable to cry, even when she was most willing, even when Adam left.

  She moved to the next pole and saw another tank. They were both at about the same height, a couple inches above her head. She took a deep breath and began walking around the wall that surrounded Timpanica.

  Another tank, this one in green, had five copies painted side by side along the gray brick wall. The stencil she’d found showed the residue of no colors but orange. Maybe that was only the most recent color he’d used. Maybe somebody else painted these things. If that were true, someone might know where he’d gone. She wanted to move outward, to search the sides of alleys and the overpasses, but the sun was setting, new life rising into the dimming light. She waited for the next bus and noticed that across the street, about thirty yards away, three figures were sitting on the outer wall of the housing project.

  They were her students, Eaton, DeRay and Lester. Their feet dangled down the side of the wall. She couldn’t be sure that they recognized her, but they all sat, unmoving, staring in her direction.

  When the bus came she hurried on, feeling gratitude she couldn’t account for. Body odor filled the bus, passengers close together. She stood holding one of the handles to her right. This caused her to stretch over a young man who was sitting, and he gave her a look of disdain as her arm reached above his head.

  Those children that spray-painted things almost surely did so at night, and she would be unable to walk these streets at such times, so Sharon realized there was little chance of ever catching someone else using the stencil. But that feeling of recognition was still with her, and when she got home she looked in on Adam’s room, studying the empty bed, the inert computer, dusty desk. For the first time in years she felt an authority over the room.

  The following day at school she again showed Eaton the stencil and asked if he’d ever seen anyone spraying it. He told her no, but she knew that he might be lying. She asked him if he’d seen her yesterday. He shook his head “no,” very slowly, the moist black of his eyes unblinking.

  Today she’d tried to instigate a reading lesson, but too many of the children had become restless, refusing to follow along, and now she had them assembling animals out of construction paper and glue. It was nearly time for lunch, anyway.

  When the children had gone to recess, she found herself thinking about the graffiti she’d seen the day before, wanting to revisit the picture as though in its markings she saw Adam. He was nine when David left her. She’d worried that David would fight for custody, but he didn’t have any such wishes. Adam became quiet. He had grown into a sullen reader.

  She’d look up and he’d be on the couch, then across the room, then gone.

  As the children ran across the grass, leapt on the climbing equipment, she remembered Adam’s athleticism as a child, his speed and grace when running. It was already an old trick that she did not think of him in the present tense. She did not think of where he might be at that moment, or what he might be doing, but kept her emotions firmly tied to their past life, and she would cast those emotions as far back as she needed in order to remember a boy who was not angry, who did not see injustice in every human endeavor.

  That was his most aggressive quality, his sense of justice, and it permitted no shades of gray. In his early teens, he’d begun asking questions when they went to breakfast after mass. Soon she saw him reading histories of Catholicism, then Christianity in general. She became afraid to sit down with him at dinner, stressed at the thought of what he might want to tell her.

  Once, he’d insisted on her staying put while he recited the history of the Crusades. He hadn’t stopped until she wept, and then he scolded her for that. He asked if she knew her church’s position during World War II. By the time the new war started, he was inconsolable on matters of church or state.

  The last night, he’d been dusting his roast with red pepper. “But you can’t be telling me, honestly Mom, that you actually believe that, like, hell is a place, or even heaven. Like these are real places where people live and it’s good or bad depending on how well you followed one interpretation of the Bible.” He was cutting his food with hard, brief strokes.

  “Well, I do,” she said. “Of course I do.”

  Chewing, his mouth full, he said “Look around, would you? Think about reality for a second, the expanse of matter, the shape of the universe, and you really think that folklore developed by a completely savage, uneducated people somehow explains all that?” He bit off his words, and the scowl he summoned indicated an alarming disgust. “And you’re going to vote with this as your criteria?”

  She’d kept her head to the roast. Why wouldn’t he talk about things like other teenagers did? Why? Couldn’t he look at the roof over their heads, the food on their table, and admit the essential goodness of life? Lord knew she had enough reasons to be soured, but she persisted. She persisted out of faith—nothing more.

  “So how do you justify voting for an idiot, spendthrift warmonger in the name of your pacifist, nonmaterialist God?”

  She placed her fork down calmly. “You know, you have made it very clear that you do not share my beliefs. I believe we should support our leaders and their decisions. You do not. But since I am the one providing us with food and shelter, I’d think that you might have the grace not to attack me because we disagree about politics.”

  He leapt upon her participation the way a cat would a mouse. “And that’s it! It’s not just a difference in opinion!” He leaned over his plate, blond hair falling in front his face a little. “It’s not just a disagreement. I’m talking about fundamental issues of good and evil.”

  “Ah!” she said. “But you said heaven and hell don’t exist. So how’s there good and evil?”

  He paused. She thought that was because she had him. “I’m sorry, what’s that mean?”

  “If you say there’s no heaven and hell, then what’s good and evil? Why be good at all?”

  He seemed genuinely aghast. “Are you saying, Mom, that if there’s no heaven, there’s no reason to be good?”

  She shrugged. She hadn’t thought that was what she said, but maybe she had. It sounded dumber when he said it.

  “Being good means doing so without thought of reward, Mom. You’re the one who’s supposed to teach me that.”

  He was silent then, appeared satisfied. He ate the food she’d prepared, silverware clinking against the plate. The dark house settled around them once again. But she, for once, nursed a silent fury. As if he’d smashed something dear to her for no other reason than to see it break. It was the smugness she couldn’t stand, his amusement with her as he chewed the roast she’d cooked. Why should she tolerate this disregard?

  “If you’re so smart, I wonder why you don’t have any friends? Hm?”

  He put his knife down and looked at her.

  “You know everything, Mister Informed, so can you tell me why you never go to any dances? Tell me why you don’t have a girlfriend? Because you’re so much smarter than everybody else, you must know.”

  He stood from the table. She saw the shadow fall around her plate, but wouldn’t look up. Sharon was nearly trembling from what he might say.

  His voice shivered with disgust. “You can’t even see how diseased you are.” He walked away.

  How could someone say that to their mother
? What cure was there for a boy given every blessing, except perhaps a good father, who still insisted on seeing darkness in everything? She thought he was actually begging for Christ’s light, and part of what upset him was his inability to see it. So she prayed that night that Christ’s light would find him.

  Two days later he was gone, a brief note explaining that he would not be coming back.

  Over the playground, a thundercloud broke, and the children screamed and ran to the pavilion’s cover. The rain grew heavy quickly, and she saw the three boys, Eaton, Lester and DeRay, standing out in it. They were watching her.

  Coach Phelps began yelling at the boys, and he scattered them under the awning.

  Sharon would not go searching the avenues for graffiti today.

  That night she ate some leftovers and went to bed early. As she was drifting to sleep, the words of the Our Father in her head, she kept seeing the three boys as she’d seen them the afternoon they’d been chasing the small dog.

  The dog was thin, with clumpy fur, and its right front leg was held just above the ground, unable to bear any weight. They were chasing the creature down the empty lot across from the school, around old chairs and a refrigerator left in the grass. The dog swerved like a rabbit trying to lose them. White teeth spread out on the boys’ dark faces, and they broke stride only to hurl a stone at the fleeing animal.

  She’d screamed at them. Told them to stop immediately.

  From across the street they’d looked at her, not talking, not moving. They’d seemed to be judging their own distance from the schoolhouse, gauging the weight of her power. Almost as one, they turned around and continued after the dog, who’d slowed a little, stunned by a rock Lester had thrown. She’d watched the dog and the boys disappear into a web of buildings. The next day she’d taken a stack of comic books from them.