Reunion at Red Paint Bay

by George Harrar

  “The River View, in Bath,” Simon repeated, resisting the urge to suggest that Officer Reade write the name down this time.

  “Is your boy used to you leaving him alone?”

  “He’s eleven,” Simon said, “and this is his second time home alone at night.”

  “If he knew you were going all the way to Bath, he might have went downtown to hang out for a while. A lot of kids skateboard in the Common in the summer.”

  “Our son wouldn’t do that.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “Because he was grounded.”

  “I see,” the young policeman said, and Simon wondered what exactly he saw. “Bath’s pretty far away. Do you go to the River View regularly?”

  “No, the food’s lousy.”

  “Think so? I used to live up that way. Went there all the time.”

  “I guess it appeals to different tastes.”

  Amy jumped up from her chair between them. “Would you two stop debating the stupid food? Davey’s missing.”

  Reade rolled his eyes at Simon as if Can’t you control your wife? The truth was, no, he couldn’t. He said, “I know you’re upset, Amy, but—”

  “Don’t be condescending.”

  “I’m sure Officer Reade is just following the protocol for getting the information he needs.”

  “Then speed up the damn protocol.”

  “How did you come to go to the River View,” Reade said with what seemed to Simon like intentional slowness, “if you think the food’s so bad?”

  “I suppose you could say we were invited.”

  “Invited by who?”

  “We don’t know by whom. I received a postcard last week from someone saying he wanted to repay me for something I did.”

  “Can I see this postcard?”

  Simon gestured to Amy. She rooted through her pocketbook, her hand plunging in and out of the various pockets. “Just dump everything out,” he said.

  “It’s not here. We must have left it on the table at the restaurant.”

  “You left it at the restaurant?”

  “We left it.”

  “But that’s our only connection to—wait a minute, I kept the other ones.”

  Simon hurried to the kitchen. The yellow fish magnet was gone from the side of the refrigerator. So were the postcards. He came back to the living room empty-handed. “They aren’t there.”

  Reade nodded as if that confirmed some theory of his. “How were you and your son getting along, Mr. Howe?”

  “Why are you asking that?”

  The policeman shrugged as if the reason was obvious. “You said he was grounded. Did he get into trouble recently?”

  “Is that important?”

  “It might figure into where he is, if we knew what was bothering him.”

  “Okay, what he did was swing his fist at a classmate.”

  “Your son hit him?”

  “It was more of a shove,” Simon said, “but he shouldn’t be touching anybody like that. That’s why we grounded him for a week.”

  “Did you do anything else—corporal punishment of any sort?”

  “I don’t think the best way to teach our son that hitting someone’s bad is by hitting him ourselves.”

  Reade shrugged. “There’s a lot of that happening these days, more than you’d think. My parents hit us big time.”

  Simon imagined the page-one story—Spanking Makes a Comeback in Red Paint. Another scarier headline popped into his mind—Search on for Editor’s Son.

  “I’m a therapist,” Amy said with her fingers touching at the tips, her way of keeping composed, “and I would never spank a child. So before I explode would you get on your radio and broadcast that our son is missing?”

  Reade nodded amiably, as if he was agreeing with her. But then, “The thing is, we don’t really know he’s missing, Mrs. Howe. All we know is that he isn’t where you expected him to be. Happens all the time with kids.” The officer walked to the front door and crouched down to inspect the knob. “No sign of forced entry here or at any of the windows. It appears your son let himself out. Maybe a friend rang the bell and he answered it.”

  “He knows not to open the door when we’re not here,” Simon said.

  “Your boy always do what you tell him?”

  “No, but—”

  “I’ll alert night patrol to check around town, the usual places kids hang out. You have a recent picture of …”

  “Davey,” Amy said, “our son’s name is Davey.” She pointed to the mantel, and Simon understood that he was to retrieve the photo of their son in his baseball uniform.

  “Cute kid,” the policeman said as he tucked the picture inside his jacket.

  Simon nodded. Davey was a very cute kid.

  Amy slammed the door shut behind the officer. “We wasted an hour with that idiot,” she said. “You know how far someone can drive in an hour?”

  “Drive?”

  “Yes, drive. If that lunatic of yours knocked on the door and Davey answered …”

  Simon took her hands. “I’m sure that didn’t happen, Amy.”

  She broke away from him. “How can you say that? You don’t know.”

  “I just think we should stay positive. We don’t need both of us going to pieces.”

  She whirled around, her hand swiping over the hall table, sending a pile of envelopes to the floor. “Maybe that’s exactly what we need, both of us feeling the same thing. Because right now I have no idea what you’re feeling. It’s like you know something about this.”

  Simon bent down to pick up the mail and set it back on the table. It took him a moment to realize what she was suggesting. “You think I’d hide information when Davey’s missing?”

  “I’m checking his room again,” she said and then swept up the stairs faster than he had ever seen. He had to take the steps by two to keep up. She stopped just outside the doorway to Davey’s room, as if not to disturb a crime scene. “Nothing’s out of place,” she said, which was easy to tell. Davey kept an unusually tidy room. Casper raised her head, stretched, then jumped off the bed and trotted to them. Amy picked her up and sniffed, as if there might be some clue.

  Simon looked around the room for clues, anything not right, and spotted Davey’s blue bandanna hanging over the bureau mirror. “This better not be one of his magic tricks or I’m going to—”

  There was a sound downstairs, a door opening. The cellar door? Casper kicked out of Amy’s hands, claws bared, and darted under the bed, a blur of white. She wasn’t often spooked like this.

  “Davey?” Amy called. There was no answer. Simon took a step, and Amy grabbed his arm. “Take his bat.”

  He reached around the doorway into the bedroom and pulled out the Louisville Slugger. He moved quietly down the stairs, with Amy just behind him. At the bottom he turned and looked toward the kitchen. There was their son, earphones in, pulling apart an Oreo.

  “Davey!” Simon yelled and ran into the kitchen. He took the boy by the shoulders. “Are you okay?” The cookie fell to the floor.

  “God, Dad, what are you doing?” Davey bent down to retrieve the Oreo.

  “Where were you? We told you you were grounded.”

  The boy pulled out his earphones. “What?”

  Amy turned her son around, her hands on his shoulders, her face level to his. “Where were you?”

  “Up in the tree house. You didn’t say I had to stay in the house. Grounded means staying in your house or yard.”

  “I’m not interested in technicalities,” Simon said, turning the boy back to him. “When we leave you in the house we expect to find you in the house.”

  Davey started to lick the icing off the Oreo, but Amy took it from him and tossed it in the sink. “Listen to us,” she said. “We’ve been home an hour worried sick about where you were.”

  “Wow,” the boy said, “and you called the police?”

  “You mean you saw the police car and still didn’t come in?”

 
“I just saw it leaving like a minute ago, Mom. I didn’t know it was about me.” Davey reached into the cookie jar and brought out another Oreo. “Can I have this one?” Amy nodded. He twisted apart the cookie and handed the icingless side to her. “Did they catch him?”

  “Catch who?” Simon asked.

  “The man out front. That’s why I went up the tree house. You told me not to answer the door.”

  “Somebody rang the doorbell?”

  “He didn’t ring it, but he was standing there for like a long time.” Davey pointed down the hallway to the panel of fluted glass next to the front door. “So I sneaked out the back and climbed the tree and pulled up the ladder and listened to some tunes. That was the right thing to do, wasn’t it?”

  It was horrible to imagine, a man at the front door, not ringing the bell, just waiting, with their son inside alone. “Yes,” Simon said, “that was the right thing to do.”

  The streets of Red Paint feel familiar to him, a pattern indelibly implanted on his brain when it was a younger age. He remembers the shortcut from the inn to the Common, parks on the darker river side, then walks the winding bike path to the bandstand. He goes up the broad steps and stops for a moment, looking out on the green as if there is a crowd come just to hear him. What would he speak of, something topical, like divine intervention in the modern world? Miracles would surely be the talk of the town after the page-one headline in the Register—Virgin Appears in Red Paint Backyard? The question mark was necessary, of course, the proper journalistic skepticism. But if you believe in God, how could you not believe in miracles? An all-powerful God could clearly do what would seem improbable or impossible, the definition of a miracle. He could even defy the logic that He Himself created—go up and down at the same time. Appear and disappear. Kill and let live. Punish and forgive. Be God and not be God. And He could be everywhere at once, no need to send the Virgin or anyone else as an emissary. He might even descend to a bandstand like this, in a small town like this, to deliver His message, perhaps ten new commandments for the new millennium. He would require a proper introduction, of course, and who would get the honor? Ladies and gentleman, boys and girls, put your hands together for the Creator of …

  He sees something in the shadows of the bandstand floor, reaches out his foot to turn it over. A small face stares up at him, a brown teddy bear with a red strip sewn on as a smile. He picks up the spindly little stuffed animal, apparently lost or thrown away. Either way, gone from whoever once loved it. He shakes the bear of dirt and its head bounces up and back, an involuntary yes. There’s no one nearby to ask about it, just youngsters kicking a soccer ball under the lamplight in the grass below. How many of these boys secretly clutch a stuffed animal to their chests at night?

  He takes the teddy bear with him down the other side of the bandstand, holding the railing as he goes. He used to tear across here and leap the half-dozen steps—the single daring act of his boyhood. He remembers the terror of it, closing his eyes at takeoff, eternity in the air, his arms windmilling to keep himself aloft, then the wonderful solidness landing on earth.

  The boys on the Common scramble after the soccer ball, crash into one another, then roll on the ground in exaggerated injury, clutching their calves, little fakers in training. They don’t take any notice of a man strolling along with no apparent purpose. He can’t remember noticing adults passing by either when he sat against the lamppost as a boy, watching the nightly Wiffle ball game his classmates organized. They coaxed him into playing once when they needed an extra kid and let him throw the ball up for himself when he batted, since he couldn’t hit a regular pitch. Still, the best he could hope for was a little dribbler that he could beat out to first base, a pizza box. At least he could run fast.

  He walks zigzag now across the worn-down playing field. It was always dusty here in summer, more brown than green, more dirt than grass. It hurt hitting the hard dry ground of summer.

  “Hey, mister!” He looks around, sees boys behind him, boys on the side, boys in front of him. “Get out of the way, will ya?”

  He waves his apology and hurries through the Common, comes to Mechanic Street and crosses without bothering to check each way. There’s little traffic this time of night in Red Paint, and people would always stop for a man shuffling across the road. The Register Building is lit up on the inside as always. He presses his face to the window and can see the old fireman’s bell hanging from the ceiling, rung when the paper went to press. There’s the typesetter’s table in the corner, full of the cast metal letters used to make up pages by hand. And on the far wall, the old map of the Province of Maine with “Red Paint Territory” marking the land between the ocean and bay. Nothing, it appears, has changed at the Register.

  He moves to the front door and reads the staff list posted under glass. At the top, Simon Howe: Editor in Chief. There are a dozen names below him, ending with Pressroom: David Rigero, written in a different typeface, an obvious addition. He looks both ways on the sidewalk, then takes out a Magic Marker from his pocket. He uncaps it and holds it under his nose for a moment, inhaling the pungent scent. He considers how to fit the word on the door. Angled seems best, top left to bottom right, for maximum size and dramatic effect. The marker squeaks across the surface, leaving thick black letters on the light wood color. He can’t decide on the punctuation. An exclamation point? Too frantic. A period? Too formal.

  He hears a car coming up the street, and it scares him that he might be seen. He can’t remember ever being caught doing anything wrong, not even being reprimanded at school. He has spent so much of his life avoiding being rebuked, yet here he is defacing a building in the center of his hometown. How would he explain himself? Momentary insanity? Continuous insanity?

  He sets the teddy bear against the door and slips sideways a few steps into the alley, leaving the single word to stand by itself, no punctuation needed.

  RAPIST

  Simon stood outside the front door to the Register staring at the word. Beside him, the paper’s photographer raised his camera to his eye. Simon turned quickly, knocking his arm. “No pictures, Ron.”

  The young man regained his balance and readjusted the Nikon dangling from his neck. “Why don’t you want a snap, boss? This would grab the eye on page one.”

  “Did anyone else see this?”

  Ron turned half around as an old woman shuffled past, her head down. “Sure, I mean, anybody who goes by can see it, if they look over.”

  “Any staff?”

  “Most of editorial is already here.”

  “How about the production people?”

  “Nobody except Rigero. I saw his truck parked in the lot.”

  Simon ran his index finger over the letters, and a little of the black rubbed off.

  Ron held out a battered old teddy bear. “I found this leaning against the door, like a calling card. You know, the Teddy Bear Vandal—good headline, huh?”

  Simon took the flimsy stuffed animal. It was pressed in at the face, as if stepped on, and cut open in the belly, a small, ragged slit.

  “The police will be over in a few minutes,” Ron said.

  Simon whirled on him. “You called the police?”

  “Yeah, they always check out vandalism.”

  “This is just a little graffiti, probably from some bored kid. Get something abrasive from the janitor’s room and we’ll rub it off.”

  “That’s bad business, that’s what it is.” The voice came with a wooden cane shaking between their heads. Simon and Ron leaned out of the way as Erasmus Hall jabbed it toward the door. “It’s a sign,” he said, “repent before it’s too late.” He held out a tract. Simon took one from his tremoring hand and then stood in front of the word until it could be washed away.

  “Mr. Howe, can I talk to you a minute?”

  Simon looked up from his desk and saw his recently hired pressroom man standing over him. He smelled of after-shave, some strong metallic scent. “Sure.” Simon scanned the newsroom. “We could go in th
e conference room, that would be private.”

  “I don’t need private. This is okay.”

  Simon gestured to the seat across his desk, then leaned over it. “The writing on the door—I guess you saw it.”

  “Yeah, there was kind of a crowd out there when I pulled in, so I took a look.”

  “I’m sorry,” Simon said. “We scrubbed it off as soon as I got in.”

  “You’re sorry?”

  “That you had to see it.”

  Rigero shrugged, his shoulders sticking up longer than usual, like a child who hasn’t quite mastered the gesture. “Doesn’t have anything to do with me. Nobody knows what I was in for except you,” he said, his voice a little lower, “and you didn’t tell anybody, did you, Mr. Howe, because that would be like invading my privacy, wouldn’t it?”

  He’d told Amy, but wives didn’t count. Everyone presumed you shared secrets with your spouse. “Of course I didn’t tell anyone.”

  “Then nobody else would know.”

  Simon nodded. “So what is it you wanted to talk to me about?”

  “I was making up the For Sale page and saw your ad for the piano.”

  “You play?” The question popped out of Simon with more surprise in his voice than was appropriate. “I mean, you didn’t mention that when we talked about your hobbies at the interview.”

  “It’s not for me. I got a sister up in Brunswick has three kids. I thought I’d refinish it for her, like a gift. She used to play when we were growing up. I figure she could teach her kids.”

  “That’s a nice idea.”

  “She stuck by me when I was in, my sister did. The rest of the family acted like I died.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that. But the piano, it’s been used pretty hard. My son used to play with his feet. And it hasn’t been tuned in years.”

  “That’s okay, I’m used to working with wood, and I’ll get it tuned. But I was wondering, the ad said a hundred dollars, would you take seventy-five? That’s all I got.”