“Okay,” she said. “Let’s get this over with.”
A man with dirt clouding his face broke free from the crowd and walked over to the Buick. Marie rolled down her window and the black seed in Greg’s belly burst. She was not her mother, frail and pruned. She was no granny. She would face this head-on.
“Hello,” she said.
The man had crouched down so he could peer into the car. Up close he looked young, younger than GJ, maybe. His hair was stiff and foul; he was smiling and Greg was relieved to see that his teeth were still mostly white. “You looking for a date?” he asked. His voice was high and feminine.
“We’re looking for our son. His name is GJ. Sometimes he goes by Greg?” Marie was leaning far back into her seat, probably trying to escape the man’s stench.
The man looked at Greg. His eyes weren’t right; they looked like they’d been put in a cup and shaken. “Don’t know him,” he said. Now his voice was deeper. “But y’all need to be careful out here.” He said it like a warning, an unwelcoming. He stood and turned to the clump. “We got slummers,” he shouted. “Look out, look out, they might getcha.”
Was the man talking about them? Were they the dangerous ones in this crowd? Or was it another warning for Greg and Marie? The man pushed between two others, who wandered off in different directions as if being separated had unleashed them, freed them. One sat on the hood of Marie’s car, his back to them; the other walked through the parking lot and out onto the sidewalk before the darkness closed ranks and he disappeared.
The man on the hood wore a shirt that said Christ Is King, a crude stick-figure Jesus on a cross forming the t in Christ. Marie honked the horn, two quick blasts. The man slid off and looked back over his shoulder at them like he’d been insulted.
“I did call the cops,” Marie said. She rolled her window back up and turned off the ignition.
“When?” Greg asked. He hadn’t seen her dialing; he hadn’t seen her phone at all.
“The first week GJ was gone. They said since he’s an adult with a history of drug use there’s not much they can do.”
“Oh,” Greg said. Sometimes he felt grateful such a word existed, a small breath of a word, a pebble, really, but one that didn’t tether him to anything. Oh. He hadn’t called the cops. Again he faced that thing, that something that felt like it was on the tip of his tongue. What was it? He believed GJ could be found. But there was something else, something attached to that. The man from the hood of the car stood and wandered into the bar, the Buick rocking gently as it released his weight.
“I said thank you and hung up,” Marie said. She was threading her house keys and car key in between each knuckle, so they stood out like spikes. “I just let it go and then two weeks went by like a snap.”
“I know what you mean,” Greg said. He was thinking of his own long afternoons, how they passed by in arcs he could trace: the sunlight in this corner, the sun apexing, the sunlight in the other corner now. The ticker-tape endlessness of the news channel. Mute, unmute. The living room holding him in place, a model home representation of a life, all he had to do was blend in. He hadn’t felt allowed to leave. He hadn’t felt allowed to panic, or cry, or start some kind of online campaign, or print flyers or even a T-shirt. All of that felt like something he saw on TV; all of it felt senseless and exhausting and—
“After this,” Marie was saying, “I really don’t know what else we can do. What I can do. If we don’t find him tonight.” She was looking at him, really looking at him, that classic Marie deep eye contact that had always unnerved Greg but that felt particularly unfair now, in the closeness of the Buick, with a crowd of strangers looking on, outside what felt like the entry to hell on earth. It hit Greg that she was asking for permission.
“You’ve done enough,” he said. He wanted to pat her hand but she was still holding the keys. She had done enough. GJ had lived with her, not Greg, all these years, all those offs and ons. It was her wallet that went light, her guest bedroom that grew dingy with GJ’s filth, her eyes that saw him on good days and bad. She took him to job interviews at the mall; she picked him up at the bus stop when he was inevitably fired. Under Marie’s watch the boy had passed his GED test, gotten his diploma. Greg had long suspected she’d somehow taken the GED for GJ, but it had been a relief for Greg, this arrangement. A boy should be with his mother was what he told himself. But he also just didn’t have it in him. Somehow, Marie did. Or had. Now she was tapping out.
A boy should be with his mother. A freeing thing and a damning one. Greg on his daily circuit of nothing, doing nothing, being nothing. Now at least one of those things wasn’t true anymore.
“We’ll ask around inside and then we’ll go home,” Greg said.
Marie nodded; it had been what she wanted to hear. She used her free hand to sling her backpack purse over her shoulder and then across her body, wearing it on her front instead of her back. “He might not want us to find him, you know,” she said. “Some people do that.”
“That’s true,” Greg said. He’d seen a handful of true-crime TV shows where an adult went missing only to be found decades later, living a totally new life. They’d left behind shitty spouses, sad family lives, loneliness. Greg wasn’t sure if GJ was sober enough to feel lonely, or to devise a plan to begin anew. When was the last time GJ seemed like himself? Greg tried to remember. It had been a long time. Addicts and teenagers hide themselves from their families, and GJ had been both. There had been one Christmas—GJ was about sixteen or seventeen—when Greg gave him a computer. Deb’s idea. Maybe it’ll get him excited about school again, she’d said. And GJ had seemed genuinely surprised, happy. Like he knew what an extravagance it was. They ate pizza by the electric fireplace that night, a family tradition, admiring the twinkle lights on the Christmas tree and watching funny movies. The next morning, when Marie came to the door to fetch him, GJ had shown her the computer with what seemed like great pride. That must have been expensive, Marie had said. Back then she could have been the president of a fan club dedicated to his finances; she kept track of every detail. But that Christmas was the last time GJ had seemed like himself. Or had seemed like the possibility of a self. Later Greg found out that GJ pawned the computer.
“Take my mace,” Marie said. She held out a small black canister to him.
“No thanks.” Holding her mace, the crude key spikes, her purse across her body, Marie looked as afraid as he felt. And as old. He wanted his hands to be empty when they walked in, ready for anything. When GJ was an infant they used to look at each other, sleepless and stunned, and say, Can you believe we made this? It was a way to remind themselves that there had been a time before, that they had brought this being into being. He wanted that again, that astonishment. Can you believe we made this? We. That he’d had that with Marie, this old woman next to him, was a different kind of astonishing, a sadder one. He opened his door and got out, and Marie did the same.
“They’ll getcha!” the man yelled again, pointing at them over the crowd. Greg put his hand up in a wave. It seemed like the only thing to do. The air felt stalled, the same oxygen passed from mouth to mouth, exhaled in a hot mist that clung to Greg’s clothing. He held the door for Marie.
The liquor store part of the Garage was about five rows of spirits, with a back wall of refrigerators and double doors leading into the bar area. The heat carried on inside, though it seemed to be coming from somewhere in the ceiling. He had heard of places blasting icy air-conditioning to keep people from lingering. Maybe the Garage was attempting something similar.
“Wine coolers are two for one. Beers are not sold separately. You break, you buy,” the cashier called out. He was a small man with a neat ponytail sitting behind thick Plexiglas, leaning on his elbows over a magazine, and Greg could not tell if he’d even looked up at them.
“We’re not here to buy anything,” Marie said. She walked over to the Plexiglas and rapped on it with her keys. “Hi,” she said when the man looked up. “We’re looking for
our son, a man named GJ. Or maybe you know him as Greg?”
“GJ, huh?” The man had a thin, wet mouth. He ran his thumb and forefinger down its outer corners. His forehead was oily, a wet ring circling his shirt collar.
“Yes,” Marie said. She was cradling her purse the way she used to cradle her pregnant belly. He hadn’t thought of that in years. He could suddenly see her standing in their tiny kitchen, laughing. He’s kicking a lot! She’d known it was a boy; Marie always knew. “He’s been missing for three weeks now.”
“Yeah, I think I know who you mean,” the man said. “Geej. Tall guy, right?”
“Yes!” Marie turned to Greg; her face was hopeful, excited. Could it really be this easy?
“I haven’t seen him around in a while,” the man said. He looked down, back to his magazine, which Greg could now see was a Penthouse. A woman knelt on a wooden chair, displaying thin buttocks.
“Oh,” Marie said.
“When was the last time you saw him?” Greg asked.
“I don’t know, man.” The cashier licked his fingertip and turned the page. Now the woman was sitting in the chair, her legs spread.
Marie went to the closest aisle and grabbed a bottle. She placed it inside the Plexiglas box in front of the cashier, who would have to take it out on the other side to scan it. “We’ll take this,” she said. “And then maybe you’ll remember something.” A bribe! Greg was flooded with gratitude. A bribe, of course!
The man squinted at the box. “Triple sec, huh? It’s forty,” he said, without even removing it.
Marie pushed two twenties through the thin pay slot. The man placed them in the fold of his magazine, one on top of the other, and closed it gently. He looked up at them, running his fingers down the corners of his mouth again. He was such a small man, Greg thought. Dainty. A bird. The opposite of GJ.
“I haven’t seen him in a while,” the cashier said. “The last time I saw him was maybe a couple weeks ago. He came in and went to the back like always. Me and the owner know he steals from us. He owes us.” He nodded at the closed magazine. “That doesn’t even begin to cover it.” He looked at them sternly, like they had been the ones to steal. The door opened and a couple walked in, keeping their heads down, holding each other and shuffling to the bar in the back.
“But we let him still come in because he’s a nice person deep down. He has a good heart.”
“Yes,” Marie said. She moved closer to the cashier, pressing her purse into the counter. “That’s exactly right.”
“He pays when he can, unlike some of the other ones.”
The other ones. In the cashier’s mind, GJ was just one of the clump. In Greg’s mind, a man who stole but paid when he could was still a thief.
“He usually comes in at least once a week, but like I said, it’s been a little while since I’ve seen him. Sometimes people just move on.” The door opened again and a man in a red baseball hat walked in; Greg could smell the sharp odor of what he’d been drinking.
“Beers are not sold separately,” the cashier called after the man. He shook his head and looked back at Greg. “If you wouldn’t mind, put that bottle back where you found it on your way out.”
Marie took the bottle out of the case and put it back on the shelf, and then walked toward the back where the bar was. Greg followed. Just before they pushed through the double doors, he saw the man in the red hat wrestle a beer from a six-pack and drop it down the front of his pants.
The bar was a square room with moldy tiles for flooring. They gave under Greg’s feet as he walked in. He’d so easily forgotten how everything in Florida gave; every surface marshy, damp, loamy. The only sources of light were a purple lava lamp at the far end of the room that was fighting a slow clog and a thin railing of fluorescence running just under the bar’s edge. The other patrons appeared hewn from shadow, if shadow had the texture of ash: just visible enough. The couple that had just walked in were sitting in bean bags, the woman’s legs splayed and her feet pointing in like a puppet whose strings had just been cut. Her skirt had ridden up and the flesh from her thighs seemed to spill out, like she was a fluid and not a solid. “Oh, don’t worry about her, man,” her companion yelled. Greg had been staring. “She’s just tired.”
The bar ran three sides of a square. The farthest side was where you went if you wanted something more than a drink. Greg had been here before, once, years and years ago when it got bad with Marie. A woman with curly red hair helped him out that day, on the far side of the bar, in the darkness that felt like another room. No lava lamp back then, but it had been daytime, possibly even a workday. The woman had thick glasses that made her eyes look like fish caught in a bowl. He’d kept his elbows on the bar, had tapped for another drink during. What had he felt that day? He remembered the feel of the woman’s molars, the tired feeling in his legs and crotch, the way the brightness of the day hurt his eyes when he left out the back … He had felt triumph. A calming sense of liberation. He was peeling himself from Marie, strip by strip. It was why he didn’t want the mace, or the keys, or the cops, coming in here: over the years those strips had wilted, liquefied, congealed into shame. Nothing worked right; he flopped and jiggled inside and out. He had done some things; who hadn’t? And he had done them willingly. He wanted away from the life he’d created with Marie. At its core there was nothing to be ashamed of there. But he hadn’t known how to do it. There was no road map, no itemized checklist, no formula. A coworker once went a week sleeping on the love seat in his office, shaving in the hallway bathroom. Smiling always, smiling like an idiot, cheersing his coffee mug at Greg in the mornings, everyone pretending like the man wasn’t drenched in pathetic. That kind of gesture wasn’t for Greg. Instead he had done something that day, that bright bright day in the bar he was standing in now, which smelled exactly as he remembered it: cigarettes and mixed drinks and armpits gone sour. He’d driven home feeling triumphant after allowing a stranger to put her mouth on him in a bar. It had been his winnings, and now it was his legacy.
Marie was crouched by the bean bags, her hand on the sprawled woman’s knee, leaning in to the man’s face. Asking him about GJ. Greg walked over. “I’m going to show him a picture,” Marie said. The man grinned up at Greg. She dug in her purse for her phone, held it up so the man could see a picture showing GJ with his arm around Marie, her head resting on his chest, both of them laughing. It was from one of the times that GJ had been well, those brief weeks or months when his eyes were clear and he smiled easily and, according to Marie, he slept nearly around the clock.
“Naw,” the man said. He shook his head at the phone. For a moment Greg felt defensive, as if this man were rejecting his son, just another useless emotion he didn’t need. “Don’t know him.”
There were a few others scattered around the place, two men leaning over the bar, a woman leaning against the far corner, the bartender sitting hunched on a stool wearing a faded and torn Liquor Garage T-shirt, its letters glowing out from his chest.
“Let’s go,” Greg shouted to Marie. She stood, brushed off her knees.
“Don’t you want to talk to those people over there?”
“No. He’s not here. This is a waste of time.” He felt desperate to leave, desperate to quit pretending at this game of P.I. that he and Marie were losing. GJ hadn’t looked like the man in that photo in quite some time. Greg could be back at the condo, back in the RV loft, in half an hour. He walked back through the double doors, down the aisle of mixers, away from the colorful glass in the refrigerated cases, such a cheerful sight to him usually.
“Safe drive,” the cashier called. Greg held the door for Marie, the heat pulling at their clothes, swallowing them whole.
“Hey.” A scrawny boy had broken off from the clump. His nose bloomed with acne, pearls of tapioca balanced one atop another. “I heard you was looking for your son.”
Marie pulled out her phone again, held it up for the boy to see.
“Yeah, I see, I see,” he said. “I think they g
ot him.” He jerked his head, looking just beyond Greg’s shoulder. “They get him sometimes.”
“Who?” Marie asked. “Who gets him?”
“Them,” the boy said. He widened his eyes; he became a mask. He looked at Greg. “They,” he whispered. And then, louder: “They.”
The clump burst into laughter, breaking apart to thump one another’s backs, rejoining like an octopus drawing in its tentacles. The boy with the ruined nose backed away from Greg and Marie, laughing now, holding his pants up with one hand and covering his mouth with the other.
“Go home, white folks,” one of the clump yelled, and there was laughter again, the white people in the clump, it appeared to Greg, laughing the hardest.
Y-ball. T-ball. Pop Warner. Tap dance (Marie,s idea). Soccer. Cub Scouts. Baseball. Football. Piano lessons (Marie’s idea). Guitar lessons. Boy Scouts. Almost to Eagle; kicked out. Journals, sketch pads, canvases. Crayons, markers, paints. Charcoal. Spray paint. Skateboard. Body board. Beach summers. Sky-blue swimming pools. Hotels. Resorts. Camping. Hamburgers, pizza, hot dogs, ice cream. Falafel, grape leaves, hummus. Enchiladas. Casseroles. Nachos. Candy. Soda. Slurpees. Big Gulps. Beer. Whiskey. Dope. Hash. Tar. Rocks. Spoon, needle. Pipe. Darkness. Light. I’m sorry. It’s okay. Theft. Shouting. Crying. Darkness. Light. I’m sorry. It’s okay. Dope, dope, dope, rope-a-dope. Darkness. Nothing, no goodbye, gone, absent. No smell no color no noise. I’m sorry. It’s okay.
Greg was having a dream that he and GJ were in a coffin, It’s a double wide, Dad, room for both of us, and they laughed, took turns knocking on the lid, polite raps, no rush, no terror about being buried alive, just patient knocks, three-two-one. He woke but the knocking continued; it was Marie, knocking on the door of the RV. He rolled into a crouch and pushed off with his fists, landing on the floor on his bare flat feet.
She was holding a plate with a bagel on it, a pretty white skirt of cream cheese around the edges that made Greg’s mouth water. One wouldn’t be enough, but it would have to be.
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