“The meat tree,” I said back to Ed, finally, and he nodded, held his can up in appreciation.
“May we all find it,” he said, and without him even telling me, I could see it, dripping red.
It was what he said Lorinda said she’d fed on those three weeks.
“After the beans?” I said.
“The second can,” he said back, passing whatever test I was giving him. That I’d hoped he was going to fail.
I stayed with him for four more days, ran his bill up talking to my mother, the earpiece of the phone worn down from telemarketing and flecked with nail polish, then on the fifth day I found myself again at Tanner’s, waiting for her. Lorinda. I told myself it was because I needed the money, but that wasn’t it. I needed her.
On her machine I said I was collecting the flyers again. Like that was healthy, would make her pick up: a sheaf of missing homeless men staring up from their faded pieces of paper, or tacked at shoulder level around the living room. The thing was, nobody knew where they were going, or being taken. Supposedly it happened every few years like this. My old Sociology professor would have flowcharted the demographics, turned it into a migratory pattern. Used it to explain what was left of the twentieth century. The few homeless men left on the street had taken to calling me the Custodian. I’d hear them behind me, speaking through their tangled beards.
No, I told them in my head. It’s Jeremy.
My hair was longer now, though, not like cropped like his parents thought—like it had been in the photograph they’d had, of me sleeping.
I wired my mom for two hundred dollars and used sixty of it for a week’s worth of hotel room, paid in advance. Local calls were fifty cents each, so I loitered in the lobby, waiting for the courtesy phone. The desk jockey watched me talk to Lorinda’s machine and smiled, the corners of his mouth impossibly sharp. It didn’t feel like a fairy tale anymore; all the girls on the corner had names like her: Savanna, Leiloni, Katressa.
I told my mom I was registered for Second Summer Session.
I stood under Lorinda’s balcony for long minutes at a time.
The clerk at the convenience store still let me have jerky on credit. Eight dollars in, I asked him why.
“She pays it,” he said, nodding his head up to the eighth floor.
She knew I was watching.
The two days after that I spent at the library, leafing through the microfiche for accounts of her ordeal; for details. There weren’t any, just what she told me—less, really—then one useless article about how going feral like she’d done—running from the man who’d stopped for her—was just another variant of the Stockholm Syndrome. I read it line by line. The homeless men there for the public restrooms and free air-conditioning watched me, too. On the long walk back to my room—one day left on my tab—I stepped into a pawn shop, held a high-dollar fly fishing rig in my hand.
“Go ahead,” the guy stocking sockets said, and I whipped it like the ceiling was higher than it was, my off-hand open, pointing with the palm, for balance.
I talked him down to forty dollars. He folded it up into a battered poolstick case and then I was walking again, following a man I thought looked like me in thirty years. He was wearing a demure grey overcoat, his hands deep in his pockets. I knew it wasn’t, that it couldn’t be, but I told myself it was Mr. Michaels, that he’d traced Lorinda back to here; that he was looking for me.
Finally, at an intersection, I let him go then stood under the stoplight, the faces of the missing massing on the pole behind me. I looked out from them into the stopped traffic, and there, both hands visible over the wheel, was a woman who could have been my mother twenty years ago.
She was staring at me.
I started running.
I don’t know what happened to the fishing rod, but, too, now, I do: a homeless man found it, opened it, fitted it together the only way it would go together, then walked through the streets casting it over the vinyl tops of cars, the flat-faced bullbats gliding down to inspect that flashing hook. He was the man I followed that first night I left Lorinda, only he was moving the opposite direction in time.
That night the clerk at Lorinda’s convenience store reached under the counter, handed me some of my books. He called it special delivery.
In the pages of Heidegger were pictures of me sleeping.
“Thanks,” I told the clerk.
I looked at the pictures in my room then tacked them to my bulletin board and looked at them some more, then took them down, and the next night, the one night the front desk was extending me on credit, a spoonful of rice unchewed in my mouth, I understood: it was an invitation; a warning; a plea.
I walked across town and sat at Ed’s kitchen table and let his wife cut my hair. So I’d look like Jeremy. And then I borrowed Ed’s truck.
Lorinda was waiting for me in the square bushes of the Michaels’ house. I’d found them in the phonebook. We were four hours away from where we were supposed to be, two hours past the vigilante diner.
“Hey,” I said, sitting down beside her.
She didn’t say anything.
The hollow dent under my eye was so empty. If I laid on my back, dew would collect in it maybe. I had a can of beans in my pocket. A light went on in the house, the window glowing yellow, then it went off again. It was a signal. I sat the beans next to Lorinda’s leg, upside down, and she righted the can then pulled her hand away, the memory snaking up her arm.
I looked out at the street.
I didn’t have to say that raccoons couldn’t read the label on a can of beans, to have set it upright for her, and I didn’t have to say that Ed had told me about the meat tree.
Her chin was trembling. She wiped her mouth with the back of her sleeve.
“Who was it?” I said. “Who left them for you like that?”
“Ur-Lorinda,” she said, her laugh a nervous trill.
“No,” I said.
She looked up at me.
“It’s happening again,” she said. “I can’t stop it. They should have left me in that ditch. Not chased me.”
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
She tilted her head back to keep from crying. Headlights washed over us and we didn’t move, and then it was dark all over again. I stood into it, away from the window, and then saw it like an afterimage, written into the sill, under the eave, all the nights she’d been spending here: the seven letters of her name. Like her father had written in the soot of their overhang.
I turned back to her.
She was looking at me.
“No,” I said, “don’t—” but she already had the match, to start the fire.
She stood too.
“Would you want to live?” she said, “if your kid was . . . ” but couldn’t finish.
I cupped my hand over hers, killing the flame, but she pushed me away, backed into the yard, lighting another, and another, and dropping them like footsteps.
No lights were going on in the house.
No cars were coming.
It was just us.
Tendrils of smoke were feeling up out of the grass. I walked through them to her, held her, and in broken breaths she told me about the meat tree, how, after the upright can of beans was another, and another, leading her deeper into the woods. When she got there it was night and the bugs were chattering above her, but when the sun came she saw it: the meat tree. It was like Ed had said: flanks of steaming red meat speared on the reaching branches, dripping. For her.
She ate.
And each night there was more, and on the third night she saw it moving through the trees above her, like leather in the shape of a man, or a man who had just forgot to die.
She told herself it was her father, her real father.
The meat made her sick, but she ate it, except the skin. That she draped back over the dead branches of the tree. It was hairless.
I pulled her tighter as the lawn sprinklers came on, then did what I’d always wanted to do, I think: traded myself
for the Michaels, went home with her. It was something only a son would do.
She had taken the bus there, so she rode back with me, sitting in the middle of Ed’s bench seat, her face paler with each car that whipped past.
We stopped at the vigilante diner and nobody remembered us. We sat against the plate glass and she ate her salad and I ate mine, and when the waitress who’d held her finger on the register key like she could have stopped the trucker at anytime asked if we wanted anything more, a burger or something real, I looked up at her and shook my head no.
Out at the last island of pumps I was floating in the oily water, a baptism, and then my eyes slammed open and I gripped Lorinda’s hand hard under the table.
I moved back in with her the next day, handing my collection of flyers out the bathroom window of my motel so the front desk wouldn’t know I was skipping out. We were avoiding Tanner’s for some reason, too. Like it would remind us of when we didn’t know so much, make us sad about who we were now, and where. That first week passed uneventful, no sex even. Lorinda was sleeping a lot. I flipped through the stations of her television and stood on her balcony at night. The Fourth of July was six weeks behind us already, more, but kids were still lighting bottle rockets and Roman candles from the tops of roofs. It was enough.
I kept the flyers of the homeless men on the nightstand.
I called my mom and told her I was okay. She asked about Lorinda. Not by name, just generally.
“She’s okay too,” I said, but it was a lie.
Lorinda’s hair was matted, matting, not anymore like she’d never been found, but like she was reverting, going back, the years falling away from her. For one bad day I thought maybe she was a ghost, that she was the girl you always hear about hitch-hiking between certain mile markers, trying to get home but not able to, but then I remembered Ed, how he’d seen her too, how the microfiche at the library had had pictures of her on the side of the road, how the napkin I’d found in the kitchen trash the other day had had real blood on it, hers, from cutting fruit probably.
So she was real, physical.
I breathed out.
The day after I thought she was a ghost, I thought she was just confused, that she was repressing. That all her talk of her time lost was a displacement or transference or something, an allegory of molestation. General Psychology was the test she’d made me miss that first time. It made sense, though, that she was just projecting someone else in the woods with her—some thing—because her father would never do what he had maybe been doing the whole time her mother wasn’t there. The meat tree even fit, the blood; the fishing rod. Isn’t that what fairy tales are, anyway? What we tell ourselves about ourselves, just in an indirect way, with elves and magic and monsters to make it all safe? I told Lorinda about it in the afternoon when we were just sitting there and she looked across the room at me and smiled one side of her face.
“You don’t gain weight from getting molested,” she said.
“You were ten,” I said.
“Call it what you want,” she said back.
I looked away. It had been a nice two hours at least, when the world had made sense.
“You don’t have to be smart like that all the time,” she told me.
I kept looking away.
The rest of the afternoon she shaped my hair more like Jeremy’s, and then, later, at the convenience store, looking through bangs that weren’t really there anymore, two things happened: the first was the new clerk nodded at me like he knew me, then followed me into the street, led me to a wooden pole. On it was a grainy reproduction of me, sleeping. And the phone number. And the reward. I closed my eyes, the clerk faded away, and then, before I could make the stoop, the stairs, the payphone on the side of the building started ringing.
I looked from it to the street.
It was just me.
It was for me.
I closed my eyes and walked back inside. I was eating candy bars then, because the chocolate was made from cocoa, which was some kind of bean, and beans had protein, I was sure. And I needed protein.
When I opened Lorinda’s door, turning the knob first all the way to the right then back to the left, making the room a safe place to enter (I’d always imagined a huge windshield wiper on the other side of the door, wiping back and forth), she was waiting for me with her new camera. It blinded me, and all I could think was silver, silver, silver. It was good, though; as the living room faded back, its corners sharpening into furniture, I let myself believe that I was just meeting her—this girl who was supposed to have a picture of Jeremy—for the first time, that I was just coming up to her apartment. That the last ten months had been some flash-forward or something, what could have happened but didn’t. Lorinda played along, snapping picture after picture, her camera pushing them out onto the coffee table and the carpet and the spaces between the cushions of the couch.
We fell into bed laughing or trying to, twined together with sheets like the dead, night feeling down around us, into us, and for a few minutes what we didn’t talk about didn’t exist. That next morning Ed was there, though. Standing in the bedroom door, the can in his hand catching the morning sun and turning it silver. Like the flash of the camera all over, my eyes just clearing.
He looked at Lorinda sprawled naked under the sheets.
“Your dad’s in town,” he said.
“I know,” she said.
She never looked at him.
On the coffee table by the couch where he’d sat, waiting for us to stir, were five empty cans and then the Polaroids of me, stacked neatly in the order Lorinda’d snapped them. You could tell by the continued motion, like how you know which panel comes next in a comic book. There were all these missing moments, though. Too much happening in the deadspace between, the gutters.
Over tasteless slices of breakfast melon I asked Lorinda if she wanted to see him?
“Who?” she said.
I didn’t know what to say. The classifieds were still spread on the table from the day before.
“We need money,” I said.
“We need a lot of things,” she said back.
It was Labor Day; nothing was easy.
She walked out onto the balcony with her melon.
I called out that I was going to get a job, a dishwasher or something, anything, the guy with the spray bottle and rag at the skin arcades downtown, but it was a lie: two hours later I was standing over her uncle. He was sleeping on his back on the couch, his wife doing her telemarketer imitation in the kitchen.
“What do you sell?” I’d asked her on the way in.
“What do you need?” she’d asked back, the receiver pinned between her shoulder and jaw.
She hadn’t known where Ed’s brother was, just nodded to him on the couch. I was turning to go to him when I saw it: one of the flyers of me on the table under her fingernail equipment. There was money involved.
“Who are you talking to there?” I said.
“You come here for me or for him?” she asked, then yes’d her way back into whatever pitch she’d been in before I’d let myself in the back door. She looked at me over her fingernails like Was I done?
I was.
Ed woke when I moved his beer.
I lied that Lorinda wanted to see him, her father.
He leaned on his knees and thinned his eyes out against the harsh forty-watt above and behind me.
It was lunch, a little after.
Ed closed his eyes and gave me directions—just another motel on another street, room 134—then patted himself down for the truck keys he didn’t seem to have.
“You sure she wants to see him?” he asked.
I nodded yes and never stopped walking out the door.
Not only were his keys gone, but his truck wasn’t there either.
By five, I was sitting outside room 134. I hadn’t eaten all day, except the part of the melon for breakfast. It had been bitter, though; I pictured the rind shriveling up at the table, the flies buzzing eight st
ories up and in through the open balcony door, the melon snapping shut over them.
For two hours, he never came out. Or back. It was another room in a row of rooms.
The new homeless man taped to the metal sides of the streetlight poles was a man I thought I knew; I already had his flyer tucked into my pocket. I think I was collecting them because of their beards, because if you shaved them they might pair up with artist’s sketches of missing third-graders twenty years after they’d gone missing. I wanted one of them to be Jeremy instead of me. Or, Jeremy too.
At dark, when no lights came on in 134, I leaned against the door and it gave—no chain—and I closed it behind me, stood in the stale air, turned the light on myself finally.
It was just me.
I sat at the two-person little table for long minutes, looking at my hands, then went into his bathroom. His electric razor was there. I shaved my head an eighth of an inch at a time with it, all the thing would take. It took maybe forty-five minutes. I left the hair on the counter, stared at myself in the mirror, ran my palm over my scalp.
On the walk back to Lorinda’s I left the Polaroids of me face-in in likely windowsills, under the wipers of parked cars. It was funny; I was laughing. The streets were full, school almost back in session again.
I shouldered through the crowds knotted around the entrances to the bars and once someone called my name and I closed my eyes. It was somebody from the Psych class I’d dropped; he pushed through to me.
“Thought you were dead,” he said.
My scalp was halogen-white.
“I am,” I said, and touched him with my finger on the forehead like I was giving Lent, then turned and walked away.
Maybe these were the missing moments between the snapshots, I thought. Literally they were, anyway; I still had two in my pocket for somewhere up the street. I started running, and didn’t stop until the foot of Lorinda’s building.
In the gutter and on the sidewalk were both her cameras, the film exposed to the sodium light.
I knelt, collected them, looked up at the rounded base of her balcony. It was just concrete.
The Ones That Got Away Page 22