Thunderstruck & Other Stories

by Elizabeth McCracken

  Where was she?

  There. In fact, someone had put up a little stage, and Lisa was on it. That haircut Sal had given her was terrible, long in back, layers in the front where the gum had been. The talc at her temples was runneled with sweat. She seemed to have dropped a pickled beet down the ruffles of her patriot’s shirt. Her eyes were closed.

  She was delivering the speech.

  A small crowd was listening. A few grandmothers, some of the littler kids. Bill Antoni. An approving man in his thirties who looked like a teacher. It was so hot you could hear the mayonnaise go bad, but there was Lisa, gesturing, serious, saying, “They tell us, sir, that we are weak.” July 4, 1976, 43rd Street, Des Moines, Iowa: this girl could start a revolution. Not with her good looks—though look at her, the beauty!—nor with her smarts, but because she is loved, she is loved, she is—Sylvia regarded Lisa’s audience and tried to put this thought in their heads.

  Because wasn’t that easier? To change a dozen strangers than a single beloved? Look at this wonderful girl. Yes, thought Sylvia, she’d take the blame but she also demanded some credit.

  A teenage boy glanced up, saw Lisa, and snorted.

  “But as for me,” she said, she was pounding her fist in her hand, she believed every word, “give me liberty, or give me death!”

  —it was never that easy though, was it, to demand a choice. Ask and ask. You might want both. You might get neither.

  The Lost & Found Department of Greater Boston

  Once upon a time a woman disappeared from a dead-end street. Her name was Karen Blackbird. She was a skinny, cheerful, nervous woman with muddy circles under her eyes and kinky, badly kept light-brown hair. She was five-foot-one or five-two or five-three. She had a tattoo shaped like a cherub that only a few people knew about, and a bit of pencil point in the palm of her right hand that she’d got as a kid tripping up a flight of stairs. She liked to show it to the children at the school where she worked as a lunch lady. “I could have got lead poisoning,” she said, fingers spread to flatten out her hand. “No, you couldn’t’ve,” the sixth-graders said, and some of the smarter fifth-graders, “pencils aren’t really made of lead, they’re made of graphite.” Still, they liked to look at the X-ray gray speck that broke her life line in half. The children knew nothing about palmistry, little about life, less about love, but they believed in life lines and love lines the way they believed in mercury thermometers: they meant something but probably you needed a grown-up to read them. “It means I’ll write my own fate,” Karen Blackbird would have said, if asked. The children, including her own son, didn’t care that Karen Blackbird was forty-two: all of adulthood seemed one undifferentiated stretch of time. But the ages of objects excited them. When Karen Blackbird disappeared, the graphite in her palm was thirty-three years old.

  In this case and no other, Once upon a time means Late summer, 1982.

  Before her disappearance, Karen Blackbird lived in a ramshackle Victorian with her elderly father and teenage son. The son was seventeen but small: five-foot tall and eighty pounds. He hired himself out to rake leaves and shovel snow, he delivered the weekly Graphic—all the usual local-boy jobs. With his dark hair and his newsprint eyes, he looked like an enterprising orphan, though he dressed like a hippie, in jeans faded to gray and ragged slogan T-shirts. The grandfather didn’t approve of how his daughter was raising his grandson. He believed childhood was the furnace in which men were forged: it couldn’t be lukewarm. The grandfather had a head shaped like a bellows, wide at the temples, ears attached at slants, face narrowing down to a mean, disappointed, huffing mouth.

  Look here: Karen Blackbird is standing on the front porch before she disappears. The house itself is a wreck, the brown asbestos tile weathered in teary streaks. A lawnmower skulks up to its alligatorish eyebrows in the yard. Half the teeth in the porch railing have been punched out, and Karen Blackbird puts the toe of her shoe through a gap in the railing and pivots her foot back and forth, as though it’s a switch that might work a decision. Her loopy hair shifts in the wind. Her lips are chapped, as usual. She has the kind of face that makes old women say, “Dear, if you just took a little care, you’d be so pretty.” Those old women are wrong. Her bare calves are thick and muscular, but her hands are bony. She’s still too young to carry that nose with any authority. Her oversized coat is missing half its buttons. She’s unlucky with buttons, always has been.

  The lives of the missing begin Last seen, and for a moment, or a week, or a day—who knows how long—she’s here. This isn’t the last time. She’s about to go but not right now. Only in magic shows does anyone announce the imminent disappearance of a woman. Even then you don’t know what you’ll find in her place.

  Once upon a time—specifically, Tuesday, September 7, 1982—Asher Blackbird, last year’s straight-A student, got caught trying to shoplift frozen French bread pizzas. He’d already slipped one box down the front of his hooded sweatshirt and was leaning over a freezer chest in the middle aisle of the Hi-Lo Market when he was spotted by the store manager, who took him to the back, through the silver doors with the high, round windows and the floor-sweeping brown-gray fringe at the bottom.

  The Hi-Lo was a run-down, bare-bones concern with more fruit flies than customers. Anyone with a car went to the Purity Supreme a mile away. The Hi-Lo was where kids got sent by parents on orders to buy cartons of milk. If there was change, they fed the coins into the gumball and prize machines at the front of the store, the heaviest machinery they’d ever operated by themselves. Broke, they fiddled with the big, cold silver keys that worked the machines and hopefully lifted the metal doors over the chutes. They stole things: candy, the terrible toys in the terrible toy section, the school-supply kits with pygmy plastic rulers and pug-nosed scissors. They drank coffee milk in the parking lot, sitting on the concrete blocks at the ends of spaces.

  “Wow!” Asher Blackbird said when the Hi-Lo manager pulled him into the back office. “OK!” He was smiling with nerves. The room smelled like a defrosted deep freeze. Asher wiped his hand across his face again and again, but the smile stayed where it was. He was clean enough but skinny, with thick black hair that looked like it had been cut in the dark. The Hi-Lo manager felt like giving him five bucks to run over to Salvi’s in the next block. A boy needed a barber. “I’m sorry,” said the kid. He grinned like he couldn’t believe his luck.

  “Sit down,” said the Hi-Lo manager. He was trying to stay stern. When kids stole, he scared the hell out of them, then sent them home without calling their parents. But that was always dumb stuff—candy, toys, soda pop. Not food you had to cook. The Hi-Lo manager dropped the pizza box on the desk. On the front, two French bread pizzas were staggered on a wooden cutting board. The boy raised his eyes. Probably he came from the tenement apartments in the next block, over George’s Tavern and Mac’s Smoke Shop. Maybe his mother put him up to it. It was a school day. The kid should be in school.

  “How old are you?” asked the Hi-Lo manager.

  “Seventeen,” Asher Blackbird answered. Then he looked at the box on the desk again, smiling at the pizzas as though they were coconspirators.

  A liar and a thief, poor kid, thought the Hi-Lo manager, and not very clever at either. No way was this little kid seventeen. Twelve, tops. The Hi-Lo manager himself was forty-four years old, bald, and pink, with a head dented like the cans in his store and an ex-wife he still loved, who still loved him, though she had remarried and had a baby. When the baby grew up, he thought, she’d divorce her husband, the fake husband, the shadow husband, and remarry him. It was the only thing that kept him in this town, where she lived; it was the only thing that kept him on this earth. She’d been his first and only girlfriend. If I’m not married when I’m forty, he’d told himself at twenty-seven, before he met her, I’ll kill myself. As it turned out, he wasn’t married at forty but he had been. Some days he wondered if he were breaking a vow with himself. At the Hi-Lo he wore a short-sleeve shirt and a red knit necktie and an engraved name
tag that said VAL.

  “Your mother home now?” he asked.

  That took the smile off the boy’s face. “No,” he said.

  “Where is she? Work?”

  The boy looked at him again, and the Hi-Lo manager saw something else. He couldn’t put his finger on it, though later he’d decide it was grief.

  “How about your father?” he asked. “Sisters? Brothers?”

  Asher Blackbird looked down. “No,” he said at last. His hands were on his knees—huge hands, the Hi-Lo manager saw then. Big feet, too, like a rottweiler puppy. “Just my grandfather.”

  “Wait here,” said the Hi-Lo manager. Outside the swinging doors, a mustached policeman flirted with Marietta from the meat department as she lay down minute steaks in the case. The Hi-Lo manager didn’t trust policemen who flirted. At the deli counter, he grabbed a piece of the awful fried chicken from the hot box, a few of the soda-heavy biscuits, a carton of milk. When he brought them back, the boy was holding the unopened pizza box in his lap and shaking it.

  “You hungry?” asked the Hi-Lo manager. “It’s all right. Here.”

  Asher Blackbird was already eating the chicken. “I’m a vegetarian,” he said apologetically between bites. Beneath its brown coating, the chicken meat looked indecent. The Hi-Lo manager handed him a paper napkin folded into thirds.

  He stepped outside to talk to the flirtatious policeman, and Asher Blackbird gnawed on the beveled cartilage at the end of the bone. He chewed and chewed and then threw up in the wastebasket by the desk. After wiping his mouth he started on the biscuits.

  Officer Leonard Aude drove Asher Blackbird home. Aude had offered the front seat of the cruiser, but the boy said he’d rather ride in back. In the rearview mirror, the kid looked even younger. “You OK there?” Aude asked.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Which house? Buddy? Which one.”

  Asher Blackbird kept raising and lowering the hood of his sweatshirt. “That one. The brown. Brownish.”

  “Your ma’s not home, you said. Where is she?”

  After a long pause, the boy said, “I don’t know. Gone. She’s just—gone.”

  “Yeah? Since when?”

  “Don’t know. Six months?”

  “Six? Who else you live with?”

  “Nobody.”

  “Your mother left you alone?”

  “No,” said the boy. Aude could hear him playing with the zipper of his jacket. “I live with my grandfather,” he said finally.

  Aude looked at the house, the garbage on the porch, the soggy gray newspapers on the steps, the advertising fliers sticking out of the wall-mounted mailbox. A wind-twisted, unhinged storm door leaned against the porch balustrade.

  “He’s Blackbird, too, right? Nathan. That him?”

  The boy didn’t seem surprised that Aude had heard of his grandfather. “That’s him,” he said.

  “And how is it, living with your grandfather?”

  The boy shrugged, shook his head. “I can’t,” he said finally.

  “OK, buddy,” said Leonard Aude. “We’re gonna take care of you. Be right back.”

  Inside the house, Aude’s boat-size heart sunk: he could feel it take on weight and drop. That’s what happened when you got smacked in the face with how people lived. No one was taking care of the boy. He’d be going into Social Services and the mother arrested when she showed back up. The house smelled of garbage and cats, though only one cat was visible, asleep on a ladder-back chair. It lifted its head. A line of drool trailed down from its mouth. Aude hadn’t known cats could drool. It needed a good home, too.

  “Hello?” he called.

  The whole living-room ceiling looked ready to collapse from damp. Five different wallpaper patterns were peeling off the wall. Scattered around the main room were half-filled cardboard boxes that looked slept on—coming in? going out?—and a sunroom beyond seemed an asylum for insane and injured furniture. In the cave-like kitchen, Aude noticed that every single cabinet was secured with bicycle locks. Some of the chains were thick; others narrow, candy-colored, plastic-wrapped. That, he was certain, was the work of Nathan Blackbird.

  Aude climbed the stairs. Later he’d be furious, but for the moment he felt only the deep sorrow that visited him whenever he got someplace later than he should have, when he saw how helpless the world was, eventually, to protect its children. The carpet runner under his feet was as filthy as a garage floor. At the top he turned and walked down the hall. A voice muttered behind a door.

  “Hello? Mr. Blackbird,” said Aude.

  The voice muttered on.

  Aude opened the door and peered in. Compared to the rest of the house, the room was oddly tidy. A window air conditioner chugged away. The dresser beneath was glazed with dust. The head end of the old iron sleigh bed had been raised on books: under one side, the Boston yellow pages and A–Ak of The Book of Knowledge, a premium from the Purity Supreme. Under the other, the white pages and XYZ.

  Ordinarily, Nathan Blackbird would have confessed to everything. He was a confessor. That’s why he was known to the police. Before he’d come to live with Karen and Asher, he’d been in a boardinghouse with other old men. Twice a year he’d show up at the station, offering up his wrists and claiming he’d murdered someone. He never had. He wanted incarceration, blame, absolution—what anybody ever wanted—but he was too chickenshit to do anything to earn them. At last, he would have said to Leonard Aude, had he noticed him there, finally you believe me. I’m the Boston Strangler. I’m the San Andreas Fault.

  The head of the bed had been raised to improve Nathan Blackbird’s circulation, though his circulation had stopped two days before, when he’d had a heart attack in his sleep. His arms were outside of the bedclothes; his wrists touched at the pulse points as if he were again, as always, ready for handcuffs.

  “Aw, shit, Nathan,” said Aude to the corpse. “Mr. Blackbird, dammit.”

  The back of the body would be black with pooled blood, a half-swamped boat, but what was visible was pale and so far intact, thanks to the chill of the room. The muttering voice came from a police scanner on the bedside table: Nathan Blackbird liked to listen to reports of all the crimes he didn’t commit. Aude turned it off so he wouldn’t have to hear himself radio in. Then he went to talk to the kid.

  Once upon a time a woman disappeared from a dead-end street. Nobody saw her go. She must have stepped out the door of the Victorian she shared with her father and son. She must have walked down the front steps. She was accompanied or unaccompanied, willing or unwilling. She left behind her head-dented pillow like a book on a lectern, on the right page one long hair marking her place for the next time. She left behind the socks that eventually forgot the particular shape of her feet and the shoes that didn’t, the brown leather belt that once described her boyish waist, dozens of silver earrings, the pajamas she’d been wearing when last seen. She left behind her mattress printed with unfollowed instructions for seasonal turning. She left behind her car. She left behind the paperback mystery she’d been reading.

  She’d been fired from her job as a lunch lady at the local grade school for allowing the children to give her back rubs. She’d had a boyfriend but they’d broken up. She’d been talking religion again; there was a girl in Hamilton, Ontario, who’d suffered a head injury and was supposedly performing miracles, and Karen Blackbird had been thinking of going. All her life she’d been looking for God. She went to church services, temple, the free brunch at the International Society for Krishna Consciousness. Then she’d come home to sleep on her own doubt-scented sheets. Maybe this time she’d elected to stay among the faithful.

  She left behind a basement filled with old photographs, smashed hats, a sprung wicker love seat that resembled the Brooklyn Bridge, a trunk full of bank statements, a canvas bag of orphaned keys, an asthmatic furnace, a noncommittal hot-water heater.

  In the upstairs bathroom she left a disheveled toothbrush with a fleshy red rubber point at one end to massage her gums, the rou
nd lavender disposable razor that she used on her legs but not under her arms, a black rubber comb bought from a truck-stop vending machine, a blond boar bristle brush darkened with her hair.

  She left behind her elderly father and her son. She never should have done that. Her father had a temper and a criminal record. The son was defenseless. He was little for his age, and then he turned sullen, and skinnier, and his skin got ashy, and he seemed barely awake in class, and everyone thought, At last, the poor kid’s going through puberty.

  But the truth was only that his grandfather was starving him to death.

  A picture of Karen Blackbird appeared on the evening news. It made her inaccurately beautiful. Her hair had been pulled back and tamed along the territory of her skull. She wore dark lipstick. The flash obscured the oddness of her nose. Her paisley dress had smocking across the chest and cutouts over the shoulders. On the nearest shoulder, you could see a few freckles, the kissing kind. Maybe the coincidences of light and angle made her beautiful; maybe it was the affection of the photographer. If you went looking for the woman in the picture, you might never find the real Karen Blackbird. It was Asher Blackbird’s favorite picture of his mother. He had given it to the police. They questioned him for a while, but he knew her only the way you know your mother—the smell of her, the dogleg corridors of her faith, the sloppy scrape of her left foot as she walked. Not scars, not most of her secrets.

  In a house like that, how could you tell whether someone had packed for a trip, and for how long?

  Had Asher known his grandfather was dead? He slept a lot, said the boy, he got mad when I bothered him. When did the chains go up? After my mother left. But why? Because I was a vegetarian. What does that have to do with anything? My grandfather didn’t believe in vegetarians: he said if I got hungry enough I’d eat what I was given.