Citrus County

by John Brandon

  Toby knew this area of the woods, and these kids apparently did not. They were walking in a circle, not a large one. At this rate, they’d be back to the road the cars were parked on in twenty minutes. Toby had wondered what he’d do if he was out with a search team and they started nearing the bunker, but he saw that wasn’t a concern on this day, with this group. The searches, in general, seemed to be fanning out in the wrong direction, inland and north. Toby felt disappointed. He wanted the searches to be organized, regimented. He wanted these baseball kids to be consumed with Kaley. They weren’t carrying photos of her, weren’t even mentioning her. Of all the searchers, they were the nearest to Kaley, yet they had no belief, no spirit for the search.

  When the group tightened up, turning a corner, Toby said, “So, where you think this little girl is?”

  The group didn’t break stride. The shortest one said, “Lot of good guesses, but the best is that she’s dead.”

  “Why do you say that?” Toby asked.

  “She could be on a boat to Thailand or in some hillbilly’s basement, but probably not. That stuff’s for the movies.”

  “There’s no basements in Florida, you dumb Yankee.” This kid had a head of bushy curls. “I’m with you, though. She’s dead as disco.”

  “Where’d you hear that? Dead as disco?”

  “I’m not certain. I don’t always keep track of where I hear things.”

  “I think she’s alive,” Toby broke in. “And I bet she’s not far away.”

  “She’s dead, but she could be close by,” a third kid said. This one wore aviator sunglasses. “It’s not that easy to get rid of a body.”

  “Sure it is,” said the short kid.

  “Whoever finds her will be a hero,” Toby said.

  “Okay,” said the kid with the sunglasses. “How do you get rid of a body?”

  “Take it ten miles out in the Gulf and weigh it down and toss it overboard. You can incinerate it. You can feed it to animals. Like pigs. I saw a movie where they fed bodies to pigs.”

  “You’ve seen a lot of movies, I bet,” said Toby. “I bet most of what you know comes from watching movies.”

  The kids finally looked at Toby. They kept walking.

  “If you guys think she’s dead,” he said, “you shouldn’t be out here.”

  “We have to be,” said the one with the bushy hair. “Our coach counts a search as a practice. You miss a practice, you don’t play that week.”

  “Our coach is a dick,” said the kid with the sunglasses. “He always hits on my mom, and if he doesn’t stop it he better fucking watch out.”

  “I don’t blame him,” the short kid said. “Your mom’s hot.”

  The kid with the sunglasses reached up and shook a branch, soaking the short kid, and the short kid stiffened, nodding in appreciation, water dripping off his chin.

  Toby felt like screaming, telling these kids to quit horsing around because Kaley was alive and she needed them. Toby felt slighted. These kids didn’t know who he was and were treating him like any old rubberneck who wanted to get in with a search party. And Toby felt annoyed, in a sharper way, at himself. He had the feeling that as long as no one knew what he’d done, it hadn’t really happened. He was allowing himself to care about what people knew or didn’t know. Toby felt like he could fall asleep in class one day and when he woke up at the end of the period none of this would be real.

  Action 7 kept leaving Cracker Barrel on the front walk. The Registers’ fridge contained stacks of foam boxes—chicken and dumplings, grits, cheese-topped potatoes. Shelby had eaten none of it except the tiny tubs of apple butter, which she spooned into her mouth with her finger.

  The church groups had stopped lighting candles on the front walk. That many candles were probably expensive and it was tough to keep them lit with the wind blowing. Four days in and they’d given up on finding Kaley, whether they knew it or not, and were now going through the motions of church folk, wondering how long faith was supposed to linger in a situation like this, how long faith was supposed to compel you to trip around in the woods getting eaten alive by bugs. It was almost time for them to say something about Kaley being an angel and return to planning their ski trips. The church folk had given up on Shelby, as well. The day before, they’d sent a girl about her age, a squinty thing with a million barrettes, right up the walk and onto the porch with a backpack full of Christian music. Shelby recognized her from school. She stared at the girl through the window by the door and the girl stared back. Shelby eased the door open.

  “Here to pray?”

  “If you’d like,” said the girl.

  “Why don’t you hand over the bag?”

  The girl mustered a smile, picking at a barrette.

  “I said hand it over.”

  “It’s stuff for us to hang out.”

  “I’ll hang out with it first,” Shelby said. “Then you can hang out with it. We’ll see which one of us the stuff likes better.”

  The girl was about to say something, but Shelby snatched the bag.

  “I’ve got something for you too,” Shelby said. “Wait here.”

  Shelby went to the fridge and pulled out a container of grits. She found a serving spoon. When she returned to the front door, the girl hadn’t moved. Her lips were stretched shut over her braces. Her arms hung at her sides, hands resting loosely in her pockets. Shelby drew the door all the way open. She dug the spoon into the grits and flung some at the girl, who was too nervous to flinch. The grits slapped against the girl’s forehead. Shelby had never done anything so mean. She heaped up another spoonful and the girl squealed, backing up.

  “Watch the step.” Shelby unloaded, the congealed grits thudding against the girl’s chest, tumbling inside her blouse.

  And then the girl stopped backpedaling, suddenly defiant. She closed her eyes and turned her face up, as if daring Shelby.

  “I get it,” Shelby said. “You’re being persecuted. You’re enduring whatever trials you have to endure.”

  Shelby readied her spoon and cocked her arm. She felt low and childish, but that was how she needed to feel. She needed to not be felt sorry for. She thwacked the girl across the bridge of the nose with more grits and then slammed the door. Shelby believed she deserved to act however she wanted. Every hour she had a different soul, and she wasn’t going to resist any of them.

  Toby didn’t know how long Uncle Neal would be out of the house. He rushed from room to room—tissues, bandages, lip balm. Toby had brought trip after trip of supplies down to the bunker beforehand, but there was a lot he hadn’t thought of. He’d rushed into the whole thing, he saw, but his mind would catch up with itself. If he could keep eating dinner and keep getting up in the morning and leaving the house, his mind would catch up.

  He looked for something other than water to give Kaley to drink, something with flavor, but he didn’t want to give her soda and make her that much more unmanageable. He saw her wide, flushed face and her snot-glazed chin every time he closed his eyes. He had decided never to speak to her, never to utter a word down in the bunker. She would settle down. She would see that Toby was a stone and she would settle down.

  Toby had to filch supplies from his uncle a little at a time. He took part of a watermelon, and a stack of paper bowls with a picture on the plastic wrap of people having a picnic. Toby needed more buckets but couldn’t find any. There were likely a few out in the shed, but the shed was locked up and Toby wasn’t allowed into it.

  There were two FBI agents, both women. They didn’t show up until Kaley had been gone almost a week. They’d been on another case, they explained. Their department had been slashed to the bone. They weren’t going to be the primaries for Kaley’s case. They were there to help out, conduct some interviews, get the police whatever resources they needed.

  The agents had spoken to Shelby’s father out in the woods that morning, and now they had Shelby cornered in the house. One of the agents was young. She wore bright sets of jewelry and had tangled, sh
oulder-length hair. The other was in her forties and had a pixie-cut. The agents interviewed Shelby in the living room. The one with the tangled hair found the remote control and muted the TV. Shelby tried not to look at the screen. It was a cooking program in which ingredients were tracked from their origin at the farm, were monitored as they were shipped to retail stores or co-ops, then finally made their way to plates.

  “Maybe you’ve got some coffee,” the agent with the pixie-cut said.

  “No,” Shelby answered. “We’ve got beer or water.”

  “Everybody calls this the real Florida,” the tangly-haired one said. “I don’t understand an expression like that. Is part of the state imaginary?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” Shelby answered.

  “And they call themselves crackers. Where I’m from, that’s what black people call white people when they’re angry.”

  On TV, an old man was explaining cheese. For some reason, he dropped a package of saltines on the ground and mashed them with his moccasin.

  “We’ve only got a couple questions.” The pixie-cut agent reached down and retied her boot, never losing eye contact with Shelby. She was performing her part of their routine. “Does your father have any friends that come around?” the agent asked. “Friends of the family? Drinking buddies?”

  “Not down here in Florida.”

  “Not one friend?”

  “Not that comes around.”

  “Does Kaley have a babysitter?”

  “You’re looking at her.”

  “Any prank calls?”

  Shelby shook her head. Prank calls seemed like a thing of the distant past, like cotton gins. She reached and pushed the power button on the remote, blanking the TV.

  “Did anything of Kaley’s go missing?”

  “No.”

  “How do you know for sure?”

  “I know how many of everything she has and it’s all in there.”

  “You know exactly how many shirts and socks she has?”

  Shelby wondered if these were the same questions they’d asked her father. She said, “The piles in the drawers look the same, and I know because I go in the drawers every morning when I get my sister dressed. When I used to.”

  After her sister had gone missing, Shelby had inventoried Kaley’s room, putting things in their place. The cops who’d come to investigate had been annoyed that Shelby’d disturbed the scene, but Shelby knew they wouldn’t have found anything. They were morons. So were these FBI agents. They all asked the same questions. They were all hoping for miracles.

  “Should you be writing this down?” Shelby asked.

  The pixie-cut agent winked. “I’d rather put it in my head than in a notepad. I could lose a notepad.”

  “You’ve never in your life lost your head?” asked the tangly-haired one.

  “Why was the sliding door unlocked?” the pixie-cut one asked Shelby.

  “I guess we were feeling carefree,” she said. “Is that an answer? We’d been out in the backyard earlier, filling the birdfeeder. It was me that forgot to lock the door. My dad told me not to forget to lock it and I forgot.”

  “Carefree, what a thing to be,” said the tangly-haired one.

  Shelby wanted to say something cutting to the agents.

  “Why do these women keep having all these children?” the pixie-cut agent asked, to no one in particular. “Nothing good comes of it. Why do they keep having them and having them?”

  The tangly-haired one raised her eyebrows, an expression that meant she was only the messenger. “Because that’s what everybody else is doing, that’s why.”

  Shelby picked her way through the woods at the rear of her house. Toby had PE sixth period and Shelby knew where he went during PE, over by the oversized air conditioning units in back of the chorus room. He always went to the far side and sat against the wall by himself. And there he was. He was reliable. He was where he was supposed to be. Shelby neared the fence, coming out of the woods, and Toby was sitting straight-legged, not more than a yell away from her. Shelby didn’t want to make noise. She waved her arm a few times and Toby saw her. He stared at first, like she was a deer that had wandered out of the woods, but then he knew it was her and he walked over toward the fence. The air was still. As Toby got closer, Shelby could hear the dry grass crunching under his sneakers. Here he was. Nothing had happened to him. He was still Toby.

  She looked into his deadpan brown eyes and they seemed to know everything. Neither of them spoke. Toby’s face was waffled with the fence’s shadow. For a moment Shelby forgot to think about herself—about her father, her sister, how she’d left the sliding door open, how she’d let her mother down, how she had to return to school and all of it seemed absurd now. The idea of being graded was farcical. The teachers. The clubs. The buildings themselves, crouched and faded.

  The PE coach sounded his whistle. Sixth period was ending. Shelby and Toby knew they had to speak. They had to finish the moment.

  “I’m still coming after you,” Shelby told him. “I’m going to pick up where I left off.”

  “I’ll be all the places I normally am,” Toby said.

  Shelby’s dad sat at the kitchen table with an open expression on his face, grasping a fork. He wanted coffee but Shelby refused to give him any. She wanted him to sleep.

  “The Boy Scouts are the best searchers,” Shelby’s dad said. “When a Boy Scout searches for something, he falls in love with it.”

  “That sounds true,” Shelby said. Her dad’s statements had taken on a philosophical tang.

  Shelby had her back to her father. She was picking chicken pieces out of some Cracker Barrel chicken and dumplings, filling a bowl. She would heavy her dad’s stomach and give him a shot of whisky.

  “This old man from the nondenominational church.” Shelby’s dad paused. She turned and saw him blinking, something in his eye. He tried to fish it out with his pinkie.

  “The old man?” Shelby said.

  “He’s got this grabber thing and then he brakes the snakes’ necks with his bare hands. He collects them in a sack and takes them home and burns them to the heavens.”

  “You’ve slept eleven hours in six days.”

  “I don’t feel that tired.”

  Shelby opened the fridge and shoved aside a mess of boxes, making room to put the dumplings back. She felt a diffuse pain in her midsection. Since her sister had disappeared, all physical pain was diffuse. She placed the bowl of chicken in front of her father. He ate three hunks, then coughed and set down his fork. Shelby went into the next room and put on quiet music. She closed all the blinds. When she returned to the kitchen, her dad had eaten no more of the chicken. He had a hunk on his fork and it was dripping gravy on the table.

  “My sister’s putting up fifty grand,” he said. “A reward for information leading to recovery.”

  “Her idea?”

  “She called yesterday. She’d been in Scotland.”

  Shelby nudged her dad’s hand toward his mouth and he ate the piece of chicken from his fork.

  Shelby’s aunt, her dad’s sister, lived in Iceland. She had a website, popular in certain circles, on which she reviewed books and restaurants and music and entire cities from the perspective of a space alien. The site was called whatwouldtheythink. Aunt Dale. She’d been with the same guy for fifteen years but hadn’t married him. There was a picture of her in the hallway that led to Shelby’s room. Aunt Dale had splotchy freckles and tight braids that stuck out stiffly from her head. She’d been friendly whenever Shelby had spoken to her on the phone, but Shelby hadn’t been in the same room with her in years. Shelby had looked at the website before, and it had made her feel lonely. The goings-on of these other people on these other continents were exciting and withering. Shelby had harbored a secret wish, after her mother passed away, that her Aunt Dale would make an effort to be closer to Shelby and Kaley, but that hadn’t happened. Aunt Dale was excused from doing a lot of things other people were expected to do. She was an artist, Sh
elby supposed. Shelby had no idea if she herself was an artist, if she would ever be excused from things for a reason other than that she’d been struck with misfortune.

  Shelby’s dad looked stymied. He was leaning forward against the table.

  “That’s good enough,” she told him. She removed his chicken and threw it in the trash, bowl and all. She poured a big shot and rubbed her father’s shoulders. He took the whisky down in subdued sips, like it was hot tea, then slid the shot glass to the middle of the table. Shelby wanted to sing her father a lullaby. She wanted to make a soothing sound. She rubbed her father’s shoulders more softly, found herself humming. It was a pretty sound. And it was working; her father was falling off.

  Shelby went across the house and pulled the mattress off her bed. She didn’t want to have to wake her father and make him stumble to his bedroom. If he took too many steps, he’d come to and head right out the front door. She stood the mattress on its side and tugged it down the hall. It got stuck turning the corner to the living room and Shelby had to bounce it free. When she reached the kitchen she leaned in the door frame and her father was not in his chair. She checked the bathroom, the utility room. She dashed to the front windows and threw aside a curtain. Her father was at the end of the walk. A couple of the reporters spoke and he spoke back. When he was almost past them, a lady reporter wearing a bright scarf, Sandra Denton, stepped from behind a van and stood in his path. The angle at which she held her head was meant to be conspiratorial. Sandra Denton fondled her earrings. She touched Shelby’s dad’s sleeve. He walked on, into the brush, and she had to watch him go.