by Mike Roberts
BALENTYNE
People don’t just disappear anymore. You would hear someone saying this. Everyone was talking about John Francis Balentyne. This was the kid who disappeared. Just out of the blue, gone, and no one could say what had happened to him.
We didn’t know Balentyne, but we talked about him, too. There were friends of friends, and all the loose degrees of separation in a small city. People felt like they could’ve known him, at a party, in a bar, just casually, wherever. Balentyne’s roommates were talking to the free weeklies, and we would look for his name in The Portland Mercury. Everyone felt certain he would come back. Everyone was sure that the whole thing would turn out fine. John just did this sort of thing sometimes, and no one gave much cause to worry yet. It had only been one week.
* * *
The story of Balentyne was simple enough: he drank too much one night and had a bad encounter with a girlfriend, or somebody, at a bar. People said that Balentyne made an ugly little scene of it and got himself kicked out. They all remembered him leaving the bar, drunk and unhappy. Walking out onto the street to unlock his bike.
Balentyne came home around midnight, grumbling how sick he was of all this Portland bullshit. His roommates laughed and ignored him as they watched TV in the other room. Balentyne dropped his bag onto the floor and took a beer out of the fridge. He went into his bedroom and came back out again, banging his bicycle down the hallway, letting the screen door slam. He didn’t say goodbye.
And that was the last time anyone saw John Francis Balentyne.
His cell phone rang and rang, and eventually went straight to voice mail. His roommates looked through his bedroom but found only unwashed clothes. There were no notes or explanations. No directions or intentions or clues left to follow. There was nothing on his computer but fragments of artwork. His truck was unlocked in the yard, but the only thing they found out there was a stack of overdue library books.
Overnight, a photocopied poster went up all over the city. Stapled to telephone poles and taped up inside of convenience stores. We looked at Balentyne’s face now as we waited for the bus or a cashier to make our change. This missing poster became a stand-in for the real thing. It was the disappearance after a while, and it kept people talking about this kid they hardly knew.
After a week, the Mercury gave a small public recounting of the life and times of John Francis Balentyne. His friends reported misadventures and personal oddities. John might simply have gone home to see his parents, they thought, though no one seemed to have a number. Balentyne used to hop trains and hitchhike, they all recalled now. He once rode his bicycle down to L.A., which had taken him weeks. He was famous for walking around the city at night, taking photographs, and showing up at work the next day without sleeping. But he never missed a day of work. They were all certain of that. He was always working: two, three jobs at a time. Balentyne had a history of leaving in the summer for seasonal work, and that could be what this was. He used to have a job on a farm outside of Olympia. He used to harvest pot for some old hippie in California. A year ago he took a job on an Alaskan fishing boat and came back with a scar on his face.
Balentyne was just prone to these breakdowns in communication, they all said, almost defensively. Even in the best of times, he would miss a bill and have his phone shut off for a day or a week. It just wasn’t that unusual. Balentyne could be a bit of a loner, yeah, but he always came back around.
Together we all told the ballad of John Francis Balentyne. There could be only two possibilities now: either he had taken off on purpose, or something bad had happened to him. People found themselves attracted or repelled accordingly. Even in the rush to rumor and conjecture, it was hard not to acknowledge some dark appeal in simply taking off. We felt threatened and excited by the disappearance of this young man. In a world of false connections, John Francis Balentyne had found some quiet mystery here. He had a secret, and like it or not, it was making a kind of folk hero out of the kid.
* * *
After ten days, someone on the Internet found a photo of Balentyne from the night he disappeared. This grainy still-frame capture from an ATM outside a Wells Fargo. The image was time-stamped 12:41 a.m., and it showed John Francis Balentyne leaning over his bicycle and withdrawing one hundred dollars, before disappearing into the night.
The photograph was online before the police even had a copy, and this was strangely thrilling. Finally there was a clue. We stared at the fuzzy blue monochrome, desperately trying to decide what it meant. Balentyne’s tired face, staring past the security camera, as he waited for his money. One frame later, he was gone.
Still, this one photo helped jump-start the search for John Francis Balentyne. It restated the plea for people with any information to please come forward. His friends got the story back up on the nightly news. Phone calls were made to bars and chain restaurants in the area. Requests were made to view surveillance tapes from businesses large and small. Strangers constructed elaborate Google maps, with lines and concentric circles running off in every conceivable direction, to show the limits of how far Balentyne could go, in one night, on a bicycle. Whatever else it meant, this picture planted a third flag on the map for real. After the bar, and after his house, John Francis Balentyne had taken out one hundred dollars cash in Northeast Portland.
* * *
By the end of the second week, the public imagination had started to turn on Balentyne, though. People knew that he had not gone to his parents’ house. He was not in Olympia or Alaska or Los Angeles. Everyone knew that he hadn’t hopped a train in over three years. No one in any part of the country had heard any word from John Francis Balentyne since the night he took off on his bicycle. And where was the girlfriend from that night at the bar, anyway? How come we never heard any more from her? Was it possible we had projected her into the story ourselves? Or maybe she just didn’t feel it was right to talk about John this way.
Either way, Balentyne was still missing, and it seemed to make people anxious and resentful. The Internet took up this story in a kind of backlash. Message boards and forums that had felt so constructive the week before felt like echo chambers now. People said ugly, impulsive, hurtful things, and they didn’t sign their names to them. Balentyne was framed as a misfit and a con man. Where was his Facebook page, and why hadn’t he posted more pictures of himself or his artwork online? How could we be asked to trust a kid who had disengaged himself from the culture of self-promotion anyway? People found it baffling and amusing that someone could exist in the world without the paper trails of his generation. This was what made John Francis Balentyne so unusual to everyone. People don’t just disappear anymore.
* * *
This being the Great Northwest, people’s minds took to wandering. Everyone suspected foul play in one way or another. People joked about the one-armed man and satanists in the woods. Others were legitimately fixated on the hundred dollars, insisting it was a drug deal gone wrong. Or maybe just a botched robbery. Wasn’t that a shadow, just off-camera, in the picture from the ATM? People said, in earnest, that John Balentyne had gone off his meds and didn’t know where he was. They said he’d been hit by a trucker and buried in the woods. Others argued that sudden disappearance was the hallmark of organized crime. Or was that UFOs? Or maybe we were all just scratching at the idea of a serial killer on the loose now. It hardly mattered. People found ways to connect the disappearance of John Francis Balentyne to unsolved crimes all across the country.
The sheriff’s office was forced to release a statement, saying that, without a single hard clue as to the whereabouts of John Francis Balentyne, they wouldn’t even know where to begin a search. Furthermore, they wanted it put on the record that, despite the many rumors to the contrary, John Balentyne had no history of mental illness of any sort. He did not have a criminal record. He was not believed to be a drug user or a depressive or any overt threat to himself or anyone else. He was just missing.
* * *
Eventually Balentyne’s roomm
ates pulled everything out of his room and found some journals in a closet. But the writing was abstract and indecipherable, as these things usually go. They were just private conversations Balentyne was having with himself, and nothing more. Worse, the notebooks were all six months old anyway.
But the Mercury still printed excerpts, out of context, just the same, and it depressed us that they would do that now. Everyone was claiming squatter’s rights on the life of John Francis Balentyne.
* * *
In quieter conversations, among friends, we found ourselves making grim jokes about death. People had some need to revel in a shared disaster. It was a way to begin to forget. Something terrible had happened to John Francis Balentyne, the same as it could happen to any one of us. So what could be done for it now?
There were rumors that Balentyne’s sister was around now, too. People said she had paid her brother’s rent and was living in his bedroom on a temporary basis. She had come because she wanted to help; she was looking for answers, and who could blame her? Someone pointed her out to me in a bar one night, but I couldn’t make myself go up and talk to her. Not even just to nod and say something friendly. I couldn’t risk the idea that she might burst into tears. Or that I might, maybe.
* * *
Is it too obvious to say that I was thinking about myself in all of this? I’ve been blacked out on my bicycle. I’ve been that drunk and fought with girls and friends. We were all self-pitying and self-destroying sometimes: taking the long way home; climbing over the wrong fences; lingering up on steep rooftops. I’ve trespassed in buildings, and jumped off of bridges, and crashed into the street. I’ve thrown punches at strangers and been knocked down for my big mouth. And who hasn’t taken a ride from a drunk driver before? Or given one, too. All these fucking drunk drivers!
Once a guy walked into a party with a gun. He pointed it at me and told me I’d better turn the stereo down, right now. Me! Jesus Christ, it wasn’t even my house. I hadn’t even been invited to this fucking party! But everyone went dead silent just the same. A kind of horror-of-the-moment, with the stereo screaming out of the wall, as this guy walked me across the living room at gunpoint. I turned the music down, and he nodded and looked around the room. And then he left. That was it. We all just laughed and turned the stereo right back up, because fuck him.
This was a thing that really happened! I have no idea what it means, but I must’ve told that story a thousand times. I drank out on it for weeks! And it didn’t do anything to change me, either. Even now, I still fight against that strain of recklessness. Every time we didn’t die we laughed. It had to be this way. I could have died a thousand times by now, but I didn’t. I was still alive.
So where was John Francis Balentyne, and what were we to make of his famous reluctance to reappear? He was more than just a name being drilled into my head. Balentyne would show up incongruously in my dreams at night. He had taken on a kind of weight in the full three-part name. John. Francis. Balentyne. His friends called him Balentyne, and his sister called him John. But the newspapers and strangers all called him John Francis Balentyne. We projected ourselves onto his life. Balentyne should have been a writer, I thought. This was the name that a novelist has. John Francis Balentyne would know how to rewrite his book. Even if it was about cows.
* * *
Eventually Balentyne’s sister disappeared, as well. Gone home to Milwaukee or Pittsburgh or Toledo, someone said. The roommates were forced to rent out Johnny’s room, and life went on. Until, one day, a picture was posted on a bike blog. Someone had found a fixed-gear locked to a tree, down by the Willamette River. Way down by the science museum, totally out of place. People wrote to say that the bike was Balentyne’s, they were certain of this, and we all got excited again in spite of ourselves. But this was fleeting, too, of course. This was not good news. Balentyne was dead, I thought.
The next morning, I decided to go down there. It was a gray and ugly day, and I didn’t tell anyone what I was doing. I wouldn’t know what to say, besides. I just wanted to see the bare spot where Balentyne had locked his bike. I wanted to see the river there. I wanted to know what made him stop in that place. Why there?
I locked up on the street, outside of OMSI, and I followed the spiral sidewalks to the end. I left the path and went down into the weeds where the ground was soft and patched with moss. I could feel the heavy, metallic grind of the trains lumbering through the switchyard in the distance. I just wanted to see the bike and go, I told myself, as I fought deeper into the tangle of weeds.
But when I finally found it I wasn’t sure. I had to stop and stare at the thing, so white and colorless it was absorbed into the landscape. I had to force myself to connect this bicycle to the picture I had looked at on the Internet one hour before. Something had already happened here, something very obvious. Balentyne’s bike was just a shell of its lock and frame. Picked apart by looters. People had already come down here, claiming pieces off the wreck. The back wheel; the seat; even the handlebars were gone.
It was clear that there was nothing left to save. I had seen it, and I didn’t want to linger. This bike was no more a symbol than Balentyne himself. And one day someone would find a way to take the whole thing apart entirely. It all felt so random now, as I exhaled and looked out across the river where the drawbridges were suddenly rising. I turned away and walked back up the hill to the street.
By the end of the week it was over. An OMSI worker found something washed up on the banks of the river, nearly a mile from John Balentyne’s bike. The police identified the body of John Francis Balentyne, age twenty-six. There was no sign of foul play upon the body. There was no evidence of accident or intent. There was no categorical way to say how this boy’s body had come to rest inside of the river. Only that Balentyne had been found now, missing one month to the day.
TEXAS LANDLADY BLUES
Maritza picked up Bruno off the floor and put him down in her lap, letting him settle there. I watched as she opened the front of her shirt and pulled out her breast to give it to the baby. I saw Maritza’s dark tan line where the skin went suddenly and startlingly white. Her breast was the same color as the baby’s face.
This happened right in the middle of our conversation, as we sat there in the living room. I paused, trying to meet Maritza’s eye, trying to remember what it was we were talking about. Not that it bothered Maritza any. This was just one more thing that she did for the baby, all day long, out of need.
“Do you want to hold him?” she asked, misplacing my curiosity.
“Oh, no. Thank you,” I said, sitting back. This was not what I wanted.
“Of course you do. Here.” And, just like that, little Bruno’s meal was over. Maritza held him out to me with his mouth still dripping. “Don’t worry. You’ll be fine.”
I reached up reflexively as she pressed the wriggling child into my chest. Maritza stepped away and smiled, the way that all mothers revel in seeing their children held.
“There. See? You can’t hurt him. He likes you.”
I held Bruno close like a small, captive animal. Balancing him against my body. “He’s so little,” I said, looking up at her.
“That’s not what Lane says. Lane says he’s getting big and fat now,” she said with a laugh. “He says that comes from my side of the family.”
I smiled and gave the baby back to Maritza. Relieved to have my arms free again.
* * *
I found Lane in the backyard swinging an ax into a tree stump in a loose and unprofitable way. “Where did you come from?” he said, looking up, flushed with sweat.
“Nowhere. I left some things at Shawn’s house. She asked me to pick them up.”
Lane nodded and slammed the ax back down, reducing this poor dead tree to splinters. It was ninety degrees at nine thirty in the morning, and no one in their right mind was chopping wood. There was a statewide burn ban, besides.
“Where did you get that thing?” I asked.
“Lady next door traded it to
me for a painting,” he said.
“Wow.” I smiled. I had one of Lane’s paintings. It showed George W. Bush on the deck of an aircraft carrier dressed in full fighter-pilot regalia. Lane had painted this picture from a dream I’d once described to him. One more thing I had neglected to take away from Shawn’s house, I realized now.
Thwack! Lane buried the ax into the old tree, chipping off another piece. It was clear that this stump had once existed as a table for splitting logs. But Lane had rendered the flat surface so completely crooked now as to make it almost entirely useless.
“Is this going to be some kind of sculpture?” I asked.
“This? No. This is just a thing to hit with my ax.”
“Right,” I said, watching him drive the bludgeon home again.
Lane stopped and wiped his hands on his chest, sucking at the thick morning air. “You wanna try it?”
It’s important to recognize a question that no one has ever asked you. I smiled and took the ax, and was pleased to find that it was every bit as sturdy as it looked. I raised it up over my head and slammed it down into the wood with a grunt.
“You know what I was thinking?” Lane asked.
“Not a clue,” I answered, bashing the stump again.
“We’re alive and living through the first decade of the twenty-first century. Do you understand what that means?”
“I think so,” I said, not at all sure what it might mean to Lane.
“It means that history is going to judge us as the most primitive and depraved people that live for the whole next hundred years. They’re not going to understand a goddamn thing about us. They’re going to think we were disgusting.”
“Who’s disgusting? Me and you?”
“Everybody,” he said, considering the mutilated stump. “I should make a video of this. Keep going. I’ll get my phone.”
* * *
I was living at Lane’s house on a temporary basis. This wasn’t the plan, it just sort of happened. I had moved down to Austin with a girl named Shawn. Shawn was the first girl I met in Portland, really. You remember Shawn. This was the girl with the dog. She loved that fucking dog, man. She would feed him straight out of her mouth and then try to kiss me on the lips. The whole thing was terrible, honestly. I didn’t even like going over to her house.