The Runaway

by Jo Barney

  When Sarah comes back to the door, smudged but not hiccupping anymore, I have finished the call. “No, I don’t want to give you my name,” I say, as I hang up. I suppose they can trace the call, but since the phone is out in the hallway, there are twenty suspects. None of their business who I am.

  And Sarah is none of my business from this moment on. Not after seeing the shoe, remembering how ten years ago, as I curled up on the kitchen floor, my eighteen-year-old son aimed a similar Nike at my stomach, yelling that he wished I was dead. Haven’t had to think of that night for a long time until now, until Sarah. This boy isn’t Danny. I could see that as soon as his young face gazed out at the sky. My son would not be young anymore. He might be under a pile of leaves, though, somewhere. Who knows?

  “Are the police coming?”

  “Not here. To the street. He’ll be gone in a minute.”

  “I don’t want to go out until…” The girl can’t seem to light anywhere, wandering from one spot to another, looking into a cupboard, touching a tabletop, and then picking up the picture frame, looking at a kid who had slicked back his long hair into a pompadour. “Who’d you say this is?”

  “None of your business,” I say. A siren blares frantic bleeps a block away and then is silent. “And that dead person who is being carted away as we speak is none of my business either, even though it is apparent that you know him.” I grab the picture from her and put it back on the table. “I don’t want to hear about it, and I want you to leave before I get sucked into the kind of trouble I‘ve managed to avoid for years. I don’t do police. I don’t do murders. I don’t do homeless girls who would not be homeless if they had any sense.”

  “I might be pregnant.”

  “I couldn’t care less.”

  Actually, I do care. The shock of that shoe poking out of the leaves has me wallowing in memories I thought I’d buried away for good. Me, pregnant, crazy in love with a fool who left me as soon as I miscarried. My grandmother washed her hands of me, and I spent the next twenty years wandering from bed to bed, one or two of them my own during the times I quit drinking and got a grip on life. I was living in an apartment when I brought someone home from a tavern to help me celebrate my thirty-seventh birthday. My birthday present to myself was a unmemorable roll in the hay, an ivory-handled knife that had slipped between the cushions of the couch we had wrestled on, and fifteen years wiping a snotty nose, combing for lice, waiting for the school to call, and chaining myself to a job in a cannery. I ended up with food on our table most of the time, a few good laughs, and varicose veins. When Danny asked, I couldn’t remember his father’s name, only that the guy stole my last pack of cigarettes as he snuck out the door sometime early that morning. I didn’t mention that I wasn’t sure which had made me madder, the ciggies or the sneaking. I did tell Danny that he was the best birthday surprise ever, no matter what. I’m not sure he believed me. He and I were not percolating much trust by then.

  Finally, being a mother didn’t work for me anymore. I wasn’t up to it. I look at Sarah, and even though I am angry at her for trying to get into my life, I can’t wish my story on her. And I can’t watch it repeat from the sidelines, either. “You are out of here tomorrow.”

  * * *

  The next morning, the door slams and I mutter, “Good riddance.” One sleepless night has convinced me I am right. Maybe pregnant. Crying for hours about her Peter under the leaves and about a camp in the forest where she’d gotten to know him. She shouldn’t have left the camp, she moaned. He’d saved her life, maybe, that night he’d found her in the doorway. She had owed it to him to stick by him. I’m guessing he might be the father of Sarah’s maybe-baby, as she calls it, abandoned even before the kid becomes real.

  By the time she leaves, I am beginning to believe that she’s probably lucky she got away from whatever is happening in that secret camp in the woods. Maybe “those people” aren’t just a bunch of runaway kids living off the land. If they are something else, something evil or nuts, Sarah herself could be under the leaves right now. For some reason, she was afraid enough to run away from a place she thought was safe, to choose the streets again, to risk bothering a crabby old lady for a bowl of mac and cheese.

  I am midway to sitting down in the overstuffed chair when I stop. I see in this same chair a girl in a red silk robe crying about a doll. I shake off the scene. Not my business, I answer myself, as usual, lowering my body into the cushion.

  “No,” I say out loud. “Not this time.”

  I should have asked more questions.

  I push myself upright and hurry to the door. I look down the hall, hear my recycled red sneakers thumping down the stairs below me, the elevator occupied elsewhere. “Sarah!” I call, not caring that doors will open as my voice echoes down the stairwell. “Wait!”

  Chapter Twelve

  Jeff

  1997-1998

  His clients say they like the way he talks, as if he’s had an education. Jeff appreciates the way their money feeds his closet, his fridge, his stash. And he is okay with the whips and rings and giant plastic phalluses some of them require. He stores such equipment under his bed, next to the box of porn. Once Danny understands, after a long night of beer-inspired intimacy, the role Grandpa Jack had in Jeff’s choice of profession, he and Danny don’t talk about this other life or the men who walk through the dim lobby to his studio apartment and back into the street, past Danny, waiting on the steps outside.

  Danny’s at his door because his mother, pissed about the calls from school, has taken to laying into him the moment he walks in. He escapes her bourbon-fueled sermons by going to Jeff’s. After the time he walked into a bare butt, not Jeff’s, Danny waits until the john has climbed into his car or has walked briskly away. The apartment offers, besides a haven from his mother’s voice, an assortment of goodies, which for Danny means pills of various colors.

  “She kicked me out.” This time Danny has come in carrying an old black suitcase. He sets it down and starts poking through the plastic bags Jeff keeps in a coffee can.

  “Your mother says a lot of things, doesn’t she?” Jeff lies on his bed, inhaling, letting the smoke ease out, a thin gray plume rising above his head. He pats the fifty bucks lying on the bed, still warm from the man’s hand. “She won’t.”

  “She found the bag of crack in my pocket.”

  “You still had it? God. Steve was waiting for it; he’s already paid.” Jeff sighs. He can’t believe Danny has fucked up again.

  Danny had stayed home that day—the flu, he told his mother. She shook her head and poured herself another drink. “Sure,” was all she said. Then she picked up his jacket, felt the baggie in the pocket, took it out. When she screamed at him to get out, he did.

  “Wasn’t my fault. I just smoked a little, to test it. I was going to deliver the rest tomorrow before school. I still got the bag, so no loss.” Danny nudges the suitcase at his feet. “I don’t have any place to go.”

  “I thought we agreed.” Jeff pushes himself up on one elbow. “We’re in this to make money. Crackheads don’t make money.” That had been their first rule. They would sell, not use. Crack, especially. Pot and pills were cheaper, easier to come by, less profitable.

  Jeff lies back down again, mellowing out, doesn’t bother to look at Danny as he takes another drag and offers the reefer to his friend. “Your mother won’t remember any of this in a couple of days. Let her cool off so you can plead adolescence. And stick with the plan: I find it, you deliver it.

  * * *

  The guy is so terrified he pees his pants, and he hands over his wallet with his eyes closed. Danny takes it, counts out eight $10 bills, tosses the wallet on the ground. Jeff is disappointed. Eighty bucks is hardly worth the effort. “Let’s check his pockets.” He opens his jacket and pulls the knife out of its sheath, aims it at the man’s heart. “There’s got to be more,” he says.

  “No more.” The man, his forehead shiny with sweat, turns out his pants pockets, pats his tweed jack
et, his hands shaking, forcing themselves into the narrow openings. “Nothing.”

  Danny bends to check for bills hidden in socks, but stops patting. “Wet. Forget it,” he says. “It’s enough for now.”

  One more jab at the white shirt reveals a little skin. The blade rests under the folds of his chin. “No sounds for ten minutes, or we’re back to finish you for good.” The man, his face ghostly pale in the dark of the doorway, nods, clutches his arms across body, lean against the window at his back. “Okay,” he gasps.

  Jeff and Danny run down the quiet street, abandoned now that the theater crowd has cleared, giving each other congratulatory shoves, laughing. God, this is so easy, Jeff thinks, a new kind of thrill even if it is only eighty bucks. The look on the guy’s face! A few blocks away they turn a corner, stop, breathing hard. Grinning, Jeff slips the knife back into its holder at his waist. “Good piece of steel, this,” he says. “Where’d you get it?”

  Danny shrugs. “Kitchen drawer. Been there forever.”

  “Your mom will never miss it.” They punch each other again. It is true; Danny’s mother never misses anything.

  “Let’s go back to my place. We both deserve a night off.”

  * * *

  This client reminds him of Grandpa Jack, a little older, “portly,” his grandfather would have said. And rich. This afternoon is the third time he’s come by, their next appointment set as he buttons his jacket, stretches his leathery neck to adjust his tie. Each time he’s paid with $50 bills, one more with each visit.

  Jeff spreads the three bills like a spray of winning cards and wonders how long this can go on. He enjoys talking to the old guy, would have listened even longer, but Roger says he has to get home.

  “Wife, you know,” as indeed Jeff does know. Roger’s stories invariably involve his family life, kids in college, disappointment in bed. “That’s why I’m so glad to have met you. You’re good for me.” He touches Jeff’s arm, seems about to come closer, but does not. Jeff is relieved. The one thing he doesn’t do is kiss. Never did like kisses, although he doesn’t know for sure because no one has ever kissed him. Not that he can remember.

  “You’re good for me, too, Roger. See you next week.” Roger opens the door and has to step around Danny. He turns his face away and hurries down the stairs without looking back.

  “What are you doing here? It’s really late.” Jeff starts to close the door. He needs a little quiet after a long day, not late-night pot-induced camaraderie.

  “I need to come in. Something’s happened.” Danny tosses a newspaper at Jeff, goes to the closet and pulls out the coffee can containing the marijuana. “I almost killed my mother.”

  “Local Man Dies After Assault and Robbery, “ Jeff reads aloud. He scans the article at the bottom of the front page which tells of a robbery victim who made his way into a store after being attacked and managed to describe his assailants and even their weapon, an ivory-handled hunting knife, before he died of a heart attack on the floor of the 7-Eleven as the medics arrived.

  “Fuck.”

  “Mom knew it was us. She called the cops this time. She was going to report us before we actually murdered someone, she said. Teach us a lesson.”

  “The cunt.”

  “I hit her.” Danny’s words were coming out in lumps, between gulps for air.

  Jeff has trouble making sense of what his friend is trying to say, but he knows it isn’t good. “Take a breath,” he says, dreading what might come next.

  “I was so mad, I kicked her while she was screaming on the floor, and I was packing to get out of there when the cop knocked on the door.”

  By now, Danny is crying and mumbling something about the policeman asking about a “family disturbance.” Something about her saying she’d been so upset she called the police. But by mistake, she told the cop. They’d made up. “We don’t need you anymore. I’ll take care of my son,” she said. The cop asked if she was sure. “Yes,” she answered, one hand bloody, pressing her nose. “I was careless, that’s all.”

  Danny drags on a joint, and his words stutter to a stop. He takes another hit, rubs the frown between his eyes. “Why would my mother do that, lie like that?”

  Jeff shakes his head. How could he know? “Your mom was drunk when she made the call, and by the time the cop came, she was still drunk and bloody and worried he’d think whatever had gone down was her fault. Maybe she was feeling guilty.”

  “I told her I hated her and I’d get even with her for everything. When I left, she was still moaning, holding her ribs.” Danny is threatening to break up again, and Jeff has trouble understanding why. The woman has been a bitch of a mother. What’s there to cry about when a parent sucks so bad at the job?

  Later, after Danny had retreated into a sodden sleep on the couch, Jeff tried to figure it out. He certainly hadn’t shed a tear when, a few months after he moved out, he got word that Grandpa Jack had hung himself. He was asked to come to his grandfather’s room in a transient hotel to clear it out.

  The smell had been nauseating because it had taken several days for his grandfather to be missed. Jeff almost turned back, but curiosity sent him into the room, his jacket collar over his nose. He found no note, just a pile of books marked “My Grandson,” which Jeff gave to the woman who came to clean the room.

  He was leaving when she held out a folded piece of paper. “Want this?” she asked. “Fell out of one of the books.” Jeff opened it, read the words, shoved the letter in his pocket. Grandpa Jack had saved it. Why? He’d think about it later. Right then, he needed to close the door on what was left of his grandfather.

  Lonely or guilt-stricken? Didn’t matter to anyone but a useless old man. Certainly not, he thinks, to the old man’s grandson, who still sometimes waits for the mattress to move, the blankets to lift and bring in cold air and warm hands. Fuck him.

  Jeff wakes Danny up. Then he opens the closet where his clothes and his backpack wait. “Doesn’t mean that she won’t sober up and call the police again, does it? We’re out of here.” The OxyContin he swallowed a few minutes before is kicking in, and he grins at Danny, who is blowing his nose on toilet paper, done with the tears. “I’ll miss Roger, but there will be a lot more Rogers up north in Green River. And good business for you, too. You’ll see.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Matt

  September 2009

  The street is a familiar one. A woman has reported a body in a gutter, covered with leaves. He drives slowly, until he sees the flashing lights of the EMT half a block away.

  As a patrolman, Matt Trommald had been assigned to this neighborhood. By day, the small park accommodated then, and still does, drug dealers, transients slumped on the wooden benches along the paths, mothers with strollers, and teenagers looking for a place to land. At 11:00 P.M. it officially closes. The benches are empty. However, the patches of grass and bark dust away from the lights, hidden in shadows, echo with the sounds of kids sharing their alcohol, drugs, sex, and laughter. Most live in the apartments that line the streets, Matt guessed. The park provides an escape from family and walls. With his flashlight and loudspeaker, some nights Matt would send a dozen or more kids streaming into the dark yelling obscenities and threats as they ran. Different kids, now, but the same vocabulary, he is sure.

  He pulls up, lights on, in the middle of the street. A couple of kneeling medics stand up, and he sees a body lying in the debris in the gutter. He gets out, walks to the crowded curb.

  “Dead, looks like for couple of days,” a medic says.

  Dry oak leaves flutter and rise in a light breeze, and an arm is revealed. A shoulder, an ear pressed against a bloody head. He can see that the victim was young, twenty, maybe, with not only a head wound but a cut that has left a red trail across the front of his plaid flannel shirt. The medical examiner will follow in a minute or two with a photographer. When they’re finished, he’ll search pockets, attempt to learn who this kid is. Was.

  When the body is ready to be taken to
the morgue, Matt stoops to look through pockets, turns him slightly to inspect arms, the other half of his face. One tattoo, done with a needle and a ballpoint pen, a smiley face, is embedded in the skin on the back of his left hand. Jeans, a knee patched with a plaid material similar to the shirt he is wearing. Brown hair, shoulder length, held back in a rubber-banded pony. Fingernails grimy, hands dirty. Athletic shoes, worn but tied. No wallet, one pocket turned out as if someone had pulled something out of it. A good-looking kid. No sign of gang identity, more likely a street kid, killed for whatever was in that pocket.

  Matt stands up and realizes he has company, mostly older folks. Neighbors. “Anyone know this person?” Heads shake. Matt hands out his card. “If you hear anything, give me a call. We‘ll need your help.” The cards are glanced at, held between fingers like unwanted gifts as the small crowd moves on.

  “It’s that damn park.” A balding, elderly man grabs Matt’s arm. “They ought to bulldoze it, get rid of the shit that goes on there. How’s a person supposed to sleep knowing they’re killing people a block away?” Murmurs. Matt wants to reassure him but doesn’t. The man isn’t really asking a question, only making a comment about life.

  One of those people walking away might have been the person who made the 911 call. An older voice, female, refused to identify herself. Matt pauses. Why would an innocent bystander not give her name? What did she see that would make her either afraid or not so innocent? Hard to think that any one of the slow-stepping seventy-year-olds had either the strength or the reason to murder the boy who is now being lifted onto the gurney.

  He radios his desk, asks his assistant, Shelly, if she has been able to trace the call. She has. It came from the multistory low-income apartment house Matt can see a block away. He gets out his pad, jots down the phone number and waits for the name of the person he’ll be talking to in a minute or two.