It was a pathetic sight. Open sores covered its tail and hind end. Its eyes were bloodshot, rimmed with a greenish discharge. Its legs were so weak that it could barely stand. Whenever it gained its footing it would topple again, falling flat on its face to a wounded cry from the crowd at the corner. The firefighters shared a plastic bottle of hand sanitizer at the truck, radioed for animal control.
A skinny kid with an uneven buzz cut broke from the crowd, ran back to his house. A minute later he returned with a plastic dish of what looked like wet cat food. He handed it to Pat. She set it down on the sidewalk, nudged it toward the dog with the toe of her rubber boot. The dog sniffed, hoisted itself up onto its toothpick legs and fell face first into the food. Another cry from the crowd. Pat turned her head, winced.
The boy asked the first firefighter how long the dog had been down there, where it came from.
“Probably a week,” the firefighter said. “Maybe more. Could have come from anywhere in the area, wandering around down in the sewer. Reached a dead end under this manhole cover and couldn’t turn around. Got stuck.”
“How’d he get down in there?”
“Crawled in through a curb inlet. Chased something down. Got pushed in, shoved in. Who knows?”
“Who does he belong to?”
“Nobody,” the firefighter said. “Everybody. He’s now a ward of the City of Los Angeles.”
The animal control van came. A pair of uniformed officers muzzled the dog, lifted it up into a cage in the back of the van. The firefighters replaced the manhole cover, climbed up into the fire truck and drove away with a quick burst of their siren, waving to the thinning crowd.
Darby knelt on the sidewalk, untied the rope from the fence. He thought of the dog under the manhole cover for a week, maybe more. The dog under there while Darby sat through the night in the pickup, while he tried to sleep during the day. The dog under there while The Kid stayed alone, while the sidewalk graffiti was sprayed. The dog under there while Darby was at job sites, while he was cleaning the hotel room by the beach.
The ring and the snow globe were in the glove compartment of the pickup. He went back to work in the garage, pulling boxes, clearing a path to the workbench and the drawer at the back.
The pager buzzed on his hip. He ignored it, continued to pull boxes. The pager buzzed again. He unhooked the new cell phone from its holster, called the dispatch office.
“Everclean Industrials.” It was Bob’s voice that answered the phone. Darby said nothing, confused, wondering if he’d somehow dialed the wrong number.
“Everclean Industrials,” Bob said.
“Bob, it’s me.”
“I just paged you. Took me twenty minutes to figure out how to do it.”
“Where’s Mrs. Fowler?”
“Home sick. Are you en route?”
“Not yet. The Kid’s sick.” The lie came quickly, easily. Standing in the driveway surrounded by boxes.
“What’s he got?” Bob said.
“I don’t know. I’ve got to pick him up at school. Something with his stomach, throwing up, the whole business.” The lie came quickly, easily, but he couldn’t leave the ring and the globe in the pickup. He had to get them into the workbench.
“Hang on a second,” Bob said. He coughed loudly away from the receiver, came back. “This is a small job, David. Don’t bother. Stay with The Kid.”
“Is Roistler there?”
“Roistler took a personal day.” Bob coughed again, cleared his throat. “Don’t worry about it. It’s a one-man job.”
“What’s the address?”
“Eucalyptus and Manchester. Down in Inglewood.”
“I’ll come once The Kid’s home and settled. An hour, tops.”
“Don’t sweat it. It’s a one-man job. Stay with The Kid. He needs you more than I do.”
Darby clipped the phone back into its holster. There were no one-man jobs. He knew this. It had been Everclean policy from the beginning. Every job was a team job. But he couldn’t leave the garage now. He pulled boxes for he didn’t know how long, until he was soaked in sweat again, until he had finally reached the workbench at the back. A couple of hours, maybe. The top drawer of the workbench, nothing but an envelope inside. Darby put the ring inside the drawer. He put the globe inside the drawer. He felt that same settling sensation from the storage facility, something completed, something done.
He had closed the drawer, was hauling the boxes back into the garage when the pager buzzed again.
The Kid was trying to draw women’s hands in his notebook. He wasn’t very good at it. His drawing was too blocky, the lines were too thick. He tried to draw like the chalk drawing in the burned house, the lines smooth and flowing, delicate. He kept crossing out, starting over, crossing out. Two pages full of mutant-looking hands already. He couldn’t get his pencil to do what he wanted it to do.
Matthew sat across the lunch table. He dipped his French fries into a small blob of ketchup, one at a time, bit the ends off slowly, chewed, placed the uneaten halves into a pile beside his plate.
Michelle set her tray down on their table. A thick slab of greasy cheese pizza, a small pile of cupcakes and Twinkies, a half-pint of chocolate milk. She sat down next to The Kid, tore the cellophane off the first cupcake with her teeth.
“Did you hear about Rey Lugo?” she said. “He had to get his stomach pumped. And it turns out that he’s a hemophiliac, which means he could get AIDS and die.”
“Where’d you hear that?” Matthew said.
“Don’t worry about where I heard it. I heard it from people.”
“What people?”
“Don’t worry where the fuck I heard it. It’s the truth. It’s real.”
Matthew made a sour face, looked down at his French fries. He didn’t like Michelle, didn’t like her curse words or her taking of the Lord’s name in vain, what he called her blasphemies.
The Kid tried to draw Michelle’s hands while she ate, but her hands were bigger than the chalk drawing’s hands, fat and stubby, with little half-moons of dirt under the chewed fingernails.
“I saw you guys talking to that new girl,” Michelle said, mouth full, black chocolate mush between her teeth. “I saw her sitting with you at recess.”
“So what?” Matthew said.
“Is she your friend?”
“Maybe.”
Michelle looked over to the other side of the courtyard, all the tables filled with kids. “Looks like she has some new friends.”
The Kid turned. Arizona was sitting at the end of a table across from Rhonda Sizemore. Brian Bromwell stood at the head of the table. They were all smiling and laughing about something. The Kid felt that familiar cold flush in his stomach. Maybe they were telling her about him, about his B.O. and bad breath. Maybe they were telling her not to stand too close, not to catch anything contagious.
“She can talk to whoever she wants,” Matthew said. “It’s a free country.”
“They’re probably talking about their periods,” Michelle said. “Rhonda Sizemore already has her period, I’ll bet you ten bucks. She’s that kind of person.”
“I don’t even know what you’re talking about,” Matthew said.
“Yes you do.”
“No I don’t.”
“You know what I’m talking about,” Michelle said. “Blood and babies.”
They sat on opposite sides of the desk in Molina’s office, looking out the open window into the garage. The TV in the waiting area showed a makeshift command center that had been set up a few hundred yards from the gates of Reality, California. A couple of tents, a podium and microphone, tall stands of TV lights. A BATF spokesman in a blue polo shirt stood at the podium fielding questions.
Molina loosened his tie, closed his eyes, fighting a headache. He pressed his fingertips to his eyelids.
“The story’s not really clear,” Molina said, “It wasn’t really clear to the cops. All I know is what Bob wrote in the log before he left for the job. The call came
in, a woman in a closet, a hanging. The police had come and gone, the coroner’s people had come and gone.”
Mrs. Fowler came into the office and set two Styrofoam cups of coffee on the desk. She left without saying a word, back through the door into the dispatch office.
“Who called in the job?” Darby said.
“The guy who owned the house. The police found one of his tenants in a closet and he wanted it cleaned.”
Darby looked at the framed photos on Molina’s desk. Molina’s wife and daughters at a motel pool in Vegas. A photo of Molina’s mother standing in a faded housedress, her dark face set, looking directly into the lens.
Darby thought of the photos from the hotel room, Stella lifting a picture from the box, holding it to her chest.
“The police came and did their thing,” Molina said. “The coroner’s people did their thing. Everybody left. Bob showed up and started the job. A couple hours later, the neighbors hear something and call the police again. The police enter the house, guns drawn. They find Bob standing in the bedroom closet, screaming.”
Molina stuck a finger in his coffee, stirred the cream into a brown swirl. “He had already completed the job. The place was clean, the van was packed. He was just standing in the closet screaming.”
Darby looked out the window at the TV. The BATF spokesman was telling the reporters that they had lost communication with the Realists, but that they were hoping this was only a temporary situation, that they’d soon reestablish contact.
“Where were you?” Molina said.
“The Kid was sick.”
“You should have called. You could have brought him over to our place. The girls would have looked after him.”
“Bob told me it was a one-man job.”
“There’s no such thing.”
“I know.”
“How long have we been doing this, David?” Molina stood, walked to the window. “No matter what Sacramento says. No matter what the safety reps say.”
“I told him I’d meet him down there once The Kid was asleep.”
“So what happened?”
Darby shook his head. “I don’t know.”
The BATF spokesman was saying that they weren’t sure if children were present in the compound, but that it was certainly something they were looking into, it was certainly something that would change the dynamic of the situation if it were true.
“Where is he now?” Darby said.
“Home. I told him to stay home a while. A week or so, however long. He said he was going to get a case of beer, watch TV, get drunk. I said that sounded like a good idea.”
Molina picked the cups off the desk, poured the coffee into the garbage can. “There’s no such thing as a one-man job, David. You know this. There’s no such thing.”
On the day after the doorbell had rung and the cops had stood on the porch and told him she was gone, the day after he’d told The Kid, after he’d called Bob, after he’d slept that first night in the cab of the pickup, he stood at a pay phone on Alvarado Street and dialed the number from the slip of paper in his wallet, waited through the long-distance clicks, listened to the phone ringing in Chicago.
He’d kept the paper in his wallet for years, since the time Lucy took The Kid to visit her parents over a summer break and it seemed like maybe they weren’t coming back. The Kid was three at the time; they had just celebrated his birthday. Lucy had left the phone number on the kitchen table, taken The Kid’s hand, lifted her suitcase and walked out of the house to the taxi waiting at the curb. Darby stood on the porch and watched them go. It was a planned vacation. Twelve days with her parents, then a return flight home. But it had become something else in the weeks leading up to the flight. The trip to Chicago was an unanswered question. Neither of them had said it explicitly, but the return ticket home no longer seemed guaranteed.
He’d called the number every night to talk to The Kid before he went to bed, to talk to Lucy for a while, soft night voices on the phone, Midwest to west coast, back and forth, a delicate negotiation, neither sure exactly what they wanted the outcome to be. Every night, twenty minutes, an hour, talking like they were discussing something that had already happened, something that had come and gone. Darby listless those twelve days, watching TV in the empty house, going out on jobs, drinking with Bob, aching for a cigarette. Thinking that maybe this should be the end, that it would be easier this way, it would be better for all of them. The Kid would adjust, The Kid would adapt. Kids did that, they survived. But he still found himself counting the days until their planned return, and then counting the days after, the postponement of the return, the no man’s land after the plane tickets expired. At night he’d call the number and Earl would answer the phone, always Earl, his daughter’s sudden guardian. Darby would ask to speak to Lucy or The Kid and Earl would put him through a whole rigmarole of bullshit, Let me see if they’re awake, Let me see if she’s taking calls, his voice leaking acid. On the fifteenth night, something in Darby’s voice set Earl off, something in the way he asked to speak to Lucy, and Earl finally burst, barking at Darby in a hoarse whisper, I swear I can make it so you’ll never see either of them again, this then triggering Darby, an explosion on his end of the line, a release, Darby raging in the living room, phone to his mouth. You faker. You fraud. Suddenly you’re a father again? Fuck you, you phony. Fuck you, you fraud.
End of conversation, obviously. The line going dead out in Chicago. Darby left standing in the dark living room, holding the dial tone. He heard nothing for two days. He didn’t know what to think, whether this was it, whether it was really over. And then, early on the morning of the third day, he heard an unmistakable sound, the popping of a taxicab’s trunk. He went to the living room window, watched Lucy and The Kid get out of the cab and stand on the curb while the driver lifted out their suitcase. He’d never been so relieved in his life. The sound of a taxicab’s trunk popping. He hadn’t known what he wanted, but now he knew. He’d kept the slip of paper in his wallet to remind himself of that sound, of what was possible, what he always thought would be the worst-case scenario.
He stood at the pay phone on Alvarado the day after they’d told him she was gone, listening to the ring on the other end of the line. He half expected Earl to answer the phone, Earl’s booming salesman’s voice, until he remembered that Earl was gone, that Earl had been gone for almost a year.
The line clicked again and Darby heard her voice, Lucy’s mother, sounding so old, so tired. Hello? Less a greeting than a resigned invitation to speak. A voice long-used to receiving bad news on the phone.
Hello? Dolores said again. That same weary tone to her voice. Hello? Hello?
He just started talking. He knew that if he didn’t, he wouldn’t have the courage to say anything, so he just started talking, telling the story of Lucy teaching a lesson and then falling in her classroom, Lucy lifted and carried down the hall by a student in her class, a star football player, followed to the nurse’s office by a trail of concerned students, and then the cops standing on the front porch of their house, hats in hands, informing Darby as Lucy’s next of kin. He told Dolores the whole story in what seemed like a single, unbroken breath. It was the most he’d ever spoken to her at one time.
Dolores said nothing. Darby listened to her breathing for a while, pictured her sitting in the dining room of the house in Chicago, late afternoon, fading light in the windows, autumn in the Midwest. She said nothing, and then she said, Thank you for calling, and the line clicked back to the dial tone.
She didn’t come to the memorial service. Darby wasn’t surprised. He understood, it made sense why she hadn’t come. She was alone now and she’d had too much of this, too many phone calls taking pieces of her away.
He stood outside the Everclean garage, called Bob’s aunt’s house from the new cell phone. On the third ring, Bob answered the phone, his voice boozy and thick.
“If you’re calling to apologize, I don’t want to hear it. Wasn’t your fault.”
&nbs
p; “I should have been down there.”
“It was a stupid thing. Wasn’t your fault.” Bob coughed away from the receiver. “Molina tell you about my forced leave of absence?”
“He said he told you to take some time off.”
“He told me to take a week, then we’d discuss if I was ready to come back. I said I was embarrassed enough, I don’t need a week. Give me a night, two nights.”
“Take the week.”
“I don’t need a week. How’s The Kid feeling?”
“He’s fine.”
“What was it? The flu?”
“Something like that.”
“Flu-like symptoms?”
“Just something he picked up. Nothing serious.”
“Bring him by when he’s feeling better. I haven’t seen him in a month of Sundays.”
“I was on my way down, Bob. I was just about to leave the house.”
“I don’t want to hear it. Wasn’t your fault. It was a one-man job.”
“There’s no such thing.”
“Tell Molina two days,” Bob said. “Forty-eight hours and I’ll be back. Tell him to take his leave of absence and shove it up his ass.”
Miss Ramirez was frazzled, running out of patience. It was near the end of the day, the class restless, kids hanging over the sides of their chairs, pushing their seats back on two legs, one leg, whispering, passing notes, popping up, sitting down, bouncing like crickets. Every ten seconds she had to tell another student to sit down, pay attention, put their hands where she could see them.
She cleared her throat and said that she had an important announcement. There was a serious situation in the schools right now. There was something very dangerous circulating among older kids at the high schools, something they had to look out for. She held up a sheet of paper. In the center of the page was a stencil of a large blue star. The kids looked at the star. A few whispered to each other. They’d heard about this from their older brothers and sisters, from their older cousins. Miss Ramirez shushed the room. She said that some older kids had gotten hold of these blue stars, and that these blue stars were actually illegal drugs. She said the real stars were much smaller, about the size of a dime, and they were printed on little pieces of paper. They worked like tattoos. A person who used illegal drugs would lick a spot on their hand or arm and then press the blue star to their skin. She said that they all needed to look out for the blue stars, and if they saw them, to run away. If an older kid had a blue star, if an older kid tried to lick their arms or hands and press a blue star to their skin they were to yell and run away, they were to tell an adult immediately.
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