Untouchable

by Scott O'Connor

  His dad had bought a bag of small-sized Hershey bars and whenever some kids in Halloween costumes came up on the porch and rang the doorbell, he answered the door and dropped a couple of bars into their bags. The Kid sat by the living room window watching the trick-or-treaters come by, or he went up to his bedroom and watched out that window if he suspected he knew the kids in the costumes. He was worried that one of the kids would tell his dad about the ruined Halloween cards or what The Kid had done to Rhonda Sizemore. He was worried that a parent would see all his dad’s tattoos and start shouting that his dad was responsible for what had happened to Rey Lugo, that his dad was creating the blue stars out of illegal drugs.

  He wondered if Arizona would come by, imagined her dad the military man taking her around the neighborhood, maybe carrying his machine gun for protection. If he had a machine gun. The Kid imagined her seeing his shabby house, imagined her dad and his dad getting into a fight like the fight his dad had gotten into at the mall. He kind of hoped she wouldn’t come by, but he also kind of hoped she would. He didn’t know which would be better or worse.

  By nine o’clock or so, the trick-or-treating seemed to be over. Arizona hadn’t come by. Out on the street it was just older kids, most without costumes, some just with rubber monster masks or black ski masks, running around, roughhousing, shouting and swearing at each other, climbing fences, kicking empty beer cans down the sidewalk. The Kid went into the bathroom to get ready for bed. He held his toothbrush, looked in the mirror. He had a new haircut, but it was the same Kid, the same face everybody hated, the same B.O. and bad breath. He put his toothbrush down. Why even bother?

  He got into his pajamas, got into bed. Before too long he heard his dad’s pager buzz. The Kid played dead while he listened to his dad getting his stuff together, felt him standing in the bedroom doorway, heard the front door locking, the pickup’s engine fading down the street. The Kid got dressed again, grabbed his backpack and went back downstairs.

  He stood out on the front porch. It felt darker than usual, wilder, a strange night, a dangerous night. It was still Halloween, even though the trick-or-treaters were all home in bed. He couldn’t even imagine how mad his dad would be if he knew The Kid was outside.

  He locked the front door behind him and walked up the street toward Sunset. It was colder than it had been in some time. There were shadows leaping everywhere, in the alleys between apartment buildings, in the yards behind houses. Big kids, high school kids with flashlights chasing each other, jumping fences and walls, running from yard to yard, vanishing behind buildings and then reappearing in the spaces between. Sometimes a few of them got caught in the flashlight beams, and The Kid could see rubber monster masks, fright wigs, white skeleton face-paint.

  He tried not to be scared. He was on a mission. He tried to think of the burned house, the angel without her hand, the pages of hands he’d drawn in his notebook. He kept walking, heading across Sunset, past the strip mall, past the cardboard box and the raggedy feet.

  He stood at the bottom of the hill, across the street from the burned house. It was still standing. They hadn’t torn it down yet. The question was, Was the scotch tape in place on the door? The question was, Had anyone else been inside and seen the angel? The Kid looked around, making sure there were no faces in the neighboring windows, then he ran across to the burned house’s yard, up onto the soft wood of the porch.

  He crouched in the shadows, catching his breath. There was something attached to the front door of the house. He crawled closer. Four glossy photographs were wedged behind the metal slats of the security door. He looked at the photos in the glow from the streetlight. The red-haired woman was in each of them. In one photo she was standing beside a bald man. They were both holding up beer cans in a salute, smiling at the camera. In another she was sitting on a woman’s lap on a yellow couch. The red-haired woman was wearing the yellow dress and cowboy boots from the chalk drawing. Both the red-haired woman and the woman with the lap were laughing, heads back, mouths open, the white blast of the camera’s flash reflected in the window behind their heads. In another picture she was standing beside an older lady, gray-haired, stoop-shouldered. The red-haired woman was smiling and the gray-haired woman was trying to manage half a smile. They looked alike. They had the same eyes, those big green eyes with long dark lashes. Her mom, maybe. In the last picture the red-haired woman was standing alone at a gas pump. She was wearing the yellow dress and the cowboy boots again. She wasn’t smiling so much as smirking. Head cocked, hand on her hip, looking at the camera like, What are you going to do about it? That sort of look. Real tough.

  The Kid couldn’t say that he thought the red-haired woman was beautiful, like he thought Arizona was beautiful, or even like he thought Rhonda Sizemore was beautiful. Perfect in the face. The red-haired woman’s head was too small, her nose was too big. He couldn’t say she was beautiful, but something about her was nice to look at. It seemed like she was the kind of person his mom would call A Good Egg. It seemed like she probably told pretty good jokes.

  There were a couple of red roses on the porch by the door, petals dry and dark, stems brittle. The Kid picked them up, looked them over, careful not to poke himself on the thorns. Who had been there? Friends? Relatives? The people in the pictures, maybe. Maybe they’d had a memorial service and come back here after, like some people had gone back to Amanda’s house after his mom’s fake memorial service. Maybe they’d gone inside to scoop some of the cremated ashes out of the bedroom.

  The Kid ran his hand up the doorjamb, feeling for the tape. It was still there, one-half affixed to the door, one-half to the jamb. No one had gone inside. The smell of the house was still strong. He dug into his backpack, pulled on the goggles and facemask. He peeled the tape off and opened the door, trying not to disturb any of the photographs. Then he stepped inside and turned on the flashlight.

  The front room looked the same. The Kid didn’t know what he was expecting. That someone had snuck in and cleaned it all up? There was still glass all over the dining room floor, crunching under his sneakers. There were the little silverware meteorites, the sagging cabinets back in the kitchen. He stopped at the door to the bedroom. Everything was like he remembered, the skeleton of the bed frame, the burned mattress, the charred wall above the bed. He walked down to the living room, set the flashlight on the floor so he could see as much of the far wall as possible.

  She was still there, the red-haired woman and her wings, lifting off the ground toward that hole in the ceiling, still missing a hand.

  The Kid looked in his notebook at the drawings of women’s hands. He’d wanted to finish the drawing, but the hands he’d drawn just didn’t work, they just didn’t match. He knew that he’d make a mess of the angel if he tried drawing a hand. He needed more practice.

  He wondered if the angel was scared or lonely. He knew it was a stupid thing to think of a drawing being scared, but he couldn’t help it. He thought of his mom in a place like this, hiding and waiting, and he knew that she would be scared, that she would wish there was something else to keep her company.

  The Kid started to draw. He picked up one of the pieces of white chalk from the floor and started on the wall to his left, far away from the angel. He didn’t want to infringe on that drawing. He started drawing woodcut waves. He tried to picture what they’d looked like when they’d flooded the hallway at school, tried to draw the grain and the knotholes correctly, the depth to the sheets of wood, one wave in front of the other, some higher, some lower, rising and falling. He looked around on the floor for more chalk. Found a blue piece and a green piece, started to color the waves, swirls of both colors mixing, darker at the bottom where the wooden water looked deeper, lighter at the top where it was really just splinters of foam. He climbed up on what was left of an armchair and drew a wooden seagull in the sky, flying out from behind a woodcut cloud. There were holes in the wall, big spots where chunks of plaster had fallen or burned away, exposing the house’s wooden frame. He dre
w the waves crashing up and over the holes, treated those holes as giant rocks, even drew a seagull perched on top of one.

  He worked from memory, what he had seen in the hall, what he’d seen on his dad’s arm a million times. He drew the pirate ship, the curving sides of the great hull, the canons poking through, the Jolly Roger flapping up top. He drew the tiny rowboat tossing in the waves, trying to outrun the pirate ship. The two desperate men bailing water, the disbelieving exclamation points floating over their heads.

  He drew until he was sweating pretty badly in the muggy room, until the goggles were foggy and the facemask was wet. He stepped down from the armchair, looked at what he’d drawn. It filled almost half of one wall, the whole picture of what he’d seen in the school hallway, what he’d seen on his dad’s arm. Some company for the angel. He shone the flashlight across the drawing, feeling not too bad about what he’d done.

  They took the sharp, quick curves of the freeway south, through the tunnels under the hills, the lanes gradually straightening, widening, the lit skyscrapers of downtown appearing on the other side of the last rise, the van finally drifting down the long slope of the off ramp into the streets of Chinatown. Red and green neon reflected in the windshield, across the broad hood of the van, Chinese characters, signs for shops and restaurants, the businesses all closed and gated, dark-windowed, their parking lots empty.

  “What do you think?” Roistler said. “I want to know what you think.”

  “I don’t think anything,” Darby said.

  “About Bob. About what happened to Bob.”

  “I don’t think anything.”

  Roistler sat in the passenger seat, his flushed face lit by the orange glow of the dashboard radio, his knees jumping, over-amped and anxious.

  “I’m trying to get this straight,” he said. “What I’m supposed to do and what you’re supposed to do.”

  “It’s like any two-man job. Nothing’s different.”

  “That’s not true. We’ve never done a two-man before. I’ve worked with Bob and you’ve worked with Bob. But without Bob, we shift a spot. You do his things, I do yours.”

  The address on the work order was a seafood restaurant, the bottom floor of a three-story brick building. Darby parked the van at the curb. The neon sign in the front window was unlit, but a young man was standing outside the door, smoking a cigarette. He wore black slacks and a white dress shirt, a stained white apron folded down at his waist.

  “Just give me a second,” Roistler said, “to get this all straight.”

  “Nothing’s different,” Darby said. He opened the door, stepped out onto the street.

  “Everything’s different,” Roistler said. “I’m you. I’m you and you’re Bob.”

  They suited up at the back of the van. Darby approached the waiter, started to talk through the work order, but the waiter shook his head. He wasn’t the one Darby was supposed to talk to. He led them into the restaurant, through the main dining room. The chairs were turned up on the tables; the low-hanging chandeliers were dark. The only light in the room came from fluorescents in the fish tanks that lined the walls. There was movement in the water, eel and lobster and crab. In the center of the room was a host’s station, a wooden podium piled with menus. The waiter opened a door behind the podium, nodded Darby through.

  It took a few seconds for his eyes to adjust to the darkness. An enclosed stairwell, steep and narrow, two flights up. At the top was an open door. In the light from the room beyond he could see the silhouette of a man sitting on the high landing.

  Darby started up, the stairs creaking with his weight. Roistler stayed down at the bottom, holding his bucket of brushes and sprays. The waiter was gone. He’d left for the night, maybe, or stepped back outside to smoke. As he climbed, Darby could see more of the man at the top of the steps. He was thin, Asian, middle-aged. His hair was slicked back from his high forehead. He was wearing a dark suit. He sat with his head down and his wrists resting on his knees, his hands held up at a strange angle, as if he were protecting them, as if he were keeping them away from the rest of his body.

  The work order said that the father would be present at the job site. The father of the girl the coroner’s people had taken from the room.

  The moonman suit crinkled as Darby climbed the stairs. He realized too late that he shouldn’t have suited up, that Bob never suited up until after he’d talked to whoever was waiting when they arrived.

  He stopped a few stairs below the man. He waited for the man to lift his head, to say something. Waited for the man to do one of the things Darby had seen Bob absorb at other job sites. Waited for the man to scream or wail, to spit curses, to throw a punch. The man did nothing. Darby could see the pale, hairless skin between the bottom of the man’s pant cuffs and the tops of his dress socks, could smell the last, faint traces of his morning aftershave, clean and sweet. Roistler shifted impatiently down on the bottom step. Darby let another full minute pass before he finally spoke, before he used Bob’s voice, Bob’s words in the quiet stairwell.

  “I’m sorry for your loss,” he said.

  The man didn’t move. Darby didn’t know if maybe he didn’t speak English. The work order didn’t say who had placed the call, only that the father would still be at the site. He wasn’t sure what he would do if the man couldn’t understand him.

  The man lifted his head. He had soft, round features, but his skin was strained tight. He looked at Darby, looked at the moonman suit. His eyes were red-rimmed and swollen.

  “What is your name?” he said. Perfect English. The son of immigrants. The son of the son of immigrants. “My name is Peter. This was my apartment, my family’s apartment.”

  Darby knew that an answer was necessary, that an answer was required to pass, to start the job. He cleared his throat. The speck was still there.

  “My name is Bob,” Darby said. “My name is Bob Lewis.”

  Peter looked at Darby’s gloves, the paper mask hanging around his neck. “I thought I could take care of this, but I could not,” he said.

  Darby nodded like he had seen Bob nod many times before, and he wondered if Bob felt the same thing he felt as he nodded, that this movement kept things away, this man and his grief, the nodding discouraged anything from attaching, anything from sticking.

  Peter shifted to the side of the step, letting Darby pass into the open doorway.

  “Thank you, Mr. Lewis,” Peter said. “I thought I could do this, but I cannot.”

  Roistler knelt on the floor, scrubbing the bathtub. Darby stood beside him, spraying the walls, wiping red handprints from the tile. The handprints were half the size of Darby’s hands. He scrubbed the sink, the toilet, went to work on the floor. The floor tile was red, nearly the same color as the fluid. He sprayed hydrogen chloride across suspicious areas, waited to see if it bubbled, indicating fluid rather than water spilled from the tub.

  They’d left Peter down at a table in the restaurant with the paperwork. Darby had marked the time, told Peter the hourly rate, how long he estimated the job would take. Peter watched Darby intently as he explained all of this, nodded at the end, sat down with the forms.

  Darby crossed from the bathroom into the girl’s bedroom. There were stipples of fluid on the cream carpeting. He followed the trail over to the double bed. He lifted the comforter, the sheets, checked for more fluid. Followed the trail to a sliding glass door on the other side of the room. There was a small covered landing outside, crammed with boxes and potted plants and a pair of bicycles. Another enclosed stairwell lead down from the landing, attached to the back of the building. There was a red handprint on the wall beside the glass doors. Darby sprayed the print, let the fluid run into a dustpan.

  She had come back in here after she’d done it. He knew this, it was clear to him. She’d filled the tub and slipped into the hot water and lifted whatever she’d used, a razor blade stolen from a drug store, stolen from the other bathroom in the apartment, lifted it up to the overhead light, the metal shining, a
nd then she’d slid the blade down each forearm, wrist to elbow. Shocked by the pain, by how much it hurt, then shocked by the fluid, so much so soon. She’d quickly become dizzy with it, submerging her arms to dull the feeling, the steaming bathwater swirling pink.

  He knew all of this, standing at the glass door, the red handprint sliding down the wall into his dustpan. He tried not to think of it, but he knew all of this, it was so clear to him.

  She’d gotten out of the tub because she was going to be sick. She was overcome, suddenly nauseous, and the idea of being sick in the tub in addition to what she had already done shamed her to stand. She braced herself with a hand on the wall, stepped uneasily out onto the tile to throw up in the toilet. She saw the bathroom then, the mirror over the sink reflecting the room wet with bathwater and lost fluid. The sight chased her into the bedroom, stepping carefully, still dizzy, her skin prickling, strangely electric in the open air.

  She stood at the sliding glass door, dripping onto the carpet, a hand on the wall to steady herself. She looked out onto the parking lot below, the blue and green dumpsters, the backs of the brick buildings that faced the street beyond. The familiar view. Everything clear and crisp, everything strange and new. The wild afternoon.

  Her hand felt hot against the wall. Everything else was cold but her hand burned, her hand left a mark when she lifted it away, a slick red brand on the clean white paint.

  She crossed the room, dripping, shivering, stopping again to stand at her dresser. She touched the framed photos that sat there, a picture of her and her mother standing on the Golden Gate Bridge; a picture of her sweet-faced grandmother; a prom photo of her and group of friends in gowns and tuxes, mugging and laughing in a parking lot at Disneyland. Her fingers left little red drops where they touched the frames, the top of the unfinished dresser.

  She lifted her head to her reflection in the mirror that hung above the dresser. The truth of the thing, the sight of the thing, standing in her bedroom with her ruined arms open and leaking. She stood and watched, the fear setting in, the finality of what she’d done. She stood and watched herself, a bright red puddle forming on the carpeting that always felt so soft between her toes.