The Boy Detective Fails

by Joe Meno

  Although the boy detective has seen this particular episode many times before, it is still very startling when the Constable fires and the Cadet is left for dead in a ditch. But he knows that the Modern Police Cadet is not dead. Leopold Jones has studied many forms of Eastern medicine, like Chinese acupuncture and herbal botany, while serving as a science officer in Asia Minor sometime after he was separated from his division during a British mission to Burma, and he knows what specific plants can be found floating in a ditch along the side of the road in urban London that can quickly cure a bullet wound in his own back.

  Billy stares at the flashing screen and wonders why nothing in his own life is ever so easy. He stands to switch the television set off, still watching as the Modern Police Cadet judo chops a great-necked thug, discovering the Constable’s hideout. The Constable, in the time span of a half hour following the Cadet’s near-fatal gunshot wound, has risen to be the new London kingpin. The final scene is, of course, Leopold, the Modern Police Cadet, chasing the Constable across several shadowy rooftops, until finally the evildoer surrenders. A Scotland Yard helicopter circling overhead, the episode ends with the Modern Police Cadet handcuffing the criminal mastermind and leading him away.

  The boy detective wonders if the Modern Police Cadet ever feels totally alone. He wonders this and finally decides that somehow the Cadet has found a way to face the evils of the world and still live with who he is.

  Leopold Jones, kissing his wife in the final frame of the show, whispers, “The world of evil is only as evil as we allow it to be,” as they sit waiting at the London train station, off together for a much overdue holiday.

  Billy finds himself standing there and clapping for some reason. The wing of Shady Glens is utterly silent. The entire world is quiet. Billy puts on his shoes and immediately begins running down the hallway.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  En route to the Gotham bus station, the boy detective is riding near the front, directly behind the driver, silently wondering what exactly he will do when he arrives. Very soon he discovers he is again sitting across from Professor Von Golum. The buzz of traffic hums outside the window as Billy tries to speak.

  “Professor?”

  “Ah, boy detective. We meet yet again.”

  “I’d like to ask you something.”

  “You know you’ll pay for the answer with your life.”

  “If that’s what you say,” Billy whispers.

  “Your question then?”

  “Why do people do evil things?”

  The Professor nods, tugging on his white tuft of beard. “It is our true selves: our identities as they appear in nature. The natural world is full of disorder and so, by our flawed definition, the natural world is evil. We are immoral by design, and so when we act evilly, we are only revealing our most basic selves, the simplest, most convenient action, to fend for oneself and oneself only. To do right—to act justly, to put the needs of someone else above your own—now that is an act of true mystery. It is completely unnatural—a gigantic step beyond the jungle instincts of man and a leap into the unknown wisdom of silent grace which lurks, harbored in the small vessel of mankind, within us all.”

  “But why? Why did you do the evil things you did?” Billy asks suddenly.

  “Ah, because I could not imagine consequences,” the Professor says. “To do harm, to live through evil, is to align oneself with chaos. Now it is the same chaos which is slowly destroying me.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “It has begun to rule my body, my health, my mind. My left hand has stopped working. My breathing comes and goes and then is lost. And I cannot remember the way to leave this bus. I’ve been on it for hours now and I have forgotten how to get them to stop.”

  “Just pull this cord.”

  “The cord! Yes, now I remember.”

  “Good evening, sir.”

  “Good evening, Billy.”

  TWENTY-NINE

  At the town’s bus station, there is much intrigue: Billy searches about the nearly empty waiting room, expecting the strange bomb to explode at any moment. He hurries through the aisles of seats, crawling furiously on his knees, knocking the few suitcases aside and trampling over someone’s sleeping feet. He bolts down the narrow hallway, running from bathroom to bathroom. He upends garbage cans, he tears open the machines which dispense newspapers, he raises his hands and howls and pounds his hands against the large glass windows and nearly begins crying.

  Then Billy turns and notices the enormous wall of small orange lockers, perhaps a hundred of them, their orange keys glimmering in their locks. Frantically, he begins to pull at their doors, one after the other—empty, empty, empty—until there, in the lowest right corner, one of them is definitely locked and definitely seems to be ticking. He places his ear against the dull orange metal and nods. He starts pulling, shouting, kicking, but the door will not budge. He looks up, the tick-tick-ticks still clicking along in his head. He counts quickly. There are maybe four people in the bus station at this time of night. He dashes toward the ticket booth and begins shouting, but the ticket agent is uninterested. He is a small man with glasses and has a hard time believing what he is hearing. He closes the window and disappears behind the booth and leaves Billy there shouting.

  Billy continues screaming, grabbing a young mother towing a bright-faced baby in a blue stroller. He hurries them outside, leaving them standing there on the corner, staring back at the small bus station, the sounds of the city muffled and sad in the middle part of the night. Billy hurries back inside, finds a bearded vagrant, lifts him under the arms, and drags him out, depositing him on a bus stop bench nearby. The man seems both unconscious and unimpressed. Another man is sitting in the last aisle of the bus station reading his magazine. Billy approaches him. The man decides he does not believe the idea of the bomb. He licks his thumb, turns the page of his paper, and looks away. Billy stands arguing before him, jumping up and down and pulling at his own hair, but the man in a tan check suit and hat does not agree. “It is impossible,” the man says. “No, I do not believe it.”

  The boy detective pounds on the ticket counter once more and the agent returns. He points toward the bank of lockers, the ticking very audible now—tick-tick-TICK-TICK-TICK. The ticket agent pushes his glasses tightly against his face, stares at Billy, stares at the lockers, and then, very professionally, closes the ticket booth, leaving a sign that says, We will reopen in fifteen minutes. He follows Billy outside, and with the young mother and her child, stares back inside the glass windows of the bus station, waiting. There, in the last aisle, the man continues reading his paper. He looks up at the strange people shouting to him outside and shakes his head, perturbed. He flips the page. He shifts in his seat. One second goes by.

  In a moment, the bus station simply disappears. The man inside, unhappily reading his paper, also vanishes, while somewhere very near, a siren begins howling.

  Flat on his back, the boy detective holds the young mother’s hand and stares up at the stars, feeling as if he is somehow flying.

  THIRTY

  At twilight the next day, the boy detective feels obliged to help the Mumford children give a proper burial for their pet bunny. There in the soft muddy earth beneath the front porch, Billy and the Mumford children sit, hand in hand, staring down at the slight mound of earth, unsure what it is they should be doing.

  “I’m sad, Billy,” Effie Mumford whispers.

  “Yes, I understand. It’s very natural to be sad in a moment like this.”

  “But why did it happen? It was just an innocent animal.”

  The boy detective twitches his nose. “There are people in this world who mean to do us harm.”

  “I know,” the girl says.

  “Yes, but you should try not to fear them.”

  Gus Mumford hands Billy a note that reads: Why not?

  “We are watching out for them. You and me and Effie, we will watch out for them together.”

  The girl nods silently. She looks u
p and smiles and Billy’s heart breaks momentarily. He remembers Caroline, his sister, many months after her dove’s unexpected death, hiding under the slanted white wood porch, burying her bird, Margaret Thatcher, the small pile of earth beside her white shoes, staring at the tiny grave of the stiffened dead dove.

  Billy blinks, holding back the sting of tears in his eyes, and then, opening his black briefcase, presents the Mumford children with a small white and blue package. The two children open it silently, Effie removing the bow and ribbon, Gus tearing the paper very careuvz fully, and soon they discover it is an ant farm—Ant City! the bright packaging reads.

  “Ants,” Billy simply mumbles, smiling.

  “They look safe,” Effie Munford says. Gus Mumford nods, staring at the small red ants hurrying behind the shiny pane of protective glass. He hands Billy a note: We really love ants.

  Billy blushes.

  “They are quite lovely,” Effie Mumford adds.

  Billy nods, staring down at the busy little creatures. “Yes, well, I hope you enjoy them.”

  It is very quiet beneath the porch then as all three watch the ants bustling about their tiny, invisible lives. Together, Billy and the Mumford children follow their movements for a while, and then the girl, Effie Mumford, stares up at him, questioningly. Her eyes have gone small with tears and her bottom lip is trembling.

  “Billy?”

  “Yes,” he replies.

  “Everyone at school thinks I’m a gaylord.”

  “It will be all right,” he says, nodding. “It will all be OK.”

  The boy detective is doing his best to play Ghost in the Graveyard. He is not very good at it. He does not really understand when he is supposed to shout, “Ghost in the Graveyard!” He is tagged out by Effie Mumford three times in a row. The other children on the block laugh when he stumbles and gets dirt on his knees, but he tries not to get angry. When it is his turn, he finds Gus Mumford hiding behind a parked car and Effie Mumford pretending to be a tree. When it gets late, someone’s mother says it’s time for the neighborhood children to go to their homes. Billy says goodnight and returns to Shady Glens. In his room, in the dark, with the light switch on and the soft cloud of snow gently falling, Billy takes his dose of Clomipramine and lifts Caroline’s notebook above his chest, quietly turning the pages. He is holding his breath. He listens carefully for a voice he might recognize, the snow drifting above him until it is no longer evening.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  THE CASE OF THEVANISHING LADY

  Some frequently asked questions regarding the boy detective:

  Does the boy detective like sweets?

  —No. He does not. He has a very

  healthy diet and rarely eats candy.

  Does the boy detective have a lovely singing voice?

  —No. No, he does not.

  Is the boy detective happy?

  —No. He is not. He has not been happy for more than a day or so at a time.

  Why not?

  —Ah. Because he is irrevocably alone and incurably lonely.

  ONE

  The boy detective falls out of bed. The sight of him lying on the floor sure is something. He moans, turns off the ringing owl alarm clock, and begins dressing. All the clothes in his wardrobe are, of course, exactly the same: blue cardigan sweater, dark pants, white shirt, blue and orange owl tie. This is his uniform from when he was a boy and, when forced to buy new clothes, wanted to waste no time choosing what might look nice.

  The boy detective waits for the bus, checking his watch every ten seconds. It is raining and gray. Early morning commuters stand around him, some listening to headphones, some cowering beneath their shiny umbrellas. The boy detective did not think to bring an umbrella. He did not think to check the weather. He has not checked the weather in almost ten years. If it was raining at St. Vitus, he was sent to the television room. If it was nice, he was allowed to go outside. He does not yet remember how to read the weather. He knows a lot, but he has forgotten many, many important things and so at the moment, he is getting very wet. His socks make a sucking sound as he paces back and forth. No one will share an umbrella with him, no matter how sad he makes his face look, and so he begins making a high-pitched noise like a motor boat starting. People at the bus stop slowly step away from him.

  The boy detective is on the bus, staring ahead. It is still raining. People talk on their cell phones or read their magazines or newspapers. Someone famous is marrying someone else famous. Someone got a boob job. Some country set fire to another country and now they are sorry for it.

  Billy sighs, touching his wrists and the bald spots on his head. He wonders if he will be fired today for some reason. He wonders if people at the office will still be nice to him. If they are not nice to him, he decides, he will stand up, shout, I got screwed! and never go back. Thinking about his job is enough to make him very anxious and so he pops an Ativan, covering his eyes with his hands. He peeks through his fingers and notices that a young man with a mustache has buttoned his dress shirt incorrectly—there is an extra buttonhole near his neck. Billy must then sit on his hands to stop himself from reaching for the strange man’s shirt. He closes his eyes and tries not to think of the open buttonhole, but it is too much and so he stands and hurries toward the back of the bus.

  The boy detective stands in front of a large skyscraper, staring up through the oncoming rain nervously. He is already hyperventilating. He does not like calling sick people. He does not like calling the dead. Businessmen hurry around him, knocking him from side to side. He imagines what would happen if the building were to suddenly fall over. He imagines the sound as the steels gives, the people screaming, the glass breaking. He gets nervous as he approaches the large glass revolving door, and waits, tries again, stops, and then—gaining enough speed and courage—he hurries through, holding his breath. The lobby is black marble, and standing among all the people, he feels like he is drowning. He is forced into an elevator before he realizes he cannot remember where he is supposed to be going. Someone is whispering in his ear, saying, “Hey buddy, can you hit thirty-five?” but Billy is too afraid to hit anything.

  The boy detective, one hour later, stands in the same crowded elevator with some other very wet people, who are all sighing. Someone’s collar is poking him in the eye. Someone’s umbrella is stabbing his ankle. He is trying not to get upset, but this is not easy. His first thought is to strike a sharp-faced woman with bangs beside him. But he doesn’t. He holds his breath again and hears the blood moving in his ears and when that clears he notices something: Someone is singing along with the elevator music, something with violins and pianos by Burt Bacharach. The voice is high and steady like a girl’s. People begin to stare at him. It is a long moment before he realizes, strangely, that he is the one singing. He thinks that if he can keep singing, he will not punch anybody. The elevator doors open to his floor and for some reason, when he exits, he says goodbye to everybody.

  The boy detective is at his desk, on the phone, selling mass-produced wigs to very lonely old women.

  “Yes, ma’am. As I said, we do have that exact hair color, but not in the Young Starlet style.”

  Larry, from across the cubicle aisle, stares at Billy. He stands and points. “OK, kid, try this one on for size. Guess what train I took today? OK? Go on, give it a try.”

  Billy eyes Larry, glancing at his shiny white wing tip shoes. “You took the C train. There’s tar on your shoes. I saw them paving the street over by the C station.”

  Billy glances at Larry’s glossy black hairpiece. There are minute white feathers in it.

  “Then you stopped in front of St. Franklin’s Cathedral. Those are pigeon feathers in your hair.”

  Larry is dumbfounded and claps with amusement.

  “You’re amazing, kid, just amazing! How’d you know all that?”

  “St. Franklin imported all white doves from Hamburg, Germany. It’s the only place in the entire city that has snow-white doves this time of year.”<
br />
  Larry smiles, slapping Billy on the shoulder, and returns to his desk. Billy returns to the phone call.

  From the salesperson script, Billy says: “Yes, ma’am. Fully flameproof and flame retardant. Yes, of course, I think you’d be very happy with the Nordic Princess style. It’s very popular with the younger set these days. Yes, I’m sure your dearly departed husband would approve. Well, yes, ma’am, you can take as much time as you’d like to think about it. I can have a catalog sent out to you today. No, I’m not sure. What other color options would you like?”

  The phone gets heavier in his hand.

  “Yes, it’s exactly that, ma’am, a miracle. A miracle of modern living. Hair-replacement surgery can be expensive and dangerous. So why risk it? What we offer you is quality hair replacement without the serious dangers and side effects.”

  Billy pages through the catalog to a still photo of a female model wearing a brown wig, the Domestic Enchantress, #318.

  “Yes, ma’am. No, but we do have the Metropolitan Debutante model in three different colors: summer sensation, autumn reunion, and springtime mist. No, that’s a kind of platinum-blond. Yes, yes, ma’am.”

  TWO

  The boy detective is on the bus, staring straight ahead, careful not to make eye contact with anybody. If he makes eye contact with someone and looks away first, they will own him. He does not want that to happen. Is it still raining? Yes, it is. Everyone’s hair looks wet and misplaced, hanging in clumps over their foreheads and faces. It makes everyone look crazy. It is also very crowded on the bus. People are standing and talking on their cell phones or reading their evening papers and the headlines are somewhat different but still somewhat the same: Someone has called someone else a liar. Someone has made a new movie. Another building in town has disappeared without reason. Some other country is bad for doing something.