by Craig Nova
He slowed down when he passed an alley. A man in a down coat that was patched with duct tape flicked his cigarette into the street, exhaled a cloud of smoke, and fell in behind Frank. The lights above the stores were covered with soot, which cast muted shadows on the sidewalk, and as Frank went through them, they appeared to him like phantoms, just dreams and half-formed impulses. Still, Frank knew what he was looking for in the aroma of fried noodles, in this half-light, and the attitude of men in the shadows who hunted for an easy mark. He’d turn on them with all the fury of ... Then he stopped. All the fury of what? He looked at the shadows on the sidewalk, like old stains that never quite wore off.
One of the shoes worn by the man behind Frank had a sole that had come loose, and it flapped on the sidewalk. The shoe must have come from Guatemala or San Salvador, where they didn’t even have any good glue. Then Frank slowed even more, giving the man time to catch up, and when the man was about two feet away, Frank stepped into an alley that was lined with trash cans and a bunch of cardboard boxes that had been cut into flat sections.
The man followed, and after he turned the corner, he found Frank. They stood opposite one another for about thirty seconds, the man thinking things over, looking into Frank’s eyes, which were bright with the luminescence of a yellow sign for a Chinese take-out restaurant. The man glanced into the street, and then back again, going through the possibilities.
“Do you have business with me?” said Frank.
The man hesitated, one hand in his pocket.
“No,” he said after a minute. “I guess I don’t.”
“Too bad,” said Frank. He waited a moment more. “You’re sure?”
“Yes,” said the man. “Yeah. I’m sure.”
“Then get out of here,” said Frank.
The man stood there for a moment, and then backed up, into the light.
“I didn’t mean nothing,” said the man.
“I did,” said Frank.
The man took a paring knife out of his pocket, the handle of which he had wrapped with adhesive tape for a better grip.
“Don’t come after me,” said the man. “I’m warning you.”
The man turned and went back out, into the light, the sole of his shoe making that steady flap, flap, flap. Frank waited until the sound disappeared into the honking of horns, the distant rumble of trucks and cars, and the buzz of old neon. Then he started back toward the Commons, mystified that he had taken this chance, but still certain about what he had wanted. But even so, he was desperate to find a way out of this. He knew he needed to calm down, to relax, to see things from the right perspective. Maybe he should go home and read.
Kohler read Greek and Roman history, although he had to do so in translation, which gave him the sensation of being remote from what he was fascinated by. Maybe there was something in Caesar, or in Xenophon, Tacitus, or Seneca. He would reread The Peloponnesian War. Surely he would discover something useful.
Then he returned to the entrance of the parking garage and descended into the underworld, where the cars were lined up like tombstones. Halfway down the stairs, he stopped and put the back of his head against the concrete wall to feel the cool, reassuring surface.
HE HAD MISSED the rush-hour traffic, and on the way home it was late enough that he didn’t have to drive into the setting sun at the end of Route 2. He noticed, too, that the Chevrolet didn’t have 75,000 miles on it, but 87,000. Then he thought about his mother.
Frank Kohler had been twelve years old when the police came to the door to tell him that his mother, Jerri Kohler, was missing. He was in the living room, in the small house in Northampton, Mass., looking at the TV, which had rabbit ears that were covered with aluminum foil. He had squeezed the foil down until it looked like a silver cocoon on the antenna, a metal pod that was going to give birth to mechanical insects. The policemen stood on the front porch and then knocked, one of them putting his hands to the side of his face to cut down the glare on the panes of glass in the door. Frank had made himself some macaroni and cheese, and he came to the door with the bowl in his hand, the spoon held in his fist, like a wrench. The policemen told him that his mother was missing, which Frank knew, although usually, when she disappeared, the police didn’t find out about it. The police knew because her boyfriend had reported it. So he had two things to worry about: how to stop the police from interfering with his usual life, and then the other, more important matter, which was where his mother had gone this time.
The police asked if she had packed a bag, been upset, made phone calls, or told him of any plans, and they wondered, too, if she had met anyone new recently. Frank stood at the door with his bowl and shook his head, but of course she had done all of these things. She was always making plans, meeting new men, often in bars but sometimes through ads in the Advocate, which was the local paper. It was difficult to describe his mother’s plans, her hopes to meet the right man, or a lot of other things about her: her bad luck and her resilience, too, in facing up to it. Frank knew that she loved him, and that she wanted the best for him. Recently she had even bought him a computer, which had been repossessed, but what he remembered about this, and used as a kind of psychological charm, was his mother’s generous impulse. They had opened the boxes together, his mother sitting on the sofa with a rum and Coke and Frank setting the machine up on the coffee table. When they turned the power on for the first time, Jerri said, “Frank, that’s the sound of the future. Hear it, darling?”
“She didn’t pack a bag,” said Frank to the police. “Not that I know of. She wasn’t planning on anything, like a trip.”
He put the bowl down on a table by the door.
“I guess I better call my uncle,” said Frank. “He’ll come over.”
“Will he?” said one of the policemen. He looked around the living room with the TV on a Goodwill table, the sofa with some stains on it, and the bare floor.
Frank nodded.
“Sure,” he said.
“Do you know her boyfriend?” asked the other policeman.
“You mean Joe?” said Frank.
“No,” said the policeman. “I mean Bob.”
Frank shrugged.
“I guess so,” he said.
“What did you think of him?”
“I don’t know,” said Frank. “Kind of usual.”
“You’re sure about your uncle?” said the other policeman.
“He’ll come,” said Frank. “I just have to call him. He doesn’t live far away.”
The policemen stood by the door and the subdued sound of the television blended with the cars on the interstate, which was about a quarter of a mile away. Then they turned and went down the broken concrete walk, between two bare patches of dirt. Frank closed the door and went back to sitting in front of the TV, although he didn’t finish the macaroni and cheese. He wished the computer were still here and that his mother would come home soon, as she always had in the past. He missed her touch, even her wobbly gait and the smell of the perfume her boyfriends gave her. Her absence was so enormous as to color everything, the sounds in the house, the way his skin felt, the taste of the food he made, the noise of the cars on the interstate.
Once she had disappeared in the middle of winter, and while he was waiting for her to come home, it had snowed. The street at the back of the house was a long, straight one so the snowplow could get going fast, and when it did, at three or four in the morning, the house shook with a deep, appalling rumble. There was the sound, too, of the blade as it bounced on the pavement. When he heard that rumbling onrush, he looked out the window and saw the sparks from the scraping of the blade on the pavement. The plow looked like it was part machine and part monster, a combination of flesh and steel that made those shooting stars and left the smell of burned metal. Then the rumble diminished, becoming more and more distant and leaving him with the realization that while the sound had disappeared and the house had stopped shaking, he hadn’t.
Jerri’s boyfriend, that is Bob, not Joe, sol
d insurance and had left his wife, but this was the kind of man Jerri often had. The men saw her as a way station, just sweet enough and dependable enough and good looking enough to spend some time with while they tried to figure out what they should really be doing. They all had names like Joe, Mike, Mick, Jack, Bob, Jim. When she met a new man, Frank asked if it was a new Bob Jack, and she would just smile. Sometimes Frank saw her sitting in her room, by herself, next to the nightstand where she always kept a glass of water that had a bunch of small air bubbles in it. She never drank it. She just wanted it there in case she needed it. Even then Frank knew that she didn’t want a glass of water, she wanted someone to comfort her, but she was stuck with that stale water.
She sat and looked into those bubbles, as though she could see something in them, a clue that would be valuable, but mostly when he asked if she had found someone new, she looked away and said, “Frank, close the door, will you?” Sometimes after she said this, Frank went in and sat next to her, looking at her fishnet stockings and smelling her perfume, which was expensive, although it had been given to her when she and Frank had really needed something to eat.
There was no one, though, as happy and filled with hope as Jerri when she had met someone who looked like he was going to work out. Then she would take Frank out to a diner in town, out by the highway, and talk about how they were going to live in a three-bedroom apartment or maybe a house with two stories, and Frank could get a computer and a motorcycle. She had a small tattoo, which she had gotten when she had been going out with a man who rode a motorcycle, a Norton with a black tank and chrome that was as shiny as a mirror. When she was sure that she was onto something good, she’d pull up her sleeve and show it to him, as though to say she had made mistakes in the past, but now everything, even the tattoo, was going to look different. Frank let himself be convinced, since she seemed so happy, and he didn’t feel bad afterwards, either, when the new man turned out to be like the others, since that moment of hope had been so wonderful as to seem not delusional, but just premature.
One of these men gave Frank a pair of pliers. Another gave him a condom in a foil pack. One of them sold Frank a broken watch for a dollar.
And one of the Bob Jacks had given Frank twenty dollars to hide in the closet in his mother’s bedroom. Frank had taken the money and gotten into the closet innocently enough, and when he looked out, amid the odor of wool and the mixture of scents his mother had worn, and feeling the tickle of the stockings that were hung on the door, he saw her kneeling in front of the man who had given him the money. As Frank peered out, his face hot with confusion, the man winked at him. Frank closed the door softly and sat back, under the coats, his hands trembling as he reached up to cover his ears.
Another of these men had seen a black eye that Frank had gotten at school, and he took Frank outside, in the backyard, which was under a billboard that could be seen on the interstate and which advertised a steak-house, and up in the air, visible from the highway, there was a slab of rare steak, about six feet thick. Below the sign, Jerri’s boyfriend told him that he should never be afraid in a fight, and that if he was going to fight, he had to win. Use a two-by-four, a pipe, a rock, the man said, hit them hard and don’t stop. Break a bone. Or a nose. Don’t be a pussy. Don’t be afraid to put them in the hospital. Don’t fight to fight. Fight to win. It’s not about honor. It’s about scaring the shit out of people.
AFTER SCHOOL, Frank sat in the kitchen, hearing the throb of the cheap icebox while he waited for Jerri to come home. He opened a can of tomato soup and had it with a pat of margarine in the middle, eating it with his spoon and making patterns out of the melting margarine. The clink of the spoon against the bowl made his mother’s absence more real. He also noticed that the house was mustier now that Jerri was gone. When she was home, he hadn’t minded so much. He often thought this smell was a sign of how he and his mother weren’t like other people. Still, Frank craved those occasions when they splurged on dinner or when she overcharged her credit card. She told him then that they were going to make up for what they had missed, and even when it didn’t work out, he was glad to be with her. She was what he had, and when they were inside the house, with her scratching his head while she drank her rum and Coke, everything was fine.
Jerri’s brother came into the kitchen and said that the police had come to see him. It would probably be best, he said, if Frank came home with him for the time being. Frank went into his bedroom and put a couple of pairs of underwear and a couple of T-shirts into a brown paper bag, and then the two of them went over to the uncle’s house, walking along the river, where they appeared like two black silhouettes, one tall and heavy, the other smaller and thin, carrying a black lump, against that yellow sky. Even the air seemed different now, a little sick making and with a slight emotional tug, too, as when you first notice a chill in the early days of fall.
His uncle’s house was next to a bridge that went over the river, and at night Frank could hear the cars’ tires on it. On nice days, he liked to stand in the middle and look down and think that there were fish in the river, silver ones the size of a wheelbarrow, or maybe a sturgeon as big as a Volkswagen, all going upstream to a secret place where they would spawn. He stood there and imagined that he could feel the fish swim along underneath him, the creatures so big and perfect that they—instead of the traffic—made the bridge hum.
Frank sat on the single bed in his uncle’s house. On the other side of the door and through the wall he heard the TV his uncle was watching, which was tuned to a football game. Some shows, according to his uncle, were one six-pack long, but a football game took two.
Frank didn’t see God as a person, as a man or a woman, but as a bright presence, or just a feeling that might help you. He asked for help now. Then he felt ashamed for praying, because he didn’t know how to do it, really. He felt this mystification again, years later, when he slept with a woman for the first time. Had he done it right? When he prayed, he saw the glass of water on the nightstand next to his bed. Bubbles had formed overnight. Sometimes when he was close to those lead-colored bubbles he saw his face in them, distorted as in a fish-eye lens. He had never felt so close to his mother as when he looked at the bubbles, and had never missed her so much, either. When he prayed for an answer, he heard the sound of the TV through the wall.
After school he stood on the bridge and noticed dogs nosing around a trunk that someone had left in the mud at the edge of the river. The bridge had struts, rivets, a cross-hatching of supports, and a curve that went over the top, from one side to the other. Frank knew there was a powerful and unseen principle of engineering at work here, like other principles he didn’t understand, such as the cumulative effect of each new day that his mother was gone and how each additional one changed his perspective. He didn’t like the change, since it felt like falling and left him trying to hang on to something, but no matter how often he tried to catch a root or branch at the edge of the cliff, this sense of free fall was what remained. The horror of it, though, was its quality of slow motion. He had all the time in the world, but nothing to do with it.
The next afternoon the police had parked their cars at the end of the bridge, but the people in uniform were by the water, stepping around that black trunk in the mud. Frank came along from school and went out into the middle of the bridge and watched them, some in blue uniforms and two in bright yellow slickers. The box was locked, and now they broke it open with a hammer and a screwdriver, and then they lifted the lid. A woman cop who was there stepped back and put her hand to her mouth. A police photographer obviously wanted to have the camera between himself and the black chest in the mud, and he started taking pictures. The dogs were on the bridge, too, looking down at that trunk, the kind that you would take on a sea voyage.
Frank started walking toward the end of the bridge, where there were a couple of policemen watching what was happening at the side of the river. When one of them tried to grab him, Frank dodged to the side and went straight down the bank,
giving in to the steep grade of it, not trying to brake himself at all, just running. When the policemen by the trunk tried to stop him, he went between their legs, moving with the quick agility of a child. Then, as he glanced inside at what was left of Jerri, a policeman pulled him away. The others closed ranks around the trunk, like a curtain swinging shut in a theater.
A policeman brought Frank up the bank and they sat on a bench outside an ice-cream place that had plywood in the windows and a sign that needed paint. It read THE REAL SCOOP.
“Is that her?” Frank said. He didn’t care that his voice was quavering.
The cop looked around, but didn’t answer, and Frank didn’t say anything more, although for an instant he wondered if this man had been touching her, too, and then he thought, What difference would that make? Everyone was always touching her.
“I’m just sorry,” said the policeman.
At night, Frank tried to sleep, and his uncle brought him a cup of warm milk. He had put some bourbon in it, but Frank couldn’t drink it. After a while Frank pretended to go to sleep so that his uncle would leave, and then he sat in the dark, thinking about what he had seen. He realized she was gone, and that the darkness around him wasn’t going to change the way it did when she showed up at the front door. Frank tried to grasp the scale of that darkness, which was everywhere, even oozing down to the river. It was the last sign he had of Jerri, as though she had left this enormous emptiness behind and while he was appalled that this was the only way he could feel her presence, it was what he had, and even though he was too frightened to cry, he still clung to the darkness, like the memory of a goodnight kiss, or her grand way of signing her name to a credit card chit she was never going to be able to pay. He tried to make sense of how much he had loved her, no matter what she had been, and to decide what good it had been to care so much about someone who could vanish and leave him with this loss mixed with knowledge of the malignant. He seemed to teeter on the edge of letting go, of almost crying, but the hot throb of it scared him. He suspected it was better to keep things under wraps, since crying was like stepping into a current that was too deep and too fast. He felt closer to her by having that sense of pain, and he didn’t want anything to relieve it, since if it was gone, it would be like losing his last real memory of her.