Missing Chldren

by Gerald Lynch

  “What do you need me for?”

  He looked at me and, satisfied, said, “Lorne, I’m pleased to see you’re your old self. I believe we’re still a step ahead of Homicide — another reason I shouldn’t have waited. But I need someone, and I won’t risk Frank Thu’s career again. You knew Bob Browne. He liked you. I’m expecting this could get ugly and I’m gonna need everything you know, even if you don’t know you know it.”

  “Perfectly clear.” I looked at his profile. He was…glinting. He was using me, all right, to make Homicide, which he would. If he wanted to, Kevin Beldon could one day own the police.

  He opened his window farther and flicked out the cigar butt, took the cherry off the dash and fixed it to the roof. He didn’t hit the siren but we sped up as he shifted into the bus lane on the right. Off the Queensway at King Edward and down into Lowertown, he made that big old boat perform. He slowed to read the house numbers and pulled up at a dilapidated complex on St. Patrick’s Street.

  The apartment door was open, though not broken in, like someone had heard us coming and run for it. The room spoke of compulsive ordering and hurried chaos. Its dominant feature was piles and stacks of things: ancient VHS video cassettes dominated, but also lots of newspapers, magazines, pamphlets, photo albums and loose photos, letters and postcards, with silver computer disks cascading like spilled treasure. Much of the print material was in big Ziploc bags, as though evidence had been pre-packaged. The magazines were bundled, though sliding off in places too.

  Cobwebs with desiccated flies draped a window that had never been opened. One dumb-dumb fly wouldn’t stop bumping its head softly against the dirt-coated glass. A few breezy shirts lay crumpled about. In a corner, dirty grey-and-red thermal socks half hid a pair of green rubber boots.

  Shouting came continually like raving sickness through the walls and floor and ceiling.

  A cursory inspection revealed that all the media was devoted to the same subject: child beauty pageants. And the show of fixation was always the same: Our Little Miss.

  Had we really found our man? The late Bob Browne? I couldn’t believe it.

  OUR LITTLE MISS. The show’s name was also the label on every video cassette, followed by tape number, the level of competition, place and time, all printed neatly in black marker. The first cassette Kevin inserted in the old VCR was titled OUR LITTLE MISS #11: STATE FINALS, ATLANTA, 1/5/79.

  The third little girl to take the giant step up onto the platform and totter stiffly towards centre stage looks most like a high-gloss wooden doll from another time: painted eyes with raking lashes, brightly rouged, stiffly animated. The hair towers in a blonde bouffant three times the length of the tiny shining face. The smile, too, is as permanently fixed as a marionette’s. The arms are stiff at the sides with the hands turned out at the wrists like thalidomide flippers. The crinoline dress suggests a debutante’s coming-out party somewhere posh — Cape Cod, the Hamptons, Beverly Hills — those legendary locales mythologized for the trash moms.

  The child on the small dusty screen is named Little Pepper. The event’s hostess, Auntie Alice, singsongs: “Little Pepper says she enjoys making mud pies and watching Face the Nation.”

  No one laughs.

  When the shot cuts to Little Pepper’s mother, who looks eerily like Auntie Alice, Mom is grittily beaming and nodding approval, even as she keeps her own arms tight to her sides and turns stiffly. And when the song portion commences (“You Light Up My Life”), she sings in mimicry of the cute tongue-tied mimicry that is Little Pepper.

  Little Pepper completes a full circuit of the stage, like a mechanized baby bride atop a musical wedding cake, and curtsies. She exits somewhat less petitely (stompingly, in fact, gleeful that it’s over). Her turn is followed by some dozen others. This is the “Not Tots” portion of competition, we’ve been informed, ages four to six.

  Not Tots ends with the one boy in the competition: “Here he is, our perennial King…King Robbie!” And as King Robbie struts out in his little tux, complete with frill-fronted mauve shirt and crimson cummerbund, Auntie Alice gushes in hushed tones: “Robbie is learning to play the harmonica and says he’d like to make the whole world sing a fun song!”

  The shots of the backstage moms show a number of other child contestants awaiting their call (“backstage” meaning crowded behind grey bifold room dividers). The kids, whose competition days would be spent waiting on folding chairs in overly heated or cold rooms, are the picture of sullenness. Chins on hands, feet not reaching the floor, intermittently being pulled and pinched and hissed at with last-minute instructions, they mostly wait and keep neat.

  The only activity from the waiting children is their group response to Auntie Alice’s tagline. The mistress of ceremonies intermittently startles the room with a shouted question:

  “What’s that smell?”

  “Money!” the kids and adults shout back.

  “Let them hear you over in Dallas, Austin! What’s that smell?”

  “Money!” the whole room erupts.

  Kevin switched tapes. OUR LITTLE MISS #12: STATE FINALS, MEMPHIS, 1/6/79. More of the same. Fast-forward. More of the same. Skip a couple of months. More of the same.

  OUR LITTLE MISS #15: STATE FINALS, LITTLE ROCK, 1/9/79. Little Pepper likes boys who know how to treat a girl of any age like a lady and watching Kung Fu, her bestest friend Robbie’s favourite show too. King Robbie has learned to play “Over the Rainbow” on the harmonica and Mom is his hero. We listen to him play it in a low register, incredibly well for any age, and neither of us can speak.

  More months and more state finals. Little Pepper and King Robbie are regularly crowned together, they make a cute couple.

  Flip through tapes and years of this… It’s enough — the costumes getting tighter, replaced way too late for Little Pepper’s bum and King Robbie’s crotch, especially when in adolescence he wears a lederhosen costume — it’s enough to make a normal grown man cry. I may have.

  For how can I begin to do justice to the injustice of it all? Viewing the cavalcade of years was as dispiriting as witnessing a child’s slow death from cancer (and only a week before I’d believed nothing, but nothing, could equal that). If the first impression the “little misses” convey is the mechanical — clockwork automatons, Victorian marionettes — the lasting one is fetishism, perversion. Hard-core child pornography would be worse, I suppose. But only “differently” worse. And this was before the other tapes, the ones waiting in the black plastic toolbox.

  Through the years of pageants, King Robbie kept his small size, until puberty, when he shot up to what appeared a comparatively towering five feet, becoming the husky twelve-year-old Bob Browne. After that, King Bob would make his non-competing appearances only at the end of the show, escorting the crowned Supreme Queen (invariably Little Pepper). Her Majesty and entourage of runners-up would pose, with King and Supreme Queen centring a court of increasingly pissed fidgeters.

  But as the years rolled by and the featured pair entered their teens, it became clear that Bob Browne would grow no taller than five-foot-zero. He grew huskier, quite muscular, in fact, looking in his tux more and more like the bouncer at an exclusive club for Munchkins. Little Pepper, on the other hand, streaked past him like some Olive Oyle to his Popeye. They looked ludicrous and like they knew it. They continued in couples competitions, until Little Pepper was being introduced as Lady Alice Pepper-Pottersfield, a good head taller than her escort, Sir Robert Browne. Neither of them was winning anything any more, nothing but outbursts of audience laughter. “His Highness comes in handy for straightening Our Lady’s waistband.” A few times Sir Bob chased off stage after a crying Lady Alice.

  Beldon and I endured a bad hour of the videotapes and paused. There was easily a week’s worth of 24/7 viewing stacked and scattered about the smelly room. Somebody would have to watch it all, but not on a small TV with bleeding colours, and not in that d
im and dusty cell suffused with the stink of burnt margarine. Not us. Not I.

  Speechless, we began listlessly picking through the room. The promotional print material alone told a story that could make a wedding guest run to upchuck his chicken and angel food cake.

  Our Little Miss was a touring show, mostly of the American southern states, with recurring locales in Texas, Georgia, Arkansas, lots of Florida, but California too (in fact, every state but Hawaii and Alaska made at least one appearance). They had local preliminaries, regional competitions, state finals, and the Our Little Miss International World Championship in Dallas (with four Quebec and two Mexican regional champs justifying the bombast). But a child didn’t have to live in a place to compete for its title. There were multiplied possibilities for success in hundreds of shows, with the same children from a battle-hardened cohort regularly winning the prizes. One of the magazine articles estimated approximately fifty thousand participants annually. Atop it all stood CEO Alice Pottersfield (a.k.a. Auntie Alice), who hosted all state finals herself. She was Alice Pepper’s aunt and later Alice Pepper-Pottersfield’s stepmother. The specialized magazines tracked their stories as if they were movie stars or royalty.

  Sunshine Beauty Pageants was the conglomerate whose Our Little Miss tour was Little Pepper and King Robbie’s primary showcase. Key phrases recurred in the promotional materials.

  “LET YOUR LITTLE BRIDE (OR BEAU) SHINE!”

  (Little Bride costumes were big, bested only by cowgirls, but there were also lots of cheerleaders, schoolgirls, and even little ladies in business suits toting regular-sized briefcases, either cute feminism or anti-.)

  CASH PRIZES!

  (Lots of pictures of brilliantly toothed kids fanning the cash.)

  “What’s that smell!”

  “CHERUBS, 0-12 MONTHS. SPECIAL CHUBBIEST CHERUB TROPHY AWARD PRIZE!”

  (What, oh what, could a 0-month-old have to offer?)

  “TINY TOTS, GIRLS AND BOYS 1-3 YRS”

  “NOT TOTS, GIRLS AND BOYS 4-6”

  “AND STANDARD 11 DIVISIONS FOR GIRLS 7-18”

  (Only King Robbie survived the gender bias.)

  “COUPLES COMPETITION (FOR THOSE WHO KNOW A GOOD THING WHEN THEY SEE IT!)”

  (I have no idea about the parenthesis. Graphic icons were everywhere, overdone of course, and the above was decorated with something yellow and winking.)

  “COMPETITION IN: DANCING, SINGING,

  WESTERN WEAR, SWIMSUIT”

  (Par for a competition, with the recurrent Western wear indicating the regions of greatest fan base. The song-and-dance portions of the competitions were the most disturbing. The parents — though this seemed to be where pedophilic Dad had most influence — liked to have their tots dance to old show tunes, the kind of Let-Me-Entertain-You fare that once kept aging burlesque queens gainfully employed.)

  “OUR PAGEANT TEAM ENCOURAGES SELF-CONFIDENCE, SELF-ESTEEM AND HEALTHY PEER-GROUP INTERACTION!”

  (Team.)

  “DON’T HIDE YOUR LITTLE MISS’S PINT-SIZED

  GLAMOUR UNDER A THIMBLE!”

  “EVERYONE’S A WINNER!”

  (Essentially the parents were buying one trophy or another, and there was enough hardware on display to fill a pimp museum. Show some love for Little Miss Thirteenth Runner-Up!)

  “SCHOLARSHIPS AND FEE ASSISTANCE AVAILABLE”

  And on and on and on it went, with lots of asterisks and daggers leading to the back of the pamphlet where microscopic text precisely gave the puny amounts available for “scholarships and fee assistance,” and stipulated a means test. It was all a kickback scheme, where the money was paid to “your very own personal beauty pageant account and/or coach.”

  Upwards of $500 entry fees, with the moms and their daughters spending weekends travelling to an average of ten pageants per year.

  The print material advertised subsidiary enterprises that would have fattened the bottom line further: used outfits at one thousand dollars a pop, studded chaps for the little one’s Western wear, jewellery whose gem of choice was the rhinestone — earrings, crowns, tiaras, sceptres, spurs, bangles, necklaces, chokers and such. Everything “official” was emblazoned with the Sunshine Beauty Pageants’ logo: a chubby-cheeked sun with eyes bugging and lips pursed as if giving an appreciative wolf-whistle. And everywhere a roll call of coaches and agents advertising their expertise in stage presence, dancing and singing, makeup, hair arranging and, of course, loan arranging.

  Having scanned some of the legitimate magazine investigative reports on child pageants, I read aloud this mom’s lament (in my best Blanche Dubois voice): “I know moms that spended so much they had their trailers repoed!”

  Kevin laughed and that fortified us to proceed — to the black toolbox whose exploration we’d been delaying. To the other cassettes. There are always the other videos in poorly locked black plastic boxes with false bottoms. When you fall into a hole of human depravity, the ground holds for a stunned moment…then you fall farther, you free-fall in stinking darkness, till you plop at the bottom of humanity’s shithouse, where fat Nazis dine Bosch-style on spitted Jewish toddlers while hungry jihadists prepare a dessert of juicy female foetuses.

  This particular box had two broken clasps and a red pry bar lying inside it. Kevin pinched the bar’s end and set it aside.

  “Careful with evidence,” he said.

  Some of the contents were damaged, the old cassettes’ hard plastic cracked as if they’d been attacked with the pry bar; others had their shiny tape sprawling like voracious turd-brown tapeworms. The false bottom was wedged at an angle. We chose an undamaged cassette and inserted it.

  Simultaneously we sucked and held our breaths.

  Now, the show has moved off the tacky stages and into neutrally coloured rooms, hotel, motel, those nondescript rooms that whisper never tell. We watched Little Pepper running through her fists-on-the-hips Western-wear performance, heel-and-toe and away we go! But silly Little Pepper has forgotten to don her cowgirl costume. She sports only her hat cinched tightly at the chin, underwear (which comes high above that big tummy little girls have), and her faux-snakeskin cowgirl boots. She is the only one on that video, mechanically executing her steps in front of a dead TV fixed to the wall. You blindly hope that she’s simply practising her routine. But you know he’s there: the man sitting on the edge of the bed, facing her, swirling vodka in a Styrofoam cup, which he rests against his rising and falling belly. You don’t have to see him to believe in him.

  The tapes from the black box were unlabelled and jumbled chronologically, as if time passing made no difference. In some, little no longer, pubescent Alice Pepper dances in motel rooms in the narrow alley along the bottoms of beds or in the tight spaces between them. At the end of the routine, someone will clap, loudly and slowly like considered spanking. Sometimes he whistles. Sometimes he groans. At other times, grown to resemble the Alice Pepper-Pottersfield I knew, she wears a majorette’s costume of sparkling red spangles. But it’s not a baton she plays with, it’s a sceptre topped with an emerald ball, King Robbie’s old symbol of power. Then they are little kids again, alone and waiting, as they’ve been trained to do. Robbie is sitting on a bed in white jockey shorts. A big hand will often come up from nowhere to block the lens.

  When alone together and waiting, they have developed a routine to occupy their dead time. Alice asks, “What’s that smell?” And Robbie shouts, “Shit!” The camcorder operator, always female, always snickers.

  But who is recording such shows? And to what purpose? Blackmail? Personal pleasure? As a memento of the event, same as they sell overpriced at the shows? As proof of something that could never have happened? Who was the Leni Riefenstahl of this holocaust?… Alice Pottersfield, that was my best guess, Auntie Alice.

  Before the last viewed cassette would work, I had to cram my pinkie in the tiny white spool hole and manually ratchet up it
s splayed tape; the nail tore right up the middle, stinging like hell, and blood dripped.

  A shot dollies in along the narrow carpeted hallway as Little Pepper emerges from the motel room, quietly closing the door behind her. She notices the camera and, flushed still from a performance, melodramatically places a shushing finger to her lips. I caught my own breath. By then I could smell the hot dust of the cheap motels. Little Pepper looks momentarily confused — her Shirley Temple furrowed brow — then understands and turns back to open the door for the camera…person. The shot moves past the clinically lighted bathroom on the left, past the half-opened closet on the right, where the unzippered flap of a travelling suit bag hangs down like the butchered body in a serial killer’s hidden room, and holds still.

  It’s olden times again. You can hear the relic zoom lens whir as the shot sneaks up on the middle-aged man in white sleeveless T-shirt, boxer shorts, and hint of gartered black socks that are mostly hidden by the near bed. It would be difficult to tell anyway, because on his knee sits that ancient ruler of the hearts of fair young damsels, the dandled King Robbie. His youthful Highness has no clothes indeed, as he’s dressed in white jockey shorts only. His chin is firmly pressed between his baby-fat boy breasts, but his lower lip can be seen to protrude like a fresh wet worm. In his left hand he holds a cone of melting ice cream. The man growls soothingly at the boy. Then his fat paw covers Robbie’s small hand and he pulls the cone towards his own mouth and takes a slurping lick. He says, “We’re havin’ some fun now, ain’t we, little fella, me’n’you!”

  Robbie looks up at the camera. He’s crying.