by Matt Bell
In the summer we mow the neighbors’ lawns, the father said. To keep up appearances. To make it easier to hope other people might move here too.
The mother and the father: their titles made them sound older than they were but they were the same age as Kelly or else younger. The father was a veteran, had come home from overseas to study, work, start a family. His grandparents helped with the down payment on the house and with adoption costs and they were the ones who had paid the reward.
We don’t have much, the father said. We have to be willing to take help wherever we can find it.
They didn’t have much but they had a family. Kelly sat down on a creaky wooden chair, focused on not putting his head in his hands. Before the small talk was exhausted Kelly stood and again began inspecting the family photos on the walls, tried to imagine the life they suggested. The mother saw him looking, came to stand beside him, touched his arm. He looked at where she had touched him, followed her hand as it left his skin to gesture through the photographs, indicating various ages, after-school activities, the brother playing basketball for the school team, the boy sitting at a piano dressed in the same gray suit.
The mother asked, Do you have kids?
No, Kelly said. No kids.
She said, We wanted kids of our own. And when he couldn’t have them, then we wanted to love a child no one had wanted. We wanted there to be less suffering because of our love.
Her earnestness embarrassed him. He turned and looked for the boy, wondered what the boy had heard. The blonde reporter asked where the brother was and the father and mother looked at each other before answering.
He’s out, the father said.
We didn’t know you would want him here, the mother said.
The blonde reporter needed a family reunited but it didn’t matter to her who the family contained. The cameraman shot video of the father and the mother, of the family together, and then the boy by himself. The father put his hand on the boy’s shoulder and the boy flinched. On the news the reporter had said basically nothing had happened to the boy. But it wasn’t nothing, couldn’t have been nothing. Even if he was unhurt now, he had not been unhurt in the basement. He had been watched and Kelly knew watching could be its own kind of injury.
The boy had been left too, and hadn’t he screamed in the dark?
The boy was looking at Kelly and Kelly tried not to stare back. The cameraman maneuvered closer, asked Kelly to sit beside the boy. They were supposed to talk but about what? Kelly had good teeth too but never showed them in pictures because before they’d been bad. He had to keep blinking to keep his eyes from watering. He never paid much attention to his face but the camera made him aware how it was moving wrong.
Kelly wanted to say something to the boy but not in front of these hovering people, not with their hands touching the boy, his head, his hair, his hands. He saw the way the boy suffered under their touch but he didn’t know if this was new. After the photographs were finished the father pumped Kelly’s hand and thanked him, handed him a check. The worth of a boy, paid for again. Who was the real criminal, the one who took the boy or the one who took the ransom? They treated him like a hero but he’d been acting like a thief and yet here was the payment for the best thing he’d ever found, in any abandoned house.
Kelly could smell the suit he was wearing, his sweat tanging through the harshness of the cheap chemicals used to wash away whoever had worn it last. He kneeled down in front of the boy, touched the boy’s skinny arm.
Daniel, he said. I want to see you again.
He hadn’t meant to say it so loud but there it was. Conversation stopped and he knew he’d made a mistake. The father bristled and the mother put her hand on the boy’s head, pulled the boy away before Kelly could see his reaction.
The parents had been friendly with him but now he saw their truer feelings cloud their faces, suspicion shifting toward accusation. They were happy for their boy’s return, had paid the reward, but honestly what was he doing in that house.
The boy was too old for the gesture but now he hid his face in the mother’s side, tucked away an expression Kelly couldn’t track. Then the boy nodded, his face moving against the fabric of the mother’s dress.
If it’s okay with you, Kelly said—speaking to the boy’s parents, being careful not to address the boy again—I’ll leave my phone number, in case you need me.
Need you for what, the father said, but the mother brought Kelly a pen and a pad of paper. An instinctual courtesy.
The father said, I don’t think this is a good idea. We want this to be over. I’m sure you understand.
The boy stayed where he was and shuffled his feet, scuffed his dress shoes against the linoleum. An odd smile crossed the father’s face and Kelly knew he would be polite enough to wait until Kelly left the house to throw the number away. The cameraman shot more footage but Kelly knew it wasn’t the story they’d come to tell and afterward Kelly cried out in the reporter’s car, a tremor in his hands and his voice not making the words he wanted to say, not any apologetic noise. The blonde reporter touched him on the shoulder but her touch wasn’t what made him stop. He was almost done when she took her hand away, checked her watch, put the car into drive.
By late afternoon, the local news was teasing the story, displaying a ticker along the bottom edge of daytime programming: local hero meets saved boy. When the broadcast began, Kelly poured himself a tall-enough drink to watch the video of the family together, a video of him and the boy. He wasn’t in the first shot, and the second made him look criminal. He had three days’ worth of beard, needed a haircut. The suit fit him but its origins showed. How long had it been since he’d seen himself look so naked. You stopped looking in mirrors when you brushed your teeth, you learned to shave by feel and muscle memory, maybe you never had to look yourself in the eye ever again.
He watched the blonde reporter speak, heard something missing in her cause and effect, in the suggestion that he had always been the hero, that the boy had always been the saved boy, their meeting a plan instead of coincidence. The national news picked up the story, reran the report. He’d been invisible for a year but now he was so easy to find. Other reporters called, wanted their own exclusives. A news van parked outside and Kelly called into work, pushed his luck. He wondered if the southern woman saw. He wondered about her boy. How they would not be convinced by the new narrative of his life, despite the eerie parallels. How he would always be sorry for what he’d done, his own worst thing. The collapse within the collapse. How sorry wasn’t enough, how nothing he could say would be. Always there would be the complete insufficiency of words. On the worst day he had promised not to contact them and this was a promise he would keep. There had been love but he of all people knew love was not enough.
Later a familiar sickness returned as he pushed the cashier’s check across the counter at his new bank. How he could have sent it to the southern woman. How he could have given it to her boy.
When he asked, the bank teller said he probably would have to pay taxes on the reward but not until the end of the year.
THE OTHER WORKERS KNEW he’d been hired to appease the boss’s wife, smoked and swore and spat and ignored him. He wanted a reputation as a hard worker but first he had to match their pace. The challenge of the right kind of slow. He wanted to work safely but it was hard to keep yourself safer than the least-safe guy. He said he knew how to swing a sledge, to work a torch, wanted to be inside the buildings putting his skills to use but after the first week Kelly never saw the man who hired him again. The other men showed him where to shovel the debris, told him to move the shattered plaster or concrete into the long red dumpsters in the parking lot, they made fun of his name and he let them. They weren’t the first to try.
Once the walls of a building came down Kelly swept broken glass in the open air, breathed hard under a paper mask. Snow fell, made every shovel-load heavier. He wore lay
ers of shirts, long underwear under thick brown pants, filled the layers with sweat and silence. He swept and shoveled and hauled what the others knocked down and it was beneath the skills he’d acquired in the zone. Sometimes he worked straight through the day. More sweeping glass, more dragging splintered rafters and crushed wood paneling. In one building he carried cracked urinals down five flights of stairs in one wing, down six in another. Often someone shit in a toilet long after the water was shut off. The others joked it beat walking all the way downstairs but Kelly was the one who had to carry what they made, had to crouch over and reach around the loaded bowl to back out the four bolts securing it to the wall. Shit on his hands and piss on his shoes, a hard hat on his head and a fluorescent vest fastened around his chest. A mask might keep his lungs from turning black but nothing stopped his stomach turning.
How do you rate, one of the others said, shouldering past him in a narrow hallway littered with broken glass, shattered plaster. My brother used to do your job and now look at how shitty you’re doing it.
One day the foreman made him maneuver a fire hose, spraying water over the dust forced free by an excavator. The dust could explode, the foreman said, and Kelly nodded, did what he was asked. The water turned the worksite into a puddled muck, gray water moving fast over frozen ground, thick with floating particulate. The dust rose and he knocked it down. It was a job anyone else might get complacent about but never him. He could never tell anyone about the fire at the plant but he knew some part of him was constantly turning over what had happened. He had worked to make this part inaccessible to the rest of him. This was a diminishment in capacity but so far he thought he was getting along fine.
When the Christian women left, the city watch entered. Five men, volunteers dressed in orange t-shirts and orange football jerseys worn under winter coats, each shaking Kelly’s hand, each bearing a name forgotten immediately for some identifying mark instead: the first, big as a linebacker; another white haired and white mustached; another bad toothed, tattooed; the fourth with one cloudy eye, as white as the other eye was yellow, jaundiced. The fifth a former cop with silvered temples, a nose broken multiple times.
We saw you on the news, the cop said. A hero. We want you to come to our meetings.
Kelly balked but opened six beers, dumped an ashtray so the men could smoke. He’d seen men like these men before, in other neighborhoods, had learned to recognize their type, the sunglasses and ball caps and leather gloves, how against their own rules some disguised their bright uniforms beneath dark jackets. The city watch held its own training sessions, invited city councilmen and police veterans and the survivors of horrible crimes to come and speak. If you could tell yourself you were protecting someone else, how much further might you be able to go.
In his apartment, the men told stories and Kelly relaxed into their tall tales, the bravado and the dismay. The volunteers spoke the name of a minor dealer; the name of a raped girl, the name of her child; the name of a minister who fed gang members because he said everyone deserved a chance at redemption. A roll call of scared neighbors they each checked on, of old women living on blocks all their own, their yards growing high and snarled as the streetlights clicked off for good. The last white family living in what used to be a white neighborhood. The last black family living in what used to be a black neighborhood. After both families were gone, only ghosts would remain. And what color were ghosts.
The men drank and the men smoked and Kelly followed along better when they used the names of streets and neighborhoods, the numbers and letters of freeways. In the zone they drove pickup trucks or SUVs, installed brighter headlights, dashboard cameras, did their best for the city they loved. Kelly asked the former cop if he carried a gun on his rounds, and the cop said, Never tell them either way. Don’t say you do and don’t say you don’t.
We don’t talk about firepower, he said, but whatever they got, we can match it.
Kelly nodded. He understood but he didn’t want a weapon of his own. He had a short temper he controlled by not putting himself in places it might erupt. If he had a handgun in his truck he knew someday the handgun would go off.
Would go off. As if it were the gun doing the work. As if a plastic Glock had its own agency.
He would go to their meeting, he said, but that didn’t mean he was joining their cause.
They laughed, clapped him on his shoulders. He’d see, they said. He had saved a boy but the police hadn’t found the boy’s kidnapper. Maybe these volunteers would.
Kelly put down his cigarette, rubbed his eyes. For a moment he’d had trouble telling one man from another. What was similar was stronger than what was different, their station an ideal better than any individual. He moved his gaze from face to face, trying to match the names they’d offered to the features he saw.
The suspect, he thought. The volunteers were right: he had been thinking about the suspect. Maybe there was something more he wanted done. Or else something he wanted to do.
He wasn’t scrapping anymore but nights the girl with the limp worked he drove the oldest neighborhoods, cruised the streets bordering overgrown fields and crumbling industrial parks. He bought a police scanner, affixed it to the dash, listened for arsons and burglaries, domestic violence, the reported sounds of gunfire. Dispatch spoke at a remove, spared the details. Most nights he heard her voice on the airwaves, disappearing fast into a squelch of turning static. Her radio voice was pleasantly dispassionate, speaking from within an unfolding tragedy but without inflection. She narrated codes, directions, the street addresses, and the names of cross streets. Sometimes he went the places she named. If he didn’t know how to get there he plugged the address into the dash and then there were two female voices telling him where to go. The satellites pointed him in the direction of her mind. He often beat the first responders to the scene but what could he do next, what else except drive by a burning building and hope everyone inside had escaped the flames.
He wasn’t scrapping but it didn’t keep him out of the oldest buildings. The night he found the boy he had come home to his apartment and found all his relics uncharged, their thrum dissipated. His life had changed but he didn’t want to lose what he’d gathered, needed more. He pry-barred the lock on a door in a house he was sure was empty and walked its rooms, ran his fingers through the carpet, put his palms against the plaster walls. There was a mailbox out front with a series of numbers meant to separate this home from all others. Someone could live here again but who. Someone had owned this house but where had they gone. He listened to the boards creak, waited to hear the way the house held both a whisper and a hush. The absence of expectation: nothing more would happen in this house. The phone would not ring, the kitchen timer would not go off, no one would knock on the door. He’d gotten used to so much quiet but never this.
The boy still appeared on the television but less and less. What had happened to the boy was a crime but who would solve it. The scene had given the heavy detective nothing, thanks to Kelly’s obscuring work, his covering of every surface in drywall dust and tracked dirt. He gauged his responsibility, tried to assign fault in right proportion. He tried to imagine what might happen next, if the kidnapper knew his name, the name of the boy. He tried to imagine if the balance of power might be upset, if he could come to know the watcher, the man in the red slicker.
From the relics he’d found in the zone Kelly had learned it wasn’t possible to know what the hearts of others would treasure or protect. He was coming to believe that if he wanted something saved he had to save it himself.
THEY ATE COLD SANDWICHES and hot soup in a diner, split a piece of apple pie for dessert. She told him about her week, rehashed all the stories that made the newspaper. Even worse, she said, were the ones that never would, the lower cries of human misery answered at her terminal every hour of her working day: a mother with her kitchen on fire, a wife with a voice slurred by drink or bruises, a child calling for help from th
e last pay phone on earth, lost and unable to explain where she was, where she was supposed to be. The car crashes, the slip and falls, the temporary troubles and the irreversible blows. The insane cruelty of chance, the magnificent dangers of the everyday, all filtered through her station.
When I started this job, she said, I thought the voices went right through me. I took each call, passed its information to someone who could help, moved on.
The first month, she said, I couldn’t remember the calls by the time I got home. I dealt with them and then I forgot. But I didn’t stay uninvolved forever. I became something else.
A salvor, Kelly said. Salvor. A word he’d been thinking of ever since the first step out of the basement in the blue house. One possible future.
She said, One day I came home and I told someone else what I’d heard on the phone. I’d never done this before, never talked about the day. The someone else was a man but who he was isn’t important. The story I told him was about a boy who had fallen into a sewer opening while playing with some friends. They shouldn’t have been doing what they were but their mistake wasn’t my concern. My concern was getting the boy out of the hole.
There’s always a boy to be rescued, he said. Or else a girl.
Public works, she said. The fire department. Both called and put on the case and when I hung up the phone I didn’t know how the case would end but I believed it would be resolved. It was so simple, a boy at the bottom of a ladder, too scared to climb back up, maybe hurt.
She stopped talking, stuck her fork through the pie to scrape the plate below, carving the slice into smaller pieces without taking a bite.
The fire department radioed back, she said. This happens. They need more information than what I’ve provided, or else the person calling has made a mistake. It’s so hard to be accurate in the presence of trauma. The firemen and the men from public works had arrived at the open sewer cover to find the first two boys, the one who stayed and the one who made the call. From the street the men couldn’t see the third boy at the bottom of the hole and when they went down into the sewer—it was ten feet down, nothing any man and a flashlight couldn’t handle—the boy wasn’t there. There was nowhere for a boy to go but the firemen searched the shallow passage, trolled the water, shined their lights across every foot of the sewer entrance, all its holes and cubbies, any place a boy might have hidden.