by Matt Bell
Why would he hide? she asked. From who? Public works unlocked the gratings at each end of the chamber and a further search was organized. Even as they searched they must have known they wouldn’t find the boy, because how would he have gotten past those same grates? At first they thought the boys had made up the fallen friend, but he was real enough. It turned out the friend’s parents hadn’t seen him since before school. They never saw him again.
She said, Once there was this single mystery, the missing boy in the sewer. Now there are so many. Your boy too. Because you saved him—at last she lifted a bite of cold pie to her mouth—but from who?
It’s not the unsolvable that bothers me, she said. It’s the solvable unsolved.
She wasn’t as emotive as every other woman he’d dated. He didn’t know the shapes of all her thoughts, had no taxonomy for her modes of expression and speech and careful withholding. After her third bite of pie he realized he didn’t have to respond. As with every other conversation it was often enough for him to be the listener, to remember what he’d been told.
There was a grocery in his new neighborhood but he didn’t need more food. He bought a handle of whiskey, a twelve-pack of beer, a carton of cigarettes, a squat spiral notebook, and a package of black pens. Back in his apartment he started at the beginning, listed details, whatever precursors of memory he might be able to tug. What had he seen. What did it mean. Who had hurt the boy. The boy had given the detective only the mask, the gloves, a red slicker; no identifying details, no sure guesses of height or weight. As if he’d been abducted by a ghost or an idea. Kelly could picture someone more solid but the imagined man wore a face born from movies, crime procedurals.
In the notebook he wrote what he had not told the heavy detective: How before he’d returned to the basement, he had tried to pretend he’d never seen the boy. And how when he returned it was for a moment the blankness he’d seen.
He wrote, The two ways of seeing the room: the scrapper and the salvor.
The boy was screaming the first time Kelly touched him. He couldn’t get the boy to stop. He had tried to pick the boy up because he couldn’t see the cuffs around his ankles.
The cuffs caught and the boy screamed again.
Kelly had sawed the handcuff chain but he barely remembered doing it. By then the boy had almost stopped crying. Maybe there wasn’t any sound except for the scraping pull and push of the saw, the breaths in between.
Kelly wrote: The night of the first snow. The night I found the boy. The beginning of my involvement in the case but not the beginning of the case. When had the boy been reported missing? Two days earlier. When had the boy actually gone missing? The day before that. The entire case three days long, the crime cut short by my entrance. My last night as a scavenger. I must have known but I went back for my tools. While the boy waited in the locked truck, down in the dark of the pit.
The facts of the case, the scenes of the crime: The boy’s school, the house where the boy was kept and watched. The car that ferried the boy. The man in the red slicker. The accumulation of mattresses and foam and handcuffs. The purchase of tools. The lock on the basement door. The coming and going from the house and how had no one seen him coming and going. Easy. The complete absence of neighbors. The total lack of community. The man in the red slicker and the boy, adrift in the zone, waiting for the first to find the second.
The confidence it took to take a boy. The confidence it took to park right in front of the school. Confidence or else direst need. And if the man who kidnapped the boy wore a mask, then when the boy first saw my face he must have thought I was the kidnapper, carrying the same wants into that basement.
What if this wasn’t the first time. Then what happened to the other boys. Then what would have happened to the boy if I hadn’t found him. And if there is this depravity what other depravities exist, wherever no good man is looking.
What is the responsibility of the good man in the zone?
Is detective a role or an action. Is the good man an action too.
Can I take on the role of the detective and carry it to its completion.
Can pretending to be a good man one day make me a good man.
Outside, a great rain filled the city, overwhelmed the sewers. Another hundred thousand homes went without power and today there would be no work and in the dark of the apartment Kelly smoked and listened to the thunder announce the lightning and he wrote in the notebook and when he got bored he did one hundred push-ups, one hundred sit-ups, sets of one hundred squats, lunges, leg lifts. He thrilled at his body in motion, his body hurting. He was strong from the zone but he knew he could be stronger. In high school he’d put on muscle fast, lifted his way into the starting lineup, the top of his weight class. The pride of his father’s coaching. County wrestling champion one year, state champ the next. Once he’d been able to run for miles without tiring and he wondered if he could make himself do it again.
5
THE PHONE RANG and Kelly didn’t recognize the number. The phone rang again and he let it go to voicemail. He waited for the beep and then he pressed the button, put the phone to his ear, heard the boy’s voice. He listened to the message, listened to it again. Five minutes later, the first text arrived: this is daniel call me
Then: this is daniel i have my own phone
so i don’t get lost again
this is daniel
Kelly had given the boy his phone number and the boy had put it to use. What could Kelly write back? The one thing he knew.
this is kelly.
They were strangers but now they would be something else. Kelly couldn’t pretend he didn’t know what a bad idea was because here they were at the start of one, a mistake amassing potential.
this is daniel
whats your address
i want to see you too
Kelly unbuttoned the top button of his shirt, smeared the sweat from his neck and chest. He put his thumbs to the screen, typed his new address. The invitation had become a trap. He was the sole suspect in the kidnapping and he had shown who he was: someone who wanted the boy, who couldn’t keep from asking for more.
how will you get here.
i’ll come get you.
are you home.
are you home.
are you home.
An hour passed before the phone beeped again. Kelly went to the intercom beside the door and he buzzed the boy in, then opened the door to find the boy in his school uniform, the blue jacket and the striped tie, the khaki pants over clean white sneakers. He wanted to ask the boy why he’d come but it wasn’t the right way to start.
Kelly asked, How did you get here?
My brother brought me, the boy said. I told him this was a friend’s house.
Okay, Kelly said. Come in. This way.
Kelly pointed to a chair on the other side of the room, took his own seat on the couch. The boy sat where he was told. He had a quiet politeness in his movements Kelly had seen before, known himself, the boy moving as if afraid to make a mistake. The notebook was on the coffee table, folded open. The case, Kelly was calling it. The case notes. Kelly picked up the notebook, folded the cover around the spirals. The television was tuned to a documentary about whales, whale songs. The narrator claimed whales could recognize voices through a thousand miles of black water but military outposts and underwater fiber-optic cables disrupted the songs, confused the whales, and limited the range of their speech. The sound was below the limits of human hearing and so it took special equipment to know what had been lost. The cost of progress, above the earth and below it and upon the air and in the sea.
Kelly muted the television. The boy asked if he could have something to drink and Kelly appreciated knowing what to do next. There wasn’t anything in the refrigerator for a boy so he filled a glass of water from the tap. He had plenty of food left from the Christian women and when he asked the bo
y if he was hungry he thought it was better if the boy said yes.
But then the boy’s voice spoke from closer than Kelly expected.
Kelly turned around and found the boy in the kitchen with him. A mere foot of separation breathing between their bodies. Kelly set the table, retrieved the last of a deli tray from the fridge, a plastic container of potato salad. A bottle of mustard, a jar of mayonnaise. Salt and pepper. He only had enough dishes for two people but there were only the two of them eating.
Kelly asked, How old are you?
Twelve, the boy said. Until next summer.
Twelve, thirteen. What had changed for Kelly in the gap between those years. The arrival of the new body that brought him further under his father’s gaze, bought admission into the gym and the mat room and his father’s coaching.
Kelly thought he wasn’t hungry but he knew better than to have another drink on top of the two he’d had before the boy arrived. The boy grinned above his sandwich and Kelly’s appetite awoke. He piled more meat on his plate, more cheese than the bread needed. The boy finished his sandwich first, excused himself from the table. Again the politeness but when the boy returned to the living room he sat on the far end of the couch instead of the chair. The whale documentary was still playing and the boy picked up the remote, fingered the mute, returned volume to the room. The boy watched the whales and when Kelly wasn’t watching the boy they watched the whales together.
All slap and splash atop the surface, quiet consumption underneath. Nothing was bigger than the biggest of their number, and their only predators were men and giant squid and other whales. On-screen a whale carcass appeared on the seafloor, lit by an unmanned submersible. Thirty-five tons of gray whale a mile below the surface, crawling with life: the whale had fed off the ocean and the ocean would feed off the whale. The narrator intoned the stages, the eras of the mobile scavenger, the enrichment opportunist, the sulfophilic, spoke over footage of eel-shaped hagfish swimming through the whale fall, through the fallen timber of the bones: Two years of soft-tissue consumption, one hundred thirty pounds of blubber and muscle and organ consumed every day. Then years of unimaginable creatures colonizing what was left. Then bacteria breaking down lipids in the bones for fifty more years, a hundred. The bacteria not needing oxygen to live, not expelling carbon dioxide. Sulfate in, hydrogen sulfide out. Mussels and clams living on chemosymbiotic bacteria. Limpets and snails grazing bacterial mats, biofilms.
There were many places any one animal couldn’t live but nowhere no animal would not. All these animals Kelly had never known: the squat lobster, more amphipods, impossible mollusks. Zombie worms born without digestive tracts. A name for everything, no matter how strange. So many hundreds of thousands of dead whales crashed into the ocean floor they created a migratory path, a way for organisms to move, evolve. If you were a single cell wide, how many cities might one whale comprise, falling blackly through the black water? Another exclusion zone filled with rot, shared by other scavengers. A bowhead whale could live two hundred years, and one hundred years after it died it might at last disappear from the earth, dispersed entirely. Off the shore there were carcasses of American whales as old as America and what did this say for this past century, for what was man-made and had lasted only half as long.
When the show ended the boy stood from the couch and retrieved his backpack, paused by the door. He was nervous but there was something brave in him and Kelly recognized this too. He had come through his own troubles with something similar, an unspoken belief nothing worse would happen next.
Kelly asked, Where are you going? It’s a long way home.
I’m not going home, the boy said. I’m going to my father’s.
Now the boy began to speak, slowly, carefully, his backpack on his shoulders. At first the boy hadn’t noticed his father had moved out. In the first month of the separation, his father had come back every night for dinner, stayed listening to records in the living room until the boy was in bed. He wasn’t there for breakfast but he’d always left for work before sunrise. He’d realized the father was gone only when the father’s things went missing. The books stayed on the shelves because the father didn’t read but one day there was hardly any music left in the house. Certain kinds of food stopped being stocked. The boy hadn’t said anything. He didn’t mention every obvious problem he saw. His parents had separated before what happened but afterward they’d reunited for the photo op, made nice for the cameras. The appearance of normalcy for the return of their boy. Now the cameras were gone and the boy’s father was back in his apartment, didn’t have to pretend to show up for dinner.
This was why the parents hadn’t understood he’d gone missing. They weren’t speaking and both of them had thought the other had the boy.
I’ll drive you, Kelly said. He gathered his keys, found a ball cap and a sweatshirt. He checked his watch. On the way to the truck he called the girl with the limp, offered her a time, then adjusted his arrival into the further future, said all estimates were dependent on weather and traffic. She heard the truck start, asked him where he was going first.
He gave her the details: The boy had come to him. They had spent some hours together. He was taking the boy home.
She said, I don’t know if that’s a good idea.
Be careful, she said. I hope you know what you’re doing.
He gave her the details but what did the details mean. She was the soul of understatement but maybe she understood. Something had begun in the basement of the blue house and this was how it continued. He hung up the phone, maneuvered the truck out of the neighborhood and onto the freeway, moved the truck into the left lane, kept his foot on the gas. There was a joy to going fast and when a grin broke over his face he looked over at the boy, hoping to share it.
The boy’s face crumpled. He cradled his backpack in his lap, hugged it against his chest. He wasn’t crying yet but maybe he would. Kelly reached out a hand, put it on the boy’s shaking leg.
I’m sorry, Kelly said. I forgot you’d been in the truck. I forgot how it might feel to be in it again.
He waited until the boy was calm again and then he removed his shaking hand, put it back against the wheel. The questions should have been hard to ask but somehow Kelly got them out. The truth at higher and higher speeds, acquiring motion, dopplering through the night.
He said, You don’t have to tell me anything you don’t want to.
Yes, I do, the boy said. Because you were there too.
What the boy remembered hadn’t changed. There was no more or no less story than before, when he told it to the heavy detective.
The boy said, My brother was supposed to pick me up in front of my school. We don’t go to the same school anymore but his school excuses first so he’s supposed to be there waiting for me when I get out. But my brother didn’t come and then there were less cars waiting.
My mother used to pick me up but now she was looking for work. My brother used to be late all the time but now he didn’t always show.
I didn’t have a cell phone then, the boy said. I have one now.
The boy said, He isn’t my real brother. My parents aren’t my real parents but I know you know. My parents are separated and they don’t talk and my brother uses their two houses as a way to never go home, by saying he’s always at the other house.
He hasn’t been in our family long, the boy said, putting his head against the steamed window. The boy was quiet for a mile, two miles. An eerie silence complemented his calm speech, too controlled for his age. Snow fell over the pavement, obscured the lines marking the edge of the road. As the miles passed the boy began to speak again. He said he wasn’t telling Kelly anything he hadn’t told the police.
The boy wasn’t confused. This was a repetition of the facts.
He had been waiting for his brother.
He waited until there wasn’t anyone else waiting.
When the br
own car arrived, the boy thought it was his brother’s or else he never would have been so close to the curb. The car was the right color and make and model, the right year, a car like the brother drove.
The boy didn’t know if the man in the car was trying to take him or just anyone there waiting. The boy opened the back door, the boy climbed in, sat down, closed the door, and buckled his seat belt. The boy said, The whole time I was doing it, I could see it wasn’t my brother’s car. It didn’t smell like cigarettes and pot. It wasn’t littered with fast-food wrappers. It was spotless and there was no smell and as I buckled my seat belt I saw the man who was driving it wasn’t my brother. He was shorter than my brother and he was wearing a red hooded slicker. In the car the man wasn’t wearing a mask. It was the only time he wasn’t. He wasn’t wearing a mask but he was wearing gloves and as I slid into the backseat he pulled his red hood up.
The boy said, The sound of the child safety locks.
He hadn’t meant to sit down. He hadn’t meant to close the door. He’d been tired or uncareful. Habit took over and by the time alarm arrived it was too late.
Kelly knew this mode too, the maturity in the boy’s voice, the flatness of affect: the shock that outlasted the trauma. What the boy said he remembered most wasn’t the fear but the confusion. The car was the same car his brother drove. The same color exterior, the same patterned fabric inside. At first the boy had thought the brother’s car had been stolen. For a moment, he’d worried about the brother. He couldn’t understand why the car thief would pick him up from school. He hadn’t realized yet it wasn’t the car the thief had stolen but him.