Scrapper

by Matt Bell

  Who did this to you? she asked—and it was almost Kelly who answered.

  No one, the boy said. No one did anything.

  Kelly asked too but the boy wouldn’t say the brother’s name, only cried harder, his body trembling. The shame of being hurt, of being hurt again. And when Kelly didn’t move to the boy’s side she was there instead, sitting down on the floor and pulling the half-dressed boy into her lap, saying, Jackie’s here, saying, Daniel, you’re safe now. You’re safe with us.

  Kelly stood against the vanity, a new kind of uselessness falling over him, another failure to act. In the swelling steam of the room he watched this fine woman comforting this fantastic boy, telling the boy she would keep him safe, sounding so sure she couldn’t fail, speaking as if a mother comforting her own child, her soft speech promising the long safety of love, every motherhood’s first and most lasting and most necessary lie.

  W

  The boy’s parents were already waiting when Kelly pulled into the mother’s driveway, the father and the mother reunited and shivering in the short dusk of winter. What had the brother told them after he visited? Enough that before Kelly opened the door he knew the boy would be taken. As he approached the boy’s parents Kelly could barely listen over the ringing in his ears but he knew they would speak all the expected words, all the other words Kelly must have known would one day come: It had been a mistake to let the boy spend time with Kelly. They hadn’t known until the brother told them but they should have paid more attention. They too had been the victims of trauma. What happened to the boy had happened to them, in their own way, and in the aftermath they hadn’t been the best parents they could be.

  The father said, Thank you for taking care of Daniel. It’s been a hard year for all of us.

  The mother said, We missed him but we didn’t know how to be with him. This is our fault, not yours.

  The father spoke again, said, We appreciate everything you’ve done—Daniel’s brother told us you’ve been watching him after school—but I think this friendship has run its course. Daniel needs friends his own age, normal friends. I hope you understand.

  What Kelly wanted most was to put his hand on the boy, to touch his head or his shoulder. For it to be as easy as it had been beside the river, as it had been the day of the lost key. Instead Kelly would give the boy back so they didn’t have to take him. He would surrender his affection for the boy and he would promise not to see him again, not to let him into his apartment, certainly never to take him away again. A week from now his apartment key would come in the mail, the second key he’d made for the boy, barely used. It would be the mother’s handwriting on the envelope but there would be no accompanying note. Kelly knew this and later it came true.

  The father offered his hand. The boy stayed beside Kelly, waiting to move until Kelly reached out, took the father’s hand. The father released his grip, reached for the boy. The boy didn’t move yet but he would soon and in the last moment with the boy at his side Kelly surveyed the family the boy was rejoining: The mother, fit in her sweater and slacks and scarf. The father, bigger bearded than ever, looming in his winter coat, smiling his odd smile. The palpable presence of the missing brother. The boy moved toward his mother, put his arms around her. She would smell the sickness on his breath and know what to do. This was the boy’s mother, the boy’s father. If they were not perfect they were good enough. It was they who had claimed responsibility for the boy, who had freed him from foster care and group homes, who had promised to give him a better life. Theirs was the first taking of the boy, the best of its kind.

  You had to trust, you had to have faith in their goodness.

  But doubt. But fear. But how Kelly had always succumbed to the rush toward quicker action, immediate results.

  Daniel, Kelly said, the word harsh in his mouth.

  Daniel, he said again, softer, more sure.

  He’s sick, Kelly said, speaking to the parents. He threw up today. He needs you to take care of him.

  The mother smiled, ran her hands through the boy’s hair. She said, Of course. Of course we will.

  Now there was worry in her eyes and for a moment Kelly thought he would tell her. He opened his mouth, closed it again. He could insert himself further into their lives but by what right, at what cost. He could tell them about what he believed the brother had done to the boy but the boy wouldn’t admit the brother’s fault, and so would the mother and the father believe Kelly or would they think Kelly was the one who had hurt their son.

  She said, What is it? Is there something else?

  Kelly shook his head. It’s nothing, he said. What would the fear of exposing himself to danger let continue, for how long. He wanted someone to tell him what to do next but the girl with the limp was already taking him by the hand, pulling him away. The boy wasn’t his boy, she would say. In the truck he shook and flushed and drove away too fast, accelerating through the unplowed streets until the girl objected. It was almost the holidays, almost the new year. A few more weeks. The weather had turned bitter and there was more snow coming. The snow wasn’t like the rain. He couldn’t smell the snow before it arrived but he knew there were other ways to read the sky. He thought he might at last train himself to suss out such deeper signs, to hear clearly the subtlest speech of the slower, colder world to come.

  THE LAST HOUSE IN THE northern city, the city’s last boy: always the blue house had been silent and static but that night you arrived to a movement of the air whistling through an open window, to muddy tracks on the floor, boot prints leading from the foyer to the kitchen, upstairs, and then down into the basement.

  Remember the powerful wakefulness, every nerve lighting up for the reappearance of the new. You had been bored and had tried to keep yourself away so your boredom might fade and now there was this newness, arrived again, lighting you into attention.

  Remember how this boy had meant nothing. How there had been no joy in the watching. How you thought perhaps someone else had watched him first, how the other had removed what you sought, the unnamable portion of a boy the watching could claim.

  You took your shoes off in the foyer. You had to kneel to undo the double knot of the laces. There wasn’t anywhere to hang your coat so you carried it into the kitchen, where the stove jutted out from the counter, half dragged into the middle of the room. A window hung open, let in snow accumulating on the dirty tile. The walls were opened too, the wiring and piping roughly removed. The basement lock was busted free and the basement door was ajar and no sound came from below.

  You should have fled then but you needed to see for yourself. You moved slowly down the rough wooden stairs, descending through the busted plaster and the bare studs, down into the cool damp of the underground. You had a flashlight in your pocket but you didn’t use it.

  Certainly the dark had never bothered you.

  There were footprints upstairs, damage to the house everywhere. An intruder had come for the plumbing and had taken something better. You had known the boy—had almost already been done knowing him—and now the boy and the intruder were somewhere else, together.

  In your anger you first thought you would find the intruder, find him and bind him and watch him. But in your fear you fled until one day you awoke in a new city, in the room at the top of this yellow house, into the terror of its absolute dark, its total quiet. The room sealed so tight it stayed warmer than the rest of the house even without heat. Your mouth starched, your tongue thick between your teeth, your heart hammering above the absence of other sound. Every wet noise outside your body dulled by the soundproofing but your licking your lips loud as a scrape of sandpaper across flesh. Your pride in your accomplishment as the movement of the chair against the wood disappeared into a whisper.

  There was nothing in the room but yourself and when the boys were in their rooms like this room there were only whatever sounds their bodies could make, all those trapped breaths and
thumping bloods, their fickle limitations. What a gift, given to every boy you’d taken.

  Outside the yellow house the midwestern winter hung, cold and blue and uninviting. In every city in the country you believed you could find a place such as this, an uninhabited zone full of empty buildings, rooms waiting to be repurposed into function. You walked the long blocks from the yellow house into the brighter parts of your new city, the busy streets where you watched and waited and looked for the right boy. The yellow house was readied for the taking and yet perhaps it would not be enough. Perhaps the intruder had changed the terms of your watching. If you made any mistake in the blue house perhaps the mistake was in the fleeing. You could have waited for the police to arrive. Did you want to hear what they would say, once they could see you? The explanations of who you were, of what you had become? The great curiosity of the why. The question you had never answered even for yourself. Your captors would have tried to see the evil in your face and they would have been disappointed. No matter how long they watched they would never see what they wanted. Because you had already looked and whatever there was inside you it was nothing you could watch no matter how brightly the light shined upon the mirror. Because it was only in a boy you could make yourself seen, only in a perfection of fear you could reveal the name you most desired being called.

  KELLY FOLLOWED THE LINEBACKER into his house, a squat building of brick at the end of the neighborhood’s last occupied block. Inside, a television voiced a repetition of sports news and on either side of the set there was a dog behind bars, in a cage barely wider than its shoulders, their animal smells swamping the crowded living room. The dogs barked at the sight of the linebacker, who swore in their direction, kicking at one of the cages but absently, without malice. Kelly didn’t recognize the dogs’ breed, imagined some combination bred cheaply together, a mix of incompatible angers, canine functions.

  My girlfriend’s dogs, the linebacker said. I could take them or leave them. He asked a question, had to repeat himself before Kelly answered: What kind of caliber, what kind of stopping power?

  Kelly said, I would like something the sight of would make a man do anything.

  The linebacker said, There are certainly guns like that but they aren’t free. Have a seat.

  The linebacker returned from the second floor with a logoed duffel bag, its two zippers padlocked together. He pulled a key ring from his pocket, separated out the right key from the clump. Inside the duffel were individual objects concealed in bubble wrap, their danger sealed away. The linebacker chose three of the bundles, peeled back the masking tape across their folds, laid out the contents on the kitchen table.

  Each weapon was black, unloaded. There were some differences in ornamentation, some spread of calibers, stopping power. The smallest pistol was heavier than Kelly expected but immediately he knew he wouldn’t want anything lighter. If he was going to carry a loaded gun he wanted to know it every step. If he was going to hurt someone he wanted to carry the burden of that hurt across a great distance. The act might be a surprise to the killed but he thought the killer should know its weight. He put down the smallest pistol and picked up the biggest. He couldn’t imagine doing anything but killing with it.

  He asked, What would the recoil be like?

  Magnificent, the linebacker said. Like holding a stallion in your fist.

  The safety was on but Kelly gave the trigger a pull anyway, explored the short range of motion the safety allowed. He put the pistol down, asked how much.

  The linebacker laughed. That’s it? Five minutes ago you didn’t know what you were looking at and now you know exactly what you want.

  The linebacker laughed again. The sound filled the room, overflowed it. Somewhere above them a baby started crying. Kelly had forgotten there was an upstairs. He hadn’t even known about the baby. A woman’s voice could be heard comforting the child. Kelly made an awkward apology. He wanted to leave but not without the pistol, its halo of deathly want. The linebacker named a price and Kelly opened his wallet. The linebacker sealed the pistol in the bubble wrap, reaffixed the masking tape, searched the kitchen drawers for a plastic shopping bag. Upstairs the baby cried and cried. As Kelly walked out of the house the dogs kept their silence, cowed in their cages. He wanted to get down on his hands and knees and growl into their faces but the linebacker wanted him out of his house. Upstairs, the baby continued to cry and the woman’s voice lost its whispered comforts, rising harsh and frustrated as Kelly stepped out into the snow.

  On the last night of the year they made love carefully, bodies angling against each other in the dark, their motions unhurried. Her cane was beside the bed, her nightstand full of muscle relaxers, creams, lubricants. It was up to him to find the proper approach, to move them through the stations of their sex, and now he did so easily, knowing what she liked best. Or else he thought he did and she let him think it. She was vocal in her desire in a way he had not previously known. He had preferred a certain roughness but this was good too. He’d never known any tenderness within himself, had only briefly approached it in the past. The way a child supposedly rewrites its parents: he’d craved this, thought he needed it. Even though the child wasn’t his own he had wanted the child to make him new.

  Afterward they lay naked beside each other, waiting without talking for the end of the year, and in the quiet dark preceding the midnight hour he didn’t speak the sudden sadness she couldn’t see. The new year came and went and at first he said nothing, instead thinking about how distant all the other years he’d known had become, how everyone he’d ever loved then had been lost to him, their faces gone dark, the smell of their skin faded from memory. Now here he was in the zone, in a new year, living some new life. But every new affection bred its own fears. Because anyone you loved became a responsibility. Because to be a good man meant taking their protection seriously, meant removing every danger it was in your power to remove, no matter what the consequences.

  Because any responsibility taken far enough inevitably risked an atrocity.

  He could only rarely speak openly but now he turned toward her, tried to tell her what he felt for her, how he wanted what he felt to last. But as he spoke she moved closer, then stopped his mouth with hers.

  No, she said, pushing herself up on one elbow, her pale body lean and luminous in the streetlight descending through the window. This is all temporary. I won’t last. Sooner or later the attack that ends all this will come.

  He shook his head, denied the obvious truth. He said, I am with you either way. I am with you no matter what happens.

  Temporary, she said again. Everything you love about me is temporary.

  Her hands pushed upon his stretched chest, lifted her body atop his again. He was so much bigger than her, the difference greater than ever before.

  She said, I think you are temporary too. I think you believe you know who you are because of something that happened to you a long time ago. You haven’t told me but I know. But there’s always a choice. You could be this person or you could become someone else.

  There is a good man, she said. There is a good woman. We could become those people. Sometimes it feels so easy to choose.

  FLORIDA

  THE KILLER WAS NOT AFRAID. The killer knew who he was, how he had been made, made himself: The killer almost joined the marines. The killer almost remained a Catholic. The killer almost had a successful insurance business. The killer almost earned a criminal justice degree. The killer almost went to jail for threatening his then fiancée. The killer almost went to jail for shoving a police officer. All this in the almost-distant past and now the killer was almost thirty. Now the killer rented his home but he almost always thought of it as his.

  The killer did not think of himself in the third person but there almost wasn’t enough of him to justify the first. The killer was living a life of almost but surely almost had not made him afraid.

  The killer was not afra
id. There had been four hundred police responses to his neighborhood in thirteen months but still the killer was not afraid and because he was not afraid he had placed fifty of those calls himself.

  The killer was not afraid when he made his complaints: This loud party, he said; This garage door left open; These unbearable potholes; These children playing in the streets, where they might be hurt.

  The killer was not afraid when he reported suspicious persons, loose dogs.

  The killer was not afraid when he said Burglar into his cell phone, when he said Thief. Even if he had not seen any actual burglaries, any actual theft. Only almost, the potential of.

  When the dispatcher asked him to describe the suspicious persons, he was not afraid when he said he was almost sure they were black males, when almost every single time he said they were young and black and suspicious.

  The killer was not afraid of the suspected burglars or the suspected thieves. The killer was not afraid of the thugs he thought he saw, their dark shapes moving from house to house, looking in windows, eyeing flat-screen televisions and surround-sound systems.

  The killer, who did not know he was a killer yet, was not afraid of meeting one of these thugs while he patrolled the streets, in command of the neighborhood watch.

  Why not? Because the killer was not afraid.

  Surely the killer was not afraid behind the wheel of the car, with his pistol on the passenger seat. Not just because it was raining and hard to see. It wasn’t the weather the killer wasn’t afraid of.

  The killer was not afraid for his home.

  The killer was not afraid for his wife.

  The killer was not afraid because he was there, watching and waiting.

  He would not let them make him afraid.

  Even though he couldn’t say who they were.

  The killer was not afraid when he dialed the emergency number.

  The killer was not afraid when he said into the phone, There’s a real suspicious guy here.