The Good Boy

by Schwegel, Theresa

  He was so fucking obtuse.

  She tucks the makeup into the vanity drawer and gets up and he doesn’t want to scare her so he steps back and forward again and makes like he’s just now walking into the room.

  “Hey,” he says. “You going somewhere?”

  “I hope so.” She doesn’t seem surprised to see him but she doesn’t seem angry, either. She opens the bureau—only two-thirds of the way, because of the bed—and picks out a sweater. Then she says, “I doubt it.”

  “I talked to McKenna. There’s news?”

  “Not exactly news. Bo has a few leads.”

  Pete doesn’t like that she’s so comfortable calling the detective by his first name. “Why isn’t that news? Good news?”

  “I don’t know, Pete,” she says, holding on to the cuffs of her V-neck as she pulls on the sweater. “It’s been forty-eight hours.”

  “So what? For forty-eight hours, I’ve been thinking our son is dead.” The statement feels like a confession. But: “This is great news. Why didn’t you call me?”

  She goes to the antique settee at the foot of the bed—the only place they could find for the damn thing, her grandmother’s—and takes a towel from a pile of clean laundry. She says, “I was waiting to hear from Bo again.”

  “Tell me what he said. Tell me everything he said.” He had been terrified that Joel was dead and now this rush of hindsight—his whole body trembles.

  “There’s nothing solid.”

  “That’s better than nothing at all.” He thinks of the word, solid. Thinks of coincidence. Thinks, how could I ever explain all this?

  Sarah shakes out the towel and lays it across the bed to fold it and says, “A gentleman who lives in a halfway house down by Welles Park claims he saw Joel and Butch late Friday night. Apparently, the man encouraged them to go home. Joel told him they were on their way.”

  “Welles Park, that’s what, a mile from here?”

  “Bo says the guy is a whackjob. He kept trying to explain the importance of the house’s steps.”

  “That’s it? The whackjob?”

  “Might as well be, but no. Another woman responded to the bulletin. She says she saw Joel yesterday morning at the Jewel on Lincoln Avenue. That’s the same neighborhood. She said he bought bread. She wanted to know if there was a reward.”

  “I didn’t even think about that,” he says. “A reward.” He didn’t know there was a bulletin, either.

  “Yeah. Well.” Sarah puts the folded towel back on the settee and picks up another. She is determined to be busy. She will create order.

  Probably because Pete’s made such a mess. And she doesn’t know the half of it.

  “Listen,” he says, “there are a lot of things I didn’t think about. Anything you said, for starters. All I knew was that I had to do something. Joel was gone; I couldn’t sit here and wait for a case to come together. I couldn’t put his fate in someone else’s hands. I had to look for him myself.”

  “I know.” She spreads the towel on the bed. She won’t look at him.

  “When I couldn’t find him, I looked for a motive. I couldn’t believe Joel would leave on his own, you know? Our boy? There had to be a reason. There’s always a reason—and I kept finding reasons—but I couldn’t find Joel.”

  She stacks the towels on the settee and nods almost automatically, which means she agrees or else she anticipated what he’d say. She picks up a pair of pants. Joel’s school pants. She does not shake them out, she just holds them there.

  “Sarah, I stayed away because I was afraid to come home without him. I couldn’t fail you again.” He takes the pants from her, puts them back on the settee, and holds her hand, his own still trembling. “But I realize, now, I failed you the minute I left you here.”

  Sarah takes her hand away, looks down at her rings. “The, ah. The real reason I didn’t call is because Mrs. Moeller? Two doors down? When Bo interviewed her yesterday, she told him she saw a car driving on our block the night Joel went missing. A car that stood out because it had lettering along the side—”

  “No—”

  “She couldn’t see the letters, exactly; she insisted they were Roman numerals, except that Bo knew there is no numeral Z—”

  “Fuck. Sarah. You knew?”

  “Elgin Poole,” she says, barely.

  “I should have told—”

  She holds up her hands. “You didn’t, and anyway, I wouldn’t have listened to you. I needed you to be wrong. But after you left last night, I asked Bo to talk to McKenna. She was acting so—just, guilty. And Bo,” she says, tears in her eyes now, too, “he’s been looking at Zack Fowler. That’s the lead he’s following—he thinks Zack knew about your history with the Hustlers and thought he’d use it to his advantage. He thinks Zack lured McKenna to his place as some show of solidarity to the gang. But Zack didn’t invite Joel, and he certainly didn’t anticipate Butch. They were there, Pete. They ran from there.” When she looks up at him, a tear falls. “You were right. I just couldn’t let you think so.”

  “I didn’t want to be right.”

  She clears space on the settee, socks falling to the floor. “I saw a shrink,” she says, and sits down. “After Ricky died. He said I was depressed. Of course I was depressed: my brother died. The doctor gave me a prescription, but I didn’t take it. I thought if I was grieving I would get better. But now that I’ve been over it a million times, just like everything else I obsess about, you know what I realize? I’m the one who’s crazy. I worry about you, and the kids, because I can’t understand how you’re normal and I’m not. I fight with you so I’ll have a reason to feel bad. I say there’s something wrong with Joel because I know there’s something wrong with me. And I just need you to be wrong. All the time. About everything.”

  “You’ve been grieving.”

  “But it’s not about Ricky, Pete. It’s us.”

  Pete looks across the room, the night-blacked window. And the yellow rocking chair sitting beneath it—the one Sarah used with both kids—another impractical, sentimental piece. Another of her attempts to make this place feel like home. What the hell has he ever done to make it feel that way?

  “It’s me,” he says.

  She puts her head in her hands, same as McKenna, and says, “You ran away a long time ago. I still don’t know why.”

  Pete pushes the rest of the laundry off the settee and sits next to her. He wants to put his arms around her, but he doesn’t want to risk being pushed away.

  “It was Kitty,” he says. “That night, when Quick photographed us? I never told you. I mean, I told you—nothing happened—that’s true. But something did happen. While I was on her detail. All that time I spent with her, watching her get raked over for one bad clack of the gavel? In this world, you can be just or you can be passionate, but not both. That was her problem. She wanted both. And that’s what made me realize I didn’t have any passion left. I’d been trying to do police work, but all the bosses really wanted me to do was be the police. And that’s not the same thing. Not at all. I tried—I mean, I wanted to, for us—for rank, a raise. A desk. Our life. But that meant my life. That meant not doing the job. It meant officially no longer giving a shit.

  “So when Oliver Quick took that photo and everybody else made up their own thousand words’ worth of context, I blamed him. I said my whole fucking career was ruined by that one moment. The punch. But the truth is, my whole life had been leading right up to that moment. And what I wanted was a different ending.”

  “What ending did you want?”

  “I don’t know. It doesn’t seem like there will ever be a fucking ending.”

  Sarah says, “It would have been easier if you’d just had an affair with her.”

  He slides off the settee, finds the floor. “The city is settling with White. I have to settle.”

  “You shouldn’t.”

  “I have to,” he says, and thinks of Elgin. “I have to take responsibility.”

  “You always take respon
sibility, Pete. It’s what makes you so easy to blame.”

  He feels her hand on his shoulder and he is surprised and he doesn’t ever want her to take it away so he stays there, still, and closes his eyes, and feels her warmth. Her steady hold. He has missed her so much. He will miss her so much more.

  He needs to tell her. He can’t let her soften; she needs to know what he’s done. She needs to know, and to prepare; when he goes this time, it will not be temporary.

  But then she gets down on the floor in front of him, between his legs, and she says, “I gave Oliver Quick Joel’s photo.”

  He can’t look at her—not because he is mad, but because he is ashamed.

  “Pete?” She tries to find his eyes and when she does, they both see: this is not about what they’ve done. It is about what they have done for Joel.

  “I know you will bring him back,” she says.

  When she kisses him he remembers the blood on his clothes and takes her hands to stop her and says, “Sarah, I’m filthy.”

  She says, “I don’t care. You’re here.” And then she kisses him again and she doesn’t stop and he doesn’t stop her.

  * * *

  In the dark, after Sarah’s fallen asleep, Pete lies there underneath the crisp, light sheet and listens to her breathe. He wants to take it all in, and to take it with him: the shape of the room, blue moonlight from the window, the stillness, his wife. And this feeling—this glimpse of life as it is, apart from consequence—it isn’t perfect. But it is now.

  He wishes he could remember every detail. Like Joel would.

  30

  The line to get into the courthouse is long and Joel waits with his hood on, head down, hoping the people waiting with him are too busy with their own pending cases to have read the newspaper this morning, his face right there on the front page.

  The security guard makes him feel like he’s up to something as he rattles off a list of dos and don’ts—mostly don’ts:

  “No food, no drink, no cameras … phones off, bags open … Parents, watch your kids; kids, listen to your parents…”

  Joel decides the woman in front of him—a blonde with a file folder under her arm—will be a better pinch-hit parent than the Hispanic man behind him who kicks his bag along the floor while talking on his phone, testing the nos. Joel steps closer to the woman than she’d probably appreciate if she noticed, positioning himself out of eye reach from the guard.

  When the woman gets to the front of the line, Joel takes off his hood, puts his book and wallet in a plastic bin on the conveyor belt and follows her through the metal detector. He finds Butchie’s plastic tags around his neck and presses them between his fingers for good luck as he passes through.

  On the other side, the woman swipes her folder and takes off before Joel’s bin comes out from the X-ray machine.

  And then the belt stops.

  Joel waits, the bin visible right there on the other side of the flaps, his “mom” disappearing into the sea of people headed for the courthouse lobby. He looks after her as the female guard stationed at the monitor calls for backup; he’s certain his cover is blown.

  He thinks about following her. Just pretending that’s not his stuff in the bin and keeping up with his fake mom and hoping nobody saw his face. In his wallet, the guards would find his name on his library card, and his Game Planet card, but only his name—not his face. He’s so close. If he took off, would they catch him?

  Another guard, a tall black man, joins his partner and nods at the monitor, eyes knowing. He looks at Joel and Joel swallows, dry, a gulp. It’s too late. He’s been made.

  “Sir,” he says, which is confusing because Joel is not a sir.

  “I’m a friend of the judge’s—” Joel starts to explain, but then the guard starts the belt again, watches Joel’s bin roll by, and lifts the Hispanic man’s bag.

  “Excuse us, kid,” he says, so Joel gets his things and gets swept up in the lobby rush.

  On the way to the elevators, he stops at the drinking fountain outside the men’s bathroom. The water tastes metallic, and at first it hurts his dried-out throat. After a long drink and nobody in or out of the bathroom, Joel pushes through the door. He doesn’t have to go—he already did, in an alley on the way over—but he wants to fix his hair before he sees the judge.

  In the bathroom mirror over a pair of sinks he discovers he wouldn’t fit his own description: his hair hangs in limp strings, there is some kind of rash on his chin, and his face is so filthy he appears naturally dark-skinned. He probably could have passed for the Hispanic man’s son, though he’s glad he didn’t try.

  He keeps one hand pressed to the faucet’s push handle while he dispenses liquid soap, goopy and pink and smelling like disinfectant. When his hands are clean he washes his face and runs wet fingers through his hair, behind his neck, around his shirt collar. The water is cold, and it feels nice.

  It isn’t until he’s good and soaked that he realizes there are no paper towels—just two hand dryers—and it turns out neither of them is worth the noise it makes. He holds his knees and shakes out his hair, like Butchie would, water everywhere.

  When he’s through he checks the mirror, and now he looks filthy and wet.

  He’s pressing his hair to his head when two men in suits come into the bathroom and he tries to play it cool, like there’s another reason everything’s all wet.

  “It’s like that fucking Mamet play,” says one, turning to a urinal. “We were just speaking about selling senate seats. As an idea. And Jesse Junior—boy, he’s perfectly cast.”

  The other one smiles at himself in the water-pocked mirror and picks something out of his teeth. He says, “Because, because you know it’s a crime.” He never looks at Joel.

  Joel wipes his hands on his pants and ducks out and he hopes the men are careful on the wet floor, this being the place for lawsuits and all.

  On the way to the elevators a Snickers taunts him from a rack of candy at the snack bar. He wonders if things would have turned out differently if he’d bought one back at the Jewel. If that would have changed the course of events just so, made the trip a success or a failure, but not a loss. He can’t stand feeling like things would have worked out—that Butchie would be here—if he’d handled any one thing differently. The Snickers, the storm, the soup.

  He crosses the lobby and shares an elevator with a handful of adults who step in and look up. Next to him, a black woman has a huge purse hooked in one arm and a doll-dressed, sticky-faced toddler in the other. As usual, the little girl is the only one who looks at Joel; in fact, she’s the only one who’s made eye contact since he made it through security. Joel smiles at her and gets sunny eyes in return. Nobody else notices. He wonders when his adult bubble will surround him, and he’ll simply stare at the rising floor numbers like everyone else.

  At the seventh floor, Joel is the only one who exits. He’s also the only one in the corridor who isn’t a police officer: there are at least twenty of them standing around in groups like there’s been some sort of roll call. Joel turns a hard right for Judge Crawford’s door and he hopes the cops, who are supposed to notice when someone’s out of place, don’t start to wonder where he belongs.

  He pushes open the heavy doors and, like yesterday, the courtroom is empty. He walks the center aisle toward the judge’s bench and takes a seat in the second row from the front—the seats are reserved for witnesses—and though the judge doesn’t know it yet, Joel is one.

  He slides down to the middle of the bench. Daylight glows white in the high windows and ceiling fans turn slowly enough to count the blades, which he does, until the clock ticks a minute past nine. He waits, and another minute goes by, and another. No one comes in.

  The plan is to see the judge, and this is where he planned to see her, and so he’s not going anywhere. He opens his book to where he left off and reads about White Fang’s fight with the bulldog Cherokee.

  The fight is long and White Fang is losing, the bulldog’s jaws lock
ing on to his neck, hanging there, suffocating him. Patiently, heartlessly. And the men cheer, their dollars against the wolf-dog.

  Joel pictures Beauty Smith as Agapito, standing on the edge of the ring. Before, he had imagined the character was Zack Fowler, the dead-eyed aggressor. But Agapito is the one who took Butchie—and on a trick, just like Beauty did with White Fang. And Agapito is the one who pretended to be friendly. Zack Fowler never ever did that.

  As White Fang struggles, Beauty enters the ring and starts to kick him, and Joel’s picturing Butchie there, left to fight alone. Left to die.

  Then a camp newcomer named Whedon Scott stops the fight. He rescues White Fang and looks around at the other men and cries, “You cowards! You beasts!” And in that role—the hero’s—where Joel always pictures the Hollywood actor who played Iron Man, Joel sees his dad instead.

  “Miss Garza,” someone says, and Joel snaps the book shut; so engrossed, he didn’t even notice the man with the untied pinstriped tie who came in and set up shop, his briefcase open and unpacked, papers all over the defense table. He’s addressing the bailiff, a long-legged woman wearing a stiff, short-sleeve uniform, who’s come in from the door in the front corner of the room—the one to the judge’s chambers.

  “Counselor,” the bailiff replies; she doesn’t seem the least bit interested. She climbs risers to the judge’s bench—a silly thing to call a big chair, if you ask Joel, who should know, since he’s sitting on a bench. Loose black curls fall over her shoulders as she leans over, flips a switch, and brings the audio system to life, the speakers hitched up along the walls burping their hellos.

  “When’s Crawford due?” the attorney asks, taking up the ends of his tie.

  Miss Garza steps down to the witness stand—another funny name, since it’s also a chair—to check the microphone. “Judge Crawford,” she says, but her voice doesn’t go through. She pulls the mic from its stand, which is actually a stand, and follows its cord underneath. Whatever she does down there fixes the problem because she tells the whole room, “Judge Crawford is impaneling the grand jury this morning. She isn’t expected in court until ten thirty.”