by LR Wright
“There ain’t a thing you can do for him, you know that. I wish I’d never turned you in his direction. It happens he’s nothing but bad. Bad blood, from somewhere. A bad seed, that’s what that boy is.”
“I don’t believe in bad seeds.”
She was clearly astounded, and for a few seconds, speechless. Finally she said, “A man like you, a policeman, a mature person been living in this world more than fifty years, most of the time wholly immersed in crime—”
Alberg remarked mildly, “Not wholly immersed, Bernie.”
“—a man like you,” she barreled ahead, “you can sit there and tell me you don’t believe in bad seeds?”
“Yeah,” said Alberg. “I can.”
She peered at him across the table, inspecting him closely, as if she’d never seen him before. “And I s’pose you don’t believe in evil, either?”
“Ah, Bernie. Sure I believe in evil. Neglect is evil. Abuse is evil. Look.” He leaned forward, resting his arms on the table. “That’s what the kid’s relatives said, too. But it’s too easy, Bernie. I want to know why this thing happened, and to say it’s because the kid’s a bad seed, or the devil made him do it, or some damn thing—that’s not helpful.” He sat back and watched her drink some tea.
“I think you figure you shoulda seen it coming,” said Bernie.
He laughed a little. “Yeah.”
She sniffed her contempt. “So you’re psychic now, are you? How about reading my tea leaves here?”
“I should have seen something coming,” said Alberg. “And I did. But I was looking in the wrong fucking place, Bernie.” He had never used that word in her presence before, and it caused her lips to clinch together. “I was looking at Ralph.”
Betty was dusting her living room like Maura had shown her, flicking the duster up and down and across, and when she’d done this a certain number of times it was necessary to rush out onto the porch and shake it vigorously: that was how to make sure she actually got the dust to go away. And she was doing this, standing out on the porch, shaking the dustrag, when she saw that the policeman was standing on his porch, too. “Yoo hoo!” she called to him, waving the duster, and she hurried down the steps and along the sidewalk, calling “Yoo hoo!”
“Oh wait wait wait,” she said when she got close to him, for he had come down the steps. “I have a question for you. Were you wearing your uniform when you met your wife? She’s a very nice person, your wife, an exceedingly nice person.” She flapped the dustrag energetically. “When I went to your house the other day—remember? Remember?”
“I remember, yes,” he said, but he didn’t sound friendly.
“I had a problem for which I needed help, and as soon as I saw the inside of your house—” She examined him closely, standing there in his uniform, so crisp and clean, just like his house. “It is extremely clean, your house, extremely clean, I have never ever seen a house so clean. And so I knew that she could help me, your wife.”
He kept glancing at his police car, which was parked in front of the house. Betty knew that he probably wanted to get in it and drive away, so quickly she asked him again, “Were you wearing it when you met her? Your uniform?”
He looked left and right. “I don’t know.”
Betty was astonished. “You don’t know? You don’t know?” She threw back her head and clasped her hands together, laughing merrily. “I certainly know, what Jack was wearing.”
“Look, I’ve got to get back to work,” said the policeman, and he started to walk toward his car.
But Betty said, “Oh but wait! Let me tell you how I met him.”
“Mrs. Coutts—”
“Yes!” said Betty, and she bestowed upon him a generous smile. She shoved the duster into the pocket of her dress. “Good for you! You remembered my name!” He looked at his watch, and she tapped the face of the watch with her finger. “There there, that’s good, you have a minute or two, maybe three, I can see that.” She smoothed her hair with her hands. “It was at a party. Years and years ago. There were two men there when I arrived, and two women. One of the men wore a green suit and there was dandruff on his shoulders. His eyelashes were so fair that his eyes looked naked. He sold things at The Bay.”
The policeman looked behind her, and Betty turned around and saw that Heather was approaching along the sidewalk. “Go home!” Betty said sharply.
The policeman consulted his watch again. “I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to—”
“Your apology is accepted,” said Betty, and she ran her hands over her hips. “Then another man arrived at the party. This was Jack. He was tall, but not big. He had ordinary brown hair, short. And he wore not a suit but a sweater with a V-shaped neck, and a shirt and tie peeked out from underneath. The sweater was beige.”
Again, he looked behind her. Again, Betty turned. Heather was standing in front of Betty’s house, on the sidewalk, watching them. Betty gestured, furious. “Go inside! Inside!” She turned back to the policeman, who had taken a few steps toward his car. “I liked the look of him,” she said, quite loudly, and he stopped. “And he liked the look of me, too. I was thin, then. Very very thin, and also quite young, and my hair was long and hung down my back.” She looked back over her shoulder, but Heather was gone. Good. “Later I told him that I had to leave. And he said, ‘Let me drive you home.’ So politely he said this, so politely”—she clasped her hands again, remembering, and rocked herself, ever so slightly, rocked back and forth on her tiny feet—“that I agreed.”
“That’s a very interesting story,” said the policeman. “Thank you for telling me. I have to go now.”
“She gave me advice, your wife did. About cleaning my house.”
Maura’s husband walked toward his car.
She watched him drive away, and went back inside her house. She would make some tea, she decided. She didn’t feel like dusting anymore.
Chapter 12
THE KID WAS STILL in the hall when Eliot emerged from the fireplace room. He was sitting on the floor with his knees up, leaning against the wall. Bits of icing and pastry crumbs were smeared all over his mouth. When he saw Eliot he scrambled to his feet, stumbling over his sweatpants.
“I’m supposed to be outside,” he said. “Wanna come?”
“Those pants are too big for you,” said Eliot. He sounded disapproving, as if it were the kid’s fault. But the sweatpants probably didn’t belong to Alvin. They’d probably been given to him when he got here. Eliot figured there was a room somewhere in the house stuffed full of kids’ clothes. Used clothes, not new ones. He wondered where the kids were who’d been the original owners. He wondered how their lives had turned out.
“Yeah, they are,” said Alvin, hanging on to the waistband. It was a good thing there was elastic at the ankles because in addition to being too big around, the sweatpants were too long.
“Lemme see that,” said Eliot, and he pulled the waistband from the kid’s hand. “Jesus. You need to cut a big piece right out of there.”
Alvin sat down on the floor again and took off his right shoe, a black high-top, and peeled off the sock that was on that foot, a gray worksock. “Here,” he said, handing Eliot a Swiss army knife that felt warm and damp from having been pressed against the sole of his foot.
“Shit,” Eliot muttered, glancing up and down the hall. But for once there was nobody in sight. He noticed a thin strip of gleaming wood on either side of the worn-down well-trodden pathway up the middle. For a second Eliot had a vision of how this hallway might have looked when it was new, shining like a bright bronzy stream through the heart of the house, echoing with footsteps and probably laughter, too.
“Come on,” he said to the kid, and they went outside into the exercise area.
A few kids were shooting baskets, a few more were lounging against the twelve-foot chain-link fence that surrounded that part of the yard. Beyond it on one side was the parking lot. Trees pressed against the fence on the other two sides. Eliot and Alvin hunkered down on
the hard-packed dirt edging the concrete pad that served as a basketball court.
Eliot pulled at the threads in the waistband of the kid’s sweatpants, using the scissors on the Swiss army knife, and finally freed the elastic. The kid smelled, he noticed. Not of dirt, or sweat, it was just a little kid smell. Eliot felt weary just thinking about how truly young this kid was, with his black hair, bleary and sticky, always falling into his eyes, and his forehead with the worry marks permanently impressed into it. Huddled into himself, the kid was; probably he ate so much to deliberately make himself fatter, to create more layers of himself. Eliot tugged on the elastic and tried to snip out a chunk of it, but it was too thick for the tiny pair of scissors. He finally sawed through it with the knife, and then tied the ends together.
“What kind of a knot is that?” said Alvin.
“I don’t know. One end over, then the other end over. I don’t know what you call it.” He handed the knife to Alvin, who removed his shoe and sock and put the knife back where he’d gotten it, then put on the sock and shoe again.
They stayed there for a while, their backs against the chain-link fence, watching the halfhearted basketball game that was now going on. The day had grown suddenly cold, and Eliot realized that he was shivering in his denim jacket. The sky was cloud-swept, the sun hidden, its warmth evaporated. There’d be months of this now, he thought. Three or four months of rain and cold and gray skies. Weather had never bothered him before, not like it affected his mom, for instance. When the sun shone it was like it had lit up in her face as well as in the blue sky above. But she hated the day after day of rain that happened every winter—and it was just the same here, on the other side of the whole damn country, exactly the same kind of winter weather…
This was what got to him. This was what had got to him. It was the same weather, the same weather, and there they were on the beach, doing the same things, the exact same things, so tell me, Eliot had said inside his head, tell me, somebody please tell me why we came here…
“I gotta go,” said Eliot, and he stumbled to his feet, hanging on to the chain-link fence for support.
“Sure,” said Alvin, and he started to get up, too. But then his migrating gaze fixed on Eliot’s face, and he sank back onto the ground. “So I’ll seeya at dinner, okay?”
“Yeah, whatever,” said Eliot, moving off toward the door. He pushed inside and down the hall to the fireplace room. But when he opened the door he saw a girl in there—he thought she was called Gloria something—talking to probably her social worker. So he backed out and went upstairs, heading for the room he shared with a kid named Dick, taking the steps two at a time. He burst into this room and found Dick lying on his bed, hands behind his head.
“What the fuck you want?” said Dick, who was two or three inches taller than Eliot and at least twenty pounds heavier. He had a scar on his head that crept out from under his flattop haircut and squirmed halfway down his forehead. Sometimes it looked longer than at other times. Eliot had found no explanation for this. This scar was red now, which wasn’t a good sign.
“Nothin’, I don’t want nothin’,” said Eliot, retreating, closing the door.
He stood in the hall, looking out one of the barred windows that lined the wall. He could see over the parking lot and the landscaped perimeter of the east side of the building to the four-lane street whose name he still didn’t know. His predicament, his situation, was at that moment incredible to him. He shoved his hands in his pockets and looked up and down the hall, at the barred windows that faced a row of closed doors with numbers on them. The number on his door was seven. Was seven a lucky number? He couldn’t remember.
He heard footsteps coming up the stairs and because he didn’t want to look like he was loitering, he began walking toward them. It was one of the housekeeping staff. He saw her head first, then her neck and chest; she was wearing an apron and carrying an armload of clean towels. She ought to have had a cart, he thought, like they have in motels, with cleaning supplies on one shelf and clean towels on another. She wasn’t very old, but older than Eliot, of course. Almost everybody in the world was older than Eliot—everybody except the Alvin kid. She nodded at him as they passed on the stairs, not quite smiling, too cautious for that.
Once she was out of sight he sat down on the steps, because he couldn’t think of where to go or what to do. His knees were pressed together, feet splayed apart, pointing inward. Eliot scratched at the knee of his jeans with his fingernail. There was dried dirt there. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d worn these jeans. He only had two pairs with him in this place. And four tops and four pairs of socks and four pairs of undershorts. Plus his denim jacket. They’d said he could bring books with him but he hadn’t wanted to.
He remembered now with some surprise that he hadn’t wanted to be distracted. He’d intended to spend all his life from then on thinking. His thoughts would be a great burden he would carry. This burden would cause veins to pop out on his forehead, and in his ever-larger biceps, too. He had decided never to get his hair cut again or shave the hairs that had started to grow on his face or trim his toenails or his fingernails. He was going to let his body just do it, grow, whatever, not pay it any attention, not pay attention to anything but what he’d done.
But he’d found that he couldn’t do this. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to. He just couldn’t. Somebody would be face-to-face with him, the lawyer, or a social worker, a psychiatrist, youth worker; he didn’t know who the hell they were, exactly. But there was this Ms. Tilley, Eliot thought she was a social worker. And there was the lawyer—she was a woman, too, an older one, with gray hair and a face that looked tired. They had both asked him questions that he knew they already had answers to and when they asked these he looked at them, waiting, or else he looked somewhere else, waiting, until finally they asked him—both of them did, in different ways—about what he’d done.
He remembered the very first time anybody had asked him what had happened, or why, or something. It was the cop, Alberg, back in Sechelt, before they’d taken him away.
“What the hell happened?” he’d said, or something like that.
Eliot had felt like he had a mouthful of sand. He remembered that his hands were cold, too. He thought, looking back, that he’d tried to answer, or at least to get some kind of picture in his head that he could refer to. He’d figured if he could do that, then maybe he could think of some words to say about what he saw there, in his head. He had a pretty good vocabulary—at least he’d always thought he had. But it didn’t do him any good on that particular occasion. And in fact it hadn’t done him any good since, either, because without a picture to describe, words weren’t of any use, and he couldn’t get a picture to form, no matter how hard he tried. It was like his head was full of something silvery and slippery, like rain or a streamful of eels; he couldn’t form shapes there, and he couldn’t see colors.
Not when he tried.
Sometimes he had sudden flashes of stuff. But he didn’t even know if they were real. He didn’t know if he was remembering, in flashes; or only making things up.
He sat on the stairs, looking down and along the length of the hallway to the front door at the end. There was a square of colored glass in the top of it. He heard laughter coming from the main office, which was around the corner: the hallway formed a “T” with the entrance to the house at the place where the two arms met. The main office and a reception area were off to one side and a bunch of other offices were off to the other. These other offices, which were really cubicles, were where the social workers and the lawyers usually met with kids. But sometimes they were all full, and then they took what they called their “clients” into the room with the fireplace.
Eliot liked that room. He’d have liked to spend more time in there. He’d have liked to think of stuff to say, to talk about, so that his meetings with the social worker or the lawyer would be longer.
But he couldn’t.
Chapter 13
CA
SSANDRA WAS WATERING THE plants that sat next to the big front window when she saw the brown truck. It was parked across the street. There was nobody in it, but a man wearing a red plaid jacket and jeans was sitting on the bench in front of the real estate office, facing the library. Cassandra stepped behind a fig tree. She looked around the library, at the senior citizens sharing newspapers and comfortable chairs with the unemployed; at Paula, checking out books for a young mother whose infant slept in a stroller at her feet; at the shelves of books, hundreds of books— my work, my comfort and my joy, she thought, feeling slightly dizzy; Cassandra looked around the library, a place of learning, of diversion, of refuge—and looked again out the window. The truck was still there, but the man was gone from the bench.
She finished watering the plants. When she next glanced outside, she saw Sid lumbering along the street. He came in and looked around uneasily, and she called out to him.
“I was hoping I could have a word with you,” he said. “If it’s not a bad time.”
“I want a word with you, too, as it happens.”
She led him behind the counter, through the Dutch door and into her office. “Sit down, Sid,” she said, indicating a large gray easy chair. “Can I get you some coffee?”
“No, thanks.” He sat down gingerly, put his cap on the floor next to him, and rested his hands on his thighs.
Cassandra sat on the edge of her desk. “Have you seen—” she said. And stopped. Had he seen what, a man driving a brown truck?
“I’m hoping you can advise me,” said Sid laboriously. “About me and Elsie. About how I can persuade her to come home.” His brow was wrinkled in distress. “I’m not too good at talking. And the more important a thing is, the worse I get at it.”
Cassandra was dismayed: she was pretty sure Elsie had no intention of going home. “Well,” she said, carefully, “if she wants to come home, Sid, well, then, I guess she will. Maybe she’s just not ready yet.”