“The hospital?” Jimmy’s aunt snapped, stepping forward. “Oh my God, you mean her mother’s a nurse?”
“No, she works in the admitting office,” Mrs. Beauvais said, still sounding utterly delighted. “And a lovely person she is—”
“Oh, that’s just great.” I thought Jimmy’s aunt was going to spit with disgust. “She’ll know all our private business and so will this little shit here—”
Mrs. Beauvais straightened up instantly. “I have warned you before—do not use that language about children in front of children, especially your own, or Jimmy won’t be the only child going into care tonight.”
Jimmy’s aunt stared at her openmouthed—she needed a dentist bad, I thought—then turned to look at her daughters now lined up on the sidewalk next to her. Their faces were so terror-stricken that I forgot I wanted to punch them out. I tried to will Jimmy’s aunt to bend down, gather them into her arms, and tell them they didn’t have to be afraid. Instead, she turned back to Mrs. Beauvais. “You got someplace to take them, you go right ahead, lady. I need a rest and I can’t get a babysitter.”
All three girls burst into loud tears. It was all I could do not to cry with them.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, shut up!” Jimmy’s aunt shouted, dabbing at her eyes with the enormous tissue wad. “You’re not goin’ nowhere, they don’t got nobody to take care of you. Now shut up before I give you something to cry about!” This only made them cry louder. Mrs. Beauvais turned to the skinny guy, who went over to the girls and tried to comfort them.
Naturally, they thought he was trying to take them away. Screaming at the tops of their lungs, they ran into the house and slammed the door. Even then we could still hear them wailing and sobbing. I looked around, wondering why the neighbors weren’t coming out to see what was going on, and then remembered about Kennedy. They’d all be glued to their TV sets. Besides, they were probably used to hearing Linda Valeri’s kids cry.
“Oh, what are you lookin’ so upset for?” she asked the skinny guy, who was pinching the bridge of his nose like he had a bad headache. “You don’t have to live with that—I do.”
“Mrs. Valeri—” he started.
“Don’t Mrs. Valeri me, you—you—” She hesitated, as if she’d been about to say something and then caught herself. “You social worker. You never mind about them or my brother’s kid. We’ve got real problems now. Kennedy’s been shot, probably by some Communist! This time next week we could have Russian tanks rolling down Main Street, unless they just drop the bomb on us. You gonna take my kids away then?”
Mrs. Beauvais and the skinny guy looked at each other for a moment; then she turned to me with a pained look that was trying to be a smile. “Sweetheart, an awful lot has happened today and it’s got everyone so upset they’re saying things they don’t mean—”
If she was talking about Jimmy’s aunt, she was a lousy judge of character, I thought, but I didn’t say anything.
“—but right now, I’m very, very worried about Jimmy because nobody seems to know where he is.” She stared into my face as if she really expected me to solve all her problems.
“Well, he wasn’t in school today,” I offered.
She nodded patiently. “Yes, we know that now. His aunt Linda said Jimmy left the house this morning just like always so she thought he was in school. When he didn’t come home with his cousins, she called to see if he was with me. Now we’re all very concerned—”
“Include me out,” said Jimmy’s aunt. “That kid can take care of himself just fine.”
“Please, Mrs. Valeri—” said the skinny guy.
“Don’t Mrs. Valeri me!”
He looked like he wanted to say something; instead, he turned his back and moved away a couple of feet. What did she want him to call her, I wondered—Aunt Linda? Your Majesty? At least none of us had to call her Mommy; inside the house, Jimmy’s cousins were still wailing and sobbing.
“There, you hear that?” Jimmy’s aunt said, gesturing with the wad of tissues. “That’s my night shot to shit. Smooth move, Ex-Lax, thanks for nothin’. You’re so worried about Jimmy, go look for him. I did what I was supposed to do. I told you to come and get him after school. It’s not my fault if he took off. All I can say is, I just better see a check for the last month and a half or I’ll sue you and the city.” She marched into the house and slammed the door behind her. A moment later we could hear her screeching at the kids, who began crying louder than ever.
Mrs. Beauvais seemed to sag all over, even her face, as if she were deflating. Then the skinny guy touched her arm and nodded toward me. She squared her shoulders and made herself smile. “I have an idea,” she said, trying to sound cheerful. “Why don’t you help me look for Jimmy? We’ll drive around in my car.”
I looked at the big Oldsmobile. “I’d have to ask my mother but she’s still at work, and I’m not supposed to call her there unless it’s an emergency.”
“That’s no problem, I’ll call her,” said the social worker airily. “There’s a pay phone in the candy store up the street, we’ll call her from there.”
“Well…I guess,” I said dubiously. First it was “I’ll call her” and in the next breath it was “We’ll call her”? Sounded like a classic double cross to me. But even if it wasn’t, I didn’t think this was going to go over very well. It had the feel of something that was supposed to be a good deed but would somehow end up backfiring and getting me into trouble.
The skinny guy bent down so we were eye-to-eye. “Look, Jimmy might have been intending to go straight to school when he left his aunt’s house this morning and then had an accident or something. He could be lying hurt somewhere, unable to call for help and hoping that someone, anyone would come looking for him. I bet he doesn’t even know what happened to the president.”
I shifted uncomfortably from one foot to the other, imagining myself lying unseen all day in a ditch with a broken leg or worse without anyone knowing it. The fact that there were no ditches where even a mouse could have lain unseen all day between my house and school didn’t matter.
“Good girl.” The social worker was ushering me toward her car quickly, before I could think of an argument. “Hop in, we’ll drive to the store.”
I pulled away from her. Getting into someone’s car without permission? Unthinkable, even if I got permission afterward.
“Please,” Mrs. Beauvais said wearily. “It’ll take me a half hour to walk all the way there, make the call, and walk back again. That’s a half hour when we could be looking for Jimmy and it’ll be dark soon.”
I gave in, hoping that somehow my mother either wouldn’t find out or would make an exception to the rule this one time. Like if Jimmy really were lying hurt somewhere and would have died if I hadn’t gone looking for him with his social worker. Nobody would punish a kid for saving someone’s life, I thought.
The guy behind the counter at the candy store was watching a little black-and-white TV with the sound turned down low. Every minute or so, he changed the channel, which meant he had to fiddle with the antenna. A lady came out from the back room and asked him what was happening now. Then they’d both look at the skinny guy and say something like, “Can you believe it? What’s this country coming to?” The skinny guy nodded and said something similar, all the while glancing over at Mrs. Beauvais, who was on the pay phone with my mother. Getting her permission for me to drive around with her and look for Jimmy was taking a lot longer than I’d thought it would.
Not a good sign—the longer it took, the more trouble I would probably be in later, whether we found Jimmy or not. Hoping I wouldn’t have to talk to my mother myself, I stayed by the counter with the skinny guy, who had told me he was Mrs. Beauvais’s assistant.
The conversation went on and on; I couldn’t imagine what they were saying to each other and I didn’t want to. The candy-store guy had flipped around the dial six or seven times when Mrs. Beauvais suddenly looked up and beckoned to me, pointing at the receiver. My heart san
k but I went over anyway.
“—absolutely right, Janet, I don’t know what it’s like to bring up a child as a single parent,” she was saying. “But you’ve known me for years and I would hope you know that I would never let any harm come to a child in my care. There is absolutely no danger and if I thought there were—”
Long pause. Mrs. Beauvais patted my shoulder reassuringly and then held on to it to keep me from walking away.
“I highly doubt that anyone would think anything bad about you or your daughter just because they saw her in my car, and if anyone ever did say anything, you have my assurance that I would correct them—”
Pause again.
“Well, then, how about just until four thirty? No matter what, I will drive her home at four thirty on the dot.” Pause. “Yes, I promise. Four thirty on the dot. Yes, she’s right here—” Mrs. Beauvais put her hand over the receiver and held it out to me. I took it from her, thinking that JFK had been lucky to have a quick death.
“Hi, Mom,” I said miserably.
“Why does Social Services think you know where that boy is?” she demanded. “Where on earth would they get an idea like that?”
“I don’t know,” I said even more miserably.
“However you managed to get involved in this, you’d better be home at four thirty on the dot. Because I’m going to call the house at four thirty-five and you’d better answer by the third ring.”
“I will—”
She went on but the social worker took the phone away from me and talked over her, thanking her profusely for allowing me to help a child who through no fault of his own was in trouble and what a day this was with one thing and another, isn’t it just awful what happened and again, thank you so, so much. I was pretty sure my mother was still talking when Mrs. Beauvais hung up and turned to me with a bright, professional smile. “I guess we’d better get a move on if I’m going to get you home on time.”
“Four thirty on the dot,” I reminded her. My mother was going to kill me.
“Where are you two going to look first?” the skinny guy asked Mrs. Beauvais as we left the store.
“Well, where do you think we should look?” she asked me brightly. “Is there any special place Jimmy likes to go that only he knows about and nobody else does?”
I wanted to laugh in her face. If only Jimmy knew about it and nobody else, then I wouldn’t know about it, either. Then I thought of the embankment and the area under the Fifth Street Bridge.
“Maybe,” I said. “There’s this place where we go sledding when it snows.” I looked down at her feet. She was wearing boots but they had heels and looked dressy and expensive. “It’s over by the playground. The one near the bridge.”
“That’s where we’ll be,” she told the skinny guy.
“I’ll go uptown, then,” he said and headed for his VW. I almost called after him not to bother—Jimmy never went uptown if he had a choice—but Mrs. Beauvais was stuffing me back into the front seat of the Oldsmobile like she was afraid I’d change my mind.
Back then, the Fifth Street Bridge was one of the longer bridges in that part of the county. It connected the main part of town with the more suburban south side, stretching over the railroad tracks that went to and from the state capital and, parallel to the tracks, the Nashua River, which in those days wasn’t so much a river as a waste runoff from the paint factory and a couple of paper mills. You could tell how good business was by the color of the water—bright red, ink blue, puke green, or milk of magnesia white were all signs of an economic upturn, more so if there was a particularly bad stench.
Mrs. Beauvais parked the car across the street from the playground and peered through the windshield, worried. “Do you think Jimmy is on the bridge?” I knew she was looking at the concrete arches on the near side. The more daring high school boys showed off by walking all the way up and over them. Occasionally, the fire department would have to come out and rescue someone who’d reached the top and then lost his nerve, and everyone knew someone who knew someone who had seen the kid who had fallen off and splattered all over the road, although no one seemed to know exactly when this grisly event had occurred. I knew Mrs. Beauvais was wondering if Jimmy planned to walk over.
“No,” I said, “he’s not on the bridge. He’s under it.”
She looked at me, horrified. “But it’s dangerous down there. The railroad tracks—he could get run over by a train. Or he could fall in the river—God only knows what would happen to him if he did!”
I shrugged. Getting hit by a train seemed to be a lot more difficult than avoiding it—it wasn’t like a train could sneak up on you, after all, you could hear it coming for miles, which gave you plenty of time to get out of the way. The river we gave a much wider berth. It was generally accepted among kids that if you stuck your finger in the Nashua, all the flesh would dissolve off it, leaving the naked bone. But that was pretty easy to avoid, too—you just stayed far away from the water’s edge. Not hard to do—there was a lot of land under the bridge, overgrown and wild, a jungle in the middle of town.
As if Mrs. Beauvais caught a sense of my thoughts, she said, “You know, sweetheart, sometimes bad people hide down there. Tramps passing through, criminals on the run from the police. If Jimmy ran into someone like that—well, there are people so bad they do that, you know. They hurt kids.”
I didn’t say anything. I had a vague idea of what she was talking about but as far as I knew, bad people like that didn’t hide in the undergrowth beneath bridges—they lurked around outside schools with bags of candy.
“Do you and Jimmy spend a lot of time down there?” she asked, looking into my face seriously.
“Everybody goes sliding here when there’s enough snow,” I said. “There’s a steep part and a part that’s not so steep. Sometimes if it’s slippery enough you can build up enough speed to go all the way to the tracks, practically.”
“That’s very dangerous,” Mrs. Beauvais scolded. “A train could come along at exactly the wrong moment and there’d be nothing left of you.”
“Nobody’s ever slid onto the tracks,” I said. “I don’t think you could go fast enough.”
She sighed heavily and looked toward the bridge again. “You think Jimmy’s down there now?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “We’d have to go down and see. If you want, I’ll go down by myself and come back and tell you.”
Mrs. Beauvais shook her head so emphatically, the little net veil on her hat wiggled. “Didn’t you hear me just tell you it’s dangerous? Besides, I don’t just want to know where he is. He has to come with me.”
“Why?” I asked.
She looked startled at the question. I was startled myself at my sudden and hitherto unsuspected nerve. Never in my life had I ever asked an adult to explain herself.
“His aunt kicked him out, didn’t she,” I said.
“I’d rather you didn’t put it that way,” Mrs. Beauvais said and I realized she was embarrassed, which startled me even more.
“Where’s he going to go now?”
She tapped her gloved fingers on the steering wheel. “That’s a good question. I think Jimmy may have finally run out of relatives.”
“Why can’t you just make his mother take him?” I said. “Isn’t it against the law or something for a mother to refuse to take care of her own kid?”
Mrs. Beauvais gave me another startled look. “I’m sorry, that was indiscreet. I shouldn’t have said anything about Jimmy,” she said in that brisk way grown-ups use when they’ve done something wrong and a kid bags them right in the act. “It’s nothing that concerns you. These are matters that you’ll never have to worry about, God willing. Now let’s see if we can find Jimmy.”
We got out of the car and Mrs. Beauvais followed me over to the easier way down, which wasn’t all that easy for her in those boots and her dress and her nice tweed coat. I thought she probably would have had a hard time anyway at her age; I had no idea how old she was but all grown-ups s
eemed to be too old for everything kids could do. Every time I looked back at her clambering down the uneven slope after me, I was tempted to tell her to forget it, Jimmy probably wasn’t down here, it was too cold.
I guess she knew from the look on my face because she kept telling me to keep going, she was doing fine, she had actually been a kid once herself, even if I found that hard to believe. What I found hard to believe was that I would get her back up the hill to the car fast enough so she could drive me home in time for my mother’s four thirty-five phone call. How could I have been so stupid, I thought furiously. If I’d been with another kid, it would have been simple: I could just say I had to go home or my mother would kill me and then leave. The other kid wouldn’t have blamed me for taking off. But if I left Mrs. Beauvais here, I would somehow end up in worse trouble when my mother found out. And she would find out, because Mrs. Beauvais saw her several times a week. She’d make a point of telling her.
That was grown-ups for you—do them a favor and they’d end up making stuff that should have been simple into something so complicated you ended up in trouble no matter what you did. Maybe that was why Jimmy’s life was all messed up, I thought—he’d done some adult a favor once and he’d been paying for it ever since.
Finally we reached the bottom of the hill where the land sloped gently toward the railroad tracks. Mrs. Beauvais stood there for a few moments, swaying on her high-heeled boots, her pocketbook swinging from the crook of her elbow. Jeez, why hadn’t she hidden that under the front seat, I wondered as she grabbed my shoulder to steady herself.
“I don’t suppose there’s an easier way back up?” she asked, puffing a little. I shook my head; I was doomed.
After she caught her breath, we continued down the slope and I led her toward the patch of land directly under the bridge. In the summer, big weeds grew up around the bridge support, overgrowth tall enough to hide in. I had thought most of it would have been gone now, killed off by the cold, but a lot of the thicker stalks were still there, yellow and dry as old corn husks.
The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy Page 32