The Missing Person (9 page)

“He squishes these little frogs with his feet!”

“Oh, man! You should've seen the expression on his face!”

All three Michaelsons were paralyzed now, clutching their stomachs and listing from side to side, their laughter coming in breathless hoots.

“And the smell!” Darren said.

“Wow,” I said. “That's really gross.”

The brothers bobbed their heads up and down in asthmatic hilarity.

“Yeah,” Donny finally got out. “Gross!”

“So, you're saying you killed them in advance?” I said.

“Well, yeah, obviously. Otherwise they would've jumped out of the shoes.”

“How'd you kill the frogs?” Wylie said. I glanced at him, but his tone and face were set and calm.

“We, um, squished them.”

“But carefully, you know, so that they'd still be squishy in the shoes.” Darren wiped a tear from his eye and shook with a few final tremors.

David Michaelson looked at Wylie. “Now, I realize it might not be too politically or animalistically correct,” he said, “but you've got to admit it's pretty funny.”

“You had to see the guy,” Darren said, “running around the locker room with frog parts stuck to his feet, yelling ‘What the fuck! What the fuck!'”

“I thought I was gonna die it was so funny,” Donny added.

“They were probably toads,” Wylie said.

“Is that a fact?” David said.

“Where you live it was more likely to have been toads,” Wylie said. “Wide and fat, with warty skin? Their habitat's around the Northeast Heights. Some of them are desert toads. Down by the Rio Grande there are a lot of bullfrogs, but up where you are there's less water, so, yeah, I think you actually killed a lot of toads.”

“Toads, huh?” Darren said. He thrust his hands in his pockets.

“Ah, well,” David said, “boys will be boys.”

“And toads will be toads,” Darren said. Donny elbowed him in the ribs and said, “‘What the fuck! What the fuck!'” and they both cracked up again.

Our mother came out into the room, smiling another brisk and terrible smile. “Who'd like another drink?” she said.

“I would,” Wylie and I said at the same time.

I followed her back to the kitchen, where things were simmering in multiple pots. The oven was on and onions were turning golden in a sauté pan. Everything smelled excellent, and it occurred to me that she was capable of much better cooking than anything she'd served me so far this summer. In the other room I could hear the Michaelsons launching into yet another story guaranteed to please Wylie, probably involving the torture of puppies or the wanton discarding of recyclable materials.

“I think it's going well, don't you?” my mother said.

I poured myself another hefty glass of wine. “Are you out of your mind?”

“No, I don't believe I am. And I'll thank you not to speak to me in that fashion.”

“Sorry,” I said. “But seriously, Mom, what were you thinking? Can't we just have one night, the three of us? I finally get Wylie to come home, and this is what you do?”

“David is part of my life now, and you children have to accept that.”

“So's David's wife, and you didn't invite her.”

She kept her back to me, tasting something with her finger.

I considered repeating myself, in case she hadn't heard me, then thought better of it and headed back to the living room, where a troublesome silence had taken over.

Wylie was sitting with his head practically between his knees, clutching himself for dear life.

David looked up at me with an expression of concern, placed a hand on Wylie's back, and said, “He's not feeling very well, I don't think.”

I saw a shudder run down my brother's spine.

“I'm fine,” Wylie muttered from between his knees.

“Maybe you should lie down or something,” Donny said.

“I think dinner's almost ready,” I offered helpfully.

“I'm fine,” Wylie said again, and uncurled his head. “Just a little nauseous.”

“It's probably all those snacks,” I said.

“No,” he said, “it isn't.”

We sat there sipping disconsolately from our drinks until my mother announced that dinner was served. There were linen napkins on the table and the good china we once used only at Christmas. For a second the world slipped, loosened around its edges, and I was standing in the past: the smell and heat of candles, the white tablecloth with green trim, my father's face flushed as he lifted his chin and laughed at something Wylie or I said. All of this—this present day—seemed imaginary and flimsy compared to that memory; it shocked me to think that he was dead and the rest of us, here in my mother's house, were still alive. Then I sat down.

“Let us pray,” David said. His sons bowed their heads, as did my mother. Wylie and I looked at each other across the table.

“Dear God,” David went on. His voice was relaxed and familiar, as if God were a neighbor with whom he was accustomed to discussing baseball or the weather. “When we sit down in a lovely home with a lovely meal prepared by a lovely woman, in the company of family and friends, we remember to be grateful to you, Lord, and take it as a sign of your continuing and blessed grace which you bestow upon us every day, and we thank you for it. Amen.”

“Amen,” said everybody except me and Wylie.

Across the table, Darren winked at me and said, “Good grub, good meat—thanks, God, let's eat.”

We were served a fine and complicated meal involving pork tenderloin and braised vegetables and sauces and sides, and I would have eaten a lot had I not spent the entire day emptying the kitchen cupboards. Instead I drank several more glasses of red wine and picked at my food. Fortunately, the Michaelsons were there to pick up the slack, and their appetites were substantial. Wylie, to my amazement, continued to eat without stopping, methodically clearing one helping and serving himself another, as if he were a camel or some other animal capable of storing enough food to last through the lean weeks to come. Seated at the head of the table, our mother poured wine and proposed toasts: to summer, to children reunited with their parents, to old neighbors, et cetera. From the other end of the table David toasted her back, the wet hem of his mustache glinting in the candlelight. Outside, the red sun glowered low in the sky, the horizon soupy and green, the world colored like an infection. We ate.

The first half hour passed without incident. Our mother told stories about the travel industry, describing the outrageously false claims made by fleabag hotels charging luxury prices and the insufferable demands of cheapskate clients who wanted to tour the world for the price of a bus ticket to El Paso. Even Wylie laughed. David asked me how my studies were going, and his boys leaned forward to hear my answer.

“I'm working on my dissertation, I guess.”

“You must be smart,” said Donny.

“Of course she's smart,” David said. “You know, Lynn, I love art. Whenever I'm in a foreign city, the first place I go is the museum.”

“Really,” I said. I assumed my mother had told him to say this.

“Lynn's loved paintings since she was a little kid,” Wylie said. “She used to just stand there and stare at them, like she was sleepwalking or something. You could talk to her and she wouldn't even hear you.”

“You loved
paintings
when you were a kid?” Darren said.

“When I was a kid,” Donny said, “I loved baseball and, I don't know, making fun of girls.”

“Some things never change,” Darren said philosophically, then elbowed his brother, and they both laughed.

David wiped his mustache delicately with his napkin and patted his belly as though complimenting it on a job well done.

Meanwhile Donny, Darren, and Wylie all used pieces of bread to clear their plates of any last vestiges and sat back with an air of regretful finality.

Donny grinned at Wylie across the table. “For a skinny guy, you can put a lot away.”

“It's probably his first square meal in weeks,” our mother said.

“If I don't eat real regular, I get irritable and off-balance,” Donny volunteered.

“Now that makes sense,” she said, looking at Wylie.

“I feel good now,” Wylie told her quietly.

“I'm sure glad to hear it,” David said. “You were giving your mother quite a scare.”

“Was I?” Wylie said.

“Now, son, you know you were. Running around with all those—” here he paused, and smoothed his mustache with his right index finger—“antisocial types.”

I watched Wylie smile at this, first gently and then widely.

“Those antisocial types,” he said quietly, “are good people doing important work, and they're my best friends.”

“Those people are spoiled brats and trust-fund babies. I'll bet you dollars to donuts that they're living off their parents while they run around thinking they're righteous because they spike trees.”

“You don't know that they spike trees,” I said. “You don't know anything about them.”

“You'd be surprised what I know,” David told me. “I know it's not all fun and games and some big party like you kids think it is.” His lips were sputtering beneath his mustache. “I know that there are serious issues at stake.”

“Like hell you do,” I said. I was drunk.

At the end of the table, my mother covered her face with her hands. “Why are you defending those people?”

“Why shouldn't she defend them?” Wylie said.

“Now, listen, young lady,” David said. “I'm as environmentally sensitive as the next person—”

“Sure you are, when the next person's a toad killer,” Wylie said.

“What's that mean?” Donny said, and Darren shifted in his seat.

“Toad killer,” Wylie said slowly. He was still smiling, his jaw clenched, and the words issued from between his teeth in a whisper. He stood up. In the flickering candlelight his smile shimmered with rage. “As in one who kills toads just for the fun of it.”

“Sit down,” our mother said. He ignored her. Across from me, Darren wiped a finger over his plate and licked off some final morsel. His father rose heavily to his feet and held up his palms in what I guessed he thought was a soothing gesture. But it had the opposite effect, and Wylie whirled on our mother and said, “You don't understand anything.” I said his name, and he looked at me and shook his head, then ran out of the house in his clean, bare, callused feet.

I was the only one who went outside, calling his name again, twice. I knew he heard me, but he didn't turn around, running silently down the street and disappearing around the corner.

Inside, my mother was shaking her head, David had his arm around her, and the sons were doing dishes. I couldn't stand to stay in there. I went back outside and sat on the trunk of the Caprice. Lights around me blinked on and off: distant headlights showing through the gaps between houses, people drawing the curtains on a window down the street.

Later, much later, I fell asleep with the nagging feeling that there was something I could have done but didn't, might have prevented but let slip—a slim thought that kept getting away from me, like something glimpsed out of the corner of my eye, but when I turned my head, it was gone.

Eight

July came, summer bursting into full bloom, the long heat of arid days and the brown edge of wilt around plants. The city announced a water shortage and promoted discounts on rock-garden materials and low-flush toilets. On the Fourth, my mother and David invited me along to watch fireworks explode over the muddy dregs of the Rio Grande, but I declined. Instead I sat in a lawn chair in her tiny backyard listening to the manic end of a bipolar swing: the quiet, crickety hush that usually blanketed my mother's neighborhood gave way to the whistle of bottle rockets, the screech of tires, the occasional backfire, hoots and hollers of people driving by. Children calling out the names of other children. A vodka and tonic sweated peacefully in my hand.

Of all the seasons, summer felt the most like childhood. I was thinking about vacations when Wylie and I were little, the four of us piling into the car for road trips to Colorado, my dad's family in Chicago, or, once, the Grand Canyon. My father loved maps, and every night in the motel room he'd unfold one and draw a blue line over the road we'd traveled that day. One time, in a small town on the outskirts of Denver, I woke up in the middle of the night in a strange motel room, dizzy, entranced, sick with fever. My brother was breathing noisily next to me—he was a mouth breather—but he looked like a stranger, and so did my parents in their bed. Laid out on the desk was an unfolded map tracing our path from Albuquerque, heading north, but the world was a puzzle, the geography foreign: I didn't recognize the route we'd taken or the location of home. My father rolled over and asked what I was doing.

“I'm trying to do my homework,” I told him, “but I don't
understand
it.” He pressed a large palm flat against my forehead and then scooped me up. Shivering in my nightgown, I fought against him because it hurt my skin to be touched, and a minute later I threw up in his lap. He was three years older than I was now.

“And so what,” I said out loud, to myself, in the dark. I finished my drink. In a lull of quiet between illegal fireworks I heard the crunching sound of someone walking around the side of the condo. I stood up and found myself on the receiving end of a bear hug given by Angus Beam, my cheek smashed against his bare shoulder, my feet momentarily off the ground. I'd forgotten the odor of his body—part close skin, part distant chemical—and the dense spray of orange-brown freckles across his grinning face.

“Happy patriotic holiday,” he said, releasing me. “Need anything plumbed?”

“Actually, there
is
a strange smell coming from the garbage disposal. Like a nasty, rotten kind of smell. Can you help with that?”

“I know just the thing,” he said. “Get me a lemon and two glasses of ice.”

“You're kidding.”

He went into the kitchen without answering. I brought him the supplies, and he cut the lemon in half with a Leatherman he pulled out of his back pocket.

“Watch,” he said. He poured a glass of ice down the disposal, switched it on—a ferocious, grinding sound—and turned on the cold water. He ground up half the lemon, too, then wiped his hands. “You're all set.”

I stuck my nose over the sink, and the smell was gone. “Hey, it worked,” I said. “What's the other glass of ice for?”

“I was hoping you'd make me a drink with it.”

His eyes shone. He was the only person around who ever seemed truly happy to see me. We poured vodka, tonic, ice, and lemon juice into his water bottle and went for a walk, holding hands like a couple of civilized people.

The sky was fizzing. Small green rockets popped and showered in the air, and every once in a while a big white explosion was followed by a single bang, like a bomb going off, whose sound hit me right in the chest and made me shudder. At these moments Angus squeezed my hand. We drifted through the streets, not talking much. The smell of innumerable barbecues sailed out on the night air. Cars swerved recklessly through the streets and ran red lights, their stereos pumping. Everybody seemed to be drunk. On the enclosed front porch of an adobe bungalow, the windows of the house itself dark, a dog was shaking piteously and howling in fear. I told Angus about Wylie defining “toad killer” in his argument with my mother's boyfriend—I stumbled over the word, but couldn't think what else to call him, really—and he practically keeled over laughing. He was wearing jean cutoffs, and when he slapped his leg his hand left a white imprint on his skin.

“Those people sound horrible,” he said when he finally straightened up. “How do you stand living in that boxy little place with the boxy little backyard and those horrible people? Why don't you leave?”

The idea had never occurred to me, though I wasn't about to admit it. “I don't know,” I said. “My mom—”

“Your mom thinks I'm the devil.”

“I didn't know you two had met.”

“We haven't,” Angus said, grabbing my hand again.

We kept walking, in silence now, until we came to the gate of a small, run-down cemetery with crooked graves whose colorful fake flowers competed against an army of weeds. We went inside and looked around, examining all the old Spanish names. Angus was quiet, and I knew he'd decided this was a romantic and memorable context for a kiss. I didn't think this kind of seriousness suited him as well as laughter did, and didn't feel like being the target of his courtship, so I got it all over with by kissing him.

We stood there kissing under the moon. I touched the nape of his neck, where delicate hairs lay slick with sweat. His skin radiated heat against the palm of my hand, and his arms came around my waist to pull me closer. There was a flash of red behind my eyes.

“Let's go to a motel,” I told him.

“We could just stay here. It'll be gorgeous and unique.”

I stepped back, although I maintained a gentle grip on his hands. “It'll be more gorgeous in a motel. Also, comfortable.”

“Come on.” He was grinning again, and running a hand through his hair, now all helter-skelter points. “Let's make love in the face of death. Let's feel alive.”

“I'm leaving,” I said. “Are you coming?”

He crossed his tanned arms. “I love the way you make unreasonable demands.”

“You've got a real knack for compliments,” I said.

I loved the sterile anonymity of the motel, its small bathtub and plywood dresser. We could be anywhere, I said to myself. We
are
anywhere. An hour later, Angus in the shower, I left a message on my mother's answering machine.

“It's me. Lynn. Listen, I'm going to be away for a few days but I don't want you to worry. I'll be fine. So will Wylie—I mean, I think he will, not that I'm with him right now or anything. Okay, see you. Bye.”

Angus went out for a six-pack of beer and a pizza, and we sprawled on the bed watching CNN. Every once in a while he'd run the palm of his hand from my neck down my back, then start over again from the bottom. I fell asleep to the weather forecast, blue currents and red arrows crossing a map of the world.

I woke up to see Angus returning to the room from somewhere. He stood beside the bed jiggling keys, his white coveralls gleaming in the shadows.

“Where did you go?” I said. “How long have you been gone?”

“I have to work today,” he said. “Want to come with me?”

“You really work?”

This seemed to offend him, and he stood up straighter, fussily adjusting the fit of his coveralls. “I told you, I'm a plumber. Today I've got an out-of-town job. We can go for a drive. It'll be fun.”

“I don't have the Caprice, remember? We walked here.”

“I went and got the van,” he said.

“The
what
?”

He opened the curtains, unleashing massive sunlight through which, squinting, I could make out what looked like an enormous eggplant parked in front of the room. When my eyes adjusted I saw it was a dull purple van with PLUMBARAMA written in white letters on its side. Small drips of white paint burst around the letters, symbolizing either the excitement of plumbing or the reality of bursting pipes, I wasn't sure which. I got dressed, and short minutes later we were cruising on the highway with Angus singing along to “My Way” from the Sinatra tape he must've recovered, along with his hat, from Wylie's car. He had a surprisingly pleasant voice, trained and lilting, and could hit the high notes without any apparent strain. The city spread into the desert, miles of development, chain restaurants and movie complexes and subdivisions, before petering out. On either side the land lay brown and skeletal, starved of grass or trees, under the enormous sky and the relentless sun.

Fifteen minutes later we passed a billboard with a background of lush, verdant lawns and the profile of a man in white clothes swinging a golf club: FUTURE SITE OF SHANGRI-LA. I laughed out loud.

“What?” Angus said, interrupting his performance of “Night and Day.”

“They're building Shangri-la out here,” I said. “Did you know?”

“Oh, I know all about it,” he said, flushing red down to his neck. “Developing this land into a golf course is insane. It's a profanation.”

“It definitely seems like an odd choice of location.”

“Albuquerque's going to run out of water within twenty years. No water.
None.
The whole city shouldn't even be here, but what are they going to do about it? Build another golf course. And do you have any
idea
how much water a golf course uses? Do you think they're going to forgo the grass and use native plants?”

I guessed these weren't rhetorical questions. “I doubt it,” I said.

“They're leasing the land from a pueblo, and you can't blame
them.
Of course they need to make money—but do they have to make it from this?”

“I don't know.”

“It burns me up,” he said, his face so red that it might well have burst into flame.

Five minutes later he took an exit that led past a gas station and then turned into a parking lot full of cars in front of a windowless gray building, flat and square as a storage compartment. The small neon sign outside read SUNRISE CASINO, with spikes of sunrays poking up from the
o,
but the sign was turned off and didn't glow in the late-morning glare. Inside, it still looked like a storage compartment, without decorations or pictures or even a carpet, a place stripped down to the barest of uses. Country music was playing, dim and static, on a bad sound system. Against the walls stood slot machines where people of diverse race and age sat smoking and pulling levers, the smoke hanging thick as cobwebs in the air over the blackjack and roulette tables in the center of the room. With his white overalls and healthy glow Angus looked alien here, and I expected we'd draw some unfriendly stares. But as he strode by purposefully, nodding to people here and there, they nodded casually back. He'd been here before.

I followed him down a green hallway with linoleum floors to a closed door whose black sign said MANAGER. Angus turned, sudden and intent, and kissed me, then knocked and opened the door.

“Gerald Lobachevski, man of many hats,” he said, stepping inside. “This is Lynn Fleming, woman of my life.”

Reclining in a chair behind the plywood desk was the middle-aged Native American man I'd seen at Wylie's place that first night—the same thick glasses and braided hair and turquoise jewelry. He gave the distinct impression, looking at me, of being unimpressed. I found myself reaching up to tuck my hair behind my ears.

“Wylie's sister,” he finally said.

I sighed. “Yes,” I admitted.

“You look like him.”

I had nothing to say to this. Angus sat down on the corner of the desk, next to a stapler and a beige rotary telephone. The office had gray cement walls and no windows.

“Scrawny. Same color hair. How'd you get involved with this guy?” Gerald cocked his head in Angus's direction.

“Gerald,” Angus said.

“I was looking for Wylie,” I said.

“Did you find him?”

“Yeah, I found him.”

“But now you're hanging around with this guy here.”

“I guess so.”

“Well,” Angus said, “show me what you need done.”

“Do you gamble?” Gerald said to me, ignoring him.

“Excuse me?”

“Blackjack, slots, craps, roulette.”

“Not really,” I said.

Gerald reached into a desk drawer, pulled out several rolls of quarters, and held them out to me. “Give it a whirl,” he said, “while I put this fellow to work.”

I felt dismissed. “Thanks,” I said.

Back in the gaming room, I watched people playing the slots. A woman in a red sweatsuit got up from her seat and wagged her chin in my direction. “I'm going to the ladies',” she told me. “You can have it.”

I played for a while, and there was a rhythm to the clicking of the machine and the movements of the levers, a consonance and ringing, that I imagined was as addictive as the thought of winning or losing. Apples, oranges, cherries, apples, oranges, cherries. The wild card slot. I couldn't ever get a match, and lost all of Gerald's money in a matter of minutes. Since it was going back to him anyway, I wasn't too concerned. The people around me worked on their games as if in a trance, hunched over machines or tables, hardly speaking, every so often sipping from vat-sized cups of Coke. A wailing country song halted mid-lament, and “Night and Day” came on.

It was noon, and I hadn't eaten, but there was no food at the casino. Outside, the heat was malicious and extreme, and the wind blew a blinding dust into my face as I trudged up the road to the gas station. The girl behind the register looked no older than thirteen, and she handled each transaction with superb speed, her fingers flying as she counted back the change for lottery tickets and cigarettes. There were wizened burritos baking under the light of a heating element, and some crusty yellow popcorn that didn't look much better. I settled for a bag of pretzels and a soda, then sat down on the shaded curb outside.