Stony River Page 11

  Allen said, “Hi, Richie.”

  “Hey, squirt, neato costume.”

  A colony of kids swarmed in. Allen ascended with them to Richie’s house. Linda hung back, suddenly self-conscious about chanting “Anything for Halloween” with a pack of juveniles.

  “His mother asked me to take him around,” she told Richie.

  “Tereza still missing?” he asked.

  “Yeah.You haven’t heard from her?”

  “Nah.” He drew on his cigarette, leaned his head back and blew gray rings into the black air.

  “Not with your friends tonight?” Linda said, hoping she wasn’t breaking any rules about what you could ask a high-school boy.

  “Later,” he said, “after the little goblins go in. We’ll smash a few pumpkins is all.” He took another drag and said, “Linda, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You look nice.”

  She searched his face. He didn’t seem to be mocking her. Mother had let her wear lipstick, “just this once.” Maybe it made her look older like Tereza. She smiled and said, “Thanks.”

  Richie ground his cigarette out with his black loafer, setting off tiny fireworks of sparks. He stood and moved so close she had to take quick, shallow breaths against his Old Spice. His voice was soft and secretive. “There’s something I didn’t tell you when you came to the Castle on Saturday.”

  Allen thundered down the steps with the others. “Let’s do the rest of the street.”

  “Go ahead,” Linda said. “I’ll catch up.”

  Richie watched Allen’s disappearing back then turned to Linda. “Don’t ask me how, but I happen to know Tereza was giving blow jobs to guys she picked up at Tony’s. Old guys who left their cars to be fixed. She might’ve gone away with one.”

  “What’s a blow job?”

  He barked out a laugh. “You shitting me? You don’t know?”

  She shook her head.

  “C’mere,” he said, gesturing for her to follow him up the steps.

  “I need more light.” He pulled a small notebook from a back pocket and a pencil from behind one ear. “I’m gonna be famous someday,” he said, his right hand making sharp, quick strokes. “You read the funnies?”

  “Sure.”

  “It’s more than telling a good story,” he said. “Most people don’t appreciate the artistic skill you need. The guy that does Steve Canyon? His brushwork and knowledge of anatomy are phenomenal. I’m saving up for art school.”

  Linda was amazed Richie knew the word phenomenal.

  He finished the drawing and held it under the front-door light so she could see: a cartoon girl with pointy breasts, on her knees in front of a cartoon man with his pants down. Without thinking, she let out an encouraging “Ooh,” anxious to let him know she appreciated art. Then she noticed It sticking out of the cartoon pants as straight as a dishtowel rack and the girl’s fish-like mouth opening to It. Linda’s face got hot and her throat tight. Tereza had said she only kissed mouths.

  “Liar!” she said, batting the paper from his hand. She fled down the steps to find Allen.

  THE MAN BEHIND THE DESK at a hotel that billed itself as “Your Home Away from Home” didn’t care who Tereza was as long as she paid in advance.

  “Six bits a night, four bucks a week,” he said, squinting into his own cigarette smoke. He had a thick neck and dandruff-speckled shoulders.

  Tereza bought two nights. He led her down a hallway of grimy black-and-white linoleum squares arranged in a checkerboard pattern. Her windowless room, lit by a blinking fluorescent tube, was no bigger than a jail cell. The bed stuck out of the wall like a shelf. On it, a thin mattress and blanket and a pillow without a case. A chair held a towel and washcloth, the floor an ashtray. She’d have to get her own lock for the footlocker, the man said. He nodded toward her briefcase. “You in some sort of business?”

  Tereza couldn’t answer. Her voice was with her gut in a deep hole between her feet.

  “Well, none of my beeswax,” he said. “We don’t get many ladies here. Mostly men on benders. When they get drinking good they stay in their rooms, but I can’t guarantee it. If I was you, I’d push that locker up against the door when you’re in here.”

  “The bathroom?” she whispered.

  “Down the hall. There’s a lock on the door.”

  After he left, she bolted the door and dragged the footlocker over to it. She hung her coat on a hook, sat on the bed and hugged the briefcase to her chest. Stared at the nicotine-stained wall, refusing to cry. She hadn’t run away to be shipwrecked someplace worse than she’d left.

  She retrieved the napkin with Buddy’s number from her pocketbook, opened the briefcase and took out the knife and flashlight. Set them beside her.

  9:15 PM. They’d be watching I Love Lucy at home right now.

  SEVEN

  NOVEMBER 1, 1955. How dare Richie think she’d want to see that drawing? If a girl had to do that when she got older, Linda would stop having birthdays. Fear and disgust, thick and sour as vomit, had congealed in her throat overnight. She couldn’t bring herself to smile at the breakfast table and swatted Daddy’s hand away when he tried making the “little bird” sit on her lip.

  “I’m not a child,” she said.

  “Whoa ho,” he said.

  She grabbed her books and stomped from the house, not expecting Allen on her front stoop, sucking his lips in, his forehead lost in a too-big hat with earflaps. “Can I walk to school with you?” he asked. “The bogeyman won’t get me if I’m with you.”

  “The bogeyman didn’t take Tereza,” Linda said. “She doesn’t want to come back.” Linda was too full of outrage to care about Allen’s quivering lower lip. She took big steps, hoping he’d disappear, but he kept pace with her while bouncing a ball, a feat she’d have admired if her heart hadn’t become a knotted fist.

  “I can’t play with this in the house no more,” he said. “I drive Pop-Pop bananas.”

  “You’re driving me bananas, too. Walk with your friends.” Allen had never tagged along with Linda and Tereza; he’d always trailed behind them with a pack of other little boys.

  Allen stopped bouncing the ball. Head down like an old man, he hurried along, occasionally stumbling in his attempt to keep up. One of his shoelaces dragged but Linda didn’t stop to let him tie it. She didn’t care if meanness doomed her to Hell. She belonged there. If she hadn’t become Tereza’s friend, she wouldn’t be scouring her memory to recall if Daddy was late coming home any time he left their car at Tony’s. He wouldn’t have had occasion to say “I like Tereza; she has spunk,” leaving Linda to wonder now what he meant.

  She didn’t return the smile of the policeman who helped them cross the highway.

  She slogged through the school day, hunched and angry, ignoring Mr. Boynton’s questioning looks and, at recess, the gangly new girl Connie Boyle’s invitation to double Dutch. Such a baby game. At the final bell, she dashed away before Allen could trail her down to the river’s edge near Haggerty’s boarded-up house. The river was foamy and smelled like rotting lettuce. The cattail leaves were dead and the punks gone to fluffy white seed. Tereza had sworn you could live on nothing but cattails in the spring, eating the shoots and the male part of the punk while it was still green. She said it was easy to tell the male because it was always on top. Linda’s cheeks stung at the recollection; Tereza must have been laughing inside at her ignorance. Richie, too.

  Had Officer Nolan found any trace of Tereza at Haggerty’s? Linda inched along the river toward the house, screwing up the courage to look for herself then losing it again.

  She left the river and trod purposefully to The Island, keeping her eyes straight ahead as she walked past Richie’s. The hollowed-out log was creased with shadows, a dirty secret now. Linda yanked out everything she and Tereza had collected for Swiss Family Robinson. She screamed as if her clothes were on fire. She stomped on the tinfoil, acorns, string, sticks and withered punks, trying to make a Rumpelstiltskin crack in th
e earth big enough to disappear into forever. Were the Wonder Bread bag not already gone, she would’ve let the wind blow Tereza’s precious tobacco to Mars.

  “LOOK AT THIS HEADLINE,” Daddy said over breakfast the next day. “Fear Missing Boy K-i-d-d-n-a-p-e-d. Next thing you know, everyone will be spelling it that way. Newspapers used to take their responsibility for literacy more seriously.”

  “Can I see?” Linda asked.

  Daddy peered over the page. “Well, well, glad whatever was bothering you is over. Welcome back to the family. And it’s may I, may I see.” He folded the paper to the article and handed it to her.

  The newspaper said a Long Island woman had gone into a store to buy bread and left her two-year-old son outside, beside a stroller holding his seven-month-old sister. The girl in her stroller turned up a few blocks away but the boy was gone. Under a picture of men fording tall grass, it said that more than two thousand people were searching for the boy. Two thousand!

  Why weren’t thousands looking for Tereza? She could be in as much trouble as that little boy, especially if Richie was right and she’d gone off with a stranger. On the other hand, she might be playing the Prodigal Daughter, living it up in a distant land before coming to her senses and returning home. Linda could not see Jimmy killing a fatted calf for her.

  The article had a second picture: the young mother, tight hands in her apron, eyes like a spooked kitten’s. Allen’s eyes, yesterday. He was waiting for her again this morning. This time, she let him trot beside her. “Pop-Pop says I gotta stop having nightmares,” he said.

  “What are they about?”

  “Somebody chasing me, sometimes monsters, I don’t remember good.”

  “How does he know you have nightmares?”

  “I wake up screaming. He comes in my room, all mad.”

  “When I was little and woke up from a bad dream, instead of yelling, I spelled my name with tummy breaths. My mother taught me that.” Linda sometimes forgot the ways Mother had cared for her before she got sick. She missed that mother.

  She showed Allen how to put his hand on his tummy and spell out his name letter by letter between breaths.

  “Can I do Tereza?” he asked.

  She spelled it with him all the way to school and, with each breath, grew hungrier to find Tereza. She wondered why the police hadn’t organized a search and how Mr. and Mrs. Dobra could go to work every day as if Tereza’s absence was as normal as nightfall.

  LINDA AND ALLEN would have been having lunch by the time Tereza woke up, lost and panicky. She groped for the knife until she remembered locking it in the briefcase with Miranda’s money and necklace. So where was the briefcase and how had she ended up in a clammy room wearing only a bra and skivvies under a blanket that smelled like mothballs? She sat up so fast she got dizzy. Had to lie back down so she wouldn’t puke. Her eyes took in the cheesy wood paneling and the Anheuser-Busch sign on the bar with relief: she was in Buddy’s basement. She threw off the blanket, got down on all fours on the cold linoleum floor and felt under the sagging convertible couch. The briefcase was there where she’d put it. The pocketbook she’d slept with between her knees had crept its way to the bottom of the couch. The key was still in it. She opened the briefcase and counted the money. It was all there except for what she’d spent.

  She let out a noisy breath and shook her head at how easily she’d let Buddy rescue her.

  She’d planned to return his jacket and flashlight yesterday then head off on the train to New York. Try her luck at finding a decent place to stay, maybe audition for a show. She started calling at nine, practicing in her head how she’d say, all cool as cream, “Hi, remember me?” when he got on the phone. Her calls rang on and on until the afternoon when a high-pitched, quivery female voice told her to call around nine-thirty that night after Buddy’s shift at the A&P. By the time Tereza reached him, all she could manage was a whiny “I need you.” It shamed her to be such a chicken but she couldn’t stand a second night in “Your Home Away from Home,” listening to banging doors and hollering voices, scared sleepless she’d be raped or murdered.

  “I’ll be there in two shakes, fair damsel,” he’d said, like some lame Prince Valiant.

  “There” was the diner she’d hung out in all day, eating, using the john and the pay phone, leaving only to buy new duds, including dungarees she wore out of the store with the pink sweater she’d had on the night she met Buddy. She wanted to be sure he recognized her despite the purple shadows below her eyes and the greasy Brillo pad her hair had become under the wig. From the booth where she sat nursing a root beer, she watched him enter and cast about before spotting her. His shoulders seemed even wider than she remembered, his pants tighter. He slid in beside her, so close his thigh pressed against hers. She handed him the flashlight and his jacket.

  “I thought about it holding you,” he said, his milky-smelling breath tickling her face. “Imagined it was me.”

  He didn’t seem to notice the briefcase she’d slipped into the shopping bag with her new clothes. And he said “Of course” when she asked him not to tell Richie he’d seen her. He took her to a tall, narrow, banana-colored house, let her in through the back porch and made up the convertible couch for her. The basement had a small bathroom, with toilet, sink and mildewy shower. She washed off two days of slime and came out in new undies thinking he’d expect a thank-you hand job, at least. But he had one foot on the basement steps. “Thank you for letting me help you,” he said, like he was giving a speech. “You’re very brave, but fragile, like an African violet.”

  Tereza would’ve said something smartass but a zombie look she’d seen too often in Jimmy’s eyes warned her off. “I’ll put a note on my grandmother’s door so she won’t be surprised when she sees you,” Buddy said. He left her wondering what happened to the guy who’d imagined himself as his jacket around her.

  Her watch showed nearly noon. She stepped into the dungarees she’d left on the bathroom floor and pulled a new sweater over her head—purple, Ma’s favorite color. She climbed the basement steps and heard, “In here! In the kitchen.” Following the smell of coffee, she found a saggy-boobed old lady seated at a small wooden table. Her red-and-yellow-striped housecoat fought something awful with the bright pink hair swirling round her scalp like cotton candy. The woman peered up from her newspaper over wire-rimmed specs and smiled with her whole wrinkly face, as if Tereza’s being there was the most normal thing in the world.

  “Just reading the funnies,” she said. “Have a seat. Buddy’s long gone to school. You staying awhile?”

  Tereza pulled out a chair, turned it around and straddled it. “Nope. Heading to New York to become an actress.”

  “That so? You got a stage name?”

  Tereza didn’t but one came to her right away. “Ladonna Lange.” Her own middle name and Ma’s last before she married Jimmy.

  The old lady took a swallow of coffee. “It suits you. My birth”— it sounded like boith—“certificate says Mina, but the day I came out, my three-year-old brother stuck his head in my cradle and said, ‘She’s a dearie.’ Nobody’s called me nothing else ever since. You hungry?”

  “Wouldn’t mind a cup of joe.”

  Dearie had a boss cackle. “Hear that, Alfie? Your words exactly.” She got up and shuffled over to a cupboard in fuzzy blue slippers. Thick orange hose stopped at her knees. “Cream and sugar?”

  “Uh-uh. Who’s Alfie?” A radiator beside the table hissed out warmth and, off the kitchen, a glassed-in porch trapped sun. Ma would’ve been fanning herself like crazy.

  “My husband. Dead five years now. A Fuller Brush Man all his working life and proud of it. I was seventeen, him thirty-two, the Saturday he knocked on our door with a free pastry brush. I told him I liked what he was selling. He didn’t have a chance.” She poured coffee from a percolator on the stove and set a cup and saucer in front of Tereza. “Buddy left me a note. Said you need looking after. Why’s that?”

  Tereza shrugged. “I don
’t, really.”

  “Your ma okay with you going to New York?”

  “She don’t know.”

  “How long you been gone?”

  “Couple days.”

  “I wouldn’t want the cops coming ’round looking for you.”

  “They won’t. Only you and Buddy know I’m here. Ma would get in trouble with Jimmy if she called the cops and he sure as hell won’t.”

  “Who’s Jimmy?”

  “Wish I didn’t know.” Tereza went on to say more than she probably should have about her stepfather and the shit he’d done but the coffee was going down warm and Dearie’s eyes, not at all sleepy like Buddy’s, seemed to yank the words right out of her.

  Dearie ran her fingers softly over the lump on Tereza’s jaw. Her eyes got damp behind her specs. “Nobody should have to live where it ain’t safe. Where’s your real dad?”

  Tereza shrugged again. “I don’t even know his name. Ma’s folks sent her away to have me. When she got back they made up a story for neighbors about how she married a G.I. who got shipped overseas; later they said he got snuffed in the war.”

  Dearie squeezed her hand. “Girlies used to get sent to unwed moms’ homes all the time. It says a bunch about her that she didn’t give you away.” Dearie took her specs off and wiped them on her housecoat. “You old enough to quit school?”

  “Don’t matter if I ain’t. I’m never going back.” For some reason Allen tumbled into Tereza’s head. She could see the twerp lining up for school on the playground that last day, as though time had stopped and she could step right back into the scene.

  “I always wanted my high-school diploma,” Dearie said. “Had to leave after eighth grade to help support the family. I worked as a seamstress until I married Alfie. Buddy’s almost finished eleventh. I’m darn proud of him.”