Cannibals in Love (29 page)

*   *   *

After ten days, someone on the Internet found a photo of Balentyne from the night he disappeared. This grainy still-frame capture from an ATM outside a Wells Fargo. The image was time-stamped 12:41 a.m., and it showed John Francis Balentyne leaning over his bicycle and withdrawing one hundred dollars, before disappearing into the night.

The photograph was online before the police even had a copy, and this was strangely thrilling. Finally there was a clue. We stared at the fuzzy blue monochrome, desperately trying to decide what it meant. Balentyne's tired face, staring past the security camera, as he waited for his money. One frame later, he was gone.

Still, this one photo helped jump-start the search for John Francis Balentyne. It restated the plea for people with any information to please come forward. His friends got the story back up on the nightly news. Phone calls were made to bars and chain restaurants in the area. Requests were made to view surveillance tapes from businesses large and small. Strangers constructed elaborate Google maps, with lines and concentric circles running off in every conceivable direction, to show the limits of how far Balentyne could go, in one night, on a bicycle. Whatever else it meant, this picture planted a third flag on the map for real. After the bar, and after his house, John Francis Balentyne had taken out one hundred dollars cash in Northeast Portland.

*   *   *

By the end of the second week, the public imagination had started to turn on Balentyne, though. People knew that he had not gone to his parents' house. He was not in Olympia or Alaska or Los Angeles. Everyone knew that he hadn't hopped a train in over three years. No one in any part of the country had heard any word from John Francis Balentyne since the night he took off on his bicycle. And where was the girlfriend from that night at the bar, anyway? How come we never heard any more from her? Was it possible we had projected her into the story ourselves? Or maybe she just didn't feel it was right to talk about John this way.

Either way, Balentyne was still missing, and it seemed to make people anxious and resentful. The Internet took up this story in a kind of backlash. Message boards and forums that had felt so constructive the week before felt like echo chambers now. People said ugly, impulsive, hurtful things, and they didn't sign their names to them. Balentyne was framed as a misfit and a con man. Where was his Facebook page, and why hadn't he posted more pictures of himself or his artwork online? How could we be asked to trust a kid who had disengaged himself from the culture of self-promotion anyway? People found it baffling and amusing that someone could exist in the world without the paper trails of his generation. This was what made John Francis Balentyne so unusual to everyone. People don't just
disappear
anymore.

*   *   *

This being the Great Northwest, people's minds took to wandering. Everyone suspected foul play in one way or another. People joked about the one-armed man and satanists in the woods. Others were legitimately fixated on the hundred dollars, insisting it was a drug deal gone wrong. Or maybe just a botched robbery. Wasn't that a shadow, just off-camera, in the picture from the ATM? People said, in earnest, that John Balentyne had gone off his meds and didn't
know
where he was. They said he'd been hit by a trucker and buried in the woods. Others argued that sudden disappearance was the hallmark of organized crime. Or was that UFOs? Or maybe we were all just scratching at the idea of a serial killer on the loose now. It hardly mattered. People found ways to connect the disappearance of John Francis Balentyne to unsolved crimes all across the country.

The sheriff's office was forced to release a statement, saying that, without a single hard clue as to the whereabouts of John Francis Balentyne, they wouldn't even know where to begin a search. Furthermore, they wanted it put on the record that, despite the many rumors to the contrary, John Balentyne had no history of mental illness of any sort. He did not have a criminal record. He was not believed to be a drug user or a depressive or any overt threat to himself or anyone else. He was just missing.

*   *   *

Eventually Balentyne's roommates pulled everything out of his room and found some journals in a closet. But the writing was abstract and indecipherable, as these things usually go. They were just private conversations Balentyne was having with himself, and nothing more. Worse, the notebooks were all six months old anyway.

But the
Mercury
still printed excerpts, out of context, just the same, and it depressed us that they would do that now. Everyone was claiming squatter's rights on the life of John Francis Balentyne.

*   *   *

In quieter conversations, among friends, we found ourselves making grim jokes about death. People had some need to revel in a shared disaster. It was a way to begin to forget. Something terrible had happened to John Francis Balentyne, the same as it could happen to any one of us. So what could be done for it now?

There were rumors that Balentyne's sister was around now, too. People said she had paid her brother's rent and was living in his bedroom on a temporary basis. She had come because she wanted to help; she was looking for answers, and who could blame her? Someone pointed her out to me in a bar one night, but I couldn't make myself go up and talk to her. Not even just to nod and say something friendly. I couldn't risk the idea that she might burst into tears. Or that I might, maybe.

*   *   *

Is it too obvious to say that I was thinking about myself in all of this? I've been blacked out on my bicycle. I've been that drunk and fought with girls and friends. We were all self-pitying and self-destroying sometimes: taking the long way home; climbing over the wrong fences; lingering up on steep rooftops. I've trespassed in buildings, and jumped off of bridges, and crashed into the street. I've thrown punches at strangers and been knocked down for my big mouth. And who hasn't taken a ride from a drunk driver before? Or given one, too. All these fucking drunk drivers!

Once a guy walked into a party with a gun. He pointed it at me and told me I'd better turn the stereo down,
right now
. Me! Jesus Christ, it wasn't even my house. I hadn't even been
invited
to this fucking party! But everyone went dead silent just the same. A kind of horror-of-the-moment, with the stereo screaming out of the wall, as this guy walked me across the living room at gunpoint. I turned the music down, and he nodded and looked around the room. And then he left. That was it. We all just laughed and turned the stereo right back up, because
fuck
him.

This was a thing that really happened! I have no idea what it means, but I must've told that story a thousand times. I drank out on it for weeks! And it didn't do anything to change me, either. Even now, I still fight against that strain of recklessness. Every time we didn't die we laughed. It had to be this way. I could have died a thousand times by now, but I didn't. I was still alive.

So where was John Francis Balentyne, and what were we to make of his famous reluctance to reappear? He was more than just a name being drilled into my head. Balentyne would show up incongruously in my dreams at night. He had taken on a kind of weight in the full three-part name. John. Francis. Balentyne. His friends called him Balentyne, and his sister called him John. But the newspapers and strangers all called him John Francis Balentyne. We projected ourselves onto his life. Balentyne should have been a writer, I thought. This was the name that a novelist has. John Francis Balentyne would know how to rewrite his book. Even if it was about cows.

*   *   *

Eventually Balentyne's sister disappeared, as well. Gone home to Milwaukee or Pittsburgh or Toledo, someone said. The roommates were forced to rent out Johnny's room, and life went on. Until, one day, a picture was posted on a bike blog. Someone had found a fixed-gear locked to a tree, down by the Willamette River. Way down by the science museum, totally out of place. People wrote to say that the bike was Balentyne's, they were certain of this, and we all got excited again in spite of ourselves. But this was fleeting, too, of course. This was not good news. Balentyne was dead, I thought.

The next morning, I decided to go down there. It was a gray and ugly day, and I didn't tell anyone what I was doing. I wouldn't know what to say, besides. I just wanted to see the bare spot where Balentyne had locked his bike. I wanted to see the river there. I wanted to know what made him stop in that place. Why there?

I locked up on the street, outside of OMSI, and I followed the spiral sidewalks to the end. I left the path and went down into the weeds where the ground was soft and patched with moss. I could feel the heavy, metallic grind of the trains lumbering through the switchyard in the distance. I just wanted to see the bike and go, I told myself, as I fought deeper into the tangle of weeds.

But when I finally found it I wasn't sure. I had to stop and stare at the thing, so white and colorless it was absorbed into the landscape. I had to force myself to connect this bicycle to the picture I had looked at on the Internet one hour before. Something had already happened here, something very obvious. Balentyne's bike was just a shell of its lock and frame. Picked apart by looters. People had already come down here, claiming pieces off the wreck. The back wheel; the seat; even the handlebars were gone.

It was clear that there was nothing left to save. I had seen it, and I didn't want to linger. This bike was no more a symbol than Balentyne himself. And one day someone would find a way to take the whole thing apart entirely. It all felt so random now, as I exhaled and looked out across the river where the drawbridges were suddenly rising. I turned away and walked back up the hill to the street.

By the end of the week it was over. An OMSI worker found something washed up on the banks of the river, nearly a mile from John Balentyne's bike. The police identified the body of John Francis Balentyne, age twenty-six. There was no sign of foul play upon the body. There was no evidence of accident or intent. There was no categorical way to say how this boy's body had come to rest inside of the river. Only that Balentyne had been found now, missing one month to the day.

 

TEXAS LANDLADY BLUES

Maritza picked up Bruno off the floor and put him down in her lap, letting him settle there. I watched as she opened the front of her shirt and pulled out her breast to give it to the baby. I saw Maritza's dark tan line where the skin went suddenly and startlingly white. Her breast was the same color as the baby's face.

This happened right in the middle of our conversation, as we sat there in the living room. I paused, trying to meet Maritza's eye, trying to remember what it was we were talking about. Not that it bothered Maritza any. This was just one more thing that she did for the baby, all day long, out of need.

“Do you want to hold him?” she asked, misplacing my curiosity.

“Oh, no. Thank you,” I said, sitting back. This was not what I wanted.

“Of course you do. Here.” And, just like that, little Bruno's meal was over. Maritza held him out to me with his mouth still dripping. “Don't worry. You'll be fine.”

I reached up reflexively as she pressed the wriggling child into my chest. Maritza stepped away and smiled, the way that all mothers revel in seeing their children held.

“There. See? You can't hurt him. He likes you.”

I held Bruno close like a small, captive animal. Balancing him against my body. “He's so little,” I said, looking up at her.

“That's not what Lane says. Lane says he's getting big and fat now,” she said with a laugh. “He says that comes from my side of the family.”

I smiled and gave the baby back to Maritza. Relieved to have my arms free again.

*   *   *

I found Lane in the backyard swinging an ax into a tree stump in a loose and unprofitable way. “Where did you come from?” he said, looking up, flushed with sweat.

“Nowhere. I left some things at Shawn's house. She asked me to pick them up.”

Lane nodded and slammed the ax back down, reducing this poor dead tree to splinters. It was ninety degrees at nine thirty in the morning, and no one in their right mind was chopping wood. There was a statewide burn ban, besides.

“Where did you get that thing?” I asked.

“Lady next door traded it to me for a painting,” he said.

“Wow.” I smiled. I had one of Lane's paintings. It showed George W. Bush on the deck of an aircraft carrier dressed in full fighter-pilot regalia. Lane had painted this picture from a dream I'd once described to him. One more thing I had neglected to take away from Shawn's house, I realized now.

Thwack! Lane buried the ax into the old tree, chipping off another piece. It was clear that this stump had once existed as a table for splitting logs. But Lane had rendered the flat surface so completely crooked now as to make it almost entirely useless.

“Is this going to be some kind of sculpture?” I asked.

“This? No. This is just a thing to hit with my ax.”

“Right,” I said, watching him drive the bludgeon home again.

Lane stopped and wiped his hands on his chest, sucking at the thick morning air. “You wanna try it?”

It's important to recognize a question that no one has ever asked you. I smiled and took the ax, and was pleased to find that it was every bit as sturdy as it looked. I raised it up over my head and slammed it down into the wood with a grunt.

“You know what I was thinking?” Lane asked.

“Not a clue,” I answered, bashing the stump again.

“We're alive and living through the first decade of the twenty-first century. Do you understand what that means?”

“I think so,” I said, not at all sure what it might mean to Lane.

“It means that history is going to judge us as the most primitive and depraved people that live for the whole next hundred years. They're not going to understand a goddamn thing about us. They're going to think we were disgusting.”