Search Party (5 page)

It was our son. The sight copied itself on the way to me, coming by degrees as if I were blinking. This is the way the lightning of reason blinks through the mind, too swift, too hot for one steady cut. He was dead, drowned, and I would soon be dead! With an awful thrill, I inhaled the cold green air and held it. In a rigor of pity for my husband I dragged my eyes to his. But he knew our son was not dead.

A sound echoed out over the wind. I reached up. My boy was ice cold, wet, laughing. “I went swimming! I got my head wet! Dad didn't but I did!” He shook his wet hair onto me. I reached up. His cold skin sanded my palms as he planted his freezing kiss on me. “I swam!”

In the middle of the night the boat yawed, bumped—what were these intermittent thuds coming from the underside of it, like a huge stymied heartbeat?—and strained at the ropes. We were all three frozen in the wet sleeping bags. Miraculously, two had gone to sleep.

I did not notice right away that the wind had stopped and that I was hearing the water lap against the hollow pontoons with a chop-licking sound. I had pulled way back, up into the night, and was looking down at a walled ocean with tiny rocking huts sheltered in every inlet.

I unfolded my sour limbs and got up unsteadily, my bare soles squishing on the indoor-outdoor carpet, to rummage for the tape recorder. In the dark I whispered the date to it. I was ready to continue but nothing came to me. I sat there, sliding against the wall and slumping forward, back and forth, with the boat's movements. I sat there for a long time, maybe an hour.

It was then I received the augury. I saw birds, four of them, long-billed shorebirds of a tawny pink color, and transparent, like tinted cellophane. A foamy tide ran in and out around their feet. One, slender and high-stepping, stretched its neck and flapped its wings. All of this with no sound. That one was young and was, I knew as you do in dreams, my son. About the others—the adult ones, the
three
adult ones—something could not be put into words at all, but I knew it. That I passed over, in the dream.

So my son would make it through adolescence, into a long-legged, proud stage. He would get that far.

Off to one side and above the beautiful, backlit sandy reach on which these birds were stepping, hovered, or actually sat in midair—its wings were folded—an owl. It was smaller than a spotted owl. It did not really have the implacable eyes of owls, but half-closed, rather sleepy, childish eyes. Words came from it. I saw, or read, or almost heard them, words of the deepest comfort. Not the words themselves but a hum, a bird-signification. Some note at a very low frequency was aimed toward me and meant . . . I don't know what it meant.

I knew at the time but I lost it when I woke up. I felt wonderful. I was at home. I thought, I'll call Tracey, she'll love this, and I did, but she had died. Then I really woke up, and saw that I was on the houseboat.

It was palest morning. Not a single bird. Orange-tinted boas of cloud were lying on nothing, above the water and halfway up the stone chimneys. All around us the air had a faint tremble
and a taste, like air in a room where the TV has blown out. The thorny weeds had exhausted themselves against a shelf of rock; the sky was a swept-clean floor.

T
HE
sister sighs. She is too old, older than the old man; she has worn herself out in Martha House, cleaning up after sick, messy, dislocated women with somber grievances. The old man is even now—accepting no rebuff, squinting out of one eye in the quickly achieved tipsiness of age—making an effort to bring things to a satisfactory conclusion. “Now, sacrifice . . . Now, the Blessed Mother . . .” I know this old man; he is a lordly old Midwestern tithing Catholic of a disappearing kind, apt to fall into teasing reference to saints and sacraments on the golf course or at the dinner table. He's the type, with his expensive shoes, his “if you please,” to have some right-wing justification for capital punishment in the back of his mind, that he's too chicken to mention openly to the mother of a criminal son.

On the other hand he could be simply comparing the confused grieving woman to the Blessed Mother.

I don't know. There's no way to know.

I won't ask anybody anything for the rest of the flight. Why do I have to? I don't have to. I'm going to make a telephone call and then I'll rest. I'll go to sleep.

We bank sharply, perhaps avoiding something, some unimaginable night-sky traffic, and for a time I can see the crescent moon gliding from window to window as the plane slowly rights itself.

Someday my son's kindergarten class will laugh at the elephantine maneuvers of jets. They will have their own wonders, as I have lived to see the day when a telephone call can be made from an airplane.

In India the face you see immediately after looking at the new moon—is this the new moon or the old? I have forgotten how to tell. How few I have actually stored, of these alchemical facts! If the face you see is the face of a good man, it will bring you luck the whole year. Don't look down on luck, bedraggled though it may be when you pull it up out of the jumble and see it is yours,
all tangled with planets, clouds, wind, inventions, dolls, pebbles, birds going left or right.

The face of a good man. Oh, where is the flight attendant with his tender smile? But it's too late, I've glanced at the old man, who has gained no satisfaction from the sister and is opening his third burgundy. All right. So be it.

I excuse myself in a businesslike way, and pull my card through the slot. I know the number. I have something to say to that young woman, my boy's teacher, advocate of stability, of security, that she is. Take back what you said.
Pollutes
is a serious word, at St. Joseph's school. You can't expel that boy, the Flores boy! His name is Rafe. You have a lot to learn.

No one answers at the school, because it is night.

Please leave a message
. I will. I'll leave a message.

Not so long ago the answering machine, “machine” now everywhere on earth, belonged to very few. All that was required was the assembly of separate inventions to call it into existence, and already it is giving place to something else. Soon if you are not there, there will be a hologram of yourself to deliver your messages, simple enough for a child to operate, and even if he stretches his hands right through it, it will not go away.

Downward Dog

D
OOLEY
had to keep the session with Vo and Jackson short because it was midmorning and he had to get back out in the halls before classes changed. He was in a new life. He was off the force; he was doing security. Working with the young, as his social worker put it. He was the owner of a new dog, a big dog, when for his wife's sake he had always had little dogs.

At the pound they had said the dog was as friendly as any animal they had on board, but this was the last extension of his stay and on the weekend he would be put down. Because frankly people didn't want a dog that big unless it was a purebred. Keeping a heavy paw on his knot of rawhide, the dog had smiled at Dooley.

When Dooley hauled a kid in by the shirt and sat him down, the dog's head stayed on his paws and his eyes stayed on Dooley. Always. These two faced the desk, with the dog at their feet on a blue mat that had been Dooley's wife's yoga mat. “Dog bother you?” he said, because maybe half the kids were scared of a dog.

“What's his name?” It was the Vietnamese kid, Vo, who asked, which surprised him since Jackson was the one in real trouble, the one he was aiming at.

“Bruno,” he said. “Great Pyrenees plus Malamute.” In the tiny room the words had the sweep of a map, but it would be lost on these two, Vo and Jackson. The dog took up so much room
in the office both boys had to sit sideways. Before Dooley came on board there had been no office. This was a supply closet with a stenciled sign on the door,
SECURITY OFFICER
. The sign was the principal's doing. She had given him the go-ahead for the dog. “It's your deal,” she said. “It's Dooley's deal,” she told the office staff.

She knew he had beaten up a guy in an arrest. She had the report on her desk; the school district did a background check, even on a cop. He had been exonerated but they had made him do anger management and see a social worker at his own expense and he had quit. Quit the force. He was in a new life.

On the desk he had a jar of pepperoni sticks. Sometimes he offered one, but the kids didn't take them so he ate them himself. “They're worried about their breath,” the principal told him. He tipped the chair back so far laughing he cracked his head on the wall. On an empty shelf he had placed his wife's Mr. Coffee. A few of them drank coffee if it had sugar and creamer, though there were drawbacks: a kid had thrown a full cup at the wall. Kid who liked the dog. Hot coffee had splashed on the dog and the dog had done nothing more than shake his ears and thump his tail. So Dooley had fought down the urge to put a real scare into the kid. He had made him swab down the wall and eight shelves with the dust of sixty school years on them. While the kid was doing it Dooley talked. He couldn't believe he was repeating stuff from anger management.

Both his sons were on the force by the time of his administrative leave and they had stood by him. But he could tell they weren't sure about him any more, and their wives weren't, and their mother wasn't there any more to explain him to them and to himself. All he had was the dog.

If gangs were involved, he wouldn't find out from Vo. The Asians kept quiet. Vo was a little guy, but Jackson—tall as he was he should have been playing JV—was the one with the eye swollen shut. He should have been able to fight; he was the one with the scars and the record at fifteen. Both of them were going out—automatic three days for fighting in the halls—but Jackson
was heading for juvie or worse even though he was the loser in this and his previous fight on school grounds.

“Are you surprised? You raised kids.” That was the principal's response to any comment he might make about what went on. It seemed to him now that his wife must have done most of the raising of their boys. He couldn't say he liked the kids in the halls and johns and parking lots of this particular school. Maybe he didn't like kids. “That isn't what matters,” his social worker said. She was a girl some years younger than his sons. She used the same voice with him, a kind of purr, that the female wardens used to soothe a nut case.

But if not that, what? What mattered?

When Dooley said “OK, Bruno,” the dog would lumber up, wave his tail. Until then he just lay there. Vo had faced forward but Jackson still had his long legs pointed at the door and his eyes on the dog. Vo saw that, and let his fingers drop to the top of the dog's head and give it a casual but showy caress. The dog shifted on the mat, Jackson shrank back in his chair. Vo's phone went off.

“OK, Mr. Grant Vo. You put this on your little screen you got there and send it to yourself: ‘Think jail.' You read that. You come in here again, I'll be unhappy.” Dooley knew not to make a real threat. The bulk of him was the threat, the uniform, even one he paid for and ironed himself. “I'll be unhappy, you'll be unhappy. Now go see Mrs. G. in her office and then go see how they like you at home.” He waved Vo out.

“Not you, Mr. Temp Jackson. See your name's Temple. Momma named you Temple.” He smiled a smile he knew was mean. The dog was smiling a real dog-smile at Jackson.

Slowly, through stiff lips, Jackson said to the dog, “Don't you get near me.”

“He's friendly,” Dooley said. “Most of the time.” A bit of a scare wouldn't hurt this kid. “OK, Bruno.” The dog got up.

“Don't get near me!”

Jackson jumped up, reached down the front of his sweats and pulled out a gun. It was so small in his palm that for an instant Dooley thought it was a cell phone. A make Dooley didn't even
recognize, though he recognized the moment. A moment both fast and slow, well known to him in dreams. What he did was what he did in dreams: he waited. He wished his sons were there to see him so composed. He waited to die.

The boy shot the dog. All this took three seconds. The dog just stood there. Then he sank into the position Dooley's wife, when she was doing her cancer yoga, had taught Dooley was Downward Dog. Then he rolled over like he was just going to show his belly to be scratched. On the floor he panted with a tongue-out smile.

Dooley had his own weapon in his hand. At anger management they had a woman up there telling you anger was grief and you had to list everything bad that ever happened to you. Hours of that. Nobody defended anger or said you'd better have some so you could die for your buddies on the force or your dog.