The Local News (16 page)

“Hey,” I said to David. “No game?” He spent most lunch hours now in empty classrooms huddled around a ten-sided die with Adam Deselets and Adam Deselets’s minions.

“Taking a break,” he said and rolled his eyes, which made me feel momentarily hopeful. The innards of his egg salad sandwich resembled spackle.

“Cold,” I said.

“Yessy indeedy,” he said in a high-pitched British accent that I assumed was an imitation of something, though I wasn’t sure what. Then he did a strange sort of bow at the waist. “Quite cold indeed,” he said as he straightened, still in the same accented voice.

I smiled, but my cheeks felt stiff. David Nelson had always tried hard; now it was just more apparent. I pressed my feet against the packed snow. In the distance, clouds of words came out of Denis’s mouth. Marvin/Martin didn’t appear to be saying much, nodding some, shrugging a couple of times.

“You think Yeltsin’s digging himself too deep a hole?” David said. He was a little like the soap operas my mother had taken to lately—whenever you tuned in, you could count on hearing the same patterns of dialogue about the Quartermaine’s newest business scandal or the breakup and eventual reunion of Bo and Hope. It held a lulling, predictable appeal.

“With Chechnya?” I asked. I’d been following the news, but only barely lately. More and more, it’d grown hard to concentrate. A blanket of grogginess seemed to come over me as I scanned a paper or listened to the well-modulated voices of public radio.

David Nelson talked about the protests in Grozny and how Prime Minister Zavgaev had lost all popular support. “Yeltsin needs to get his head out of his butt,” he said. “Or this occupation is going to turn into his own personal West Bank.”

“Sure,” I said, “sure, sure,” trying to think of something else. David was wearing the same down jacket he’d had for the past two winters, mustard yellow and marshmallowy. It swallowed him up, making his head look tiny peeking out of the collar. “It wasn’t a good move for Russian troops to fire into crowds of protesters,” I said. There was of course something nice about standing out here with David. I wanted at least to try.

Out of my peripheral vision, I saw movement. Martin/Marvin marched toward his car as Denis made a straight line right to us. My heartbeat rose to my throat. I ate my sandwich intently, trying to think of conversation to be deeply involved in with David Nelson.

“The troops,” I sputtered, mouth full of sandwich. “Why did they fire? I mean, who do you think ordered it?”

“Zavgaev,” he said, “but Zavgaev is in Yeltsin’s pocket, so it’s just semantics. Any way you cut it, it’s all Yeltsin.” By that point, he too saw Denis striding toward us. “That’s your PI?”

The idea that David Nelson knew who Denis was surprised me. Were even the most peripheral students of Franklin High—the gamers, the band geeks, the burnouts smoking in the courtyard-alerted to him? “We don’t call him that,” I said, and I could hear the slight edge to my voice.

“What do you call him?”

“Denis,” I said. Saying his name made me feel childish and exposed.

“Oh, sorry.
Den-is,”
David said with loud, dramatic emphasis. “I have not been so intimately acquainted with
Den-is.
I have not had that
pleas-ure.
” He was trying to be funny.

“Stop it,” I said too sharply, but Denis was almost upon us and I didn’t want this to be the conversation he stumbled upon. I tore into my sandwich, the horseradish on my corned beef clearing out my nasal passages.

“You out here keeping tabs on me, Lydia?” Denis said in a loud, joking voice. Hearing my name from his mouth gave me the same childish, exposed feeling. “Supervising my work?”

My mouth was full. I tried to swallow, chewing and chewing; I feared I had horseradish on my face. Denis and David Nelson stood staring at each other. Denis was wearing the kind of hat you might see on a hunting trip, one lined with sheepskin and with long dangling earflaps. It was preposterous but endearing, a bold choice.

“Denis Jimenez,” Denis finally said, reaching out a gloved hand to David.

David introduced himself, then said, “Your name has a distinct meter to it. A very clean rhyme.”

“Thank you,” Denis said, looking unsurprised, as if that were the sort of thing he heard all the time.

“Hi,” I finally said after swallowing. “What’s going on?”

He waved his notepad at us. “You know, just background information. You never know what information can spark a lead. You want to get a real fleshed-out picture of your subject before you go running off on wild goose chases.”

I nodded. “Background’s good.”

“Sure is,” he said. “Tell your folks I’m planning to come sometime next week to give them an update. Not that there’s any big news. This kind of thing works inch by inch.” The hat boxed his face in, framing his features in not the most flattering way. His nose looked wide, all nostril. His stubble was better groomed than usual, only a light sprinkling along his cheeks, but a red rash of razor bumps festered beneath. There was a patch of longer hair he’d missed in the dimple of his chin. Denis was a mess, but his eyes had their usual smolder, and I imagined him arriving at our home several days later. I thought of his voice rising from the kitchen and filtering through the rest of the house. I thought of him knocking on my closed door, asking if he could come in.

“I started
A Sportsman’s Notebook
,” I told him now, my words chalky in the cold air.

He looked at me blankly.

“Turgenev,” I said. “You know, Hemingway?”

“Sure, sure,” Denis said, nodding. “You like it?”

“It’s good,” I said. “There’s a lot of wandering around and describing things, not really a plot. It’s a little disjointed.”

“Sure,” Denis said. “He’s more oblique than a straight-ahead narrator.”

“Oblique,” I said. “I like that. He conveys the anonymous days of Russians very well,” I said, cribbing one of the ideas I’d read in the introduction. “It gives the work a real timelessness.” I added, “Paradoxically.” That’s how it’d been discussed in the intro, as a paradox.

Denis smiled at me, openmouthed. “Smart cookie.”

I smiled back. I couldn’t help it.

David Nelson stared hard at me; I could feel it on the side of my face. “So, what, you’re a professional PI and an amateur member of the literati?” he said. His voice bristled, but I wondered if Denis
even noticed. For someone who didn’t know David, it could’ve just sounded like the normal croaking of a pubescent boy.

“I wouldn’t go that far,” Denis said, chuckling. “Reading’s probably just the least damaging of the available distractions.”

David appeared to be in need of a comeback. Air clouded out of his mouth, but soundlessly. I felt bad for him, in the same low-level guilty way I would for years after high school, whenever I stumbled upon a memory of him. I did not, in the waning months of our friendship, do justice to our history. There was just too much else going on. When he looked at me during that lunch, though, there was something pleading in his eyes, some desperate imperative that I pretended not to see, that I hoped Denis was not picking up on.

“Listen,” Denis said. “Can you ask your mom to dig out all of the letters from that file cabinet? Not just the nutters. All the correspondence she’s saved, no matter how inconsequential-seeming. I want to take a look at everything she’s got, see if I missed anything.”

“I can get the letters in order for you.” I tried to sound more dutiful than obsequious, though even I could hear the strain of eager puppy dog in my voice. “Is there any particular order you want?” David made a small, glottal sound, something between a hiccup and a cough, though with more incredulity than either of those.

“Great,” Denis said. “Any order’s great. I’m sure I can wade through.” He slapped his notebook into his palm, a motion that was coming to seem like his trademark, a punctuation mark of sorts, often directly preceding his exit. “Good to meet you,” he said to David, holding the notebook to his forehead in a quick salute.

Alone together again, the air crackled around David and me. Cars began making their way back into the lot, a few fishtailing on
the slippery pavement, their wheels making dramatic grinding noises. I found myself wishing for a collision, just for the venting relief of such drama. But everyone navigated safely into spaces, without so much as a car door dinging the vehicle parked next to it. We spent the rest of lunch like that, neither of us saying much of anything, both pretending to be occupied by the mundane details; for David, something at his feet and, later, a muffler-heavy car in the street; for me, the slushy trails of boot prints and, finally, the leaden sky overhead.

I had to make stealth work of the letters, given my mother’s proclivity for hovering near the kitchen file cabinet. She spent her days at the breakfast table, an arm’s length away, or pacing the small nook with a cigarette in hand, or opening and closing the three drawers as they squealed on their long hinges. The cabinet was her sole, un-contested domain. I did not want her to get wind of what I was doing, to mistake this for a collaborative venture. I could just imagine her fetishistic stroking of each envelope, her fresh recital of words read countless times, her shoulder-to-shoulder, breathy camaraderie.

I timed things precisely so I could delve inside when she was out of eyeshot and earshot—during her brief trips to the bathroom or while she was taking naps or walking the dogs around the block. This one element of subterfuge quickly tinged the venture with an
illicit little thrill.
A spy,
I hummed to myself as I fingered through the manila folders, listening for the sound of her footsteps.
A DEE-tec-tive.

It was easy to get lost inside the drawers. There were rough markers of an organizational structure, sections labeled
History
and
News
and
Evidence,
though those had been long abandoned. Now fat folder after fat folder was crammed tightly into hanging files, where you’d find a tenth-grade math test (basic algebra, marked liberally with red
X
es, a
D+
at the top) alongside a recent clipping from the
Free Press
alongside a silvery certificate from the state swim meet alongside a photocopy of an early police report. Nothing was too inconsequential to keep—there was an old gum wrapper in one folder, a mucky used Band-Aid in another, the adhesive covered in dog hair and dirt, browned blood still spotting the bandage. Where had this once been? His elbow? Chin? And how had she come to find it and store it away?

The contents of the drawers were compelling and unsettling in the way crazy was compelling and unsettling. They were the shut-in who stacked years of newspapers into towers until his apartment became a narrow, moldering gauntlet. They were the paranoiac who jury-rigged a home security system from crisscrossing strands of dental floss and mousetraps. My first job, then, became one of simply rooting out the letters and secreting small stacks up in my room.

I’d never read any of them before; they’d struck me as invasive, one more way our life had become boundaryless and up for grabs, the community slithering in daily through our mail slot. I’d felt indignant at the Love stamps and the unnecessary
c
often added to our name, turning us into The Pasterna
c
ks, a family I came to imagine as existing in a parallel universe, their evenings spent around a fireplace, their coffee table littered with Renaissance art books and international newspapers, jazz music playing in the background.
Now, though, as I spread the letters across my desk and studied the inky cursive on monogrammed stationery or a typed missive on letterhead or a child’s blocky print, they held new fascination.

Maybe it was the low-level but constant narration that accompanied the task, narration that would only grow in the coming weeks, capable of enlivening even the most ordinary or solitary of pursuits, characterized simply as
What I Will Tell Denis About This
(“Denis, seven out of every eight writers seem to be female.” “Den is, did you see that three separate letters came from Georgia?”). Or maybe it was the challenge of the venture, the familiar appeal of trying to master something new: the puzzling together of many random bits of information into a sensible whole. Or maybe it was simply the appeal of having something to do.

Certainly I had school and homework and Lola and listening to the radio and feeding the dogs and making my lunches and going to Chuck, but all of that, no matter how pointed, had an overarching cast of aimlessness. The letters brought a satisfaction before I’d even started in on the work. How unwittingly desperate I had become for just such a sharpening of my attention, for the distillation of my long, shapeless days into a bite-sized, concrete problem set.

I read and sorted after school, before bed, in lieu of breakfast, and a categorizing system naturally emerged. There were, most voluminously, the Nice letters. These were the ones devoid of substance, filled instead with snippets about prayer and sympathy and love, the ones most likely to be written on store-bought cards featuring doves or flowers. Most Nice letters were simple and brief, a mention of seeing us on the news, heart going out, etc. A subset of them, though, invoked the shameless sentimentality reserved for grade-school love notes,
i
’s dotted with hearts, smiley faces attached as addenda to signatures. For all of the Nice letters, I penciled a small
N
on the back flap of the envelope.