The Local News (34 page)

I watched one night as Kirk Donovan conducted a jailhouse interview on the eleven o’clock news. Elvin hunched forward in his pea green jumpsuit and spoke with a slight lisp (his
th
’s had the slightest, most awful sibilance), saying he didn’t know what had happened. With his overbite, his front teeth sat lazily over his bottom lip. It was almost laughable, the bad teeth and the lisp. His lawyer sat to his side, a pinched man in a cheap-looking suit who kept touching Elvin’s arm when Elvin began to say too much.

Elvin said that he had “black spirits” he sometimes couldn’t control (the lawyer’s hand came into the frame) and that “I didn’t mean nothing bad” (lawyer’s hand), and then he repeated what would become his insane mantra: “We had some real good times together” (no hand). The camera flashed to Kirk Donovan, who sat nodding, his face pancaked with his familiar expression of sympathy. He spoke in the same low, consoling voice he’d used each time he’d come over here and sat in this very room with us. For a brief, blistering moment, it was Kirk Donovan’s offense that cut more deeply.

I had thought it would bring some relief, knowing details. Instead, the information—taser gun, good times, the smashing of an eye—scooped out something essential from the center of me, leaving only a wide, whooshing hole instead.

•  •  •

And then, without warning, time resumed its normal march forward. Just as it had during the previous winter, the tone of frenzy proved unsustainable at school. My classmates returned to talk of finals and college and Senior Skip Day. Lola was going to prom with Lyle Walker. David Nelson had a summer internship at a software firm in California; he would live with his aunt outside Sacramento and learn about Perl programming and JavaScript. Tip received a football scholarship to Utah State University. He was going to be an Aggie, and he took to wearing a slick navy-and-white jersey nearly every day. Hollingham lectured about Constantinople, Principal Garver made announcements about graduation tickets, and all the while something crawled beneath my skin.

Scabies, I thought. Mites.

I spent class time scraping at my skin, first with fingernails, then with the lead tip of my pencil, even occasionally with the needle-sharp point of a protractor. I kept taking the wrong books with me—my fat chem book to history, Dickens to trig. I became easily, entirely distracted by Devorah Birnbaum’s tapping foot two desks over from me or the three robins in the treetop out the window. I stopped doing homework.

I ate in the cafeteria less and less. The noise in there, the constant scrambling bodies, the bright fluorescent lights—too much. As the flag girls went on about upcoming stretch limos and after-parties, I scratched at my thighs and the side of my neck and had thoughts of taking my dull cafeteria knife and, rather than using it to saw through my meatloaf, stabbing it through the leg of the nearest flag girl.

I found some comfort in watching Bayard down at the other end of the table, the brooding way he ate his turkey loaf or sloppy joe, chewing slowly, eyeing the burger with slit-eyed suspicion. Ever since assembly I’d taken greater notice of him—the way he tiptoed
alone through the halls in his strange, chunk-heeled shoes or sat stiffly at his chem table near the front of the classroom, legs crossed at the ankles, hands in his lap, as if he were at a tea party rather than in front of a Bunsen burner. I found something appealing in the alien air he gave off. Often he eyed the rest of the lunch table the same way he eyed his sandwiches, with a pinched expression just short of a scowl, as the girls chittered about Diana trying out for cheerleading or Penny being too much of a chicken to ask Marty Grindell to prom. “Bok-bok-bok,” Rochelle said to Penny, her fists cupped in her armpits, her elbows flapping. Bayard got up then, the remains of his cheeseburger piled on his tray. I felt the blood rush to my face, with a clear sense of being stranded, and I was up and nearly running across the cafeteria before I even had time to think about it, trying to catch up with him as he set his tray on the conveyor belt.

“You get tired of them?” I called. The question came out screechy. When he turned, he squinted at me in the same suspicious way he squinted, it was becoming clear, at everything.

“Is strange,” was all he said. I remembered him saying exactly the same thing the day of the search.
Eez strinj.
Apt then, still apt now.

“I’ll show you something,” I said, inexplicably emboldened. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d started a conversation with someone. “Do you want me to show you something?”

I’d recently found a quiet hallway by the cavernous family and consumer science classrooms. There were no lockers there, only long murals of multicolored children holding hands in a circle or of farms with two of every animal. This cut down on almost all lunchtime foot traffic. I could spend the hour alone there, sitting or pacing, mostly pacing.

We walked in silence. Bayard’s shoes clicked against the floor. I
couldn’t think of anything to say, and he didn’t seem one for conversation. When we arrived at the home ec hall, I slid down the wall, a pair of alpacas at my back, and sat on the floor.

“This is it?” he said.
Zees ees eet?

“Yeah,” I said, embarrassed. I remembered how little I’d liked Bayard in the factory with his glib, impassive attitude about everything.

“It looks like a nursery school.” He flapped his arms at the murals.
Nur-zree skull.

“I know,” I said quickly. “But there are no
people
here.”
Get it?
I wanted to say to him.
Get it?
I felt a desperate need for him to, though I realized the odds were against me, given that he was a costume-wearing, foot-stomping, hip-shaking member of the flag team.

“Americans,” he said, “are tiring.”

I wasn’t sure if he was including me in this characterization, but I didn’t much care. Soon he was sliding himself down the wall and sitting on the floor across from me.

“I am sorry about your brother,” he said, picking at the skin around one of his fingernails.

“Are you
zorry
?” I said, but when he looked at me, I realized the imitation wasn’t funny, so I said, “Thanks.” Strange, I thought, how his time here had been marked by the events of my family. Was this what he reported about in letters home? Were his parents worried that he too would be snatched by a stranger in America? It would not be until much later—years, really—that I considered that other people may have found the events of my life incidental to their own, unworthy of particular note, that perhaps someone like Bayard filled his letters home with greater preoccupations, such as the joys of cable television or the glut of available McDonald’s.

“Are you homesick?” I said.

His finger had started to bleed, a bright sliver of red next to his nail. “Sure,” he told me. “Of course.” He had a way of talking, his accent and his tone, that made it seem as if he could add
stupid
to the end of every sentence.
Sure, stupid. Of course, stupid.

“Me too,” I said, and he nodded at me, unsurprised.

I sought out Bayard more and more, finding him in the cafeteria and sitting nearby, poking at my fish stick with a fork or chewing on the inside of my cheek until I could bear the tablemates or the sweetish smell of the tartar sauce no longer. I implored him to walk with me through the halls.

“How do you say,” I would ask, “radius? Hotpad? Leapfrog?” This was, I found, the easiest conversation to make, a distracting buzz of noise with endless possibilities.

“Rayon,”
he told me.
“Dessous-de-plat, saute-mouton.”
I began trailing him to his host family’s house after school. “What are you doing today?” I would ask and would take his shrug or his
Nuzzing
as invitation. Bayard’s host family, the McAllisters, had a house dotted with the sort of ornamental bric-a-brac—a small wooden cow on a windowsill, a pair of woolly sheep on an end table,
a ceramic milkmaid in pointy hat and apron on the back of the stove—that made it seem like nothing bad had ever happened to them.

“Put that down,” Bayard often told me, of the tiny gold-painted teacup or the glass horse I carried around. Sometimes I listened, often not. I was obsessed with the chore chart that hung on the fridge, fashioned out of two paper plates, a pinwheel fastener in the middle, and meticulous drawings for each slice of the pie: a broom for floors, Oscar the Grouch for garbage. “Don’t,” he told me as I spun the inner plate, the one with the names on it.
Dunt.
“You’re screwing it up.” I couldn’t stop touching things. More than once I pressed the polished surface of a purple geode to the tip of my tongue.

Two elementary-school-aged children ran screaming around the McAllisters’. Bayard referred to them as Fick and Fack. The nicknames were interchangeable, uttered out of frustration more than affection
(Sit down now, Fick. Fack, stop screaming in my ear)
, though the children, a boy and a girl, appeared delighted by any attention from Bayard, dissolving into giggles even when he chastised them, which was often. They easily put their hands on me, sticky and grabby, asking the first time I met them if I would play Go Fish, if I knew how to jump rope.

Bayard’s host parents were both doughy and round, with ruddy faces and overly friendly manners to match their children’s. They said, “It’s a terrible thing, what’s happened to your family,” and “We’ve prayed for you,” both sentiments less creepy than usual since their expressions were so plain and open, devoid of the hungry, searching look most people had when they met me. They smiled through even the highest-pitched shrieks from their children. They offered up baked goods and card tricks with ease, seeming like just the sort of people who would open their home to a foreigner for a
year, and just the sort not to seem disappointed when it turned out to be one as remote and odd as Bayard. Being around them brought a heady mix of comfort, indignation, relief, and injustice. Why had Bayard lucked out in such a way? Or Fick and Fack, for that matter?

It was so weird in their home, so simultaneously restful and disorienting. I tried to relax into it but often found myself twitchy with disbelief or wonder. The first time Mrs. McAllister invited me to stay for dinner—something she would come to regularly do—I was stirred with such simultaneous excitement and inconsolability, I called out, “Zah!” She didn’t even pause, smiling and nodding as if I’d said the
Yes
I’d intended. I managed a reasonable enough “Thank you” in return while fingering the painted wooden egg I’d secreted into my pocket hours before.

As for Bayard and me, we took walks through his neighborhood similar to the ones we took through the school hallways
(chat tigré,
he told me for tabby cat,
prise d’eau
for fire hydrant). We sat in his room, me frequently asking, “What do you want to do now?” as I paged through anything with pages: a French-English dictionary, his fat stack of car magazines. I rocked back and forth at the edge of his bed or tapped my feet or asked barrages of questions: “Why don’t you take more of an interest in politics?” or “Why did you come to the United States?” or “What’s your family like?” He often seemed to find me either crazy or unintelligible, leaving my questions unanswered, blinking at me or staring at the brown shag of his rug as if I hadn’t even spoken. I would think,
Does he hear me? Am I making myself clear?

I suffered indignities from Bayard I would have suffered from no one else, mostly because I found solace in his displaced otherness, the low-level, constant hum of alienation coming off him. He still didn’t know how to conjugate verbs; he still couldn’t comprehend seventeen-theater multiplexes, bulk-food aisles, or SUVs.
What at first had appeared to be his cool detachment upon closer inspection looked more like an ongoing effort to tamp down his oft-rising befuddlement.

One night we sat on the creaky plastic swings of the McAllisters’ swing set after dinner. I pumped my legs in the air, grateful for the continual motion offered by a swing. The shaky metal frame made ominous buckling noises.

“Careful,” Bayard warned. He was hardly moving in his, dragging the tips of his shoes in the grass. It was the time of year when the days had grown noticeably longer. The extra hours of daylight felt illicit, ill-gotten.

“Fucking spring,” I said. Talking didn’t really help. Not talking didn’t either.

“I hate summer,” Bayard said.

“Me too,” I said, but this was a lie. I had always enjoyed summers, spending past ones teaching myself the tenets of Buddhism, learning conversational Italian, reading the Brontë sisters. It was impossible, though, to imagine the coming summer. It felt like trying to imagine a solar system beyond ours or what it was like to have Down syndrome. The idea that summer was coming, then fall, then winter, then spring, then summer again brought forth that same sick, illicit feeling.

“So much sweat,” Bayard said. This, his explanation.

I kicked harder, my swing groaning loudly, jerking through the air. The whole swing set felt like it could come down around us. Rust from the chains turned my fingers orange and gritty.