The Local News (9 page)

Bayard smiled at us. Not exactly a boastful smile, but closed-mouthed and sly, like he knew something the rest of us had no inkling of. He seemed briefly arrogant, in spite of being bright-cheeked and spindly and wearing high-heeled shoes. His hand sat in mine still, loose and impassive. I stared at the dirty brick of the building; this close, random patches looked blackened, as if they’d been charred by fire. Yellow caution tape fluttered in one doorway, flapping in the air like a party streamer.

The longer we stood there, the more feverish the lunch-table girls grew in their objections (“We’re not allowed to separate,” “You’re going to be
trespassing”).
The rain was fully upon us now, sure and constant. A few groups of searchers passed by on the sidewalk,
nodding wordlessly. One man looked at the ground near our feet and asked, “Did you find something?” and shook his head sadly when we told him no. Bayard still had that smile, and the feeling of surrender rose again within me. I would let him lead me inside. This awful building seemed suddenly to fit perfectly with the general strangeness of the morning.

“I’ll go,” I said, and Lola looked between me and her friends, her freckles brightening on her face. I thought she might burst into tears. Inside meant respite from this rain and this search, from these squirrelly girls, from my mother and the inevitable circle she was making back toward us now.

I squeezed Lola’s hand. “Come with us,” I said, the first generous thing I ever said to her, really. And she did.

There was a musty, charred smell to the place, not smoky, more like the bitter sharpness of crossed wires. It reminded me of the smell that wafted from the voc hall at school as students patched together busted radios in electronics. Glass and debris littered the floor; our steps were noisy and crunching. It was hard to see, as the inside was cavernous and most windows were clouded over with a dirty film. The broken ones let in jagged streams of light and a steady patter of rain. You could hear a few voices from outside, but just barely. Lola kept making mewling noises behind me, gasping as she walked into cobwebs. There was a constant film of them, shocking at first, the intimate way they clung to your face.

“You guys,” Lola kept saying. “You guys, is this a good idea?”

Bayard marched ahead of us like a drum major. “Don’t be scared,” he called.
Dun be skeered.

We moved past hulking, unidentifiable machines. In the dark, one looked like a loom, another a gross imitation of a grand piano.

“What’d they used to do in here?” I called, my voice loud and echoy. Neither answered, but Lola let out an unusually high-pitched squeal followed by a loud, skittering noise. When I turned around, she was down on all fours, splayed like an animal.

“I tripped!” she said, her tone as if she were accusing us of something. “I tripped!”

When I got to her, she was breathing heavily, examining her wrists for scrapes. I helped her up by the elbow. She had an expression I hadn’t seen before, far more intent and fiery than normal. She looked like she was working hard to bite back something. The sight of it made me like her more than usual. It made me give her more credit. I helped brush the dirt off her pants.

“I’m cut,” she said. She held her palm to my face. There was a thin trail of blood on the fleshy pad beneath her thumb. “I think there’s some glass in there.”

I felt around her hand impotently, imitating something my mother must have done a long time ago. I couldn’t feel anything.

When Bayard got to us, he proclaimed, “Come on. This will be fun.” The hood of his rain jacket was pulled back now; several curls had broken free of his gel and popped from his head like loose bedsprings. His ears were huge. I felt like laughing.

“Zis weel be fan,” I said to Lola. That made her smile a little.

Bayard found a dark stairwell that smelled rancid, as if someone had long ago left meat to defrost there. Lola cupped both hands over her nose and mouth as Bayard bounded up the stairs ahead of us. The darkness was so dense I held my arms out in front of me protectively. The smell was potent; it went right to my throat and I started coughing. For a quick moment I thought,
Danny.
I felt, briefly, a fleshy, sweaty sureness. An image popped into my
head—some long-ago Halloween, him swaddled in toilet paper, his face paled with white powder, red grease-pencil blood dripping from the side of his mouth.

Soon Lola’s hand was on my back. “You okay?” she said.

I’d stopped on the stairs, was hanging on to the railing now. “Sure,” I said. I cleared my throat. “Sure.”

“Just don’t look,” she said, and as my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I made out a faint, feathery carcass in the corner of the stairwell. It was huge, certainly bigger than a pigeon, and dark, with its wings splayed at strange angles. A dense shadow fanned out beneath it. Blood.

“Poor crow,” Lola said.

“Crow,” I said, as if I’d never heard the word before. Lola was patting my back.

I couldn’t stop staring. There was a bit of movement near the beak, and for a second I thought it might still be alive until I realized maggots were slithering around in the eye sockets. I tried not to gag and hurried up the rest of the steps two at a time, listening to Lola’s footsteps behind me.

As I came out of the stairwell, my blood pounded in my ears, my face felt weighty with a rush of blood. The second floor looked just like the first except even darker, with fewer broken windows. Bayard sat waiting for us, cross-legged beside a huge machine with a conveyer belt. His jacket was spread out beneath him, as if he were on a picnic.

“What took you so long?” he said. I wondered if the smug un-flappability was a French thing. It was starting to bug me. “Have a seat,” he called, fanning his arm in front of him.

I tried to slow my breathing. Lola performed a long, meticulous ritual of sweeping away the debris with the sides of her shoes before laying her coat down. She made worried, chirpy noises at
what she thought were spiders but were only dusty clots of dirt carried along by the low wind currents. I sat too, feeling uncomfortably small in the shadow of the machine. The air was cool and musky. There was a steady patter of rain against the windows. My one shoulder was freezing.

“What do we do now?” Lola said.

“I don’t know,” Bayard said. “Tell ghost stories?”
Gust sturries.

“Eh,” I said. I was unenthused about ghost stories. Lola examined the cut on her hand, pressing a finger along the line of blood. Bayard sat with a placid expression, seeming utterly at home. I wondered what my parents were doing, which field they were marching through, what sort of soggy receipt or abandoned shoe they were picking up and fingering. I wondered when they would head back to the starting field, and what they would do when I failed to arrive, if their hands would fly around their faces, if they would shriek, run in circles, fall to their knees.

“I really loved your brother,” Lola said. Her face was drawn again, serious as when she fell.

“I know you did,” I said, nodding, though I could feel the tiredness at the base of my neck like a weight.

She ran her finger along the dirty floor. Bayard stared between us. It was strange and comforting, the fact that he’d never known Danny, that Bayard had been an ocean away the last time Danny’s whereabouts were known, that all Danny was to him was an idea.

“Why did you love him?” I asked, trying not to sound defensive, trying to sound curious instead. Which I was.

“I don’t know,” she said.
“You
know.” She looked at me as if of course I knew. What did I need
her
telling
me
?

Years later I would sit in a child development class during my short and ill-conceived phase of wanting to be a teacher (I was not nearly patient enough and lacked the necessary empathy by about
half). I listened to my professor explain a set of rat studies that tested Pavlovian theories about intermittent stimuli. Rats had had to press their nose against a button to get food. For one set of rats, they pushed the button, they got food. For another, they pushed the button and they got an electric shock along with their food. For the third, sometimes they got a shock with their food, sometimes not. “Which group,” the professor asked from behind his podium, “do you think fared the worst?” and then looked pleased when the majority of hands rose for the rats with the constant shocks.
Wrong.
A good number of those rats developed compensatory skills, he told us, such as pressing the button for shorter durations or with less frequency. They survived, hungrier than the shock-free rats but relatively intact. The rats with the intermittent shocks, though, those were the ones who chewed their tails to a nub and rubbed so hard against the wire of their cages that they sheared away first their fur, then their skin. Those were the ones who ate their own feces. “Inconsistency,” the professor declared excitedly, “is the single most destructive force on a being’s psyche.”

Had Danny administered his shocks daily, I could’ve grown inured to him. I could have built up my defenses. But between the long weeks of his dismissive silences, he’d slouch every so often in my doorway and say simply, “How’s it going, Lyd?” After a campaign of ripping pages from the books on my bookshelves (only a few here and there at first, so I thought it was just a strange anomaly, page 212 jumping to 215, until slowly the last page of every book on my bookshelf was gone, the remnants jagged and fluttery along the spine), he’d hand me, unbidden, an old Eric Clapton album, saying he didn’t want it anymore. In the same week he could tell me, “That coat is cool” and “You better start wearing makeup if you don’t want to look so unappealing.” Peabody, he’d call me
sometimes, in a giggling, congenial way, the name of the genius with the Wayback Machine from the cartoon we used to watch together Saturday mornings. Duckling, he’d call me on other days, always with a snarl and often in front of his friends, which to my knowledge was the only literary allusion he’d made in his life.

I was stuck always between wanting him and hating him, between hoping he’d come sit on the edge of my bed and hoping he’d have some gruesome accident that would scar him or paralyze him or both. I was—long before he went missing—the crazy rat.

“Tell me,” I said now to Lola, drawn against my better judgment to her simple, rose-colored version.

“He was really funny,” she began, looking at Bayard, not me. “And he made people feel good. You know?” Bayard shrugged. “And he didn’t treat you like crap just because you weren’t an up-perclassman. There was this one time last year when we were out on the field practicing before the Thompson-Perkins game and Beth kept tangling up her flag.” Bayard rolled his eyes knowingly. I didn’t know which one Beth was or what her tendencies toward flag tangling were.

“And it was pouring out and we were all really starting to get frustrated and we just wanted to get it right. And Danny comes out from the lockers, all suited up for practice. When he sees us on the other side of the field, he runs over and he can see we’re all unhappy, and he just says, ‘Ladies, may I?’ and hands me his helmet and holds out his hand for my flag, which I give him. And he takes over. I’m not kidding. He’s shouting
one, two, three, four,
and waving my flag around and kicking up his feet like a Rockette, and everyone’s laughing. He starts marching around and everyone follows him. I mean, he’s got his shoulder pads and cleats on and everything.” She giggled at this memory, then looked almost embarrassed by her noise.

“It doesn’t sound that funny now, but it was. When he hands me back my flag, he says, ‘You guys are doing a good job.’ ” She looked meaningfully between me and Bayard. Bayard shrugged again. “You know how many football players tell us that?” Lola said. “Not many. Not any, really. They don’t bother with us. I know what the rest of them call us.
Cowgirls. Heifer Brigade.
”

There was a breathless look about her, as if the story had really taken her for a ride. She stared at me like now it was my turn. The longer I remained quiet, the more her features changed, as if she were remembering where she was. Her eyes grew wide and watery, her lips drooped. One tear slid down her cheek, and Bayard made a weird, soft,
awww
noise, which I found so disappointing. Her tears—there were more—created a bitter, pulsing knot in the base of my throat, one that held back all the terrible things I longed to tell her about how she’d been fooled, about how Danny had never so much as mentioned her, about how he had always juggled a handful of girls, all of whom were lither and leggier and prettier than she.

His—I was so tired of everyone being his. In the absence of David Nelson, in the grime of this factory, in the midst of the cold, rainy patter of this day, I needed someone—okay, anyone—to be mine.

We stayed there for a long time. Bayard told stories about France, mostly to do with how frustrating it was not to be able to find particular foods here. He mused lovingly about boursault cheese and congolais cookies and Mirinda soda. I found it a waste that out of all the exchange students from France, we ended up with one who
could speak of his culture in only the most minute and palate-driven terms.