Untouchable (17 page)

There was a cardboard box on the floor of the bedroom, filled with the family photos, stuffed animals, the cards they’d taken from the room. The box would sit with the hotel manager until someone claimed them or he threw them away. Stella crouched beside the box. She lifted them carefully, one picture to the next, until she finally settled on the most recent, the woman she remembered, smiling bravely in a hospital bed, surrounded by many of the same cards and flowers and stuffed animals in the box. She turned back to Darby.

“If you will not tell anyone,” she said. “I would like to have one of these pictures.”

She looked at Darby, then down at his bucket, the roll of paper towels he’d set on top of the snow globe. She stood with the photo in her hand, smoothed the front of her apron.

“No one notices such things,” she said. “But I would like to take it with me.”

The Kid waited in bed, listened to the pickup pull away down the street. When he was reasonably sure his dad wasn’t coming back, he got dressed, double-checked that the mask and goggles were still in his new backpack, pulled his flashlight from under the bed and went down through the dark house, out the security door to the front porch.

Night on the street. Half moon high overhead, lighting the black sky to gray. He knew that he shouldn’t be out there. What would his dad do if he knew The Kid was out of the house, ready to go out into the city at night? Blow his stack, probably. The Kid would see his dad in full anger mode, in red-face, jaw-clenching mode. He knew he should be back in bed, waiting for his mom to come home, but he was afraid that they were going to tear down the burned house. He was afraid that he’d never find out more about that wing drawing, about the giant chalk bird’s wing or whatever it was, floating out of the front door.

He headed up the street, past the apartment building and the vacant lot, up the hill to the intersection. There was some traffic on Sunset, adults going to restaurants or bars while the kids of the city slept. Traffic lights changing, a few horn honks. The mysterious world of night. The Kid was a little afraid, a little thrilled. He kept his head down, worried that an adult he knew would drive by, that Amanda or Bob would pass on their way somewhere and recognize The Kid standing at the corner waiting for the stoplight. He kept an eye out for his mom, like he always did. He looked into cars stopped at the intersection, searching for the familiar face.

Where had she gone? Was she in Chicago with The Kid’s grandmother? Was she living in that upstairs bedroom, where he and his mom had stayed the time they went out to visit? That sad blue room? The Kid didn’t know. For a while after she was gone, The Kid’s grandmother would call the house. When The Kid picked up the phone and heard his grandmother’s voice, he’d wanted to ask if his mom was there, if she was staying up in that room. But he had already made the Covenant, so instead of asking anything he just listened to his grandmother saying,
Hello? Hello?
on the other end of the line until one of them hung up.

There had been a memorial service. The Kid and his parents didn’t have a church, so Amanda organized it at her church in Burbank. It wasn’t a funeral like The Kid saw on TV shows, because there wasn’t any coffin. This confirmed The Kid’s suspicions. He asked his dad why there wasn’t any coffin and his dad said it was because his mom hadn’t wanted a coffin. She’d wanted to be cremated. His dad asked him if he knew what this meant. The Kid knew what it meant. He couldn’t remember where he knew it from, but he knew it. It meant that they burned the body until it was ashes.

There were a lot of people at the service. Bob and his dad’s boss Mr. Molina and his family, Amanda and her husband, teachers and students from his mom’s school. People got up and said nice things about his mom, read poems they said reminded them of his mom. It seemed like a lot of work. All those people fooled by The Kid’s dad. The Kid kept his mouth shut, didn’t say anything, didn’t tell anyone that they were being fooled. During the service, The Kid kept looking over at the group of his mom’s students. It would have been so easy to find out for sure if his dad was lying. Just go over to the students and ask if his dad’s story was true. Ask if they’d really seen his mom fall on the floor. Ask which one of them had carried her down to the nurse’s office. It would have been so easy. But The Kid kept his mouth shut, sat in his new black suit, didn’t say anything. He was sad and embarrassed, just like his dad. Sad and embarrassed that his mom had been so fed up she’d had to leave.

The Kid’s grandmother didn’t come out from Chicago for the memorial service. This also confirmed The Kid’s suspicions. Why waste money on a plane ticket for something fake? Why come to a memorial service if the person the service was for was maybe really staying in that upstairs bedroom?

He crossed Sunset, then down the sloping sidewalk alongside the strip mall. He passed the red-lit
Gift 2000
sign on the side of the building. He passed the big cardboard box, heard rustling, snoring inside. The streets grew quieter the further he got from the intersection. No movement, no cars except those sleeping at the curb, a few dogs barking from backyards, blue TV glows in living room windows. The burned house was still there, sitting silent and dark. A streetlight gave off just enough light to see shapes, outlines, the figure of the house, the roof, the porch. The blown-out windows were even darker than the night around the house, bottomless black, neverending pits.

The Kid stood in the front yard and thought about going home, going back to bed. He thought about getting into trouble with his dad, about missing his mom when she finally came home. But then he saw the eagle’s wing, or whatever it was, the chalk drawing on the front wall of the house, and he stepped up into the dull heat of the front porch, put his hand on the steel security door and pulled.

The smell from inside was still strong, but The Kid was ready. He put on the safety goggles, the paper facemask. He took a deep breath and stepped into the house.

So dark inside that the darkness looked purple. The Kid switched on the flashlight. The beam played wildly across the front room. There was no paint on the walls. There were no walls on the walls. The walls had been burned of plaster, burned down to the wooden skeletons of walls. There were small clumps of metal on the floor. The Kid knelt beside one, shone the flashlight on it. Forks, knives, spoons, all fused together. They looked like little meteors. This must have been the dining room. The Kid took careful steps, glass crunching under his feet. What was left of the windows, maybe, picture frames and flower vases. The Kid could still smell the awful smell, but not as much, not as bad. The goggles and the mask were working.

A doorway led into a small kitchen. The flashlight made shadows jump, made things move, grow, shrink. The blown-out window above the sink let in some moonlight. Pinprick holes in the ceiling let more moonlight through in thin white columns. There was shattered glass all over the countertop, over the broken tile floor. The cabinets on the wall sagged where they hung. They looked like diseased lungs. They looked like cigarette smokers’ lungs The Kid had seen in science books, scorched and heavy.

He went down a short hallway. Two more doors at the end. There was a small pile of rubble in the doorway on the right. He shone the flashlight into the room. One blown-out window and a bed frame, the mattress charred, the sear stain spreading up the walls, reaching across the ceiling back to the doorway. This room felt hotter than the others. This was where the fire had started. The person had been trapped in here. The Kid knew this. He didn’t know how, but he knew this. The person who lived in the house had burned in this room.

He crossed the hallway into the second room, the biggest in the house. More tiny holes in the ceiling letting in little shafts of moonlight. This looked like it had been the living room. There was a couch against the back wall, blackened and gutted. Big piles of ash and scraps, burned bookshelves and books and rugs. There was an exploded TV lying on its side on the floor. More crunching under The Kid’s sneakers. Glass and something harder, maybe another fork-and-spoon meteor. The Kid knelt, shone his flashlight at the floor. Thick pieces of colored chalk, white and yellow and red.

He shone the flashlight across the room, corner to corner to corner, the beam finally stopping on the opposite side of the room and the image that nearly covered the far wall. It was a chalk drawing of a red haired woman in a daisy-yellow dress. Her eyes were closed, her arms were at her sides and her small body stretched up, lifting toward the ceiling. Her bare feet were a few inches out of a pair of brown and black cowboy boots. Angel wings unfolded from behind her shoulders.

This was the person who died, the woman who burned in the bedroom. The Kid knew this.

The drawing was sort of cartoony. The woman was short, but her features were oversized—her round eyes, her long eyelashes, her big hands and feet. The woman’s head was tilted up as she rose, her eyes closed, a peaceful little smile on her face. The drawing was taller than The Kid. The top of his head only reached the bottom of the woman’s chin. He looked up. The roof had a hole in it, right above where the woman was drawn. Black sky above, hint of moonlight. The hole she would pass through on her way up, he guessed. He wasn’t sure if the hole had been there before the drawing, or if whoever had drawn the woman had knocked out the hole to let her through.

He wondered when someone had drawn this. If they’d done it in broad daylight, the middle of the night, what. If they’d gotten someone’s permission. He wondered whose permission they’d have to get. The city? The police? The Kid wasn’t sure. He had a feeling whoever had done it hadn’t gotten permission. It seemed like something done secretly, like the tags on the walls of buildings. Someone draws or paints and then runs the other way. Like the tags but really not like the tags. This was something else. This was more like the murals disappearing underneath the tags.

The woman was missing a hand. Her left arm ended at the wrist. The Kid didn’t think this was intentional. Whoever had drawn the angel had run out of time, gotten caught, something. The hand wasn’t missing; it was unfinished. Maybe the artist would come back and finish it. Maybe they would come back tonight; maybe they were on their way over right now. Maybe the artist would find The Kid in the house and be angry that The Kid had gotten inside, that The Kid was looking at the unfinished drawing.

The Kid was getting nervous. He didn’t want to get caught. He backed out of the room, down the hallway, through the living room. Opened the security door, peering outside to make sure no one was on the porch waiting for him. The yard and street were quiet. He stepped out onto the porch, took off the goggles, the facemask, put them back in his backpack. He closed the security door tight behind him. There was no way of locking the door. Anyone could get in there, the chalk artist, the homeless person who slept in that big cardboard box, anyone. Next time he went inside the house, someone could be hiding inside, waiting to pounce. How would he know if someone was in the house?

Of course. Scotch tape. He had seen this tactic before in a detective comic. The Kid rummaged through his backpack, found the end of the roll they’d used while making the Halloween cards. Tore off a small piece, stuck half on the edge of the security door, half on the door jamb. Nearly invisible. If anyone opened the door, the tape would break and The Kid would see it before going inside next time. Sometimes The Kid was amazed at all the things he knew.

He ran home as fast as he could, back up the hill, across Sunset, down his street, afraid that he’d see the pickup parked in the driveway, his dad sitting on the porch, angry and waiting.

The house was dark when he got home. The pickup wasn’t in the driveway. The front doors were still closed and locked. He got back into his pajamas, back into bed. Really tired, suddenly, his heart and his breathing finally slowing. At least he hadn’t missed his mom coming home. He was disappointed that she wasn’t there but he was also glad that he hadn’t missed it. He tried to keep awake, tried to keep his eyes open so he’d hear it when she came through the door, but it was no use, he was so tired. Mad at himself as he crashed into sleep, dreaming of fires and ashes, feathers floating on walls, a glowing chalk angel trapped in a room while her house burned down around her.

T
here was a fire truck on the street in front of the house when Darby got home mid-morning. A small group of onlookers had gathered at the corner, older people from the neighborhood, grandparents, great-grandparents, a few children too young for school.

The fire truck was blocking his view of the house. Darby’s first thought was the lights. The Kid had left the lights on in the house and one of them had caught fire, old wiring, a bad bulb, a bad fuse. He stopped the pickup on the other side of the street, ran across to the fire truck.

The Kid. Had The Kid already left for school, or was he still inside when the fire started? The security bars, the security door. The Kid trapped inside while the house burned.

Darby came around the fire truck, up onto the curb. The house looked just like it always looked. Nothing was burning, there wasn’t any smoke. He caught the toe of his boot on something lying on the sidewalk. The manhole cover, pried up, lying flat on the cement. He turned just in time to see a firefighter lower himself into the open manhole and disappear.

Another firefighter stood over the hole holding a large beach blanket, her arms spread wide as if waiting for something to leap out, as if she was going to catch it in the blanket when it did. The blanket was red and white and green, had a large Mexican beer logo splashed across its front.

“Please keep back, sir,” she said. “We don’t know what’s in there.”

Some kind of inhuman noise issued from the manhole, a ragged, fearful growl. The crowd at the corner moved back a few steps.

The firefighter inched closer to the hole, adjusted the towel. “Everything all right down there?”

The first firefighter’s voice came up through the hole. “It’s a big one. Be ready, Pat. I’m going to lift it out.”

Pat moved into position, bent her knees, nodded at Darby to move away. “Take a few steps back, sir. Keep a safe distance from the hole.”

The first firefighter’s voice came up through the hole, talking to someone, something down there. “It’s okay, big fella, I’m not going to hurt you.”

The growl again, lower this time, a warning, and then the sounds of a struggle down in the hole, some splashing, cursing from the first firefighter, and then a head appeared, a big black dog, wet and wild-eyed, up through the open manhole. The body followed and Pat embraced it in the towel, pulling as the first firefighter pushed. The thing kept coming, an enormous animal, soaking wet and half-starved; a hairy, trembling bag of bones. Finally it was up and out, wrapped in the towel, shivering. The first firefighter lifted himself out of the hole, his uniform wet, his wading boots covered in sludge. He coughed and spat into Darby’s yard.

“That fucker’s gigantic,” he said.

He held the dog down while Pat pulled a length of rope from the fire truck and tied a loop at one end. The animal thrashed under the towel. The crowd at the corner moved a little closer, whispering in Spanish and English. The first firefighter pulled the towel down to expose the dog’s head and Pat slipped the loop over, tied the other end around a link in Darby’s front fence. The dog bucked at the constraint, flashing its teeth, and the firefighters backed away, letting the animal claim the towel, shake the water off its patchy fur.

It was a pathetic sight. Open sores covered its tail and hind end. Its eyes were bloodshot, rimmed with a greenish discharge. Its legs were so weak that it could barely stand. Whenever it gained its footing it would topple again, falling flat on its face to a wounded cry from the crowd at the corner. The firefighters shared a plastic bottle of hand sanitizer at the truck, radioed for animal control.

A skinny kid with an uneven buzz cut broke from the crowd, ran back to his house. A minute later he returned with a plastic dish of what looked like wet cat food. He handed it to Pat. She set it down on the sidewalk, nudged it toward the dog with the toe of her rubber boot. The dog sniffed, hoisted itself up onto its toothpick legs and fell face first into the food. Another cry from the crowd. Pat turned her head, winced.

The boy asked the first firefighter how long the dog had been down there, where it came from.

“Probably a week,” the firefighter said. “Maybe more. Could have come from anywhere in the area, wandering around down in the sewer. Reached a dead end under this manhole cover and couldn’t turn around. Got stuck.”

“How’d he get down in there?”

“Crawled in through a curb inlet. Chased something down. Got pushed in, shoved in. Who knows?”

“Who does he belong to?”

“Nobody,” the firefighter said. “Everybody. He’s now a ward of the City of Los Angeles.”

The animal control van came. A pair of uniformed officers muzzled the dog, lifted it up into a cage in the back of the van. The firefighters replaced the manhole cover, climbed up into the fire truck and drove away with a quick burst of their siren, waving to the thinning crowd.

Darby knelt on the sidewalk, untied the rope from the fence. He thought of the dog under the manhole cover for a week, maybe more. The dog under there while Darby sat through the night in the pickup, while he tried to sleep during the day. The dog under there while The Kid stayed alone, while the sidewalk graffiti was sprayed. The dog under there while Darby was at job sites, while he was cleaning the hotel room by the beach.

The ring and the snow globe were in the glove compartment of the pickup. He went back to work in the garage, pulling boxes, clearing a path to the workbench and the drawer at the back.

The pager buzzed on his hip. He ignored it, continued to pull boxes. The pager buzzed again. He unhooked the new cell phone from its holster, called the dispatch office.

“Everclean Industrials.” It was Bob’s voice that answered the phone. Darby said nothing, confused, wondering if he’d somehow dialed the wrong number.

“Everclean Industrials,” Bob said.

“Bob, it’s me.”

“I just paged you. Took me twenty minutes to figure out how to do it.”

“Where’s Mrs. Fowler?”

“Home sick. Are you en route?”

“Not yet. The Kid’s sick.” The lie came quickly, easily. Standing in the driveway surrounded by boxes.

“What’s he got?” Bob said.

“I don’t know. I’ve got to pick him up at school. Something with his stomach, throwing up, the whole business.” The lie came quickly, easily, but he couldn’t leave the ring and the globe in the pickup. He had to get them into the workbench.

“Hang on a second,” Bob said. He coughed loudly away from the receiver, came back. “This is a small job, David. Don’t bother. Stay with The Kid.”

“Is Roistler there?”

“Roistler took a personal day.” Bob coughed again, cleared his throat. “Don’t worry about it. It’s a one-man job.”

“What’s the address?”

“Eucalyptus and Manchester. Down in Inglewood.”

“I’ll come once The Kid’s home and settled. An hour, tops.”

“Don’t sweat it. It’s a one-man job. Stay with The Kid. He needs you more than I do.”

Darby clipped the phone back into its holster. There were no one-man jobs. He knew this. It had been Everclean policy from the beginning. Every job was a team job. But he couldn’t leave the garage now. He pulled boxes for he didn’t know how long, until he was soaked in sweat again, until he had finally reached the workbench at the back. A couple of hours, maybe. The top drawer of the workbench, nothing but an envelope inside. Darby put the ring inside the drawer. He put the globe inside the drawer. He felt that same settling sensation from the storage facility, something completed, something done.

He had closed the drawer, was hauling the boxes back into the garage when the pager buzzed again.

The Kid was trying to draw women’s hands in his notebook. He wasn’t very good at it. His drawing was too blocky, the lines were too thick. He tried to draw like the chalk drawing in the burned house, the lines smooth and flowing, delicate. He kept crossing out, starting over, crossing out. Two pages full of mutant-looking hands already. He couldn’t get his pencil to do what he wanted it to do.

Matthew sat across the lunch table. He dipped his French fries into a small blob of ketchup, one at a time, bit the ends off slowly, chewed, placed the uneaten halves into a pile beside his plate.

Michelle set her tray down on their table. A thick slab of greasy cheese pizza, a small pile of cupcakes and Twinkies, a half-pint of chocolate milk. She sat down next to The Kid, tore the cellophane off the first cupcake with her teeth.

“Did you hear about Rey Lugo?” she said. “He had to get his stomach pumped. And it turns out that he’s a hemophiliac, which means he could get AIDS and die.”

“Where’d you hear that?” Matthew said.

“Don’t worry about where I heard it. I heard it from people.”

“What people?”

“Don’t worry where the fuck I heard it. It’s the truth. It’s real.”

Matthew made a sour face, looked down at his French fries. He didn’t like Michelle, didn’t like her curse words or her taking of the Lord’s name in vain, what he called her blasphemies.

The Kid tried to draw Michelle’s hands while she ate, but her hands were bigger than the chalk drawing’s hands, fat and stubby, with little half-moons of dirt under the chewed fingernails.

“I saw you guys talking to that new girl,” Michelle said, mouth full, black chocolate mush between her teeth. “I saw her sitting with you at recess.”

“So what?” Matthew said.

“Is she your friend?”

“Maybe.”

Michelle looked over to the other side of the courtyard, all the tables filled with kids. “Looks like she has some new friends.”

The Kid turned. Arizona was sitting at the end of a table across from Rhonda Sizemore. Brian Bromwell stood at the head of the table. They were all smiling and laughing about something. The Kid felt that familiar cold flush in his stomach. Maybe they were telling her about him, about his B.O. and bad breath. Maybe they were telling her not to stand too close, not to catch anything contagious.

“She can talk to whoever she wants,” Matthew said. “It’s a free country.”

“They’re probably talking about their periods,” Michelle said. “Rhonda Sizemore already has her period, I’ll bet you ten bucks. She’s that kind of person.”

“I don’t even know what you’re talking about,” Matthew said.

“Yes you do.”

“No I don’t.”

“You know what I’m talking about,” Michelle said. “Blood and babies.”

They sat on opposite sides of the desk in Molina’s office, looking out the open window into the garage. The TV in the waiting area showed a makeshift command center that had been set up a few hundred yards from the gates of Reality, California. A couple of tents, a podium and microphone, tall stands of TV lights. A BATF spokesman in a blue polo shirt stood at the podium fielding questions.

Molina loosened his tie, closed his eyes, fighting a headache. He pressed his fingertips to his eyelids.

“The story’s not really clear,” Molina said, “It wasn’t really clear to the cops. All I know is what Bob wrote in the log before he left for the job. The call came in, a woman in a closet, a hanging. The police had come and gone, the coroner’s people had come and gone.”

Mrs. Fowler came into the office and set two Styrofoam cups of coffee on the desk. She left without saying a word, back through the door into the dispatch office.

“Who called in the job?” Darby said.

“The guy who owned the house. The police found one of his tenants in a closet and he wanted it cleaned.”

Darby looked at the framed photos on Molina’s desk. Molina’s wife and daughters at a motel pool in Vegas. A photo of Molina’s mother standing in a faded housedress, her dark face set, looking directly into the lens.

Darby thought of the photos from the hotel room, Stella lifting a picture from the box, holding it to her chest.

“The police came and did their thing,” Molina said. “The coroner’s people did their thing. Everybody left. Bob showed up and started the job. A couple hours later, the neighbors hear something and call the police again. The police enter the house, guns drawn. They find Bob standing in the bedroom closet, screaming.”

Molina stuck a finger in his coffee, stirred the cream into a brown swirl. “He had already completed the job. The place was clean, the van was packed. He was just standing in the closet screaming.”

Darby looked out the window at the TV. The BATF spokesman was telling the reporters that they had lost communication with the Realists, but that they were hoping this was only a temporary situation, that they’d soon reestablish contact.

“Where were you?” Molina said.

“The Kid was sick.”

“You should have called. You could have brought him over to our place. The girls would have looked after him.”

“Bob told me it was a one-man job.”

“There’s no such thing.”

“I know.”

“How long have we been doing this, David?” Molina stood, walked to the window. “No matter what Sacramento says. No matter what the safety reps say.”

“I told him I’d meet him down there once The Kid was asleep.”

“So what happened?”

Darby shook his head. “I don’t know.”

The BATF spokesman was saying that they weren’t sure if children were present in the compound, but that it was certainly something they were looking into, it was certainly something that would change the dynamic of the situation if it were true.

“Where is he now?” Darby said.

“Home. I told him to stay home a while. A week or so, however long. He said he was going to get a case of beer, watch TV, get drunk. I said that sounded like a good idea.”

Molina picked the cups off the desk, poured the coffee into the garbage can. “There’s no such thing as a one-man job, David. You know this. There’s no such thing.”

On the day after the doorbell had rung and the cops had stood on the porch and told him she was gone, the day after he’d told The Kid, after he’d called Bob, after he’d slept that first night in the cab of the pickup, he stood at a pay phone on Alvarado Street and dialed the number from the slip of paper in his wallet, waited through the long-distance clicks, listened to the phone ringing in Chicago.