Untouchable (3 page)

The Kid stood at the door, debating. What if he didn’t go? How long would it take the adults at the school to find out? What would happen? What if he went somewhere else instead? What if he went out the door and just started walking in the other direction? Twenty miles to the ocean, that’s what his dad told him once. Twenty miles. How long would it take him to walk? What would he do when he got there? He thought about the dream he’d had, what he could remember of it, the feeling of being somewhere else, moving across the map in another direction.

He stood at the door, debating. The feeling in his belly was at its worst now, this moment at the door every morning, when he felt there was a decision he could make.

He opened the security door, stepped out onto the porch, relocked all the locks with his key. Not today. Twenty miles was too far. He headed out onto the sidewalk, into the ramshackle procession of kids, head down, moving quickly, up the slow hill toward school.

Here he comes, Whitley Earl Darby, commonly known as The Kid, big head, big feet, spindly body, the whole contraption threatening to tip over at any moment as he navigated the buckled sidewalk, readjusted the weight of his overlarge backpack. Here comes The Kid, make room, make way. Don’t get too close. Known to have germs, cooties, bad breath, B.O. Known to be diseased, known to be contagious. Known as Whitley to only a very few: Miss Ramirez, his teacher; Mr. Bettemit, the vice-principal; Mr. Bromwell, the school counselor. Known to everyone else by his preferred name, his alter ego. Known to everyone else as The Kid.

His neighborhood was at the eastern end of Sunset Boulevard, Los Angeles, California, the United States of America, Western Hemisphere, Planet Earth. Not too far from Dodger Stadium. This was only one part of the city. The city was big. There was a whole other part of the city a half hour drive to the west, maybe a forty-five minute drive, where the ocean was, where the movie stars and talk-show hosts lived. The Kid had been there a few times. His mom had taken him to the beach a couple of times each summer. They’d looked for seashells in the sand and ridden the giant Ferris Wheel at the end of the long wooden pier.

The other kids were some distance ahead of The Kid, some distance behind, over on the opposite sidewalk. The other kids ignored him, which was okay, which was fine, which was preferable to the alternative.

Everything in his neighborhood was crooked. Everything bent away from everything else at different angles—the outside walls of houses, the iron-barred fences around the front yards, the street lights, the telephone poles, the sickly palm trees that shot up through the overhanging mess of telephone wires. He noticed these things as he walked, and when he thought something was particularly interesting he made a note in his notebook.

He looked at the paintings on the walls, the murals that he passed. They had learned about murals in school the year before. They were all over the neighborhood, painted on the sides of buildings, across the lengths of freeway underpasses, along the cinderblock walls sloping down from the side streets toward Sunset. They’d learned that in ancient times murals were a way of sharing news, of telling other people what was going on. This was before TV or radio stations or the Internet. People painted murals to show other people what was happening, what they should be aware of. These murals were newer than those murals, but they were probably still way older than The Kid.

He stopped in the tunnel under the Sunset Boulevard bridge, looked at the mural on the wall above. It was a painting of the city, the tall downtown buildings jumbled along streets that rolled like waves. Behind it all was a giant brown-skinned woman, smiling, holding her arms out like she was about to hug the city or maybe the person walking by the mural. A big golden sun glowed from behind her hair, lighting the sky above and the buildings below.

The Kid didn’t know what news this mural imparted, what it was trying to say, but he liked the drawing. He liked imagining someone up on a ladder under the bridge, painting the scene to be found and looked at years later by pedestrians and passing drivers and kids on their way to school.

Echoes jumped along the walls and ceiling of the tunnel, the sound of cars speeding by, the shouts and laughter of the other kids horsing around on the opposite sidewalk. There was even more graffiti covering the mural than there had been the day before, creeping across the painting, choking the woman and the buildings. The graffiti was written in dripping spray paint or fat magic marker, black mostly, but some red and yellow and green, people’s nicknames, gang tags, bad words, arrows pointing this way and that, arrows leading toward something, away from something, secret messages to other graffiti writers: go here, meet here, hide here.

The Kid was worried that someday he’d come by on his way to school and the mural would be completely covered with tags, suffocated under all that paint and marker. He was worried that someday he’d come by here as an adult and wouldn’t even remember what the mural had looked like, the thing he’d seen so many times. The news someone was trying to share. All that work would be gone, forgotten.

He started drawing the mural in his notebook. He tried to get the woman’s face right, her warm smile; tried to draw the bend of her arms correctly. Cars whizzed by on the street behind him. He drew the downtown buildings, the rolling streets. He was rushing, eventually just sketching the outlines of things, because there was no way he could draw it all in the time before school, but at least he could get some of it down, finish the rest later on his way home.

It was quiet under the bridge. The traffic had come and gone, the other kids were all well out of sight. He’d lost track of time. He closed his notebook and hurried out of the tunnel, backpack bouncing as he ran, finally reaching the front gates of the school. The other students were streaming in, hundreds of them, pushing and shoving to get inside. The gates looked like open jaws, eating kids. The feeling in his stomach returned with a vengeance. He usually tried to get into his classroom before everyone else so he could take his seat safely, but he’d lost track of time and now he’d just have to hope for the best, he’d just have to brave it, so he put his head down and clutched his notebook and ran into the middle of the crowd, deflecting punches and shoves, pushes, kicks, finally breaking through the other side, sprinting full-tilt into the building and down the hall.

They entered a room never sure what they would find, prepared for the worst. This is what they trained for, Friday afternoons at the Everclean garage in Glendale, once a month, once every six months, whenever the state safety reps came down from Sacramento and stood sweating in the heat in their dark suits, watching the techs work through simulated clean-ups on the set Bob and Darby had built in the parking lot, a mock motel room, a floor and three plywood walls, open to the sky. The techs had arranged an assortment of thrift store furniture inside, two twin beds and a night table, a broken TV on a thick oak dresser. They’d hung curtains over the window holes, tacked strips of mismatched carpeting to the floor. Somewhere along the line, someone had procured some authentic motel room art, Bob probably, blurry pastel watercolors of seascapes and sand dunes in chipped wooden frames, and these were hung on the walls over the bed and dresser.

They rehearsed using different props, set pieces they’d constructed, a narrow air duct they could crawl into, a short staircase leading nowhere. Every job was dangerous, potentially. Every room contained invisible pathogens, some air-borne, some fluid-borne, some deadly, some merely unpleasant. Herpes Simplex Type 1, Herpes Simplex Type 2; Hepatitis A, B, C; Trichophyton; Giardia; Human Immunodeficiency Virus; Escherichia coli; Campylobacter; Staph; Strep. The names cycled through Darby’s head at a job site. The list of potential miseries. The respirator masks and rubber gloves and Tyvek body suits were protection against the list, although there were hidden dangers at every site, rusty nails and broken glass and pinprick syringes discovered under mattresses, in dark corners.

They worked through every eventuality on the set in the parking lot—natural expiration, accidental expiration, murder two, murder three—though suicides accounted for maybe eight jobs out of ten.

Bob and Javier Molina, a friend from his old neighborhood, had started Everclean ten years before in Molina’s mother’s garage. Molina handled the business end while Bob handled the cleanups. Things had gone well. It turned out there was a need for their particular services. The company had grown to include Darby and Roistler, Mrs. Fowler in the dispatch office, the two vans and enough equipment to warrant the Glendale garage.

The garage sat near the end of a dry, sun-exposed industrial strip, amid long, flat, stucco-and-cinderblock warehouses and machine shops, a small salvage yard, a couple of empty, trash-strewn lots wrapped in chain-link. Behind the garage, on the other side of a high fence, was the long drop-off into the concrete trough of the Los Angeles River. The river was dry most of the year, just shallow pools of oily water around swollen trash bags and discarded shopping carts. A chain of small islands stretched off to the west, each maybe thirty or forty feet of high weeds and brush. There were homeless encampments clustered along the islands, and at night the techs could see the flickers of cigarette lighters and cooking fires, shadows jumping along the river’s graffiti-striped walls.

Bob maneuvered the van into the garage and Darby climbed up into the back, emptying out the equipment, spraying the walls and floor with disinfectant. The phone rang in the dispatch office. Darby could hear Mrs. Fowler’s sunny sing-song answer,
Good morning, thank you for calling Everclean.

There was a waiting area at the other end of the garage, a couple of chairs, a coffee maker, a table with a spread of muscle car magazines, a TV on a metal stand. The TV showed a live news shot from some outlying location, a brown, bleak place, dust and long sky, a low ridge of mountains in the distance. The camera zoomed in on a large barn without windows or a visible door, then pulled back to reveal a pair of smaller buildings, a garage, a water tank, all behind a high deer fence topped with concertina wire.

“Where is that?” Bob said, squinting at the screen from halfway across the garage. “The Tehachapis? Looks like the Tehachapi Mountains.”

Roistler stood in front of the TV, head forward to hear the low volume. “Some kind of survivalist group,” he said. “Been living there for a few weeks. They’re going to wait out the Millennium Bug.”

“Where is that?” Bob said. “Roistler, turn up the goddamn sound.”

A female reporter was now in the shot, holding a microphone, standing in front of a satellite news van.

“Twenty-five, thirty people,” Roistler said, relaying what he heard. “They all met in an online message board. These reporters found their web site.”

“Can you please turn up the goddamn sound?” Bob said.

Darby hopped down out of the van, still shaking the last of the headache from the job site. He patted his waist, his belt. His cell phone was gone. He kept the phone in a leather holster clipped to his belt, set to vibrate in case The Kid needed to reach him. The entire holster was gone. He checked the front of the van, under the seat, behind the seat. He tried to remember if he’d had the phone with him when he’d left the house the night before, if he’d clipped the holster to his belt next to his Everclean pager, if he’d had it in his hand when he stood in The Kid’s bedroom doorway, watching him sleep.

Molina came out into the garage from his office, looked at the TV. He pulled at the collar of his white dress shirt, too tight around his wide neck. A bird’s claw tattoo poked out from under his cuff, the man that the businessman had once been showing through a little.

“Have you seen this?” Roistler said. “Tell me you’ve put a bid in on this.”

“There’s nothing to bid on,” Molina said. “Nothing’s happened.”

“Give them a call. Get us on a list. Someone’s starting a list, government bids.”

“Roistler, they can’t take bids on something that hasn’t happened.”

“Big job,” Roistler said. “That’s going to be a big job.”

The Kid had convinced Darby to buy the cell phone, had come up with an entire system for its usage. Darby hadn’t wanted to leave The Kid alone in the house when he went out on night jobs, but The Kid didn’t want to stay with anyone else, so one evening, nine or ten months before, The Kid laid his cell phone plan out for Darby on the front porch. The plan took up an entire two-page spread in his notebook—diagrams, arrows, the whole nine yards. Darby would buy a phone and subscribe to one of the monthly calling plans The Kid saw advertised during the late-night talk shows. The Kid would be the only person with the phone number. If there were any problems at night while Darby was at work, The Kid would call Darby and relay a series of dot-dash-dot bleeps using the keypad of the kitchen phone. Morse Code. Bob had bought The Kid a book on Morse Code for his birthday that year, and this had sparked his whole idea. In his notebook, he’d copied over a few phrases he thought he’d be using in his transmissions to Darby:
Help, Come at once. What is your position? Calling for assistance. S.O.S.

Darby stood in the middle of the garage, scanning the cement floor. No sign of the phone or the holster.

“Here you go,
jefe
.” Bob handed Molina the paperwork from the cleanup. He turned up the volume on the TV, pulled a three-ring binder down from the shelf above the set, slid the
Before
and
After
photos into a plastic sheet at the back. These were the sales binders, the case study binders. Molina would sit in his office with potential clients, property managers and county administrators and representatives of hotel chains, and take them on a tour through the binders, a pictorial history of Everclean cleanups, selling them of the need to plan for the unthinkable. He showed them the Polaroids of how the rooms looked before the techs got to work and waited as they flinched, as they turned their heads or covered their mouths, as their faces blanched, as their lunches rose. He always made sure they’d eaten well before they sat with the binders, a rich and heavy meal on the company credit card, a visceral reminder of how unequipped they’d be to deal with something like this. When he was sure he had their attention, he showed them the next set of pictures, the
After
photos, the disappearing act, the rooms good as new. That was how clients were acquired, contracts were signed. An ad in the yellow pages, word-of-mouth from cops and EMTs, a binder full of Polaroids.