Untouchable (5 page)

There it is, he’d say. Can you hear that? There it is.

Out in the pickup, he rolled down the windows, stretched out across the front seat. It was a blocky hulk of a truck, a 1972 Chevy Cheyenne Super he’d bought fifteen years back. It still had its original green and white two-tone paint job, marred here and there by dings and dents and spiderweb patches of rust. The stereo hadn’t worked in a decade, but he kept a transistor radio up on the dash, murmuring low. Political talk, religious talk, financial talk, sports talk. The subject didn’t matter, just the sound of someone’s voice while he tried to sleep. Light and heat gathered around the day. He dozed fitfully for a while, half-listening to the radio, jerked awake by dogs barking, cars backfiring, blasts of hot air sighs from buses stopping down at the corner. He’d once been a prodigious sleeper. They had to literally drag him out of bed on Saturday mornings, regardless of whether or not there had been a job the night before. Head under the pillow, sheets pulled tight around his body, a great bear in hibernation. Lucy and The Kid would each grab an arm and pull, groaning with the exertion. The Kid would snap on the overhead light to help the cause, Darby burrowing deeper, dead weight, The Kid lowering his face to Darby’s, checking for signs of life. The Kid’s Saturday morning breath, chocolaty cereal and cold milk. Lucy pulling one way, The Kid pulling the other, both of them straining, laughing at the massive struggle.

From his low angle in the cab, Darby could see the wide brim of the postman’s straw hat through the back windshield. The hat coming up the driveway, crossing toward the house, disappearing. The thump of mail tossed onto the front porch. The hat crossing back past the pickup, down the driveway, disappearing again.

He gave up on sleep, pulled on his boots and climbed down out of the truck. His knees and wrists were sore from scrubbing at the job site. He flipped through the bundle of mail on the porch. At the bottom of the stack was a plain white envelope, addressed to Darby in Mrs. Fowler’s immaculate script. Inside was another, smaller envelope, addressed to
Tall Technician With Tattoos
in care of the Everclean garage. Darby turned over the envelope, looked at the return address. Hacienda Heights. He tried to remember the job. Two or three weeks back, a large sunflower yellow house across from a church; a tiny, older Asian woman waiting at the door when they arrived. Bob had taken her into the kitchen while Darby and Roistler went upstairs, hauling their gear.

Inside the envelope was a note card, a single line written across its face in a birdlike scrawl, the time and effort it took to shape the letters apparent in the labored precision of the handwriting.

I thank you for doing what I could not.

Cards arrived every few weeks, once a month, maybe, forwarded from the garage to the techs by Mrs. Fowler. People at job sites didn’t know the techs’ names, so they sent the cards addressed to
Heavyset Man With Handlebar Mustache
or
Shorter Red-Hair Muscle Man
. Their Native American names, Bob called them. Darby was
Tattooed Technician With The Blue Eyes
. Darby was
Shaved-head Technician Who Looked Like My Son
.

The cards came weeks after a job, sometimes months after, sometimes years. They came at holidays, Christmas and Easter and days significant only to the sender, birthdays, anniversaries. Sometimes they came on the anniversary of the job itself, and then they came every year on that date.
We will never forget what you did for us
. They gave phone numbers, email addresses, websites where they’d set up online memorials to the departed. Sometimes they asked questions, wanted to know if the techs had families, if they’d experienced similar tragedies. Darby never answered the cards. He didn’t think Bob or Roistler answered their cards, either. Only Mrs. Fowler responded, replying to the cards that were addressed to the company as a whole, a few lines on Everclean stationary, short passages from the Bible or inspirational verses from her book of famous quotations.

Darby stood in the back of the house, a corner of the laundry room Lucy had jokingly referred to as her office. A green metal desk they’d bought at a yard sale sat under shelves of teacher guides and textbooks, a bulletin board covered with yellow sticky notes and her class rosters from the previous year. There was a snapshot tacked to the corkboard, Darby and The Kid sitting at the picnic table on the back porch, The Kid’s birthday party from a few years before. A couple of other kids standing in the shot, The Kid’s friend Matthew and some boys from younger grades Lucy had managed to rope in to the party. There was an empty space beside the photo on the corkboard, where two other photos had once been tacked. There was an empty tea mug on the desk, a short stack of ungraded essays. A thin film of dust covered everything. He hadn’t touched her desk in a year.

There was nothing in the house. He’d thought that there would be, somehow. He’d imagined that the place where they’d lived would have something more to it after one of them was gone. But there was nothing. Wood and windows, carpeting, furniture, pictures, frames. A place of objects, materials. There were no ghosts. Her absence was a blank space, nothing more.

He stood on the back porch, in the living room, The Kid’s bedroom. He stood at her desk with his hands at his sides, still holding the note from the woman in Hacienda Heights.

The phone rang in the kitchen. He answered it, expecting the dot-dash-dot bleeps of The Kid’s Morse code, hearing instead the cigarette-roughened voice of the middle school’s vice-principal telling him there had been more trouble, telling him that he needed to come and pick up his boy.

The Kid waited. He looked at the wall clock above the part in Mr. Bromwell’s hair and tried to gauge the amount of time it would take his dad to get from the house to the school. He had to keep reconfiguring his answer because his dad hadn’t arrived yet. His calculations were off or maybe his dad had gotten into some terrible crash, the pickup wrapped around a tree or a telephone pole, his dad launched through the windshield, head first. A reporter on TV once said that 25% of all fatal car accidents happen within a mile of home. This was about the distance from their house to the school. That meant that if three other people left their neighborhood at the same time his dad had left to come pick up The Kid, one of them would be in a fatal car accident. The Kid pictured his dad shot like a spear through the windshield, glass shattering around him, sailing straight as an arrow, arms at his sides, flying over honking traffic, drop-jawed pedestrians.

Mr. Bromwell’s office was a windowless room beside the nurse’s office. There was the desk and Mr. Bromwell’s chair and a chair for a visitor. Mr. Bromwell’s chair had wheels and reclined a little when he pushed back in his seat; the visitor’s chair did neither. The office was so small that it seemed likely Mr. Bromwell could touch both walls if he stretched his long arms out to either side, but The Kid had never actually seen Mr. Bromwell do that.

There was a phone on Mr. Bromwell’s desk, a blotter covered with yellow sticky notes, a small picture in a metal frame of Mr. Bromwell’s wife and two sons. There was a wooden coat tree in the back corner, hung with running shorts and a t-shirt. There was a pair of running shoes on the floor beside the tree, tongues and laces spread wide, insoles up and out, airing, because in addition to being the school counselor, Mr. Bromwell was also the track & field coach.

The clothes The Kid was wearing were too big. The pants itched. After the incident in the locker room, the nurse had given him pants and a shirt and socks from the lost-and-found box, but the clothes were for a bigger kid, and the pants felt like wool.

“I don’t really want a name, Whitley,” Mr. Bromwell said. “A name does us no good. We’re looking at a pattern of behavior. There are reasons why this happened. There are reasons why you are sitting here and not another student.”

The Kid had an appointment with Mr. Bromwell on Monday, Wednesday and Friday afternoons, after lunch. He’d had these appointments for almost a year now. He came from the cafeteria and sat in the visitor’s chair, sneakers dangling six inches above the floor. Mr. Bromwell sat on the other side of the desk, underneath the clock, and drummed the eraser tip of his pencil against his blotter and asked questions for The Kid to answer in his notebook. The questions weren’t about specific things that had happened to The Kid, incidents in the classroom or the locker room, but about why The Kid thought these things were happening to him, what The Kid thought he was doing to make these things happen. Mr. Bromwell would ask a question and then push back in his chair and stretch his legs out under his desk so that the tips of his shoes touched the feet of The Kid’s chair. Or sometimes he’d ask a question and then get up and stand next to the coat tree and pull his ankle up behind his back, stretching his leg muscles. There were posters tacked to the walls of the office, bright color pictures of waterfalls and mountain ranges with sayings underneath about hard work and endurance and determination. Mr. Bromwell liked to talk about these things, about being strong, being tough mentally and physically. He liked to talk about
Responsibility For Our Actions
, which meant that sometimes when other kids did bad things to The Kid, it was actually The Kid’s fault.

“Can you think of a reason,” Mr. Bromwell said, “why something like this would happen to you and not to another student?” He stood and held onto the coat rack with one hand, pulling his ankle back behind him with the other, watching The Kid, waiting for an answer.

It was known to The Kid’s teacher and all the other teachers that The Kid could visit Mr. Bromwell any time he needed to. This was a special arrangement, owing to The Kid’s circumstances. It was also known that The Kid could be sent to Mr. Bromwell’s office if something bad happened, if he locked himself in a stall in the bathroom and refused to come out, or if something like this happened, an incident in the locker room. The Kid didn’t like going to Mr. Bromwell’s office, didn’t like all the questions, but at least he could use the phone, could call his dad’s cell phone and send a Morse Code message. This usually made him feel a little better, even if he wasn’t calling for his dad to come pick him up and take him home. Just sending the message made him feel better, receiving his dad’s coded reply from somewhere in the city, knowing that his dad wasn’t so far away, that they were in contact somehow.

The Kid looked at the clock, thought of his dad and three other neighbors leaving their street at the same time, three cars and the pickup, 25% of them involved in fatal accidents.

It was always the moment between taking off his gym clothes and putting on his school clothes when bad things happened. An especially vulnerable moment. The Kid tried to change as quickly as possible, tried to minimize the length of time he was standing in the locker room in only his underpants, because that seemed to incite some of the other kids. But he wasn’t always fast enough, and this time his gym clothes were stolen as soon as he took them off, grabbed by one of the dodgeball boys who ran back toward the showers, waving The Kid’s shorts like a captured flag. The Kid didn’t even bother to run after him; he knew that would just be asking for trouble. He would think of some excuse to tell his dad for needing new gym clothes. He’d lost them, they’d gotten muddy, something that wouldn’t make him sound like such a wimp. He wouldn’t let his dad pay for the new clothes. He would pay for them with his own allowance money. He didn’t want his dad to have to pay for the fact that he was weak, the fact that he couldn’t stop the other kids from stealing his things.

The Kid could smell it even before he’d opened the door of his gym locker. Strong pee. Morning pee. He opened his locker and the stench socked him in the nose. Boys around him made gagging noises, plugged their nostrils and backed away from The Kid’s locker. The Kid looked inside. His school clothes were dark with it, his pants and shirt and socks. His backpack was dark with it. The smell was overpowering. On the other side of the lockers, Razz and some other boys were laughing, even though they couldn’t see what happened. They knew what had happened, they’d been waiting for it. Some other boys made retching sounds, mimed throwing up into a garbage can. The Kid looked for Matthew and found him over at the other end of a wooden bench, tying his shoes, staring hard at the laces, trying to pretend he didn’t hear or see or smell anything.

The Kid felt someone standing right behind him. He turned and Brian was there, towering over him.

Mr. Bromwell dropped his leg to the floor, lifted his other leg by the ankle and pulled it tight behind his back. He looked at The Kid, looked at The Kid’s notebook. Waited.

The Kid knew he could give the answer Mr. Bromwell wanted, the answer that would explain everything, why bad things happened to The Kid, why The Kid was like he was. He knew that if he told this, Mr. Bromwell could maybe even get the other kids to leave him alone, to let him be. But The Kid also knew that once you told a secret it was loose in the world, it was a wild thing.

The Kid picked up his pencil, stared at the blank page.

Brian Bromwell was a good six inches taller than The Kid, long and lean like his father, packed with wiry muscle. It was impossible to get away from him, impossible to run faster or break free when Brian pinned him to the sidewalk and dangled long, glistening strings of saliva from his bottom lip, squeezing The Kid’s face with one strong hand, prying open The Kid’s mouth, trying to get the spit to fall in. Sometimes The Kid was able to clench his jaw tight and Brian’s spit landed on his cheek or in his eye. But sometimes Brian got a thumb wedged inside and was able to get The Kid’s mouth open and the spit fell right into the back of The Kid’s throat.

Or sometimes worse things happened, things like this, the smell of strong pee in the locker room.

Brian had smiled at The Kid, a nasty slash of a smile, then he moved away, turned the corner into the next row of lockers. More laughter from the boys on that side. The bell rang and the locker room emptied. The Kid looked for Matthew, but Matthew had already gone. The Kid stood there in his underpants, looking at the wet clothes in his locker, frozen, unsure what to do.