Boy Still Missing (23 page)

“When I was little, my dad took me to see a show in New York at Radio City. They had all kinds of singers and dancers. It was like a performance pupu platter or something. Anyway, there was this one yodeler and she was far out. She stepped onstage, and as soon as the spotlight hit her, she let it rip. After that I was obsessed with yodeling for a year or so. I basically taught myself.”

“So do you yodel at auditions?”

“No way,” she said. “I sing regular there. I only yodel for cute guys who I meet on the bus.”

At that I felt a lump in my throat. I was the cute guy she met on the bus. For me she yodeled. Made a fool of herself without so much as blushing. Leon would have thought she was a seven-and-a-half. But to me she was better than that. I glanced down at Sophie in my arms, though, and told myself it was no time for me to be picking up girls when I had a baby to take care of. As much as I wanted to tell her that I thought she was beautiful, I didn’t say a thing. I let the silence hang between us as a sign that I wasn’t taking the bait. All that quiet must have left her
feeling stupid, because she smiled at me, beaming those eyes for a moment more, then turned away.

“Don’t get nervous,” she said. “I have a lot of boys in my life.”

“You mean your brothers?” I asked.

“Maybe,” she told me.

“And your dad, too?”

“No,” she said. “He’s gone.”

I asked her if her parents had split up and she told me no, that her father had died two years ago. He fell on the train tracks during a snowstorm. Freak accident. “After that is when my mom checked out,” she said.

I studied her face to be sure she wasn’t messing around again. She must have known what I was thinking, because she said, “No kidding this time.”

If I opened my mouth to tell her about my mother, it would have been my first time explaining her death to a stranger. She must have known about it from the paper, but since I didn’t quite know how I would fill in the details of what had happened, all I said was “Sorry. That must have really sucked.”

“It did suck,” she said. “It still does suck. Present tense.”

She seemed to be waiting for me to say something more. And I wrestled with a way to get it out, to tell her that I knew how she felt. My mouth actually opened, and I searched for the words. But nothing came, so I pressed my lips together, clenched my teeth with my mother’s gum in between.

After that we rode for a while without saying anything. Finally Jeanny let out a big yawn. She pulled off her poncho and draped it over herself like a blanket. “I’m beat. Excuse me while I take a nap.”

I wanted her to stay awake so I could enjoy the rest of the ride with her, because after that I had to start thinking about the mess I was in again. But the moment she closed her eyes, I realized I’d be able to watch her, to study her face so I could conjure up the memory of her later on my own. The way my mother must have done that day in New
Mexico, recording the details of a life she couldn’t lead. Jeanny shifted her head toward the aisle and tilted her neck against the seat in an effort to get comfortable. When that didn’t work, she shifted her head forward, chin to chest.

I knew the way Leon and my father would have handled the situation. They would have put their arm around her and pulled her into them without saying a word. But that seemed wrong for me. “If you want,” I said, taking a deep, nervous breath, “you could put your head on my shoulder. I mean, only if you want to.”

Jeanny didn’t even answer. She kept her eyes closed and leaned her head toward me, resting it there as if she’d been doing it for years. She yawned one more time. And just like that, fell asleep.

For the rest of the ride I took turns watching Sophie and Jeanny. Sophie was nestled up inside her blanket with only her little bug of a face showing. It looked more like the face of an old woman than of someone just born. I noticed, too, that she had a cluster of white bumps around her nose. Under the skin like whiteheads, only she was too young for acne, so who knew what it was? Every once in a while she let a saliva bubble pop from her mouth. A line of drool managed to leak onto my sweatshirt, but I didn’t care. Jeanny, meanwhile, kept her lips parted ever so slightly, like she was ready to leap into conversation or start yodeling even in her sleep. She had long lashes. Not clumped together like Vicki Spring’s. Hers were soft black brooms that swept the skin beneath her eyes.

With the two of them sleeping near me, I felt the way a man must feel with his wife and child. Not a father like mine. One who cared about the people around him. Loyal to his wife. Loving toward his children. I wondered if that was the type of man Mr. Burdan was. If he had been home every evening of my brother’s childhood, waiting to hug and kiss the boy he refused to return to my mother. I wondered, too, if I would ever have a child of my own who I loved that much.

When the bus arrived in Holedo, the baby started fussing and crying the second we pulled into the station. The reality of what I had gotten myself into came back with her every shriek.

I had taken a baby.

I had no place to go.

“I’ll carry her off the bus for you and get her settled down if you like,” Jeanny said when she stretched and stood. “Just grab my guitar for me.”

I handed Sophie over and picked up Jeanny’s guitar case. When I looked back to make sure we’d left nothing behind, I caught sight of a few of Jeanny’s scattered M&M’s in the crack between our two seats. I thought of that freckled girl on the ride home the night my mother died.
I saved their lives,
she had whispered to me.
Take care of them
. This time I left the candy on the seat as I walked off behind Jeanny and the baby.

The sky was the steely blue color of dusk. It wasn’t snowing, but random snowflakes lingered in the air, blown from the rooftop of the bus station. One landed on Jeanny’s nose, and she blew it away. “I’ll trade you one baby for one guitar,” she said, smiling.

“Go fish,” I told her.

We had a hard time switching Sophie for the guitar, and our hands got tangled for just a moment.

“Got her?”

“Got her.”

When I was holding Sophie again and she had her guitar, we stood there not talking. Jeanny kicked at the frozen fossil of a tire track in the snow with her black boot. Across the lot a metallic blue Barracuda like the one Leon always wanted was spinning doughnuts in the unplowed area. The engine revved and revved.

“Well, I guess I’ll see you around,” I said, even though I probably wouldn’t.

“See you,” she said, and another snowflake landed on her nose. This time she let it melt before touching her face with her oversize mitten.

I had the urge to lean toward her and press my lips to hers. With Sophie in my arms, though, I didn’t think I could manage it. There were questions I wanted to ask Jeanny, but I couldn’t marshal the energy in my tongue to get them out. “I’m glad we met,” I said.

“Me, too,” she told me.

Still we stood there. “Okay,” I said. “I really have to get the baby out of the cold.”

“Okay,” she said. “Bye, Sophie. Bye, Dominick.”

With that she turned and clomped off across the parking lot, her guitar case banging against her back. I tried to memorize the details of this moment, this other life I might have led, walking away from me. And then, before I knew it, Jeanny turned the corner and was gone.

To stop the funny feeling in my chest, I rocked Sophie in my arms and stared down at her. “Okay,” I said, trying to sound sure of myself. “Let’s find us a place to stay.”

I made my way to the pay phone and dialed Leon’s number. Mrs. Diesel answered, her cigarette-rattled voice blasting into the phone. Cheap Trick played on the stereo in the background. “Is Leon there?” I asked, dropping my voice and mumbling in hopes that she wouldn’t recognize me.

“He’s out joyriding in his new machine,” she told me.

“What new machine?” I said, switching Sophie from one arm to the other and rocking her.

“He got his license last week, and now he’s got a car,” she explained.

I squinted my eyes at the driver of the Barracuda doing doughnuts across the lot. Leon. Right in front of my face. But where the hell did he get that car?

“Is this Dominick?” Leila asked over a guitar riff.

“It’s Ed,” I said and hung up the phone. I walked across the lot, cradling the baby in my arms. As Leon twisted the car in circles, I stood by a snowbank and watched him. Snow sprayed and cascaded all around his dream machine. Finally, when he fishtailed to a stop, I called out to him.

“Well, if it isn’t Dominick Pindle,” he said, getting out of the car. He was wearing a burgundy ski jacket and aviator sunglasses like my father’s. All new duds. “You’ve been in the paper all month. Your dad reported you missing.”

“Where’d you get the wheels?” I asked, ignoring his spiel.

He crossed his arms, leaned against the car. Looked at the hood, looked back at me. “Let’s just say that Ed and I came up with a moneymaking scheme.”

“Why are you and Ed like bosom buddies all of a sudden?”

He took off his leather driving gloves. I guess he thought he was driving on Hogway’s racetrack. “What’s the matter? You jealous or something?”

“Hardly,” I said. “It’s just that he’s such a loaf.”

“You’re entitled to your opinion,” Leon said. “So what’s with the bambino? Oh, wait. Don’t tell me. I knew it. You
did
get Edie pregnant. You know, at first I was jealous. But she was too old for me anyway. You’re a father. Congratulations, man. Who knew you’d beat me to the punch?”

I stood there staring at him, trying to figure how I was going to unload all my shit. Sophie started to cry again, and I rocked her until she shushed. I was beginning to realize that she was happiest in motion. The second I stopped moving, she got fussy.

“You and the bambino want a ride?” Leon asked.

“That’s a start,” I said. “But I need more than just a ride.”

“Get in,” he said, pulling open the passenger door and holding out his arm chauffeur style. “We’ll talk.”

I climbed carefully into the car with the baby on my lap. The bucket seats still had that new-car smell. Like a pool liner and new carpeting mixed together. On the dashboard Leon had stuck one of those silhouettes of a big-breasted naked woman that usually showed up on mud flaps of eighteen-wheelers. “Where’s the fuzzy dice?” I asked, still rocking Sophie.

“What do you think I am, Pindle? Low class?”

“No comment,” I said.

Leon turned on the stereo and pushed in an eight-track. Daltrey was singing,
“Give us room and close the door. Your boy won’t be a boy no more.”
He put the car in gear, and we fishtailed out of the unplowed part of the lot.

“Easy,” I said. “No car games. We’ve got a baby in here.”

“I hear you, Pops. You’re concerned for your kid. I understand.”

“She’s not my kid,” I told him.

“Whose is it then?” he said.

I blinked, sucked in a breath, looked down at Sophie’s pink face. Her squeezed-together eyelids. I knew she liked the wheels beneath us, all that motion. “She belongs to Edie. But I’m not the father.”

We pulled out onto the main street and drove toward the center of town. Surprisingly, Leon seemed cautious out on the real roads, like the new driver he was. He kept both hands on the wheel. He braked early for lights. He didn’t even mouth off or say anything until we got to Hanover Street. “Then who’s the father?”

We were passing Maloney’s Pub, the Dew Drop Inn. I thought of that night last summer when I cruised this strip with my mother and Marnie before driving over to Edie’s house. Hadn’t it been my suggestion to go there in the first place? No surprise that I was to blame from the get-go. “She’s my father’s baby,” I said. “Edie doesn’t know I have her.”

“Whoa. Whoa. Whoa,” Leon said. “Did you just say that she doesn’t know you have the baby?”

“Correct,” I said. “Ten points.”

“And I take it, since your father reported you missing, that he doesn’t know either.”

“Ten more points,” I said.

We stopped at a light in the center of town. A truck pulled up next to us, and I glanced over, momentarily panicked that it might be my father. Thankfully, it wasn’t. I tried to hold Sophie low on my lap, because I didn’t want anybody wondering what two teenage guys were doing joyriding with an infant. Sophie didn’t seem to like that, though, because she made one of her unhappy squeaks. After the light turned green, I lifted her up against my chest. I could feel the surge of the engine as we started moving again.

“In other words, you’re a kidnapper,” Leon said.

“You could put it that way,” I told him. “But since the baby is my
father’s, that makes her my sister. She kind of belongs to me. I have every right to take her after what Edie did to my mother.”

At the mention of my mother, Leon was quiet. My mind flashed on the way I had chewed him out at her memorial service.
About that letter. From your friend,
he’d said, and I’d let him have it, told him never to mention Edie again. And here I was unloading all this crap on him. “Remember at my mother’s service when you said you wanted to tell me something about Edie? What was it?”

Leon shrugged his shoulders and stepped on the gas. “Who knows? I guess I was going to ask if you wanted that letter from her.”

“Burn it,” I told him.

We drove through a series of turns, and Leon snapped back into concentration mode. When we were on a straightaway again, he said, “Well, you’re just lucky there’s not a reward for you. Otherwise I’d be driving to the police station to turn your ass in.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I knew I could count on you.”

Leon reached one arm around to the backseat and produced a copy of the
Holedo Herald.
My picture was on the front page, a yearbook shot from the seventh grade that looked like somebody else now. A little kid with a crooked collar and an awkward smile. Hair parted unevenly with choppy bangs hanging over the forehead. Beneath the photo was that same headline from Truman’s disappearance.
BOY STILL MISSING
. The article gave all the details: “Dominick Pindle, 15, of 88 Dwight Avenue, was reported missing by his father, Roy Pindle, 42, of 88 Dwight Avenue. The report of his disappearance comes just weeks after the death of Theresa Pindle, 38, of 88 Dwight Avenue.”