City of the Sun

TWO

Carol Gabriel pushes a strand of dirty blond hair back behind her ear and sips her coffee, Folgers beans, freshly ground, a mellow roast. Her friends like Starbucks, but she finds it bitter and knows they drink it for the name.

She stands in the kitchen and looks out over the sink through the small square window. She ’ s found herself smiling here most days since the move. Especially since fall hit three weeks back with a burst of color on the trees. There ’ s no smile today, even though the day ’ s a bright, shiny thing. Her second cup of coffee has begun to curdle in her belly, as Jamie usually wheels into the driveway before she ’ s done with her first.

Paul walks into the kitchen, a blue rep tie hanging unknotted around his neck. Because he ’ s got his nose in a pamphlet, he bumps into a kitchen chair. The chair groans across the terracotta tile floor and sends a painful report through his knee and up his thigh. Carol looks over at the noise.

Split annuities. Tax-advantaged cash flow and principal protection. How to sell the concept hasn ’ t really stuck yet for Paul, but he ’ s got to get into new products now. He sits, reaches for toast that ’ s gone cold. Variable whole life; yearly contributions to a policy that pays a death benefit but turns into an IRA-type retirement instrument at age sixty-five, is what got him into this neighborhood. He broadened his base, reached a new level of clientele. He made a solid conservative play and bought a house that he could carry the monthly nut on during his worst month, by virtue of his commissions on those policies alone. Now the plan was to have no worst months.

Paul chews toast. Feeding himself right-handed, he presses his gut with his left. It yields. Thirty-five years ’ worth. It was a cut slab through age thirty-one, but for the last four years he ’ s let it slide. At six-one, he ’ d been lean, a runner, for most of his life. Then he got a bone spur on his heel. Doctors recommended he get it cut out, but the surgery meant a long recovery, so he decided to run through it. They said it wouldn ’ t work, that the thorny spur would continue to aggravate the plantar fascia, that it couldn ’ t be done, but he ’ d gotten the idea it could. Mile after grueling mile he kept on, until something changed and yielded, and the thing wore away to nothing. Then his job did what pain could not and stopped him in his tracks. He started coming home tired in a different way from any manual labor he ’ d done in his youth. A few scotches a week became a few per night, so he could sleep. That, he suspected, added the first girth layer. He switched to vodka, which helped, but he was out of shape and he knew it.

“Paul, I ’ m worried.” Carol stands over him. He looks up. A shadow lies across her face. “Did you see Jamie outside?”

“No. Why?”

“He ’ s not home and I didn ’ t hear him come in from his route.”

“Maybe he left for school early…”

Her face radiates a dozen questions back at him, the most pleasant being: What kid goes to school early?

How can a grown man be so damned dumb? It leaps to the front of her mind. She feels guilty for it immediately and pushes it away. But it had been there.

“No, you ’ re right,” he says. He gulps coffee, pushes together a pile of insurance pamphlets, and stands. “Maybe his bike broke down.” Carol looks at him with doubt, not hope. “I ’ m already late, but I ’ ll drive his route and look for him on the way to the office. Call me if he shows up. I want to know why — ”

“Call as soon as you see him. Call as soon as you can. I ’ ll try the Daughertys ’. Maybe he ’ s over there.”

“Yeah. That ’ s probably it.” Paul gives her a peck and heads for the door. It ’ s like kissing a mannequin.

Mothers know.

Paul ’ s blue Buick LeSabre traverses the neighborhood. Streets that had been empty quiet an hour ago now hum. Minivans tote children to school. Older children pedal in packs. Kids, older still, drive four to a car to the high school. Joggers and dog walkers dot the sidewalks.

Paul coasts up in front of a miniature stop sign held by an aging woman with white hair and an orange sash across her torso. She waves a group of eight-year-olds across the front of the Buick as Paul lowers the window.

“Do you know Jamie Gabriel? Have you seen him?”

“Not by name,” she says, years of cigarettes on her voice. “I know the faces.”

“Have you seen a paperboy?” Paul asks, wishing he had a picture with him. “His bike might have broken down.”

“Sure haven ’ t, just kids on the way to school.”

Unsatisfied, Paul nods and drives on. He makes a right on Tibbs. An oil-stained street. Jamie ’ s not there and nothing ’ s out of the ordinary. Not sure what to do next, he drives the rest of the route and then continues to the office.

Rooster sits and sips his morning beer. Overdriven guitar sounds thunder in his head. He ’ d been playing Mudvayne all morning. He turned it off a minute ago, but can still hear it. He can do that. It is one of many things he can do that others cannot. He ’ s special. He knows he is. But he ’ s not happy. Having gifts is not the same thing as happiness. His mind roils in simulated guitar fuzz — he doesn ’ t want to think about in there — until he hears the van drive up outside.

Tad lumbers out of the panel van clutching a sixer of Blue Ribbon and the reload, the day ’ s second round of food. This time it is McDonald ’ s as directed. He approaches the house, the eyesore of the neighborhood. The paint is falling off in flakes and long curls, and only the windows on the side and those of the room down the hall are freshly painted. Black. It is what they ’ ll call their “music studio” if anyone asks. But no one does. This is the house the neighbors wish would just go away so property values could rise.

Tad enters, pulling off dark sunglasses and sliding them into the chest pocket of his flannel shirt. The living room is dingy. Carpet that is lentil in color and texture, and secondhand green and orange sofas that have gone decades without a re-covering fill the room.

Fast-food sandwich boxes and wrappers litter a dinette area. Rooster sits on a spindly chair across from a dormant twenty-year-old color television with tinfoil bunny-ears antennae that rests on a milk crate. His eyes are on the dead screen and he rocks slightly in rhythm to music that seems to fill his head from an unknown source. He is shirtless.

“You are one lazy bastard.”

Rooster ’ s eyes don ’ t leave the television as he gives Tad the finger.

“You got no work ethic at all.”

“You speak to Riggi?” Rooster asks as if Tad has just entered the room and the previous comments had never occurred.

“Shiftless. Look at you.”

“I ’ ve already been in there two times since you been gone,” Rooster says. Flat. His eyes, also flat, turn to Tad, stopping him up. “You speak to Riggi?”

“Two times? Bullshit, two times…” Tad gets his breath back. “Yeah, I spoke to him.”

“What ’ d he say?”

Tad puts the beer down among the rubble on the dinette table. He opens one for himself and chucks one over to Rooster.

“Mr. Riggi said he needs it for Thursday.”

Rooster opens the new beer and takes a delicate, probing sip. “Thursday. Shit.”

“Yeah,” Tad begins, enjoying his partner ’ s discomfort, “he ’ s got it arranged for Thursday, so you better get cracking.”

“Yeah? I should get cracking? Whyn ’ t you take a turn?” This silences Tad for a moment.

“No thanks. You ’ re the pro.”

Rooster nods slightly, pleased, then kicks a pill into the back of his mouth, drains off a few ounces of his beer, and wearily stands. Vicodin. When you ’ re in physical pain, it takes away the pain. When you ’ re not in pain, it takes away other things. He gathers himself and walks purposefully down the hall toward the back bedroom door.

Tad occupies the chair in front of the television, leans forward, and turns on cartoons.

The sound of a lock being undone from the outside and the door opens, allowing a crease of light into the ugly, darkened bedroom. The blacked-out windows are nailed shut and have metal grating over them on the inside. A sheetless bed is the only furniture. Rooster reaches up and tightens a bare lightbulb into its fixture, illuminating the room. Balled up between the bed and the wall is a tearstained, violence-shocked flash of skin. The man ’ s face sets in a mask that expresses neither frenzy nor madness. The boy ’ s face forms its own mask of pain, and fear, and incomprehension, and so far below the surface as to be invisible, fury. He doesn ’ t even say no but weakly tries to scrabble away from the man.

“Here it comes,” Rooster says. He jerk-steps toward the boy and kicks the door shut.

Out in the living room Tad turns up the volume on the television.

Goddamnit. Where did he put the damned instruction manual for his BlackBerry? Paul sifts through his paperwork-laden desk. The phones outside are busy. He ’ s been programming numbers into the thing for weeks, but now he can ’ t get it to work. His paneled office sports several framed certificates distinguishing him for his efforts as an insurance agent, but they aren ’ t helping him now.

Janine appears at the door. “Carol on three.” And she disappears again. He had called Carol on the way to work and told her to start looking for Jamie.

“Carol? My BlackBerry just crashed. Did he show up? ’ Cause when he does he has some explaining — ” Her answer freezes him inside. It ’ s 10:15.

“The police? We can, but I don ’ t know. It seems a little drastic…” His gaze goes distant. There ’ s a world full of possibilities out there. But he isn ’ t ready to accept them. Fathers may not want to know.

“If he doesn ’ t show up at his normal time after school…” He stops. His stomach has soured. Acid churns in it like he ’ s had six cups of coffee on no food.

“No, you ’ re right — I ’ ll come home and we ’ ll deal with it… Okay… Try not to worry.” But as he hangs up, that ’ s what he has begun to do.

Paul and Carol stand static amid the bureaucratic swirl of the busy police station. Things move slowly for them, incoherently, like a warped videotape caught up in the machine.

They stand and gesture with the beefy desk sergeant.

Later, they sit at the desk of a concerned-looking patrolman, filling out forms, giving him photographs.

Now, waiting, silent, on a wooden bench, Paul holds a dead cup of coffee in one hand and Carol ’ s cold palm in his other. Her features have begun to tighten — it ’ s not possible to see it yet — but she ’ s begun to desiccate and wither on the vine.

Finally. Finally, the concerned-looking patrolman shows them into Captain Pomeroy ’ s small, glass-walled office. Pomeroy, a soft, pillowy man with a prominent nose bone, sits behind his desk. His tie has a silver bar across it. A silver pen and pencil set rests in his shirt pocket. His hair is swept back with Vitalis, his face full of Aqua Velva, his mouth full of nicotine gum.

“Mr. and Mrs. Gabriel, I ’ ve looked over your paperwork here, and I just want to assure you that this office will do everything it can to assist you in locating your boy, ahh, James.”

“Jamie” comes through Carol ’ s clenched jaw.

“Jamie.” Pomeroy makes a note. “Thought it was short for — ”

“No, that ’ s his name. It ’ s on his birth certificate.”

“But before we do, before we open this thing up wide, I just want to be sure that this is…That is, that your boy didn ’ t run off for a — ”

“He ’ s missing. I know it. You hear about these things.”

“Ma ’ am, most mothers…Look, all I ’ m saying is to be sure. It ’ s just that boys are known to be boys.”

“What?” It comes out a hoarse croak, as if Paul hasn ’ t used his voice box for years.

“What I ’ m saying is, often in these types of situation, maybe he had a math test he didn ’ t want to show up for. Or he got a bad grade on that science project and didn ’ t want you to — ”

“Not Jamie.”

“Mrs. Gabriel…” Pomeroy leans back and shifts his holstered automatic against his hip. He looks to Paul in muted demand.

“Honey, I ’ m sure that ’ s what everybody says about their…”

“Exactly,” Pomeroy breathes in gratitude, taking over from Paul. “Hell, he probably just…”

Hope is a slim branch, and the men do their best to grasp it, but it ’ s a bit overweighted for Carol. Her expression stops Pomeroy.

“I suggest you talk to his teachers.” He manages to start again. “See if everything was jake at school. Ask his friends…”

“Fine, we will, but…” Paul offers.

“Anything you do along those lines will save us legwork.” Pomeroy taps a silver pen against the edge of the desk.

“What are you going to do? What about issuing an alert?”

“We have. We ’ ve passed around the information. Okay, ma ’ am. We ’ ll open it up wide. We ’ ll set up on your house. Your place of business, too. I ’ ll put officers out in the neighborhood canvassing door to door. And I want you to call in the minute your son shows up” — Pomeroy leads them out of the glass-walled office — “because he ’ s going to.” Pomeroy smiles reassuringly. “He ’ s going to.” And he shuts the door behind them.

“That man is not going to help us.” Carol ’ s words come, grim. Paul says nothing.

The seasonal switch has been made to Eastern Standard Time, and darkness is coming early in Indiana. The Buick drives up. After long hours of looking, of hanging flyers, Paul steps out of the car, the way he has so many times after picking Jamie up from soccer practice. Paul stands on the driver ’ s side. Carol, after an afternoon of waiting by the phone, appears in the front door. She shakes her head. In the setting sun, Paul is a handsome, still-young father. He appraises his home of comfort, his still-young wife before it. A police cruiser is parked at the curb. He walks toward the house and she crosses toward him. They come together and cling to each other in the driveway, neither sure what they ’ re holding on to now. The sun drops below the trees.

Paul eats a bleak dinner of cold cereal. Rigged to the phone is a trace/recording device monitored by the two patrolmen outside in their cruiser. Carol sits in a trancelike state next to him. A scratching is heard at the kitchen door. Carol gets up and lets Tater in. His mouth drips blood. She gets a dish towel and wipes him clean. He is uninjured — the blood belongs to something else — and he rumbles off into the living room, excited at the smell of the police sniffer dogs that have been through the house all afternoon. Paul shakes more Lucky Charms into his bowl and the prize falls out.

“He was waiting for this. I ’ ll save it for him.” He puts it aside on the table and breaks down, his shoulders shaking with sobs.

Carol stands across the kitchen. She doesn ’ t go to him. After some time he stops.

“Let ’ s just go up to bed.” He stands. Maybe we ’ ll wake up tomorrow and find out this was all a bad dream, he wants to say, but does not.

Paul crosses to the staircase. Carol goes to the wall and turns on the living room and porch lights.

“Let ’ s leave these on in case.” She follows him up the stairs.

The door swings open, throwing light onto the mattress, which the boy has pulled off the bed and angled against the wall over himself like a protective lean-to. Rooster offhandedly tosses a grease-soaked fast-food bag into the room and sniffs to himself at the attempted defense. Never seen that one before. As if it ’ d work. He slams the door behind him. Again the room is awash in darkness.

Paul lies on his back in the darkened bedroom, unfeeling of the mattress beneath him. He floats in space defined only by his misery. Grief that he could never have imagined surrounds him and tears at him from every direction. Circumstances pulverize him, sap him motionless in the dark. A dull rumbling sound filters in from the bathroom. There, sitting in a filling tub, Carol thinks of Jamie when he was a three-year-old playing the Down the Drain game, an amusement of his own invention. Better get the plumber, Mommy, I ’ m gone. I ’ m down the drain… Carol ’ s pale back shakes. The water pounds and thunders. She realizes the sound isn ’ t the water but her screams.

Rooster and Tad sit at the cluttered dinette table. Heavy feedback music is in the air and Tad drums along to it.

“So ’ s he gonna be ready?”

Rooster looks at his partner. Tad ’ s recently started smoking meth, and he ’ s on it now. Rooster can tell because Tad has that filthy sheen. It ’ s a dirty drug that opens the pores and seems to suck in airborne dirt and debris. He must ’ ve smoked up the last time Rooster was in the room down the hall. Disgusting. “Of course he ’ s gonna be ready, bitch.”

“Because it ’ s first thing, like fucking dawn on Thursday, you know, asshole?”

Tad has a wild, risky look in his eyes. Wouldn ’ t be there if not for the meth, Rooster thinks.

“Yeah, I know, douche bag.” Rooster flicks a bottle cap at him. Just misses the fat fucker.

“Watch it.” Tad moves evasively and too late. “Just so you ’ re sure, dickhead.”

“I ’ m a professional, fuck face.” This taunt catches Tad, and he isn ’ t sure where to go next, how to escalate.

“Listen, faggot,” he begins, and then there ’ s a click and a knife blade ’ s at his throat. Rooster ’ s pulled the four-inch Spyderco he carries in his back pocket and locked it back. Just like that. Tad feels the pressure of the blade against his Adam ’ s apple, a hard thin line.

“Don ’ t even say another word. Not sorry, not spit. Hear me?” Rooster ’ s face radiates blood.

Tad Ford nods slowly.

Class has just ended at JFK Middle, and kids stream out toward buses and their parents ’ cars. Carol Gabriel walks opposite the flow toward the low building and wonders why she ’ s done this to herself and not come later in the afternoon. It has been four days. The police have left her house. Every backpack she sees, every jacket, screams Jamie for a moment before dissolving into a different child. Alex Daugherty walks by her and stops.

“Hi, Mrs. G,” he says.

She bends down. “Alex. Hi, Alex.” The boy seems to know something ’ s going on but not exactly what. “You know that Jamie ’ s been away for a couple days?” she goes on. She can ’ t hold herself back from touching him. Her hands reach out and smooth the boy ’ s sleeves, his hair. Her hands, disconnected from her mind, need to know that this boy at least is real.

“Yeah.”

“Do you know if he was…upset? Was everything okay at school and stuff?”

“Yeah. Did he run away?” the boy wonders.

“We don ’ t think so.” The conversation is already taking a toll on Carol. “He wasn ’ t having any problems that he told you about? He hadn ’ t met anyone? Any secret stuff? Because you should tell me if he did, it ’ s important.”

Alex shakes his head and begins digging at the sidewalk with a toe, when a little way off at the curb his mother honks and gets out of her station wagon.

“There ’ s my mom.”

Carol straightens up and trades a glance with Kiki Daugherty, who waves. She ’ s told Kiki and Kiki ’ s said all the right things. Carol watches jealously as the other mother collects her child. If there ’ s any accusation in Kiki ’ s stare, any “What kind of a mother lets this happen to her son?” she keeps it to herself so Carol can ’ t see it. Carol hurries toward the school.

Inside Jamie ’ s homeroom, his teacher, Andrea Preston, a twenty-seven-year-old black woman, hands Carol a cup of coffee.

“We have assemblies where we teach the children not to talk to strangers or accept rides. And we had one yesterday to redouble — ”

“Yes. Yes.” Carol ’ s words echo, disembodied, against the linoleum. “Really, Jamie ’ s old enough to know all that. I just wanted to check again and see if everything was all right here. He was doing fine, wasn ’ t he?” There is panic in her voice now. Perhaps nothing was as she thought.

“He was doing fine. Really well,” the teacher says slowly, and gives a pained smile, as if to invest the empty words with hidden meaning. “A few problems with fractions, nothing out of the ordinary. I wish there was something more.” Preston ’ s face searches hers.

Carol realizes how young the teacher is and that she is shattered, too. She feels she should try to comfort the woman, but how? “Can I get those things out of his locker?”

The teacher nods.

What passes for lawn in front of the seedy house is purple gray with Thursday-morning frost. Tad sits behind the wheel of a van, an aging Econoline with covered rear windows, listening to wacky morning radio. He ’ s been keeping his distance from Rooster, who ’ s up on the porch walking back and forth and smoking a cigarette.

An immaculate black Cutlass Supreme with smoked windows and custom t-top rolls up to the house. Out steps a stout man in a slightly shiny, several-hundred-dollar suit. He wears gold and sunglasses and has a bald head. He ’ s Oscar Riggi. He ’ s the man.

Rooster stops pacing.

Tad jumps out of the van and crosses through a cloud of Econoline exhaust. “Mr. Riggi, how you doin ’?”

Tad kisses ass, but Rooster doesn ’ t go for that. He knows he ’ s not so easily replaced.

“Rooster. Tad. How are things? How ’ s our package?”

“Everything ’ s all fine and loaded, sir,” Tad answers, looking involuntarily at the van and thinking instinctively of the carpet-lined cut in the floor. He pats the van ’ s side.

Riggi looks through Tad as if he ’ s an exhaust cloud. “Things went well, I trust, huh, Rooster?”

“Yeah, you can trust, Captain.” Rooster flicks his cigarette butt in Tad ’ s direction. Not at him, but in his direction. It ’ s just far enough off so that Tad can ’ t say anything.

Riggi climbs the few steps up to the porch and flips Rooster a fairly thick roll of small and medium bills rubberbanded together. Rooster thumbs it nonchalantly and tucks it away. Riggi cuffs him behind the head, not without affection.

“Hey, I can count on you, huh?”

“That ’ s right, Oscar.”

Tad comes up to join them, much larger than both men, yet feeble and intimidated in their presence. Without taking his eyes off Rooster, Riggi reaches into his jacket pocket and produces a packet of papers that he hands to Tad.

“There ’ s the address of the other pickup. Instructions on what roads to take. Your destination is in there, too. Memorize it, write it in code, whatever, then destroy it. There ’ s travel money in there also.”

Tad stays with it, endeavors to look keen, on top of things. “Okay, okay.”

“Call me every eight hours regardless of where you are. Got it? I want my phone ringing every eight hours.”

“Got it.”

“Where you gonna call me?”

“Wherever I ’ m at, eight hours.”

Riggi gives a pinched smile, like he ’ s tasting bad jelly. “You get the rest of your money when you ’ re back.”

“Yes, sir.”

Riggi nods and turns to him. “You ’ re still here?”

Tad hustles into the van and drives off. Riggi turns back to Rooster. “You have breakfast yet?”