Dark Places

Patty DayJANUARY 2, 1985

1:50 P.M.

Patty wondered how many hours she and Diane had spent I rumbling around in cars together: a thousand? two thousand? Maybe if you added it all up, a sum total of two years, put end to end, the way mattress companies always did: You spend a third of your life asleep, why not do it on a ComfortCush? Eight years standing in lines, they say. Six years peeing. Put like that, life was grim. Two years waiting in the doctor’s office, but a total of three hours watching Debby at breakfast laughing until milk started dribbling down her chin. Two weeks eating soppy pancakes her girls made for her, the middle still sour with batter. Only one hour staring in amazement as Ben unconsciously tucked his baseball cap behind his ears in a gesture mirror-perfect to what his grandpa did, his grandpa dead when Ben was just a baby. Six years of hauling manure, though, three years of ducking calls from bill collectors. Maybe a month of having sex, maybe a day of having good sex. She’d slept with three men in her life. Her gentle high school boyfriend; Runner, the hotshot who stole her from her gentle high school boyfriend and left her with four (wonderful) children; and a guy she dated for a few months some-where in the years after Runner left. They’d slept together three times with the kids at home. It always ended awkwardly. Ben, sulky and possessive at age eleven, would park himself in the kitchen so he could glower at them as they left her bedroom in the morning, Patty worrying about the guy’s semen on her, that smell so stark and embarrassing with your children still in their pajamas. It was clearly not going to work from the start, and she’d never gotten the courage up to try again. Libby would graduate from high school in eleven years, so maybe then. She’d be forty-three, which was right when women were supposed to peak sexually. Or something. Maybe it was menopause.

“We heading to the school?” Diane asked, and Patty pulled out of her three-second trance to remember their horrible errand, their mission: find her son and, what? Hide him away til this blew over? Drive him to the little girl’s house and straighten it all out? In family movies, the mom always caught the son stealing, and she’d march him back over to the drugstore and get him to hand over the candy on a shaky palm, and beg forgiveness. She knew Ben shoplifted some. Before he started locking his door, she’d occasionally find strange, pocket-sized items in his room. A candle, batteries, a plastic packet of toy soldiers. She’d never said anything, which was horrible. Part of her didn’t want to deal with it—drive all the way into town, and talk to some kid who got paid minimum wage and didn’t care anyway. And the other part (even worse) thought, Why the hell not? The boy had so little, why not keep pretending this was something a friend gave him? Let him have this stolen trifle, a pebble-plunk of a wrongdoing in the grand scheme.

“No, he wouldn’t go to the school. He only works Sundays.”

“Well, where?”

They came to a stoplight, swaying on a line like laundry. The road dead-ended onto the pasture of a land-rich family that lived in Colorado. Turn right and they were heading to Kinnakee proper— the town, the school. Turn left and they were going deeper into Kansas, all farmland, where Ben’s two friends lived, those shy Future Farmers of America who couldn’t bear to ask for Ben when she picked up the phone.

“Take a left, we’ll go see the Muehlers.”

“He still hangs around with them? That’s good. No one could think those boys would do anything … weird.”

“Oh, because Ben would?”

Diane sighed and turned left.

“I’m on your side, P.”

The Muehler brothers had dressed as farmers for Halloween every year since birth, their parents driving them into Kinnakee in the same wide-body truck, the boys deposited on Bulhardt Avenue for trick-or-treating in their tiny John Deere baseball caps and overalls while the parents drank coffee at the diner. The Muehler brothers, like their parents, talked only about alfalfa and wheat and weather, and went to church on Sunday, where they prayed for things that were probably crop-related. The Muehlers were good people with no imagination, with personalities so tied to the land, even their skin seemed to take on the ridges and furrows of Kansas.

“I know.” Patty reached to put her hand on Diane’s just as Diane shifted gears, so her hand hung just above her sister’s and then went back to her lap.

“Oh you bleeping jerk!” Diane said to a car ahead of her, rolling along at twenty miles an hour and deliberately going slower as Diane closed in on the bumper. She swerved up to pass them and Patty stared rigidly ahead, even though she could feel the driver’s face on her, a murky moon in her peripheral. Who was this person? Had they heard the news? Is that why they were staring, maybe even pointing? There’s the woman who raised that boy. The Day boy. A hundred phones were rattling this morning, if Diane had heard last night. At home her three girls were probably sitting in front of the TV, turning from cartoons to the blaring telephone, which they’d been told to pick up in case Ben called. They seemed unlikely to follow that instruction: they were strung out with the fear of the morning. If anyone dropped by, they’d find three unattended, teary kids, age ten and under, huddled on the living room floor, cringing at the noise.

“Maybe one of us should have stayed home … in case,” Patty said.

“You’re not going anywhere by yourself while this is going on, and I don’t know where to go. This is the right thing. Michelle’s a big girl. I watched you when I was younger’n her.”

But that was back when people still did that, Patty thought. Back when people went out for a whole night and left the kids on their own and no one thought anything of it. In the ’50s and ’60s, out on that quiet old prairie where nothing ever happened. Now little girls weren’t supposed to ride bikes alone or go anywhere in groups of less than three. Patty had attended a party thrown by one of Diane’s work friends, like a Tupperware party, but with rape whistles and mace instead of wholesome plastic containers. She’d made a joke about what kind of lunatic would drive all the way out to Kinnakee to attack someone. A blond woman she’d just met looked up from her new pepper-spray keychain and said, “A friend of mine was raped once.” Patty had bought several cans of mace out of guilt.

“People think I’m a bad mother, that’s why this is happening.”

“No one thinks you’re a bad mother. You’re superwoman as far as I’m concerned: you keep the farm going, get four kids to school every day, and don’t drink a gallon of bourbon to do it.”

Patty immediately thought of the freezing cold morning two weeks ago, when she almost wept with exhaustion. Actually putting on clothes and driving the girls to school seemed an entirely remote possibility. So she let them all stay home and watch ten hours of soap operas and game shows with her. She made poor Ben ride his bike, shooed him out the door with a promise she’d petition again to get the school bus to come to them next year.

“I’m not a good mother.”

“Hush.”

THE MUEHLERS’ HOME was on a decent chunk of land, four hundred acres at least. The house was tiny and looked like a buttercup, a swipe of yellow against miles of green winter wheat and snow. It was blowing even harder than before now; the forecast said it would snow through the night, and then would come sudden springlike temperatures. That promise was wedged in her brain: sudden springlike temperatures.

They drove up the skinny, unwelcoming strip of road leading to the house, past a tiller sitting just inside the barn like an animal. Its hooked blades cast claw shadows on the ground. Diane made a sinus noise she always resorted to when she was uncomfortable, a fake clearing of the throat to fill the silence. Neither of them looked at the other as they got out of the car. Attentive black grackles perched in the trees, cawing continually, ill-natured, noisy birds. One of them flew past, a silvery trail of Christmas tinsel fluttering from its beak. But otherwise the place was immobile, no motors of any kind, no gates clanking shut, no TV within, just the silence of land packed under snow.

“Don’t see Ben’s bike,” was all Diane said as they banged the doorknocker.

“Could be around back.”

Ed answered the door. Jim, Ed, and Ben were all in the same grade, but the brothers weren’t twins, one of them had flunked at least once, maybe twice. She thought it was Ed. He goggled at her for a second, a short kid of only 5’4” or so, but with a man’s athletic build. He shoved his hands in his pockets and looked behind him.

“Well, hi, Mrs. Day.”

“Hi, Ed. Sorry to bother you on Christmas break.”

“No, no problem.”

“I’m looking for Ben—is he here? Have you seen him?”

“Be-en?” He said it in two syllables, like he was tickled at the idea. “Ah, no, we ain’t seen Ben in … well, I don’t think we seen him this whole year. Aside from school. He’s been hanging around with a different group now.”

“What group?” asked Diane, and Ed looked at her for the first time.

“Uh, we-ell …”

She could see Jim’s silhouette approaching the door, backlit by the picture window in the kitchen. He lumbered toward them, bigger and wider than his brother.

“Can we help you, Mrs. Day?” He nudged his face in, then his torso, slowly moving his brother to the side. The two of them effectively closed off the doorway. It made Patty want to crane her neck around them and peek inside.

“I was just asking Ed if you two’d seen Ben today, and he said you hadn’t been seeing much of him this whole school year.”

“Mmm, no. Wish you’d phoned, could have saved you some time.”

“We need to find him soon, you have any idea where we can find him, it’s sort of a family emergency,” Diane interrupted.

“Mmm, no,” said Jim again. “Wish we could help.”

“You can’t give us even a name of who he spends time with? Surely you must know that.”

Ed had swung to the background now, so he was calling from the shadow of the living room.

“Tell her to phone 1-800-Devils-R-Us!” he cackled.

“What?”

“Nothing.” Jim looked at the door knob in his hand, debating whether to start closing it.

“Jim, can you help us, please?” Patty murmured. “Please?”

The boy frowned, tapped the point of a cowboy boot against the floor like a ballerina, refused to raise his eyes. “He hangs out with, like, the Devil crowd.”

“What does that mean?”

“Some older guy heads it, I don’t know his name. They do a lot of drugs, peyote or whatever, and kill cows and sh-stuff. That’s just what I heard. They don’t go to our school, the kids in it. Except for Ben, I guess.”

“Well, you must know the name of someone,” Patty coaxed.

“I really don’t, Mrs. Day. We steer clear of that stuff. I’m sorry, we tried to stay friends with Ben, but. We go to church here, my parents, they run a tight ship. Er … I’m real sorry.”

He looked at the ground, and stopped talking, and Patty couldn’t think of anything else to ask.

“OK, Jim, thanks.”

He shut the door and before they could turn around, from inside the house they heard a bellow: Asshole, why’d you gotta say that! followed by a heavy bang against the wall.