The Best American Mystery Stories 2007

Peter Blauner Going, Going, Gone

From Hard Boiled Brooklyn

It happens so fast, Sussman only turns his head for, what, maybe two seconds, to check out that hoochie mama in the low-slung ram-riders and the spaghetti-strand top and when he looks back, his six-year-old Ben is already on the Coney Island — bound F train and the shiny metal doors are closing between them.

Sussman pushes through the crowd of departing passengers, trying to pry the doors apart, hut it’s too late. The train is already starting to move. He runs alongside it, yelling “STOP” and gesturing wildly, as Ben stares through the scratchiettied glass in open-mouthed confusion.

But then the window slips past him, like a frame going through a film projector, and he almost collides with a pillar near the end of the platform. A seismic rumble fills the station and he sees the white F on the hack of the train receding into darkness, going, going, gone, leaving him stranded.

He pictures his heart untethered from his body, falling through space but somehow still pulsing on its own.

The morning had begun on such a tremulous note of anticipation. This was supposed to be the day when he finally assumed his proper responsibilities and proved he wasn’t such a schmuck after all. For the first time since the divorce, he’d managed to get away from work and set aside a full weekend for the kid. No phone calls from clients, no answering e-mails, just quality father-and-son time. Up until eleven on Friday night with a Star Wars DVD marathon (which, truth be told, he kept watching even after Ben fell asleep two-thirds of the way into A New Hope); field box seats from the corporate account at a Saturday afternoon Yankees game (half the innings spent at the souvenir stand, hut that’s what you get for taking a six-year-old), and dinner at Junior’s (three-quarters of a strawberry cheesecake slice left uneaten).

But today was supposed to be the penultimate bonding experience, the maraschino cherry rescued from the bottom of the Shirley Temple glass: the long-awaited pilgrimage to Coney Island that Ben had been begging for. Sussman had been building it up for weeks, telling the kid about the trip he’d make to Astroland every summer with his father, who’d moved the family from Bay Ridge to Long Island back when he was seven. He’d told Ben about the Cyclone, the bumper cars, the shooting galleries in the midway, and of course, the Wonder Wheel. For some reason, the last attraction had meant the most to the kid; he woke up this morning to find Ben with his crayons in the kitchen, drawing a picture of a stick-figure man running after a spiny Ferris wheel as it rolled down a hill.

Now Sussman stands at the end of the platform, feeling a cold ripple of panic rise from the pit of his stomach. The murmur of the departed train still vibrates through the station.

The only thing that matters. I have lost the only thing that matters. His chest heaves and dread worms into his veins. He looks around — shouldn’t there be a station manager on duty or a call box with a button you can push in case of emergencies? But it’s still before noon on a Sunday morning in August and the place is desolate. He calls out, “Help,” but his voice sounds thin and nasal echoing off the tiled walls. An old bag woman on the opposite platform, her jaw working like Popeye’s from overmedication, glares at him furiously, as if she’s seen everything that’s just happened and knows he’s at fault.

He starts to run, half-remembering a pay phone he’d once used way down at the other end of the platform for another hassled conversation with his ex. Yes, I sent the check already. No, I can’t take him next weekend... What will she say about this time? I knew it! I knew I couldn’t leave him alone with you! You’re such a fucking thoughtless asshole! He grabs the phone’s gummy yellow receiver, the rusted coil slithers, and then red and green wires spill from the chrome mainframe. Broken! Of course!

He drops the receiver in disgust and charges toward the stairs, blood throbbing in his cars. He pictures Ben alone on the train, a wan frightened child in a forest of strangers. Would he think to look for a policeman or another responsible adult? Who knew what his mother had taught him to do in an emergency? He was a fragile kid at the very best of times, and the divorce had shaken him badly. He’d cowered in his bedroom when his parents fought and had turned shy and withdrawn after the split: “a bully magnet” according to his kindergarten teachers, easily buffaloed away from the more popular toys. Sussman imagines a stranger taking the child’s hand and leading him off the train at some unknown stop, saying Mommy and Daddy are waiting for him there. He leaps up the steps two at a time, the slap of concrete on the bottom of his loafers stinging the soles of his feet.

You’re taking your son for the weekend? One of the other guys in sales gawked at him Friday afternoon. Jesus, I never even knew you’d spawned.

He stops a second on the landing to catch his breath, his belt buckle digging into a flabby roll. He’s terribly out of shape these days, from eating junk food on the road and skipping the gym for weeks on end. You think somebody’s going to give you their account because you’re the most relaxed rep they’ve ever met? he’d asked one of the newbies just last week. He swallows and sees the token booth a football field and a half away. No awards for the best excuse. He who hesitates is lunch. He makes another run for it, his lungs already straining, his knees audibly squeaking. He realizes he’s become the stick figure from Ben’s drawing, chasing the giant wheel rolling down the hill. He lifts his thighs and digs for all he’s worth. The future has narrowed to this barren gray stretch of concrete from here to the token booth.

But when he gets there the booth is empty. A small beige bag blocks the trench under the glass. For a second, he sees himself like Willem Dafoe on the poster for Platoon, falling to his knees as an enemy’s bullet rips into his chest.

No. He doesn’t even have the luxury of despair. Every wasted second holds the potential for disaster. What’s the next stop on the train? His eyes find the map on the wall and start desperately searching for the right artery through Brooklyn. Up until this second, he’s never bothered to study other routes besides the ones that take him back and forth to Manhattan.

The wilderness. Though he was born here and has been renting an apartment in Windsor Terrace for two years since the breakup, this borough is still the unexplored wilderness to him. Threatening swatches of Fort Greene and Williamsburg have only been glimpsed fleetingly through car service windows coming home from work late at night. He sees the train cuts through Borough Park and pictures mirthless bearded Hasidim glowering down at his boy. The stops have unfamiliar names like Church Avenue, Ditmas, Kings Highway. He sees “Avenue X,” and somehow the starkness of those black letters on the bland beige background strikes terror into his heart.

He runs up the stairs for the street, drenched in sweat, his arteries beginning to constrict.

But the world above ground is oblivious. Just minding its own business and acting like this is just another peaceful Sunday morning on Fifteenth Street, by the park. The sidewalks are empty. Birds sing in the trees. Copies of the Sunday New York Times sheathed in blue plastic lie undisturbed on the doorsteps of prim Victorian-looking brownstones and limestones. How can the people upstairs still be sleeping, or having drowsy rollover sex, or scratching their butts on the way to the bathroom with a hangover, when his whole life is falling apart? How can they be so complacent?

He reaches for his cell phone but knows before his hand even touches his pocket that the thing is still sitting on the bedside table, where he’d deliberately left it this morning, so for once he wouldn’t be answering calls about work instead of spending time with his son. He imagines it, blinking dumbly, its battery life slowly ebbing away. Fuck. Now he can’t even call 911. Shouldn’t there be one of those old-fashioned red fire department call boxes on this street? This is a nightmare in broad daylight. This is the beginning of a tragic story in the newspaper. He keeps seeing Ben’s stunned little face pulling away from him. His heart squeezes and he feels a dull pain beginning in his left shoulder.

The wheel is rolling down the hill faster, picking up momentum. Blame. There must be someone else to blame. It can’t all be his fault. At work, he’s always had a talent for handling pressure and delivering in the clutch, but this is too much for anyone to carry. He pictures Ben surrounded by a roaming wolf pack on the train, a bunch of dead-eyed little thugs demanding the brand-new Game Boy Advance he had with him.

“Somebody help mee,” his voice jiggles as he pounds on down the sidewalk, heading for Eighth Avenue, looking for someone, anyone, to make a call for him and stop the trains.

He sees a doughy-looking woman, gray hair sticking out from under a Yankees cap, on her way to the park with a saggy-faced mastiff on a leash.

“Cell phone?” he calls out to her.

She looks at him blankly. The pitch. He has to make a pitch to her, to sell her his terrible need.

“Excuse me.” He holds his hands out, beseeching. “Do you have a cell phone I could borrow? I’m having an emergency. My child is missing.”

She tugs down on the bill of her cap, not meeting his eye as she starts to pass, a time-honored urban tradition for dealing with street crazies.

“Stupid bitch!”

A part of him is appalled, he doesn’t say this sort of thing, but he can’t stop himself. The wheel is spinning out of control. His whole life is on the brink of nullity, of meaninglessness, of total annihilation.

He sees one brownstone without a Times on its doorstep and decides the people inside must be awake. Maybe they even have children of their own. He runs up the stoop and starts ringing their buzzer.

“Hello?” A groggy female voice comes out of the intercom.

Automatically, he finds himself trying to picture her, like he’s making a sales call. He sees a woman no longer young, not nearly old, on her first cup of coffee of the day. The type he could trap on the phone back when he was in telemarketing. He sees her in a flannel bathrobe, trying to make pancakes, moving around the kitchen with a three-year-old dinging to her leg like a little koala bear.

“Hi,” he says, trying to modulate and sound reasonable. “I’m sorry to be bothering you. Something terrible has happened. I lost my child on the subway and I need to call 911.”

“Oh.”

For a moment, time stands still and the wheel stops turning, leaving him suspended at the top of the arc, rocking in the breeze. Everything depends on that one syllable. He tells himself that only someone who’s known the joy and pain of childbirth could say “oh” in just exactly that way. Only someone who’s stayed up at a feverish child’s bedside until the bleak morning hours, with a damp washcloth and a dropper full of Children’s Tylenol could draw the word out just so. Only someone who’s filled a bathroom with shower steam at three a.m. for a croupy cough could be this empathetic. She understands. She knows he’s telling the truth. He’s going to close the deal with her. People are good. People are compassionate. This is a borough of neighbors, not a chilly collection of anonymous souls piled on top of each other in teetering stacks like Manhattan.

So he waits. And waits. Surely, she’ll come back. But then he notices the tightness has moved down his shoulder to his arm now. Where’d she go?

“Hello?” He presses the talk button, knowing she couldn’t have forgotten about him. “Are you still there?”

He can almost feel a waft of cool air issuing through the speaker holes.

“For God’s sakes, at least make the call for me,” he pleads, trying to get her back. “Tell them there’s a little boy lost on the Coney Island F train…”

He’s wasting his time, he realizes. The deal is off. She doesn’t believe him either. No one could be that irresponsible, that criminally negligent, to just leave a child on a train, could they?

He runs for the corner, remembering a bodega there, one of those cramped little twenty-four-hour groceries, where cats chase mice around the produce and disenfranchised men hang around the pay phone outside. The dull pain in his shoulder has become a kind of tourniquet-like tightness. The only thing that matters. I have lost the only thing that matters. All the world could die now and he wouldn’t care.

He arrives, gasping for breath, his thighs in flames from rubbing together. But somebody is already at the phone. A trim young man upholstered with muscles, wearing a white silky do-rag and a gold capped tooth that makes him look a little like a pirate. And with him, a girl. But not just any girl. A little sex grenade in a skimpy top and jeans low enough to reveal the jut of her hipbones. The very girl. Sussman realizes, with a sickening clench, he was ogling when Ben got on the train without him.

“Yeah, yeah, but what happened to my tape, son?” The pirate is ranting. “That was my tape, yo… Don’t be playing me cheap…”

It’s a performance — Sussman sees that right away. The boy is displaying his plumage, showing the girl that he is tough, a defender of his own rights, a man not to be trifled with.

“I’m a kick his ass, he tries to bite me. I’m serious, dawg…”

“Excuse me.” Sussman stands before him, gulping, still trying to catch his breath. “I need to use that phone.”

“What do you mean, you’ll get back to me?” The pirate ignores him. “When does my copyright run out?”

How can anyone be so blindly selfish, Sussman asks himself, so wrapped up in themselves? How can anybody be so unaware there are other people in the world, going through their own private dramas? How can he just automatically assume that his needs are paramount and more urgent than anyone else’s?

“I need that phone. My son is missing.”

“Say it again, man.” The boy turns his back. “Some asshole was trying to talk to me.”

Sussman stares at a spot between his shoulder blades, not quite believing what he’s just heard.

Force of will, he tells himself. Nothing gets accomplished in this world, without force of will. He sees that every day in sales. Some people just won’t move or react until you start to push.

Before he knows what he’s doing, Sussman finds himself reaching over the boy’s shoulder and pushing down on the pay phone’s hook.

“What the fuck?” The boy spins around.

Sussman sees the girl flinch as the boy’s gold tooth catches a glint of sun and he knows he’s gone too far.

The gray receiver slams into the side of his head. His brain rings as he staggers sideways from the blow. But within the pain, there’s something small, hard, and rightful. He knows this is what he deserves.

He clutches at the boy’s forearm, to try to keep from falling, but it’s too late. His muscles have lost their organizing principle. The back of his head hits the sidewalk. A flashbulb explodes inside his skull.

And in the fading light of the dying filament, he sees Ben alone on the train, drawing that picture of that stick-figure man chasing the wheel, as the Wonder Wheel looms into view against the gray ocean backdrop. It’s over now. He’s tried, given it everything he had, but he never got ahead of that wheel. It just kept spinning faster and faster, so that he could never catch up with it. And if the boy somehow survives this, his father wonders if he’ll just end up chasing the same thing.

“Hi, Mrs. Sussman, you don’t know me, but I have your son.”

The woman in dreadlocks and flip-flops is talking on a cell phone while keeping an eye on the two small boys as they steer toward each other with the bumper cars, blatantly ignoring the safety sign on the wall.

“Yes, he’s fine. I just gave him a hot dog and put him on one of the rides. He gave me your number and asked me to call. Apparently, he got separated from your husband on the train.”

She watches the cars crash head-on as the kids jerk back convulsing with laughter.

“Well, I don’t exactly know how it happened, but your boy’s a real trooper,” she says, holding the phone away from her ear a little as the voice on the other end turns sharp. “Some hairy puke started to bother him on the train so he got up and sat next to me because he saw I had a kid. There’s grown men don’t have that much sense.”

The cars skitter and thump across the scuffed floor, barging heedlessly into one another’s paths and slamming their front ends together again with joyful abandon.

“Don’t worry about it, I’ll keep him with me until you get here,” she says. “The only thing is, he doesn’t know what happened to his father. Maybe you ought to send somebody out to look for him.”