The Best American Mystery Stories 2016

Matt Bell Toward the Company of Others

From Tin House

The morning of the first snow, Kelly drove an unexplored length of the zone, coasting the truck slowly from driveway to driveway, assessing doors left open, windows missing, porches collapsed by the removal of their metal supports. Some of the houses had been scrapped already, but he knew he would find one more recently closed, with boards in the windows and an intact door. A space empty but not yet shredded. The farther he moved toward the center of the city, the more the neighborhoods sagged, all the wood falling off of brick, most every house uninhabited, the stores a couple thousand square feet of blank shelves, windows barred against the stealing of the nothing there. Paint scraped off concrete, concrete crumbled, turned to dust beneath the weather. Wind damage, water damage. Fire and flood. Before the zone, Kelly had never known rain alone could turn a building to dust. But rain had flooded the Great Lakes, ice had sheered Michigan’s cliffs, had shaped the dunes he’d dreamed of often after he’d left the state, before he’d returned to find these fading city streets, the left-behind houses abandoned to this latest age of the state’s greatest city.

As Kelly drove he saw how the zone sprawled beneath the falling snow, casting its imperfection wider than he could accept, but eventually he chose a house — two floors, blue paint on the siding, gray boards over the windows, a yellow door, surrounded on both sides by vacant lots, with only a burnt shell standing watch across the street — then went to the door and knocked, yelled greetings loaded with question marks.

He waited, yelled again.

He raised his hood, returned to the truck for a pry bar. He moved out of the front yard and along the side of the house, the brown grass crunching beneath the snow. Beside the blue house was a metal gate in a chain-link fence, but the gate wasn’t latched. At the first window he pulled back the covering board, found the glass gone. He peeked in, searched for furniture, a television or a radio. Instead, stained carpet, signs of water damage, a kitchen with no dirty dishes but an intact gas range, a sink and faucet he could wrench from the countertops.

He lifted himself through the window. Leading away from the kitchen was a staircase to the second floor and also a basement door, closed and latched with a padlock. He’d cut the lock later, after the other work was done. Upstairs, the bedrooms were small, their ceilings sloped to fit beneath the peaked roof, but there was enough room to swing a sledge. Back downstairs he opened the front door — the door not even locked, but he hadn’t thought to check before climbing in the window — then crossed the snowy yard to the truck for the rest of his tools. Already his first footprints were buried beneath the accumulation and afterward he wouldn’t be able to convince himself there had been others, no matter how insistently he was asked.

In the master bedroom he flicked the light switch to check the power, then aimed above the outlets and swung. He took what other scrappers might have left behind. With a screwdriver he removed each metal junction box from the bedroom, then in the bathroom he cut free the old copper plumbing from under the sink and inside the walls. He smoked and watched the snowfall through a bedroom window, the world quiet and wet under its weight. In the South he’d forgotten the feeling of a house in winter, the unexpected nostalgia of watching the world disappear under snowfall. He put his forehead to the cool glass, watched the stillness fill the pane.

Downstairs, he dismantled the kitchen, disconnected the stove from the wall, cut the steel sink from the counter. He worked quietly in what he thought was the wintry hush of the house, but later he would be told about the amateur soundproofing in the basement, about the mattresses nailed to the walls, about the eggshell foam pressed between the basement rafters.

The soundproofing meant the boy screaming in the basement wasn’t screaming for Kelly but for anyone. There would be talk of providence, but what was providence but a fancy word for luck? If the upstairs of the blue house had been plumbed with PVC, Kelly might not have gone down into the basement. But then copper in the bathroom, but then the copper price.

It wasn’t until he cut the padlock’s loop and opened the basement door that he heard the boy’s voice, the boy’s hoarse cry for help rising out of the dark.

As soon as Kelly heard the boy’s voice the moment split, and in the aftermath of that cry Kelly thought he lived both possibilities in simultaneous sequence: there was an empty basement or else there was a basement with a boy in a bed, and it seemed to Kelly he had gone into both rooms. Kelly thought if he had fled and left the boy there and disappeared into the night he might never have had to think about it again, couldn’t be held responsible for everything that followed. Instead he had acted, and now there would be no knowing where this action would stop.

Kelly climbed downward, descending the shaft of light falling through the basement door. His clothes clung to the nervous damp of his skin as he stepped off the stairs toward the bed at the back of the low room, toward the boy restrained there, all skin and skinny bones, naked beneath a pile of blankets and howling in the black basement air.

One by one each element of the scene came into focus, the room’s angles resolving out of the darkness, each shape alien in the moment, the experience too unexpected for sense: the humidity under the earth, the musky heat of trapped breath and sweat, piss in a bucket; the smell of burrow or warren, then the filth of the mattress as Kelly slid to his knees beside the bed, his headlamp unable to light the whole scene; the boy atop the stained and stinking sheets, confusing in his nudity, half hidden by the pile of covers, a nest of slick sleeping bags and rougher fabrics partially kicked off the bed, and beside the pile of blankets a folding metal chair.

The boy’s screaming stopped as soon as Kelly lit his features, but Kelly knew the boy couldn’t see him through the glare. He shut off the headlamp, removed the glow between them, let their eyes readjust to the dimmer light. He leaned closer, close enough to hear the boy’s rasping breath, to smell his captivity, to touch the boy’s hand. To try to bring the boy out of abstraction into the sensible world.

Kelly’s body was moving as if disconnected from thought, but if he could retouch the connections he would begin to speak. He tried to say his name, pointed to himself, failed to speak the word. He shook his head, reached down for the boy. The boy flinched from Kelly’s touch, but Kelly took him in his arms anyway, gathered him against his chest and lifted quick — and then the boy crying out in pain as Kelly jerked him against the metal cuffs shackling the boy’s feet to the bed, hidden beneath the bunched blankets.

The sound of the boy’s voice, naming his hurt into the black air: this was not the incomprehensible idea of a boy abducted but the presence of such a boy, real enough. And how had Kelly come to hold him, to smell the boy’s sweat, then the sudden stink of his own, their thickening musk of fear? Because what if he had not left the South. If he had been able to find work instead of resorting to scrapping. If there had not been the fire in the plant so that afterward he worked alone. If he had not met the girl with the limp. If she had not been working today. If she hadn’t had another attack the night before, keeping him from drinking so much he couldn’t scrap. Providence or luck, it didn’t matter. He told himself he believed only in the grimness of the world, the great loneliness of the vacuum without end to come. You could be good but what did it buy you. You could be good and it meant more precisely because it bought you nothing.

Kelly cursed, lowered the boy back onto the bed, felt the boy’s heat linger on his chest like a stain. He touched the place where the boy had been, felt the thump of his heart pounding beneath the same skin, listened to their bodies huffing in the dark as he relit the narrow beam of the headlamp, its light scattering the boy’s features into nonsense.

I have to go back upstairs, Kelly said. I’ll be right back.

No, the boy whispered, his voice swallowed by the muted room. Please.

Kelly quickly removed his coat and wrapped it around the boy to cover the boy’s nakedness, then moved toward the stairs as fast as he could, trying to outdistance the increasing volume of the boy’s cries. But there was no way of freeing the boy without his saw, no way of getting the saw without leaving the boy. The basement door opened into the kitchen, and in every direction Kelly saw the destruction he’d brought, the walls gutted, the counters opened, the stove dragged free from the wall, waiting for the handcart. The day was ending fast, the light fading as Kelly moved across the dirty tile, looking for his backpack, the hacksaw inside.

Outside the opened window the wet whisper of snow fell, quieting the world beyond the house’s walls, while inside the air was charged and waiting. When Kelly turned back to the basement he saw the door was closed, the boy and the boy’s sound trapped again. It was a habit to close a door when he left a room, but this time it was a cruelty too. Back downstairs Kelly found the boy sitting with his bare knees curled into his naked chest, all of his body cloaked under Kelly’s coat. Kelly raised the saw so the boy could see what it was, what Kelly intended. I’m here to help you, Kelly said, or thought he did, the boy was nodding, or Kelly thought the boy was, but after he switched the headlamp on again he couldn’t see the whole boy anymore, only the boy in parts. The boy’s terrified face. The boy’s clammy chest. The boy’s clenched hands and curled toes. He ran the beam along the boy’s dirty bony legs, inspected the cuffs, the bruised skin below.

Kelly put a hand on the boy’s ankle and they both recoiled at the surprise. Hold still, Kelly said. He lifted the chain in one hand and the saw in the other and as he cut he had to turn his face away from the boy’s rising voice, speaking again its awesome need.

The boy was heavier than Kelly expected, a dead weight of dangling limbs. He asked the boy to hold on and the boy said nothing, did less. When Kelly looked down at the boy he saw the boy wasn’t looking at anything. Out of the low room, up the stairs, into the dirty kitchen. All the noise the boy had made in the basement was gone, replaced by something more ragged, a threatened hissing. The front door was close to the truck but the back door was closer to where they stood, and more than anything else Kelly wanted out of the blue house, out into the fresh snow and the safety of the truck, its almost escape.

Other scenarios emerged. Other uses for the basement, what might happen to Kelly if they were caught there. What might happen to the boy for trying to escape. Outside, the wind was louder than Kelly had expected and the thick wet snow would bury his newest footprints but there wouldn’t be any hiding what he’d done. Kelly carried the boy around the house to the truck, adjusted the boy’s weight across his shoulder so he could dig in his pocket for the keys. The boy was shoeless and Kelly couldn’t put him down. The boy was limp and shoeless in his arms, but Kelly thought if he put the boy down the boy might run.

Kelly lowered the boy into the passenger seat, then stripped off his own flannel shirt. His arms were bare to the falling snow, but he wasn’t cold as he helped the boy stick his arms into the shirt, its fabric long enough to cover most of the boy’s nakedness. He bundled the boy back into the coat too, but the truck was freezing and the boy’s legs were bare and Kelly wasn’t sure the boy’s shivering would stop no matter how warm he made the cab.

Kelly walked around to the driver’s side, opened the door. Without climbing inside he reached under the steering wheel, put the key in the ignition, started the engine. He punched the rear defrost, cranked the heat, hesitated.

I have to go, he said. I have to go back into the house, but I will be back for you.

The boy didn’t speak, didn’t look in his direction. It wasn’t permission. He didn’t know if the boy understood. This was shock, trauma. The boy needed to go to a hospital, he needed Kelly to call the police, an ambulance. He needed Kelly to act, to keep rescuing him a little longer.

However many minutes it took — moving back into the kitchen to gather his tools into his backpack, then down into the basement for the hacksaw he’d left behind — each minute was its own crime. In the basement Kelly knew the bed was unoccupied, but when he entered the low room there appeared a vision of the boy still chained to the bed, an afterimage burning before him. He knew he’d saved the boy, but when he made it back to the truck the doors were locked, the boy gone. A new panic fluttered in Kelly’s chest — but then he looked again, saw the boy hidden in the dark of the snow-covered cab, crouched down in the space near the floorboards beneath the passenger seat — a space, Kelly remembered, as a kid he had called the pit.

The boy wouldn’t come out of the pit, wouldn’t unlock the doors or turn his terrified face toward Kelly. Kelly waited until he was sure the boy was looking away, then pulled his undershirt sleeve over his bare elbow and shattered the truck’s driver-side window. Before he drove the boy to the hospital he had to clear the safety glass from the boy’s seat, from the thick scrub of the boy’s hair.

When Kelly pulled into the hospital parking lot he maneuvered the truck under the emergency sign, the snow turned heavier than at the blue house, then stepped outside into the unplowed parking lot. He walked around the truck, opened the passenger door, lifted the boy’s limpness into his arms, said his own name to the boy for the first time. The snow fell on Kelly’s face and on the boy’s face, and neither said anything else as Kelly carried the boy across the parking lot. The boy didn’t look at Kelly, and Kelly thought he had to stop looking at the boy, had to watch where he was going instead of taking in every feature, every eyelash and pimple and steaming exhale, had to concentrate on making his body move. A few more steps, he said to the boy. A few more steps and they would be inside, passing through the bright and sterile and inextinguishable light of the hospital, toward the company of others, where they would be safer than they were now, alone.