The Outlaw Album: Stories

FLORIANNE

If they ever catch who took my daughter, I’ll probably know him. Maybe I’ve known him all my life; maybe he’s only a familiar face and name. I might have given him credit at the store, let his tab ride till next Friday or the one after, carried groceries to the car for his wife, cut two pounds from a chub of bologna and shaved it paper-thin the way he likes. Maybe he leans on the counter and repeats his favorite jokes, and I laugh at the right parts while recalling the sound of his mitt snapping shut when he shagged fly balls long ago.

I suspect everybody around here and nobody special.

At the opening of each deer season I hope this time she’ll be found. Eleven hunts have come and gone now, and others have been stumbled across in culverts, under old plywood, wrapped carefully in white sheets, and piled over with leaves, but not my girl. This is rough country, though, steep hills, rocky bottoms, hard ground to walk on, gloomy from the trees, and she could be ten feet away as three hunters pass and they’d all miss her. She might lie somewhere else, I guess, under a barn or the freshest patch of concrete in a bachelor’s basement, but that’s not how it comes to me. I can hear wind in the trees and limbs tapping limbs and feel rain.

She disappeared only a quarter mile down our road, taken out of the churchyard where she was mowing the grass, putting a few bucks in her pocket for Saturday night. There are exactly three homes between ours and the church and no strangers in any of them. The lawn mower was still running, blatting and fuming untended beside the tall stone church, until the nearest neighbor noticed the annoying noise no longer moved to and fro and looked from a window. She’d’ve turned seventeen in a month. There’s never been another sign of her.

Sometimes I’ll be at the cash register and catch somebody looking at me in a sort of funny way, at such a slant as to appear sneaky, or with lips curled too high on one end, and think, Is that him? Is he watching me sack groceries and gloating? Does that shifty glance say I fucked your daughter, Henry, from every which angle that felt good to me, then choked the light from her pretty eyes and put her…Should I grab him now while he’s handy and beat on him till he tells me where I can rake her bones together?

At some point every old friend sensed my suspicion aim their way and several couldn’t get over that moment of recognition, even after my suspicion rotated to the next ol’ buddy, or slightly creepy cousin, that mailman with the pencil mustache. There was no blood, no hair strands snatched loose in a fight or torn bits of her blouse, and she was a strong girl, so he had a gun to her head or she trusted him enough to go sit in his truck a minute, hang out, sip a soda. That brings everybody I know into the picture.

Her mother ran west when the girl was five. I was too steady for her taste, too regular, too much the same one day to another. She wanted fizzy drinks and jukeboxes, different arms to hold her every week or two. She remembered her daughter’s birthday for a few years, sent a gift at Christmas, then she just didn’t anymore. She’d turned that page, lit a fresh cigarette, poured a cold one, found new lips to kiss.

I went to all the trouble and tracked her to Reno once our girl was gone, and she said, “Everything with you is a downer, Henry. I just can’t stand your blah-blah-blah negative attitude. You’re so selfish that way. She’ll turn up.”

“She didn’t leave—she was taken.”

“What’s your proof? You got any?”

“You don’t even know her.”

The phone went click, and that was it. She has yet to call with another question.

I always wondered if her mom’s leaving was why the girl ran to fat for so long, had a roly-poly figure until the year before she went gone. She took up swimming, jogging, some flowery-sounding yoga class at the Civic Center, ate salads and more salads and rice cakes. She made herself into a size she hadn’t believed she could ever be. That meant so much to her, to finally have a figure clothes looked good on, to feel a little admired when lolling around the pool in town, wear shorts to the ballpark on summer nights.

I’ve often thought about that: If she’d stayed chunky would she be here now?

Such questions popping up keep the hurt fresh.

And sometimes I think, Were there two of them? Three?

How much of our world is in on this?