Vanished Read online

  The counterman had moved off a few feet. He was pouring coffee from a filmy glass pot.

  “Dry!” Wallace called out suddenly.

  The counterman set down the cup. “Dry what?” he said over his shoulder.

  Dotty chuckled.

  “Cornflakes … she don’t like milk in ’em,” he added sheepishly.

  “They got doughnuts,” Canny said hopefully, pointing to the pyramid of doughnuts under a scratched and yellowed plastic cover.

  Wallace shook his head.

  Canny leaned forward over the counter. “We could split one,” she whispered past Dotty.

  Again, he shook his head.

  “Please, Poppy,” she teased.

  “Give her a doughnut,” Dotty groaned, pinching the bridge of her nose, her eyes still closed.

  “I ain’t got enough,” Wallace hissed out of the side of his mouth.

  The counterman stood nearby, rattling through a shoebox of silverware until he found three spoons, which he placed in front of them.

  “Please, Poppy!” Canny said, her voice rising. “I gotta dime!”

  “That ain’t enough,” he said through clenched teeth. “And ’sides, last time, you threw up all over the back seat.”

  “Oh shit!” Dotty groaned, and buried her face in her hands. The counterman smiled.

  “I won’t get sick, Poppy, I promise! Please! Please, Poppy!”

  “No, dammit!” he hissed, staring straight ahead. “Now stop teasing!”

  “Jesus Christ,” Dotty growled, opening her red purse. “Here!” She pulled out a twenty-dollar bill and slapped it down next to the coffee the counterman had just set down. “Give her a friggin’ doughnut, will ya?”

  “Jelly, sugar, or plain?” the counterman asked Canny with a grin. Wallace could tell he was enjoying seeing him squirm. People usually did. It was something in his eyes, something in the way they gleamed, as quick and furtive as the frantic night-ward scratching of a rodent’s claws behind the walls.

  “No thanks,” Canny said, her eyes downcast and miserable.

  Wallace was staring at the twenty-dollar bill. Dotty snatched it back into her purse. “I found it,” she said. “Will you stop looking at me like that,” she growled, before spinning off the stool and flouncing into the ladies’ room. Canny gestured for Wallace to lean close. “It wasn’t a guy,” she whispered with her hand at his ear. “It was just some pills. I saw her sell some.”

  He nodded and sat up. Dotty always seemed to have money. He didn’t know which was worse—men paying her to go out with them or the pills. Some of them made her real happy and some made her sleep. And there were some that made her crazy-mean, like those times lately with Canny.

  The counterman brought Canny’s orange juice and a little box of cornflakes. Wallace grinned watching her tear back the top and leave it hinged. He had forgotten how she loved those little boxes. Once he had bought her a whole pack of them, each a different cereal. She had stretched them out a whole two weeks, eating just a little every morning.

  Dotty came out of the ladies’ room. She had combed her hair and put on lipstick and eyeliner. She sat down and picked her tee shirt away from her wet armpits, which she’d just washed. Halfway through her coffee, she perked up. “Hey! Where’s that?” she called, pointing up at the cardboard sign taped to the milk dispenser.

  “Where’s what?” the counterman asked, looking up from his paper.

  “Hortonville,” Dotty said. “The Hortonville Fair,” she read, peering at the sign.

  “North about two hundred, two hundred fifty miles,” he told her.

  “What’s it, like a county fair or something?”

  The counterman shrugged. “It’s a fair—rides and shows, I guess. I never been. My wife goes. She likes the flea markets. Always bringing home crap and what-nots.”

  Dotty looked at Wallace and smiled. “That’s what we do,” she told the counterman. “Flea markets. We probably sell the same kinda crap your wife brings home,” she said proudly.

  “Oh yah?” The counterman eased down the counter toward them. He rubbed his belly and shifted it into place. “You mean I got you to blame for all them little statues and empty perfume bottles she says’re gonna be worth a fortune some day.” He laughed.

  “Don’t laugh. I heard of that happening before,” Dotty said. She tossed her head to get her hair off her shoulders. “You never know what you’re gonna pick up.”

  “Ain’t that the truth?” the counterman said, leaning back with his elbows behind him in such a way that his belly thrust obscenely upward.

  “Once this girl I knew bought a ring. She only paid a coupla bucks for it, so even though it was pretty, she didn’t think much of it,” Dotty was saying. Her face flushed as she spoke. Her eyes brightened and her voice ran breathless and wet and her hands fluttered like little white flags and every now and again, she patted back her hair and flicked her tongue over her lips. “And then one night, this guy says, ‘Hey, I’ll give you twenty bucks for that hunk of glass.’ And she says, ‘Sure, why not,’ which was more than she paid for it, the twenty, that is. And so the guy goes off with the ring and we’re drinking Mai Tais, me and her, with the guy’s twenty bucks and all night we’re laughing and feeling guilty how she ripped him off and all. Then next thing we know, the guy’s back with a roll could choke a horse and he says, ‘Hey …’”

  Wallace stared into the sludge at the bottom of his cup. He’d heard this story hundreds of times. Sometimes it was a diamond ring. Sometimes a solid gold bracelet. Sometimes the guy with the roll felt guilty and gave them fifty or sixty more. Other times the girl started to bawl when she realized she’d let something so valuable just slip through her fingers like that and then Dotty would take it upon herself to set things straight.

  In any event, he and Canny could both relax now that Dotty was her old self again; full of chatter and that strange rush of laughter that always seemed to hang in the air a long time into silence, so that hours later, days later, it would still be with him like the after-cry of some distant wounded creature.

  She and the counterman were both laughing. He shook his finger at her. “Yah!” he said, nodding and shaking his finger. “You know when you came in, I thought you were familiar.” Hefting his belly into place, he leaned over the counter and studied her face. He snapped his fingers. “Raquel Welch, right?”

  “Right!” she squealed.

  “That’s who you remind me of,” the counterman said. “’Cept for the red hair.”

  She laughed happily. People told her that all the time. She lit a cigarette. “Okay,” she grinned and gestured at Wallace. “Now him—who’s he remind you of?”

  Under the counterman’s scrutiny, Wallace’s eyes scrambled from sign to sign. Dotty knew he hated this.

  “Well, I can tell you who he don’t remind me of,” the counterman chuckled. “Robert Redford, Cary Grant, John Wayne, Burt Reynolds …”

  “No, really!” Dotty giggled, squirming on the stool. “Look close.”

  The counterman leaned even closer and studied Wallace’s narrow, stubbly face. Wallace blinked. Like Dotty’s, the counterman’s breath smelled of stale booze.

  “I dunno,” the counterman said. He shook his head and looked at Dotty.

  “Willie Nelson!” she cried. “Without the pigtails of course.”

  The counterman narrowed his eyes and angled his head. Wallace sighed and looked down at Canny. With her fingers, she was eating her cereal flake by flake.

  “You know, you’re right!” the counterman said. “He does. It’s the short hair throws ya off.”

  “And them mean little eyes,” Dotty said.

  “Momma!” Canny chided, and the counterman laughed.

  Wallace wanted to go, but Dotty had ordered another coffee. She lit another cigarette and stretched back lazily. The counterman set down the coffee and started to scrub the countertop in front of her. “I think Raquel’s taller’n you,” he said with a thoughtful frown as if it matt
ered, as if it were the least bit important.

  “Nope!” Dotty said, delighted to be back on the subject again. “We’re the ’zact same. Five-nine.”

  The counterman folded his arms and looked her over. “How ’bout the eyes? Hers are brown, right?”

  “Same as me,” Dotty said, blowing on the hot coffee. “Green.”

  The counterman’s gaze sank to the front of her tee shirt, which said HANDS OFF in glittery red letters.

  “Same,” Dotty laughed.

  The counterman’s face reddened. “How ’bout you,” he said to Canny. “Who do you look like?”

  Canny shrugged.

  “You sure don’t look like Raquel or Willie here,” he said, leaning down and tweaking her nose. “Not with them big blue eyes and that blondie hair.”

  “How much I owe you?” Wallace growled, getting off the stool.

  “Two bucks,” the counterman said, a little startled by this sudden shift in mood.

  Dotty swiveled off her stool and went outside. Canny grabbed her cereal box and chased after her.

  The counterman stood in the window, scratching his belly. He watched them get into their beat-up Chevy. The rear window and the trunk were plastered with decals and bumper stickers and the roof was lashed with boxes. As they backed around, then turned in front of the diner, Dotty blew him a kiss with her middle finger.

  “Take your pick,” she said, opening her purse.

  “Momma!” Canny squealed, hanging over the seat. “I didn’t see you buy any of these,” she said, choosing a furry white sugar doughnut.

  “Neither did that asshole,” Dotty laughed. Before Wallace could say anything, she held her fingers to his mouth for him to lick off the sugar.

  At four o’clock they had only traveled twenty miles farther than the diner: First, the fan belt had snapped and Wallace had to walk four miles into the nearest town and four miles back with the new one. After he got the fan belt on, he had driven just a few more miles when the engine overheated and the radiator boiled dry.

  He came along the edge of the roadbed now with a bucket of water and a can of coolant. He was exhausted. His shoulders ached and his eyes were red-rimmed and bloodshot under the fiery sun. The heat of the highway stung through the thin soles of his old black sneakers. His right foot dragged more than it usually did. Cars blurred past, spitting back bits of gravel like birdshot against his legs. He groaned when he saw the steep rise ahead. As he began to climb, his leg trembled and every step stabbed pain up his shinbone.

  When he was just a boy and new to the Home, a doctor had come along the rows of beds early one morning and flashed a light in Aubrey’s face. The doctor checked his clipboard and then he pulled down the bed covers and told the boy to straighten out his right leg. It only took him a few minutes to fit the cold metal brace to the boy’s leg and flap the back piece under his heel. He fastened the straps and tightened the screws and went on his way so quickly that Aubrey fell asleep, certain that it had been a dream, until the bell rang and he needed help out of bed.

  “What’s he need it for?” his father had asked on his last visit. The duty counselor wasn’t sure. Sunday counselors never knew much. So his father asked him. “I dunno,” Aubrey said. “You got to know,” his father, said. “You don’t jest lay there and let them strap a thing like that to you and never ask why … ’less you’re a retard.”

  A few years later, another doctor came by all in a sweat and undid the contraption, which should have been put on Barney Hobbs But by then, Barney Hobbs was long gone and Aubrey’s withered and hairless leg was forever fused in its wide-angled step. Without his brace, he had a terrible time. Not only did he have to learn a whole new way to walk, but his new weightlessness frightened him. Some days it felt as if no part of him was real or solid enough to keep him from drifting off the face of the earth.

  Now as he came to the top of the hill, he staggered a moment under the weight of the pail. Looking down, he saw no car, just the beginning of another hill, this one even higher than the one he had just climbed. He set down the pail and took off his baseball cap, wiping sweat from his eyes with the back of his hand. Coming down the opposite hill, then climbing this one, was a liver-colored van with gold curtains on the windows. The driver sat high over the wheel. Wallace’s eyes widened painfully on the young, bare-armed woman next to him. Her long, dusky hair streamed out the window as the van whizzed past. “Dotty,” he tried to say, but his throat was dry and tight as his gut. Tears stood in his eyes that swam like milky lenses. He began again to climb this misshapen, wobbly hill, with the water sloshing against the sides of the bucket and running down his leg, and he knew, was absolutely certain that when he got to the top the forlorn and faded car nose down in the dusty weeds below would be empty. Of course it would be.

  This was the moment he had always dreaded, this abandonment, which of all the mysteries and all the things he didn’t know about her, was the one certainty, that one fixed point to which he had returned again and again, so that the loss of her had come to be as much of a throb in him as his jawful of stained teeth, splintered and rotten with the phantom pain that threatened to devour him with every bite, hot and cold, sweet and sour, and every breath, in and out. He was panting now as he ran toward the car, the empty car. Of course it would be empty, empty like that quiet center of his being, that strange and simple silence. Everything beyond was fairy tale, words from a story, just as a voice on the phone was no more than that—a voice on the phone. For some reason, he used to call late at night. Maybe it was the two boys. Maybe he was afraid if he heard their voices, the horror of what he had done would all come true. He never spoke, just listened; for what was there to say? How could he explain what he had never gotten straight in his own head; except to think, It just happened. That was all. Some things just happen and there’s nothing anyone can do.…

  “I know who this is,” she’d say. “You don’t fool me. Don’t bother us anymore.” Then one night, she whispered in the cackly witch voice she always used in the stories, “They’re all gone. Her and the two boys. Moved away and gone forever, so stop calling here.” So he did. Stopped calling and started guarding against the day of Dotty’s leaving and Canny’s; Canny, who wasn’t his, but in a way was, he had tried once to explain to Dotty, was his, because she was all he had, like he was all she had in the whole world. “That’s not true, she’s got me,” Dotty flared back, and though he knew that wasn’t true, he took those words and put them in that quiet place, along with the old phone number, Piedmont 8-6705 and she’s got me, because there, somehow, they were all connected and real.

  “Where the fuck’ve you been?” she called out the window.

  He looked inside, relieved to see Canny asleep with her head in Dotty’s lap. Beads of sweat frothed her temples. Her lips were white and flaky. He stuck his hand through the window and felt Canny’s forehead.

  “She’s hot,” he said.

  “Course she’s hot,” Dotty said, batting away his hand. “Baking in this shitbox all day long, you’d be hot too.”

  He filled the radiator with water and added the coolant, then closed the hood as gently as possible so as not to wake Canny. Dotty stared at him through the smutty windshield. When he got into the car, she continued to stare straight ahead.

  “Think she’s sick?” he asked.

  “No, I don’t think she’s sick!” she said disgustedly.

  “She looks sick,” he said, turning the key with a hopeful wince until the engine caught. He smiled. “Mebbe we oughta find a place for the night,” he called over the racing motor. “Get a good night’s sleep.”

  “We’re going to Hortonville,” she said. “You promised.”

  He pulled onto the highway. All last night’s driving and today’s walking had exhausted him. But they were on their way to Hortonville, wherever the hell that was, and that was that. Just like always, wherever she wanted to go, he always took her. Up one highway and down the next, so that after a while they all looked the sa
me to him now; maybe even were in a sense, the very same road, in and out of the same towns that were all alike, though they bore different names like Moundsville and Hayestown, with the same tired people drifting over the same tired streets and crumbled curbstones, home to the same tired shacks and bunks and rooms they could let a night or a season or until she was ready to move on for whatever the reason or whim: too hot, too cold, the landlady’s too nosy, or the guy looked at me funny like he knew me from someplace, she’d gasp as she ran around filling up the boxes and bags they never discarded, but lived out of. Even Canny was expert at it now, always keeping her teddy bear and her coloring books and crayons in a good strong bag, ready to pack at a moment’s notice.

  “Where we going?” Canny would ask.

  “Ask your Momma,” he’d say.

  Where are we? Ask your Momma. When we gonna get there? Ask your Momma.

  “Don’t you know anything, Poppy?” she’d say in that same faint, sorrowing, watchful tone of his boys.

  Soon, they were seeing signs for Hortonville. On telephone poles and the sides of barns and even now on the radio. “The Hortonville Fair,” the announcer drawled in a high nasal tone.

  “Sounds like you, Aubie,” Dotty laughed, pointing at the radio.

  “The world’s biggest twenty-four-hour flea market and rides and bingo and sideshows! Shop and relax while your kids Shoot the Bullet and hubby enjoys sparkling refreshment in the genuine, authentic Munich Beer Garden. Admission is absolutely free, and for all you entrepreneurs out there, selling space is still available.”

  Dotty was pawing through the glove compartment. She shook out a map and brought it close to her face. “Jesus, I can’t hardly see the route numbers,” she said.

  “Mebbe you need glasses,” he said, glancing through the mirror at Canny, who was asleep again. At the last rest stop, he had taken the records out of the box and stacked them on the floor, with blankets over them. Canny had more room to stretch out now. She had been complaining of a sick stomach and her head felt sweaty and hotter than before.