Dance Real Slow (23 page)

When practice is finished, I sit in the basketball office waiting for Calvin and Kate to return from Lawrence. Hanging on the wall, there is a framed black-and-white photograph of Coach Miller's 1966 state championship team. The thing that strikes me most about this picture, other than the crew cuts, is how skinny and bone-straight everyone's legs seem to be. From afar, if you squint, they look like bars on a window.

At seven I leave, convinced I have made a mistake
and am supposed to meet them back at the house. The lights are off and Kate's white rental car is not in the driveway. Inside, the house is empty, and I turn up the heat and bring in the mail. Because it's late, I figure Calvin has already had his dinner, so I fix myself a peanut-butter sandwich and a glass of Scotch. There is not much mail: bills from the gas and telephone companies, an alumni magazine from Michigan Law School, a Stop 'n' Shop coupon flyer. On the bottom is a cream-colored envelope devoid of any postmarking, only my first name written across its middle in familiar black pen. Embossed in the upper left-hand corner is the red logo of Amis Motor Lodge. Nothing can feel like this, I think, leaning away from the table to catch my breath. I rip open the envelope from the side, also tearing the top edge from a matching sheet of Amis Motor Lodge stationery.

My eyes cannot read fast enough, but my brain understands, gleaning only those facts it needs to know. Kate has taken Calvin. They have gone away—to Texas, to Bali, to Budapest, she does not say. First, I am nauseous, laying my head on the table for support as my heart tries to shake its way up past my lungs. When I stand, my head fills with blood, quickly, and a shower of black spikes blurs my vision. The countertop is smooth and stable and I spread my hands flat, thumbs nearly touching. My arms have turned cold, pimpled with gooseflesh.

The woman at Amis Motor Lodge lets the phone ring eight times, I count, and when she finally answers, her voice is sharp and lucid and without compassion. She tells me Kate checked out this morning, and nothing
else. She says it is not her policy to interrogate guests, so she doesn't know where Kate was headed. Before I can ask her anything else, she hangs up.

There are others to call—Kate's parents, the police—but I don't. The jukebox is playing loud and scratchy and Zoe tells me to wait while she switches to the phone in the kitchen. By the time she comes on again I am crouched down beside the stove, the telephone cord stretched nearly straight.

“Sorry, I couldn't hear you,” she says.

In the background, someone asks for mashed potatoes and then there is the glassy sound of dishes being stacked.

“Calvin's gone,” I say, clearly.

“What do you mean, he's gone?”

“He's
gone
! Kate's got him.”

Now my voice is not so strong and it begins cracking, near the edges.

“Take it easy,” says Zoe. “Yesterday Kate told me something about buying Calvin some clothes, in Lawrence.”

“They're not in Lawrence.” My tongue is bloated, heavy, and I run it along the scaly roof of my mouth. “She has taken him someplace else. Someplace I don't know.”

“Listen, maybe they just—”

“There's a note.”

For a moment Zoe is silent and I can hear the scurried clicking of a ballpoint pen.

“Stay where you are, Gordon. I'm coming over and we'll go look for them.”

“She checked out of the motel,” I say. “I know 'cause I called over there. Don't you think that's the first thing I'd do? Call over there?”

I feel queasy, sliding down the cabinet and allowing my head to rest on the cool floor.

“Gordon, what was that? Are you all right?”

I do not answer.

“Just wait for me, okay?”

I release the phone and watch it slingshot across the room, smacking into the far wall and slowly, methodically, bouncing on its cord until it rocks to an easy dangle.

In the frigid night air, Kate's note has turned soggy and limp beneath my fingers. The note is spread against my right thigh and every so often I examine it, reading the words again just to make sure, to make sure that this is all real. I'm sitting on the sill outside Calvin's window, his beaded Indian belt twisted into an empty knot. Below, the crooked river of wheat, dusted white, casts lean shadows in the wedge of floodlight.

All I want, now, at this moment, is my son. There are no tears, I cannot even cry.

I suck deep icy breaths that cause the sides of my tongue to curl. A steady stream of snot oozes from both nostrils, collecting on my upper lip.

“Calvin,” I say, out loud.

Kate will not allow harm to come to him, she won't be careless. He is safe, my son, traveling the slick interstates seated in a rental car beside his mother, a woman he hardly knows. They will stop at a roadside convenience store, perhaps in Oklahoma or even as far
north as Iowa, and she will buy him Moon Pies and wax lips and orange soda.

The panic is debilitating. My mind skips from thought to thought, rapidly, never settling with any certainty, any clarity, on a method for rescuing him. A numbness climbs from my calves as they rub against the gutter, feet dangling below—like Calvin's atop the kitchen counter or a restaurant booth. “They don't reach,” he would say, because nothing fits his little body. Everything is too big. And now everything feels too large even for me, most especially this house. The only sound is a soft thumping as the insteps of my boots knock against each other.

This I remember, as my hand squeezes Kate's note into a tight, prickly ball. In Calvin's second week of life, days after we brought him home from the hospital and set up his basinet beside our bed, Kate decided to meet a friend for coffee, to take her initial rest from maternity. It was the first time in nine months, the first time ever, she and Calvin had been apart. Before she returned, Calvin began crying hysterically and although I tried to comfort him, singing while I carried him from room to room, he would not stop. Then, finally, I leaned in close so that our warm faces touched, and I offered my tongue. I don't know why I thought to do this, but he pulled my tongue into his mouth with force—sucking a lone, milkless nipple, tugging harder than I thought his tiny lips would allow.

Soon he was quiet and I placed him back on his blanket to sleep. I never did this, with my tongue, again and, in fact, never told Kate or anyone else about it. But
at that moment, shortly after he had closed his eyes and turned silent, I knew this experience would provide me with a strange confidence. The confidence of fatherhood. No matter what, I would learn to adapt and find a way to make my son's life easier.

Except for now. There is nothing I can do but wait to make things whole.

The snow comes in flakes so pinhead-small I squint to see them blowing down near the light. Zoe pulls her truck around back, leaving the engine idling and door ajar as she runs to the house. Just before she reaches the porch she stops, looking up at the soles of my boots.

“Are you okay?” she says.

I shake my head. She grabs for my feet, but when her fingers peak they are still too far away.

“You want to come down?”

When I don't answer, she enters the house and I can hear her walking through the kitchen and up the staircase behind me.

“Nothing can make this better,” I say, more to myself than to Zoe, who is now kneading my shoulders through the open window.

“It will be better when Calvin is back home.”

“No. Nothing will ever feel the same for him. You lose something, some part of yourself … Maybe he won't trust people anymore. Maybe he won't trust
me
.”

“He's too young. He won't understand.”

“He'll understand.”

When I was six my mother took me away. She awakened me at five-thirty in the morning and we loaded into
her station wagon and drove the two and a half hours to her sister's place in Jamestown, New York. We didn't stop until we were only a mile or so from my aunt's and it was then, parked on a soot-sprayed curb beside the road, that my mother said we were leaving my father. We only stayed for three days and my mother never told me why we had left Ohio, but at the time I remember believing my father must have done something terribly wrong. Late, during our first night at my aunt's house, I lay nearly asleep on the living-room couch. I am kidnapped, I kept thinking, pulling a stuffed, knitted rabbit close to my throat. And this I understood: I would never feel exactly the same about either of my parents again.

Calvin, too, will understand. He won't forget what's happening to him, no matter what I say afterwards. No matter how soon he is found.

Zoe checks with Mrs. Grafton and then calls the rental-car company from next door to see if Kate has returned her Ford and taken Calvin somewhere by plane.

“She's still got the car,” says Zoe, standing against the back wall, away from the cold air.

The evening passes and I make Zoe drive me along the back roads and smaller highways in search of my son. She does not need to tell me he is far away now, in another state. Still, I peer longingly into the windshield, my heart racing each time we spot a white vehicle—a car or a truck or, once, even a pale tractor. As the sun begins to pitch its way over the horizon, she parks at the base of my driveway and takes my hand, rubbing
it against the stretched, oily skin of her forehead.

“We'll get him back,” she says softly.

She holds me as the tears come, my head propped on her shoulder for support. We stay this way until finally, after nearly twenty minutes, she pushes me back and wipes my red, puckered eyes with the sleeve of her coat.

“Some tea will make you feel better.”

But, of course, she is wrong.

The kitchen is exactly as I left it, with the telephone receiver still hanging loose and the Amis Motor Lodge envelope lying in pieces on the table. Near the sink, Zoe squeezes honey into two mugs of tea and then sits beside me.

“Can I fix you a sandwich?” she asks, steam rising to meet her face.

When I shake my head Zoe raises her arm, as if she is taking a vow, but she's only reaching to hang up the phone. Then she lights a cigarette and hands it to me. I take a long, slippery drag and let the smoke stay in my lungs for as long as I'm able—longer. After exhaling, I feel lightheaded and for the second time in a day lie flat, back-down, on the kitchen floor.

“Soon he will not remember me,” I say. “She will hide him away and he will live a life separate from mine, a life where he can ride horses—his horses—whenever he wants.”

“You're talking nonsense.”

“She has money and can fight this in court. Really, I want to believe she couldn't win a custody battle. But there are things, things she could say that …”

“There is nothing,” says Zoe. “You're a good father, Gordon. She
left
both of you.”

In the quiet I can hear Mrs. Grafton slam the back door to her house, maybe after taking out the trash or sprinkling her stairs with rock salt.

“You don't know this,” I say, sitting up with my back against one of the table legs. “But not long after Calvin was born, something happened.” I take a breath. “There was a woman, a girl. She was sixteen and she lived with her family in the building beside our apartment. From the hallway, on the south side of our place, you could look directly into this girl's bedroom. At night, I used to leave Kate reading or watching TV in bed and take Calvin into the hall. There, I would stand with Calvin pressed to my chest watching this girl undress.

“One night, while I was staring out the window, I became pretty aroused.” I stop, biting on my lower lip before continuing. “I was standing there holding Calvin with one arm while … well, fondling myself with the other. Kate had come up behind and it wasn't until she was nearly beside me that I heard her. She told me she knew I'd been watching the girl most nights. We had a big fight and she said I should get help, professional help. Like it was a problem.

“We didn't talk about it after that. Ever. It should be nothing, really. But you never know what people will use against you.”

“There's no law against masturbation.”

“Who knows what a judge is going to think of as deviant behavior. Especially for a parent.”

“It will all be fine,” says Zoe.

She pinches off the words so they sound tight, without conviction.

A stiffness has settled into my lower back when I awaken on the couch in the late morning. The few hours of sleep came in fitful bursts, leaving my shirt clinging to patches of sweat below my armpits and across the well of my chest. There is a sound, like the backfiring of a car, coming from outside, except this banging is consistent, breaking the silence again every minute or so.

Beyond our dirt basketball court, calf-deep in aged wheat, Zoe stands aiming a shotgun at a ragged sack of sand. The ground near her feet is speckled with empty, red shotgun casings once heavy with birdseed-sized pellets. She gives the gun a pump and then shoots, this time causing the frayed upper edge of the sack to rupture and spill in a runlet across its folded paunch.

“It helps clear my head,” she says, watching as I move to her side. “The noise, the violence.”

“That's comforting.”

“I didn't mean for it to be comforting,” says Zoe. “It's just something I do.”

The sky is the flat, lifeless color of bone. Someone is burning cedar and the smell, like holiday spice, carries past us. Walking toward the house, Zoe puts her arm around my waist, bracing the gun against the raised leather seam of my belt. I can feel the warm barrel near my hip.

“Do you want to go out and look some more?” she asks.

“Where?” I say. “They could be fuckin' any place
by now. I want to look, I want to do something,
anything
, I just don't know what. Which direction would we even go in?”

She shrugs and leans the shotgun against the porch, butt-down. Then we sit quietly for a time, me on the ledge beside the fireplace and Zoe on the ottoman. When she rises, it is so she can make some calls from the telephone in the kitchen. The walls are thin and I can hear her speaking, first to the police and then to the school, letting them know I will not be at basketball practice today.