Lost (21 page)

The boy and dog appeared, caught a ride and left, appeared and left, but where they came from, where he ate, slept, no one knew. They were seen rising from a weed-thatched ditch alongside the road one morning, the boy picking the brown leaves of his cover from his clothes. A farmer returning to his isolated home from a church council meeting found the contents of his refrigerator upset and rummaged through and some of his son's work clothes missing, including an old pair of shoes, but nothing else had been touched. Fifty miles farther south, a country wife wiped her hands on her apron, tucked the edges of her hair into her headscarf, and opened the front door on a scraggly, misbegotten boy. “Could I get a glass of water?” he asked. “I need to take a pill for my headaches.” She observed his crumpled, unwashed clothes and told him to wait there on the porch. Afterward she was certain he had been in the house. It was a feeling, a sense of things disturbed, and a lingering, almost palpable odor like the stench of a moldy dog.

To anyone who would give him a few minutes, the boy hastened to show two pictures, the first a torn snapshot of a woman. “Have you seen this woman?” he would ask. “Did she stop here, pass through here, driving an old Buick? She's got a little girl with her. Here, I'll show ya.” He'd draw out the other picture ripped from a newspaper. “This one's of my sister. Her name's Mamie. Have you seen her with that woman? That woman just took her. Didn't ask anybody. She just did it. And I've got to find 'em. They're ridin' in an old Buick.” He asked the same questions in much the same words again and again, until the newspaper photograph began to disintegrate at the folds.

A man wheeled his rack of tires out on the drive to open his gas station and saw the boy and dog approach from the side of the building. “Yeah,” the man said in answer to Sherman's question. “It was evening, day before yesterday.” In another town, in Woolworth's, the boy went from counter to counter and questioned the clerks, and one of them said, “She looks kinda familiar. Maybe I saw her, I don't know. There wasn't any girl with her, though.” But when he tried to press for details, leaning close over the counters or stepping behind partitions, they saw the hard glint in his eyes and sensed more than that: a force full of rage. The dog was never far behind.

They were dirty and they stank and they moved like wraiths upon the land. Grime had collected in the creases of the boy's skin and he smelled like the dog, of soured sweat and damp wood rot and wet ferreting animals. People shrank from them because of the odor and because of the dog, but the boy seemed oblivious to it. They ate at roadside diners and dinettes, always taking the sandwiches and plate lunches outside, and when they were stranded on the road, they stole what they could to get by. They slept together in whatever place presented itself—in unlocked cars and in the unlocked bathrooms of gas stations when it was colder. In the daytime, after the boy had been up most of the night and couldn't get a ride, they slept in deserted sheds and outbuildings and in culverts along the road. Climbing out of the ditch on a lonesome stretch of highway, he stuck out his thumb and walked and waited until one of the passing cars swerved to the side of the road, only to see it tear away, throwing up gravel, when the Chinaman lumbered out of the weeds. It was hard getting rides, and getting harder all the time.

On milder days, policemen saw him hanging around gas stations, near the doorways of restaurants, in front of shops displaying the new 12-inch television sets, but never for long; a runaway, they thought without noticing how intently he listened to the news being broadcast. He begged most of his rides at gas stations when the cars and trucks were at a standstill, the drivers captive to at least some of his plea. When his luck ran out completely, he offered them five or ten dollars for a ride. Eventually someone would say, “Well, all right. Come on. Get in the back seat. But you damned well better keep a hand on that dog.”

After they were on the road, if the radio wasn't already turned on, he would say, “Could we play the radio? I used to have an old radio, but it never did work right.” Then, until the news came on, he studied very carefully how they drove their cars and trucks. With complete absorption, he watched the coordination of hands and feet, noticed the movement of feet on clutch, brake, and accelerator. One driver told him how to sight down the hood a distance of fifty feet and use the side of the road as a guide to steer by rather than focus on the road immediately ahead. That way a passing car at night wasn't blinding. A young driver let him shift the gears with the long floorboard stick. As he grew bolder, he told them, “If I could get somebody to turn me loose in a rig like this, I believe I could figure it out all by myself and drive it. I know I could. I've been studying how to do it. If you'd let me, I bet I could drive this car right now.”

Two nights south of Gambria, in a freezing rain storm, Sherman and the Chinaman clambered down from a flap-covered truck at an all-night truck stop. Through the bright-colored calligraphy of light, truckers milled in and out of the coffee shop. Sherman stood between the main door and a pyramid of oilcans, asking for rides as the men returned to their trucks. It was after 2:00 a.m, and very cold. He wore two sets of clothes now, for the extra warmth, but also, he thought, if he got in a jam he could shuck the outer shell of clothes and look entirely different to an unsuspecting eye. When the crowd had dwindled away, he waited inside the restaurant door to get warm, and caught the end of a news broadcast: “…
Fielding Heights police now believe there may be a connection between the disappearance last Sunday evening of Patsy and Walter Aldridge, the six- and five-year-old children of Mrs. Adele Aldridge, and the similar disappearance of seven-year-old Mamie Louise Abbott in Graylie, a rural community north of Scranton.… Police have established a special telephone number
…”

On the inside flap of a matchbook, Sherman wrote:
ADELL
. He asked the waitress, who had loaned him her pencil, how to spell Aldridge.

He shook two of the pills into his mouth, swallowed them, and counted the ones remaining in his bottle. Only six left. He returned the small bottle to his pocket. The double dose of medicine jolted him with a sensation of renewal. It lifted him. His body constricted; his eyesight cleared. The world of Mill Run Drive in Fielding Heights came to him in sudden sharp clarity. He stroked the Chinaman's head with his good hand and stepped from the curb. Thunder cracked over them and two crippled shards of light danced on a rooftop lightning rod. The rain drummed harder, splattering the sidewalk. His spine shivered involuntarily as the painkillers knitted his muscles.

The house was silent and dark. He cut the telephone line with his pocketknife. He slit the screen wire down and across at the lower corner of the wood frame, reached in, and inched the window up with his fingertips until he could slide it open and crawl into the house. He stood inside the curtains and closed the window. Nothing stirred. The Chinaman watched him from the other side of the glass. Sherman motioned him down, then moved out of the curtains and away from the three tall windows overlooking the shallow porch.

The contours of furniture glowed with the penetration of streetlight. He noticed two drinking glasses and a bottle of liquor on an end table, along with a pair of high-heeled slippers. Lapping over the edge of the coffee table was a clutter of
Look
and
Photoplay
magazines. A coverlet had been left wadded on the sofa. His hair and clothes were sopping wet. He wiped his hair on the coverlet and dropped it. The beam of his pencil flashlight sliced over walls, entryways, doors, and settled on a black-and-white celluloid clock, softly grinding in the dark. Three-thirty. He shut off the light. His shadow ebbed over the furniture.

When he stepped from the living-room rug, the bare floor groaned beneath him. Listening for any other noise, he stood very still before proceeding down the hall toward the back of the house. Doors hung open in the dark. He scanned the kids' unoccupied room and eased back. In the bathroom, ghostly silk stockings hung like withered skins on a spindly rack. Behind it, a door to the other bedroom stood open a few inches. He touched the stockings and they were dry. He glimpsed his face in the medicine-cabinet mirror as he turned. Only the prominent features of his face caught the faint glimmering streetlight; the darkness covered his clothes. He backed into the hall.

Standing just outside the door to the other bedroom, he heard the short roll of bedsprings, the rustling of sheets. He waited. The door was partially open; he stepped through it carefully. A window blind had been left up; through the rainy glass, the bank of streetlight rippled as if it were alive. Tangled in the ropy covers, she was sprawled in the center of the bed, her face mashed sideways into the pillow. Her hair was pinned up in knots with crossed bobby pins. She was snoring very lightly, soft and smooth. Noiselessly he moved away from her.

He retreated to the dimly lit windows of the living room. Through a shadowed doorway, he saw a rack of dishes glowing like teeth in the semi-darkness and went toward it. The kitchen counters held the makings of a feast: pies and cakes and loaves of bread, a ham embedded with pineapple circles and cherries. He dug out one of the pineapple pieces, slipped it into his mouth, and went to find the fuse box.

He did not know until he heard the swish of her nightgown that she was very near. “Davy? Is that you?” Her voice sounded soft and dream-weary. “Davy … Who is it? Jerry? Oh, my God.” He lifted his head and stared at her stricken eyes, heard her sharp intake of breath. He had just stepped up from the landing to the basement. The storm had slackened; a streak of drab moonlight divided them. His excitement was like terror and her terror was very real; and so, terrified, neither of them moved, the air dangling between them. He needed a long deep breath, now that he had been discovered, but his breath stalled in his throat and he strained to stay quiet. He could not let her scream; if she tried to, he would have to stop her.

Adele Aldridge went on looking at him, stony-eyed. Then she swallowed and blinked her eyes countless quick times, a flurry of impulses shooting through her face. She looked white with fear. Even her arm, outstretched, seemed to grow whiter and more stationary with each passing moment, fossilizing in the air like Lot's wife turning to salt.

It troubled him; this was not how he had imagined it would be. But it was too late to retrace his steps.

“Nobody's gonna hurtcha,” he said at last, composing his voice while he stood, no more than five feet from her, looking at the shadowed curve of her body through the skimpy film of her gown. He struggled to keep his voice calm and firm. “I didn't come to hurt you,” he said, knowing if anything would keep her from screaming, short of the knife, it would have to be what he said and how he said it. “Just don't scream.”

She did scream then, in a way, after all, the fear she had held in her body spewing from her lips in a long sob. She lowered her arm, closed her eyes, and licked her lips, and when she drew breath, it shuddered in.

He had started to speak to her again when she broke in: “Please … what do you want? How'd you get in here? Please, now—you're just a kid. What're you doing here? Take whatever you want. But please, I want you to leave—leave now.”

“I don't want to hurtcha,” he said, “but you gotta promise to be good, and not try anything, and listen to me—willya listen to me? And let me tell you why I'm here? Why I had to come here? I don't want your things, I'm not here to take your things … because, see, somebody took something that's mine, maybe the same woman that took your little kids and all I want is for you to listen to me. Wouldn't you do that and just not scream, Mrs. Aldridge?”

The mention of her children and her name sank through her face like light spreading in water, but he didn't give her much time. When she didn't answer immediately, he began to talk again, keeping his voice quiet. “I can explain. Honest, Mrs. Aldridge. Wouldn't you just listen?” He spoke on and on, his voice never pausing for long, filling the time until she gave some sign of acknowledgment. Although he knew she could not see it clearly, he took the disintegrating newspaper photograph from his pocket and shook it open. “This here's a picture of my little sister. Her name's Mamie.” Then he brought out the other photograph. “And this woman took her while she was at the hospital. I know she did. She's pro'bly the one took your kids.” He saw the change come to her face, the softening of fear. He folded the pictures and put them away, letting her make up her mind, waited and let the time build heavy with waiting, and she revealed herself in the most bewildering way: she began to pluck the bobby pins from her hair, raking them out with her fingers and dropping them on the metal tabletop. Finally he asked her again, softly, “Wouldn'tcha listen to me?” And she nodded, but her voice still quivered when she said, “For just a minute, if you'll leave then. Let me get a drink.”

She stepped past him to the cupboard. She took out a tray which held several glasses and a bottle of whiskey. Her hands were trembling. She uncapped a bottle and poured the glass full, spilling a little down the sides. The smell of whiskey thinned in the air. She took a long drink. Then another, and filled the glass again. He didn't know what she thought of what he'd said. When she turned away, she kept her head bowed. He was drenched with sweat and rain, his clothes soaked through. “That woman,” Sherman said. “I have to find her. I
have
to. She pro'bly took your little boy and girl, too.”

The woman sighed, glanced at him. “Nobody knows what happened to Patsy and Walter.” She crossed one arm under her breasts to prop up her drinking arm. In her trembling hand, the whiskey swished softly in the glass.

“I do,” he said. “I know what happened. And sooner or later I'm gonna catch up with 'er. That's why I came here. Maybe the police told you something that might help me look for 'em. I figure she's a day ahead of me, maybe two at most. I can get your kids back.” He heard a momentary shift in her breathing, but nothing registered in her face.