The More They Disappear (15 page)

He wanted desperately to travel back in time, erase everything that had happened since he'd first stolen a drug sample and sold it. He wanted his textbooks to offer the same comfortable escape they had for the past year, but the time for magical thinking was over. The sun continued to rise and the atrium filled with a dusty light. Mark stacked his books on the table and left them. A symbolic gesture. His life as a student was over and he needed to come to terms with that.

*   *   *

Harlan ducked out of the office and picked up two boxes of campaign signs he'd printed on the cheap. He figured it was okay to start campaigning now that Lew was buried, okay to at least put the word out. When he dropped the signs off at his house, he found the neighbor girl, Mattie, crouched on his porch steps and picking at a scab.

“You need some help?” she asked, jumping to her feet as Harlan grabbed a box from the truck bed. She scrambled up onto the Ford, her tattered sneakers knocking rust from the tailgate. “Man, this thing is older than my daddy's car,” she said, turning her attention to the rust and scratching at it much as she had the scab. Blood ran a thin course down her leg and pooled in a loose, white sock.

“It's old,” Harlan admitted and pointed to the second box. Mattie lifted it over the side and onto his shoulder. “What's your daddy drive?” he asked.

“Drunk,” she said and Harlan tried not to smile. “Naw, he drives … I don't know what you'd call it. The body is an El Camino but the engine is from a Ford. Other parts he grabbed out of whatever junked-out beater he could find. It's a mutt car.” She rushed ahead to the porch and put out her hands to stack the boxes. “I'm taking the driver's test next month, and I told my dad that if he lets me use his car, I'll rip off one of those Mercedes hood things and solder it on the front all classy-like.”

“You think it's smart to talk about breaking the law in front of the sheriff?”

“Don't be rude now,” she said. “I didn't have to help you carry these.”

“I didn't ask.”

Mattie put a finger to her mouth and bit it, scrunched up her nose. She had large, open pores, some of which had turned into pimples, and her legs were rubbed red, like she'd shaved with a dull razor. Her clothes were secondhand things, pillowed over her lanky body, but she was sturdy—every inch of her muscle or bone. “You wanna come pick through the ashes of that fire with me?” she asked.

“I've already been there. You won't find much of value.”

“It's just something to do.”

“Maybe another time.”

She tapped her fingers on one of the boxes. “What's in these anyway?”

“Stuff.”

“Sounds interesting.” She lifted a necklace with a pocketknife charm from under her shirt, cut open the box, and pulled out one of the signs, reading it aloud. “Harlan Dupee for sheriff,” she said, butchering his last name.

“It's ‘Du-pay.'”

“Oh, Du-pay. Classy. I thought you was already sheriff after that last guy died.”

“Not for long unless I win the election. You gonna vote for me?”

“Not old enough. Sorry.”

“Maybe you can put up signs at the Spanish Manor.”

“Sure. But dogs'd just piss on them. Or people.” She returned to the scab, picked at the dried blood. She licked two fingers and swirled it in a mess. “You already knew that, though. My daddy told me you was once poor like us, that you wasn't bigger than your britches 'til recently.”

“Guess your dad knows everything, huh?”

“Naw. He's a puffy bastard. Like how he taught me to work on cars as if it was father-daughter bonding and now he just orders me around. Mattie, fix this, Mattie, fix that.” She pulled a pack of Pall Malls from her pocket. “He don't pay, so I steal my wages in smokes.” She lit a cigarette, inhaled, and coughed like an amateur.

“He sounds pretty rough,” Harlan said. “Maybe the sheriff should pay him a visit.”

Mattie beamed. “Yeah right.” She threw a couple of phantom punches. “Henry would make mincemeat out of you.” A bee buzzed nearby and came to rest along the lip of an Ale-8 bottle to suck syrup. Mattie pointed and said, “He looks just like one of your advertisements.”

Harlan studied the sign she'd pulled out. Some of the ink came off on his fingers. He'd used his full name in all caps across the top—black over a yellow background.
HARLAN DUPEE
. Most people just knew him as Harlan. Harlan that drives the old truck. Harlan whose daddy drowned in the river. Harlan who lives in that run-down shack. Below his name the words
FOR SHERIFF
were printed. He was proud of the sign—its simple honesty, the future it portended. “Maybe I should've gone with red, white, and blue.”

“Naw,” Mattie said, “everyone does that. You're different.” She crouched close to the bee and blew smoke on it.

“You're gonna make him angry,” Harlan said.

“Nuh-uh. This stuns 'em.” She blew another cloud and the bee stumbled along the edge of the bottle, its legs twitching.

“So that boy from the other night, is he your steady?”

Mattie straightened up. Her reddish-brown hair was uncombed and she shook it before her face, peering through the tangles while she rubbed the hairs on her wrist. “Why do you want to know?”

“Just making conversation.”

“I wouldn't date a chubster like Lard. That's his name you know. His real name is Lawrence, but people been calling him Lard ever since he was a fat baby. It's good you showed up. He would have blabbed about it otherwise.”

“Why'd you have relations with him if you don't like him?”

“First off, we were fucking. Second off, it was a transaction. Lard gave me something for my trouble.”

“What's that?”

“Something you don't tell the sheriff about.”

Harlan sat on the porch steps and patted the space next to him. “How about I promise immunity.”

“You promise?”

“Promise.”

Mattie accepted the invitation reluctantly, held out her pinkie and made him swear. “Lard gave me a couple pills,” she said. “Nothing much.”

“What kind of pills? Tylenol? Birth control?”

She rolled her eyes and offered him a fake smile. “Just some stuff for aches and pains.”

“Where'd Lard get the pills?”

Mattie made a big show of avoiding the question, stood up, and stomped away. “I thought we was gonna be friends,” she said, “but you're just trying to get me to snitch.”

“I'm not taking out the handcuffs,” Harlan said. “I just want to chat, maybe convince you to stop having sex and doing drugs. That sort of thing.”

She put her hands on her hips, thumbs forward, elbows cocked back. “Do you like me, Harlan Du-pay?”

“I'd like you more if you started taking care of yourself.”

She cat-walked up to him. “Let's roll a joint,” she said. “I know you smoke.”

“No.”

“You're a good guy.” She sat next to him again, rested her head against his shoulder.

Harlan looked into the dusty dandruff along her scalp and shrugged her away. “Time for you to go home, Mattie,” he said. “I've got grown-up business.”

“What'd you think I was suggesting?” she asked, pursing her pale lips. “'Cause I don't think it would work. You want to be sheriff, and I'm just trailer park trash. People wouldn't understand our mismatched love.”

“Funny,” Harlan said.

Something about the girl put him at ease—the way she jumped from subject to subject as the boredom set in, the way she couldn't keep still. “What do those pills do?” he asked. “They must do something if you sleep with boys named Lard to get them.”

“Oh. They just make your body go numb,” she said. “Send this sort of cool water through your veins and turn all your worries away. Some people take uppers so they can keep doing stuff. I did that once, but it made me feel like my arms weren't mine. I didn't like that. I like the lay-in-the-grass-and-look-at-the-sky pills.”

“Kids have died taking them.”

“I ain't dead,” she crowed. “Besides, I can't even afford the good pills. Those are for rich kids now. I wouldn't let Lard stick his stubby in me for nothing.”

“So Lard deals?”

“Oh, Jesus Christ, Harlan. You being a cop again? Lard sneaks them off his daddy who's got this back thing. He takes a couple and convinces some girl to fuck him. Lard likes skinny girls.”

Harlan didn't want to know more. Mattie acted as if her life were normal, which in its way it was, but that didn't make it right. She was still just a kid. “You want a Coca-Cola?” he asked and opened the cooler he kept on his porch. The tepid water floated a couple of sodas and some dead insects. A waterbug had managed to make a home there and skated across the surface with frog-leg kicks.

“You know how I like my Coke?” she said. “With big chunky ice in a Styrofoam cup.”

“Settle for lukewarm in a can?” He handed her the soda and popped his own. “You know, I hate to sound like an old fart, but things have changed since I was your age. Not so much kids breaking the law. They've always stolen what isn't theirs and started fights and gotten high. It's just that now they rob houses and the fighting involves guns and the drugs can kill you. I've caught twelve-year-olds sucking nitrous from Reddi-wip canisters and drinking cough syrup. I even found one kid setting a plastic garbage pail on fire and huffing the fumes.”

“That's pretty desperate.”

“I don't know what to do about it.”

“Why do you have to do anything? It's their choice to get high. And they don't hurt nobody besides themselves.”

Harlan thought about his own father—all boozy breath and heavy belt, purple fists and white rage. He could still touch the scars from a nail-filled two-by-four swung into his shoulder. “Your daddy told the truth,” he said. “I grew up poor.” He motioned toward the house. “Shit, this ain't a castle. But I saw how all that getting fucked up hurts someone eventually.” He pulled down his collar and showed her the scars, scattered like buckshot.

Mattie clutched the Coke in both hands and brought it to her mouth, looked away. “Let's say you caught me with pills,” she said. “What would you do?”

“I'd ask you where you got them.”

“And I'd say they're for my grandma. She forgets to take them, so I remember for her.”

“I'd check on the prescription.”

“And you'd find out I don't even have a grandma.”

“So I'd arrest you.”

“Okay, but what if I had a doctor's note of my own. 'Cause maybe I have some pain, too. Most people do. And maybe I'd go across the river to a doctor in Ohio and get a second note for all that pain.”

“You're not telling me anything I don't already know.”

“You don't want to be sheriff, Harlan. Deep down you're like us over at the Spanish Manor. We don't care who the sheriff is.” She drained her Coke, stood up, and kicked at the boxes. “It's a shit job anyway.”

*   *   *

Mary Jane pressed her palms against the wall and stretched the length of Mark's bed. It felt good waking up away from her parents' house. Mark was gone but she had a dim recollection of him helping her to bed and kissing her good-night, almost like a dream. The sheets were steeped with the salty smell of him. She doubted they'd been washed in months. She sat on the edge of the mattress and pictured the bedroom with a more feminine touch—art on the walls, clean carpet, lavender-scented potpourri. Imagined a pair of heels kicked beneath the bed, a small box of jewelry atop the dresser, their clothes side by side in the closet. Two lives braided like rope. Visions of their future threatened to overwhelm her. With happiness. With doubt. She'd risked everything for Mark. Lew Mattock was dead. And the memory of it cored her. His slumped head on the grill. She stood up and searched for an Oxy to fill the void, hesitated once she'd found one because it was still so early, then popped it in her mouth. She reminded herself she'd done it to save Mark—that they'd done it together.

When Mark first told her Lew was going to arrest him, Mary Jane brushed it off as false bravado. She'd always considered Mark more pharmacist than drug dealer and couldn't imagine him in an orange jumpsuit. Prison wasn't a place for boys like Mark Gaines. He'd just finished his first year at UK with good grades, and he was home for the summer but acting strange. Mark had never been a heavy user but that summer he invented a game where they both snorted so much Oxy they passed out, and the “loser” was the first one to wake up. That person had to write a note with a joke or a funny drawing welcoming the other back to the world of the living. Mary Jane tired of the game but Mark insisted, thought it was hilarious when he found a note telling him how much better off he'd be dead.

Then one terrible night Mark's concerns about Lew became real to her. They were sitting on the docks tossing stones in the river. The town had thrown a party for the Fourth of July, trying to one-up the pyrotechnics set off by their neighbors to the north. Remnants of the celebration littered the riverbank—trash cans vomiting beer bottles and half-eaten burgers, tufts of exploded paper and plasticware lapping against the shore. Mark was quiet, and when Mary Jane asked him what was wrong, he said “nothing,” which had become his standard response to any question. She leaned over and kissed him—the only way to break through—then took a walk. She worried she was losing him. Her plan had been to join Mark at UK, but when the university rejected her, that idea went up in smoke, though Mark never wanted to talk about it.

It was only a couple of minutes after she left him on the dock that Mary Jane heard Mark arguing with someone. She hurried back to find Lew harassing him. “I will make your life a living hell, you stuck-up prick,” Lew barked as he balled Mark's shirt in his fist.