Boy Still Missing

O
nce a year I return to Holedo, Massachusetts, on a bus from far away. I watch out the window as we pull off Route 67 and make our way along Hanover Street toward the station. Holedo is nothing like the desolate, middle-of-nowhere place it was when I lived here. There’s a McDonald’s now, a 7-Eleven, a golf course, and a mammoth grocery store called the Big Bag, where skinny mothers shop in bulk, stocking their refrigerators like fallout shelters. Only one of the old town bars still stands. Renamed the Pewter Pub, Maloney’s looks even more dismal than it did when I was fifteen, the year I tangled myself up with Edie Kramer and changed my life for good.

Even though my father stopped hanging out in bars ages ago, I find myself trying to catch a glimpse inside as we pass, but all I see is the bus’s gray reflection shining back in the white light of a hot summer day. A moment later we’re off Hanover. The bus rounds the corner, and we drive
by the Holedo Motel, owned and operated by my father since he bought it in a foreclosure sale. With the kidney-shaped pool out front, blue siding, and hedges trimmed in the shape of animals—a pig, a mouse, a puppy—the motel holds no trace of the dump it used to be. I glance up at room 5B, vacant since a winter day almost thirty years ago. Something in me pulls the way it always does when I first catch sight of that door. A sign the rest of the trip will turn out the same. After I settle in, my father and I will spend an entire weekend together, walking around the property, sitting at the table in the back of the office.

Together, but not really together at all.

When he yawns and goes to bed for the night, this is what I do: lift the master key from its hook and climb the stairs to the vacant room, now used only to store mops and brooms, cleaning rags and linens. Inside, the air smells of an old woman’s suitcase, a cheap vacation. I sit on the naked, lumpy mattress and touch my hand to the disconnected phone, spinning the rotary once or twice just to hear that forgotten sound.

How many minutes pass? Ten? Forty?

Time is the one thing that changes, but eventually I lift the throw rug by the bed and stare down at the stain on the carpet beneath, still there after all these years. The shape is a rounded triangle, a giant pear, a teardrop as big as a baby. Thoughts I spend all year pushing away tumble forward, and I have to hold my breath to shut out the stale air, the memories, the regrets.

If only I hadn’t kissed Edie that first night.

If only I hadn’t been so curious about Truman.

If only I could have stopped the most important person in my life from dying in this room alone.

June 1971

W
henever my father disappeared, we looked for him on Hanover Street. My mother drove us slowly along in our orange Pinto, gazing into shadowy windows. Between the rows of smoky bars glowing with Schlitz and Budweiser signs were slim alleyways where he parked his fender-dented GMC. My mother’s best friend, Marnie, sat in the passenger seat, and I squeezed in the back. Marnie’s job was to keep an eye out for my father’s truck, but she spent most of the time applying foundation, darkening her lashes, and glossing her thin lips in the visor mirror. Marnie had recently read somewhere that all men were intrigued by Southern women, so she adopted the appropriate lingo. Besides the occasional “y’all” and “yahoo,” it meant a lot of nicknames. Peaches. Honey pie. Cupcake. At fifteen I considered myself practically a man, and the sound of all that food coming from her mouth did nothing but make me hungry.

Tonight Marnie was in the middle of plucking her eyebrows when she said, “Is that his truck, peaches?”

“Where?” I said, sticking my head between them. I loved being part of Find-Father-First, and when she spotted his truck, it pissed me off, because I felt I had lost somehow.

“There,” Marnie said, tapping her nail against the windshield. “There’s the bastard.”

I scanned the narrow parking lot. Datsun. Ford. Plymouth. Ford. GMC. My heart banged away, thinking of what usually came next. My mother hated bars and would almost always send me inside to nab my father. “A person could waste a whole life in one of those places,” she liked to say.

For me there was nothing better than stepping inside the crowded brick caves—the smells of wet wood, stale beer, and smoke forever mingling in the air. I loved being surrounded by the cracking of pool balls, women with tight jeans and cigarette voices. They were so opposite from my mother with her smooth, young skin, flowery blouses and chinos, timid movements and soft hum of a voice. My mother had the air of a churchgoer, even though she never went to church. She was Sunday afternoon, and those women were Saturday night. Whenever my father saw me, he would pat his heavy hand on my shoulder and introduce me to all his pals. My father was like a movie star inside a bar, probably because he wasn’t bald or potbellied or sloppy like the rest of the guys. He had straight teeth and a wave of dark hair, muscles and a flat stomach. He wore the same rugged denim jacket all year long and held his cigarette like a joint. While he paid his tab, I’d grab a fistful of straws so Leon Diesel and I could twist and snap them at the bus stop in the morning. Some nights I’d shove my sweatshirt pockets full of maraschino cherries and a couple green olives for Marnie. The neon fruit stained my hands and the inside of my pockets a strange artificial red that never completely came out in the wash.

The thought of the whole routine made me smile when my mother signaled and braked. We all squinted at the truck parked between
Maloney’s Pub and the Dew Drop Inn. Even in the summer, faded garland Christmas bells and angels dangled from the wires that hung between buildings and across Hanover Street. Every December the Holedo town maintenance crews put up new decorations, only to let the weather slowly take them down the rest of the year. Under the wiry remains of a golden bell sat the truck Marnie had spotted. Red and silver. Snow chains on the tires even though it was June. “No,” my mother said in the softer-timbre voice she used for disappointment. “Roy’s truck has that dent in the fender. And he took his chains off last March.”

“Honey,” Marnie said, “that man took his chains off long before that.”

My mother glanced in the side-view mirror and pulled back onto the street, not laughing at the joke.

“Get it?” Marnie said. “Ball and chain.”

Neither of us smiled. After all, none of this was funny. For the last two days my father had been on what we called a “big bender.” It meant he left for work on Wednesday morning and hadn’t been seen since.

I took the opportunity to dig at Marnie for picking out the wrong truck. “Those weren’t even Massachusetts plates.” My voice cracked a bit, which took away from the slight. I had the froggiest voice of any guy my age and was glad the magic of my long-awaited puberty was finally beginning to deepen it. Marnie looked at me and shrugged like she didn’t care. But we both knew she had lost a point or two in the game.

She went back to her eyebrows, and I tried not to be distracted as she plucked. Hair after hair. Hair after hair. She was one of those women who had great faith in the transformative powers of makeup and jewelry. Marnie was so different from my mother, who kept her thick, soot-colored hair in a neat little headband. My mother had tattoo-green eyes and a smile that didn’t call for lipstick or gloss. On her ring finger she wore a tiny silver band with a diamond no bigger than a baby’s pinkie nail.

We rolled to the end of Hanover Street, where the entrance ramp led to the highway out of Holedo. The bar lights blurred behind us, and my mother started checking and rechecking her watch, probably realiz
ing how long we’d been searching. I stared out the window at a row of gray apartment complexes, an auto body shop with a half dozen mangled vehicles in the lot, the steady row of streetlamps that cast white light and shifting shadows inside our car as we moved. Marnie clicked on the radio and left the dial right where she found it. Whatever was playing when she hit the button—country, rock and roll, Bible preachers telling her she was headed straight for the pit of hell—suited her just fine. Tonight the car filled with the sound of violins. My mother was too distracted to care, and when I reached to change the station, hoping to catch the last inning of the Red Sox game, Marnie brushed my hand away.

“We’re not fussy, sweet lips,” she said. “Let’s just listen.”

“My name is Dominick,” I told her, but she was already entranced by the music and didn’t seem to hear. I could have hassled her some more, but I wasn’t dying to listen to the game anyway. Just trying to follow the Sox so I could keep up with my father, something I hadn’t done all season.

We cruised to classical, and I thought of Leon at the bus stop. Every Friday morning the band kids lugged their clarinets and flutes to school in black cases like miniature caskets, and it set Leon off. “That’s the problem with this fucking town,” he said. “They waste time teaching pansies how to play useless instruments. Give me an electric guitar, and then I’ll join the band.”

More than once I had suggested he take up drums because he seemed genuinely troubled by the lack of cool instruments in our high school. But Leon said he wasn’t interested in playing backup for a pansy band.

I had known Leon since the first grade, when his family moved to the basement apartment downstairs from ours. In that time he had grown to be one of the toughest guys in school. His body had transformed into a lean muscular form. He kept his wispy hair perfectly feathered with the help of a wide-tooth comb carried in his back pocket, the handle forever jutting out of his jeans. Leon’s biggest badge, though, was the slight trace of a mustache above his lip. For some reason he didn’t seem to notice that I had ended up a lot like those band kids, with my
thin voice and splash of acne on my forehead. Over the last year I had shot up in height, but I was reedy and long-legged, which left me feeling awkward all the time.

“Look at you,” Marnie said whenever she caught my eye in the visor mirror, her lipstick dried into the wrinkles around her skinny lips. “You’re such a doll.”

That was my problem. I was the type of a kid that weirdos like Marnie, old ladies, and nuns found attractive. “He is so gorgeous,” they would say to my mom. “He must be a real lady-killer.” Leon had already fooled around with half a dozen girls and even claimed to have finger-fucked one. I had yet to kiss.

The violin rose and fell. A car with one headlight passed. We were alone on the highway, moving toward our exit. A police car was parked off the road in the parking lot of the Holedo Motel, behind a scattering of raggedy pine trees. The inside car light glowed yellow, and I caught a glimpse of the officer’s mustache. If my father was cruising by, he would start muttering his usual speech about all the cops in this town being crooked, that they were a bunch of lazy cowards banned together in their own little boys’ club. He’d light a Winston and then his speech would work into bitching about President Nixon, tax increases, and layoffs. My mother just glanced at the cop car, looking too worried for someone going fifty-five.

“Maybe it’s time to start a new life,” she said absently.

Something always shifted inside me when my mother talked like that. Before I was born, she had slipped from life to life the way some people changed jobs. The biggest proof of her aborted existences was my older half brother, Truman, who lived in New York with my Uncle Donald. “Someday,” my mother used to say, “when things settle down with your father, Truman might come live with us.”

I had never met Truman. Every month or so my mother took a train to New York City to see him. But for reasons no one would explain to me, he didn’t visit. I guessed my mother wanted to keep Truman away from my father. Or maybe if Truman came, it would be too hard to send
him back. Since I didn’t like the idea of her old life cluttering up her new one, the arrangement suited me just fine.

Still, I was curious.

“Tell me about Truman’s father,” I said after Marnie leaned against the window and shut her eyes. The other day I’d found some pictures under my parents’ bed while I was snooping. None of Truman, but one of a man with bushy black hair and firm white skin stretched across his face like a mummy’s.

“Oh, Dominick,” my mother said, “let’s not talk about that now.”

“What should we talk about?” I asked, sticking my head between the bucket seats.

Two of my mother’s front teeth barely overlapped each other, but it was enough of an imperfection for her to have mastered a lips-together smile. I was sure other people thought the expression was sweet in a shy kind of way. To me it always looked like an odd cross between happiness and sadness. “Let’s talk about my life when I lived in New Mexico,” she said and smiled in her way.

This was one life my mother loved to discuss. It was full of bright memories, as annoyingly cheerful as one of my old children’s books. Page one: My mother woke up one sunny New Mexican morning. Page two: She let out a big New Mexican yawn. Page three: She made a hearty New Mexican breakfast. It was so unmysterious I grew bored, but I let my mother talk because I knew it made her feel better.

“I used to make these breakfasts,” she said, “with cilantro and fresh tomatoes, eggs and tortillas.”

“Sounds great,” I said, feigning enthusiasm.

“It’s funny. When I made those breakfasts, I used to think I’d always make them. No matter where I lived or who I lived with.”

“So why don’t you?” I asked her.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Grocery stores are different around here. Everyone in Massachusetts eats pancakes and French toast in the morning.”

My mother kept talking, walking me through the canyons she used
to wander. As she blathered on, I thought about my father. Most of the time I’d flip-flop between trying to side with him and feeling bad for my mother. At the moment, though, I felt bad for me. After all, who the hell wanted to drive around aimlessly half the night listening to my mother’s narrated tour of New Mexico? If my father wasn’t on Hanover Street, it meant he was with his latest girlfriend. And if we were really planning on finding him tonight, we might as well look there. “We could drive by Edie Kramer’s house,” I said, interrupting.

My mother tightened her hands on the wheel and stared intently out at the highway, as if we were making tracks through one of her canyons at that very moment and she needed to concentrate. I had the urge to roll down the window in hopes that a fresh breeze might loosen things up again. More than once I had heard my mother accuse my father of sleeping with Edie. It seemed ridiculous that she didn’t simply assume it to be true. Edie was the ex-wife of Stanley Elshki, the owner of the plastics factory where my father worked. Over the last few months there were three nights like this one when we couldn’t find him in any of the bars on Hanover. When my father returned home near dawn, he explained that he had been playing cards and lost track of time. Last week he claimed to have fallen asleep in the factory parking lot.

“Imagine,” he had said. “I stuck my key in the ignition, rested my head on the steering wheel a second, and the next thing I know it’s four in the morning.”

“Now he has a sleeping disease,” Marnie had said when my mother told her his story.

Since my mother ignored my suggestion, I leaned back and opened the window. The car filled with cool summer air, and Marnie stirred in her seat. “Could you shut that?” she asked.

I closed it partway.

Marnie looked at my mother, her full-moon eyes widening above her chicken-beak nose. “Terry, Dominick’s got a point. I mean, if you have your heart set on finding Roy, we could see if he’s at Edie’s.”

“And what if he is?”

“We don’t even have to stop. We’ll just roll on by, and if his truck is in the driveway, you can tell him to shove his line of bullshit once and for all when he comes home.”

We all knew—or at least I did—that there would never be a once and for all when it came to my mother and father. Here’s how it would go down: My father would walk in the door; my mother would hurl accusations and promptly burst into tears; she’d let him sweet-talk her into the bedroom, where they’d fuck their brains out. Loud enough for me to hear. Loud enough to turn my stomach. After that, my mother would act like nothing ever happened. She’d smile and ask me, “What would you like for dinner?” or “How’s school anyway?” And that’s what I hated most: When my father was on her shit list, she acted like I was a grown man, her partner in all of this. But the second he won her back, I was a simply a boy again, their son.

My mother pulled off the highway. She cut across Hattertown Road and over the narrow wooden railroad bridge to Gringe Farm. There were no streetlights in this part of town. All I could see out my window were the shadows of leafy branches against the dark sky, the string of sagging telephone wires from pole to pole. Pegluso’s swamp reeked like a septic tank as we passed. Soon we were driving up Barn Hill on our way to Edie’s. She lived in a large Victorian topped off with a slanted and spiraling roof, painted lemonade yellow but peeling since her divorce. A couple of times when Leon and I were hanging out in the parking lot behind the Doghouse, shoving fries and foot-longs into our mouths, we spotted Edie. She was tall and leggy, with shampoo-commercial hair the color of a Twinkie. Leon knew she was divorced, and for him that added an element of sluttiness to her. Whenever we saw her, he spent hours afterward speculating about her sexual appetite, the way she liked to do it, the number of men she rolled around with.