Imaginary Men (20 page)

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Authors: Enid Shomer

Tags: #Fiction, #General, #Anthologies (Multiple Authors), #Literary Collections, #Literary Criticism, #test

BOOK: Imaginary Men
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Page 124
before." She turned around and stared at me as I swallowed some beer. "And the foal?"
"Oh, all right," I said. "He'll make a good pleasure horse, at least in the winter." I knew I was agreeing to more than a blue-eyed white horse that needed sunglasses, just like when the truck salesman asked, "Would you like it in red or green?" and I spent $7,000 on a color. In my head I started figuring an asking price for my lot and trailer and pictured my old rocker in the A-frame.
"The garden was a success," Alice told us. "But it's too big for one person. I'll have to make a smaller circle next planting season." She tried to catch my eye, but I looked away. "Maybe half a circle." She tapped a pencil on the table. ''I'm gonna try nasturtiums next to the blueberries. And black salsify for the carrots."
"There's a companion for every plant," Jackie said.
The two women talked a while longer. Then Alice came and knelt by me, talking under her breath. "She wants us to hold on to Sir Loin till she and Hudson get settled. They're going to keep him. As a pet."
"That's fine."
I pulled Alice onto my lap. I couldn't rightly imagine Jackie and Hudson settled anywhere but in each other's memory, but I smiled at the thought of that big steer eating his way through our life, getting fatter, sleeker, safe as a sacred cow.
 
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Disappeared
"Look at my life," Fontane said. She clutched her robe together below her neck. Fontane was a thin, lithe woman with springy black curls that lay close to her scalp. Even in grief she was beautiful, like a piece of sculpture in the rain. "It's as if I'm being punished for killing people in another life."
"I know, I know." Leila Pinkerton sprinkled sweetener into a glass of iced tea. "There's no explaining it."
"Why would the Lord give me two children if He was going to take them away?"
"I'm sure Hiram is all right," Leila said, hoping Fontane wouldn't get angry at the ease with which hope poured from her mouth. Leila had never had children herself and was well past the age for it. "I just
 
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know it in here." She pointed to her heart. "It's only been three days. He could have amnesia, he could have gotten lost." She stopped before saying that he could have run away. What would he be running away from?
Leila Pinkerton and Fontane Whitley were as close to friendship as they could get, given that Leila was white, Fontane was black, and they lived in a world full of people who claimed to know what that meant. They came together in crisis, like an emergency room team. At other times, a formality neither of them had created restrained them, driving them back into their separate shells. They trusted each other hesitantly, the way you trust a relative you've heard bad things about since childhood but who has always treated you with the utmost kindness.
Fontane began weeping again. Leila put an arm around her and squeezed her shoulder. "Did you search his room?"
Fontane's eyes caught fire. "Do you think I'm an idiot? We tore the house apart, hoping for a note."
"I'm sorry. I know you did. I thought you did."
"If this is some prank of his, I'm going to kill him when he gets home." She laughed at herself; then she began to cry again.
"There was nothing missing from his room?"
"Not that I noticed." Fontane stirred and sat upright.
"Like a favorite book or toy, his sneakers?"
"I don't think so." But as she said it, Fontane stood and began walking up the stairs, and Leila followed.
Leila had never seen Hiram's room, and it wasn't at all the way she would have pictured it. It was futuristic, like the inside of a spaceship. "Handsome," she said, looking around. One wall, covered with black corkboard, had posters from the video store thumbtacked all over it, and four intricate circuit boards hanging from hooks. Shelves spray-painted silver held books and magazines jammed in at all angles, including a few titles Leila had given Hiram. She believed reading kept the mind sharp, and she liked to turn a phrase herself. She'd rearrange a thought or observation in her head until she got it just right, as if she intended to write it down, though she never did. Her favorite author was Mark Twain.
"I fought the beer sign." Fontane pointed over Hiram's desk to a Miller High Life neon sign with a whale spouting a bright-blue plume of water. "That was a birthday gift from Dayton." Dayton
 
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was Hiram's father. He had refused to marry Fontane when she got pregnant at seventeen and had left town two months after Hiram was born.
Leila felt Hiram's absence more here than she had downstairs. Stuffed animals, model planes, an afghan draped across the foot of the bed: without their owner, the objects seemed forlorn. She remembered sorting through her husband's clothes after he died. She had felt sad and then had fallen into a rage. Colonel Pinkerton's ties and shirts were uncooperative messengers, not the measure of the man but a pile of anonymous hand-me-downs. It reminded her of what happened when Claude Rains removed his suit and unwound the bandages from his hands and face. There was nothing left but his cigarette and the desperation in his voice.
"Is it O.K. if I look in here?" Leila's hand hovered at the pull of the center desk drawer.
Fontane began to rummage through the bureau. "Yes, oh yes," she said. "You can look anywhere at all."
<><><><><><><><><><><><>
Hiram Whitley, aged twelve, had been missing officially since Monday. On the noon news that day, Hiram had been described as a
slender black boy, five feet two inches tall, last seen at home on Sunday morning wearing a T-shirt and pajama bottoms. Leila, who lived next door to the Whitleys, was no alarmist. Having no children herself, she had nothing to relate Hiram's disappearance to but her own childhood, so long ago. In those days, instead of sassing, children often ran away from home or vanished into the woods for a day. She'd never known of one who hadn't come back. She imagined that Hiram was off hunting squirrels with the BB gun his father, Dayton, had given him, or exploring the bat caves formed by the interstate crossing Bellamy Creek.
But Fontane and Evan Whitley, Hiram's stepfather, were more modern, and, Leila supposed, more realistic. They were half out of their minds with worry. No doubt they were thinking of the little girl who was kidnapped last year from a department store in Palm Beach and then murdered. The killer was never found. That had happened three hundred and fifty miles to the south, in the glittery, crime-ridden part of Florida, which seemed a crazed foreign country com-
 
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pared to Bellamy County. Bellamy County had hummed along for more than a hundred years on lumber mills, tobacco, cattle, and truck farms. The town of Waccasassa was a transparent place, like a piece of old glass with impurities in it. Its inhabitants had long ago accommodated themselves to its flaws. They had their troubles, like people everywhere. There were bar fights and convenience-store robberies, but Leila had never heard of a child being snatched and murdered in Bellamy County.
"Have you got any notion at all where Hiram might be?" Fontane had asked her on Sunday afternoon, when she first discovered Hiram was missing. Hiram had made himself scarce right after breakfast, Fontane said, probably to avoid his stepfather's weekly attempt to persuade him to go to church.
"The last I saw him was yesterday, when he did the yard for me," Leila said. It had been overcast and windy on Saturday, and the whole time Hiram was cutting her grass, she had worried about lightning, staring through the window as the mower slowly peeled narrow swaths of lawn from dark to pale green. "I'm sure he'll turn up by supper."
"I tried to call Dayton, but wouldn't you know it, his phone's been disconnected," Fontane said. According to Fontane, she and Dayton had been on good terms only for the amount of time it took to conceive Hiram.
After Fontane left, Leila got in her old white Valiant and drove over to Vern's Kwik Stop, where kids often hung out to play video games and read comic books. Then she tried the middle-school playground. She stopped for a glass of iced decaf at Sinrod Drugs, swiveling slowly on her counter stool as she tried to put herselfa plump, sixty-eight-year-old white womanin Hiram's place, tried to divine his whereabouts.
Leila had run away once, but she was nearly an adult at the time. It was during the war, and the Colonel was being sent to an island in the Pacific that was so small it wasn't on the big globe at her teachers' college. They spent his last weekend pass in a motel room in Myrtle Beach. Her parents didn't approve of the Colonel. Too impulsive, they said. Reckless. White trash was what they meant. He had a thick north-Georgia drawl, and he was big and raw-boned and had crooked front teeth. She loved him, she remembered, she loved him so much that just seeing the golden hairs bristling on his arms made her feel
 
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safe. And then, after forty-three years, he had disappeared into the earth as if he had never existed.
<><><><><><><><><><><><>
By Monday, the Whitleys were frantic. Mr. Whitley stayed home from the lumber mill where he was a foreman to be with Fontane. It was especially trying for them, coming so soon after the death of their six-year-old, Beckah, who had succumbed the year before to leukemia. AN ANGEL CAME TO EARTH AND TOOK THE FLOWER AWAY, Beckah's headstone said. The cemetery was at the end of two miles of washboard road. Beckah's first-grade teacher and Leila were the only white people at the funeral. Leila remembered the smell of freshly turned clay, and Mr. and Mrs. Whitley standing in front of the small coffin. Hiram had patted his mother's arm and tried to act like a grownup man, but Mr. Whitley dropped to his knees and began rocking back and forth, sobbing, ''Lord, O Lord, you took her away." Fontane knelt down and wrapped herself around her husband. Hiram had stood behind them, suddenly tall and alone.
Leila believed that Fontane had married Evan Whitley out of spite, to get even with Dayton for leaving her. Evan was upstanding and proper. Once, at a Fourth of July street party, Leila had asked him to call her by her first name instead of Mrs. Pinkerton. He had raised his index finger to his eye and rubbed it and blinked repeatedly, as if a gnat were trapped in his lashes.
Dayton, on the other hand, was the kind of colorful, lying, energetic man whom adults saw right through and children adored. Hiram adored him. When Dayton visited, he was extravagantly attentive. Then no one heard a word from him for six months. He drove a hot rod with airbrushed flames licking the fenders and the rear end hiked up like a scorpion's tail. He never had money, though he always had some kind of recent good time he could tell you about. For Dayton, charm was a means of locomotion, like a swift pair of legs.
When Hiram was five or six, Dayton started bringing his women around. Leila had overheard some nasty arguments. Last Easter, Mr. Whitley had ejected Dayton from the house and stood screaming at him until he drove away, and Leila could understand why. She didn't care for Dayton's values or his women, with their black leather shorts and tube tops and tall boots. "They're all nurses, according to him,"
 
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Fontane had told her. Leila responded with a questioning look. "That's how he introduces every one of those trashy women. He says, 'Have you met Sharanda, my scrub nurse friend?'" Fontane had burst out laughing. "He must think I have the brains of a bowling ball." But, for all his flaws, Leila could see that Dayton had a little fire in his soul and that the same light flickered in Hiram.
The Atlanta police had gone to Dayton's last known address on Monday. He wasn't there. His employer said he hadn't given notice, just quit showing up. The Bellamy County police stopped by to question Fontane that afternoon. Was it possible that Dayton had kidnapped Hiram? Fontane was sure he hadn't. "He's never even invited Hiram to come home with him for a weekend," she reported to Leila later. "Hiram is just a toy he plays with when he wants to show off for one of his girlfriends."
<><><><><><><><><><><><>
The neighborhood where Leila and the Whitleys lived had been built at the turn of the century for the new middle classfor meek, polite women like Leila's mother and grandmother, women who held the line between public and private life and feared shame. All the houses backed onto service alleys, as if the household functionsgarbage pickup, stove-wood deliveryhad to be handled as discreetly and invisibly as bodily functions. When Leila was growing up, everything about family life was thought to be proper and just, and you weren't allowed to talk about anything personal. Nowadays, nothing was right anywhere in society. Just tune in "Donahue" or "Oprah": people confessed everything, absolutely everything, in public. The sound of the daytime talk shows was one gigantic lamentation. Were there shameful secrets in Hiram's family? Late Monday, the police had questioned Leila privately, asking whether she'd noted any tension between family members, any bruises on anybody. She told them she was certain there was no violent behavior among the Whitleys. When Hiram misbehaved, he got a "time-out,'' not a slap.
Fontane was not trained to be meek, but to be scrappy and vigilant. She was born to adversity, while Leila was born to the smugness typical of Southern white people of a certain class. She and Fontane had never discussed it, would never discuss it. Fontane, the solitary dancer on the music box, with long legs like exclamation points. What

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