The Dispatcher (8 page)

But then he got an idea.

He wasn’t sure how Beatrice would react, so he held off for a long time, hoping she would manage to pull herself out of the hole in which she was wallowing. She had stood by him for twenty-eight years, through drunken arrests and holes punched in walls, through fist fights with her brother, through slaps and punches that were the cause of the fist fights with her brother, but he didn’t know if she would stand by him if he went through with this, and if he went through with it it would be for her.

Beatrice only got worse. She stopped bathing. Sometimes she would urinate or defecate without getting up from the couch. She did nothing but watch TV and eat and cry. The dishes piled up in the sink and on the counter. The house started to smell bad. He took off her clothes as she sat passively, neither assisting him nor trying to stop him, and wiped her down with washcloths, but it didn’t help much, and soon she began to develop sores—small round scabrous holes in her flesh like cigarette burns. Some of them got infected. But still she would not move.

It was horrible. He knew he had to act.

So he spent several days driving around, looking for potential Sarahs. He sat in front of a couple daycare centers in Mencken, but all the kids there were too old to be proper replacements. He tried the Mencken Regional Medical Center, but couldn’t manage to get past the front desk. Finally he got lucky at an Albertsons. He wasn’t even looking for a Sarah at the time. He was there simply to get groceries for the week. But when he saw his opportunity, a baby sitting unsupervised in a shopping cart while her mother fought with groceries in the back of a station wagon, he took it. He walked by and scooped the baby up, walked around a gray Nissan, and made his way back to his truck. He walked briskly but did not run. Running, he knew, would give him away. He glanced down at the baby as he walked. She had an oval face and blue eyes, not green, and a pink ribbon in her hair. Her eyes weren’t the right color, but they were close. He slid the baby into the seat and buckled her in and was sticking the key into the ignition when the woman started to scream. He looked up at her through his bug-spattered windshield.

She was standing outside her car with her mouth hanging open and her eyebrows cocked and her eyes wide and glistening with terror. She turned in a frantic circle and said, ‘’Becca?’Becca!’ Then she said, ‘Someone took my daughter!’ Then she put both her fists into her hair and began to pull at it. ‘Help. Someone help. My baby’s gone. Someone took my ’Becca!’

Henry put the truck into gear and pulled out of the parking lot. He watched in the rearview mirror as a store employee ran toward the woman, then he made a right onto the street and drove away and could not see her anymore.

Beatrice loved her. Her face lit up and she held her and stroked her face and loved her. She insisted that Henry get rid of all Sarah’s ‘hand-me-downs’, stuff that they did not get for her, the things she was wearing when Henry took her, so he put them in a bag to throw them away, but because he didn’t want anyone to find them, he buried them in the woods instead. Life returned to normal. Life was good, even; they were simply a happy family living a normal life.

But six months later Henry had to put her into the ground next to her clothes. Bee had forgotten to feed her. She said she’d forgotten, but Henry thought she had stopped lactating after the first Sarah died and hadn’t wanted to admit it to herself; he’d seen the baby suck at her nipple but cry still hungry fifteen minutes later. Either way the second Sarah was dead.

Bee held on to the corpse for a week, refusing to let Henry take it away from her. She held it and rocked it in her arms and tried to brush its hair, but the hair peeled away with a flap of skin and she put the flap back, pretending to herself that it hadn’t happened. Finally when Bee was asleep Henry took it out of her arms and carried it out to the woods and dug a hole. He put it into the hole and tried to say a prayer, one he’d learned in church, but couldn’t remember it, so he made something up about children being innocent and please take this innocent into Heaven, amen, and scooped dirt over its face so he wouldn’t have to look at it any longer.

Two weeks later he found their third Sarah. She lived five years before Henry spanked her too hard. He felt bad about it, it had been an accident, but she’d misbehaved and she needed to be punished, and if he punished her a bit too much, well, that was as much her fault as it was his. If she hadn’t misbehaved in the first place he never would have lost his temper. He put her into the ground beside the last Sarah and went looking for the next.

That one screamed and screamed when he grabbed her and he put his hand over her mouth to silence her. She stopped screaming, but she stopped breathing too.

Then there is this Sarah. He spent a week fruitlessly searching before he finally decided to go up to the petting zoo. It was on the north side of town, near Interstate 10, and mostly people who visited were traveling through. They saw the signs,

and their kids bugged them till they agreed to stop for half an hour. Since it was Saturday there would probably be a dozen Sarahs to choose from.

It was a pleasant April day with a breeze just strong enough to make the trees whisper.

Kids were running around looking at all the animals—pot-bellied pigs and rabbits and miniature horses—and reaching through the fences to pet them. Some of them were buying celery and carrots from a woman with a vegetable cart.

Everybody else was there with kids. Henry felt very conspicuous walking alone. He felt like he must stand out, the only giant at a midget convention. But nobody seemed worried by his presence. He was in public and behaved accordingly. A sort of dumb open-mouthed smile pushed up his cheeks, his eyes wide and bright, his hands in his pockets, legs doing a going-nowhere shuffle. Just a harmless old man probably there with his granddaughter who’d run off someplace, maybe to use the restroom.

‘Would you care to buy some vegetables to feed the animals?’

‘Not today,’ he said, pulled out his pockets to display them empty, and shrugged.

‘Maybe next time,’ the woman said.

Then he saw her, the Sarah he wanted, standing just behind the woman with the vegetable cart. She was standing beside her daddy and a teenage boy, looking through a fence at an alpaca.

‘Look it, Jeffrey!’ she said as the alpaca pulled a piece of celery from her fingers.

‘I am, dorko.’

‘
You’re
the dorko, dorko.’

She was the one. Beatrice would love her. Her face was a bright oval, green eyes alive with joy and humor. Beatrice would absolutely love her. He knew she would.

He followed the family around from a distance, waiting for his moment, but her hand remained within her father’s as they walked. Eventually they circled the entire petting zoo and headed for the exit.

He followed them out to a dirt parking lot east of the petting zoo and watched them pile into a red ’65 Mustang with a primer-gray trunk lid. He got into his truck and followed them out to Crouch Avenue, and then left onto Grapevine Circle. They wound round Bulls Mouth Reservoir, water on their right, a bunch of trees and mustang grapevines and blackberry bushes on their left. By summertime half the houses around the reservoir would be loaded with jars of homemade preserves. They pulled the car into a driveway at 44 Grapevine Circle. Henry drove all the way around the reservoir, made a u-turn when he got to an intersection, and went back. He parked across the street and a few houses down. He had to wait for hours, till her mom and dad left without her, and later still, till the teenage boy watching her finally made her go to bed. He sat and waited, urinating into three beer cans while he did so, setting the warm beer cans just outside his truck on the asphalt, and watching the house. He hummed to himself. He nodded once at someone walking by. Once the little girl was in her bedroom Henry got out of his truck and walked the perimeter of the house. He peeked into her window and watched her change for bed. Little Sarah. He waited till she was asleep before cutting the screen away with a box cutter. He didn’t want to scare her before he was near enough to keep her silent.

It was worth it. Beatrice’s face was as joyful as he’d imagined it would be when he presented their new Sarah. It simply lit up like sunshine.

 

 

 

Henry hits a red light at the corner of Crockett and Hackberry and brings the truck to a stop. He finishes his beer, tilting the bottom of the can to the sky, tosses it to the floor where it falls among the other dead soldiers, and pulls a fresh one from its ring. To his right he can see one of Pastor Warden’s dachshunds digging in a flower garden in front of the Skating Palace, head down, dirt flying up from between its legs and arcing through the air before it falls to the sidewalk. He wonders when—if—someone is going to see how scratched up his truck has gotten and make the connection between that and Warden’s fence. There is probably green paint residue on the chain-link fence as well.

The light turns green and Henry’s gas-foot gets heavy.

 

 

 

He pulls his truck into the lot on the east side of the small college campus, parks in front of the two-storey building where all classes are held, and kills the engine. The first floor won’t clear out till ten, but until then he and Mike will be plenty busy with the second floor, which is not used for classes after four o’clock.

He finishes his second beer, grabs the three that remain, as well as his lunch, and steps from the vehicle.

 

 

 

When he walks into the janitor’s closet Mike is already slipping into a blue work shirt. Mike’s a permanent fixture, been here three years now, but not technically a full-time employee of the college. If he works more than a hundred and eighty days he becomes eligible for benefits, so Henry has to lay him off for a month every six so that his work cycle will start anew. He hates to do it, but he can never seem to get approval for a full-time hire.

He walks through the door and smiles. ‘Hey, Mike. Sorry I’m late.’

‘That mean you let me do classrooms tonight?’

‘I’m not that sorry.’

‘But Doug always accuses me of stealing chips from the rack.’

‘Then don’t steal chips from the rack.’

‘I make six bucks an hour, Henry.’

Henry shrugs: what are you gonna do? Then he changes into his blue work shirt. He grabs his cart and pulls it away from the wall and checks to make sure it’s properly stocked: cleaning fluids full up, plenty of trash bags, rubber gloves, paper towels, a couple fluorescent tubes in case he stumbles on any that have gone out. Once he’s sure everything is in order he rolls his cart out of there and into the hall.

From now till two o’clock in the morning his job is to get classrooms ready for tomorrow. He likes his work. There’s nothing to it but to do the same thing again and again. It’s relaxing. You find your rhythm and let the night pass you by.

He walks to the cafeteria, which is closed—it closes from four to six—unlocks the door, and walks to the chip rack. He snags a bag of Doritos and heads out, locking the door behind him. Doug will notice, of course, but it doesn’t matter. Henry can just blame Mike.

Ian pulls his car to the curb in front of the house he once called his own. It is nothing special as far as houses go, a brick building fronted by a lawn and a tree with branches like broken fingers, but once upon a time it belonged to him. Now another man sleeps beside his wife and watches baseball on his television and eats food prepared in his kitchen off his plates with silverware he and Deb got as a wedding present from his mom, two years before the lung cancer got her. Bill Finch doesn’t even know there’s a history there; as far as he’s concerned all these things came into existence the moment he got the key to the front door.

After Maggie was kidnapped he spent a long time living in a strange fog, and when Debbie finally asked him to leave the conversation was short. In his mind he supposes he was already gone. He didn’t even look away from the television commercial telling him he needed to switch toilet paper brands.

‘I want you to move out.’

A pause. Then: ‘Okay.’

‘That’s it?’

He nodded.

‘You’re not gonna get mad? You’re not gonna fight me over this?’

He shook his head. ‘No.’

‘Do you wanna know why?’

‘No.’

‘I’m sleeping with Bill Finch.’

‘I know.’

Debbie stood there for a long time. He didn’t look at her, but he could sense her in his periphery. After a while she simply said, ‘Fine,’ and walked away.

The next night he slept on Diego and Cordelia’s couch.

And a week after that he put the extra TV, some books and book cases, a couch from the garage, Maggie’s bed, and his clothes into a truck he rented from Paulson’s U-Haul and drove to his new apartment. He could have afforded a house, but did not see the point. Houses were for people with families and expanding futures. He was no longer one of those people. His future was shrinking.

The first few weeks were strange and sleepless. Not because he missed Deb—he did not exactly miss her—but because he was used to having someone sleeping beside him. Soon enough, though, he got comfortable with the absence. His body learned to spread out across the full width of the bed. He stopped sitting up at night to call Debbie’s name. He stopped believing she was merely in the next room.

Ian knocks on the front door and waits.

He scratches the top of his head where the blond hair is thinnest, then arms the sweat off his forehead. It’s still hellish out.

Debbie pulls open the front door from inside. She’s wearing beige shorts and her white work T-shirt with PINK’S SALON written in cursive across the right breast. She manages the place for Vicki Dodd—who’s the only reason the Dodd family has any money left at all, her brother Carney being useless—and must have just got home. When she sees Ian she frowns. It’s brief, and the frown is immediately followed by a polite smile, but the frown was true and the smile is false. Ian understands this. As far as Debbie is concerned he can be nothing more than a walking reminder of the biggest loss she’s ever suffered. He just looks too much like the daughter she has spent the last seven years trying to forget. She’s tried to bury her again and again. He’s from a part of her life she no longer wants to think about.