THE BOY CAN COOK.
He didn’t know why, but the phrase, a remark his father had made years ago, always went through his mind when he was in the kitchen, rolled around and around in there like a loose ball bearing. He’d learned in pure self-defense, unable to digest, barely even to eat, what his mother put on the table those times she tried at all, but he’d come to like it. It made sense to him. Once you got the basic moves down, broiling, braising, browning, roasting, you pretty much had it. Reliable commonality in combinations of flavors, spices, and sauces, all built up from sweet, sour, savory, salty. You started with one thing, added others, turned it all into something else. Cooking made sense the way geometry or numbers made sense.
He had put on stew meat earlier, fire as low as he could get it and as little water as he could get away with, and was chopping celery, onions, carrots, and potatoes to add.
Cooking made sense. The dreams were another matter.
This time he had been walking down a long corridor. People watched from within the frosted-glass doors that lined either side. He couldn’t make out features, couldn’t see the heads really—just ill-defined ovoids that changed shape behind the glass as they went from profile to straight to profile, tracking his progress. There were small numbers on the upper left-hand corner of the doors’ glass panels, like page numbers in a book: 231, 230, 229. And a window far ahead at corridor’s end, black beyond. As he passed door after door, though he still couldn’t really see them, the heads appeared to change more substantially, becoming larger, out of proportion, like the heads of animals.
He never felt the pain, just looked down to see blood spreading over the cutting board, chopped onions gone pink. Even then, it didn’t register. He stood holding the knife in his right hand, thumb and middle finger still around the onion, tip of his index finger lying alongside. Interesting how, instead of blossoming into pain, the finger went numb, as though it were not even there, as though it were someone else’s finger. It bent when he willed it, but he couldn’t feel the movement.
In the bathroom he ran cold water over the oozing raw flesh, poured peroxide over it, held a compress against it. Feeling slowly returned, first as pins and needles, then as burning pain. He’d dealt with injuries before, even closed a three-inch slice in his arm with butterflies improvised from adhesive tape, but he couldn’t think how he might be able to fix this. Supergluing the tip back on didn’t seem like a good idea.
Mrs. Flores opened her door wearing an apron and a surprised expression. Her eyes went directly from his face to his hand. The washcloth he’d wrapped around his finger was dark with blood.
Ten minutes later he was in her friend’s truck, a comfortably middle-aged Ford F-150 that had at least three different colors of paint warring across hood, fenders, and bed, being driven to a free clinic that, Mrs. Flores said, wouldn’t ask questions. She still had her apron on.
Three hours after that, he was sitting at the table in her house having dinner with Mrs. Flores, her friend Felix, and two neighborhood kids of eleven or twelve who seemed simply to have wandered into the house in time to eat. Platters of
machaca
and of sizzling pepper and onions moved steadily around the table. Mrs. Flores heated tortillas on the open burner of her stove, dropping them on, turning, serving.
His finger throbbed now. A big-nosed doctor had cleaned and bandaged it tightly. Very clean, he said. You may lose some feeling in that finger, but it’s going to be fine. We’ll give you a shot, antibiotics, just to be on the safe side. He looked at Mrs. Flores. Bring the boy back if he starts running a fever, sweating, drinking a lot, anything like that.
The boy
.
Felix pushed the
machaca
toward him. “How’d you cut yourself?”
“Not paying attention.”
“How accidents mostly happen.”
Jimmie didn’t have much by way of social conversation but gave it a shot. “What do you do, Mr.… ?”
“Just Felix. Nobody calls me anything but Felix.” He exchanged glances with Mrs. Flores. “Drive trucks, mostly.”
“He helps people,” Mrs. Flores said.
“Like he did me, today.”
“It was nothing,” Felix said, then, smiling at Mrs. Flores: “Es nada.”
“I’m going to be a football player,” one of the kids said.
“And I’m going to own my own business,” the other said.
Jimmie asked him what kind of business.
“Don’ know. Big one.”
It was getting dark outside, trees going gray, fading into the grayness around them. Everyone said this used to be pure desert, then people moved in from elsewhere and brought along their trees and bushes and backyards. But everyone also said there used to be rivers here, and boats going down them, so go figure.
“I should be getting home,” Jimmie said. “Can I help clean up?”
“We can help, Mama Flores,” one of the kids said.
“Looks like we have it covered, then.” Mrs. Flores leaned close to him as she scooped dishes from the table. “Are you going to be okay?”
Jimmie stood, and nodded. “Thank you both, more than I can say.” He held out his hand, and Felix, looking a little surprised, shook it. They walked together into the front room. When Felix switched on the porch light and opened the door, a moth flew in. Without apparent effort or thought, Felix lifted his hand, intercepted the moth, carried it outside with them.
“Roshelle wants me to tell you,” he said, “you need anything, you just come right on back here.”
“I will. And thanks again.”
Felix let the moth go. “A pleasure,” he said.
Back at the house, Jimmie cleaned up the kitchen as best he could with one hand pretty much out of commission. The finger was thickly bandaged. The big-nosed doctor had cautioned him against getting the dressings wet. He felt every heartbeat there at the fingertip, like those cartoons where thumbs or heads blow up like balloons, deflate, and blow up again. He put the pot with the stew meat in the refrigerator, tossed the vegetables. He’d start fresh tomorrow.
Flipping the computer on, he thought about Mrs. Flores, Felix, and the kids, this ramshackle, sort-of family of hers, as it booted up. He thought of the moth Felix had taken outside, and remembered his mother proudly showing him her mason jar of mosquitoes.
Once when he was small, they’d been out walking and come across a pigeon with a broken wing. It must have just happened, he realized now, thinking about it. The bird would walk a few steps, then hop, trying to fly, as the wing just hung there, fanned out, at its side. The bird couldn’t understand: this had always worked. It took three steps, hopped again, fluttering the good wing. Jimmie looked over and saw tears on his mother’s face.
Now, remembering that, what came to him was the thought of how panicked the bird must have been, how lost, how the only thing it could do was keep trying.
He entered his password, travelR2, to check on orders. Four of them, including the set of luthier tools he’d figured to be a tough sell. He’d bought the set from the family of a Filipino ukulele maker; it came wrapped in goatskin, which was how, the family said, he always kept them. Jimmie acknowledged the orders, promised shipping first thing tomorrow, then e-mailed for package pickup. Business as usual. Not a big business, but his.
He logged on to check payments, then began his cruise of sites where he regularly picked up items for resale. Over time he had found his way to some fairly obscure sites. These didn’t take long, as turnover was slow, and often a glance was enough before moving on. Even with the common sites, eBay and so on, one learned to scan efficiently: using keywords, selecting chronological entries, and skipping to the end, setting very specific search parameters.
His eyes went down the pages:
Printing press circa 1919, fully functional
Loom, brought over from Scotland
Artist action mannikin, 15 inch
Planter made from authentic coolie hat
Button collection, over 1,000!
He read the entries, registered them as his eyes moved down the listings. He flagged four to keep watch on. But he wasn’t there, not really. He was walking down that corridor again, watching the featureless heads turn toward him. He was beside his mother on the street, watching the pigeon try to fly.
“THING ABOUT IT IS, you sit there and you’re mad, but after a while the mad starts to get boring, so you move on, think about other stuff. How often do you get the chance, day to day, to just sit and think?”
Too often.
“And you for damn sure can’t sleep. Sounds like a train station down in there. Doors clanging, walls shaking, voices everywhere. Footsteps you hear from half a mile away. Deep thoughts, that’s what come to you. What’s it all about, why are we here, who am I. All that shit. Then you look around and all at once you see it’s like you’re back in college, this steaming mass of bodies, bullshit, attitude, big talk.”
Having never been to college, Sayles wouldn’t know. Back in the day, when he came on the job, high school was good enough; lot of old-timers didn’t have that. Nowadays, newbies like Graves, they knew everything. Stop for hot dogs at a roach coach and you’d hear about the industrial revolution. By the time your indigestion kicked in some miles down the road, they’d be on to union activity in the forties, maybe hum a bar or two of “Which Side Are You On?”
Truth to tell, Sayles often thought of his partner as pompous and full of himself, never far away from cutting one fine figure of fool. Kind of guy who grew up in Cedar Rapids on meat loaf and green bean casserole and just
knew
he was beyond all that. But Sayles also had to remember how many times he’d seen Graves turn on a dime, veering from his usual mode to sudden, wheels-down compassion in the presence of real pain.
Graves waved a hand. “And then I woke up.” He waited. “It’s the punch line—”
“I know, Graves. I know. But what the hell are you doing here? You just got out, right? Why aren’t you home? Showering, sleeping, having a stiff one?”
“And pass up all this?” He cast a glance, proud shepherd, out over the field of desks, chairs, side tables, and filing cabinets. “I would not, however, pass up a kind offer of breakfast.”
At the Early Bird, surrounded by lawyers prepping clients or puffing out cheeks at one another, businessmen with laptops, and slow-eyed hospital workers going off shift, Sayles heard about his partner’s prison experience, which sadly, unlike what people seemed to claim these days of just about anything from reading a bestseller to going to the dentist, had not changed his life.
As they ate, Sayles brought Graves up to speed on their cases, not that there was much speed to any of them. Janice Beck’s boyfriend had come in to confess, saying he put her and the child in the cedar chest to keep them “fresh” and keep the bugs away. They’d packed him off to the psych ward. The Navajo girl from the irrigation ditch, that one was starting to look not random like they first thought, or gang related, but like the stepmother’s doing; she’d had a hand in the pot, anyway. When Sayles came to Rankin’s shooting, he didn’t mention the doll connection, the note left for him at his home, or his Internet communications with an apparent witness.
“Something’ll turn up,” Graves said.
“Sure it will.” Tomorrow’s a new day and all that.
Two tables over, a man sat feeding the froth off his latte to his three-year-old, skimming it up half a spoonful at a time. Two servers, one male, one female, stood in the entryway by the kitchen door talking about a concert they’d been to. A woman walked out of the dress shop across the street with a single elegantly wrapped package.
All around him, people were going on with their lives, things pretty much the same day to day. Mothers were dying, husbands slipping away, new wars breaking out and old ones from years before continuing, but their lives went right on. Certainly not the first time he’d had the thought. Just seemed he was having it more and more often of late.
Then, and with no idea why he was doing this, Sayles leaned in close over the table and told Graves about Josie: how he’d got up and found her gone, the medications she’d ditched, the note, where she was.
Getting Graves home took some time. Road crews were tearing up Central again, and every alternate Sayles tried, Seventh, Osborn, turned out to be as hopeless. They sat through change after change of light at Indian School watching the light rail glide by. Sayles’s revelation had visibly subdued him, but his partner was wired. Nerves, adrenaline, sleeplessness. Residual anger. Sayles had told Graves how he sat outside the hospice some nights.
“And you don’t go in?”
Sayles shook his head.
“Why?”
Respect. Honor. Fear.
But how, not why, was the true question.
How
could he do that, not go inside, see her? Over and again we manage to convince ourselves that we’re doing what’s right, even when our actions violate another’s wishes, the will of society itself, and all good sense. It would be so easy for him to say, Josie really does want me there, or to decide that it had to be, after all, in her best interest. But a quieter voice always surfaced. Well, not so much surfaced as made its presence known. Like that unease that settles on you and you don’t know where it comes from.
Still a lot of day left when he got back to the squad. He paged through the five case folders on top. Sometimes something will jump out at you. Or something will seep in, do its work later, cause you to look at what’s on the table in a different way. One of his high school teachers had a favorite saying: You gotta take time to shake the jar.
So he shook and shook, and not much happened.
Late that afternoon he fielded a call to a Circle K where “some old dude was hanging around outside hassling customers” and it looked like there might be a body back in the alley. Patrol car called in asking for a supervisor or detective. Man was all of forty, possibly a deaf-mute, possibly just too addled to speak intelligibly. The body was the man’s ragged bedroll. Sayles gave him five dollars.