Undeliverable (6 page)

He left his car in a rundown parking structure that promised all-day parking for ten dollars and set off in the direction of the park. His goal was to completely cover the park and the surrounding block of streets. Every telephone pole he passed, every boarded window or door, every blank wall received a poster. And it had to be every possible surface; every few feet he would stop and look back, making sure he had achieved maximum poster visibility. His heart leapt every time he noticed a space he had missed, and he would hurry back to fill it in, give it the face of his son.

There was a sort of mantra or meditation to the work, step step staple, step step staple. The repetition and the fact that he was doing something active, something that could bring in a hint of his son, helped him to relax more than anything else he did on his search. He worked steadily as the sun rose, stopping passersby to make sure they saw the picture. “Have you seen this boy? He’s five; my son.”

He had stopped noticing what the people actually looked like. They were a blur of red and blue ties, dark suits, high heels, styled hair. Occasionally a detail would pop out in particular—a purple mohawk, a brightly patterned umbrella used as a walking stick, a violet muu-muu.

“If you could for a moment, ma’am. Just a quick look; have you seen this boy?”

They all passed by, most of them just shaking their head and not engaging. Some would just snatch the paper as they went by to glance at before tossing it in the trash or gutter within the next block. If it was salvageable, Ben would retrieve the poster, flatten it carefully, and post it farther down the block.

“Have you seen my son? Benny?”

Sometimes he wished that even one would stop for just a few seconds to take an honest look at the flyers he held and actually think about whether or not they had seen his son.

“Maybe you’ve seen this boy around the park?”

Mothers steered their flocks of children around him. Those were always the most painful. Fingers in their mouths, hands clasped to their mother’s pants leg, sitting in their strollers. Every one of them reminded him of something about Benny. He had the same dinosaur toys as the young African-American boy or he always insisted on mismatching shoes as a toddler, like the little girl in the stroller wearing one mini Sketcher and one mini sandal.

“No? Thank you anyways. Have a good day.”

He always made sure he was unfailingly polite, regardless of how negative a reaction he received. He didn’t want anyone to think he had lost his grip, and it was sometimes hard to keep from shouting at the people who just brushed past him. He wanted people to actually think, to look at the posters. He knew he would be dismissed even faster if he turned into one of those bullhorn men shouting damnation from the street corner.

Around noon he took a small break, walking toward the zoo and getting a hot dog from a vendor at the entrance. He sat on a bench, stretching his legs to try and ease the tension in them while he ate his lunch. Just enough to keep going and then up and at it again.

He and Jeannie had taken their son to this zoo last year. Benny had wanted to see a real, live monkey. Ben could remember it so clearly, just a flash of the three of them standing in front of the gorilla enclosure.

“See, Benny, see how that gorilla moves? It’s just like a human really. They’re incredibly intelligent. They learn sign language and can communicate with humans just as easily as I talk with you.”

“But, Daddy, they’re so hairy!” Benny had his nose pressed to the glass, the air so humid and hot that his breath didn’t even fog it.

“So is your Uncle George, but he’s definitely human, I think.” Ben had grinned as his wife slapped his shoulder for maligning her brother, but she let it stand.

Ben finished his hot dog and tossed the wrapper into the trash beside him before heading back to the sidewalks and his flyers. He passed a bag lady pushing a cart full of cans and automatically held out a flyer. “Have you seen this boy?”

She stopped and looked sideways at the poster, eyes scanning back and forth, before settling back on her cart. “’S one of them missing boys, ain’t it? Them truck boys.”

Excitement coursed through him, an electric tingle bringing him fully awake and out of his moving meditation. He had known that if he just kept asking long enough, he’d find someone who saw something. “Yes, yes, he’s my son; he went missing a year ago. You’ve seen him?” Ben scrambled for his notebook, letting the flyer fall.

“Not him. Like him. Them truck boys. Green truck boys. Green truck comes, little boys go.” She started off down the street, muttering, “Green truck comes, little boys go.”

Ben stared after her for a moment, then shook his head and stuffed the notebook back into his satchel. He should have known better than to try to get sense out of a transient. They couldn’t even keep it together enough to have someplace to live, let alone have a firm grasp on their memory. But that wasn’t fair to the homeless population, and he instantly chastised himself, blaming his attitude on the disappointment he felt that she hadn’t seen anything after all. He bent to retrieve the flyer he’d dropped and was taping it to the back of a mailbox when a thought started to niggle at the back of his mind.

It was the green truck. Even if the lady was a bit off her rocker, it didn’t mean that she hadn’t seen something. And he was sure he’d heard something else about a green truck recently, but he couldn’t quite place where. As he walked the rest of his route, he absently thrust the poster under people’s noses and forgot to say thank you, all the while racking his brain for the reference he was missing. He walked until dusk started to fall and then he made his way back to his apartment. Once inside, he dumped his satchel among the empty beer bottles on his counter, cracked open a fresh one, and sat at his desk.

A green truck. He rifled idly through the tip-line transcripts, taking slow swigs from the bottle until it struck him. The tips from Atlanta. He sat up straight and started flipping pages faster, scanning each page until he found it. A green truck. A man just outside of Atlanta had reported a young boy on a sidewalk picked up by a green truck, though the boy didn’t seem to know the driver. Excited again, he started from the beginning of the transcripts and gripped a highlighter in his teeth as he went page by page, trying to see if there was anything else about a green truck.

After two hours, he had no other occurrences, his back was sore, and he realized he was hungry for the first time since he had started his new job. He called the local pizza place, the only number on speed dial, and ordered a medium sausage and black olive. He got up to stretch, walking around his kitchen sipping his beer while he waited for the pizza. As soon as it arrived, he sat back down at his desk to wade through more of the tips. There were over four hundred pages of transcripts, mostly garbage, people looking for attention. He hardly noticed as he dripped pizza sauce on page 270, the smear of tomato and grease blending nicely into a brown soy sauce stain.

He read until he could hardly see the page, and it wasn’t until he sat back when he reached the end of the transcript that dawn was actually breaking. He had found three specific instances of people talking about a green truck with a young boy, though they were in different areas—the one outside of Atlanta, one by the zoo, and the last about halfway between Atlanta and Savannah. None of the boys’ descriptions sounded like Benny, but eyewitnesses were unreliable, everyone knew that. Especially if you watched enough crime drama, like Ben had before his son disappeared. Afterwards, he just didn’t have the stomach. But here was a lead, a solid lead, and he smiled.

Since it was so early, Ben decided to catch a few hours sleep before calling Detective O’Connor, the man in charge of his son’s case, and letting him know what he had found.

“Detective, please, I know you—”

“Ben. Stop. We’ve been through this more times than is healthy. You really need to stop; leave the investigation to us. We’re the ones trained in it. Though, admittedly, it’s been a couple weeks since your last proposed lead.” The detective sounded tired, strained. He sighed, then asked, “But, whatever. This is a great way to start my Sunday. What color truck did you say?”

“Green. Three times.” Ben waited, hoping that this time—this time—his information might actually convince the detective to do something. He had lost track of the number of times he had called the man, insistent that he had found something new in the morass of paper on his wall.

A sigh came down the line. “Did you count how many times other vehicles appeared in the slush?”

“No, but there was someone in Atlanta, a woman, she said—”

The detective didn’t wait to hear anymore. “According to the analysis sitting in front of me, there were three green truck tips, four white sedan tips, and ten all popular panel van tips. We’ve checked this out.”

Ben thought he remembered those tips. But this one had seemed real. He’d spoken to someone who had actually seen the truck. “Really? You’ve tracked down these people and asked them what they saw?”

“We can’t track down every anonymous tip, Ben, you know this. We’ve been over it.”

Ben’s hand clenched convulsively around the phone, but he tried to keep his voice level. He was not going to be dismissed again. “You should try. How many hours are you putting into this, anyway? One, two a month now? I’m still putting in forty-five or more each week. How can you justify telling me you can’t track this stuff down when you’re not spending the time to even keep up with the tip line?” Despite his best efforts, Ben was breathing heavily, the anger showing through in his voice. There was a moment of silence on the line.

“I’m going to forgive you that one, Mr. Grant. I have forty cases on my desk right now. Your son’s included. But we’ve hit a dead end. There is no new information coming in to attend to. I go over it as often as I can find the time, to try and find a new thread, but there is nothing there.”

“Don’t say that! There has to be something there, you can’t just give up—” Ben’s voice broke and he struggled not to let his exhaustion and fresh despair overwhelm him.

Silence again.

“Look, there’s someone I think can help you. If you’ve got a pen, I’ll give you her number.”

“Is she a private eye? A missing person’s consultant? I’m not sure I can afford that right now, maybe if I saved a bit.” Ben shuffled papers on his desk to unearth his legal pad and pulled a pen out of the “#1 Dad” mug on the corner of his desk.

“She’s…not. Ben, she’s a counselor, and I think with the amount of time you spend obsessing over this—”

Ben slammed down the phone. He lowered his head onto his crossed arms and stayed there, taking deep breaths to calm the tide of anger that flooded him. He wasn’t like his wife, the suicidal mess. He didn’t need some shrink telling him he couldn’t look for his son, or worse yet, telling him time after time that what he did made no difference. After a few moments, he hauled himself out of the chair and fell into bed, only to rise four hours later and start over on the tip line transcripts, this time listing on a legal pad all the references to specific vehicles or objects and where they were located.

The next morning, Ben mumbled a greeting to Judy and made his way back to the warehouse. He dropped into his seat, threw his sunglasses onto the desk, and briskly rubbed his face, trying to force himself awake. He had fallen asleep at his desk late last night and had slept poorly for it. A mug of coffee appeared on the desk in front of him, held by a slim hand with something green under the fingernails.

“Judy said you looked like you could use some. Careful though, Byron brews it like his very life depends on the amount of caffeine he can squeeze out of the beans.” Sylvia perched on the end of his desk, gesturing with the cup. “Come on, it’ll do you good.”

“I don’t know. Should I accept something from someone with green gunk under their fingernails?” Ben was striving for a light-hearted tone as he reached out and cupped the lukewarm mug in his hands. But judging by the look on her face, he didn’t quite succeed.

Frowning at her nails, she started picking at them. “It’s paint. It’s hard as hell sometimes to get oil paints out from under your nails without dipping your hands in turpentine. Then they smell.” She made a face and gave up on the stains. “So, looks like you had quite the weekend. Care to spill the juicy gossip?”

Ben took a cautious sip of the coffee, swallowing a couple times to try and rid himself of the acrid aftertaste and set it gently on the desk. And then ignored her question. “You were right. Coffee of doom they should call that stuff.”

She dropped her head to the side, waiting.

Ben tried again to distract her. “Painting, was it? A fence in the garden?”

“No, portraits, of a sort. It’s hard to describe. So, who was it kept you out to all hours?”

Since she wouldn’t take subtle hints to drop it, he attempted the more direct approach. “I don’t want to talk about it. Alright?” Ben pointedly turned to the stack of new entry forms already on his desk.

“Fine. Whatever. I don’t need to know her name I guess.” She flounced over to her cart and proceeded down the bays. “But next time I advise you to drink some V8 Splash with whatever it was you drank last night. Lots of vitamins and minerals, keeps you from getting a hangover the next day.”

“You know this from experience?” he called after her.

“Ah, no, but I’ve heard people say. They swear by it!”

He lowered his head to the desk and stayed there for a second to let his fatigue settle more fully into his bones before getting up and following her, still clutching the acrid coffee.

“So how much shelving do we have today?”

“Not all that much actually. We might be able to start pulling the next auction materials today. Sound good?”

“Ah, sure. I think I remember that part of the manual.”

“It’s easy. Here. You finish shelving these, and I’ll go get your computer set up.”

Ben took his time shelving the books at the bottom of the cart to give the coffee time to enter his bloodstream before trundling the cart back to his desk. “So, how does this work?”