Untouchable (34 page)

He went back into the garage to get the clipping from the drawer. He wanted it with him, felt he would need it when the football coach called.

The light in the windows was fading. The haze of the day had grown to cloud cover, the gray threat of rain. He opened the workbench drawer and removed the clipping. He pulled the drawer out further, pulled the drawer all the way out of the bench. The wooden rabbit was gone. He looked on the floor, back behind the lower drawers. He tried to think, tried to recall if he’d moved it, if he’d changed things. The tape recorder was gone, too. The Kid’s recorder and the cassette Darby had found.

Up in The Kid’s bedroom, he searched the dresser drawers, the drawers of The Kid’s small wooden desk. He dumped the drawers, spilling socks and underwear across the floor. He pulled clothes out of the closet, The Kid’s notebooks from the shelf. He lay on the carpet and reached under the bed. He found the recorder and the cassette. The rabbit was gone. He couldn’t find the rabbit. He reached further under the bed and found a calendar, another calendar from the previous year. Arrows in the squares, pointing to the right. Days and weeks filled with arrows. The previous month, the previous, back to the beginning of the year. The other calendar had arrows as well, leading back from the end of the year to the previous fall, to the day Darby had told The Kid what had happened to Lucy.

Darby sat on the floor and looked at the calendars. He couldn’t believe there were so many arrows. He couldn’t believe that they’d spent so many days without her.

The cell phone jangled on his hip. The number displayed wasn’t one he recognized, wasn’t the nurse from The Kid’s school, wasn’t Bromwell’s office. The man on the phone introduced himself as Mr. Gonzalez, Art Gonzalez, the football coach at the high school. He’d received a message that Darby would like to speak with him. Darby asked if they could meet that afternoon. It wouldn’t take long, he wouldn’t take too much of Gonzalez’s time. He knew a bar not too far from the school.

It had started to rain. Fat drops splattering on the street, on Darby’s windshield. The rabbit was gone. He had to stop thinking about the rabbit. He had tried to save those things, but it was impossible to save them. He knew that now. He could feel the loss, the failure to protect those things. A blank space within him.

The cell phone rang again. It was Bob’s voice on the line, distant and fuzzy.

“David? David, I’ve got a shitty connection. Can you hear me? I’m on my way north. I couldn’t watch any more of it on TV. I know the area. I used to camp up there.”

Bob was talking loud and fast. Darby didn’t say anything. He had to fight to keep his mouth closed. The speck was in his mouth, threatening to get out.

“Listen to me,” Bob said. “I want you to look in on Rhoda, if I’m not back soon. Can you do that? Can you do that for me?”

He wanted to tell Bob to turn around, to stay away from what he’d seen on TV, but he had to keep his mouth shut, had to keep his teeth pressed into his tongue, and then the cell phone connection was lost, the line was dead.

The afternoon sky looked burnt, brown and gray, the sun just a pale blot behind the haze. Rain coming.

There was some commotion in a far corner of the schoolyard. A surge of kids running, breaking up from their recess groups to join the rush flowing back toward the far corner. The Kid had a bad feeling about this. This kind of excitement was never good. He followed the nearest group of kids, walking quickly at first and then breaking into a run, dragging a little behind the wave. A few yard aides noticed all the excitement and started toward the crowd from the opposite side. The Kid knew that it would take them too long to get there, to do anything about whatever was happening inside the growing ring of kids.

The Kid reached the outside of the crowd, started pushing his way through. Just about everyone was taller than he was. The Kid shoved stomachs and chests, trying to make his way into the center. He passed Arizona, who was waving her arms at the yard aides, yelling,
Help, Help.

The first thing he saw was Matthew, half of Matthew’s face, shiny and wet with tears, his eye spinning, white and wild, looking for help, a way out. Brian had him in a headlock, his ropy arm tight around Matthew’s neck, the hidden half of Matthew’s face squeezed into Brian’s ribcage. Brian was punching him with short, hard pops on the top of the head. Matthew was screaming, a high, terrified sound. The Kid had never heard anything like it.

The aides would never get there. Brian was landing those rabbit punches,
bam, bam, bam,
and Matthew was screaming and The Kid thought of this as something more than just another fight, thought of this as an irreversible thing, something that would be around forever. Brian hitting right on the top of Matthew’s head. The Kid thought of some kind of brain injury, Matthew with lightning bolts over his head. The Kid thought of this as permanent damage.

He kept pushing, finally through the innermost ring, and then he was out into the middle. It felt like falling, that sudden emergence into the open space at the circle’s heart. Brian still had Matthew in the headlock, was still punching the top of his head, both of them turning counterclockwise with the force of the punches, the punches spinning them slowly as if Brian wanted every side of the crowd to get a good look.

The Kid had to move fast. As soon as he got close to them, as soon as someone noticed, another kid would jump in, Razz or one of Brian’s other friends. This was how these things worked. Everybody stayed back, everybody observed the rules until somebody didn’t and then all bets were off.

Brian’s face was set. He looked determined, his eyes straight, his jaw tight. He was trying to do something, there was something he was trying to accomplish. He would keep hitting Matthew until something happened, something that couldn’t be taken back. The scream, the sound Matthew made was the most awful sound The Kid had ever heard.

The Kid was in there before he really knew what he was doing, wedged between the two of them, and then he had his arms around Matthew, like a bear hug, his back to Brian, and Brian’s punches were wilder now, surprised, and he hit The Kid’s backpack and the back of his head, just above his neck. The punches were so hard. The amount of pain was something The Kid had never felt before, ripping up from the base of his skull, over the top, settling in behind his eyes.

He held Matthew in his bear hug and they all fell to the ground, The Kid on top of Matthew, Brian on top of The Kid, punching wildly. The Kid’s face pressed right to Matthew’s face, Matthew’s wet cheek against The Kid’s, and The Kid held on as tight as he could until he finally felt Brian’s weight pulled off him, heard the aides’ voices and P.E. teacher’s voice, The Kid’s face pressed to Matthew’s, his cheek covering Matthew’s mouth, trying to muffle that scream.

The bar was dark and humid. The rain beat against a large plate-glass window beside the front door, the window glowing with the dull outdoor light. There was a muted TV mounted up behind the bar showing live shots of the Tehachapi situation, the line of cars on the dirt road that Bob had talked about, all the people trying to get into the compound.

Darby sat on a stool at the middle of the bar. There were two women sitting at the end by the TV, smoking and drinking beer. The women wore pink nurse’s scrubs decorated with teddy bears and giraffes. The bartender came by and Darby ordered a shot and a beer. The rainwater was still running from the top of his head down the back of his neck. He could smell the menthol of the women’s cigarettes. Bob’s brand. He thought of Bob driving north, toward the images on TV. He thought of the things he had lost, the things he had failed to protect. His hands were shaking, so he held the beer bottle, peeled at the label with a fingernail. The bartender brought him another shot.

On the TV, it looked like the authorities were gathering, a sizable police and federal presence assembling at a staging area a good distance from the press tents. The TV cameras switched to long-lens zooms, trying to make out what was going on, men suiting up, helping one another suit up.

Darby took off his jacket and wiped the rain from the top of his head, the sides of his neck. His shirt was stuck to his back. He pulled it free and leaned down the bar, extended his arm across the scarred wood, asked the nurse closest to him for a cigarette. She shook one free from her pack and rolled it to him. The bartender dropped a pack of matches and a tin ashtray beside his shot glass. Darby took the cigarette in his teeth, lit a match, touched the match to the paper. Twelve years falling away like nothing, like some kind of misguided endurance stunt. He took a slow drag, held it in his chest, let the smoke seep from his nostrils. His body warming, his fingers tingling. Twelve years. How easy. How easy to just stop doing something.

Flack-jacketed SWAT officers ran across the TV screen, helmeted heads kept low. The camera moved erratically, searching for the right shot. The klieg lights were off, the compound was blurry in the dusk, and when the SWAT officers ran past the glow of the TV lights they disappeared, they ceased to be.

A tall, thickset Latino man came in through the front door, shaking out an umbrella. He looked around the room, and when he didn’t find who he was looking for he propped his umbrella in the corner and took a seat at the end of the bar near the door. He was wearing a hooded windbreaker with the familiar eagle mascot on the breast. He struggled to pull it off over his head, standing his hair on end, spraying rainwater far enough to land in tiny beads along the edge of Darby’s ashtray. The man looked for a place to hang his windbreaker, finally draped it over the stool beside him. The bartender went over and the man ordered a diet soda. He looked at Darby, looked at the women at the other end of the bar. He checked his watch and turned to look at the door behind him. Darby didn’t know why Gonzalez didn’t say something, didn’t introduce himself, and then he realized that Gonzalez was looking for a man who could be Lucy Darby’s husband and Gonzalez didn’t see that man.

Darby sat in that empty space for a while. His hands were still shaking and he wanted to finish the cigarette before he said anything. Another minute, another two minutes. He wanted to get his twelve years’ worth.

On the TV, a reporter stood in front of a satellite truck, looking at the camera and then looking at the sky and then back to the camera again.

Darby pushed the stub of his cigarette out in the ashtray, slid his beer and shot glass down the bar toward Gonzalez. Introduced himself. Gonzalez stood, apologized, blamed the rain, the dark bar, the long day at school. They sat again, an empty stool between them. Darby signaled to the bartender and the bartender refilled his shot glass, brought another beer. Gonzalez seemed uneasy. He said he didn’t know Lucy very well, just in passing really, in the halls or at faculty meetings. He said that he’d been surprised to get Darby’s message, that he thought it might have been a mistake.

The bar filled gradually. Men mostly, white and Latino, a group of uniformed city bus drivers, a group of construction workers with drywall dust on their hands and boots. The outside light was fading, the window getting dark.

They sat and drank. It seemed like Gonzalez had said what he was going to say. He looked at his watch, moved his windbreaker so a bus driver could sit on the empty stool. Darby had assumed Gonzalez would know why he’d been called, what Darby wanted to know. That he would come to the bar with Greene’s name on his lips.

The front of Darby’s jeans were still wet from the rain and when he dug the clipping out of his pocket it was damp, the black type smeared on the paper, the photograph blurrier than before. He smoothed it out on the bar, careful not to tear the wet paper. Gonzalez leaned in and looked at the photo, the caption beneath.

“Darian Greene,” Gonzalez said, and Darby nodded like he already knew the full name.

There was a crowd around the bar now, two and three deep. The noise level was rising. Darby finished his beer and when the story still didn’t come, he asked Gonzalez about Greene, what kind of kid he was, what kind of player. Gonzalez seemed unsure of this, like he didn’t know where this conversation was going. He’d said his piece. He shook a few cubes of ice out of his glass and into his mouth, crunched them in his teeth. He said that Greene was a white kid who thought he was a
cholo
. Walked around with his jeans halfway down his ass, his ball cap on crooked, the whole thing. Bragged about his car, his guns. With a kid like that, Gonzalez said, you didn’t always know what was real, what was B.S. Gonzalez looked at Darby and when Darby didn’t say anything, Gonzalez continued. Greene had a lot of problems, home problems, girl problems, maybe drugs. That was the word on the team anyway, that there may have been a drug problem, a meth problem. Gonzalez didn’t know about any of that, it’s just what he’d heard. He looked at Darby, crunched more ice. Last year, Greene had lost a lot of weight as the season had gone on. He’d become paranoid, violent. He got into a fight with a couple other players in the locker room and Gonzalez had to cut him from the team. He dropped out of school not long after. His girlfriend was pregnant, or that was what Gonzalez had heard. She got pregnant and they both dropped out around Christmas.

Orange light in the darkness of the TV picture, pulling the attention in the bar.
Fire,
someone said, and the word began to spread in circles around the room,
Fire, fire.

Darby asked if Gonzalez knew where Greene was now. Gonzalez crunched ice, looked Darby in the eye for the first time. His gaze flicked down to the ink on Darby’s neck, Darby’s arms. The scripted letters on his knuckles.

“He owe you something?” Gonzalez said.

Darby looked at his hands, kept his mouth closed, nodded.

Gonzalez shook his head a little, like he was disappointed with himself for what he had said, what he would say.

“Out toward Barstow. Somewhere near there. He had an uncle or a cousin who worked at a factory, could get him a job. Cement factory. Someone told me this. I don’t know who. One of the players from last season.”