Devil House(34)
* * *
JANA LARSON is standing by the wall phone in her kitchen, cupping the mouthpiece with her hand, trying to make herself heard over the outbursts in the background that occasionally make it hard for the operator at the substation to understand her. Some beef stew from a can is bubbling in a copper-bottomed pan on the stove; she holds a wooden spatula in one hand, stirring while she speaks to keep the gravy from burning. It’s too early in the day for beef stew, but Michael is always content when he has a bowl of it in front of him. She would like to distract Michael for a few minutes while she gets her bearings.
“Ma’am?” says the operator. “Do I understand you, that this is for missing persons?”
“My son didn’t come home last night,” she says. She is trying without success to keep her voice down. “Please find him, please find him, you have to find him.”
“I’m going to put a stop to this shit,” yells Michael from his recliner in front of the television. He turns his head toward Jana, to make sure the dispatcher hears. “Tell him this shit is going to stop right now.”
“Please,” says Jana Larson, who went by Jana Jenkins until just a few years ago, when she’d succeeded, for the first time, in getting away from the man she’d married as soon as she turned eighteen. He’s four years her senior; he’d been nineteen when they first met in the parking lot of the A&W. Two years later she’d given him a son; they’d named him Jesse, after nobody in particular. They both just liked the sound of it. In the years since then, which feel long and hard, she has fled from Michael Jenkins several times; a few years ago, she even succeeded in completing divorce proceedings. But nothing is ever really over, she thinks sometimes.
“Right now,” Michael repeats, at or near the top of his lungs, who knows why.
“Can you tell me where you last saw him?” asks the operator; her low voice has a steady, calming resonance.
Jana draws in as much breath as she can manage. Jesse left a note the only other time he ran away.
“He was getting into his friend Gene’s car. He plays—pinball while he’s waiting for his friend to get off of work,” she manages, though she chokes on the word “pinball.” Jesse has never been good at sports or excelled in school, but he is very good at pinball, and she used to take pride in the way all the other kids looked at her son with admiration whenever she picked him up from the arcade.
The operator pauses.
“Ma’am?”
“Are you going to let him treat you like this?” Michael yells without looking away from the commercials. “Just let him treat you like shit, like this?” There’s some spit or phlegm caught in his throat, which gives an ugly granular quality to his voice. Jana stares at a fixed point on the carpet.
“Yes?” she says.
“Can you tell me what kind of car Jesse’s friend drives?”
She scowls; there’s more in this question than she’s able to parse before answering. “Yes, I think so. It’s a blue—it’s a Ford. It’s a nice blue Ford. It’s kind of a race car,” she offers.
“I’m going to hand you over to Detective Haeny,” says the operator.
* * *
IT’S A LONG WAY FROM THE DUNES to the shore if you’re pushing a heavy wheelbarrow across the sand. It has been a long day of desperate errands and hastily improvised solutions. The interior of your apartment is a catastrophe: the carpet, the walls, the kitchen and bathroom sinks, all that smeared and sticky linoleum underfoot. You have vague plans for cleaning: a vision of your home’s restoration to its earlier state has occasionally brought you mild comfort throughout the day. Mopped floors. Clean cutlery. A relatively spotless couch.
You try to hide yourself somewhere within the folds of these visions as you drag your burden down to its destination, hoping that no one notices the woman alone on the beach who might be searching for treasure or cleaning up trash but seems bent by her labor, stopping every few feet to catch her breath, and leaning, when she stops, pointedly away from the wheelbarrow she’s pushing ahead of her. Of course, this is not a private beach, and your being alone on it means that certainly someone will see you, at least in passing. You have no spell of invisibility to cast. You are nobody’s witch.
When, at last, you come to stand in the water, physically exhausted, sobbing aloud, the moon is high. The Pacific Coast is such a beautiful place, this far outpost that’s always made room for the exile, the fugitive, the wanderer. You are none of these. Your position is primary, absolute. Outlaws and desperadoes are stock figures from story and song; you are a young schoolteacher who has had to defend herself using deadly force, and who now must try to dispose of human remains. You ache. You feel it in your forearms the most, but your entire body is stiff, sore, racked by tension. You need rest. You have needed rest for too long now. You can rest when this last leg of your journey is done, you think. And so you stand in the surf holding a leaky garbage bag, sobbing aloud for what feels like the forty-eighth consecutive sleepless hour, trying to calculate how to empty the bag without once again letting its contents splash onto your clothes, your skin.
It’s such a simple problem to state, but the physics of it, at this late hour, are too much for you. When you hold the bag away from your body, it sags, and you lose control of it. It feels important to remain in control. But if you should undo the knot in the bag and empty it out too near to you, its contents will likely splash against your body as it empties, the solid pieces catching the current around your legs. You want to avoid that, but you can’t untie the bag with your arms at full extension. You stand in the surf trying to come to a decision: it will only take the effort of the first try; after that, the remaining bags in the wheelbarrow back on the shore will be easier. The byways of your life have not prepared you for this passage.