The Captive (20 page)

"What's that?" Barry said, feeling the muscles in his neck tighten.

"Barry?"

"Yes, I hear you now."

"You got the police?"

"Yes, of course, Vaire," he said, giving up his fears."Do you know what kind of car Bill would be driving?"

"I don't know," came her voice again, and he thought she must be crying. "Barry, she has been so happy with you, do you know that?"

He felt tears in his eyes again, as if it were all over and he had only memories of the love they once had. He felt weak and cursed himself silently. "Vaire, just tell me  something that will help me to find them!" he shouted.

Her voice came close suddenly. "I know someone who is a friend of Bill's, and I'll find out what he's doing."

"Vaire, call me right away," Barry shouted. "Reverse the charges, but call me, OK?"

"I will, Barry. You know our love goes with you," the woman's voice said, being calm again, the voice so like  Renee's voice that it made Barry squirm.

"Thank you, Vaire, give my love." And he put the  receiver on the hook.

He was torn now between wanting to run out of the house and begin riding down highways looking for them and waiting  at the house as that damned detective had said to do. He didn't feel hungry, although it was getting well on into the afternoon. He looked under the sink for a soft drink and found a nearly full bottle of bourbon they had bought to serve to the Rossis more than a month ago, He poured half a glass over ice and went out to sit on the porch swing and think.

There he sat until the ice disappeared from the drink, having taken one sip and shuddered at the taste. The high pitched voice startled his reverie. He knocked the glass off the arm of the swing. It shattered on the porch floor.

"Can Mina come out an' play?"

He looked at the little black-haired boy standing at the screen door. He focused his eyes with difficulty, as if he had been looking past infinity.

"You broke that glass, Mr. Golden," Benny Ochoa said, pointing at the fragments on the floor.

"She's not here, Benny." Barry got up, kicking the pieces of glass back under the swing. He walked to the door so fast that the boy backed down a step, afraid. "Did you see any cars stop here yesterday?" And his tone was very hard, as if the little boy had waked him from a dream to a reality he was determined to control.

"A beeg black car?" Benny asked, a fearful expression on his face.

"Yes, was there a big black car here?"

"No. I didn' see one."

"But you said a big black car," Barry said, squatting down and trying to hold his temper. "Why did you say a big black car?"

"I don't know," Benny said, looking down and sticking both hands in his pockets. "I thot it might be a beeg black car, I guess, but I didn' see one."

"Well, if you had seen a car stop here sometime yesterday while I was gone, I might have given you something, maybe a quarter," Barry said, aware of how useless such extorted information might be.

"A quarter?" Benny was bright eyed again.

Barry fished in his pocket, brought out a quarter and held it up. "Just like this, in fact this very quarter."

"The beeg man gave me a dime and said I shouldn't tell, so I didn'," Benny said. "But a quarter's more than a dime, no?"

"Yes it is, Benny," Barry said, beginning to shake with repressed excitement. "Here." He opened the screen door and held the quarter in front of Benny's snub nose. "Did you see a car stop here?"

"Yes sir," Benny said. "Now can I have -"

"Just a minute, now, just a bit more information. Tell me what you can remember about the car, and maybe if there's a lot to tell, maybe there will be
another
quarter."

Benny looked dazed. The thought of two quarters nearly paralyzed his faculties. Then his face brightened again. "There was thees beeg black car, and it was round in front, not like yours, and it had a circle on the door, like those police, only not like them." He took the quarter from Barry's fingers while Barry dug into his pocket to find more change. He found several dimes, no quarter.

"Look Benny, dimes," and he held them out.

"You said a quarter," the boy said, beginning to look suspicious.

"This is more than a quarter, look,
three
dimes."

"OK. Well, the man came and asked me if that was the Goldens', and I said sure, and he gave me the dime and said I shouldn't tell if I was a good boy because it was a surprise party. He was a beeg gringo, I tell you, and he had on these beeg boots," and Benny held his hands almost shoulder high to himself. "They were shiny, like those motorcycle  police-mans," he said, warming to his topic. "And then after while Mina came out and we played in the back for a little bit, but she said they were going away."

"Where, where were they going?" Barry said, and held his breath.

"Oh, she don' say where, but pretty soon they got in the car with some suitcase things and they go."

"Why didn't you tell the police this?" Barry said, feeling baffled all over again. "They asked you if you saw a car, didn't they?"

"They asked my Mama," Benny said grinning. "They didn' ask me, and beside, the beeg gringo said I shouldn't tell, and he was pretty fierce looking, I tell you."

"Now think about the car, Benny," Barry said, pressing the dimes into the boy's sweaty hand and closing the fingers over them. "What kind of car was it, and what did that circle look like on the door?"

But Benny rapidly lost interest now that he had become a man of wealth, and he yearned away from the intense man on the porch who kept pushing more questions at him.

"I already tol you it was a black car, a new one like Mr. Max's down at the gas station. And I don' know what the circle was. It was a round thing like on those policemans' cars, I tole you." He began to pull at his pants. "I got to go now. Can I go now, Mr. Golden?"

"Yeah, Benny." Barry stood up quickly, feeling the blood leave his head. He leaned against the door jamb while the momentary blackout removed the world and brought it back slowly. When he looked down the boy was gone.

***

Barry is exhausted now. He has been trying to do his own police work, going to gas stations along the highways leading out of town and asking if they have seen a black new model car with a round emblem on the door. The gas station people are sometimes apathetic, or hostile, or they do not speak English very well, or they were not on duty yesterday. I am sniffing around the yard again, moving in circles slowly, with my nose to the ground like a dog or silly coyote.

I pause, sensing a rabbit nearby and feeling it would be nice to have a bite before going on, but I am not in the mood to chase the thing. I sense him about thirty yards away in the empty lot and command him to come to me. His image in my spatial sense does not move. He continues nibbling, stopping occasionally to listen, but he does not come. I  command him again, as strongly as I can. Nothing happens. It feels somehow awkward to make the command now. I feel muscles tensing that should not tense; I attempt it again. No effect. What has happened? Since my early youth, since Charles was my person, I drew living things to me with my will as easily as I would reach out and take them with my hand. I recall a few days ago when Barry was able to call up this power to take money, what he calls "making a loan." And tonight I cannot do it. The rabbit remains thirty yards away, stubbornly deaf to my will. It makes me angry, and I feel my rage mounting so that now it surely will come to me. No. I have forgotten how to do it! When I try to think my will into action to compel other beings, I cannot remember  how such a thing could be, as if it never existed. I sit down and let my tongue hang out stupidly. Might as well be a dog - or a human. But now I am worried about the little girl. It is perhaps the first time I have felt lonely for another being. I look up at the last ruddy sliver of the waning moon hanging low now in the west, and I think I hear Little Mina speaking to me. I stop breathing, listen. It is inside, in my mind. I hold all my being very still, wiping all thought and perception away, making my consciousness an empty and receptive space, soundless, closed off. Almost I feel that I have shifted into a stone, so silent is it. Far off, like wings beating miles away, a breath of voice, a minute thread of words in a vast desert. I remain calm, listening:

"I don't like it here," the tiny sound says, finally making words.

I remain like stone. Then a question forms: "Mina? Where are you?"

"Nobody here to play with.... Daddy's so mean...."

Question, forming in space: "Mina. Where are you?"

"A lot of big trees," the voice says.

I think very slowly, trying to phrase a question that will tell me. Her voice is so tenuous, so lost in emptiness that I am sure she will soon disappear.

"How long did you drive to get there?"

Silence.

I ask again, slowly.

"All day, and ... dusty ... so bumpy ... lost Bruno."

She is fading out. Bruno is the teddy bear. All day, and it was bumpy and dusty, so bumpy she lost the teddy bear? "Are you staying there, Mina, or going on tomorrow?" But she is gone. I keep calling her to come back, but the empty space inside me is truly empty now, as silent as the inside of a granite boulder.

I go over the little bit of information she has given, making it firm in my mind and available to Barry when he wakes again. How is it that this child can speak to me over great distances? I have never experienced this with another human.  The bond between us is closer than I had thought, then. I miss the child. Something I have never felt, the need of another being comes up in me like a slow rush of blood. What is that feeling? It is not anger, nor lust, nor fear, nor any bodily thing, and yet I feel it in my body and mind together, a slow feeling of want that makes me look about for the child, as if she could be here. It is not like the hunger for food or the need of sex or the body's need to run and leap. What shall I call this feeling? Sorrow? Is it something like love? Do I feel love? I find I have sat so long in one position that I am stiff. I get up and walk about, seeing that the sliver of moon has disappeared now behind the volcanoes.  How can I love a human child? I am not human. Perhaps  she is of my own kind? But she would not allow herself to be abducted if she were.

My head aches. I have never done so much thinking. I feel down in my senses, what Barry would call depressed. I am surely turning human. I walk slowly back to the house and get back into bed.

***

The ringing phone propelled Barry from the bed before he had time to come awake, and he crashed first into the door jamb and then into the wall in the hallway before he got his bearings. He grabbed the phone and said in a mushy voice, "H'lo, whose is?"

"Barry? This is Vaire."

He came awake in a quarter second. "Yeah. I'm here. I'm awake." And he looked around to see if it was night or day, seeing the bright sun and realizing he must have slept until ten or after.

"I checked that friend of Bill's, you know?" Her voice was clear and close sounding. "They both left here more than a week ago, they said to go on a hunting trip up north on a special reservation, and they were supposed to be back by now."

"There's no hunting season in the summer anywhere that I know," Barry said, his mind still coming back to reality.

"I know that, and now Clyde's wife knows it too, and she says she is going to call the police if he doesn't show up by tomorrow because he left her with very little money. And Barry?"

"Yeah, I'm listening, trying to think."

"They took a lot of guns and ammunition with them," she said. "Clyde Lowden is his name, and he is what they call a gun fancier, has all kinds of weapons, and she says they took almost all of them."

"Hell," Barry said, his head spinning with the information.  "What would they be doing with all those guns?"

"Well I think Clyde and Bill have run off, and maybe they are heading out of the country or something. Maybe they're going to Spain to join the revolution, or to Mexico." The woman's voice was calm, but she was talking very fast.

"Listen Vaire, there isn't any revolution going on in Mexico  that Bill's type would be interested in, and as for Spain, I wonder which side they would be on? But that's just plain silly. I mean, I don't want to be insulting, Vaire, but, well, I don't know either," he ended lamely.

"Oh, and there's one other thing," Vaire said as if reading from a list. "Another man probably went with them, an older man named Ludwig, that's his last name. They call him Wiggy, Mrs. Lowden said, and he sometimes works for Clyde in his plumbing shop."

"Hey, what kind of car did this guy Lowden have?"

"I thought you'd want to know that. It's a new La Salle that he just bought a couple of months ago, a black one. And his wife was mad about that too because she said Lowden  insisted on putting his company name on the doors so it ruined the style of it."

Yeah, that's it," Barry said. "And his company name was written in a circle on the door, right?"

"I suppose so, Barry. I don't know because I didn't see it while I was there. And that poor woman is such a wreck, I mean Mrs. Lowden. She even told me, and I'm almost a stranger to her, that she didn't know whether to call the police or not, because she's glad he's gone. She said he is just a terrible person."

"Great," Barry said, almost to himself.

"Have you found out anything more?" Vaire's voice broke its calm, and she sounded afraid again, the way she had yesterday.

"No, not really. The cops half think I did away with them and buried the bodies under the garden or something. Makes me mad as hell. I've been going to gas stations asking on all four highways out of town if they remember a car." And he told her what the little Ochoa boy had said. "Hey what was the name of the plumbing shop, Lowden Plumbing or something  like that?"

There was a silence on the other end. He was about to ask again when Vaire's voice came back on.

"Yes, here it is in the Yellow Pages. It's a picture of a water pipe, looks like a
Q
, or no, it's like the Greek letter
omega
with the name written under it."