Thunderstruck & Other Stories (15 page)

“Aw, shit, Nathan,” said Aude to the corpse. “Mr. Blackbird, dammit.”

The back of the body would be black with pooled blood, a half-swamped boat, but what was visible was pale and so far intact, thanks to the chill of the room. The muttering voice came from a police scanner on the bedside table: Nathan Blackbird liked to listen to reports of all the crimes
he didn’t commit. Aude turned it off so he wouldn’t have to hear himself radio in. Then he went to talk to the kid.

Once upon a time a woman disappeared from a dead-end street. Nobody saw her go. She must have stepped out the door of the Victorian she shared with her father and son. She must have walked down the front steps. She was accompanied or unaccompanied, willing or unwilling. She left behind her head-dented pillow like a book on a lectern, on the right page one long hair marking her place for the next time. She left behind the socks that eventually forgot the particular shape of her feet and the shoes that didn’t, the brown leather belt that once described her boyish waist, dozens of silver earrings, the pajamas she’d been wearing when last seen. She left behind her mattress printed with unfollowed instructions for seasonal turning. She left behind her car. She left behind the paperback mystery she’d been reading.

She’d been fired from her job as a lunch lady at the local grade school for allowing the children to give her back rubs. She’d had a boyfriend but they’d broken up. She’d been talking religion again; there was a girl in Hamilton, Ontario, who’d suffered a head injury and was supposedly performing miracles, and Karen Blackbird had been thinking of going. All her life she’d been looking for God. She went to church services, temple, the free brunch at the International Society for Krishna Consciousness. Then she’d come home to sleep on her own doubt-scented sheets. Maybe this time she’d elected to stay among the faithful.

She left behind a basement filled with old photographs, smashed hats, a sprung wicker love seat that resembled the Brooklyn Bridge, a trunk full of bank statements, a canvas bag of orphaned keys, an asthmatic furnace, a noncommittal hot-water heater.

In the upstairs bathroom she left a disheveled toothbrush with a fleshy red rubber point at one end to massage her gums, the round lavender disposable razor that she used on her legs but not under her arms, a black rubber comb bought from a truck-stop vending machine, a blond boar bristle brush darkened with her hair.

She left behind her elderly father and her son. She never should have done that. Her father had a temper and a criminal record. The son was defenseless. He was little for his age, and then he turned sullen, and skinnier, and his skin got ashy, and he seemed barely awake in class, and everyone thought,
At last, the poor kid’s going through puberty
.

But the truth was only that his grandfather was starving him to death.

A picture of Karen Blackbird appeared on the evening news. It made her inaccurately beautiful. Her hair had been pulled back and tamed along the territory of her skull. She wore dark lipstick. The flash obscured the oddness of her nose. Her paisley dress had smocking across the chest and cutouts over the shoulders. On the nearest shoulder, you could see a few freckles, the kissing kind. Maybe the coincidences of light and angle made her beautiful; maybe it was the affection of the photographer. If you went looking
for the woman in the picture, you might never find the real Karen Blackbird. It was Asher Blackbird’s favorite picture of his mother. He had given it to the police. They questioned him for a while, but he knew her only the way you know your mother—the smell of her, the dogleg corridors of her faith, the sloppy scrape of her left foot as she walked. Not scars, not most of her secrets.

In a house like that, how could you tell whether someone had packed for a trip, and for how long?

Had Asher known his grandfather was dead?
He slept a lot
, said the boy,
he got mad when I bothered him
. When did the chains go up?
After my mother left
. But why?
Because I was a vegetarian
. What does that have to do with anything?
My grandfather didn’t believe in vegetarians: he said if I got hungry enough I’d eat what I was given
.

Why didn’t you leave?

At that the boy looked confused. “I
live
there,” he said at last.

Not anymore, you don’t
, said the police.
Don’t worry, we’ll find you somewhere good. Someplace that’ll feed you
.

In the meantime the kid stayed with Leonard Aude and his wife. He gained ten pounds the first two weeks.

On every tree and telephone pole in the neighborhood:

That was all. It was all the manager of the Hi-Lo Market knew. He’d Xeroxed the photo from the local paper. The library’s photocopier was feeble, and Karen Blackbird looked frozen in a block of ice. He replaced the fliers every week, whether they’d been rained on or not, but forgot to include a number to call. They were like the refrain of some pop song as you passed them on the street, all question and no way to answer.

Have you seen Karen? Have you seen Karen? Have you seen Karen?

The Hi-Lo manager worked six days a week and waited for someone to come question him. No one did. Shouldn’t someone have asked him what he knew? He’d found the boy, he’d alerted the police.
I could tell something was wrong, right away
. He wouldn’t mention his initial anger—not that the boy was stealing, but that he was stealing so ineptly the Hi-Lo manager was obliged to collar him. He would describe the way the boy looked, hollow-eyed.
A good kid
, the Hi-Lo manager imagined saying.

Surely the Hi-Lo manager had a right. Before he found the boy, he’d had an idea that the one good thing in his life was his love for his ex-wife. Most people didn’t know what that kind of love was like. He hadn’t known himself back when they were married, when he felt only as though he were doing it wrong, as though there were a curtain between them. Divorce had lifted that curtain, and now when they spoke on the phone he could suddenly declare, in his
truest voice, “I love you,” and he could hear the breath knocked out of her, and then her answer—matter-of-fact because she couldn’t deny it—“I love you, too.” Then they’d just breathe at each other a while, across the perforated tops of the phones, breathe, breathe, and then she’d say, “What are you cooking yourself for dinner? Tell me.” Mostly he cooked hamburgers, but he learned a few other dishes so he could tell her something else.

Then he found the boy. Shouldn’t that change his life?

A locksmith replaced the front door lock of number 13, then added a hasp and a padlock. An orange-overalled man nailed a piece of plywood over the broken window. Who had hired them? One at a time, a woman, two men, and a teenage girl left funereal flowers on the front steps of the ramshackle house. Who for? No one mourned the dead man. They were ghouls, those flower leavers. They wanted to attend a funeral but there wasn’t one. Nathan Blackbird’s body was still waiting at the morgue for someone to claim it. The boy had been sent away to live in a new home, a clean one, in another town.

Some fool—the manager of the Hi-Lo—came with a length of yellow ribbon to tie around a tree, like with the hostages a few years back. It was still in the early years of American ribbons. He was disappointed to see that there was no tree, and besides, someone had already tied yellow ribbon—but, no, that was just police tape. The Hi-Lo manager tied his ribbon around a bush.

One of the neighbor girls came out to talk to him. She was blond and chinless and rubber-mouthed, with a thick lower lip.

“He’s coming back,” she said to him.

“Who?”

“Asher Blackbird.”

“Yeah?” said the Hi-Lo manager.

She nodded. He had a sudden feeling of waking up in a hospital and knowing how bad your condition was by looking at your ward mates.

“You know Karen?” he asked cautiously.

She said, “Look.” She was pointing to a spot above her right eye, a blue-gray shadow.

“What?” he said.

“Pencil,” she said. “First day of school a kid slapped me on the back while I was erasing. Now, Karen,” she said, and flipped out her palm, “had the same thing, here.”

“Pencil.”

“In her palm. Right on this line.”

“Lana!” a woman called from the porch next door.

“Gotta go,” said the girl.

A piece of pencil in her hand! In the coming months, the Hi-Lo manager would look at his own palm, expecting to see it there, a pencil point beneath the skin, twitching like a compass needle.

Suddenly everything in the neighborhood, it seemed, was lost. Telephone poles were feathered with MISSING posters until you couldn’t see Karen Blackbird’s face. People didn’t take her down, they just tacked up their new
losses over hers. Missing: A bobtailed German shepherd named Ponto. A watch with only sentimental value. A tabby cat named James who needed medication. Rodan, beloved parakeet.
Please look. Please check your basements. Have you seen me?
People wanted to help. They kidnapped the wrong animals, kept them in garages, and called phone numbers. “Are you
sure
it’s not Ponto?” a worried woman asked Ponto’s owner, who answered, “Lady, a dog is not a starfish. Tails do not grow back.” A neighborhood away, a ten-year-old girl wrote in block letters,
Help find me! I am a German shepherd, I answer to “Auntie,” I am nervous and sometimes bite
.

They found a body.

The body belonged—if that word made sense, if once you were dead your body still
belonged
to you—to a woman in her thirties or forties. She’d been lashed to a shopping cart and pushed into the Charles River. She was found three months after Karen Blackbird officially disappeared. Skeletal remains, they said. Someone had broken the dead woman’s cheekbone recently, and her femur some years before. She wore a T-shirt that said
VIRGINIA IS FOR LOVERS
. That survived, but anything else—tattoos, a bit of pencil in the palm, signs she fought back—had been boiled off by the river. There was Karen in the newspaper again, with her freckled shoulders.

But the coroner decided the next day that the body wasn’t hers; it had been in the river for a year. There was no
evidence anyone had reported this particular woman missing. She’d only been found.

Someone always confesses eventually. In this case, his name was Manny Coveno. The mug shot printed in the paper convinced everyone: nose broken into several bends, a few days’ growth of black beard, a mole just below his right eye that looked like a thumbprint. He’d been picked up in Providence at the end of a week of heavy drinking: he’d wandered into the lobby of the Biltmore Hotel at three
A.M.
shouting, “I did it! I did it! I did it!”

Even Manny didn’t know what he was doing in Providence, but his confession seemed plausible. He’d known Nathan Blackbird. They’d kept rooms in a boardinghouse called the Hollis Hotel till the woman who ran it died and the property was sold. Manny, homeless, went on the march. The few people who knew him said they couldn’t imagine him killing anyone. Still, he’d confessed.

He was so drunk it took him two days to sober up, at which point he went into the delirium tremens. They sent a police stenographer to take notes.

I strangled her. I stabbed her. Threw her body off the bridge. The bridge, the bridge by the trackless trolleys. Blackbird, Blackbird, Nathan Blackbird. I hated him. She took him away and I followed. She picked him up. I waited. I waited ten, eleven, fifteen years. I caught her. I caught her and I killed her.

How?

Oh, any way at all. I bit her. Nathan Blackbird. There was a guy—you can’t believe the things he’d do. He’s the devil. I swear to you, sir, he’s the devil, and me, too.

Nathan Blackbird?

Of course. He helped me. I helped him. I bit her. I killed her.

Did you do anything else?

Plenty.

Did you rape her?

“Oh, Jesus, sir,” said Manny Coveno, shocked, “I could never do a thing like that.”

“Not that or the rest of it,” his sister said, trying to get him released. “He’s a child, he’s got an IQ of sixty-eight. I’ll show you his records. They loved him in school. He lost his way!”

“He lost his way, and we found him,” said the police chief.

For four days Manny Coveno spoke. On TV, as he was taken from the police car to the jail, he looked less convincing, a little guy with the kind of skull-baring brush cut mothers force on their sons in the summer. But he had a lot to say. He smothered her. He shot her.
With what kind of gun?
A bullet gun. Gun that shoots bullets. He wrapped her body in a sheet and put it on a train. A boxcar. A subway. She had gone to heaven and he’d gone, too. He’d killed her with a blunderbuss. He’d killed her with a credit card. With poison. He’d hidden her under his bed, she was still there, she’d been there for ages. He had been in love with her—wasn’t everyone?
In love with who, Manny?
With the girl. The girl. That girl.

On the fifth day, he woke up in his cell. His heart was calm. The walls were steady. He was astounded to hear that he’d been arrested for murder.

“Well, maybe I did it,” he said to his lawyer. “I don’t remember much of anything about anything.”

“You didn’t,” said his lawyer, an awkward young woman named Slawson. She was a friend of his sister’s, and she was relieved to believe he was innocent, because he terrified her.

The police had followed every single harebrained lead that Manny Coveno had given them. They’d even checked the former Hollis Hotel, much to the consternation of the new owner. It had all been nonsense. He’d hallucinated every detail.

Manny began to cry. “Jesus,” he said. “Who did I kill?”

“Manny,” said Slawson desperately. She felt her pockets for a handkerchief. “You didn’t kill anyone.”

“Then why am I here? Oh, Jesus, I don’t want to kill anyone!”