Remains

  Table of Contents

  REMAINS J. WARREN

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Part One

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  Part Two

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  Part Three

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  REMAINS

  J. WARREN

  LETHE PRESS

  Remains

  Copyright © 2016 J. Warren. All rights reserved. Publication history of individual stories can be found at the beginning of this volume.

  No part of this work may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, microfilm, and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing

  from the publisher.

  Published in 2016 by Lethe Press, Inc.

  www.lethepressbooks.com

  ISBN-13: 978-1-59021-606-4

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictiously.

  Cover design: Inkspiral Design

  For Nathan, Larry, Lee, Max, Billy, and Tony

  The boys who taught me how to write

  PART ONE

  ONE

  I want to tell you about Randy McPherson. I’m afraid, though—afraid that you won’t care. Afraid that I’ll get through this whole thing and you’ll let him disappear, anyway. I want to make sure he never dies.

  The first thing you need to know is that, when he disappeared, he was just a boy. That’s all anyone would say after it happened. Everyone walked around for weeks with that look on their faces, the look you get when you put something on the counter, walk away, come back, and can’t find it.

  I remember him, too. No matter what I do, he’s always right there, just behind my eyes. That was the problem. I couldn’t help but remember him. I’d taught him how to swim. I remember how light he was in my hands. I used to have to hold him up out of the water when he got scared, and I remember how light he was. I remember his tiny little shoulders. When they put the casket in the ground without him in it, I couldn’t help but think ‘it’s too wide’. And it was. It was too wide for how small his shoulders were. He was always tall, but not that wide. People would come in, look at the casket, then search the crowd for Mr. Barker’s face. I guess they wanted to ask him the same thing we were all thinking. We all knew that casket was empty when they put it in the ground.

  There was only one casket place in town back then. Mr. Barker owned it. I guess most people liked him. He went to church every Sunday and most Wednesday nights. He lived alone, though, and didn’t date much. I guess after the thing happened with Randy, he got a little less religious, too. People started to talk about how he wasn’t in church anymore. Started wondering why a forty-eight year old man didn’t have a wife or a girlfriend. Every time a cat disappeared or someone lost a dog, all the adults would just sort of look toward that house. You know how people get talking. He moved, eventually. Placerville must not have been the right place for him.

  I guess in some ways, someone must have thought it wasn’t the right place for Randy, either. I don’t know. I’m getting ahead of myself. See, that’s my problem. Mom always says I can’t focus in on what I’m supposed to be doing. I’m always off in the clouds somewhere. Most guys from Placerville, they go out for football and they get a girlfriend and get married, eventually. Then they either go off to work at the truck plant in Eukiah, dragging along the wife and her expanding belly, or they enlist in the Army. The recruiter here in town always gets his quota, every year. Either way, the girl packs up all their things and cries, trying not to watch the last stop sign on Hitt road as they drive past.

  Until Randy disappeared, I swear I the universe ended at that stop sign. In kindergarten, they ask you to draw a map of the world. Most kids draw something like a circle and color it blue. That’s what they’ve seen on the television. I left mine blank, but even back then I knew it had something to do with that stop sign. I can remember sitting there and thinking about it. I did all kinds of wandering around what I thought of then as “in town,” but never beyond that stop sign.

  I went out for football just like every other boy, but I couldn’t cut it. I mean, I just wasn’t interested. I think maybe there’s more to life than trying to knock some guy down just because he has a ball in his hands. I don’t tell people that, though. They’d call me a nancy. I tell them it’s an old knee injury from when I was in scouts. I tell them I was trying to climb Freeberg Hill by myself and I slipped on the bared rocks at the top. The girls always make that ‘oh’ sound and cock their heads to the side. I like that.

  The day I got my degree, I kept thinking about how Randy would be just old enough to have started college that year. Sitting in my cap and gown, listening to some professor from State or someplace ramble on for an hour, all I could think about was how Randy should have started this year. I wondered if he’d have been going here. I wondered if he’d have remembered that I gave him swimming lessons.

  He had been ten. I remembered that. I mean, things get blurry after a while, but him turning ten I can remember. His mom held his birthday party at the Y that summer because he spent so much time there. She asked me to be come, and he smiled at me when I showed up. I was the kind of teenager always trying to prove how tough I was, but him smiling at me made me feel good. I don’t tell anyone about stuff like that, but I think about it a lot.

  It had been my sister Sarah who told me the awful news. I was out on the back porch, staring at the corn in the distance. We lived up on a hill, of sorts, and at about six o’clock or so, I loved to watch the corn sway. I was sitting out there thinking about how if someone were to write a symphony to time of swaying corn, it would be really good. I tried to hum something like that when Sarah came out with a puffy and red-eyed face.

  “They took him,” she said between sobs, “they took him.”

  “They took who?” I sat up. I thought about my father… to this day I don’t know why I did.

  “Randy McPherson. He’s gone. No one can find him,” she said, and then fell into sobbing. I stood up and pulled her to me because that’s what you’re supposed to do, but I wanted to run somewhere. I wanted to know who’d taken him. I wanted to start looking for him.

  The next day it was all anyone wanted to talk about. The main thing that kept going through my mind was small his shoulders were. How light his body was in the water. How he always looked muskratty with his hair all messed up, and his crooked smile. No one knew anything. No one had any information. He was supposed to have walked home from school that day and when he left Mrs. Latham’s class that afternoon at 2:34, no one ever saw him again.

  Some folk from the news came to talk to Sheriff Aiken. They kept running clips of things he’d say. When I learned what the word soundbyte meant, that’s what I thought of; Sheriff Aiken on television. I remember I was scared of him. He always had a mean look on his face. Since then, I’ve seen a lot of men with that same look. My dad watched the news a lot, back then, but whenever Sheriff Aiken was on, he’d get up and leave the room. I never noticed until much later, going back over all of this in my head, knowing wh
at I came to know. The sheriff had been in World War II, we’d learned when one of the deputies came for law enforcement month. I suppose the sheriff might have been the most respected man in Placerville.

  Over and over again, the news would show the clip of the Sheriff saying he had every confidence in his search parties. He expected that the boy would be found any minute now, and brought home safe. I guess they teach a class at the police academy on saying things like that. I’ve seen it a lot. Most of the time, it isn’t true. Usually if a kid isn’t found that first day, they don’t get found. I mean, sure there are cases where some kid shows up at a police station seven years after they were taken and gets to go home, but it’s pretty rare, I think.

  I just remember that whenever they showed the sheriff, I felt like walking away from the television.

  There came the dreams, too. The big black car pulling up. I mean, none of us ever saw the car, but isn’t the car always black? I remember in one of my freshman lit classes, we read this poem by Emily Dickinson where she talked about death stopping for her. I always pictured death driving some big black car. I see it all the time when I can’t stop myself: that shiny black lumbering American-steel rectangle of a car pulling up next to Randy. Some violence, then his backpack flying into the McMillan’s yard.

  Mr. McPherson had everyone he talked to call him Pete. He ran a hardware shop over on Kent. He’s the one who built that new swing set at the Center park. Every time I went there on weekends, he’d be there with Randy. He’d always ask me to push the boy on the swings when he saw me, then he’d wander over by his truck and smoke a Pal Mall. I don’t think Mrs. McPherson knew he smoked. I tried to smoke once, and I puked. To each his own, or something like that, I guess.

  I was thirteen that year. I was doing okay in school. We were supposed to be reading The Lord of the Flies. A girl I knew—Jamie, I think her name was—read it and gave me copies of her notes. We made out sometimes. I read her notes just before the test. The book sounded pretty okay. I wished I’d read it. I used to think about that after.

  Three years later, I decided to brave that stop sign on Hitt road. My dad had just bought me this huge old clunker from the junkyard up near Eukiah. It had spots of three different colors on it, but mostly it was primer gray. Dad and I worked on that car the entire year I was fifteen. When it was ready, I drove it for the first time. It was loud and ugly and way too big for me. I loved that car. The first night I had it, I cranked it and went out to that stop sign. I parked there, engine running, for a while. I thought about how maybe, if Randy and I had been friends, he’d be in the car. We’d maybe be listening to some music or something, and talking about Becky Morton.

  After a bit, I put the car back in drive, and floored the pedal. I went flying past that stop sign with no idea where I was going. I don’t know why, but my head grew clearer the faster I went. I think I looked down after twenty minutes or so, and the needle shook near to eighty. I think I remember laughing out loud as the car slowed. I remember smiling.

  After that I spent a lot of time out along the endless stretches of two a.m. highways. The faster I drove, the clearer my head got. I never took anyone with me, though. I liked being alone. People are always interrupting me when I’m sitting and thinking. I liked it out there because no one could catch up to me. I could think for an hour or so.

  Sometimes time to think wasn’t a good thing, though. I got to wondering ‘what if’ a lot. Like what if Randy and I had been walking together that day? What if I’d have been a better friend to him and protected him. Growing up, my sisters and I lived in the flat fields surrounding our home. They were always pastel princesses, I was always their brave protector. It felt good to have that. It felt right to be that for them. Then Randy disappeared, and I wondered if I could protect anything.

  There was a junkyard not far from my house. My sisters and I weren’t allowed to go to it, but the guy who owned it kept a small lot much closer. It was just across from the park. He had all sorts of junk there waiting to be sorted and brought to the real junkyard. I would go over there all the time with my friends from football, when I was still playing. We would crawl in and out of things all day. It was the best. We would pretend we were the survivors of a blown up world. My sisters were a lot different from me, though. They were smart and talked about things princesses should talk about; I found dirt clods and wondered how far I could throw them. They always tried to get me to join them in their debates about how to feed the peasants: I just wanted to take a sword and slay something.

  I never told them, but I kept looking in the backseats of the abandoned cars, wondering if this was the one that had taken Randy. I kept looking for one of his shoes or the little metal necklace his mom had given him to wear. I don’t remember what it looked like, but I remember it was round and looked sort of like a dime. Some medal of saint something-or-other. Everyday on my way home, I’d search the inside of any new car that came in. At night, I’d sit by my window and look out toward where I knew the highway was. All my friends lived out that way. The whole world was that way.

  After prom, we all chipped in together and rented this cabin near Lake Taboga. We all had sleeping bags and a fifth of something with River in the name. It seemed right. Jenny Marshall asked if I would take her and I wanted to but I also wanted to say no. Jenny was pretty, and I liked her and all, only she wanted something I can’t explain, but I knew when she asked that she wanted something.

  I told her I wanted to see the lake, and she said she did, too. We went down to the rocks just before the sand and sat down. I spread out my jacket for her to sit on. While we were sitting there, I kept thinking about Randy. Wondering if he’d ever seen the lake. The whole time I noticed out of the corner of my eye her watching me. Then she touched my arm in a way no one had ever touched it. It made me tighten my hand into a fist, and flex my arm. It felt almost like she wanted to take my arm, to make it her own. I know that’s all crazy talk, but that’s how it felt.

  She put my hand on her chest. My heart beat really fast and I couldn’t catch a descent breath. After a while, I moved my fingers some and she closed her eyes. She bit her bottom lip a little. To this day that’s the main thing I remember, the tiny indention on her bottom lip from her teeth, and how it slowly started to pop back up after she let go.

  We did it right there on that rock. It was over really quick. She said that was alright, but I’m not stupid. I knew it wasn’t. I didn’t put my clothes on right away, though. That night was really cold, and parts of me were numb, but I didn’t get dressed. I stared at the moon reflecting off the lake and felt my bare legs touching the cold rock. I guess at some point she kissed my shoulder and went back. I stayed out there a while. I got to wondering if whoever took Randy had hurt him…or made him do things he didn’t want to do. I wondered if they’d ever find him, and if they did, would he get to do the thing Jenny and I had just done.

  When I made it back to the cabin, the lights were off and everyone was asleep. I don’t know how long I’d been out there, but when I put my clothes back on, I was almost frozen. I stripped back off, and crawled into my sleeping bag. In the glow of the space heater, I saw Jenny’s face while she slept. I kept looking at her face, and then at the orange glow from the space heater for a long time before I fell asleep. What makes some men write symphonies, I wonder.

  The reason I’m thinking about all of this is my father’s phone call, I guess.

  TWO

  My dad and I were close for a while. He used to ask me to go along and keep him company on long road trips. He had to make a lot of them all over the state, back then. He sold industrial vacuum cleaners to mechanics. To this day, the first whiff of the industrial strength floor cleaner in the morning reminds me of those times because the places always reeked of it. We would pile into his Cutlass Sierra, he in his best white shirt and slacks pressed to within an inch of their life and me in with a tucked-in short sleeve button down.

  We used to sing to each other, too. He’d belt
out the first line of a song right on time with the music. I remember when I was small, that was the funniest thing I had ever seen. I used to laugh a lot, and he used to like to make me laugh. That’s what I remember most. We’d sing along with the radio all day. If it was a duet, we’d trade off parts. I always had to take the girl’s part because dad’s voice was really low, but I didn’t mind. We liked corny old radio stations, and let each other cuss all we wanted..

  After Randy disappeared, though, mom always wanted me with her. I didn’t get to go off with dad like I wanted to anymore. I used to mope around the house for days while he was gone. I withheld myself from her as much as I could as punishment. She would ask me questions and instead of answering them, I’d just grunt and nod. I did everything I could to let her know I wasn’t happy.

  I never told her or anyone, though, how I’d feel sick to my stomach lying in bed at night after. I’d cry and feel bad and mean. I’d dream about going into her room, waking her up, and saying that I was sorry. I never did, though. I don’t know why, but I never did say I was sorry.

  There was a time I can remember he used to want me to sit in his lap. I was little and I’d climb up onto him. We’d watch baseball and he’d rock me. I’d fall asleep with my head under his chin. I don’t think I’ve ever been that warm again. And he’d talk. See, that’s what I miss the most. He’d just talk to me. He’d explain what was going on in the game, or tell me about my mom when she was younger. It didn’t matter to me. He’d babble about how he was going to make sure I had the best pitching arm in the whole state. I didn’t even know what a pitching arm was, but I knew he wanted me to have it, and that made me want one.

  Then something happened and he stopped asking me to sit with him. He’d still call me in to the living room and we’d watch the game, but it was never like before. I’d sit no the couch and we’d talk about the play at the plate, or how far outside the last ball had been. We never talked, though. That’s what I most remember about my dad. We never really talked about anything after that. I got taller and taller and my voice broke and all I ever wanted was to crawl back into his lap and have him talk to me again.