Randy White - Tampa Burn

Where better to keep an active, kidnapped boy locked away than a bear cage?

I moved across the room, toward the hall into which dim light filtered. Just as I was about to enter the hallway, my cellular phone began to vibrate once again. I stepped back into the shadows, took it from my pocket, expecting to see Harris’s number. I saw, instead, that the caller’s I.D. was blocked.

Only one person had done that before.

Dewey.

I fought the urge to put the phone to my ear just on the chance that I might hear her voice. Instead, I waited until the thing quit buzzing. Then I deactivated it and slipped it back into my pocket.

There was better light in the hall, which ran the length along the front of the trailer. There was another exhibitor’s room to my left, plus a small vendor’s kitchen with a two-burner gas stove and a soft drink station.

A greasy pan was on the stove. Someone had been cooking there recently.

I found where they’d kept my son, Lake, imprisoned just a little farther down the hall. It was a box that was walled and roofed with steel bars. The cage was about half the size of a small bedroom. Like the performing dog’s theater, a mural of the bear was painted in bright colors on the wall behind the cage. The animal had a weird-looking Cyclops eye in the middle of its forehead. But there was no bear in the cage, and there was no boy.

There was, however, lots of young boy residue. Several things I saw were characteristic of what I knew and loved about my son.

In the far back corner was a cot, neatly made. The top sheet was pulled and tucked so tightly that you could have bounced a quarter on it.

It was the way I made my own bed each and every morning of my life.

There was a simple table and chair in the opposite corner, with a reading light plugged into an extension cord. On the table was a tin plate, a cup, fork and spoon, all overturned and neatly laid out atop a towel. There was also a magnifying glass, a blunt scissors, and a blank sketchpad. The table was dominated, though, by stacks of books.

I hadn’t used my little flashlight, but I did now, turning my head sideways to read the book spines.

Most of the books were nonfiction: books about fish, fishing, biology, and the other natural sciences. There were a couple of the small Audubon guides that I had in my own library. I noted that there were also several standard physician’s reference books, as well as one called Studies in Abnormal Psychology.

I wondered if Lake was reading that in an attempt to understand Lourdes. Or his mother?

It was a sad and touching question to consider.

They don’t love anyone, Tomlinson had said. They’re not capable of the emotion.

Could that possibly be true of Pilar when it came to her own son?

If accurate, it made Lake an emotional orphan of a sort-a description that I’d never applied to my own circumstances in life-and that possibility made me all the more desperate to find him.

I tested the cage door. It swung open.

I stepped inside, hoping that Lake had anticipated me coming and that he had left me one more clue; some kind of parting directive. As I did, though, I froze when a quivering voice, off to my right, said, “The boy, he gone, you know. They both gone. And they ain’t comin’ back no more.”

Then the wagon’s dim overhead fluorescent lights flickered on.

Startled, I jumped, turned, and found myself looking down into the face of a very old and thin, dwarf-sized black man. He was the color of a winter leaf, and so tiny that he looked as if a gust of wind might lift him skyward and float him away.

I suspected he’d bought the blue denim coveralls he wore in the children’s section of some department store.

The man didn’t have the oversized head and hands I associate with dwarfism, though. He appeared regularly proportioned in every way, and normal but for his eyes. Judging from the way he stood, with his head tilted back, and because of the blue film that covered his eyes, I suspected that the man was blind.

Even so, I immediately stepped to the cell’s door so he couldn’t slam the thing and lock me in. As I did, he said in what sounded to be a Cajun accent, “Are you him? You the one the boy call ‘Doc’? Yeah, you must be. So I know it true, now. The boy said you’d come. I learn to never doubt that boy, Laken. He a good one, he is, jus’ a good li’l boo-boy. When Laken leave, I pass a big ol’ hug on him, I did. I’m gonna miss me that T-boy.”

I said quickly, “That’s my son. Is he O.K.? If anyone’s hurt him for any reason-”

“Your boy fine,” he interrupted. “He jus’ fine. I took care of him myself. Made him eat good every day.”

As the man spoke, I noticed that he backed away slightly just before I pushed the cage door open. So maybe he wasn’t totally blind. Or maybe he just had the heightened sensory abilities that some say compensate for the loss of vision.

I said to him, “Where is he now? My son. Where did Lourdes take him?”

The old man’s expression showed puzzlement. “Who that name you using? Lourdes?”

“Lourdes, the man who kidnapped Laken. Where are they?”

“Oh… that be Jimmy Gauer you talkin’ about. Mean Jimmy Gauer. Jimmy, he used to live here when he jus’ a squirt. We all thought the Gauers, that whole family, that they long dead till Mean Jimmy come back here two, three years ago, and buy him a little place.”

I said, “The guy I’m talking about is a big man. Broad, with burn scars on his hands and face. Is that who you’re calling Jimmy Gauer?”

“Oh yeah, he got scars,” the old man said. “Mean Jimmy, that’s what we called him as a boy. He got him lots of scars. More than jus’ on his face, too. But me, I ain’t never seen ’im. Not the way you and him sees things, anyway. Why you think he let me watch your boy, and not kill me before he go off? I be a blind man, you know.”

There was a curious lilt of a smile in his voice, and on his face, when he said that. I wondered why.

I said, “That’s the guy I know as Lourdes. If you did know where they’ve gone, would you tell me?”

“Yes indeedy, I would, sir! I’ll help you any way I can. Ol’ Baxter Glapion-which be me-I got no good things to say about Mean Jimmy. And I sure do like that li’l boo-boy of yours, Laken. So come in, come on in”-he was waving his arm as if to drag me behind, already walking down the hall-“maybe Jimmy, he forgot something back behind that’ll tell you where they is. Believe me, that man didn’t tell me nothin’. ”

I began to follow, then stopped. “Give me a second to look through my son’s things first, O.K.?”

The old man waited patiently while I stripped the bed, looked through every book. I even got down on my hands and knees and looked under the table. Maybe something was written there.

Nothing.

As I was finishing, the old man said, “Laken, he left a book for me to give you. He knowed you was comin’. Called you ‘Doc.’ Didn’t say you was his daddy. That one smart boy you got there, mister.”

I stood quickly. “Show me the book.”

Baxter Glapion moved with the gliding, sure-footed gait of a tightrope walker, or someone who navigates a room by memory. I followed him down the hall, past the main entrance, into a private living quarters. It was where the old man lived, apparently.

As we walked, I listened to him tell me that the wagon we were in had belonged to Lourdes’ uncle, who’d died the previous year. Lourdes had inherited it. Lourdes’ family, the Gauers, were old carney folk, he said, sideshow performers mostly, and Baxter had been an old friend of the family.

Lourdes had told the old man that he was keeping Lake locked up for his own safety, and as a favor to the boy’s mother. There was a war going on down in Central America, he’d said, and Lake was a prime candidate for abduction. Trouble was, the boy refused to stay away from his mother. Kept finding a way to sneak across the border home each time she sent him away.