John Katzenbach - The Analyst

Ricky considered what he’d just heard, then asked: “You came in after the eviction?”

“That’s right.” Charlene sighed and shook her head. “This whole block be a whole lot nicer just two years back. Not so much trash and drinking, people fighting. I thought this be a good place to get started, but now ain’t got no place and no money to move. Anyway, I heard the old man’s story from folks across the street. They gone now. Probably all the folks knew that old man be gone now. But it didn’t seem like he had too many friends. Old man had a pit bull, chained up in back where we got our dog now. Our dog, he just bark, make a commotion, like when you come walking up. I let him loose, he likely to kiss your face more than he be like to bite you. Tyson’s pit bull, not like that none. When he was younger, he likes to fight that dog, you know, in those gambling fights. Those places, they got lots of sweaty white men betting money they don’t have, drinking and swearing. That be the part of Florida that ain’t for tourists or the navy folks. It be like Alabama or Mississippi. Redneck Florida. Rednecks and pit bulls.”

“Not a popular choice,” Ricky said.

“There’s plenty kids in the neighborhood. Dog like that a threat to maybe hurt one of them. Maybe some other reasons folks ’round here don’t like him much.”

“What other reasons?”

“I heard stories.”

“What sort of stories?”

“Evil stories, mister. Mean, nasty evil, be all wrong and bad stories. I don’t know they’s the truth, so my mother, my father, they tells me not to go repeating things I don’t know for certain, but maybe you ask around somebody not as God-fearing as me likely to talk to you some. But I don’t know who. No folks left from that time.”

Ricky thought another moment, then asked, “Do you have the name, maybe the address of the guy you pay rent to now?”

Charlene looked a bit surprised, but nodded. “Sure. I make the check out to a lawyer downtown, send it to another guy at the bank. When I got the money.” She took a piece of crayon from the floor, and wrote down a name and address on the back of an envelope from a furniture rental outlet. The envelope was stamped in red with the phrase: second notice. “I hope this helps you out some.”

Ricky pulled two more twenty-dollar bills from his wallet and handed them to the woman. She nodded her thanks. He hesitated, then pulled a third out. “For the baby,” he said.

“That’s nice of you, mister.”

He shielded his eyes from the sun as he walked back out onto the street. The sky above was a wide determined expanse of blue, and the heat had increased. For a moment he was reminded of the high summer days in New York, and how he’d fled to the cooler climate of the Cape. That was over, he thought. He looked toward where his rental car was parked by the curb and he tried to imagine an old man sitting amid his meager possessions by the side of the street. Friendless and evicted from the house where he’d lived a hard life, but at least his own life, for so many years. Cast out quickly and without a second thought. Abandoned to age, illness, and loneliness. Ricky stuffed the paper with the lawyer’s name and address into his pocket. He knew who had evicted the old man. He wondered, however, if the old man sat in the heat and despair of that moment and understood that the man who had cast him out on the street was the child of his child who so many years earlier he’d turned his back upon.

There was a large, sprawling high school less than seven blocks away from the house that Claire Tyson had fled from. Ricky pulled into the parking area and stared up at the building, trying to imagine how any child could find individuality, much less education, within the walls. It was a huge, sand-colored cement building, with a football field and a circular track stuck on the side behind a ten-foot-high link fence. It seemed to Ricky that whoever had designed the structure had merely drawn an immense rectangle, then added a second rectangle to create a blocklike T , and then stopped, his architecture completed. There was a large mural outline of an ancient Greek helmet painted on the brick of the building, and the slogan home of the south side spartans! beside it in flowing, faded red script. The entire place baked like a pound cake in a pan beneath the cloudless sky and fierce sun.

There was a security checkpoint just inside the main entrance, where a school guard, wearing a blue shirt, black patent leather belt and shoes, and black pants, giving him if not the same status as a policeman, at least the same appearance, manned a metal detector. The guard gave Ricky directions toward the administrative offices, then had him walk between the twin posts of the machine, before pointing him on his way. His shoes clicked against the polished linoleum floor of the school hallway. He was between classes, so he maneuvered more or less alone between rows of gray-colored lockers. Only an occasional student hurried past him.

There was a secretary at a desk inside the door marked administration. She steered him to the principal’s office after he explained his reason for visiting the school. He waited outside while the secretary had a brief conversation, then appeared in the doorway to usher him in. He stepped inside and saw a late-middle-aged woman, wearing a white shirt that was buttoned to her chin, look up from where she worked at a computer screen, peering over glasses, giving an almost scolding, schoolmarmish look in his direction. She seemed mildly discomfited by his intrusion, and gestured toward a chair, while she swung around and sat behind a desk cluttered with papers. He sat heavily, thinking that he was taking a seat that had probably mostly known squirming students, caught in some malfeasance, or distraught parents, being informed of much the same thing.

“How precisely is it that I can help you?” the principal asked briskly.

Ricky nodded. “I’m searching for information,” he said. “I need to inquire about a young woman who attended school here in the late Sixties. Her name was Claire Tyson-”

“School records are confidential,” the principal interrupted. “But I remember the young woman.”

“You’ve been here a while…”

“My whole career,” the woman said. “But short of letting you see the class of 1967 yearbook, I don’t know if I can be of much help. As I said, records are confidential.”

“Well, I don’t really need her school records,” Ricky said, removing his phony cancer treatment center letter from his pocket and handing it to the lady. “I’m really searching for anyone who might know of a relative…”

The woman read the letter swiftly. Her face softened. “Oh,” she said apologetically. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t realize…”

“That’s okay,” Ricky said. “This is kind of a long shot. But, then, you have a niece who’s this sick, you’re willing to take any long shot there is.”

“Of course,” the woman said rapidly. “Of course you would. But I don’t think there’s any Tysons related to Claire left around here. At least not that I recall, and I remember just about everyone who passes through these doors.”

“I’m surprised you remember Claire…,” Ricky said.

“She made an impression. In more ways than one. Back then I was her guidance counselor. I’ve come up in the world.”

“Clearly,” Ricky said. “But your recollection, especially after all these years…”

The woman gestured slightly, as if to cut off his question. She rose and went to a bookcase against a rear wall, and returned in a moment with an old, faux leather-bound yearbook from the class of 1967. She passed it across to Ricky.

It was the most typical of yearbooks. Page after page of candid shots of students in various activities or games, buttressed by some overly enthusiastic prose. The bulk of the yearbook was the formal portraits of the senior class. These were posed shots of young people trying to look older and more serious than they were. Ricky flipped through the lineup, until he came to Claire Tyson. He had a little trouble reconciling the woman he’d seen a decade later with the fresh-faced, well-scrubbed almost adult in the yearbook. Her hair was longer, and tossed in a wave over her shoulder. She had a slight grin on her lips, a little less stiff than most of her classmates, the sort of look that someone who knows a secret might adopt. He read the entry adjacent to her portrait. It listed her clubs-French, science, Future Homemakers, and the drama society-and her sports, which were varsity softball and volleyball. It also listed her academic honors, which included eight semesters on the honor roll and a National Merit Scholarship commendation. There was a quote, played for humor, but which to Ricky had a slightly ominous tone, “Do unto others, before they have a chance to do unto you…” A prediction: “Wants to live in the fast lane…” and a look into the teenage crystal ball: “In ten years she will be: On Broadway or under it…”