J.T. Warren: Remains

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 what 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.