Jason Mott - The Returned

The red-faced man spoke again, louder this time. Then the second man joined him, both of them yelling and motioning in the direction of the door. “I surrender,” Kamui said yet again, fearing the way their voices were rising. The lanky man grabbed a soda can from the counter and threw it at him. It missed, and the man yelled again and pointed toward the door again and began searching for something else to throw.

“Thank you,” Kamui managed, though he knew it was not what he wanted to say. His English vocabulary was limited to very few words. He backed toward the door. The red-faced man reached beneath the counter and found a can of something. He threw it with a grunt. The can struck Kamui above the left temple. He fell back against the door. The brass bell rang.

The red-faced man threw more cans while the lanky man yelled and searched for objects of his own to throw until, stumbling, Kamui fled the gas station, his hands above him, proving that he was not armed and meant to do nothing other than turn himself in. His heart beat in his ears.

Outside, the sun had risen and the city was cast a soft orange. It looked peaceful.

With a trickle of blood running down the side of his head, he raised his hands into the air and walked down the street. “I surrender!” he yelled, waking the town, hoping the people he found would let him live.

Two

OF COURSE, EVEN for people returning from the dead, there was paperwork. The International Bureau of the Returned was receiving funding faster than it could spend it. And there wasn’t a single country on the planet that wasn’t willing to dig into treasury reserves or go into debt to try and secure whatever “in” they could with the Bureau due to the fact that it was the only organization on the planet that was able to coordinate everything and everyone.

The irony was that no one within the Bureau knew more than anyone else. All they were really doing were counting people and giving them directions home. That was it.

* * *

When the emotion had died down and the hugging and all stopped in the doorway of the Hargraves’ little house—nearly a half hour later—Jacob was moved into the kitchen where he could sit at the table and catch up on all the eating he’d missed in his absence. The Bureau man sat in the living room with Harold and Lucille, took his stacks of paperwork from a brown, leather briefcase and got down to business.

“When did the returning individual originally die?” asked the Bureau man, who—for a second time—revealed his name as Agent Martin Bellamy.

“Do we have to say that?” Lucille asked. She inhaled and sat straighter in her seat, suddenly looking very regal and discriminating, having finally straightened her long, silver hair that had come undone while fawning over her son.

“Say what?” Harold replied.

“She means ‘die,’” Agent Bellamy said.

Lucille nodded.

“What’s wrong with saying he died?” Harold asked, his voice louder than he’d planned. Jacob was still within eyesight, if mostly out of earshot.

“Shush!”

“He died,” Harold said. “No sense in pretending he didn’t.” He didn’t notice, but his voice was lower now.

“Martin Bellamy knows what I mean,” Lucille said. She wrung her hands in her lap, looking for Jacob every few seconds, as if he were a candle in a house of drafts.

Agent Bellamy smiled. “It’s okay,” he said. “This is pretty common, actually. I should have been more considerate. Let’s start again, shall we?” He looked down at his questionnaire. “When did the returning individual—”

“Where are you from?”

“Sir?”

“Where are you from?” Harold was standing by the window looking out at the blue sky.

“You sound like a New Yorker,” Harold said.

“Is that good or bad?” Agent Bellamy asked, pretending he had not been asked about his accent a dozen times since being assigned to the Returned of southern North Carolina.

“It’s horrible,” Harold said. “But I’m a forgiving man.”

“Jacob,” Lucille interrupted. “Call him Jacob, please. His name is Jacob.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Agent Bellamy said. “I’m sorry. I should know better by now.”

“Thank you, Martin Bellamy,” Lucille said. Again, somehow, her hands were fists in her lap. She breathed deeply and, with concentration, unfolded them. “Thank you, Martin Bellamy,” she said again.

“When did Jacob leave?” Agent Bellamy asked again softly.

“August 15, 1966,” Harold said. He moved into the doorway, looking unsettled. He licked his lips. His hands took turns moving from the pockets of his worn, old pants up to his worn, old lips, finding no peace—or cigarette—on either side of the journey.

Agent Bellamy made notes.

“How did it happen?”

* * *

The word Jacob became an incantation that day as the searchers looked for the boy. At regular intervals the call went up. “Jacob! Jacob Hargrave!” And then another voice lifted the name and passed it down the line. “Jacob! Jacob!”

In the beginning their voices trampled upon one another in a cacophony of fear and desperation. But then the boy was not quickly found and, to save their throats, the men and women of the search party took turns shouting out as the sun turned gold and dripped down the horizon and was swallowed first by the tall trees and then by the low brush.

Then they were all trudging drunkenly—exhausted from high-stepping through the dense bramble, wrung out from worry. Fred Green was there with Harold. “We’ll find him,” Fred said again and again. “Did you see that look in his eyes when he unwrapped that BB gun I gave him? You ever seen a boy so excited?” Fred huffed, his legs burning from fatigue. “We’ll find him.” He nodded. “We’ll find him.”

Then it was full-on night and the bushy, pine-laden landscape of Arcadia sparkled with the glow of flashlights.

When they neared the river Harold was glad he’d talked Lucille into staying back at the house—“He might come back,” he had said, “and he’ll want his mama”—because he knew, by whatever means such things are known, that he would find his son in the river.

Harold sloshed knee-deep in the shallows—slowly, taking a step, calling the boy’s name, pausing to listen out in case he should be somewhere nearby, calling back, taking another step, calling the boy’s name again, and on and on.

When he finally came upon the body, the moonlight and the water had shone the boy to a haunting and beautiful silver, the same color as the glimmering water.

“Dear God,” Harold said. And that was the last time he would ever say it.

* * *

Harold told the story, hearing suddenly all the years in his voice. He sounded like an old man, hardened and rough. Now and again as he spoke, he would reach a thick, wrinkled hand to run over the few thin, gray strands still clinging to his scalp. His hands were decorated with liver spots and his knuckles were swollen from the arthritis that sometimes bothered him. It didn’t bother him as badly as it did some other people his age, but it did just enough to remind him of the wealth of youth that was not his anymore. Even as he spoke, his lower back jolted with a small twinge of pain.

Hardly any hair. Mottled skin. His large, round head. His wrinkled, wide ears. Clothes that seemed to swallow him up no matter how hard Lucille tried to find something that fit him better. No doubt about it: he was an old man now.

Something about having Jacob back—still young and vibrant—made Harold Hargrave realize his age.

Lucille, just as old and gray as her husband, only looked away as he spoke, only watched her eight-year-old son sit at the kitchen table eating a slice of pecan pie as if, just now, it were 1966 again and nothing was wrong and nothing would ever be wrong again. Sometimes she would clear a silver strand of hair from her face, but if she caught sight of her thin, liver-spotted hands, they did not seem to bother her.