Benjamin Markovits - You Don't Have to Live Like This

When I came back in everybody was in the kitchen, Robert and Tony and Fran and Peggy. Mrs. Rodriguez, the cook, was there, too, preparing supper. It was cool in the kitchen, the air tasted nice and artificial, I could breathe again. Fran said into the telephone, “Give me a fucking break. I just want a phone number. We’re looking for a kid.” Apparently the human being was reluctant to give out personal information, and Robert took the phone away and walked out of the room with it. I heard him say, “Nobody’s angry with you, she’s upset.”

I said to Mrs. Rodriguez, “When did you get here?”

“About a half hour ago. I didn’t see the boy. Maybe I left the gate open, I don’t know. Sometimes I park in the driveway to bring something in, but I don’t leave the car there, I park in the road. Today I had a little shopping, so that’s what I did.”

“He was missing already, a half hour ago,” Tony told her. “We went out looking for him. It wasn’t you.”

Robert came in. “She’s going to call back. She doesn’t know their private numbers. The next thing we do is call the police. Peggy, give me your cell. I don’t want to use the house line.”

“I can’t sit here,” Tony said. “I can’t just sit here.”

“Do you want me to just drive around with you?”

“Okay.” He gave me the keys. “You drive. I’ll look.”

We went outside to the car. It was like walking into a bathroom where the shower’s been left on. My hay fever came back, my throat ached, my nose started running. The only thing I had to blow it with was a balled-up sheet of toilet paper. For the rest of the afternoon I had this uncomfortable drip.

Tony kept the windows rolled down. We crawled around the neighborhood. It all looked terrific, the big houses, the old trees, the front gardens, it looked like a million bucks. But we didn’t see anybody to talk to.

“Look,” I said. “Nothing’s going to happen to him. He went outside and got lost, that’s all. There aren’t even any cars around.” Later I said, “Maybe we should take both cars. That way we can cover more ground.”

“I don’t want to be alone right now,” Tony said. “Okay, all right.”

So we drove back to my place, which wasn’t far. Outside the house I pulled up and left the keys in the car and got out, and Tony got out, to switch sides. Nolan was standing on the porch.

“What do you want?” I said.

“I want to talk to you.”

“Not now.”

“I want to talk to you now,” he said.

“Tell him to fuck off,” Tony said, and got in his car.

My car was parked in the drive, with the driver’s side facing the porch. Nolan had a big blue medical bandage on the side of his neck and face. The whites of his eyes looked bloody, his nose was scratched up.

“Where have you come from, the hospital?”

“I got the kid.”

“What do you mean, you got him?”

“I mean I got him, I took him.”

I called out to Tony, “It’s all right, he found Michael.”

“I didn’t find him, I took him. I got him.”

“Well, where is he?”

“I want to talk to Robert James. I want you to call him for me.”

Tony came out of the car, and it went from there. Eventually I managed to get them in the house — they were shouting at each other on the porch, like a couple of drunks, you could hear them up and down the block. But there was nobody around. I had a hangover coming on, a faint one, starting from the inside of my eye sockets, by the bridge of the nose. I felt thirsty and light-headed, almost dizzy, but Nolan looked excited, too, he didn’t make sense. First I pulled Tony inside and up the stairs and then Nolan followed.

“Let’s just sit down and get something to drink. It’s too hot outside. I don’t understand what’s going on.”

But nobody sat down. “I want to talk to Robert James,” Nolan said.

“Where the fuck is my son?”

“What do you want to talk to him about?”

“He’s got to understand what this is about. We’re not fucking around here. He can buy up our neighborhoods and there’s nothing I can do about it. But this is due process, this is the law.”

“What’s Michael got to do with it?”

“I’m just making him sweat a little. He needs to understand what political pressure is. This is political pressure.”

“You’re not listening. I need to know where he is.”

“He’s fine. He’s not the one you should be worried about here.”

“Tell me where my fucking son is, you fucking—”

“Tony, shut up for a second. Let’s everybody calm down. I just want to understand what’s going on here.”

Afterwards it occurred to me that maybe Nolan thought Michael was Robert’s kid, maybe that’s why he took him, in protest, when he wandered into the street. I don’t know if Nolan ever met Michael. When Clarence came by our house, his grandmother picked him up. But even Nolan must have realized his mistake. At one point, Tony said to me, “This is stupid. Give me your phone. I’m calling the police.”

“The fuck you are,” Nolan said and took the phone away, grabbing it out of my hand — he had big hands. Suddenly it was like this very obvious fact about all of us, which nobody ever mentions, had just been mentioned. He wasn’t just stronger than me but maybe two or three or four times stronger. Tony had left his cell in the car but then Nolan stood up to block the door, and I remember thinking, he’s scared, too, Nolan’s a big guy and Tony is scared. “Haven’t you got a gun, Marny?” he said. “Go get your fucking gun.”

“That’s right, Annie. Get your gun.”

“Go to hell, Nolan.”

“Just get it,” Tony said.

So I went upstairs, which I was glad to do anyway, to get away. I had two guns, the Remington from Walmart, which I kept under the bed, and Mel’s Smith & Wesson, a handgun, standard police issue. That lived in my sock drawer. The shotgun was plainly ridiculous, but then the Smith & Wesson seemed ridiculous, too, and I sat on my bed fighting a strong sense of unreality. I felt like I had to fight the unreality if I was going to get back to some kind of normal state of affairs, because if I didn’t get back to normal, bad things might happen, things outside the human range I was accustomed to, which I had read about but which I had mostly preserved myself from.

The best way I can put this feeling is this. Once, driving through South Carolina with a couple of college friends, on the way back from Spring Break, we struck a rock in the road and popped a tire, and had to pull across the lanes of traffic to the hard shoulder. It was about one in the morning. The highway wasn’t particularly busy, there were a lot of trucks, but the noise they made was terrific — more than terrific, frightening — as soon as you stepped out of the car. When you’re in the car your own noise drowns much of the traffic sound, but as soon as you stop, as soon as you stand aside to observe it, you hear and feel the violence of the machinery passing by. And bad things can happen to you. Someone might run into you, someone might pull over and rob you. Until you get back in the car, on the road, in the traffic again, you feel helpless, and I sat on the bed until I heard Tony calling out to me so I went downstairs.

They were wrestling and punching each other on the floor, punching but not really hitting. They were both worn out. Nolan was almost on top, on his knees, and Tony lay on his back trying to hit him. “Get this— Get him off me,” Tony said, but I just stood there, watching. Both of these guys were my friends, I didn’t know what to do. Tony kept clawing at Nolan, openhanded, and then he caught him in the face and Nolan’s bandage kind of dragged away. All his human mess, the inside stuff, started leaking out.