Nell Zink - Mislaid

He could use Byrdie as bait. Publish an appeal by the lonely boy desperate to see his mother. Say Byrdie was gravely ill. Run a newspaper ad offering a generous reward for any and all information leading to a dour lesbian with a blond limpet of a daughter. Hire a bounty hunter.

But Mireille might be growing up black in Farmville, or as an ethnic Pole in Baltimore. The shock of seeing her again might do him in.

It occurred to him that if he let it be known he was in the market for a wife, he could get a compliant young cook and housekeeper within weeks and a replacement child by this time next year.

On his own back porch he was always the same. Self-stalemated, dangling in the wind, exhausted. Besieged by emotions, none stronger than the self-respect he gained by doing nothing. It was a good reason to get up and offer his guest another drink.

They agreed that it was hopeless, but the detective promised to keep an eye out for her anyway. He performed a farewell service for the Fleming clan: He had a forensic artist create an updated image of the missing child. This was an expert with training in physical and cultural anthropology who worked scientifically. He knew that the lissome Mireille, entrusted to a mother like Peggy, would turn into a freckled, husky tank. Her hair would darken to a shade between dishwater and mousy.

Even Meg couldn’t have seen Karen in it. And the description gave her race as white. So even if it had been a good likeness, people who knew her would have said, “Funny how that missing white girl Karen Brown almost looks like our Karen Brown!” But almost no one saw it. Snatched children on milk cartons were still years away. Eventually it appeared in a pamphlet aimed at school administrators and teachers. Distribution was hit or miss, and it missed.

If Lee had known how Mickey was living, how would he have reacted? If he had known his daughter had but one toy, a rabbit-skin mouse Lomax bought her at Horne’s?

She carried it in her hand. She would balance it on a fallen log and lie down to squint at it with one eye closed so that it loomed like a buffalo. Her spiritual kinship with Lee would have been obvious to any impartial observer, were there such a thing as an impartial observer. What is a poem, if not a toy mouse viewed from an angle that makes it appear to take over the world?

Lee was not that observer. His thoughts on his back porch surrounded him like a carpet of mice, immobilizing him via his unwillingness to cause them pain. The mice of introspection were as effective as any buffalo herd. He was strong, and the energy that kept him motionless was his own. Expending it on self-defeat exhausted him every day.

A t school Byrd Fleming was accounted slightly weird but popular, neatly straddling two pigeonholes without fitting in either. He could hang around with rich kids, slinging derogatory remarks about the middle classes with blasé aplomb, without being regarded as a wannabe. When it came to food, beverages, and drugs, he was unsurpassed, awing even the teachers with his disdain for clove cigarettes and Tokay. All the boys copied his way of making gin and tonics. The rich kids liked him because he never claimed to have done anything he hadn’t done. Deep powder skiing: Sounds cool. Twelve-meter yacht: Sounds cool. Orgy in a model apartment: Sounds cool. In exchange he offered them solidly grounded, reliable secondhand knowledge of nightclubs, high culture, and sex for hire.

He finagled a single room his junior year and stayed in it senior year, because it was on the ground floor and he could get in and out without using the door. In warm weather he could often be seen and heard sitting in the window, picking out Jerry Garcia guitar solos on a Gibson Hummingbird somebody left at his dad’s house. He dressed perfectly in boat mocs, oversized khakis, threadbare button-downs, and a navy blazer with OMNIA PRO DEO on the breast pocket. He shrugged when people asked what school. Said somebody left it at his dad’s house. His black cashmere overcoat soft as chambray: Don’t know, some faggot forgot it at my dad’s house. Fleming’s dad’s house was widely regarded as something akin to the Xanadu where Kubla Khan decreed his stately pleasure dome.

And compared with the other kids’ homes, it was. But no one had seen it. Lee and Byrdie had had a minor disagreement after Lee’s first parents’ weekend, freshman year. “You should tell your little friends to stop coming on to me,” Lee had said.

“Dad, are you bonkers? What are you talking about?”

“The tall kid, what’s-his-name. Chad. Thad?”

“Thad’s a senior. He has two girlfriends, one at Madeira and one at Chatham Hall!”

“And they use him and don’t put out, and he thinks he can work that magic on me. If I fucked every high school senior who wanted his poetry in the Stillwater Review, my dick would be worn down to a nub and it would still be useless juvenilia. You tell him that.”

Byrdie drew back as though a cream puff had exploded in his hand. He closed his eyes and resolved to avoid boys who wanted to meet his father.

The first couple of times he was invited to friends’ houses for the weekend, he went. He sat waiting for their moms to serve roast that was getting cold while their dads carved it, and played Monopoly with their little brothers until bedtime. Then it occurred to him that the school administration wasn’t in the habit of calling parents to check whether visitors had arrived. He and a friend would sign out for the weekend, take a taxi to the Greyhound station in Orange, and check into the residence hotel where the more alcoholic members of the school’s kitchen staff lived. Given a sufficient bribe, the taxi driver would continue to the ABC store, pick up two fifths of Tanqueray, and deliver it to the hotel.

With time Byrd and his friends became more adventurous, on one occasion flying in a chartered plane from Fredericksburg to Savannah to board a chartered fishing boat.

That trip was subsidized by a frustrated boy from Detroit whose parents had sent him away to boarding school as a punishment. He wasn’t sure what he’d done wrong that finally clinched it. Paint his room black, probably. He’d done plenty his family would never have found out about. But paint your own room black, and you’ve blown your cover.

His initial idea for revenge on his parents was to charge calls to them. He would chat with friends at home for as long as he could stand it and leave the phone off the hook at both ends, so that his parents were assured a phone bill of $400 or more for every week they kept him at Woodberry. This earned him widespread resentment, since there was only one pay phone per hall. Meanwhile, he let his grades suffer, applying himself to learning only useless skills such as landing a switchblade over and over in the center of the dartboard that hung on the back of the door to his room.

Byrd Fleming opened his eyes to the possibilities. Fleming didn’t have money, but he had something many boys don’t know exists and many men never learn: He knew how to spend it. He convinced the boy from Detroit that the closest contact to be found anywhere between the high culture parents aspire to and the sordidness their sons crave takes place in the general vicinity of off-Broadway theaters. Obediently, the boy worked on his parents for months, raving of Brechtian virtues such as mind-numbing tedium and repetition, until they hauled him and Byrdie to New York over Thanksgiving in a Learjet. They left at the first intermission, leaving their son in the care of Byrdie with money for dinner and a taxi. The boys sat out the performance and followed a beautiful woman of around thirty-five in a tight, silky sea-green dress to a diner on the West Side Highway. They made friends with her, letting her mother them for hours, watching theater people and (they hoped) thieves and hustlers come and go. They drank coffee.