Charles Bock - Beautiful Children

The lights were on in the front window and for a few seconds it was as if everything might be fine, like maybe the boy somehow had found his way back on his own. But Newell's parents wouldn't have come out of the house like that, this rush of worry and expectations.

His mother just this stunning woman, so beautiful that she could not go inside stores. She'd always been polite to him before. But now her eyes were wild. She grabbed his arm, dug her nails into his flesh.

It was the dawn of his life as a suspect. They made him take them, show them, driving him back out into the desert, trying to draw him out on the details along the way, which had just been awful, the father controlled behind the wheel, maybe even a little kind in the way he asked his questions, though each follow-up was more specific, asking for clarifications, making adjustments to previous inquiries where maybe, Kenny figured, he hadn't answered the right way. There was a lot of silence and tension, Kenny could feel Newell's mom was ready to go off on him at any moment, and while he tried to answer as best he could, be as helpful as possible, at the same time there was a limit.

The sun had been rising over the mountains and a pale yellow light had covered the brush and weeds and vast emptiness. The stage was still out there. A couple of teens who Kenny guessed the promoters hired were straggling about, red-eyed and bagging trash. Soon enough, investigators would be there as well, taking plaster casts of different footprints, finding the remnants of treads that corresponded to the size and make of the boy's Nikes. They'd discover one trail over by the side of the interstate, exactly where Kenny said they'd been. Another trail, deep in the desert, led to a third set, harder to track and not an exact match. That one had been disrupted by other footprints and smears and scufflings. But near a collection of tire treads where most of the cars had parked — half of one heel print would match up.

That set it off. Media outlets would pay different partygoers for photos and video footage from the gigs, with the photos appearing beneath large-point headlines, the footage accompanying a special weeklong report, repeated at five, six, and eleven: Is your child attending illicit drug and sex bacchanals? Stay tuned for what every parent ought to know.

As Kenny remembered it, the coverage effectively put the kibosh on the parties, giving local teens one less thing to do, until the promoters found a new location. Kenny would also remember Newell's parents driving him straight from the desert to a police station, the day extending, continuous, refusing to end. Newell's dad urged his wife to have a doughnut. Haggard, frail as a dry leaf, she refused even a cup of coffee. They were filling out paperwork when someone took Kenny aside and said they needed a statement. He was guided to a small dingy room and left there, underneath lights that were hot and bright. When the officer exited, he locked the door from the outside. Most of Kenny's afternoon was spent sweating, wondering if he was under arrest. Every once in a while an investigator checked in on him, said someone would be by soon. Nobody ever brought the water he asked for.

Even after the girl backed up his version of events, a surveillance car followed Kenny, parking down the street from his dad's trailer, his mom's place, or his aunt's. The cops called him in for follow-up interviews, went over his story untold times, even asked him to take a lie detector. If the bald chick's testimony hadn't corroborated his major points, he'd still be locked up. Thank goodness for that girl. The officer in charge had been forced to admit that a couple of lie detector inconsistencies, story gaps, and some unexplained questions, all together they added up to zero tangible evidence against Kenny, certainly nothing that could hold up to a prosecutor's scrutiny. The kid's parents hadn't been happy, but what could they do? Pretty much they'd been forced to call off the dogs.

A little bit more than five months afterward, Kenny's aunt said he had a visitor. Waiting at the front door: the woman who had first provided him with a real-life notion of feminine beauty.

She wore prewashed jeans and a formless purple blouse, and seemed so very small, fiddling with the sunglasses in her hand, closing and then reopening the frames. No makeup. Complexion pale, her eyes too large in a gaunt, haunted face. When Kenny appeared, her eyes went larger. Her lips pursed and for long moments she stared at him.

She stared at him, Ken recalled, and in her stare he felt the unfathomable depth of her loss— You are the one who did this, the one who took my child.

She needed to know.

“About that night,” she said. “About Newell.”

She said this and it was as if something broke inside her, as if she had no more room for anger, no more strength for rage. On the front steps of that crappy little starter home, she shuddered and conceded defeat in her fight against tears, and Kenny did not know what to say. All he could do was take her hand, bring her inside.

Every few months afterward she stopped by. Sometimes she took him to lunch. Other times she just drove by, slowing down her sedan, letting the car idle across the street.

Kenny would come to understand that the visits coincided, more or less, with new sightings — if he remembered correctly, there was one in Tacoma, another in a small Arizona town. A call traced to a pay phone on the corner of Heart Attack and Vine. Other times the boy used one of those prepaid calling cards, or called collect and just held the phone to his ear, listening to those he'd left behind.

Lorraine told him these things. She was the one who had urged him to apply to art school, the one who had helped him fill out the financial aid forms, even putting down the deposit that secured his seat in the fall class that first term.

And he had never been able to tell her everything.

Kenneth turning to his lover: How could he?

Somewhere else, a New Age Ken sat in the lotus position and cried for all of our inner children.

Projections are endless, as innumerable as towns that may be ventured to from any specific point on a map. And there would be other formative events, other people and places to shape his identity. But no matter what life held in store for Kenny, no matter which fate he'd end up occupying, which reality he'd inhabit when he remembered this event, no matter if his eventual reality was, in fact, none of the aforementioned, whether Kenny would choose to admit the facts of his childhood, whether he chose to embellish, or fabricate, or deny the circumstances of this Saturday night, this much was true: over and over, the man he would grow into would remember certain instances exactly the same way, in the same order.

He was never good with names, but he would remember the name.

And his face. Yes.

Just a kid. Like fourteen or something.

Kenny had started off by reaching for the fun cup. Then his hand had inched upward. Along the inside seam of the boy's thigh.

As if trying to find a comfortable position to sleep in, the child's body had curled away from the attention. He'd snapped out of his drowse, his eyes uncertain and sleepy. If he was surprised he did not seem to show it, not all that much. There was murmuring, his voice garbled.

And now he sat up.

“Dude. What're you doing?”

“What?”

“That.”

Underneath folds of denim, the boy's dick becoming swollen; Ken remembered it jerking.

He remembered the car silent except for the sounds of the engine's vibrations. A thin smoke drifting from underneath the FBImobile's hood.

The boy staring at him, fear growing in his eyes. “So,” he asked. “You're a butt pirate?

“If you're not a butt pirate,” Newell said, “why don't you get your hand off?”