Elizabeth McCracken - Thunderstruck & Other Stories

Look here: Karen Blackbird is standing on the front porch before she disappears. The house itself is a wreck, the brown asbestos tile weathered in teary streaks. A lawnmower skulks up to its alligatorish eyebrows in the yard. Half the teeth in the porch railing have been punched out, and Karen Blackbird puts the toe of her shoe through a gap in the railing and pivots her foot back and forth, as though it’s a switch that might work a decision. Her loopy hair shifts in the wind. Her lips are chapped, as usual. She has the kind of face that makes old women say, “Dear, if you just took a little care, you’d be so pretty.” Those old women are wrong. Her bare calves are thick and muscular, but her hands are bony. She’s still too young to carry that nose with any authority. Her oversized coat is missing half its buttons. She’s unlucky with buttons, always has been.

The lives of the missing begin Last seen , and for a moment, or a week, or a day — who knows how long — she’s here. This isn’t the last time. She’s about to go but not right now. Only in magic shows does anyone announce the imminent disappearance of a woman. Even then you don’t know what you’ll find in her place.

Once upon a time — specifically, Tuesday, September 7, 1982—Asher Blackbird, last year’s straight-A student, got caught trying to shoplift frozen French bread pizzas. He’d already slipped one box down the front of his hooded sweatshirt and was leaning over a freezer chest in the middle aisle of the Hi-Lo Market when he was spotted by the store manager, who took him to the back, through the silver doors with the high, round windows and the floor-sweeping brown-gray fringe at the bottom.

The Hi-Lo was a run-down, bare-bones concern with more fruit flies than customers. Anyone with a car went to the Purity Supreme a mile away. The Hi-Lo was where kids got sent by parents on orders to buy cartons of milk. If there was change, they fed the coins into the gumball and prize machines at the front of the store, the heaviest machinery they’d ever operated by themselves. Broke, they fiddled with the big, cold silver keys that worked the machines and hopefully lifted the metal doors over the chutes. They stole things: candy, the terrible toys in the terrible toy section, the school-supply kits with pygmy plastic rulers and pug-nosed scissors. They drank coffee milk in the parking lot, sitting on the concrete blocks at the ends of spaces.

“Wow!” Asher Blackbird said when the Hi-Lo manager pulled him into the back office. “OK!” He was smiling with nerves. The room smelled like a defrosted deep freeze. Asher wiped his hand across his face again and again, but the smile stayed where it was. He was clean enough but skinny, with thick black hair that looked like it had been cut in the dark. The Hi-Lo manager felt like giving him five bucks to run over to Salvi’s in the next block. A boy needed a barber. “I’m sorry,” said the kid. He grinned like he couldn’t believe his luck.

“Sit down,” said the Hi-Lo manager. He was trying to stay stern. When kids stole, he scared the hell out of them, then sent them home without calling their parents. But that was always dumb stuff — candy, toys, soda pop. Not food you had to cook. The Hi-Lo manager dropped the pizza box on the desk. On the front, two French bread pizzas were staggered on a wooden cutting board. The boy raised his eyes. Probably he came from the tenement apartments in the next block, over George’s Tavern and Mac’s Smoke Shop. Maybe his mother put him up to it. It was a school day. The kid should be in school.

“How old are you?” asked the Hi-Lo manager.

“Seventeen,” Asher Blackbird answered. Then he looked at the box on the desk again, smiling at the pizzas as though they were coconspirators.

A liar and a thief, poor kid , thought the Hi-Lo manager, and not very clever at either . No way was this little kid seventeen. Twelve, tops. The Hi-Lo manager himself was forty-four years old, bald, and pink, with a head dented like the cans in his store and an ex-wife he still loved, who still loved him, though she had remarried and had a baby. When the baby grew up, he thought, she’d divorce her husband, the fake husband, the shadow husband, and remarry him. It was the only thing that kept him in this town, where she lived; it was the only thing that kept him on this earth. She’d been his first and only girlfriend. If I’m not married when I’m forty , he’d told himself at twenty-seven, before he met her, I’ll kill myself . As it turned out, he wasn’t married at forty but he had been. Some days he wondered if he were breaking a vow with himself. At the Hi-Lo he wore a short-sleeve shirt and a red knit necktie and an engraved name tag that said VAL.

“Your mother home now?” he asked.

That took the smile off the boy’s face. “No,” he said.

“Where is she? Work?”

The boy looked at him again, and the Hi-Lo manager saw something else. He couldn’t put his finger on it, though later he’d decide it was grief.

“How about your father?” he asked. “Sisters? Brothers?”

Asher Blackbird looked down. “No,” he said at last. His hands were on his knees — huge hands, the Hi-Lo manager saw then. Big feet, too, like a rottweiler puppy. “Just my grandfather.”

“Wait here,” said the Hi-Lo manager. Outside the swinging doors, a mustached policeman flirted with Marietta from the meat department as she lay down minute steaks in the case. The Hi-Lo manager didn’t trust policemen who flirted. At the deli counter, he grabbed a piece of the awful fried chicken from the hot box, a few of the soda-heavy biscuits, a carton of milk. When he brought them back, the boy was holding the unopened pizza box in his lap and shaking it.

“You hungry?” asked the Hi-Lo manager. “It’s all right. Here.”

Asher Blackbird was already eating the chicken. “I’m a vegetarian,” he said apologetically between bites. Beneath its brown coating, the chicken meat looked indecent. The Hi-Lo manager handed him a paper napkin folded into thirds.

He stepped outside to talk to the flirtatious policeman, and Asher Blackbird gnawed on the beveled cartilage at the end of the bone. He chewed and chewed and then threw up in the wastebasket by the desk. After wiping his mouth he started on the biscuits.

Officer Leonard Aude drove Asher Blackbird home. Aude had offered the front seat of the cruiser, but the boy said he’d rather ride in back. In the rearview mirror, the kid looked even younger. “You OK there?” Aude asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“Which house? Buddy? Which one.”

Asher Blackbird kept raising and lowering the hood of his sweatshirt. “That one. The brown. Brownish.”

“Your ma’s not home, you said. Where is she?”

After a long pause, the boy said, “I don’t know. Gone. She’s just — gone.”

“Yeah? Since when?”

“Don’t know. Six months?”

“Six? Who else you live with?”

“Nobody.”

“Your mother left you alone?”

“No,” said the boy. Aude could hear him playing with the zipper of his jacket. “I live with my grandfather,” he said finally.

Aude looked at the house, the garbage on the porch, the soggy gray newspapers on the steps, the advertising fliers sticking out of the wall-mounted mailbox. A wind-twisted, unhinged storm door leaned against the porch balustrade.

“He’s Blackbird, too, right? Nathan. That him?”

The boy didn’t seem surprised that Aude had heard of his grandfather. “That’s him,” he said.

“And how is it, living with your grandfather?”

The boy shrugged, shook his head. “I can’t,” he said finally.

“OK, buddy,” said Leonard Aude. “We’re gonna take care of you. Be right back.”