God Save the Child

We pulled around a bend about two hundred yards in and stopped. The land before us was cleared and might once have been a lawn. Now it was an expanse of gravel spattered with an occasional clump of weeds, some of which, coarse and sparse-leafed, looked waist-high. Behind one clump was a discarded bicycle on its back, its wheelless forks pointing up. The scavenged shell of a 1937 Hudson Terraplane rusted quietly at the far edge of the clearing. The remnants of a sidewalk, big squares of cracked cement, heaved and buckled by frost, led up to a one-story house. Once, when it was newly built, an enthusiastic real estate broker might have listed it as a contemporary bungalow. It was a low ranch built on a slab. The siding was asphalt shingle faded now to a pale green. A peak over the front door had been vertically paneled with natural planks, and a scalloped molding, showing traces of pink paint, ran across the front. Attached to the house was a disproportionate cinder block carport, partly enclosed, as if the owner had given up and moved out in mid-mortar. From the carport came the steady whine of a gasoline engine. Not a car, maybe a generator. I saw no utility wires running in from the road.

A narrow mongrel bitch, about knee-high, with pendulous dugs, burrowed in an overturned trash barrel near the front door. A plump brown-haired girl of maybe fourteen sat on the front steps. She had big dark eyes that looked even bigger and darker in contrast with her white, doughy face. She had on a white T-shirt, blue dungarees with a huge flare at the bottom, and no shoes. She was eating a Twinkie and in her right hand held an open can of Coke and a burning filter tip cigarette. She looked at us without expression as we got out of the car and started up the walk.

“I don’t like it here,” Susan Silverman said.

“That’s the trouble with you urban intellectuals,” I said. “You have no sense of nature’s subtle rhythms.”

The girl finished her Twinkie as we reached her and washed it down with the rest of the Coke.

“Good morning,” I said.

She looked at me without expression, inhaled most of her filter tip cigarette, and without taking it from her mouth, let the smoke out through her nose. Then she yelled, “Vic.”

The screen door behind her scraped open — one hinge was loose — and out he came. Susan Silverman put her hand on my arm.

“You were right,” I said. “He is unusual, isn’t he?”

Vic Harroway was perhaps 5'10", three inches shorter than I, and twenty pounds heavier Say, 215. He was a body builder, but a body builder gone mad. He embodied every excess of body building that an adolescent fantasy could concoct. His hair was a bright cheap blond, cut straight across the forehead in a Julius Caesar shag. The muscles in his neck and chest were so swollen his skin looked as if it would burst over them. There were stretch marks pale against his dark tan where the deltoid muscles drape over the shoulder and stretch marks over his biceps and in the rigid valley between his pectoral muscles. His abdominal muscles looked like cobblestones. The white shorts were slit up the side to accommodate his thigh muscles. They too showed stretch marks. My stomach contracted at the amount of effort he’d expended, the number of weights he’d lifted to get himself in this state.

He said, “What do you turds want?” Down home hospitality.

I said, “We’re looking for Walden Pond, you glib devil you.”

“Well there ain’t no Walden Pond around here, so screw.”

“I just love the way your eyes snap when you’re angry,” I said.

“If you came out here looking for trouble, you’re gonna find it, Jack. Take your slut and get your ass out of here, or I’ll bend you into an earring.”

I looked at Susan Silverman. “Slut?” I said.

Harroway said, “That’s right. You don’t like it? You want to make something out of it?” He jumped lightly off the steps and landed in front of me, maybe four feet away, slightly crouched. I could feel Susan Silverman lean back, but she didn’t step back. A point for her. A point for me too, because as Harroway landed I brought my gun out, and as he went into his crouch he found himself staring into its barrel. I held it straight out in front of me, level with his face.

“Let’s not be angry with each other, Vic. Let us reason together,” I said.

“What the hell is this? What do you want?”

“I am looking for a boy named Kevin Bartlett. I came out here to ask if you’d seen him.”

“I don’t know anybody named Kevin Bartlett.”

“How about the young lady,” I asked, still looking at Harroway. “Do you know Kevin Bartlett?”

“No.” I heard a match strike and smelled the cigarette smoke as she lit up. Imperturbable.