The missing, p.4
The Missing, page 4
Yes. When he ran down to the first floor with a message for the foreman, he saw someone on the stairs with Rosa Fleming. He remembered that Rosa Fleming. He remembered he would like to poke her with a pencil.
He had thought she was laughing—she could have been screaming. That man she was with, he could have been Leonard Judd. It was dark. Yes, there was a window above the stairs, but it didn’t give much light. He delivered the message to the factory foreman, Casey said, and he went back upstairs. There could have been a man on the stairs when he went back up. It could have been Leonard Judd carrying that girl. Could have been, maybe. There are other tall guys around, you know—the foreman’s assistant, the supervisor, the janitor. The guy on the stairs said something. No. Casey didn’t remember what the guy said. The next thing he remembered was when the police were in the building. Well yes, that was the next day. It was, anyway, the next thing he remembered.
Casey’s mouth gaped during the defense attorney’s cross-examination, and his lower jaw remained open; the television went off.
As I did most nights, I sat and watched the screen while it remained gray in the dark room. For five or seven minutes longer, I watched the screen. I watched it until shapes appeared in the room—the curved couch arm, the straight edge of the shade. I wouldn’t pull up the shade. I knew if I did, the streetlight would fall into my basement room and blind me. I watched the gray screen, and I didn’t try to figure out what, in the movie, had already happened, or what would happen next. They run these movies day after day at different times, over and over, as if we don’t have anything better to do than watch the same movies over and over. In a week or two, I knew, the whole movie with variations would run through my time slot. Some nights, after the movie goes off, my days with variations run on the blank screen, and some nights the light bulb turns on, and the children upstairs scream.
On Tuesday evening I stared at the screen and tried to figure out who Casey Mann reminded me of. That afternoon, after school, I’d watched a scene in the principal’s office as I dusted the big desk and rearranged the names in the Rolodex. Over the years I’ve watched plenty of scenes in the principal’s office. Whoever notices the janitor? I’m there; the furniture is there. What’s the difference? There were a few teachers in the office along with the principal. And there was a kid held after, a kid standing with his mouth open in front of the principal’s desk. That was Oskar Primos, a fifth grader, and he was the kid Casey Mann reminded me of. Oskar had orange hair, a copper earring, and he stood in the office with his pink mouth slightly ajar, with the peaks of his hair drooping slightly. Oskar is the sort of kid that principals, other kids, and teachers all don’t like. Oskar had folded the cuff of his white sleeve, and he pushed the sleeve again and again, up above his elbow. Again and again the sleeve slid down. Finally, Oskar folded the sleeve above his elbow and the pink arm dangled from the uncomfortable roll of cloth as if it were attached to the shirt, not the shoulder.
On Tuesday afternoon in the principal’s office, I found out why Oskar was held after. I learned that the kids, the principal, and the teachers had all decided that Oskar was the one who beat up a second grader after school. He left him near the dumpster, on the blacktop. Oskar had stayed late at school finishing his math assignment in the fifth-grade classroom, before he left around four. Not long after, one of the teachers said, some mom picking up a Girl Scout found a second-grade boy limping across the parking lot. She helped him to the principal’s office. She found Jason Mackerel on Monday afternoon, and his curly hair was matted with mud and canned peas. I knew that little kid. He had curly hair but a flat face. No rosy cheeks.
I knew what they were talking about. Of course I couldn’t say anything as I emptied the pencil sharpener. After all, you know, a janitor is not much more than furniture. No reason to remind anyone.
I knew when school was out on Monday, Jason Mackerel, the second grader, came back to school as he did most days, to ride his bicycle on the sidewalks and on the blacktop of the playground. Jason Mackerel was still riding his bike when the Girl Scout meeting let out at 4:30. I knew when the Girl Scout meeting let out because that was when I’d meet Angela Morris, another sixth grader. They would come out of the side door, those green girls, when I was taking out the first load of trash. After a while, on Mondays, I would take out the trash a little later, and Angela would hang behind the other girls. She had yellow hair, two holes in each ear, a prim smile, an earring in one of the holes. Did she think the other green girls didn’t figure out she was meeting the janitor, figure out she was meeting me? I wondered. Did she care? Not likely she cared.
On Monday the bicycle wheel was turning, and its frame lay on the ground when I stood with one hand on the trash bin and one hand holding the door. Jason Mackerel lay on the ground and his hands were over his cap, over his head. Two sixth-grade boys were holding him down while Angela Morris kicked his back and his shoulder with her pointy little boots, and there were splashes of dirt on her white tights. The sixth graders looked alarmed, just slightly alarmed, when they spotted me. They took off and Angela turned toward me and sneered.
“This little fucker’s been watching us,” she said. “He was squatting down there at the corner, waiting for us.”
I didn’t let the kitchen door close.
Her eyes narrowed to slits as she watched me. Then she smiled; it was not a prim smile. “You tell on me, garbage man, I’ll tell on you.” She slapped the dumpster. “We could just dump it in there. Why not. Destroy the evidence. Why not.”
Jason Mackerel was beginning to crawl away. Angela gouged his butt with her boot. I was kind of sorry for the kid. He used the dumpster to pull himself up.
I stepped back inside the kitchen door and let it close behind me.
“He was in pretty bad shape,” the principal told the teachers the next afternoon, Tuesday afternoon. “That little second grader, Jason Mackerel, was pretty beat up, yesterday, when he stood by my desk. ‘Could have been one guy,’ he said. ‘Could have been two guys,’ he decided.”
“He couldn’t see,” the principal told the teachers. “He couldn’t see because they pulled his hat down over his face and tied it with his scarf. He couldn’t see much anyhow because he had his hands over his face most of the time when they were kicking him. He thought he saw an earring, maybe a pointy boot.”
“You know,” the principal told Oskar in the principal’s office, “There’s not much doubt because of the earring. You, Oskar Primos, are the only fifth- or sixth-grade boy with an earring.”
“It wasn’t me, not me,” cried Oskar. “I bet it was those other guys. Not me. No, I dint! Who says? You know who it was? Those big guys. The big guys in sixth grade.”
The principal said something about overwhelming circumstantial evidence, but the lack of definitive proof. “Make no mistake, young man; we will be keeping a close eye on you.”
And it was Oskar Primos who resembled Casey Mann, the office boy on the witness stand. They looked like they were asleep during the joke and that they woke up too late for the punch line. They were not quite the same. Casey had no shadows on his arms, and he had sick, gray skin. Oskar had freckled skin, and, I’m sure, when he was sleeping, his little sister, or cockroaches, got into the Vaseline and fucked around with his orange hair. The hair of the kid on TV was not orange; prematurely, it was gray.
When the TV light gave out, I stood and stumbled on the stuffing that fell from the couch cushions. I landed on the couch and slept there. It smelled of stale bagels, hair grease, and dried ants. I didn’t particularly like the smell, but it was, at least, familiar.
On Wednesday the TV came on as I ate my dinner. I ate Vienna sausages that looked like children’s fingers and tasted like the aluminum can. I drank pink whiskey that tasted like gasoline. On Wednesday, on the TV, black vertical lines intersected with diagonal slashes and the horizontal hold did not hold.
The janitor of the pencil factory flipped by. He was large, growing larger. His chin rose toward the top of the screen and his forehead appeared on his chest. The janitor, Jerry Cornwall, broke a handful of pencils, and the wastebasket rose to the top of the screen. Jerry Cornwall dumped the wastebasket into a large bin full of shavings. The stairs of the pencil factory flipped by. Jerry Cornwall, slowly, stumbling, carried a body down the stairs.
During the commercial I thought of other janitors and other kids. At Francis Stoddard Elementary, where I work, the janitor makes doorstops out of sneakers; the first graders and kindergartners carry teddy bears and toy trucks up the steps of the elementary school on Show and Tell day. During inside recess, when it rains, they build small castles with their pencils.
On the TV, boxes of pencils in stacks flipped by, and one stack was not as high as the others. Leonard Judd, the factory superintendent, flipped by. He rearranged the stacks to make them even, and as he gave the last stack a satisfied pat, the police walked in. They charged him with the murder of Rosa Fleming, and Leonard Judd adjusted his bow tie.
The horizontal hold did not hold.
A while later, not a short while later, the judge spoke in long sentences with long pauses, and he spoke in sober tones. The judge stared at the jury, the camera stared at the jury, and the jury squirmed. During the long pauses the judge would pull out the knob of his watch; he would spin the knob, changing the watch hands, and then he’d push the knob in again. Either the judge thought he could rearrange the position of the sun, or he enjoyed the sound of the click. The judge, making use of his long sentences, handed down the sentence. For the murder of Rosa Fleming, Leonard Judd was to hang.
The jury, satisfied, stopped squirming. Rosa Fleming’s mother wove her gray handkerchief in and out of her thick fingers and stared at the blank wall between the judge’s head and the empty witness stand. The judge stared at Leonard Judd; the camera stared at Leonard Judd; Jerry Cornwall, the janitor, stared at Leonard Judd and shook his head slowly. Leonard Judd licked his mustache and looked at a pencil on the table.
When the TV went off on Wednesday, I took a sip of nothing from my empty cup, frowned at the staring screen, and considered the taste of the tiled walls in the boys’ john at Francis Stoddard. That afternoon there were three sixth graders in the john when I went in to empty the trash. The one who pushed in ahead of me was a kid I’d seen hanging around with Angela Morris. On Wednesday the john was bright and smoky. Its yellow walls smelled, but they smelled worse when they were wet. The walls were wet on Fridays when I scrubbed the graffiti that was too boring to read any more. On Wednesday the sixth graders complained about Oskar. “He told on us, he did. That tattletale—we gotta get him.” The john didn’t smell too bad on Wednesday because the kids smoked pot as they conspired to get Oskar, as they dropped their underwear on the floor. On my way out I turned on the hot water and turned off the lights. I thought those kids led such exciting lives.
On Thursday night I came the long way home from the bus stop. While the short way was just across the street and up the alley, the long way was up two blocks and through the park. In the park I had to set each swing ajar, slide down the slide, cross over the jungle gym, and swing across the monkey bars, wearing my backpack the whole way. If I missed a swing, or if I dropped from the monkey bars, part-way across, I had to start over.
On Thursday I made it, tired as I was. When I got to the house, it was quiet upstairs and there was a smell of burnt margarine. When the TV came on, I drank a glass of orange juice. It tasted of copper.
On Wednesday the judge had sentenced Leonard Judd to die.
On Thursday the judge sentenced Leonard Judd to die, and the governor commuted the sentence, and the crowd gathered on the courthouse lawn.
I fell asleep watching the TV, and it was off when I woke. I was still tired. It seemed I’d been at the Francis Stoddard Elementary School for a week and a half or a year and a half. I couldn’t leave until after I’d cleaned the kindergarten and vacuumed all the carpets, after I’d watched the playground through the ammonia and crayon on the fourth-grade window, after I’d folded the cafeteria tables and swept the cafeteria and gathered the trash.
On the other side of the fourth-grade window, on the other side of the playground, I’d watched as the sixth graders played by the backstop. The game had started out as a baseball game after school, but the baseball kept disappearing in the long grass beside the playground. After a while, the boys started passing the bat around, and the game was more like fox and geese than baseball. It was more like foxes and goose, and the goose was always Oskar Primos, the fifth grader with the orange hair. They kept going after him with the bat. He would laugh and run and flash the bird and slip in the mud. He was fast, but he fell a lot and then the one with the bat, whoever had the bat, would get him. In a couple of days his bruises would resemble the second-grade sink after finger painting, or the sides of the cafeteria garbage can at noon. I saw Angela Morris cheering from the bleachers, and Oskar, limp, curled on the ground. Then Angela was cheering from behind the backstop. Her fingers grabbed the webs of the backstop. I didn’t see what they did with the body. I had to sweep the cafeteria and sweep the gym. Before dumping the trash and catching the bus, I had to lean over the side of the dumpster. In the dark I had to feel around for a body buried in the trash.
The television went off some time after I fell asleep Thursday. A while after I woke; I turned the TV back on. The sun shone on the courthouse dome. The sun reflected off the foreheads of the people listening to a man on the courthouse steps. One large hand clenched the iron railing, the other hand punched periods in the air. The railing was too thin for the wide courthouse steps, and the man’s clothes were too dark for the afternoon sun. The people cheered silently; they wiped their foreheads and sprinkled sweat on the courthouse lawn, watering the grass with salt. They thrust hats in the air, but they didn’t let go. Later they’d need the hats for fans.
I drank whiskey from the chipped coffee cup. The camera moved close to the crowd. A boy in the crowd ripped his comic book apart. Methodically, he shredded a page to long strips; neatly tore the strips across, carefully tucked the ragged rectangles into his overalls’ front pouch. The boy tore out another page. He did not look up, but occasionally his cowlick bent to the exhortations of the crowd.
I turned up the sound. Upstairs the woman and the children cried and cried so I turned the sound up louder.
The pale, dry streets had dark patches of day-old puddles, and the man with the rope ran through the streets and ran through the puddles, and the mud on his shoes collected dust from the road. The man with the rope joined the dark-suited man on the courthouse steps and they shouted brave words to the crowd. They cheered and they descended to the mob. They left their footprints on the courthouse steps. The boy in overalls sprinkled comic book confetti on the mob.
They were enjoying it. They were smiling, swinging hatchets, singing, breaking glass. One guy was happily jumping up and down. “You know, it wasn’t him,” he cried. “It wasn’t him, it was this other guy, you know. It was the janitor!” One or two guys stopped and looked at him. They stopped looking and rejoined their mob.
Mobs charged from the opposite ends of the same street toward each other. I wondered if, converging, each would trample the other, if one or two nimble boys would be left to bounce, light-footed over the arms and backs, slipping in the sweat, catching toes on the short-sleeved arms. But the two mobs met at a brick building and both groups surged up the steps. Soon faces appeared—on the roof, at the windows. There were only a few casualties, only one or two dark rag dolls flopped from the roof or fell from the windows.
In negative, a silhouette emerged on the TV screen. The mob raged on. The shape of the hanged man appeared and grew larger: within the silhouette the mob rampaged, in negative, white eyes on black; without, the mob rampaged, black on white.
On Friday I slept late, and I barely made it to school on time. Police cars were at the school. I learned that Oskar’s parents had called the school the evening before when Oskar never came home Thursday afternoon. When there was no answer, they called the police. The police arrived at Francis Stoddard Elementary School to investigate. They arrived not long after I left, and they were still investigating when I got to school on Friday around three. The teachers, at three o’clock, were relieved that they could finally let the kids go home. None of the fifth graders or second graders or any other graders had paid any attention in class with all the policemen wandering around. There was no sign of Oskar Primos at school or anywhere between school and his home. A reporter from Channel 7 attempted to interview Oskar’s parents. Oskar’s parents did not wish to be interviewed. No one said anything about the dumpster. I didn’t ask.
On Friday evening I heated baked beans and burned them in the thin aluminum saucepan. I cut my thumb as I cut open the cellophane wrapping of the hot dog package. The TV was already on.
On Friday Casey Mann, the office boy, ran into Jerry Cornwall on the stairs. “It wasn’t me, man,” said Jerry Cornwall. “You know it could never have been me.”
On Friday the citizens of Atlanta rolled newspapers into cones and pulled pillowcases over their heads. I sliced the hot dogs, stirred them into the baked beans, and scraped my dinner into a bowl. The mob on TV nearly lynched Jerry Cornwall. The good people of Atlanta dragged him slowly down the front steps of the pencil factory, down the street, and Casey Mann stumbled after the crowd. He was crying, the only one crying, and he never saw Jerry Cornwall pull away from his captors and run toward the top right-hand corner of the TV screen. The movie’s sad music grew louder and slower as the credits slid sadly down the screen. That was it. Finally, the gloomy movie was at an end.
On Friday the mob did its best to lynch Jerry Cornwall.
