Part 1
The Missing Boy
Ch.1
The Dead Horse
She would later recall to the police that it was early morning on Thursday, June the seventeenth, when Roland Clayton appeared at the front desk of the elementary school and demanded his son be removed from daycare.
Helen Cox enjoyed watching the cards flutter to the bottom of the computer screen. After two more rows, there would be fireworks. She had volunteered to run the check-in desk on a bi-weekly rotation for the summer day care program to pick up a little extra cash and the job had turned out to be as simple as running a coat check, ideal for the newly retired woman. The kids were dropped off in the morning and whisked away to a room in the back so that Helen wouldn’t see them again, using the time until pick up at three to polish her solitaire skills and reflect on what she couldn’t leave behind. It was easier to laugh than to feel sorry for herself at the thought of, after having served Hook’s Elementary School for twenty-five years and basking in all the attention of the retirement party, sharing with her colleagues the plans of how she would spend her golden years, that she would so easily run back to the place she had just said good-bye to without giving retirement a chance. But she could feel, even before blowing out the candles on her cake, like a single stapler against a large magnet, the pull the school had over her. “I’ve been at that school for a quarter of century,” she would tell her two grown children, “and they’ve looked after me, and besides I’m still fit as fiddle and if you just want me to sit around all day then I might as well get paid for it. Maybe one day I’ll have enough interest in dirt to start a garden.” Truth was, she was just afraid of being bored. She believed boredom lead to a quicker death.
As soon as Helen caught sight of Roland Clayton darting through the front door towards her desk, a chill slithered up her spine, snapping fiddle strings in broken notes one by one, and she would later wish to have just opened the door to boredom and stayed home with it.
Along with the janitor, whose car Helen hadn’t seen in the lot when she had pulled in, the only other occupants of Hook’s Elementary was the daycare supervisor, Izzie Boland, who the children would only ever refer to as “Mizzie Izzie”, and a bakers dozen of Hook’s youngest under six year olds.
As Roland approached her desk, Helen grew nervous of the lack of male presence in the building. Her thin fingers left the computer mouse and pinched one of the petals of the lei dangling down her chest that one of the children had given her that morning. The theme of the week was Hawaiian Luau! and Mizzie Izzie was in the middle of negotiations for a small inflatable pool to be brought out to the playground next to the sandbox, along with the previous week’s request for a Foreman grill for burning burgers and dogs.
“I’m here for Jaime.”
The windows of the front office were open to invite the still pleasant warmth of the morning in, but as Roland Clayton spoke , Helen shivered as if a winter strom had rolled in with him.The chill along her spine only intensified, aching her tired joints.
“Is everything okay?” Helen asked. “When Carly dropped Jaimie off this morning she didn’t say anything about him having to leave early.”
Roland’s eyes dropped to her fingers still gripping the little pink petal and Helen let it go, slowly hiding her hands under the desk. The sight of him alone was enough for her to want to call the police. Considered by few to be a “looker”, Roland Clayton appeared especially disheveled today. A big man whose muscles hadn’t come from the gym and were subtly concealed by the pudge of too many six packs. His copper brown hair was sticking up in rough tufts around his tight-skinned skull. The center of his bottom lip had a scabbed over split big enough to swipe a credit card through; a plumb purple bruise on his chin to match the shiner over his left eye, all the rest of him was a sickly pale..
Roland took a step towards the desk and Helen fought not to slide her chair away. His appearance had initially distracted her from the pungent mildew smell coming from his dirty clothes, mingling with the cool air, but now that he was close enough it was impossible to ignore.
“Roland, are you okay?” Helen asked.
For a moment Roland stood still giving Helen a look she had seen many times during her days in the classroom, catching students staring in the middle of their papers at a question they didn’t understand. He let out a deep breath with a slight wheezing tail and said, “I’m his father, and as far as I knew a parent could take their own child out school for whatever damn reason they wanted.”
It was true, even more so for daycare, but Helen considered making up a rule on the spot, peppering in a little administrative language to convince Roland otherwise. But the harshness in which he had spoken to her had sucked the breath from her throat. Then she felt the pull again, the same feeling that had brought her back to the front desk when she was supposed to be sitting on the couch learning to knit. She was the staple and he was the magnet and despite every brake in her body pressing down to get her to stop, no thought of action crossed her mind other than to just do what this man was asking. So Helen Cox slowly rose from her desk and heard a voice in the room, that must have been hers, say, “wait right here Roland, I’ll go and get Jaimie.”
The bottoms of her sneakers, the rare treat for the summer school worker, squeaked against the tile hall; starting in a slow, deliberate pace that grew speed as Helen expected to hear a second pair of footsteps echo behind her. Getting out of bed now was accompanied by a symphony of snaps and pops along her body that left her sore until lunch time, so If Roland had chosen to follow her, she was ashamed to admit, there was nothing she would be able to do to stop him and with the way she had so easily complied with him, she doubted her voice would even let her scream for help.
` Even with the bright summer sun shining through the windows, the modest twelve room school seemed uncharacteristically dark, heightening the emptiness, the quiet, so much so that though the veteran of these halls she was, Helen briefly questioned where she was and if she was going in the right direction. Like the changing of a television channel her mind flipped from a still of Roland standing at the desk, to static, then back to the dark hallway she was coming to the end of. Horror movies had a way of scaring you for a brief moment before you laugh at yourself for falling for their made up tricks, but this was a different feeling of fear, something real, something growing and hungry. Helen could see the yellow light from the kindergarten room spilling out through the bottom of the door. The tapping of her shoes against the floor quickened. A burst of high pitched laughter leaked through the door, ricocheting down the hall.
Helen knocked on the classroom door. She pinched her lei again and without realizing began to slow grind a blue petal into a fine dust that drifted to the floor.
Izzie opened the door with a ear to ear smile that only stretched further when she saw Helen.
“Hey girl, come to join the game?” Izzie said.
Peaking over Izzie’s shoulder, Helen saw the children of the day care sitting in a circle. They had stopped their play to look directly at who had come knocking at the door. The eyes of thirteen quiet children staring at her did little to calm Helen’s rising nerves.
“Game?” Helen said.
“Duck duck goose,” Mizzie Izzie said, “I think Kelly has a future as an olympic track star, no one has been able to catch her yet.”
A little blonde haired girl in the circle started giggling, annoying the boy next to her.
“Oh, no,” Helen feigned a smile, “maybe next time. I’m here for Jaime, his father has come to pick him up.”
The smile on Izzie’s face faltered and when she realized that her back was to the children, dropped completely.
“Why? What’s he doing here?” she asked Helen in a whisper.
“I don’t know, but he’s Jaimie’s father and can pick him up whenever he wants.”
“What the hell Helen, does Carly know about this?”
“I don’t know.”
A crack came from the end of the dark hallway and Helen Cox’s head snapped back towards the sound, expecting Roland to be only a stride away from her with his hands reaching for her throat. Izzie Boland heard it too and when she craned her neck out in to the hall, there was nothing. She saw Helen shaking and put a hand on her bony shoulder for comfort.
“What’s going on?,” Mizzie Izzie asked.
“Nothing,” Helen said, brushing off Izzie’s hand, “just get Jamie for me.” She ignored the look of offense on Izzie Boland’s chubby face. She was ready to get back to her desk, close out her solitaire game and phone Terri Pritchard, the first year second grade teacher Helen shared the check-in rotation with, to come take over for her for the rest of the day.
Izzie Boland didn’t say anything, so Helen brushed passed her into the classroom and said, “Jaimie, get you things and come with me, okay?”
From the circle a little boy of five years old with a bowl cut, hair the same color as his father’s, rose quietly and went to the corner of the room to collect his Spider-Man back pack and matching lunch box.
“Helen, what are you doing?” Izzie whispered.
The channels changed again: Izzie’s face, Roland waiting at the front desk, static, back to Mizzie Izzie.
“Back off,” Helen said as politely as she could, and Izzie took it literally with a step back. Helen almost expected the daycare supervisor to use her large body as a shield to keep Jaimie Clayton from leaving the classroom, but Mizzie Izzie stepped aside and let the boy pass through, and Helen placed her hand on the boy’s shoulder to lead him down the hall.
“Bye Jaimie,” Izzie called out, “remember to wear your lei again tomorrow for the luau. We’re gonna get that pool so bring a bathing suit!”
“Bye Mizzie Izzie,” his soft voice echoed across the hall.
Izzie watched little Jaimie raise a hand and wave and kept watching until the pair disappeared around the corner towards the front office. She turned to the kids still sitting like ducks and told them that she would be right back and to keep playing until she returned.
She kept the classroom door open and made her way across the hall where there was a closet sized room with a single desk and telephone, used for teachers that needed to make personal calls during the school day. Mizzie Izzie crammed herself behind the desk and punched the numbers down on the pad. The fluorescent lights above flickered and hissed, she watched a fly beat itself against the bulb as the phone started to ring.
Izzie drummed her purpling fingers against the desk. This was drama as hot as a plate of fajitas placed in front of you, still popping and sizzling, seeming delicious enough that you couldn’t wait for them to cool before devouring. Look out or it’ll burn ya, the waiter would say. That’s just what you got whenever a situation involved Roland and Carly Clayton. Mizzie considered Carly a friend, the way you do when you needed someone around to make you feel better about yourself. Should a Greatest Hits tape of the public outbursts from the recently divorced Clayton’s be available, it would be on a constant loop on Mizzie Izzie’s living room television while she sat down with a beer and bowl of ice cream. Even the best television soap writers could only dream to match the drunken melodrama that Carly Clayton carried about her like the plague.
It was hardly two weeks ago that the ex-husband and wife’s latest spar had gotten them both banned from Whistle’s Wet. Mizzie Izzie wasn’t going out for a drink that night but the way bad knees know a storm is coming, her heart guided her to the bar and lucky for her she had been able to witness the shouting and taunting that started in the bar’s opposite end and climaxed with Carly hurling a beer bottle that connected with Roland’s head, smashing to pieces on the sawdust floor. A thrilled Izzie clutched her breast and felt close to orgasm at the spectacle.
As the phone continued to ring, she felt that familiar thrill, only this time she had the privilege of being the drama’s instigator. She could serve the fajitas and eat them too. Flick the match, drop it in the dry field and stand back to see how fast the wildfire spread.
“Everything For Nothing, how can I help you?” A voice came on the other end of the line.
“Hey Todd, it’s Izzie, is Carly there?”
“Yeah she’s here.”
There was a pause on the other end of the line interrupted by bouts of labored breathing.
“Well can you go get her, tell her it’s about her son?”
“Yeah, I can.”
The line clicked and played staticky muzak. Mizzy Izzie was practically salivating imaging Carly running through the isles of Everything for Nothing, cursing up a storm, face red with fire after hearing the news she was about to deliver.
The line clicked again.
“Carly, yeah, it’s Izzie, do you have any idea what just happened over here?”
–
The retired Texas Ranger was laying in a hospital bed, minus one gangrenous leg, dying and giving his final goodbye when the bell above the door chimed and heavy footfalls entered the store.
Tom Graham shut the broken spined paperback and hid it behind the register. It was hardly uncommon to find Tom behind the register of the bait and tackle shop he owned with one eye skimming a book’s page and the other keeping watch of the aisles, but this particular book had drawn from him a cluster of emotions that he was just was demanding his full attention and he was just beming comfortable to confront.
Normally he’d pass the time with war books, either fiction or fact, and revelled in a fantasy in which he was the hero on a the battlefield. Known only by himself as man destined for action, he’d regretted never seeing Vietnam or Korea, and in his reading fantasies he bypassed every position all the way up to Lieutenant Colonel, devising plans of combat that all ranks above and below claimed him mad for but will be damned if they always worked, his men trusting him as the crazy lunatic bastard who they could hand their lives over to.
This western he’d picked up from the library’s annual “too busted up” book sale for a buck in an effort to expand his literacy horizons. It was thick as a brick and had been dropped in the bathtub so the pages were hard and the book never kept closed. Tom had started on page one believing it would only take a couple more before it was placed in a permanent spot on the bookshelf to never be glanced at again. Cowboys and Indians was a game little boys played and was what made John Wayne famous, but it wasn’t long before Tom was staying up late in to the night to read more of the increasingly dangerous adventures of the two retired Texas Rangers on their pipe dream of a cattle drive from Texas to Montana. It was exciting enough, there was enough violence, cheating and hookin’ to keep Tom engaged on a surface level, but it wasn’t until he was getting to the end when a feeling crept up and tapped him on the shoulder that had never happened in all his previous war story reads. It must have been there from the beginning and he could only praise the book for not revealing itself until now. He’d started to see himself in the characters.
Like the two retired Rangers, Tom had grown complacent in his little spot of life. The bait and tackle store had been his for as long as he could remember, running it even before he popped his first erection as a pre-teen while his daddy was dying of lung cancer. The old boys on the ranch couldn’t ignore their age and yearned for one last adventure, but Tom looked back and realized he’d never had one to begin with. As the old cowboys set out they realized that the world around them was changing and maybe it was too late for their time to be a part of it and Tom would sit reading out the heydays of the old west, turning the water damaged pages with arthritic fingers and want so badly for the characters to succeed. The pages he’d read now vastly outnumbered the pages he had left and one of the old cowboys (his favorite character, the funny, ornery son of bitch) was dead and Tom didn’t know what his best friend was going to do about him. He saw it coming about a hundred pages back and in reading it Tom found himself struggling to breathe. A tear had fallen on to the page as the bell above the door chimed. So Tom hid the book quickly, wiped his eyes and silently cursed the customer who had ruined his special moment. They always seemed to come in at the most inconvenient times.
Leaning over his stool behind the register, Tom saw the back of who looked like Roland Clayton stalking through the line aisle. Tom held in a sigh and coughed instead. Had it been a year or so, the visiting of Roland Clayton would have brought a smile to Tom’s face, but now the man carried problems on him like a bad smell and like the occasional mouthy tourist, Roland had become a customer that Tom wanted out the of the store as quickly as possible.
“Morning Roland,” Tom called from behind the register.
Roland stopped for a moment and picked up a role of big game line. He didn’t look it at, just held it like his hand was missing something, then he placed it back on the shelf and wandered to the back of the store where the beer coolers were.
Drunk, Tom thought. Shit.
His knees popped standing up from the stool. The mood he had felt from the goodbye of the two fictional best friends was fading quickly and he wanted the store empty and the book back in his hands before the farewell was completely gone.
Tom followed Roland’s path down the line aisle and heard the hum of the AC units from the beer coolers, when he rounded the corner, the cold, fresh air wrapped him up like a blanket. Three of the cooler doors were open and Roland Clayton was standing before them still as a statue.
“What’s going on here Roland?” Tom asked, slowly approaching what he believed to be either a very drunk or very hung over man looking for the next one. The fans from behind the shelves of beer fired a wet, mildewy smell in Tom’s direction. Smelled to him like Roland had taken a dip in the lake and not changed and the sight of the man’s hardened, stained clothing all but confirmed it to Tom. Whatever, Tom thought, if he just wants more beer I’ll get it for him and get him on his way without any problems.
“Roland, close those doors until you’ve picked something huh? Those fans cost an arm and leg in electricity to run.”
Roland didn’t answer. The fans blew his gangly brown hair. Tom came around and started closing the doors, muting the hums of the air con. The closer he got, the more harsh the mildew smell grew. As he was about to close the final door, Roland’s hand shot up and grabbed Tom by his frail wrist. Tom gasped and tried to pull away but Roland’s grip on him only strengthened.
“Hey now Roland, no trouble now, okay?” Tom said trying to pull away.
Roland turned towards the old shop owner who only wanted to get back to his book, and Tom saw the busted lip, the black eye, the tired eyes that seemed to be somewhere else. He could feel Roland’s nails digging into his wrinkled skin and expected any moment for blood to draw.
Their eyes met and for a brief moment Tom saw nothing but black, like life had turned off.
All the fantasies, all the imaginations of the lunatic bastard brave enough to charge the battlefield, confirmed only as such, fantasies, once Roland had a grip around Tom’s wrist.
Tom looked frantically around the store, wishing now more than ever for another customer to walk in. Instead out in the gravel lot he saw Roland’s busted up Chevy parked and in the front passenger seat, with his chin down to his chest, his little boy Jaimie.
“That Jaimie out there Roland?” Tom said, his chest was starting to feel a tingle of pain. Roland was grabbing his right wrist and Tom started praying for a heart attack to just skip by him. “You taking him out on a fishin’ trip or something?”
Roland’s brow furrowed, then he looked out the window to his son in the truck and released his grip from Tom’s wrist.
“Mhm,” Roland said.
Then, as if they’d just casually said hello to each other at a party, Roland walked passed Tom and out of the store, ringing the bell above the door as he left.
Tom rubbed his wrist making his way back to the register. Outside, the Chevy chugged to life and peeled out, kicking up bits of gravel against the axel and when Tom looked out the window there was only a cloud of dirt hovering over the lot.
He took his seat on the stool behind the register, still holding his wrist, and thought about what he should maybe do next. He looked at the book he’d hidden but felt no desire to pick it back up. The pain in his wrist and his chest were receding but replaced by an intrusion unlike a sickness that he could feel traveling through his blood.
Tom Graham sat in silence behind the register for an unbroken hour until the next customer rang the bell. In that hour he thought about things he should have done but never did and two days later when Sheriff Barker would come to call on him, Tom didn’t feel surprise at all.
Only guilt.
–
“That Goddamn Son of a Bitch!”
Carly Clayton was the meat in a bumper to bumper traffic sandwich.
Two of the only things she had inherited from her mother were road rage and the philosophy that traffic only existed when you had somewhere to be in a hurry. Like telling a child that thunder was only God playing bowling up in heaven and scoring a strike, traffic was also God being bored and dumping out every Hot Wheels car he owned into one big pile.
Carly was clenching the steering wheel as hard as she was grinding her teeth. When Izzie Boland had called her at work and spilled that Roland had taken Jaimie out of day care without her permission, she’d torn out of Everything For Nothing roadrunner style and hopped in the car, hoping to intercept her ex-husband before he could take Jaimie on the fishing trip up to Blue Mesa, which she told Roland repeatedly the boy could not go on.
“That Goddamn Son of a Bitch.”
Now she was staring at the ass of an old Camry, formerly black but now sun bleached grey, and in front of a Dodge diesel whose fumes were starting to leak though her windows. She thought of blasting the horn, not that it would get her moving any faster but it might release some of the rage bubbling within her.
Traffic only exists when you have somewhere to be in a hurry. Right now Roland was packing his truck up with her son and enough for them to get away for the weekend and she wasn’t going to make it to them in time. With Roland, custody agreements were like asking for no lemons in your lemonade; I don’t care if that’s the way it’s made, I don’t like it so get rid of it.
“Fuck it,” Carly said aloud and slammed her palm down on the horn.
The driver of the Camry flashed her the finger but she didn’t care. Nobody was moving.
And they wouldn’t be for some time.
Nobody in the traffic line knew that a little more than a mile up the road Sheriff John Barker was dragging his horse blood-coated boots across the asphalt while his team attempted to divert traffic from the main road out of Hook to a narrow dirt road that the compacts were having trouble traversing.
It was the damndest thing and not something Barker expected to start his day with. Along Highway 34 was the horse farm of Pete Thornton, fenced off by barbed wire, but Pete’s horses were known to trot straight up to the fence to graze and watch the traffic. Barker couldn’t get a clear answer of what happened but the man in the totaled Volkswagen, with blood streaming down his face, said the horse had just come out of nowhere, hopped the fence and run right into him.
“Something must have spooked him, I don’t know, I’m just trying to get to Denver International, fuckin’ hell this is a rental and I didn’t get the insurance on it.” The driver said, blood dripping on to his white button up. He was wrapped in a blanket and sitting in the back of an ambulance.
“You’re lucky to be alive,” Sheriff Barker said, scribbling away in his notebook. “Twelve hundred pound animal colliding with a twenty hundred pound rental, and you right in the middle.”
“Well what about my fuckin’ horse!”
Pete Thornton, who looked like a scarecrow, hopped down from the police cruiser and was coming up quickly along the side of the ambulance. “You fuckin’ killed Brownie!,” his sobs coming over the sounds of the ambulance and police sirens trying to make their way to the front of the traffic.
Barker flipped his note pad closed and stuffed it in his front pocket. “Pete calm down now, it’s not this man’s fault your horse jumped the fence.”
“Who’s gonna pay for this rental car?” the man in the back of the ambulance said.
“Who’s gonna pay for my fuckin’ horse?” Pete shot back, pointing to the broken carcass of a once beautiful dark brown mare in the middle of the road. Tears were streaming down the old farmers face, cleaning off streaks the dirt on his cheeks.
The roar of a motor came down the road. A rusty yellow tractor with a backhoe was slowly chugging along toward the scene of the accident.
“Oh lord no,” Pete Thornton sobbed.
The tractor drove up to the corpse of Brownie the mare and lowered the backhoe to the road. The clang of metal on asphalt was as loud as cannon fire as the tractor scooped up the horse and raised it up off the ground.
“You’ll be hearing from my lawyer,” Pete Thornton said to the man in the back of the ambulance.
“I am a lawyer,” the Man said.
But Pete didn’t hear the lawyer, already turned around to follow the tractor as it drove away. He placed a hand beneath the backhoe and walked along playing pallbearer to his prized mare.
Sheriff Barker watched the scene with admiration.
“What should I do about the rental car?” the Lawyer asked him.
“I don’t know,” Barker said.
“Sir,” one of the deputies tapped Barker on the shoulder, “we’re backed up about three miles now.
Barker watched the tractor carrying the dead horse away and old Pete Thornton following alongside it, slowly making their way down the road.
“We’ll get them going soon,” Barker said, he looked down at his blood stained boots already starting to crust and dragged them across the road again, “hope everyone has cancelled all their appointments.”
–
The trees. The cloudy morning sky. The twigs snapping under boots. The world spinning in and out of focus.
A large shard of glass lodged above his left ear continues to spill blood into his ear drum. His son, clutched to his chest, squirming like a worm on hook, but Roland holds onto him tight, he won’t get away. The truck is wrapped around a tree somewhere but he doesn’t remember where the crash was, he’s traversing through a maze of aspen eyes, staring at him with drooping black lids. It looks familiar, where he’s walking through. The trees end and open to a wide space of cluttered washing machines, dryers, dishwashers, lawn mowers and cash for clunker cars, behind them all a small shack that he once called home, behind that, the lake.
The boy is starting to cry, Roland can feel the hot tears soaking his shirt, he’s crying as well but he doesn’t know why. The last thing he can remember was laying drunk in a patch of dirt after taking a good beating, looking up at the stars in the middle of the night and wishing he was dead. He’s not blinking but every other second the world turns black. He feels his body move without command, luring him past all the broken down appliances, past the house, to the shore of the lake.
He throws the boy into the canoe. The little body comes down with a loud thud. Then Roland is getting into the boat and paddling off the shoreline. The boy is crying and tries to get up, but his knee is scraped up and he has a shard of window glass stuck deep in his color bone. He doesn’t seem to have any strength left to stand. Roland paddles on trying to not look at him, trying not to hear his son’s sobs.
In the boat there is a spool of rope that he doesn’t remember putting in there but knows its reason. They paddle out a little further. All the houses surrounding the lake are empty. His son crawls over to the side of the canoe and tries to slip over. Roland grabs his son by the injured shoulder and punches him in the face, breaking the boy’s nose and shattering his right cheek. The boy is unconscious.
Roland picks up the limp body and holds him against his chest, he can feel the shallow beats of his son’s heart against his own, can hear the raspy breath as blood leaks from the crooked nose.
The world goes black again. Black. Except for gray shadows that slither around like snakes.
Roland takes the rope he doesn’t remember bringing and starts to wrap it around both their bodies, binding them together. He secures the rope with a knot and tests its strength. It’ll hold. He pets the boy’s brown hair, same color as his own, and tells him that it’s going to be okay. The boy stirs, whimpers, but Roland is already bringing them over the edge of the canoe.
They hit the water with barely a splash.
The world goes black again.
It takes strength but Roland starts to swim down and down and down.
The boy strapped to his chest is fully awake now and struggling, desperate air bubbles float and pop against Roland’s face. He can hear the high pitched and distorted screams but he keeps swimming down, deeper and deeper, until the bottom of the lake opens up and he is guided down even deeper.
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