I stood like a flamingo on one leg, holding my throbbing foot and watching him taunt me. The Indian lay on his stomach, hands under him, moaning. Teen me kept dancing around, doing Muhammad Ali routines. A group of workers had gathered to watch our festivities. While I held my foot, one of them stepped out of the crowd and whacked the kid on the head with a board. Afterward the guy just stood there with the two-by-four in his hand, looking stupid, like he was waiting for someone to tell him what to do now.
The kid was suddenly on the ground on all fours, head hanging low. Someone was helping the Indian up. I tested my foot to see if it still worked. It hurt, but I’d survive. “All right, that’s it, everything stops. Who’s in charge, who’s the construction company, where are your permits? I want to see everything right now.”
“Frannie?” A familiar voice said my name. Still down on the ground, the boy looked up slowly because it was his name too. Nearby Johnny Petangles stood holding a large bottle of club soda. He stared at me with impassive eyes. “What’re you doing, Frannie?”
I looked from him to the house, the workers, to little Fran on the ground. It felt like every one of them was staring at me but none made a sound. And then the idea arrived. I pointed at the house. “What do you see, Johnny? What do you see over there?”
He tipped back his bottle and took a long drink. Lowering it he burped and clumsily wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Nothing. I see a house, Frannie. You want some of my club soda?”
I limped through the crowd of workers to the house. The air smelled of freshly cut wood, burnt metal, and gasoline. It smelled of hammered nails and power tools just turned off, sweat in a flannel shirt, coffee spilled on stone. It smelled of many men working at hard physical jobs. I took hold of one of the long steel bars in the scaffolding and shook it till things rattled.
“What’s this, Johnny? Do you see this?”
“I told you, it’s a house.”
“You don’t see the scaffolding?”
“What’s that?”
“Metal bars wrapped around the house. Like what they put on when they’re fixing it, doing construction?”
“Nope. No cat folding. Just a house.” He said those three words as if he were singing—da dee da—and gave one of his rare Johnny smiles.
I pointed to the boy on the ground. “Can you see him?”
“Who?”
“Johnny can’t see me, I told you. No one can see any of this but you.”
“Why?”
The boy flickered—was there, gone, there again like interference on a TV. Then he began to fade. The construction workers too, as well as the metal spiderweb around the house. All of it began fading, growing dimmer, changing from solid to transparent to gone.
“Why only me?”
“Find the dog, Frannie. Find it and we can talk again.”
I tried to step toward the kid but used the bad foot. The pain that flew up my leg almost buckled me. “Which dog? The one we buried? Old Verture?”
“Who you talking to, Frannie?” Johnny had his mouth over the bottle hole. He blew into it and made the low, sad toot of a boat leaving the harbor.
Everything had disappeared. The Schiavo house was no longer encased in a metal web. There was no sign of a construction site, workers, anything out of the ordinary. No bent nails on the ground, wood shavings, tools, electrical cords, discarded Coca-Cola cans. Just an empty house on a well-kept lot on a quiet street at three in the A.M.
Petangles blew into his bottle again. “How come you’re out here tonight, Frannie? I never see you when I’m out walking.” He tooted once more.
“Gimme that stupid bottle!” Snatching it out of his hand, I threw it as hard as I could. But even that disappeared, because wherever it hit, it didn’t make a sound. I started walking home. He followed.
“Johnny, go home. Go to bed. Don’t follow me. Don’t come with me. I love you, but don’t bug me tonight. Okay? Not tonight.”
Bill Pegg turned into the school parking lot while I looked out the car window. When we stopped I reached down and flicked off both the siren and flashing light. After the motor died, we sat there a moment gathering strength for what came next.
“Who’s the kid?”
“Fifteen-year-old girl named Antonya Corando—new student this year. Eleventh grade.”
“Fifteen in eleventh grade? She must be smart.”
“I guess not so smart.”
Bill shook his head and reached for his clipboard. I got out of the car and checked my pockets to see if I had everything I needed: notebook, pen, depression. Ten minutes after I entered the office that morning, we got the call from the principal at Crane’s View high school saying they’d found a body in the women’s toilet. She was sitting on the can and was discovered because the syringe she’d used was on the floor in front of the stall. Some girl saw it, looked under the door, and ran for help.
We walked into the high school and, as always happened when I went there, I shuddered. This had been the worst place in the world for six years of my life. Now a lifetime later—way past the Himalayas of youth and down onto the plains of middle age—I still got the creeps whenever I entered the building.
The principal, Redmond Mills, was waiting for us in the entranceway. I liked Redmond and wished there had been a principal like him when I was a student at the school. The high point in his life had been attending the Woodstock Festival. He wore his sixties sensibilities like too much patchouli, but better that than the old fascists who ran the place back in our day. Redmond cared a lot about the students, his teachers, and Crane’s View. I often bumped into him at the diner across the street from the school at ten at night because he had just left work and was getting a bite to eat before going home. Today he looked stricken.
“Bad news huh, Redmond?”
“Terrible! Terrible! It’s the first time it’s ever happened here, Frannie. The news is already all over the school. That’s all the kids are talking about.”
“I bet.”
“Did you know her?” Bill asked gently as if the dead girl had been the principal’s daughter.
Redmond looked left and right as if about to say dangerous information and didn’t want to be overheard. “She was a nebbish, Bill! Homework was her middle name. Her essays were always ten pages too long and she was supposedly cataleptic if she didn’t make the high honor roll. See my point? That’s what I don’t understand about this. She carried her books against her chest like she was in a fifties TV show and was so shy she always looked down when teachers talked to her.”
He turned to me and his face went cynical. In a loud, resentful voice he said, “I’ve got kids at this school who are devil worshippers, Frannie. They’ve got swastikas tattooed on their necks and their girlfriends last took a bath when they were born. Them I could see killing themselves. But not this girl, not Antonya.”
What immediately came to mind was an image of Pauline in the bathroom last night wearing only eye makeup and an attitude. Who knows what Antonya Corando did behind her closed doors when everyone thought she was doing calculus homework? Who knows what she dreamed, what she hid, what she pretended to be? What on this earth did she hope to gain from sticking a needle full of heroin in her arm while sitting on a toilet?
“You didn’t move her?”
“Move her? Why would I do that, Frannie? She’s dead! Where am I going to put her, in my office?”
I patted his shoulder. “It’s okay. Take it easy, Redmond.” His eyes had crazy in them by then, but he was a gentle man. Why shouldn’t they after what he’d seen that morning?
We walked down empty, silent halls. In contrast, through small windows in the classroom doors, I could see the bright, buzzing life of school everywhere. Teachers wrote on blackboards, kids in white aprons and plastic goggles worked over Bunsen burners. In a language lab two boys were horsing around until they saw us and disappeared fast. In another room a beautiful tall girl dressed in black stood in front of a class reading aloud from a large red book. When she tossed her hair I thought, Oh boy, Frannie from last night would love her. I looked in another room and recognized my old English teacher. The old bastard had once made me memorize a poem by Christina Rossetti, which to this day I couldn’t forget: