Beautiful Children Read online

  “Serious. He's gonna take me out tonight and abuse me.”

  “THAT’S ENOUGH—”

  A snort. A cackle. The boy slapping his knee. “He told me so. Burgers, then anal penetration.”

  1.6

  Anal rape was actually the phrase Lorraine would first remember, though she also would recall hamburgers had been involved in some strange way. Certainly, Newell's spoken words would not be her foremost memory of the day he went missing (that honor would go to the phone call, received deep in the night, those screams, malicious, cackling, a celebratory spew of profanities). However, throughout the ensuing months, as Lorraine obsessed, she would, in a tedious and meticulous and thoroughly roundabout manner, reconstruct the entire sentence in all its snotty glory, with every one of the untold layers of torment that words contain.

  Burgers, then anal penetration, would remain a sticking point for her, leaping out from her reflections of that afternoon's gleaming heat. Though Lorraine had immediately reacted in the car, firmly putting an end to Newell's little rebellion, when she looked back on it, she was vexed by how much there had been for her to clamp down on—the ugly fact of her child saying such an obviously inappropriate sentence; the uglier fact of her child disrespecting her, blatantly challenging her; and because her boy—her son—had even been capable of saying something so wrong.

  Then again, why should she have read more into it than the obvious? It was a crude joke, nothing more, uttered during one of those rock-and-a-hard-place meltdowns that every parent and child get caught in. A kid hears things from older kids. He repeats things from off cable. That doesn't mean he knows what he's talking about. How the hell could he? A child's world is a ripe grape waiting to be tasted. His youth is eternal, his life an adventure in which he is the hero and the star. A child imagines what the future will be like, naturally, but he sees only swashbuckling adventures, true love, hundred-room mansions atop seaside cliffs. His contemplations must be informed by the viewpoint of youth, and therefore, by their very nature, must be flawed in the most beautiful and optimistic ways. The real meanings of words, the weight of consequences, adulthood, with all its responsibilities and implications, is as impenetrable to a child as martian trigonometry. That is one of the beauties of youth. And it is why someone has to be there, vigilant.

  Kenny had glimpses naturally, in nibbles and morsels and bite-size portions, arriving with the aunt who filled uncomfortable silences with innocuous, if equally uncomfortable, questions; with the trade school representatives and army recruiters who regularly prowled the cafeteria of his vocational high school. The future was thirty seconds during late-night syndicated dating shows where a low-rent spokesperson talked about the career in the exciting field waiting for you. It was some huge and unknowable network of people who were key to getting cushy summer jobs, like, say, being a lifeguard at a hotel pool. It didn't matter how much you wanted the whistle around your neck and the perch above all those oiled bodies. Like, like . . . like how you got it? The procedures involved? They were beyond Kenny, he didn't know how they worked or where to begin. The future was nebulous and large and halfhearted. It was a promise to get his shit together. Right after the commercial. After the show. Five more minutes. Kenny tried not to think about the future. Thinking—wanting—only hurt worse.

  Shit happened, then more shit happened. That was the future.

  The easiest way to deal was to stretch out across the floor along the far end of his dad's trailer and press his chest against a throw rug that in no way cushioned him from the hard floor. Occasionally, Kenny warmed up with a light sketch, say, a front porch—the house cat up on blocks in the driveway, the rusting jalopy trapped in a tree. Eventually his attention would turn toward his father's illicit pleasures, stashed in a cardboard box. His dad would be in some church basement for one of his “meetings,” he'd be relapsing at some penny-ante blackjack table, and Kenny would surround himself with soft-focus photographs on high-glossed pages: the syndicated bombshell lolling amid a frothy surf; the televangelist's infamous secretary straddling a pew; the airbrushed bodies that melted, as if by magic, into bearskin rugs; girls of the Ivy League, their pleated skirts tantalizingly raised; would-be starlets, more than eager to show a rosy cheek.

  The harder stuff, it was there, too: magazines that were lusterless and brittle with dried misuse; women who were not bunnies, or pets, but haggard. Inhumane hairstyles. Eyes raccooned with dark circles. Page one seventy-six of a prehistoric Swan revealing a cigarette burn along a stringy, pockmarked forearm; the foldout from January's Cheri showing a deep bruise on the back of a thigh. On the rare—indeed, miraculous—occasion when a woman still wore panties, inevitably the fabric was flimsy, and the model always pulled it to the side. Using her index and middle finger, she'd spread apart the gates to what should have been her most private self.

  A singular photograph had preoccupied Kenny for a good while now, most of the summer, really. It took up a full, loose page, which had been freed from the magazine's confining staples. Basically, the photo was a woman's head, a close-up. She had an oblong head, long and thin, with platinum curls framing her features in the manner of an ancient football helmet. The woman wore way too much makeup but you could still see pockmarks on her skin. Collagen bloated her lips beyond the cracking point. And there was something else—inside the squinting slits that doubled as this woman's eyes. This strange, almost unquantifiable quality. It brought a cohesion to her expression, it seemed to Kenny, a clarity to her pain, all but transforming her dried, crack whore face, creating a statement, a message that Kenny could not give words to, yet somehow recognized.

  Stretched out in his father's trailer, sitting at his mom's kitchen table, trying to get away from all the drama by crashing with his aunt, using the loose magazine page in front of him as a guide, working from and relying on his memory, Kenny would clutch a nub of pencil and ignore his more carnal instincts. A yellowed white pages might serve as his table, the back of an unsolicited flyer as his canvas. With fastidious delicacy, he would reproduce the woman's chins of loose flesh. He'd take great pains to render her nostrils as bloated, and scribble a flush into her cheeks, so it appeared she had recently concluded a vigorous workout. Often, he tried to shade her gaze with what he felt to be a proper desperation. Then he might go back, augmenting her hatred, adding to it the first traces of a saddened poise.

  Here and there a tangled forelock would fall in front of his eyes, and less often than this, he'd brush the annoyance behind his ear, and through every second he would become less aware of the water pump's arrhythmic hum. Further he'd retreat, further, until he entered a locale without matter or dimension, without thought or awareness of thought, this almost spiritual calm, where sound was black and the earth no longer rotated around the sun, and he was not ashamed of being a perv who rummaged through his dad's cardboard boxes for dirty magazines; indeed, in this realm of his own creation Kenny did not worry about the currents that run between a naked woman, the guy doing her, and the voyeur getting off on the scene. He did not worry about the fact that he had never kissed a girl.

  The inside of his right hand became smudged with lead. His left sneaker lolled in slow, counterclockwise circles. He refused to think about whether letting Mom know about Dad's latest binge would end custody weekend visitations. He refused to think about senior year or anything that might happen afterward. Noticing a flaw, Kenny would quickly double back. Persistent, short jabs of his eraser would reconfigure the glop that sat, iridescent, on her soft jewel of a tongue. Broad strokes might reduce the ejaculate along her chin. Once in a while he even lucked out. The insulting connotations that accompany exaggerated humor would actually disappear, and the woman's face would be left with a stressed, fundamental humanity—the nobility inherent in struggles that cannot be won.

  Problem was, about the only serious feedback Kenny'd ever gotten about his work had come on a school desk, scribbling back and forth with some dude who had a later class in the same room. You couldn't
exactly know if you were any good when your only responses came from a person you'd never met and didn't know anything about. When the only real, live person who'd ever seen your sketches in person was all of twelve years old. Kenny had to get opinions from someone who mattered, he knew this much. All summer long, he'd counted down the days toward each weekend, figuring out which pictures were best suited for that particular visiting artist, coming up with new drawings, tweaking old ones, improving them right up until he'd gone too far. Kenny had ruined an embarrassing amount of his most promising stuff and then he'd acted as if it were no big thing, consoling himself with the idea that the whole deal was kind of stupid anyway. He sabotaged himself in other ways too, volunteering to take his aunt to a swap meet on a Sunday when a particular visitor was supposed to be receptive to amateur work. The Reliant hadn't started. He just plain didn't show up and Newell asked where he'd been, and he had no response, not anything believable. Newell shrugged, he answered, Sure, and from the hurt in the boy's eyes, Kenny saw that his friend believed in him just a little bit less, maybe Newell didn't even believe in him anymore, Kenny couldn't blame him if he didn't, retreating the way he did always made Kenny feel terrible and disappointed in himself, the biggest coward the world had ever known. But he couldn't help it. The thought of a reckoning was just that terrifying.

  Beneath the awning outside Amazin’ Stories he took his time and retied his sneakers. He flattened out the drawings that had begun to curl up at the edges and rearranged the order of the sheets. Kenny felt along the war zone of his chin. His fingers ran over hairs he'd missed the last time he'd tried to shave, fledgling hairs that had grown in since then, and finally, a triangle of three small pimples. A deep breath. A ginger step forward.

  His strategy, as much as he had one, was to hang in the back, wait for everyone to leave. That got shot to hell when he saw that the area around the table could not have been more deserted—just Bing there, alone, slumped in his seat, staring down at nothing in particular. Gravity seemed to be pulling extra hard at the flesh of the comic book artist's cheeks and chin, for it loaded his jawline with extra weight, and made his face look really heavy. Kenny watched him remove his glasses, let out a breath that was more like a sigh, and rub the corner of his eyes with the inside of his palm.

  But then the guy looked up. He said, “Oh. Hey.”

  “Um. Am I—”

  “No. Of course not.”

  “I didn't mean . . .”

  A hand extended, waving him forward. “Please.” A smile at once apologetic and welcoming: “Bing. Bing Beiderbixxe.”

  “Right. I know, hi.”

  “Sorry about that. Long day. Kind of hit a wall, I guess.”

  “Don't worry about—it's—I mean—”

  “What's your name?”

  “Oh. . . . Kenny. My—I . . . Kenny.”

  “Hi, Kenny. Nice to meet you.”

  “Yeah, hi. Right. Nice to meet you, too. Ah, I want—wanted to—I was hoping . . . What I mean—” Kenny stopped, gathered himself. “I thought your last issue was real excellent. How you did the Sienkiewicz and all . . .”

  “Thank you, Kenny. What a nice thing to say.”

  Bing cocked his head slightly, as if waiting for the next step. Kenny shifted from one foot to the other. He started to speak, but the wires got crossed, on the way from his brain to his mouth, the map turned upside down. Bing's face remained patient, plastered with indulgence. For a moment he smoothly rubbed his eyeglasses against the part of his shirt where the fabric lapped over the buttons.

  “Anything you'd like me to sign? That's what I'm here for.”

  “Oh—Oh, shit. I can't believe—Mr. Bidderboxxe, I swear I had them out to bring. I—I set them out.”

  “It's all right, Kenny.” Bing put his glasses on now. As if he were a veterinarian putting a suffering pet to sleep for its own good, he nodded toward Kenny's chest. “And what do we have here?” He reached out for the crumpled papers and set them down in front of him, and here it was, the future arriving with the next moment and the next: Bing trying to smooth out the place mat so it didn't roll up at the edges; Bing giving up on the rolling edge and taking in the drawing, his brow crinkling into a pointed arrow, the comic book artist squinting a bit, pursing his lips. “You did this?”

  It was as if Kenny were anesthetized, as if he were going through the motions of being himself. Bing did not seem to care, he was raising his hand and extending a finger, nudging his frames back up the bridge of his nose. He was remarking about Kenny's touch with a pencil, how sophisticated the shades of her hair and cheeks were, their contrasts. “Her expression is really great,” Bing said. “And I really like what you did with her eyes. Most of the time, when someone brings me a naked woman, they're not women, you know? Not flesh and blood. This is real. Really nice, Kenny. Let's see what else you have here.”

  He emerged into the parking lot in time to watch a V-pattern of birds ascending above the disappearing horizon of traffic signals. The shopping plaza appeared as a large stucco corral, reining him in on all sides. The asphalt lot was a lake of shining tar. Kenny's head swam with the unlimited possibilities of a dreamer's imagination. If he'd known how to whistle, man would he have been whistling.

  In the grand scheme, the whole thing was like a very special after-school television presentation. He saw this: the wily pro recognizing the potential that lay inside this unacknowledged and rough diamond, the grizzled vet taking an obviously troubled and shy and awkward pupil under his wing, helping someone step forward while at the same time helping himself let go. The feel-good story of the year. It had everything except the group hug while the music swelled and the credits rolled.

  So maybe that had been expecting too much. Entirely possible that Bing Beiderbixxe's generosity and interest, no matter how legit it had been, also was practiced, standard. Asking about rumpled papers was part of the gig. Giving advice helped push units.

  And really, how hard is it to say something nice about one or two drawings? How hard is it to show someone a different way to grip his pencil? To tell someone, keep up the good work?

  Bing had not offered him a job, that was for sure. He hadn't provided a name to contact, a number to call, or an address to e-mail. In no way, shape, or form had the guy bestowed entry into any kind of future or profession. The facts were plain: he was right where he always was. Outside, alone, lost again, looking for his Plymouth.

  Yet he felt everything had changed. He hadn't gotten what he'd come here for. But he'd gotten something, that was for sure.

  The beat-up, boxy two-door was a relic from the eighties—the more paranoid stoners at Vo Tech thought it was an undercover FBI car. Eventually, it turned up on the other side of the lot, in a row and space parallel to where Kenny had been looking. He headed around to the passenger side, and wrapped his hand in his shirttail. He pulled open the creaking door, watched a crushed Big Gulp cup fall out.

  All over the car's bucket seat and the floor, Kenny saw parts of other crushed Big Gulps, many with scenes from a crappy summer movie on their sides. He saw segments of tangled ribbons from cassette tapes. He saw loose magazine subscription cards and the hardened remains of deformed french fries. Assorted coins were in there, some of them shining, others moldy and green. And plastic soda container lids. And a corroded and ripped egg carton that once had been blue. And twisted straw fragments. And the ripped partitions of various diner place mats (pencil etchings invariably running along their margins). And the disconnected and free-floating spiral spine of a notebook. And the casings of two shotgun shells that Kenny had found when he'd been wandering through a vacant lot behind his mom's apartment complex. A sick recognition took him, heavy, pulling. The inside of his mouth was impossibly dry. He tossed a few more empty and crushed soda cans onto the cement. He threw out a pair of burger wrappers that seemed to have been fused together with dried condiments. He carefully placed his drawings in the newly created space in the front seat. He climbed into the car and struggled to
cross over, into the driver's seat, without putting his knee through the drawings.

  What really sucked was, not only did the FBImobile not have air-conditioning, but ever since his dad had sideswiped that light pole, something had been wrong with the driver's side, so the driver-side door wouldn't open, and something electrical had shorted out, so the driver-side window wouldn't roll down. Which meant that as the engine turned over on the fourth attempt, as balding tires backed over the cardboard with a dull pop, and Kenny started off to go get his aunt, not only did he not enjoy a refreshing swoosh of air onto his face, but he received magnified sun, concentrated heat. It meant the FBImobile was basically a mobile furnace.

  It took less than a block before he pulled into the Jack in the Box drive-through circle, and by then his pit sweat was worse than usual, the back of his T clinging to him like a second skin. A late model Mazda sports car was idling ahead, at the farthest window. While Kenny stared at the menu and waited for the first noise from the microphone clown head, a car pulled up behind him. Kenny felt the beads of perspiration forming, then dripping down his forehead. His thighs were roasting inside his jeans. He distracted himself by anticipating all the certainties of a drive-through exchange, not the least of which was the polite greeting, the simple pleasure of being asked what you wanted: Hello, may I take your order please.

  Except the FBImobile's driver-side window would not roll down.

  And the driver's door would not open.

  Kenny didn't know how he would be able to answer the clown head, if it ever asked him hello, may I take your order please, which didn't seem to be happening anytime soon, anyhow. His hand tapped against the steering wheel. His temples pulsed and pounded. Here he was, a promising artist—hadn't he just been told he was promising? And he was trapped in place, stuck in this stupid box of trash. Promise wasn't enough. Promise wasn't a way out.