“She’s in trouble,” I said. Coco was far enough behind us and totally enthralled in whatever she was writing. “Mad is in trouble, Baz. She needs help.”
Baz’s face changed, but I couldn’t read him. He stared ahead, straight down the road as he walked. “What do you mean?”
“I woke up two nights ago, just as she was leaving. I followed her. She has an uncle. And a grandmother. She lives in a house not too far from the orchard.”
. . .
“I know.”
I almost tripped over my own feet. “You know?”
“Yes.”
. . .
. . .
“Um. Okay.”
“Nzuzi checked on her yesterday morning.”
“I don’t understand. So Mad told you?”
Baz shook his head. “Months ago Nzuzi followed her just like you. He woke me that night, led me to the house, showed me.”
“What did you see?”
“She was watching television. With an old woman. It was dirty, but they seemed okay.”
“What about the uncle? Did you see the uncle?”
Now that the conversation was out there, it felt urgent that he understood. I needed Baz to see the same painting I saw: Self-Portrait Man Terminates Television. The problem was you couldn’t force someone to stand in front of a painting.
Baz shook his head. “There was no uncle.”
“There is an uncle, Baz.” I wanted to rip this painting off the wall and stick it in his face. “And he’s awful. I’m afraid he might hurt her.”
Baz didn’t speak for a few moments, but when he did, I heard the very same conflict I’d felt for two days.
“Okay,” he said. “We’ll go tonight. After Coco is asleep.”
I nodded, felt a small sense of relief.
Coco and Nzuzi ran up behind us. “Finished!”
We were still a solid mile and a half away from the warmth of the greenhouse; it was downright frigid.
“Finished what?”
Coco nodded at Nzuzi, who, astonishingly, began beat-boxing.
“Yo, yo. Uh,” said Coco in low, rhythmic intervals. “Let us wrap . . . the Lettuce Wrap. Let us rap . . . the Lettuce Rap.” Nzuzi’s beatboxing remained steady, though somehow increased in complexity as Coco broke into limerick:
We’re the real Kids of Appetite here to say
Been wrapping our lettuce since way back in the day
It’s crunchy, it’s healthy, it’s sort of sweet
Gimme those veggies, don’t gimme your meat
Lettuce ain’t no filler, son, why you playin’?
It’s legit delicious, yo, I’m just sayin’
Who are we to boss you around?
I’ll tell you in a sec, gotta drag this chorus down
Let us wrap . . . the Lettuce Wrap
Let us rap . . . the Lettuce Rap
Not cola, not classic, I’m Coke, that’s enough
Made by Queens machines, so you know that I’m tough
Over here is Baz, he old, but he cool
Right there, that’s Spoils, ain’t nobody’s fool
My boy Zuz dropping truths like a motherfrakking boss
He speaks in other ways—don’t hear him? Your loss
Mad ain’t here, so you know what to do
Leave a message once it beeps—here, I’ll do it too
(Beep!)
Let us wrap . . . the Lettuce Wrap
Let us rap . . . the Lettuce Rap
Suffice it to say, we just took you to school
Played you like a fiddle, done soaked up your cool
Listen up now, chump (and you a chump unanimous)
Said it once, twice, thrice, now infinitous
I’ll keep preaching my sermon, keep gettin’ knocked down
I know a good thing when a good thing’s around
And here’s that good thing, imma say it again
It’s simple, it’s truth, here it is now, lean in
If you wanna hella good thing to munch
The KOA endorse lettuce for lunch
Let us wrap . . . the Lettuce Wrap
Let us rap . . . the Lettuce Rap
The streets of New Milford did not know what hit them. And as we rapped Coco’s song once, twice, infinitous times, I went to my Land of Nothingness, and there I saw the many chumps of suburban Jersey, hiding in their basements, waiting for the anthem to end.
They would be waiting a long time.
* * *
After returning to the greenhouse, it took Coco pretty much forever to fall asleep. Juiced as she was from the success of her latest rap hit, she lay in her sleeping bag and beseeched Baz to tell a story. Ergo, he caved, and told a story from the Bible about Moses leading the Israelites out of Egypt. Coco interrupted a couple of times with title ideas for Baz’s book (Pillar of Fire and Bible II: The Reckoning). We were trekking down Mt. Sinai before she started snoring, at which point Baz told Nzuzi to stay with Coco, that we were going to check on Mad, but would return soon.
Baz and I left the orchard together, stepping out into the momentously cold night to do something.
My inner sideways hug shuddered mightily.
Baz said, “The Mets suck, you know.”
I’d just finished crawling under the fence, where my Metpants had gotten snagged on a link. Baz had hopped over effortlessly and was waiting on the other side, with his cutting remark.
Like I hadn’t heard it before.
“Yeah, I know. They’ve had some decent years recently, though.”
As we walked toward Mad’s house, Baz held out his Thunder baseball cap, explained how exciting it was to watch the young Yankees up-and-comers. I thought of the spring Dad and I decided to be Trenton Thunder fans. As the minor league affiliate of the New York Yankees, the team played games that provided us with early intel on the enemy. Double-A ball meant fewer suicide squeezes, more raffle tickets and wrinkled hot dogs. But Dad used to say, Baseball’s baseball, V. Beats the hell outta sitting at home, twiddlin’ your thumbs.
I used to hate it when he said twiddle. Now? Shit. Missed it.
For a couple of blocks, Baz talked Thunder and Yankees baseball with the enthusiasm of a true baseball fan. Even so, I had little tolerance for a team that prioritized purchasing players over developing them (Jeter notwithstanding).
Twenty-seven championships? Sweet. I’ll take my two and go home.
But hey.
It probably made sense, like, on a personal level. The Yankees were win at all cost. The Mets were good game, good game. The Yankees were Ruth, Gehrig, Mantle. The Mets were Seaver and Piazza. (Gooden and Strawberry both ended up in Yankees uniforms, so Dad said they didn’t count.) Much as I hated admitting it, the Mets aspired to certain levels of automobile rental entrepreneurship. But they had heart. And this was the number-one selling point for a couple of tried and true heart-thinkers like my dad and me.
“You should consider switching sides,” said Baz.
The suggestion made me unexpectedly happy.
Dad’s friends used to say the same thing.
We arrived at Mad’s house, where I led the way up to the same front bay window, warning Baz not to step in the storm drain, as I had last time. Baz took off his hat, pressed his face right up against the glass to get a full view of the room. It was still a mess, though less than before. The TV was gone, which shouldn’t have been surprising, considering it had been obliterated. Still. I’d been primed to show it to Baz, counting on it as evidence that things were not okay, that her uncle not only existed, but was flat-out dangerous.
After a few minutes of nothing, we walked around the sides and back of the house, looking for other windows or visual points of access. I appreciated that Baz wasn’t just here to appease me. Or at least, I
didn’t think he was. He seemed genuinely concerned. Likewise, I understood his hesitations. Our being here, however right it might be, was a definite breach of Mad’s trust.
We checked the front window one more time, got a brief glimpse of Mad. She was wearing tall rubber gloves and appeared to be cleaning the house, which my current spy-brain found suspiciously domestic.
There was no sign of her grandmother. There was no sign of her uncle.
Everything seemed to be well and in order.
Eventually Baz insisted we go.
“Baz, wait,” I whispered.
“What?”
. . .
“Where’s your hat?”
He reached up out of instinct. But yeah. It was gone. We searched high and low, did two circles around the house, but found no sign of the hat. Baz kept saying it was no big deal, but the thing was: it was. That hat was a direct link to him, and if Mad found it, she’d know he had been there. We did more circles around the house, but after turning up nothing, we eventually called it quits.
The walk back to the orchard was a quiet one. We didn’t talk about baseball. We didn’t talk about much of anything.
* * *
I lay in the darkness, wide-awake, waiting on verbal confirmation that Baz and Nzuzi were asleep, kicking myself again for leaving my iPod charger at home. Mostly I could have used the soaring sopranos. Those two ladies were absolute aces at instilling courage, and right now courage was in short supply.
When we left Mad’s house, part of me knew I wasn’t done for the night. Part of me knew I would go back.
So many parts.
As if pieces of a puzzle had come to me intermittently throughout the day. One piece: the bruises on Mad’s arms and wrists. One piece: the growling of Mad’s uncle. One piece: a rifle through a TV. At first I’d been confused about why Mad would even go back. Apparently her uncle had been too drunk or apathetic (or both) to notice his niece’s absence. There was no talk of school or friends or even, Mad, my God, where have you been? She certainly didn’t return for him.
It had to be the old lady. Jamma, Mad called her. I’d bet anything it was her grandmother, and I’d bet even more she was the reason Mad continued returning to the house.
. . .
Baz’s breath had settled into an even rhythm, his chest rising and falling in time. Nzuzi’s, too. I swiveled on the couch, noiselessly lowering my feet to the ground. From here I could see their eyes closed—good enough for me.
I sneaked down the center walkway, grabbed my coat off the rack, and exited the greenhouse. Outside, the night wind turned my leaky mug into a Popsicle. I ran across the orchard, the bridge, all the way to the fence, and was just about to scurry underneath when I heard the sound of a single cough.
I froze.
. . .
. . .
The nearest bush or tree was at least ten yards away. Nothing to hide behind.
“Mr. Maywood?” I said, my voice thinner than string.
No answer.
“Who’s there?”
. . .
. . .
. . .
Nothing.
Just a snowy, nighttime quiet.
I tried to convince myself that the cough had been nothing more than a figment of my imagination.
Be the Racehorse, Benucci. Be the motherfrakking Racehorse.
Under the fence I went, and for the second time that night I caught my Metpants on the chain link. Prying myself loose, I retraced our steps from before, only this time I ran. Very suddenly I felt I’d waited too long. Horrible imaginings took root in my brain, but the worst: Mad’s face as a TV.
Her beautiful, simultaneously extreme opposite punk cut.
Her smile and her singing.
Her self.
I ran faster.
So fast.
Until I was there. In the same spot.
Under the front bay window.
My right foot fell out from under me. I cursed, pulled it out of the same snow-covered storm drain I’d fallen in last time, when I saw it—a Thunder cap. Relieved, I picked it up and slipped it onto my head. This provided me with an extra measure of incognito recon garb (though seeing as how I had no incognito recon garb to speak of, the hat wasn’t so much an extra measure, as it was a measure).
I stepped around the storm drain and looked through the window.
Mad had been cleaning, all right. And she’d gotten plenty done in the hour or so it took the Kabongos to fall asleep. The magazines and pizza boxes, soda cans and bottles, the greasy paper plates and dust and dirt—all of it was gone. In fact, were it not for the gun rack on the wall, and the mounted antlers next to that, I might have thought I’d had the wrong house. I waited a few minutes, just to see if Mad would enter with a Coca-Cola, plop down in the recliner like last time.
Still nothing. No sign of Mad, Jamma, or the Self-Portrait Man.
I bent low, ran around the side of the house.
Swift. Soft. Stealth. Spook. Spy. Speed. Silence.
At the far right corner of the house, a single light shone through a window. It was dim, slightly reddish, like a lighthouse through a squall. A curtain was drawn, thin enough to let the light through, thick enough that I couldn’t see inside.
Behind the house, I stepped onto a patio with stained-brown furniture, a grill, a stone ottoman, and a table that looked like it hadn’t been used in decades. A set of sliding glass doors led out to the patio. No curtains this time, just long, vertical blinds.
They were not drawn.
I pressed my face against the glass and quietly observed the makings and colors of a very average American kitchen: beige refrigerator, silver toaster, black microwave, brown stove. I quietly observed something else, though, just below the surface.
Don’t look at the colors that are there, V. Look at the colors that aren’t.
I’d always suspected Matisse’s paintings were alive, that they studied me as much as I studied them. I wondered if they could feel their own colors, especially the ones that had been covered up. And I wondered about Matisse himself, what it must have taken for a Fauve to cover up all those brilliant colors, inch by inch, with muted tones. Such restraint. But well worth it. The figures in the paintings felt their colors whether we saw them or not.
I went to my Land of Nothingness and felt a pulsing vibrancy, a burst of color underneath this kitchen: red.
So much red.
I reached for the handle and found that it was unlocked.
* * *
The air in the beige-red kitchen was only slightly warmer than the air outside.
This is how I knew I was indoors.
The carpets smelled like cats and cold pizza and Lysol.
This is how I knew I was in the living room.
Blank walls stared at me, whispered of distant memories.
This is how I knew I was in the hallway.
“What do you think of them?” she asked in a whisper, on her bed, in the dark, in a nightgown and slippers, two cans of Coca-Cola on the nightstand beside her. “I finally finished my mittens.” She held out both hands to me, admiring the fluffy pink mitten on each one. “I’m warm. Finally warm.”
This is how I knew I just met Jamma.
The silence was broken by a whine, something like an animal, only meeker, more desperate and muted.
This is how I knew Mad was here.
Across the hallway, the door was cracked. I put my eye up to the opening. Inside, the red, the dim, the room with the drawn curtain.
This is how I knew Mad was in trouble.
The Self-Portrait Man sat on the floor, his back to me. His words weren’t just slurred, they were intrinsically venomous, as if he hated himself for whatever it was he was saying. Through the crack, I watched him raise a large open hand and bring it down w
ith force.
A shriek. And crying.
“No one gave you permission to touch that picture,” said the Self-Portrait Man, raising a bottle to his lips, downing what was left in a few large swigs.
My legs were the calmest part of my body: they turned, walked by Jamma’s room, made their way to the living room, past the mounted antlers where Mad’s jacket hung, and stopped in front of the gun rack. I reached up, pulled the heaviest-looking rifle from its place of prominence, turned, walked calmly back to the red room.
I could never shoot anyone. Even if the heart-thinker in me managed to pull the trigger, I’m not sure the brain-thinker would know how. But here was the conclusion at which my factual heart arrived: a large, heavy rifle was as good as a baseball bat.
I pulled Baz’s Thunder cap low over my eyes and pushed open the door. My feet continued walking until I stood right behind the Self-Portrait Man. He sat on top of Mad, pinning down the arms and legs of my Stoic Beauty, my first kiss, my first love, my first everything. I thought of Mad’s up-closeness, and the word together, the Hinton Vortex, and feeling like an I am, and her quiet-lovely voice singing of junkyards and false starts, and the momentousness of Altneu, and simultaneous extreme opposites, and the comparison of wrists on the rooftop of my dead grandparents’ house, all those bruises and the Self-Portrait Man was to blame, to blame, to blame . . .
. . .
It was quick.
Like someone hit the fast-forward button in my body. I hoisted the rifle high above my head, slammed it down with every ounce of myself, and watched my two favorite Matisse paintings become one as the Self-Portrait Man collapsed into The Red Room.
I dropped the rifle to the floor.
“I am a Super Racehorse,” I said.
And that was how I knew.
EIGHT
COMING UP ROSES
(or, As I Opened the Door)
Interrogation Room #2
Madeline Falco & Detective H. Bundle
December 19 // 7:13 p.m.
I see the blood even now. All of it, gushing like water from a hose. And his eyes, turned off. And the other eyes too, lit up like fire.
“Madeline,” says Bundle, draining the vestiges of his coffee.