Darlene had been gone a few months, and Eddie had failed to find her walking anywhere along Houston’s semi-abandoned commercial strips. But the night people who populated the 24-hour diners and after-hours clubs treated him well, offering to help even if they couldn’t, and he stopped judging them. A guy at a gas station gave him a discount on a pack of bubble gum and a free king-size candy bar. Everybody had a different suggestion for what could have happened, and though no one proposed that his mother might’ve died, none of the potential scenarios sounded promising. She could have run off with a john, some said, or someone could have abducted her. Perhaps someone robbed her and she’d ended up in the hospital again, Eddie thought, like last February, when he’d lived with Aunt Bethella. But he didn’t find her at the hospital, and what’s more, Aunt Bethella had moved. She’d told him then that she and her husband might leave Houston soon, that they would let him know and call with the address, but Darlene’s phone got cut off, so maybe Aunt B. would send a letter soon.
Remembering Mrs. Vernon’s chat with the police, Eddie assumed that they had not arrested Darlene for soliciting and thrown her in jail. She could be on an extra-long binge, a hotel clerk theorized. A few of the people he met squinted and tried to remember if they’d met her, licking her name with their tongues. Eddie’s rapport with Houston’s underworld didn’t snuff out his despair, but when he returned to the badly lit rooms in their apartment complex, it reassured him to know that word on the street had started to pass from sidewalk to fried-chicken joint to strip club to pawnshop. But the routine of getting undressed for bed and brushing his teeth and saying his prayers did not change. He held to it desperately. After turning out the light and listening to the low hum of televisions and conversations in other apartments gradually settle down to the nervous tension of silence, he watched the movements of shadows on the ceiling and did not sleep until his uneasiness mingled with exhaustion and boredom and took his senses hostage. Then he rolled his borrowed bicycle down the steps and all over Houston. The Fifth Ward, where he and his mother lived, sat in the middle of Houston, so he often didn’t have to travel that far, and Houston didn’t have much in the way of hills, which made biking relatively easy. Cars and trucks caused more trouble for him than distance or topography.
He could not keep from searching during the day, but the best leads came at night. Once school ended, he’d spend the afternoon reading car magazines in libraries and bookstores, or visiting school friends, fixing their bicycles and hooking up their Nintendo systems, then playing Donkey Kong Jr. and Super Mario Bros. until their dinnertimes, when he would usually slink away unless he could figure out how to stay and eat something other than cereal or sandwiches without having to explain anything about his situation at home. At night, he would mount his bike to continue the quest, sometimes pretending to be a Batman-like character.
The seedier areas of Houston became his haunts. Down in Garden Villas, Eddie met a lady who called herself Giggles, and though she didn’t seem to know much, he enjoyed running into her every few nights. Like a lot of people, she mistook him for a runaway at first. Many others had made that mistake, and it angered him, but sometimes they gave him food, so he tried to keep his cool. But this time he lost his composure and shouted, No, I’m the opposite of a runaway! I’m a stayahere!
Giggles told him that she’d seen a woman out walking in Montrose who resembled his mother, but when he went there the next night, a pothead by the name of Myron couldn’t confirm her report. Myron did think that Darlene might be going under a different name out in Southwest or up in Hidden Valley.
In Hidden Valley several nights later, Eddie spotted a group of women on the other side of 45, but by the time he found the closest underpass and arrived in the place where he’d seen them, they’d disappeared into various town cars with darkened windows. At a tattoo parlor, a guy called Bucky ushered him out of the place immediately but stopped outside to listen to Eddie’s description of his mother. Bucky claimed to know six different women who sounded exactly like Darlene, and wanted to know what an eleven-year-old kid was doing in that part of town so late. Frowning sweetly, he paid for Eddie to take a cab home and tossed the bike into the backseat.
That routine had lasted a month and a half. By late August, Eddie’s sources started to yield other sources. Giggles told him to find a woman of the night nicknamed Juicy near where Giggles worked, up on Telephone Road, then Juicy told him to go way further north, to Jensen Drive. Jensen Drive was on the way home, so Eddie saved it for another night. When he got there, to a strip mall that contained an arts-and-crafts emporium, a post office, a dusty liquor store, and a pet-store franchise, Eddie met a chain-smoking Asian transsexual who called herself Kim Ono. She suggested he go back to Southwest, walk down Gulfton Street, and find a hooker named Fatback.
Fatback knows everything that happens before it happens, she said, and quite a bit that don’t.
How will I find her? Eddie asked. What does she look like?