Those appetite-suppressing chocolates that did not work. That did not keep the lonely woman from eating the company of food. Bandages on a plate for all the wounds inside.
She continued to read the newspaper. “I wonder if Scranton will get AIDS. They say it comes with the fuckin’, you know.” She seemed both pleased and distressed by the thought, though it was hard to tell with the heavy black liner she drew across her white brows. “That old rat bastard. If anyone deserves it, he does.”
Grand tried to swipe the paper back from her, but she began to bark and growl at him like a dog. He backed, along the way grabbing up his baseball glove from the table.
“I’m goin’ to practice.” He pecked Mom on the cheek.
He made a last attempt for the paper but this time Fedelia bit him on the left forearm, leaving behind her red lipstick that smeared across his skin like blood.
“Goddamn, Auntie.” He grabbed his arm.
“There’s more where that came from, you piss-ant.” Fedelia rolled and pointed the paper at him, her cruel smile made even more monstrous from the lipstick having been smeared around her mouth, spreading so far from her lips, it reached her cheeks in claw-mark strides.
“Cука,” Grand mumbled out the door.
Fedelia threatened that when she found out what that meant, she was going to kick his ass good. Then in a sudden turn of emotion, she looked toward Mom. “Before I forget, have you heard about Dovey?”
Fedelia, the wheel of gossip.
“She’s still in the hospital up in Columbus, ain’t she?” Mom picked up her crochet hook and yarn, pretending to be more interested in finishing the crocheting of her afghan square than anything else.
“Oh, my, yes. Might lose that baby. Fall really done her in. Or was it a push?” Fedelia puckered her lips, the wrinkles emphasized and parading around her mouth like thorns of flesh.
A push. That was the idea laying pipes through town. Elohim did as he told the sheriff he would, which was to clear Sal’s name. Still, the thought was too hard to abandon for some, and once it was said, it became like most gossip, drama that ruins.
As Fedelia kept chatting with Mom, someone knocked on the front door. It was the sheriff come to speak to Dad. While Sal stayed in the living room, staring at Fedelia’s hair, I crouched down in the entry hall, at the side of the screen door so I could see and hear the sheriff and Dad out on the front porch.
The sheriff spit over the railing. The glob colored red from his cherry hard candy. He wiped his mouth on his arm before saying, “You know how I’ve been lookin’ into some of the surroundin’ counties for missin’ boys? Well, now, I’ve come up with somethin’ quite interestin’.”
“What’s that?” Dad asked.
“An abundance of missin’ boys. Not much ruckus has been raised about these disappearances. Furthermore, these vanishin’s have happened over the course of years. I can’t say they’re all related, yet I can’t say they ain’t. I mean we’re lookin’ at boys disappearin’ at exactly thirteen years of age. Same as the boy you got in your livin’ room. Boys from poor families. Judgin’ by the clothes he showed up in, he ain’t no Rockefeller. I’d say he’s some farm pup. Plus, all these kids, they were all black, Autopsy.”
Dad wiped his hand over his mouth. “Any suspects?”
“No sir-ree Bob.” The sheriff leaned back into his heels, causing his bulbous stomach to lead out. “Most folks ain’t gonna pay a lot of attention to a kidnapper if they ain’t even aware there is one. These stories of these kids, only two were even mentioned in their local papers. The rest were just police files. And most of ’em was put down as runaways.”
“No linking evidence?”
“Nothin’ hard. There was one thing. A shirt was found belongin’ to one of the boys. Found by a series of railroad tracks. At first they thought the spots on the shirt were bloodstains. Tests proved it chocolate. Better chocolate than blood, I reckon. Gave the momma hope her son was still alive. I imagine the truth will eat her up sooner or later though. It’s a thing to eat any parent up. Losin’ a child is a thing with teeth.”
“Were there photographs in the police files?”
“Some.”
“Any of these boys, the recent ones to go missing, any of them look like Sal?”
“A bunch of little black boys?” The sheriff’s laugh reminded me of Elohim’s. “Sure they looked like him.”
Dad sighed and wiped the sweat from the back of his neck. “Be fair.”