Fifth Row from the Front (4)

He went down the aisle at a walk because a man does not run in a field full of people he grew up in front of.

By the third row he was not walking.

The gravel was loose there where the cars had chewed it, and he went through the mud at the end of the row without going around it and felt it come in over the top of his shoe. The car that had been stuck in it was gone. He did not remember it leaving.

At the bottom of the field the ground flattened out and went to grass. The screen stood over the playground the way a wall stands over a yard, and the light coming off it was enough to see faces by.

There were nine kids on the equipment. He counted them twice because the first count did not seem right.

"Bobby," he said.

Nothing came back. Two on the swings, not swinging. Three sitting on the merry-go-round with their feet down on the ground. The rest standing in a knot at the bottom of the slide with their heads back.

He put his hand on the rail.

"Hey. Y'all. There was a boy down here in a blue windbreaker."

They looked at him. One of them, a girl of about twelve with a jacket over a costume, said, "Which one?"

"Blue windbreaker. Zipped up to here. He's eight."

"There was a bunch of boys down here."

"He was on this," Dennis said. "Right here. Twenty minutes ago."

A smaller one on the swings said, "He went that way," and pointed off toward the fence on the highway side, and the girl said, "He did not, he went to get a chocolate," and the small one said, "He went that way," again, with less in it.

"Which way is that way."

The small one pointed the same place. It was not a place. It was the grass on the highway side where the posts ran out.

"All right," Dennis said. "All right."

He went along the front of the playground and around the end of the slide to where the ground rose up into the base of the screen. Back there it was weeds to the knee and cold and there was a smell of standing water. Cups and paper trays had blown up against the bottom of the frame and stuck there in a line. He walked the whole length of it with his hand out on the steel, sixty feet of it, and came out the other end.

He said the boy's name once more back there and got nothing for it.

---

He came up out of the grass into the light and stopped and got his breath, and while he was getting it he understood that the field had gone quiet.

Not all the way. There were engines running. But the horns had stopped, and the hollering had stopped, and the radio in the hatchback had been turned off or turned down, and what was left over the whole field was the music coming out of four hundred speakers at once with nothing on top of it.

He turned around and looked up at the screen because everyone else was.

It was not the square anymore.

It was a field, or a yard, in white daylight, and there were people standing in it in dark clothes with their backs to the camera, and the film was black and white now instead of orange, and grainier, and the frame was crooked so that there was too much sky in the top of it and the people came in only at the bottom.

He looked at it for about as long as it takes to say a short sentence. Then he took his eyes off it and went up the aisle.

---

The concession stand had three people in line and one of them was not in line, was only standing near the window with a paper tray in her hand, looking back over the roof of the building at the screen.

Dennis went past the line to the window.

"I'm looking for a little boy."

The woman with the cigarette had put the cigarette down. She looked at him and it took a second for her to come from wherever she was.

"Say what, hon."

"Eight years old. Blue windbreaker. He had a dollar. He might have come up here for a chocolate."

"I ain't sold a chocolate in ten minutes." She turned around and said something to the boy working the fryer and he shook his head without turning around.

"Can I look in the back."

"There ain't a back."

"Can I look."

She lifted the pass-through and stood out of the way, and he went in behind the counter. It was hot in there and smelled like scorched butter and there was a mop sink and a stack of syrup boxes and a door at the end standing open on a room with a chest freezer and a water heater and nothing else. He came back out.

"He'll turn up," she said. "They always do. They get up under somebody's car."

"He knows where the car is."

"They all know where the car is." She was looking past him at the screen while she said it. "I'd try the restroom. It's only the one working."

"Far side."

"Far side."

---

The far side meant across.

He went out of the light of the concession stand and into the rows, and the crossing took a long time.

The cars were not doing what cars in a drive-in do. Nobody was slumped. Nobody had their feet up on the dash. In the first row he crossed, the people were sitting forward with their arms on the wheel. In the next one a woman had her window down in the cold and was leaning out of it. A little further on there was a man standing outside his own car with the door open and one hand on the top of the door, not moving, and Dennis had to go around behind him and the man did not look at him and did not know he was there.

Two rows further on, three men were laughing.

They had not gotten to it yet. They were sitting on a tailgate with a cooler between them and one of them was telling the other two something with his hands, and they were all three laughing, and forty feet away a woman was standing beside her car with her hand over her mouth.

Dennis went between them.

He stopped at every car with a child in it. He looked in windows with his hands cupped on the glass and said he was sorry and asked, and every one of them told him no, and every one of them turned back to the screen before he had gotten all the way straightened up.

Somewhere in the middle of the field he passed close by a car with a boy in it about seventeen, sitting alone in the driver's seat with both hands flat on the wheel. The boy was not watching the screen. He was watching the people. His head went from one side of the field to the other and back. There was a camera bag on the seat beside him.

Dennis went past him without slowing down.

---

The restroom was cinder block like the concession stand and there was a light in it that buzzed.

A man was in there at the sink with his sleeves pushed up, running water over his wrists. He straightened when the door came open and looked at Dennis in the sheet of polished tin they used instead of a mirror.

Dennis went along and pushed the two stall doors and they swung on nothing.

"I got a boy missing," Dennis said.

The man turned the water off. He was fifty-some, with gray coming through the sides of his hair, and his face was wet.

"Ain't been nobody in here but me."

"How long you been in here."

"A while," he said.

He dried his hands on his trousers and went out and let the door bang.

---

Dennis came out behind him and the whole far side of the field was standing up.

Not all of them. Enough. People out of their cars in the cold with their arms crossed, and some of them had come up out of the rows into the aisle to get a clearer line, and there was a sound going through them that was not talking and was not anything else. Down at the front somebody blew a horn one time, one long one, and nobody joined it.

And because they were all facing that way, Dennis faced that way.

There was a hole in the ground with a mound of dirt beside it and a green cloth over the mound. There was a coffin. The coffin was not in the hole. It was set down on the grass at the edge of it on the boards, and the men who had carried it had let go of it and stood up and moved back.

He had the year in his head before he could stop it. He had gotten as far as the cedar and the soft ground and the jar with the shape held in the clay.

Then the picture took it away from him.

The men wore hats. All of them, every man in the frame, and the hats were wrong, and the women's coats came down past the knee, and out at the left edge there was the front fender of a car with a running board on it. The trees along the fence were no higher than a man.

It was fifty years too early to be anybody he had ever known.

He knew the ground. He knew the way it fell off to the right and the line the fence took along the top of it. He had walked it that afternoon with the boy running out ahead of him through the grass. But he did not know one face in it, and there was not going to be anybody left alive who did.

The men at the graveside were arguing.

You could not hear them arguing. The music went on the same as it had gone on over the parade and the women on the sidewalk. But you could see it in the shoulders and in one man's arm going out and coming back, and in a second man who kept turning away and then turning around again, and in a third who did not move at all the whole time and only looked down at the box.

The camera did not cut. It did not come closer and it did not go away. It sat where it was in the too much sky and let it happen, and it went on happening, and it went on longer than a thing like that goes on.

A woman broke out of the group and went to the coffin and put both her hands flat on the lid of it.

Two men took her off it.

Dennis heard the sound the field made when that happened, four hundred people fifty feet behind him, and he heard out of it one voice close by, a man's, saying to somebody, "That ain't the Gentry boy's picture. Go get Hollis."

Dennis was already turning around. He had his hand up over his eyes against the light off the screen and he was looking down the rows for a blue windbreaker, and he did not see one, and behind him the music kept on going with no bottom to it and did not stop where a song stops.

 

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