PICTURE HEAD by Mary Otis
Beverly puts words in jail. She hunts and traps them, stuffs them into little black boxes. Crosswords. “Clayton, is it cirrus or stratus that means rain?” Beverly asks. She doesn’t reach for either of her paperback dictionaries on the coffee table. It’s that hot.
Clayton turns up the TV. Here comes Kent Salvey’s head again. Clayton has seen it thirteen times since this morning. He sits back down on the floor and puts his hand on the cool tile. Beverly took up the rug this morning. Beverly is his father’s girlfriend. She’s allowed.
“Maybe they don’t teach clouds in first grade,” Beverly says.
Kent Salvey is the same age as Clayton, though Kent goes to a school that is not Clayton’s school. Kent Salvey has gone missing. Maybe kidnapped, the TV says. From Van Nuys, where Clayton lives. Kent stars on One Fine Family, Clayton’s favorite television show. Who will play his part now?
“Although they should. Never too early to learn about clouds.” Beverly has two beauty marks that sit one atop the other to the right side of her mouth just like a two in dice. She draws a line between them with her fingertip while she thinks. Then she reaches across the coffee table and turns the portable fan so it blows across Clayton’s back.
The TV shows a close-up of Kent Salvey’s face. Clayton practices holding his head very still like Kent Salvey’s and looks down and off to the side like he sees something that slightly disgusts him.
“Five across,” murmurs Beverly, “a legacy hunter”–this must be a hard one because her voice sounds like it’s slowly stepping downstairs. “You little egg,” she adds, as if to make up for it. Beverly says this plenty of times a day.
Beverly had a little baby girl when she was seventeen. She will never see this girl again. This is why she is so fun. Pacer, Clayton’s father, explained it to him: if a person has a kid they can’t ever see, that person tends to be nicer to whatever child is around because secretly in that person’s mind they will just pretend that the kid in front of them is the one they don’t have.
“Legacy hunter,” repeats Beverly. “I’ve got H-E-R-E-D-I with six empties.”
She stares at Clayton, searching.
“Diver!” shouts Clayton, not because he thinks this is the answer, but because he guessed this word once before and, miracle of miracles, it was right.
Today is Beverly’s birthday. Beverly is twenty-nine, she says. It’s her solar return year, and important things in her life that have gone missing will appear once again. Maybe even as soon as today, she says. Clayton knows for a fact that Pacer forgot to get her a birthday gift, but he won’t say a word about it. Clayton knows exactly what Beverly wants for a present, and he can describe the slippers in detail–the pink silk rosettes, the gleaming satin panels, the seed pearls no bigger than birdseed. Beverly saw them in the Nordstrom’s catalog and ripped out the picture, which is folded in quarters and hidden in her Big Book of Crosswords. Beverly and Clayton studied the color choices, and they agreed that the blue ones were a possibility, but Beverly said they’d fade to the color of old bathwater, and who needs that? Really, pink is the way to go.
So now Pacer and Clayton have come to steal the fancy bedroom slippers for Beverly. The gift was Clayton’s idea. The free gift was Pacer’s idea. From two blocks away, Pacer reads the banner hanging outside Nordstrom’s. “Half-Yearly Sale,” he says to Clayton. Clayton thinks of the broken railroad track behind their house. The half-track, everyone calls it. Once he found a braid of human hair on the track. It was gone the next day. Beverly says punks do magic out by the half-track. Punks. Broken heads, missing fingers, scary pockets. Clayton hasn’t spotted one yet, but he’ll know him when he sees him.
“The air in Nordstrom’s has a fine ingredient,” says Pacer. Clayton can tell that means Nordstrom’s needs to be stolen from. Nordstrom’s almost always needs to be stolen from. It’s not about money. It’s a matter of pride. Pacer applied for a job as a security guard and they turned him down. Twice. What were they thinking? Pacer Bing has twelve years of professional security under his belt, and military besides. Although he’ll never say exactly which branch of the military. Top secret, etc. “Might as well have the sock folders watch the place,” Pacer says. When he walks, his big black boots head in slightly different directions, as if in constant disagreement.
It’s 103 degrees in Van Nuys, and in the distance Clayton can see cars in the parking lot that seem to jiggle in the heat. “Well, sometimes people need to learn from both sides of the coin, and Mr. Nordstrom might be one of them.” Pacer walks just ahead of Clayton. He stops in front of a small yard with a sign that reads: Matthew Smyte, Chiropractor. Then he takes Clayton’s hand, and they look at the two koi in Matthew Smyte’s miniature pond. People relax here to get rid of their painful bones, and who wouldn’t, the fish are so becoming. Beverly has explained it to Clayton. The big one is the soft lavender color of Beverly’s bath-oil beads, and the other one looks like their kitchen tile with ink spilled on it. Pacer pulls Clayton’s hand to his mouth and kisses the top of his knuckle. Pacer is a good father. Once, when he was very tired, he made Clayton a sandwich.
“You say to the lady, see, it will probably be a lady, that you want to check the size of the slipper, and then she’ll say a number like seven or nine, and you’ll say you don’t know what the numbers mean and that you want her to try on the slippers for you . . .”
Around the corner of Matthew Smyte’s house comes a man with a leaf-blowing machine. He continues down the walkway, where a little cloud of dust blows toward a black Lincoln parked by the sidewalk.
Pacer lifts his index finger in the air, draws a slash, and this is not a good sign. “What the fuck are you doing?” he shouts, as if the car were his own. “Wipe that off. Now.” The man turns off his leaf-blowing machine and takes the corner of his T-shirt and rubs a small circle on the side of the car. Clayton can’t see any dust on the door, but it doesn’t matter. Pacer sees things other people don’t see, and it wads up his nerves. Sometimes Pacer doesn’t act well because he doesn’t feel well, though no one ever says what’s wrong with him. But Pacer is a good father. Once he let Clayton ride his bike into Wells Fargo bank. He said it served the security guard right for reading the newspaper. A professional only does that on his own time.
The man takes a rag and begins to wipe again, but Pacer grabs the man around his neck. Now he is laughing. Laughing, laughing, laughing. Because no matter what, Pacer Bing has fraternity. Then Pacer lets the man go, takes Clayton’s hand again, and they start off toward Nordstrom’s.
They are almost at the store where actors buy pictures of their heads when Pacer’s body goes completely rigid, and they both turn to face a lady coming down the sidewalk behind them. And this is another thing about Pacer Bing, he can feel people looking at him from one hundred feet in any direction. Any direction at all.
At first, Clayton thinks it might be Beverly because the woman is wearing a gauzy pink shirt with sleeves like wispy split tongues, and Beverly has a shirt like that. She clutches a box to her chest that is stamped: Picture Head. Clayton knows this not because he can read it, but because Beverly once read it to him. And since that day it has had a secret meaning. And the secret meaning is this: Clayton is Picture Head. What Beverly does not know is that when she catches her words for the crossword puzzles and explains them to Clayton, words like tugboat, sleigh, arachnid, and scampi, Clayton pictures them for exactly four seconds, just once, and then they’re in his head forever. Soon he will be the Boy with the Most Remembered Things in His Head.
Pacer turns to the side just before the woman passes them, and he makes a sweeping motion with his arm as if he means to let her pass, but instead his arm flies down in front of her like the old railroad arm out by the half-track. The woman gasps, and up go her sleeves. The woman’s box of photographs flies open and the photographs slip over each other, silky and gleaming, and there are scraps of her name floating down, and there are corners of her hair, each time the same hair, falling neat and unmoving, not like real hair, and there are pale lips full of white delicate teeth, over and over, landing every which way.
“An actress,” Pacer says, “now that’s the life.” Already he’s trying to take attention off the fact that he caused this accident. The woman kneels down. Her breasts come together, and Clayton thinks of the soft velvety crack in their sofa where he sometimes hides nickels. “Beats working on a tanker, let me tell you that. It blows up your love life. Remember that if you remember anything.” Pacer is talking in a quick way like he doesn’t want his tongue to touch the roof of his mouth.
Clayton picks up two of the shots and neatly stacks them face to face.
“Oh, I’ll take that,” says the woman, but she only takes one, leaving Clayton to hold the other in his left hand, the hand with warts on his index finger and thumb. He switches hands. She is so pretty.
“Jamey Keener, now that’s a nice actress name,” says Pacer.
As Jamey leans over, skin widens between her belt loops and pink blouse. There is a word tattooed on her back in purple ink. It’s not a long word, but he can’t sound it out. Beverly has a tattoo on her ankle of a daisy. He decides Beverly’s tattoo is better.
“Can you pick up my sides, honey?” Jamey Keener says to Clayton, and he picks up the single sheet of paper that has blown against his leg.
“Those your practice lines?” asks Pacer.
“Line,” says Jamey.
Clayton looks at a freckle above her right breast. It’s not unlike Beverly’s beauty marks.
“Can we hear it?”
“It won’t make any sense when you don’t know the story.”
“Why don’t you just try old Pacer and little Clay. Let us be the judge.”
Jamey Keener folds her arms across her chest as if she’s suddenly mad. Clayton watches her nostrils flare. Then she puts her index and middle fingers to her lips, like someone who forgot her groceries. She looks at Matthew Smyte’s fence, squints. She looks down. Looks up. Finally: “I killed him because I hated winter,” she says.
“The captain is on the bridge!” says Pacer, his lips jumping. Pacer usually says this when he’s happy about God. Maybe this means he is happy about an actress.
“You’re quite good,” he adds. Clayton knows that Pacer thinks all actors are a waste of time. Worse than sock folders.
“Are you from England?” says Pacer. He’s looking like he’d like to kiss Jamey’s mouth. He’s just saying words to get there. Does it all the time with Beverly.
“What?” Jamey Keener says. She pulls her Picture Head box closer to her chest, and Clayton has seen the look in her eyes before. Pacer is overplaying his hand. To use Pacer’s own word. He always says a person needs to be just fifty-one percent sure of a thing. But you don’t want to overplay your hand, and Jamey walks away fast.
Clayton and Pacer stand in front of the Nordstrom’s first-floor elevators. One has orange cones set across where the door should be. The floor has gone missing and Clayton peeks in at the elevator guts before Pacer yanks him back. A man wearing a matching green shirt and pants steps into the elevator with them. Clayton can tell he’s a real elevator man, because he faces the people, not the door.
“How’s business?” asks Pacer, as if he were the man’s boss. Gone is his slidey-mouth way of talking.
“Lost one this morning,” says the elevator man, smiling at Clayton. Clayton listens to people’s voices slipping down the insides of the walls.
Pacer snorts. “Beats the hell out of working on a tanker, let me tell you that.”
They get out on the second floor and Pacer stops to look at a display of rings while Clayton leans against a glass display case. The case is so warm, and inside there is a scarf folded in a fancy way like ribbon candy. The scarf is a soft orange, and it’s woven through with real gold. Clayton is sure of it. He has never seen anything so beautiful. If only he could lie on the display case and just look at it.
There is a piano player next to the shoe department. He lifts his hands when he plays, like the keys sting his fingers. When he finishes, Clayton quietly claps his hands five times as he has been taught in school. More is inappropriate. Pacer tucks his T-shirt into his old khakis and nods to the piano player. He takes Clayton’s hand and they walk toward the shoe displays. A salesman starts toward them.
“What I want to know is why shoes are on one floor and slippers on another?” Pacer says loudly. “I mean, feet are feet.” The salesman turns from them, as if an invisible hallway had just appeared.
“Sir, is there something I can help you with?” The woman is tall and wears a red belt with a big gold lion’s head for a buckle. She carries a silver ring packed with keys, and in the crook of her arm, three clipboards. She does not look at all like Beverly.
“Yes, my son and I are looking for a birthday present for a very special mother.” Mother, thinks Clayton. Close enough. She’s someone’s mother. Could be his. “We are looking for slippers with velvet inlay or satin embroidery, something like that. Price doesn’t matter.”
Then Clayton sees it. The leg. The leg is connected to a body that is slumped beneath a rounder of white raincoats. The leg is about the length of his own leg. The leg is sunburned and wears a purple lace-up sneaker.
“And little roses have to be on the toes, pink ones. Right, Clayton?”
The foot flops right and left, then right and left again, and, absolutely, this is a sign.
“Right, Clayton, right? It’s roses you said.” And Clayton knows that he should say a bunch of stuff about the slippers, because this is part of it, saying a whole lot to people and seeing what will hook them, but he can’t. Because there, right there, beneath the raincoat rounder in Nordstrom’s, he’s sure he has spotted Kent Salvey. And, of course, this is where he would be. Kidnappers love malls, stores, airports, and bus stops. If he’s learned anything in first grade, he’s learned that.
They are following the lady’s lion belt up the escalator and Clayton tries to see more of the body now that they’re over people’s heads. Not any better, but still there is that leg, and it’s simply amazing that everyone isn’t staring at it. He thinks he hears crying, but he’s not sure.
The lady is talking about how fancy slippers come in fancy bags so ladies can take them to nice hotels. Pacer is nodding, and then they’re at the slipper display near the women’s underwear, and it doesn’t look anywhere near as good as the one in the catalog. For one thing, there aren’t any swans lying around on pink satin sheets. But Clayton has an even better view of Kent from here.
The lady begins to open drawers, and this is no good, she needs to leave them alone if they’re going to get anything accomplished. Clayton can see this even though he can’t do anything about it. Even if all he can think about is Kent, Kent, Kent.
“Well, I think one of her feet is bigger than the other, so I guess we might need to see a couple different sizes. Different makes and models, ha, ha. So we might need to make you go in back to look.” Pacer squeezes Clayton’s hand and he knows he should say he has to go to the bathroom or something for distraction purposes, but when a child star lies trapped beneath raincoats, what can he do?
Pacer starts grinding his teeth, and Clayton has heard him tell Beverly many times that this has to do with casting aside his crutches: crystal meth and eight packs of cinnamon gum per day. It’s a small price to pay for clarity, he says.
The lady holds up powder-blue slippers with squashed tulips on the toes. Completely wrong! Beverly’s worst nightmare! Clayton means to clear things up, but he can’t think what to say. This is not good, not good, and if only the lady would leave so Clayton could tell Pacer about Kent, because everyone knows kidnappers have to be handled with kid gloves.
“Little Clay, what sizes are Beverly’s feet? Do we know?”
A wail pierces the store, and, yes, it has to be Kent Salvey, because no one would be crying in a place like this who had not been kidnapped.
The woman tightens her lion’s head belt. “But sir, we sell slippers in pairs, always pairs–it’s not like you can buy them a la carte, so to speak.”
Now Clayton does have to go to the bathroom, and the boy under the raincoat rounder is sobbing and no one is coming for him, and Pacer is squeezing his hand way too hard, and Clayton can see from the way the lady’s squinting at Pacer that she may be on to him, and once a person is on to you, all bets are off; this much he knows, if he knows anything from everything Pacer has taught him.
“Clay. Clay. Clayton, don’t you want to ask the lady something?”
But what was it? What was he supposed to say?
“Clayton. Clayton!”
What was it? It was about the slippers. Was it about the rosettes? Was it about the seed pearls like birdseed? Blue is bad because blue can turn to bathwater. No, that’s not it. Pink is good because, because–he can’t remember.
“Clayton, what was it you wanted to ask the lady? Clayton?”
Clayton sees the leg jerk. Kent may have stopped breathing. He may be dying from fear this very moment. He needs to save him. Now. If he brought Kent home, Kent could have his bed, and he could lend him his Dodger pajamas and everything would be okay, and there would probably be a big story about it on Access Hollywood and–
“Clayton.” Pacer snaps a finger in front of his face. “Clayton!”
“Kent. Kent! You’re safe! You’re safe!” shouts Clayton at the top of his lungs.
And then it’s like Clayton has fallen down, but he’s standing up. It’s like a door slamming, and he’s the door. It’s no breathing. It’s done before it starts. It’s a second cracked in half. Just a crack. The half-crack. It can snap a person into reality, Pacer will say. The right side of his face feels like it fell into a frying pan. But Clayton does nothing. Still, somewhere far below, Kent Salvey can be heard, crying, crying.
“Such a big umbrella for such a little boy,” says the girl who came out from behind the cosmetics counter as Clayton and Pacer were led outside the store by two security guards and asked to wait on stone benches. She’d grabbed the umbrella from the accessory department and given it to Clayton. Clayton let it drag on the ground a little.
“It’s pretty, isn’t it? The nice colors?” She’s got a point. She turns the handle for him and the green designs jump around on the blue background. It’s kind of like watching spring leaves blow around in the air.
“Yes. He did. So hard his head spun around!” The slipper lady puts her right hand on her hip and her left hand on her lion. Now people are looking at Clayton, people are looking at his head. Clayton keeps it very still, and he looks down and off to the side as if he’s slightly disgusted. He can feel a little bit of blood run down his neck. Inside his collar. Feels like an ant. Now what will they give Beverly for her birthday? It’s so hot, and the colors of the cars in the parking lot have leaked out. They all look a pale reddish gray. Clayton would like to not remember them ever again. But there is no four-second forget.
“Mr. Bing, may I have a moment of your time?” The man wears a suit and on the suit is a special gold pin with words on it. Part of one word is “man.” Clayton is sure.
“Why certainly, Mr. Human Resources Specialist, and yes, we’ve met before and no, you didn’t hire me, because Nordstrom’s seeks to attract and retain only the very finest in the security industry.”
“Mr. Pacer, please refrain from . . .”
“Oh, I’ve got plenty of refrain, mister. When I was in the special service they used to wake me up in the middle of the night and tell me my mother had had a heart attack just to test my abilities in case I ever got caught by subversives. What do you think of that, huh? Get up, Pacer Bing, get up! And if you think that was good for my nerves, it wasn’t.”
“Mr. Pacer, what type of special service were you in?” Clayton hears the man talk to Pacer in the type of voice people use to coax a mad dog out from under a porch.
“Tanker-related, top-secret cargo.” Pacer points his index finger in the air, draws a circle. Dots it in the middle.
Clayton sees a boy about his age walk out with his mother. He wears purple lace-up sneakers and cargo shorts that cut into his sunburned legs when he walks. He is crying in a way that anyone could tell he’s actually forgotten what he’s crying about. He looks at Clayton and cries some more. He is no Kent Salvey. Not even close. Clayton could tell you that if he could tell you anything.
The cosmetics girl squats in front of Clayton, close enough for him to smell her perfume, which is almost as good as Downy fabric softener. She smiles at Clayton. “You’re the best quiet person I’ve ever seen. You know that? You know?” Clayton points his umbrella toward the ground and slowly turns it. Actually the leaves could be fish and the sky could be the ocean. Then he closes his eyes almost all the way, and the blue falls into the green. Now it is all green. Just green. Now the umbrella is like a big swirling emerald.
“You know? You know . . .” the cosmetics girl trails off, as Clayton knows she will, because if you don’t answer a grown-up, sometimes they’ll just stop talking.
Mary Otis’s stories have appeared in Best New American Voices, Tin House, Cincinnati Review, Berkeley Literary Journal, and Santa Monica Review. “Picture Head” is included in her debut story collection Yes, Yes, Cherries (TinHouse Books 2007).