Free Ask the Dark by Henry Turner

’cause the next day they turned the electric off and Daddy and me went downtown real early. We had to go downtown ’cause we couldn’t call nobody ’cause the phone’d been turned off about a week then and we had to go in person, to the electric company, I mean, so’s to get on what they call the low-income rate for electrical consumption. Actually we could’f called ’cause Leezie still got’r cell phone and don’t ask me how she was paying for it, prob’ly just sweet-talking some cell phone operator, ’cause she never did get a job back then, just me. But what I’m saying is she weren’t home that morning, she’d been out all night, and after seeing who she was going out with I didn’t even want to think about it.
    Downtown after we got off the bus we went to the building and waited in a long line just to get inside, then waited in another line, and they put Daddy on the runaround, always going to the wrong room and talking to the wrong person, till we got what they call an emergency reconnect ’cause there’s children in the house, then got sent out ’cause Daddy, he ain’t brought the right papers to prove lack of income, so they called it, so except for that emergency reconnect the whole thing was a goddamn waste of time.
    But coming home before we got the bus—we got free tokens by the way, Welfare tokens—Daddy, he remembered the larder was open, Social Services Larder, they call it, sort of like a ugly grocery store, more like a cage with food in it. So we went there first, and filled the two bags they give you, we going up to these racks where they got macaroni and cheese mix and corn cereal and these packs of cottage cheese that Leezie likes and cans of red salmon I personally can’t fuckin’ stand.
    So it weren’t all a waste, the day, I mean, ’cause we got all that and lugged it home, which was hard work, ’specially seein’ as how the bus stop up our way is at least half a mile from my house, and when we get there Leezie still ain’t home and I’m thinking, What’s that bastard Bad-Ass Ricky doing with’r?
    Now I’d promised Marvin I’d go out early but I was late and I felt bad for it, ’specially thinkin ’bout the money I could’f made. So after I got home I run down there. He was still out going his rounds, Miss Norris told me, so all I did was step out to the parking lot alongside and sit there, my back against the wall, my ass on the ground, feeling a shitload of gravel through my pants, chucking bits of that gravel at a sheared-off pipe I seen to see how many I could get in.
    After about twenty minutes Marvin drove up.
    He parked at the curb but then when he seen me he pulled in the lot and stopped right acrost from me. I’d been sitting there awhile and maybe I was worried about Leezie or thinking ’bout seeing that man last night, but Marvin looked at me like there was something wrong with my face, like I felt terrible, I mean, and he said, So, Billy, I guess you heard.
    Now I did feel bad. Sort’f dreadful. I just looked at him and groaned, Oh God, Marvin, now what?
    He looked a little surprised.
    You don’t know?
    He didn’t say nothing more, just reached aside. And when his hand come back up he was holding a piece of paper with Jimmy Brest’s face printed on it, under where big black letters wrote M-I-S-S-I-N-G .
     
    We drove and I was staring forward, looking at this piece of dashboard where the vinyl was cracked and had yellow foam in it, all tore up and brown at the edges under the crack. We’d go a block, stop, I’d jump out and tape a flyer, get back in, go another block, jump back out. That’s how it went. We didn’t talk at all, me and Marvin.
    The street was bright, with the green of the trees all spread over it, and flashes of sunlight comin’ through the leaves. The houses looked empty and clean and white under the gray roofs, set back far on the wide green lawns, no lawn furniture ’cause it ain’t allowed around here, not on front lawns,