At first I thought it was the passing headlights of a car, and shut my eyes to avoid the glare. Then I heard the dead bolt turn, and reaching for the railing above me I struggled to my feet.
Standing in the doorway, thick, hairy legs protruding below a threadbare flannel robe tied together with a cotton belt that did not match, Howard Flynn blinked into the harsh overhead light.
He took one look at me and shook his head.
“How did you know it was me?” I asked as he shut the door behind us.
He turned on the light in the small entryway and looked at me from head to toe. “Why?” he asked with a shrug. “Because you’re not wearing a tie?”
“What took you so long to answer the door?” I asked irritably as I followed him into the kitchen.
“I kept hoping whoever it was would go away.” He paused and cleared his throat. “Actually, I was watching television and I didn’t hear it at first,” he confessed.
“How could you not hear that goddamn thing? It makes as much noise as an electrocution, for Christ sake,” I grumbled.
“For a homeless guy, you’re pretty damn pushy, aren’t you? Sit down,” he ordered. “I’ll make you some coffee. You look like you could use it.”
While Flynn carefully measured three level teaspoons of ground coffee into a paper filter, I waited at a small Formica table that looked onto a square atrium. A glass bowl of artificial fruit-yellow wax bananas, and red wax apples, and green and purple glass grapes-was right in the center where it always was. A bite mark on the side of the apple, left by the teeth of a disappointed child of a long forgotten friend, made all of it seem more real. Flynn poured water in the top of the coffeemaker and turned it on.
“That friend of mine-the psychologist-saw Danny.” He stared into the glass pot, watching as first one drop, then another slowly formed and then fell, coating the glass bottom with a dark turgid liquid. “Turns out he isn’t retarded after all-not in the usual sense, anyway. Fox thinks he’s about twenty-three or -four. Can’t be sure, exactly. Danny doesn’t know. He lived somewhere-out in the country, near a river. Fox thinks it might have been somewhere down around Roseburg or Grants Pass.”
The coffee kept dripping down, gradually increasing speed until it turned into a fine-flowing stream.
“His mother might have been retarded. She wasn’t married-
he didn’t have a father that he knew-but there were always men around. He was abused, probably starting when he was just an infant: sexual things, physical things, mean, perverted, awful things. Fox thinks the burn marks weren’t the half of it.”
Turning around, Flynn put his hands on the counter behind him, looked at me, a grim expression on his face, and then stared down at the floor. “He never went to school; he never went anywhere. When he wasn’t locked in a room he was chained like a dog in the backyard.”
Flynn raised his eyes. “You can’t really blame the mother. You ever know a girl like that when you were a kid, a girl who was a little slow, a little backward: a girl guys knew how to take advantage of? That’s probably what you had here: A girl, young and retarded, who didn’t have any parents of her own, finds herself pregnant, has the kid at home, lives from hand to mouth, becomes the punchboard for every lowlife in the county, and then one of these creeps starts getting his kicks with the kid.”
Suddenly, from out of nowhere, an orange cat with a torn ear and a thick stump where its tail had once been bounded onto my lap and then onto the table. Like a boxer throwing a jab, Flynn flicked out his hand, grabbed the cat by the scruff of the neck, and sent it flying out of the room.
“Nomo isn’t supposed to get on the table,” he explained as he poured the coffee.
It was hard to know whether to be more astonished at how much speed Flynn still had in his hands or at the distance the cat had sailed before it landed, without so much as a whimper, somewhere down the hall.
“Nomo?” I asked.
Flynn handed me a mug of coffee and sat down on the other chair. “Yeah. Stands for Nomellini. You remember Leo Nomellini-played for the San Francisco 49ers back in the fifties? Leo
‘The Lion’ Nomellini?”
I did not remember, if I had ever known, but I was not surprised Flynn had.
“You named the cat after Leo Nomellini because he looks like a lion?”
Flynn rolled his eyes. “I named him after Nomellini because he’s big and stupid.”
It was the lawyer in me: Every answer was the invitation to a question. “How do you know Nomellini was big and stupid?”
“He was a defensive tackle,” he explained patiently. “By definition he was big and stupid.”
“Weren’t you a defensive tackle?”
Flynn nodded. “Which means I know what I’m talking about,”
he said as he got to his feet.
I followed him down a short, narrow hallway to the smaller of the two bedrooms, the room which as long as I had known him had served as both a study and a guest room. A desk, a chair, a television set, and a beige sofa that made into a bed were the only furnishings. Turning off the television, Flynn sat down at the desk and thumbed through a stack of manila folders.
Flynn had loosened the cotton belt that held his robe together.
Sitting on the wooden chair behind the desk that was really nothing more than a plain wooden door resting on cement blocks, the tattered ends of the robe lay in a heap on the rose-colored carpet. He was wearing a white T-shirt and a pair of blue and white striped boxer shorts underneath. The folds of skin around his eyes were thick and puffy, the way they are on the face of a fighter years after he has left the ring. His mouth moved silently as he read the names of the files through which he searched.
“I just had it here,” he mumbled to himself. “Here it is,” he said, as he pulled out a thin report, the pages of which were fastened together with a blue plastic paper clip, and handed it to me. “A lot of it is guesswork, but I don’t think it’s too far from right. The kid never went to school, never had a friend, never had anyone to talk to. He’s not retarded, not in the clinical sense.
There’s nothing wrong with his mind. He’s socially retarded; he’s what you would expect to get if you locked a baby in a room and didn’t let him out except to be mistreated for the first fourteen or fifteen years of his life. Except for one thing,” Flynn said, shaking his head with a kind of wonder. “There’s nothing vicious about him. He’s an innocent. He’s like a dog people keep kicking and he still comes back, hoping that maybe this time someone will treat him with a little kindness,” he said, using the same analogy I had used when I tried to explain to Jennifer what the boy was like.
Flynn took a deep breath and, wearily, let it out. At the sound of it, I felt again my own fatigue. Sinking against the corner of the sofa, I let my feet slide out across the carpet until I caught sight of my own filthy, mud-encrusted shoes. “Sorry,” I began to apologize as I sat up.
Lost in thought, Flynn did not hear me. My eye moved behind him to a photograph barely visible on the shelf behind his chair. Like the bowl of artificial fruit in the kitchen, the tarnished silver frame was always in the same spot.
“How old would he be now?” I asked in a voice that was more like a whisper.
He did not turn around, and I wondered if he ever looked at it anymore: that picture of the bright-eyed little boy held in the powerful arms of his young father.
A clumsy smile came and went and came again. “Twenty-nine last month. Hard to believe, isn’t it: where all the time has gone?”