where the skin was ashy, dressed the boy in the boxer shorts, and wrapped him in a red-and-green-and-black scarf Naomi had once given him for Christmas. Tuuro then shut the door to the closet again and walked to the social hall to get wood for the coffin.
Tuuro went through the planks of wood stored at the back of the stage. No one would miss a few boards. It was evening now, but still light out, and Tuuro checked the parking lot through the window to be sure the pastor’s car was gone. Making a coffin would involve banging. Tuuro knew his boss’s habits: unless there was a committee meeting—unlikely in the summer—the pastor would not be back during the evening.
By the time the boy was nestled on his side in his coffin, his lips over his broad white teeth oiled, a drop of cologne placed in the indentation below his nostrils, the city was almost dark. These days there were fewer and fewer lights at night, and Tuuro wanted the burial finished before he had to use a light to see. “Good-bye, my son,” he said, kissing the boy’s forehead, and then he hammered the board onto the coffin’s top. It was sad to no longer see or touch him: Tuuro thought of the boy’s puzzled face, his long fingers and slender wrists.
He dug a hole in a bare patch behind a prickly shrub in the church garden, a place Tuuro had never liked much (the volunteer gardeners were lazy) but one that would have to do. The hole was maybe a bit sloppy, not quite deep enough, but every minute it was darker and Tuuro wanted to be done. Beads of sweat dripped from his nose. He laid the coffin in the hole and shoveled dirt over it. The hollow thuds echoed like cannon shots, the worst sound in the world.
Another prayer.
But where was the service? The boy deserved the service.
Why am I creeping? Tuuro thought. Why don’t I put the lights on? But he was creeping, without the lights on, through the narthex and past the social hall and the classrooms and into the pastor’s office, a place which, for the sake of cleaning, Tuuro had a key.
There, Tuuro closed the curtains and put the light on. He went through the pastor’s computer index, then his bookshelves. The Book of Presbyterian Liturgy. Seasons of Life. Today’s Rituals for Today’s Times. He finally found the service he wanted (“ashes to ashes, dust to dust”) in a book with a broken spine that made him sneeze as he leafed through it. He took the book outside and, with a flashlight, read the entire service over the grave. He replaced the book in the pastor’s office. Then, because it was too late for the buses to be running, Tuuro walked the three miles home.
TUURO BOLTED awake in the middle of the night: But he has a mother.
A cold sweat washed over him. He got up and stood over the toilet, wanting to vomit.
So what if Tuuro didn’t have a mother, so what if other women, not his mother, fought over him? Why in the world did he assume the same about the boy? The boy who was just a boy, maybe four, maybe five, who lay now in the dark, warm ground. Of course the boy’s mother, his only mother, his true and real mother, was frantic now, looking for him.
Tuuro dressed and ran back to the church, his left little toe sore, a blister rubbed open, the air still hot and sticky even as the dawn made a pink stain in the sky. He would unearth the coffin, go into the church, call the police to tell them what he’d found. The police would say oh yes, thank you for calling, we have the mother right here. They would bring the mother over in their car, her eyes like draining holes in her broad face, but when Tuuro prized the coffin open (he hadn’t used that many nails), she would understand. As terrible as her son’s fate had been, Tuuro had, in his small way, eased the pain of it. He pictured the boy’s mother kissing her son’s face, running her hand over the boy’s thin shoulders, touching the scarf with which Tuuro had dressed him, turning her eyes to meet Tuuro’s, acknowledging in that gaze their mutual love for the boy.
By now it was light out. If he was lucky, if he kept running, this could all be over before the pastor showed up to his office.
Two blocks from the church a big dog ran down the center of the street, a twist of red and black and green trailing from his mouth. Tuuro broke into a cry, understanding. He had forgotten about the dogs.
There were scores of dogs, newly feral, that had been abandoned to the streets when people left Dayton. During the Short Times abandoned dogs had been a problem, too, but now the situation was worse, because most members of the Containment Squad were volunteers from the southern—the wealthier—suburbs, and a disproportionate number of those people had found a way out of town. Tuuro had heard that the Containment people now simply shot dogs in the street. As Tuuro ran now he cursed himself for not making the coffin stronger, for not burying it deeper, and he begged God again and again to let the boy’s body be intact. He was so worried about the dogs he never imagined police cars and a van outside the church. He didn’t notice the horde of people, some in uniform, in the garden.
Who is this? Why are they here? Tuuro thought when an arm stopped him. Then, even worse, he spotted the pastor. “Tuuro!” the pastor cried, lifting his hands in the air. “Do you know anything about this?
THE LAWYER’S NAME was Brandon English. He was the color of a peeled potato, stocky, probably fifty, wearing a rumpled shirt and pants it looked like he’d slept in. For Tuuro, who kept himself neat, the attorney’s disdain for his own appearance was puzzling. It might be alcohol, it might be a runaway wife, it might be so much power that looks didn’t matter.
“Mr. Tuuro,” the lawyer said. “Don’t tell me if they roughed you up.” He removed his perc from his pocket, set it on the table between them, then slumped over its tiny holographic screen. He did have power, Tuuro thought: those holo-screens were expensive. After some minutes he looked at Tuuro with an unvarnished weariness and said, “First off, you need to know something: this boy of yours is Nenonene’s grandson.”
Nay-no-nay-nay. The name was somehow familiar. Tuuro ran through his list of neighbors. No. Tuuro said, “Does the boy have a mother?”
“Of course he has a mother!” Mr. English closed his eyes; when he opened them he looked, if possible, even wearier. “Even in our crazy modern world, a child has a mother. But it’s Nenonene’s son that is the father. I don’t know who the mother is. Some woman. The wife of Nenonene’s son.”
Tuuro stared. The boy did have a mother.
“Nenonene!” English repeated. “The general. The African. The one who runs the Alliance from that hotel basement up in Cleveland.”
Tuuro tried to shift his mind from the mother to a famous grandfather, but it was an ungainly process, like an old machine slipping laboriously into gear. Of course Tuuro knew Nenonene! Everyone knew Nenonene. But as a name, a concept, not as a real person.
“My God,” Tuuro said after a moment. “Nenonene is the enemy. What was this boy doing in Dayton?”
English shook his head impatiently. “His parents live here. Nenonene’s son is an American citizen. He has a PhD from somewhere south. International finance or global economics, something like that. He teaches at Wright State. He didn’t keep his father’s name. The son’s name is Norris. Ken Norris.”
Tuuro nodded blankly, trying to take it in. Still, the boy had a mother. “And this little boy, what was his name?”
“Cubby Norris.” A very American name. Not a name you’d expect for Nenonene’s grandson. Maybe the mother had picked it.
“Does Cubby”—Tuuro paused on the name; you could say the boy had been hidden in a cubbyhole; how savage, to make a name into a place of death—“have brothers or sisters?”
