Sam Berman
1. THE DISPATCHA Searcher’s Guide to Finding Lost Boys
We lost the boy. We’d lost the boy. Dan Guerri’s boy to be exact, but if you lived in our town–where the clocktower rang twice a day, and the Apple Blossom queen had lost her hand when the Quimby kid turned over his truck after homecoming, and the moon often waited quietly above the wildcats, long into the following day, hungover, slow and angry with how the night before had played out–then you were missing a boy too. The FBI had come because they too felt they had lost something. We hummed along to the honeyed roar of the helicopters overhead. The national news trucks had arrived earlier that morning with their pink and freshly plucked anchors. We could see LeeAnne Holt who was normally the most beautiful person in our town–our nightly news anchor who had a clover tattoo most of us knew about on her lower back, and who gave out the church schedule in person every Wednesday at the Wimbley Mall–as she shook her hair out, and pressed her breasts together using the top parts of her arms, before letting her arms back down, and everything she was has holding up was free to fall back to earth. Now: the new, younger sheriff was on the tallest part of the tallest truck, megaphone in hand, explaining what to do with our flags if we find anything out of the ordinary.
“We’ll drive out to the edge of town and start in at the waterway,” said the Quimby boy, who now went to the high school once a semester and extolled the virtues of Christ, and who was now a man with a rounded belly and small breasts. His truck bed had the legs of an animal swung upwards, pointed towards the sky as silver bugs and fruit flies spun around the unmoving hooves.
The morning’s newborn light began to spray out from between the mountains way, way out there.
We walked for hours that first day.
Just as we had years earlier when we’d lost a boy named Bishop.
Who everyone had called Baloo.
And whose mother had tried a new type of cooking class that afternoon down at the rec center and when she had returned home his tennis shoes were sitting in the mailbox, his socks folded neatly inside them.
Like always.
On the first day we had grabbed our walking sticks and our coffee mugs, met in the big parking lot outside the Circuit City and started looking at the map, unfolded on the hood of the old sheriff’s Tacoma. By weeks end we had searched the old Caterpillars and abandoned grain harvesters, the rusted silos where the spiders had been left to do their work. And our feet had grown sore and wet as we walked the uneven ground between the flattened trash and ditch weed that lined the road. It had been raining nonstop that spring so everything and everyone had been driven down hard into the mud.
“Let’s call it,” one of the wives had said on that final Friday.
She’d seen the firelight way out where the dirt bikers had finished their drive through the hillside, no longer able to look for the boy in the wet night, they’d stopped to drink a little and have a smoke and some of them had been kissing.
We had finished out the last of the cement canals.
“Baloo. Boy, you down here?”
But in response all we’d heard was all that we’d been hearing that long, wet week in September: the bullfrogs in the yellow grass somewhere overhead and hapless snakes winding against the canal floor.
We’d try yelling once more: “Baloo!” “Baloo, little buddy!” “Baloo.”
Nothing.
Then: we’d found ourselves up on the access road.
Me, Mike Holler and Jim Price had agreed to walk our wives out to see the bright colored motorbikes up close. Of course, the wives, had wanted to see the bikers who’d been riding those motorbikes too, with their dirtied cheeks, sweaty heads, and scars of all size and shape.
“We didn’t see anything up on North Ridge.”
“Nothing in Quail Valley, neither.”
“He ain’t going anywhere tonight,” one of us had said, trying to ingratiate us. “So, we’ll find him held up in some tree tomorrow…maybe the day after. We’ll find him”
One of the bikers had fallen off the back of his seat.
And they had picked him right back up, a too tall and too skinny fellow who had all these tattoos that looked like they were fighting one another. Like a war had broken out on his arms. An uprising born on his neck. A revolution across his knuckles.
“That’s a child of God that’s gone missing,” he’d slurred.
“Yes sir,” I’d said, my walking stick in one hand and my wife’s wrist in the other. I’d given her that little squeeze I sometimes gave. That squeeze that meant everything was–in one way or a another–going to be okay.
“But we once were two headed monsters, so strong we fought God,” the fallen, tall, skinny biker had said, his voice then tiny and sharp. Blood had started falling from his elbow. “That’s ancient mythology, buddy boy. Us fighting God. Us being God. God planting three seeds in us, just to steal one of them back…I don’t…” he again had fallen back into his own bike and was worming around against the wet ground as the other bikers looked on with laughter.
“You have a good night,” one of us had said. “Drive safe.”
* * *
Seven weeks later they would arrest a man named Robert Bow three counties away.
Baloo had been found sitting in Robert Bow’s front seat with s cowboy hat pulled tightly down over his eyes.
We had one of our boys back.
We did.
But it wasn’t so great later on then.
Cause Baloo was a little different after we’d gotten him back.
He had changed a bit.
* * *
So, there’s a tip that’d come in from Omaha that a woman was beating on a kid that looked a bit like Dan Guerri’s boy in the parking lot of a Best Western. Now: the FBI is taking the helicopters over to see if the boy is Dan’s boy or if he’s just a boy that looks like Dan’s boy.
So, we’re praying, you know?
We’re praying.
2. BUREAU INVENTORYWhatever 6-7 books I'm referencing or using for inspo on that specific day.
A King Edward Imperial Cigar box filled with pens and Silly Putty.
(Sometimes) a toy from off the big shelf. Just something I can hold in my hand while I think. It was a real (as in non-negotiable) deal that if I got my own office in our new apartment I would keep all my collectibles in and around me. Which is perfect for me because I love to be surrounded by books and toys. It's my happy place.
A bag of Dunkin, normally. If I need a little sugar boost.
Band aids. I work with my hands so I have little cuts all the time. Don't want to bleed on the Macbook.
Always a copy of From Your Jerry by Kevin Stone. It's a story I come back to once a week. So simple. So good.
A bandana in case my hands get clammy.
A cup of tea.
One of my dog's bones under my desk. He hides them anywhere and everywhere.
A picture of me, my twin sister, and little brothers.
3. BIOGRAPHYSam Berman is a short story writer who lives in Chicago and works at Lake Front Medical with Nancy, Andrew, and Reuben. They are terrific coworkers. He has had work published in Maudlin House, The Masters Review, D.F.L. Lit, Hobart, Illuminations, The Fourth River, and SmokeLong Quarterly, and recently won Forever Magazine's Unconventional Love Stories competition. He was selected as runner-up in The Kenyon Review’s 2022 Nonfiction Competition as well as shortlisted for the 2022 Halifax Ranch prize and the ILS Fiction Prize. He has forthcoming work in Expat Press, The Northwest Review and The Idaho Review, among others.