“Hi. My name is Milo. I’m with Boy Scout Troop Twelve and we’re collecting bottles and cans for recycling. We use the money to help us go to camp. Do you have any empties that we could have?”
The woman remained silent for a moment, maintaining her gaze on Milo as if offering a last chance at escape, before finally looking back into the house and calling out, “Louis?” A moment later, without any response that Milo could hear, the woman invited Milo to enter.
The door opened up onto a dimly lit living room carpeted in a thinning olive green shag. Though Milo hadn’t noticed from the outside, the shades were drawn and the only illumination was coming from a lamp that was positioned on an end table adjacent to a patchwork couch, and from a large console television to the far right.
Both sources of illumination startled Milo.
The lamp, a three foot tall replica of a woman’s leg, adorned in a stiletto and garter belt and topped with a lampshade tasseled with purple and red fringe. The lamp looked remarkably similar to the one featured in the classic movie A Christmas Story, a film that had failed miserably in theaters only to gain popularity once it was syndicated for television. At the time, the movie was just becoming a holiday staple on network television, but Milo hadn’t seen it yet. If he had, it might have reduced his shock on noticing this highly suggestive lighting fixture.
Of course, this lamp paled in comparison to what was showing on the television: four naked muscular men having sex with a petite blond female modeling an outfit surprisingly similar to the lamp’s. The performers, writhing on a bed large enough to fill the living room in which Milo was now standing, were moaning, whimpering, and panting in ways that Milo had never heard before.
Reclining in front of the television, in a La-Z-Boy that was comically large in comparison to his size, was a rail-thin man in dark horn-rimmed glasses, a white tank top, camouflage pants, and black combat boots. His receding hairline exposed a wrinkled, pale forehead, and a bald patch had formed in the back as well, making it seem as though his scalp were waging a two-front war on baldness, without much success.
“Louis,” the woman said. “This kid wants empty bottles for the Boy Scouts. They’re recycling.”
“Cans too,” Milo added, hoping the normalcy of his words would somehow compensate for the insanity of the rest of the living room scene.
“You know where they are. Go get ’em,” Louis said in a voice that was nasally, authoritative, and disinterested. He waved his hand in a dismissive gesture, eyes still affixed to the television screen, where the writhing continued.
“Wait here,” the woman said. “The bottles are in the basement. I’ll be back in a sec.”
Please don’t leave me here, Milo wanted to say as the woman disappeared through a short hall into a kitchen and beyond. Instead, he stood his ground as instructed, desperately searching for something in the room on which to affix his own gaze while he waited. Anything but the television.
Unfortunately, the room was lacking of anything else of interest. Stairs to Milo’s left ascended to the second floor. An identical recliner stood about three feet to the left of Louis’s recliner, both pieces of furniture filling the center of the room, with a folding tray occupying the narrow space between the two. The top of the tray was littered with Chinese food containers, opened cans of Tab and Fresca, and half a bag of miniature marshmallows. Several marshmallows had fallen onto the floor beneath the tray, alongside a discarded pair of chopsticks and a plastic container of dental floss.
“Come over here, kid,” Louis said, finally turning away from the television long enough to make eye contact with Milo. As he lifted himself from the cushions of the recliner in order to pivot, Milo could see that his body barely filled the tank top that he was wearing. The twin strips of cotton holding it up were struggling to maintain their purchase on the man’s measly shoulders.
“Thanks,” Milo said. “But I’ll just wait by the door. I don’t want to be a bother. I’ll be out of here in just a minute.”
“Come over here, kid,” Louis repeated with authority that did not match his insubstantial frame. “Annie’s gonna be a minute. I just toss my empties down the cellar stairs. She’s gonna have to pick ’em up and stick ’em in a bag. And get the ones in the garage too.”
Milo had no desire to close the distance between himself and the pornography on the screen, but he also couldn’t ignore this man’s request. Though Milo suspected that the man was a loon, he did not appear dangerous or even rude. So moving as slowly as possible, all the while praying that Annie would return with the recyclables, Milo crossed the living room until he was adjacent to the empty recliner.
“Take a seat,” the man said, this time not bothering to look up at his guest. At this distance, Milo could see a name badge stuck to his tank top that read:
Hello, my name is:
Below these preprinted words, written in red ink, was
Louis, AKA Hot Potato
“Take a seat, man,” Louis repeated, now breaking away from the pornography long enough to make eye contact with Milo and motion to the empty recliner. Unable to resist, Milo sat, sinking into the chair further than he had expected. He suddenly felt trapped.
“Want a marshmallow?” Louis asked, pushing the bag in Milo’s direction. Several marshmallows tumbled to the floor, joining their compatriots in surrounding the chopsticks.
“No, thank you,” Milo said, watching three more marshmallows plummet from their perch as Louis returned the bag to the tray.
“Your loss.”
The man’s eyes returned to the screen, where the moans and pants were increasing in frequency and intensity, but Milo remained turned toward the second recliner. “Thank you for donating the bottles and cans,” he said, not wanting to stare at the man without trying to make conversation.
Louis nodded.
“We’re going to use the money to go to camp this summer.”
“Just gimme a second, kid. This is almost done.”
Milo was perfectly willing to give the man a minute, but he wanted to avoid the television screen at all costs. Anything but the writhing images of the naked people illuminated five feet away. But this left him staring at the man.
A second later, probably sensing the eyes upon him, Louis turned. “Kid, just gimme a second. Okay? You’re giving me the creeps.”
Giving you the creeps? Milo wanted to say. Are you insane? A Boy Scout comes into your house and you can’t find the decency to turn off the porn that you and your wife were watching—in the middle of the day, mind you—for what? Two minutes? Not only that, but you invite me to sit down next to you and watch this stuff like it’s something I do every day. What the hell?
Instead, Milo turned his gaze onto his hands, which he had folded on his lap in an unconscious attempt at innocence.
Thirty seconds later, the moaning reached a high point and began to wind down. Milo noticed movement to his right and turned to see Louis lifting a remote control from the floor. It was attached to the VCR on top of the television by a wire, a setup that Milo had seen once before in his uncle’s home when video cassette recorders first hit the market, but not since.
“The wire, right?” Louis asked. “Ain’t seen one like this before, huh?”
“No, my uncle had one. But I haven’t seen one in a long time.”
Louis had thankfully stopped the movie during what Milo thought had been the credits (he never dared to look). Without the moans and pants filling the room, conversation with the man was supremely easier.
“I could get a new one,” Louis said. “A VCR, I mean. I got the money. Money ain’t the problem. But the wire is so goddamn fun. When my sister brings her two little brats over here, I trip them with it. And I caught Annie once or twice too. When she’s not looking.”
“Oh.”
“Don’t worry. I don’t hurt the kids or nothing. They’re still little, so they don’t got far to fall. It’s just that my sister’s got something against me. She don’t approve of my l
ifestyle. Makes me turn off the porn and hide my videos when the kids come over. She tells me to put on a shirt and lock the bedroom door too, so her kids don’t sneak in and see my stuff when they’re visiting. Like she’s embarrassed of me. But a guy’s got a right to be himself.”
“Yup,” Milo said, listening and praying for Annie’s footsteps.
“You know what I mean, right? It’s like when you’re a kid, everyone says to be yourself. Forget all the other assholes and peer pressure and shit like that. Be yourself, everyone says. So you grow up and decide that you want to work at a video store and watch a little porn at home and suddenly everyone’s got a beef with you. Why do you work at that video store? Why do you got porn all over your house? But I thought I was supposed to be myself. You know? And I like porn. Hell, even Annie’s into it now. Never trust a man who don’t watch porn. That’s what I always say. You didn’t mind me finishing my movie. Right?”
“Not at all,” Milo said, relieved to hear a door somewhere in the house slam shut. The basement door, he hoped. Perhaps Annie was back.
“See. You know. You get it. But even Annie gave me that look. You know, that do you want to turn that off? look. When you knocked, I mean. But I figured, What the hell. He’s a Boy Scout, for Christ’s sake. It’s not like you’re in grade school. And what boy don’t like porn?”
Certainly not me, Milo might have said, hoping to placate the lunatic Louis, but Annie’s voice interjected. “I’m just grabbing the empties on the back porch. Two seconds!”
In truth, the brief glimpses of the television before the screen had gone blue had been Milo’s first encounter with pornography, so noting his appreciation for the genre would have been disingenuous. In the years before the Internet, he had no way of acquiring video pornography, even if he had wanted to. And not understanding everything that he had seen on the television, he felt like he was right back in that van, being questioned about what a rubber was by boys who knew damn well that he did not know.
“You sure you don’t want a couple marshmallows for the road?” Louis asked, stuffing a handful into his mouth.
“No, thank you,” Mio said, using the mention of the road as an opportunity to extract himself from the La-Z-Boy and begin sidling toward the front door.
“Your loss,” Louis said between cheek-filled bites.
A moment later Annie returned, dragging two plastic garbage bags full of empty bottles and cans. Less than a minute later, he was out the door and back on the street.
Memories of those ten minutes spent in the living room of Louis and Annie ran through Milo’s mind as he drove over to 9 Summer Street, the home of Kelly Bryson. He had never told the story to anyone, choosing to bury it like so many other things that he had kept to himself, even as far back as childhood. The words. The drink boxes. The balsa wood. The confusion between a rubber and a dildo. He had nearly told the story to Arthur Friedman when the old man began watching pornography, but even Arthur had the good sense to keep his new hobby between Milo and himself.
Porn fiend Louis had lacked all discretion.
Yet Louis had said something that day that had resonated long after Milo had left the glow of the garter belt lamp and the aroma of Chinese food. As crazy as Milo thought Louis had been, he also thought that the man had been right about a lot of things. It was true that Milo’s teachers, beginning as early as kindergarten, had assured their students that it was okay to be different. They had encouraged Milo and his classmates to take the road less traveled, find their true colors, and be themselves. They had read books to their students in which characters such as Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and Dumbo had found acceptance by embracing their obvious differences, and deservedly so.
Throughout much of his childhood, all manner of adults had warned Milo about the dangers of peer pressure and trying to fit in no matter the cost. They had encouraged him to find his own way in life, develop a personal sense of style, and to be true to his heart. Qualities such as individuality and uniqueness were prized by his elders and fostered within him and his peers. Milo had even taken a peer leadership class as a junior in high school, where he learned about how to mediate disputes among his classmates and promote tolerance and acceptance in the school community. Milo had come to the assistance of younger students who were being bullied, had encouraged middle-schoolers to Just Say No, and had helped a freshman boy who was almost certainly gay find a modicum of acceptance by his peers. He did all this with great enthusiasm and pleasure, even with a locker full of juice boxes waiting to be popped open and words like catatonic and delectable (one that had proven to be especially difficult to rid himself of) pounding away in his head and secret after secret piling up around him.
All of this encouragement to be yourself and find your own way was meaningless to those beyond the curve of normality. For the compulsive karaoke singers with the need to bowl strikes and pop open jelly jars and the unapologetic porn fiends with a fondness for miniature marshmallows, there was no red-nosed reindeer acceptance, no aerodynamic elephant ears, and no duckling-to-swan future for them. As much as Louis the Porn Fiend had unabashedly embraced his individuality, and as much as his wife may have even accepted it as well (though Milo still doubted it all these years later), Milo knew that society would never accept these people for who they were, despite the constant, insistent messages indicating otherwise.
Though Milo doubted that he would find a ninety-pound porn fiend behind Kelly Plante’s door, he wasn’t sure what he would find, and this made him nervous beyond measure. The last time he had knocked on a stranger’s door, he had found Louis and Annie, shameless and surreal but otherwise harmless. But that was not all. He had also found someone so strikingly different than himself; forthright, unashamed, and quite possibly courageous, and yet someone with seemingly so much in common with him as well. Louis the Porn Fiend was a man full of oddities and peculiarities, only he was willing to share them with the world. For Milo, it had been like looking in a mirror and seeing what he could have been (and could still be) and not knowing whether he should loathe or admire the image.
He had no time for this debate. All he wanted to do was find Tess Bryson, fill her in on Freckles’s story, and go home.
It began with three firm knocks on Kelly Plante’s yellow door.
chapter 25
Kelly Plante was not a porn fiend.
Nervous was the best way to describe the woman, who couldn’t have been more than thirty years old, if that. When she opened the door and saw a strange man standing before her, Milo saw a flash of uneasiness in the woman’s brown eyes, indicating, at least to him, that she was probably home alone. He quickly tried to put her mind at ease, and in doing so, put his own at ease.
“Hi, my name is Milo. I’m sorry to bother you. You don’t know me, but I’m trying to find an old friend. Someone who I think might be related to you. I’d like to ask you a few questions, but if this isn’t a good time, or you’d prefer to chat in a more public place, or over the phone, that’s fine.” As he spoke, he began backing up across the porch toward the steps in an effort to punctuate his purposeful timidity.
“You’re looking for a friend?” she asked.
Milo paused before descending the first of three steps to the brick walkway. “Yes, an old friend from grade school.”
“You’re not from around here,” she said.
“No, I’m from Connecticut. Would you like me to come back at another time? Or maybe talk over the phone instead?”
“No,” she said, seeming to relax a bit. “That’s okay. But how ’bout we sit out here, on the porch.” She was tall, at least as tall as Milo, with a short, dark, somewhat messy hairstyle and the muscular build of a woman who worked out seven days a week. Milo wondered why she might be nervous around someone like him, since he was relatively certain that she could kick his ass if need be.
“Sure,” Milo said. “It’s a nice night. My first night in North Carolina. Sitting out here would be great.”
“I’m
Kelly, by the way,” she said, motioning to a pair of wicker chairs a few feet down the screened porch.
“I know,” Milo said, taking a seat. “Kelly Plante. I looked you up online. That’s why I’m here.”
“I don’t understand,” she said, looking nervous again.
“I’m looking for a girl named Tess Bryson. She may have come to Chisholm about twenty years ago. She’d be about thirty-two years old today.”
“Why do you think I would know her.”
“Your last name is Plante,” Milo answered. “Tess Bryson’s mother’s maiden name was Plante.”
“And since we have the same last name, you thought we might be related?”
“I was hoping. I mean, Chisholm is a small town. I thought there was a chance that you might be her cousin, or a distant relative.”
“I’m afraid not. At least not that I know of. I’m the only Plante in town, I think. There was a Bryson family living in town for a while. A husband and wife. And they had kids. Two, I think. But the kids grew up and moved away a while ago. And they weren’t related to me. But you’re right. Chisholm is a small town, so I knew them. Well, I didn’t know them. I knew of them. But she’s moved away too. The kids’ mother, I mean, about two years ago. I think the husband might’ve died. At least that’s what I heard.”
“Do you know where she might have gone? Or where the kids went?”
“No idea.”
“Do you know where they lived?”
“Somewhere on the south side of town, I think. Near Milk Pond. But like I said, I didn’t really know them.”
“Do you have any other relatives in the area?” Milo asked, hoping to find another lead.