Empire Falls

himself had begun to bathe after falling in love, back in tenth grade, with the beautiful Charlene Gardiner. So, maybe. They were working together. They were in the city art show together. They had lunch together all by themselves. Might all of this have caused a romantic constellation to form in the boy’s otherwise comatose mind?
    Poor Christina, he couldn’t help thinking as he swallowed the last of the chalky antacid and then went directly to the cafeteria, where he found not just these students, but also a third, Zack Minty.
    T HE BIG BOTTLE of antacids that Otto Meyer kept in his desk drawer at school did not represent his entire stash. He kept an additional three or four rolls in the glove box of his Buick, and of course he also had a jar on his nightstand at home. Parked in front of the ramshackle house out on the old landfill road, chewing a couple of tablets in preparation for his interview with the boy’s grandmother, he noted that the air was almost cold enough to bear snow.
    In another month the four o’clock mornings would begin again. On days when snow was predicted, Otto and the principals of the elementary and middle schools would be up early, groggily watching the weather channel and listening to the state weather service on the radio. By five-thirty they would have to decide whether it was too dangerous to put the buses on the road. Parents, for the most part, were eager for their kids to go to school, because otherwise they would have to figure out what to do with them. Before attending to these necessary arrangements many parents liked to call Otto Meyer Jr. at home and convey their impression that he was a fucking idiot, a lazy, no-good bastard angling for a reason to take a day off of work, as if it weren’t enough he had the whole summer. If Otto was in the shower and his wife answered, they told her instead. The parents who were the angriest and most abusive on snow days were generally not the ones who had to worry about missing a day of work to attend to their children. Rather they were the same parents who signed their kids up for the free-lunch program and sent them to school inadequately clothed, but who could afford answering machines so they never had to waste time talking to principals and bill collectors.
    Actually, even these were not the worst. The very worst, Otto Meyer thought as he studied the dilapidated house, were the ones you never saw, the ones who seemed to exist only as narratives prepared by state caseworkers for files that followed kids from school to school in a feeble attempt to prepare teachers and administrators for what they were up against. According to the file he reviewed before driving over here, John Voss’s parents, who’d disappeared beneath the bureaucratic radar nearly five years ago, had been small-time Portland drug dealers and habitual abusers who discovered after having children what a nuisance they could be when serious business was being transacted. When John was a little boy, it had been their habit to stuff him into a laundry bag, pull the string tight and hang him on the back of the closet door, where he could kick and scream to his heart’s content. After a while he always calmed down, and then they could have some peace. The trouble with the silence was that sometimes they’d forget all about him, fall asleep and leave him hanging there all night.
    Otto did not normally think of himself as philosophically or politically confused, but after rereading this file he found himself deeply conflicted about whether or not John Voss’s parents should be summarily executed, assuming they could be located. On the one hand, he had never favored capital punishment, reasoning that it didn’t really solve the problem it was intended to address, but in this instance the problem it would solve—quite elegantly, he thought—was the disgust he felt at the idea of sharing the world with these two particular people.
    Not that he considered himself an ideal parent. Far from it. He and Anne had indulged their son, Adam, beyond reckoning, and as a result the boy was showing signs of a distinctly unrealistic worldview. He seemed, for example, to believe the world was kindly disposed toward him as a matter of course. Otto had been ineffectual in the area of discipline for too long, but now, he suspected, it was too late to start doing things differently. Earlier in the year when he’d caught his son at a party that featured both alcohol and drugs, he’d