Storm Drain Bob
Thomas Cooper
Before dusk he takes the long and winding way across the neighborhood, the
secret way, past the rocky creek and the duck pond and the briar field where
he and
his mother used to pick blackberries. This is the best part of the boy’s
day, the only part he looks forward to, when he ventures far beyond the point
that his father forbids so he can visit Storm Drain Bob.
After dinner the boy’s father is usually so out of it that he doesn’t
notice the boy wrapping meatloaf or tuna casserole or beef stroganoff in wax paper
and stuffing it in his backpack. He’s sunk in the living room recliner,
boozy-eyed and clutching a Schlitz in front of the nightly news. The boy says
he’s going out and his father tells him to stay on the block and to be
home before dark. There’s still a neighborhood curfew after somebody strangled
that old lady behind the bowling alley a few months ago.
Just after the start of his third grade year, the boy was jabbing an ant pile
with a stick when a voice rose out of the storm drain.
“Hey, kid,” a man said. “Knock knock.” The voice was
gruff and grunty, like that baby gangster with the cigar in the cartoons.
The boy felt his heart pounding against his ribs. He looked around. A man several
houses down sheared away at rose bushes. A woman a few doors farther swayed soundlessly
on a porch swing, a newspaper or book spread open on her lap.
At first the boy thought someone was playing a trick. Maybe his father, or one
of the kids from the neighborhood.
“Who’s there?” the boy asked.
“Bob.”
“Bob who?”
“Storm Drain Bob.”
The boy sprinted away, crazy-legged, sneakers pounding on asphalt. But Storm
Drain Bob was there when the boy came back the next day.
“I hear you up there. I know it’s you. Don’t be scared.”
“Go away,” the boy said.
“Go away? You’re the one who came to me. I don’t go in your
room and
tell you to go away, do I?”
The boy knelt in the dirt, palms in the thick-leaved St. Augustine grass. He
smelled something cobwebby, like damp moss. Far down below, water plinked into
a puddle, a silvery and echoey sound, as if deep within a cave.
Storm Drain Bob told him he could visit anytime he liked, as long as he didn’t
tell anyone. If he told anyone, there would be trouble. Never mind what kind,
because the boy wasn’t going to say anything, right? They were a secret
club, right? The words didn’t sound angry or threatening. They sounded
lilting, soft, concerned, a sagely old uncle offering advice.
Now the boy brings Storm Drain Bob food every other night.
“Your ma make this meatloaf?” he asks. “It’s fucking
delicious.”
The word fucking makes the boy laugh. But then he tells Storm Drain Bob that
his mother’s dead.
Storm Drain Bob says he’s sorry to hear that. Awful sorry.
The man sounds like he might be his father’s age, but he’s different
from his father because he talks to him like a real person. The boy’s father
says less and less these days, and whenever he does say something, it’s
like he’s lobbing the same words at him over and over again. How was your
day, how was school, will you try out for the soccer team this year. “That’s
good,” his father says before he’s even finished answering. This
man, Storm Drain Bob, is honest and funny and always waits for him to finish
his answers, like what he says is important.
“Are you a ghost?” asks the boy.
“How the hell did you know?” Storm Drain Bob says.
“Are you stuck down there forever?”
“I’m not sure, kid. It’s not forever yet.”
“You ever talk to other ghosts?”
“There’s hardly enough room down here, there’s so many. We’re
always bumping into each other.”
“Ever meet a lady named Sherry?”
“Holy shit, you ask a lot of questions, kid. Yeah, I know Sherry. Just
saw her
the other day. Why? You know her? Want me to say hello?”
Sometimes Storm Drain Bob will ask him to bring more than food. A flashlight,
some detective novels, a portable radio. The boy sneaks these out of the house
and drops them down into the hole with a rope tied to a plastic beach bucket.
He even brings a bottle of Beefeater gin that’s been under the kitchen
sink with other shiny jewel-colored bottles since ever since his mother died.
One day Storm Drain Bob asks, “Hey, kid, ever seen a pussy?”
“No,” he says, a hot tingling in his face like thousands of the tiniest
pinpricks. A kid at school once told him a pussy was like one of those fuzzy
gloves you wash a car with, except black, with wax candy lips.
“Lower the bucket,” Storm Drain Bob says.
When the boy pulls up the bucket there it is, a glossy magazine with a stunned-looking
blonde woman on the cover. She’s bent over a dune buggy with her butt stuck
up in the air and her open-mouthed face turned over her shoulder. A platinum
tassel of hair hangs between her legs and the boy thinks of a lucky rabbit’s
foot.
He stuffs the magazine down his cargo shorts and pulls his t-shirt over the part
sticking out. Then he sprints, body jackknifed as if he’s been socked in
the gut. He spends the night under his bedcovers with a flashlight, flipping
through the pages like scripture. A pussy does not look like a fuzzy car glove
with wax candy lips, not at all. He scissors out a picture from between the centerfold’s
legs and tucks it into a Ranger Rick magazine.
The next day at school, like a poker player with a trump card, he slaps the picture
down on the cafeteria table. Other boys shoulder in for a good look. There’s
snickering, snorting, elbow jabbing. Then someone grabs the boy’s arm,
fat fingers digging in deeply. Mr. Green the guidance counselor glares down,
nostrils twitching fiercely. The boy is known as a troublemaker with a hyperactive
imagination and things like this have happened before.
He’s sent home with an envelope, the principal’s seal stamped against
the flap.
The father opens the envelope at the dinner table, peering over his half-moon
reading glasses, lips stuck out like he’s blowing into a trumpet. He looks
at the picture, then at the boy, then at the picture again.
“Where’d you get this?” he asks.
“Storm Drain Bob,” says the boy. He can see the lines on his father’s
face, the ones that are new since his mother died.
“What’s this boy’s number?” His voice is getting harder.
“It’s a man,” says the boy.
“Jesus Christ,” his father says, terror-stricken. His hands fist on top
of the table. “What man? Who? I’ll kill him.”
“He lives underground,” says the boy.
The father’s shoulders notch slowly down and his fists unfurl. He rubs
his forehead, keeps rubbing it. “This is not good. Jesus Christ, this is
bad.” His eyes are soft and trembling when they rest on the boy. “It’s
my fault. We should go outside after dinner. Throw a ball around. Want to go
outside and throw a ball around? After dinner?”
Actually, the boy prefers spending time with Storm Drain Bob. Storm Drain Bob
tells jokes and shares wisdom gathered during his years both alive and dead.
Things about courage, risk, trust, revenge, God, women, and just about everything
else important about being a man. A lot of it the boy doesn’t understand
but he shares at school anyway. “Experience is the comb we receive after
losing our hair,” he tells the other kids. And, “If sex doesn’t
scare the cat, you’re not doing it right.”
One day Storm Drain Bob says, “There’s this lady down here. She says
she wants to see you.”
“You lie,” says the boy.
“Fine, don’t believe me.”
“Get her to talk.”
“It’s like a different language. We’re dead.”
“Can she write a note?” the boy asks.
Storm Drain Bob tells him to come back tomorrow. He’ll see what he can
arrange.
The next day Storm Drain Bob tells him to drop the bucket. When he pulls it back
up there’s a note, written in red bubbly cursive on lined notebook paper. “Please
help me! Love, Mom.”
It might be his mother’s handwriting. He isn’t sure, and this also
frightens him, that he’s forgotten so much about his mother so soon, as
if he’s somehow failing her. It feels like he’s letting her slip
away bit by bit, atom by atom, and that every day there’s less of her than
before.
“Come closer,” Storm Drain Bob says. “There you go. I can hear
you
up there. Put your ear down to the ground. You hear your mother? She’s
trying to tell you something. Her name’s Sherry, right? You’re a
brave kid, that’s what she’s always saying about you. You’re
brave, right? Come down for a minute and say hello.”
The boy hesitates. The evening sun glints off the house windows down the street,
but the lawns are already turning dark in the peaked rooftop shadows. He ties
the rope around the trunk of an oak tree and tests the knot, yanking hard. Then
he crouches down in front of the storm drain’s mouth, flattens belly-down
to the ground like a snake and shimmies inside. The rope is rough and damp and
thick between his clutched fingers. He drops deeper and deeper down into darkness.
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