The Cutout

somewhere in Asia without being dead, in a plane that failed him when he least expected it. She knows his face and name by heart, she knows the outline of his story as another child might know Santa Claus — Bill Bisby, Salinas hero, with the fields of artichoke and garlic in his blood; Bill Bisby, a flyboy at twenty-two, with his finger on the afterburner; Bisby the careless warrior, her daddy. A kind of elf, with his short, dark hair and his open grin, one hand waving forever before the cockpit shield comes down. Bill Bisby, who might just slide down her chimney come Christmas.

Your daddy was a hero, Grandpa whispers in her ear. Your daddy died for his country. Your daddy might be coming back, some day. It'd be just like you to fool us all. You've got to make your daddy proud.

A screen door slams. Caroline cocks her head and watches as Grandma shakes the crumbs from Grandpa's napkin, then turns back into the house without a glance for the warming day, without a hint of Caroline crouching secret in the acrid furrows. Grandma's lips are folded in a line as straight as an ironed napkin edge; her eyelids are red. Caroline bites hard at a hangnail trailing from her thumb.

Her knees are dirty, and one of them bleeds. Her hair has not been combed. She has been up for four hours, up since the last hour of darkness and the irrigation machines rolling like giant spiders across the landscape. She is waiting there among the green leaves, the scent of garlic and artichoke, for a last glimpse of her mother.

Brakes squeal as a truck slows at the crossroads, turning toward Gilroy, its outline shimmering like a mirage in the morning heat. Caroline ignores it. She has heard such things from birth, as common as birdsong and the whisper of surf when the wind blows from the west. Her ankles ache from crouching and she needs to pee, but she stares unblinking at the farmhouse's front door.

And there, thrusting carelessly through it in her worn jeans, blond hair flying, a pack already slung over her back, is Jackie. She clatters down the sagging wood steps. She shoves open the VW van's battered door and hurls her heavy rucksack — army green, probably from a surplus place, the irony of it lost on her — into the back. Then turns and waits for Jeremy. Or is it Dave? Last year it was Phil.

Caroline rubs at her streaming nose with a dirty hand, then wipes it on the skirt of her dress. Grandma would purse her lips and frown; she would think, inevitably, Just like her mother. When Jackie is gone, Caroline will creep into the house and stand furtively before the washbasin, before anyone sees. Have they missed her yet? Are they worried? Do they remember that it is her birthday?

The man with the beard and the long hair, the leather vest and the bell-bottom jeans with heart-shaped patches and peace signs scrawled in ink, avoids the door altogether. He shuffles around the far corner of the house from the direction of the privy, his thin frame curled in an eternal question mark. He stares at his own shoes as he walks. A mongrel dog lopes at his heels, tongue dangling. Its breath reeks of raw meat and decay, the good- natured slobber left in Caroline's lap.

“Carrie!” her mother calls. She cups her hands to her mouth and bellows again.

“Carrie! Shit! Where the fuck did that kid go?” Caroline crouches closer to the earth and tries not to breathe. Jackie turns, impotent and furious, her gaze roaming over the morning fields. Her daughter kneads the soiled cotton of her dress between hot and damp fingers. There was yelling last night, too, when she was supposed to be asleep; shouts and demands and a bitter sobbing that might have been her grandmother's. They would not let Jackie take her away, Grandpa said, cutting off the tears; they owed that much to Bill. And to the child. It was no life for a five-year-old, in the back of a van. It was no life for Jackie.

“Don't tell me how to raise my kid, old man,” Jackie had said.

“Seems to me you ain't raising her,” Grandpa had replied. And then, much later, the scent of pot and her mother's hand in the darkness, smoothing Caroline's hair back from her face. Caroline squeezed her eyes shut and pretended to sleep; she prayed that Jackie would stay all night, while the moon shifted across the face of the clapboard house and the cicadas died down to a murmur. But Jackie rose after a moment and shuffled back up the hall, the tip of her joint a wandering flare.

Now the man who may be Jeremy or Dave or even possibly Phil orders the dog into the back of the van. He slides the door shut with a rumble. Grandma is standing on the front porch, her fingers gripping the rail, her face wiped clean of emotion.

“Where's my kid?” Jackie snarls.

“Where've you put her, Elbe?” Grandma allows herself to blink.

“Nobody puts Caroline anywhere. The child has a way of hiding herself.”

“Right. Convenient. Isn't that flicking convenient, Dave? Christ. Well, let's find her. Carrie!”

Caroline's heart is suddenly pounding in her rib cage; she buries her face in the leaves. She is one second away from racing toward the woman with the blond hair, one second from hurling herself into her mother's arms. She so wants to be wanted. But she remembers, with the sharpness of a child's memory, what it was like being Jackie's girl. She can still smell the stench of her own unchanged diapers, the hunger of forgotten lunch and dinner and then breakfast again, the nights she slept hiding under a blanket in the back of a thousand cars, terrified that Joe or Zane or Eddie might remember she was there.

“Carrie!” The voice hoarse with smoke and rage.

Her grandfather's broken shotgun snaps suddenly to attention. The sound is small in the morning air, almost an indifference, but Caroline's head comes up and her eyes move unerringly to the man standing silent on the front porch, his gun leveled at Jackie. Bill Bisby's dad. The hero's father.

Jackie freezes where she stands, outlined against the waving artichokes, the van at her back. Caroline watches the anger drain from her face, sees her eyes close in bitterness.

“It's time to go,” Grandpa says quietly.

“You go on, girl, and get in that van.”

The blond hair writhes as she turns. She gives him the finger. But she goes.

When the minibus stops for an instant at the end of the dirt drive and hesitates, then lumbers with the pain of hard old age in the direction of Santa Cruz, Caroline rises from the ground. She is suddenly sobbing. She has wet her pants. Her mother is gone, as she has gone every year of Caroline's life. But Grandpa is sauntering slowly through the field, the shotgun barrel broken over his forearm. He is whistling a tuneless little song that might be “Happy Birthday.” He knows exactly where Caroline is; he has found her there before. In his other hand is a present tied in blue ribbon.

They do not hear from Jackie for another three years.

Caroline stirs in the airless dark of a hurtling plane. The gin has left her cotton-mouthed. She is flying toward Eric, who fell off her radar like vanished Bill Bisby — only this time the hero came sliding back down the chimney. It is Christmas in midair, and Caroline is supposed to believe in miracles now, however improvident. What would her grandfather say to all this? What would he think of Caroline's Eric?

He would wonder how she came to be so far from Salinas. “My condolences, Mrs. Bisby,” says the man at the edge of the cemetery as the rain spatters down around them and their pumps sink into the mud.

“Your husband was a good man. He died too young.”

Grandma weeps into her handkerchief. Caroline grips her elbow with one hand and an umbrella with the other. It is February, and Caroline is barely eleven years old — February, and whole sections of the coastline are falling into the sea, Highway 1 is closed. The artichoke fields and the expanse of garlic are drowned in mud. She tries not to stare at the crumbling edge of her grandfather's grave, the way the loamy earth is sliding downward. She tries not to think of him at all.

The rain swept over Caroline's grandfather while he drove south from San Jose in the dark; it dogged him down the curves of the Santa Cruz mountains; it filled his headlights and obliterated his windshield. He steered blindly into the grille of another truck, arms flung up before his face — and so he ended, the hero's father, still believing his boy was coming home.

The silver-haired man standing before them in the Salinas cemetery pries the umbrella from Caroline's hand. He clasps her chilled fingers in his enormous palm. She sighs deeply and, without thinking about it much, buries her face in his black raincoat. He strokes her hair while Grandma weeps.

“I'm Hank Armstrong,” he says. “Jackie's uncle. I've come to take you home, Caroline.”

“Home” turned out to be a duplex on Park Avenue, a house on Long Island, a woman named Mrs. Marsalis who presided over the kitchen in a starched uniform. Home was home for only a few months of the year, because