Maybe Baby Read online

  Rusty hadn’t cared to hang around in the dining room later as Gretchen explained that she and Ray were part of an international underground movement of couples who were practicing this new method of child rearing. Ray had stood by Gretchen’s side, nodding with his new jagged hairdo, trying—Rusty thought—to look urbane, when really he belonged in a zoo, was cuckoo, was out of his mind if he thought for one minute that Rusty would just play along.

  By the time the red Ford had driven away, the shower loot secured under a tarp, Rusty had been seething. It was all he could do to confine himself to the bedroom. And now that they were gone, he made his way back to the living room to look at the ponytail lying on the arm of his chair. It was dark and thick and wavy, held fast by a blue rubber band with gold flecks.

  Rusty could not pick it up with his bare hands. He could hardly stand looking at it. It was repugnant. The thought of it having been connected to the Chimp’s head, the thought that this hair held the Chimp’s history, had slapped against his back as he danced or walked or made love—all that he did—made Rusty’s stomach turn.

  He went downstairs to dig around in the closet where Judy kept their winter wear. There, among the scarves and earmuffs, he found a single orange glove. How had that gotten there? he wondered. It seemed suitable for the job at hand. He put on the glove and went back upstairs.

  Judy, who was still in the kitchen, peered out over the shutters. “What are you doing?”

  “What does it look like I’m doing?” Rusty hovered over the hair, frowning. He saw there were a few silver strands. How old was this guy, anyway? Where had he come from? Why had he declined to invite his parents, the neighbors in their community?

  “Why are you wearing that glove?” Judy appeared, drying a crystal serving platter.

  “What does it matter?”

  She shrugged. “That’s the one I found downstairs in Gretchen’s room after Donald spotted our robbers.”

  “What robbers?”

  Judy sighed and disappeared back into the kitchen.

  “I never heard about any robbers.” Rusty had on the glove, but he still couldn’t pick up the hair. He sniffed at it mistrustingly, then poked at it with a gloved finger as if it might suddenly recoil, then strike. “I’m taking out the hair,” he called over his shoulder after he’d managed to pick it up. He held it away from his body, carrying it gingerly down the hall to the front door, the hair dangling from between his thumb and forefinger like animal remains.

  Rusty carried the hair around the side of the house. Outside, the sky was dusky. There was a light mist in the air, neither rain nor fog. It left the skin feeling clammy. Rusty went into the garage, rustled about until he found a cigar box to put the hair in, then grabbed a shovel.

  “Whatcha up to there?” It was Donald calling over the woodpile. Across the way, a streetlight snapped on. Rusty cast a glance over his shoulder to catch Donald standing under a red umbrella, puffing on a cigar. Donald pulled a second one out of his shirt pocket and extended it to Rusty’s back.

  “Naw,” Rusty said gruffly, shaking his head. He hoisted a shovelful of earth to the side, making a hole between the drain spout and a cluster of hollyhocks.

  “Sure, go ahead,” Donald said. “Meant to give it to you earlier.” Rusty stopped digging, turned his head just slightly to the side, and, without facing his neighbor, did his best to keep his voice calm. “No thanks, Donald.” Rusty waited, motionless, a pile of dirt in midair.

  A few seconds later, a branch cracked behind him, signaling Donald’s retreat. From the corner of his eye, Rusty watched the red umbrella fade into the next yard, the smell of cigar smoke still lingering in Donald’s wake.

  Rusty sighed through his teeth, tossing dirt at the tops of the hollyhocks. He finished his work quickly, setting the box into the shallow hole, then covering it. The sound of earth striking hollow cardboard made him shiver. Or maybe it was a chill in the air, the cool mist mixed with his own sweat, making his T-shirt damp.

  He left the dirt loosely piled by the drain spout, then hurried into the garage. After returning the shovel to its nail, he climbed into his car and sat in the driver’s seat, holding the wheel to keep his hands from shaking.

  A soft rain started up, thrumming on the roof of the garage, then grew louder. Rusty tilted back against the velour headrest and licked his lips. He could hear his own heart beating so loud it drowned out the rain and seemed to fill the whole sedan. When he rubbed his palms over his knees, he couldn’t determine which of his body parts was shaking hardest. He closed his eyes, hoping for respite behind his lids, but all he could see was the hair lying in the box, the box so full it could hardly close, loose strands seeping out around the sides. He saw the hair slithering into the soil, making its way down toward the house, like the roots of hardy vines wheedling their tendrils through the cement foundation.

  Why had he buried the hair under the drain spout in a cardboard box that would get soggy? In the morning, there might be hair all over the yard, spread over the tops of the grass, laid out like some sort of dark aftermath from a gruesome battle.

  Rusty’s eyes flashed open. Before his face, a single yellow orb floated in the darkness. It took him a moment to remember that it was a Ping-Pong ball he’d hung from the ceiling on some old fishing line. The darkness seemed to congeal around him, thick, heavy—it was almost as if he were sitting in dark syrup. On the roof, the sound of the rain was like dozens of small fingers tapping and tapping to be let in.

  A light came on overhead, then the door from the house to the garage opened, and Rusty saw Judy’s bare legs and feet standing in the doorway. She had on white terrycloth slippers and the turquoise negligee he remembered from the back of her closet. It rippled above her knees, like water.

  She descended onto the step covered in Astroturf and leaned over to peer through the car window, her eyebrows furrowed, her lips together. Around both eyes, he noticed purplish rings, halos of sleeplessness. She cocked her head to the side, wedged her hands between her knees, and stared at him quizzically.

  He ran a hand over the plush red velour of the passenger seat, as if it might offer some sort of explanation as to why he was sitting alone. Still, she looked puzzled.

  “For heaven’s sake,” she said, her voice muffled. “I’ve been waiting.”

  He shook his head as if he had no idea what this meant.

  She crossed her arms. “I’m going in.” He watched her feet pause on the step a moment longer. Then she went inside. He knew she would wait on the other side of the door until she heard his movement. She would listen, arms crossed, watching the fluorescents over the kitchen sink flicker.

  He had to be quick. He had to go out back and dig up the hair, dispose of it once and for all. “Judy,” he called as he stepped out of the car, giving the door a good slam. “I’ll just be a minute.” His voice echoed through the garage, returning to his ears, confident and commanding.

  He grabbed a flashlight and a bucket on his way out the door to the driveway. He turned for a moment, trying to recall where he had left his orange glove, then decided to forget it. The rain had evolved into a steady drizzle. He knelt down by the gutter and plunged his bare hand into the mud, grappling for a hold on the box. He expected it to come loose like a giant tooth, but some force of suction made for an impossible grip. He pulled, and it slipped from his hands, the cardboard slick, almost mushy.

  “God,” he murmured, securing his weight with one hand on the ground as he used his other to fish around. He finally plunged his hand up under the cardboard flap and yanked the hair free, ripping it up through the ground, straggly and muddy and twisting in his grip as if it were alive.

  He let out a shrill cry—unexpected, almost childlike—then thrust the wet clump down into the bucket. He stood up, shaking.

  A faint red blur appeared down the block, bouncing under a

  streetlamp. Rusty squinted and saw that it was Donald’s umbrella.

  “Donald,” he called, shuffling forw
ard, his pants wet, his loafers squishy. He ran his clean hand over his hair as he moved toward the walk, trying to appear impervious to the weather. “Donald.” His voice was desperate.

  “Hi ho there,” Donald called from two houses down. “Need that cigar now, do you?”

  “Yeah,” Rusty jibed, swinging the bucket behind his back. “You wouldn’t want to take a ride now, would you?”

  “Kinda late.” Donald strolled up and stopped short, producing a cigar in a cellophane wrapper. “Whatcha got there?”

  Rusty, who was about a foot shorter than his tall, angular neighbor, looked up into Donald’s face. With the streetlight behind him, Donald’s skin was free of lines. He looked almost young, except for the thin shell of ice white hair combed back over his ears. For an instant, Rusty flashed back to the day he and Judy had moved in. Henry had been an infant. Donald and Celeste, expecting their first, had come over with some fresh bread, Celeste’s belly distended under a checkered sundress. She had sat down on the one kitchen chair they had at that time and rested little Henry against her own full-blown tummy. The world had seemed bursting with possibility.

  Donald had helped Rusty move the water bed, and afterward, the two had gone for a drive, gotten high on the hood of Donald’s Chevrolet. Rusty had put his arms behind his head and leaned back against the windshield to look up at the stars, sensing the closeness of other life, as if his own future waited radiantly ahead.

  Over the years, he and Donald had gone for numerous drives at night, more often when the kids were young. Sometimes the children had begged to come along, to be allowed to get a cherry ice. But many drives had just been the two of them, carrying on with the windows open, cajoling each other about their wives, confiding in each other. There were things Rusty and Donald had confessed to each other that not even their wives or children knew.

  Tonight, Rusty looked up at Donald, then back down at his shoes, and Donald knew. “Come on,” Donald said, his voice still carrying the faint drawl of his Texas upbringing. “You won’t believe how that Seville handles the open road compared to my V6.” He took Rusty by the elbow and led him toward the garage.

  Rusty wiped his hands on a towel slung over Donald’s workbench, then set the bucket in the trunk of the Seville. The trunk was still immaculate, neatly lined with a child’s blanket. Rusty jammed the bucket down next to the wheel well, then climbed in the passenger seat.

  “That was quite a day you had,” Donald said after they pulled out of the drive and onto Seeley Street, the car gliding into its full-metal dream, noiseless and smooth on the uptake.

  Rusty just nodded.

  “Can’t say that I ever met one quite like—what’s his name?”

  “I call him the Chimp,” Rusty said under his breath.

  “Yeah, well, he was an original.” Donald gave a little laugh and followed it with a few slow nods. He drove with his arms outstretched, his seat far back and low to accommodate his tall form. Around them, the neighborhoods of Fort Cloud were aglow. A recent initiative had been passed to double the county’s streetlamps as a way to reduce crime, though few could remember anything other than the Dairy Queen’s being held up once and, here and there, a bit of petty theft. Nonetheless, crime was everywhere in the world, and that seemed to suggest a shady forecast, even for Fort Cloud. The county supervisor had endorsed the streetlamps as a preventative measure toward continued bliss. Throughout downtown, banners had been strung between lampposts and store awnings, proclaiming FORT CLOUD: CONTINUE THE BLISS. And residents had followed suit with signs on their front lawns, the L in Bliss drawn as a lamppost.

  The lamppost initiative had still not quite made it over to Donald and Rusty’s street. All spring, work crews had been out, paid overtime was what people said, to get all the posts in by late summer.

  “You got anything else in here to smoke?” Rusty smiled, rapping on the glove compartment. He squinted and raised his eyebrows, trying to appear collected.

  “You kidding? With this crackdown on crime?” Donald let out a whistle. “No sir.” He shook his head. “Those days are over.”

  They drove out onto County A, the bright lights of Fort Cloud disappearing behind a hill like a sparkler gone out.

  “You mind stopping on the bridge up a ways?” Rusty asked.

  “All the way up there?” Donald rubbed at his jaw. “It’s kinda far.”

  Rusty was quiet, listening to the engine’s purr, watching the headlights move along the road like a set of ghost eyes, catching on the occasional dead raccoon or broken tree limb along the shoulder.

  “Donald,” he said, “I don’t believe I’ve broken in this car with a proper confession.”

  “Yeah?” Donald turned away from the wheel for the first time toward Rusty.

  Something about the way Donald looked at him with his watery eyes, his square jaw set, gave Rusty confidence. He drew in a deep breath. “It’s like parts of my life keep unraveling in front of me,” Rusty began. “I can’t sleep at night, and sometimes even during the day, it’s like I’m in a dream, walking past things that have already happened to me in another life.”

  Rusty looked out the passenger window at the moon, full and gold, following them over the hills. “I’ve never told anyone this,” he said, swallowing. “In fact, I can’t remember the last time I thought about it until today—it’s like I forgot for a lotta years, and now it’s dangling in front of me. Everything I do brings it closer.”

  A car passed them. Donald flipped on his brights.

  “I was in Philly, just out of the service, working second shift on the lines. Came home one day, and there was this kid, this scraggly, bearded, long-haired hippie guy eating at my table. Goddamn breakfast,” Rusty said, tossing out a hand as he stared out the window at even rows of corn breaking through the soil. “He’d just let himself in and helped himself to what was in the fridge, used the toaster, fried some eggs. He had a pack of smokes and was reading my paper.” Rusty shook his head, then opened his mouth, waiting for the words to come to him.

  “I was tired; I’d had a few drinks after work.” He passed a hand across his lips. “First thing I did was grab the kid by his hair and drag him off the chair to the floor.”

  “Well, did he have an explanation?” Donald asked in a low voice.

  “Of course,” Rusty said matter-of-factly. “He was hungry.” Rusty shrugged. “Said his girlfriend had kicked him out and taken up with some guy in a band.”

  “Did you believe him?”

  “What does it matter? I was too angry to believe anything. I pinned him down on my kitchen floor and went at him. But partway through” —Rusty paused—“somehow he got the better of me. He struggled loose and stood bleeding in the corner by the stove, pleading for me to stop. Said he had to pick up his son.” Rusty swallowed. “Then he reached around to the back of his jeans—I thought he was going for a knife.” Rusty stopped to stare, blinking across the dark car at Donald. “I really did. I thought he was going to pull a knife on me, so I went after him again.”

  Donald winced. “You finish him off?”

  “No, nothing like that. Messed him up badly though.” Rusty’s voice strained. “Later, I checked his back pocket, and I found what he was trying to show me.”

  “What was it?” Donald asked, his voice hardly audible over the motor’s hum.

  Rusty sniffled, tugged his earlobe a few times, then spoke. “A picture of his kid, Donald. He wanted to show me the picture of his little boy. I’ve still got it somewhere.”

  Donald slid the car over to the shoulder and reached over to rest a hand on Rusty’s arm.

  “It was awful,” Rusty said. “And what’s worse, I’d forgotten about it. I’d clean forgotten.” He leaned forward and pressed his cheek against the top of the glove compartment, eyes closed.

  “What’s in the trunk?” Donald asked quietly. “We’re at the bridge.”

  “The hair,” Rusty said, his voice choked. “That’s what made me think of this.” He let out a loud,
short sob, then sat back.

  “I’ll handle it,” Donald said, swinging his car door open and stepping out into the dark air. The car idled. Rusty watched in the side-view mirror as Donald tossed the bucket’s contents over the guardrail. He waited for relief to flood over him, but it did not.

  “I remember being young,” Donald said on the way home. “Celeste and I wanted to buy a farm and have city kids come out in the summers to taste the wild and ride the horses.” He let one hand drop a slow arc through the air. “We didn’t have a clue what we were talking about.”

  “That’s how it is,” Rusty said, starting to peel the cellophane off his cigar. “It’s just”—he paused—“you expect to feel less confused as you grow older—you keep expecting this to all line up, only to realize you’re more confused than ever.”

  Donald nodded grimly. “We’ve all been there.” He fished in the pocket of his shirt and offered Rusty a light. Soon the car was filled with smoke. They cracked the windows, let the cool, damp air, with its smell of earthworms, fill the car. Rusty looked out the passenger window, imagining beyond the guardrail to a place where the Chimp’s long ponytail lay among the rocks. He pictured hikers coming across it some afternoon, spotting it from a distance, the hair glinting in the sun. Is that a body? they would ask themselves.

  And it was. In a way, it was a body—or it led to one, at least in Rusty’s mind. Touching the Chimp’s hair had cast him back in time to observe, at a distance, his own violent temperament. He could smell that morning in Philly, touch pieces of that kitchen almost. It amazed him, how fresh it had stayed in his mind, though he had called it up from memory so few times. It was like pulling frosty Tupperware up from the bottom of the Deepfreeze, only to find a perfectly preserved meal under the lid.

  There had been a few other occasions—when his sons had been young—that he’d flashed back to that day. When he’d disciplined them, for example, when he’d visited the outer limits of his rage. One summer, he had caught Carson lying naked in the backyard, reading on a blanket. The boy had been nine or ten. What exactly had disgusted him? Rusty wondered now. Was it the sight of his bare skin before the neighbors, this skinny blond boy, so hairless and strange-looking, sprawled facedown on one of Judy’s afghans like a feral cat? Rusty had stood at the back door, agog for a few minutes, watching the boy lazily scratch an elbow, then his shoulder blade, legs crossed, toes flicking at the grass.