The Cradle

by Patrick Somerville

  Matt stood up.

  “This town have a bank?” he asked.

  Matt withdrew the cash from an ATM back on Main Street, then walked back down toward Ferris Street. On the way there, he’d stopped thinking about what good might come from the cradle’s return and had begun to think about Darren again, and something he’d said back at the house.

  Pregnant women. Am I right?

  So now it seemed obvious. The marketplace.

  Caroline hadn’t made Darren steal the cradle because it had any particular cash value or sentimental value to her—she’d sent him into the house to take it because of its utilitarian value. She’d sent him in to take it because she had been pregnant or planned to be pregnant again.

  With Darren. She’d left Marissa and Glen because she was going to start again somewhere else. Her version of escape was to begin.

  It was simple, but it left damage behind that she had to keep moving away from. What kind of woman, Matt wondered, would do this? What kind of person? It was the opposite of Marissa, whose world had become one singular laser beam of attention. If he were to suggest it to her, she would not be able to mentally process the concept. Begin but never stay? Also, if this story was true, where was the child?

  If there was a child.

  It wasn’t dusk yet, but dusk was coming. Matt saw a pay phone. Leaning against a light pole, he deposited the quarters and dialed home. Marissa answered after one ring.

  “Hi, baby,” she said. “Is this a you-got-it call?”

  “No,” Matt said. “Not yet. But I might soon.”

  “Really?” He could hear her eyes go wide.

  “Maybe. I’m not sure yet.” He cleared his throat, looked down at the ground. He was not used to lying to his wife. “I’ve gotta go a few more places. The truck’s getting some miles.”

  “Should I ask you where you are right now?”

  “Probably not,” Matt said, looking at the house.

  “Okay,” she said. “Dad and I are going to see a movie later on. That’s all.”

  “Did you go to work today?”

  “No. I just hurt all over. Every place I go is uncomfortable. I was lying on top of a bed of pillows on the couch and I couldn’t even stay there.”

  Matt imagined her there, splayed out like a queen, with every pillow in the house beneath her.

  “So you’re not going to be back tonight.”

  “I might be,” he said. “I still don’t know.”

  “Okay,” she said. “I’m glad that it’s working.”

  “All right,” he said. “I love you. I’ll talk to you soon.”

  “Okay. Be careful.”

  He hung up the phone and walked back to Darren’s house.

  He knocked at the front door and heard the dog barking. No one came, though. After a few more knocks, he went around the house and found it had a small backyard. Darren was sitting on a patio chair with another beer. When Matt came around the corner, Darren looked up and said, “I thought you may have reneged.”

  “No,” said Matt. “Here.” He handed him the fat pile of money. For a moment the number of hours of work it constituted surfaced in his mind like a submarine and startled him. He beat back the feeling.

  Darren took the money, looked at it, looked at Matt, and stuffed it all into his back pocket.

  “I’ll help you carry it up.”

  The two men carried the cradle up the stairs carefully—Matt went backward. The dog was moving around behind him, and he had to stop a couple of times and kick backward lightly to get him to move. Darren yelled at Darren a few times and told him he was a sonofabitch. Out on the street, they could just get the cradle inside the truck’s door. Matt angled it and had it sitting in the seat. He reached over and pulled the seat belt across it, and Darren laughed and shook his head when he saw that happening.

  “How about another beer before you go, then?” he asked, hands on his hips. “Now that we’re close friends and all.”

  “Okay,” Matt said. “I could do that.”

  They went back around the house.

  Evening was coming finally, and it was cooling off. Matt was tired and took the beer gladly from the man who not an hour ago vaguely threatened him with a gun. He just couldn’t tell about Darren. He was clean when he was supposed to be a slob and smarter than he was supposed to be, too. And yet in him Matt sensed something deeply selfish. It was something in the way he joked, something in the way his eyes went up when he thought, or how he shook his head or scratched at his little beard or wore his sunglasses on his head. Something in the way he’d received him. Matt didn’t know. Had the man been hurt by Caroline in the same way Glen had been? He didn’t seem like the kind of person you could hurt. He just seemed like the kind of person who hurt other people. You could get hurt only if your heart ever pointed outward.

  Matt said, “So what do you do?”

  “Not a lot,” he said. “I went to an interview today about fifty miles from here. I’ve been painting houses in town, but there’s better work in Rochester. What do you do?”

  “Factory work. Chemical plant.”

  “Steady?”

  “I’ve been there eight years.”

  “Sounds just delightful,” said Darren. Then he burped loudly, and the noise brought Darren the Dog to the back door to check things out through the screen, ears up.

  “How often do voices in your head talk to you?” Darren asked.

  “Never.”

  “Not even your own voice?”

  “I do think, if that’s what you mean.”

  “But how can that voice be you, if you’re the one who’s listening? Do you see my point here, Matt?”

  “I’ve never thought about it.”

  Darren scrunched up his lips, nodded, took a long pull from his beer. “People speak to me,” he said. “They do. I thought for some time it was only one using different voices, as in ventriloquism, et cetera. But now I’m not so sure.”

  Matt looked at the fence and worked on his beer.

  “Want another one?”

  “Okay.”

  Darren got up, went inside, and came back with more beers.

  “Interesting story,” Darren said, “along those same lines. I once tried to become a shaman. There are whole courses for it, you know.”

  “What does one do to be a shaman?”

  “Had to go all the way to India,” said Darren. “Yes,” he said, nodding. “You don’t see it if you look at me. I bet you’re wondering what I’m talking about. Voices, shamanism. Let me tell you. Everything with being a shaman didn’t exactly fucking work out, granted, but beyond that I like to think of myself as a self-educated philosopher.”

  “What kind of—”

  “Now I went all the way and I’m a nihilist,” Darren said, “which basically makes me the be-all of philosophers. I believe in nothing. After a long and arduous path of studying, I’ve come upon that. What I realized was that actually I’ve always been that, and it just took me reading about seven hundred books at about one word per hour to finally figure out what it was called.”

  “Okay,” Matt said. “Wonderful.”

  “You see, it’s about the human condition,” Darren said. “I never judge anyone. That makes me special; most people do. My mother, for example. That woman just hates everyone. She’s stuck in that, she’ll never get out of that. I don’t think shit about anything. All I ever do is watch people operate.”

  “You mind if I ask you a question?” Matt said.

  “No, I am not a multimillionaire.”

  “What happened?” Matt said, ignoring him. “Back then? With Caroline?”

  Darren raised one corner of his upper lip, then closed one eye.

  “Oh yes,” he said. “Caroline. Isn’t it obvious to you? I don’t know. Maybe I don’t know what obvious is. Definitions are suspicious things. It’s not obvious?”

  “Some,” Matt said. “You met her down in Milwaukee and you left together. Somehow. And then she put you up t
o robbing Glen’s house for her.”

  “Glen.” Darren nodded. “That was his name, wasn’t it? Quiet little pushover mouse-person?”

  “He’s a good man and also my father-in-law.”

  “Good. What’s good?”

  “Good is good.”

  “Yeah, well, I guess that fits,” said Darren, “as Caroline is not a good woman and I am not a particularly good man. According to the way you’re meaning it, at least.”

  “She left you?”

  “She left me. But not for about five years. Then she just took off one night and left me with the kid.”

  Matt breathed in slowly, then exhaled through his nose, looking down at his boots.

  “There’s a kid.”

  “There’s a kid,” said Darren, “rocked in that very cradle. You’re shitting me. You’re telling me you didn’t know that? What am I, like, the only person who can tell what’s going on?”

  “How old is he?”

  “I think he should be five now.”

  “Should be?”

  “I do some proactive blocking out of some of these things, you’ve gotta understand.”

  “Where is he?”

  “He’s at my mother’s now.”

  “And where is that?”

  Darren turned and looked at him.

  “You’re talking about a person who is basically my wife’s brother,” said Matt, “if you’re wondering why I care.”

  Darren nodded, breathed in and out once, thinking. “Well, okay. Fine. But it might be the kind of thing better left undisturbed,” Darren said. “Just to give you some advice on that. I know you’re going to be a father soon. Why don’t you worry about that? I usually advocate thinking of history as cement. You know. It gets hard. That’s it. That’s what I suggest to my clients.”

  “Why did you give him up?”

  “Because I had a life of my own,” he said. “Because I don’t want no kid wandering around my house. I already have Darren. But beyond that, from an abstract point of view, if you will. This one Caroline had, he gave me the willies. Never talked. And once Caroline was gone, do you think I had the faintest idea what to do with him? No. Absolutely not. I just told you I didn’t care. We sat here together and watched TV. I’m no father. It doesn’t fit.”

  “But you are his father.”

  “Maybe. That’s in doubt. She had a few flings. I’m not convinced one way or the other.”

  “You were here, he was here. He thinks you’re his father.”

  “He doesn’t remember me.”

  “You couldn’t have—”

  “Here is the essential truth of this, Matt,” Darren said loudly, much more agitated than he’d been. “It doesn’t matter. Not in the long run. Let me make manifest my point of view for you. If we were to sit down and tally up every single person in this town, then state, let alone this country, let alone the world, it wouldn’t make a difference what happens to him. If you hold anything up alongside that, you come down with exactly zero. And so I said to myself, Hell, if it doesn’t matter one way or another, in the same way nothing does, not really, then if I want to live this way, then I’m gonna live this way. Ain’t no goddamned little kid going to alter the path that I’m on. I am a motherfucking thinker and I am on a motherfucking path. And I don’t give a shit if my path is all alone and terrible, at the very least it’s my terrible, and I’m going to walk along on my terrible path all by myself and piss when I want, et cetera. That’s how it was done to me and that’s how I’m doing it.”

  About a minute passed after Darren stopped talking.

  “You must go to see him, then,” Matt said. “At your mother’s.”

  “My mother and I do not talk nor correspond.”

  “When was the last time you saw him?”

  “When I dropped him off.”

  “When was that?”

  “Year and a half ago.”

  Matt paused. “Mind if I use your bathroom?”

  “Go ahead.”

  Matt got up and opened the screen door. Darren the Dog jumped all over him as he went to the bathroom. Inside, he peed, then looked at himself in the mirror. He was feeling something he didn’t recognize.

  It felt, in a way, like the good feeling, about the days rolling by—the gratitude.

  Except it was turned on its head and reversed in some way, and felt powerful, and dark.

  Back in the kitchen, Matt held open the door and said to Darren, “How about another one?”

  It took a solid three hours to get him falldown drunk. Twice Matt went into the house to vomit. His other trick to keep up with Darren was to just open a new beer whenever Darren opened a new beer and set his half-full beer down in the grass, as though he had finished it. Darren’s final musings on the night came in the form of a huge piss beside his grill and a comment about too many Hispanics moving into town. After that he sat back down in his chair, tilted to the side, and collapsed onto the ground.

  Matt considered helping him up and dragging him into bed, but he was drunk, despite his best efforts not to be, and besides, since he’d learned about the kid, he’d been having more and more trouble holding back the urge to stand up and kick Darren in the jaw and watch as every one of his teeth fell out of his face. So it was fine that he would spend the night on the slab of concrete that constituted his porch. Matt let himself into the house and looked around for a desk or a file drawer. In the dining room he stumbled about and found a shoe box full of receipts, but that didn’t help him. He went upstairs to the bedroom. It was also neat—the bed was even made. Some bachelor. Matt looked through some drawers and again found nothing. He went back downstairs, to the kitchen. Beneath the silverware he found a drawer that had papers and postcards in it, along with a roll of outdated thirty-two-cent stamps. He shuffled through the cards; at the bottom, he found a birthday card, still tucked inside its envelope. He pulled it out.

  On the front there was a pig. Inside, the bold writing said oink. Beneath it, in a scrawl, the message said, “Happy birthday, Darren. This will be a strong year for Pisces. Your mom.”

  He slid the card back inside the envelope and looked at the return address. Rensselaer, Indiana. The postmark made it three years old.

  Matt copied the address down onto a blank envelope he found, then put the card back at the bottom of the pile, then put the pile back right where he’d found it. Outside he looked disdainfully at Darren again, then went to the half-full beers he’d had around his feet and emptied them out, one by one, into the grass. He put the cans back beneath the chair. Finally, he turned out the light and left Darren in darkness, just a tangled curl of arms and legs. He walked around the outside of the house, got in his truck, and drove away.

  He took special care to drive well on his way out of town. He was not sober, not by a long shot. Once he’d gotten a few miles east, he pulled over at a gas station and bought a thirty-two-ounce coffee and a bottle of No-Doz, ate three of the pills in the parking lot, filled up with gas, drove off, and turned the radio up loud and zoned out, spending most of his mental energy on aiming high and not weaving. The cradle was right there beside him, stable with the belt around it; once in a while he found himself touching it. It was past midnight, but if he drove all night he’d be there before the sun came up, or at the very least just as it was coming up.

  And he was. Right at sunrise, he was parked three blocks from his house with the engine off.

  It can be completely done right now, he said to himself. I can tear this envelope up, even, and walk inside with this in my arms and be the hero. And then time will start.

  He had, though, parked this far away from the house, and he knew the reason. The reason was the feeling. It was a fog, lighter than it had been back with Darren but still there, absolutely still there, and it was not at all a joyful celebration of life. It was the same rage.

  He thought back to the answering machine, when he’d given up on it before he’d encountered this, and he thought of Darren’s bullshit pontific
ations on the world and on life. That had been it. That man had been the conflagration of all wrong ideas in the universe.

  He looked at the cradle. Just walk inside with it in your arms, all will be well.

  He was so tired—if he walked inside, he could lay his head down on the pillow beside Marissa, sleep in, eat a big breakfast in the morning, then try to get a Sunday shift to start making up for what he’d spent on the cradle.

  He reached into his pocket and looked at the envelope, crumpled now. The address in his wobbly drunken handwriting.

  He looked at the cradle.

  He started the car, drove past his own home, and got back on the highway, this time heading south.

  8

  He called Marissa from the motel just past noon and said, “Another day, I think. I’m close.”

  “You sound tired.”

  “I’ve driven a lot,” he said. “I’m going to get some sleep now, actually. I just got a motel room.”

  “It’s noon.”

  “My schedule is not quite a nine-to-five schedule at the moment.”

  She told him about the movie she’d seen with her father, then talked about what it was like to feel the baby kicking when he wasn’t around. She’d had a dream that she’d gone into labor early and had gone to the hospital. She’d told the doctors the baby had to wait for Matt’s return, and then a nurse had come in and taken her hand and said, “But you are giving birth to your husband.”

  “Good Lord,” Matt said.

  “I know. Thank God I didn’t have to watch you crown.”

  “I’ll be back before anything happens,” he said. “Don’t worry about that.”

  “All right. Come home soon. I’m missing you. And on top of that I’ve got a surprise.”