Marry or Burn

by Valerie Trueblood

  “It was lucky. Luckier than seeing a real plane. I used to wait . . . I used to almost pray to see one, for a while there.”

  In the driveway she said, “Can you pray at that age?”

  HE GOT UP early and went down the block in the near dark to shoot baskets at Chris’s old house. While he was gone Chris had moved. His mother blamed it on Chris’s dad. “He got a raise. So right away you know Katie had to have a horse.” Katie was Chris’s little sister and nobody could stand her attitude. “So now they have one and they board it next door. Couldn’t be more convenient for Katie.”

  In front of Chris’s old house the hollow bashing of the ball was a shock, in the quiet. He saw lights come on next door, and he tucked the ball and left. He saw his mother through the fogged front window—she was keeping the house hot—sitting very still on the couch in the T-shirt she slept in, with the baby on her lap. She was looking through the window at him, her face puffy and blank. Suddenly she snapped to and waved.

  He took off his coat. “Look what I found in my pocket.”

  It was a pacifier. She smiled her old smile. “I snuck that jacket while you were gone. Do you mind? I won’t wear it anymore. It’s too big for me anyway.”

  Holding the ball, he flopped down at the other end of the couch in the steamy room. Across from them was the broad, high-riding armchair he had noticed last night, brown leather or something that looked like leather, with a bulging headrest and sleeves on the arms, and a handle like a gearshift on the side of it. “Where’d you get that?”

  “I bought it. It’s a recliner. Do you think it’s ugly? It is ugly. I just wanted something . . . substantial in here. Bad, huh?”

  “It’s OK.”

  The baby was awake on her lap, staring at him with its blue protruding eyes, like Mr. Lofgren’s. And the ears. It screwed up its face to cry, but instead of crying jerked the big head several times in a kind of pitcher’s windup.

  “He’s too sleepy to nurse. Did you hear him in the night? He doesn’t get up much compared to most, do you, buddy, do you?” She picked something off the faded yellow sleeper, which looked as if the baby had already worn it out in his crib life. Now the crib was at the foot of her bed, but Gabe had the feeling she had had it in his room. Everything was where it was supposed to be in his room but there was a sticky smell when you stepped inside the door.

  “He’s cute.”

  “Honey, you don’t have to keep saying that. He’s funny-looking at the moment, if the truth be told. Well, I’m going to get him ready.”

  “Ready for what?”

  “He’s going when I go.”

  “But I’ll be here. I could keep him.”

  “Honey, I’ll just take him to Mattie. His sitter.” For a second Gabe thought, his sister?

  “He has a sitter who takes just two others, two babies. He’s used to her; he does this every day.” She dropped the blanket on the rug and swung the baby above it, causing him to kick and stub his feet on each other, rasping the cracked vinyl heels. Why didn’t she dress him in something newer than that?

  The baby didn’t want to be on his back; he thrashed, grunted, and rolled his eyeballs at her in a ridiculous, threatening way, like a fish scowling in a bowl.

  Even serial killers had their diapers changed at one time. No one changing them knew what was to come. No one had any idea what was cramped up in a little shrimp body waiting to unfold. A baby did not know it was not innocent.

  “They were going to give me a leave but it never materialized. Then they were going to let me take him to school with me because I don’t have anything to do, but no, dammit. Bad example.” She unzipped the suit and peeled it down, releasing a rich, sour smell that seemed to excite the baby, who flailed his arms and made a trilling noise. His tongue was another limb, so active it made his chin slick, as well as the creased area that would have been a neck if he had had a neck.

  “Hand me those.” She wiped the yellow paste off the baby’s tapered buttocks, which were remarkably smooth and clean-looking under it. “I know you could watch him. But it’s hard to take care of a baby this age. They’re irritating. They tire you.”

  “Hey, whatever.” He bounced the ball off the new chair.

  “Gabe, I haven’t explained anything to you. About Lars.”

  “You don’t have to explain to me.”

  “I feel as if I do need to. Give me a chance to do it. Look at me. Listen. One child was all I ever needed. One. You. I was . . . it was . . . I said to myself, that was stupid, you got pregnant, but you’re thirty-nine, you can either do this or forget that whole side of life. Babies. The part of life that ends. I mean it ends. I know it’s hard to see that, at your age.”

  “Hey, I think you should do what you want. So when do I go back to school? I might as well get started.”

  She had her chin on the baby’s head. “Let’s wait awhile. A few days. I called to see if Chris could come over this weekend and his mom wants you to come down there instead. Tomorrow. See the new place. He’s out of school for parent conferences. She’s taking off work to see his teacher.”

  “How come?”

  “Conferences. Just the routine thing where they tell you your kid is distracting everybody, or everybody is distracting him, that stuff. But she’s worried about him. You know how she is. The music worries her, the swearing, the drugs, she thought the suburbs would be safe, blah, blah.”

  “His crazy friends.”

  “If you say that all the time, you’ll convince yourself, honey.”

  He moved closer. She saw he was going to touch the baby and she smiled at him. He said, “I just want to feel his ears.”

  HE WAS COLD, waiting in the shadow of the garage across the street, behind a recycling bin. The ground was yellow with wet leaves. Mr. Lofgren lived in an old neighborhood; all up and down the block the old trees with fat, knotted trunks had burst the sidewalk and pried up the street with their roots. Right at that moment he was up on one of the roots, balancing himself.

  The windows of the Lofgrens’ house were steamed up just like the windows at his own house. Two or three of them had sheets of plastic nailed up around them in preparation for winter, and there was a ladder propped against the house. There was no garage, or he could have turned on the ignition in Mr. Lofgren’s car—though he would have needed the car key—and locked the car and, when Lofgren came to investigate, shut him in with the exhaust. He had seen this done on TV. Though what had prevented the victim from leaving the garage the way he had come, through the house? Or just opening the garage door from inside?

  Would he want to do that? Not that. But something. He knew Mr. Lofgren got off early on Thursdays because of the extra time he put in coaching. His car was on the street so he was home, though no lights were on in the front room. Gabe imagined him in a den in the back, sitting in front of the TV. If they were home from day care his younger daughters would be in there, little droopy girls hanging around not knowing enough to memorize what he looked like: his big forearms thickly covered with blond hair, his quarterback jersey with the white latex 11, his size 13 feet. Gabe probably knew more about the man than they did.

  At the beginning of his ninth-grade year Lofgren had said Gabe was turning into a good ball handler. But he had not built up the speed that was expected of him, and almost as quickly as his ability to grab rebounds had come on, it was gone; his mind had robbed his body of it. When he got out on the court in PE his brain locked on to some string of words—even some rule stamped on the equipment bins—and ran them, until at a certain point the rhythm would get in the way of what his body was doing and he would be shut in with the sound, and a nearly irresistible feeling that the others were not on the court with him, were in fact far enough away that he could not tell for sure what they were shouting. With each occurrence the sensation had an added power and reasonableness. And there was a certain way Mr. Lofgren came to eye him, and slap him on the back, and pick him for errands, that made him think Lofgren—always ready
to kid around but not, Gabe thought looking back, really as funny, or smart, or tuned in to his athletes as most of the kids considered him to be—thought something was the matter with him, something that had to be talked over with his mother. So, the telephone call. “Gabe? Carl Lofgren. Is your mom at home?” So that was the beginning of that.

  Two hours had gone by soundlessly, except for the tap of pigeons’ beaks. Something had attracted a flock of pigeons and all afternoon they had been stabbing at the pavement, near enough to his feet that he could feel it through his shoe soles. A bird needed a lot to eat, because of its metabolism, the number of seeds and insects it had to eat to stay alive and keep scratching away at the insects living on it, in its feathers and on its skin. Everything eating. The thought began to exert an unpleasant spell. He couldn’t decide whether pink, the pink of rubber bands, was supposed to be the color of pigeons’ feet—he could not recall ever seeing it before—or whether this was a rare group of pigeons. All right. He pressed his back against the tree; he was not going to dwell on birds, or their feet, or the life of no arms and of pecking the sidewalk.

  He was not going to pay attention to anything and everything, as he had.

  He blew on his hands and pressed them over his cold ears. Suddenly a woman walked past the front window. So Lofgren’s wife was at home. She was supposed to be a checker at the Safeway, that’s what his mother said. He could see that she was small, like his mother, and not screaming at anybody, not holding her head or waving her arms. She merely passed by the window, holding newspapers under her arm. No screams, no tears. She did not see him.

  Just after four o’clock by his watch, the door opened. He crouched behind the bin as Mr. Lofgren came out onto the porch. He was taller and bigger in the belly and shoulders than Gabe had been remembering, longer-armed, pulling on his football jacket with the leather sleeves. The air lifted the thin blond hair on top of his head. Like an animal emerging from a burrow, he aimed his big forehead and nose to one side and the other. He bent and picked up two yellow leaves off his doormat and dropped them over the edge of the porch, and then he ran down the steps, shaking out his knees to either side. He opened the trunk, pulled out a car seat and chucked it into the back of the car, and swiped leaves off the windshield with his sleeve. When he got in, the tires spread with his weight. They scraped, angled out, and he drove away down the block.

  The car stopped with a thud and went into reverse. He roared back, braking in front of the recycling bin. “Hi there,” he said, rolling down the window. “Why don’t you get in and I’ll give you a ride home. I’m going to pick up Lars. Get in.”

  Gabe stood frozen.

  “Get in.”

  He had to. When he did, he and Mr. Lofgren faced each other and shook hands. He looked briefly into Mr. Lofgren’s big shiny eyes and away. Mr. Lofgren’s hand was large, dry, and hot, while his own, he felt, was cold and moist and had not kept pace with his growth.

  “So I hear Lars was the name of your brother,” he found the voice to say after a block or so, when Mr. Lofgren drove on without speaking.

  “Yes it was.”

  “I didn’t know that,” he said lamely. Lars Lofgren, he said to himself. Stupid name.

  “Well, we’ll be getting to know a good bit about each other,” Mr. Lofgren said, driving with one hand. Some moments passed before he looked over at Gabe. “My brother Lars,” he said, “stepped on a mine. He was dragging his sergeant, bringing him in. I didn’t see it, I was back at the base.” He pulled up in front of a small house with a tricycle in the yard.

  “That musta been bad,” Gabe said. “Both of you out there.”

  Mr. Lofgren leaned towards him. “That’s exactly what your mother would say.” He jumped out of the car and on the sidewalk he signaled for Gabe to roll down his window. He came close, breathing on the glass as it went down. “Man, it was the best thing we ever did.”

  While they were piling the satchels, pack, infant seat, and blankets into the car, the baby, slung into the car seat sideways, began to cry. “Hey!” Mr. Lofgren said, and closed his hand over the baby’s whole face. He rubbed. The crying stopped and the baby’s stunned eyes fixed themselves on Mr. Lofgren, who did it again. Slowly the baby smiled. He widened his eyes, and then shut them tightly, waiting. Mr. Lofgren did it again, more roughly, and again, until Gabe felt a stitching in his own scalp and said, “I don’t know, does he really like that?”

  “Does that grin tell you anything?”

  They let themselves into the house with Mr. Lofgren’s key. After they dropped the stuff in the hallway the first thing Mr. Lofgren did was grab a bottle out of the refrigerator and crash down into the new chair. He tilted the chair back and jostled the baby into the crook of his arm.

  “Don’t you have to warm it?” Gabe said.

  “Nah, that’s a myth.” He was jolting the baby up and down as it sucked. “This is her milk, you know. Pumps it every day. It’s an incredible thing, a beautiful thing. We bottle-fed all four of ours. What did I know?” Gabe could hear the air bubbles going into the baby’s mouth from the nipple. That was not right. He remembered Chris’s mother feeding Katie from a bottle, speaking to him, Gabe, for some reason. Saying how you had to do this and that. In Chris’s room they made fun of the baby. They must have been four. If they were four, his father was alive, maybe coming to get him at Chris’s house.

  He sat down in the rocking chair and shut his eyes. The streaming of the bubbles went on and on. Finally he said, “Maybe you oughta burp him.”

  “Well, why not?” Mr. Lofgren said. “Let’s give it a try.” He heaved the baby onto his shoulder and thumped him, whereupon milk spewed all over the back of the chair. “Whoa, cleanup crew. Gabe?” The phone rang. Mr. Lofgren rolled out of the chair and scooped up the phone with the hand that had the bottle. “Hey. Whadda you mean who is it? It’s me. We’re feeding Lars. Gabe. Yeah. Gave him a ride. Yeah. He came to see me.” He winked at Gabe. “Well, come on then. Yeah. I can stay. I’ll stay for dinner. They’re all right. They will. They’ll come through all right.”

  “Who will?” Gabe said rudely when he hung up.

  The blond eyebrows drew together in the big dented forehead. Mr. Lofgren said with dignity, “We were discussing my kids. My girls. Not the big ones, they’re OK. The little ones.”

  “I bet they’re mad,” Gabe said.

  “Mad? No. No, I wouldn’t say they’re mad.”

  “Well what are they?”

  Halfway into the chair Mr. Lofgren gave him a look before he let himself down with the baby. He arranged himself. Then he said, “I’ll tell you. What are they? They’re forgiving. They’re forgiving.” He thought for a minute. “That’s the way girls are, with their father.” Then—Gabe could not believe it was happening—Lofgren’s eyes developed a brighter shine and a big flashing tear welled out onto his cheek.

  He didn’t make a sound, but muscles were pulling in his face and a few tears dripped onto his shirt and onto the baby. Gabe couldn’t look. His own face felt large and hot. He was surprised, somewhere else in his mind, that the wind rattling the window and the leaves sailing past it and the sound of the radiator banging on did not crowd in on him as they might have. In the months of his illness these things would have distracted him from any embarrassing situation. In fact they had done away with any such thing as an embarrassing situation.

  At length Mr. Lofgren wiped his eyes with his thumb and took a shaky breath. With no preliminaries, the baby had fallen asleep. Gabe didn’t want to get up and leave because leaving would suggest he was not in the living room of his own house. That was another thing, the drug slowed his decisions. He had always been quick to decide. There was still the baby’s mess going down the back of the chair. “Guess I’ll wipe that up,” he said, without doing anything.

  Mr. Lofgren said, “Your mother is a wonderful woman.”

  Gabe remembered a cartoon in which a cow was telling a calf, as another cow jumped over the moon, “Your mother is a remarka
ble woman.” He remembered the calf’s stupid, open mouth, its eyelashes. He felt himself grin. Mr. Lofgren frowned, his tears gone. “You think that’s funny? I’m not trying to be funny. At school, you boys, you get used to me being funny, I know that.” He had fallen into a kind of singsong, leaning forward. Because he coached basketball he sometimes tried to get a black rhythm into his talk, a habit everyone, black and white, made fun of. Harmless fun, because it was Mr. Lofgren. “You boys think highly of me, I know. I know that. I would guess there’s some disappointment. Especially you, Gabe. You must be disappointed at what I’ve done.”

  “What, having a kid?”

  “You think that’s all there is to it? You think we just went and had this kid? There’s a lot involved here. This is a life here.”

  Maybe a serial killer, Gabe thought.

  Mr. Lofgren lumbered to his feet with the sleeping baby and laid it down ceremoniously on the couch. “Listen,” he said. “We named him Lars, right? That means something to me. That means he’s my responsibility. But I have four more kids. Your mother understands that.”

  “You mean you’re not getting married.”

  “We’re getting married,” he said, his big mouth turning down. “I know it, your mother knows it, and my wife knows it.” He pointed two fingers at Gabe. “I’ll tell you something. My brother Lars didn’t get married. Why not? He matured early. He could have gotten married. He almost did, before he went. These were two kids who never broke up in four years of high school. Next thing, he was dead. But I’ll tell you this, if he had married Ronna—had he married her, they’d have been married for life. That’s the kind of person he was. No fooling around, no giving in. No retreat, baby, no surrender. He would not have disappointed you boys. You see what I’m saying? I’m disappointed in myself.”