by John Searles
With the two of them sleeping near me, I felt the way a man must feel with his wife and child. Not a father like mine. One who cared about the people around him. Loyal to his wife. Loving toward his children. I wondered if that was the type of man Mr. Burdan was. If he had been home every evening of my brother’s childhood, waiting to hug and kiss the boy he refused to return to my mother. I wondered, too, if I would ever have a child of my own who I loved that much.
When the bus arrived in Holedo, the baby started fussing and crying the second we pulled into the station. The reality of what I had gotten myself into came back with her every shriek.
I had taken a baby.
I had no place to go.
“I’ll carry her off the bus for you and get her settled down if you like,” Jeanny said when she stretched and stood. “Just grab my guitar for me.”
I handed Sophie over and picked up Jeanny’s guitar case. When I looked back to make sure we’d left nothing behind, I caught sight of a few of Jeanny’s scattered M&M’s in the crack between our two seats. I thought of that freckled girl on the ride home the night my mother died. I saved their lives, she had whispered to me. Take care of them. This time I left the candy on the seat as I walked off behind Jeanny and the baby.
The sky was the steely blue color of dusk. It wasn’t snowing, but random snowflakes lingered in the air, blown from the rooftop of the bus station. One landed on Jeanny’s nose, and she blew it away. “I’ll trade you one baby for one guitar,” she said, smiling.
“Go fish,” I told her.
We had a hard time switching Sophie for the guitar, and our hands got tangled for just a moment.
“Got her?”
“Got her.”
When I was holding Sophie again and she had her guitar, we stood there not talking. Jeanny kicked at the frozen fossil of a tire track in the snow with her black boot. Across the lot a metallic blue Barracuda like the one Leon always wanted was spinning doughnuts in the unplowed area. The engine revved and revved.
“Well, I guess I’ll see you around,” I said, even though I probably wouldn’t.
“See you,” she said, and another snowflake landed on her nose. This time she let it melt before touching her face with her oversize mitten.
I had the urge to lean toward her and press my lips to hers. With Sophie in my arms, though, I didn’t think I could manage it. There were questions I wanted to ask Jeanny, but I couldn’t marshal the energy in my tongue to get them out. “I’m glad we met,” I said.
“Me, too,” she told me.
Still we stood there. “Okay,” I said. “I really have to get the baby out of the cold.”
“Okay,” she said. “Bye, Sophie. Bye, Dominick.”
With that she turned and clomped off across the parking lot, her guitar case banging against her back. I tried to memorize the details of this moment, this other life I might have led, walking away from me. And then, before I knew it, Jeanny turned the corner and was gone.
To stop the funny feeling in my chest, I rocked Sophie in my arms and stared down at her. “Okay,” I said, trying to sound sure of myself. “Let’s find us a place to stay.”
I made my way to the pay phone and dialed Leon’s number. Mrs. Diesel answered, her cigarette-rattled voice blasting into the phone. Cheap Trick played on the stereo in the background. “Is Leon there?” I asked, dropping my voice and mumbling in hopes that she wouldn’t recognize me.
“He’s out joyriding in his new machine,” she told me.
“What new machine?” I said, switching Sophie from one arm to the other and rocking her.
“He got his license last week, and now he’s got a car,” she explained.
I squinted my eyes at the driver of the Barracuda doing doughnuts across the lot. Leon. Right in front of my face. But where the hell did he get that car?
“Is this Dominick?” Leila asked over a guitar riff.
“It’s Ed,” I said and hung up the phone. I walked across the lot, cradling the baby in my arms. As Leon twisted the car in circles, I stood by a snowbank and watched him. Snow sprayed and cascaded all around his dream machine. Finally, when he fishtailed to a stop, I called out to him.
“Well, if it isn’t Dominick Pindle,” he said, getting out of the car. He was wearing a burgundy ski jacket and aviator sunglasses like my father’s. All new duds. “You’ve been in the paper all month. Your dad reported you missing.”
“Where’d you get the wheels?” I asked, ignoring his spiel.
He crossed his arms, leaned against the car. Looked at the hood, looked back at me. “Let’s just say that Ed and I came up with a moneymaking scheme.”
“Why are you and Ed like bosom buddies all of a sudden?”
He took off his leather driving gloves. I guess he thought he was driving on Hogway’s racetrack. “What’s the matter? You jealous or something?”
“Hardly,” I said. “It’s just that he’s such a loaf.”
“You’re entitled to your opinion,” Leon said. “So what’s with the bambino? Oh, wait. Don’t tell me. I knew it. You did get Edie pregnant. You know, at first I was jealous. But she was too old for me anyway. You’re a father. Congratulations, man. Who knew you’d beat me to the punch?”
I stood there staring at him, trying to figure how I was going to unload all my shit. Sophie started to cry again, and I rocked her until she shushed. I was beginning to realize that she was happiest in motion. The second I stopped moving, she got fussy.
“You and the bambino want a ride?” Leon asked.
“That’s a start,” I said. “But I need more than just a ride.”
“Get in,” he said, pulling open the passenger door and holding out his arm chauffeur style. “We’ll talk.”
I climbed carefully into the car with the baby on my lap. The bucket seats still had that new-car smell. Like a pool liner and new carpeting mixed together. On the dashboard Leon had stuck one of those silhouettes of a big-breasted naked woman that usually showed up on mud flaps of eighteen-wheelers. “Where’s the fuzzy dice?” I asked, still rocking Sophie.
“What do you think I am, Pindle? Low class?”
“No comment,” I said.
Leon turned on the stereo and pushed in an eight-track. Daltrey was singing, “Give us room and close the door. Your boy won’t be a boy no more.” He put the car in gear, and we fishtailed out of the unplowed part of the lot.
“Easy,” I said. “No car games. We’ve got a baby in here.”
“I hear you, Pops. You’re concerned for your kid. I understand.”
“She’s not my kid,” I told him.
“Whose is it then?” he said.
I blinked, sucked in a breath, looked down at Sophie’s pink face. Her squeezed-together eyelids. I knew she liked the wheels beneath us, all that motion. “She belongs to Edie. But I’m not the father.”
We pulled out onto the main street and drove toward the center of town. Surprisingly, Leon seemed cautious out on the real roads, like the new driver he was. He kept both hands on the wheel. He braked early for lights. He didn’t even mouth off or say anything until we got to Hanover Street. “Then who’s the father?”
We were passing Maloney’s Pub, the Dew Drop Inn. I thought of that night last summer when I cruised this strip with my mother and Marnie before driving over to Edie’s house. Hadn’t it been my suggestion to go there in the first place? No surprise that I was to blame from the get-go. “She’s my father’s baby,” I said. “Edie doesn’t know I have her.”
“Whoa. Whoa. Whoa,” Leon said. “Did you just say that she doesn’t know you have the baby?”
“Correct,” I said. “Ten points.”
“And I take it, since your father reported you missing, that he doesn’t know either.”
“Ten more points,” I said.
We stopped at a light in the center of town. A truck pulled up next to us, and I glanced over, momentarily panicked that it might be my father. Thankfully, it wasn’t. I tried to hold Sophie l
ow on my lap, because I didn’t want anybody wondering what two teenage guys were doing joyriding with an infant. Sophie didn’t seem to like that, though, because she made one of her unhappy squeaks. After the light turned green, I lifted her up against my chest. I could feel the surge of the engine as we started moving again.
“In other words, you’re a kidnapper,” Leon said.
“You could put it that way,” I told him. “But since the baby is my father’s, that makes her my sister. She kind of belongs to me. I have every right to take her after what Edie did to my mother.”
At the mention of my mother, Leon was quiet. My mind flashed on the way I had chewed him out at her memorial service. About that letter. From your friend, he’d said, and I’d let him have it, told him never to mention Edie again. And here I was unloading all this crap on him. “Remember at my mother’s service when you said you wanted to tell me something about Edie? What was it?”
Leon shrugged his shoulders and stepped on the gas. “Who knows? I guess I was going to ask if you wanted that letter from her.”
“Burn it,” I told him.
We drove through a series of turns, and Leon snapped back into concentration mode. When we were on a straightaway again, he said, “Well, you’re just lucky there’s not a reward for you. Otherwise I’d be driving to the police station to turn your ass in.”
“Thanks,” I said. “I knew I could count on you.”
Leon reached one arm around to the backseat and produced a copy of the Holedo Herald. My picture was on the front page, a yearbook shot from the seventh grade that looked like somebody else now. A little kid with a crooked collar and an awkward smile. Hair parted unevenly with choppy bangs hanging over the forehead. Beneath the photo was that same headline from Truman’s disappearance. BOY STILL MISSING. The article gave all the details: “Dominick Pindle, 15, of 88 Dwight Avenue, was reported missing by his father, Roy Pindle, 42, of 88 Dwight Avenue. The report of his disappearance comes just weeks after the death of Theresa Pindle, 38, of 88 Dwight Avenue.”
“Do you think people will get the point that we live at 88 Dwight Avenue?” I said to Leon, thinking that the Holedo Herald really knew how to knock out some Pulitzer Prize–winning journalism. “I mean, it’s a little vague.”
“Huh?” he said, not paying any attention to me.
“Never mind,” I said, wanting to simply keep driving.
And that’s exactly what we did. We drove and drove and drove while Leon rattled on about his car, which he referred to as a she. She had a dual exhaust system. She had a pistol grip four-speed. She had a four-ten Dana rear end. She could do zero to sixty in 5.8 seconds. The whole time he spoke, I stared out the window at our scenic tour of moonlit Holedo—“the Hole,” as Jeanny had called it. I found myself wondering if one of the houses we passed might be hers and how she had gotten home on foot from the bus station. I imagined her inside one of the windows we breezed by, dreaming of her singing career or her next protest. I imagined—hoped was more like it—that she was thinking of me, too.
We passed the Doghouse.
We drove by the new police station.
We drove by the old police station, still closed, awaiting renovations from Vito Maletti.
When Leon finished yammering about his new set of wheels, I let him in on the entire Edie story. My kiss with her. The money. The baby. I gave him a blow-by-blow right up to the moment I called out to him in the parking lot of the bus station.
He didn’t say anything at first, because he seemed to be thinking. All that silence and brainpower produced, though, was “Whoa, man. That is a lot of heavy shit. What are you going to do now?”
“I need a place to stay until I figure that out. Any suggestions?”
“I’d let you stay at my place. But my mom would have a shit fit about the bambino. She hates kids. Happiest day of her life was when I turned sixteen.”
“That’s okay,” I said. “It’s a little too close to home anyway.”
“Ed’s grandparents have a cabin in the Poconos.”
“Forget it,” I said. “I don’t want him involved with my life.” Marnie was out, too, I realized once I gave it some serious thought. She wouldn’t be able to deal with my taking the baby. I had a desperate, sinking feeling in my stomach. When I looked out the window, we were passing the Holedo Motel. The yellow police tape was gone. Still no cars in the lot. A NO VACANCY sign hung out front. The place was empty. I stared at the two sets of cement stairs on each side of the motel, the crooked shutters on the row of windows. When I caught sight of room 5B, my stomach dropped still more. “Why is the motel closed?” I asked.
“After what happened to your mom, Old Man Fowler freaked. That night he got in his car and took off to Florida for the winter. The cops had everything cleaned up, and they took down the yellow tape a few days after you left. I hear the guy might sell the place.”
“I can stay there with Sophie,” I said, the second the idea occurred to me. It seemed strange and fitting at the same time.
Leon slowed the car down and did a 180. We headed back to the motel, pulled around to the rear of the building so no one would see us from the street. As soon as Leon cut the engine, Sophie began fussing. I rocked her in my arms. “How am I going to get in?”
“Leave that to the pro,” Leon said.
He got out of the car and opened his trunk. I watched him carry a crowbar toward the back office window. It occurred to me that the crowbar might have something to do with his and Ed’s moneymaking scheme. Breaking and entering. Robbing houses. I had my own life of crime to worry about, though, so I decided to mind my own business. Leon examined the window, and my guess was that he was looking for a place to jimmy the thing open. But then he stepped back and held the crowbar in the air like a baseball bat. A second later he swung and gave the window a whack. Glass came crashing down like Edie’s kitchen window had the night I threw that planter at it. Shattering, then silent.
“Open for business!” Leon announced, turning back to me and smiling.
“Jesus Christ, Leon. Couldn’t you have jimmied the lock or something?”
“Do I hear a complaint? Because you and the bambino are going to be mighty cold on the street tonight.”
“I just meant—Forget it. No complaints here.”
“Good,” Leon said. “I like a satisfied customer.” He took a blanket out of his trunk and threw it over the broken glass on the window ledge, then climbed inside. A moment later he came around and opened the back door. “Welcome to the Holedo Motel,” he said.
I stepped through the doorway carrying Sophie and thought of my mother checking in to this place. The newspaper article that ran after she died had quoted Fowler, who was working the desk: “A woman came in and said she needed a room. I didn’t notice anything unusual about her at the time.”
Nothing unusual except that she was about to die.
The office was cold and dark. The walls were covered with pictures of race cars as well as paintings of goldfish that looked like they’d been done with a paint-by-numbers kit. On the desk there was a meatball grinder, three stale brown lumps covered with dried red sauce, a single bite taken out of one end. I guessed Leon hadn’t been exaggerating when he said Fowler freaked out and left in a rush the night my mother died. I imagined him standing up from his meal, shaken and changed by what had happened here, and walking outside to his car. Driving south without so much as packing a suitcase. Leon flicked on a lamp and surveyed the office. Keys to each room hung on a rack by the desk, marked in descending order: 10A, 10B, 9A, 9B, 8A, 8B, and so on. “Would you and your sister like a suite with an ocean view, sir?” Leon said. “Or an economy room overlooking the septic tank?”
“I want to stay in Five-B,” I told him. “My mother’s room.”
Leon stopped for a moment, then scanned the row of hooks, grabbed the one I was asking for. “Are you sure?”
I knew it was a strange request. But I had come this far, and I wanted somehow to be close to my moth
er. The only way I knew how was to stay in the room where she had breathed her last breath. Maybe part of her—a spirit, a ghost—was still up there, waiting for me to return with the baby. Maybe she’d been leading me here all along. “I’m sure,” I told Leon.
“Okay,” he said and looked down at a sort of switchboard near the desk that reminded me of one an old-fashioned operator might use. Plugging pegs into holes, connecting people all over the world. Leon fiddled with the wires, then flicked a switch at the top of the board. “I believe your phone works now, sir. But there will be a five-dollar surcharge for every minute.”
“Thanks,” I said, trying to smile. We unlocked the front door of the office and peeked outside to be sure no cars were driving past. When there was a break in the traffic, we made our way up the stairs to 5B. The second Leon opened the door, it all came back to me. Marnie moaning and making that indecipherable sound, the police clustered around the stairwell, the way I made a break for the door and shoved myself inside, only to find my mother lying there. That night I had expected it to be Edie inside the room. And I wondered if there had been one brief second of relief that it wasn’t her on the floor, before I realized it was my mother.
The thought made me dizzy.
I sat with Sophie on the bed and looked around. A gold bedspread. Beige lamps on the two wooden nightstands, each with a tattered white shade. The curtains by the window were beige, too, and Leon pulled them shut, draped two blankets over the rod so no one would see the light on up here. A picture of a red stock car at Hogway’s was screwed into the wood-paneled wall. The number “5” painted yellow on the driver’s-side door.