Which was a damn sight more than he could say for his sex life. A dollar for each time there wouldn't have bought him dinner for one at any place fancier than the local Sizzler.
He stopped worrying about it as he stooped to pick up Doug. The baby really did sound upset, and the nightlight showed Pete that he had somehow managed to twist himself at right angles to the way Mary always set him down.
"All right, sport, what's going on here?" Doug yelled louder than ever as Pete lifted him. His father's hands under his chest squeezed the air from him until Pete shifted him into the crook of his left elbow. Pete stuck his right hand into Doug's diaper. The baby was dry. Pete frowned, just a little. There went the most obvious reason for Doug's distress.
"Maybe you spit up," Pete muttered. Doug's chin was damp, but then Doug's chin was often damp. This was only drool, not spit-up sour milk. Pete ran his hand over the crib sheet. It was dry too. Not only that, Doug threw out his arms and shrieked when his father bent down.
"I'm not going to drop you," Pete told him, though for an instant the prospect seemed tempting, if for no other reason than to get the little squawkbox away from his ear.
He felt Doug's forehead, to see if his son had a fever. Doug was cool. He stuck a finger in the baby's mouth, felt around to see if he was cutting a tooth. It was early, but still possible. It was possible, but not true.
"What's happening in there?" Mary asked from the master bedroom.
"Beats me." Pete remembered what he'd said at breakfast a couple of weeks before. "Maybe he's doing it on purpose."
He looked at Doug, who was still hollering—now probably in resentment at having something that wasn't a nipple shoved in his mouth. Then Doug met Pete's eye. He stopped crying for a moment, cocked his head to one side so he could peer up at his father out of the corner of his eye. It was his smug look, but something more was there, too. Gotcha, was what Pete thought.
"Why, you little sonofabitch!" he said.
He didn't realize he'd spoken out loud until Mary called, "What'd he do? Did he poop?"
Pete opened his mouth to answer, then left it hanging open. What was he going to tell her, that a nine-week-old baby had interrupted them because he was feeling mischievous? That he'd done it on purpose? She'd think he was crazy—he, Pete, not he, Doug.
If anyone else had told that to him, Pete thought, he wouldn't have believed it either. Doug started crying again. Now his face was just a baby face, eyes screwed shut, cheeks puffed out, mouth wide open. But Pete was sure of what he had seen. It was not an expression that belonged on the face of a baby too young to have teeth. The last time he'd seen it, when he was nineteen, his cousin Stan had just pulled a practical joke on him. He'd punched Stan.
"Pete?"
He had to say something. "I don't know what his problem is. He's just yelling and he won't shut up."
He heard Mary sigh. "I'm coming." She was just wearing jeans herself, which painfully reminded Pete of what wasn't happening. But she was only thinking about Doug now. "Here, let me have him."
Pete passed her the baby. He didn't stop crying when she took him. He didn't stop crying, in fact, until one in the morning. By then Pete and Mary had taken turns bouncing him till their legs were sore, and had danced him to rock 'n' roll until their next-door neighbor pounded on the living-room wall, something she'd never done before.
Pete was holding Doug when he finally gave up and fell asleep. Pete was no longer interested in sex; he was no longer interested in anything but collapse. He carried Doug down the hall.
The baby's eyes opened. Pete cringed. Before Doug came along, his father had never imagined that anything that weighed twelve pounds and had trouble holding up its head could make him cringe. Now he knew better. He tried without much hope to brace himself for the next round of howls.
They didn't come. Instead, Doug gave him that knowing sidelong look again, sighed, and went back to sleep.
"Why, you little sonofabitch," Pete whispered. "You did do that on purpose." Another thing he had not known was how angry it was possible to get at a baby.
Doug slept for almost twenty minutes.
* * *
Thinking back, Pete decided the real war between his son and him began that night. He was a large, grown man. Logically, all the weapons should have been on his side. He told himself that, a lot, as he toted Doug around and wished and wished and wished the wailing, wiggling little creature in his arms would be quiet.
Wishing did not do much good. Neither did logic. Doug was not equipped to understand logic. He was equipped to make noise, at a volume that would have put a stack of Marshall amps to shame.
Doug didn't seem out to drive Mary nuts. When it was just the two of them in the condo, he behaved like any other baby: sometimes he cried and sometimes he didn't. But she got the backwash of his feud with Pete. So did everyone else within half a mile, Pete thought.
Pete began to spend as much time as he could away from home. Trouble was, that wasn't really much. He wasn't the sort of person who got anything out of sitting in a bar for hours, soaking up beers. He was happier drinking at home: it was cheaper and the company (berserk bawling ghetto blaster excluded) better.
Tacking an extra ten minutes on a trip to the store or inventing an excuse to get away to the mall for half an hour just didn't do enough to help. Besides, Mary got stir-crazy too, all the more so when she was cooped up with Doug by herself. She started inventing excuses of her own.
Pete even called San Flavio State about ending his sabbatical early.
The department chairperson's laugh was not altogether kind. "Baby's not as much fun as you thought, Peter?" David Endicott turned serious. "It's not just that I'd look like a fool, having to go to the assistant dean irregularly to get her to undo something I'd gone to her to approve irregularly only six months ago. It really isn't; I hope you understand that. But we've already done the budget transfer, so we can't pay you till next September anyhow. This is the '80s, Peter. Soft money for that kind of thing just isn't there any more."
"I know. Thanks anyhow, David." Pete hung up. He took off his glasses, bent his head and rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. He'd known what Endicott would tell him before he picked up the phone. That he'd called regardless didn't seem a good sign.
Doug started up again, though he'd only been asleep a little while. Mary hadn't heard Pete on the phone, but she heard Doug. "Get him, will you?" she called from the kitchen. "My hands are greasy."
"All right." Pete walked slowly into his son's bedroom. He slammed his closed fist against the wall, as hard as he could. Pain shot up his arm.
"What was that?" Mary exclaimed.
That was your husband, not hitting his kid. Pete tried the taste of the words in his mouth, tried hearing them with Mary's ears. They would never do. They would frighten her. They frightened him.
"It's that bitch next door again," he answered after a pause he hoped she did not notice, "pounding for Doug to be quiet." He could not remember the last time he had lied to her about anything important.
"Well, she can go to hell, too," Mary said indignantly. The tigress defending her young, Pete thought. No, he could not have said what he almost told her. He would have to bear his secret, and his secret shame, alone.
He picked up Doug, who was now yowling indignantly at the slight delay. He put his face close to the baby's. Those small, wide, darkening eyes met his. "Will you please for God's sake just shut up?" he whispered. He did not know if he was taking the name of the Lord in vain or making one of the few honest prayers he had ever made in his life.
Doug actually did quiet down pretty fast; Pete's arms were automatically rocking him the way he liked—when he liked anything. His father was not reassured. Doug's face wore the smug expression he had come to know only too well.
"That wasn't too bad," Mary said when Pete toted the baby in a few minutes later. Doug was awake but not fussing. He tried to turn his head toward his mother's voice, and smiled in her direction. Mar
y smiled back; it was hard not to. Then she saw Pete's face. "Why so glum, hon?"
"Just tired, I guess." Pete knew he had shown weakness in the presence of the enemy. He also knew that was something else he could not tell his wife, not when the enemy was their son.
Mary could see what was going on, though, even if she did not understand it. When they went to bed that night, too worn for anything but whatever sleep Doug was going to let them have, she touched her husband's arm. "Pete, please don't take it so personally when Doug cries. I hate to watch you clamping your jaw when you carry him around. You act as though you think he deliberately sets out to provoke you."
"Sometimes I do wonder. His timing is awfully good." Pete kept his tone light on purpose. Mary could take his words as a routine complaint if she wanted . . . or she could ask just how serious he was. He was ready to cite chapter and verse to her, if she gave him half a chance.
"Pete." His heart sank. Her voice had that ring that sounds like patience but is really anything but. "He's just—"
"—a baby," Pete finished sourly.
"Well, he is." Mary was starting to sound angry. "Now let's go to sleep, shall we? We don't have time for this foolishness, not when Doug's liable to wake up any old time at all."
Pete was angry too, silently, frustratedly furious. It seemed to him that his wife had contradicted herself without so much as noticing. If Doug were "just a baby," they'd have some idea, at least, of when he'd be awake and when he'd be asleep. The only thing they were sure of now was that he'd pick the most inconvenient times possible.
That struck Pete as something nobody ought to find normal. Then something else struck him: fatigue, which laid him low as surely as if he had been sapped. For once, even Doug's howls failed to wake him. He never noticed Mary twice stumbling out of bed to nurse the baby. It was a splendid victory, and he did not know he'd won it.
* * *
The next few days made Pete wonder if he'd been wrong all along. Doug was amazingly civilized. He slept regular hours and was cheerful when he was awake. Pete paid him the ultimate compliment: "You wouldn't think it was the same baby."
Mary snorted but, he noticed, did not disagree.
The fragile hope Pete had nourished only made him hurt worse when it was dashed. His first stab at a Christmas list disintegrated in his mind when Doug let out a screech that should have burst from the iron throat of an insane calliope. Mary got to the baby before he did. He saw tears in her eyes. She'd had hopes, too.
"Hush, hush, hush," she murmured. She hugged Doug's little body against the softness of her breast, leaned his chin on her shoulder. She moved in the little dance steps that sometimes helped calm him. Nothing helped calm him today. Somehow Pete had thought it was going to be like that.
After a while, with an apprehensive look in her eye, Mary handed the baby to him and went into the kitchen to make dinner. Pete was fine with steaks and chops and hamburger, and had done most of the cooking since Doug was born. But Mary was a really good cook. She missed being in front of a stove; Doug's amiable spell had encouraged her to send her husband out for fancier food than he was up to making himself. Tonight she had something exotic and oriental planned for a pork roast.
That left Pete holding the baby. He carried Doug into the living room, turned on the stereo, and started going round and round the coffee table. The pile on the carpet was noticeably more beaten down there than anywhere else in the room.
"Hush, hush, hush, you little monster." Despite his words, his tone was a fair imitation of Mary's croon. He was determined not to let Doug get his goat—or not to let him know he had; listening to Doug at close range would have turned the back of Job's neck red. But Pete swayed and jiggled, as dedicated to calming his son as Doug was to driving him out of his tree.
He thought he was earning at least a draw. Doug's howls came further and further apart, and took on the rusty-hinge quality that showed the baby was getting tired. "Shh, shh," Pete sang. He turned his head. "How's dinner coming?"
"Getting there. How's he doing?"
"Not too bad." Pete glanced down at Doug. The baby's gaze met his with more directness and intelligence than ten-week-olds are supposed to show. Then Doug let out all the stops. Pete only thought he'd heard him cry before. He wished he'd been right.
He looked at Doug again. His son's face wasn't all screwed up, as baby's faces usually are when they pitch fits. Except for having his mouth open wide enough to let out all that horrible noise, Doug wasn't acting upset at all. He seemed . . . positively smug.
Rage filled Pete. "What sort of noise would you make if you really were hurting?" he growled. For a moment, the idea of dropping the kid just to find out looked awfully good. Almost without willing it, Pete felt his arm start to straighten to let go of Doug.
"Dinner," Mary called—shouted, rather, to be heard over the sound effects. "What was that you were saying to him?"
"Nothing." Saved by the bell, Pete thought. He wasn't sure whether he meant Doug or himself.
His legs felt very light as he carried Doug into the kitchen. He took a while to recognize the feeling, or rather to remember it. When he was a kid, they had felt that way whenever he was scared green and getting ready to run like hell. He was that scared again, but now he could not run.
He plopped Doug into his yellow plastic infant seat, setting him down with exaggerated care, as if to make up for his thoughts of moments before. He expected the baby to raise even more Cain at being put down, but Doug was mostly quiet while his parents ate. His few tentative yarps, though, sent worried jolts quivering through Pete. He wondered each time if this would be the one where the baby really let loose, and so he enjoyed the excellent pork roast less than he should have.
As he was filling the sink to soak the dishes, he wondered if Doug was beginning to learn subtlety to go with his brute-force hysterics. Babies learned things as they got older. Thinking about the sort of things Doug might like to learn filled Pete with dread.
In the two days that followed, Pete felt as if he were on a ship that had holed itself on submerged rocks: he sank slowly and on an even keel. The deck seemed stable and level under his feet, but he was going down all the same.
What made it even worse was that, as far as Mary could see, Doug was only a baby who cried too much. His outbursts didn't particularly interrupt her unless she was doing something with Pete, like eating lunch. He didn't yowl just to make her jump, or just to disrupt her train of thought.
And he didn't give that little aren't-I-clever-to-be-driving-you-bonkers stare out of the corner of his eye when she held him. By now, that expression infuriated Pete as much as Doug's crying. It was a constant reminder that his son was having sport at his expense. Sooner or later, Pete promised himself grimly, that would have to stop.
Had he been able to find boned chicken thighs on his last trip to Safeway, things might have turned out better. As it was, he'd brought home thighs with the bones still in. Mary had taken them out of the fridge to start defrosting early that afternoon, and was cutting the still partly frozen meat away from the bones. "This'll be good," she promised. "I'm just sorry you're stuck with Doug while I work on 'em."
"What?" Pete had heard maybe one word in three. Doug was squalling in his ear. Doug had been squalling in his ear for the past hour and a half, since he woke up from his latest nap. He wasn't hungry; he'd nursed for five minutes a while ago, and spit the nipple out. He wasn't wet, or poopy, or gassy, or warm, or cold, or anything. He was just ornery. Pete's tolerance for orneriness had worn very thin.
Mary turned away from the countertop to repeat herself. Doug yelled even louder, drowning her out again. He looked smugly up at his father. What are you going to do about it? his eyes seemed to say.
Pete heard the words in his head as plainly as if they were spoken aloud. "This," he answered, and threw the baby against the refrigerator.
The thud of the little body hitting the yellow-enameled metal door killed his fury like a bucket of icewater poured ov
er a campfire. Horror replaced it. He took a step toward Doug, who for the moment was not crying at all.
"No!" Mary sprang at him. No linebacker could have done a better job of stopping him in his tracks. Linebackers, however, do not commonly carry knives. Rushing to defend Doug, Mary probably forgot she was still holding hers. It sliced a long furrow in Pete's sleeve, and in his arm.
The pain, and the sudden wet warmth of spilled blood, made him automatically grapple for the blade. He was bigger and stronger than Mary. He yanked it out of her hand. She fought back with more ferocity than he had dreamed was in her. They wrestled. She tripped him. They fell to the Solarion tile floor. He felt the knife go in.
There are not many places where a single knifethrust will kill at once. The soft flesh under the angle of the jaw is one of them.
"Mary?" Pete said. Even then, though, from the way she convulsed and suddenly stopped fighting him, he knew he would get no answer.
He pulled out the knife. His blood and Mary's were both on it, in a last terrible mingling. He sat on the floor of the kitchen, with Mary's body, and with Doug (Doug was crying again, and this time, by Christ, Pete knew why), and with the half-boned chicken thighs, and with the ruin of everything he had spent a lifetime building.
He looked at the knife again. It looked better to him now, better than whatever else lay ahead of him. He made sure he had a firm grip on it, drove it into his chest.
He took much longer dying than Mary, and hurt more than he had ever imagined he could, as his heart tried to beat around stainless steel. Consciousness finally faded. The last sound in his ears was Doug, crying.
* * *
Vicki Garreau fumbled with the car seat's catch as she took Doug out. Poor little fellow, she thought: he was too young to be coming home from the hospital for the second time, and to a new, unfamiliar home at that. Thinking about the baby made it easier not to think about what had happened to her sister and brother-in-law.
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