by Adam Johnson
“Unbearably sweet,” the other adds as she pulls the smock over his head.
When they bring him to Nonc, he can see they’ve given the boy a haircut, and they’ve applied a thick cream to his sunburned face. He’s in a hand-me-down set of coveralls from the auxiliary.
“You give him a bath?” Nonc asks.
“We cleaned him up a little,” one says, then adds, “Geronimo is such a special name.”
“Synonymous with resilience and determination.”
“In the Apache language, Geronimo means fiercely loyal.”
“One of the books we read together was The Last Palomino.”
The women go on and on about all the books they read and activities they did, enunciating everything like they’re hosting an event, like Geronimo’s a grand guest and Nonc and Relle are being introduced to him for the first time.
One of them takes a drawing of some yellow swirly lines and pins it to the boy’s coveralls. The drawing is captioned “Macaw.” “A disaster can be a trying time,” she says.
“Especially for a child,” the other adds. She holds out a brown paper bag, its top neatly rolled up. “Here are the child’s pajamas.”
Nonc can feel Relle wince. “Those aren’t pajamas,” he says. “That’s a custom tracksuit, with piping and everything. It’s tailor-made with fabric from—”
“Morocco,” Relle says.
“From Morocco.”
There is a pause. In it, the old ladies give Nonc that look.
“You were right to come here,” one of them says. “Geronimo is always welcome here. All of you are. What a perfect age he is.”
“A difficult age to be separated from a parent.”
“Such a trauma that can be.”
“Maybe I’m the boy’s parent,” Relle says. “Did you think of that? Do you know that I’m not her?”
—
Outside, it’s dark. Nonc fires up the van and heads to Relle’s halfway house. He doesn’t prowl roadhouses or cruise Charity looking for Marnie. He steps on the gas to blow out the mosquitoes, and they go.
As soon as they arrive, Dr. Gaby opens the door, which means that Nonc won’t be sleeping on clean sheets with Relle and Geronimo, that there will be no hot shower and toilet in the A.M. When Geronimo sees Dr. Gaby, he runs and leaps up onto her wheelchair, which makes Nonc cringe because Relle has told him that Dr. Gaby uses a piss bag, that you’d never know it, but it’s under her clothes.
Dr. Gaby throws Nonc a dubious look. “You cut his hair,” she says.
Relle says, “How do you know I didn’t give him a haircut?”
Dr. Gaby doesn’t respond to this. She turns the boy’s face right and left, inspecting the sunburn. “It’s better,” she says, and throws Nonc a look of true distaste. Then she goes through her routine: She takes the boy’s earlobe and peers inside. She runs a finger along his teeth. With a thumb, she pulls down his eyelid to inspect the white of the eye. She’s not a real doctor—she was a psychiatrist before she retired because of her condition.
“Haircut itch?” she asks Geronimo.
Geronimo rubs his neck. “Itchy,” he says.
Dr. Gaby blows the stubble off his neck, then wheels an about-face and rolls inside.
Nonc and Relle follow. It’s not really right to call it a halfway house. There are four residents with permanent problems, and they live here permanently. Once you come to this place, you don’t go anywhere. Relle doesn’t have any training, so her job is more like babysitting, and you can believe she has a rule for everything.
Then, in the wake of Katrina, the dream team arrived. They got off a bus from the Superdome holding hands, eight adult men. Dr. Gaby thinks they have entrenched autism, but she doesn’t know for sure—they came from an unknown facility without files, medical records, case histories or full names. Wherever they were housed, they were housed together, accustomed to staying up to ungodly hours, and damned if they don’t get their nightly video. Tonight, as Nonc and Relle pass, they are in the living room, drinking diet sodas in the blue glow of a Robin Williams movie.
“They give me the willies,” Relle says.
Nonc looks at their uncomprehending faces, at the sodas in their thick hands.
“So pathetic,” she adds. “Can you imagine being like that, stuck watching whichever TV show is played for you, living in whatever town the bus plops you in?”
In the kitchen, racks of cookies are cooling, and the smell is overpowering. The counters are custom-made for a wheelchair, so they’re just the right height for a little boy. Geronimo, on Dr. Gaby’s lap, sits before a large mixing bowl. Dr. Gaby places an egg in Geronimo’s hand, then wraps hers around his. Together, they crack an egg on the rim. Dr. Gaby then splits the egg, letting the yolk flop into the bowl. Without a word, she hands the next egg to Geronimo. He taps it on the rim, then hands it to Dr. Gaby, who splits it.
Relle grabs a cookie. “God, oatmeal,” she says with her mouth full. “Someday our kids are gonna live on cookies.”
To Relle, Dr. Gaby says, “Those are for the volunteers. And tomorrow’s list is on the fridge.” Then she turns toward Nonc. “You’ve gathered that your girlfriend’s not too touchy-feely. I must say, though: give the girl a list, and have mercy, she can procure.”
Nonc asks, “So nobody’s come forward to claim the dream team?” He knows he shouldn’t call them that. It’s Relle’s term, and she only calls them the dream team to get under Dr. Gaby’s skin.
“Hundreds of thousands of people are displaced,” she says. “I know your famous position that the hurricane is no skin off your nose, but for the rest of us, it’s a different matter.”
“What if nobody ever comes to get them?” Nonc asks.
“What if,” Dr. Gaby says, and shrugs. “And before we get too chatty, I can’t let you stay tonight, Randall. I know it happens, and I can’t control what goes on when I’m not here, but these people, they’re vulnerable right now, they need stability. Plus, I need to think of the child.”
“Don’t you worry about the boy,” Nonc says. “He gets taken care of just fine.”
“I don’t want to imagine,” Dr. Gaby says, “where this child spends his nights. But I’m talking about the boy’s well-being in this facility. I don’t know these men’s backgrounds, what they’re capable of. Telling right from wrong, that’s a luxury of the able-minded. I’d have to take a host of precautions to have that boy safely sleep here.” Dr. Gaby lets Geronimo dip a finger in the batter. “Where do you sleep?” she asks him.
Geronimo lights up. “Van,” he says. “Baby kiss van.”
“That’s a sentence,” Dr. Gaby says. “I don’t want to know what it means, but he’s talking in sentences already.”
“I taught him that,” Relle says.
“We sleep in a fat house by Prien Lake,” Nonc says.
Dr. Gaby throws him a look that says, I bet.
“Oh, God,” Relle says to Nonc, “I totally have to show you something.” She takes off upstairs.
“So, how’s parenthood treating you?” Dr. Gaby asks Nonc. “What have you learned from fatherhood so far?”
“I don’t know,” Nonc tells her.
She gives him a look.
“You trying to make me uncomfortable? Just go ahead and tell me something I’m doing wrong. I got the boy his shots, okay? Just like you told me.”
“Dr. Benson, at the clinic?”
Nonc nods.
“That’s good, Randall. That’s a step. Have you ever seen a child with rubella? My Lord, and this is when it happens, after a disaster. Classic distribution potential.”
Nonc takes a cookie. “If these guys could be dangerous, what about you, what about your safety?”
“Oh, that’s not a concern,” she says. “There is something I’m concerned about, though. In life, a lot of important decisions are made for us.”
It’s clear to Nonc that she’s about to give a speech, like the one she gave a couple weeks ago about child development. The
truth is that he’s discovered, at the age of twenty-six, he loves being lectured. Never before has someone spoken to him, at length, with the sole purpose of making him better.
“I wouldn’t have chosen to live in Lake Charles,” Dr. Gaby says. “My marriage didn’t work out as I would have wished. My illness, I didn’t choose that. Similar things must be true for you, right? You’re adaptive, though, very flexible. It’s one of your attributes. But when it comes to things like that boy, you can’t ever bend. You have to choose him—then you have to be one hundred percent. Don’t think of it as making a choice but obeying one. Determine what you want, and be obedient to that. You can’t stay here tonight because I’ve chosen these people, and nothing will let me compromise that. You’ve got to create family, Randall. You choose them and you never let go. Blood, it doesn’t mean anything. Your kin, and I know of them—you don’t owe them anything. Cherelle, she’s talking like that little boy isn’t yours, that there’s a test that will say that. Do you think that matters to a little boy? Do you think these men are my kin? I’m not even positive of their names. But I chose them, Randall. And I don’t let go.”
There’s a look on Dr. Gaby’s face that says she has more to administer, but Relle comes downstairs with a painting of a duck. It’s floating above the water, breast high, wings out, ready to land. It makes you wince to look at it—you can just feel the trigger that’s about to be pulled.
“What the hell is that?” Nonc asks.
“I got this at the Salvation Army,” Relle says. “It’s for the lodge. Our hunting lodge.”
—
On the south side of Prien Lake, out at the end of the point, is the foundation of a house that was blown away by Hurricane Audrey fifty years ago. The footings are brick, and the cement is mixed with lime shale, which glows eerily in the moonlight. Nonc used to park his van out there nights, pull right up like he was home from the office and string his hammock from the van to a lone fireplace stack. Now Nonc has the pick of the litter: Rita’s storm surge floated all these houses out into the channel, where the tides broke them up.
In the dark, Nonc approaches a cement slab in the headlights. He muscles the van up onto the foundation, parking in the living room. Then he and Geronimo begin their bedtime routine. They stand on the cool of ceramic kitchen tiles, the wind from the lake rattling their clothes as they brush their teeth and stare out at the green-and-red channel markers of the shipping lanes and, farther off, the blinking derricks of oil platforms. There is a solitary toilet, the structure’s only survivor, but when Nonc cautiously lifts the lid, it has already been fouled. Nonc pisses in the bedroom, then fastens a new diaper on the boy. When he grenades the old one into the marsh grass, the frogs go quiet.
The cargo racks fold up, the foam mat unrolls, and a father and son bed down for the night. Geronimo is on his back, looking up at the dome light. Nonc is on his side, looking at a boy whose breathing is untroubled for all he’s been through, though there’s a lack of shine in his eyes, as if the little light in him might someday go out. His breath is clean and perfect, though, sweet-smelling. While the boy might not look much like Nonc, there’s a knit to his brow, one suggesting an uncertainty and reproof that is unmistakably Harlan’s. And those deep brown eyes, streaked with wheat, are pure Marnie.
“Where’s Mama?” Nonc asks him.
The boy looks at the light. “Eyeball,” he says. He says it with clarity and certainty but not emotion.
“Eyeball?” Nonc says.
“Narc,” the boy says.
“Nonc?”
“Eyeball,” the boy says.
Nonc sees that there’s clay gunked under the boy’s fingernails. Nonc takes a hand and, with a pen cap, uses a half-moon motion to scrape them clean, one nail at a time. Geronimo shifts his eyes and, with a blank relaxation, watches his father work. The boy’s nails are soft and smooth, perfect somehow. Dr. Gaby said you can tell when a kid’s had poor nutrition by the streaks on his fingernails—Geronimo’s nails were proof that Marnie had fed him well. Nonc had visited the boy once in New Orleans. Under Marnie’s ever-suspicious eye, Nonc ate pudding with the boy and played along with games like “I’m Going to Grab Your Sunglasses and Throw Them on the Ground and There’s Nothing You Can Do About It.” But Nonc had to admit he had one eye on the apartment, looking to see how Marnie was spending the money. He never really saw the boy, how perfect he was, how utterly unspoiled. Nonc knows that someday, after Marnie takes the boy back and he grows older, he won’t remember these moments, the way they showered early at the Red Cross, foraged for their morning pizza, roamed the countryside together in a brown panel van. It’s probably a good thing, Nonc tells himself. Developmentally, it’s got to be good for him. He strokes the boy’s hair.
There’s a ring—California—and Geronimo eyes the phone with great apprehension. Nonc takes the call, it’s a woman’s voice.
“I’m calling on behalf of Harlan Richard. Is this Randall Richard?”
“It’s Ree-shard,” he says.
“You may not be aware of this,” she says. “But your father has lost the use of his vocal cords. He’s asked me to read a note.”
“Are you a nurse?” Randall asks.
“Nurse’s aide.”
“Is he dying?”
“They don’t exactly write that on the chart,” she says. “But this is hospice.”
“Nobody leaves hospice, right?”
“I wouldn’t say that.”
“How long have you known my father?”
“I just came on shift,” she says, then begins reading the note in a clipped, mechanical voice. “ ‘I know I haven’t given you much, Randall. I haven’t always had much to give. It’s funny. All the things I have to say to you are all the things you already know. I have some things to transfer to you. You may find them useful. The doc says—’ ”
“Put him on,” Nonc tells her.
“It may take some getting used to,” she says. “But he’s lost the ability to speak.”
“Please,” he says. “Hand him the phone.”
When Nonc hears the wheeze and click, he says, “Here’s your grandson,” and hands the phone to Geronimo. “It’s your grandpa,” he tells the boy, but the boy just sits there, the blue buttons of the keypad casting a glow on his cheek. He doesn’t even say eyeball. Grandpa is a word, Nonc realizes, that the boy has probably never heard. Nonc whispers, “It’s Grover.”
“Grow grow?” the boy asks. “Grow grow?” Then he starts mumbling his way through the entire Grover ABC song. His eyes stare blankly into space as he singsongs, and it occurs to Nonc that the boy may never have seen the Sesame Street characters, just heard their voices on that one endless CD.
After a while, Nonc takes the phone back. “You got to talk to your grandson—that’s not too shabby, huh? Not every grandpa gets that. Look, Dad, you should know there are no grudges here. There’s no blame in me. I want you to tell yourself you did your best—then let things go. When the time comes, don’t be looking over your shoulder, okay?”
Nonc closes the phone and pulls the cargo door shut. Then he kicks his leg out from under the sheet and leaves it exposed to lure mosquitoes away from his son, and before the timer on the dome light has extinguished the glow, Geronimo is snoring his baby-fat snore, and they are out.
—
The next morning is a blur of Brown know-how. After saddling up some sippy cups and sandwiches, they swing east through Welsh, Iowa, Lacassine, where the newly emptied hog lots speak of the sausage plant’s return to glory. There is a shipment at Chennault airport, then they turn toward Calcasieu Parish jail, passing the equipment dealers and the boys’ home, and finally turning off where the bail bond trailers line the road.
The Calcasieu jail is operating at triple capacity with all the prisoners from New Orleans, and in the parking lot, the evacuated families of evacuated prisoners have set up camp outside the perimeter fence, which is serving as a temporary visitation room. In the bare sun, a line of
parents and wives lock fingers in the fencing, while on the other side, under guard, the inmates keep their distance and do what inmates always seem to do: affirm and reassure, make the future seem doable. Prisoner, visitor and officer alike are surviving off Red Cross kits, so everyone has the same Scope breath, the same hotel soap smell, the same ring of aluminum around their armpits. Nonc has delivered everything from video games to wedding tuxedos to this jail, but today, as he wheels a hand truck around folks strewn on the sidewalk, he brings quick cuffs, stab vests, and a box from a company called SlamTec.
Waiting in line for security, Nonc leans against those boxes and checks out an inmate tracking station the jail has set up. For the hell of it, maybe—he can’t put it into words—he walks up and says he needs to see Marnie Broussard, that he’s her brother, Dallas. The guard fingers through stacks of tracking sheets, makes a call on the radio. “If they’ve got her,” she says, “they’ll bring her out.” Nonc finishes his delivery, buys a soda, then waits in the van with Geronimo, reading the newspaper while that one CD loops. There is an article about the lady who threw her kids off the bridge. It says there’s no record of the kids, no birth certificates or anything; she probably had them at home, in the projects, then never took them to school or even a doctor. The weird thing is that she claims not to remember their names. For the life of her, she just can’t come up with them. Nonc wonders if that’s possible, that there can be no record somebody ever existed. Maybe if your life is screwed up enough, maybe if you’re living way out on the edge.
Finally, through the windshield, he sees Marnie led out, hands up against the bright light. All kinds of people have been shuffling around in different-colored jumpsuits, but when he sees her in one, it’s a shocker.
“Lo and behold,” Nonc tells his son, then steps down from the van and crosses the lot.
When Nonc, too, clasps the fence, Marnie shakes her head at the sight of him. “I should have known,” she says. “My brother would never come see me.”
“What the hell are you doing here?” Nonc asks. “I’ve been looking for you.”