Disciples

by Austin Wright

  4

  Oliver Quinn

  Everything depends on preparation. That’s why I bought the car seat. If you want to do something, you must think the future step by step. Likewise the time spent training Nick. How many times I had to explain because it takes him a while. Next was set a date, which was hard because of the unpredictable element. There’s always an unpredictable element, you could fall dead of a heart attack while eating your cereal on the morning of a day of no importance. The fine weather solved that. With foresight I stopped for diapers, it being common knowledge that babies require them.

  Drive three days, two stopovers in motels before our destination. Two rooms, one for the baby, the other for me and Nick. I planned to eat in restaurants and counted on the waitresses to tell us what babies eat, many of them being mothers themselves.

  I did not anticipate the crying. It got worse through the afternoon. Across the barbaric country of farms, it was hard for a person like me to bear. The message was full of rage and insult and nothing I could do but ignore.

  We needed supplies. All societies have babies, therefore baby supplies like others should be available in areas of commerce.

  We exited by a cluster of buildings with illuminated signs up high. The sky was fading. If you have a poetic temperament you’ll notice the twilight approaching across the terrible flat Republican land of middle Ohio, the deepening color behind the silhouette of a farm house and silo turning pink and gold. In this setting the commercial signs by the exits riot like devils of orange and green against the departing sun. That’s what we saw, while inside the car the noise produced by the child who couldn’t describe her needs reached storm dimensions.

  Next to the gas stations, we found one of the great discount stores, a big red sign across its front, K-MART. We left the baby in the car and went in. Baby food, stacks of small glass jars, a baby face on each. I got an assortment for balance, yellow, green, shades of brown. Nick took the babyfood out to the car while I looked for baby clothes. A woman asked if I needed help. I said I wanted baby clothes. She asked what kind. All kinds, I said. I got a little of everything, guessing the sizes. The woman laughed like I was joking. She said if my wife didn’t like it I could bring them back, but I didn’t have a wife. I also got toys, selecting on the basis of what I would like if I were a baby. A bulldozer, a machine gun, a rattle. I got the rattle because this baby is still young and might prefer young toys. Enough variety in the toys would shut her up.

  Back at the car I found Nick shuffling the sidewalk holding the baby. He told about three women around the car when he brought the baby food. They weren’t very nice. They asked what kind of father would leave his child alone in a parking lot and they mentioned the police. He tried to say it ain’t no baby of his, but when he opened the door the crying activated his instinct, which saved him. It caused him to pick the baby up, and she shut up like he was her savior, because of exhaustion probably. This took the rhetorical steam out of the ladies. The strangest thing when I tried to take the child to put back in the car, he swung away not letting me, and when he turned back he started to cry. A grown man, don’t ask me. I humored him, let him put the baby back himself, so that we could go on our way.

  Back to the Interstate in the dark. We ate in McDonald’s. The baby was stinky but not too bad, just don’t get too close. She sat in a high chair, with a jar of baby spinach. I gave her a spoon which she banged and threw on the floor. Nick wanted to feed her so I let him, and she got spinach on her face and the tray but we did the best we could. Nick got her a glass of Coca-Cola with a straw, but she lacked the conception of the straw. An idiot woman at a nearby table kept making cute-type noises intended to evoke a display of cuteness in the baby. After a while the baby cried again. It made Nick edgy, or else some softening of his mind from walking the baby in the parking lot turned him into a mother. He picked her up without permission and walked her around, and she stopped. As for instinct, it’s well known that as mankind developed intellect, so his instincts died away. In comparison with migratory birds, for example, we are stupid when it comes to instinct. We have only a few, an instinct to eat, flee from danger, sex. We make up for it by brain. It follows that Nick, who’s not so bright, would have more instinct than I. Note also his instinct is feminine, maternal, across the lines of sex, which I attribute to his primitive development, it taking a higher development to bring out sexual differentiation in animals.

  We put the baby back in the car and drove on, looking for a motel like Red Roof or Cheap Couples. The baby was quiet like she thought the stuff she had spit out was dinner and she had actually been fed, and it would have been fine driving in the peaceful dark with the other cars humming along only that Nick Foster who seems to think his newly roused maternal instinct means something kept murmuring baby all the time, I love babies oh do I love babies.

  I told him to shut up. We found a Day’s Inn and stopped. Two rooms, one for me and Nick, the other for the baby, with the baby on the second floor and us on the first. We put the baby to bed. I let Nick carry her because of his instinct. The question was whether to change her diaper since she was getting pretty foul. I tried Nick. I said, let’s test your smarts. What should we do about the baby’s diaper?

  We should change the baby’s diaper.

  I asked why.

  Because the baby will be happier, he said.

  That’s anthropomorphic, I said. The question is not the baby’s happiness but the baby’s health. It’s healthier to change the baby’s diaper. Have you ever changed a diaper?

  No. I spread a newspaper on the bed. The baby was a mess. It took a lot of toilet paper, more than for an ordinary person, because the baby was smeared all over its behind. When we were done I’ll admit I would not have been satisfied with the cleanup if it had been me, but we did the best we could.

  We put on the new diaper and the pajamas I bought at the store. Nick dumped the dead diaper and toilet paper in the toilet. I don’t know what’s to prevent it plugging up. The stuff didn’t go down when I flushed, so I left it for the maid to figure out. We left the baby in the middle of its bed, locked the door for its protection, then back to our own room on the ground floor.

  We watched television before sleep. I don’t know if the baby cried, because we couldn’t hear her where we were. She was crying when we left, but not loud, and I figured she either fell asleep or didn’t. In the morning I thought she had been kidnapped but we found her on the floor by the window. She was asleep. She seemed chastened. That’s the word I’d use, chastened or less arrogant than before.

  I explained to Nick. What you’ve got to understand, I told him, is the incompetence of this child’s mother. She’s a mother not by nature but by accident, making the best of a bad situation. Ann Landers will tell you love based on the best of a bad thing is not to be trusted. That’s the first count against her. Second is the environment in which she’s raising this child. Not only does she work nine to five, leaving the care of the baby to others, a new man has entered her life. Apparently she has not noticed his black face, which implies colorblindness not merely physical but moral. Worse still if she has noticed, she being the daughter of a professor who thinks he is wiser and more intelligent than anybody else. I know better. Never forget the moment of creation of this child. In the dark of a motel in sound of the pounding surf of Cape Hatteras. How she lusted then, laughing, giggling, no sense of significance at all, it was embarrassing. Yet so vindictive later. Now this alliance with a man not merely black but trying to rise above who by nature he is. It’s my daughter she wants to raise like a black man’s child, soaking her in black culture like cornbread and molasses, not to speak of moral relativity nor the revolution ahead when children rise up against their fathers. That’s why. She has no right to scorn me and look down on me. She has no right to deny me my part in the baby, my claim. To ignore me, pay no attention to my warnings. To care so much about that baby to the exclusion of everything else.

  I am taking her to Miller.
I told her on the telephone the second night. She thinks I’m crazy. She doesn’t understand, nobody does. I tried to tell her once, she didn’t hear, she wasn’t interested. Don’t say she don’t deserve what she gets.

  *

  They called me preacher’s kid, which was my father’s fault. He stood up front in his gothic church talking to the ladies. Snobbish sermons interpreting the Bible. He kept God’s distance, telling the ladies what God meant, like his job was to protect God from people instead of bringing people to God. If I wanted to speak to God, I had to go through channels, through my father. Pray my prayers in his words like the people praying in church.

  As a kid I was too sensitive. I got over it by making other people cry. Jump out from the bushes at the swaggering kids going home with their school bags, beat them up. My father wanted to make me a copy of himself only inferior. I was to be a man of God like him, by his permission. He would introduce me to God but keep an eye on us to make sure we didn’t get too chummy. I refused. Silently, for everything was unspoken between us, my father and me. His rules were unspoken, like the curfew when I was a teenager, likewise his punishment when I violated it. His punishment was silence for me to figure out like remorse. Since he wouldn’t punish me in a conventional way I violated every rule I could identify. I violated the curfew. I refused to do well in school until I realized my bad grades pleased him. After that I studied to learn how ignorant he was.

  I read about what it was like in a world without God. It hadn’t occurred to me there might be such a world. I learned about Raskolnikov from Cliff’s Notes. He believed a strong man can do anything he likes, and to prove it he murdered an old pawnbroker and her daughter. I wondered if I could do that. From Twombly’s Study Guide on Sartre and Existentialism I learned that in a world without God you have an obligation to do what you can get away with because otherwise your life’s a waste.

  My mother had been dead a good many years. My father expected me to eat dinner with him, cooked by his housekeeper, Melissa Drew. Sometimes I did, sometimes I didn’t. I practiced friendliness like how are you this morning Pop, what kind of a day did you have. I practiced doing what I could get away with. Speeding in the car without getting caught. I was an excellent shoplifter. Women’s sweaters, cameras, stuffed animals. I put them in the living room. What’s this? my father would say. What do you want with a woman’s sweater? You already have a camera.

  I wasn’t satisfied, something was missing. I moved out, left town, came to Cincinnati, a room of my own. Didn’t tell my father so there were no letters. Later I heard that my father had died alone in the house. They found him when he didn’t show up for church. He left me some money but not enough.

  I had another reason for leaving town, Priscilla Mantel. We had a fine thing going. She was a clerk in a record store, never mind what I was doing. She liked sex, and we made a lot of it on weekends. She liked to take risks. We would lock ourselves in her apartment and take off our clothes on Friday night and not put them on again until Monday. Sometimes she would stand naked in her window that looked down from the third floor to the busy neighborhood street where the kids jumping rope could look up and see her and she would wave to them. Sometimes we went to a hotel and pretended we were man and wife and sometimes we went out to the park at night and found a place behind bushes off a path while watching the people strolling who didn’t know what they were missing if they would only look. We had a great time until she got pregnant. That spoiled everything. She had no right to get pregnant. She expected me to take an interest. She was wrong. Her pregnancy took all the fun away. I dropped her, that made her mad, and the next thing I knew she tried to sock me for child support. I had to leave town. Shook her off finally, she never knew where I went. Never again, I warned myself.

  I met Nick Foster at the United Dairy Farms where I was working the night shift. He was pumping gas next door. He would take a break to sit in a booth and drink a milkshake and I talked to him. Nick Foster had inferiority feelings and sometimes when he found it hard to talk he cried. I thought he’d be good to practice on. I made him realize he was not bright. He already knew but I made it clearer, after which he became my faithful and doggy follower. He was living with Billie Hambrell. She encouraged his dependency, so I made him get rid of her and live with me. She made a fuss. I helped him write her a letter which he signed. That was the last we heard from Billie Hambrell. Nick cried but he became my loyal friend. He learned to do what I asked, which made me feel better about myself.

  Judy Field was not so nice. I met her at an AA meeting, thinking she was better than the rest of us. Because her father was a professor who wrote books. She acted smart so I went after her. I talked about Raskolnikov and the existential act and she said I was an intellectual in disguise. I told her my father was a minister, and she said I was in rebellion, how exciting. Her father believed in science not God and she thought we should get together. I had no interest in her father. She thought I was a good guy and I offered to take her home, but she was tied up. The next week we went to McDonald’s and drove around the country and ended up at her apartment. She was good but not the best (not as good as Priscilla) because she was too self-conscious but it was better than nothing and I wasn’t ready to quit yet. Only the next time she made me drop by her parents’ house and meet her father and forced me into a discussion with him about religious beliefs. This was a mess because she told him I had been reading Raskolnikov and Sartre and the professor smiled like he knew all about me and he talked about science and the big bang and consciousness as if that’s what I wanted to know. He told me science and religion can be reconciled, just don’t expect God to intervene in every little personal thing, and I thought what the hell. He irritated me. He said every thought I ever had somebody else had thought before. He thought I was grateful for his wisdom since he was a scientist and only a scientist could know the truth about God. I made up for it with Judy at my place. She pushed under me while the juice rose and I thought of the professor looking at us and not knowing what to do.

  I warned her not to get pregnant, if she got pregnant I wouldn’t be responsible. I thought she understood that, she never said she didn’t. At Cape Hatteras where we screwed inside all weekend ignoring the surfers sporting outside on the flying fringes of the sea, by the end of the weekend there was nothing left, and I thought that was the end of it. But a few weeks later she called to say she was pregnant, doing exactly what I had warned her against. I couldn’t believe it. It made me laugh for the professor who couldn’t control his daughter but mainly I was disgusted. She did it on purpose, just like Priscilla Mantel. How treacherous they all are, luring you with siren songs of naked flippery, and then sock it to you with results. To happen to me twice was more than I could bear. I needed to do something, to punish her some way but what could I do? I stopped seeing her. I bought an answering machine and did not return her calls. I figured the best way was to cut her like a cold turkey and hoped that would satisfy me. At the AA meeting I looked away. It worked. She moved back into the parents’ house which served them right too. She had it coming for thinking she could screw me without consequences, for by God, there are consequences, which is something they all need to learn. You do things and you face the results. Nothing is free.

  I went to work as a cook at Basil’s Russian Parlor. Fancy restaurant near the university. When Estelle Gaines told me Judy was due, I got another idea. You never know in advance what feelings you’re going to have. I thought, it’s not often you can greet a baby fresh out of the abyss. It occurred to me that pregnancy is the natural outcome of sex, and maybe the proper response for me would be to take over the fatherly role. Instead of leaving it all to the woman, take charge as the man is supposed to do. Judy wouldn’t like it, but that’s her problem. So when a few days later Estelle called and told me Judy was in the hospital I went over and found the room and went in. I’m the father, I said, so they let me in.

  Small room with people around the bed, Harry Field and Mrs. Fie
ld and a couple of Judy’s irritating friends named Joe and Connie Rice and a nurse. The nurse said: You the father? Come on in. I heard Judy moan, Who? then saw her on her back with a mountain on top of her. Face ugly without makeup, corpse-colored, she winced when she saw me like a dog had bitten her. Saying, What are you doing here?

  Come to see my baby born.

  Go to hell, she said. In front of her father and mother and friends and nurse, to the father of her child.

  I came to see my wife, and my baby born.

  Wife?

  There there, the nurse said, this is a time for joy, not family problems.

  I stayed. The monitor showed the baby’s heartbeat, the nurse went in and out, the doctor in green with not much talk while the mother grunted and yelled. When the baby was about to come they kicked out the parents but let me stay because I was the father.

  Afterwards they let me sit alone with Judy in her room. The baby wasn’t much, too small to be human, wrinkled and ugly, hard to look at on Judy’s breast. Judy grumbling she would never forgive me. I said this was my baby and I wanted to play a normal role in her life. She asked where I had been the last nine months and I said it was none of her business. I had been minding my life and now I wanted to reenter hers in the role nature created for me. The baby, which looked more like an aardvark than a child, or maybe a gargoyle in the zoo, started to cry. The cry was inside a tunnel or a paper cup, enclosed and tiny. I remembered making this child, I remembered it coming out of my cock. With Judy whose capacity to be a mother was unproven and in doubt. The poor little thing. The cry inside the cup was so tiny and helpless the child could die from not being touched in a half hour or overnight with an incompetent mother. It seemed like I had been neglected all my life. Like walking in a cocoon of anesthesia, a blindfold mask. My father dying by himself and Judy hateful and resenting my absence and me acceding to being put down by going down before they began. How this was my baby but I’d never be allowed as father, and the baby would be raised like an absentee donor.