I even stopped most of the bickering and belittling after a while.
Why?
I don’t know, probably because I thought the wife would come around to the improbability of the whole thing at some point and that marginal damage could be done to the child in his early years so long as he was fed and watered.
Or maybe it’s because I loved Penny in weakness, and like Antony with Cleopatra, I would always follow her ships wherever they sailed.
It also could have been because I was still more or less a Christian, and this meant I had to grant the possibility she might be right about everything and if there was a chance, who was I not to take what she was saying seriously?
I’ll also admit I was pretty wrapped up in myself back then and at the beginning of a long series of fogs that would leave me scattershot, depressed, and resentful, incapable of much concern as to what was going on with my son.
But if I’m going to hold nothing back and be completely honest here, it’s mostly because I had, over the years, become something of a monster.
Here’s what I’m saying: I wanted revenge against my old man.
During the first year or so of Sparky’s life, he was over to the house almost every night to tut and dote and drool over his brand new grandson. I could see it in the way his eyes brightened. I could tell in the way his voice became solemn and still: he believed Sparky was Him, the Great Horvath. My father had convinced himself the only reason God had told him about it at all was because he was destined to bear witness. Which would explain why, to Penny’s and my severe annoyance, he started showing up to the house just about every day, shit-slobbering grin on his face, Camcorder in hand. He wanted every moment, he said, from first teeth to first steps to first words, recorded for posterity.
“Hundreds of years from now, our descendants will still be watching these videos!” he said many times, always breathlessly.
Also: “Frankie, get out of the way, I only want Michael in these shots. Seriously, son. Out!”
As you might expect, the old man’s behavior drove me to explore the more malevolent aspects of my fallen nature.
Hence, revenge.
Combining these reasons together, despite my doubts that our son could ever truly become the Antichrist, I played along with the wife and watched with a hidden, though no less wicked glee, as my father’s pride in Sparky faded, his smile dimmed, and his visits became increasingly sporadic, sans camera.
How I loved the sound of his voice in those days, the familiar, strained, panic-stricken sound of a Charles Bronson whose beloved watermelons are withering, one at a time, before his eyes.
“Shouldn’t he be potty-trained by now?”
“Don’t you think he’s getting heavy for his age?”
“Why doesn’t he say anything? He just sits there and stares out into space.”
“Why is his hair falling out?”
“Will he ever stop scratching his crotch?”
“What do you mean they want to give him a do-over for Head Start?”
In less than five years, I had the old man on the ropes. At his breaking point. Beaten and desperate.
I, on the other hand, was in the sort of boundless ecstasy only arch villains can appreciate. I felt like Baby Jane Hudson singing to piano accompaniment and staring at herself in the mirror. You know: I’ve writ-ten a lett-er to Dadeee. Like Alex DeLarge in the throes of his first successful sex fantasy after overcoming the Ludovico Technique. You know: Oh, I was cured all right. Like Jabba the Hutt gazing upon Han Solo in carbon freeze. You know: Ho ho ho.
Thanks to my machinations, Sparky was well on his way to becoming every bit as unimpressive as anyone in our family had ever been. It took long enough, but finally here was an unqualified success I could claim for my own.
Excuse me for a moment, as I savor the peak of this delectable victory. On the phone with my father, while inwardly twirling around like Hannibal Lecter to the Goldberg Variations, I was reassuring him he need not worry about the future, as I was convinced God had told me Sparky would one day sire a male heir and keep the Old Horvath Machine up and chugging.
“But I don’t think I’ll be making such a big deal out of it with him as you did with me,” I said.
To my everlasting delight, the old man let out a dejected moan and hung up on me.
Apparently, Sparky extending the Royal Horvath Bloodline wasn’t good enough for him anymore. Now that he was closer to the end of his life, the old man didn’t consider it such a good thing to see the Great Horvath from the view of Eternity. Clearly, he wanted to say he’d had a hand in the Great Horvath’s development—more than just DNA—a place of honor in the whole process, something to make himself feel better about the jack squat his life had amounted to.
Normally, I would have sympathized with this yearning for purpose and meaning. Not this time.
Of course, that triumph, as all of mine have been to date, was short-lived, and it was followed by a rout more humiliating than anything that win could have accounted for.
My father, though old, paunchy, sad, wrinkled, and hobo-faced, miraculously managed to woo a waitress more than twenty years his junior, wed her, and, through her, beget another son.
A son who appears to be, at age eight, a genuine fucking genius.
So much for revenge.
4
On to the weird stuff.
For the first eight months or so of Sparky’s life: nothing. Unless you find the little processes all babies do to be weird, like Penny did; and those first months, she could be found spending most of her waking hours analyzing baby Sparky’s every movement, be they of the motor or bowel variety. She also liked to pester me for my point of view.
“He’s smiling. Why do you think he’s smiling? What do you think he’s thinking about that’s making him smile?”
“Is that a snarl?”
“Did you hear that grunt?”
“Why does he never laugh?”
“Why does he never cry?”
I suppose she might have been right to ask some of these questions, as it is worth noting that Sparky rarely, if ever, cried—though I hardly thought it confirmation of anything. I had heard of lots of babies that had never cried. As it so happens, I was one of those babies, something I pointed out to the wife once as we were sorting laundry together.
“He’s like me that way,” I said, putting all the socks in a pile. Mine and hers. Some of them, probably mine, were smelly. “I never cried.”
“Well, he doesn’t laugh either,” the wife said. She was gathering underwear, but only hers. She refused to touch mine.
“He smiles, that’s enough for right now,” I said, gathering up the socks and putting them into the machine. I noticed one of the wife’s had a gaping hole in it. I left it in the wash.
“Disturbing smiles, Frank,” the wife said. She had moved on to her bras. “Disturbing serial-killer smiles that keep me from sleeping at night.”
“Penny, no baby smiles like a serial killer,” I said, picking out my own underwear, boxer briefs, and throwing them into the wash. A top pair, a white one, had multiple skid marks in the seat, indicating it needed to be put out to pasture; but, like the holey sock, I left it in, a decision that did not go unnoticed. The wife was now looking into the washer with Gross Face. She had seen the skid marks.
Stronger of mind than ever, I pushed on. “Let’s not project our worries here and turn a bunch of reasonably normal baby stuff into some kind of omen.”
The wife said nothing to this pearl of wisdom and just stood there, transfixed by the agitating load in the machine and the thought of how much havoc my shit-stained boxer briefs might be wreaking upon her defenseless panties. It took a moment or two longer for her to recover, but she did. C’est la vie.
“Explain to me why won’t he laugh, then?” she said. “When I make goofy faces and
dance around, sing songs and oochie-coochie?”
“I don’t know, maybe you’re not all that funny,” I replied. I was still a bit miffed at the extended repugnance directed at my boxer briefs.
“I’m plenty funny, Mr. Man,” she said, closing the lid to the washer, now full of smelly socks, sweaty bras, and skiddy underwear. “Funnier than you’ll ever be.”
“Show me what you do then,” I said.
She did.
“I’m afraid I’m with the boy on this one,” I said.
The wife became suspicious of strangers, many of whom she thought might be the aforementioned Satan’s minions stopping by under various guises to check on the welfare of their infant savior.
She bought a handgun: the precious 9mm now lost to the goons of E.
During small breaks from baby scrutiny, she would glare out the window at the postman, cable man, and utility man as they performed their various jobs. By her side was the pistol, just out of sight.
I can only imagine how confident she felt then, how sure of herself. If only one of them had actually been a Satanist. Man, he never would’ve known what hit him!
Anyway you slice it though, the wife’s over-sensitive Antichrist detector aside, nothing really happened that first year. Nothing obviously evil from the baby, no minions or toadies attempted to take him away or perform satanic maintenance on him. No Rottweilers passed by to communicate with him via tongue-lolling telepathy. All quiet on the western front. Except for us.
During that time, I was in the midst of a fog, handling the situation with our son with equal parts apathy, skepticism, and vodka, whereas the wife was going nuts over anything and everything and feeling a lot of anger toward me for my lack of faith, support, and sobriety.
It’s possible we would never have made it as husband and wife if things had gone on like that; it’s possible, if we had stopped being husband and wife, I would now have no input, say-so, or control whatsoever concerning my son and, therefore, the fate of mankind; it’s possible I wouldn’t even be in his life at all right now if things had kept on like they had started, that’s how close I was to failing the world and not knowing it.
So what was it that turned this thing around? Grab your hanky and snuggle up with the one you love.
Sparky’s first Christmas.
5
To help you appreciate the magnitude of what happened, let me first temper your expectations by taking off the board some of the things that didn’t.
For instance:
Sparky’s skin did not sizzle, nor did he prophesy in a deep, demonish voice the coming destruction of the Kingdom of Heaven and the end of all celebrations of Christ’s birthday. The corkscrew pasta nativity scene in our living room window didn’t explode or melt. The wife wasn’t impaled by the Christmas tree or electrocuted by the lights. Eggnog was not turned into bloodnog. The living room stereo didn’t magically change from Bing Crosby to “Tubular Bells.”
The only thing that did happen was that Sparky came down with a wicked case of colic.
That’s right, he cried. All goddamned day and all goddamned night. Making up for lost time you could say.
What statisticians would call “regression to the mean.”
Not a thing we did could make him stop. Not patting. Not burping. Not changing. Not even a special holiday appearance of the wife’s left breast for Christmas dinner.
It was incredible. Nothing seemed to be wrong with him and yet, there he was, bawling his head off.
Finally, at my suggestion, we took him to the hospital in Indianapolis, and there, in keeping with the sterling reputation of their profession, the doctors couldn’t find anything wrong with him either. They didn’t even bother with a decent guess this time. They took his tiny temperature. They took his tiny blood pressure. They poked and prodded him a little here and a little there.
No clue.
“Aaaaand we’re out of here,” they said. “Happy holidays.”
We drove Sparky back to Little Hat, back to the Christmas prayer vigil being held at Little Hat Pentecostal, where he was prayed and gibbered over and sang to until Reverend Worley, Phipps’s replacement, kindly asked us to remove him from the service.
“Try reading Galatians to him,” one of the church ladies suggested to us on our way out.
“Jangle some wind chimes,” Ken Huckaby said.
“Coochie-coo him,” Mrs. Worley said.
Back home we tried gibbering and singing and dancing churchily around Sparky in his crib, in the hopes that doing these things in a more intimate setting would prove more effective, and when that failed, we went back to the traditional stuff and goo-goo’d extra hard and rocked him.
At some point, you gotta figure the baby would get tired, right? Fall asleep? Suck his toes? Didn’t happen. Not until the clock struck twelve and rang in December the 26th. At that moment, with the clock in the midst of its chimes, with Penny and me at the absolute end of our sanity, Sparky blew out his diaper and barfed all over his crib.
And that was that.
And nothing was said.
We never did discuss what shrieking for the entirety of Christ’s birthday followed by an expulsion of stomach and intestinal contents might portend for the future of a child whom a missing and presumed dead minister had said would be the Antichrist. The wife didn’t send any letters to Dr. Thessaloniki, and there was no way we would tell our parents about it other than to assure them everything was peachy now and that their ideas had been a big help. (“Did you rub castor oil on his chest?” Penny’s mother had asked. “How about a pillow over his face?” her father had joked. Meanwhile, the old man, hysterical from taking care of my flu-ridden Aunt at Sioux Falls: “DO YOU NEED ME TO COME HOME?”) The only result from Sparky’s first Christmas, besides the purchase of a new crib, was that my skepticism and doubt could now be shouted down.
I have to admit I even found myself wondering if Penny might have been right after all. I know it was only crying, but then, context is everything.
So, unless seen from our unique perspective, most of the oddball happenings during the opening years of Sparky’s life weren’t much to be concerned about. Take that away and what we had on the whole was, admittedly, dismissible: the occasional unhinged look on his face when regarding something alive, an early obsession with fire, dismembering teddies with relish, and so forth. But as time went on, we began to notice that a number of strategies we had employed to hinder his growth had not worked as well as we’d hoped, as by age three, Sparky was able to walk, talk, and do most things most normal three-year-olds can do (though it should be said he couldn’t do them very well).
The wife, as she was wont to do, was going shitballs over it. She wondered how he had picked up so many things without being taught. She then, as she was also wont to do, blamed me.
And into a fog I would go.
Things went on pretty much like this until the next major occurrence: the Saturday after Sparky’s fifth birthday. That afternoon the wife raced into our bedroom in a full-on sprint, flapping her hands and hyperventilating.
I was already there, in bed, comfortably ensconced in malaise, a state of mind for which I had cleared my schedule for the rest of the day to properly enjoy. I also might have snuck in a few drinks.
“Oh Jesus, oh Lord,” the wife said, dramatically pulling the bedspread up to cover her mouth. “It’s happening. It’s starting to happen.”
She raved about the starting and the happening for a few minutes while I made multiple attempts to sit up and figure out what was starting and happening. Sad to say, because my stomach was well past “bit of” stage and my brain was addled by a tad more booze than any rational human being would have consumed by 1:30 in the afternoon, these two tasks took much longer than they should have. It eventually took calling up previously untapped reserves of concentration and strength before I was able to pro
p myself up on an elbow and get the gist of what had thrown the wife into such a panic. The What being two things, the worst being something Sparky had said, which had come right on the heels of his having done Something.
Something horrible. Something Antichristy.
What did he say? Allegedly, the following: “Grandma sucks pee-pees in Heck!”
The wife understood that to mean her mother was performing fellatio on unnamed persons in Hell. Penny was petrified as to how Sparky would have any clue what her mother, dead for eight months, would be doing with her time in the Big Adios. Unfortunately, the wife had failed to recognize the line for what it was: a quote from a movie.
Which movie? The Exorcist. Which quote? From the demon Pazuzu, spoken through Linda Blair: YOUR MOTHER SUCKS COCKS IN HELL!
The original quote is obviously a bit more randy than the more sanitized one Sparky used, which I believe was his way of conforming to his mother’s law that no profanity was to be used in the house by anyone for any reason at any time (a law I frequently, shamelessly broke).
This led me to wonder how Sparky, at age five, knew the bad words well enough to supply cleaner substitutions for them. This also led me to wonder why he would say such a thing—sanitized or not—in the first place. What I did not have to wonder about was how he came across The Exorcist. That one’s on me.
Earlier that day, in the midst of fog, I had turned the TV on for Sparky without first checking what was on it and told him to have a good time before stumbling off to descend into my whiskey-fueled gloom. So there was a logical explanation for why Sparky had said what he had, and once explained, the wife calmed down a little, though she was not all that happy with me.
The Antichrist of Kokomo County Page 19