Sweet Land Stories

by E. L. Doctorow

  Then we were back in the studio with the handsome news anchor: He said Mrs. Wilson the mother was under sedation. He quoted Mr. Wilson the father as saying he didn’t understand—they were not rich people, that he was a CPA who worked for his living like everyone else.

  I had seen enough. I woke up Karen and hustled her and the baby and all the Kmart paraphernalia into the Durango. Why, whatever is the matter, Lester? Karen said. She was still half asleep. Are we going somewhere? She looked frightened for a moment until I put Baby Wilson in her arms. I ran back to the house and grabbed some clothes and things for each of us. Then I ran back again and turned off the lights and locked the door.

  I could imagine them any minute coming up the road and through the woods around us at the same time. We were in a cul-de-sac at the end of a dirt road here. I drove down to the two-lane. It was a mile from there to the freeway ramp. I pointed east for Nevada, though not planning to go there necessarily but just to be out on the highway away from town, feeling safer on the move, though expecting any minute to see a cop car in the rearview.

  I wasn’t worried about Brenda—she would think twice before getting involved. But I reasoned that if the police were smart they would talk to every florist in the city. Of course their being Crenshaw’s finest, it was only even odds they would make the connection to an employee of Nature’s Basket who had not shown up for work, one Karen Robileaux, age twenty-six. But even odds was not good enough as far as I was concerned, besides which the FBI were getting on the case, so say the odds were now sixty-forty, and if they made an I.D. of Karen it would be too late for an anonymous return of the baby. And if they came knocking on the door before I had the chance to deliver him back of our own accord, as appeared likely, there would be no alleviating circumstances for a judge to consider, that I could see.

  And so we were out of there.

  I HAD PICKED up her shoulder bag when running out of the house. Of course it was of Indian design, knitted, with all sorts of jagged lines, sectioned like a map in different colors of sand and rust and aqua. Inside, she kept not what women usually keep in their bags, no lipstick or powder compacts or portable tampon containers or any such normal things as that. She had some crumbs of dried flowers and a packet of Kleenex and her housekeys and a paperback book about the Intergalactic Council, a kind of UN of advanced civilizations around the universe and how it was trying to send messages of peace to Earth. It was a non-fiction book, she had told me all about it. She had been thinking of becoming an Earth Representative of the Council. And two crumpled dollar bills and a handful of change.

  Karen, don’t you have any money? Didn’t you get paid this week?

  Oh I forgot. Yes, Lester, let’s see, she said and rooted about in the pocket of her dress. And she handed me her pay envelope.

  She had her hundred and twenty in there. I was carrying thirty-five in my wallet. Not great. I could cover gas, food, and a motel room for a night.

  After a couple of hours on the road I was calming down. It occurred to me, despite everything I was not mad at Karen. Given her state of mind she couldn’t be held responsible. If anyone, I was the one to blame for not springing into action the minute she walked in the door with the kid. And she was so trusting, sitting up there beside me with Baby Wilson in her arms and her eyes on the road ahead. She didn’t ask where we were going, not that I could have told her. And the moving car seemed to soothe him, too. He was quiet in her arms. A weird feeling, something like a pride of ownership, came over me, that I would compare now to falling asleep at the wheel. Migod, I woke up quickly enough.

  By now it had gotten dark, it was all desert now, the road flat and straight. Karen opened her window and leaned out to see the stars. I had to slow down so Baby Wilson would not have a cold wind blowing into his face. I stuck my hand over the back of the seat and rummaged around till I found the package of diapers. I pulled one out and told her to put it around his little head.

  Babies don’t get sick the first three months of their life, Karen said. No viruses or anything. They are automatically insured by God for three months exactly, did you know that, Lester?

  But she did as I asked.

  By midnight I had us tucked away in a Days Inn outside of Dopple City, Nevada. So without consciously thinking about it till we were practically there, this is where I had meant to come.

  I brought in a hamburger dinner, french fries, chicken wings, a milkshake, and for Karen a garden salad. She never drank anything but water. I left her sitting on one of the double beds and feeding the child. I went outside for a smoke and then got back in the SUV.

  I knew Dopple. It was a city in its dreams only—what, a railroad yard, a string of car dealerships? It wasn’t much of anything. Anyone could find the strip by seeing where the night sky was lit up.

  I decided on Fortunato’s. The lady dealers, with their little black bow ties and white shirts and black vests and ass-tight slacks, were the one bit of class. Bells ringing, someone singing with a karaoke, the usual din of losers. A cheap mob place trying to be Vegas with an understocked bar and slots from yesteryear. It smelled, too, like there was a stable or a cow barn out back.

  In the men’s room, where the floor was all wet and some drunk had lost it, I carefully combed my hair. Then I went out and sat down at a five-dollar table that looked about right and bought fifty dollars in chips. Little blond lady dealer, a pit man just behind her. Four decks in the shoe, but my system is not counting cards. My system is betting modestly while sitting next to a high roller with a big stack in front of him. Kind who talks too much and swivels around with each winning hand to see if he’s gathered the audience he deserves.

  I didn’t look at the dealer, but smiled as if to myself every now and then. I was very quiet. When I doubled, if the pit man had moved on, I put down a chip for her. She didn’t look at me, but nodded slightly and smiled as if to herself. Tiny mouth but well shaped. There arose a sympathy between us. It’s not as if any cheating goes on, it’s more like a flirtation through the cards. Things happen. At the end of a half hour it was as if she’d taken the edge of her plump little hand and cut one of the high roller’s stacks and slid it over to me. I got up at that point—it was supposed to be a fun thing, nothing to take too far. That would lack class, ruin the whole game between us. I left twenty for her and cashed in for a hundred twenty-five dollars net.

  It was a short drive to the Mexican part of town. Dark there, quiet, not many lights. I parked into the curb, rolled down the window, and sat there and had a smoke, and pretty soon a kid came along. He couldn’t have been more than thirteen, fourteen. Peered in at me for a good look. When I told him what I was buying, he went to the front of my car and looked at the California plate. Then he went around a corner and a few minutes later someone who could have been his mother was standing at my window. She was a heavyset woman with a handsome broad face and a black dress too tight for her, but she acted tired, or fed up. She wanted one-fifty for a six-pack, which was cheap enough, but I told her as honestly as I could I only had one and a quarter to spend. She said something indicating her disgust in Spanish, but then she nodded and I drove away with two Visas, two MasterCards, and two Amexes, one of them Gold.

  What was I up to if not executive decisions? I felt almost proud of myself by the time I got back to the motel. Karen was asleep with her arm around the infant. Her shift had ridden up. She was weird and maybe even a witch of a sort, but those were the smoothest young legs and artfully draped crescents of backside a man could ever hope to gaze upon. But I was tired too and decided to wait till morning. I conformed one of my driver’s licenses, practiced my signature, and then went to sleep in the other bed thinking what a great country this was.

  OF COURSE the infernal problem remained, whatever the stupid mood I happened to be in. How was I going to get little junior away from Karen without making her crazier than she was? And if I managed that, how to avoid the law while finding a way to deliver him to his proper parents? And thirdly, how t
o keep Karen out of a U.S. District Court, as well as the newspapers as an object of public odium, to say nothing of myself?

  And then in the morning of course she was so busy with the baby that she didn’t have time for me. Or inclination. Everything was Jesu this and Jesu that, all her love flowing out of her and none of it coming in my direction. She sent me off for more supplies, so careless of my feelings she didn’t even feel it necessary to explain that the baby was taking all her weakened strength, as if she was a real mother recovering from the act of giving birth. She just expected me to understand that from the way she moved about, holding her hand in the small of her back for a moment of thought, or blowing back from the corner of her mouth a strand of hair that had fallen over her eye because both her hands were busy diapering the kid, and so on.

  It is strange how different the same woman can be at different times, even a lovesick crazy one like this, who was so moony about me from the first moment I caught her attention when I walked into Nature’s Basket to wire flowers for my mother’s birthday in Illinois. There was this lovely girl in a long dress and barefooted who seemed to have risen out of the smell of earth and the heavy humidity you get in a florist. Karen looked at me as if struck dumb. She tucked her hair behind her ears and said it was nice that I had a mother I thought so well of. I didn’t tell her otherwise. I went along with her illusion, whereas the twenty-five dollars I laid down for the mixed bouquet was an investment against a return of ten times or twenty times that which I hoped to wheedle out of the old bat after a decent interval.

  So after I get back with doughnuts and coffee, and a yogurt for Karen, and this and that from the drugstore, it starts to rain in Dopple City. Lightning and thunder, an unlikely spring torrent, and what does she do but take Baby Wilson outside behind the Days Inn, where she steps over the scraggly attempt at landscaping and walks out into the desert dirt, laughing and hugging the poor child and holding her head up to drink rainwater while not listening to what I am saying, and shaking me off when I try to hustle her back inside. And as suddenly as it came the rain passes, and Karen is standing there with her hair wet as if she’s just had a shower and she says, Look, my sweet baby, you see what God is doing? And to me she says, You too, Lester. Wait for the runoff, where the rivulets leave their traces, keep your eyes focused—it is the pure magic of the desert you are about to see.

  And all she meant was those desert wildflowers that hurry to blossom from the least encouragement of rain, which they did—little settlements of blue and yellow and white spikes and petals and tiny cups in the declivities, clustered close to the land as if not wanting to take the chance of growing up too far away from it, flowers that you don’t actually see opening but just have the feeling that they were there all along only you didn’t happen to notice them before.

  And that was pretty if you go for that sort of thing, but the child still couldn’t see, although he seemed to be peering out from under her hand, which she held over his head like an umbrella, and for a moment I had the ridiculous feeling of real communication between them, this mad girl and a stolen infant just two or three days old who were now poking about together under the sun out there in the flowering desert behind the Days Inn.

  I LEFT THEM there and got the keys to the Durango and took it down the highway to a used-car place. I wanted to get out of Dopple City as soon as possible. My theory was to keep moving if nothing else. Besides which I did not want to have to pay another day’s rent on the motel room, the checkout time for which was twelve noon.

  The Durango was registered in both our names, although in truth it was Karen’s savings that had bought it, but under my influence, I might add, since I had always held Durangos in high esteem.

  It was already used when we bought it, though in reasonable condition, with just fifty thousand miles on the odometer, which I had since added twenty to, but the front tires were almost new, which is what I explained to the guy at the car lot, uselessly, since he would only give me seven-fifty for it, six if I wanted cash. I took the six hundred. He was a short, fat underhanded thief in a white shirt and string tie but then again did not ask too many questions as he unscrewed my plates and handed them to me.

  His man gave me a ride a mile down the road to the Southwest Car Rental and I used my Amex Gold to secure a Windstar van, whose greatest if not only attribute was a Nevada license plate.

  It was in this sad, shining new van that I wouldn’t ordinarily be caught in that I packed up my imitation wife and child and headed west back to California. I had no idea what to do. But we were well disguised in our domestic vehicle and a little baby boy adorably asleep in the new car chair I had gotten him. Karen stroked the upholstery. She marveled at the drink containers at each seat. She accepted the Windstar without question as she did any mysterious moves on my part. My feeling about things began to change: I had cash in my pocket and now some pride in my heart, because Karen loved the new car. She turned the radio on, and there we were, heading west with the sun behind us and the great Patsy Cline singing “Sweet Dreams of You,” Karen giving me a sly amused and weirdly sane glance that caused me nearly to swerve into the opposite lane as we sang along with Patsy, I know I should hate you the whole night through, instead of having sweet dreams of you.

  NOW I DO admit that there came over me an idea I not only hadn’t considered but that wouldn’t have come even glancingly to my mind before this moment, which was to go with the flow—to take my girl’s madness for my own, to embrace it as, before all this happened, I had customarily embraced her. Why not? Baby Wilson already had a certain character that I found agreeable. He cried only when he had to, and seemed thoughtful most of the time, if that was possible, full of serious attention to the new world in which he found himself, as if, seeing it only as a blur, he was making up for it by listening very carefully. And though Karen told me that what I thought was a smile as he looked at me was in reality of bit of indigestion, it was hard for me not to smile back. Karen seemed to have acquired the wise love that mothers have the instant they become mothers, as if the hormones or whatever maternal chemicals were involved had begun to operate within her from the moment she calmly walked out of that hospital with some other woman’s newborn in her arms.

  I didn’t know anything about the Wilsons except that Mr. Wilson was an accountant, which didn’t foretell a particularly exciting life for this kid, who had already seen, and not yet a week old, two states and a rare rain in the desert that not many people not living in the desert would ever see. And his beautiful though self-appointed and by law criminally insane mother had picked one tiny blue flower and put its stem in his little hand, and his fingers had curled around it, automatically of course, but he still clutched it, though fast asleep in his car chair as we crossed the state line into California.

  And from all of this and the sun lighting our way ahead like a golden road, I had this revelation of a new life for myself, a life I had never thought of aspiring to, where I would be someone’s husband and someone else’s father, dependable, holding down a full-time job, and building a place in the world for himself and his family. So that when he died they would mourn grievously and bless his departing spirit for the love and respectable life he had given them.

  A SPECIAL NEWS bulletin on the radio was like cold water on my face: Baby Wilson’s parents had received a ransom note.

  We were about a hundred miles east of Crenshaw. I pulled over to the side of the road.

  The details of the note had not been divulged, but it was believed the Wilsons intended to meet the kidnapper’s demands.

  Goddamn!

  What, Lester?

  Can you believe this?

  I pounded the steering wheel. The baby woke and began to cry. Karen reached back and unbuckled him and lifted him over the seat and held him in her arms as if to protect him from me.

  Lester, you’re frightening us!

  Can you believe the evil in this world? That some slime would con those poor people and cash in on their su
ffering?

  She was silent for a moment. She said, I do believe there is evil in this world, yes, but I believe people can be redeemed? Her voice clouded up. She could barely finish the sentence. She began rocking the kid in her arms and soon the tears were coming and now I had the two of them bawling away.

  I got out of the van and lit a cigarette and paced up and down the grass shoulder. A car sped by and its wind made the van shudder. Then another. I wanted to be in one of those cars. There was some sort of green crop growing in bunches low to the ground behind the fence and it seemed to go on for miles. I wanted to be the farmer out here in the middle of nowhere quietly growing his cash crop of whatever it was—spinach or cauliflower or some other inedible damn vegetable. I wanted to be anyone but who I was and anywhere but where I was. What was I supposed to do now?

  I motioned for her to roll down her window: Has it occurred to you, Karen, that you have provided him or them the opportunity?

  Gone were all my diplomatic strategies. All the anger that I had pent up cascaded over this sad pathetic girl sitting rocking the baby in her arms, and her pale eyes reddened and enlarged with the tears rolling down her cheeks.

  Yes, you have stirred up something really grand, you know that? You have inspired others to do evil, Karen Robileaux. And not only this slime or slimes. Supposing he really had possession of the baby? Is it in the baby’s interest of safety to have the news broadcast all around the country that there is a ransom note? Of course not. How could this slimeball trust them now, these poor parents, thinking they had told everyone about his private communication. What would you do under the circumstances if you couldn’t trust the parents to deal without calling in the cops, the FBI, and the media—I mean this is a goddamn radio station in Los Angeles. Los Angeles! They don’t give a shit if the baby turns up dead. They just want people to listen so they can sell their advertising. They are happy to violate such delicate confidences. They are proud to be good reporters! So the evil is going out in all directions, Karen, like radio waves from an antenna!