Sweet Land Stories

by E. L. Doctorow

  He can’t do anything bad to this baby, she sobbed. None of them can. He doesn’t have this baby. I have this baby, she said, kissing the child fervently on the cheeks, on his head, every part of him that was not swaddled.

  Well maybe not, I said, quieter now. But how do the Wilsons know that? He has already done something to them when they find out he is a fraud and a hoax and they are who knows how many thousands of dollars poorer. And not only that, I said more to myself than to her, everyone thinks now you have an accomplice, a male accomplice, because no woman alone who stole a child would do it for purposes of ransom.

  Karen opened the door and stepped out of the van and handed me Baby Wilson, and then went off a ways on the shoulder behind a tree and lifted her dress and squatted down to pee.

  I had not held him before to any extent. He was a warm little fellow. I could feel his heart beat, and he squirmed around a bit trying to look at me who was holding him. And he had stopped crying.

  When Karen came back she took Baby Wilson and got back in the van and sat there frowning and staring straight ahead and she wasn’t crying anymore, either. It was like she was waiting for the car to move, as if it really didn’t need a driver to get up there beside her and put the key in the ignition.

  A FEW MILES on at the edge of a town I pulled into a gas station with a convenience store. I bought us bottled water and presented one to Karen by way of a peace offering. Without looking at me she took it. I bought the newspapers they carried, the local and the L.A. and San Diego papers. They all had the story, they were blissed-out with excitement. And every story came with a composite police drawing of someone who looked like Karen though with her ears grown bigger and her mouth thinner and her eyes transplanted from someone else. It was both not a good likeness and too close for comfort.

  I tossed the papers away. I didn’t feel the need to show her anything more by way of persuasion. She had no voice in the matter as far as I was concerned. We drove on and this turned out to be a well-groomed little town, with big trees shading the streets and the retail stores uniformly in good taste so as not to offend the eye. And there was nobody in sight, as if the townsfolk were having their afternoon nap, even the police.

  It hit me then, my idea: If the story was in every paper, if it was all over the damn state, did it matter where we dropped off Baby Wilson? And I thought, Why not here? And if not now, when?

  I peered right and left as I rolled to stop at each corner until I saw something along the lines of what I wanted—a neat white stucco church with a red barrel-tile roof. It was a Catholic church, as uniformly tasteful as everything else in this town. It had a Christ on the cross in relief on the stucco steeple. I can’t now remember the Saintly name of it, even the town’s name escapes me—this was a moment of such stressful fatedness that the surroundings remain in my mind only as bodily impressions. I remember the sun on my neck as I carried the car seat by its handles as a portable carryall for the baby after Karen had been in there a few minutes, I remember my instructions to her beforehand as we sat in the van with the motor running in the neatly ruled empty parking lot around the side, and though the air-conditioning was on I felt the sweat dripping down the small of my back.

  It was very peculiar that she seemed as ready as I was, as if somewhere, at some moment—I couldn’t have told you when—we had made magnetic contact. As if it had never been otherwise than that we were both sane and synchronized in our thought. So I experienced something also like a feeling of estrangement as I realized, looking at her, that I loved Karen Robileaux. I loved her. I mean it just came over me—an incredible welcoming rush of gladness that welled up in my throat and threatened to spill out of my eyes. I loved her. Her frail being was strong. Her kookiness was mystical. And it was even eerier to hear in my mind, at last, what she had been telling me time and time again before this all happened—how she adored me, how she actually did love me in all the ways that people understand as love. It was a bonding that was true if it was this scary. Of course I said nothing, and did not declare myself. I really didn’t have to. She knew. Our intimacy was in the fact of our conspiring together as she concentrated on what I was saying with her pale wolf eyes staring into mine, so much so that, once she got out of the car and walked up the steps into the church, I wondered if this hadn’t really been her plan and that she had brought me to this moment as I believed I had brought her. Because I remember her only problem was technical, whereas you might have expected much more in the way of resistance.

  Lester, she said, I don’t know the right words for confessing.

  It’s okay, I said. Just go in there and sit down in that box they have. It is somewhere off to the side. You don’t have to be Catholic for them to listen to you. When he hears you, the priest will sit down on the other side of the screen, and you just tell him you want to confess something. And he will listen and never betray your trust that it is just between the two of you. And you don’t have to cross yourself or anything—he will tell you what to do if you put it in the form of asking for his advice. I mean you know what he will say. And you will thank him, and you will mean it, and maybe thank God too that there are people who are sworn to do this for a living.

  And what will he do then?

  See, I have to believe priests read the papers and watch the TV like everyone else, so he will know what baby you are talking about. He will say, And where is the Wilson baby now? And you will tell him, Father, the baby is here. You will find him in his carryall just inside the front door. And a paper sack with his formula and his diapers and a tube of Polysporin for his bellybutton.

  And when he gets up and runs down the aisle, you slip out the side door to right here where we are parked.

  Karen is a brave woman. She has always been brave, and never more than in this moment. She walked in there with her skirt swaying from her lovely hips and her hair, which she had tied up in a ponytail given the solemnity of the occasion, also swinging from side to side, and for the same reason her usually bare feet in a pair of sandals.

  But before she took her deep breath and stepped down from the Windstar, she held the baby in her arms and caressed his round little head and brushed his dark hairs with the tips of her fingers as he stared up at her in his impassive manner and then looked away. And then Karen slipped him gently into my arms like a friend of the mother’s who has been given the privilege for just that moment of holding another woman’s child.

  THAT WHOLE DAY as we drove she slept in the backseat, curled up with her hands under her chin. I had decided to head north, staying off the freeways for the most part. When it was evening, I pulled into a motel and she went right from the car to the bed, where she got under the covers and went immediately back to sleep. I didn’t take any chance that she would wake up and watch the TV, so I pulled the plug and bent it out of shape before I went to the restaurant they had there and watched for myself on the bar TV. Mr. and Mrs. Wilson were shown hugging their baby and laughing through their tears. They were not the youngest of couples, they were both on the portly side, and in fact Mr. Wilson had a paunch on him to make me think I would never let myself go that way. And it turned out they had six other children of various sizes standing around the couch looking at the camera with what I recognized as the same unsmiling quietness of expression as Baby Wilson himself.

  Meanwhile an announcer was telling the story of the return, and quoting Mr. Wilson saying he and his wife were so happy they forgave whoever had kidnapped their child, but before I could breathe a sigh of relief, the camera cut to the FBI official in charge of the investigation and he said that the FBI would continue the search—that, regardless of the outcome, a federal crime had been committed and it was never up to the Wilsons to decide whether or not to prosecute. And then another shot of the bad drawing of Karen.

  In the gift shop there I bought a pair of sunglasses and an Angels baseball cap, and we got up at dawn and drove away. Karen wore the glasses and that cap with her hair tucked up inside all the way through C
alifornia. I used the credit cards sparingly, each one never more than once until the last one, which I hazarded a couple of times and then threw it away, not wanting to press my luck, and now we were down to our diminishing cash funds.

  In San Francisco, I parked Karen in a movie theater and went around to Noe Street to see if Fran still lived there. She did. When she opened her door, she said, Well, will you look what the cat dragged in! Fran was never the sort to bear a grudge. She was a song stylist who made her living singing in clubs. She had a housemate now, a kind of blowsy older woman, who nevertheless had the tact to excuse herself on some errand or other, probably to her chosen bar. I visited with Frannie almost the whole two hours of a feature movie, and then she walked with me to the ATM at the local grocery. As I left, I swore I would return her generosity in full. I knew she didn’t believe me, because she gave a good-hearted laugh and said time would tell and she was smiling and shaking her head as I waved and turned the corner.

  Just before the Oregon state line, I removed the Nevada plates from the Windstar and replaced them with the Durango’s old California plates.

  In Seattle, we took the ferry to Canada, standing at the rail in the gray and green mist of that day, with the foghorns coming over the water and the smell of the sea and gulls appearing and disappearing in the bad visibility. Karen loved this part of the trip. There was a new peace between us, and she held my arm with both her hands with a kind of fervent wifeliness.

  At the hotel in Vancouver we resumed our lovemaking as in our first days together and it was action-packed. She had really come awake to life as I realized now, reflecting on the last months between us, when she was more withdrawn than I wanted to admit.

  Vancouver is a squeaky-clean town, like all of Canada that I have ever seen—glass office buildings the color of the sky, the waterside filled with flag-flying yachts and motorboats, the downtown without litter of any kind, and everyone going about their business so as not to disturb anyone else. Not a town you want to stay in very long. But you find things if you look and I found a man in the import-export business who would take the Windstar off my hands, and if he gave me three thousand American for it, I knew he would clear at least ten at the other end.

  Then I bought Karen an opal engagement ring and a gold wedding band for one thousand Canadian, though we didn’t actually get legally married till we were settled in this town in Alaska, where she is known not as Karen Robileaux but as Mrs. Lester Romanowski, although she doesn’t get around enough to be known very well in her condition but stays up there in this hillside cabin we rent and tends her garden and cooks good things, not only for me but for herself, since she is eating for two, while in the meantime I am working down below, at sea level, between the mountains and the waterside, which is where the town is crammed.

  I have different jobs, one scrubbing pots and pans in this phony frontier restaurant, where the monster hamburger menu is up on blackboards and the bartender has a red beard and wears a lumberjack shirt with the sleeves rolled and there is sawdust on the floor. I also drive a school bus in the early morning and mid-afternoon, and another job, when I have to, is the slime line, which is where they handle the fish off the boats—a heavy-hauling, slippery job requiring rubber apron and gloves and hip boots and a shower and a good deodorant at the end of the shift.

  Just now I have a new opportunity on the weekend. I put on a funny bear costume and meet the cruise-ship passengers as they come down the gangway. I do it because, A, nobody knows it’s me in that stupid outfit and, B, it gives me a chance to get close to those ships without drawing attention to myself. I dance the ladies around a bit and make them laugh and pose with them for a photo to record their historic visit to Alaska.

  On my off day, Karen and I have found a place to watch the bears fishing in the shallows for their salmon dinner. Lots of birds busy in the forest, and animals I don’t get up out of bed to identify rustle around the cabin at night. Up through the tops of the trees every morning we see the black bald eagle that lives up the side of the mountain and likes to soar about in the thermals.

  Most people living here don’t quite fit into the greater U.S. for one reason or another, so nobody asks too many questions. Everyone I’ve met mostly has an attitude of big plans for themselves, which I certainly can appreciate. I’m beginning to think my big plan must have something to do with those cruise ships. They sail up every day to rest their block-long hulls against the dockside. When the tourists pour down the gangways to flow through the streets, well, this, plus the fish, is what keeps the Panhandle in the money. But more of the money stays aboard at the gaming tables and so I’m thinking I might find a way to I.D. as a passenger, take an overnight cruise to the next landing, come back flush the next day—I don’t know—the modus is there, it is only a matter of time till it makes itself known to me.

  Karen hugs me when I come home and always has a good dinner waiting, and sits across the table with her chin in her hand and stares at me as I eat. Of course she praises the reformed man I have become, and as a person who has not been without bold ideas of her own, she can appreciate that I am alert and ready for inspiration. But basically she has no mind for anything but the baby growing inside her. She has a wise, contented smile these days, my young wife. No one meeting her for the first time would think she was anything but sane. She said last night that she hopes I don’t mind not being consulted but she got used to the name Jesu and so that is what he will be called.

  JOLENE: A LIFE

  She married Mickey Holler when she was fifteen. Married him to get out of her latest foster home where her so-called dad used to fool with her, get her to hold him, things like that. Even before her menses started. And her foster mom liked to slap her up the head for no reason. Or for every reason. So she married Mickey. And he loved her—that was a plus. She had never had that experience before. It made her look at herself in the mirror and do things with her hair. He was twenty, Mickey. Real name Mervin. He was a sweet boy if without very much upstairs, as she knew even from their first date. He had a heel that didn’t touch the ground and weak eyes but he was not the kind to lay a hand on a woman. And she could tell him what she wanted, like a movie, or a grilled-cheese sandwich and a chocolate shake, and it became his purpose in life. He loved her, he really did, even if he didn’t know much about it.

  But anyway she was out of the house now, and wearing a wedding ring to South Sumter High. Some of the boys said smutty things but the girls looked upon her with a new respect.

  Mickey’s Uncle Phil had come to the justice of the peace with them to be best man. After the ceremony he grinned and said Welcome to our family, Jolene honey, and gave her a big hug that lasted a mite too long. Uncle Phil was like a father to Mickey and employed him to drive one of the trucks in his home oil delivery business. Mickey Holler was almost an orphan. His real father was in the state penitentiary with no parole for the same reason his mother was in the burial ground behind the First Baptist Church. Jolene asked Mickey, as she thought permissible now that she was a relation, what his mother had done to deserve her fate. But he got all flustered when he tried to talk about it. It happened when he was only twelve. She was left to gather for herself that his father was a crazy drunk who had done bad things even before this happened. But anyway that was why Jolene was living now with Mickey under the same roof with his Uncle Phil and Aunt Kay.

  Aunt Kay was real smart. She was an assistant manager in the Southern People’s Bank across the square from the courthouse. So between her and Uncle Phil’s oil business, they had a nice ranch house with a garden out back and a picnic table and two hammocks between the trees.

  Jolene liked the room she and Mickey occupied, though it looked into the driveway, and she had what she could do to keep it nice, with Mickey dropping his greasy coveralls on the floor. But she understood the double obligations of being a wife and an unpaying boarder besides. As she was home from school before anyone finished their jobs for the day, she tried to make herself useful
. She would have an hour or so to do some of her homework and then she would go into the kitchen and put up something for everyone’s dinner.

  Jolene had always liked school—she felt at home there. Her favorite subject was art. She had been drawing from the time she was in third grade, when the class had done a mural of the Battle of Gettysburg and she drew more of it than anyone. She couldn’t do much art now at this time in her life as a married woman, not being just for herself anymore. But she still noticed things. She was someone who had an eye for what wants to be drawn. Mickey had a white hairless chest with a collarbone that stood out across from shoulder to shoulder like he was someone’s beast of burden. And a long neck and a backbone that she could use to do sums. He surely did love her—he cried sometimes he loved her so much—but that was all. She had a sixteenth birthday and he bought her a negligee he picked out himself at Berman’s department store. It was three sizes too big. Jolene could take it back for exchange, of course, but she had the unsettling thought that as Mickey’s wife all that would happen in her life to come was she would grow into something that size. He liked to watch her doing her homework, which made her realize he had no ambition, Mickey Holler. He would never run a business and play golf on the weekend like Uncle Phil. He was a day-to-day person. He did not ever talk about buying his own home, or moving toward anything that would make things different for them than they were now. She could think this of him even though she liked to kiss his pale chest and run her fingers over the humps of his backbone.

  Uncle Phil was tall with a good strong jaw and a head of shining black hair he combed in a kind of wave, and he had a deep voice and he joked around with a lot of self-assurance, and dark meaningful eyes—oh, he was a man, of that there was no doubt. At first it made Jolene nervous when he would eye her up and down. Or he would sing a line from a famous love song to her. You are so beautiful to mee! And then he would laugh to let her know it was all just the same horsing around as he was accustomed to doing. He was tanned from being out on the county golf course, and even the slight belly he had on him under his knit shirt seemed just right. The main thing about him was that he enjoyed his life, and he was popular—they had their social set, though you could see most of their friends came through him.