Barrel Fever (11 page)

When he was first born my nephew looked like a doll. A doll made of raw hamburger meat. Most babies come that way but it was a lot worse with Marty Jr., who remained raw and blistered after repeated washings. His features continue to look handmade and richly textured. Vicki tried convincing Marty that babies age and grow into their faces. She said his ruddy color meant that he would tan easily later in life.

“He’ll be a lady-killer,” she said to Marty. “Just like his old man, a four-star lady-killer.”

Marty wasn’t buying any of it. This child was clearly not what he had in mind and he regarded it as if it were an oversized turd. His mild curiosity was replaced by disgust and, finally, anger.

“I can tell you’re the daddy because he’s got your eyes!” a nurse made the mistake of saying to him.

Marty waited until she had taken the baby away before calling the nurse a bitch and repeating “No I’ve got my eyes. Me — I have the both of them.” He pointed to his face and accidentally stuck his finger into his left eye. When Vicki offered him a Kleenex he brushed her hand away, knocking her water glass to the floor.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” Vicki repeated these words until it was just a noise. Marty turned his back to her until an-other nurse arrived with her dinner tray. Marty ate everything but the pudding.

When I first laid eyes on Marty Jr. I understood that he would need to develop a winning personality ASAP so, after he was re-leased from the hospital, I quit school in order to help Vicki take care of him. To be honest I probably would have quit anyway so, when Vicki suggested it, I was grateful to have such a formal-sounding excuse. The only person I miss is my English teacher, Mrs. Colgate. She told me to keep in touch and to “read, read, read.” I called her once but hung up when she answered the phone crying, “Curtis, listen. For the love of God, Curtis, I can explain everything.”

Carrying a baby had worn my sister out. After her week in the hospital she decided that now was the time for Vicki to start thinking about Vicki. This was the time for her to reevaluate and work off the weight she had gained while eating for two. How she worked it off while watching fourteen hours of television a day is anyone’s guess but it worked! I would arrive in the morning and spend my day taking care of the baby: changing and feeding, putting him down for naps, giving him a bath, laundry — I did it all.

“Teach him to cry only during the commercials,” Vicki would shout from the living room whenever he began to fuss. “He needs to spend more time outdoors, that’s his problem. Take him to the grocery store and let him look at the meat.”

I stayed at the house until the baby was put to bed for the night and then I returned home to my father’s place at around nine-thirty in the evening. By this time he understood that Vicki was neither a model nor a stewardess. He wasn’t invited to the wedding but didn’t seem to mind, saying, “She’ll invite me to the next one.” He expressed no interest in Marty Jr. “I’m too young to be a grandfather,” he said, brushing the sides of his head, the top bald and gleaming.

During Marty Jr.’s nap time I straightened up the house and made a list of the things we needed: clothing, formula, diapers, shampoo — baby things. I carried the list to Vicki, who would keep her eyes fixed on the television and say, every time, “Bring it up with the Bank of America,” which meant Marty. And I hated asking him because he always treated it like a loan, implying that I still hadn’t paid him back the twenty dollars I hit him up for last week.

This was around the time my father’s girlfriend, Rochelle, moved in. Rochelle works as an old waitress and always has money in her purse, a roll of bills the size of a hair curler. When she returns home from work she acts as though she has just walked across the burning desert in her bare feet and has cactus thorns dug deep into her heels. “Now it’s my gaddampt time to get waited on,” she says, dropping her pocketbook on the kitchen chair and limping off to the living room to put her feet up. She yells at my father, “Change the gaddampt channel and bring me a caffee.”

My father yells at me, “Change the goddamned channel and bring Rochelle a coffee.”

A remote control would not have solved the problem. Rochelle needed a full-time slave. Every now and then, during one of my trips to the kitchen, fetching her this or that, I would open her purse and take a little something for Marty Jr., just a few dollars here and there for diapers and formula. It was easier than asking Marty and I felt that Rochelle owed me something for my many hours of service.

The baby got by but still there were certain things that cost more than the few dollars a day I was able to provide. Special things, such as a rabbit-fur jacket that caught his eye one afternoon in a shop window. I wrote these things down as they came to me and posted the list on the refrigerator, where Marty would be forced to notice it. A few days before the baby’s first birthday I was in the dining room when I heard the sound of paper being crumpled. Then I heard Marty call out, “What was that shit on the refrigerator?”

Vicki was on the living room sofa and answered him saying, “What shit?”

Marty said, “You know what shit I’m talking about.”

Vicki didn’t say anything.

“You know I can’t stand to have shit taped to my refrigerator.”

Vicki said, “No, sir, I didn’t know that.”

“Well, you know it now, don’t you?”

Vicki said, “I guess I do.”

For his birthday I decorated with balloons and bought Marty Jr. a store-bought cake and a stuffed E.T. with some of Rochelle’s stolen money. The cake he threw up. The E.T. scared him until I blacked out its keen eyes with a Magic Marker. We celebrated by ourselves as Vicki and Marty chose to spend their Thanksgiving with someone named Cuff Daniels, a guy Marty used to jam with. For his birthday they gave their son a wish-bone from the turkey they had eaten. Vicki carried it home in her purse and it was covered in lint.

As Christmas neared I made another list and worked up the nerve to approach Marty man-to-man about the gifts his son deserved. Marty regarded the list for a moment before folding it in half. He told me that Christmas is just another day as far as a baby is concerned. He folded the list again, explaining that, as far as he was concerned, Christmas had nothing to do with spending all your hard-earned money on bullshit gifts.

“Christmas is in here,” he said, pointing to the spot where he thought his heart might be. “It’s on the inside, where it counts.” He folded the paper again and again until it was the size of a matchbook, all the while telling me some story about the time someone’s Christmas tree caught their house on fire and he found a roll of quarters in the ashes. The money had melted into a lump and he used it as a paperweight until some asshole stole it off his worktable.

For Christmas Marty bought himself a motorcycle, brand-new. He gave Vicki a helmet, unwrapped. He just handed it to her. The two of them rode off to Cuff Daniels’s house and brought the baby another wishbone. This one still had meat on it and was ice-cold from riding in Vicki’s pocket.

For the first few months Marty parked his motorcycle in the dining room nursery. He would take it out for joyrides and guide it back into the house, where he would lay newspapers on the floor and tinker with it. Marty understood that enclosed exhaust fumes can be fatal so he was always careful to raise all the windows while the engine was running. It was a nuisance as I would turn my back for a moment and discover the baby sitting on the greasy newspaper with a wrench in his mouth, the cold air steaming from his nose.

I bided my time, waiting for the day Marty would park the motorcycle in the garage rather than forcing it up the front steps of the house. I knew the day would come and when it finally arrived, a Thursday evening in early February, I sneaked into the garage with a hacksaw. It took me four hours in the dark but I did it: I sawed off both the handlebars. I also filled the gas tank with Dr. Pepper, but Marty is so caught up in the handlebars he still hasn’t noticed it. The next morning, when Vicki told me what had happened, I acted shocked. She led me to the garage, where she pointed to a scattering of metal flakes on the concrete floor.

“There,” she said, aiming with her cigarette. “Those are the shavings.”

When Marty came home from work he did the same thing, led me to the garage and pointed out the shavings. He told me there was no use in calling the police seeing as they’ve had it in for him since day one. Marty said he would solve this crime himself, one man, on his own. He said he couldn’t say for sure but he was practically certain that Cuff Daniels had something to do with it. “Good old Cuff,” he said. Then he spit on the con-crete floor.

Things went along like always until the next week, when Rochelle caught me taking money from her purse. Normally I could always tell where she was as I could hear her moaning, sometimes actual words and other times just sounds, like a weary motor. She must have held her breath this time. Maybe she suspected something was up. I turned around and there she was.

“I wasn’t taking your money,” I said, rolling up the bills and replacing the rubber band that held them. “I wasn’t taking it, I was just . . . counting it. You’ve got thirty-seven dollars here. Boy, that’s a lot of tips, thirty-seven dollars.”

Rochelle stood in the doorway with her fists in the air. “Not but twenty minutes ago I had forty-one dollars,” she said, hobbling closer toward me. “Do you expect me to believe that the rest of my money got tired of being cooped up in that packet-book and decided to walk off on its own and explore the world? Is that what you expect me to believe? Is it? Because, let me tell you something, Mister, I can’t stand a thief.”

She brought her fist up against the side of my face. “Somebody needs to box your ears, Mister, and it might as well be me because if there’s one thing I can’t stand it’s a thief, a lazy, sneaking thief.”

She kept hitting me, her voice rising until my father came from the bathroom and pulled her off of me. After listening to her side of the story he calmly placed his left hand on my shoulder and, with his right, punched me very hard in the stomach.

“That’s what he needs,” Rochelle said, “someone to box his ears. Thief! Liar.”

Just like Vicki before me, I packed my belongings into paper bags. At the time all I felt was shame and regret — not for taking the money, but for my pitiful lie that I was just counting it. I know how I must have looked at that moment, washed out and sneaky and stupid. I should have said I was collecting for services rendered and stood my ground. I should have predicted my father’s punch. Should have, should have. I spent the night in the woods behind my father’s house thinking of all the should haves. That night I should have packed a sleeping bag.

The following morning I presented my case to Vicki, who said she’d bring it up with Marty when the time was right. I spent the next two nights in their backyard before he decided I could stay in the garage. It doesn’t have any heat but at least it’s dry. I ran an extension cord in from the house so now I can choose between having a lamp or the broken TV, which has sound but no picture, just a snowy gray screen that I find I can’t take my eyes off.

Marty Jr. can walk now. He can even think. If you point and say, “Bring me the book, Baby, bring me the book,” he will do it. When you ask, “Where’s Big Bird?” Marty Jr. will toddle over and pound on the TV set, hoping to drive him out. He’s not stupid far from it. Soon he will speak and I have been working to coach him. Everything I touch I hold up and name in an instructive tone of voice. “Cushion,” I’ll say. “Ashtray.” “Can opener.” I do this only in the daytime, when Marty’s not around. Last Sunday, at dinner, he started making fun of me. He picked up his fork and turned to the baby saying, “Douche Bag.” Then he pointed at me and said, “Dip Shit. Dip Shit.”

Marty Jr. clapped his hands together and said, “Dishyt, Dishyt.”

I thought Vicki and Marty would never stop laughing. They patted Marty Jr. on the head, and he said it again: “Dishyt.” It burned me up that he might turn on me like that. He said it once more while I was putting him to bed and I took the meat of his thigh and twisted it between my fingers.

A few weeks after I moved in, Marty caught the baby making a long-distance call. It was just dumb luck he punched in some numbers and made a connection. When Marty took the phone out of the baby’s hand, he found himself speaking to a woman who kept saying, “C’est toi Julien? . . . C’est toi?”

Marty thought the baby had dialed China. Vicki said it sounded like Hawaii to her.

Marty said, “Hawaii, China, or Puerto Rico, what the hell difference does it make? I’m the one who’s stuck paying for it and, in case you haven’t noticed, I am not made of money. Is that what you thought, that I’m made of money?”

Vicki said, “No, sir, I do not.”

Marty Jr., on a roll, gurgled and dialed 911.

The next day Marty placed all the telephones in high places, where the baby couldn’t reach them. Then he went out and got himself a dog. A puppy might have been nice for the baby but Marty brought home a full-grown Doberman, a used dog given to him by a guy he works with. Jamboree has a bullet head and a stumpy tail, like a big black thumb smeared with shit. I think perhaps the previous owner trained him to be unpleasant. I’ve seen that in a magazine before, men with thick pads around their arms, provoking dogs to attack so they can qualify for high-paying jobs patrolling department stores and car lots. Jamboree was here only two days before he took down Playboy, the neighbor’s old basset hound. Poor Playboy didn’t know what hit him. Marty took the body and set it in the street, hoping his owners would believe Playboy had been hit by a car.

Right, Marty, a car with teeth.

Jamboree shouldn’t be allowed on the street, even on a leash. Everyone but Marty is afraid of this dog. Even cars speed up when they see him on the sidewalk. During the night jamboree sleeps on a pad beside his master’s bed. Vicki told me that she no longer drinks fluids after 9:00 P.M. as she is afraid to leave the bed and risk going to the bathroom. Jamboree has already bitten her once, nipped her when she tried to remove an ashtray from the mattress. Marty tells her that jamboree can smell her fear and that she has no one but herself to blame for being a coward. Vicki asked him what her fear smells like and he said it stinks like a carton of milk left out in the sun for five days to a week.