The Bazaar of Bad Dreams

Finally she had the phone taken out altogether. I told her she had to have a phone, living by herself like she did, but she wouldn’t hear of it. She said, Sometimes he calls in the middle of the night, Georgie. You don’t know how it is, lying awake and listening to the telephone ring and knowing it’s that child. What kind of parents he has to let him do such things I can’t imagine.

Unplug it at night, I said.

She said, I did. But sometimes it rings anyway.

I told her that was just her imagination. And I tried to believe it, but I never did, Mr Bradley. If that bad kid could get hold of Marlee’s Steve Austin lunchbox, and know how badly Vicky messed up her tryout, and about the Trailman Specials – if he could stay young, year after year – then sure, he could make a phone ring even if it was unplugged. Bible says the devil was set free to roam the earth, that God’s hand would not stay him. I don’t know if that bad little kid was the devil, but I know he was a devil.

Nor do I know if an ambulance call could have saved Mama Nonie. All I know is that when she had her heart attack, she couldn’t call for one because the phone was gone. She died alone, in her kitchen. A neighbor lady found her the next day.

Carla and I went to the funeral, and after Nonie was laid to rest, we spent the night in the house she and my father had shared. I woke up from a bad dream just before daybreak and couldn’t get back to sleep. When I heard the newspaper flop on the porch, I went to get it and saw the flag was up on the mailbox. I walked down to the street in my robe and slippers and opened it. Inside there was a beanie with a plastic propeller on top. I fished it out and it was hot, like the person who’d just taken it off was burning up with fever. Touching it made me feel contaminated, but I turned it over and looked inside. It was greasy with some sort of hair oil, the old-fashioned stuff hardly anyone uses anymore. There were a few orangey hairs sticking in it. There was also a note, printed the way a kid might do it – the letters all crooked and slanting downhill. The note said, KEEP IT, I HAVE ANOTHER ONE.

I took the goddam thing inside – tweezed between my thumb and index finger, that was as much as I wanted to touch it – and stuck it in the kitchen woodstove. I put a match to it and it went up all at once: ka-floomp. The flames were greenish. When Carla came down half an hour later, she sniffed and said, What’s that awful smell? It’s like low tide!

I told her it was most likely the septic tank out back, full up and needing to be pumped, but I knew better. That was the stink of methane, probably the last thing my father smelled before something sparked and blew him and those two others to kingdom come.

By then I had a job with an accounting firm – one of the biggest independents in the Midwest – and I worked my way up the ladder pretty quickly. I find that if you come in early, leave late, and keep your eye on the ball in between, that just about has to happen. Carla and I wanted kids, and we could afford them, but it didn’t happen; she got her visit from the cardinal every month, just as regular as clockwork. We went to see an OB in Topeka, and he did all the usual tests. He said we were fine, and it was too early to talk about fertility treatments. He told us to go home, relax, and enjoy our sex life.

So that’s what we did, and eleven months later, my wife’s visits from the cardinal stopped. She had been raised Catholic, and stopped going to church when she was in college, but when she knew for sure she was pregnant, she started going again and dragged me with her. We went to St Andrew’s. I didn’t mind. If she wanted to give God the credit for the bun in her oven, that was okay with me.

She was in her sixth month when the miscarriage happened. Because of the accident that wasn’t really an accident. The baby lived for a few hours, then died. It was a girl. Because she needed a name, we named her Helen, after Carla’s grandmother.

The accident happened after church. When mass was over, we were going to have a nice lunch downtown, then go home, where I’d watch the football game. Carla would put her feet up and rest and enjoy being pregnant. She did enjoy it, Mr Bradley. Every day of it, even early on when she was sick in the mornings.

I saw the bad little kid as soon as we came out. Same baggy shorts, same sweater, same little round boy-tits and poochy belly. The beanie I found in the mailbox was blue, and the one he was wearing when we came out of the church was green, but it had the same kind of plastic propeller. I’d grown from a little boy to a man with the first threads of gray in his hair, but that bad little kid was still six years old. Seven at most.