Damn Straight

by Elizabeth Sims

  "Your friend had it, she was dabbing your face with it, and I took it from her and put it in my pocket."

  "It must be the one I lent her the first night I came to town. She must have intended to give it back to me. And you wanted some of my blood to carry along with you?"

  "I felt you with me every step of the way. And it's over, and I'm safe. Aren't you going to ask if I took the jump?"

  It was a tradition, a screwy one, for the champion of the Dinah to dive, or wade, into the water hazard before receiving the trophy. I wouldn't, boy. That water didn't look any too clean to me, although they'd dyed it blue for TV. Golf course water never does look clean, because of the fertilizer runoff, plus most hazards aren't part of a natural waterway, so the water is slow-moving to the point of stagnation. I'd overheard a marshal on seventeen say, "They had to use about three gallons of Aqua-Shade this year."

  I sat silent.

  Genie said, "Well, I did! A nice belly flop, I did, and it felt great! I can look anywhere now, and see the future. It's so beautiful. I'm the best ever—do you realize that? I'm going to set records no one will ever break. The history of golf belongs to me. The history of sports! No one will forget me."

  "Aren't you grateful to Coco Nash for smacking Dengel?"

  "What?"

  "Genie. Didn't you see her break Dengel's hand while I had him on the ground? She cracked him with her two-iron and broke the acid all over him."

  "Oh. She did?"

  "You were being carried up the fairway by her security women. I would judge that precise hit on Dengel took something out of her. For all you know, she broke her own hand doing it, slamming her club into something like that. For all you know, she used up everything she had, defending you. I'm not surprised her second shot found the water."

  "Well, who knows, right? You know, I have so much more to talk to you about."

  "Yes, Genie, you do."

  "Lillian." She brushed my hair back from my eyes and peered in. "What's wrong with you? Aren't you happy? Aren't you happy for me? For us?"

  "You know that Peaches died today."

  Her eyes shifted away, and she nodded.

  I said, "He died this morning."

  "Seems like a week ago, doesn't it?"

  I closed my eyes.

  "I'm going to, ah, set up a fund," she said, "like a caddie scholarship, in his name."

  "Are you going to go see his wife? And the baby?"

  "Uh...I don't really know her."

  Looking at her, I said, "Genie. You need to shut up and listen to me. Okay? I'm going to tell you a story. It's a story that's very important to me, and it's important to you. It happened a long time ago. I don't know how—I need to know how it ended. Then maybe we can go on together."

  She stared hard at me, her mouth tight.

  "A girl and a boy are in love," I began. "It's puppy love at most, I guess. They fool around and she gets pregnant, only they're so dumb they don't know she's pregnant. These two kids, they're on their own. They're trash; they're nobodies that nobody gives a shit about. And they've found each other, and they think, Well, this is something. This is love. She thinks, My God, this boy loves me. She's an overweight slob, her mother's a drunk, her father's a shit-ass, and she doesn't give a damn about anything except being loved."

  Genie's eyes moved to the trophy. She looked at me again, and a veil came over her eyes. She eased away from me on the couch, her back against its fat leather arm.

  "Let's see," I went on, "the boy had a car. And that was their private place, the one place they had to themselves. And after a while she notices that her periods have stopped, and they're having sex more often, and it occurs to them that they should have birth control. And she's worried about this thing that's moving around in her stomach. And the kindly country doctor says, 'Honey, you're going to have a baby. A baby!'"

  Genie's face was blank, her eyes dull now; not even the shine of the trophy showed in them.

  I kept talking. "The kindly doctor is very concerned. 'Would you like help giving this baby up for adoption?' 'Oh, no, thank you, Doctor. You won't tell, will you?' 'No, child. But you must go home and tell your mother right away.' 'Oh, yes, I will.' They're confused, and they're dumb, and maybe they don't really believe a baby will come along after all. She ignores the pregnancy. And since everybody ignores her, nobody notices. She's fat and unfriendly, and nobody notices that she's gotten fatter and maybe a little unfriendlier. She wears—let's see, she wears big sweatshirts to school. Big jeans and big floppy sweatshirts, and the baby kicks in the middle of the fall of the Romanovs and it kicks during calisthenics and it kicks while X squared plus Y squared is equaling Z squared. And she wonders what will happen."

  Genie turned her face away from me and held herself rigidly against the arm of the couch.

  "They try to decide what to do. 'Let's not tell anyone yet. We can always tell, but we can never un-tell.' Her mother yells at her for eating too much. When her stomach starts to hurt, he gets hold of his dad's credit card, and they go to a motel. She gives birth there, with him running for more towels, scared shitless. It's a bloody scene, but there is a baby, there in the middle of all that blood, and whoa, here comes the afterbirth—my God, what kind of a freak gives birth to something like that, so soon after a regular baby?"

  I could see I was nailing it all pretty well, so far.

  "Were you happy when the baby came?" I asked.

  Genie sat as motionless as her trophy. She murmured, "It hurt. It hurt so bad. I felt so bad."

  "Was Dom happy? Dom was happy, wasn't he?"

  "Dom..."

  I waited, then pressed on. "The next day, Genie, he goes out to buy some things."

  "The baby needed milk. He went to buy milk for the baby."

  "And when he comes back..." I waited again. "Look at me, Genie. Come on and look at me."

  Genie turned her face to me, her eyes empty, and said, "When he comes back..."

  "Tell me, Genie, when he comes back, the baby is dead. Isn't that right?"

  "The baby is dead."

  "But it wasn't born dead. It was born alive, wasn't it?"

  "He was excited. He wanted to buy a stroller. He went out to buy milk and a stroller. I needed Kotex."

  "What happened to the baby, Genie?"

  "Somehow...it died."

  "How?"

  "It was crying."

  "The baby cried—"

  "And I was scared. It cried. It didn't even look at me when it cried."

  "What made him stop crying?"

  "A pillow."

  "A pillow made him stop crying."

  "We were in a motel."

  "And there were pillows," I said. "The baby was crying, and there was a pillow. And Dom—"

  "And Dom went out."

  "Why did you smother the baby, Genie?"

  "I was afraid..."

  "What were you afraid of?"

  "I was afraid it didn't love me."

  "Oh, my dear God."

  "Dom was angry when he came back."

  "Did you love the baby?"

  Genie's gaze was utterly blank.

  I asked, "Where's the baby now?"

  "I don't know."

  "You don't know now, but you did know."

  "I wrapped it in a towel. Dom had a box. He wanted a funeral."

  "What did you tell Dom?"

  "That the baby died."

  "He didn't believe it died by itself, did he?"

  "I don't know. I might not have been the one....He wanted a funeral, so we made a funeral. I thought he'd be happy then."

  "Dom had a box—what kind of a box?"

  "For tools."

  "It was a metal tool box?"

  "A box, a hard red box, and he dug a hole—we went down to the river and he dug a hole, and I put the baby in the box, and he put it in the hole and buried it."

  "And he marked the grave somehow?"

  "At the end of the fence."

  "The grave was at the end of the fence?" />
  "Where it comes out from the parking lot. We sang a song."

  "What did you sing?"

  "'Puff, the Magic Dragon.' It was May. It was a pretty night."

  "You buried the baby at night."

  "I had a candle. It was May."

  "The child was your May child. You had your May child, and you killed it, and you took its name. Genie Maychild."

  "I buried..."

  "Yes?"

  "Myself."

  "Yes. Yes. Did you know that Dom took the baby's fingerprints? That he marked ink from a pen onto his fingers, and pressed them down one by one onto a piece of paper?"

  "No."

  "It doesn't matter, does it?"

  "No."

  "The two of you buried that baby, and you buried yourselves, and you split up."

  "He said he wanted to marry me."

  "But you didn't want that. And you didn't want a baby."

  "There was...Somewhere, there was more for me."

  "'More.' And you found it. Coach Handy—she helped you find it."

  Genie nodded slowly. "That's right."

  "And after you made it, and after he got cancer, Dengel showed up again. Wanting help from you. Wanting money."

  "But..."

  "But you refused, and he began to terrorize you. He showed up in that dead bloody baby costume at Handy's retirement."

  "Yes, that was him."

  "Then he threatened to tell about the baby. He threatened to dig it up."

  "Unless..."

  "Unless you helped him. And he got people out here in California, those people in their little anti-abortion terror societies, to bug you, to harass you. And then he came out to get to you himself."

  We didn't speak for a while. Little sounds came to my ears: the refrigerator motor, a crinkle of newspaper from Todd's room.

  Gradually, Genie came out of the past, back to herself. Back to Genie Maychild right now.

  She said, softly, "Lillian, you've got to try to understand."

  "I helped you, and Coco helped you, and Coach Handy helped you. She's in jail now. She's your little Jack Ruby."

  "No, no. She might have to stay overnight, but she'll be out tomorrow. My lawyer's taking care of her. They're not going to charge a sixty-six-year-old woman with murder. She won't ever tell anybody anything, and she won't go to jail."

  "You called on her, and she got a shovel and dug up that box and moved it to another place."

  "It wasn't safe where it was."

  "You weren't safe with the box where it was."

  "Lillian. Marian understands. You've got to understand, too."

  It was some time before I spoke again. "How do you justify it to yourself?"

  "I was young and I didn't know. How much different is it from an abortion? You understand getting an abortion, don't you?"

  "Actually, I have a hard time with that one. An abortion's a brutal thing—there's no way anybody can say it isn't. But I guess a woman ought to be able to do what she wants, when it's her body. But when there's a baby, Genie, a breathing baby you've given birth to, that smells like you and came right from you and survived its first night on earth...that's murder."

  "I'm not saying it isn't."

  "Oh."

  "I'm saying you've got to understand. It's not a simple thing."

  "From the baby's viewpoint it is. And from the law's viewpoint, too."

  "Can we stop talking about this?"

  "And just move on?"

  "Yes!"

  "No."

  "I can't believe this."

  "Genie, you know you're going to have to live with this, with all of this."

  She looked at me impatiently. "I do live with it."

  "How?"

  She had no answer.

  Chapter 33

  The shuttle doors banged shut, and it lurched away. My car was just as I'd left it, albeit covered with a grimy film. I'd always taken good care of my geriatric Caprice, a former cop car, but at this point in its life I always held my breath when starting it after it'd sat parked for more than two days. But the old girl chugged right into action.

  The engine warmed up while I loaded in Todd and my mandolin and suitcase, and breathed deeply of the western Wayne County air, hanging there beneath a skaggy cloud cover. Spring had come.

  Yes, you could smell it for sure, that loamy wet fragrance, little seeds and roots and whatnot shifting in the soil, the earthworms poking out and rubbing their eyes, saying, Hey, it's sort of warm!

  Was there a skim of green on the bare branches yet? Maybe not, but I could feel that photosynthesis would not long be denied hereabouts.

  "Ah!" I said, settling behind the wheel. I rolled down the window and Todd lifted his nose as we peeled out and headed for home.

  Going up Middlebelt I had to swerve to avoid a streaking squirrel. Here and there, furry carcasses littered the shoulder.

  Springtime in Detroit is squirrel carnage time. Every year the squirrels emerge from their nests up in the trees where they've hidden all winter, venturing out only to scrape around for the caches of acorns they absentmindedly buried last fall, and as we know, they're not terribly adept at it. So come spring, thin and excited, they climb down to the thawing ground and start running around looking for new things to eat. They're crazy with relief, and it takes them a while to get focused. On top of that, during the long winter they've forgotten what roads are and what cars are. Don't they tell stories up in those nests during those long winter nights? Don't they have legends? What do they talk about? They appear to pass on no lore whatsoever to their young.

  All this results in much needless loss of squirrel life.

  Mrs. McVittie was on the porch digging into a flowerpot with a trowel when I pulled up. I saw Mr. McVittie up the driveway near the garage, rinsing the winter's worth of accumulated salt from the undercarriage and wheel wells of their station wagon. He'd made a special nozzle for the job from some PVC pipe and one of Mrs. McVittie's support stockings.

  "I'll do yours next!" he hollered as I came up to the house.

  "All right! Thank you!" I shouted back, in deference to his deafness.

  "Trip go okay?"

  "Yeah! Did you catch some fish up north?"

  "Hell yes I caught fish! Me and the boys—" He peered at me. "Lillian, did you get in a fight?"

  "Yeah. But you should see the other guy."

  After I unpacked and hooked up my little washing machine in my kitchen, I smelled gingerbread baking in the kitchen below. I set my stovetop percolator to boil with a basketful of nice fresh Sumatran.

  Fifteen minutes later I heard Mrs. McVittie coming up the stairs in her hesitant, light-footed way. I opened the door for her. She carried a plateful of the steaming spicy cake, and I asked her to join me for some coffee.

  Being diabetic, she couldn't eat the gingerbread, but she enjoyed watching me eat it, and she enjoyed her coffee.

  "It sure is good to be home," I said with satisfaction. I'd stood a while on my balcony surveying the neighborhood and looking for Monty. You remember Mrs. Gagnon's dog, Monty.

  "Did you see the crocuses in the backyard, dear?"

  "No! Are they up?"

  "Yes, and just as pretty as ever."

  "This gingerbread is the whip, Mrs. McVittie." Somehow I never could call her "Mildred," nor Mr. McVittie "Emmett."

  "Oh, it's a pleasure, isn't it? I just love how it smells." She shifted in her chair and looked my face over carefully. "Did you get in trouble with the police in California?"

  "No, no, I just got into a little—it was more of an accident than anything. I'm just fine."

  "Well, did you have a nice time, aside from that?"

  "I did have a bit of fun, yes. I spent some time in Los Angeles."

  "Los Angeles is an interesting place."

  "Yes, it is."

  "Then where did you go?"

  "Oh, the desert area, you know."

  "Oh. I bet it was nice there."

  "Yes, very good weathe
r."

  Mr. and Mrs. McVittie were not golf fans, which I was glad for.

  I asked, "Have you gotten out on your bike yet?" She liked to ride that three-wheeler to hell and gone, making friends everywhere.

  "As a matter of fact, yes, dear, I have gotten out. And I think you'll be glad to know something." Her thin hand shook just a little as she lifted her cup to her lips.

  "Yeah? What's that?"

  "I think that Monty won't be bothering Todd and you anymore."

  "Really? What happened? I didn't see him outside. Would you like some more coffee?"

  "Yes, dear, it's delicious. I can't get mine to taste like this." She drank it black, as I did. "Well, I was riding up and down the streets, you know how I do. And I thought—well, you know how dogs love rotten meat."

  "I sure do." I set the pot back on the stove.

  "Well, I took a plastic bag along with me the other day—spring came so fast! Doesn't the air feel wonderful?"

  "Yes, it does. It feels swell."

  "I expect we'll get one more flurry before the warm weather sets in for good."

  "Mm-hmm."

  "And I had my plastic bag, and I picked up three dead squirrels—you know how they're all over the place now..."

  "Yes!"

  "I picked up the rottenest ones I could find, with lots of maggots and ants, and also I got one little raccoon, too, although come to think of it, it might have been a cat—"

  "Yes!"

  "And I put them in a crate Emmett had, a plastic crate that he didn't want anymore?"

  "Yes!"

  "It's more of a tub. Anyway I dragged it out front, and Monty ran right over—"

  "Yes!"

  "And he jumped into that crate, and oh, dear, he had a wonderful time! Rolling back and forth in those rotten squirrels."

  "Was Mrs. Gagnon—"

  "Oh, yes, Dolly was out planting petunias in her box, you know, yes. She saw him come over, but she couldn't see what was in the crate. I pretended to shoo Monty away, and of course she just laughed, and Monty kept rolling and chewing and sniffing in that crate for the longest time. Then she held her door open and called him to come in, and I gave him—well, I gave him a little kick, and he ran right across the street and into the house, and I haven't seen either of them since."

  I looked at her, and she looked at me, and an atomic bomb couldn't have set our smiles askew.