Baby's First Book of Seriously Fucked-Up Shit

by Robert Devereaux

  “My wife,” he begins, “likes you. I like you. And Tinkerbell likes you, but then she’s liked every last one of her boyfriends, even the slime-sucking shitwads—can we speak man to man?—who used Tink for their own degenerate needs and then discarded her.”

  I don’t want to hear this.

  “Not that there’ve been lots of men before you. She may be a pixie, our daughter, but she’s got the good sense of the Joneses even so. But you know, Alex my boy, you’d be surprised at the number of men in this world who look and act perfectly normal, men whose mild exteriors cover sick vistas of muck and sludge, men who make regular guys like you and me ashamed to be called men.”

  “I assure you, sir, that—”

  “—and I’d believe those assurances, I really would, even though I’ve believed and been fooled in the past. My little girl, Tinkerbell Titania Jones, is special to me as she is; not some freak, not a thing of shame or suspicion, no, but a thing of grace and beauty.”

  “She is indeed, Mr. Jones.”

  He fixes me in his glare and exhales a puff of blue smoke.

  It hangs like a miasma about him, but he doesn’t blink. His eyes might be lizard eyes. “I had doubts when she was born, of course. What father wouldn’t? No man likes to be deceived by his wife, not even through the irresistible agency of a stray faerie or incubus, if such there be in this world. But there are mannerisms of mine I recognized quite early in my daughter, mannerisms I was sure were neither learned nor trumped up by some phantom lover bent on throwing a cuckolded husband off his trail.”

  He cranes his neck and stares, about fifteen degrees askew of my face. It’s a look I recognize from my first meeting with Tink at the miniaturists’ show in Sacramento the previous winter. I’d asked her to dinner and she went all quiet and contemplative, looking just this way, before finally venturing a twinkled Yes. I could tell she’d been stung before, and recently.

  “She’s mine,” he says. “Some mutation if you want to be cold-bloodedly clinical about it, but all mine. And I love her dearly, as parents of special children often do.”

  He takes a long puff, exhales it, looks at me. “Now I’m going to ask you three questions, Alex. Only truthful answers are going to win my daughter’s hand.”

  I feel odd about this turn in the conversation, and yet the setting, the cigar smoke, the close proximity of this beast in his lair, make it seem perfectly normal. I nod agreement and flick a squat cylinder of ash into the open glass hand, severed, of a four-fingered man.

  “First,” Mr. Jones says, not stumbling over any of the words, “have you had sex with my daughter?”

  My head is pounding. I take a long pull on my cigar and slowly exhale the smoke. My hand, holding it, seems big and beefy, unworthy of my incisive mind. “She and I have… made love, yes. We love each other, you see, and it’s only natural for—”

  “No extenuation,” says Mr. Jones. “Your answer is Yes.

  It’s a good answer, it’s the truth, and I have no quarrel with it. I would think you some sort of nitwit if you hadn’t worked out some mutually agreeable arrangement between you. No, I don’t want to know how it’s done. I shudder to think about it.

  When she drops in, she seems none the worse for wear. If she’s happy, and you’re happy with her—and with the limitations you no doubt face—then that will content her mother and me.”

  I think of course of vaginal sinkings, that nice feel of being gripped there by a grown woman. And I think back years to my first girlfriend Rhonda, to her mouth, to the love she was kind enough to focus down below from time to time though less frequently than I would have preferred.

  “That leads, of course, to my second question,” says Mr.

  Jones, putting one hand, the one without the cigar, to his temple. “Will you be faithful to Tinkerbell, neither casting the lures of temptation toward other women nor consenting to be lured by them?”

  I pause. “That’s a complex question.”

  “It is indeed,” he says, with a rising inflection that asks it all over again.

  “I don’t think,” I tell him, my hands folded, my eyes deeply sincere, “I will ever fail my beloved in this way. Yet knowing the weakness of myself and other men, the incessant clamor of the gonads that I daresay all males are prey to, I hesitate to say Yes unequivocally to your question. But Tinkerbell gives me great satisfaction, and, more importantly, I believe I do the same for her. Something about her ways in bed, if you will, seems to silence the voice of lust when I’m around other women. Besides which—and I don’t mean this flippantly—

  I’ve grown, through loving Tinkerbell, to appreciate smaller women. In fact, on the whole, I’ve come to find so-called normal-sized women unbearably gross and disgusting.”

  Mr. Jones looks askance at me. “Alex, you’re a most peculiar man. But then I think that’s what my daughter’s going to need, a peculiar man, and yet it’s so damned hard to know which set of peculiarities are the right ones.”

  I’m not sure how to take his comment, but then I’m in no position to debate the issue. “Yes, sir,” I say.

  “Almost out of the woods,” says Mr. Jones, grinning. “The third one is easy.” He tosses it off like a spent match: “Do you love Tinkerbell?”

  This question throws me. It seems simple enough, but that’s the problem: It’s too simple. Does he want a one-word response, or a dissertation? Is it a trick question of some sort?

  And is the time I’m taking in deliberating over it actually sinking my chances? What is love, after all? Everybody talks about it, sings about it, yammers on and on endlessly about it. But it’s so vague a word, and so loaded. I think of French troubadour poets, of courtly love and its manufacture, of Broadway show tunes and wall-sized faces saying “I love you” on big screens, saying it like some ritual curse or as if it signaled some terrible loss of control akin to vomiting.

  And I say, “Yes and no,” feeling my way into the open wound of shared camaraderie, ready to provide reasons for my equivocation, a brief discourse which will show him the philosophical depths of my musings and yet come about, in the end, to a grand paean of adoration for his daughter.

  But before I can begin, he rises from his chair and reaches for me, and the next thing I know, the furniture hurtles by as if in a silent wind and the doors fly open seemingly without the intervention of human hands and I’m out on the street in front of their home, trying to stop my head from spinning.

  It’s dark out there but muggy. I ache inside, ache for my loss. It’s not fair, I think. She loves me and I love her and by God we belong together. I’ll call her in the morning when she’s back in the city, I’ll send roses, I’ll surprise her with a knock on her door. We’ll elope. This isn’t the Dark Ages, after all. Tinkerbell and I don’t need her parents’ permission to marry.

  Doors slam in the house. Downstairs, upstairs. A high-pitched voice, Melissa’s, shouts something childish and angry, is answered by falsely calm parental soothings. None of the words can I make out.

  The first floor goes dark after a while, then bit by bit the second. From where I’m standing, it looks like a miniature house, one of my basement models. I raise both hands and find I can obliterate it completely.

  There is one golden glow of light hovering behind a drawn tan shade upstairs. Her bedroom, the room she grew up in. I want to clap my hands, clap them in defiance of her parents—

  she’ll know what that means, she’ll surely understand. But the energy has drained from my arms and they hang useless at my sides.

  Behind the shade, my lost love’s light moves slowly back and forth, back and forth, growing dimmer, casting forth ever smaller circles of gold with each beat of my heart.

  RIDI BOBO

  At first little things niggled at Bobo’s mind: the forced quality of Kiki’s mimed chuckle when he went into his daily pratfall getting out of bed; the great care she began to take painting in the teardrop below her left eye; the way she idly fingered a pink puffball halfway down her
shiny green suit. Then more blatant signals: the creases in her crimson frown, a sign, he knew, of real discontent; the bored arcs her floppy shoes described when she walked the ruff-necked piglets; a wistful shake of the head when he brought out their favorite set of shiny steel rings and invited her, with the artful pleas of his expressive white gloves, to juggle with him.

  But Bobo knew it was time to seek professional help when he whipped out his rubber chicken and held it aloft in a stranglehold—its eyes X’d shut in fake death, its pitiful head lolled against the back of his glove—and all Kiki could offer was a soundless yawn, a fatigued cock of her conical nightcap, and the curve of her back, one lazy hand waving bye-bye before collapsing languidly beside her head on the pillow. No honker would be brought forth that evening from her deep hip pocket, though he could discern its outline there beneath the cloth, a coy maddening shape that almost made him hop from toe to toe on his own. But he stopped himself, stared forlornly at the flaccid fowl in his hand, and shoved it back inside his trousers.

  He went to check on the twins, their little gloved hands hugging the blankets to their chins, their perfect snowflake—white faces vacant with sleep. People said they looked more like Kiki than him, with their lime-green hair and the markings around their eyes. Beautiful boys, Jojo and Juju. He kissed their warm round red noses and softly closed the door.

  In the morning, Bobo, wearing a tangerine apron over his bright blue suit, watched Kiki drive off in their new rattletrap Weezo, thick puffs of exhaust exploding out its tailpipe. Back in the kitchen, he reached for the Buy-Me Pages. Nervously rubbing his pate with his left palm, he slalomed his right index finger down the Snooper listings. Lots of flashy razz-ma-tazz ads, lots of zingers to catch a poor clown’s attention.

  He needed simple. He needed quick. Ah! His finger thocked the entry short and solid as a raindrop on a roof; he noted the address and slammed the book shut.

  Bobo hesitated, his fingers on his apron bow. For a moment the energy drained from him and he saw his beloved Kiki as she’d been when he married her, honker out bold as brass, doing toe hops in tandem with him, the shuff-shuff-shuff of her shiny green pants legs, the ecstatic ripples that passed through his rubber chicken as he moved it in and out of her honker and she bulbed honks around it. He longed to mimic sobbing, but the inspiration drained from him. His shoulders rose and fell once only; his sweep of orange hair canted to one side like a smart hat.

  Then he whipped the apron off in a tangerine flurry, checked that the boys were okay playing with the piglets in the backyard, and was out the front door, floppy shoes flapping toward downtown.

  Momo the Dick had droopy eyes, baggy pants, a shuffle to his walk, and an office filled to brimming with towers of blank paper, precariously tilted—like gaunt placarded and stilted clowns come to dine—over his splintered desk. Momo wore a battered old derby and mock-sighed a lot, like a bloodhound waiting to die.

  He’d been decades in the business and had the dust to prove it. As soon as Bobo walked in, the tramp-wise clown seated behind the desk glanced once at him, peeled off his derby, twirled it, and very slowly very deliberately moved a stiffened fist in and out of it. Then his hand opened—red nails, white fingers thrust out of burst gloves—as if to say, Am I right?

  Bobo just hung his head. His clownish hands drooped like weights at the ends of his arms.

  The detective set his hat back on, made sympathetic weepy movements—one hand fisted to his eye—and motioned Bobo over. An unoiled drawer squealed open, and out of it came a puff of moths and a bulging old scrapbook. As Momo turned its pages, Bobo saw lots of illicit toe hops, lots of swollen honkers, lots of rubber chickens poking where they had no business poking. There were a whole series of pictures for each case, starting with a photo of his mopey client, progressing to the flagrante delicto evidence, and ending, almost without exception, in one of two shots: a judge with a shock of pink hair and a huge gavel thrusting a paper reading DIVORCE

  toward the adulterated couple, the third party handcuffed to a Kop with a tall blue hat and a big silver star on his chest; or two corpses, their floppy shoes pointing up like warped surfboards, the triumphant spouse grinning like weak tea and holding up a big pistol with a BANG! flag out its barrel, and Momo, a hand on the spouse’s shoulder, looking sad as always and not a little shocked at having closed another case with such finality.

  When Bobo broke down and mock-wept, Momo pulled out one end of a checkered hanky and offered it. Bobo cried long and hard, pretending to dampen yard upon yard of the unending cloth. When he was done, Momo reached into his desk drawer, took out a sheet with the word CONTRACT at the top and two X’d lines for signatures, and dipped a goose-quill pen into a large bottle of ink. Bobo made no move to take it but the old detective just kept holding it out, the picture of patience, and drops of black ink fell to the desktop between them.

  Momo tracked his client’s wife to a seedy Three-Ring Motel off the beaten path. She hadn’t been easy to tail. A sudden rain had come up and the pennies that pinged off his windshield had reduced visibility by half, which made the eager Weezo hard to keep up with. But Momo managed it. Finally, with a sharp right and a screech of tires, she turned into the motel parking lot. Momo slowed to a stop, eying her from behind the brim of his sly bowler. She parked, climbed up out of the tiny car like a soufflé rising, and rapped on the door of Room Five, halfway down from the office.

  She jiggled as she waited. It didn’t surprise Momo, who’d seen lots of wives jiggle in his time. This one had a pleasingly sexy jiggle to her, as if she were shaking a cocktail with her whole body. He imagined the bulb of her honker slowly expanding, its bell beginning to flare open in anticipation of her little tryst. Momo felt his bird stir in his pants, but a soothing pat or two to his pocket and a few deep sighs put it back to sleep. There was work afoot. No time nor need for the wild flights of his long-departed youth.

  After a quick reconnoiter, Momo went back to the van for his equipment. The wooden tripod lay heavy across his shoulder and the black boxy camera swayed like the head of a willing widow as he walked. The rest—unexposed plates, flash powder, squeezebulb—Momo carried in a carpetbag in his free hand. His down-drawn mouth puffed silently from the exertion, and he cursed the manufacturers for refusing to scale down their product, it made it so hard on him in the inevitable chase.

  They had the blinds down but the lights up full. It made sense. Illicit lovers liked to watch themselves act naughty, in Momo’s experience, their misdoings fascinated them so. He was in luck. One wayward blind, about chest high, strayed leftward, leaving a rectangle big enough for his lens. Miming stealth, he set up the tripod, put in a plate, and sprinkled huge amounts of glittery black powder along his flashbar. He didn’t need the flashbar, he knew that, and it caused all manner of problem for him, but he had his pride in the aesthetics of picture-taking, and he was willing to blow his cover for the sake of that pride. When the flash went off, you knew you’d taken a picture; a quick bulb squeeze in the dark was a cheat and not at all in keeping with his code of ethics.

  So the flash flared, and the smoke billowed through the loud report it made, and the peppery sting whipped up into Momo’s nostrils on the inhale. Then came the hurried slap of shoes on carpet and a big slatted eyelid opened in the blinds, out of which glared a raging clownface. Momo had time to register that this was one hefty punchinello, with muscle-bound eyes and lime-green hair that hung like a writhe of caterpillars about his face. And he saw the woman, Bobo’s wife, honker out, looking like the naughty fornicator she was but with an overlay of uh-oh beginning to sheen her eyes.

  The old adrenaline kicked in. The usually poky Momo hugged up his tripod and made a mad dash for the van, his carpetbag shoved under one arm, his free hand pushing the derby down on his head. It was touch and go for a while, but Momo had the escape down to a science, and the beefy clown he now clouded over with a blanket of exhaust—big lumbering palooka caught off-guard in the act of chicken stuffing—proved no match
for the wily Momo.

  Bobo took the envelope and motioned Momo to come in, but Momo declined with a hopeless shake of the head. He tipped his bowler and went his way, sorrow slumped like a mantle about his shoulders. With calm deliberation Bobo closed the door, thinking of Jojo and Juju fast asleep in their beds.

  Precious boys, flesh of his flesh, energetic pranksters, they deserved better than this.

  He unzippered the envelope and pulled out the photo.

  Some clown suited in scarlet was engaged in hugger-mugger toe hops with Kiki. His rubber chicken, unsanctified by papa church, was stiff-necked as a rubber chicken can get and stuffed deep inside the bell of Kiki’s honker. Bobo leaned back against the door, his shoes levering off the rug like slapsticks. He’d never seen Kiki’s pink rubber bulb swell up so grandly. He’d never seen her hand close so tightly around it nor squeeze with such ardency. He’d never ever seen the happiness that danced so brightly in her eyes, turning her painted tear to a tear of joy.

  He let the photo flutter to the floor. Blessedly it fell facedown. With his right hand he reached deep into his pocket and pulled out his rubber chicken, sad purple-yellow bird, a male’s burden in this world. The sight of it brought back memories of their wedding. They’d had it performed by Father Beppo in the center ring of the Church of Saint Canio. It had been a beautiful day, balloons so thick the air felt close under the bigtop. Father Beppo had laid one hand on Bobo’s rubber chicken, one on Kiki’s honker, inserting hen into honker for the first time as he lifted his long-lashed eyes to the heavens, wrinkle lines appearing on his meringue-white forehead. He’d looked to Kiki, then to Bobo, for their solemn nods toward fidelity.