by Lydia Millet
“What’s this? Judas Priest. Marilyn, take a look,” said Junior, stooping to pick up the Mace can.
“My Lord, that’s Mace,” said Marilyn.
“Lady? Lady, looka this!” said Junior, and thrust it at Estée. “Mace? It’s fuckin empty. This stuff is toxic. My two-year-old was here. My little girl! What kinda sick people we dealing with?”
“Maybe they kept it for self-defense,” ventured Estée.
“Look at this, people! Mace on the floor. Child abuse. Find those people, choke it out of ’em. Goddamn Mace!” He turned to Caregiver Kim, crumpling the can in his fist. “Lady, I got a bone to pick with you.”
“I’ll be in the car,” said Estée. “Keeping tabs on the search.”
She found a pack of Pete’s cigarettes in the glove compartment and smoked one with the window rolled down. Thank-you time was over. Caregivers scattered to the winds. Behind her she always left deserts or ghost towns, scorched earth and empty buildings. Bill and Betty lay somewhere under the sun. Alive or not alive. The telephone was silent. Her presence anywhere was tenuous; she was hardly felt. She was a husk of elements, air, water, surrounded by solid objects. Substance willed itself into motion. In the dark, the whites of Bambi’s eyes were visible. In the distance, she could make out a pinprick on the skin of the night. First it was red, and then it shifted lower and was green instead. Finally an orange flower bloomed above her near Orion and she got out of the car.
Inside the parents had turned into a lynch mob. They were crowded around Caregiver Kim, hurling insults.
“If my kid was traumatized by this crap I’m gonna burn your fuckin house down,” said Junior.
“Junior,” said Marilyn, “don’t hit her. She’ll sue.”
“It’s not her fault,” said Estée. “Talk to management.”
“Management? They’re gone forever. You think they’d stick around to face charges? Whose side are you on anyway?” asked the bull man. “This kind of crap is the disease of society! Didn’t you read about those faggot priests?”
“We’re all tired,” said Estée. “They sent the flare up. Everything’s going to be fine.”
“Pammie!” shrieked Marilyn, and ran to the door. Glassy-eyed infants were borne in on the arms of Pete Magnus’s victorious army. Parents surged and crowed as Estée scanned the throng for William. Pete, bringing up the rear with his sidekick, Daniel, was covered in mud.
“Little Bill made a fast escape, Esty. Too fast for me. Jesus, what a scene.”
“What do you mean got away? Got away?”
“Found ’em in someone’s backyard, other side of that trailer park. Eating the face off a cat. I go, Danny Boy, you can tell they been hangin out with my son.”
“What do you mean he got away?”
“Kid runs like a rabbit Esty. Had our hands full with the others. Danny puked. Guy’s an animal lover. It’s like mass hypnotism. I’m thinkin Kool-Aid, Guyana. Luckily they were out of it. Zombie kids. Night of the Living Dead.”
“Where, Pete? Where was it?”
“Don’t be crazy Esty, there’s a hurricane watch out. Find him in the morning. Calm down Esty. Just chill.”
“Tell me where, Pete. Now. I’ll go alone.”
“Excuse me,” said Douglas’s mother to Pete, touching his hand. “I just want to thank you! Douglas, say thank you to the man.” She lifted him up by the armpits. He hung like a sack.
“Dank oo ban,” recited Douglas, monotone.
“Yeah yeah lady. Your kid eats pets. You’re not going out there Esty. I mean it.”
“He’s my baby, you idiot,” she said, and grabbed his flashlight.
It was raining. Past the trailer park, she walked over a soft hill overgrown with kudzu beside an access road, scoping with her beam. The terrain grew marshy and she had to find her footing carefully on a rise beside a long ditch full of stagnant water. Rain patterned it with pockmarks under her spotlight and she counted three crushed Diet Sprite cans and an old sock. Cresting the hill she saw a frame house with a basketball hoop in the driveway. She stalked through the backyard. The corpse of a tabby cat was twisted under a bush.
Soaked, shivering, legs aching, she tried different paths from the backyard, over sagging fences and piles of tires, reciting old catechisms to keep herself alert. “Nonmigratory tropical lepidoptera of dry forests spend the dry season in riparian forests in a state of reproductive diapause,” she repeated, kicking over the handle of a rusty shovel. “Saturniids, royal moths. Sphingids, hawkmoths.” A cobweb stretched over her lips as she ducked to avoid a thorny branch. She felt the water seep through her shoes, felt the soles of her feet grow spongy.
Her digital watch read 10:32 when she caught sight of him lying at the edge of a mangrove swamp in a foot of water, his face above the surface. His hands were tied to his ankles, his mouth was stuffed with something red, and there was a bruise on his forehead. She picked him up. He was inert, his skin cold and slick. She removed the gag. It was a tie patterned with gold script initials: PM.
Blue-faced, in repose, he was a hideous angel. She sat down with his body in her lap and performed CPR, hair matted to her scalp beneath the lightning. Finally he coughed up water, shuddered, hiccuped, and blinked.
“William!” she cried, and wrapped him in her jacket. “Pete did this to you. With that bastard Daniel. It was two against one, wasn’t it William. Unfair odds.”
“Tale of neglect in New Jersey,” rasped William. “Deadbeat dads.”
She lifted him off the mound, held him close to her chest, and made the long trek back to the parking lot. The Debbie Does premises were dark, though one floodlight cast the gravel back lot into white relief. She noticed, for the first time, a mound of Day-Glo green under a fringe of lilac bushes at the gravel’s edge, and walked over to it with William, a soggy weight against her stomach, limp and soft, snoring. It was the last of the Bouncy Ponies, eviscerated on its side in the grass.
As she drove home, William gurgled and burped in his sleep. Bye baby bunting, Papa’s gone a-hunting. Better late than never. She knew what to do.
She locked William in his bedroom and trucked to a twenty-four-hour food mart, where she bought frozen dinners, milk, fruit, vegetables, diapers, twelve-packs of beer, and Pete Magnus’s favorite snack: tortilla chips and salsa. She bought in volume. She had five cartloads by the time she was finished, which the lone late-night bagger helped her push out to the van.
At 2:00 a.m. she pulled into the service entrance and unloaded the groceries laboriously. She carried them up to one of the fourth-floor suites, at the back of the building. Its window was small; it was unbooked for three weeks. She packed the perishables into the refrigerator, lined the shelves in the kitchen with cans, cartons, and bottles, and packed diaper boxes and toilet paper into the cabinets beneath the sink.
Sleep was difficult. She lay down on a couch and stared at the ceiling until morning, when she called a locksmith, a handyman, and a bricklayer from the next county. She paid them premium rates for discretion and watched while the locksmith affixed a heavy, keyed bolt to the outside of the suite door.
She was overseeing the handyman as he bricked in a window with quick-drying mortar when one of Pete’s liveried doormen brought her a postcard on a tray. In the foreground were sun-bleached walls, a terrace tiled in blue, and an orange tree. In the distance was a small minaret. She flipped the card and read its printed description: Eternal Morocco. The postmark was blurred and the card was unsigned, but written in a familiar cramped hand at the bottom were four short words.
Wish you were Hear
Over dinner with the golf-pro celebrity sponsor she watched Pete across the table as he talked about the CRB index, futures, and copper prices to a new investor from Boca Raton. Instead of listening, she let her mind wander, through orange groves, past mosques and farms and over hills of scrub and sand, and everywhere was one place, Casablanca, California, the sunshine state. Her father had long arms. Oceans were nothing to him.
; While they drank apertifs in the lounge, she transported a pile of Pete’s clothes to the suite. She set up a potty for William and hung a Jolly Jumper from the ceiling; on a dolly she rolled in his artificial tree. She would provide every amenity. She checked the air conditioning and the heating, the plumbing and the lights. Last she disconnected the phone and removed the jack from the wall. All the suites were soundproofed.
She went for William first. Lying curled in his crib, with only the orange glow of his night light illuminating his hirsute cranium above the bundle of flannel sheets and shredded cotton, he was not asleep.
“William,” she said, bending over the bars, “come here.”
She bathed him, washed his face with Baby Wipes, brushed his sharp teeth over the bathroom sink, patted baby powder onto his bottom, diapered him, and suited him up in his Osh Kosh B’Gosh overalls and Buster Brown shoes. He would strip it all off in no time, but for the short trek to the fourth floor she wanted him to wear his Sunday best. “This is what you’ve been waiting for, William,” she told him. “It’s all up to you now.” He gnawed busily on the bars of his crib, leaving tooth marks in the metal.
They used the service elevator. Once inside the suite he relaxed his hold on her neck, jumped down, and dashed up his fiberglass tree. She stood still a second and then turned off the lights.
“Good-bye William,” she whispered.
“Gutsy mom gets transplant,” he said softly in the dark.
She found Pete Magnus in the bar and billiard room in conversation with the golf pro, discussing a full-page, full-color endorsement of the resort that would appear in nationally distributed retirement magazines.
“Excuse me, Pete,” she said, sidling up to him with a sisterly touch to his elbow. “There’s been an electrical fire in 412, they’ve put it out, but it did cause some damage. Can I steal you away for a minute?” And the senile golfer, popping a cherry-colored Luden’s cough drop into his gray flap of a mouth, nodded benignly as they coasted off, and turned back to his Manhattan.
“So you found the kid last night,” said Pete Magnus as they walked. He was checking his manicured nails, his watch, then the knot of his tie, for he was a busy man. “Mother’s instinct or something, like women’s intuition.”
“Yeah, I found him,” she said. “He’s fine now.”
“Fine,” repeated Pete, nodding. “Great, good. Where the hell was he?”
When they reached 412 she pushed the door open, ushered him in ahead of her, and flipped the light switch. “You know where he was Pete,” she said. “William, say hi to your father.”
William was on all fours at the base of the tree, poised to spring. He was still wearing his overalls.
“Murderous rampage in Toledo,” he said clearly.
As Pete stood gaping she pulled the door closed behind him, shot the bolt, and locked it with her shining key.
Stock-still, she waited for protest, for noise from beyond the paneling, through the new bricks blocking the window, but perfect security had been achieved. A grim silence reigned, broken only by the intermittent sound of mosquitoes zapping on the blue-light bug apparatus on the wall outside the room door. She hung a Do Not Disturb sign on the doorknob and stood holding on to the balcony rail to make sure, watching palm silhouettes weave back and forth against the purple sky. She had done what she could. Big Bill was beyond her reach, sitting on a porch with a view of the sea. Small consolation that each dawn and dusk he’d hear the prayers of the faithful floating by on a cool breeze to Mecca: he would never know what they were. He was insulated. It was clear to her now: Big Bill would never die.
In the lobby, she entered the names of fictitious guests into the register under 412 and extended their stay for two weeks on the database. Next she approached Maria, head of Sanitary Services, who was folding white towels in the laundry room. “Room 412 should not be cleaned. There’s a couple staying in there, special friends of Mr. Magnus, and they’re on their second honeymoon. They don’t wish to be bothered at any time. I can’t stress that enough. They have their own supplies—just cross that room off everyone’s rounds. Does Mr. Magnus have your personal guarantee?” Maria nodded and looked down at her feet.
Finally she spoke to Pete’s assistant manager, underpaid and overworked, who had his rooms in the basement. “Pete and I and the baby are taking a trip, leaving tonight. It’s an emergency. Death in the family. We’ll be away for two weeks. Pete’s too busy with the funeral arrangements to give you detailed instructions, but I’m sure you’ll do a fine job in our absence. Here’s a bonus check. I’m sorry for the short notice.”
At ten o’clock she began to pack her belongings into the van; at midnight she checked room 412, her ear to the door. She could hear nothing. The door did not shake and quiver with pounding from the panicked Pete Magnus, newly incarcerated. Still, William knew his enemy. He had always known.
As she drove through the gates, window rolled down, a road map in the passenger seat, she felt a pang for Little Bill. He was a man-eater, but she loved him. Pete was the strongest opponent he’d had; they were well matched. In the event of a standoff they had everything they needed for sustenance. When two weeks were up they might be discovered, enraged but healthy, by the cleaning staff. But it was her bet that William, when he grasped the circumstances of his confinement, would smile, blink, and waddle toward his father with hunger glinting in his eyes.
After that he could take care of himself. Bricks and mortar were no obstacle to him. He was a survivalist and a hunter; he would unearth her trail eventually, no matter how old it was or how far afield, and he would find her. Until then she had, at least, the commonplace illusion that she was free.
ALSO BY
LYDIA MILLET
Fight No More
Sweet Lamb of Heaven
Mermaids in Paradise
Magnificence
Ghost Lights
How the Dead Dream
Love in Infant Monkeys
Oh Pure and Radiant Heart
Everyone’s Pretty
My Happy Life
George Bush, Dark Prince of Love
Copyright © 1996 by Lydia Millet
First published as a Norton paperback 2018
All rights reserved
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110
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Book design by Barbara M. Bachman
Cover design by Fred Davis
The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Names: Millet, Lydia, 1968– author.
Title: Omnivores : a novel / Lydia Millet.
Description: New York : W. W. Norton & Company, 2018.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018009311 | ISBN 9780393635461 (pbk.)
Subjects: LCSH: Married women—Fiction. | Mothers and sons—Fiction. | Satire. | GSAFD: Black humor (Literature)
Classification: LCC PS3563.I42175 O46 2018 | DDC 813/.54—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018009311
ISBN 978-0-393-63547-8 (e-book)
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