by Ron Carlson
“I don’t understand you,” she said. “You’re a lawyer, for Petes’ sakes. You like things nailed down. What’s the problem?”
But she said it as: what’s your problem? I watched the children, many babies, being fingerprinted. I couldn’t express what my problem was.
And my mother wanted to know why, in light of all the missing children and the recent abductions, why wouldn’t I do it for their sake.
“Because,” I had explained to her at last, at the end of my patience: “Because the only use those prints will ever have is in identifying a body, okay? Do you see? They use them to identify the body. And my children will not need fingerprints, because nothing is going to happen to my children. Is that clear?” I had almost yelled at my mother. “We don’t need fingerprints!”
Then my mother would be hurt for a few days and then silent for a few days, and then there’d be another news story and we’d do it all again.
Annie tried to intervene. “Stop being a jerk. It’s not a big deal. It’s not going to hurt the boys. They’ll forget it. Your mother would feel better.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
I don’t know how many times we had some version of that conversation, but I do know that once I took Annie’s wrist and raged through the house like the sorry creature I can be at times, pointing to the low surfaces, “Because, we’ve got fingerprints! Look!” I made her look at the entryway door and the thousand hands printed there, at the car windows, and the front of the fridge, and finally the television, where a vivid hand printed in rice cereal made Tom Brokaw on the evening news look like he was growing a beard. “We have fingerprints. And I love these fingerprints. We don’t need any others.”
All Annie said was, “Can I have this now?” She indicated her arm. I let her go. She shook her head at me and went in to check on the boys.
AND there was the milk.
I wanted Annie to change milk. We had been getting the Hilltop green half-gallon cartons. Then they started putting children on the back panels, missing children. Under the bold heading, MISSING, would be two green and white photographs of the children, their statistics printed underneath: date of birth; age; height; eyes; hair; weight; date missing; from.… The photographs themselves assumed a lurid, tabloid quality, and everytime I opened the fridge they scared me. I’d already seen ads for missing children on a weekly mailer we receive which offers—on the flip side—discount coupons for curtain and rug cleaning, optical services, and fast food, primarily chicken. And in Roy’s Drug one night I dropped the Archie comic I was going to buy for the boys (to keep them from ripping up our art books), when I saw two missing children inside the front cover. It was all getting to me.
One night late, I went into Smith’s Food King and turned all the Hilltop milk to the back panel so sixty children stared out from the dairy case. I started it as a statement of some kind, but when I stepped back across the aisle and saw their group sadness, all those green and white poor resolution smiles, wan even in the bright Food King light, I lost my breath. I fled the store and sulked home and asked Annie if we could buy another brand.
When I told her why, when I told her about the two kids taking a little starch out of the world for me when I opened the refrigerator at two A.M. to grab Bobby a bottle, those nights when he still fusses, Annie just said No.
TONIGHT after I have the fifteenth version of my fingerprint call with my mother, I am out of tolerance, reason, generosity, and any of their relatives. I never swear in the company of my mother, and as I sit down in the kitchen and watch Annie spoon the boys their macaroni and strained beef, I think perhaps I should. I might not have this knot in my neck. There on the table is the Hilltop milk with somebody’s picture on the back.
I don’t know why, but I start: “Annie, I don’t want this milk in the house.”
She’s cool. “And is there a reason for that, oh powerful Rulemaker?”
“I’ve told you the reason. I’m not interested in being depressed or in having my children frightened by faces of lost souls in the refrigerator.”
Annie says nothing. She spoons the macaroni into Bobby’s open mouth. After each mouthful, he goes: “mmmmnnnnn!” and laughs. It’s something I taught the boys with Milupa and bananas, but Lee’s version is softer, almost a sigh of satisfaction.
“What is the point? There is no point in publishing these lurid photographs.”
“They’re not lurid.”
“What’s the point? I am supposed to study the carton, cruise the city, stop every child walking home from school: is he missing? would he like to go home now? Really, what? I see some girl playing tennis against the practice wall in Liberty Park, am I supposed to match her with my carton collection of missing children?” I’ve raised my voice a little, I can tell, because Annie looks narrow-eyed, stony.
She hands me the spoon for Lee, who is smiling at me for yelling. Annie rises and takes the milk and puts it in the refrigerator. “Missing children don’t get to play tennis,” she says quietly, wiping Bobby up and putting him on the floor. Bobby goes immediately to the one cupboard I haven’t safety clipped, opens it, and pulls a large bottle of olives onto his foot.
He watches the bottle roll across the floor and when it stops against the stove, he looks up into my face with his beautiful face and he starts to cry.
“Bobby’s first,” Annie says, plucking him from the floor. “Bobby’s first in bed tonight!”
When she carts Bobby off, I let Lee out of his chair. I hand him his bottle out of the fridge and he takes it with both hands as if it were an award. He starts to walk off, then realizes, I guess, that Mom isn’t here and he doesn’t really know where to go. So, he looks up at me, a child who resembles an angel so much it is troubling. Then Annie is behind him, lifting him away, and I am left alone in the kitchen.
I wipe up the chairs and the floor and cap the macaroni and strained beef, but when I put them away, I see that green Hilltop milk carton.
“You want to close the fridge?” Annie is behind me.
“No look. Look at this.”
“Close the fridge door.”
“Look!” I point at the child, his green and white photograph so grim in the bright light of the fridge.
I take one carton of milk out and close the fridge. I read aloud: “MISSING: Name: Richard Tarrel. D.O.B.: 10/21/82. Age: 4. Height: 2 feet 8 inches. Eyes: blue. Hair: light brown. Weight: 27 pounds. Date missing: 6/24/84. From: Omaha. …” I mean to make a point by reading it, but the twenty-seven pounds gets me a little, and by the time I read Omaha, I stop and sit down and look across at Annie. She looks like she is going to cry. She looks a lot like I have made her cry again.
She firms her mouth once and shakes her head as she stands up to leave the room. “Nebraska,” she whispers. “Omaha, Nebraska.”
I SIT at the kitchen table listening to Bobby and Lee murmuring toward sleep in their room, and I look at little twenty-seven pound Richard Tarrel. Even in the poor quality photograph, he is beautiful, his eyes huge and dark, his lips pouted in a coy James Dean smile. There is no background in the photo, but I’ve been to Omaha. I can imagine the backyard somewhere out near 92nd Street, the swingset, the young peach tree Richard’s father planted this summer, after the man at the nursery told him that though it was small, there would be peaches next fall.
THE next morning, I’ve got the day trip to Denver, the quick deposition, and back on the nine o’clock. Annie is cordial to me in the morning, well, stern. I have a cup of coffee and pick at some of Bobby’s scrambled eggs. Annie doesn’t offer to have the whole gang drive me to the airport, which would have happened if we weren’t fighting. I feel bad about it, kind of flat, but the boys will not have their fingerprints taken. I do not believe in it and it will not happen. Not my boys. It’s a rule.
The flight over is rocky. The plane pitches heavily up the slope and then down, across the mountains to Denver. Sitting in the window seat of my row, one empty seat away, is a pale blond
girl. I’m trying to fill in all the forms so I can maybe make the early plane tonight, but she stops me. I have to study her. She huddles to the window, her fragile face poised there, watching the unchanging grayness. Her Levis are worn and the red plaid bag she clutches on her lap is years old. Her shirt is a blue stripe dress shirt that could have never, ever fit her; it is five sizes large. She sits in a linty, dark blue serape. I can’t stop myself from looking at her. Date of Birth: 1969. Age: 17; Height: 5’9”; Eyes: brown; Hair: light blond; Weight: 120; Date Missing:.…
The girl turns her face to me in the bouncing airplane and speaks, her lips barely moving: “Don’t,” she says. “Please. Just don’t.”
My deposition is a witness to a motorcycle accident, a sophomore in psychology, and I meet him at the University Union in Boulder just after noon. In our hour, I learn: both children moved to avoid the cycle, but they moved different ways and one, the victim, our client, was hit and injured. My witness was driving pizza delivery behind the motorcycle and saw it all. Daylight. Sun to his back. A simple story. After the witness leaves for class, I sit in the modular furniture mesmerized for a while by the young people streaming around me.
There are children everywhere. All the way down the highway from Boulder to Denver, I see them alone and in groups, kicking along in the gravel. They all seem to need haircuts. I check my watch: two o’clock on a school day. Why isn’t anybody where he’s supposed to be? I think about our case; it’s a given. I wonder what help the settlement will be to the parents of the hurt girl. I try to make the equation in my mind. We’ll ask for six hundred thousand and get two. The girl’s eleven years old and has one complete knee and six-tenths of the other. Let’s see: she’ll have that limp for sixty-eight years, if she lives her statistic. That’s three thousand dollars a year not to walk like everyone else, or play soccer, I guess, or tennis. I ditch my rental car at the Avis curb, and think: what a strange man I’m becoming. What’s happening to me?
The six o’clock is full so I hit the little sky-lounge near the gate and have a Manhattan. I used to love having an hour or two to ransack the magazines and have a Manhattan, my little joke living in the West, but now it’s not much fun. There seem somes urgency about getting home. I can’t really settle down. I want to get home.
SOMETIMES, driving home alone in the last two blocks before our house, a feeling descends upon me like a gift. It is as if a huge door opens and I can breathe differently, see the entire scope of our lives, and it makes me unreasonably happy. It makes me want to rush into the kitchen and sweep Annie up and cry: forgive me, forgive us, let’s never quarrel again, we have everything. I don’t know where the feeling comes from or how real it is, but I have it tonight as I turn into the driveway.
My mother’s white Seville is parked to one side, something I didn’t really want to see, but there’s our house standing like a house in a story, an entire happy little world. The kitchen windows are beautiful yellow squares and a blue glow in the two small windows out front means they’re watching television.
I vow to go in cheerfully and join them, open a beer, chat openly with the two women about everything. This fingerprint thing doesn’t have to be such a big deal. We can agree. We can face the future without unreasonable fear.
In the kitchen, two blue Community Fuel Folders spill across the table. On the cover of each is a large white fingerprint the size of a head of lettuce. Underneath the print, it says: COMMUNITY I.D. / PROJECT FINGERPRINT. I can hear the women talking in the other room under the television noises. I open the first folder and there it is in Annie’s printing: Bobby Hensley. Date of Birth. Age. Weight. Hair. There is an empty square: place recent photograph here. And below: the ten smudges of Bobby’s fingers.
I reach two bottles out of the fridge, one Nuk, one yellow nipple for Lee, and slip them inside my sportcoat. I tiptoe into the boys’ room. Lee is asleep in a knot of blanket; Bobby lies on his side with his thumb loosely in his mouth experimenting with sounds: doya, doya, moya. He looks up at me calmly and smiles and then rolls to a crawl and stands in his crib. I pick him up and park him in a shoulder and then lift Lee like a melon under my forearm. I sweep the boys noiselessly through the kitchen and out to the car.
I calm enough to strap them in their car seats, Lee asleep in the back and Bobby on the seat next to me in the front. I coast back down the driveway before starting the car, and I am on the road half a block before I pull the lights on.
“Ba,” Bobby says as we pass a city bus in front of East High. “Ba.”
“Bus,” I say, the first word I’ve said aloud since my plane landed. “That’s right. It’s a bus.”
The streets are luminous, wet and shiny, ticketed with early leaves, and our tires make the friction I have always loved to hear after rain. So the streets whisper darkly as we slow at each bright intersection, the flaring Seven-Elevens, the flat white splash of a gas station. Then it is dark again, and we are driving.
Lee starts to squeak, which means he will babble for a while and then cry. He’s a little tongue-tied and is gradually tearing the cord underneath by stretching his mouth in low squalls which becomes real crying after about a minute. I stop at the light at Fourth and State and give both boys their bottles.
We turn left onto State and head south, cruising by the jillion colored lights the kids love. In the rearview mirror, I can see Lee settled now in his seat. He has learned to balance the bottle on the carseat arm-tray, so his hands are free. Right now, they extend off to each side, palms up, and Lee opens and closes his hands slowly as he watches them and sucks on the bottle.
Bobby has his head tipped right to witness the spectacle of neon from the bars and motels, the bright dragon above the Double Hey Rice Palace, the pulsing tire in front of Big O. He has his bottle clutched in both hands and set hard in the side of his mouth like a cigar.
WHEN I was a boy I remember that my father would always pick up babies in restaurants. We’d go to Harmon’s on North Temple about every other Sunday as a treat. My brother and I always had the gorgeous shakes, strawberry and chocolate, too thick for the straw, my mother always wore one of her three pretty dresses and patted our faces with the corner of her napkin, and my father would always spot a baby three tables away. He would simply rise and go over to the little family and pick up their baby and bring it over to our table and talk to it, asking did it want to be ours and things like that, just loud enough for the parents to hear. I remember the parents always smiling, perhaps an older sister craning her neck to see where the baby had gone, and my father dipping a spoon into my strawberry shake for the child. Sometimes he’d keep the baby on his lap for half an hour, showing off, sometimes, he would return it right away, the baby squirming in his arms, fighting for a last glance at my strawberry shake. My father gave forty kids their first taste of ice cream at our table, and no one seemed to be scared of anything.
“NAMMA,” Bobby says, lifting his bottle over the seat and dropping it. He places one hand on the window and says it again, “Namma.”
Somewhere out in this garish Disneyland of light, he has spotted a bear, and now he wants “Namma,” his bear, actually a stuffed toy raccoon. Namma is the one who taught us all peek-a-boo and Where’s-your-nose. In my haste leaving the house, I have forgotten Namma.
In the backseat, Lee is again asleep, his arms limp at his sides, his bottle still protruding from his mouth.
“Namma,” Bobby says, turning to me.
“Namma,” I say back to him, and he smiles. We will have to go home. Namma is at home peeking out of a corner of the crib. Bobby is still smiling at me coyly, waiting for me to say something else, so I sing his favorite song: “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.”
“Ooh Wimoweh. Wimoweh, O Wimoweh …” I sing, nodding my head so Bobby will nod his too. “In the jungle, the quiet jungle, the lion sleeps tonight. …”
Tired, he leans his head back against the car seat and watches me sing, his open-mouth grin never changing. I do a lot of extra “O Wimoweh’s
,” and the song ends somewhere in Murray. Bobby has closed his mouth now; his eyes are next. I look at my watch: ten to twelve; and I realize that this is the latest I’ve been out since the boys were born, and people are everywhere. We better go home.
I do a U-turn in the bright, crowded parking lot of a Seven-Eleven. A lone teenager leans against the phones, smoking a cigarette. He wears a Levi jacket and a blue bandanna around his neck. I look at his face, the eyebrows almost grown together, the pretty lower lip. Date of Birth: 1971; Age: 15; Height: 5’7”; Weight: 125; Eyes: blue; Hair: dark brown; Date missing: I don’t know. On the milk carton there will be a date, but as I glance back at the boy, I can only see that it looks like he’s been out in the night a long time.
Three blocks later, Bobby’s asleep. It’s late. The traffic is thick and bright. I pass a twenty-four hour Safeway and the parking lot is full. Behind me the headlights teem. A man cruises by us smoking a cigarette in a large Chevrolet. Two couples on motorcycles, the girls holding on, their faces turned out of the wind into their boyfriends’ backs. A new station wagon, three girls bouncing in the front seat. Two boys in a Volkswagen bug, their elbows out the window as if summer weren’t really over.
At home Annie has checked on the children by now and found them gone, and she has found my valise, and she has given my mother another drink and calmed her down. She knows I’m coming home. We have been safe all our lives. We’ve traveled: London, Tokyo, Paris, where we saw a diplomat shot down the block from us. Annie has broken her leg skiing. Our Cherokee was totaled by a street department truck two summers ago. We have always felt safe until the boys arrived, and now I am afraid of everything.
I start to sing. We’re locked in, the windows are up. These are my boys. I sing softly: “Ooh Wimoweh. Wimoweh, O Wimoweh, Wimoweh,” and on, even at a stoplight. I can feel people looking at me, and I lower my face onto the back of my hand on the steering wheel. It’s so late. What is everybody doing up so late?
