by Otto Penzler
She learns a lot about me as well, at least the stuff I want her to know, but her face goes to stone when I tell her my number-one pet peeve is when people praise God only for the good things in life. “If God is so great,” I say, “what the hell is up with cancer and dropped touchdown passes? No one points to the sky when a pass slips through their fingers.” We go at it pretty good when I think, If you’re smart, you’ll never say these things again, but I know I will. All this learning about each other is fine, but the great stuff comes out when we sit in a tan stucco courtyard on our honeymoon in Savannah. We are waiting for our food, sipping on red wine, when Nicholle asks me the worst thing I’ve ever considered doing to someone else, even if it was just for a split second. I consider taking my hit-and-run and forming a hypothetical, just to see the reaction, but all that comes to me are the girl’s spotless white shoes. I feel my stomach clench and push the image away. I search my mental catalogue for relief, and it doesn’t take me long to sift through the feeble mock threats and momentary revenge wishes to a wooded mountainside near my childhood town.
I was twelve, cutting down dead white pine with my father in the backcountry. I’d taken a break, leaning against the old red Dodge truck, and in a bizarre mental pulse I thought of taking the chainsaw and hacking my father. I imagined the roaring saw, the blood and limbs mixing with the sawdust, the dumbfounded look in his eyes before the spinning hot teeth bit. Even in that moment I remember being ashamed and frightened of my own psychological capacity.
Now in the Italian restaurant courtyard, I hold the saltshaker in my hand and avoid Nicholle’s brown eyes. I don’t know if the words have come out right. Can those words come out right? “It’s crazy,” I say. I feel heavy and place my hands in my lap. “I don’t know what I’m saying. Ya know what I’m saying?” I steal a glance. She’s wearing my favorite sundress, a white number with small red and yellow flowers. She’s tan and has her hair pulled back. There’s a large party in the courtyard clinking wineglasses and talking over one another. We’re all visitors.
“Stealing a baby,” Nicholle says. “I don’t know where it comes from. But there it is. I’d planned names, escape routes from the hospital, everything. I didn’t care if it looked like me. I even thought it might be easier to take a year-old, not a newborn. They’d be eating solids.”
The food arrives. I cut the veal with my knife. I take another bite and watch Nicholle move her bare arms as she negotiates her utensils into her pasta, then grabs for her wineglass and gulps. We should laugh. I think of laughing.
“So,” I say. “I’m glad we’re the normal ones.”
We move into a nice rolling subdivision in Knoxville called Hawks Landing. Lo and behold, about a month into our stay, two hawks make their nest in a giant ponderosa in our front yard. The place is spacious and we have privacy on almost an acre. The neighbors are fine, but there’s a guy around the corner who lets his dog shit in our yard. One Sunday morning, as I trim the flowering bushes in the front, he comes around with the dog and waves friendly to me before the dog scampers ten feet onto the grass and does his business. I don’t have the balls to say anything. I’m out-of-shape thin and believe there’s a hovering fistfight in every confrontation. He’s a big guy, brick shoulders, looks like he wouldn’t mind a fight, win or lose. Sometimes I see both him and the dog rolling around on his front yard when I come home from work. I stay clear. Besides that, life is great. Nicholle and I join a coed softball league, help clean up the local park, and make church about a third of the time. I like the routine. We break it up just enough to keep everything interesting. Nicholle steals $400 worth of tile from a local hardware store. Just walks out. It’s in our bathroom on a diagonal. I lie to my boss most days about where I am, the hours I put in, but I work hard enough that he never questions me. I’m a Tennessee fan now, but Nicholle is Alabama all the way, so we have one of those stupid house-divided license plates, half orange, half crimson. We have lots of friends and a few enemies, but it’s a healthy proportion.
Dub calls one night and talks to Nicholle for an hour. This is not normal.
“He needs money,” Nicholle says. My head is already in my hands. “Five thousand.” We don’t have $2000. “He’ll pay us back. He says he’ll pay us back. I know what you’re going to say. He wouldn’t ask unless he needed it.” I’m not going to say a thing. “He’s desperate and we can cash bonds if we have to. Say something. We need to be together on this.”
She’s near tears. It’s breaking her heart. She knows we’ll never see a penny back, knows we can’t afford it, knows I despise her for asking, and yet here she is. It’s her brother. I tell her I want him to drive up so I can see him face-to-face when I hand him the check. Everyone agrees, but two weeks later Nicholle puts the money in the mail and talks to me about the price of gasoline.
Nicholle and I think we’ll get pregnant right away. We’re both healthy, but after six months we’re still not pregnant. We lie to the doctors, tell them it’s been a year, but they say nothing’s wrong. Nicholle and I fight and stress, and making love morphs into an exercise of hopelessness over the next two years. I change jobs and become a rep in a pharmaceutical company selling erectile dysfunction drugs. The money is good, but I’m on the road every other week. I’m outside a Taco Bell in Jacksonville when Nicholle calls me. I shift the greasy bag to my right hand and answer the phone.
“You’re going to be a father,” she says.
“Okay,” I say. “Really?”
She loses it and I want to, but I can’t cry. Of all things, I imagine the drive home from the hospital with our newborn child in the back seat. I think of all of the new drivers, the drunk drivers, the red-light racers.
“We need a car seat,” I say.
“I love you,” Nicholle says through the sniffles.
I love her, too, but I say, “Does this mean we don’t have to steal a baby?”
Four weeks later I’m outside the VA hospital in Charlotte when she lets me know the pregnancy is ectopic. It’s July, and dust swirls in the empty sky. I think of our growing child in Nicholle’s right fallopian tube, budding bigger and bigger, slowly killing my wife, but she says the doctors are going to take care of everything the next day, and they do. I fly home and sit in our living room, Nicholle’s head in my lap as she rubs at her legs. There’s nothing I can say, so we’re mostly quiet.
She says, “We have to wait three months.”
The ceiling fan spins above us, and Nicholle’s hair brushes at my legs. I study her body from her head down to her hips and bent knees and tucked feet. Very slowly, she uncoils. She hasn’t told her parents yet, but as she heads upstairs and closes our bedroom door I know she’s going for the phone. I hear her muffled voice through the ceiling. She’s not crying yet. There’s nothing her mother can do from that distance, but there’s a safety in that bond that I’ll never be able to join. The fan does little to help with the thick humidity. I wonder, is all of this part of my penance? A life for a life? Am I even with the universe? Still, the pain of losing something sight unseen seems like an easy sentence. Is this just the beginning? I see the Los Alamos girl curled up like an embryo. My heart was exploding and my hands pounded as they shifted the Jeep into first gear and released the clutch. I pressed the gas. I named the girl long ago, and tonight I hear it in my ears: Courtney. It’s not the name said in the television reports in the aftermath, but I don’t care. I haven’t met a Courtney since. She’s the only one.
In early September, just as we find our voices again, we watch television clips from New York City of people jumping from the buildings. I’ve never considered choosing between flame and gravity, and later, when the photos come out in magazines showing the bodies falling to their deaths, I am certain gravity would be the answer if given the choice.
After another miscarriage, Nicholle becomes pregnant. She’s seven months along, a big, beautiful belly with a dark line bisecting her bulge. We ride in a bus. I can’t stop touching her. Across from us sit
four men that resemble the plane hijackers. I’m educated. Logically, I know these aren’t terrorists. They ride the public bus downtown. They’re happy and joking with one another. They speak a mix of English and something else. But one of them looks over at us, looks at Nicholle, at her belly, and stares. His brown face goes slack, his entire countenance trancelike. Am I due? Will this be it? The man will make a move toward us. His friends will hold me down while he struggles with Nicholle. I may survive this attack, alone. When that image passes, I imagine him flying a plane, a little single-prop Cessna, over our neighborhood. The hawks are up and circling high in the sky. He brings the plane into a dive, tears up the birds, heads straight for our shingled roof, but before I can complete the daydream, Nicholle reaches for my clenched hand, unfolds it, and intertwines hers. The man stares unflinchingly.
“Soon,” Nicholle says to the man, tilting her chin up. “Two months left.” It takes a second for him to realize that she has spoken to him. The man breaks his stare. “Soon,” Nicholle repeats.
The four of them become quiet. The man taps his brown shirt above his heart, taps his forehead, and circles his hand toward us. “Girl,” he says.
The magnolias I planted bloom large white blossoms. I stare at them with a cup of coffee one Saturday morning when the neighborhood jackass brings his retriever by. Nicholle’s parents are in town, and her father stands next to me as the dog unloads one on our driveway. I’m near my limit with no plan. He gives me enough time to say something, and when I don’t he asks, “How often, Slim?”
“I only see them on the weekends,” I say.
“That’s not what I asked,” he says, and looks at me as if I’m a whiny child.
Later in the week Nicholle’s dad tells me the jerk works the midshift, that he must walk the dog when he gets home. I don’t ask how he knows this. He steps into the den and calls someone on his cell phone. When he returns he says, “You’ll have to help.” He asks me to wait in the parking lot of the store, and comes out with a plastic bottle of antifreeze. Sparks fly around me, and before he gets in the car, I assign the guilt to him: his idea, his purchase. I can’t take on this one as well. I’ve decided I won’t say no as long as he pours it into the dog bowl. Nicholle’s father sits down with a heavy exhale.
“Dub’s done this a couple times,” he says. “Says to mix in a little vinegar, helps it go down.”
“Vinegar?”
“That’s what he says. He sends his love. Wanted me to tell you.”
The doctor makes me grab a leg before he tells Nicholle to start pushing. Emma arrives early, only three pounds, two ounces. This is what family means. Three days later Emma comes home. No man could endure Nicholle’s schedule of no-sleep, all-go patience. Emma has my blue eyes, and even though many children are born with blue eyes, hers are my blue. I see them under the oxygen mask she has to wear to keep her lungs full.
Eight weeks later Emma has some neck control. I’ve just returned from Lexington. She rests on my chest when I get a call.
“Kevin has died,” Uncle Norv says.
Kevin, my cousin, died while trying to escape Paddy’s Pub in Bali. After the call, I do a little research until I know the scene inside the pub: a small explosion flashed out of a backpack amid the music and drinks and sweat. Kevin joined the frantic swarm into the warm night, only to be greeted by a white Mitsubishi van loaded with explosives. It left a crater more than a meter deep. Later, as I consider the incident, I like to rewind a moment before the backpack detonation; where, in his midtwenties, Kevin swayed and bounced to the band in pure bliss; where the dreamlike Bali became real under a mix of alcohol and moonlight; where, for Kevin, time slowed just enough to pause.
I consider the end often. I always have after the hit-and-run. I tell Nicholle that if we played the percentages I’d go before her, most likely some kind of cancer. It’s probably already started somewhere deep inside my slippery body. Sometimes I worry Nicholle might go first. When she’s late getting home from a mom’s night out, my mind allows about a thirty-minute cushion and then begins the murmurs of what-ifs. The whole scene flashes by: the dreaded call—auto accident, funeral, insurance money, my baby girl growing, me dating or not, the guilt of either, moving (would I have to move? yes, definitely), different career, Emma’s wedding—but then the garage door grumbles open and Nicholle saunters in, because in the end, there’s absolutely nothing wrong.
I’m back on the road now: a week away every other month. When I’m gone I call home at six-thirty their time every night. Emma has just finished her bath and Nicholle puts the phone up to her ear so she can hear my voice. Emma’s only eight months old and already she plays with her first steps.
Whenever I’m in Memphis I play cards a couple blocks off the strip in a brick basement where there’s a password. It’s a thrill. I know most of the participants. We aren’t thugs. When we lose money, it hurts. We have polo shirts and mortgages. This time I have a flush and a story starts up around the table about a guy who had his dick put in a vise. He owed money to the wrong people, the regular story. There’s laughter. I stare at my spades, organized and lethal. I reach for chips.
“Named Dub,” says Nick, the organizer of the game.
“Dub?” someone says. “Deserved it.”
Jordan, a baker with nervous hands, asks if you could die from that—a dick in a vise.
A new guy, Alec, quiets everyone with his monotone. “Yes,” he says. “If you leave ’em there, eventually they die of hunger.”
How many Dubs can there be? I think of what I’ll say to Nicholle. What do I ask? Water moccasin Dub, snapping turtle Dub. I see him laughing in the muddy water as I dry off on the bank, still unable to quiet my knees. I wait until the next day. It’s 7 p.m. I’ve whispered to Emma, and Nicholle explains how she’s considering going back to work, just part-time, over the summer. She’s having trouble losing the last ten pounds of pregnancy weight.
“When’s Dub going to come visit his niece?” I ask.
“I don’t know,” she says. “He’s not coming with money.”
Dub rolls his truck eight times on a Monday morning at 3 a.m. He’s drunk and his face and chest are mashed up good. Nicholle’s parents call. Her mother asks for our prayers. We pray. It’s close for a few hours, but Dub pulls through. Nicholle’s mother praises God and his mercy and his comfort. It’s all she talks about. Dub drank a bottle of Jack and got behind the wheel. He forgot to put his seatbelt on, was ejected from the rolling vehicle, and landed on his back, his eyes looking up at dizzying stars. I want to ask Nicholle’s mother if buckling in is the devil’s work, but I never will.
Two months later Dub shows up at the house one evening, twenty pounds lighter, hands shaking. He smells like boiled cabbage and urine. He says he’s been in the same clothes for a week, sleeping during the day, driving at night. He’s out of money and in trouble. Says it’s the kind of trouble you don’t wake up from.
“Got to stay out of ’bama,” he says.
Before I can wrap my head around the situation, Nicholle has invited him in and shown him to the guest room. He showers upstairs while Nicholle and I cuss and stomp. Before the water turns off we’ve come to a compromise. He has two weeks. After that, he’s on his own. I know Nicholle won’t kick him out at the deadline, but it’s something.
A month later I make the morning hospital rounds in Little Rock. I’m not supposed to leave until the following day, but I think of changing my flight to get back to the girls and Dub that night. I hustle back to the hotel. I pick up the ringing hotel receiver just before I leave for the airport. It’s Nicholle’s voice, nervous and quick. She says there are two men, a tall one at the front door, the other standing at the side of the house. She’s ignored them, but the man at the front door has stopped knocking and peers into the long, narrow window to the left of the door. Emma sleeps.
“Am I crazy?” she asks.
“Just wait a minute,” I say. “Deep breaths. Are they in uniform?” I ask.
> “No,” she says, “Why? Did you schedule something?” But she doesn’t let me answer. “Because it’s been far too long, they’ve been here five minutes.” She tells me that she can see the one at the front door glancing around, not into the house, but around and at the other houses in the neighborhood. I hear Dub in the background.
“Put Dub on.” I wait for his voice and the pause stretches. I force myself to breathe.
“There’s some shit,” he says. “Damn. Damn. Nothin’s gunna happen, man. Trust me.”
“You son of a bitch. Handle this, Dub.” There’s no reply.
“Hello?” It’s Nicholle. “The one on the side moved into the backyard,” she says. I picture the spacious yard, the towering ponderosa and medium dogwoods. It is 3:15 my time, 4:15 there. “Dub left the damn truck in the driveway. Listen to me. Something’s not right here.”
I stand in the small hotel room, packed suitcase at my feet. “Go get Emma,” I say.
Nicholle breathes heavy into the phone and she says, “My God.” I trace her path in my head, down the long second-floor hallway, through the white door into the baby’s yellow bedroom with pink block letters above the crib: EMMA.
“I’m back in our room. Emma’s . . . They’re in—” she says. “The other one is on the back porch and the man at the front door, he’s knocking again.”
