Thumbsucker

by Walter Kirn

  “I want to know how to get liquor,” I said.

  “Steal it from your folks.”

  “I can’t. They’d catch me. I’d get sent somewhere.”

  Willy smiled. “There’s nothing wrong with that. I got sent to Pine Island Juvenile. I learned to play chess there. Mastered archery. Far and away the best year of my life.”

  “What if I gave you money for vodka?”

  “Don’t drink clear spirits. Don’t go down that road. They say they’re purer. They’re not. Drink rock and rye. The fruit in the bottle adds important nutrients.”

  I fished in my jeans for the crumpled fives I’d stolen from Mike’s basement workshop. One reason for his despair about money might have been his inability to keep physical track of it; he rarely got through an entire checkbook before losing it down the seat crack of the car, and he littered the house with change and crumpled bills. When he came home from the store at night, he’d fling what was in his pockets on shelves and tables as if he were ridding himself of built-up poisons, not seeming to notice when his property vanished What disturbed him was spending money, buying things; misplacing money was just a part of life.

  “You sure you want to go this route?” said Willy, counting the fives. I felt patronized, insulted. He’d done quite well as a drunk—he’d won a movie role.

  “Buy me some booze or I’ll get it from Fred Hurley.” Fred was our other town drunk, Willy’s rival, younger and less picturesque by half, but possibly more authentic. Not an actor.

  “You’ll get it from me,” said Willy. “I’m your guy. How much do you want?”

  “Enough to knock me out.”

  “This isn’t a suicide thing, I hope.”

  “Just buy it.”

  I came back three days later, as directed, and found my connection unconscious on the couch. His head hung down over the edge and grazed the floor and the blood pooled in his face had turned it purple, swelling his lips into froggy blobs. I rifled cupboards and yanked out drawers, freeing clouds of midges and flying ants. I couldn’t find my vodka.

  “Out. Get away!” I heard Willy shout behind me.

  I turned, harassed by the insects in my face.

  “It’s you,” Willy said. “I’m sorry.”

  “Where’s my liquor?”

  “Never give an alcoholic money, kid.”

  I made him sit up, then searched his dungarees. He held his arms in the air and didn’t protest. But besides some empty food stamp booklets, all I found was his actor’s union card, laminated in plastic. What a fake.

  I soon discovered that marijuana was easier to get. I followed a smell to the woods behind the Lions Park and found a group of older girls in tube tops passing a stone pipe and gossiping. They were comparing the size and shape of the school’s top athletes’ penises. When I joined the girls the next day the topic was “assne”—who had pimples on their butts. In return for a couple of hits off the pipe, I sold out half the boys’ locker room. It was something that I’d been waiting to do, I realized.

  The girl I grew closest to was Donna Prine, a redhead with freckles the color of new pennies. She lived alone with her famous father, the only Shandstrom Falls celebrity other than Willy Lindt. His twice-weekly column for the St. Paul paper was syndicated throughout the northern plains and took as its theme the decline of basic values. I wasn’t a fan of his politics, but I admired his wordplay. He called Hollywood actors “movie scars,” abortions “vacwombs,” politicians “kleptocrats,” and people on welfare “food tramps.” Due to his highly sensitive skin—the result, Donna said, of attending H-bomb tests during his 1950s army days—he seldom left the house. The one time I’d glimpsed him working in his yard, he’d worn a hooded sweatshirt and his face was smeared with white zinc oxide.

  One night I went with Donna in her Skylark to buy an ounce of pot. She blindfolded me before we left, wrapping my eyes in a sheer black nylon stocking fragrant with sweat and soap and baby oil. I inhaled deeply as we drove along. “Are you getting off on that?” said Donna. She took my left hand and sucked the middle finger, then guided it knuckle by knuckle through her zipper. “Just touch, don’t look,” she said. “That’s my rule, okay?”

  “Why can’t I look?”

  “I’m saving myself.”

  “For who?”

  “The area’s changing. New guys are moving in. Richer, more experienced. More eligible.”

  When Donna untied my blindfold we were parked in front of a lopsided white farmhouse whose windows were covered with sheets of plastic. The place was a dump like many local farms, surrounded by weedy fields and rusting implements. Government programs paid farmers not to plant, so they’d taken to selling things instead: Amway detergent, gizmos that boosted gas mileage, knickknacks made of weathered wood. And drugs.

  “Be cool,” Donna said as she knocked on the screen door. “And don’t make a fuss if he pulls the baby stunt.”

  The dealer, whom Donna called “Munch,” was tall and in his twenties, with moles on his eyelids the size of pencil erasers. He led us to a makeshift table fashioned from a door raised up on cinder blocks. He cleaned the pot with a putty knife. A Nazareth album, turned down low, warbled from the stereo and I noticed that the floor was out of true. Getting my money out, I dropped a quarter, and it rolled forever, out of sight.

  “Hey, Grit!” Munch yelled. “Get down here! Customers!”

  “Grit’s Munch’s girlfriend,” said Donna. “They have a son.” She seemed to be preparing me for something.

  A young woman appeared at the foot of the stairs. Her breasts hung out of the sides of a black halter top and her jeans rode high and tight against her crotch. In her arms was a baby whose head lolled, unsupported. Its face was grim and pinched and vaguely mummified, like something that had been buried and dug up.

  “Duncan’s a weed freak, too,” said Munch. “Kid Cannabis.”

  “What do you mean?” I said.

  “Likes to feed his head.”

  The girl laid the baby down beside the pot and went into the kitchen. Munch tickled the infant’s bare stomach. It didn’t react. He scratched under its chin. It didn’t twitch. The baby’s stoniness seemed to be the point.

  The girl returned with a large cardboard carton and opened the lid and set the baby inside it. She closed the lid and sat down next to Donna as Munch flicked a Zippo and lit a joint he’d rolled. The joint sparked and sizzled as Munch inhaled, choking back a heroic load of smoke. He leaned across the table over the box and blew out his hit through a hole punched in the cardboard.

  Smoke leaked out through the lid. I heard dull thumping sounds. The box moved a couple of inches across the table.

  “Imagine what he must think in there,” Munch said. “It’s Disneyland in a box. It’s Disney World.”

  I looked at Donna, stunned, wondering how many times she’d seen this horror and how she’d managed to harden herself to it. She dropped her eyes and folded her hands and sighed. I wanted to go, but I also wanted the pot. Maybe smoking enough of it would help me forget buying it.

  “Babies are naturally high,” the girlfriend said. She steadied the box as it rattled toward the table edge. “It’s because they don’t have language yet. They’re pure. They think in pictures.”

  “Of what?” Munch said.

  “Of animals.”

  “That’s a guess.”

  “It’s what I like to think. It makes me feel good.”

  Munch blew more smoke in the box and it stood still. The girl untucked the lid. She lifted out the baby by its armpits and held it so we could look. Its skin was gray, its toes and fingers curled up tight like paws. Oddly, the kid didn’t seem to have a belly button, only a sort of bumpy reddish smudge.

  “Watch now, here’s the amazing part,” said Munch. The girlfriend sat the baby in an armchair and started untangling a power cord running to a pair of headphones. She seated the headphones on the baby’s skull and crossed to the stereo and turned a knob. Instantly, the baby started kicki
ng. An eerie bugling sound escaped its throat, followed by a clamor of grunts and squawks in which I heard crowing roosters, rooting pigs, a whole excited barnyard.

  “We’re programming him young,” said Munch. “He’ll be a star someday. Bigger than Jethro Tull. Than Jimmy Page.”

  An hour later, parked above the dam, Donna and I divided up the pot. “Munch is sick,” she said. We were good and stoned by then. “Sometimes I’d like to steal that baby from him. Leave it in a church.”

  “Probably not a bad idea,” I said.

  “A child should be a beacon. A light of hope.”

  “I agree.”

  “They’re scrambling its little brains.”

  An ember jumped onto the thigh of Donna’s Levi’s; I brushed it onto the floor mat. I touched her shoulder. She didn’t shrink or flinch. My hand slid down her slick acrylic sweater onto her breasts. “My rule,” she said. “Eyes closed.” My hand felt her ribs, her speedy little heart.

  “I’m taking that kid. Will you help me?” Donna said.

  I would have promised her anything just then.

  The marijuana lasted us two weeks. We smoked most of it in Donna’s bedroom in the basement beneath her father’s study. It spooked me to hear his castered desk chair scrape across the ceiling. He dictated his columns in headlong bursts, adopting a screechy, politician’s tone.

  “Vacwombs outnumbered live births this year—a milestone. The old and infirm are next. The march is on, folks. Next stop the crematorium. All aboard!”

  I feared Mr. Prine might detect our marijuana fumes, but Donna said not to worry. “He’s very tolerant. The column is all an act. It’s showbiz, really. As a matter of fact, that book was his idea. He gave it to me on my sixteenth birthday.”

  The book was a deluxe-size paperback: The Sensual Gourmet. We’d been working our way through it chapter by chapter. We rubbed ourselves down with olive oil and perfume and wriggled like fish in each other’s greasy arms. We positioned ourselves on chairs and stacked-up pillows and tested the limits of human flexibility, sometimes crossing the line into real pain. Playing Donna’s puppet, I wore the blindfold as she twisted us into taut, ecstatic knots. I realized passivity suited me. No pressure.

  Unfortunately, we were running low on pot and I was nervous about buying more. Our noble talk of snatching little Duncan, a subject Donna inevitably brought up after we’d closed the book and caught our breath, had grown into a plot I didn’t like.

  “Fine,” Donna said one day. “I’ll go alone. By the way, we’re finished here. My teenage experimental phase is over.”

  “America, wake up! Ignore the movie scars! Look to your friends and families and clergy.”

  “I told you I’d help,” I said. “I won’t go back on that. I love you, Donna.”

  “That’s not what we’ve been doing here.”

  “I know. It just happened.”

  “Well, nip it in the bud. When Daddy and I decided I needed experience, we thought I should get it at home. In a safe setting. We also decided that picking a kid, like you, would keep down the chance of someone getting attached.”

  “You’re kidding me.”

  “We love each other, okay? We tell each other everything. Get used to it.”

  “Fine, but I think it’s strange. You’re father and daughter.”

  “I think your family’s strange. Go home,” said Donna.

  Upstairs, I heard her father start to type.

  I had trouble leaving the house that night. Mike was throwing a fit in the kitchen over our family’s failure to come to grips with the rising cost of groceries. He flung open drawers and cabinets, removing cans of soup and vegetables and quoting their prices in a high, scared whine. “Cut green beans for thirty-seven cents. A dollar for brownie mix. A dollar fifty for raisins.” Next, he’d drop the items on the counter, where they’d burst open or roll onto the floor. “We have to stop eating,” he said. “We’re going under.”

  I got up from the table as Joel slipped out of the room. I heard him turn on the TV to Wimbledon.

  Mike kicked a jar of spices at my chair. “Where are you going?”

  “A movie.”

  “What kind of movie?”

  “Whatever’s showing. I can’t digest my food here.”

  At the end of the driveway Donna’s red Skylark idled. Her dilated pupils reflected the glowing gauges. She’d combed her bangs straight down and put on lipstick and donned a pair of tight black driving gloves.

  “After we make the buy,” she said, “we’ll hide outside until they put the baby down. Then you can climb through a window and hand him out to me.”

  “I’m scared. I can’t do it. It’s wrong.”

  “What’s wrong is leaving him there.”

  “We could call in a tip to the cops,” I said.

  “Like Munch isn’t already paying them off. Get real.” Donna held out a pill bottle, uncapped it. “It’s Daddy’s phenobarb. Sometimes his skin’s so itchy he can’t sleep.”

  “Give me two.”

  “You’ll pass out.”

  “I wish,” I said.

  The lights were out at the farmhouse and the cars were gone. In a crate on the porch a litter of runty kittens nursed on a sweat sock, their mother nowhere in sight. I peered through the screen door and saw the lit-up stereo but heard no music.

  “Lucky break,” said Donna. “They’re at the bar. They leave the baby home.”

  We went on in. My bravery surprised me. To my small but growing list of talents I could add nighttime burglary.

  The baby was on its back in the armchair, the headphones hugging its ears. Its eyes were open. It appeared to have grown some since we’d seen it last. The legs sticking out of the diaper were longer, trimmer, and a ridge in its forehead suggested a heightened intellect.

  Donna removed the headphones. A bass guitar blared. Suddenly, the baby spoke: “Ma pa ma pa.”

  “Jesus!” I said.

  “Just hold him, shitbrain. Here.”

  I cradled the baby as Donna opened a closet and climbed on a chair to hunt for Munch’s stash. Something seemed wrong with the baby’s nervous system. I moved a forefinger across its vision, but the pupils failed to track the progress.

  “You’re safe,” I whispered. “We’ll take good care of you.” I didn’t believe myself.

  Donna stood down off the chair holding a plastic trash bag wrapped in duct tape.

  “Take it all,” I said. “Just take it all.”

  “They’ll notice. They’ll freak”

  “They’ll notice their kid’s gone, too.”

  I made a nest from a cheerleading costume and bedded the baby down in Donna’s backseat. She drove an inconspicuous forty, taking right turns on unmarked gravel roads. Once we’d lost track of where we were, Donna killed the engine and lit her pipe.

  “Not in the car,” I said. “The baby.”

  “Sorry.”

  We stood in the ditch and got higher than we should have. The pot Munch kept for himself was stronger than the stuff he sold. An owl glided past just feet above our heads and Donna yelled and ducked.

  “I think we should drive to the Lutheran church,” I said. Each word was a labor, like hoisting a stone slab.

  “Ixnay,” said Donna. “Lutherans are too strict.”

  “The Catholic church? The Methodists? The Baptists?”

  “I want to take him home to show to Daddy. He’s lonely, Justin. A baby might lift his spirits.”

  I didn’t answer. I couldn’t lift the words.

  Donna smoked as she drove, braking for animals only she could see. She parked in front of her house and cut the lights. The baby chirped and whinnied and made clicking sounds. In the glove compartment I found a Tootsie Pop, which I put in the baby’s mouth. It spit it out.

  “I’m sorry. I need my daddy now,” said Donna. “We shouldn’t have done this. I blew it. Don’t be mad at me.”

  I snugged the baby against my chest. I felt possessive suddenly. No churc
h that I knew of deserved him. No one did.

  Donna opened her door and swung her legs out. “Try the Episcopalians,” she said.

  Where I went next—I felt I had no choice—was Willy Lindt’s houseboat. The baby didn’t faze him. I chalked up its presence to “a screwed-up dope thing” and Willy said he understood and knew how to fix things.

  “Sit, I need the company. I’m drying out and it’s rough as hell tonight.”

  Willy opened two cans of 3.2 beer and brought out a bag of pretzels. For the baby, he dipped a finger in some milk but it jerked its head away. Its tongue was pale.

  “I’ll drop him at the sheriff’s in the morning. I’ll say I woke up from a binge and there he was. They expect this kind of thing from me.”

  “Why are you trying to quit drinking?” I said.

  “I’ve got a line on a role. In Minneapolis. I play a corpse in a trunk. A crime-spree movie.”

  The baby’s condition worsened as we talked. A film formed on its eyes. New sounds erupted. They rose from deep in the baby’s heaving chest—the scrambled upshot, I supposed, of so much heavy metal over headphones. Willy paced with the baby, rocking it, but the sounds kept coming. The baby flailed its arms.

  “Maybe it’s allergic,” Willy said, “and it’s having some kind of reaction. Or epileptic.”

  “The parents kept it high on pot,” I said.

  “That’s what it wants, then. Roll a joint.”

  “That’s sick.”

  “We need what we’re used to. Take an old bum’s word.”

  I argued but eventually Willy prevailed. Once the joint was rolled and lit, we knelt on the floor. Willy stroked the baby’s head. I gazed into its face and saw no soul, nothing but a blurry, rubber mask. This changed with my first exhaled puff. The baby cooed. Its mouth opened wide for more. I sucked more smoke in. Shame burned my face and split me into two: the kid who knew better and hated what he was doing and the kid who didn’t know a thing and let other people who claimed to know control him. I positioned my mouth above the baby’s thin dry lips and blew until I was crying and had to stop.

  “The thing to remember,” Willy said afterward, “was that we didn’t start this mess, now did we?”