Make Believe

by Joanna Scott

  In Hadleyville, Marge and Eddie slept without dreaming. Outside, an opossum, ghostly pale against the driveway gravel, slunk toward the garbage bins.

  At that hour of night most of the houses on most of the streets were dark — except for the house on Douglas Street, Judge Wright’s house, a ramshackle stucco Tudor covered with vines. Some of the vines were a foot in diameter, others as thin as wire and without their green leaves looked like an elaborate web spun over the walls and roof. The light in a front window on the second floor shone through the web — Judge Wright was in his bedroom, thinking of nothing particular, or at least nothing he could have put into words. But at that moment, as he stepped into the legs of his pajamas, the decision he would reach six weeks later in favor of Marjory Gantz, the decision everyone involved expected him to reach, took root in his mind. The evaluator hadn’t finished her report, and Judge Wright knew no particulars about the case at that point, especially not what would be revealed toward the end of the trial: that the counsel for Marjory Gantz has learned, Your Honor, of a drugrelated arrest made on the premises of the Gilberts’ house in May of 1992 — a young man named Taft, a relative of the family, busted for possession of cocaine. However important this disclosure should have been, to Judge Wright it would be no more than validation for his opinion. The novel irritated him, and his irritation made possible an irritating acceptance of the significance of matrilineage. No wonder most judges still awarded custody to the mother, and so they should. “There is but a twilight zone between a mother’s love and the atmosphere of Heaven,” the judge in the case of Tuter v. Tuter wrote way back in 1938. Of course Judge Wright wouldn’t have put it that way, wouldn’t even have alluded to the subject if there’d been someone else in the room with him. It was merely a belief he had about the father’s uncertain presence in the life of his child, a belief that would determine his response to the arguments presented by both sides in the case of Gantz v. Gilbert and would keep him from considering how in a just world, albeit an unreal world, Bo’s father would have a chance to speak in his own defense.

  PART FOUR

  Kamon Gilbert woke up on the morning of the last day of his life at 6:19, and in the minute before his alarm went off thought something to this effect: to exist in space, to have a body that can be aroused, senses that give proof of joy, to be in love, to be in love and alive, to love Jenny Templin and to know Jenny loved him, to know the feeling of love, to know they’d have a child soon — why, it was all a fortunate accident, luck, a gift of chance, one sperm out of millions, one egg with the odds against it, the world already crowded, stasis always easier than growth, nothing always dominating something, so life could never be more than a minute fraction of its own potential —

  “…’cause Sunshine Boy got the weather for you right after…”

  Kamon slammed his hand down on the clock radio’s snooze button. Jenny stirred beside him but remained asleep. She’d thrown off the sheets and blankets during the night, and Kamon had only to lift her T-shirt a few inches to reveal the mountain of her belly. He lay beside her, resting on an elbow, and with his free hand felt the taut skin hiding the form that would be their child in two months. And he went right on thinking:

  An image like stepping-stones, patches of light on custard skin drawing his mind not from foreground to background as it would have if he’d composed the shot (knowing as he did a little, far too little, about monocular perspective) but from foreground to that dimension behind any image — the past. All images had stories to tell, causes to explain. In the case of Jenny’s swollen belly the cause was, as Kamon had put it to his friends, “bumping without a body bag.” He was proud of what they’d done, their exquisite faith in each other, and, yeah, he’d been dismayed when she refused to have it undone, yet by then he was hopelessly in love with her, loving their dark-and-pale symmetry, loving what he hoped to make her, bringing her along up through life as he went up instead of kicking her to the curb, which is what his cousin Taft told him to do. Oh, Taft liked to give her the red-eye now that they were living in his apartment, never mind what he said. He enjoyed Jenny Templin’s good looks even if he liked to say that Kamon’s life was damn well over, an opinion that became to Kamon an energizing challenge. He was just beginning — he knew this for a fact, knew that while other guys would have walked away from the situation he was going to stick it out with Jenny, make himself a family to take care of, and go on loving what he already loved: the girl made of velvet opening her legs to him, going up with him when he went up.

  Don’t mind that she’s white.

  Loving her not because of the color of her skin, though not in spite of it either. He’d admit there were times he minded. He’d even found himself wishing, once things started to get heavy, that she’d spent longer in the oven and been roasted to a darker shade. But he loved what they became together, their contrasts, the balance of light and shadow. Stepping-stones of light. He knew how to look at them together, his hand on her belly, the picture enhanced by contrast. Yet what he really wanted was to move the image through the lens of a camera and save it once and for all on paper.

  He just had to keep himself from going too fast. Had to learn all he could about the behavior of light during an interval of time. Had to take advantage of time and get himself properly educated. He could look all he wanted, but he had to get educated if he meant to turn looking into a trade and move on up from the bottom. He never doubted his potential. He was busting with talent, everyone thought so. Kamon Gilbert, seventeen years old, acting day in and day out like a celebrity, pretending that he couldn’t help being as handsome as his daddy, smart to boot and quick and good at everything he tried out, his special destiny written all over him, bringing girls over to his table at a bar to ask, Who are you? You must be someone famous….

  Not yet, baby girl, but soon, as long as he didn’t lose his way. Sticking to a white girl who was having his child might have added to his journey an extra loop, but he hadn’t stopped heading up. If anything, Jenny made him more bent on doing the best he could. Maybe she wasn’t busting with talent like Kamon, but she had a kind of courage he could learn from — the courage to try anything, to pick up and start over. She was no average recruit. Why, look at her. Keep looking. The soft point of her chin. The curve downward at the corner of her almond eyes. All the shades of yellow and brown in her hair. Her lips slightly parted. Her tongue moving inside her mouth as she dreamed of love.

  Dreaming, wasn’t she, of what they’d done? Kamon lying flat as a carpet runner while Jenny licked the salt off him. Jenny straddling Kamon, Kamon straddling Jenny, two bodies rubbing together, building up wet friction, feeling the thrill, again and again, of making love as though for the first time, brown nipple filling his mouth, bodies lying side by side, front to back, upside down, the furnace inside her, cold toes curling against his calves, lips latched onto the ridge of his collarbone, thoughts all jumbled by pleasure, his pleasure shored up by his faith in eternity and hers by fear, Kamon assuming they’d love each other forever, Jenny assuming that something this good couldn’t last.

  Kamon watched her sleep, thinking about how they’d climb back into this same bed at the end of the day and make love as best they could, lifting themselves up and over the custard mountain of their baby, and when they were done they’d wonder how that mountain would ever come out of her, the baby growing bigger every day, the doctors at the clinic keen on natural childbirth, natural hell. “Wake me up when it’s over,” Jenny would say, tucking her knees up, closing her eyes, preparing to sink into a good night’s sleep.

  No denying their lives would have been easier if Jenny had agreed to give up that clump of cells inside her before it got itself a soul. But she wanted a baby, so Kamon made himself want what she wanted, accepting fatherhood as another challenge and thinking ahead, trying to imagine the face of his child but unable to sort through all the possible images to find the one that would greet him in two months, reminding himself as he lay there, his hand sti
ll resting on Jenny’s belly, that he sure had plenty to learn about photographic composition before his child was born, especially if he wanted to make a record of the baby’s opening act. And this kind of thinking made him consider how proud he was to be fathering a child who’d be as lucky as this child, what with Kamon and Jenny and all of Kamon’s family loving him as they would, Kamon and Jenny heading up in the world, up and up and up.

  Yeah! exclaimed the baby, shifting abruptly, pressing an eager foot into the wall of its sac, a motion that felt to Kamon like a mouse bouncing against his palm, transforming his pleasant, lazy contemplation into awe. A body inside a body, one asleep, the other awake — fucking weird, man! He’d like to catch that on film somehow, some way: motion inside stillness. Except he’d used up his allotment of contact paper at school and couldn’t afford to buy more and had sworn off begging extras from his art teacher, Mr. Manelli, a white hot-sauce boss who made it all too clear that Kamon was his favorite.

  Which reminded him, oh shit, that he was supposed to have finished Hamlet for his English class. See you later, peanut! He pulled the sheet over Jenny’s bare belly, kissed her lightly on the cheek, and turned off the pending alarm on the clock radio. He dressed quickly in jeans and a ratty T-shirt under his flannel shirt and walked in bare feet along the cold hallway of his cousin Taft’s apartment to the kitchen. He made coffee in the old Hamilton Beach pot he’d picked up a few weeks earlier at the Salvation Army and while the coffee was dripping he ate two big bowls of cereal and paged through the final scenes of Hamlet, got as far as the sparrow’s providential fall, and chose to spend the last minutes before he left the apartment not finishing the play but instead grooming himself in the bathroom, for wasn’t it more than likely that his English teacher would assign him the role of Hamlet during class? He’d already read the parts of Romeo and Julius Caesar. And now this: If it be now, ’tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now.

  At 3:05 P.M., two old women in the East Avenue McDonald’s waited at the counter for their order. One said, “I got mice. Mice!”

  “The live ones?” the other asked.

  “In my apartment. They wake me up at night.”

  Kamon stood behind them but moved forward when a girl appeared at another register to take his order. He bought a milk shake and fries and walked to a far booth so he could be alone and spend a few minutes calming himself down, untying the knot of anger, loops as tight as the muscles in his neck after a day spent at the snake pit that was his school, every student there bent on bringing Kamon down, hating him, if they were white, because he was a nigger, hating him, if they were black, because he was exceptional when measured by the teachers and their standardized tests against the rest of them. Kamon Gilbert this and Kamon Gilbert that. Kamon, you’re jack shit, busting your balls over white pussy. So he kept to himself between classes and had stopped eating lunch altogether so he wouldn’t have to face the cafeteria mob. And at the end of the school day he always ended up here, at the McDonald’s across from the garage where he worked, so hungry that he ate two fistfuls of fries as he walked to a table.

  A few minutes later he took the lid off his milk shake and shook the last bit into his mouth. He stood up again, noticing with some pleasure that the white lady with mice in her apartment reached for her purse and placed it securely on her lap as he passed behind her chair. She kept her back to him, but her friend followed Kamon with her eyes, that ancient terror making her hands tremble just enough that a few drops of coffee splashed out of her wobbly cup and she had to set it down.

  Don’t you lay a hand on me, black boy!

  Ah, lovely ladies!

  Kamon couldn’t leave without saying hello. He stopped in front of the door, swung around, and as he pulled on gloves, filthy black woolen gloves snipped to leave his fingers bare, he said, “Afternoon, ladies!” They didn’t reply. “I was wondering if you knew the time?” They were silent for a period that threatened to stretch into tomorrow, until the lady with the mice finally turned to look straight at Kamon and without glancing at her wristwatch said, “Three-eighteen,” grinning warmly as though to signal her forgiveness.

  “That’s all right then,” Kamon said, returning the smile, thinking to himself that if he smiled in just the right way he might give false courtesy a palpable heat and make the ladies feel the flames dancing at their feet. But his smile was ineffectual, or else the lady proved more resilient then he’d expected. She kept grinning, leaving him nothing else to do but nod his farewell.

  At the garage he found the owner, Paul, at his computer tapping numbers into the Customer Alpha Service program. “Fucking gas thief,” Paul muttered, banging his index finger against the enter key in an attempt to pound information out of the computer. He snatched a set of keys from a drawer and threw them at Kamon, who had yet to speak.

  “Tan Honda Civic, ’87 or ’88.” Paul scribbled the license number on a piece of scrap paper. “Get the bastard,” he growled, pressing the paper into Kamon’s hand.

  So someone had driven away without paying for their gasoline. Another fucking runner, another gas thief, petty stuff — the police had better things to do than respond to such a complaint. If Paul wanted the money for his gasoline he had to track down the thieves on his own. He’d copy the plate number from the video and try to find the owner’s name in the computer’s bank — with a name and address, he could send a nasty letter. Without the information, his only chance of reimbursement was to catch the crooks on the road. And since Paul himself had better things to do than go chasing cars like a dog, he usually sent one of his mechanics, whoever happened to be close by.

  Kamon took Paul’s Corvette and headed in the direction Paul had pointed him, knowing that he didn’t have much of a chance catching up to the Civic but thinking that if he did, he’d force the guy off the road, flashing that friendly smile of his, waving through the window, mouthing happily, I’m gonna kill you! Problem was, Kamon couldn’t read Paul’s handwriting, so when he did spot a tan Honda Civic a few miles down the road, he couldn’t be sure whether the driver, a middle-aged Asian woman, was really his fugitive. He decided against a confrontation, just drove on in a leisurely way for a while, thinking that he didn’t mind working for Paul, not just because the pay was good or because he got to take Paul’s Corvette for a spin once in a while, but because the other mechanics didn’t despise him. In the garage, unlike at school, Kamon was considered good enough, not worse because he was better than the rest of them in any obvious way.

  Good enough to grab a quarter-inch ratchet from the toolbox for Paul’s cousin Jeff, who when Kamon returned to the garage was in the process of prying off a brake shoe, but not so good he could upload the idle speed into an engine computer or scan information about a malfunctioning ABS brake system or change the setting on a lock. Good enough to raise a car on the lift, but not so good he could disassemble the wiring. Good enough to work the alignment machine and balance the wheels on an ’89 Ford Escort, good enough to plug in the AVR machine to analyze the charging system on the ’82 Toyota, good enough to check the setting on the main air compressor in the pump room and, of course, to straighten up the drawer of mid-sized screwdrivers, but not good enough to explain to an owner of a ’92 Saab that because the value scanned from the engine computer of his car was incorrect he would have to pay one hundred and thirty-eight dollars just so Paul could take apart the fuel-injection system to find out what was wrong.

  “Kamon, buddy, grease the rod ends of this dinky, will ya?”

  So Kamon pulled the grease gun away from the bulk oil dispenser and started filling up an outer rod end, stopping a second too late — thick black grease bubbled out of the ball joint and splattered his shirt. Paul was still on the phone with a customer, Darryl had stepped behind the alignment rack to help Jeff with the brake shoe, so no one noticed Kamon’s mistake. He wiped the grease with a gloved hand and moved beneath the car to get at the inner joint, listening as he worked to a song on the radio:

&n
bsp; “My snake-hipped, red-lipped, wild revolutionary man…”

  “You know why surgeons get paid so much?” Paul had hung up the phone and come over to inspect Kamon’s work. Kamon pressed the trigger carefully, filling up the ball joint until the grease seeped to the edges, and stopped.

  “Why’s that?” he asked.

  “Because they got to listen to back talk.” Paul pushed on the front fender of the car on the lift. “Maybe we work harder than your typical surgeon. But the fact of the matter is, we don’t have to listen to back talk.”

  Paul was honest and fair, though permanently angry at the world, with his spongy features bunched up in a scowl and his voice crackling with resentment. By his own account he never recovered from the change in the industry, twenty years ago, to the metric system. He had two large cabinets for tools — just to see them made him mad, since back in the old days a mechanic needed a single drawer of tools, sizing was simple, and an experienced mechanic could measure a socket with his eye. With the metric system, the fucking metric system, nothing was simple. Yet Paul continued to blame himself for the confusion and slammed his hand against something hard whenever he grabbed the wrong ratchet. What’s experience worth when everything’s changing so fast? He’d tried out that question on Kamon more than once, and Kamon had tried out an answer:

  You learn from experience how to learn from experience.

  Kamon, what the fuck are you talking about?

  What was he talking about? Smart-ass Kamon, he should have learned from experience to keep his mouth shut, since what he couldn’t do was explain himself accurately. He was quick at calculations, could write an elegant sentence, could take a fine photograph, but he couldn’t explain how to do any of it and so couldn’t make himself understood. No wonder the other students hated him — strutting around like royalty, working from the unspoken assumption that he had special rights.