Bring Me Children

by David Martin

  Carl spits over the porch railing and then reaches out to grab Lyon’s shoulder, the deputy grunting either from the effort or with contempt. “Move, asshole.”

  “Take your hand —”

  Carl moves him out of the way as easily as you would a child.

  Lyon follows him into the kitchen. “Listen to me, Deputy —”

  “Where’s the bitch?” he asks in a grim voice.

  “To whom are you referring?”

  Another grunt as Carl turns his bulk and heads for the living room like a sumo wrestler in a hurry. Lyon catches up with him in the middle of the room, grabbing his elbow, Carl swinging around to put one hand at Lyon’s neck, the other grasping the front of Lyon’s trousers, Carl suddenly — breathtakingly — lifting Lyon into the air, lifting him so high his head actually touches the ceiling, then carrying Lyon like that — head bumping along the ceiling — across the room to slam him against a wall.

  Lyon has no breath left.

  “Touch me again and I will fuck you.” He says this with surprising clarity. Then he drops Lyon to the floor.

  By the time Lyon recovers his composure, Carl is moving — fitting himself—through the bedroom doorway.

  Lyon is desperate now. “Claire!”

  But when he enters the bedroom he sees only Carl there — opening a closet, looking into the bathroom, and finally turning to face him.

  “Where’s the bitch?”

  Lyon shakes his head.

  “Going to fuck you, man,” Carl announces as he resumes searching, pulling aside the shower curtain and then with considerable effort actually getting down on his knees to check under the bed.

  After finally struggling back to his feet he walks out of the bedroom without acknowledging Lyon, searching through the rest of the cabin, finding nothing that interests him.

  In the kitchen he asks Lyon, “Who you calling to? Claire?”

  “I didn’t call to anyone.”

  “Claire,” Carl repeats. “Heard you. That nigger nurse?”

  “Fuck if I know.”

  Carl steps out onto the porch and spits over the railing, Lyon following, excited, on an adrenaline high. Wherever Claire has hidden, she’s safe for now, and Lyon wishes he had the nerve to pick up some kind of club and hit this fucking fat man right across his jack-o’-lantern head.

  Instead, he settles for this: “On second thought, Carl, I don’t think you’re the fattest man I ever met. When I was a young reporter I was sent out on one of those weird-character stories that newspapers sometimes do, this was decades ago when I worked for the Tribune, and I went to interview a guy who hadn’t left his house for eight years, mostly just staying in bed, relatives coming over to feed him. He was too fat to fit on a toilet so he had to shit in the bathtub, sitting over the edge of the bathtub, and then when he finished he had to turn on the shower to wash the mess down the drain. My editor wouldn’t let me use that part, of course. I was wondering, Carl — can you still fit on a toilet?”

  The deputy has listened to this without reaction, unless you count the rolling of that tobacco plug in his cheek. When he realizes Lyon is done, Carl sucks to gather a mouthful and then spits a thick brown stream right into Lyon’s face.

  “Jesus! Damn you!” Lyon wipes at his eyes, getting what feels like warm, sticky snot all over his hands, trying to wipe it on his shirt but it won’t come off.

  “Har … har … asshole.”

  “You son of a bitch!” Lyon takes a swing which Carl catches in his hand, twisting Lyon’s arm, stepping one boot — a surprisingly small boot — on Lyon’s bare foot, knocking him to the floor of the porch. Then Carl puts that boot on the side of Lyon’s face.

  Lyon is cursing, trying to wriggle free.

  Carl eases a hundred or so of his pounds behind that boot, Lyon afraid now that the deputy is going to press down until Lyon’s head splits open like an overly ripe cantaloupe.

  “Har … har … asshole,” Carl says again, spitting another brown-snot tobacco stream into Lyon’s face.

  He can’t get away, Carl’s foot on him the way a circus elephant places a foot on the beautiful trapeze artist — and to crush her, all the beast has to do is step down.

  “Going to fuck you,” Carl says, jamming that boot on Lyon’s face — once, hard — before pulling back and then just standing there to see what Lyon is going to do about it.

  He’s crying. Lying in a mess of tobacco spit, a reddened imprint of a boot tread on the side of his face, Lyon doesn’t move, remaining on the porch exactly the way he was when Carl had that boot on him, staying there, crying.

  Carl laughs before lumbering away toward his patrol car, parked a hundred yards down the road.

  In the cabin’s tiny bathroom Lyon is washing his face for the third time, the tobacco juice already cleaned away, Lyon trying without success to obliterate the idea of it — and he can’t seem to stop this goddamn crying either. It’s not a sobbing breakdown this time, just a constant womanlike weeping.

  “Claire.”

  Where is she, he needs her. Lyon leaves the bathroom to stumble through the rest of the cabin, calling her name, going to windows and looking out, assuming that’s how she escaped, through a window, and now she’s hiding in the forest somewhere, maybe that freakish little hermit caught up with her.

  “CLAIRE!” Lyon bleats at each window he opens, still weeping, still needing her.

  He ends up scrounging for some proof that she ever existed, but the evidence is sketchy: a second cup among the breakfast dishes, that dull ache in his pubic bone, the way his heart hurts.

  He’s back on the bed, begging her to come out from wherever she’s hiding, calling her name, unable to stop crying.

  CHAPTER 26

  Randolph walks as a mule walks, taking mincing steps that carry him up and down these hills with surprising efficiency. And as long as he’s walking, the baby on his back is quiet. Randolph is heading home, never going to try to talk to that TV man again, it’s too confusing what’s happening over at that cabin.

  It’s also confusing what happened to the sheriff now that Randolph, walking, thinks about it. He didn’t exactly mean for his dogs to kill the man, though Randolph did indeed give them that instruction, but mainly he just didn’t want the sheriff to leave before understanding why it was that Randolph was keeping a baby girl in the back room. Except Randolph couldn’t explain it no matter how long the sheriff stayed. Confusing.

  He gets so confused sometimes, it hurts — hurts worse than … than what? It’s difficult to rank his pain, he’s had such an abundance of it in his life. Confusion hurts worse than that molar that went bad on him somewhere back in the 1960s, Randolph working the molar to and fro with his tongue and then his fingers, placing in the side of his mouth a small rag-knot soaked in hard cider, biting and pushing and pressuring over two weeks’ time until that molar became sufficiently loose in its socket that he was able finally to wrench it free with a cloth-covered pair of Klein No. 9 pliers. The pain caused by that bad molar during those fourteen days of self-dentistry became so exquisite that at times the little man could do nothing but sit in his shack, stunned.

  Randolph keeps walking. She ain’t heavy. And that molar didn’t hurt him anywhere near as much as the confusion caused by these troubles with babies.

  The troubles started some five years ago when that big deputy Carl drove up to the shack and sat in his patrol car honking the horn until Randolph came out and tied up the dogs, Carl explaining he was looking for a cave, any cave that nobody else knew about, said he was going to start shooting Randolph’s dogs unless the hermit showed him a cave. Randolph led him to the one you get into through a limestone cleft behind a big white oak tree, the little man not mentioning that the cave could also be entered by following a sinking creek just below his shack.

  A week later this fancy four-wheel-drive truck — all black and chrome — went past Randolph’s place and stopped up at that white oak, the hermit taking off along the sinking creek to
get to the cave’s other entrance. Once inside he hid in a niche, snuffed out his carbide lamp, and just sat there and listened. Someone had been left in the cave without a light, someone who was mad at God, cursing God for what God had done to him — but howling for more too. Randolph had never heard such anger.

  The little hermit loves the burrowlike security of caves but in spite of rumors to the contrary, Randolph can’t maneuver around in underground blackness minus a light. Randolph was confused about what this man had done that was so bad he had to be left in a cave without a lamp, convinced finally that the deputy had caught the Devil and put him blind in that cave for safekeeping.

  Went on for a month, Randolph sneaking in there every day to listen to the Devil rail, cursing God, the Devil claiming he could take whatever punishment God could hand out, howling for more.

  Carl would drive past Randolph’s shack each morning and leave the Devil’s food and water by the white oak entrance. More confusion — because if you had gone to the trouble of sticking the Devil in a cave without a light, why would you bother feeding and watering him?

  Then one day Randolph went to the cave and found that the Devil was gone.

  Came back though.

  Two seasons later, in the dead of winter, that fancy black and chrome truck drove past the shack, heading up to the white oak, Randolph making his way to the cave’s other entrance to find out who or what was being put in there this time.

  By the time Randolph got in position, it was all over. Later on, he explored the cave’s lower reaches, finding the baby’s body on the shore of a cold black underground lake.

  Mother always said curiosity killed the cat.

  When she died the lawyer who sold her house came to the institution looking for Randolph, telling him that he had money coming and that he also had the legal right to be set free. The lawyer even sold Randolph some land. It just so happened that the land cost exactly what was left in mother’s estate.

  But once he had the land, Randolph didn’t need much money, discovering that self-sufficient independence was largely a matter of doing without things, doing without a telephone, electricity, plumbing, vehicles. Growing his own food. Keeping a few random dogs that had wandered away from the rich men who once hunted in this area, Randolph breeding his own line and selling them for enough cash to buy books. He considered himself happy, an island — until he found that baby on the shore of a cold underground lake.

  The little boy was less than a year old, the baby’s head showing some kind of defect that Randolph didn’t understand, though he understood enough to realize the child was discarded for the same reason Randolph himself had been banished and institutionalized: because of defects.

  It happened again the following spring and then once more the next summer.

  The first baby went in a grove of sycamores down by the creek, the second went on a ridge covered with wild roses, the third was buried between two walnut trees.

  What could Randolph do about it, couldn’t tell the law because Carl was the law. Shouldn’t get involved at all, Randolph’s lack of involvement with people was what kept him safe, but the more he thought about it, the more he realized he couldn’t just let babies keep piling up on the shores of that black lake.

  So the next time the fancy truck went by his shack, Randolph ran along the sinking creek and got positioned in that cavernous room well before the Devil made his way underground. Sitting in the dark, Randolph listened to the Devil curse God, saying, “Here’s another one for you, Old Man, what’re you going to do with this one!” Then waiting for a response. Then howling. “Nothing,” is what the Devil kept howling. “Nothing!”

  Waiting until the Devil was gone — but barely gone — Randolph lighted his carbide lamp and hurried over to a crevice, seeing that the child had been left out on a round-topped boulder in the middle of a narrow limestone bridge that crossed this crevice, which dropped a hundred feet down to that underground lake.

  Randolph scurried onto the bridge and got to the child just before it — he — rolled off the boulder. The hermit brought him home but the little boy died the next week and Randolph put him among the roots of a Virginia pine, a tree known to flourish in poor soil.

  As soon as he reaches his shack he takes the little girl into the back room and washes her, changes her clothes, getting ready to feed her — or at least try. He’s had this one since March, the fifth baby Devil-delivered to that cave in five years, the second one Randolph was able to save, the only one who’s lived.

  And for almost four months now Randolph has been confused about what he should do with her. Also confused about who the Devil is or what the Devil will do to him when it comes out what Randolph has been up to. And he’s confused about what people will do to him — something bad but what? — when they come looking for Sheriff Stone and find his exploded body in that brush-covered patrol car.

  It hurts, being this confused and being this scared — there’s no other way for Randolph to explain it except that it hurts.

  What Randolph likes remembering best about mother is the part where she used to come in his room at night when he was a child, constantly crying from the pain, and mother smelled of soap and her skin was cool, coming into his room to tell him stories of heroes — books about heroes are the kind Randolph likes to read — and how these heroes endured great pain to rescue the innocent, Mother kissing his eyes and nuzzling along his neck, telling Randolph she was eating up all his pain, eating where it hurts, eating his “ows.”

  Randolph is surprised when the baby girl finishes her entire bottle and then howls for more. Maybe she’s getting better. He’s confused about whether he has any right to keep her.

  In fact, about the only thing that doesn’t confuse him is the knowledge, the certainty, that some kind of trouble — Devil trouble or people trouble — is coming his way. Or as he puts it, carrying the little girl about the shack, feeding her a second bottle, whispering into her pink pearl ear: “Twouble’s comin’ and we got no hewo.”

  CHAPTER 27

  Lyon’s not going to let her catch him asleep this time, here he is in the middle of the night, lying on his side, under the sheet, but by God he is watching that bedroom doorway, absolutely sure she’s going to appear there any minute now … and then not so sure, convinced one moment that Claire is an apparition, the creation of his inflamed insane mind, but telling himself the next moment that of course she is real, that she’s the one who is unbalanced, as voodoo-hoodoo crazy as her grandmother was … he loves her, he loves her not, that kind of Ping-Pong bullshit, and it goes on and on as night deepens — until there in the doorway Claire appears, small black and naked.

  When she sees his eyes, sees that they are open, Claire immediately looks down in embarrassment, then she pads, bare feet dry-kissing the hardwood floor, over to the bed to slip under the sheet with him.

  Thrilled that she’s here, Lyon now tries as hard as he can to be angry with her. He turns his back and refuses to speak for the longest time. Why doesn’t she say something? Then, still not facing her, he finally asks, “Where did you go?”

  “I disappeared.”

  “I know you disappeared, what I’m asking is where did you disappear to?”

  Claire takes so long to answer that Lyon begins to wonder if she’s fallen asleep.

  “When I’m forced to attend one of our departmental dinners,” she finally says, “and the person on my left turns away from me, ignores me during the entire dinner, and the person on my right is doing the same thing, both of them having found someone more interesting to talk to, and I’m forced to sit there for an hour, rearranging food on my plate and feeling smaller and smaller — for all intents and purposes I have disappeared from that dinner table, haven’t I? So you tell me, John — where did I disappear to?”

  Lyon doesn’t want to hear this shit, he wants to know where the hell Claire has been hiding.

  “Or when my sisters drag me to one of their parties and they assign some man to talk to
me but then the entire time he’s standing there his eyes are working the party and I’m hating myself for going through the motions of making conversation with him and then he interrupts me in mid-sentence to leave and go talk to someone more interesting and the way he leaves, a quick nod, a false smile, touching me on the shoulder when he says ‘excuse me,’ patronizing and dismissing me at the same time, then fleeing with this sense of relief, and for the rest of the time I’m at that party he makes sure he never sees me. I was invisible when he and I were standing together and as soon as he got away from me I disappeared from his sight. So you tell me, John, where do I keep disappearing to?”

  “I understand what you’re saying but —”

  “Do you have an answer?”

  He doesn’t. “All right, forget where you were hiding this afternoon. Why didn’t you come back after Carl left? Didn’t you hear me calling you?”

  “You shouldn’t have let that man come in here. This was Claire’s cabin. She and Stuart used to bring me out here, we had great times at this place, and even if Claire did lose this cabin in the bankruptcy, letting Carl come in here is like defiling —”

  “Wait!” Lyon turns toward her. “I didn’t let him come in. I didn’t invite him in, I didn’t say, ‘Hey, let’s go in the bedroom and see if we can find Claire.’ Have you seen Carl? Carl is immense. Carl came very close to crushing my —”

  “I can make other people disappear too.”

  Lyon sighs dramatically. “You know, what I really need in my life right now is a stabilizing influence, someone who —”

  “My sisters are always trying to fix me up with guys, it’s probably a running joke among their men friends, how you have to be careful or you’ll get stuck with the ugly sister, the one who just sits there and doesn’t say anything.”

  “Why are you always running yourself down? You’re the most exciting, the sexiest woman I’ve ever met in my life.”

  “Yes, John, but you found me in a coffin.”

  Lyon can’t think of a comeback.