Baby Is Three (51 page)

“Everywhere we go, everything we do, we’re surrounded by symbols, by things so familiar we don’t ever look at them or don’t see them if we do look. If anyone ever could report to you exactly what he saw and thought while walking ten feet down the street, you’d get the most twisted, clouded, partial picture you ever ran across. And nobody ever looks at what’s around him with any kind of
attention until he gets into a place like this. The fact that he’s looking at past events doesn’t matter; what counts is that he’s seeing clearer than he ever could before, just because, for once, he’s trying.

“Now—about this ‘thirty-three’ business. I don’t think a man could get a nastier shock than to find he has someone else’s memories. The ego is too important to let slide that way. But consider: all your thinking is done in code and you have the key to only about a tenth of it. So you run into a stretch of code which is abhorrent to you. Can’t you see that the only way you’ll find the key to it is to stop avoiding it?”

“You mean I’d started to remember with … with somebody else’s mind?”

“It looked like that to you for a while, which means something. Let’s try to find out what.”

“All right.” I felt sick. I felt tired. And I suddenly realized that being sick and being tired was a way of trying to get out of it.

“Baby is three,” he said.

Baby is maybe. Me, three, thirty-three, me you Kew you.

“Kew!” I yelled. Stern didn’t say anything. “Look I don’t know why, but I think I know how to get to this, and this isn’t the way. Do you mind if I try something else?”

“You’re the doctor,” he said.

I had to laugh. Then I closed my eyes.

There, through the edges of the hedges, the ledges and wedges of windows were shouldering up to the sky. The lawns were sprayedon green, neat and clean, and all the flowers looked as if they were afraid to let their petals break and be untidy.

I walked up the drive in my shoes. I’d had to wear shoes and my feet couldn’t breathe. I didn’t want to go to the house, but I had to.

I went up the steps between the big white columns and looked at the door. I wished I could see through it, but it was too white and thick. There was a window the shape of a fan over it, too high up, though, and a window on each side of it, but they were all crudded up with colored glass. I hit on the door with my hand and left dirt on it.

Nothing happened, so I hit it again. It got snatched open and a tall, thin colored woman stood there. “What you want?”

I said I had to see Miss Kew.

“Well, Miss Kew don’t want to see the likes of you,” she said. She talked too loud. “You got a dirty face.”

I started to get mad then. I was already pretty sore about having to come here, walking around near people in the daytime and all. I said, “My face ain’t got nothin’ to with it. Where’s Miss Kew? Go on, find her for me.”

She gasped. “You can’t speak to me like that!”

I said, “I didn’t want to speak to you like any way. Let me in.” I started wishing for Janie. Janie could of moved her. But I had to handle it by myself. I wasn’t doing so hot, either. She slammed the door before I could so much as curse at her.

So I started kicking on the door. For that, shoes are great. After a while, she snatched the door open again so sudden I almost went on my can. She had a broom with her. She screamed at me, “You get away from here, you trash, or I’ll call the police!” She pushed me and I fell.

I got up off the porch floor and went for her. She stepped back and whupped me one with the broom as I went past, but anyhow I was inside now. The woman was making little shrieking noises and coming for me. I took the broom away from her and then somebody said, “Miriam!” in a voice like a grown goose.

I froze and the woman went into hysterics. “Oh, Miss Kew, look out! He’ll kill us all. Get the police. Get the—”

“Miriam!” came the honk, and Miriam dried up.

There at the top of the stairs was this prune-faced woman with a dress on that had lace on it. She looked a lot older than she was, maybe because she held her mouth so tight. I guess she was about thirty-three—
thirty-three
. She had mean eyes and a small nose.

I asked, “Are you Miss Kew?”

“I am. What is the meaning of this invasion?”

“I got to talk to you, Miss Kew.”

“Don’t say, ‘got to.’ Stand up straight and speak out.”

The maid said, “I’ll get the police.”

Miss Kew turned on her. “There’s time enough for that, Miriam. Now, you dirty little boy, what do you want?”

“I got to speak to you by yourself,” I told her.

“Don’t you let him do it, Miss Kew,” cried the maid.

“Be quiet, Miriam. Little boy, I told you not to say ‘got to.’ You may say whatever you have to say in front of Miriam.”

“Like hell.” They both gasped. I said, “Lone told me not to.”

“Miss Kew, are you goin’ to let him—”

“Be quiet, Miriam! Young man, will you keep a civil—” Then her eyes popped up real round.
“Who
did you say …”

“Lone said so.”

“Lone.” She stood there on the stairs looking at her hands. Then she said, “Miriam, that will be all.” And you wouldn’t know it was the same woman, the way she said it.

The maid opened her mouth, but Miss Kew stuck out a finger that might as well of had a riflesight on the end of it. The maid beat it.

“Hey,” I said, “here’s your broom.” I was just going to throw it, but Miss Kew got to me and took it out of my hand.

“In there,” she said.

She made me go ahead of her into a room as big as our swimming hole. It had books all over and leather on top of the tables, with gold flowers drawn into the corners.

She pointed to a chair. “Sit there. No, wait a moment.” She went to the fireplace and got a newspaper out of a box and brought it over and unfolded it on the seat of the chair. “Now sit down.”

I sat on the paper and she dragged up another chair, but didn’t put no paper on it.

“What is it? Where is Lone?”

“He died,” I said.

She pulled in her breath and went white. She stared at me until her eyes started to water.

“You sick?” I asked her. “Go ahead, throw up. It’ll make you feel better.”

“Dead? Lone is dead?”

“Yeah. There was a flash flood last week and when he went out the next night in that big wind, he walked under a old oak tree that got gulled under by the flood. The tree come down on him.”

“Came
down on him,” she whispered. “Oh, no … it’s not true.”

“It’s true all right. We planted him this morning. We couldn’t keep him around no more. He was beginning to st—”

“Stop!” She covered her face with her hands.

“What’s the matter?”

“I’ll be all right in a moment,” she said in a low voice. She went and stood in front of the fireplace with her back to me. I took off one of my shoes while I was waiting for her to come back. But instead she talked from where she was. “Are you Lone’s little boy?”

“Yeah. He told me to come to you.”

“Oh, my dear child!” She came running back and I thought for a second she was going to pick me up or something, but she stopped short and wrinkled up her nose a little bit. “Wh-what’s your name?”

“Gerry,” I told her.

“Well, Gerry, how would you like to live with me in this nice big house and—and have new clean clothes—and everything?”

“Well, that’s the whole idea. Lone told me to come to you. He said you got more dough than you know what to do with, and he said you owed him a favor.”

“A favor?” That seemed to bother her.

“Well,” I tried to tell her, “he said he done something for you once and you said some day you’d pay him back for it if you ever could. This is it.”

“What did he tell you about that?” She’d got her honk back by then.

“Not a damn thing.”

“Please don’t use that word,” she said, with her eyes closed. Then she opened them and nodded her head. “I promised and I’ll do it. You can live here from now on. If-if you want to.”

“That’s got nothin’ to do with it. Lone
told
me to.”

“You’ll be happy here,” she said. She gave me an up-and-down. “I’ll see to that.”

“Okay. Shall I go get the other kids?”

“Other
kids—children?”

“Yeah. This ain’t for just me. For all of us—the whole gang.”

“Don’t say ‘ain’t.’ ” She leaned back in her chair, took out a silly little handkerchief and dabbed her lips with it, looking at me the whole time. “Now tell me about these—these other children.”

“Well, there’s Janie, she’s eleven like me. And Bonnie and Beanie are eight, they’re twins, and Baby. Baby is three.”

“Baby is three,” she said.

I screamed. Stern was kneeling beside the couch in a flash, holding his palms against my cheeks to hold my head still; I’d been whipping it back and forth.

“Good boy,” he said. “You found it. You haven’t found out
what
it is, but now you know
where
it is.”

“But for sure,” I said hoarsely. “Got water?”

He poured me some water out of a thermos flask. It was so cold it hurt. I lay back and rested, like I’d climbed a cliff. I said, “I can’t take anything like that again.”

“You want to call it quits for today?”

“What about you?”

“I’ll go on as long as you want me to.”

I thought about it. “I’d like to go on, but I don’t want no thumping around. Not for a while yet.”

“If you want another of those inaccurate analogies,” Stern said, “psychiatry is like a road map. There are always a lot of different ways to get from one place to another place.”

“I’ll go around by the long way,” I told him. “The eight-lane highway. Not that track over the hill. My clutch is slipping. Where do I turn off?”

He chuckled. I liked the sound of it. “Just past that gravel driveway.”

“I been there. There’s a bridge washed out.”

“You’ve been on this whole road before,” he told me. “Start at the other side of the bridge.”

“I never thought of that. I figured I had to do the whole thing, every inch.”

“Maybe you won’t have to, maybe you will, but the bridge will be easy to cross when you’ve covered everything else. Maybe there’s nothing of value on the bridge and maybe there is, but you can’t get near it till you’ve looked everywhere else.”

“Let’s go.” I was real eager, somehow.

“Mind a suggestion?”

“No.”

“Just talk,” he said. “Don’t try to get too far into what you’re saying. That first stretch, when you were eight—you really lived it. The second one, all about the kids, you just talked about. Then, the visit when you were eleven, you felt that. Now just talk again.”

“All right.”

He waited, then said quietly, “In the library. You told her about the kids.”

I told her about … and then she said … and something happened, and I screamed. She comforted me and I cussed at her.

But we’re not thinking about that now. We’re going on.

In the library. The leather, the table, and whether I’m able to do with Miss Kew what Lone said.

What Lone said was, “There’s a woman lives up on the top of the hill in the Heights section, name of Kew. She’ll have to take care of you. You got to get her to do that. Do everything she tells you, only stay together. Don’t you ever let any one of you get away from the others, hear? Aside from that, just you keep Miss Kew happy and she’ll keep you happy. Now you do what I say.” That’s what Lone said. Between every word there was a link like steel cable, and the whole thing made something that couldn’t be broken. Not by me it couldn’t.

Miss Kew said, “Where are your sisters and the baby?”

“I’ll bring ’em.”

“Is it near here?”

“Near enough.” She didn’t say anything to that, so I got up. “I’ll be back soon.”

“Wait,” she said. “I—really, I haven’t had time to think. I mean—I’ve got to get things ready, you know.”

I said, “You don’t need to think and you are ready. So long.”

From the door I heard her saying, louder and louder as I walked away, “Young man, if you’re to live in this house, you’ll learn to be a good deal better mannered—” and a lot more of the same.

I yelled back at her, “Okay,
okay!”
and went out.

The sun was warm and the sky was good, and pretty soon I got back to Lone’s house. The fire was out and Baby stunk. Janie had knocked over her easel and was sitting on the floor by the door with her head in her hands. Bonnie and Beanie were on a stool with their arms around each other, pulled up together as close as they could get, as if was cold in there, although it wasn’t.

I hit Janie in the arm to snap her out of it. She raised her head. She had gray eyes—or maybe it was more a kind of green—but now they had a funny look about them, like water in a glass that had some milk left in the bottom of it.

I said, “What’s the matter around here?”

“What’s the matter with what?” she wanted to know.

“All of yez,” I said.

She said, “We don’t give a damn, that’s all.”

“Well, all right,” I said, “but we got to do what Lone said. Come on.”

“No.” I looked at the twins. They turned their backs on me. Janie said, “They’re hungry.”

“Well, why not give ’em something?”

She just shrugged. I sat down. What did Lone have to go get himself squashed for?

“We can’t blesh no more,” said Janie. It seemed to explain everything.

“Look,” I said, “I’ve got to be Lone now.”

Janie thought about that, and Baby kicked his feet. Janie looked at him. “You can’t,” she said.

“I know where to get the heavy food and the turpentine,” I said. “I can find that springy moss to stuff in the logs, and cut wood, and all.”

But I couldn’t call Bonnie and Beanie from miles away to unlock doors. I couldn’t just say a word to Janie and make her get water and blow up the fire and fix the battery. I couldn’t make us blesh.

We all stayed like that for a long time. Then I heard the bassinet creak. I looked up. Janie was staring into it.

“All right,” she said. “Let’s go.”

“Who says so?”

“Baby.”

“Who’s running things now?” I said, mad. “Me or Baby?”

“Baby,” Janie said.