The New Black (6 page)

Danny says, “Daddy! Don't you remember the sign? It's against the law to feed the ducks.” Danny looks around, making sure the people who aren't there still aren't there.

“It's okay now, buddy. I don't think anyone will care anymore. Here, kiddo.”

He takes the Cheerio bag from Daddy. Daddy pats his head. Danny digs a hand deep into the bag, pulls it out, and throws Cheerios onto the sand. The ducks flinch and scatter toward the water, but they come back and feed.

T
he baby was normal when it came out. Daddy snipped the cord like nothing, the baby screaming silently till the nurse sucked out whatever bloodsnot was stuck in his throat, then there was no turning back, it was there, his voice, his mouth wide and wider, that baby was all mouth, his cries like a nail being driven into rotten wood. Normal.

Daddy said, let's name him Levis, we always liked Vs in names, and I'd heard the name Levis before but couldn't place it, and besides, that baby was a Levis, it was obvious.

We took Levis home and he sucked me dry within an hour. Daddy went to the store for some formula and Levis ate that up too. I made a pot of mashed potatoes for me and Daddy and the baby did his best to stick his face into it, his neck nothing more than a taffy pull, his big head hanging so I could see the three curls he'd already grown at the base of his neck, sweaty, looking for all the world like pubes lathered with baby oil, and I shuddered looking at them and chalked that feeling up to postpartum.

Levis wouldn't let Daddy sleep in bed with us, he was clever that way, soon as Daddy slid under the bedcovers Levis would start screaming, that nail torturing that rotted wood, that endless nail, then when Daddy would get up for a glass of something the baby would quiet down, and Daddy and I aren't stupid so soon we figured Daddy could get familiar with the couch for a while if it ensured Levis acted peaceful, and I gave Daddy permission to tend to himself in that way as much as he needed to since I was busy with Levis and couldn't do my wifelies.

Levis grew at night and plenty of mornings I'd wake up to see him laying there with his diaper busted open. Other ladies I've known who have given birth had always chittered on about their babies' growth spurts, but here Levis was 40 pounds within a week and 60 midway through the next, hair on his knuckles and three block teeth scattered amongst his jaws, then when he was one month old he called me Honey, his first word, fisted my breast, his nails leaving little half-moons in my flesh when I pried his hand from me, his grinning mouth showing a fourth tooth, a molar like a wad of gum wedged way back.

Daddy and I had heard of ugly babies, of unnaturally big babies. We'd seen a show once where what looked like a 12-year old boy was in a giant diaper his mother had fashioned out of her front-room curtain, sitting there with his legs straight out in front of him like he was pleased to meet them, his eyes pushed into his face like dull buttons, and the mother claiming he wasn't yet a year. But Levis wasn't on the TV, he was right there, his eyes following Daddy across the room, those eyes like gray milk ringed with spider's legs, and at two months Levis had chewed through a wooden bar in his crib, splinters in his gums, him crying while I plucked them with a tweezer, me feeling that nail in my gut, me feeling something less than love.

We took the baby to the doctor, Daddy explaining that there was something off about Levis, he was big, he didn't look like other babies, he had teeth like a man, and Levis quiet and studying Daddy like he understood, twirling his finger in his nostril, around and around, pulling it out tipped with blood. The doctor weighed Levis and he was up to 75 pounds and his third month still a week away, the doctor asking what on earth we were feeding him, warning us babies his age shouldn't be eating table food, and me and Daddy scared to say that the night before Levis had lunged for a pork chop, screamed until we let him suck on the bone, Levis making slurping noises like he was a normal baby, like the bone was his momma's nipple, his cheeks like two halves of a blush apple. The doctor sent us home, told us to watch what Levis ate, get him a jumpy chair for exercise. The doctor reaching out to pat Levis' head, then thinking different when Levis grabbed his wrist, the doctor blanching at the thick hair on Levis' arms, Levis giggling like a normal baby playing, just playing.

During bath time that night Levis' baby penis stiffened and poked out of the water, Levis saying HoneyHoneyHoneyHoney in his husky baby voice. I called Daddy to finish the bath so I could lay down but Levis screamed until I came for him, wrapped him in a towel, him freeing an arm to reach up and stroke my cheek, for all the world like I was his, like he had me, and there was that stiffy again when I was fitting him with his diaper.

At six months Levis walked into the kitchen at breakfast and tried to open the fridge himself, Daddy stunned and dropping scrambled eggs from his mouth, and Levis speaking his next word, Pickles. Pickles, Honey, he said, pounding on the fridge door with his hairy chunk fists, and I sliced some bread and butter pickles up for him and that's what he had for breakfast, a whole jar, me noticing that he was only a foot shorter than the fridge door, could almost reach the freezer where Daddy kept his vodka.

One night Daddy turned to me and we began our special time, I let Daddy do what he would since it had been so long, but soon enough I noticed Levis standing in the doorway watching, that finger in that nostril, and when I made Daddy stop Levis climbed into bed between us and began feeding, something he hadn't done in months, falling asleep with my breast in his mouth, like any other sweet baby, I told myself, like any other sweet baby boy, Daddy going back to his couch for the night, his shoulders hanging heavy, like the pillow he carried was a stone.

At eight months Levis opened a drawer and found a paring knife, held it to Daddy's gut and giggled, a sheen of drool on his chin, finally pulling the knife away when he got distracted by the ladybugs printed on his T-shirt. Then Daddy left, saying Levis wasn't right, saying he needed to get away, saying he'd be back, driving away while Levis watched him from the window, his baby man hands flat to the window, like everything he saw could be touched that way, me watching Daddy's headlights cut the dark and then the dark crowding right back in behind them, Levis saying Honey? to whatever he saw out that window, maybe even to himself.

Levis came to bed with me, molding his body to mine, rubbing his face on Daddy's pillow sleepily, his breath like garlic, like garlic and meat, didn't even open my eyes when he reached for my breast in the early hours and fed himself. In the morning he woke me, whispering Honey, Honey, smearing the sheets in elaborate patterns with fingerfuls of poop from his diaper, twining his fingers in my hair, Honey.

Normal. Later I bathed Levis and dressed him and we went to the park. For a while I pushed him on the swings, waited for him at the bottom of the slide, did the seesaw with him. When Levis was playing in the sandbox another mother came and sat beside me on the bench, said Your boy is quite large, me saying Yes, me saying Thank you. The woman's son got into the sandbox with Levis and they started building something and the woman went on, said I'm a producer for the local news and we'd love to have your boy on if you're interested, as kind of a feature on local unnaturals, and Levis looking up and showing his teeth, his eyes slitted at the woman, like he heard her, like he understood.

Maybe, I told the woman, when Levis is a little older, the woman saying Fine, fine, smoothing her jeans like she was peeved at the color of the wash, and her son getting up to bring his fat little shoe down on Levis' sandpile, over and over, saying Unh Unh Unh, Levis letting him for a while before grinding a fist of sand into the boy's face, the boy just blinking for a minute like his second hand had stopped, Levis taking the opportunity to grab the boy by his ankle and bring him down to where he could pound on his abdomen with his fists, like any baby with a toy drum, like any baby figuring out how hard to pound to get just the right sound, the boy going Unh Unh Unh.

The woman said, My Lord, do something, he's flattened my Jared, her running over like her legs were breaking out of concrete molds, her boy saying Unh a little quieter now and me more proud of Levis than I'd ever been and so getting up and walking to the car, Levis saying Honey? Levis standing up to see better, saying Honey, stepping over the boy and out of the sandbox, me getting into the car and locking the doors, key in the ignition, Levis just standing there, the late afternoon sunlight giving him a glow, just standing there with his fists at his sides, looking like a fat little man more than anybody's baby, a little fat man beating his chest now, me pulling out onto the road, Levis wailing Honey, wailing Pickles, getting smaller and smaller in the rearview until I took a turn and he was gone, my heart like a fist to a door and my breasts empty and my nipples like lit matchheads.

1.

T
he year my boy Danny turned six, my wife Penny and me took him down to Lexington and got him good and scanned because that's what everybody was doing back then, and, like they say, better safe than sorry.

He was a good boy and never got out of hand until he was seventeen years old and we got out of hand together. Around this same time Penny kept saying she was going to leave and stay with her sister in town. She said it enough that we stopped believing her, but the last time she said it, she did it. I remember the day and the hour. Friday, September 17, 2024. Quarter after five in the afternoon, because that's what time her grandmother's grandfather clock stopped when I kicked it over.

Danny heard all the yelling, and he came running downstairs and saw her standing there with her two suitcases and looked at me like I ought to do something. “Goddamn it, I'm not going to stop her,” I said.

“It's your fault she's going,” he said.

Penny hauled off and slapped his mouth. “I didn't raise you to talk to your father that way,” she said, and at that moment I was of two minds, one of them swelled up with pride at the way she didn't let him mouth off to me.

It's the other one that won out. I reached back and gave her what she'd had coming for a long time now. I didn't knock her down, but I put one tooth through her lip, hit her just hard enough so she would come back to us when she was calmed down.

She didn't come back, though, and she didn't go stay with her sister, who claimed not even to know where she was. One week, two, then on a Saturday me and Danny had enough. We hauled Penny's mother's pink-painted upright piano out the front door and onto the porch and then we pushed it off and picked up our axes from by the wood pile and jumped down on it. “You got to be careful, Danny,” I said. “There's a tension on those strings that'll cut you up bad you hit them wrong.”

It was pure joy, watching him lift that axe and drive it into that piano. Up until then his head was always in books or that damn computer. Dead trees, I'd tell him, got not one thing on milkweed and sumac, horsemint and sweet William. But now I wasn't so sure, and now he'd caught on. “It's what you do with the dead trees,” he said, like he was reading my mind.

I don't know what came over us after that, and it's not enough to blame it on our getting into the whiskey, which we did plenty. Penny had a old collection of Precious Moments figurines handed down from her own mama and grandmom. Children at a picnic, or playing the accordion to a bunch of birds, or hands folded in prayer, and nearly every little boy or girl wearing a bonnet. At first Danny said we ought to shoot at them—we had everything from assault rifles to a old Civil War service revolver that I'd be afraid to try firing—but then one Tuesday morning—by now it was November, and the old dog pens were near snowed under—he found some of the yellowjackets I had caught in glass Mason jars and forgot about. He found them dead in there and I saw him looking at them and he saw me watching but didn't say anything, just went upstairs and came down with my old orange tacklebox, which was where Penny kept her scrapbooking things.

“You gonna scrapbook those yellowjackets, buddy bear?” I said.

He said his plan was to shellac them, but I could see he couldn't near do it right. I said, “Here, let me show you how,” and showed him how to thin the shellac with turpentine and dab it on soft with the paintbrush bristles, which was something I knew from when things were better with Penny and I'd help her with her scrapbooks just so we could sit with our legs touching for a while.

He got good at it fast, and then we caught more yellowjackets and did what Danny had in mind all along, which was shellac them stiff, wings out like they were ready to fly, and set them on the Precious Moments figurines in a swarm.

After a while that stopped being fun, and it kind of took the shock away when every Precious Moment in the house was swarmed like that, plus we were running out of yellowjackets. “We got to get more minimal,” Danny said, and I could see what he meant. It's like when I served my country in the African wars. You get to see enough dead bodies and before too long you get used to seeing them, and then you see another and it don't mean one thing to you. But you run into one little live black girl with a open chicken wire wound up and down her face and maybe three flies in her cut up eye, that gets to you.

So after that, we got strategic. We'd put three yellowjackets right by a brown marbly eye, eye to eye. Or one, stinger first.

Nobody but us had got to see what we had done to the Precious Moments until a few days later when Benny Gil, our postman, came by with the junk mail, and Danny saw him and invited him in for a glass of water, and he saw what it was we were doing with the wasps, and he said, “Son, that's sick,” but he was smiling when he said it, and it was then I knew he was a person who could be trusted. Up until then, he'd always been asking about my methadone, which I got regular from the pharmacy at St. Claire's Hospital in town, on account of my back pain. He wanted to get some off me because he could trade it for other things he wanted.

This day I asked him, “Why is it nobody writes letters anymore?”

“It's a general lack of literacy,” he said, and we started laughing because everybody knew that wasn't why.

“It's the government,” Danny said, but he was just repeating what he always heard me say, and I wished he wouldn't get so serious in front of Benny Gil.

“They're spying,” Benny Gil said, “listening in on us right now,” but he wasn't serious.

“Best be careful,” I said, because now was a time to keep it light. “Benny Gil here is on the government teat.”

Benny Gil took a sip of his water and smiled some more. “That one,” he said, “and maybe a couple two or three others.”

Danny caught on. “It's you we saw across the creek there, in the tall grass.”

“I been watching,” Benny Gil said. He leaned back in the wooden chair, put all his weight on the back two legs. I could see by the look on Danny's face he was still thinking about how Penny would say not to lean back like that because it could put another divot in the wood floor, which was the kind of not-important thing Penny was always worried about. There was a thousand or more divots in the wood floor, and by now another one just added a little extra character.

Benny Gil leaned forward again, put his elbows on his knees so his face was closer to mine. “I know where Penny can be found,” he said.

Danny's ears perked up at that.

“She wants to be found,” I said, “and I don't care to find her.”

“Irregardless,” Benny Gil said.

“Where is she?” Danny said, and I shot him a look.

“Maybe,” Benny Gil said, “me and your Dad ought to go out back and have a smoke.”

Danny watched us through the window, and I wonder what it is he was thinking and wonder to this day whether whatever it was he thought had anything to do with what he did later. Surely he saw something changing hands between me and Benny Gil, and he must have seen us shaking hands, too.

What he didn't hear was Benny Gil saying, “God didn't invent thirteen-digit zip codes for nothing,” or me saying, “How many?” or him saying, “Sixteen,” or me talking him down to six. Six, I could spare, by careful rationing, and by grinding the white pills into white powder with my pocketknife, and snorting them instead of swallowing, which meant I could stretch out the supply until it was time for a new scrip.

Danny didn't hear any of it, but maybe he knew something of it, because after Benny Gil left, he said, “You get to hurting again, I know somebody who can get you what you need.”

“Who?”

“Ben Holbrook,” he said.

“That's the case,” I said, “I don't want to hear of you talking to Ben Holbrook ever again.”

I meant it when I said it, but the problem was the methadone got better after I started grinding it up, and once I knew how much better it could get, I had a harder time rationing it, and ran out a week early.

Believe me when I say I know a thing or two about pain. I was wounded twice in Liberia, and got radiation poisoning from the Arabs in Yemen. Once in Minnesota I split a fourteen-point buck in half on a old fossil fuel motorcycle and broke nearly every bone in my body and knocked one eye crooked, and it stayed that way until I could afford to get it fixed. But, son, you don't know pain until you get what I got, which is a repetitive stress injury in my back from solar panel installations up there on roofs in the heat or the cold. So when the methadone ran out, I forgot about what I said before, and told Danny maybe if he knew somebody he ought to give him a call.

Ben Holbrook was a skinny son of a gun, no more than maybe eighteen years old, pimple-faced, head shaved bald so you could see its lumps. Money was not a problem for us. Benny Gil wasn't the only one on the government teat, he just had to work for his. Still, I didn't like the way this bald zitty kid came into our house thinking he was the only one who could set prices in America.

“Who do you think you are,” I said, “Federal Reserve Chairman Dean Karlan?”

He was cool as a cucumber. “Supply and demand,” he said, “is the law of the land in Kentucky, U.S.A.”

Much as I didn't like it, I knew he was right, and I paid what he asked, which was considerable, and he handed over three brown-orange plastic bottles, which was supply enough for my demand and then some.

Soon as Ben Holbrook left, I went into the bathroom with my pocketknife and dropped two tablets on the sink counter and chopped them to powder and made a line. Then I put my nose low to the Formica and closed off my right nostril with a finger and snorted the line through my left.

I must have left the door open a crack, because I saw Danny there, just outside, watching. He knew it was a thing I was doing, but I don't think he ever saw me do it before.

I knew good and well that wasn't the type of thing I wanted him to see. Any other time I would have thrown a shoe at him if I caught him spying like that. But when you take your medicine through your nose, it hits your bloodstream fast and hard. That's why you take it that way. So my first thought was to throw a shoe, but before that first thought was even gone the juice hit my bloodstream, and there was my boy, his eyes looking at mine through the crack in the bathroom door, and if I ever loved him I loved him more in that now than in any ever, and right alongside that first thought was the second, which came out my mouth the same time it came into my head, even though I knew it was wrong as I thought it and said it. “Boy,” I said. “Come on in here and try a line.”

Some things you see like from outside yourself and from above, and that's how I see what happened next. Right there, below, there's big old me, and there's my boy Danny, and I'm coming around behind him, putting my arms around him like I did when I showed him how to line up a cue stick at Jack's Tavern or sink a putt at the Gooney Golf, and he's got the open pocketknife in his hand, and I've got his hand in my hand, pushing down on it, showing him how to crush without wasting anything, how to corral the powder, how a good line is made. That's me, leaning down, pantomiming to show him how. That's him, fast learner, nose to the counter, finger to nostril. There's the line, gone up like the rapture. Danny, standing up too fast because he don't know any better, and the trickle of blood down his lip and chin, and me, tilting his head back, cradling it in the crook of my arm, putting the old Boy Scout press on his nose with a wad of toilet paper, saying, “Hold still now, baby boy,” and his eyes bright, and his cheeks flushed, and his voice like from a hundred miles away saying, “Lord, have mercy,” then, “Weird,” and us lying back, then, on the cold tile, his shoulder blades resting on my chest, both of us waiting for the hit to pass so we could take another.

The days and nights started going by fast after that, and sometimes there was no cause to tell one from the other. One morning or afternoon or midnight, for all I know, I went into my room and found Danny half-naked underneath the bed I shared for all those years with Penny, and when I asked him what he was doing under there, he said, “She's been after us all this time,” and I said, “Who?” and he said, “Her,” and hauled out a stash of scented candles his mother must have left under there, cinnamon and jasmine and persimmon-lemon.

At first I thought he was talking crazy, but then he pulled himself out from under the bed and walked real close and put the purple jasmine one under his eye and struck a blue tip match and lit the wick, and soon as it started to burn his eye went all bloodshot and swelled up. Even still, I wanted to take up her case.

“How was she to know?” I said, but he was looking at me hard. “Turn around,” he said, “and look in that mirror.” And sure enough, my eye was tearing up and swelling and all the blood vessels were turning red.

“Benny Gil,” he said, “told you where she is.”

“That's not strictly true,” I said, except it was.

“The general area, then,” he said.

“The general neck of the woods,” I said.

He went into me and Penny's bathroom, then, and for some reason, even though we had being doing it together, I couldn't go in there just then and do it with him. I could hear him, though, and then I heard a few more sounds I knew but hadn't expected to hear, which were the sounds of him loading my old Browning 9mm, which I kept under the sink in case of emergencies. When I heard that, I got scared, because for a while now I had been feeling, like I said before, like things were getting out of hand, but now, him stepping out of the bathroom, hand around the grip of that nine, I had the kind of proof that makes it so you can't look the other way anymore.

“Killing,” I said, “isn't a kind of thing you can take back.”