I have asked several past contributors if they might pick stories over the next month or so. This selection was guest-edited by Sean Ennis, author of “St. Roger of Fox Chase,” one of our two launch stories. Below is what Sean had to say about “Search History.” —Matt Salesses, Good Men Project Fiction Editor
Issues of fertility and pregnancy are typically the realm of women, and there’s no surprise in that. But surely there is another side to such a weighty drama–the potential father’s–and Matt Brock’s “Search History” has taken up this challenge with humor and honesty. Barry has become alienated from his wife and his own body as they desperately try to conceive in increasingly clinical ways. Yet after he becomes convinced that he has fathered a child in the past with another woman, the piece takes some wild turns involving toilet-fixing in-laws, kidnapping ninjas, and even the destruction of Cormac McCarthy’s childhood home. Barry’s paranoia grows and he rarely makes a smart decision, but in his bumbling to become a good man, a good husband, and a good father, the reader understands he might be able to achieve all of those things.
♦◊♦
Barry found it difficult to masturbate with his mother-in-law in the kitchen singing “Immaculate Mary,” but in less than an hour, he was supposed to meet Shelly at Doctor Heiny’s office with a specimen. If he failed to do so, the medicine and injections, the 100s of dollars they had spent the past month would be pointless. And Shelly, pumped full of hormones that made her moods unpredictable and extreme, would either burst into tears, fly into a fit of rage or both.
Sitting at his computer desk, slacks and boxer briefs lowered to his knees, tie thrown over his right shoulder, the sterile cup the clinic had sent home with Shelly beside the mouse pad, their wedding photo turned toward the wall, he pressed on, scanning raunchy website after raunchy website.
One offered near cross-eyed Russian teens in neon spandex, hopping in an inflated room of plastic balls with a drooly, geriatric man. Another showed what appeared to be a beautiful nude woman until Barry scrolled down to see the massive male genitalia. Yet another promised some bizarre sex act involving a Louisville Slugger. Was this what it took for people to get off these days? The world of Internet porn. If his wife felt like a “fertility science experiment” as she so often claimed, he felt like a sperm factory constantly drained and working overtime to keep up with demand.
He called her cell. “I’m having a hard time,” he said.
He could hear the rush of her engine, Steve Inskeep’s voice on the radio. She chuckled. “Then it sounds like you’re right on track.”
“I should have said ‘limp, shriveled, retracted time.’”
“Gross, honey.”
“What’s gross is your mother. She’s singing hymns for Christ’s sake.”
“I love my mom’s singing.”
“That’s not what I mean. Can you meet me somewhere first and, you know, lend me a hand?”
“Good one,” she said, “but I’m giving a presentation to the County Commission on Cormac McCarthy’s childhood home in five minutes. I’ll be lucky to make it to the clinic in time. You’re on your own, baby. I’m sure you’ve had plenty of practice.”
What used to work, what got Barry feeling randy, was thinking back to his teenage exploits. There weren’t many, just one really which occurred soon after he turned eighteen, the night he lost his virginity in Room 309 of the Budget Inn off I-75. He got off the phone with his wife and closed out the windows on his computer screen. He recalled the girl’s face. Young and smooth, cherry lipstick and blue eyeliner, curly black hair, a slight underbite that made her flawed and sexy. She was a sorority girl his older cousin had invited to the motel party, the ugliest of the bunch, but beautiful to virginal young Barry.
He’d thought about her a few times before he and his wife started trying to get pregnant, Shelly working overtime at the Knoxville Preservation Society, he a new member at McNally’s and Sons architect firm, when they were lucky to find time for sex once a week. Often he’d felt guilty for lusting over the girl, for remembering with pleasure the chain of events that transpired that night. First, the come on: “Hey, baby, wanna Natural Ice?” Then the slobbery kiss at the snack machine. Lastly, all the partygoers passed out except the two of them, hammering at each other on the motel bed once, twice and a broken condom.
He reached down and clutched “Big Mister,” the name his wife had graciously given his penis. His mother-in-law silent now, he said the girl’s name: Melanie Lane. He looked at the computer screen and that’s when he got an idea.
He logged on to his Facebook page and typed Melanie’s name into the search box. 12 Melanie Lane’s popped up, locations scattered across the country, but one, a Melanie Lane Baxter, was from Knoxville.
Barry clicked on the small photo icon and was taken to her homepage. Face a little older, lined with thin wrinkles and the lips of a smoker, but she still had the pretty hair, that underbite. He clicked on her “Photos” link. The first set in the bunch was dated five months ago and titled “Summertime!” One photo featured Melanie and four women, all wearing wet bikinis and holding Coronas, posing wildly on the bow of a houseboat. Melanie had the nicest body of the bunch. She was like he remembered, trim and toned, no cellulite or stretch marks. He inched closer to the computer screen, looking at her leaning over in her red bikini top, one of the cups dipping past her dark tan to reveal white skin. He looked at those legs and thighs, her small bikini bottoms. He knew what she looked like beneath the clinging fabric. He had had that, by God! And…and…
He let out a sigh and twisted the lid onto the sterile cup, set it on the computer desk. His wife had told him to keep the specimen close to his body for warmth. It was January, 46 degrees outside, ice and freezing rain in the forecast. He stood and pulled up his pants, tried to tuck the cup into his pocket, but it wouldn’t fit. He dropped it into the crotch of his boxer briefs, zipped up his pants, straightened his tie, slid into his sports coat, unlocked the door to his office and emerged, a bit flushed and dreamy, walking carefully so as not to let the cup fall down one of his legs.
His mother-in-law, Christine, in her tightly strapped white cotton robe was sitting cross-legged at the kitchen table, her devotional book turned to a page with a picture of praying hands above a candle. She looked up and smiled. “Horny, honey?” he thought she said.
“I’m sorry?” He wondered whether the cup had formed a bulge in his pants.
“Are you hungry?”
“No thanks. I’m running late this morning.”
“Breakfast is the most important meal of the day.”
“I’ll grab a bite on the way in.”
“Don’t get fast food,” she said as he continued down the hallway, “They make their sausage out of pig eyeballs.”
He passed the dining room. The napkins and plates were pushed to one side of the table, and scattered in their place were a tube of model cement, jars of paint and plastic World War II plane parts. Shelly had let her father turn the dining room into his workshop. Barry crept past the dining room and had almost made it to the foyer when his father-in-law emerged from the guest bathroom, a cloud of stink exiting with him. He was holding a fuselage in one hand, a shark face painted on its nose, and a wing in the other. “Barry,” he said. “Let me show you something.”
“I’m in a hurry.”
“It’ll just take a second.”
He led Barry into the bathroom. His father-in-law leaned down toward the toilet bowl. Barry tried not to breathe.
“Listen,” his father-in-law said.
“I don’t hear anything.”
“Your toilet won’t quit running. Have you noticed an unusually high water bill?”
Barry shook his head. “Well, it sure can cost you. Might just be a drip, but drips add up to dollars. Want me to fix it?”
“Sure,” said Barry. “That would be great.”
Barry adjusted the cup, which was pinching his left testicle, and his father-in-law gave him a strange look. “You okay?”
“Yeah,” said Barry. “I’m running late.”
They stared at each other for a moment. “I thought you were running late,” his father-in-law said.
“I am.”
“Then get going.”
“Okay.”
As Barry exited the house into the cold morning, he heard his father-in-law mumbling something about the boy just standing there and staring at me, like he’s lost, like he needs my permission. He would complain to Shelly about her father later, but he was free of his in-laws for now and relieved to climb into his Jeep Cherokee. He reached into his pants and removed the cup, tucked it between his thighs, turned on the heat and aimed the vents at his crotch, then backed out of the driveway.
The fertility clinic was a short interstate drive away. He navigated the streets of their neighborhood of Holston Hills, driving beneath overhanging oaks and maples, bare branches black and twisting against the gray sky. The golf course was deserted, the grass brown. The swimming pool was drained. He crossed Magnolia Avenue and took the interstate on-ramp, joining the morning traffic headed west.
A billboard along the interstate still advertised a New Year’s Eve party in the Sunsphere. A week had passed since he and his wife celebrated at home, toasting champagne to a year of prosperity and progeny. So far their year was off to a bad start. When a tanker truck wrecked behind Shelly’s parents’ condominium complex, spilling thousands of gallons of hydrogen peroxide into a nearby stream, the city forced the residents in the area to evacuate for a week.
Barry arrived at the clinic 15 minutes later. It was a block building located between The Cancer Institute and The Comedy Zone. His wife’s blue Camry, with the bumper sticker, “Well behaved women seldom make history,” was parked up front. He looked through the windows to see a crowded waiting room. Even though this was one of the few places in town that encouraged carrying a cup of sperm onto the premises, there was no way he could walk inside and put the cup on the counter. Why hadn’t they given him a privacy bag of some sort?
He got out of his Jeep and searched through the back floorboard until he found a crumpled McDonald’s bag. He dropped the cup inside and entered the clinic. Five couples were seated together around the room, all there for IUI’s. Shelly had said Mondays were Dr. Heiny’s IUI days. Somehow, Barry guessed, she got all the women in the room ovulating at the same time, a type of multi-tasking.
When his wife saw him, she lowered her magazine and rose from her seat. She wore a black skirt and red sweater, a tag with her name and “Knoxville Preservation Society” pinned to her chest. She met him at the counter and looked at the McDonald’s bag. “Did you bring breakfast?”
“No,” Barry whispered. “I didn’t want everybody to see my sperm.”
The nurse behind the counter, a middle-aged blonde haired woman wearing Noah’s ark scrubs, slid open the dividing glass. Shelly informed her that Barry had arrived with his specimen. He handed the bag across the counter and the nurse took it. She reached inside and removed a crumpled Egg McMuffin wrapper, then fished around inside the bag until she found the cup. She held it up to the fluorescent lights and glared at it as if searching for impurities in a jar of river water. Barry’s face turned red. He looked at his wife. “Oh please,” she said, much too loudly. “Do you know how many times I’ve had to show my vagina in the past year?”
Barry heard muffled laughs coming from behind him and turned to see a number of the women reigning in their smiles, feigning coughs and covering their mouths. They sat erect in their chairs, flipping through magazines. The men in the room sat shoulder-slumped, eyes on the floor like kids awaiting shots. None of them lent him any looks of support or camaraderie. Whether real or not, Barry felt a certain male hatred suffusing the room, likely due to the fact that the women here, like his wife, had spent month after month poked, prodded and examined while their spouses did nothing but get their rocks off three times a week.
Barry followed his wife to a chair and selected a Popular Science magazine. He settled in and tried to read an article about Harvard scientists developing robotic honey bees in order to supplement colony collapse. It was difficult to concentrate. He felt exposed and sad, or was it somber? He felt like he was at the funeral of a stranger, naked.
Soon the nurse swung open the hallway door and smiled at Barry’s wife. “You ready, hun?”
Barry followed the two of them down the hallway, past a cork board covered with photos of smiling couples and babies, a room where he heard the whirring of a machine, and saw Dr. Heiny standing before it wearing what looked like safety goggles, cup after cup of sperm under a heating lamp beside her. The nurse led them to a room and asked Shelly to undress and put on her gown. She left and closed the door. Barry stood against the cold wall, his hands shaking.
“Why are you nervous?” Shelly asked, stripping off her sweater.
“This is just weird.”
“Try having that stuck inside you every month.”
She pointed toward a monitor on a stand, the cord running from it attached to a tubular device that looked to Barry like some sort of medical dildo covered by a medical condom. He assumed it was the device that performed the vaginal ultrasounds his wife told him about. There was nothing sexy about this place.
Shelly stripped out of her black pantyhose and climbed onto the examination table, slid a blue paper sheet over her mid-section. She lay down and rested her legs between the stirrups. There was a knock at the door, and Dr. Heiny, a stocky woman who spoke like she’d injected coffee into her veins, entered carrying a vial of Barry’s sperm, which she had run through the machine and “washed,” along with a syringe and catheter.
She pulled up a stool and slid toward Shelly, lifting her ankles and guiding her heels into the stirrups. Barry stayed beside the bed, near Shelly’s head. “You have 7,000,000 sperm,” said Dr. Heiny.
“Is that good or bad?” said Barry.
“Adequate.”
At age thirty, Barry was satisfied with adequate when it came to male performance issues.
Dr. Heiny pulled down the lamp, switched it on and aimed the bright beam between Shelly’s legs. “This might be a little uncomfortable,” she said. “Try to be as still as you can.”
She stuck the syringe into the vial and sucked up Barry’s sperm, then attached the end of the syringe to the catheter. She pumped a dollop of lubrication on her gloved hand and reached under Shelly’s gown. With the other hand, she eased in the catheter.
Barry watched Shelly’s face. She grimaced and strained not to move as the doctor inserted the catheter. He reached for her hands, but she was clenching the sheets. He put his hand on her forehead and she shook it away. Just when he thought she might cry out, the doctor pulled away, slid across the room on her stool and dropped the catheter, syringe and her gloves into a waste basket.
She stood and smiled, pushed a button on the exam table that inverted it, told Barry and Shelly the nurse would be in in 15 minutes, and left the room.
Shelly lay on the table, nearly upside down. She put her knees together and pulled them toward her stomach. “Are you okay?” said Barry.
“It hurt,” she said.
“This is it,” he said. “My sperm are right there at your eggs, knocking on their doors as we speak. 7,000,000. I did pretty good, huh?”
“Yes, honey.”
“I was afraid I would screw up, like miss the cup or spill it. Your mom was singing, your dad bugging me about our toilet.”
“By the way,” she said. “They’re staying for a few more days.”
“But you said only a week.”
“Shh,” she said. “Meditate.”
“Go sperm,” Barry said.
♦◊♦
“It’s still leaking.” Barry’s father-in-law sat across the kitchen island from him, chewing his tofu salad like an old cow. “And I’ve replaced everything: new trip lever, new float ball, new flapper, new ball cock. I’m starting to think the problem’s with your wax ring. Have you checked your wax ring lately?”
The salad tasted like cardboard. Barry’s mother-in-law insisted on forcing her newfound vegetarianism on everyone. “No,” said Barry, “I have not checked my wax ring lately.”
Shelly noticed Barry’s irritation and said, “You know, Dad, we really appreciate you working on the toilet, and, Mom, this is delicious. We appreciate you, too. Don’t we, Barry?”
You liar, Barry thought. “Uh-huh,” he said.
“Oh, it was simple,” said Christine. “Just lettuce and tofu, a touch of olive oil and freshly squeezed lemon juice for the dressing.”
“It’s not fixed, but it will be,” said Barry’s father-in-law. “It won’t stump me. Especially now that we have a few more days here.”
Before dinner, Shelly had informed Barry that the cleanup at the condominiums was taking longer than expected. Fumes from the hydrogen peroxide had seeped into some of the units. The EPA had gotten involved.
Shelly’s cell phone rang. “This is probably about the McCarthy house.”
She excused herself and took her phone into the living room. Barry could hear her and knew it was the fertility clinic calling, checking on Shelly. She was vague with her answers so as not to tip off her mother. “Day 14,” she said, “but not before then. Yes, I’m fine. Okay, thank you.”
She hadn’t told her parents about their efforts to get pregnant, didn’t want her mother nosing, picking out baby clothes, planning a shower before she was even pregnant.
“It could be in the wall, too,” said Barry’s father-in-law. “A leaky pipe.”
“Jack,” said his mother-in-law, “enough already about the toilet. We’re eating.”
“You know how I am when I get started thinking about something.”
“Obsessive compulsive?”
“Determined.”
Shelly rejoined them at the table. She put her hand on Barry’s knee and squeezed. He guessed she was letting him know she was hopeful about the IUI. He wanted to ask her what the doctor had said, but he’d have to wait until later when they were in bed. His in-laws had only been there for a week, but it felt like a month. Barry missed the days when it was just he and Shelly eating dinner on the couch, a meal that involved meat.
That night Barry sequestered himself in his office under the guise of doing research on codes and zoning for the elementary school his architect firm was bidding on. He took a large glass of wine with him, closed his door, rotated the wedding photo of him and Shelly back toward the room and sat at the computer desk.
He logged on to the Internet, planning to delete his seedy search history. He opened the “History” window and saw the link for Melanie’s Facebook page. He clicked on the link and it took him back to the photo of her on the boat. He clicked on her “Info” link, learned that she was a dental technician and was married to a man she called her “soul mate.” She also read vampire novels, liked photography and Bunko and especially spending time with her two children. Her favorite quote: “The bond that links your true family is not one of blood, but of respect and joy in each other’s life,” attributed to some guy named Richard Bach. Apparently, she really dug being a mother.
Barry thought back to that night again, two kids drunk and ravenous not for each other but for an idea: wildness with the opposite sex. They both could have been anybody and the same thing would’ve happened. The girl he’d lost his virginity to lived only miles away. She had children, a husband, and their night together meant nothing.
Curious about Melanie’s family, he returned to her photo page and browsed. He saw the usual photos: a cookout, sunset over some mountain, two fat guys playing ping-pong. He spotted a set of photos titled “Cage’s 12th Birthday Party.” Barry clicked on it and saw in the first picture a boy sitting before a cake, a Ninja made of icing holding up the number twelve. Immediately, the boy looked familiar. The nose and thick, curly hair, the dimples. Barry glanced at his wedding photo and felt his stomach leap into the back of his throat. He and the boy looked nearly identical. Barry thought of the broken condom, Melanie’s quote about blood and family. The photo was dated less than a year ago. He did the math.
He shut down his computer, gulped his wine and left the room. As he brushed his teeth, he remembered how Melanie had treated him after their one-night stand. He had called her a few times at her dorm, but she seemed in some constant melancholy mood, never wanting to speak to him. He finally gave up on getting a second date with her and eventually lost her number. The condom had broken, that was a fact, and he remembered her plainly albeit drunkenly saying, “Don’t worry, there’s no way I can get pregnant.”
He never knew what she meant by that, but he’d trusted her. After all, a woman knew her body. At least that’s what he’d thought until recently. Since the fertility difficulties with his wife, he’d learned that even women didn’t know everything about their bodies. Before they met with Dr. Heiny, they’d been having sex on the wrong day, a full week after Shelly ovulated.
Barry climbed into bed, trying to convince himself that he was just tired, paranoid and anxious because of his in-laws’ visit, his strange day. The boy didn’t really look like him.
He walked into the bedroom and saw Shelly leaning against the headboard reading a novel titled Suttree. He climbed in bed beside her and pulled the covers up to his neck. “Sometimes you men just gotta find a place to stick it,” she said.
Barry started. Had she read his mind?
“Did I wake you?” she said.
“Huh?”
“Sorry. A boy in this novel just got arrested for screwing a watermelon.”
♦◊♦
The next day in his downtown office at McNally’s and Sons, Barry struggled through a thick stack of legal filings related to the elementary school bid. He couldn’t focus, especially on bullshit lawyer jargon. All he could think about was Melanie and the boy.
At lunchtime, he logged on to Facebook and found her page. When he clicked on the “Photos” link, planning to get another look at the boy in the light of day, a message popped up: “Melanie Lane Baxter only shares some profile information with everyone.”
She had changed her settings. Barry swallowed, his stomach squeezing into a fist of nausea. Wasn’t there a way for people to check and see who had been viewing their photos? She was on to him.
He walked down the hall and stepped into Josh’s office. He was older than Barry, a senior member at the firm, and had a tenth-floor view of the city. Last year, Josh and his wife had finally gotten pregnant with twin girls after two years of trying.
He was chewing the butt of a pencil, looking over blueprints. He looked up and saw Barry standing in his doorway. “Any luck on the baby front?” he said.
“Shelly got an IUI yesterday.”
“Ah,” said Josh, “the turkey baster. You know the further you go in the process, the more likely you are to have twins or triplets. Or worse. Maybe you’ll have sextuplets and the whole town’ll chip in, buy you a house, supply your baby formula and bottles for the first three years like what’s their names. That shit’s expensive, man.”
Barry looked out the window. Down on Gay Street, people scurried about bundled against the cold, breath steaming around their faces. How many of those people had histories with those they passed on a daily basis? “You ever think about what it used to be like,” said Barry, “you know, when you were single?”
“The college days,” said Josh. He leaned back in his seat and linked his hands behind his head, stared at the ceiling and smiled. “What was harder than any school work was keeping my girlfriends from finding out about each other.”
Though Barry had only been with two women in his entire life, he nodded like he shared Josh’s experience. “If I could go back,” said Josh, “I wouldn’t do it the same.”
“You wouldn’t?”
“No, I’d do it tenfold. My dad always used to tell me never to settle down, that variety would give me good dreams when I got older. I know what he meant now.”
“Do you ever worry you might have a kid out there somewhere. You know, like you had a one-night stand with some girl, she got pregnant and decided not to tell you?”
Josh winked. “I had more than a few of those.”
“What if you looked her up on Facebook twelve years later and saw a little boy that looked just like you?”
“And she never told me, never came after me for child support?”
Barry nodded. “I’d thank my lucky stars, but damn,” Josh counted on his fingers, “you’ve got me worried now.”
When Barry walked back through the lobby of the firm, the receptionist waved at him. “You’re father-in-law’s on line one. He says it’s an emergency.”
Barry picked up in his office. “Hey,” said his father-in-law, “we have a problem. I was right, it is your wax ring, but it’s worse. The leak got into your floor joists. They’re rotten.”
“Okay,” said Barry.
They breathed into the phone.
“Is that it?”
“Yep.”
♦◊♦
The last thing Barry wanted to do at three o’clock was go home. He’d feel obligated to help Jack work on the toilet, and Shelly was working late, trying to secure funding for the McCarthy home from a group of university administrators. She had invited him to the meeting, but he didn’t want to go. Wine and cheese and academics who spoke with too much inflection was worse company than his father-in-law. He wanted to be alone, breathe and think. He wanted to eat a cheeseburger. Before he left the office, he made one last search on his computer, looked up Melanie’s address: 2532 Fair Drive.
It was early evening when he made it to her house, a cloud bank the color of lead looming over the city. She lived in a two-story yellow cottage-style home with a fenced-in back yard. There were child’s playthings in the yard, a trampoline, a basketball goal. Christmas lights still hung from the gutters and a brown Christmas tree, strands of silver tinsel in the branches, leaned against the porch. The windows glowed orange behind drapes. Barry thought of her inside with their son, Cage. Once they had been so close as to conceive him. Now they were only feet away, separated by the veneer stone of the house and something more. Time, separate lives, a thick invisible wall she had put up against him.
He drove down Broadway to The Creamery, a restaurant located in a strip of old buildings less than a mile from Melanie’s house. He and Shelly ate there from time to time. He loved the 1800s architecture, the weeping mortar and verandas, buildings simple and sturdy, built with real stone and wood. Barry ate at a window table, staring out at Fountain City Park across the street. Melanie must have eaten here, must have taken her son to the park. He wondered why she had blocked her page and what that meant. For some reason, she was keeping his child from him. What did she think he was, some worm?
There was a chance Shelly was pregnant, that his sperm had penetrated the wall of an egg and it was burning with life. Until now, he wasn’t even sure he’d wanted kids. He’d just thought it was what a married man his age was supposed to do. Now he desired more than ever to be a father. He stared at an empty bench at the park, a shivering bird perched on the backrest. Barry had a vision of a spring day, the trees filled with leaves, blooms sprouting up from the green grass, warm birds flitting about while he and Cage sat on the bench, Barry imparting wisdom or some fatherly skill, whittling. He thought he could cry. First he’d have to learn to whittle.
His in-laws had turned in by the time he got home that night. They were in the spare bedroom with the door shut. Barry didn’t even look at the bathroom. He got on his computer to check his email and take one last look at Melanie’s Facebook page. He saw that Jack had used his computer, left page after page about floor joists and water damage repair up on his screen. Had the old man forgotten Barry was an architect?
Shelly opened the office door and grinned. “Guess what?”
Barry looked at her, knowing it was too soon to learn if they were pregnant. “Did you secure more funding for the house?”
“Yes,” she said, “but I felt something today. A small pain, here.” She touched her lower stomach. “It was something I’ve never felt before. I bled a little, too. It might be implantation bleeding.”
“What if we had twins?” Barry said.
“Then we’ll quit.”
“What if one was older?”
“I don’t understand what you mean, honey.”
“Me neither.”
♦◊♦
Barry’s father-in-law dropped the old toilet trying to carry it out of the bathroom and cracked the porcelain. Barry met him at Lowe’s before work to pick out a new one. Jack walked ahead of Barry, hunched over in his fisherman’s hat and denim shorts with an elastic waistband. He had been quiet since Barry met him in the parking lot, not talking about the toilet or airplanes or his morning fiber. Barry guided the cart down the aisles. When they reached the toilet aisle, commode after commode lined up on the shelves, his father-in-law turned to Barry and said, “Goddamn it, I told Christine I was gonna wait and talk to you about this later, but now’s as good a time as any.”
Barry brought the cart to a stop, raised his eyebrows. “Is everything okay with you and Shel?” said Jack.
“Of course.”
His father-in-law narrowed his eyes at him. “You guys sure don’t see much of each other.”
“We’ve just been busy.”
“You remember what I told you when you asked me if you could marry her?”
Barry thought back to the day he met her father at Litton’s for a beer to ask for Shelly’s hand in marriage. He’d been so nervous he’d downed three beers in less than 10 minutes and shredded the receipt into tiny pieces. His father-in-law had told him, “You can marry her, but if you do her wrong, I’ll kill you.”
His warning was much more frightening ten years ago, before he became arthritic and curmudgeonly. “I remember,” said Barry.
“Don’t forget it. I hate to threaten you, but that’s what it is and the threat still stands. She might be 30 years old, but she’s still my little girl.”
“Everything’s fine, Jack. I promise.”
“You’ve got to make time, son. You’ve got to cherish her. Don’t be hungering over other women. Lust is a one way street to loneliness, and death. I’ve got a .357 Magnum, you know.” Jack smiled with satisfaction, then he turned to the toilets. “Okay, which one will it be? I recommend one that lets you spread out, so you don’t have to shit with your knees in your chest like that old one.”
♦◊♦
After work, Barry drove back to the yellow house on Fair Drive and sat idling outside a neighbor’s house. The Christmas tree was gone. A man in coveralls wearing a tool belt stood on a stepladder, unstringing the Christmas lights from the gutters. Barry had never put much thought into how her husband would react when Barry came barging into his life, claiming fatherhood of the son he may or may not think was his. Barry might ruin their marriage, but it wasn’t his fault, it was Melanie’s.
As he sat in his Jeep, trying to work up the courage to cross the invisible threshold that would set his life, his wife’s, everyone’s involved on a new path, the front door swung open and out walked Melanie and a little girl. Melanie was wearing jeans and a green sweatshirt that read “Gresham Middle PTA.” She looked toward the road and Barry inched down in his seat.
Seeing her standing there with her family, he realized there was no way he could step out of his Jeep, march across the yard and demand to see his son. He’d have to think of another approach.
Barry drove to Fountain City park and pulled into a parking space. He sat with the heater running, the old brick building where he’d eaten the day before in his rearview. Relationships were not dissimilar to buildings. They were built on strong foundations with honest labor. A shift in the load and the foundation could crumble. He’d have to come clean to Shelly before he went any further.
He put his Jeep in gear and started to leave the park. That’s when he saw a boy hopping his skateboard along the sidewalk. He wore tight black jeans and a hoodie, blue checkered tennis shoes. He picked up his board and walked toward the swing set. As the boy came closer, Barry recognized him as Cage.
Before he knew what he was doing, Barry was twenty feet from his idling Jeep, standing behind the boy as he sat on a swing, lighting a cigarette.
“Cage,” said Barry.
He flicked away the cigarette and leaned over his shoulder. When their eyes met, Barry felt love swell in his chest.
“Yeah?”
“I saw you skating. You were like Tony Hawk.”
“He’s old,” said Cage. “My board sucks. Who are you?”
“I’m Barry. I know your mom.”
“Melanie?”
“Yes.”
“Are you going to tell her I was smoking?”
“No,” said Barry.
“Promise?”
“Of course.” Barry found himself talking in some new, gentle voice.
Cage reached down and fished the cigarette out of the dirt, put it to his lips and inhaled. “What do you want?”
“I was driving by and saw you out here, thought I’d say hello.”
“Did you know me when I was a baby or something. That’s what all grownups say: ‘I knew you when you were this little.’”
“Sort of,” said Barry.
Cage threw down the cigarette and snuffed it out with his shoe, climbed out of the swing cradling the skateboard and started toward the street.
“Where are you going?” said Barry.
“Home.”
A cold drizzle had begun to fall. Barry looked at the heavy traffic on Broadway. His son could catch a cold, get run over. “Why don’t I give you a ride?” said Barry.
Cage stopped. He looked in the direction of his house. “I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“Stranger danger, dude.”
“Come on. I’m not a stranger. Actually, we’re related.”
“Like an uncle or something? I never had an uncle.”
“Sort of.”
“Okay,” he said and followed Barry to his Jeep. “But you’re not some perv are you?”
“Do I look like a perv?”
“Everybody looks like a perv.”
“Well, I’m not,” Barry said, opening the passenger side door and helping Cage in. “Put on your seatbelt. Would a perv say that?”
“Probably.”
The spell Cage had put on him still unbroken, Barry drove, admiring the boy. He was Barry’s little clone. Barry was going to teach him wise things, take him fishing, clap like a fool from the stands when he became a pro skateboarder tearing up some half-pipe in California. Cage noticed Barry staring at him. “What?” he said.
Barry just smiled.
Melanie and her were husband still outside taking down Christmas decorations. She squinted at Barry’s Jeep as he pulled into the driveway. Cage waved and Melanie took off sprinting toward him. The father sprung down from the ladder, pulled a claw hammer from his work belt and followed. Their alarm alarmed Barry right back to his senses. He slammed on the brakes, put the Jeep in reverse and squealed out of the driveway.
He sped down Fair Drive, Cage thrown back in his seat, Melanie and her husband running down the street, hollering at him. Barry flew through stop signs, took lefts and rights, and two miles later ducked the Jeep into an apartment complex, pulling to a stop behind a dumpster.
Cage was scared. He was reaching for the door handle, his hands shaking too badly to open it. Barry reached across him and pushed down the lock. Cage brought his hands up in a karate pose, his eyes wide with fear, little nose red from the cold.
“Relax,” said Barry, panting. “I’m not going to hurt you. I’m sorry about that. I wasn’t thinking.”
“Let me out,” said Cage.
“I will, but there’s something you need to know. I’m your dad. Your mother and I used to go together. I got her pregnant, and she had you, but I didn’t know it until now. I didn’t know what to do. I wanted to see you so bad and—”
“You are not,” said Cage, lowering his hands.
“I know you’re probably too young to understand all that. She probably told you that he was your dad.”
“My dad’s dead, dumbass.”
“Is that what Melanie’s been telling you?”
“Not Melanie. My mom. I have to see her a couple times a year with a judge and lawyer. Melanie and David have to be with me.”
“Melanie’s not your mom?”
“They adopted me and my sister when we were babies. She can’t have kids. Duh.”
Barry sat back in seat and thought. It made sense now, the quote on her Facebook page, what she had told him that night when the condom broke. “My god, said Barry. “I’ve made a terrible mistake.”
He heard police sirens in the distance. “Can I go home now?” said Cage.
No judge or jury would empathize with Barry. They wouldn’t believe his story. The penalty for kidnapping was what, at least 10 years, maybe more? He was going to prison, leaving his wife a single mother, his real child without a father. “Will you tell on me if I let you go?” said Barry.
“Depends,” said Cage.
“On what?”
“What are you gonna give me?”
“What do you want?”
“Money.”
“How much?”
“Enough for a new board.”
“How much do they cost?”
Cage scrunched his lips and closed his eyes, put a finger to his chin as he thought about it. “500 dollars should do it,” he said.
“Okay,” said Barry.
“Really?” said Cage, a bright little smile forming on his face.
To get the money, Barry had to withdraw it from the bank or an ATM machine, but they had cameras. First, he had to find a place to leave Cage. He couldn’t drive through the city with him in the car. The police and news stations, everybody in town would be looking for a gray Jeep Cherokee with a man and boy inside. He had to leave him somewhere safe.
Weeks ago, his wife had taken him to the Cormac McCarthy house to get his professional opinion on what repairs needed to be done to restore the building. It was set a distance from the city, deserted and hidden in thick undergrowth. If Barry could make it to the house and hide the boy until he got his money, he might be able to avoid a prison sentence.
“Lie down in your seat so nobody sees you,” said Barry.
“That’ll cost you another 100.”
The little shit was a good blackmailer. “Fine,” said Barry.
♦◊♦
He stuck to the backstreets, driving through neighborhood after neighborhood as he made his way south through the city toward the McCarthy home. He knew they were looking for the boy, knew there were likely Amber alerts and broadcasts on the local news and radio, describing Barry’s Jeep, but luck was on his side. The sun had set and a moonless winter night provided them cover.
Barry pulled into the driveway, illuminating the dilapidated house and overgrown yard. He shut off the lights. “Whose house is this?” said Cage.
“It was some writer’s. I’m gonna leave you here while I get the money.”
He led the boy inside the musty house. “Let me see your lighter,” he said and Cage handed it to him. He struck a dim flame inside the living room, could see old hardwood flooring, gouged from furniture and footsteps, a yellow hearth stained black, an oak mantle, rusty stocking nails lining its rim. “It’s a little cold in here, but I won’t be gone long.”
“I want more.”
“Surely 600 bucks will get you two or three skateboards.”
“A pack of smokes. Marlboros.”
“But you’re only 12.”
“Barry. Gray Jeep Cherokee. He—”
“Okay,” said Barry.
When Barry returned 20 minutes later with an envelope of six one hundred dollar bills and the cigarettes, Cage was sitting on the front porch, burning a dead twig with his lighter. “I figured it out,” he said. “You thought you were my dad because you banged Melanie, like 12 years ago.”
“You’re a smart kid,” said Barry.
“I know.”
“What are you going to tell her happened tonight?”
“Some pervert took me, said he was my dad.”
“You won’t tell them it was me?”
“I’ll make something up. I hate the police anyway. They put me in juvenile last year for nothing.”
Barry handed him the money and cigarettes. “Come on,” he said. “We need to find a way to get you home.”
Cage picked up another stick and lit it, looked back at the house. “I want to stay here for a little while.”
“I won’t leave you. You’re a kid.”
“Yes you will.”
“If something happened to you, it’d be my fault.”
Cage reached into his pocket. He pulled out a cell phone, held his finger an inch from the keypad. “Dude,” he said.
Barry started to turn and go, then stopped, watched Cage as he burned the stick, the light flickering on his young face. “Life gets weird sometimes,” he said. “But you know what you’re doing. You’ll be fine.”
Cage stared at the flame. “Whatever.”
♦◊♦
When Barry made it home, his in-laws were waiting on him, their bags packed and leaning against the wall. Christine met him at the door and led him to the table, where Jack sat with his nostrils flared, chewing at his cheek. Both hands on Barry’s back, Christine pushed him into a chair. “We’re leaving,” said Jack, “and I fixed your bathroom if you even care. But there’s something we gotta have out with you.”
“Barry,” said Christine, “we all make mistakes, and we can ask forgiveness from God and get help, but first we must confess.”
Barry thought they somehow knew: the police had notified them, there was a manhunt. “First,” said Jack, “I thought you were having an affair, looking up another woman’s Facebook page. Then I found these.” He lifted two sheets of copy paper from beneath the table. Printed on one was a picture of the Russian teens, on another the woman who was a man. “I couldn’t even stand to look at that last website,” he said. “You’re a piece of work.”
“If you have an addiction,” said his mother-in-law, “We can get you help. You’re not alone. So many men these days are just like you: golfers, congressmen.”
Barry couldn’t help himself. He burst into exhausted and relieved laughter.
“So you think this if funny?” said Jack.
Barry stood up and waved them away. “Talk to Shelly.”
No sooner had he said her name than she threw open the front door. She looked worn from a long day, seemed flabbergasted about something. “What is it, honey?” said Christine. “Jack, did you tell her about the porn?”
Shelly sank onto the foyer steps. “The house,” she said. “It’s on fire.”
“What house?” said Jack, sniffing and looking around.
“Cormac McCarthy’s house.”
She buried her face into her arms. “All that work.”
“Well,” said Jack, “If the house was so important to him, the old son of a bitch should’ve preserved it himself. He’s the one with all the money.”
♦◊♦
Later that night, the in-laws finally gone, Christine giddy about the possibility of a grandchild, Jack confused about everything, Shelly and Barry watched the 11 o’clock news. The first story showed the house engulfed in spiraling flames, firefighters soaking it with water to no avail. “Oh, well,” said Shelly. “I guess Dad is right, but who would do such a thing?”
“Who knows,” said Barry. “It could’ve been an accident.”
The next story provided an update about the missing Knoxville boy. “12-year-old Cage Baxter was found at midnight,” said the news woman through her nose, “after he used his cell phone to contact his mother. The details of his abduction are sketchy, but police say the boy claims a man dressed in all black, whom he calls a ‘ninja,’ abducted him with a sword. Apparently, the boy was able to escape by fighting off the ‘ninja.’ Police are still on the lookout for a man in all black driving a gray Jeep Cherokee.”
Barry changed the channel at the description of his Jeep. “Wait a second,” said Shelly, “Turn that back.”
“Why?”
“I didn’t hear. What was the boy’s name?”
“Cage,” said Barry.
“I like that name,” she said. “We’ll have to remember it in case we have a boy.”
—photo Flickr/luz
“Boy?” said Barry. “I’m hoping for girls.”
Dear Lord this story is good.
Interesting story.
Moral of this story: check your facebook settings. 😉
Great post.