Thumbsucker (11 page)

“We’re programming him young,” said Munch. “He’ll be a star someday. Bigger than Jethro Tull. Than Jimmy Page.”

An hour later, parked above the dam, Donna and I divided up the pot. “Munch is sick,” she said. We were good and stoned by then. “Sometimes I’d like to steal that baby from him. Leave it in a church.”

“Probably not a bad idea,” I said.

“A child should be a beacon. A light of hope.”

“I agree.”

“They’re scrambling its little brains.”

An ember jumped onto the thigh of Donna’s Levi’s; I brushed it onto the floor mat. I touched her shoulder. She didn’t shrink or flinch. My hand slid down her slick acrylic sweater onto her breasts. “My rule,” she said. “Eyes closed.” My hand felt her ribs, her speedy little heart.

“I’m taking that kid. Will you help me?” Donna said.

I would have promised her anything just then.

The marijuana lasted us two weeks. We smoked most of it in Donna’s bedroom in the basement beneath her father’s study. It spooked me to hear his castered desk chair scrape across the ceiling. He dictated his columns in headlong bursts, adopting a screechy, politician’s tone.

“Vacwombs outnumbered live births this year—a milestone. The old and infirm are next. The march is on, folks. Next stop the crematorium. All aboard!”

I feared Mr. Prine might detect our marijuana fumes, but Donna said not to worry. “He’s very tolerant. The column is all an act. It’s showbiz, really. As a matter of fact, that book was his idea. He gave it to me on my sixteenth birthday.”

The book was a deluxe-size paperback:
The Sensual Gourmet
. We’d been working our way through it chapter by chapter. We rubbed ourselves down with olive oil and perfume and wriggled like fish in each other’s
greasy arms. We positioned ourselves on chairs and stacked-up pillows and tested the limits of human flexibility, sometimes crossing the line into real pain. Playing Donna’s puppet, I wore the blindfold as she twisted us into taut, ecstatic knots. I realized passivity suited me. No pressure.

Unfortunately, we were running low on pot and I was nervous about buying more. Our noble talk of snatching little Duncan, a subject Donna inevitably brought up after we’d closed the book and caught our breath, had grown into a plot I didn’t like.

“Fine,” Donna said one day. “I’ll go alone. By the way, we’re finished here. My teenage experimental phase is over.”

“America, wake up! Ignore the movie scars! Look to your friends and families and clergy.”

“I told you I’d help,” I said. “I won’t go back on that. I love you, Donna.”

“That’s not what we’ve been doing here.”

“I know. It just happened.”

“Well, nip it in the bud. When Daddy and I decided I needed experience, we thought I should get it at home. In a safe setting. We also decided that picking a kid, like you, would keep down the chance of someone getting attached.”

“You’re kidding me.”

“We love each other, okay? We tell each other everything. Get used to it.”

“Fine, but I think it’s strange. You’re father and daughter.”

“I think
your
family’s strange. Go home,” said Donna.

Upstairs, I heard her father start to type.

I had trouble leaving the house that night. Mike was throwing a fit in the kitchen over our family’s failure to come to grips with the rising cost of groceries. He flung open drawers and cabinets, removing cans of soup and vegetables and quoting their prices in a high, scared whine. “Cut green beans for thirty-seven cents. A dollar for brownie mix. A dollar fifty for raisins.” Next, he’d drop the items on the counter, where they’d burst open or roll onto the floor. “We have to stop eating,” he said. “We’re going under.”

I got up from the table as Joel slipped out of the room. I heard him turn on the TV to Wimbledon.

Mike kicked a jar of spices at my chair. “Where are you going?”

“A movie.”

“What kind of movie?”

“Whatever’s showing. I can’t digest my food here.”

At the end of the driveway Donna’s red Skylark idled. Her dilated pupils reflected the glowing gauges. She’d combed her bangs straight down and put on lipstick and donned a pair of tight black driving gloves.

“After we make the buy,” she said, “we’ll hide outside until they put the baby down. Then you can climb through a window and hand him out to me.”

“I’m scared. I can’t do it. It’s wrong.”

“What’s wrong is leaving him there.”

“We could call in a tip to the cops,” I said.

“Like Munch isn’t already paying them off. Get real.” Donna held out a pill bottle, uncapped it. “It’s Daddy’s phenobarb. Sometimes his skin’s so itchy he can’t sleep.”

“Give me two.”

“You’ll pass out.”

“I wish,” I said.

The lights were out at the farmhouse and the cars were gone. In a crate on the porch a litter of runty kittens nursed on a sweat sock, their mother nowhere in sight. I peered through the screen door and saw the lit-up stereo but heard no music.

“Lucky break,” said Donna. “They’re at the bar. They leave the baby home.”

We went on in. My bravery surprised me. To my small but growing list of talents I could add nighttime burglary.

The baby was on its back in the armchair, the headphones hugging its ears. Its eyes were open. It appeared to have grown some since we’d seen it last. The legs sticking out of the diaper were longer, trimmer, and a ridge in its forehead suggested a heightened intellect.

Donna removed the headphones. A bass guitar blared. Suddenly, the baby spoke: “Ma pa ma pa.”

“Jesus!” I said.

“Just hold him, shitbrain. Here.”

I cradled the baby as Donna opened a closet and climbed on a chair to hunt for Munch’s stash. Something seemed wrong with the baby’s nervous system. I moved a forefinger across its vision, but the pupils failed to track the progress.

“You’re safe,” I whispered. “We’ll take good care of you.” I didn’t believe myself.

Donna stood down off the chair holding a plastic trash bag wrapped in duct tape.

“Take it all,” I said. “Just take it all.”

“They’ll notice. They’ll freak”

“They’ll notice their kid’s gone, too.”

I made a nest from a cheerleading costume and bedded the baby down in Donna’s backseat. She drove an inconspicuous forty, taking right turns on unmarked gravel roads. Once we’d lost track of where we were, Donna killed the engine and lit her pipe.

“Not in the car,” I said. “The baby.”

“Sorry.”

We stood in the ditch and got higher than we should have. The pot Munch kept for himself was stronger than the stuff he sold. An owl glided past just feet above our heads and Donna yelled and ducked.

“I think we should drive to the Lutheran church,” I said. Each word was a labor, like hoisting a stone slab.

“Ixnay,” said Donna. “Lutherans are too strict.”

“The Catholic church? The Methodists? The Baptists?”

“I want to take him home to show to Daddy. He’s lonely, Justin. A baby might lift his spirits.”

I didn’t answer. I couldn’t lift the words.

Donna smoked as she drove, braking for animals only she could see. She parked in front of her house and cut the lights. The baby chirped and whinnied and made clicking sounds. In the glove compartment I found a Tootsie Pop, which I put in the baby’s mouth. It spit it out.

“I’m sorry. I need my daddy now,” said Donna. “We shouldn’t have done this. I blew it. Don’t be mad at me.”

I snugged the baby against my chest. I felt possessive suddenly. No church that I knew of deserved him. No one did.

Donna opened her door and swung her legs out. “Try the Episcopalians,” she said.

Where I went next—I felt I had no choice—was Willy Lindt’s houseboat. The baby didn’t faze him. I chalked up its presence to “a screwed-up dope thing” and Willy said he understood and knew how to fix things.

“Sit, I need the company. I’m drying out and it’s rough as hell tonight.”

Willy opened two cans of 3.2 beer and brought out a bag of pretzels. For the baby, he dipped a finger in some milk but it jerked its head away. Its tongue was pale.

“I’ll drop him at the sheriff’s in the morning. I’ll say I woke up from a binge and there he was. They expect this kind of thing from me.”

“Why are you trying to quit drinking?” I said.

“I’ve got a line on a role. In Minneapolis. I play a corpse in a trunk. A crime-spree movie.”

The baby’s condition worsened as we talked. A film formed on its eyes. New sounds erupted. They rose from deep in the baby’s heaving chest—the scrambled upshot, I supposed, of so much heavy metal over headphones. Willy paced with the baby, rocking it, but the sounds kept coming. The baby flailed its arms.

“Maybe it’s allergic,” Willy said, “and it’s having some kind of reaction. Or epileptic.”

“The parents kept it high on pot,” I said.

“That’s what it wants, then. Roll a joint.”

“That’s sick.”

“We need what we’re used to. Take an old bum’s word.”

I argued but eventually Willy prevailed. Once the joint was rolled and lit, we knelt on the floor. Willy stroked the baby’s head. I gazed into its face and saw no soul, nothing but a blurry, rubber mask. This changed with my first exhaled puff. The baby cooed. Its mouth opened wide for more. I sucked more smoke in. Shame burned my face and split me into two: the kid who knew better and hated what he was doing and the kid who didn’t know a thing and let other people who claimed to know control him. I positioned my mouth above the
baby’s thin dry lips and blew until I was crying and had to stop.

“The thing to remember,” Willy said afterward, “was that we didn’t start this mess, now did we?”

I was bawling. “We didn’t stop it, either.”

“We got here in the middle. It’s not our fault. Look at him—like it or not, he looks much better now.”

Willy was right. The baby looked revived. So why did I feel dead?

The middle of things was a lousy place to be.

I saw them together again a few weeks later—Munch, his girlfriend, the baby, and Donna, too. She’d broken things off with me after the baby caper and taken up with a handsome college sophomore who was home for the summer from Marquette, where he supposedly edited the newspaper. I’d seen them at the movies a couple of times, smooching away at the foot of the screen while Donna’s father sat a few rows back, sucking a Coke and pretending not to watch them. I got the feeling the joke was on the college kid and that he was being spied on without knowing it. For all Donna’s talk about catching a rich man someday, I strongly suspected that she’d never leave home.