“A purpose,” Carol repeated. “If you’d wanted one of those, you could’ve come over and helped me paint my condo.”
“I’m serious. Doug has his purpose: making money, for himself and his clients. He does a good job at it. But what do I have? Don’t say the newspaper, please. I’ve gone about as far as I can go there. I know I’m paid well and I have a cushy job, but—” She paused, trying to put her feelings into words. “That’s something anybody can do. The place won’t fold if I’m not at my desk.” She cut a piece of salmon but left it on her plate. “I want to be needed,” she told Carol. “Needed in a way that no one else can match. Do you understand?”
“I guess so.” She looked a little uncomfortable at this personal revelation.
“It doesn’t have anything to do with money or possessions. Not the house, not the car, not clothes or anything else. It’s having someone who needs you, day and night. That’s what I want. And, thank God, that’s what I’m going to have.”
Carol was attacking her salad. “I still say,” she observed, a shred of crabmeat on her fork, “that a puppy would have been less expensive. And puppies don’t want to shave all their hair off except for a rat-tail hanging down in back, either. They don’t like punk rock and heavy metal, they don’t chase girls, and they won’t get their front teeth knocked out at football practice. Oh, Jesus, Laura!” She reached across the table and gripped Laura’s hand. “Swear you won’t name him Bo or Bubba! I won’t be godmother to a kid who chews tobacco! Swear it, okay?”
“We’ve decided on a name,” Laura said. “David. After my grandfather.”
“David.” Carol repeated it a couple of times. “Not Davy or Dave, right?”
“Right. David.”
“I like that. David Clayborne. President of the Student Government Association, the University of Georgia, nineteen …oh Lord, when would that be?”
“Wrong century. Try twenty ten.”
Carol gasped. “I’ll be ancient!” she said. “Shriveled up and ancient! I’d better get some pictures made so David’ll know how pretty I used to be!”
Laura had to laugh at Carol’s expression of merry terror. “I think you’ve got plenty of time for that.”
They veered away from talking about the forthcoming new arrival, and Carol, who was also a reporter on the Constitution’s social desk, entertained Laura with more tales from the trenches. Then her lunch break was over, and it was time for Carol to get back to work. They said good-bye in front of the restaurant as the valets brought their cars, and then Laura drove home while cold drizzle fell from a gray winter sky. She lived about ten minutes away from Lenox Square, on Moore’s Mill Road off West Paces Ferry. The white brick house was on a small plot of land with pine trees in front. The place wasn’t large, particularly in comparison to the other houses in the area, but it had carried a steep price tag. Doug had said he’d wanted to live close to the city, so when they found the property through the friend of a friend they’d been willing to spend the money. Laura pulled into the two-car garage, opened an umbrella, and walked back out to the mailbox. Inside were a half-dozen letters, the new issue of The Atlantic Monthly, and catalogues from Saks and Barnes and Noble. Laura went back into the garage and pressed the code numbers in on the security system, then she unlocked a door that led into the kitchen. She shed her raincoat and looked through the letters. Electric bill, water bill, a letter whose envelope read MR. AND MRS. CLEYBURN YOU HAVE WON AN ALL-EXPENSES-PAID TRIP TO DISNEY WORLD!, and three more letters that Laura held on to after she’d pushed aside the bills and the desperate come-on for the sale of Florida swampland. She walked through a hallway into the den, where she punched on the answering machine to check her messages.
Beep. “This is Billy Hathaway from Clements Roofing and Gutter Service, returnin’ your call. Missed you, I guess. My number’s 555-2142. Thanks.”
Beep. “Laura, it’s Matt. I just wanted to make sure you got the books. So you’re going to lunch with Carol today, huh? Are you a glutton for punishment? Have you decided to name the kid after me? Talk to you later.”
Beep. Click.
Beep. “Mrs. Clayborne, this is Marie Gellsing from Homeless Aid of Atlanta. I wanted to thank you for your kind contribution and the reporter you sent to give us some publicity. We really need all the help we can get. So thanks again. Good-bye.”
And that was it.
Laura walked over to the tapedeck, pushed in a tape of Chopin piano preludes, and eased herself down in a chair as the first sparkling notes began to play. She opened the first letter, which was from Help for Appalachia. It was a note requesting aid. The second letter was from Fund for Native Americans, and the third was from the Cousteau Society. Doug said she was a sucker for causes, that she was on a national mailing list of organizations that made you think the world would collapse if you didn’t send a check to prop it up. He believed most of the various funds and societies were already rich, and you could tell that because of the quality of their paper and envelopes. Maybe ten percent of contributions get where they’re supposed to go, Doug had told her. The rest, he said, went to accounting fees, salaries, building rents, office equipment, and the like. So why do you keep sending them more money?
Because, Laura had told him, she was doing what she thought was right. Maybe some of the funds she donated to were shams, maybe not. But she wasn’t going to miss the money, and it all came from her newspaper salary.
But there was another reason she gave to charities, and perhaps it was the most important one. Purely and simply, she felt guilty that she had so much in a world where so many suffered. But the hell of it was that she enjoyed her manicures, her steambaths, and her nice clothes; she’d worked hard for them, hadn’t she? She deserved her pleasures, and anyway she’d never used cocaine or bought animal-skin coats and she’d sold her stock in the company that did so much business in South Africa. And had made a lot of profit from the sale, too. But Jesus, she was thirty-six years old! Thirty-six! Didn’t she deserve the fine things she’d worked so hard for?
Deserve, she thought. Who really deserved anything? Did the homeless deserve to shiver in alleys? Did the harp seals deserve to be clubbed and slaughtered? Did the homosexual deserve AIDS, or the wealthy woman deserve a fifteen-thousand-dollar designer dress? Deserve was a dangerous word, Laura thought. It was a word that built barriers, and made wrong seem right.
She put the letters aside, on a small table next to her checkbook.
A package of four books had come in the mail yesterday, sent from Matt Kantner at the Constitution. Laura was supposed to read them and do reviews for the Arts and Leisure section over the next month or so. She’d scanned them yesterday, when she’d been sitting by the fireplace and the rain was coming down outside. There was the new novel by Anthony Burgess, a nonaction book on Central America, a novel about Hollywood called The Address, and a fourth nonaction work that had instantly caught her attention.
Laura picked it up from where it sat beside her chair with a bookmark in it. It was a thin book, only one hundred and seventy-eight pages, and not very well produced. The covers were already warping, the paper was of poor quality, and though the pub date was 1989, the book had a faintly moldy smell. The publisher’s name was Mountaintop Press, based in Chattanooga, Tennessee. The title was Burn This Book, by Mark Treggs. There was no author’s picture on the back, only an ad for another book about edible mushrooms and wildflowers, also written by Mark Treggs.
Looking through Burn This Book brought back some of the feelings that had surfaced when she was sitting in the Fish Market. Mark Treggs, as recounted in the slim memoir, had been a student at Berkeley in 1964, and had lived in Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco during the era of love-ins, long hair, free LSD, happenings, and skirmishes with the police in Peoples’ Park. He wrote wistfully of communes, of crash pads hazed with marijuana fumes, where discussions of Allen Ginsburg poems and Maoist theories mingled into abstract philosophies of God and nature. He talked about draft card burnings,
and massive marches against Vietnam. When he described the smell and sting of tear gas, he made Laura’s eyes water and her throat feel raw. He made that time seem romantic and lost, a communion of outlaws battling for the common cause of peace. Seen in hindsight, though, Laura realized there was as much struggle for power between the various factions of unrest as there was between the protesters and the Establishment. In hindsight, that era was not as romantic as it was tragic. Laura thought of it as the last scream of civilization, before the Dark Ages set in.
Mark Treggs talked about Abbie Hoffman, the SDS, Altamont, flower power, the Chicago Seven, Charles Manson and the White Album, the Black Panthers, and the end of the Vietnam War. As the book went on, his writing style became more confused and less pointed, as if he were running out of steam, his voice dwindling as had the voices of the Love Generation. At the midpoint, he called for an organization of the homeless and a rising up against the powers of Big Business and the Pentagon. The symbol of the United States was no longer the American flag, he said, it was a money sign against a field of crosses. He advocated demonstrations against the credit card companies and the TV evangelists; they were partners, Treggs believed, in the stupefaction of America.
Laura closed Burn This Book and laid it aside. Some people probably would heed the title, but the volume was most likely fated to molder in the cubbyhole bookstores run by holdover hippies. She’d never heard of Mountaintop Press before, and from the looks of their production work they were only a small regional outfit with not a whole lot of experience or money. Little chance of the book being picked up by mainstream publishers, either; this sort of thing was definitely out of fashion.
She put her hands to her stomach and felt the heat of life. What would the world be like by the time David reached her age? The ozone layer might be gone by then, and the forests gnawed bare by acid rain. Who knew how much worse the drug wars could get, and what new forms of cocaine the gangs could flood the streets with? It was a hell of a world to bring a child into, and for that she felt guilty, too. She closed her eyes and listened to the soft piano music. Once upon a time, Led Zeppelin had been her favorite band. But the stairway to heaven had broken, and who had time for a whole lotta love? Now all she wanted was harmony and peace, a new beginning: something real that she could cradle in her arms. The sound of amplified guitars reminded her too much of that hot July night, in the apartments near the stadium, when she watched a woman crazy on crack put a gun to a baby’s head and blow the infant’s brains out in a steamy red shower.
Laura drifted amid the piano chords, her hands folded across her belly. The rain was falling harder outside. The gutters that needed repairs would soon be flooding. But in the house it was safe and warm, the security system was on, and for the moment Laura’s world was a sanctuary. Dr. Bonnart’s number was close at hand. When the time came, she’d deliver the baby at St. James Hospital, which was about two miles from the house.
My baby is on the way, she thought.
My baby.
Mine.
Laura rested as the silvery music of another age filled the house and rain began to slam down on the roof.
And at a K-Mart near Six Flags, the clerk behind the counter in the sporting goods department was just selling a boy-sized rifle called a Little Buckaroo to a customer who wore stained overalls and a battered Red Man cap. “I like the looks of that one,” the man in the cap said. “I believe Cory will, too. That’s my boy. Saturday’s his birthday.”
“I wish I’d had me a squirrel gun like this when I was a boy,” the clerk said as he got the rifle, two boxes of ammunition, and a small telescopic sight ready to go. “Nothin’ better than bein’ out in the woods doin’ a little shootin’.”
“That’s the truth. Got woods all around where we live, too. And plenty of squirrels, I’m tellin’ you.” Cory’s father, whose name was Lewis Peterson, began to write out a check for the amount. He had the work-roughened hands of a carpenter. “Yeah, I believe a ten-year-old fella can handle a rifle that size, don’t you?”
“Yessir, it’s a beauty.” The clerk copied down the necessary information and filed the form in a little metal box behind the counter. When the Buckaroo was slid into its rifle case and wrapped up, the gun was passed across the counter to Lewis Peterson. The clerk said, “There you go. Hope your boy has a happy birthday.”
Peterson put the package under his arm, the receipt in full view for the security guard up front to see, and he walked out of the K-Mart into the misting afternoon rain. Cory was going to be jumping up and down on Saturday, he knew. The boy had wanted a gun of his own for some time, and this little rifle was just the thing for him. A good starter rifle.
He got in his pickup truck, a shotgun in its rack across the back window. He started the engine and turned on the windshield wipers, and he drove home feeling proud and good, his son’s birthday present cradled on the seat beside him.
2
A Careful Shopper
THE BIG WOMAN IN the Burger King uniform pushed a cart along the aisles of the Piggly Wiggly supermarket. She was at the Mableton Shopping Center about a quarter mile from her apartment. On her blouse she wore a yellow Smiley Face button. Her hair, shiny with smoke and grease from the grills, hung loosely around her shoulders. Her face was composed and calm, without expression. She picked out cans of soup, corned beef hash, and vegetables. At the frozen food section she chose a few TV dinners and a box of Weight Watchers chocolate fudge bars. She moved methodically and carefully, as if powered by a tense inner spring. She had to stop for a moment and breathe the chill air where the meat was kept, because she had the sensation that the store’s air was too thick for her lungs. She smelled the blood of fresh slaughters.
Then Mary Terror went on, a careful shopper who checked prices and ingredients. Foods could be full of poisons. She avoided boxes with scraped sides or cans that had been dented. Every once in a while she paused to look over her shoulder and gauge who might be following her. The FBI bastards wore masks of human skin that they could peel on and off, and they could make themselves look young or old, fat or skinny, tall or short. They were lurking everywhere, like cockroaches in a filthy house.
But she didn’t think she was being followed today. Sometimes the back of her neck tingled and goose bumps rose on her arms, and it was then she knew that the pigs were near. Today, though, there were only housewives and a couple of farmer types buying groceries. She checked their shoes. The pigs always wore shined shoes. Her alarm system was silent. Still, you never knew, and that was why she had a Compact Off-Duty Police pistol in the bottom of her purse that weighed twenty-eight ounces and packed four .357 Magnum bullets. She stopped by the wine section and picked a cheap bottle of sangria. Then it was on to select a bag of pretzels and a box of Ritz crackers. The next stop was an aisle over, where the jars of baby food were.
Mary pushed her cart around the corner, and before her was a mother with her baby. The woman—a girl, really, maybe seventeen or eighteen—had her child strapped into a bassinet in her cart. She had red hair and freckles, and the baby had a little shock of pale red hair, too. The child, dressed in a lime-green jump suit, sucked on a pacifier and stared out at the world through large blue eyes, hands and feet at war with each other. The mother, who wore a pink sweater and bluejeans, was choosing some baby food from the Gerbers shelf. That was also Mary’s preferred brand.
Mary guided her cart in close and the young mother said, “Scuse me,” and backed her cart off a few feet. Mary pretended to be searching for a certain food, but she was watching the red-haired infant. The girl caught her looking, and Mary snapped on a smile. “What a pretty baby,” she said. She offered her hand into the cart, and the baby grasped her index finger.
“Thanks.” The girl returned the smile, but uncertainly.
“Babies are a joy, aren’t they?” Mary asked. She’d already checked the girl’s shoes: scuffed-up sneakers. The child’s fingers clenched and unclenched Mary’s finger.
“Yes’m,
I reckon they are. ’Course, when you got a kid, that’s it, ain’t it?”
“What’s it?” Mary lifted her eyebrows.
“You know. A kid takes up an awful lot of time.”
This was a child with a child, Mary thought. She could see the dark hollows under the young mother’s eyes. You don’t deserve to have a baby, Mary thought. You haven’t paid your dues. Her face kept its smile. “What’s his name?”
“Her name. She’s a she. Amanda.” The girl selected a few jars of assorted food and put them into the cart, and Mary worked her finger loose from the child’s grip. “Nice talkin’ to you.”
“My baby likes the strained pears,” Mary said, and took two jars of it off the shelf. She could feel her cheek muscles aching. “I’ve got a fine, healthy boy!”
The girl was already moving away, pushing the cart before her. Mary heard the soft wet noise of the baby sucking on her pacifier, and then the cart reached the end of the aisle and the girl turned to the right. Mary felt an urge to go after the girl, grab her by the shoulders, and make her listen. Tell her that the world was dark and full of evil, and it chewed up little red-haired baby girls. Tell her that the agents of Moloch Amerika lurked in every corner, and they could suck your soul out through your eyeballs. Tell her that you could walk through the most beautiful garden and hear the scream of the butterfly.