The Cradle Read online

  “I’m not talking to you,” Darren said. “Hold on.”

  Matt waited. Darren did a little sit-up then and loosened one of the boots holding him in. He put his arm on the ground, then reached up with his other hand and did the same again. Darren the Dog was up and excited, wagging his tail, and Darren shoved him away and lowered himself down onto his back and stood up right in front of Matt.

  “-Good-bye, then,” he said, and he went past him to the door.

  “What about all of that?” Matt said. “What about your Question of the Ages?”

  Darren opened the door and looked outside, then turned back.

  “I have determined that there might be some other goddamned paths,” Darren said.

  “Like what?”

  “I just suddenly got in a bad mood,” he said.

  When Matt still looked confused, Darren pointed out the door and said, “Look. Send the mail here to the house. I didn’t get to say it out loud. Maybe I’m not so smart after all.”

  They were ninety miles away when the radiator blew up. Joe had been sleeping since Matt had come back to the truck. When he’d come back, he’d found the boy shaking again, and it had taken him a few minutes to calm Joe down. Matt had said, “This isn’t normal, all this driving. So this is the end. You don’t have to worry about it. This was something else. Now we just have to drive a little more and then we’re done. Keep the hat on.”

  Joe didn’t wake up when the engine rattled, then popped, and the steam started shooting out. Matt pulled the truck over to the side of the road. Everything around was black. They’d crossed the Mississippi and had gone through La Crosse. As Matt sat, thinking, a semi blasted by. About a half mile back he had seen the sign for a campground, and he figured it was either find a phone somewhere and call a tow truck, get it towed, find some hotel, get it fixed, then go home, or sleep at the campground, try to get it fixed in the morning, and be home at the same time with a lot more money. He looked at the clock. It was 10:13. He closed his eyes and turned the key and promised his truck he’d do something nice for it so long as the engine didn’t melt.

  He did a U-turn, went back to the campground, and pulled off onto the dirt road. They trundled down it, slowly. There was no one at the entrance when they pulled up, but a light was on in a little cabin past the semaphore, and when Matt stopped, a teenager came out holding a can of Coke and walked up to the window and said, “Ten bucks for the night.” Matt paid him, and the kid raised up the gate and waved him inside and told him, “C6,” as he idled by. They drove down an even smaller road; here and there he could see tents pitched, and a few sites had campers in them. He found the Cs, and together they rolled into the empty patch of dirt. Matt put the truck in park, closed his eyes, leaned his head back. “Just for the night,” he said.

  Joe was sitting up now, and he looked back at Matt. “You want a Twinkie?” Matt said.

  Joe nodded.

  Matt reached into the glove compartment and found one of the two remaining Twinkies. He broke one open and handed it to Joe, then broke the other open for himself and started to eat it.

  “Do you have a tent in that backpack?” he asked Joe.

  Joe said, “No.”

  Matt looked at the big sodium light hanging above the bathrooms twenty feet away. “What we’re gonna do,” he said, digging around behind the seats, “is make you a little bed in here. So you can sleep right here and I’ll sleep in the back of the truck. Right back there. Then it’ll be morning and we can go home. What do you think of that plan?”

  Joe kept looking down at the Twinkie.

  “We don’t have to do anything like this again,” Matt said. “You’ll actually get a room. You don’t really have a lot of reason to believe me at this point. I realize that.”

  He found the fleece blanket he’d been looking for and laid it out.

  “You thirsty?” he said. “I’ve got water. You have anything in there you haven’t peed out?”

  Joe shook his head, then slowly crawled himself into position and lay down across the seats. Matt helped him arrange his backpack up near his head so he could use it as a pillow.

  “Both you and me stink, kid,” Matt said. He reached down and touched Joe on his head. He scrabbled the hair around a little. “Showers for both of us tomorrow.” He picked up Joe’s dirty bag of clothes and shut the door.

  The Dumpster wasn’t far away, and Matt tossed the bag into it and then came back to the truck and climbed into the pickup, slowly. Once he was all laid out, his head up just beneath the cradle, and everything was quiet, the everyday world moved aside like something was pushing from within. He waited and felt it. He pushed himself up a little closer to the cradle and closed his eyes. This was a onetime thing, all this driving. We don’t have to do anything like this again. As though the world and the stars would never again offer up something that needed to be punished.

  “I will kill you,” the janitor had said to him many times, and each time he said it, another voice in Matt’s head said back, No. Don’t you see that I will be the one to kill you? But he’d never had his chance, had never been alone with him in the bathroom or the closet or the boiler room and happened upon the gun he always dreamed of holding or the razor he always dreamed of sliding across the man’s half-shaved tiger neck.

  Then one day the janitor quit, and there was a new one, a woman who never talked but who handed out caramel candies to the boys, especially if they didn’t leave bad messes for her to deal with alone.

  It was three months later that the letter arrived for Matt, with its cold computer-printed faded font, telling him there was a foster family named Kincaid who would be taking him. He didn’t have any friends to say good-bye to and barely owned a thing.

  Lying here in the bed of the truck reminded him of that night. That night he lay in his bunk, staring up at the wood frame of the bed above him, and listened to the sounds of boys whispering here and there; even, from time to time, some footsteps. But he didn’t turn and look under Mr. Whittaker’s door for the light to pop on. Instead he stared straight up at the crosses of wood keeping the other boy’s weight from collapsing down onto him.

  He remembered what he kept thinking that whole night. He remembered he just kept asking the same kind of question over and over again: why did you do this to me? Why did you do this to me? Why did you do this to me? Why did you do this to me? Why did you let me be here? Why did you make this choice?

  Through the night Matt slept on and off, woken up by mosquitoes and once by the haunting sound of drunken laughter coming from somewhere else in the campground. The metal underneath him was painful, but he didn’t want to sleep on the dirt. It seemed important to stay where he was. What dreams he had were of Lucille Kincaid trying to serve him grass. Once, she looked at him and said, “You don’t have me because I am not your mother.”

  The stars were still visible when he woke after that, but the moon was gone, and he drifted away again. When he opened his eyes next, it was light and he was cold.

  Joe had left the cab of the truck and was now sleeping beside him on the metal, curled up with his back against Matt’s hip.

  Matt reached down and touched the boy’s head.

  12

  “We’ll be home today,” Matt said. “I just called work and told them I’d be in tomorrow.” The radiator had a hairline crack, the mechanic had said, so he’d tried to seal it and they’d refilled the fluid. It would get them home, at the very least.

  “What’d they say to that at Delco?”

  “No one was happy. They’ll be all right.”

  “Matthew,” said Marissa, “where did you go? Why aren’t you here?”

  Matt stared at the wall of the truck stop. Joe was still inside the car, and Matt was leaning against the grill of his pickup, feet crossed, staring at the silver buttons on the pay phone.

  He said, “It was just one more thing. I went to see his father and made sure he’d agree to it all.”

  “All the way back? Why did
n’t you leave him here? With us?”

  “I just didn’t want to keep droppin’ him off to different people, Mare.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Okay.”

  “We’re gonna eat, then drive the rest of the way. We’ll be there by one or two.”

  “How is he?”

  “He’s fine.”

  She paused, then said, “What’s he like?”

  “You’ll have to meet him. He’s quiet. He likes Life cereal. That’s all I know.”

  “Is this too crazy?” she asked. “To do all of this? Tell me if this is too crazy, Matt. Talking to you yesterday, I just felt how right it was to have him come live with us. Now it’s the next day and I’m thinking maybe it’s not so right.”

  “There’s nothing crazy about it at all,” Matt said. “You felt right the first time.”

  “Daddy’s all messed up,” she said. “He’s coming over later. He took the day off of work, too.”

  “Okay,” Matt said. “We won’t be long.”

  Inside, in a booth, Matt tried to quiz Joe about what he liked, but he wouldn’t talk, and he only looked down at the menu. Matt realized he probably couldn’t read. There were large, bright pictures of possible breakfasts. Joe was smiling at them.

  “You like pancakes?” he said. “Everyone likes pancakes.”

  Joe shook his head no.

  When the waitress came, Matt nodded to her and ordered an omelet. “And what would you like, darling?” she said, turning to Joe.

  Joe looked up at her.

  “Do you have cereal?” Matt asked her.

  “We’ve got some Cheerios,” she said.

  Matt looked at Joe, eyebrows up. Joe nodded.

  “Looks like we’ll take one order of Cheerios.”

  When she left, Matt sipped at his coffee a little, then looked at Joe and said, “I know you wanna talk. I’m not saying you have to. You don’t have to do anything. I’m just saying that somewhere in there I bet you anything you’ve got a little ticker running and saying things to yourself. You know that everyone has that, right? So when you want to talk, what you do is you open up the door a little bit and let some of it run out to your mouth. Just be careful with what. Some people in the world just open the door completely and they never stop talking. You don’t want to be like that.”

  Joe smiled even though he was looking down. He pulled the bouncy ball out of his pocket and stared at it.

  “You don’t wanna be the other way, though,” Matt said. “And never do it. You need that, too. You need to talk to people. Everyone does.”

  Joe kept looking at the ball.

  “There’s a balance,” Matt said.

  He was going to leave it there, as Joe still hadn’t looked him in the eye, but one more thought came to Matt’s mind, and it was as though he had to say it, as though he was convinced by his own advice about letting some things out, about needing to sometimes allow the unexpected transmissions to break through. How else did one tell the truth, ever? Messages came up from all sorts of sources; at times they were not correct. He felt this one was.

  He said, “You’re free.”

  Joe looked up at him.

  The boy’s dark eyes were clear and unwavering.

  Matt said, “Everyone’s free.”

  They ate their breakfast in silence. He felt none of the mountain-moving feelings he’d felt in the past week and instead was just locked in a kind of easy, low feeling. He thought about Darren. He imagined him upside down in his machine. He hoped he’d never see him again or have to think of him again. He wanted him simply to be gone. He knew he probably wasn’t, but for now he would allow himself to believe he was.

  When they were finished eating, Matt said, “Okay. Now there’s something important we have to do. No more talking, no more eating.”

  Joe was scooping around at the bottom of his cereal bowl.

  “One minor pit stop down there,” Matt said, nodding. “Come on.”

  He left money on the table and tried not to think of what he’d spent on gas and rooms. It would take months to get things stabilized again. He led Joe down the hall of the truck stop and then they came to the bathroom door. “This is what they call a public bathroom,” Matt said. “Got it?” He pushed open the door.

  Inside, Matt told him all there was to know about urinals, then demonstrated how one approached the urinal, used the urinal, flushed the urinal, and stepped back away from the urinal, then went to the sink, then went toward the door. He said, “That’s the whole thing. It’s easy. I’m sure you know about this. So think of all this as a refresher course.”

  Joe looked at the white urinal.

  “Now you,” Matt said.

  He looked up at Matt.

  “Really,” he said. “It’s easy.”

  Joe took a step forward, then slid the ball back into his pocket. He looked at Matt one more time, then walked the rest of the way, to the kiddie urinal, and stood in front of it.

  “Don’t forget the pants,” Matt said.

  Matt watched, pleased, as Joe went through all the steps. On the walk back out, he put his hand down on Joe’s head again and said, “Good work,” and they walked through the glass doors, into the sun. It was a beautiful day. People were moving about, gassing up their cars, sitting at picnic tables. Across the lot there were about twenty semis all in a row, and Matt could even see a few of the truckers through the windshields. He felt a strong, strong sensation of needing to be home. But they weren’t far away. They went to the truck, and Matt said, “Okay. Last stop. You need anything else? Otherwise we’re going straight through.”

  Joe shook his head no, and Matt nodded, opened the door, and helped him up into the truck. It was just as he was shutting the door that he looked to his left and saw that the cradle was gone.

  Matt’s eyes went wide, and he moved to the empty space. Bits of his twine were there but frayed, and the bungee cords were in a little twisted pile. His head shot up, and he looked back and forth at all the different vehicles and all the different people he’d just so sentimentally considered. He closed his eyes for a second, enraged, and mashed his teeth together. He should have parked somewhere where he could see the thing from their table, through the window. Why hadn’t he?

  “Please don’t tell me you don’t know that woman” came a man’s voice from behind.

  Matt turned. There was a yuppie-looking guy standing two spots down. He was at the trunk of his Volkswagen. “What woman?”

  “Goddamnit,” the man said, shaking his head. He closed the trunk, then stepped closer. “So I was standing right here, okay, and I watched this chick walk by, then walk by again. Then she came back and cut all of the string with a little knife and just picked up whatever that whole bundle was and walked off with it.”

  “When was this?”

  “Ten minutes ago,” he said. He shook his head and looked out at the highway in the distance. “I’m sorry, man. She drove off. I kept thinking it was shady, but I thought it was hers. Or her truck. Or something. I don’t know.”

  “What’d she look like?”

  “She wasn’t too tall. Short. Red hair. Maybe fifty-five or sixty.”

  “You have got to be fucking kidding me,” Matt said, crossing his arms and closing his eyes.

  “What was it?”

  Matt opened his eyes and looked at the man.

  “What was what?”

  “What’d she take? Under the tarp.”

  Matt looked back at the empty bed of the truck, then looked back at the man. “It was a cradle,” he said. “From the Civil War.”

  The man nodded, put his hands on his hips. “Well,” he said, “that totally sucks.”

  Matt didn’t know what else to tell Joe just before he turned the engine off. He didn’t say anything to the boy. Instead, he looked down at his knuckles.

  Joe was transfixed by the front of the house. Matt was impressed: Joe was probably the first person in the history of St. Helens to be transfixed by the front of this partic
ular house. It was yellow with white shutters and a tar-paper roof. The front porch and steps were concrete, and a long crack ran along the stairs. It had been only getting bigger. There were weeds here and there, but the lawn looked okay still, even though he hadn’t mowed since last week, since before the barbecue. They were home.

  Matt opened his mouth to just say “Okay” to Joe, but as he did, he looked up, and Marissa opened the front door of the house and stepped out onto the porch, arms crossed, and then Glen, behind her, floated, looking furtive.

  Marissa’s hair was gone. She’d cut it all off again. Now it was cropped short, a little bit spiky here and there. Matt smiled and she waved, but she waited there on the porch.

  He’d given Joe their names and had tried to explain again who they were. What else could he do? He leaned over and said, “Okay,” then opened his door and got out. He went to Marissa and gave her a long hug, pushing his cheek into her neck and breathing in. Her belly pressed into his.

  He said, “Hi,” and she said, “Hi.”

  “Why’d you chop it off?” he asked her. “I was starting to get used to you being stylish.”

  “Every single thing is uncomfortable,” she said. “I had to do something. It was pretty much all I had left.”

  He put his hand in her hair and scratched her head. “It looks good.”

  Matt turned to Glen and held out his hand to shake. Glen took it and shook it but didn’t look at Matt.

  He was still looking at the truck.

  “His name’s Joe,” Matt said, turning and going back to the truck. Before he got there, Joe had already opened the door, and Matt took his backpack and helped him get down.

  Matt closed the door and Joe stood quietly, looking at Marissa and Glen.

  Marissa took a few slow steps forward, then squatted down low and said, “Hi, Joe,” and waved from across the yard.

  Glen was still up at the door. Matt saw that he’d turned another color, something whitish-green, and he was backing away, into the house.

  “Daddy,” Marissa said, looking back over her shoulder, “stop blubbering. Go get him his present.”