An American Family: The Baby With the Curious Markings Read online

  AN AMERICAN FAMILY

  The Baby with the Curious Markings

  HARRY CREWS

  2006

  FOR GEORGE KINGSON

  Your exquisite cradle of body,

  mind and spirit has rocked me

  to a place where only the angels know.

  You gave me back my life.

  Lovely lady, my heart will forever

  beat with your heart.

  Chapter One

  It was Sunday, Major Melton’s second wedding anniversary. As soon as he opened his eyes he heard the demented barking of the pit bulldog. Then all the way from the other room he smelled the baby. The baby boy with the strange markings. The dog’s barking got louder. Curled beside him under the thin blanket, his wife farted briefly as she snored counterpoint to the sound of the dog. He knew the dog was probably as crazy as it was ever going to get by now. Poor bastard. Major was sympathetic. The dog had gone berserk from being tied on a leash that was too short. Major’s own problem exactly, which hardly made him or the dog unique. Everybody he knew was going quietly mad from being tied on a leash that was too short.

  My God, he thought, hardly awake and it already felt like a bad day. Another bad day in a whole calendar of bad days. His dog was out there tied to the only tree left in the whole neighborhood. There used to be a forest here until a developer decided this would be a great place to build something called Crippled Horse Acres. So the first thing the developer did was bring in an army of bulldozers, push down every living thing, and burn it up.

  A single tree had been spared. Nobody knew why. Major was fairly sure he had paid an extra ten thousand dollars for his house because he got the tree. His wife had fallen in love with it.

  “I’ve fallen in love with that tree,” she said one early Spring evening when they drove by the vacant lot where the house would later be built. For the moment the lot held nothing but a single spindly tree.

  He only looked at her, unable to think of anything to say after her naked declaration of love for the tree.

  “Don’t let anything happen to it,” she said, “or you know what.”

  He did know what — the bitch would cut him cold between the sheets — so he said, “I’ll make sure the tree’s well taken care of.” But he tried not to think about it too much because God knows he had too much to think about already.

  Nicky rolled out of bed and padded to the bathroom.

  Even after two years of marriage, the sight of her naked made his stomach pitch and roll. She was thin as a model and lightly muscled from hours of swimming laps in the pool at the junior college where he taught English. By any measure, she was an incredibly beautiful girl with a stunning body. He had thought more than once that the way she looked might very well be the root of all his problems. He had gone about marriage the way he was convinced most guys went about it. He had married for reasons of the flesh. When it came time for him to think about getting married, he became determined not to spend the rest of his life looking across the bed or across the breakfast table at a homely girl. As puberty approached he had started thinking it must be as easy to fall in love with a good-looking girl as it was one that was plain. He had finished a hitch in the Marine Corps before he decided that the girl he married might as well be wealthy as well as good-looking. It had not been easy but he had managed to pull it off and he had never been sorry. Her money was, after all, how he managed a two hundred thousand dollar house on a junior college teacher’s salary. Well, not her money really, her parent’s. But it might as well as have been hers because they loved their daughter and wanted her to have the very best of everything. Which made them generous to a fault. They were both dentists with great smiles and consummate dental technique. God bless their money and their teeth.

  She came back to bed and was getting under the covers when the baby made a sound as if somebody had stepped on him. For a moment Major Melton lay very still wondering if he could get away without reminding her that they were expecting a visitor this afternoon. He clearly could not. It was pay now or pay later. Later would be worse.

  He tried anyway. “We’ve got to get up unless you want me to get on the horn and call Peter. Tell him I’m sick or something. I can call it off if you like. He won’t be all that freaked about not watching the Super Bowl with us.”

  She was suddenly off the bed, standing tall, bright as a nickel. “How could you even think such a thing?” she said. “He’d be crushed.” She turned her head to glance at the clock. “You get the baby. I’ll make coffee. Get shaking now. Petey is never late.”

  Ah, Petey. Never Peter or Pete. In her mouth, he was always Petey, like she was his fucking mother or something.

  Yeah, or something, like maybe his whore. He snatched his Levis from the back of a chair and hopped down the hallway on one leg, trying to pull the Levis on as he went. He hopped into his son’s room and stopped beside the crib. Major leaned into the crib until he was close over his son.

  “Damn, you stink, little boy,” he said.

  The baby said something back to him, something wet and smelling of milk. Then the boy reached up with his tiny, dimpled hands and started a careful examination of his feet.

  God, he was a beautiful baby. But beautiful or not, Major had a terrible problem with the way his son looked. There was too much of Peter about him. For one thing, he had a deep cleft in his chin. The cleft was so deep you could hide a quarter in it. Major had never tried to hide one in it, of course, but he thought you probably could hide a goddamn quarter in it. And his friend Peter — the very guy who had introduced him to his wife — had such a cleft.

  Major had never seen a cleft before he met Peter. Now his fucking infant son had one. Was there a coincidence in the whole world large enough to accommodate that sorry fact? He hoped so, he did fervently hope so, but finally he doubted it. And if it was not a coincidence, then all he was left with was his gross, night-time visions of Pete mounting his wife.

  As he watched, the baby struggled to put his toes in his mouth. Major would rather take a beating than open his son’s overfull diaper, but he did not have to like it, he only had to do it, so he held his breath and bent to the task.

  “One of the pleasures of parenthood,” he said grimly to himself. And then to his son: “You ought to be ashamed, befouling yourself like this and you already nearly six months old.”

  He pulled open the Velcro fasteners of the diaper. The mound that confronted him was yellow and of an odor indescribable, but he was not really looking at the place where his son had found relief. Not any more. Now that the diaper was open, his attention was focused on his son’s cock, standing at half-mast and about as big as a peanut. However, it was not the half erection that caused him to stare in what he thought was probably an unseemly way. Rather, it was the markings, the strange markings on the tiny cock. On one side, from root to circumcised tip was the purple figure of a camel. At least it looked like a camel most of the time. Other times it looked like a lion standing on its back legs. The image varied but not the startling color. It was always bright purple. The royal color.

  The doctor at the birthing, and the pediatricians later, all agreed it was a birthmark. Perhaps unfortunately located, but a birthmark all the same, and therefore nothing to worry about. But it worried him none-the-less. He did not know the world of birthmarks very well, except he was fairly certain that a baby had to get a birthmark from either its mother or its father. And so far as he had been able to discover, neither he nor his wife had a birthmark, whether purple or any other color. And God knows he had looked. First on himself and then on Nicky. She had not taken the examination all
that well.

  “You son-of-a-bitch,” she had said in a voice that was a fierce little whisper. “This is grounds for divorce. What time is it anyway?”

  “It’s still early,” he said. “Now if you could turn over and lift your ass a bit, perhaps …”

  “You’ve looked there,” she hissed through clenched teeth. “Turn out the light, damn it.”

  “It’s not that I haven’t looked there,” he said, “only maybe I haven’t looked, you know, well enough and …”

  “I’ll slap you blind, if you don’t turn out the light and go to sleep.”

  Her way of talking had turned violent over the past eighteen months or so. He did not like it. He even found it, at times, frightening. He quickly turned off the light and laid breathing quietly into the dark of the bedroom.

  Still, over time, he had been able to search every square inch of her several times, even if it did keep her in a state of mild outrage. In fact, it had occurred to him that her anger was all out of proportion to the small cooperation he had asked of her, which only made his suspicions stronger that the baby had not got his strange markings from Nicky or from him. That, to his mind, left only Peter. Did Peter have the same purple markings on his dick? How could Major find out for sure one way or the other? It was a question that had rarely been out of his mind since he had first seen his son’s ugly little cock.

  “You don’t mean to make an all day project out of changing that baby’s diaper, do you?”

  He looked up to see his wife standing in the doorway, her hip cocked in a sarcastic question mark.

  “I won’t be but another minute, Honey.”

  “I’ll finish with the baby,” she said. “You go and talk to Petey.”

  “I didn’t hear him come in.”

  “He’s in the back yard. He’s gone out to see how the dog’s doing.”

  “Maybe I can get him to take it home with him.”

  “Don’t you dare say a word to Petey. Not one word. He’s a friend and that dog was a gift. I’ll bet he’s never given one of the pits to anybody else before.”

  “The beast wasn’t even his to give, belonged to his daddy.”

  “Well, hell, I knew that.”

  “Damn, I can’t win for losing. First I couldn’t refuse the dog because it was a gift, now I can’t give it back for the same reason.”

  “You and I know that’s not the way it happened. But go ahead and blame the whole thing on me.”

  “I’m not blaming you for anything. Should I? Is there something to blame you for?”

  “What’s wrong with you? What are you talking about?”

  “You’re the one who brought it up.”

  “What? Brought what up?”

  “Blame.”

  “Have you been drinking too?”

  “Too? What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Petey’s been in the bottle already this morning. I can tell. And you’re beginning to sound a little drunk, too.”

  “I’m not. But I’m beginning to wish I was.” He turned and started down the hall.

  He had his hand on the back door when she said, “Take him a beer.”

  “What?”

  “He wants a beer.”

  “Is that what he said?”

  “I said you’d bring him one. And don’t sound so self-righteous. It is Super Bowl Sunday, you know.”

  “Good Christ, Nicky.”

  “You begrudge poor Petey a beer?”

  Poor fucking Petey and poor fucking tree with fucking dog tied to it and poor fucking baby with poor fucking markings on his tiny dick and all of it on the poor fucking scam that is Super fucking Bowl Sunday. How utterly depressing. He felt his whole life quietly unraveling. But he was determined to hold what he could together so he winked at his wife, and said, “Right it is, my dear. One beer coming up for Petey.”

  Nicky said, “Well thank God. That sounds more like it.”

  Major went to the refrigerator and took out two bottles of beer and walked into the backyard.

  The sun was almost directly overhead in a sky that was blue and cloudless. The pit bull lay on its hard, flat stomach with its head — only slightly bigger than a man’s fist — resting on the ground between its forelegs.

  “Your dog is shithouse crazy,” Pete said, taking the beer that was offered him.

  “He’s not my dog.”

  “Who owns the only tree in sight?”

  “Leave the tree out of it.”

  “Can’t be done. Not in a million. There’s only one tree as far as the eye can see. You own it, it would seem. Therefore, whatever’s tied to the tree belongs to you.”

  “Your logic is as crooked as you are. How much you had to drink this morning?”

  “Well, hell, it is Super Bowl Sunday.”

  “The Super Bowl doesn’t even make the day special. When’s the last time you saw a good game in the Super Bowl?”

  “My point exactly,” Pete said. “The tree now, that’s different. And then the dog. Then you.”

  “Go back in the kitchen and look in the bottom of the fridge. Get yourself another beer and press it to your face. You’ll feel better. Get me one while you’re at it. I’m going to give the dog some fresh water if I can get close enough to him without him tearing my arm off.”

  “Pits don’t need water, they need blood.”

  Major threw back his head and stared into the cloudless sky before making a sound that was half-sigh, half-groan. “Every time I think I’ve seen the worst from you, there’s always something nastier on the other side.”

  “Hell, that’s not nasty. You want nasty? I can show you nasty.”

  “Just don’t make up something that’ll take me for a fool.”

  “I’m not making anything up here, only describing what I see. Get used to it.”

  “I don’t like it. Quit with the description.”

  “Can’t do that, Bro.”

  “I’m not your brother.”

  “Of course we’re brothers. We’ve always been brothers. Some day you’ll know that. I love you, man.”

  “Don’t love me.”

  “Since I’m trying to get you to see how things are, I want you to think about birds of prey.” He quickly held up his hand, palm out. “Wait. Let me finish. Birds of prey — hawks and eagles and such — won’t drink water unless they’re sick. If they’re really healthy and down with the world, all they want, all they’ll drink is blood.”

  “Is that really true?”

  “Sure it’s true.”

  “Who told you that?”

  Pete smiled. “Dad told me.”

  “I guess I walked right into that one.”

  “I guess you did,” Pete said.

  Major dropped his head back and screamed into the unmarked sky. “NNICKYY!”

  “No use getting your wife into this. And remember, it is Sunday. Not everybody gets up for the Super Bowl. You’ll have every late sleeper on the block out here mad enough to crucify us.”

  “I feel like I’ve already been crucified,” said Major. The back door slammed open and there stood Nicky, bright as light, in shorts that were too tight and too short, making Major momentarily forget the problem with the dog and remember only the problem with his strangely marked son.

  “Petey, for Christ’s sweet sake,” said Nicky in a voice pitched strangely low and lilting, “Can’t you do anything about him? He’s been crazy all morning.”

  Pete had gone over to sit on the step next to where she was standing. Major could hear the flirt in her voice. In a single dreadful instant he realized that she had no fucking shame, this woman, and realized too that he did not know her.

  “I was thinking about taking him and his poor animal over to Dad’s store before the game. I really don’t know if even Dad can bring him back or not. Nicky, he’s got this dog as dry as burnt toast. I’ve been trying to tell him that without help it’ll be dead before dark.”

  Major turned slowly to face Pete. “Why are you lying? Bur
nt toast, Pete? Burnt fucking toast? Dead before dark, Pete? You were telling me no such thing. Why are you lying like this? What have I ever done to you?”

  Chapter Two

  In the living room in front of the television set, the baby was slapping the pit bull across the head with a soiled diaper. The dog was wearing a muzzle made of black wire. Above the muzzle his eyes were malevolent and shot with blood. The eyes never seemed to blink and lay in the bony little skull staring with such intensity they seemed crossed. The baby swung the diaper and slapped the dog again, then raised the diaper to his mouth and chewed on it.

  “Nicky, please do something about this baby, would you?”

  “Just listen to yourself, Major. Petey, will you listen to him?”

  “I ain’t got time for this. I ought to get the dog on over to the Pit Stop and let Daddy have a look at’m before it’s too late.”

  “Said he was dying is all you said.”

  “Believe I said you was killing’m. It’s a difference.”

  Sitting in a low chair, Pete did not look up from his long yellow feet that he was working on, scaling dead skin way from his discolored toes with a tiny knife. The way he was concentrating on the particles of skin sifting toward the floor made Major’s gorge rise. And he wondered vaguely if he could kill Pete. It seemed a right and natural thought and it did not surprise him at all. It never did.

  “Not to the dog, I wouldn’t imagine.”

  “What?”

  “Make a difference.”

  Nicky stood straight out of her chair and in a tight little voice said: “Jesus fucking Christ. I need to find a shot of whiskey.”

  When she was gone, Major said: “I wonder what the hell’s eating her?”

  “The curse, old son, the curse. Women get it and we pay for it.”

  Major felt something cold and smooth move over his spine. Now how did this son-of-a-bitch know his wife was on the rag?

  Pete was staring at him. “You all right, man?”

  “Why, shouldn’t I be?”