Marry or Burn (21 page)

Would he want to do that? Not that. But something. He knew Mr. Lofgren got off early on Thursdays because of the extra time he put in coaching. His car was on the street so he was home, though no lights were on in the front room. Gabe
imagined him in a den in the back, sitting in front of the TV. If they were home from day care his younger daughters would be in there, little droopy girls hanging around not knowing enough to memorize what he looked like: his big forearms thickly covered with blond hair, his quarterback jersey with the white latex 11, his size 13 feet. Gabe probably knew more about the man than they did.

At the beginning of his ninth-grade year Lofgren had said Gabe was turning into a good ball handler. But he had not built up the speed that was expected of him, and almost as quickly as his ability to grab rebounds had come on, it was gone; his mind had robbed his body of it. When he got out on the court in PE his brain locked on to some string of words—even some rule stamped on the equipment bins—and ran them, until at a certain point the rhythm would get in the way of what his body was doing and he would be shut in with the sound, and a nearly irresistible feeling that the others were not on the court with him, were in fact far enough away that he could not tell for sure what they were shouting. With each occurrence the sensation had an added power and reasonableness. And there was a certain way Mr. Lofgren came to eye him, and slap him on the back, and pick him for errands, that made him think Lofgren—always ready to kid around but not, Gabe thought looking back, really as funny, or smart, or tuned in to his athletes as most of the kids considered him to be—thought something was the matter with him, something that had to be talked over with his mother. So, the telephone call. “Gabe? Carl Lofgren. Is your mom at home?” So that was the beginning of that.

Two hours had gone by soundlessly, except for the tap of pigeons' beaks. Something had attracted a flock of pigeons and all afternoon they had been stabbing at the pavement, near enough to his feet that he could feel it through his shoe soles. A
bird needed a lot to eat, because of its metabolism, the number of seeds and insects it had to eat to stay alive and keep scratching away at the insects living
on
it, in its feathers and on its skin. Everything eating. The thought began to exert an unpleasant spell. He couldn't decide whether pink, the pink of rubber bands, was supposed to be the color of pigeons' feet—he could not recall ever seeing it before—or whether this was a rare group of pigeons. All right. He pressed his back against the tree; he was not going to dwell on birds, or their feet, or the life of no arms and of pecking the sidewalk.

He was not going to pay attention to anything and everything, as he had.

He blew on his hands and pressed them over his cold ears. Suddenly a woman walked past the front window. So Lofgren's wife was at home. She was supposed to be a checker at the Safeway, that's what his mother said. He could see that she was small, like his mother, and not screaming at anybody, not holding her head or waving her arms. She merely passed by the window, holding newspapers under her arm. No screams, no tears. She did not see him.

Just after four o'clock by his watch, the door opened. He crouched behind the bin as Mr. Lofgren came out onto the porch. He was taller and bigger in the belly and shoulders than Gabe had been remembering, longer-armed, pulling on his football jacket with the leather sleeves. The air lifted the thin blond hair on top of his head. Like an animal emerging from a burrow, he aimed his big forehead and nose to one side and the other. He bent and picked up two yellow leaves off his doormat and dropped them over the edge of the porch, and then he ran down the steps, shaking out his knees to either side. He opened the trunk, pulled out a car seat and chucked it into the back of the car, and swiped leaves off the windshield with his sleeve. When
he got in, the tires spread with his weight. They scraped, angled out, and he drove away down the block.

The car stopped with a thud and went into reverse. He roared back, braking in front of the recycling bin. “Hi there,” he said, rolling down the window. “Why don't you get in and I'll give you a ride home. I'm going to pick up Lars. Get in.”

Gabe stood frozen.

“Get in.”

He had to. When he did, he and Mr. Lofgren faced each other and shook hands. He looked briefly into Mr. Lofgren's big shiny eyes and away. Mr. Lofgren's hand was large, dry, and hot, while his own, he felt, was cold and moist and had not kept pace with his growth.

“So I hear Lars was the name of your brother,” he found the voice to say after a block or so, when Mr. Lofgren drove on without speaking.

“Yes it was.”

“I didn't know that,” he said lamely.
Lars Lofgren
, he said to himself.
Stupid name
.

“Well, we'll be getting to know a good bit about each other,” Mr. Lofgren said, driving with one hand. Some moments passed before he looked over at Gabe. “My brother Lars,” he said, “stepped on a mine. He was dragging his sergeant, bringing him in. I didn't see it, I was back at the base.” He pulled up in front of a small house with a tricycle in the yard.

“That musta been bad,” Gabe said. “Both of you out there.”

Mr. Lofgren leaned towards him. “That's exactly what your mother would say.” He jumped out of the car and on the sidewalk he signaled for Gabe to roll down his window. He came close, breathing on the glass as it went down. “Man, it was the best thing we ever did.”

While they were piling the satchels, pack, infant seat, and
blankets into the car, the baby, slung into the car seat sideways, began to cry. “Hey!” Mr. Lofgren said, and closed his hand over the baby's whole face. He rubbed. The crying stopped and the baby's stunned eyes fixed themselves on Mr. Lofgren, who did it again. Slowly the baby smiled. He widened his eyes, and then shut them tightly, waiting. Mr. Lofgren did it again, more roughly, and again, until Gabe felt a stitching in his own scalp and said, “I don't know, does he really like that?”

“Does that grin tell you anything?”

They let themselves into the house with Mr. Lofgren's key. After they dropped the stuff in the hallway the first thing Mr. Lofgren did was grab a bottle out of the refrigerator and crash down into the new chair. He tilted the chair back and jostled the baby into the crook of his arm.

“Don't you have to warm it?” Gabe said.

“Nah, that's a myth.” He was jolting the baby up and down as it sucked. “This is her milk, you know. Pumps it every day. It's an incredible thing, a beautiful thing. We bottle-fed all four of ours. What did I know?” Gabe could hear the air bubbles going into the baby's mouth from the nipple. That was not right. He remembered Chris's mother feeding Katie from a bottle, speaking to him, Gabe, for some reason. Saying how you had to do this and that. In Chris's room they made fun of the baby. They must have been four. If they were four, his father was alive, maybe coming to get him at Chris's house.

He sat down in the rocking chair and shut his eyes. The streaming of the bubbles went on and on. Finally he said, “Maybe you oughta burp him.”

“Well, why not?” Mr. Lofgren said. “Let's give it a try.” He heaved the baby onto his shoulder and thumped him, whereupon milk spewed all over the back of the chair. “Whoa, cleanup crew. Gabe?” The phone rang. Mr. Lofgren rolled out of the chair and
scooped up the phone with the hand that had the bottle. “Hey. Whadda you mean who is it? It's me. We're feeding Lars. Gabe. Yeah. Gave him a ride. Yeah. He came to see me.” He winked at Gabe. “Well, come on then. Yeah. I can stay. I'll stay for dinner. They're all right. They will. They'll come through all right.”

“Who will?” Gabe said rudely when he hung up.

The blond eyebrows drew together in the big dented forehead. Mr. Lofgren said with dignity, “We were discussing my kids. My girls. Not the big ones, they're OK. The little ones.”

“I bet they're mad,” Gabe said.

“Mad? No. No, I wouldn't say they're mad.”

“Well what are they?”

Halfway into the chair Mr. Lofgren gave him a look before he let himself down with the baby. He arranged himself. Then he said, “I'll tell you. What are they? They're forgiving. They're forgiving.” He thought for a minute. “That's the way girls are, with their father.” Then—Gabe could not believe it was happening—Lofgren's eyes developed a brighter shine and a big flashing tear welled out onto his cheek.

He didn't make a sound, but muscles were pulling in his face and a few tears dripped onto his shirt and onto the baby. Gabe couldn't look. His own face felt large and hot. He was surprised, somewhere else in his mind, that the wind rattling the window and the leaves sailing past it and the sound of the radiator banging on did not crowd in on him as they might have. In the months of his illness these things would have distracted him from any embarrassing situation. In fact they had done away with any such thing as an embarrassing situation.

At length Mr. Lofgren wiped his eyes with his thumb and took a shaky breath. With no preliminaries, the baby had fallen asleep. Gabe didn't want to get up and leave because leaving would suggest he was not in the living room of his own house.
That was another thing, the drug slowed his decisions. He had always been quick to decide. There was still the baby's mess going down the back of the chair. “Guess I'll wipe that up,” he said, without doing anything.

Mr. Lofgren said, “Your mother is a wonderful woman.”

Gabe remembered a cartoon in which a cow was telling a calf, as another cow jumped over the moon, “Your mother is a remarkable woman.” He remembered the calf's stupid, open mouth, its eyelashes. He felt himself grin. Mr. Lofgren frowned, his tears gone. “You think that's funny? I'm not trying to be funny. At school, you boys, you get used to me being funny, I know that.” He had fallen into a kind of singsong, leaning forward. Because he coached basketball he sometimes tried to get a black rhythm into his talk, a habit everyone, black and white, made fun of. Harmless fun, because it was Mr. Lofgren. “You boys think highly of me, I know. I know that. I would guess there's some disappointment. Especially you, Gabe. You must be disappointed at what I've done.”

“What, having a kid?”

“You think that's all there is to it? You think we just went and had this kid? There's a lot involved here. This is a
life
here.”

Maybe a serial killer
, Gabe thought.

Mr. Lofgren lumbered to his feet with the sleeping baby and laid it down ceremoniously on the couch. “Listen,” he said. “We named him Lars, right? That means something to me. That means he's my responsibility. But I have four more kids. Your mother understands that.”

“You mean you're not getting married.”

“We're getting married,” he said, his big mouth turning down. “I know it, your mother knows it, and my wife knows it.” He pointed two fingers at Gabe. “I'll tell you something. My brother Lars didn't get married. Why not? He matured early. He could
have gotten married. He almost did, before he went. These were two kids who never broke up in four years of high school. Next thing, he was
dead
. But I'll tell you this, if he had married Ronna—had
he
married
her
, they'd have been married for life. That's the kind of person he was. No fooling around, no giving in. No retreat, baby, no surrender. He would not have disappointed you boys. You see what I'm saying? I'm disappointed in myself.”

“Well, don't do it, then.”

“That's just what your mother says. ‘Go on back to her.' Like
her
, right? With your dad. Faithful to a dead guy. She's like Lars. My brother. Same kind of a person.”

“Except
she
hates the military.”

“That's right. Yes, she does.”

“She hates it.”

“You're saying you're surprised she picked me.”

In its sleep the baby—put down at an angle, its big head closest to the edge—began to roll over. In the time it took Gabe to open his mouth, the head hung in air, the body finished turning and dropped headfirst onto the rug.

“Oh Jesus!” Mr. Lofgren leapt, colliding with Gabe and almost stepping on the baby. Gabe shoved him out of the way and gathered the baby up. Mr. Lofgren tried to haul it out of his arms and for a minute they scuffled, turning, arm against arm, as if Lofgren were fouling him as he tried to shoot.

The baby could not get breath to cry. When he got his wind he howled. The howling was deep, for a baby, and angry, and Gabe understood that the baby was furious at having no power to alter whatever happened to it. Mr. Lofgren had stopped trying to wrench it away from him and was feeling all over its scalp with his broad hand. “He's not hurt,” he kept crooning, as if he could tell with his hand. “He's not hurt. That's all I need to do, is hurt
him.” Gabe got the baby firmly against his chest and Mr. Lofgren backed away and sank onto the radiator in front of the window instead of the big chair.

Gabe sat down while the baby peeled off one howl after another. He had not held a baby before, but something told him to put it up against his shoulder, although that way the yells funneled directly into his ear. He felt the furious muscles contract all over, struggle against him, and only gradually give way. He kept his hold strong. The baby was not big, as it appeared from its big joggling head, but small, a thing that could be dropped, or stepped on, or thrown out the window. He felt its lip, wet on his neck; he positioned his hand behind the head so his fingers covered the big soft ear that was in the open, to keep out the noise its owner was making.

The baby continued its jerking bawl. Mr. Lofgren sat with his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands. After a while he groaned through his fingers, “Walk around.” He remained slumped on the radiator for so long with the light behind him that when he finally came to and jumped up, hearing the key in the door, Gabe saw his image still there on the window.