Sweet Land Stories

BABY WILSON

I had taken up with her knowing she was this crazy lovesick girl. It was against my better judgment. I was too accustomed to having my life made easy. I was stuck in my tracks by the smitten sweet smile and the pale eyes. With straight brown hair she never fussed with but to wash it. And she wore long cotton dresses and no shoes in the business district. Karen. A whole year ago. And now she had gone and done this thing.

She held it out to me all rolled up in a blanket.

Where’d you get that?

Lester, this is our baby. He is named Jesu because he is a Spanish-looking child. He will be a dark saturnine young man with slim hips like yours.

The face was still red with its effort to be born, and the hair was slick with something like pomade, and it had small dark eyes struggling to see. Around his wrist was a plastic band.

I don’t want to hold him, I said. Take him back.

Oh silly man, she said, smiling, cradling it in her arms. It’s not hard to hold a dear child.

No, Karen, I mean take him back to the hospital where you stole him.

I couldn’t do that, Lester. I couldn’t do that — this is my newborn child, this is my tiny little thing his momma loves so that I am giving to you to be your son.

And she smiled at me that dreamland smile of hers.

She moved her shoulders from side to side and sang to it, but the little arms sort of jerked and waved a bit and she didn’t seem to notice. There was a dried blob of blood on the front of its wrappings.

I looked at the clock. It was just noon. Was this a reasonable day, Karen should have been at Nature’s Basket doing up her flowers.

I went into the bedroom and put on my jeans and a fresh shirt. I wet my hair and combed it and got a beer from the kitchen.

There were two hospitals in Crenshaw, the private one in the historic district and the county one out by the interstate. What did it matter where she took it from, either one would be just as good. Or I could drive it direct to the police station, not the smartest move in the world. Or I could just take the Durango and leave.

Instead of any of these things, by which I would finally reform into a person who makes executive decisions, I thought to myself I would not want to shock such a woman in her dangerous blissful state of mind, and so went back and tried again, as if you could argue sense into someone who was never too steady to begin with and was now totally bereft of her remaining faculties.

This is wrong, Karen. It is wrong to go around stealing babies.

But this is my baby, she said, staring into its face. I mean our baby, Lester. Yours and mine. I bore it as you conceived it.

I went over to the couch where she had sat down and I looked again at the wristband. It said “Baby Wilson.”

My name is not Wilson and your name is not Wilson, I said.

That is a simple clerical error. Jesu is our love child, Lester. He is the indissoluble bond God has placed upon our union. God commanded this. We can never part now — we are a family.

And she looked at me with her pale eyes all adazzle.

Jesu, if it was him, was crying in little yelps and its head was turning this way and that with its mouth open and its little hands were all a-tremor.

I had known she would finally put me at risk. I tried to pay no attention when she stole things and presented them to me, because they were little things and of no use. A Mexican embroidered nightshirt, whereas I like to sleep in the altogether, or a silver money clip in the shape of an L for Lester, like I was some downtown lawyer, or an antique music box, for Christ’s sake, that plays “Columbia the Gem of the Ocean,” as if anyone would want to hear it more than once. Totally the wrong things for me, if it was me she was stealing for, whereas I was hard pressed to get a decent meal in this household.

Karen opened her blouse and put the baby to her breast. It hadn’t changed any that I could see — of course there was no milk there.

I sat down next to her and pointed the remote at the TV: cartoon, a rerun, puppets, a rerun, nature, a preacher, and then I found the local news station.

Just like them, they hadn’t heard the news yet.

KAREN, I SAID, I’ll be right back, and I drove into town to the Bluebird. It was lunchtime, busy as hell, and Brenda wasn’t too pleased, but seeing the look in my eyes she took a cigarette break out the back door. I told her what was what.

She stood listening, Brenda, and shook her head.

Lester, she said, your brains are in your balls. That is the way you are and the way you’ll always be.

Goddamnit, Brenda, it’s not something I’ve done, you understand. Is this what I need to hear from you right now?

She was squinting at me from the smoke drifting up into her eyes.

I said, And you sometimes haven’t minded if that’s where my brain is, as I recall.

Brenda is as unlike Karen as two women can be. Sturdier in mind, and shaped as if for the Bluebird clientele in her powder blue uniform with the Brenda stitched on the bosom pocket.

Are you aware, she said, that kidnapping is a federal offense? Are you aware that if something happens to that infant the both of you — I’m saying the both of you, don’t shake your head no — let’s see, how do they do it in this state, I forget, electricity or the needle? I mean all Alice in Wonderland will end up is in the loony bin, but you as aiding and abetting — good-bye, Charlie.

I was beginning to feel sick to the stomach standing there out in the sun with the Bluebird garbage bins in full reek.

She ground out her cigarette and took me by the arm and walked me around to the parking lot.

Now, Lester, the first thing is to go to the Kmart and buy you some infant formula, I believe it comes in their own plastic bottles these days. You follow the instructions and feed that baby so it doesn’t die, as it surely will if you don’t step in here. And while you’re at it, buy you an armload of diapers — they come with Velcro now — and a nightie or three and a cap for its head — she looked up at the sky — it’s supposed to get cooler later on — and whatever else you see there in Infants and Toddlers that might come in useful. You understand me?

I nodded.

And then when it turns out you haven’t killed that child, you get it back to its rightful parents as soon as you possibly can, anyway you can, and see to it that your darling poetess up there on Cloud Nine takes the rap that is justly hers to take. Do you hear me?

I nodded.

Brenda opened the door for me and saw me up behind the wheel.

And, Lester? If I don’t hear on the TV tonight that you’ve settled this to a happy conclusion, I personally will call the cops. You understand me?

Thanks, Brenda.

She slammed the door. And don’t ever try to see me anymore, Lester, you asshole, she said.

I HAD DONE everything Brenda said to do by way of food and sanitation, and now there was peace in the house. I didn’t want to alarm Karen in any way, so I treated her with nothing but cooperation. By the time I had gotten back from the store, she had just begun to realize a baby needed taking care of. She was so grateful she hugged me, and I helped her fuss over that child as if it was truly ours. Isn’t he the sweetest thing? Karen said. How he seems to know us — oh that is so dear! Look at that sweet face. He is surely the most beautiful baby I ever have seen!

Now, with everything calmed down and both Karen and Baby Wilson asleep on our bed, it was time to do some thinking. I put on the five o’clock news to get the lay of the land.

Oh my. The Crenshaw Commissioner of Police saying the entire CPD had been put on alert and deployed throughout the city to find the infant and apprehend the kidnapper or kidnappers. He’d also notified the FBI.

Hey, I said, it is just my slightly crazy girl Karen. You don’t have to worry, we’re not kidnappers, man.

The female they wanted for questioning was probably in her twenties, young, white, about five-six, slight of build with straight brown hair. She had brought a bouquet of flowers and, when approached by a nurse, claimed to be a friend of Mrs. Wilson.

She was that cool, my Karen?

Behind the commissioner was a worried-looking hospital official and, I supposed, the nurse in question, tearful now for having turned her back for a moment to look for a vase.

Then a doctor stepped to the microphone and said whoever had the baby to remember that there was an open wound at the site of the umbilical cord. It should be kept clean and dressed with an antibacterial agent and a fresh bandage at least once a day.

Well, I knew that. I had seen it for myself. I’d found the Polysporin in the medicine chest I had once bought for a cut on my forehead and applied it only after I washed my hands. I am not stupid. The doctor said the baby should only have sponge baths until the wound healed. I would have figured that out, too.

A reporter asked if a ransom note had been received. That really got me riled. Of course not, you moron, I said. What do you think we are? No ransom note as yet, the commissioner said, emphasizing the “as yet,” which offended me even more.

Then we were back in the studio with the handsome news anchor: He said Mrs. Wilson the mother was under sedation. He quoted Mr. Wilson the father as saying he didn’t understand — they were not rich people, that he was a CPA who worked for his living like everyone else.

I had seen enough. I woke up Karen and hustled her and the baby and all the Kmart paraphernalia into the Durango. Why, whatever is the matter, Lester? Karen said. She was still half asleep. Are we going somewhere? She looked frightened for a moment until I put Baby Wilson in her arms. I ran back to the house and grabbed some clothes and things for each of us. Then I ran back again and turned off the lights and locked the door.

I could imagine them any minute coming up the road and through the woods around us at the same time. We were in a cul-de-sac at the end of a dirt road here. I drove down to the two-lane. It was a mile from there to the freeway ramp. I pointed east for Nevada, though not planning to go there necessarily but just to be out on the highway away from town, feeling safer on the move, though expecting any minute to see a cop car in the rearview.

I wasn’t worried about Brenda — she would think twice before getting involved. But I reasoned that if the police were smart they would talk to every florist in the city. Of course their being Crenshaw’s finest, it was only even odds they would make the connection to an employee of Nature’s Basket who had not shown up for work, one Karen Robileaux, age twenty-six. But even odds was not good enough as far as I was concerned, besides which the FBI were getting on the case, so say the odds were now sixty-forty, and if they made an I.D. of Karen it would be too late for an anonymous return of the baby. And if they came knocking on the door before I had the chance to deliver him back of our own accord, as appeared likely, there would be no alleviating circumstances for a judge to consider, that I could see.

And so we were out of there.

I HAD PICKED up her shoulder bag when running out of the house. Of course it was of Indian design, knitted, with all sorts of jagged lines, sectioned like a map in different colors of sand and rust and aqua. Inside, she kept not what women usually keep in their bags, no lipstick or powder compacts or portable tampon containers or any such normal things as that. She had some crumbs of dried flowers and a packet of Kleenex and her housekeys and a paperback book about the Intergalactic Council, a kind of UN of advanced civilizations around the universe and how it was trying to send messages of peace to Earth. It was a non-fiction book, she had told me all about it. She had been thinking of becoming an Earth Representative of the Council. And two crumpled dollar bills and a handful of change.

Karen, don’t you have any money? Didn’t you get paid this week?

Oh I forgot. Yes, Lester, let’s see, she said and rooted about in the pocket of her dress. And she handed me her pay envelope.

She had her hundred and twenty in there. I was carrying thirty-five in my wallet. Not great. I could cover gas, food, and a motel room for a night.

After a couple of hours on the road I was calming down. It occurred to me, despite everything I was not mad at Karen. Given her state of mind she couldn’t be held responsible. If anyone, I was the one to blame for not springing into action the minute she walked in the door with the kid. And she was so trusting, sitting up there beside me with Baby Wilson in her arms and her eyes on the road ahead. She didn’t ask where we were going, not that I could have told her. And the moving car seemed to soothe him, too. He was quiet in her arms. A weird feeling, something like a pride of ownership, came over me, that I would compare now to falling asleep at the wheel. Migod, I woke up quickly enough.

By now it had gotten dark, it was all desert now, the road flat and straight. Karen opened her window and leaned out to see the stars. I had to slow down so Baby Wilson would not have a cold wind blowing into his face. I stuck my hand over the back of the seat and rummaged around till I found the package of diapers. I pulled one out and told her to put it around his little head.

Babies don’t get sick the first three months of their life, Karen said. No viruses or anything. They are automatically insured by God for three months exactly, did you know that, Lester?

But she did as I asked.

By midnight I had us tucked away in a Days Inn outside of Dopple City, Nevada. So without consciously thinking about it till we were practically there, this is where I had meant to come.

I brought in a hamburger dinner, french fries, chicken wings, a milkshake, and for Karen a garden salad. She never drank anything but water. I left her sitting on one of the double beds and feeding the child. I went outside for a smoke and then got back in the SUV.

I knew Dopple. It was a city in its dreams only — what, a railroad yard, a string of car dealerships? It wasn’t much of anything. Anyone could find the strip by seeing where the night sky was lit up.

I decided on Fortunato’s. The lady dealers, with their little black bow ties and white shirts and black vests and ass-tight slacks, were the one bit of class. Bells ringing, someone singing with a karaoke, the usual din of losers. A cheap mob place trying to be Vegas with an understocked bar and slots from yesteryear. It smelled, too, like there was a stable or a cow barn out back.

In the men’s room, where the floor was all wet and some drunk had lost it, I carefully combed my hair. Then I went out and sat down at a five-dollar table that looked about right and bought fifty dollars in chips. Little blond lady dealer, a pit man just behind her. Four decks in the shoe, but my system is not counting cards. My system is betting modestly while sitting next to a high roller with a big stack in front of him. Kind who talks too much and swivels around with each winning hand to see if he’s gathered the audience he deserves.

I didn’t look at the dealer, but smiled as if to myself every now and then. I was very quiet. When I doubled, if the pit man had moved on, I put down a chip for her. She didn’t look at me, but nodded slightly and smiled as if to herself. Tiny mouth but well shaped. There arose a sympathy between us. It’s not as if any cheating goes on, it’s more like a flirtation through the cards. Things happen. At the end of a half hour it was as if she’d taken the edge of her plump little hand and cut one of the high roller’s stacks and slid it over to me. I got up at that point — it was supposed to be a fun thing, nothing to take too far. That would lack class, ruin the whole game between us. I left twenty for her and cashed in for a hundred twenty-five dollars net.

It was a short drive to the Mexican part of town. Dark there, quiet, not many lights. I parked into the curb, rolled down the window, and sat there and had a smoke, and pretty soon a kid came along. He couldn’t have been more than thirteen, fourteen. Peered in at me for a good look. When I told him what I was buying, he went to the front of my car and looked at the California plate. Then he went around a corner and a few minutes later someone who could have been his mother was standing at my window. She was a heavyset woman with a handsome broad face and a black dress too tight for her, but she acted tired, or fed up. She wanted one-fifty for a six-pack, which was cheap enough, but I told her as honestly as I could I only had one and a quarter to spend. She said something indicating her disgust in Spanish, but then she nodded and I drove away with two Visas, two MasterCards, and two Amexes, one of them Gold.

What was I up to if not executive decisions? I felt almost proud of myself by the time I got back to the motel. Karen was asleep with her arm around the infant. Her shift had ridden up. She was weird and maybe even a witch of a sort, but those were the smoothest young legs and artfully draped crescents of backside a man could ever hope to gaze upon. But I was tired too and decided to wait till morning. I conformed one of my driver’s licenses, practiced my signature, and then went to sleep in the other bed thinking what a great country this was.

OF COURSE the infernal problem remained, whatever the stupid mood I happened to be in. How was I going to get little junior away from Karen without making her crazier than she was? And if I managed that, how to avoid the law while finding a way to deliver him to his proper parents? And thirdly, how to keep Karen out of a U.S. District Court, as well as the newspapers as an object of public odium, to say nothing of myself?

And then in the morning of course she was so busy with the baby that she didn’t have time for me. Or inclination. Everything was Jesu this and Jesu that, all her love flowing out of her and none of it coming in my direction. She sent me off for more supplies, so careless of my feelings she didn’t even feel it necessary to explain that the baby was taking all her weakened strength, as if she was a real mother recovering from the act of giving birth. She just expected me to understand that from the way she moved about, holding her hand in the small of her back for a moment of thought, or blowing back from the corner of her mouth a strand of hair that had fallen over her eye because both her hands were busy diapering the kid, and so on.

It is strange how different the same woman can be at different times, even a lovesick crazy one like this, who was so moony about me from the first moment I caught her attention when I walked into Nature’s Basket to wire flowers for my mother’s birthday in Illinois. There was this lovely girl in a long dress and barefooted who seemed to have risen out of the smell of earth and the heavy humidity you get in a florist. Karen looked at me as if struck dumb. She tucked her hair behind her ears and said it was nice that I had a mother I thought so well of. I didn’t tell her otherwise. I went along with her illusion, whereas the twenty-five dollars I laid down for the mixed bouquet was an investment against a return of ten times or twenty times that which I hoped to wheedle out of the old bat after a decent interval.

So after I get back with doughnuts and coffee, and a yogurt for Karen, and this and that from the drugstore, it starts to rain in Dopple City. Lightning and thunder, an unlikely spring torrent, and what does she do but take Baby Wilson outside behind the Days Inn, where she steps over the scraggly attempt at landscaping and walks out into the desert dirt, laughing and hugging the poor child and holding her head up to drink rainwater while not listening to what I am saying, and shaking me off when I try to hustle her back inside. And as suddenly as it came the rain passes, and Karen is standing there with her hair wet as if she’s just had a shower and she says, Look, my sweet baby, you see what God is doing? And to me she says, You too, Lester. Wait for the runoff, where the rivulets leave their traces, keep your eyes focused — it is the pure magic of the desert you are about to see.

And all she meant was those desert wildflowers that hurry to blossom from the least encouragement of rain, which they did — little settlements of blue and yellow and white spikes and petals and tiny cups in the declivities, clustered close to the land as if not wanting to take the chance of growing up too far away from it, flowers that you don’t actually see opening but just have the feeling that they were there all along only you didn’t happen to notice them before.

And that was pretty if you go for that sort of thing, but the child still couldn’t see, although he seemed to be peering out from under her hand, which she held over his head like an umbrella, and for a moment I had the ridiculous feeling of real communication between them, this mad girl and a stolen infant just two or three days old who were now poking about together under the sun out there in the flowering desert behind the Days Inn.

I LEFT THEM there and got the keys to the Durango and took it down the highway to a used-car place. I wanted to get out of Dopple City as soon as possible. My theory was to keep moving if nothing else. Besides which I did not want to have to pay another day’s rent on the motel room, the checkout time for which was twelve noon.

The Durango was registered in both our names, although in truth it was Karen’s savings that had bought it, but under my influence, I might add, since I had always held Durangos in high esteem.

It was already used when we bought it, though in reasonable condition, with just fifty thousand miles on the odometer, which I had since added twenty to, but the front tires were almost new, which is what I explained to the guy at the car lot, uselessly, since he would only give me seven-fifty for it, six if I wanted cash. I took the six hundred. He was a short, fat underhanded thief in a white shirt and string tie but then again did not ask too many questions as he unscrewed my plates and handed them to me.

His man gave me a ride a mile down the road to the Southwest Car Rental and I used my Amex Gold to secure a Windstar van, whose greatest if not only attribute was a Nevada license plate.

It was in this sad, shining new van that I wouldn’t ordinarily be caught in that I packed up my imitation wife and child and headed west back to California. I had no idea what to do. But we were well disguised in our domestic vehicle and a little baby boy adorably asleep in the new car chair I had gotten him. Karen stroked the upholstery. She marveled at the drink containers at each seat. She accepted the Windstar without question as she did any mysterious moves on my part. My feeling about things began to change: I had cash in my pocket and now some pride in my heart, because Karen loved the new car. She turned the radio on, and there we were, heading west with the sun behind us and the great Patsy Cline singing “Sweet Dreams of You,” Karen giving me a sly amused and weirdly sane glance that caused me nearly to swerve into the opposite lane as we sang along with Patsy, I know I should hate you the whole night through, instead of having sweet dreams of you.

NOW I DO admit that there came over me an idea I not only hadn’t considered but that wouldn’t have come even glancingly to my mind before this moment, which was to go with the flow — to take my girl’s madness for my own, to embrace it as, before all this happened, I had customarily embraced her. Why not? Baby Wilson already had a certain character that I found agreeable. He cried only when he had to, and seemed thoughtful most of the time, if that was possible, full of serious attention to the new world in which he found himself, as if, seeing it only as a blur, he was making up for it by listening very carefully. And though Karen told me that what I thought was a smile as he looked at me was in reality of bit of indigestion, it was hard for me not to smile back. Karen seemed to have acquired the wise love that mothers have the instant they become mothers, as if the hormones or whatever maternal chemicals were involved had begun to operate within her from the moment she calmly walked out of that hospital with some other woman’s newborn in her arms.

I didn’t know anything about the Wilsons except that Mr. Wilson was an accountant, which didn’t foretell a particularly exciting life for this kid, who had already seen, and not yet a week old, two states and a rare rain in the desert that not many people not living in the desert would ever see. And his beautiful though self-appointed and by law criminally insane mother had picked one tiny blue flower and put its stem in his little hand, and his fingers had curled around it, automatically of course, but he still clutched it, though fast asleep in his car chair as we crossed the state line into California.

And from all of this and the sun lighting our way ahead like a golden road, I had this revelation of a new life for myself, a life I had never thought of aspiring to, where I would be someone’s husband and someone else’s father, dependable, holding down a full-time job, and building a place in the world for himself and his family. So that when he died they would mourn grievously and bless his departing spirit for the love and respectable life he had given them.

A SPECIAL NEWS bulletin on the radio was like cold water on my face: Baby Wilson’s parents had received a ransom note.

We were about a hundred miles east of Crenshaw. I pulled over to the side of the road.

The details of the note had not been divulged, but it was believed the Wilsons intended to meet the kidnapper’s demands.

Goddamn!

What, Lester?

Can you believe this?

I pounded the steering wheel. The baby woke and began to cry. Karen reached back and unbuckled him and lifted him over the seat and held him in her arms as if to protect him from me.

Lester, you’re frightening us!

Can you believe the evil in this world? That some slime would con those poor people and cash in on their suffering?

She was silent for a moment. She said, I do believe there is evil in this world, yes, but I believe people can be redeemed? Her voice clouded up. She could barely finish the sentence. She began rocking the kid in her arms and soon the tears were coming and now I had the two of them bawling away.

I got out of the van and lit a cigarette and paced up and down the grass shoulder. A car sped by and its wind made the van shudder. Then another. I wanted to be in one of those cars. There was some sort of green crop growing in bunches low to the ground behind the fence and it seemed to go on for miles. I wanted to be the farmer out here in the middle of nowhere quietly growing his cash crop of whatever it was — spinach or cauliflower or some other inedible damn vegetable. I wanted to be anyone but who I was and anywhere but where I was. What was I supposed to do now?

I motioned for her to roll down her window: Has it occurred to you, Karen, that you have provided him or them the opportunity?

Gone were all my diplomatic strategies. All the anger that I had pent up cascaded over this sad pathetic girl sitting rocking the baby in her arms, and her pale eyes reddened and enlarged with the tears rolling down her cheeks.

Yes, you have stirred up something really grand, you know that? You have inspired others to do evil, Karen Robileaux. And not only this slime or slimes. Supposing he really had possession of the baby? Is it in the baby’s interest of safety to have the news broadcast all around the country that there is a ransom note? Of course not. How could this slimeball trust them now, these poor parents, thinking they had told everyone about his private communication. What would you do under the circumstances if you couldn’t trust the parents to deal without calling in the cops, the FBI, and the media — I mean this is a goddamn radio station in Los Angeles. Los Angeles! They don’t give a shit if the baby turns up dead. They just want people to listen so they can sell their advertising. They are happy to violate such delicate confidences. They are proud to be good reporters! So the evil is going out in all directions, Karen, like radio waves from an antenna!

He can’t do anything bad to this baby, she sobbed. None of them can. He doesn’t have this baby. I have this baby, she said, kissing the child fervently on the cheeks, on his head, every part of him that was not swaddled.

Well maybe not, I said, quieter now. But how do the Wilsons know that? He has already done something to them when they find out he is a fraud and a hoax and they are who knows how many thousands of dollars poorer. And not only that, I said more to myself than to her, everyone thinks now you have an accomplice, a male accomplice, because no woman alone who stole a child would do it for purposes of ransom.

Karen opened the door and stepped out of the van and handed me Baby Wilson, and then went off a ways on the shoulder behind a tree and lifted her dress and squatted down to pee.

I had not held him before to any extent. He was a warm little fellow. I could feel his heart beat, and he squirmed around a bit trying to look at me who was holding him. And he had stopped crying.

When Karen came back she took Baby Wilson and got back in the van and sat there frowning and staring straight ahead and she wasn’t crying anymore, either. It was like she was waiting for the car to move, as if it really didn’t need a driver to get up there beside her and put the key in the ignition.

A FEW MILES on at the edge of a town I pulled into a gas station with a convenience store. I bought us bottled water and presented one to Karen by way of a peace offering. Without looking at me she took it. I bought the newspapers they carried, the local and the L.A. and San Diego papers. They all had the story, they were blissed-out with excitement. And every story came with a composite police drawing of someone who looked like Karen though with her ears grown bigger and her mouth thinner and her eyes transplanted from someone else. It was both not a good likeness and too close for comfort.

I tossed the papers away. I didn’t feel the need to show her anything more by way of persuasion. She had no voice in the matter as far as I was concerned. We drove on and this turned out to be a well-groomed little town, with big trees shading the streets and the retail stores uniformly in good taste so as not to offend the eye. And there was nobody in sight, as if the townsfolk were having their afternoon nap, even the police.

It hit me then, my idea: If the story was in every paper, if it was all over the damn state, did it matter where we dropped off Baby Wilson? And I thought, Why not here? And if not now, when?

I peered right and left as I rolled to stop at each corner until I saw something along the lines of what I wanted — a neat white stucco church with a red barrel-tile roof. It was a Catholic church, as uniformly tasteful as everything else in this town. It had a Christ on the cross in relief on the stucco steeple. I can’t now remember the Saintly name of it, even the town’s name escapes me — this was a moment of such stressful fatedness that the surroundings remain in my mind only as bodily impressions. I remember the sun on my neck as I carried the car seat by its handles as a portable carryall for the baby after Karen had been in there a few minutes, I remember my instructions to her beforehand as we sat in the van with the motor running in the neatly ruled empty parking lot around the side, and though the air-conditioning was on I felt the sweat dripping down the small of my back.

It was very peculiar that she seemed as ready as I was, as if somewhere, at some moment — I couldn’t have told you when — we had made magnetic contact. As if it had never been otherwise than that we were both sane and synchronized in our thought. So I experienced something also like a feeling of estrangement as I realized, looking at her, that I loved Karen Robileaux. I loved her. I mean it just came over me — an incredible welcoming rush of gladness that welled up in my throat and threatened to spill out of my eyes. I loved her. Her frail being was strong. Her kookiness was mystical. And it was even eerier to hear in my mind, at last, what she had been telling me time and time again before this all happened — how she adored me, how she actually did love me in all the ways that people understand as love. It was a bonding that was true if it was this scary. Of course I said nothing, and did not declare myself. I really didn’t have to. She knew. Our intimacy was in the fact of our conspiring together as she concentrated on what I was saying with her pale wolf eyes staring into mine, so much so that, once she got out of the car and walked up the steps into the church, I wondered if this hadn’t really been her plan and that she had brought me to this moment as I believed I had brought her. Because I remember her only problem was technical, whereas you might have expected much more in the way of resistance.

Lester, she said, I don’t know the right words for confessing.

It’s okay, I said. Just go in there and sit down in that box they have. It is somewhere off to the side. You don’t have to be Catholic for them to listen to you. When he hears you, the priest will sit down on the other side of the screen, and you just tell him you want to confess something. And he will listen and never betray your trust that it is just between the two of you. And you don’t have to cross yourself or anything — he will tell you what to do if you put it in the form of asking for his advice. I mean you know what he will say. And you will thank him, and you will mean it, and maybe thank God too that there are people who are sworn to do this for a living.

And what will he do then?

See, I have to believe priests read the papers and watch the TV like everyone else, so he will know what baby you are talking about. He will say, And where is the Wilson baby now? And you will tell him, Father, the baby is here. You will find him in his carryall just inside the front door. And a paper sack with his formula and his diapers and a tube of Polysporin for his bellybutton.

And when he gets up and runs down the aisle, you slip out the side door to right here where we are parked.

Karen is a brave woman. She has always been brave, and never more than in this moment. She walked in there with her skirt swaying from her lovely hips and her hair, which she had tied up in a ponytail given the solemnity of the occasion, also swinging from side to side, and for the same reason her usually bare feet in a pair of sandals.

But before she took her deep breath and stepped down from the Windstar, she held the baby in her arms and caressed his round little head and brushed his dark hairs with the tips of her fingers as he stared up at her in his impassive manner and then looked away. And then Karen slipped him gently into my arms like a friend of the mother’s who has been given the privilege for just that moment of holding another woman’s child.

THAT WHOLE DAY as we drove she slept in the backseat, curled up with her hands under her chin. I had decided to head north, staying off the freeways for the most part. When it was evening, I pulled into a motel and she went right from the car to the bed, where she got under the covers and went immediately back to sleep. I didn’t take any chance that she would wake up and watch the TV, so I pulled the plug and bent it out of shape before I went to the restaurant they had there and watched for myself on the bar TV. Mr. and Mrs. Wilson were shown hugging their baby and laughing through their tears. They were not the youngest of couples, they were both on the portly side, and in fact Mr. Wilson had a paunch on him to make me think I would never let myself go that way. And it turned out they had six other children of various sizes standing around the couch looking at the camera with what I recognized as the same unsmiling quietness of expression as Baby Wilson himself.

Meanwhile an announcer was telling the story of the return, and quoting Mr. Wilson saying he and his wife were so happy they forgave whoever had kidnapped their child, but before I could breathe a sigh of relief, the camera cut to the FBI official in charge of the investigation and he said that the FBI would continue the search — that, regardless of the outcome, a federal crime had been committed and it was never up to the Wilsons to decide whether or not to prosecute. And then another shot of the bad drawing of Karen.

In the gift shop there I bought a pair of sunglasses and an Angels baseball cap, and we got up at dawn and drove away. Karen wore the glasses and that cap with her hair tucked up inside all the way through California. I used the credit cards sparingly, each one never more than once until the last one, which I hazarded a couple of times and then threw it away, not wanting to press my luck, and now we were down to our diminishing cash funds.

In San Francisco, I parked Karen in a movie theater and went around to Noe Street to see if Fran still lived there. She did. When she opened her door, she said, Well, will you look what the cat dragged in! Fran was never the sort to bear a grudge. She was a song stylist who made her living singing in clubs. She had a housemate now, a kind of blowsy older woman, who nevertheless had the tact to excuse herself on some errand or other, probably to her chosen bar. I visited with Frannie almost the whole two hours of a feature movie, and then she walked with me to the ATM at the local grocery. As I left, I swore I would return her generosity in full. I knew she didn’t believe me, because she gave a good-hearted laugh and said time would tell and she was smiling and shaking her head as I waved and turned the corner.

Just before the Oregon state line, I removed the Nevada plates from the Windstar and replaced them with the Durango’s old California plates.

In Seattle, we took the ferry to Canada, standing at the rail in the gray and green mist of that day, with the foghorns coming over the water and the smell of the sea and gulls appearing and disappearing in the bad visibility. Karen loved this part of the trip. There was a new peace between us, and she held my arm with both her hands with a kind of fervent wifeliness.

At the hotel in Vancouver we resumed our lovemaking as in our first days together and it was action-packed. She had really come awake to life as I realized now, reflecting on the last months between us, when she was more withdrawn than I wanted to admit.

Vancouver is a squeaky-clean town, like all of Canada that I have ever seen — glass office buildings the color of the sky, the waterside filled with flag-flying yachts and motorboats, the downtown without litter of any kind, and everyone going about their business so as not to disturb anyone else. Not a town you want to stay in very long. But you find things if you look and I found a man in the import-export business who would take the Windstar off my hands, and if he gave me three thousand American for it, I knew he would clear at least ten at the other end.

Then I bought Karen an opal engagement ring and a gold wedding band for one thousand Canadian, though we didn’t actually get legally married till we were settled in this town in Alaska, where she is known not as Karen Robileaux but as Mrs. Lester Romanowski, although she doesn’t get around enough to be known very well in her condition but stays up there in this hillside cabin we rent and tends her garden and cooks good things, not only for me but for herself, since she is eating for two, while in the meantime I am working down below, at sea level, between the mountains and the waterside, which is where the town is crammed.

I have different jobs, one scrubbing pots and pans in this phony frontier restaurant, where the monster hamburger menu is up on blackboards and the bartender has a red beard and wears a lumberjack shirt with the sleeves rolled and there is sawdust on the floor. I also drive a school bus in the early morning and mid-afternoon, and another job, when I have to, is the slime line, which is where they handle the fish off the boats — a heavy-hauling, slippery job requiring rubber apron and gloves and hip boots and a shower and a good deodorant at the end of the shift.

Just now I have a new opportunity on the weekend. I put on a funny bear costume and meet the cruise-ship passengers as they come down the gangway. I do it because, A, nobody knows it’s me in that stupid outfit and, B, it gives me a chance to get close to those ships without drawing attention to myself. I dance the ladies around a bit and make them laugh and pose with them for a photo to record their historic visit to Alaska.

On my off day, Karen and I have found a place to watch the bears fishing in the shallows for their salmon dinner. Lots of birds busy in the forest, and animals I don’t get up out of bed to identify rustle around the cabin at night. Up through the tops of the trees every morning we see the black bald eagle that lives up the side of the mountain and likes to soar about in the thermals.

Most people living here don’t quite fit into the greater U.S. for one reason or another, so nobody asks too many questions. Everyone I’ve met mostly has an attitude of big plans for themselves, which I certainly can appreciate. I’m beginning to think my big plan must have something to do with those cruise ships. They sail up every day to rest their block-long hulls against the dockside. When the tourists pour down the gangways to flow through the streets, well, this, plus the fish, is what keeps the Panhandle in the money. But more of the money stays aboard at the gaming tables and so I’m thinking I might find a way to I.D. as a passenger, take an overnight cruise to the next landing, come back flush the next day — I don’t know — the modus is there, it is only a matter of time till it makes itself known to me.

Karen hugs me when I come home and always has a good dinner waiting, and sits across the table with her chin in her hand and stares at me as I eat. Of course she praises the reformed man I have become, and as a person who has not been without bold ideas of her own, she can appreciate that I am alert and ready for inspiration. But basically she has no mind for anything but the baby growing inside her. She has a wise, contented smile these days, my young wife. No one meeting her for the first time would think she was anything but sane. She said last night that she hopes I don’t mind not being consulted but she got used to the name Jesu and so that is what he will be called.