Baal

Baal Page 6

THE CHILD WAS BORN at the end of a turbulent March, while the wind outside Mary Kate's hospital room blew snow past the window in wild high flurries. She heard the scream of the storm both before and after labor, even as she was wheeled down linoleum corridors into Recovery.

The child was not beautiful. It was a boy with tight flat features and piercing, inquisitive blue eyes that she knew would dim to a much darker hue. But still she gratefully took the child from the nurse's arms and held him close to her breast to feed. The child was very quiet, barely moving except to grab the flesh of her swollen teat with his tiny fists.

She didn't care for Joe's choice of a name for the baby, Edward, after one of his more obscure English poets. Instead, she wanted a name that had been in her family for years. So on the records of birth was written Jeffrey Harper Raines, over Joe's mild protests that the name Jeffrey currently belonged to one of his least favorite of her cousins.

When they brought him home from the hospital they lowered him into a crib he would share with red-lipped rubber animals. Above the crib, attached to the ceiling, was a hanging mobile of grinning plastic fish. She would move the fish in a tight circle and Jeffrey always sat in silence, watching. They arranged the crib so the child could see the television. It disturbed Mary Kate in the first few weeks that Jeffrey was home, that the child so seldom cried. She complained about it to Joe, citing tears as a healthy response in children, and he replied, "So? Maybe he's satisfied."

But Jeffrey never laughed either. Even on Saturday mornings during cat-and-mouse cartoons and Howdy Doody reruns, Jeffrey's eyes roamed the tight confines of the apartment while his new teeth gripped at a pacifier. The lack of emotion in the child's eyes worried her, they were like the eyes of a fish or a snake, desiring either the cold sea or the depths of a den.

Sometimes when she held the child she thought it didn't seem to want to be near her. He would fight against her grasp and, when she pulled him closer, he would reach out to pinch her flesh between his fingers. Looking at Jeffrey, actually examining his features, unsettled her more and more as time went on. He didn't seem to resemble her at all, nor did he resemble Joe, as much as she imagined this to be the case. He would comment dryly on how the baby would eventually look just like him but she knew it was far from the truth. And what was the truth? Was it perhaps locked away in her subconscious, lurking there where she remembered dimly a screaming ambulance and nurses white against emergency walls, groping, groping, groping?

Despite her disappointment, she never allowed herself to cry. She always stopped thinking about the child before the rush of tears, of mad whirling self-doubt, of figures framed in darkness, could begin.

Joe had begun working a double shift three days a week at the cab company. He came home on those days in the early morning hours, ready to drink a can or two of beer and fall into bed, sometimes without even undressing. Some days he went to work in the same clothes he had worn the day before and slept in; sometimes he went without shaving for days at a time; he had neither the time nor the energy to even consider a return to college, and always his sharp accusing eyes cut her to the quick. He barely spoke to her anymore unless he found it necessary, and she learned to turn her back on him in bed.

In three months' time, as the apartment began to become cluttered with rubber toys and diapers and smelled of sourness and milk, Joe took to leaving on rambling walks, often not returning until Mary Kate had been asleep for some time. Wakened by the opening door, she would hear him enter, often drunkenly, and mutter to himself things she couldn't quite hear. The bastard, she would say to herself. The stupid drunken bastard. And then she would say sharply, without looking at him, "Take your clothes off before you come to bed."

Joe's sleep was becoming more and more restless; often he cried out in the dark of night. Then she would hear him get out of bed, drink a glass of water in the bathroom and, oddly, rattle the door chain to make certain it held securely. But she never moved to show him she had awakened, and when he returned to bed she felt sure he lay for a very long while with his eyes open in the dark, just staring at her back.

More than once she awakened to see him framed in the square of light from the window, looking down into the crib at the sleeping child. He would stand rigid with his fists white-knuckled, staring down at the little quiet form in white baby pajamas. In the mornings she would find Jeffrey already awake, his hands curled around the safety bars as if he wanted to escape the prison of infancy prematurely. His dark eyes pierced her; he seemed to be glaring through her at her sleeping husband. Once when Joe held the child in his arms in a rare show of fatherly affection, his eye was almost jabbed as Jeffrey pointed with a finger at the fish mobile. Joe said, "Shit!" and eased the child back down into the crib, rubbing his injured eye.

She became fearful of Joe. He became increasingly short-tempered toward the child, as the hot summer fell upon them like a slavering animal. Jeffrey's eyes grew darker. They became black slits that gleamed with some sort of childish intelligence; his hair became straight and black. His nose lengthened and Mary Kate saw, with a rush of alarm, that there was going to be a cleft in the chin. There were no cleft chins in her family, as far as she knew, nor in Joe's. She traced the beginnings of the cleft with her finger, hearing somewhere the faint wail of a siren across the roof of the city. And Joe had noticed it as well. He would pop open a beer and watch the child as Jeffrey played on the floor. Mary Kate was certain that, if he could, Joe would lean forward and kick the child in the face.

As Jeffrey played with blocks strewn across the carpet one evening in late summer, she sat before him on the floor and examined his face. The black eye slits watched her incuriously, daring her to maintain a steady gaze, as he built towers of multicolored blocks. The thin fingers moved not with the clumsiness of an infant, but instead with a practiced adult grace.

"Jeffrey," Mary Kate whispered.

The child slowly looked up from his blocks.

Mary Kate was forced to avert her gaze from his intense black stare. Looking into those eyes made her feel breathless and dizzy, as if she had been drinking. His eyes were as immobile as those in a painting.

Mary Kate reached out to smooth his swirling mass of black hair. "My Jeffrey," she said.

With one arm Jeffrey swung out and through the tower of building blocks. They scattered across the room, and one of them struck Mary Kate in the mouth. She cried out, startled.

Jeffrey leaned forward, his eyes wide and entranced, and Mary Kate shivered. She took his hand and slapped it, saying, "Bad baby! Bad baby!" but Jeffrey paid no attention. Instead, with his free hand, he touched his mother's lip. The fingers came away with a single drop of blood.

Horrified and hypnotized by his black, unwavering stare, she watched him put his fingers to his mouth, saw the tongue dart from between lips to lick the red liquid, saw the eyes gleam briefly like a light shining far away in the night. She recovered herself and said, "Bad for baby!" trying to slap his hand again, but he turned his back on her and began gathering up the building blocks.

Autumn came, then winter. Outside the wind was unnervingly shrill, day after day. Leaves clattered along the gutters. Ice and snow caked the lids of garbage cans. Throughout the winter bleakness Mary Kate grew more distant from Joe. It was as if he had given up; now he ceased even to try to communicate with her at all. He had long since forgotten that she shared a bed with him and now she knew it was only a matter of time before he would leave the apartment one night for "a walk" and never come back. Already he was sometimes gone for a day at a time and, afterward, when she would scream at him about having to make up excuses for the cab dispatcher, he would simply spin around on his heel and disappear again through the doorway. And then, finally, he would come home unshaven and dirty, his body reeking of beer and sweat, stumbling through the doorway muttering something about the child. "You fool," she would tell him. "You pitiful fool."

And one night less than a week before the child's first birthday, after leaving Jeffrey with Joe for a few moments while she went down to the delicatessen for groceries, she returned home to find him calmly undressing the child over a tub of steaming water. The child's hands were gripped around his shoulders; the eyes were narrowed and cunning. Across Joe's unshaven face were red marks that looked like scratches. An empty wine bottle lay broken on the yellow bathroom tiles.

She dropped the sack. A glass broke. "What do you think you're doing?" she screamed as Joe held the struggling child over the hot water. He looked around, his eyes bleary and frightened, and she twisted Jeffrey away from him to hug the child to her breast.

"My God!" she said, her shrill voice echoing from the tiles. "You're crazy! My God!"

He sat, his shoulders sagging, on the edge of the tub. His face seemed drained of blood, the only color the gray circles beneath his eyes. "One more minute," he said in a distant, dead, emotionless voice. "If you'd only stayed away one minute more. Just one."

"My God!"

"Just one," he said, "and it would've been over."

She screamed at him, "You're crazy! My God! Oh my God Jesus!"

"Yes," he said. "You call out for Jesus. You do that. But it's too late. Oh God it's too late for that. You look at me. Look at me, I said! I'm dying... inch by inch... I'm dying, and you know it." He looked around and saw the fragments of glass on the floor. "Oh no," he whimpered. "My last bottle."

As he stood up and began walking toward her, she backed away with the child in her arms. He caught himself in the bathroom doorway and stood there with his head down and mouth open, as if he were about to be sick. "I have good dreams at night, Mary Kate. Oh those dreams I have. You know what I dream about? You really want to know? I dream of faces that come flying around me screaming my name. A thousand... ten thousand times a night they wake me. And I dream of a child's gouging out my eyes until I'm blind. Oh Jesus Christ I need a drink!"

"You're crazy," said Mary Kate, her tongue slowly going numb so she had to concentrate to get the two words out.

"I thought maybe if I got away from here, if I slept somewhere else, it would help. If I slept in the subway, or in a movie, or even in a church, I thought it would help. But no. You know what else I dream, Mary Kate? My sweet Mary Kate... you want to know? I dream of finding you on your knees, my sweet wife, sucking the penis of a man with the face of a child. That child in your arms now."

She caught back a cry and saw his mad eyes darting at the long shadows in the room. "That child is not mine, Mary Kate," he said. "I'm certain of that now. And you've known all along. I don't care how it's done, Mary Kate, I don't care who does it. That child must die. We can put the body in a trash can somewhere across town; we can throw the body in the river."

He stood staring at her, pleading, and she saw him through eyes that suddenly filled with tears. "Oh God you need help, Joe. You need help."

"No one can give me help." He staggered weakly to the window and stood with his forehead steaming the cold glass as his hands scratched across the cracked walls. He closed his eyes. "Oh Jesus Christ."

Jeffrey stirred in her arms and moved against her. "I love you I love you I love you," she murmured inaudibly to the child. "He's crazy. This man is crazy and he's going to try to kill you. Oh God."

The child's hands moved at her face. It burrowed against her for warmth and when she looked down she saw his strange hot stare.

Joe leaned against the window, breathing harshly. She saw his breath fan out in a mist across the dirty glass. Tears streaming hotly down her face, she put Jeffrey back into his crib and listened to Joe's wild muttering. Jeffrey sat up, squeezing his face against the safety bars. He'll try to kill both of us, she said to herself. Both of us. Goddamn his soul! He's going to kill my baby... and then me so I'll never tell anyone what happened!

Going back into the bathroom, she watched her tears splash the long jagged shards of the broken wine bottle on the floor. He'll kill us both. Both both both. He's gone crazy. She picked up the neck of the bottle and stepped toward him.

Joe started to turn away from the window and opened his mouth to say something.

She took two quick steps and was upon him, driving the jagged glass into his chest, beneath the collarbone. He grunted with the shock of the blow and stood, his mouth still open, looking down at the front of his shirt. When the racing pain had arrived at his brain, he cried out wildly and pushed her away. She dislodged the broken bottle and struck again; his drink-slowed hand was not enough to stop her. The glass pierced through the rib cage into lung tissue. He coughed a shower of red droplets that sprayed across her face and blouse. She struck at his face. He frantically backed away, bleeding from his chest and cheeks, and still she attacked, like something wild and relentless, her arm upraised for a second thrust at his face.

His panic carried him backward and, his arms flailing, smashed him through the window. His face, white and with terror-stricken eyes, went over the ledge and the last thing she saw before he fell were his fingertips, reaching desperately for the windowsill.

Below the window his body lay sprawled wildly on the concrete, the neck twisted at an angle to the torso.

Someone, a man in a brown overcoat, stood over the corpse and stared up at her with frightened eyes.

Behind her, in his crib, Jeffrey pointed up at the dancing mobile. "Mommy," he said in a saliva-thick voice, "see pretty fish?"