A stupid, stupid thing to do, of course, remaining so close to your town after taking you away, but you were afraid and clinging to my leg. Coming into the city was supposed to be a diversion for you because I couldn't just rip you up at the roots and take you from your mother and I thought, better to lose ourselves temporarily in the monochrome anonymity of the city where we would not be caught. Besides, the city is familiar since it's where we go for most of my weekend visits, to the zoo, or to the movies where you could spend five dollars and an entire afternoon playing video games in the lobby. We could spend one night in the city, then maybe go camping at the state park to fish in the lake they stock with trout this time every year, and we could rent bikes to ride the trails in the afternoon. It just seemed easier to remove you by degrees from her. A boy needs a man around, Sam, to teach him strength and fortitude, but as we
sleep in this decrepit bed, one metal leg on the left side dented and leaning, the detective has entered the lobby. Something has enclosed the building like the pincers of steel ice tongs. Something about the air is cold and alert as he coughs to announce his presence and gives a stiff, official tug at his blazer lapels. The Pakistani woman, asleep in front of the mute television, almost falls off her chair, she wakes and retracts so fast her sandaled feet propped up on the counter. The black and white TV bathes everything in its antiseptic glow the walls, the counter, the detective, and the two uniformed officers with him it casts everything under an aluminum hue. Have you seen this little
boy, he asks, showing her a dog-eared picture of you in your blue pin-striped baseball uniform, a film of countless fingerprints clouding your face. He here, he here, she says cooperatively. Wit a man. What he done? We want no trouble. No trouble. And trouble is just what we've got now, Sam, with the detective in the lobby, the uniformed officers unbuckling the flaps over their holsters. I've been sleeping in fits and starts all night, waking every twenty minutes or so in anticipation of this trouble with a knot in my neck and the bedsheet twisted around my ankles. Or if that's not why I'm waking so
often tonight, maybe it's that when you were an infant you would sleep in our bed, cradled naked between your mother and me, and I would lie there listening to your breathing, watching you writhe in confusion and squeeze your fleshy little face into a grimace as you waded through your first dreams. And I lay there sometimes till four in the morning, forbidding myself to shut my eyes for fear that I would roll over in my sleep and smother you to death. I have a Polaroid taped to my bedroom mirror, though, that your mother took, of you
and I asleep when you were about eight months old, me in my shorts and you in just a diaper on a Saturday afternoon, you lying flush on my chest, your head nestled in the crook of my neck. The only way I could make you take your nap was to lie down with you because you were crying, and I didn't know how to make it stop. I rubbed my hands together before touching you because they were so cold, and when I reached down into the crib to pick you up my hands
were covered with this charcoal colored clay, totally unexpected. As I was digging the first hole the soil was strangely wet after the initial eight inches or so. Then the shovel came out with a damp, sucking sound, the shovel plate covered with this gray slimy clay. I picked up a handful and carried it to the porch and called to your mother. Well, she said, I guess you can't put up a fence after all, smiling sarcastically, because she didn't want the house fenced in to begin with, and until it occurred to me to mount each post in a base of a little cement, I stood there, the clay on my hands, confused,
hopeless, like the first time I touched your mother's face and kissed her, like every time I touched her, in fact, because, you know, Sam, every time she pulled me down into bed I discovered her body all over again. Sometimes I'd lie awake after she'd fallen asleep just to pet her, just to lay my hand on the here and the there of her, curving the palm of my hand to the alignment of her flesh, sensing at the perimeter of her body the pulse of her blood against my skin as though my pores could hear. And falling asleep myself to
that liquid rhythm, as in early October the year you were born when we made love nearly every night, all the windows in the house thrown open, the sound of countless crickets busily rubbing their legs together in the surrounding trees, an autumn breeze bounding into the house, nuzzling up against the walls, filling up every room. And me there, my legs dangling over the foot of the bed, my head resting on her stomach, eyes wide open waiting for the stars to quietly open and bid us entry. But at your age I cannot tell you of the animal comfort of a woman's breasts, though something in you may remember, and these are things, of course, I can never tell you of your mother, just as she could never explain to me the mystery of the pain and joy of giving you life. Such screams she let out, but with the strangest smile the whole time, the corners of her mouth pulled back in pleasure but with transparent dots of perspiration on her upper lip, her teeth improbably clenched, and I could never know what she was thinking just then. True, when you would cry at night it was as often me as it was her who bent over your crib and
picked you up at the schoolyard that day. That's not my son, I said. Not my son throwing rocks at that other boy. The lot of you, standing around like a pack of wolves, the sight even more horrific because of your age, a throng of six-year-old Nazis persecuting that poor boy cowering against the wall, his arms wrapped around his head for protection, his elbows and knuckles bleeding, a dog urgently barking from a few feet away. Where did you learn to do that, Sam? Where do boys
learn cruelty? Perhaps you learn it from each other, though that would explain nothing, or from watching the violent interaction of animals, dogs fighting on the lawn or squirrels frenetically chasing each other in lunatic circles up the trunks of trees and across telephone wires. Or maybe you learn it from me. Is
that possible? Is it possible that you, even at your age, took something away, like a sharp pebble in your shoe, from those nights when your mother and I refused to eat together as some form of hunger strike, when she would sit, silent and brooding all night in the unlit kitchen?
The detective, humorless, efficient, is on the stairs, Sam, and if I were awake, and smarter, we would already be on the fire escape, tumbling down the iron ladders, a comical assemblage of half-dressed, flailing emergency limbs, our fingernails clawing at the rails, taking flecks of black paint off the metal as we plunge into the darkened street
before dawn, after a late night of arguing, so pointless, looking out over the lawn at my half-finished fence, sitting in the bedroom on the high-backed wooden rocking chair my father made, the chair she sat in to feed you. Sitting there brooding, rocking laboredly, the gray, cloying clay beneath our home rushing in cold over my bare feet, miring the chair's curved braces, mocking me with that foul slurping sound, the sound of coming unstuck, mocking me for wanting to hold everything in, and be held, for wanting to to stand on the front lawn, my arms up in a posture of authority, and shout, "STOP! STOP! NOBODY MOVE!" And I find, instead, my raised hands covered with clay, the cold bacterial sludge sliding between my fingers, running down my arms, and I smear this clay all
over your face, trying to wipe away your tears in the park today when I explained to you why we can't ever see your mother again. A foolish thing to do, staying so close to home, people passing, wondering what I've done to so upset you. That must be how they came to find us, that scene in the park today. Every woman notices a crying child. And there I sat on the bench beside you, swiping at your tears, pushing in your face the hamburgers I bought for lunch, hoping to shut you up that way, knowing I was hurting you but convincing us both that it was for your own good. You are my son. My son. I wipe your tears with my shirtsleeve, and gently take
your hand. Curl it around the nail like this, I say, molding your tiny fingers with my own as we crouch down beside the unfinished fence, holding your fingers in position. Now keep steady. And you look up at me, your bright, helpful eyes peeking out from behind your bangs, proud to help your father, and I bring down the hammer hard on your thumb. You spring backwards away from me as though propelled by a force much greater than the terrible pain I've given you. Your mother rushes from the house, bidden by your ferocious howling, and she's yelling as well, yelling at me, straining to be heard over your screams. She says, he's at the door what's wrong with you the detective's at the door, and as I wait
for his deliberate pounding to jolt me wide awake from this troubled half-sleep, it occurs to me: though my long, wiry body is coiled around yours like some familiar snake, it is you who surrounds me, you who holds me, small, perfectly round and vulnerable, chilled like a ripe grape, gently between your teeth.