Sweet land stories - E. L. Doctorow [17]
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