The Feast of Love - Charles Baxter [94]
“No, I haven’t,” I said. I put the grocery bags down on the stoop. He wasn’t going to hurt me in broad daylight. Bats don’t do that. Not here. God, he stank. I could hardly breathe. Evil has got a smell. Don’t let them tell you otherwise.
“You been takin’ my things, girl. You could have got you your own things but you took mine and you kept them for yourself. You even took that souvenir glass dish I like. I want the things back, all the valuables that you got your little bitty hands on.”
“What glass dish? I don’t have your things,” I said. “Except Oscar, and he’s not yours.”
“I oughta punish you for your smart mouth,” he said. “Wouldja like that?” He smiled, making a joke. “Some do.”
“No.”
“I been thinkin’ ’bout how I might just manage it. The punishment.” He put his chin in his hand like a demonstration of thinking. “It’d hurt. And you, with them nice pretty features you got there, it’d sure be such a shame and a mess.” He waited in a posture of thoughtfulness. “I’m still pondering it, considering the right and the wrong.” He smiled again, and what an awful sight that was. Demons smile, as a rule, before they force themselves into you. “You showin’ your naked self to me in my house and then stealin’ my son the same breath, and takin’ my valuables, I oughta just cancel your rights right on the spot, missy.”
“What spot would that be?” Maybe I could get him on technicalities.
He looked confused for a microsecond. “Any spot.”
“Like this one?”
“You’re tryin’ to turn me around. All’s I’m sayin’ is, you return what you stole. Meanwhile I’m keepin’ my eyes on you, so’s you don’t take you any more of my belongings and then smile yourself up like the little weaselly piece of tail you are.”
He did this little swivel thing and walked back to his car before I could correct him on his dirty language. It’s sad when youth has to reprimand the elders. I could hear him chuckling to himself. I felt relieved that he wasn’t going to try anything violent on my front stoop. He couldn’t have done anything anyway because that week, being totally in love, I was immortal. Also I was relieved to see evil in such a pure form and to see how stupid it looked. The thing about Oscar’s dad was, he was a moron. God himself could’ve tried to tutor the Bat and He’d’ve gotten absolutely noplace. Still, he was Oscar’s dad, and I was sorry we’d never have cheery Thanksgivings around the turkey, family reunions, photo albums, and suchlike. We’d have this dumbfuck drunk meanness, instead. We’d have forty miles of bad road always stretching out in front of us.
It just amazed me that Oscar had come out the way he had, with a father like that. It just goes to show you how inexact a science genetics is.
I took the groceries upstairs and got the ice cream into the freezer before it melted.
Oscar’d been gone a lot, working at Jitters during the day and taking classes at the Arbogast School of Broadcasting at night. He wasn’t going to do coffee all his life. Oscar was not a loser. He had a future in broadcasting. He would be Radio Man. We both agreed on that. He would practice his glottal thrust in the bathroom where the echo was good. In the shower with me, while I was washing his back or his chest, he’d recite commercials that he had written himself in his broadcast voice. He wrote commercials for products that didn’t exist. He wrote a commercial for a pair of scissors with three blades instead of two. You could efficiently cut two things with it simultaneously. He wrote a commercial for a pocket furnace that you’d carry in your overcoat during the winter. Oscar had many many ideas, several of them amazing.
He made an audition tape for a radio show he wanted to do, a mix of Goth, techno, and progressive rock. I listened to it at home. You’d never guess that it wasn’t already on the air. His DJ name was Bone Barrel. He had a medium-low voice and could sound scary and crucial.
We had to do something, since the sex thing hadn’t been lucrative and had been a morale drain besides. We were starting to map out