midlife realities of my generation: we can’t touch a child who isn’t our own without fearing others will see something lecherous in our touching . . . or without thinking, way down deep in the sewers of our psyches, that there probably is something lecherous in it. I got her out of the road, though. I did that much. Let the Marching Mothers of Western Maine come after me and do their worst.
‘You take me beach?’ the little girl asked.
She was bright-eyed, smiling. I figured that she’d probably be pregnant by the time she was twelve, especially given the cool way she was wearing her baseball cap. ‘Got your suitie?’
‘Actually I think I left my suitie at home. Don’t you hate that? Honey, where’s your mom?’
As if in direct answer to my question, the car I’d heard came busting out of a road on the near side of the curve. It was a Jeep Scout with mud splashed high up on both sides. The motor was growling like something up a tree and pissed off about it. A woman’s head was poked out the side window. Little curie’s mom must have been too scared to sit down; she was driving in a mad crouch, and if a car had been coming around that particular curve in Route 68 when she pulled out, my friend in the red bathing suit would likely have become an orphan on the spot.
The Scout fishtailed, the head dropped back down inside the cab, and there was a grinding as the driver upshifted, trying to take her old heap from zero to sixty in maybe nine seconds. If pure terror could have done the job, I’m sure she would have succeeded.
‘That’s Mattie,’ the girl in the bathing suit said. ‘I’m mad at her. I’m running away to have a Fourth at the beach. If she’s mad I go to my white nana.’
I had no idea what she was talking about, but it did cross my mind that Miss Bosox of 1998
could have her Fourth at the beach; I would settle for a fifth of something whole-grain at home.
Meanwhile, I was waving the arm not under the kid’s butt back and forth over my head, and hard enough to blow around wisps of the girl’s fine blonde hair.
‘Hey!’ I shouted. ‘Hey, lady! I got her!’
The Scout sped by, still accelerating and still sounding pissed off about it. The exhaust was blowing clouds of blue smoke. There was a further hideous grinding from the Scout’s old transmission. It was like some crazy version of Let’s Make a Deal.’ ‘Mattie, you’ve succeeded in getting into second gear — would you like to quit and take the Maytag washer, or do you want to try for third?’
I did the only thing I could think of, which was to step out onto the road, turn toward the Jeep, which was now speeding away from me (the smell of the oil was thick and acrid), and hold the kid up high over my head, hoping Mattie would see us in her rearview mirror. I no longer felt like Chester the Molester; now I felt like a cruel auctioneer in a Disney cartoon, offering the cutest li’l piglet in the litter to the highest bidder. It worked, though. The Scout’s mudcaked taillights came on and there was a demonic howling as the badly used brakes locked. Right in front of Brooksie’s, this was. If there were any old-timers in for a good Fourth of July gossip, they would now have plenty to gossip about. I thought they would especially enjoy the part where Mom screamed at me to unhand her baby. When you return to your summer home after a long absence, it’s always nice to get off on the right foot.
The backup lights flared and the Jeep began reversing down the road at a good twenty miles an hour. Now the transmission sounded not pissed off but panicky — please, it was saying, please stop, you’re killing me. The Scout’s rear end wagged from side to side like the tail of a happy dog. I watched it coming at me, hypnotized — now in the northbound lane, now across the white line and into the southbound lane, now overcorrecting so that the left-hand tires spumed dust off the shoulder.
‘Mattie go fast,’ my new girlfriend said in a conversational, isn’t-this-interesting voice. She had one arm slung around my neck; we were chums, by God.
But what the kid said woke me up. Mattie go fast, all right, too fast. Mattie would, more likely than not, clean out the rear end of my Chevrolet. And if I just stood here, Baby Snooks and I were apt to end up as toothpaste between the two vehicles.
I backed the length of my car, keeping my eyes fixed on the Jeep and yelling, ‘Slow down, Mattie! Slow down!’
Cutie-pie liked that. ‘S’yo down!’ she yelled, starting to laugh. ‘S’yo down, you old Mattie, s’yo down!’
The brakes screamed in fresh agony. The Jeep took one last walloping, unhappy jerk backward as Mattie stopped without benefit of the clutch. That final lunge took the Scout’s rear bumper so close to the rear bumper of my Chevy that you could have bridged the gap with a cigarette. The smell of oil in the air was huge and furry. The kid was waving a hand in front of her face and coughing theatrically.
The driver’s door flew open; Mattie Devore flew out like a circus acrobat shot from a cannon, if you can imagine a circus acrobat dressed in old paisley shorts and a cotton smock top. My first thought was that the little girl’s big sister had been babysitting her, that Mattie and Mummy were two different people. I knew that little kids often spend a period of their development calling their parents by their first names, but this pale-cheeked blonde girl looked all of twelve, fourteen at the outside. I decided her mad handling of the Scout hadn’t been terror for her child (or not just terror) but total automotive inexperience.
There was something else, too, okay? Another assumption that I made. The muddy four-wheel-drive, the baggy paisley shorts, the smock that all but screamed Kmart, the long yellow hair held back with those little red elastics, and most of all the inattention that allows the three-year-old in your care to go wandering off in the first place . . . all those things said trailer-trash to me. I know how that sounds, but I had some basis for it. Also, I’m Irish, goddammit. My ancestors were trailer-trash when the trailers were still horse-drawn caravans.
‘Stinky-phew!’ the little girl said, still waving a pudgy hand at the air in front of her face. ‘Scoutie stink! ‘
Where Scoutie’s bathing suitie? I thought, and then my new girlfriend was snatched out of my arms. Now that she was closer, my idea that Mattie was the bathing beauty’s sister took a hit. Mattie wouldn’t be middle-aged until well into the next century, but she wasn’t twelve or fourteen, either. I now guessed twenty, maybe a year younger. When she snatched the baby away, I saw the wedding ring on her left hand. I also saw the dark circles under her eyes, gray skin dusting to purple. She was young, but I thought it was a mother’s terror and exhaustion I was looking at.
I expected her to swat the tot, because that’s how trailer-trash moms react to being tired and scared. When she did, I would stop her, one way or another distract her into turning her anger on me, if that was what it took. There was nothing very noble in this, I should add; all I really wanted to do was to postpone the fanny-whacking, shoulder-shaking, and in-your-face shouting to a time and place where I wouldn’t have to watch it. It was my first day back in town; I didn’t want to spend any of it watching an inattentive slut abuse her child.
Instead of shaking her and shouting ‘Where did you think you were going, you little bitch?’
Mattie first hugged the child (who hugged back enthusiastically, showing absolutely no sign of fear) and then covered her face with kisses.
‘Why did you do that?’ she cried. ‘What was in your head? When I couldn’t find you, I died.’
Mattie burst into tears. The child in the bathing suit looked at her with an expression of surprise so big and complete it would have been comical under other circumstances. Then her own face crumpled up. I stood back, watched them crying and hugging, and felt ashamed of my preconceptions.
A car went by and slowed down. An elderly couple — Ma and Pa Kettle on their way to the store for that holiday box of Grape-Nuts — gawked out. I gave them an impatient wave with both hands, the kind that says what are you staring at, go on, put an egg in your shoe and beat it. They sped up, but I didn’t see an out-of-state license plate, as I’d hoped I might. This version of Ma and Pa were locals, and the story would be fleeting its rounds soon enough: Mattie the teenage bride and her little bundle of joy (said bundle undoubtedly conceived in the back seat of a car or the bed of a pickup truck some months before the legitimizing ceremony), bawling their eyes out at the side of the road. With a stranger. No, not exactly a stranger. Mike Noonan, the writer fella from upstate.