Adam Johnson - Fortune Smiles - Stories

“What if nobody ever comes to get them?” Nonc asks.

“What if,” Dr. Gaby says, and shrugs. “And before we get too chatty, I can’t let you stay tonight, Randall. I know it happens, and I can’t control what goes on when I’m not here, but these people, they’re vulnerable right now, they need stability. Plus, I need to think of the child.”

“Don’t you worry about the boy,” Nonc says. “He gets taken care of just fine.”

“I don’t want to imagine,” Dr. Gaby says, “where this child spends his nights. But I’m talking about the boy’s well-being in this facility. I don’t know these men’s backgrounds, what they’re capable of. Telling right from wrong, that’s a luxury of the able-minded. I’d have to take a host of precautions to have that boy safely sleep here.” Dr. Gaby lets Geronimo dip a finger in the batter. “Where do you sleep?” she asks him.

Geronimo lights up. “Van,” he says. “Baby kiss van.”

“That’s a sentence,” Dr. Gaby says. “I don’t want to know what it means, but he’s talking in sentences already.”

“I taught him that,” Relle says.

“We sleep in a fat house by Prien Lake,” Nonc says.

Dr. Gaby throws him a look that says, I bet .

“Oh, God,” Relle says to Nonc, “I totally have to show you something.” She takes off upstairs.

“So, how’s parenthood treating you?” Dr. Gaby asks Nonc. “What have you learned from fatherhood so far?”

“I don’t know,” Nonc tells her.

She gives him a look.

“You trying to make me uncomfortable? Just go ahead and tell me something I’m doing wrong. I got the boy his shots, okay? Just like you told me.”

“Dr. Benson, at the clinic?”

Nonc nods.

“That’s good, Randall. That’s a step. Have you ever seen a child with rubella? My Lord, and this is when it happens, after a disaster. Classic distribution potential.”

Nonc takes a cookie. “If these guys could be dangerous, what about you, what about your safety?”

“Oh, that’s not a concern,” she says. “There is something I’m concerned about, though. In life, a lot of important decisions are made for us.”

It’s clear to Nonc that she’s about to give a speech, like the one she gave a couple weeks ago about child development. The truth is that he’s discovered, at the age of twenty-six, he loves being lectured. Never before has someone spoken to him, at length, with the sole purpose of making him better.

“I wouldn’t have chosen to live in Lake Charles,” Dr. Gaby says. “My marriage didn’t work out as I would have wished. My illness, I didn’t choose that. Similar things must be true for you, right? You’re adaptive, though, very flexible. It’s one of your attributes. But when it comes to things like that boy, you can’t ever bend. You have to choose him — then you have to be one hundred percent. Don’t think of it as making a choice but obeying one. Determine what you want, and be obedient to that. You can’t stay here tonight because I’ve chosen these people, and nothing will let me compromise that. You’ve got to create family, Randall. You choose them and you never let go. Blood, it doesn’t mean anything. Your kin, and I know of them — you don’t owe them anything. Cherelle, she’s talking like that little boy isn’t yours, that there’s a test that will say that. Do you think that matters to a little boy? Do you think these men are my kin? I’m not even positive of their names. But I chose them, Randall. And I don’t let go.”

There’s a look on Dr. Gaby’s face that says she has more to administer, but Relle comes downstairs with a painting of a duck. It’s floating above the water, breast high, wings out, ready to land. It makes you wince to look at it — you can just feel the trigger that’s about to be pulled.

“What the hell is that?” Nonc asks.

“I got this at the Salvation Army,” Relle says. “It’s for the lodge. Our hunting lodge.”

—

On the south side of Prien Lake, out at the end of the point, is the foundation of a house that was blown away by Hurricane Audrey fifty years ago. The footings are brick, and the cement is mixed with lime shale, which glows eerily in the moonlight. Nonc used to park his van out there nights, pull right up like he was home from the office and string his hammock from the van to a lone fireplace stack. Now Nonc has the pick of the litter: Rita’s storm surge floated all these houses out into the channel, where the tides broke them up.

In the dark, Nonc approaches a cement slab in the headlights. He muscles the van up onto the foundation, parking in the living room. Then he and Geronimo begin their bedtime routine. They stand on the cool of ceramic kitchen tiles, the wind from the lake rattling their clothes as they brush their teeth and stare out at the green-and-red channel markers of the shipping lanes and, farther off, the blinking derricks of oil platforms. There is a solitary toilet, the structure’s only survivor, but when Nonc cautiously lifts the lid, it has already been fouled. Nonc pisses in the bedroom, then fastens a new diaper on the boy. When he grenades the old one into the marsh grass, the frogs go quiet.

The cargo racks fold up, the foam mat unrolls, and a father and son bed down for the night. Geronimo is on his back, looking up at the dome light. Nonc is on his side, looking at a boy whose breathing is untroubled for all he’s been through, though there’s a lack of shine in his eyes, as if the little light in him might someday go out. His breath is clean and perfect, though, sweet-smelling. While the boy might not look much like Nonc, there’s a knit to his brow, one suggesting an uncertainty and reproof that is unmistakably Harlan’s. And those deep brown eyes, streaked with wheat, are pure Marnie.

“Where’s Mama?” Nonc asks him.

The boy looks at the light. “Eyeball,” he says. He says it with clarity and certainty but not emotion.

“Eyeball?” Nonc says.

“Narc,” the boy says.

“Nonc?”

“Eyeball,” the boy says.

Nonc sees that there’s clay gunked under the boy’s fingernails. Nonc takes a hand and, with a pen cap, uses a half-moon motion to scrape them clean, one nail at a time. Geronimo shifts his eyes and, with a blank relaxation, watches his father work. The boy’s nails are soft and smooth, perfect somehow. Dr. Gaby said you can tell when a kid’s had poor nutrition by the streaks on his fingernails — Geronimo’s nails were proof that Marnie had fed him well. Nonc had visited the boy once in New Orleans. Under Marnie’s ever-suspicious eye, Nonc ate pudding with the boy and played along with games like “I’m Going to Grab Your Sunglasses and Throw Them on the Ground and There’s Nothing You Can Do About It.” But Nonc had to admit he had one eye on the apartment, looking to see how Marnie was spending the money. He never really saw the boy, how perfect he was, how utterly unspoiled. Nonc knows that someday, after Marnie takes the boy back and he grows older, he won’t remember these moments, the way they showered early at the Red Cross, foraged for their morning pizza, roamed the countryside together in a brown panel van. It’s probably a good thing, Nonc tells himself. Developmentally, it’s got to be good for him. He strokes the boy’s hair.

There’s a ring — California — and Geronimo eyes the phone with great apprehension. Nonc takes the call, it’s a woman’s voice.

“I’m calling on behalf of Harlan Richard. Is this Randall Richard?”

“It’s Ree-shard, ” he says.

“You may not be aware of this,” she says. “But your father has lost the use of his vocal cords. He’s asked me to read a note.”

“Are you a nurse?” Randall asks.