E. Doctorow: Sweet Land Stories

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 farmer out here in the middle of nowhere quietly growing his cash crop of whatever it was — spinach or cauliflower or some other inedible damn vegetable. I wanted to be anyone but who I was and anywhere but where I was. What was I supposed to do now?

I motioned for her to roll down her window: Has it occurred to you, Karen, that you have provided him or them the opportunity?

Gone were all my diplomatic strategies. All the anger that I had pent up cascaded over this sad pathetic girl sitting rocking the baby in her arms, and her pale eyes reddened and enlarged with the tears rolling down her cheeks.

Yes, you have stirred up something really grand, you know that? You have inspired others to do evil, Karen Robileaux. And not only this slime or slimes. Supposing he really had possession of the baby? Is it in the baby’s interest of safety to have the news broadcast all around the country that there is a ransom note? Of course not. How could this slimeball trust them now, these poor parents, thinking they had told everyone about his private communication. What would you do under the circumstances if you couldn’t trust the parents to deal without calling in the cops, the FBI, and the media — I mean this is a goddamn radio station in Los Angeles. Los Angeles! They don’t give a shit if the baby turns up dead. They just want people to listen so they can sell their advertising. They are happy to violate such delicate confidences. They are proud to be good reporters! So the evil is going out in all directions, Karen, like radio waves from an antenna!

He can’t do anything bad to this baby, she sobbed. None of them can. He doesn’t have this baby. I have this baby, she said, kissing the child fervently on the cheeks, on his head, every part of him that was not swaddled.

Well maybe not, I said, quieter now. But how do the Wilsons know that? He has already done something to them when they find out he is a fraud and a hoax and they are who knows how many thousands of dollars poorer. And not only that, I said more to myself than to her, everyone thinks now you have an accomplice, a male accomplice, because no woman alone who stole a child would do it for purposes of ransom.

Karen opened the door and stepped out of the van and handed me Baby Wilson, and then went off a ways on the shoulder behind a tree and lifted her dress and squatted down to pee.

I had not held him before to any extent. He was a warm little fellow. I could feel his heart beat, and he squirmed around a bit trying to look at me who was holding him. And he had stopped crying.

When Karen came back she took Baby Wilson and got back in the van and sat there frowning and staring straight ahead and she wasn’t crying anymore, either. It was like she was waiting for the car to move, as if it really didn’t need a driver to get up there beside her and put the key in the ignition.

A FEW MILES on at the edge of a town I pulled into a gas station with a convenience store. I bought us bottled water and presented one to Karen by way of a peace offering. Without looking at me she took it. I bought the newspapers they carried, the local and the L.A. and San Diego papers. They all had the story, they were blissed-out with excitement. And every story came with a composite police drawing of someone who looked like Karen though with her ears grown bigger and her mouth thinner and her eyes transplanted from someone else. It was both not a good likeness and too close for comfort.

I tossed the papers away. I didn’t feel the need to show her anything more by way of persuasion. She had no voice in the matter as far as I was concerned. We drove on and this turned out to be a well-groomed little town, with big trees shading the streets and the retail stores uniformly in good taste so as not to offend the eye. And there was nobody in sight, as if the townsfolk were having their afternoon nap, even the police.

It hit me then, my idea: If the story was in every paper, if it was all over the damn state, did it matter where we dropped off Baby Wilson? And I thought, Why not here? And if not now, when?

I peered right and left as I rolled to stop at each corner until I saw something along the lines of what I wanted — a neat white stucco church with a red barrel-tile roof. It was a Catholic church, as uniformly tasteful as everything else in this town. It had a Christ on the cross in relief on the stucco steeple. I can’t now remember the Saintly name of it, even the town’s name escapes me — this was a moment of such stressful fatedness that the surroundings remain in my mind only as bodily impressions. I remember the sun on my neck as I carried the car seat by its handles as a portable carryall for the baby after Karen had been in there a few minutes, I remember my instructions to her beforehand as we sat in the van with the motor running in the neatly ruled empty parking lot around the side, and though the air-conditioning was on I felt the sweat dripping down the small of my back.

It was very peculiar that she seemed as ready as I was, as if somewhere, at some moment — I couldn’t have told you when — we had made magnetic contact. As if it had never been otherwise than that we were both sane and synchronized in our thought. So I experienced something also like a feeling of estrangement as I realized, looking at her, that I loved Karen Robileaux. I loved her. I mean it just came over me — an incredible welcoming rush of gladness that welled up in my throat and threatened to spill out of my eyes. I loved her. Her frail being was strong. Her kookiness was mystical. And it was even eerier to hear in my mind, at last, what she had been telling me time and time again before this all happened — how she adored me, how she actually did love me in all the ways that people understand as love. It was a bonding that was true if it was this scary. Of course I said nothing, and did not declare myself. I really didn’t have to. She knew. Our intimacy was in the fact of our conspiring together as she concentrated on what I was saying with her pale wolf eyes staring into mine, so much so that, once she got out of the car and walked up the steps into the church, I wondered if this hadn’t really been her plan and that she had brought me to this moment as I believed I had brought her. Because I remember her only problem was technical, whereas you might have expected much more in the way of resistance.

Lester, she said, I don’t know the right words for confessing.

It’s okay, I said. Just go in there and sit down in that box they have. It is somewhere off to the side. You don’t have to be Catholic for them to listen to you. When he hears you, the priest will sit down on the other side of the screen, and you just tell him you want to confess something. And he will listen and never betray your trust that it is just between the two of you. And you don’t have to cross yourself or anything — he will tell you what to do if you put it in the form of asking for his advice. I mean you know what he will say. And you will thank him, and you will mean it, and maybe thank God too that there are people who are sworn to do this for a living.