Майкл Чабон: Along a Frontage Road

"Cute," said the man in the cashier's stand. He was of indeterminate ethnicity — Arab, Mexican, Israeli,

Armenian, Uzbek — middle-aged, with a grizzled mustache and thick aviator-style glasses. He sat behind a table laid out with a steel cash box, a credit-card-press, a cellular telephone, and five demonstration models, XS, S, M, L, and XL, priced according to size from ten to twenty-two dollars. "How old is he?"

"Four," I said.

"Cute," the pumpkin man said again. I agreed with him, of course, but the adjective was offered without much enthusiasm and after that we let the subject drop. A door banged, and I looked across the lot. A man was walking from the bait shack out to the frontage road. He was tall and light-skinned, with a kettledrum chest and the kind of fat stomach that somehow manages to look hard: the body of a tight end. He wore white high-tops, big as buckets, barely recognizable as shoes. On his head was a Raiders cap, bill to the back, on his chin the quick sketch of a goatee. He nipped around the fence where it met the frontage road, approached the car from the driver's side, and dropped into the bucket seat, with his back to the boy. The boy said something, his voice rising at the end in a question. The man offered only a low monosyllable in reply. He reached one hand under his seat and felt around. A moment later his hand emerged, holding what looked to my not entirely innocent eye like a rolled zip-lock baggie. Then the man stood, and I heard the boy ask him another question that I couldn't make out.

"When I say so," the man replied. He walked back around the fence and disappeared into the bait shack.

The boy in the Firebird turned and, as if he had felt me watching, looked over at me. We were perhaps twenty feet apart. There was no expression on his face at all. I suppressed an impulse to avert my gaze from his, though his blank stare unnerved me. Instead I nodded, and smiled. He smiled back, instantly, a great big winning smile that involved every feature of his face.

"That your kid?" he said.

I nodded.

"He getting a pumpkin."

"Yep."

The boy glanced over at the bait shack. Then he threw his legs across the driver's seat and slid himself out of the car. He was a handsome kid, dark and slender, with a stubbly head and big, sleepy eyes. His clothes were neat and a little old-fashioned, stiff bluejeans rolled at the ankle, a sweater vest over a white-collared shirt, as if he had been dressed by an aunt. But he had the same non-Euclidean shoes as his father, or as the man I assumed was his father. He took another look toward the bait shack and then walked over to where I was standing.

"What he going to be for Halloween?"

"He's still trying to make up his mind," I said. "Maybe a cowboy."

"A cowboy?" He looked appalled. It was a hopelessly lame, outmoded, inexplicable thing for a little boy to want be. I might as well have said that Nicky was planning to go trick-or-treating as a Scotsman, or as Johnny Appleseed.

"Or he was thinking maybe a cat," I said.

I felt something bump against my leg: it was Nicky, pressing his face to my thigh. I looked down and saw that he was carrying a remarkably tiny, rusty-red pumpkin, no bigger than a grapefruit. "Hey, Nick. What's up?"

There was, heavily, profoundly, no reply.

"What's the matter?"

The voice emerged from the fabric of my pant leg.

"Who is that guy you're talking to?"

"I don't know," I said. I smiled again at the kid from the Firebird. For some reason I never feel whiter than when I am smiling at a black person. "What's your name?"

"Andre," he said. "Why he got such a little one?"

"I don't know."

"How he going to fit a candle in that midget?"

"That's a very good question," I said. "Nicky, why did you choose such a small one?"

Nicky shrugged.

"Did you already get yours?" I said to Andre.

He nodded. "Got me a big pumpkin."

"Go on, Nick," I said. "Go find yourself a nice big pumpkin. Andre's right— you won't be able to put a candle in this one."

"I don't want a big pumpkin. I don't want to put a candle in it. I don't want you to cut it open with a knife."

He looked up at me, his eyes shining. A tear sprang loose and arced like a diver down his cheek. You would have thought I was asking him to go into the henhouse and bring me a neck to wring for supper.

He had never before shown such solicitude for the annual sacrificial squash. But lately you never knew what would make Nicky cry.

"I want to call Mommy," he said. "On the cell phone. She will tell you not to cut up my pumpkin."

"We can't bother Mommy," I said. "She's resting right now."

"Why is she resting?"

"You know why."

"I don't want her to rest anymore. I want to call her. Call her, Dad. She'll tell you not to cut it up."

"It ain't alive," Andre argued. He was taking such an interest in our family's pumpkin choice that I was certain his earlier boast had been a lie. Andre had no big pumpkin waiting for him at home. His father was a drug dealer who would not bother to take his son shopping for a pumpkin. This conversation was as close to the purchase of an actual pumpkin as Andre had any reason to expect. These may not in fact have been certainties so much as assumptions, and racist ones at that. I will grant you this. But what kind of father would leave his kid alone in a car, with the door open, at the side of a road that skirted the edge of a luckless and desolate place? What kind of man would do that? "It don't hurt them to be cut."

"I want this one," said Nicky. "And I'm going to name it Kate."

I shook my head.

"You can't do that," I said.

"Please?"

"No, honey," I said. "We don't name our pumpkins."

"We don't believe in it?"

"That's right." I did not want him telling all the people who set foot on our front porch the name that we had been tossing around the house over the past month or so, with an innocence that struck me now as wanton and foolish. My wife and I were given no real choice in the matter, and yet every time I look at

Nicky's fuzzy knees poking out of his short pants, or smell peanut butter on his breath, or attend to his muttered nocturnal lectures through the monitor that we have never bothered to remove from his bedroom, I cannot shake the feeling that in letting ourselves be persuaded by mere facts and statistics,

however damning, we made an unforgivable mistake. I had stood by once in an emergency room as doctors and nurses strapped my son, flailing, to a table to stitch up a gash in his forehead. I could picture,

all too clearly, how your child looked at you as you betrayed him into the hands of strangers.

"Andre!"

The father was coming toward us, his gait at once lumbering and methodical. When I looked at him, I saw where Andre had learned to drain the expression from his face.

"What I tell you to do?" he said, softly but without gentleness. He did not acknowledge me, Nicky, the ten thousand pumpkins that lay all around us. "Boy, get back in that car."

Andre said something in a voice too low for me to hear.

"What?"

"Can I get a pumpkin?" he repeated.

The question was apparently so immoderate that it could not be answered. Andre's father pulled his cap down more firmly on his head, hitched up his pants, and spat into the straw at his feet. These appeared to be a suite of gestures intended to communicate the inevitable outcome if Andre did not return immediately to the car. Andre had reset his own face to zero. He turned, walked back to the Firebird, and got in. This time he went around to the big red door on his side of the car and heaved it open.

"Your son is a nice boy," I said.

The man looked at me, for the first and last time.

"Uh-huh," he said. "All right."

I was just another pumpkin to him — dumb and lolling amid the straw bales, in the middle of a place that was no place at all. He went to the car, got in, and slammed the door. The pinging of the alarm ceased.