Talbot and Patton, coming out of the fog and ferns with his boots and the legs of his jeans wet. The commuter rush is over, should be quiet, he thinks, nodding to the bus driver like nothing’s wrong as he drops the coins he snagged from the register into the slot. He rides in the back with his eyes shut, hammering heart, jiggling his leg, for it or for him he doesn’t know, doesn’t care. Goddammit, he just might pull this off!
In fifth grade, Sappho Elementary had a new teacher, an intern from the community college with droopy pancake tits and tinted glasses and breath like tuna fish, but she read to them after lunch every day, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. God, he’d loved that book, listening with his cheek against the cool of his desk, the boy and the Golden Ticket, one in a million, chance of a lifetime. Jason looks down at the fleecy bundle in his arms. He may just have won the lottery himself.
A quick change at Salmon, walking with it under his arm like a sack of potatoes, sucking down another cigarette from the new pack—thanks, Brandi, for everything! At the MAX station, he hops the line toward the airport and is relieved to find only one stooped-over black-dressed granny holding her pocketbook on her lap, and she clutches her claws over the top of it the way women do when she sees him get on, then smiles as he turns and exposes the parcel under his arm. Money in the bank, baby, he thinks to himself. Two more transfers, and home free.
He gets off the MAX and barely has to wait for the No. 10 that will take him home. Ahh, right on time, there’s his bus. Two people get off the 10 as he gets on, the baby almost forgotten under his arm by now, just a dull ache in his right bicep from the flexing. God, he’s getting out of shape if lugging a kid tires him out. The one good thing you can say about the inside, always plenty of time to pump up, and Jason always did, came out this time in the best shape of his life. Now he’s getting soft, too much sitting around, too much worrying over bitches and babies and money, money, money.
Jason takes a seat with his back to the window, tries to settle it on his lap. It’s soft as a bread loaf, and it sags back against him. It’s been a dilemma, hide it or act casual, made extra difficult by the fact that Jason has had zero time to think this through. He bends his arm, a relaxed angle, and tucks the baby in the crook of his elbow. It has been asleep, but it opens its eyes, looks left and right, as though it knows this is a bad scene.
“Shhh,” he says, tucking his head down toward it. Thank god the bus lurches as it leaves the station toward Foster, and soon both the dirty spic drunk in the back and the baby have their eyes closed again.
Jason sniffs at its scalp. Aren’t babies supposed to smell sweet? This one doesn’t, a sickly smell, like popcorn with rancid butter, the ammonia of piss taking him right back to his first time in a holding cell, seventeen years old, stupid night of drinking and brawling with his little bro and Jason hauled in, but not Lisle. Oh, no, not sweet, precious, swift-legged Lisle. (“Shoulda named him Running Deer,” their mother used to say, as time and again he would outrun an ass-whupping by turning on the afterburners.) No, lily-white Lisle had never once spent a night locked up.
“Get used to this smell, Tonto” (Jason had had braids back then and a turquoise belt buckle, trying to find his self, his people). The deputy had laughed when he shoved a still-drunk Jason so hard he fell into the cell, his cheek against the damp cement, smelling that piss smell. “Your kind just can’t keep their noses clean. I think we’ll be seeing a lot of each other.” Which in fact turned out not to be true. As soon as Jason was released, noon the next day, he hitched home and packed a duffel bag, stole the pile of cash from his old man’s top dresser drawer, and left Clallam County. He went back to Sappho once for his mother’s funeral, thanks to a “fall down the stairs” of the one-level trailer where