Roy was screaming.
“Off, Tinker! ” Marie ordered. I heard a series of low-pitched, hollow gonks as she beat the dog’s upholstered rib cage with the watering can. She brought it down so hard on his head my boot came off. Tinker yelped and retreated through the hedges that separated two yards.
“He has my fucking shoe.” I was shaking.
“The baby!” Marie screamed. Roy was facing us, crying as the stroller rolled backward in slow motion toward the edge of the hood. I grabbed the exposed calf of his fat drumstick. Marie took hold of the stroller and lowered it to the driveway. Roy screamed louder.
“Oh, God, no,” she said. “He’s hurt.” She raised his pant leg. His skin was a bloody mess.
“Oh-fuck-oh-fuck-oh-fuck-oh-fuck-oh-fuck. Fuck me, Roy! Oh, fuck, no! ”
“Calm down! ” Marie took off her sweatshirt and used it to dab his leg. She was wearing a white tanktop. She had a detail from the Apocalpyse Now movie poster tattooed on her biceps.
I was close to crying. “He’s just a baby. He’s just a fucking baby.”
“It’s okay,” she said. “It’s okay. I think it’s your blood.”
My hands were covered in it. I looked away. I saw my desert boot lying like a mountaineering accident at the edge of the driveway. “Are you sure? ”
“I’m pretty sure.”
I WAS AWAKENED in the early hours of the morning by the sound of someone tapping their keys on the pressed-steel storm door.
“Who the fuck? ” I said, like my old man trying to eat a single hot supper in peace. I got up and slid on my pants. The tight, quiet ache in my punctured heel spiked and burned as my foot passed through my pant leg. The tapping on the door grew more desperate. I flipped the porch light on and opened the door.
Marie was standing there with no coat on. I knew drunk when I saw it.
“Please help me,” she slurred.
“Are you hurt? ”
She dismissed me. “No, no, no. I just need sleep.” She reminded me of Judy Garland leaning into Steve Allen—or whoever the fuck it was—on TV. She tried to push me aside and enter the house. I held firm.
“No, no, no, no, no, come on. Don’t do that.”
“Just right there.” She pointed to the living room floor behind me. She crouched below my tollbooth arm and attempted to squeeze between me and the doorframe. I pinched her off.
“I’m sorry. You can’t.”
She raised her face close to mine. Her breath was a vodka aerosol. “I saved your baby.”
“I know, and I appreciate it. But you have to go home.”
“But I saved it. The baby. Let me see him.” She tried to get by me again.
“He’s not here.”
“Where is he? ”
“At his mother’s.”
“Then let’s go get him.”
“We can’t get him.”
“Why not? ” She wasn’t the worst kind of drunk, but a bad-enough one: she wanted to be reasoned with.
“He’s a baby. He’s asleep.”
“Fuck you, then. Thanks.” She said something I couldn’t understand. Her upper and lower halves raced each other back to her car, which was still running and nearly perpendicular to the sidewalk. She had only a few hundred yards to drive, and it was so early in the morning, the only person she could hurt was herself.
“Fuck it,” she hollered, then threw up on the hood.
I watched her for a few seconds trying to mop the hood of the car with her sleeve. “Fuck it,” I said. I grabbed a T-shirt and went after her.
Part 2
I HAD A one-nighter in college that turned into a one-weekender. Another friend-of-a-friend thing. Her name was Julie. On Sunday afternoon I could tell Julie was getting too attached. She kept saying—in a blushing, pleasantly surprised way—that she never did things like this. She also thought it was cute the way I had to sleep with socks on. So I made sure my Friday-night disclaimer was still fresh in her mind. She had just bounded in from the kitchen, back to her futon with a tuna salad sandwich on toasted seven-grain bread. She took Court and Spark out of the tape player. She said she understood that I was unavailable for anything more, but that she couldn’t say she wasn’t disappointed. She thought maybe the weekend had changed my mind. I told her I didn’t think it had. I felt shitty about the whole thing. I didn’t want to sleep over her place that night, but I did anyway.
I woke up in Marie’s bed. She was getting dressed in the early-morning gray. She parted the