Magic Street Page 0,22
in his arms.
They went home by way of a Kmart, where Miz Smitcher bought a baby seat and some cans of formula and some baby bottles and baby clothes and disposable diapers. "Stupid waste of money when the baby's going to live with somebody else in a couple of days," she said.
"What you say?"
"Nothing," said Ceese.
"I know what you said."
"Then why did you ask?"
"Wanted to see if you had the balls to say it twice."
"Keep him," said Ceese. "You know you want to."
"Just because you want to doesn't mean everybody else does. He's an ugly little baby anyway, don't you think?"
Ceese just stood there watching while she finished belting the car seat into place. By the time she was done, she was dripping with sweat. "Give him to me now," she said.
Ceese handed the baby in to her.
"More trouble than you're worth, that's what you are," she cooed to the baby. "Use up all my savings just to put food in one end and out the other."
Ceese looked out across the parking lot toward the street. Under the bright streetlights there was a homeless man standing on the curb, watching him, or at least looking toward Kmart.
Ceese heard again the thing that must have made him turn and look: the sound of a motorcycle engine revving.
A black-clad woman bent over the handlebars of a black motorcycle that rode along the street.
She wasn't looking where she was going, she had her head turned toward Kmart, and even though there was no way to see her eyes, Ceese knew exactly who she was and what she was looking at.
The homeless man stepped into the street in front of her.
She screeched to a stop, the front wheel of her bike between the homeless man's legs.
The homeless man flipped her off.
She flipped him back.
He didn't move.
She walked her bike backward a couple of steps, then revved up and drove around him, flipping him off again.
He double-flipped her back, then strode back to the sidewalk.
"Home with you," said Ceese.
"Then get in the car."
He did. By the time they got to the street, neither the motorcycle nor the homeless man were anywhere to be seen.
At home, Mother was strangely nice about his being away all afternoon and half the evening, and when Dad got back late from work, he didn't say much, either. "Well, it's nice that Miz Smitcher will have a child to look after," Dad said.
"She didn't sound too happy about it," said Ceese. "I'm going to be helping her by tending him during the day."
"That'll keep you out of trouble," said Dad, laughing a little. And then it was on to other topics with Mom, as if finding a baby happened every day in their neighborhood.
It was all sort of anticlimactic. There was nobody to tell about the motorcycle woman or the homeless man. Nobody who even wanted to hear more about finding the baby. It was all just... done.
Over with. It'll just be Miz Smitcher's little boy growing up next door, and everybody will forget that I found him and diapered his little butt and fed him and didn't throw him down the stairs.
He ate a late supper and went to bed and lay awake for a long while. The last thing he thought was: I wonder if Miz Smitcher is going to smother little Mack in his sleep.
Chapter 6
SWIMMER
Mack Street grew up knowing the story of how Ceese found him in a grocery bag and Miz Smitcher took him in. How could he avoid it, with neighborhood kids calling him by nicknames like
"Bag Boy" and "Safeway" and "Plasticman."
Miz Smitcher wouldn't talk to him about it, even when he asked her direct questions like, Why don't you let me call you Mama? and, Was I born or did you buy me at the store? So he got the straight story from Ceese, who came over every afternoon at four-thirty to take care of him while Miz Smitcher went to work at the hospital.
Mack would ask Ceese questions all the time, especially when Ceese was trying to do his homework, so Ceese made a rule: "You get one question a day, at bedtime."
Mack would store up his questions all day trying to decide which one would be tonight's bedtime question. A lot of times he had one that he knew was great, the most important question ever, but by the time bedtime came around he had forgotten it.
"You don't got to answer it now," said Mack. "Just write it down so I