The Stud Book (29 page)

She heard him, over the rush of traffic. She didn’t answer, though.

He said, “I’ve been here three months.” He kicked his foot through the grass. “I’m an expert.” He walked right past bottles, cans, and chip bags.

She picked up a brown paper grocery bag and put it in her plastic garbage bag. If her mom saw this, she’d get on the city about recycling the trash. She’d do more about that environmental injustice than she was doing to get Arena off the chain gang.

The guy said, “You find good stuff. Last week I found this awesome bong, no shit.”

Arena looked at him then. He was tall and thin, with skin like coffee ice cream.

“It was, like …” He held his hands apart, his plastic bag swinging in one, tongs in the other. He whispered, “Had to smuggle it out in my pants. Looked like I had a woody so big I couldn’t bend my leg, but none of these homophobes wanted to pat me down.”

Arena had to laugh. She said, “You did not.”

He nodded. “I did. I’m AKA.”

She said, “That’s not a name.”

He said, “It’s mine. You can call me AK, like the assault rifle.” He made a gesture as though to gun invisible people down.

He was pretty and girlish and handsome all at once. He seemed kind of gay, but also like he was flirting.

She said, “I’m Arena.”

He said, “Beautiful name.”

“If you like sports.” She practiced looking him in the eyes. His eyes were so dark they were all one shade, almost black. His hair was shaggy, a short haircut that’d grown out, and his cheekbones were high and narrow.

He asked, “What’d you do to get here?”

“Sold Crystal Light to kids.”

That cracked him up. He said, “Jesus! She’s dangerous.” He turned to the guy behind him, a red-haired slacker with tired eyes. The wind and rush off passing semis stole their voices.

Arena’s hair blew in the freeway corridor’s draft. She asked, “You?”

He said, “Knocking over old ladies.”

The red-haired guy said, “Knocking up. And wasn’t that your mom?”

They were clustered together now.

AKA gave his friend a fake jab, a swing to his jaw that only pushed through air. His teeth were white, his fingers long. He was so tall and thin, it made him seem fragile as an insect, like his arm could come off under his heavy coat. He said, “I robbed ’em blind, and cashed in. It’s a cakewalk.”

He giggled in a way that was no kind of threat.

Arena said, “Right.”

He said, “Serious.”

Their leader marched through the tall grass, wheezing when he reached them. He made a gesture with his hands, like swimming frog-style, pushing the air, telling them to move apart.

Arena nodded, and moved away. She let the roar of traffic fill the lull in voices, and disentangled another mangled condom from the scrub grass, then another pair of underwear. Who would lose their underwear on a freeway? How did that happen?

D
ulcet called Sarah and left a jumbled message: “God, I think I dropped my underwear somewhere along the freeway!” Her recorded voice launched into a story, even as Sarah deleted it. She didn’t have time! Now was the time to be ruthless, to play hardball—or blue balls, or whatever it took.

Why wouldn’t Ben get his sperm checked? It’d been on their to-do list for months. Late one night, in bed, she’d asked him if he was scared to find out. She said, “It’s something we can address.”

He said, “I haven’t had time.”

But time was what they were losing, along with fertility. She was the one with the ticking clock, eggs, and ovaries.

He was afraid of doctors—afraid to learn the limits of his own body.

She’d be the most loving, nurturing, proud mother on the planet even if she had to kill somebody to get there.

Reproduction is not passive. Ben didn’t get it. Adaptation occurs under stress. Four miscarriages had taught her a few lessons. Everybody knows about the black widow and the mantis, insects that eat
their mates. On a relative scale, Ben would be fine with whatever happened.

Outside town, fall chinook were making their way back to rivers to spawn and die.
Spawn and die, spawn and die!
Their stomachs would disintegrate while the fish were alive, starving the host bodies, making room for eggs or sperm.

Sarah was old!

She’d spawn if it killed her.

She drove her Subaru down Martin Luther King, Jr., Boulevard. On the radio, a man with a clipped British accent reported that toxic levels of vitamin A in an energy drink had killed nine people. A computer error had moved a decimal point one space over and each individual serving was accidentally filled with enough vitamin A to blow out a liver.

Nine people?

Did nine people matter on a planet crawling with seven billion poorly evolved primates who called themselves human?

We could lose a billion and still stock the grade schools and temp agencies, keep Starbucks hopping. We could lose over three billion, almost half, and only be back to a 1970s population. Who ever missed the current crowd, the masses, before they were born? These days people stood in lines around the block for brunch, for movies, for a free dinner in a church or an overpriced meal downtown. More and more, there was always the threat of some population vigilante with a gun out to cull the herd, a psycho unleashed under the pressure of crowds.

With half as many people, though, humans had still been, apparently, expendable enough for World War II and Vietnam. Procreation and destruction walk hand in hand. With fewer than two billion people, it seems we afforded and weathered the losses of World War I, sixteen million people. The way to stop war would be to stop having babies, stop raising foot soldiers.

Sarah was only one of the masses. She knew it. Her child would be one more.

Reproduction is about survival of the species, but to an individual animal it’s about the nuclear family, the survival of biological offspring. The rest of the population is competition.

She’d be a loving mama.

The other humans, the ones who burned through fossil fuels, jammed the express lane at the grocery store, faked their way through the carpool lanes, and pissed in the communal well? They could screw themselves.

She snapped the radio off. When she found a prescription bottle on her car’s console, she drove with her arms on the wheel and worked with both hands to open a childproof cap. It was her most recent post-miscarriage anxiety prescription.

Sarah had, by now, completely given in to pills. Doctors wrote out prescriptions like love notes, trying to turn her into Dulcet—to make her not care. The pills helped! In a warbling, temporary way. They helped her to focus her concerns. And with the help of those pills, she resolved to
spawn or die, spawn or die, spawn or die
. She sang the words to herself.

She was relaxed and desperate at the same time.

She chipped the side off a tablet of Klonopin with her teeth, ignored the dosing instructions, and instead nibbled pills all day long, a little now, a little later. The smallest flake of a pill on her tongue, and the world mattered less. Time mattered less. She’d started to see the benefit: a military dose of Klonopin with red wine, dished out like a free lunch, would end the troubles in the Gaza Strip, no joke.

Why didn’t somebody prescribe mood pills for whole countries?

Her car was speckled with pink, pale yellow, and white pill crumbs, Klonopin, diazepam, Vicodin.

Martin Luther King, Jr., Boulevard was lined with junkies and hipsters.

Sarah couldn’t stand their passivity.

She couldn’t stand that she had to get older, and there was no way to stop it.

A shaggy-haired waif on the side of the road held up a battered and grease-stained cardboard sign:
PREGNANT. NO JOB
.

Bragging! Totally.

The street corners were littered with the ever-present stacks of free stuff, and today most of it was baby gear: cribs, strollers, changing tables, and car seat carriers. These stacks of junk arranged themselves into nurseries, baby-friendly spaces artfully waiting at each curb. Each one said, “Our child is off to Harvard! Have our garbage!”

At a stoplight, Sarah idled next to a free pile. A mobile jutting out of a box turned in the wind and played a soft, discordant song.

That song, that noise! It was the Empty Nest song. The free piles mocked her.

This was the deep life pain of snow leopards at the zoo. Those two animals would have a better chance at avoiding extinction if they were asexually reproductive, making autonomous biological choices. Instead they were locked in a cage, one with eggs, the other holding the sperm, at a standoff in their collaborations.

And this is what bothered her about Ben: his foot-dragging.

If she were a lesbian lizard of the desert, a whiptail, there’d be no problem: The whole tribe is female, all potentially reproductive. The lizards put on a fake sort of sex show, a physical routine sans sperm. Only the lizards who do the sex dance lay any eggs at all.

Sarah could totally fake sex—straight, queer, three-way, you name it—if it was the dance that brought about a baby.

They had ten weeks until the doctor said they could try again. Her last egg might drop in that span. Then what? She’d be old. It’d be over. They’d donate their baby books to the library’s fund-raising book sale. Ben would pat her on the back and look at her in his apologetic way and they’d go to the Ringside for a steak dinner. They’d have mixed drinks and talk about saving for a trip to Hawaii or Thailand.

They’d be old people.

She was a problem solver. She could see the problem of mortality coming from way down the road. To do nothing was a maladaptive survival strategy. Even a lowly burr in a field knows how to scatter seed.

Soon enough it’d be summer, and somewhere the summer aphids, those tiny green specks, would reproduce without the need for all this partnering, finagling, relationship building. Summer aphids, like Christ, are born from virgin mothers. The first mother in a lineage is a fundatrix, a foundress.

Sarah should be the fundatrix of her own line.

She drove past day laborers waiting for work on the side of the road. Men waited for yard work, building sites, anything unskilled. They visibly waited out their lives in hope of work. She and the men had that in common: forced passivity.

So many men. So little work.

So many swimming sperm under faded denim.

She slowed her car, ignoring the traffic on her bumper. She looked at the men, because they were men—looked at their shoulders and faces and thick, dark hair. Some were tall, others weren’t. Some had awful teeth. Most looked strong.

Every one of them was a walking sperm bank.

Who defined the limits of “day labor”?

They could help her; she’d help them. She had money. It was cheap labor, no paperwork. It was only the cost of copulation, that human risk.

Survival of the species is about creative adaptation.

Where did thriving sperm cluster? The day laborers were rugged men with hard lives, troubles that showed in their skin and teeth. But there, in with the broken and worn, was one man with a Burt Reynolds mustache. He wasn’t handsome, but he had confidence. Then she spotted a dark James Dean. His hair held a shine like the water of the river, that churning, toxic ribbon of the Willamette that cut the city in half only a block away.

Behind the day laborers a building had been imploded. There was an empty lot full of rubble wrapped in cyclone fencing. Sarah had driven that street for years, but couldn’t remember what building stood there.

That’d be her own life story: here for a while, then gone, and who’d remember Sarah? But to see these men selling their bodies, their skills, on the side of the road, gave her a new sense of possibility. One man held a guitar. He handed it to another guy when a car slowed. She pulled to the curb, still a ways back. She watched him lean in to talk through the passenger-side window of a stranger’s car.

She could do that: pull over, talk to them. They’d come to her.

She circled the block, hoping for a red light, a chance to scan the crew without swerving. She drove slowly, ignoring the honking horns—those mechanical howls of domesticated primates—and passing the line of waiting men a third time. Then the man with the guitar stretched. His guitar leaned against his leg like a devoted pet. He looked good, solid and relaxed.

Relaxed was a trick that didn’t exist in her family gene pool so far.

Sarah was high. Those nibbles on pills added up. Who kept
track? She was high and desperate. The man with the guitar leaned against the chain-link fence, his shoulders big and rounded.

She pulled over to the side of the road and powered down her passenger-side window. The pills whispered, “It’s okay.” More than okay, it was brilliant. It was survival.
“Hola!”
She waved a hand.

How awkward: Spanish or English? Her Spanish was lame. She put a smile on her face and pointed, picking out her man. It was that easy.

He left his guitar on the curb and walked to her car window.

“Quiere trabajar?”
Sarah opted for the formal verb. She admired any language that offered a built-in distance.