The Cradle (17 page)

Matt had to move the cradle. Joe couldn’t fit inside the truck with him if it was there as well. He had some bungee cords
and a tarp in his utility box, so he removed the cradle, wrapped it, and tied it down as best he could. Not satisfied, he
went into the garage of the house through the kitchen and found some twine, then used that to tie the cradle down better.
As he worked, Joe followed him. First outside to see the cradle removed, then into the garage for the twine, then back outside.
Matt didn’t talk to him as he worked, but he was glad to see that the boy appeared to have a mind.

“Okay,” Matt said once he’d tied the last knot. He looked down at Joe. “I think it’s safe.” He turned back and gave the cradle
a few tugs. “You?” he said. “You think that’s safe in there?”

Joe didn’t say anything.

“You wanna see?”

Still nothing. Matt squatted down in front of him. “You’ve been moving around a lot,” he said, and the boy kept his eyes focused
on Matt as he talked. “One more time, then you’ll be through. I saw you were all packed up.”

Joe looked over his shoulder, back at the house.

“I have to ask you, though,” Matt said. “Do you want to stay here? With your grandma?”

Joe looked back at him and didn’t nod or shake his head.

“You don’t know who I am,” Matt said. “But we’re related, actually. You see, you’ve got a big sister. She’s a lot older than
you. She lives in St. Helens, which isn’t very far from here. And I’m married to her.”

Joe looked back at the house again.

“Your grandma talked to me for a little while and she said that she thinks you might have a better time coming to live with
us for a little while. What do you think of that? Do you want to stay living here with your grandma? Or do you think you might
want to meet your big sister?”

Finally, Joe shrugged.

“You don’t know or you don’t care?”

“I don’t know,” Joe said.

Matt smiled. It was the first time he’d heard a word from him. He said, “Okay. Well, what about this: how about you come to
meet her, and you stay for a week or so, then we talk about it again and see what you want to do?”

Joe walked past him to the truck and looked at the twine that was visible from down below.

“I moved it to make space,” he said. “So you can ride in the front. The cradle, I mean.”

Joe looked at the truck.

“You like driving?”

Joe, still looking at the truck, started shaking his head slightly.

“No? I drive safe, mind you.”

Matt stood and went back into the house, and Joe followed him in. They went to the kitchen and Matt leaned down and picked
up the boy’s small suitcase. Then Joe got his backpack. He spent a moment twisting his arms so it fit onto his back, then
waited.

“Let me ask you a question,” Matt said to him. “What’s your favorite color?”

“Red.”

Matt said, “Okay. Come on.”

So this was happening. What it meant, Matt didn’t want to think about. But it was happening. He was tired from the driving,
from the questions, from having to tell his story over and over again. And yet somehow, here he was, with a cradle. And then
some. Joe followed him out to the truck, and Matt opened the door for him and stepped back. He didn’t know whether or not
the boy would be able to climb in on his own, whether or not he’d have to lean down and hoist him up. But Joe didn’t have
much of a problem. He looked around the truck a little, then found a handhold, got a foot up, and hauled himself in, then
climbed onto the seat and began arranging himself. “Good work,” Matt said, and he leaned over and stuffed the suitcase behind
the seat.

He went around the front, climbed in, started the engine, and looked down at Joe. “You ready?” Matt said. Joe didn’t say anything.
He was still wearing his backpack, and the hump of it forced him to lean forward a little bit in his seat. Matt looked closer
and saw that he had peed in his pants.

“I guess we shoulda stopped in the bathroom on our way out,” Matt said to him.

Matt hoped he would smile, but he saw that Joe’s hands were shaking. He was staring straight ahead, into the latch on the
glove box.

“Hey,” Matt said, touching his shoulder. “Hey. It’s okay.” Joe just shook.

Matt turned the engine off, got out, and came around to Joe’s side and pulled open the door. “Let’s just do a quick changearoo
and start again. For the first time. Sound okay?” He reached back behind Joe and got the suitcase, laid it on the ground,
and sorted through the messy pile of clothes inside. He found a second tiny pair of sweatpants and held them up. “How do these
look?”

Joe looked down at the pants.

“Okay, then,” Matt said. “And also, we’ll be needing one nice pair of Spider-Man underpants. Wouldn’t you know it?”

Matt held up a pair of Spider-Man underpants.

“Okay,” said Matt. “Hop out.”

Joe started to climb down. Matt said, “Hold on. Leave your backpack up there.” Arms rolling and body squirming, Joe slid out
of the backpack, climbed down to the floor, and jumped out onto the driveway. He stood in front of Matt, and Matt started
unlacing his sneakers. The pungent smell of urine wafted directly into his face. He said, “You know how to tie these things
already?” He didn’t bother looking up for a response.

Joe’s shoes off, Matt helped him out of the sullied sweatpants, then helped him out of his white briefs, stained bright yellow,
when Joe didn’t start doing so himself. He couldn’t help but see the boy’s small penis. He didn’t want to see it. Matt looked
down. He picked up the Spider-Man underpants and held them open low and told Joe to step into them. The boy did, one foot
at a time, and Matt pulled them up and let the elastic snap closed, then they did the same with the pants. Matt found a plastic
bag in the truck and put the wet pants and undies into it, tied it off, loaded the suitcase back behind the seat, and nodded
at Joe to climb up again. “Let’s try this again, shall we?” he said.

Joe climbed in, this time quicker than he had before. Matt helped him set the backpack down on the floor, then closed the
door.

He checked the cradle one last time in the back, then came around and climbed inside. He started the engine, put the truck
into reverse, and smiled down at Joe. He shook his head with the smile to make sure it seemed like it didn’t matter. “You
ready to—”

Matt frowned.

There was a new stain in the crotch of the pants, right where Joe had peed again.

It took four stops and all of Joe’s pants to get them out of Indiana. When they were through Chicago, Matt kept telling himself
to just not look down at him anymore. He hadn’t said another word or made a sound at all, but the shakes were coming intermittently.
He was terrified.

That was what
alone
did. His fear made Matt again wonder at the wisdom of what he was doing. This was all too rushed. There had to be social
workers involved, forms, consultations. A lot of bureaucracy. You don’t just walk in somewhere and take somebody because he’s
given to you. A week ago none of this existed—not the idea to find the cradle, not wrinkled old women in Green Bay, not Darren,
not Rensselaer, not the boy. Now it was impossible to back away from it. No matter what happened, it would be impossible to
walk away from it.

He’d been numb since the woman had walked out of the house and had left him alone with Joe. He hadn’t felt a thing. Now, though,
beyond the frustration with the kid, as the highway past Chicago opened up, something was growing again. Something that was
made by the Kincaids, in their way, but made more by all the rest. By the worst of them: by Clyde Hancock and his drunk German
wife, Hilda, and by Mr. Wasserstein, and by the man whose name he’d never known, the janitor at the Fryer Boys’ Home. He remembered
this kind of fear now.

It wasn’t fear, actually. It was dread. The hollow, stultifying pressure of it, the way it soaked into you and made something
as simple as opening your eyes in the morning, realizing a new day was there for you, almost impossible.

He had scrubbed himself clean of it. He had literally spent years tearing out his own insides, all of his twenties spent removing
everything that had come before, all of those years to remove each and every organ capable of producing that sensation of
the past. He had known that if he didn’t, he would always be followed by it. What had scared him even more, then, was giving
it to somebody else, either passing it down to a child or transferring it sideways, to someone he loved, if he ever found
somebody to love. He had, of course, and by that time he had taken the steel wool to the farthest edges of his mind and his
heart and had left nothing unsterilized. All that was so far behind him...he had even taken care to scrub away the scrubbing
itself, to mute it and make it small and make it seem as though it hadn’t happened, hadn’t taken every ounce of energy he
had.

Tigers. Joe was sitting beside him, quiet. Was it not obvious then, what this other feeling was, this mysterious feeling of
gratitude for a day? It was the same shape, just the opposite. He hadn’t invented it himself and he had not been touched by
the hand of God and granted a new emotion for doing nothing. No. That feeling that sometimes overcame him—that feeling that
was coming again now and that was making his heart beat faster, making him start to sweat, making his hands shake a little—that
feeling was what happened when he rushed through the carved passages of all that old pain, but rushed through them without
the pain. Instead just existed and allowed himself to be what he was and what he had been at the same time. The divots and
the paths and the channels that were there inside him were not malleable. Rather, it was what ran through them that was malleable.

He started pulling over. It was one of those. The sky in front of him was a pale blue and closing down in a circle. The edges,
again, were turning bright white. What he was feeling now was both sides of it, he realized, reaching forward and sliding
the gearshift into park. The rage was nearly unbearable, but the joy, too, had mixed with it. Why, he didn’t know. He hadn’t
the faintest idea what to do or say. This boy right here beside me, he thought. This boy. He looked over. Joe looked calm.
He didn’t have the faintest idea.

Matt got out of the car and leaned against the grill. It was hot, and he closed his eyes and let the feeling deep into the
small of his back. He was an hour from home. But he couldn’t go there. Not yet. That was the point.

Alone. This is what
alone
did. And to think there were reasons for it to happen, that it didn’t just drop down onto you. That was what he hadn’t understood
when he was a child. That the world never just happened but rather was made by people, each and every aspect of it. Whether
or not you could control it was beyond the point. It was not the question if you were a child. When you were a child, you
couldn’t control anything. That’s what being a child was.

Later, though. Later, it was different.

What he felt he knew for certain was that without going, it wouldn’t be secure. Without actually making it clear what would
happen, and making sure the law was on their side as well, something could always go wrong. Someone could go. Someone could
come back. Someone would change their mind. Matt knew, though, that he wouldn’t change his mind once he decided. And actually,
hell, he had already decided. So he would have to go back and make it clear, what he planned.

He found a phone at a gas station just a few miles down the road. He was glad that she didn’t answer, and he left a message
after hearing himself say that no one was home.

“It’s Matt,” he said. “He’s here with me. We’ll be home tomorrow. One more thing to do.”

It was evening by the time they arrived back in Walton. The sun was low in the sky, directly in front of the truck, slamming
Matt’s eyes a little—his eyes itched, and he wondered whether eyeballs could get burned—but despite its orange, the flatlands
of southern Minnesota still looked gray. No matter how you lit it, barren was barren, sterile was sterile. They’d stopped
once to eat, and now Joe was sleeping, curled up into a ball with his
Little Mermaid
backpack as a pillow. He’d had one more accident during the drive. Out of clothes, they’d stopped at a Target in Madison
and Matt had bought three more pairs of little sweatpants for him and a new package of underwear. He’d also bought a package
of Hanes white T-top shirts for himself in the spirit of hygiene. In the checkout line, he’d seen a superbouncy ball, swirled
in color, so he’d also gotten that and given it to the boy.

This time there would not be any circling through the streets. They passed the great dead mechanical beast and entered town
slowly. It was two nights ago that Matt had come here for the first time. Now, though, it was different. All through the drive,
he’d been carrying along the pulsing feeling that had overwhelmed him in Milwaukee. As they’d passed the St. Helens exit,
he had stared straight ahead and had talked to Joe about the big icicles he remembered forming on the roof of the Kincaids’
house, and how he’d loved nothing more than to throw snowballs at them and knock them down and then take them up and play
with them like they were swords. There was something to the many steps of this game that he had loved. As he spoke, the urge
to have what he was thinking to himself as a discussion with Darren Roberts tickled inside his limbs.

Just a discussion.

They passed the bank where Matt had withdrawn the money, then turned, then turned onto Darren’s street.

Joe was waking up, and Matt said quietly, “We’re here.” As they passed Darren’s house, Joe straightened up, and Matt wondered
whether or not Joe remembered this town or this street. Probably not. The boy’s mind was an opaque mystery to him. It wasn’t
only the not talking, it was everything else—the way his eyes moved with intelligence, the way his lips stayed still, never
pursed, never changed position. He didn’t smile, either. He only looked.