Instead he watched as Bag Man shambled past him and picked up the baby. "Look at him," said Bag Man. "Ain't he as pretty as can be?"
"I told you," said Byron. "He's dead."
"Don't be silly," said Bag Man. "Baby like this, it can't die. How can it die? Ain't alive yet. Can't die less you been alive, fool."
Bag Man held the baby like a football in one arm, while he snapped open a plastic grocery bag with the other hand. Then he slipped the baby into the bag. It fit nicely, with its legs scrunched up just like it must have been in the womb. That was the first time it occurred to Byron that all those grocery bags were exactly womb-sized. He wondered if that's how they decided how big to make them.
"He'll suffocate in that bag," said Byron.
"Can't suffocate if you ain't breathing," said Bag Man cheerfully. "You kind of slow, ain't you, Byron? Anyway, nobody suffocates in my bags." He looked at Nadine's naked unconscious body and Byron hated him.
"For looking at your wife naked?"
"For putting that dead baby in her."
"I didn't do it," said Bag Man. "You think I got the power to do this? Drop dead, fool, this ain't my style." He grinned when he said it, but this time Byron refused to be placated.
"Get out of my house," said Byron.
"That's what I was planning to do," said Bag Man. "But first I got a question for you."
"Just get out."
"You want to forget this, or remember?"
"I'm never gonna forget you and what you did. If I see you in the street, I'll run you down."
"Oh, don't worry, you ain't gonna see me, not for a long time, anyway, but go ahead and run me down if you can."
"I told you to get out."
"So... one for remembering, the rest for not," said Bag Man. "Your order will be ready in a minute, sir." Bag Man winked and went back out the door, carrying the dead newborn in the plastic bag.
Is this where those dumpster babies come from? Not pregnant teenagers at all.
And those really fat women who give birth without ever knowing they were pregnant. Nadine once said, How can they not know? Well, what if it was like this? What if some voodoo man did it?
Or maybe he really was a hypnotist. Maybe none of this happened. Maybe when I wake up it'll turn out not to be real.
Except when he touched them, the sheets were wet with amniotic fluid and blood.
He got Nadine awake enough to move while he got the sheet and mattress pad out from under her. As he feared, it had gone clear through to the mattress. It was never coming out of there. They'd have to buy a new one.
And these sheets? They weren't going in the laundry. He got a plastic garbage bag from the cabinet under the bathroom sink and stuffed the bottom sheet and the mattress pad into it.
As he went back into the bedroom, Nadine padded by him toward the bathroom. "That's a good idea," she murmured.
"Washing the sheets. Time to change the sheets," she said. "Did you get dinner?"
"I Cugini, as ordered," he said. Could she really be this calm?
"Mmmm," she said. "I'm gonna shower now, By. Let's eat when I get out."
She didn't remember. She had no idea that any of this had happened.
"You were real sweet, baby," she said.
She thinks we made love, thought Byron.
Well, if a woman can give birth, fall asleep, and wake up five minutes later thinking all she had was great sex, that was some kind of hypnotism, that's for sure.
If it happened at all.
I've got the bloody sheet in this bag, he told himself impatiently.
He opened the garbage bag again just to be sure. Bloody all right. And wet. And slimy. A mess.
He heard the shower start. He tied the bag again and carried it out of the room and through the kitchen, on his way to the city garbage can in the garage.
"Dad," said Andrea, the oldest. "Is Mom okay?"
"She's fine," said Byron. "Just a little sick to her stomach, but she's feeling better now."
"Did she puke?" asked seven-year-old Danielle. "I always feel better if I'm sick and then I puke.
Not during the puke, after."
"I don't know if she puked," said Byron. "She's in the bathroom with the door closed."
"Puking's nasty," said Danielle.
"Not as nasty as licking it up afterward," said Word.
Byron didn't tell him off. The girls were saying Gross, Disgusting, You're as funny as a dead slug: the koine of intersibling conversation. Byron only wanted to get to the garbage can and jam this bag of bloody sheet and mattress pad as far down into it as possible.
What was the old man going to do with that dead baby? What was this all about? Why did this witch doctor or whatever he was pick us?
He came back in and washed his hands with antibacterial soap three times and he still didn't feel dean.
"Not the salads."
Andrea rolled her eyes. He could hear her muttering as she heated up the warm dishes. "Think you have to tell me not to nuke a salad, I'm not retarded, I think I know lettuce sucks when it's hot."
Byron supervised the setting of the table. And as they were finishing, Nadine came in.
"Well, I feel a lot better," she said. "I just needed to rest a minute and then wash off the troubles of the day."
She really was clueless. For the first time it occurred to Byron that this meant there was no one on God's green earth he could ever tell about what happened. Who would believe him, if Nadine didn't back him up? Miz Nadine, your husband said you swoll up and gave birth all in one hour and a homeless man come and took it away in a grocery bag, is that so? And Nadine would say, That's just sick, if my husband said that he's making fun.
"By," she said, "you look green as a ghost. Are you ill?"
"Bad traffic on the ten," he said.
"I thought you said only a fool takes the ten, you've got to take Olympic."
"So I'm a fool," he said.
Why didn't the old man come with me all the way to our house, if he was here to pick up the baby? Why did he go into that fenced-off park?
And when did they put a gate in the fence? There was no gate in the fence.
Wait a minute. There's no fence. There is no damn fence around that park.
"Really, By, are you sure you shouldn't just go to bed? You look pretty awful."
"I suppose I just need a shower, too."
"Well, right after dinner, and I'll give you a neck rub to wipe out all that tension, see if I don't."
"I sure hope you can," said Byron.
"Of course I can, darling," she said primly. "A woman like me, I can do anything."
"She is woman!" intoned Word. "She rocks!"
"Now that," said Nadine, "is one well-raised boy."
"Well-raised man," said Word.
"I'm ten," said Word.
"Don't go calling yourself a man, then," said Nadine. "Man's not a man till he earns money."
"Or drives a car," said Danielle.
What a thing to teach the children. That a man's not a man if he isn't making money. Does that mean that the more you earn, the more of a man you are? Does that mean if you get fired, you've been emasculated?
But there was no point arguing the point. Word wasn't a man yet, and when he was, Byron would make sure he got a man's respect from his father, and then it wouldn't matter what the boy's mother said. That was a power a father had that no woman could take away.
While the rest of the family bantered, Byron's thoughts turned again to that baby. If it was real, was it a child of Nadine's, or some kind of magical changeling? If it was her child, then who was the father? Byron? Was it our son that freak toted out of our bedroom in a grocery sack? Word's little brother, now bound for some miserable grave in a dumpster somewhere?
Is he really dead? Or will the old man's magic find some spark of life inside him? And if he does, could I find him? Claim him? Bring him home to raise?