“Ralph’s got this new thing,” I said, taking Victor back from her.
“I’m sure he does,” she said. She found her purse and then her keys.
“This is,” I said. “Different.”
She was holding Victor again, giving him more kisses. “I shouldn’t be too late,” she said, “but if he gets hungry, there’s food for him in the fridge.”
“I mean, really, pretty different,” I said.
Then she handed me Victor again and said, “You can tell me about it when I get home. I have to go.”
“You won’t believe it,” I said.
“I’m sure I won’t,” she said, and then she opened the door and waved and said, “Love you two.” And then she was gone, and then Victor, who didn’t want her to be gone, started to cry.
I sat Victor on my knee and tried to distract him, tried to console him, but my heart wasn’t in it, and it wasn’t like crying was bad for him, and so I let him go at it for a little while. After a while, he’ll stop, I thought, but he didn’t, and then I got tired of the crying, but still had no idea what to do right then to stop it. I lifted him off my knee and held him so that his eyes met my eyes, though his were scrunched and wet and unseeing, and I said, “You want to go see something different?” I grabbed a cloth and wiped his chest and put a shirt on him and some shoes, then grabbed a couple of diapers to throw into the car and walked outside only to remember Sheila had taken the car. So I went back inside and grabbed the stroller, and twenty minutes and a few more crying jags later, we were back at Ralph’s house.
I walked us back around to the side yard and Ralph was there, and as far as I could tell, he hadn’t moved, not to go inside, not to go take a piss, nothing. That morning we had stood there looking at his unicorn for a good half hour not really saying much of anything, and then he had gone into the garage and had come back out again with two lawn chairs and a small cooler full of ice and beer. He was still sitting in his chair and the cooler was there, the lid open, the ice melted, the empty beer cans floating in the warm, dirty water.
He saw me and said, “You think I need to build a fence, like a real fence here?”
The sun was beating down on his high forehead, and he was sweaty and red. “I don’t know, Ralph,” I said.
“I think I need a fence,” he said.
I lifted Victor out of the stroller and set him on his unsteady feet and then opened the gate to the fence and nudged Victor into the yard. For the first time, Ralph noticed Victor was with me, and this brought him out of whatever state he’d fallen into, and he grabbed Victor, a little too roughly as far as I was concerned, as far as Victor was concerned, too, the suddenness of Ralph’s grab, how tightly he held Victor’s arm making Victor start crying all over again.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” I said.
“Sorry, Mano,” he said. “Just. I don’t know what she’s like around really little ones, you know? I don’t want to spook her.”
What about spooking my boy? I wanted to say, but instead I just took Victor from him and sat him in my lap and tried again to calm him down, and then he must have seen Ralph’s unicorn because all of a sudden he became quiet and still, and all three of us sat there looking at it.
After he first told me it was a unicorn, and after I got over the initial shock of the thing, and when I was still just playing along, I asked him, “Does it have a name?” ignoring for the moment the unreality of the thing he was showing me, or, rather, the unreality of his belief in it.
“Yeah,” he said. “The Chinaman told me her name was Fable, but that name’s for crap if you ask me. So I’m thinking of changing it to Sabre Bitch,” and then he laughed, and then, slightly more seriously, he said, “Or maybe just Sabre, you know, ’cause of the kids.”
Then he pulled up a canvas bag, like a bag you might see in a cartoon expecting it to be full of oats or something, and he opened it and started rooting around in it with a scoop. I asked him what he was doing, and he told me he needed to feed it soon, and I asked him what you were supposed to feed a thing like this, and he told me fairy dust, and I laughed and he said, “That’s no joke.” Then he opened the bag wide and showed me the fine, phosphorescent powder inside it. “The Chinaman threw it in as part of the package.”
“Fairy dust,” I said, my skepticism not even thinly veiled. “It looks like play sand you can buy at Walmart.” Then I spat on the ground and said, “Fairy dust” again.
Ralph laughed a nervous, unfamiliar laugh. “That’s what I thought, too, so I told him no thanks,” Ralph said. “But then he grabbed my arm, grabbed me by the wrist, and he shook his head real serious, and I asked, ‘What is it?’ And I don’t know, he could’ve been lying, but. You know what he said?” I shook my head and rolled my eyes. “I shit you not, he told me it was ground-up fairies, and that I had to feed the unicorn half a cup of this stuff four times a day.” He laughed that nervous laugh again. I scoffed. “That’s what he told me, Mano. And I believe him.”
I looked inside the bag again, trying to picture that fine powder as something other than pink and blue play sand. “How do you feed it this crap, anyway?” I asked.
“You mix it,” he said. “With water or whiskey or beer, but that shit will get expensive, so I figure water will do.”
That was this morning, and something in the way he sat there in his chair gazing at the unicorn made me think something subtle had changed, and when I asked him how Sabre Bitch was doing, he snapped at me. “Watch your language,” he said, and I said, “Sorry, I didn’t mean to—” and then I stopped, and then I said, “Sure thing, Ralph, won’t happen again,” feeling contrite and like I needed to apologize some more, though I couldn’t have said why.
I dipped my hand into the cooler and pulled out an empty can and crushed it and then said, “Jesus, man, it’s not even one.”
He looked at me and then at what was in my hand and then he said, “Not me. For her. She got hungry, so I mixed her up something to eat.”
“What happened to water?”
“She didn’t like it with water, so I mixed some of the beer in there, too.”
And then we didn’t say much else to each other, and we sat there looking at his unicorn until Melissa came home and started hollering at Ralph because he had apparently forgotten to pick the kids up from her mother’s, and then, distractedly, he said, “Hey, man, I have to go, okay? I’ll see you later,” and then he stood up and he looked down at me and Victor, who was still quiet in my lap, who had been there so quiet and so still for so long that in retrospect I should have been worried about him, about what might have come over him, and Ralph waited until, grudgingly, I stood up, too, and then placed Victor back in his stroller, and he stood there, Ralph did, watching us until we were out of sight and almost halfway home.
“It’s not real,” Sheila said as she stood pressed up to the kitchen counter. She was cutting up a cucumber, cutting one slice at a time, sprinkling that slice with salt, and then eating it. Watching her, I felt impatient, like I should grab the knife and cut the whole cucumber and put it all on a plate and set her down somewhere so she could give my story the attention it deserved.
“I think it is,” I said.
“It’s a goat,” she said. “One of those poor little goats with its horns twisted together.”
“It’s real,” I said.
“It can’t be,” she said.