The Used World Read online

  She heard Hazel take off her glasses and put them on the table, a sign that she was about to release a deep sigh, then smile—it was a gesture she made when she was victorious, and also when she had lost. “Charlie will enjoy his liberty for less than two weeks, Edna, and then he’ll be back in jail. You’re not going to New Mexico with him, whether or not this problem is solved.”

  “For God’s sake, it’s just mean how you say things like that when you don’t know nothing about Charlie nor New Mexico either one.”

  The baby stared at Claudia, unmoving, unblinking. She reached out very slowly and took his fist, which lay at his side. He was freezing. She could see that his diaper had soaked through, and the moisture was rising up his clothes to his chest. Now that she was this close she could smell him, too; a sharp, sick, chemical smell.

  “Perhaps I don’t,” Hazel said. “There are many times I hope I’m wrong, actually.”

  Claudia saw herself, as if she were her own neutral critic, reach down between the baby’s urine-soaked legs and unfasten the harness that held him in the chair. She did this as quietly as possible, glancing up at the two women at the table just as Hazel stood up from her chair and the pit bull in the corner leapt over the side of the cardboard box without a sound. Claudia put one hand behind the baby’s head, which was so small she could completely enclose it, and another hand under his bottom, all the while whispering shhh, shhh, and then she had the baby against her chest and under her parka, and wasn’t it amazing, she was thinking, that she had worn the Carhartt coveralls, which just happened to be waterproof. She was thinking this and not about the fact that she had someone else’s baby under her coat when she saw Hazel move more quickly than Claudia would have imagined possible, the nine-millimeter out of her pocket, where it had been hanging like a lead weight, now pointed directly at the dog that was taking one slow step toward Claudia.

  Edie stood up. “Hazel! Bandit! Get back on your bed!”

  The dog ignored her, and Edie, in her own moment of heroism, stepped up on her chair, kicked at the clutter on the table until she found a place to stand, then came down in front of the dog, catching her by the collar just as it appeared she was about to spring. “Put that gun away, Hazel!” she hissed, furious. “You pull a gun in this house you’ll get us all killed.”

  “You put that dog away, Edie, and come back and walk us to the front door as if nothing has happened. Then I’ll hide the gun.”

  Claudia, shaking now, was trying to support the baby and zip up her coat. She finally gave up and pulled the coat closed around the infant. Edie dragged the dog down the hallway to the bathroom and closed her in. Bandit hit the door in a fury, barking not in the high-pitched, almost joyous frenzy as the dogs in the backyard, but in full-throated rage. Someone from the front room yelled, “Shut that bitch up!” which earned him a round of laughter.

  Edie came back to the kitchen, her face splotchy and her eyes filled with tears. “I didn’t know you was coming so soon. I don’t know if you should take him after all.”

  Claudia reached in her pocket and got out the keys to the Cherokee, tossing them to Hazel, who fumbled but caught them. “You’ll need to drive, Hazel.”

  Edie grabbed Claudia by the arm. “Don’t tell nobody where you got that baby, Claudia, I beg you. We’ve got enough problems out here as it is.”

  Hazel slipped the gun in her pocket, walked over and looked in the cardboard box. “Want a puppy, too, Claudia?”

  Claudia shook her head, dumbfounded. “No, thanks.”

  “Edie,” Hazel said, “lead us to the door now. Just act naturally.”

  Edie walked ahead of them through the two bedrooms, past the bathroom where Bandit was rioting, through the dim, fume-soaked living room. She opened the front door; Claudia ducked, stepped out onto the porch, and Hazel followed. The air outside was frosty, clear. Claudia took a deep breath, pulled the silent baby closer to her, and headed for the car.

  “Well? What now, Hazel?” Claudia said, opening her coat and turning the baby around.

  “What do you mean, what now?”

  “I mean, what do you intend to do with this baby?”

  “He’s your baby.”

  Claudia coughed, covering the baby’s exposed ears with her hands. “No, he isn’t,” she whispered. “You’re insane. I don’t want any part of this!”

  “Well, it’s too late now.” The Jeep rocked from side to side as Hazel traversed the holes in the lane leading out of Cobb Creek.

  “We have to take him to the hospital, or to Child Services—”

  “He smells terrible,” Hazel said, grimacing. She was sitting at the edge of the seat, trying to accommodate the twelve-inch height discrepancy between Claudia and herself.

  “You can move your seat up, Hazel, you don’t have to drive like you’re ninety-seven.”

  “This is identical to the Jumpin’ Bean situation,” Hazel said.

  “Wha…” Claudia couldn’t speak the entire word. She gestured to the heavens. “What on earth are you talking about?”

  “I’m talking about Jumpin’—”

  “This is nothing like Jumpin’ Bean, why would you even say such a—”

  “How is it different, then?”

  Claudia took a deep breath, prayed for patience. “For one thing, Jumpin’ Bean was a coonhound.”

  “So he was of a different mammalian species. Big deal.”

  “AND Ernie Hinshaw didn’t want him, had never wanted him.”

  “Exactly the same here.”

  “And Jumpin’ Bean started coming around to my house on his own, I didn’t go and just steal him off somebody’s floor. And I’ll remind you he was a dog, Hazel.”

  “As I recall, you fed him for three days running, then started letting him sleep at your house, and presto, he was your dog.”

  “You are crazy to be making this comparison.”

  Hazel turned onto the highway. She wasn’t a great driver, and Claudia pulled the seat belt a little tighter around the baby.

  “All I’m saying”—Hazel pointed at the lump under Claudia’s coat—“is feed him for three days and then see what happens.”

  “Hazel, I can’t take this baby home. It’s out of the question. I’ll be happy to go to the emergency room with you, or the police department, Family Services, anything. But I can’t take him to my house.”

  “And why is that, just tell me why. Tell me why it’s okay to toss that baby, who was obviously born into suffering and has continued to suffer every single day of his godforsaken life, into the jaws of institutional bureaucracy, and what is it exactly that prevents you from rising to the occasion here?”

  Claudia stared at Hazel, stunned. “How dare you make this my problem. How dare you pass judgment on me because I don’t want to take a stolen baby into my house.”

  Hazel glanced at Claudia, raised an eyebrow. “Why did you pick him up, then?”

  “Because”—Claudia shook her head—“because I couldn’t leave him there to die.”

  “What’s the other reason?”

  Claudia let her head fall back against the seat. “There was no other reason.”

  “Really?”

  “I have been—Hazel, I have always been cooperative with you, I trust you. But you need to point this Jeep in the direction of the hospital, and from there we’re calling the police.” The baby still had not moved, and the smell rising off of him made Claudia panic; she felt tempted to grab the steering wheel, even if it meant plowing into a tree.

  “Can I tell you who this baby’s mother is?”

  “I don’t care, Hazel.”

  “She was that nineteen-year-old meth addict who died of exposure after passing out at the end of the lane at Cobb Creek. She had apparently been running all around the property in just a T-shirt and underwear, running for hours because she believed a gang of Mexicans was chasing her.”

  Claudia swallowed, turned and looked out the passenger’s side window.

  “Do you know who his
father is?

  “No, Hazel. I don’t.” Claudia pressed her back teeth together so hard she felt something pop in her jaw.

  “That’s fine, because nobody else does, either. The mother of the dead nineteen-year-old is herself in prison for check deception and embezzlement; there is no father in that case, either. Do you see what I’m getting at?”

  “Drive to the hospital, Hazel, and we’ll get this straightened out.”

  “The baby will go into the foster care system. Maybe you’re familiar with the foster families of Hopwood County.”

  Every year there was a scandal in the foster care system; in just the past summer a family with twelve children in care had been found to keep them in cages at night. “You’re being manipulative—wait, Hazel, listen to me. Manipulative is just the beginning. You’re doing something illegal and involving me and that’s too—”

  “You picked him up and put him in your coat.”

  “It’s too far.”

  Hazel took the exit and approached the commercial edge of Jonah. “Do this for me, if not for him.”

  “I won’t.”

  “Please, Claudia—this isn’t like anything else, this is a favor I would never ask of another person in this world. You. I would ask it of you.”

  Pressing her temples, which now hurt much worse, Claudia said, “I don’t have one single thing this baby needs, and I don’t know how to take care of babies, I’ve got no instincts.” She tried not to sound so furious; she tried to suppress the black rage she felt toward Hazel, toward Edie and the criminal underworld she and Charlie inhabited. They were just animals, she thought, before realizing that animals would never live as Edie did. “What I don’t have for this situation is…what I don’t have is everything. Everything I need is missing.”

  “So?” Hazel said, shrugging. “We stop by the drugstore, we go to the Emporium. It’s not rocket science.”

  “How would you know.” Claudia no longer had the energy to fight. She stared out the window at the bare, snowy fields. The baby looked straight ahead and didn’t move. “Why not you, Hazel? Why not take care of this yourself?”

  Hazel reached across the Jeep’s center console, rested her hand on Claudia’s knee a moment before touching the baby lightly on top of his head. “It’s too late for me.” But she didn’t sound particularly sorry to say so.

  1964

  She could look at the sky and see it for what it was, and she could look at the names of the planets and see something else. A constellation was a catalyst, pushing energy so dense it was nearly matter out into the universe while remaining itself unchanged. An astronomer could say Saturn, and Hazel would picture the formidable planet, its debris field; but if she herself wrote the words Saturn in its trine position, there was no planet at all. This was no different, she assumed, than how the word God is not the same as God. The word does not only not invoke, it barely evokes, or at least it seemed so to Hazel, in the grimly literal mid-twentieth century.

  Saturn, that old devil eating his children. Saturn was the bottom line, the uncompromising; it had been in Gemini the year she was born and ruled over Capricorn, her sun sign. How to think about it? Hazel sat on her bed, facing the window, a book open on her lap. She tapped her pencil eraser against the pages, drumming out an uneven rhythm. Nothing was predetermined by the time of birth, and the inner light of the night sky, the sky we carry inside us, was neither particle nor wave. Nothing was predetermined, and yet. There were influences—people were born and lived inside shafts of behavior—they lived within their natal chart as if in a suit of clothes so perfectly fitted to them it seemed to match their DNA. And she had reached a point where she could meet a person and see within a few seconds their sun, their moon, their ascendant, which was nothing like foreseeing the future and everything like reading the past, what was right before her; but the present became the future, and so it was foresight, after a fashion. At Sycamore State, where she had been a part-time student for seven years, she had heard every ancient art mocked with savage ardor by the empiricists of the age, and what she was always tempted to say in response was that she was herself empirical in her assessments, because she had a hypothesis and she had tested it (tested it every day, in fact) and the results had been replicated. The fact that her professor of natural sciences, a beaky unhygienic man much enamored of mineral deposits, could not replicate them was his failure, not hers. And not the failure of the art itself.

  Hazel sighed, closed the book on Greek astronomy she’d been reading. She had real tests coming up and knew she should be devoting herself to them. That natural sciences class, for instance. By the end of Christmas break she was supposed to have written a paper titled “The Dinosaurs: Where Did They Go?” but she hadn’t even begun it. She was also to have developed a thesis on John Steinbeck’s The Winter of Our Discontent, and had not. She sighed again, closed her eyes.

  A car pulled into the lane. It wasn’t Finney, who was at this hour working at Sterling’s Department Store, selling handbags and nylon stockings to Christmas shoppers.

  It wasn’t Hazel’s father, who was no longer ever home in the evenings. Hazel couldn’t remember the last time she’d had a meal with him. If she had asked (and she wouldn’t), he would have reeled off his busy, important schedule: the town council meetings, the men’s professional organizations, the philanthropic fraternities through the aegis of which he intended to leave his name as a legacy. In death he hoped to be far more than the general practitioner with the country clinic. He would be the decorated army surgeon, the Albert T. Hunnicutt Memorial Wing of This or That.

  Maybe someone’s mother was coming to pick up Edie to take her to the skating rink, or to a Christmas party in a basement somewhere, a gathering where there was bound to be frantic, preadolescent groping in a closet.

  Or did her mother have a patient? Hazel got up and walked to her desk, ran her finger down her calendar. No, there was no one listed. Of course, sometimes people just showed up, desperate for advice. Caroline had grown, over the past few years, into a daunting presence, her hair streaked with white and swept up into that twist, so perfect it seemed to have been designed by an architect, or a sculptor. She was thin, severe, intolerant of complaint, nonsense, or sentiment. Hazel had three times accompanied Caroline to the Negro neighborhood across the river in Jonah, to help deliver babies when the situation had grown too complicated for the local midwife, a toothless, creaky old woman named Lulamae who was so smart she left Hazel as shy as a child. She had spoken to the laboring women with such straight indifference—Don’t scream, you aren’t dying; don’t tell me you can’t do this, you can and you will—that they had simply obeyed her.

  A car door closed. Hazel slipped her shoes on in case she was needed, straightened her sweater. She opened her bedroom door to the sound of “A Hard Day’s Night” in the hallway; Little Edna was still home. Hazel rolled her eyes, slid her headband off, ran her hands over her hair, making sure her bangs covered her scar, put the headband back in place. A conspiracy had grown up in the Hunnicutt household—one of omission and silence rather than action—to ignore Edie as much as possible and hope for the best. Hazel would never have been allowed to do, as a thirteen-year-old, what her sister took as her right. No one guarded Edie from her own worst impulses because none of them understood what to protect, what was in there. It wasn’t just the knee-high white boots that puzzled Hazel and Caroline, or that Edie wasn’t good in school and had so little intellectual curiosity. It wasn’t even the boy-crazed nonsense she shared with the friends who all looked and dressed like her. For Caroline as well as Hazel, the problem was that Edna wasn’t sufficiently serious. When Hazel combined Edna’s temperament with what she saw in her chart, there seemed little chance of an adulthood devoted to either altruism or a worthy profession.

  Hazel could hear her mother talking in the parlor, and then her heels crossing toward the stairs.

  “Hazel?” she called. “You have a visitor.”

  It would be Jim Hank
Bellamy, motherless boy, much loved by Caroline and Edna. He had been courting Hazel in a steady, distant way for more than a year, and he still showed up on odd nights, even though she’d declared herself unavailable. She had declared herself unlovable, unable to love in return. He had listened patiently, sitting on the down-filled settee in the parlor, fixing his gray eyes on her face with the look of an athlete about to leap a hurdle. His expression suggested that no obstacle was greater than any other, and having crossed a class barrier, having earned enough money to buy a car to drive out to her house, having braved the potential scorn of Albert T. Hunnicutt, he was prepared to wait.

  She took the back staircase, clomping down two at a time so as not to look like Bette Davis on the grand front stairway.

  “Hey, Jim Hank,” she said, emerging from the servant’s hallway.

  “There you are, dear.” Her mother reached out for Hazel’s hand. “Jim Hank was just telling me about the weather.”

  “Yes?”

  “It’s nice.” He wore his blue wool overcoat and a black scarf Finney had made him, along with a wool cap that didn’t complement his coat in any way, but somehow drew out the paleness of his eyes and the length of his dark eyelashes. Anyone could see he was a handsome boy—a man now, Hazel had to admit—and worthy of all good things. “It’s winter,” Hazel reminded him, although she knew it was his favorite season.

  “I’ll leave you alone,” Caroline said, tugging at the seam of her suit jacket. She still wore a skirt, blouse, and jacket every day, along with silk stockings and heels. In the clinic she wore a white overcoat, so there were layers upon layers between herself and everyone else. “Jim Hank, stay for hot cider, won’t you. I’ll be in the kitchen working on my reports.” Her heels tapped against the hardwood as she took the long way, through the library and dining room, rather than the straight servant’s hallway to the kitchen.