“What’s that, Dad?” he said.
I had pulled the little gray box from my bedside table. “It’s Daddy’s beeper,” I said. “It goes beep, beep, beep.” I hooked it onto my belt.
“Beep, beep, beep,” said Davy, and he whapped me on top of the head again.
I carried him back down the hallway to the front door. Barbara stood just within the living room, her arms crossed fiercely beneath her breasts.
“Bye, Mommy! Bye!” Davy called to her, waving over my shoulder.
“Bye, sweetheart, have a great time,” she said.
In the background, I could hear the treacly solicitude of Wilma Stoat drip-dripping from the TV. I pulled the door open. I looked back and cocked an eyebrow at my wife. Her lips pursed and wrinkled. She turned her back on me.
“Ho boy,” I whispered.
I never should have stopped at that goddamned grocery.
3
" Hippopotamus!” Davy shouted. Shit, I thought. It stood just inside the zoo entrance on a sun-dappled patch of wood chips under the green trees: a four-foot-high statue of a hippo with its mouth jacked wide open. Two or three kids were already climbing on it, crawling into its mouth, sliding over its back, snaking between its trunky legs. Davy let go of my hand and ran across the patch toward it, waving his arms with excitement. He could spend half an hour on the thing before he even thought about going inside to see the real animals.
I looked at my watch. It was quarter past one. I’d have to start down to the prison around three, I figured, maybe a little after. I could pretty much forget about talking to Porterhouse before that. I stuck my hands in my pockets and strolled after Davy, kicking through the chips. I tried to shrug the thing off. It was nothing important anyway. Just like Nancy Larson and her gunshots. Just a loose end that would be tied up as soon as I got a closer look.
Davy was poking his little blond head into the hippo’s mouth now. Peering into its black depths, bouncing on his toes. Waiting for the boy who was already in there to come out so he could have his turn. I could feel my stomach buzzing as I watched him. Those goddamned potato chips. It was probably nothing, but it sizzled in my belly like an electric spark going pole to pole. Of course, there were so many sparks and sizzles going off in there just now that the place felt like Dr. Frankensteins’ laboratory on the big night. But this was another one, and I wished Porterhouse could’ve waited a bit longer before heading out to lunch. And I wished I didn’t have to take my goddamned kid to the goddamned zoo.
Davy pulled his head out of the hippo’s mouth as I approached him. His face was bright and shiny.
“Look, Daddy, it’s the hippo,” he said.
I forced myself to grin. “Shiver me timbers, so it is.”
“Why is it a hippo?” he asked me.
“Well, son, that’s an existential question.”
“Oh.”
The little boy in the hippo’s mouth came crawling out backwards, and Davy, knowing the law of the kids’ jungle, started muscling his way in there before anyone else could steal his turn. He got his knee on the creature’s lower jaw and hoisted up. His trailing foot hung off the ground but he paused and looked over his shoulder at me.
“I’m going into the hippo’s mouth,” he said, “because it won’t bite me.”
“You sure?” I said.
He hesitated, uncertain, but then said, “Yeah. Yeah, because he’s a pretend hippo.” “Ah. Gotcha.”
He climbed down into the mouth, the bottom of his shorts wriggling as he worked his way in. I stood, fidgeting, in the broken shade of the new-planted oaks. It was a relief after the white glare of the sky, but the day’s heat still smothered the hippo grove and my skin felt like it was slowly turning into glue. As a side effect, the electric stomach syndrome seemed to rise closer to the surface, seemed to spread until the sparks were doing a dermal dance from my crotch to my eyebrows. As moms and housemaids stood by their strollers, watching their charges wrestle over the beast and under it, I shifted on the wood chips, impatient and irritable.
Davy’s voice rose up to me, hollow and echoic, “Look, Daddy, I’m in the hippo’s mouth!”
“I’ll bet you taste good.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re so sweet,” I murmured indifferently. I knew he never listened to the answer to that question.
I watched him distantly as his butt wriggled, as he tried to work his head around so he could get himself out of there. I felt almost frantic with boredom; frustration. I lifted a hand from my pocket and wiped the sweat from the back of my neck. Why am I like this? Why can’t I ever stop? I thought.
“Why am I so sweet?” said Davy, his round face peering up at me now out of the hippo’s mouth.
I smiled at him. “There’s no reason,” I told him. “You were just born that way.”
And three notes trilled from the beeper on my belt.
“It went beep, beep, beep!” said Davy happily. He began to crawl out of the hippo.
“Yeah,” I muttered. My hand was unsteady as I reached down to fiddle with the thing. I swiveled it round on my belt so I could see the readout on the bottom. I recognized Porterhouse’s number and my first thought was: Christ. Not now. But I was already scanning the area for a phone.
Davy lowered himself to the ground. “Now I’ll climb on his back!” he announced.
I’d seen one earlier, I remembered. As we came in. It was just out beyond the entrance.
“Listen. Davy,” I said.
He was wrestling comically with the animal’s flanks. He was too short to climb it and was stretching his hands up high against the smooth gray sides and making little jumps. “Give me some help, Dad,” he said.
“Davy. Look. I’ve gotta go to the phone for a minute.”
“Help me up the hippopotamus.” He was still scrabbling up, sliding down.
“Look, I’ve got to talk on the phone for a minute, Davy. We’ll come right back.” But I already suspected that was a lie.
Davy looked around, surprised. He lowered his hands to his sides. He stood on the wood chips gazing up at me, forlorn. “But I want to climb on the hippopotamus now,” he said.
“Okay. Okay. But first I’ve got to talk on the phone.”
He frowned. He stamped his sneaker against the ground. “I don’t want to talk on the phone. I want to climb the hippopotamus.”
“Come on, son,” I said. And bending down, I lifted him up in my arms.
“No!” He started to cry. “I want the hippopotamus!” He started to wail. His face screwed up, reddening. He struggled in my arms and reached back toward the hippo. The mothers and babysitters pretended not to look at us. I carried Davy away.
“We just have to …” I had to hold him tight to keep him from squirming out of my grip. “We have to …”
“I want the hippo-pot-a-muuuus!” He sobbed as if his mother had died, pushing against my chest. “I want the zoo!”
“We’ll come back to the zoo. We’ll come back,” I said desperately, walking faster round the hedges toward the entrance gate.
Powerless, Davy’s face plopped against my shoulder. Pressing against me for comfort, he cried miserably. “I want to go to the-to the zoo now,” he said.
I would have to meet with him, I thought. Porterhouse. I already knew that’s the way it would be. The man wasn’t going to break down over the phone and shout, “Yes, yes, my sworn testimony was a lie.” He wasn’t going to break down at all, ever. I would have to sit down with him, sit across from him, look into his face as he explained. And I would have to do it now, if I could. Before I went down to interview Beachum. By the time I walked into that prison, I wanted that crackle of doubt in my gut turned off. I wanted to know what this story was about.
With Davy crying inconsolably in my arms, with sweat pouring down my face and my stomach churning with guilt and excitement, I passed under the gay filigree of the gate. The pay phone was right there against the zoo’s brick wall, the blue sign brightly lit by the sun.