1987

Keeping the Bad Man at Bay

IT’S 2 A.M. MAX is awakened by the realization that something in the household is amiss. It reminds him of when the Son was an infant, when he and the Wife worried that he would stop breathing in the night.

The Wife is sleeping comfortably, so he gets out of bed quietly, listening for intruders and sniffing for smoke. Nothing. But when he checks the Son’s room, he finds it empty. The boy’s jeans and his all-protective Montreal Canadiens sweatshirt are missing from the hooks on the back of his door.

Max refuses to even entertain the possibility that something bad is happening to the Son.

When his search brings him to the ground floor, he sees that the deadbolt on the front door is open. He gets on his toes, looks through the decorative glass and spots the Son. He’s sleeping on a lawn chair in his Canadiens shirt, holding his baseball bat in his lap.

Max kisses the top of his head and gently strokes his hair until the boy awakens and gazes at his father with adoring brown eyes. Max wonders how much longer he will be God in the Son’s world.

“What’s up, buddy?” Max asks.

“I’m guarding our house against the bad man,” he says sleepily. “If he comes, I can hit him with my bat, but only if I have to.”

Max knows what’s on the boy’s mind. All the media have been covering the story of a man who breaks into people’s houses. Some householders have awoken to find him staring at them in their beds. Most were just robbed, but the police are concerned that the intruder might eventually hurt someone.

At work, Max has taken several phone calls from readers of the Other Paper complaining that the Paper is frightening children with its coverage. They always acknowledge that the Other Paper is carrying the same story, and can never explain why only Max’s paper is scaring kids.

The Son read the Paper today and watched the television news. He asked Max and the Wife, separately, about the intruder. They told him it was nothing to worry about, but that apparently wasn’t enough.

“I didn’t know you were so worried,” Max tells him now.

“Just a little bit, Daddy.”

“Well, you can’t do guard duty on a school night,” Max says. “So, let me take you upstairs back to bed, and I’ll take my turn guarding the house. Nobody can get past me, right?”

“Oh, I know,” he says, as if this is knowledge shared by all sentient beings. “But I heard Mommy say you need to rest.”

Upstairs, Max puts the little guy to bed and retrieves his copy of The Handmaid’s Tale from the master bedroom. He wakes up the Wife and explains.

“Oh, Maxie. You’ll be exhausted in the morning.”

“If I’m not out there, he’ll know it and be terrified all night.”

It’s not clear why the front porch is the best place to intercept the bad man, but Max spends the rest of the night there reading and being grateful for the pleasant weather. He keeps the bat with him.

At 6:30 sharp, seconds after his Garfield alarm clock goes off, the Son is downstairs checking on his father.

• • •

At work, the consensus is that Max should buy a dog. Every boy should have one anyway.

At bedtime, Max again takes up his post on the porch. An hour later, as Max anticipated, the Son comes down to make sure Max is on the job.

“Everything okay, Daddy?”

“All clear, buddy. See you in the morning.”

“Daddy?”

“Yep?”

“I don’t think we need to guard the house tomorrow.”

“Why?”

“By then, the bad man will know that you live here,” the boy says, punching his right fist into his palm. “And once he knows, he’ll stay away.”

“You sure he’ll know?” Max asks.

“Ohhh . . . he’ll know alright.” The Son gives him a hug and charges back up to his bed.

And Max plunges back into his book, grateful for the privilege of doing his fatherly duty but alert for signs of the bad man.

You never know, he thinks.