World Famous Love Acts

It was a contest to see which of us could inflict the most horrible death on our babies. Grant and I stood on the soppy shore of Lindo Lake, mud hens gurgling in the cattails, their little white beaks and black heads, those beady, undertaker eyes all busying about, more purposeful than the other fowl, I always thought, the blue-green headed mallards and the white farm ducks dumped off each year a few months after Easter, the abandoned and hissing barnyard geese. These would be our accomplices in our last grand effort. The baby was dressed and ready on our raft of plywood and plastic milk bottles, sleeping, we said of all the victims during preparations.

I met Grant in Ms. Felder’s fourth-grade class earlier that year. I was a transfer student, unhappily arriving in a school where I was one of three black students. And worse, my father, a hardnosed, back-to-basics teacher, had joined the faculty. By the second week, the playground was referring to him as Darth Vader. I was such a pariah that even the two other black kids wouldn’t speak to me. “Git,” they said the first time I talked to them. But Grant didn’t hesitate because he could afford to be friends with a kid like me whose parents made him wear Catholic-school uniforms in a public school, navy blue Toughskins and white button-up shirts that didn’t tuck in over my fat little belly. Grant was the kind who wanted everyone to like him and everyone did, though before me, he said he didn’t hang out with anyone. He’d gotten his father’s dark eyes and Native-American hair that he feathered back on both sides, and much of his mother’s dewy skin. In school photos, he stood in the rear because he was five inches taller than the next tallest kid. But it’s not his height that stands out in those photographs, it’s his already perfect smile, those straight white teeth that got him into R movies and allowed him to turn in homework late.

“You ready for this?” I asked him as I strapped our baby to the raft. We’d both spent our allowances buying loaves of bread to make the body. This one was a boy and we called him Dexter—a small burlap sack full of bread with strategically placed beaksized holes. For limbs we used tube socks, for the head, a halfdeflated supermarket ball, the ninety-nine cent kind in the tall cages, the ones we bugged our moms to buy us but which never lasted more than a few days. For Dexter’s face, we drew large eyes and a small blue frown.

The first baby to go was Veronica—Grant’s idea, a five-pound sack of flour with a red felt-tip smile and two googly eyes plucked out of a stuffed giraffe’s head we found in the Goodwill donation box. We made her in Grant’s room, the only place where we had any privacy. My house was out. Even though, in those days, my mother was just an echo in my life, always doing something besides being home, and my father expected me to read, or practice for a recital. There was always a recital. I stayed out until nearly five o’clock when I knew my father came home from school. I was supposed to spend that time doing something constructive, but I knew I’d be locked down once he got home and there’d be plenty of time, too much time, in our quiet house.

But Grant lived in the Pink Ghetto, a low-rent apartment complex coated with stucco the color of chewed bubble gum. His room was safe to build babies. His stepfather—Grant called him “Dude”—had two jobs, one as a bouncer at a local cowboy bar, the other selling gas, so he was rarely home. And Grant’s mother never bothered us because she had to lie flat during the last three months of her pregnancy. At first, I never saw her face, just her creamy white feet beyond the half-opened door. “Hello, Herschel,” the feet said the day we finished Veronica. “You boys behaving?”

Veronica lay peacefully on Grant’s floor waiting to be dressed. “I wish she’d hurry up and have that stupid baby,” Grant said as he slipped one of his old T-shirts over Veronica’s square body. “I hate being quiet all the time. I don’t know why Dude let her get pregnant anyway.”

I sat Veronica up and held her for Grant’s inspection. He frowned, handing me some markers. “You can’t hurry a baby,” I said. “They got to eat ’n stuff before they come out.” I plumped her red, kewpie mouth and filled in doelike lashes over Veronica’s loopy eyes, her black plastic pupils swirling with each jostle.

I paused. When Grant wasn’t the expert, I took the opportunity to show him I knew something. “Milk,” I said, looking around his room. The best thing about being at Grant’s was his posters, every wall a pipeline wave with a surfer crouched and peering out. My favorite was the blonde guy with the green eyes that Grant said got killed in Hawaii surfing storm waves. But Grant liked the one of Farah, head tilted back, a mane of frosty blonde hair scattered around her face, nipples perked beneath a red one-piece.

We discussed how unborn babies ate as we walked to the bridge that stretched across the dry bed of the San Diego River. Following my tube principle, by the time we arrived in the center, we agreed that babies had access to certain foods right after the mother swallowed them. The thought of a baby sucking down chewed spaghetti grossed us out to the point of laughter.

Grant held Veronica over the concrete railing. The air was warm and breezy. Forty feet below us was the sandy riverbed, clotted here and there with bamboo stands. Veronica’s indifferent pucker mocked us now and I didn’t feel sorry for her at all as Grant let go and she turned head first, the T-shirt flailing like a comet tail. She thudded into a big white spray of flour, carnationlike. Not as gruesome as we hoped, but still worth the effort. Little white puffs blew off her like smoke. “That’s so trick,” Grant said. “She’s dead and on fire.” He looked at me, the bright sun glaring off his black hair. “Your turn, Hersch.”

Just then a sheriff’s car stopped next to us. “What are you boys up to?” the man in the car said. He was asking both of us but looking at me. This was the kind of person I had to watch out for, the kind my father explained about the day we moved into this town. “You might meet ignorant people here who are uncomfortable with blacks,” he said. He never used words like “racist” or even “prejudiced.” There were a few kids on the playground who fit my father’s definition and let me know, called me Fat Albert or Cosby Kid, but Grant was always there, so I felt ahead of the game.

Grant and I ran, relieved, laughing all the way back to his apartment. It was all we could do to be quiet when we got there. The feet were sleeping. I’d seen them enough to know, kind of curved in toward each other. Grant went in his mother’s bedroom but I stayed in the hallway. He brought out an empty pitcher and went to the kitchen, filling it with water and ice. “That was so smooth,” Grant whispered. “We were so smooth.” One thing I always liked about Grant is that he talked like TV people, at least the ones I snuck watching when my parents were asleep or outside. Grant took the ice water into his mother’s room and we met on his bed. We lay side-by-side, feet to heads.

Grant wasn’t as excited about floating Dexter as he had been. We already had two under our belt, Veronica, and James, who we hung, twice. Dexter, we planned to shove into the middle of the lake where hungry ducks and geese would then flock, devouring his insides, leaving behind his pink, plastic head and burlap skin. Grant and I sat at the edge of the lake, staring at our breadplumped creation with his sad blue smile. On the opposite shore, a late morning bullfrog started its deep call, that drawn out plea that sometimes sounded to us like a grown man’s voice calling for his mother—Mom... Mom... Mom... Mom—and sometimes—bone... bone... bone... bone.

This was big news and just like Grant to say something out of the blue like that. Most of the other kids made fun of her, but Grant thought Delia was the prettiest girl in our class, even with her prosthetic arm with its steel claspers. She wore the best clothes, usually yellow, which showed off her brown skin, darker even than mine. One time she wore a green hoop skirt to school for showand-tell but she kept it on all day. On the playground, she dared Grant and me to climb underneath. “Is she a good kisser?” I asked.

“Real good.” Grant smiled, the first genuine one of the morning. “It was so trick, I walked her home yesterday and we went in her bedroom. She has all these pictures of Mexican singers and stuff. But she just turned around and kissed me right on the lips.”

I was secretly glad that Delia’s mother interrupted them. I knew Grant liked Delia, but I didn’t appreciate the idea of my only friend being taken away. I felt like he was pretty much all I had. And at that age, Grant was already having feelings for girls I could only pretend at. When I suggested the name Veronica for our first baby, it was as close as I could get to Delia, I thought, without being obvious.

Grant kneeled next to Dexter, checking the twine I’d used to bind him. “Anyways, Dude found out. Delia told her dad and he came over. Dude was screaming at me all night. Mom even got out of bed to make him calm down.” Grant ran a hand through his hair and shook it out.

Hanging James from the rafters in our horse corral was my idea. I was smart about it. The day before, I asked my father in my most polite voice if Grant could play at our house. My father looked up from the papers he was grading. His small brown eyes were bloodshot. If my mother had been there, she would have reminded him to put on his reading glasses. “We want to build a fort in the backyard,” I told him.

My father hmmphed and looked at the fat gold harp in the living room, scratching his temple with his red grading pen. “What about practice?” He sat straight back in his chair so I had to look up at him. He reminded me that my grandmother got the harp from a woman whose house she cleaned for thirty-two years. I focused, as always, on the ridge of pebbly moles which formed dark brown cornices over his cheeks. “You know, Herschel,” he said, “success is all about execution. You can’t have good execution without practice.”

I nodded like I always did when he was speaking. My father had a way of making me feel that I didn’t have a clue as to what was valuable in life. Even years later, when I was long out of the house and just visiting, he’d find some way of bringing up the dusty harp I couldn’t play and the wife I never had. Though I knew he loved me, when I was young, I often felt my father didn’t see me so much as a boy, but as a kind of dullard robot he was trying to reprogram. That day, when I’d been thoroughly lectured on how life was a series of wisely and expertly executed acts, we agreed I’d practice the harp twice as long that afternoon and Grant could come play.

All that string plucking was worth having Grant over the next day. It was the first time I’d been allowed to have a friend visit and somehow Grant made my backyard much more interesting. We lived on two acres of eucalyptus trees and granite rock. The people before us owned a horse and for some reason, even though he’d never ridden, my father thought we’d own one, too. The corral sat in the very corner of our property, a dusty, gnawedwood square with a plywood shed in one corner.

Grant hung by his arms from one of the rafters as I prepared all the things to make our victim—two pimento olives for eyes and miniature marshmallows for the mouth. Grant’s corduroys belled slightly over his tennis shoes at my eye-level, one of them with a hole big enough that I could see his dirty white sock. “Got the pantyhose?” I asked. He dropped to the ground and pulled from his pocket a pair of his mother’s nylons and an unbelievably long length of twine.

Grant let himself down from the rafter one more time. “How do we even know if we’re people yet?” he said. Pausing in exasperation, he added, “Surfers don’t have babies.” Just then, a small whirlwind kicked up and ran through the corral, and Grant leapt into the middle of it, the twisting air pulling his black hair all about his face. He stretched his arms out, laughing, following the whirlwind out the corral gate and into the yard until it plunged through the fence and into the neighbor’s property. That night I’d dream that I jumped into the whirlwind, too, and that it lifted us both up and floated us away.

“That was so trick,” Grant said, returning to the shed. We sat down next to James, and Grant started making his version of a noose out of the twine while I began toothpicking James’ face until he had two pimentoed eyes and a broad, white, marshmallow mouth. But the oddest part about James was the large nylon rosette formed by tying off the waistband at the top of his head. This baby, we decided, was deformed.

Grant stood up and tossed the noose over the rafter. “I saw Dude with some lady,” he said in yet another of his surprise revelations. “My mom sent me to get some money from him at the gas station and this chick was sitting in the garage with him, rubbing his shoulders.”

“She had all these rings on her fingers and a butterfly tattoo on her shoulder. I just stared at him and told him Mom sent me to get some money for the store. And that chick didn’t even flinch. She just smiled and called me a cutie or something like that and kept her hands on Dude’s shoulders.” Grant pulled on the twine, leaving a bit of slack when I lifted James above my head for the hanging. “You’re so lucky you got a good dad,” he said.

That almost made me drop James right then. I’d never heard anyone say that. But somehow I understood why he would. My dad gave me hardly any freedom and Grant had all he wanted, and it didn’t make him any happier. But I was also surprised because I’d often secretly had the thought that I would have liked Grant’s stepfather as my dad, someone who would dip my head in the toilet for pretend punishment and let me out of the truck to pee just about anytime I had to go. Someone, I realized, who had no parenting skills at all but did what he could. I thought about Grant’s proposition. “I guess,” I finally said. And then, as James began to get heavy on my upstretched arms, “Ready?”

I let go of James and our makeshift noose tightened, his head flopping slightly to the side, one eye popping off. But in seconds, the sand began to ooze through the noose, James’ baby-head diminishing, his marshmallow mouth plunking off as the nylon fabric shifted through the rope, the other eye, with its dead pimento pupil, falling to the ground just before the now-headless torso flopped on top of it.

Grant laughed as hard as I’ve ever heard him. All I could think of was my father, that he was right somehow. We hadn’t been thoughtful enough. Our execution was poor. “That doesn’t count,” I said. “It’s like if the rope broke. We got to do it again.”

I figured out that we’d let too much slack at the top of his head where we tied it off. So I worked out the knot and tied it lower, giving James a broader head, something like a round of cheese. I quickly poked-in a face with the dirty marshmallows and olives. The design was hardly symmetrical but it would do.

We went through the process again, and that time James hung, face intact. He spun slowly in front of us, his dazed eyes coming around to meet ours, the brownish-white mouth looking suddenly like a frown. There was hardly a sound, the solitary clack of eucalyptus bark falling to the ground, a dog barking blocks away. Grant and I stared at James while his gentle revolutions slowed. I think both of us were surprised at how possible what we’d done was.

The morning breeze blew just as we knew it would. We were ready to shove Dexter, our white-bread infant, into the lake. He’d been our most perfectly executed plan up to that point—body and flotation design, material acquisition, shore location, Teacher Prep Day when all the kids were off, the time, it was all thorough. Grant sprinkled the remainder of the bread around the small raft, placing the bulk of it so the ducks would find the openings we’d cut in the burlap body. The last step was tying twine to the back of the raft in order to retrieve the remains.

“That’s it,” Grant said, pushing the raft into the water. It slowed to a near halt about five feet from shore. From there we planned for the breeze to carry it farther. We sat back and watched, the unraveled twine between us. A redwing blackbird trilled from atop a cattail. Our pink-headed Dexter floated surely, calmly, on the rippled water with not a duck in sight on this side of the lake.

“Like voodoo? Sure, maybe.” I looked at Grant but he was staring out at the water. A dandelion tuft landed on his head, twirled for moment on point, like a dancer, and floated off. I turned back to Dexter. He was exactly the size of a baby, I thought. The raft was making slow but noticeable progress. “Shoulda made a sail too,” I offered.

“Do you think you could put a hex on someone without knowing it?” Grant had sounded serious all morning, and I could tell by the gravity of his voice that these also were not lightly asked questions. “Like if you wanted something to happen but you didn’t know you wanted it to happen. But then it did.”

It took about twenty minutes for Dexter to float out thirty or so yards. Finally, a pair of curious mud hens swam out to the raft and started nibbling at the bread crumbs, their hornlike calls sounding like defective party favors. “Won’t be long now,” I said. Anytime feeding began, ducks from all over the lake quickly congregated.

“Dude and I were watching Hawaii Five-0 and Mom yelled from the bedroom. And Dude didn’t want to move her so the ambulance came.” Grant stood up and scratched a piece of dried mud off one shoe with the other. He brushed off the back of his pants, the whole time looking out on the lake. Dozens of ducks from all sides were headed toward Dexter, the symmetry of their wakes like one imagines D-day flotillas. A few of the more distant ones took flight.

“Yeah,” I said, and I meant it, though I knew for me that possibility was out. One time, after a round of questions on the subject, my wearied mother told me while we were buying a baby shower gift that she loved me but that in general she wasn’t fond of children and one was all she could handle.

Grant picked up what remained of our twine, the only thing now that connected us to Dexter, the plattered baby we’d sent out to get pecked and probed. I stood up next to Grant, the chill of partially-wet pant legs licking the back of my legs. The bulk of the ducks and a few bulbous geese were feet away from the raft and when they arrived they tore into Dexter from all sides. They were callous in the way that animals are, poking through the burlap where the ribs might be, hollowing out the kneecaps, tearing at the chest. All of it a frenzy. There may as well have been blood spurting about because Grant and I looked at each other at the same time and without saying a word we started yelling at the ducks and he pulled the twine to get Dexter to shore. But the milk bottles that kept him afloat so well were also like left-on emergency breaks and he came back slowly. The ducks and geese and mud hens followed, flapping loudly over one another to get at Dexter’s flesh.

Grant pulled the raft in as fast as he could, each tug whooshing it toward us in an almost predictable rhythm. I kept yelling and throwing what few sticks I could find. And when that didn’t work, I joined Grant on the twine. To us, at that moment, Dexter was real and human and we had to rescue him. And he wasn’t real because there was anything lifelike about him, nor because later we would bury him and have a funeral in my backyard. He was real because we were boys and because we said so, and because with each pull of the line connecting us to him we felt like we were saving ourselves.