The Wonders of the Invisible World Read Online Free PDF Page B

made the mistake of eating these ’shrooms they’d been saving for the right occasion. He’d taken her to the hospital—he was sure Billy would see he’d had no choice—but what was he supposed to do with her kid? The social worker at the hospital was going to put him in foster care, but—
    “Where’s Deke now?” Billy said. “Okay, listen, stay right there.”
    He woke up Labor Day morning, fried from driving to the Cape and back the day before, and with no more idea than the boyfriend of what to do with a seven-year-old kid. Deke was already up. Billy found him in Cassie’s old room, playingwith her Barbies, and decided to take him to a ball game. The Albany-Colonie Diamond Dogs were playing the Adirondack Lumberjacks for the Northeast League championship that afternoon. Billy’s father used to take him to games back when Albany still had a Yankee farm team; Billy found it heartening that these upstarts should be named after a David Bowie song.
    Deke was really too young to follow the game—the Diamond Dogs hit two home runs in the bottom of the first, and he missed them both—but he seemed to like the crowd, the bright green grass and the bursts of music and sound effects from the loudspeakers. The Dogs’ cleanup hitter popped a foul ball into the aisle between the grandstand and the bleachers (sound effect of breaking glass), and a crowd of boys ran to chase it down. Deke leaped up, then looked at Billy. “Can I?”
    “Just make sure I can see you,” Billy said.
    Deke was still scrambling down into the aisle when one of the kids held the ball up as little hands grabbed for it and the crowd applauded. Deke ran halfway over, then turned back to Billy with a stagy shrug and a genuine smile.
    By the seventh inning, the Dogs were up eleven to nothing. Billy told Deke about the seventh-inning stretch, and Deke made him sing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” in his ear to prep him; he claimed he’d never heard it. The Dogs went down one-two-three in the bottom of the eighth, and Billy, wanting to beat the crowd, asked Deke if he’d had enough. No: he wanted to chase more foul balls.
    To get out of the parking lot took them all three movements of Shostakovich’s First Violin Concerto, but Billy had no plan for what to do next anyway. Deke said he was hungry, so that settled that: they went to McDonald’s. On the way home they listened to the Barney tape Deke had carried with him from Boston to Cape Cod and from Cape Cod to here. Predictably namby-pamby—amazing that Cassie, of all people, would giveit houseroom—but not without its fascinations. Like that song “The Old Brass Wagon”: was it really a wagon made of brass, like some warrior’s brazen chariot, or just a wagon to haul scrap metal? It seemed folkloristic. The Golden Bough. The Old Brass Wagon. The dying god hauled to his funeral pyre. A harvest thing. The sun was going down on Labor Day. Summer was over.
    Billy does the dishes while Deke takes his bath, but he keeps coming in to check, imagining the worst: Deke standing up, slipping, cracking his head, drowning. He’s relieved that he hasn’t found the boy’s narrow nates and teensy penis at all arousing. At the same time, he’s irked with himself for being relieved. Does he assume that straight men reflexively slaver over girl children in their care?
    After he’s dried Deke’s soft hair with the hair dryer, they snuggle on the sofa and Billy reads him his nightly trilogy. Tonight Deke chose
The Tale of Peter Rabbit, The Runaway Bunny
and the loathly
Bugs Bunny and the Carrot Machine.
An all-rabbit program. Billy marvels at how Deke has devised it: a calming, ritualistic opener, then the emotionally heavy stuff—the mother who’ll always come after you and take care of you—and then a farce as the end piece.
    After Bugs Bunny overloads the carrot-making machine and blows it up—a not very subtle parable about overreaching—Billy takes Deke by the hand and leads him to bed.