Read Online Another Insane Devotion by Peter Trachtenberg - Free Book Online

sofa? Did she love the kitchen counter? Did she love the rise and fall of my stomach as she lay on it in the dark, waiting to be lulled to sleep? Does Zuni love F.? Did Bitey love the little boy, a refugee from a treeless city neighborhood where the nightly chimes of the ice cream truck were sometimes interrupted by gunfire, who spent three days with us one summer back when she was still alive, only to be carried away in tears?
    Wilfredo thought she loved him because she slept on his bed and not Cedric’s. Originally, F. and I were just going to have Cedric, but as we were getting ready to meet his bus, we got a call from a counselor who wanted to know if we could take in a second kid whose Friendlytown Family had backed out at the last minute. My wife stared at the phone; if it had had a cord, she would have been twisting it around her wrist. It had been her idea to have an eight-year-old from the city stay with us for two weeks, but now she was anxious. What would we feed Cedric? What if he got homesick? What if he hated
us? How would we keep him entertained? I told her that taking the other kid would solve the last problem. “Kids don’t want to be with grown-ups,” I told her. With each passing minute, the enterprise was feeling more and more like an enterprise, or, as some of my relatives would have said, a production , something that required a script and stage managers and might still get lousy reviews. Still, there was no way out of it. It was our production, this thing we were doing together. “They want to be with other kids.”
    When I look back, what astonishes me is not that I was so naive but that I was so forgetful of my own childhood, whose most traumatic episodes occurred when I was placed in a cage with other kids and told to have fun. Cedric was small and quick and lithe. Wilfredo was big and soft and slow moving, with a round, shaved head. There was something muffled about him, as if he’d been wrapped in dense cotton batting in order to protect him, but at the cost of an entranced, blinking passivity. What nobody had told us, least of all the charity that sent him to us, was that he was only six. When I put him on a bike, Wilfredo wobbled and capsized. It was just a child’s bike, purple with chopper handlebars, and I caught him before he hit the ground, but still he cried and Cedric taunted him. Taunting was Cedric’s operative mode. He taunted Wilfredo even after he’d learned to stay upright and more or less keep pace with us as we wheeled in and out of the shade of the maples on the neighborhood’s mercifully empty streets.
    â€œMan, what’s wrong with you? You can’t go no faster? You slowing us down.”

    â€œI can go fast,” Wilfredo muttered. “You just go too fast.”
    Right after that, he bumped Cedric’s rear wheel, or maybe Cedric bumped him. But it was Wilfredo who went down, and this time I wasn’t able to catch him. He skinned his knee. “He tripped me,” he cried, his voice thick with outrage. Cedric accused Wilfredo of trying to trip him.
    â€œCome on, nobody tried to trip anybody,” I said. “It was an accident. Wilfredo’s just learning.” But of course, in saying this, I was implying that the accident was Wilfredo’s fault. And I was showing my bias. Already, I preferred the mean, quick kid to the slow, gentle one. You could tell he was gentle even when he told Cedric he was going to fuck him up.
    That was later, after dinner and a game of catch played with sofa cushions on the front lawn in the dusk while lightning bugs winked around us like tiny flashbulbs, and a bath that started out well—the boys wanted to take one together, which made us think they were finally starting to get along—but ended with Cedric bursting out of the bathroom, shaking off water and yelling that Wilfredo had peed in the tub. Wilfredo said he hadn’t peed. He’d followed Cedric into