You know, to scare us off making real ones. Robyn had it last week. It was pretty loud.”
“It cries?”
“It’s programmed to act like a real baby,” he said. “It starts, like, crying at four in the morning and doesn’t stop unless you press a button on its back, and sometimes that doesn’t work, and you have to walk with it till it stops.”
“Sounds delightful,” I said.
“Yeah, and the worst part is that it keeps track of what you do. Like if you ignore it, or throw it against the wall or something, the chip inside records it, and you flunk the unit.”
“Has anybody actually done that?”
“I doubt it,” Eddie said. “It’s too real, man. Even its neck, if you don’t support it right, sort of clicks, and you know you just lost a bunch more points.”
“Sounds like a video game.”
“Maybe. Not as much fun, though.”
“Have you had your turn yet?”
“Not for a couple of weeks,” he said, then grinned again. “You wanna babysit for me, to get some practice in?”
“I might just do that,” I said, seriously considering it. It would be interesting to see how the dogs reacted to the creature, for one thing. “Is that allowed?”
“Yes, as long as we pay the going rate to whoever we get to look after it. We’re supposed to take it everywhere we go. The girls get off on it, I think, but the guys usually hibernate when it’s their turn and stay home that weekend. Especially the guys on the hockey team.”
“I can imagine. And I guess it would be worse with a real one, eh?”
“Yeah. Like if you had it right now, where would you put it?” Good question, I thought. He sounded more like Susan every day.
“In one of those carrier things on my back, I guess,” I said, after a moment’s thought.
“What if it was a real one, a newborn?”
“If it was a newborn, I wouldn’t be in any shape to haul wood, and you’d be doing this by yourself,” I said. “At the going rate, of course. Thanks for coming.”
“Oh, no problem. I helped last year, didn’t I?”
“You did. Ten bucks an hour still okay?”
“Nah. Let’s do a straight trade—I’ll do this and you babysit for me sometime that weekend.”
With Eddie’s muscle and my pressing need to prove myself capable, if pregnant, we had all my wood hauled, stacked and tarped in five hours. The way I figured it, I’d have to agree to adopt his wretched automatic baby for a whole month to pay him what he was owed, but he seemed quite content for me to be in his debt.
After we put the tractor and cart back into George’s drive shed, I helped him do the evening milking, which was his official farm chore. George kept a herd of Nubian dairy goats in the century-old barn behind the farmhouse. When I’d first moved back to Kuskawa from the city, I’d been the goat-hand myself for a couple of years, in exchange for the privilege of living in the cabin. Now I paid George a nominal rent, and Eddie was the goat-guy. I’d felt usurped to begin with, but got over it eventually. I missed the daily interaction with the animals, though. Goats are placid creatures, generally, and a dairy barn is a nice place to be. The sound track in your typical goat barn is a mixture of rustling hay, contented moans and bleats from the female residents and the occasional comical burp from Pierre Trudeau, the sire buck. In the summer, you get the burble and twitter of the barn swallows, and in the fall and winter, a rabble of chickadees lurks by the back door, looking for a handout. The barn smells of grain, warm milk and hairy goat musk (which is not at all unpleasant, in spite of what those mean-spirited anti-goat propagandists claim).
I was in the middle of filling the mangers with fresh hay when I caught a whiff of something sweet and familiar, but definitely not barn-based. I looked up to see Eddie leaning casually against the back door, surveying the hay field and smoking a joint. I’d known it would happen eventually. I am a recreational user of cannabis myself, and while I try to be discreet in the presence of those who aren’t, I don’t consider it a state secret. Eddie had probably figured me out long since, although I had never smoked in front of him. Now here he was doing it in front of me, and it disturbed me more than I cared to admit.
He turned around before I got to him and smiled in that wary, defiant way that young people do when they’re making a statement about something.
“I would offer you a hit, but you probably shouldn’t,” he said.
“You’re right, I shouldn’t,” I said. “Have you smoked around Susan yet?”
“You’ve got to be kidding.”
“Just wondering. She won’t like it.”
“I figured. You don’t either, obviously.”
“Well, I can’t say I’m delighted, my friend. But I could hardly give you the business when I smoke the stuff myself, could I? I may be older than you, but I’m not a hypocrite.”
“You’re not smoking it these days, though, right?”
“Right. I’m not drinking either, and I’m trying to cut out coffee, because I’m told that stuff is not good for kids, one of which I happen to be incubating. But I suppose you’re not a kid any more, are you?”
“Not technically.”
“You’ve done all the growing you plan to do?”
“Jeez, Polly, you’re not going to say it’ll stunt my growth are you?”
“Far be it from me. But if you smoke a lot of it, you’ll get lethargic and forgetful and asthmatic.”
“And if I smoke a little of it?”
“You’ll laugh at movies you’d hate if you were straight, and you’ll think up great ideas that will disappear like smoke if you don’t write them down. But you’d better respect the hell out of it, because if you don’t, you’ll wind up doing something stupid. It’s illegal, don’t forget.”
“I know that.”
“Good. You don’t smoke tobacco, do you?”
“Hate the stuff.”
“And booze?”
“The occasional beer—you know that, Polly. I’m not an idiot.”
I sighed—a long, heavy one that I felt all the way down to my boots. “Okay, Eddie. Interrogation over.” He had pinched the joint out soon after our conversation had begun and stashed it in an inside pocket. “Just please, please be careful with the stuff, okay? Treat it like birthday cake or chocolate truffles—nice on special occasions, but if you use it all the time, it loses its magic.”
We finished the barn chores together in companionable silence. I watched Eddie out of the corner of my eye, kicking myself for acting
