The Meridians(20)

The Army Crawl was what he called his son's primary mode of transport back in that first year. At first, Kevin had just lay there like a human pudding, not doing much more than eating, burping (and making other noises), and pooping, and Robbie began to realize that one of the reasons that having a baby was so hard was that they were simply boring. Not that he didn't love the kid - he did, and would gladly have sacrificed his own life at any time if it had meant the difference between life and death for Kevin. But that didn't change the fact that it was hard to have any kind of intimate relationship with a person so small you could put them in the palm of your hand, yet with an inside so impossibly big that it was capable of pushing out enough poop that Robbie was seriously considering looking into the cost of shovels and pitchforks for dealing with the problem.

Sleeping was good. Robbie loved it when Kevin slept in his arms. Unfortunately, Kevin didn't do that terribly often, but was instead determined to stay awake night and day, taking approximately six hundred short naps in a twenty four hour stretch, which meant that consequently someone had to help him wake up and deal with the fact that he was no longer inside the comfortable space of his mother's womb every four to six seconds. It was hard, and Robbie remembered that one night the baby monitor had gone out because its batteries had died. He tried to replace the batteries, but was so exhausted from a constant series of wakeups and cranky crying jags that had lasted for what felt like the last sixteen to eighteen millenia that he kept dropping them. And then when he finally did manage to put them in, the monitor still didn't work, and he realized that he had put the batteries in backwards.

Lynette woke then, because Robbie, in a totally uncharacteristic fit of pique, threw the monitor so hard against the wall that it dented the drywall and the monitor exploded into its molecular components. He was terribly embarrassed that his wife had caught him in such a fit of rage, but more than that he was tired, and cranky, and determined to let the universe know it.

Soon thereafter, though, Robbie horrified his wife even more when he finally discovered a way to make Kevin sleep. It was an accident, really. It was one of the long nights when Kevin seemed determine to cry and poop his way steadily through the night, and it was Robbie's turn to take over in the never-ending battle to get the kid to do a little bit of sleeping. He walked around, bouncing the boy lightly against his shoulder and singing softly to him, but no number of renditions of "Hush Little Baby" or "Wheels on the Bus" would quiet the child, and Robbie had finally slumped, exhausted, on the couch and turned on the television.

All they had was basic cable, and it turned out that at three in the morning the only things on basic cable were infomercials and horror movies. Robbie neither wanted to learn how to buy into the latest fitness craze nor find out how many girls had gotten drunk and flashed a camera last Mardi Gras, so he turned on a horror movie.

And blood and guts had never been such a godsend. From the first moment that a teenager got stabbed wickedly from behind by a mask-wearing maniac, Kevin Angel Randall settled down. He stopped crying, stopped twitching, even stopped pooping for goodness sake. He just calmed down and squirmed deep into Robbie's arms and fell asleep.

Lynette came out of the bedroom a few moments later, awakened no doubt by the sound of oversexed teens being dispatched with a large barbecue fork, and immediately scolded Robbie for subjecting their son to such horrific imagery. Robbie pointed out that Kevin had approximately the same memory capacity as a sea sponge, so probably would not turn into Jack the Ripper later in life.

Lynette was not amused by this.

Instead, she turned off the television, silencing the sound of horror mid-shriek.

And Kevin - little, innocent, beautiful Kevin - instantly awoke and began screaming. Lynette tried to comfort the baby, but he would not stop crying - and, of course, pooping at intervals so short that Robbie began to wonder if the boy was turning hollow inside - until finally Robbie marched over and turned the horror movie back on again.

Kevin immediately quieted.

Not even Lynette, as smart and capable a woman as any that Robbie had ever met, could argue with that kind of results. Instead, she just put the now-sleeping Kevin back in Robbie's arms, turned the television volume down a notch as though in a final act of defiance, then marched into the bedroom to get some sleep.

After that, whenever Kevin was acting up in the middle of the night, all Robbie had to do was sit down on the couch, curl his son up on his lap, and turn on whatever B-grade slasher flick was on television at three a.m., and Kevin would be out like a light.

He would also stop pooping as much, which was such a miracle that Robbie seriously considered calling the Vatican to inquire about the possibility of having Freddie Kreuger beatified and made into a saint. He did not, however, ever mention this to Lynette. Her capacity for humor was great, but it had boundaries, and Robbie had no wish to incur the wrath of a wife whom he loved so much.

So Kevin learned to sleep, and then learned to roll over, and then learned the Army Crawl. It started out as the Poop Scoot: he would stick his butt up in the air, then inchworm his way across a floor, unable to so much as turn if he ran into something in his path. But then the Poop Scoot disappeared, and the Army Crawl came into being. It was the most amazing thing Robbie had ever seen: little Kevin would get down on forearms and toes, and crawl across the shag rug like a Green Beret slithering through a forest under tracer fire. Robbie laughed the first time he saw it, laughed so hard he thought he was going to have to be hospitalized for a hernia.