Dead? No, not dead.
Lost? I suppose not. He's right out there. Here. Come with me.
See this well? It's an old time kind of thing. Well water, right outta the ground, it's sweeter, see. I built it for my wife when we built this house, because the water's brackish out of the tap, so I told her: sweet pea, Ima build us a well so that when the baby does come, he'll drink that sweet water straight from the earth.
We had our baby and goddamn he came out hollering. The thing that always got me about Benji were his little hands, just exactly like mine only so ittybitty they could barely palm a pea. I couldn't believe it. His fingernails were slivers. I coulda fit one of his hands in my tee shirt pocket. Why I coulda fit alla him in my tee shirt pocket.
Benji was one of those babies that just couldn't get enough of his mother. If she even looked at him in a sideways kind of way he'd up and howl. She'd take him with her everywhere. She'd hold him in her left arm and do just about everything with her right: She could plant taters and cook up some dinner and eat it and then wash the dishes all with him in her left. She went one day for water and with one hand on the bucket and one hand round Benji I think that the baby wanted to look in, and I guess he just looked in too far. I built that well and I know it's a long ways to the bottom. Nobody could survive a fall like that, and even if he did, how do you get a baby out? Go fishing? Naw.
It was real rough for a while. My wife would stand at the end of the veranda and look out west, like if she looked hard enough for long enough, she could catch sight of the Pacific. I tell you, I couldn't take that hurting that inked her eyes; it was too godawful guilty. So I went fishing. Yeah, in the well. Naw, I wasn't fishing for anything special. Catfish, maybe. Or carp. I'll tell you, sometimes my hook'd go down with a bita sardine on it and it'd come up with a catfish, but other times it'd come up clean as spring, like them catfish were clever little fuckers.
I was at it for years just cause there weren't nothing else to do, even after the fog went outta my wife's eyes and we done forgot about what we never talked about, til one day I felt a little tug, and then a big one, and no I couldn't tell you what I was thinking cause I tell you that I done forgot, but I heaved up a big one, and it weren't no fish, and whaddyaknow, my boy done grow up.
This was a slimy one, real cold, dripping a green kind of drip and bony as a runty runner bean. Had these sharp little eye teeth and hair and fingernails long and blackened. His hands were spindly, green-yellowed, with cracks full of brine. You bet I was scared outta my pants about it but I didn't think, just unhooked his lip and brought him home to his mama.
And she grinned, and she grinned, my wife. She cooked up beef and taters and some bread with some butter, gave him a glass of milk. She made him some little pants and a little tee-shirt, and went out to buy him some shoes. When she came back she saw what I saw: he was standing in the corner stark naked with a fish in his grubby little hands and the widest olive eyes you ever have seen.
What could we do? He hunkered down in corners and flopped about, suppose he never did learn to walk. He moaned a peculiar kind of groan, and when we tried to get close to cut his hair, or his fingernails, or wash the scum offa him, he'd shriek like a monkey and show us his freakish teeth. He looked like nothing human. He weren't human no more, I suppose. He was more catfish then.
At night, he would crouch in our doorway, no blankets no nothing just big green eyes watching us in the moonlight like some seacreature. He'd fall deep asleep like that. This went on for a week; maybe two, til one day my wife tried to offer him a bit of chicken, and he bit the tip of her finger clean off. This isn't my baby, she told me, and the love in her eyes was rancid, and it soured more each time she looked at him, until I couldn't look in her face no more.
I knew then that sorrow was gonna kill her. You can lose your baby once and maybe you'll live, but if he comes back as a catfish, what's a mama to do? So I gathered him up one night. I went out walking, and dropped him back where he come from.
I guess what I meant to say was, no. We don't have any children. We had a son, but not these days. Not anymore.