Copyright © 2001, 2007 Larry T. Menlove. All rights reserved.

He’d had barely enough time to get out of his soiled clothes—wet from the lake he’d jumped in to wash himself off—when the reporters arrived and snapped their shutters on him and his thick glasses, buckteeth and his slack jaw. He told them he liked his job, told them it was OK with him if other people might think it was a gross occupation. He liked it because he was outside and in the mountains most of the time. When they asked him what he would do next he told them that he didn’t care much for publicity, that he was a simple man, that he just wanted to perform his job in the right manner in which he had for the last fifteen years. Fifteen years? They asked him if he’d ever happened across anything quite like this in his fifteen years, and he told them no. Just no. Like that. No. The reporters mulled around Grant scratching their chins, expecting more, demanding more, noting in their notebooks his still wet hair and fresh Forest Service clothes. Grant had nothing more to, so they went away.

The articles started popping up all across the country, picked up on the news wires, some with a photo, some not. The story was the third report on CNN Headline News for eight half-hour rotations from 6:00 p.m. EST until 10:00 p.m. EST. The President’s visit to Russia bumped the story to fourth at 10:30 p.m. It ran dry sometime in the wee darkness of the morning. It got a fleeting mention on Good Morning America. It was reported that the baby was doing well and a search had been launched for the mother. Diane Sawyer shook her head when the newsreader sent the show’s control back to her so she could introduce the next feature: "How to Hang Valuables in your House."

At first the phone calls were of good cheer, well wishers, those who admired Grant’s bravery, his act of selfless heroism, but the calls started to take a different tone as the reprobates saw Grant’s photo and couldn’t resist the urge to put down, to accuse.

Grant lived alone with his mother. Of course Grant was away on the job most of the day during the summer. Sometimes Grant was gone for weeks at a time, depending on the assignment. One year he was stationed in the Ashley Forest. He spent the whole summer there in a staff cabin. This particular summer he was working for the Uinta Forest Service—mostly at the lakes campground just up Payson Canyon. Not far from his home in Spanish Fork. Spanish Fork was typically quiet, sleepy—a safe town.

One caller said, "I bet you dropped that baby down in there yourself, didn’t you. Freak." Grant said no into the phone, which by then was buzzing with the dial tone that sounded like a bee stuck in a glass of water. Another caller asked if he liked swimming in a shit pool. Another said, "I bet you got a ten on your swan dive." To all of these he just said no, or huh? or what? Grant didn’t really understand that these callers were harassing him. He just answered the phone and listened because his mother had grown tired of handing the phone receiver over to him. The phone calls didn’t last long. A few days after it happened they stopped completely.

Grant started fantasizing about the incident. Incident was how he had begun to relate it in his mind. His mother had called it that and it stuck. Each time he fantasized he imagined the incident laying itself out a little bit differently.

His last and favorite version is the one where he had just pushed the big hose into the access opening in the ground next to the pit out-house and was on his way back to the Forest Service tank truck to hoist the lever up on the pump when he hears the cries. He investigates the crying, thinking it might be a raccoon or, yes, maybe even a child left unattended in the bushes, because the crying isn’t coming from the toilet this time.

And so that’s the way it is. The child is behind the big gray trunk of an Engelmann spruce next to the restroom. The newborn is in a white whicker bassinet. He has a blue blanket the color of robin’s egg tucked up under his armpits. His tiny red face is kinked and tight from crying. His fists are spinning around, stopping, spinning around. Grant can smell the forest, its piney fears, as he looks around for the parents of this little one. That’s when he sees the piece of paper pinned to the baby’s jumper. He bends down and looks at it like he’s shoplifting and afraid to just steal the candy. When he does take it, he steps back a ways and unfolds the paper. He reads the note twice, three times:

Our son is good. We love him.
We can’t take care of him.
Please give him a good home.

In this fantasy, Grant doesn’t have to go in the restroom and look in the hole or get down on his backside and brace his shoulders against the cinder-block wall and kick over the toilet pedestal so he can fit. And this way the flies don’t swarm up out of the hole tickling his arms and momentarily blocking out the cries of the baby down there. In this fantasy the world is a bright place where the sun shines down yellow, and the robins flap flap from limb to limb, and chipmunks scurry with that shrill chatter that seems both a perversion of and the very life call of nature itself. In this fantasy an infant boy’s hair is downy and dry and smells of baby powder as Grant comforts him bounce bounce on his shoulder and thinks about the note and answers over and over, "Yes, I will. Yes, I will."