Daddy Love by Joyce Carol Oates Read Free Book Online Page B

witnesses.
    How many times Daddy Love had circled a target, borne in upon a target, but had to withdraw when a random witness appeared on the scene …
    Taking the little boy from the mother was more difficult than Daddy Love had calculated. He’d struck her on the head with a claw hammer—hard; enough to crack her skull, he’d thought. She’d fallen to the pavement like a dead weight and yet, in the next instant, like a comatose boxer struggling to his feet, somehow the woman managed to heave herself up from the ground and stagger after him …
    By this time he had the boy in the van. How small and light the child was, yet how frantically he struggled, like a terrified little animal! He’d shaken, punched, and struck the boy with his fist on the side of the boy’s head, to calm him.
    It was astonishing to Daddy Love, the mother running desperately after the van—that look in her face, and her face streaming blood.
    He’d swerved the van around, to run her down. Bitch, daring to defy Daddy Love!

8
I-80 EAST OHIO, PENNSYLVANIA APRIL 14, 2006
    You’re safe with me now, son.
    God has sent me to you. Not a moment too soon!
    She was an impure woman, the female you were entrusted to. She was your way
in
. But only
in
.
    Daddy Love is your destiny. Daddy Love will be both Daddy and Mommy to you.
    From this first day and forever. Amen.
    At the first exit after the Libertyville Mall he’d driven to his hiding-place. Daddy Love had scoured the area beforehand and knew exactly which hiding-place was optimum. No one would expect—no
ordinary individual
would expect—that the child’s audacious abductor would remain within a few miles of the mall; the assumption was that, in his beige van, he was fleeing. Roadblocks would be set up to deter him, flashing lights, sirens. But shrewd Daddy Love was not one of those who would be stopped by police in the next forty-eight hours to be questioned.
    At the hiding-place behind an abandoned Shell station two miles east of the Libertyville Mall he’d parked and secured the terrified child in the Wooden Maiden, as prepared. Again he rejoiced in the child’s
lightness
—the
lightness
of his bones. Nostradamus had not ever been so
light-boned.
    As planned Daddy Love spray-painted the van a dark metallic purple. Out of the battered beige van a new and more stately vehicle emerged. He took his time, he would not be hurried. There was no need to hurry. Roadblocks were being set in place, law enforcement officers were running their sirens like foolish children in pursuit of—what? No one had seen Daddy Love head-on. Not even the woman he’d run down, in that moment of utmost clarity when the front fender of the minivan had struck her, cast her down and yet not aside but beneath the vehicle, her body to be dragged across the pavement … It had been a bizarre experience. If he’d known beforehand what was going to happen, he’d have enjoyed it perhaps, as a bizarre incident in Daddy Love’s earthly history. But it had happened so quickly, he hadn’t been prepared.
    The higher power had guided him, as usual. He’d managed to swerve, skid, brake and accelerate the van, and the woman’s lifeless body had been cast off, finally.
If she is dead, it is her own responsibility.
    He was wearing gloves of course spray-painting the minivan. This was a familiar task—he’d done it several times before, with the Chrysler and with other vans. There was satisfaction here. Asense of accomplishment. Invariably the new paint dramatically improved the appearance of the van.
    Like dyeing his whiskers a dark mahogany hue, darker than the rust-streaked hair. But now powdering the whiskers with a pale-grainy powder, a women’s face-powder, and brushing it well into the bristling hairs.
    And so: he’d added twenty years to his age. Not a trim thirty-nine but a trim early-sixties. Should anyone take note.
    Waiting for the paint to dry, Daddy Love ate supper: takeout from one of the fast-food restaurants