I put the phone down with the sure sense that I was letting go of something far more than a conversation; with the sense, too, that there was little enough I could do to change this.
Or maybe it’s just my storywriter’s sense, all these years later, telling me that.
Chapter Fifteen
Boy’s been sick, Lester said. Took to his bed and won’t be budged, over a week now. Never done that before. I’d gone across for coffee and doughnuts from the Circle K. Lester held his plastic cup on one bony knee, vinelike fingers wrapped around. We’d both wisely foregone the doughnuts after tasting them. Pigeons strutted happily among their dismembered remains.
Maybe I could go see him.
Don’t know as how it would do any good. But if you could spare the time, the boy does seem to have taken to you, in his own way. Meaning only (I thought) that occasionally, in his own way, he acknowledged my existence.
We walked four, maybe five blocks. A square, Federal-looking house set almost flush with the sidewalk, columns thick as pecan trees on the shallow gallery out front, two stories, peach with darker trim, faux gable stuck atop like a stubby birthday candle. We went up wooden external stairs painted industrial gray through a wrought- iron gate, multiple locks and frosted-glass front door into the entryway. Folks are away, Lester said. Table inset with lime-green tile there, vase of yellow, hopeful flowers on it. Mail stacked alongside. Floor itself tile, darker green, light blue. Up more stairs then to the boy’s room. Mattress in a corner, chair by the window. Cardboard box on its side, packed neatly with food: boxes of crackers, squares of cheese, cans of Vienna sausage, potted meat, bags of carrots, celery. Boy doesn’t take much to beds, Lester explains, just plain will
But I understood. This food was the boy’s own, forage, stockpile. He had no further need to go out into the world for it, no need to ask anything more of that world, anything at all, at least for a while. Here in his cave, on this pure, bare island, he’d become self-contained, self-sufficient, insular, hermetic, whole.
All man’s problems, Pascal said, derive from the simple fact that he is unable to remain quietly alone in his room.
The boy, just as Lester reported, lay on the mattress. On his right side, knees drawn up, so that he faced me when I sank to the floor just inside the door. My own knees stuck up like a cricket’s. I’d put my back to the wall and slid down it. God. I used to be able to do this, and it doesn’t seem so long ago, with ease. Now garden tools dig at my joints and I fight for breath. Cramps announce themselves: arriving on track four.
The boy and I sat looking at one another. His eyes wide, unblinking. Does something, recognition, sympathy, identification, pass between us? Is there a message, is there feeling, even comprehension, in those eyes? How can I know? They’re like stone artifacts left behind, the menhirs of Carnac, unreadable.
Then the boy worked his mouth a moment and made sounds.
What was that?
You got me, Lewis, Lester said from the doorway. Miracle, some might be inclined to say. Boy’s never spoken before. No one thought he could…. Big uns?
Pigeons.
You’re right. It could be.
What about them? I asked the boy. What about the pigeons? What are you trying to tell me?
His mouth worked silently for a time before producing again (at what unimaginable cost?) that same indecipherable sound.
Here I squatted at cave’s mouth, a midwife attending language’s birth, witnessing urgencies that over hundreds of years, a thousand, would shape themselves into human speech. Lester shifted feet beside me in the doorway. Downstairs the phone rang. On the third ring, the answering machine picked up. Again, momentarily, I became a child: comforting voices from other rooms, grown-ups out there doing drinks and dinner parties, extending the ever-elastic day while I lie tucked away safe and warm in night-time’s folds.
We waited, but the boy failed to speak again. When at last I stood, hauling myself up with one hand on whatever I could reach, wincing at pain and stiffness, his eyes didn’t follow.
I could have said many things as Lester and I trudged together down the stairs. That the boy had identified somehow with the park’s pigeons, taking their illness, their immobility-all he could understand of death? — for his own. That with the extreme posture of his stillness he’d found a way to speak, a way to express his grief. Instead I said that I was sorry and hoped the boy might soon get better. Lester thanked me for coming.
It was my day for casualty reports. Earlier I’d gone to see Alouette. She’d been up and about and doing well for some time, but two days ago that bearable pain along the incision became something more; she woke with a fever and with (her words) maggoty white pus oozing from the site. A two-hour wait and five-minute visit at her OB/GYN confirmed the obvious diagnosis of infection. So now she was supposed to be back on bed rest, pushing fluids, cleaning the incision regularly with peroxide, gobbling dollar-a-capsule Keflex. I found her sitting at the kitchen table, laptop propped awobble on stacked books and phone cradled to one ear, little LaVerne asleep alongside in what looked like a dishpan lined with towels bearing pictures of teakettles, iron skillets, yellow squash, carrots.
As usual, the backdoor stood open, screen unlatched.
“Don’t blame me,” Alouette said, looking up from computer and phone, when I stepped through. “She likes it there, it’s the only place she’ll go to sleep. I laugh at your sixty-dollar cradle! your tapes of mother’s heartbeat!”
“You really shouldn’t be sitting here with the door unlocked.”
“So everyone says.” Back to the phone. “Look, I don’t mean to interrupt, but you’re telling me Judge Haslep isn’t in town? Even though he had a full docket today and has another scheduled tomorrow? Why am I supposed to believe this?”
She motioned me to sit.
“You’ll get back to me? Gee, I sure hope so.” Sweetest voice possible. “Within the hour? Before I start dialing up some other numbers here on my Rolodex, asking if
Thumbing the phone dead, she set it down.
“Every bit of your mother’s charm.”
“God, I hope so. Worked for her. Get you something?”
“I’m good. You?”
“Absolutely.”
“I do have to say it doesn’t look much like a bed in here. Which is where, according to my information, you’re supposed to be?”
She shrugged. “Larson.” Word and shrug alike conveying this comic sense of the burden she had to carry, alas. “So why is it he talks to you when he never talks to anyone else?”
“Must be the honest face. Maybe like any good tribesman he values my experience as an elder. Or at the other end of civilization, merely defers to my status as cult novelist.”
“My God, you don’t think he can
“Stranger things have happened.”
“Besides, I thought you gave all that up.”
“More like I was given up. Not that you’d be changing the subject….”
A beat, as Deborah and her actors would say. “I feel fine, Lew. Little Verne’s fine.”
“That’s good. We’d all like to keep it that way.”
She pushed the phone to one side, a dinner plate she was done with. “I’m not going to get out of talking about this, am I?”
I shook my head.
She typed in several lines, hit the mouse, glanced at the screen and hit it again. Then in a gesture of capitulation raised her hands, fingers spread. Pushed back from the table.
“The messages began about the time I learned I was pregnant. Just a sentence or two at first, scrawled on
