The Complete Roderick

IV

‘Heads,’ said Pa, ‘are wonderful things. Nobody should be without one.’ He brought down the hammer on Roderick’s head, with a sound that carried out of the garage and over to Dr Smith’s house, where the pink hands of the dentist made a convulsive movement and changed TV channels.

Roderick stood on Pa’s work-bench, watching the old man bash dents into smoothness. ‘My head gets dents.’

‘All the same, heads are wonderful things. Do you know, you can get almost anything into a head. You can think about a house in Chicago — though no one ever did — and at the same time you can think about thinking about that house. “Here I am,” your head says, “thinking a thought about a house. And thinking a thought about a thought, and so on.” And even while your head thinks that, you see, it’s giving the old thought-handle another turn… dents, eh? Dents. Yes, well you know the way we take out a dent? We put one in the other side. We dent the dent. Then if it still ain’t smooth, we dent that dent too, and so on. Seems like so much of life is just denting the dents in the dents…’

He stopped hammering and sat down. ‘Not so young any more, Roderick. You can only dent so many dents and the metal gets tired, you know that? People get tired just the same, hammering away, trying to smooth out the world you might say. Well no, you wouldn’t say that, but I might.’

The room was full of Mayflies this morning. Roderick watched one land on Pa’s hand and sit quietly until Pa picked it up and held it to the light. ‘Too tired, see? This one won’t make it.’

He moved it close to Roderick’s eyes. ‘Wings like little lenses, see? Like for reading fine print. Funny thing about these Mayflies, they only live about a day, but they have thousands and thousands of children. See, they have children inside them when they’re born. And those children have other children inside them, and—’

‘And so on?’

‘Good boy.’

While Pa rested, Roderick thought about Mayflies, thought about thinking about Mayflies. The radio was advising them to fill up that shoeshine balloon, but he hardly noticed.

‘It’s like half-ies,’ he said finally.

‘Like what, son?’

‘A game I play sometimes. In the dark. You take half of it, and then half of a half, and then half of the half of the half and and and, and so on. To see how close you get to nothing. To zilch. To Maggie’s drawers.’

Pa smiled. ‘Don’t let Ma hear you using words like that. She don’t care much for TV talk, zilch and all.’

‘So I don’t,’ said Ma, coming in through a cloud of Mayflies. ‘I don’t even like the expression TV, tedious voice, truncated vision, turning the whole blessed world into morons, teleological void — My! Look at all the winged green fairies in here!’

Ma showed him how to paint, or at least she showed him the paper and the colours and told him stories while he tried them out. Roderick worked away to the story of the cigarette girl who loved a bullfighter:

‘Once she’d been a real girl, you see, but a wicked magician turned her into tobacco and Sir Walter Raleigh took her back to Spain. She languished four hundred years in a deep dark dungeon while her lover searched all over Louisiana…’

He produced a small purple square in the middle of the great white sheet of paper. His second painting was the same, but smaller.

‘Minimalist, eh? Interesting, but hmmm.… I think you need to look at other people’s work a little, now where was I? Oh yes, every night he knelt before her picture and asked the gods to help find her. And the kneeling made his knee wear out, so he had to keep this banjo on it all the time, there’s another song about that too…’

Windows were better than TV. There was always something going on. At first he’d been afraid to sit by the back window because of the dangerous plants, friggin’ violets in pots that might break any minute and anyway looked like hairy tarantulas.

But all the windows had action: the mailman bringing bills, a car breaking down and getting a tow from the white truck (C-L-E-M-’-S spelled Clem’s Body Shop), old Violetta Stubbs walking her cat, Dr Smith swearing at his wife as he ran out and jumped in his blue car, a dog peeing on a maple tree, (trees make W-O-O-D which is just like Ma’s and Pa’s name but not like would you like to hear the story of Zadig the engineer?), and one day a big deal when the sheriff and two men from the County Hell Department came to take away the big toilet and Ma called them Phyllis Teens and Pa said would they like to take away the bill for that skullchair too, and Ma cried and said what was wrong with a bird-bath for rooks anyway, and Pa shouted and Dr Smith came out and laughed and Pa shouted at him too and said he’d like to kill a hundred Phyllis Teens if somebody would give him a dentist’s jawbone.

But the best part of windows was that you could go right outside and be in the picture yourself.

‘Sure it’s okay,’ said Pa. ‘The kid knows his name and address, he knows he must not go out in the street. Why not?’

‘Yes of course. A boy or girl needs fresh air and sun — though there are a few ferocious dogs in town. But of course he must. Of course.’

But from the back yard, Roderick could see their anxious faces peering at him through the friggin’ violets. They watched him rake a stick along the ground, stop to examine a petrified dog turd, dig a tiny hole (which he tried to make square) and squint at the sun through a shard of bottle-glass.

After a few days of this, they finally relaxed and let him go unwatched. Unwatched. he relaxed and played.

Pa had told him about this Achilles and this tortoise, a story worth trying out. He was Achilles and a stone was the tortoise:

‘Okay you’re a hundred feet ahead of me when we start the race, only I run ten times as fast as you. Okay now I’ve gone the hundred feet and catched up, only — there — you’ve moved on ten more feet. Okay now I go ten you go one. Okay now I go one and you go a tenth. Okay now I—’

‘Whatcha doing?’

A small person was following behind him, stopping when he stopped. ‘It’s a game. Like half-ies, only—’

‘Whatcher name?’

‘I’m Roderick Wood. I live at 614 Sycamore Avenue, but I’m not lost.’

‘Ha ha, I’m not lost neither. I’m Judy Smith.’

‘Hello.’

‘Hi. You look dumb to me.’

‘I’m not dumb.’

‘Hahaha, you are so. You’re a dumb dummy and your Pa works at a dumb dummy factory. You don’t know nothing.’

‘I know everything. Almost.’ He thought. ‘I know how to play jess.’

‘Chest, that’s nothing. Can you play hopscotch? Bet you can’t even hop.’ She demonstrated.

‘You’re right, I can’t hop.’ His arms sagged.

‘So you’re nothing but a dumb dummy.’

‘Guess I am.’

‘You don’t know nothing.’

He brightened. ‘Nobody knows nothing. Because there ain’t no such thing as nothing. Just half-ies and half-ies…’

‘Let’s play something. Chest maybe. You show me your chest and I’ll show you mine. Like doctors.’

‘Okay I’ll get a board and some pieces—’

‘Naw, come on. I’ll show you.’ She seized his claw and dragged him around the corner of a hedge. ‘Okay, now you be the microelectronic life-support system and I’ll be the chief neurosurgeon…’