The Complete Roderick

but listen, that’s not all. If I hadn’t heard it myself I wouldn’t believe it either, but there they were, bold as brass, with a lawyer, talking about cutting up half a million dollars! Half a… and poor Pa not even covered up with earth yet — oh yes, and there’s something very wrong with the death certificate! Well I can put two and two togeth… wouldn’t put it past her, would you?

‘Now this Guild thing, I’m sorry but it looks like they’ve sent us the wrong speaker… yes again… I don’t know… must be something wrong with their computer… No listen, I wanted the Reverend Capon just as much as you dear… But listen, we can have Positive Breathing next month then, we’ll just have to put up… I say we’ll just have to put up with this, this Miz Indica Dinks, whoever she is, she’s going to speak on something called Machines Liberation… neither do I, but I certainly don’t intend to just sit home tomorrow night, do you? And so what if she is a Communist we can always just walk out and leave her cold… Doreen, I wouldn’t miss it for the world.’

That night when Ma went out for her walk, Roderick followed. At first they headed for Main Street, past the post office, the Courthouse, Simms’s Do-It-Ur-Self, the Idle Hour (where a few men lounging on car bumpers drinking beer gave him hard looks) and the place that had once been Selma’s Beautee Salon but was now called HAIR TODAY. But then Ma turned off by the library, headed down Church Street and straight on out of town. Was she lost? Or just nuts? Because there was nothing out this way, not even lights. Just the darkness and the gravel road leading out to Howdy Doody Lake.

Roderick didn’t like it. If he dropped back too far, she might turn off somewhere and disappear. If he kept too close, she might hear his footsteps on gravel. There didn’t seem to be any distance at all between too close and too far, and he could think of only two other answers: go home, or catch up with her and pretend it was just a coincidental meeting. (‘Hello Ma. Pa told me he didn’t want anything upstairs, said I should get out and get some fresh air like you. Funny we both decided to go this way, ain’t it? Odds against it must be, let’s see… Well sure I know most robots don’t need fresh air, guess I must be different…’)

Ma wouldn’t want company. In fact she was acting kind of stealthy, walking too quietly on the gravel, stopping every now and then (to listen?). Like an international spy on his way to the hollow tree. Was she meeting someone? Was she, was she… but spies made him think of the cipher in his pocket, and that made him think of Pa, Pa and this miserable little old woman hobbling along in her bare feet in the middle of the night.

A penance, that was more like it. Offered up to reduce Pa’s days in Purgatory, his time off for her good behaviour. She must love him a lot.

Or maybe she hated him a lot. Sure it was her cooking that used up that million dollars’ worth of gas, caused Pa to take one look at the bill and keel over. Probably she felt relieved (‘So much for chickens and damn dumplings!’) and probably that made her feel guilty. Walking it off, trying to walk it off, not knowing it really came from her unhappy childhood, those early traumas causing horizontal cracks in the ego structure for which she could never forgive her father, hence Pa, hence herself. And even now unconsciously she was humming that tune: ‘Take me to the river, deliver me to the lake…’

Well suicides are stealthy. Roderick resisted the impulse to rush forward and stop her, before the cathartic moment when — but holy mackerel, didn’t she know it was a sin? St Augustine said if you were a pure, innocent person suicide was twice as bad because then you were guilty of murdering a pure, innocent person — something wrong with that maybe but sin was sin. And even if John Donne thought that suicide was no self-murder, that Jesus Christ had killed himself on the Cross by just taking a breath and blowing out his soul (but then how did he get it back three days later?), sin was sin.

Unless maybe Ma was thinking of a literary suicide! But then why pick this lake? It was so shallow that any man could be an island, and its history was no deeper than its dirty waters. Even the name sounded like reconstituted orange juice, who wanted to drown in Howdy Doody, that’s just asking for obscurity. Unless maybe she wanted to make a protest: life is shallow, art is shallower… poop on the world!

A protest, though, might be a real protest about the real world, a focus for the historical perspective, sure because look at greedy capitalist entrepreneurs like Welby and Bangfield, putting up their so-called leisure complex right on the shores of good old Howdy Doody Lake. There once silvery fish leapt, jewel- bright dragon-flies hovered near a silent canoe in which a lean red man glided o’er the glassy waters to claim his bride; they would live simply, in peace with Brother Nature.

Okay, okay it was an artificial lake only about fifty years old, but same principle — once the horny-handed farmer sat down on these shores to eat his lunch, feeling the good warm earth and smelling the clean wind — then along came lakeside cottages and water-skiers and the Welby-Bangfield Leisure Complex, profit heaped on profit, fat men in silk hats and striped pants puffing their cigars and laughing themselves sick at the idea of poor honest men standing in breadlines in cities where the buildings were heaped up like piles of gold — but one day the gold would trickle away into the dust, the cities tumble down, the silk hats rot as tatters of striped pants flapped in a new wind of change, as the expropriators got expropriated to pieces. Only that didn’t sound much like Ma either. Probably she just wanted to join Pa.

‘Will you join me?’ ‘Why, are you coming apart?’ But on the astral plane nothing ever came apart, nothing was lost. Death was just people getting temporarily misplaced — open the right drawer and there they are! Yes Ma half-believed that stuff, with all the paradoxes: life is death, all is one, up is down, yes means no. If you don’t know whether you’re a man dreaming you’re a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming you’re a man, swat the butterfly. For all is one and one is nothing, and you can be the person who killed the person who killed the person who…

Lightning flickered somewhere, and Roderick saw Ma standing by the lake, stooping to pick up something. She seemed to be wearing some kind of cone on her head. Of course! If up was down and day was night, good was evil and this was witchcraft!

He found it hard to believe even when she’d built the fire and begun the incantation: ‘Alcatraz! Mulligatawn! Tapeworm!…’

What a let-down. He’d seen hundreds of old witch movies on TV, every single one a let-down. Probably now she was going to strip off her clothes and dance around the fire, and then screw some giant goat out of the sky or something, then there’d be plenty of thunder and lightning, screaming and flames and that would be that.

A scratchy old record started up: The Bow-wow Symphony. Ma left the circle of firelight, and he could hear her calling down the beach: ‘Hurry up, the rain’s starting…’

Suddenly there was a distant bang, a flash of blue flame, and the unmistakable clatter of Patent Applied For. Then the rain came down and Roderick could no longer be sure what he saw or heard, an electric arc or was it lightning, a man’s scream or was it the scratchy record, Ma shouting not to forget the candy while lightning danced on six stovepipe hats while Roderick tried to run for the shelter of the trees but crashed into another running figure as blinding lightning struck again and he fell into perfect darkness.

XXII

‘…a bad dream?’ said Ma. ‘Your batteries must be low…’

‘Sure, from the long walk. But how did I get home?’

She pretended not to hear. ‘Feel like going to school today?’

‘And what was Cliff doing out there with his Patent Applied For?’

‘…all a bad dream, son.’

Roderick held up a scrap of wet cloth. ‘Yeah but when I woke up I found this in my fist, did I dream this? Look there’s writing on it.’

‘Did I dream this?’

‘Well yes, in a way. I do believe this is a genuine apport, son.’

‘Apport?’

‘A psychic deposit of physical evidence. It was your dream that made it appear, made it pass right through the walls of your room!’