Slow Learner (16 page)

"Don't they like Carl, or what?" he said.

"I don't think it's him. It's his mother and father."

"What did they do?"

Tim made a don't-ask-me face. "Pittsfield is a city," he said. "I guess you can do almost anything in a city. Maybe they ran a numbers game."

"You got that from watching television," Grover accused, and Tim said yeah and laughed. Grover said, "Does your mother know that you and me and Carl go out — you know — fool around?"

"I didn't tell her," Tim said. "She didn't say not to."

"Don't tell her," said Grover. Tim didn't. It wasn't that Grover ever gave orders, but there was an understanding among all of them that even though sometimes he was wrong about things, he still knew more than any of the rest of them and they ought to listen to him. If he told you that a wart wasn't going to go away, that it had a mind of its own, all the purple lights and green fluorescence in Massachusetts would not prevail. The wart would stay.

Tim looked at the wart, a little leery about it, as if it did have a separate intelligence. If he'd been a few years younger, he would have given the wart a name, but he was beginning to realize only little kids named things. Now he sat inside the washing machine he'd used last year for a space capsule, listened to the rain, began to think of getting old, and then older and older without bound, cut the thought off before it modulated to the matter of dying, decided to ask Grover today if he'd learned anything new about the other thing, the liquid nitrogen. "Nitrogen is a gas," Grover had told him, "I never heard of it being a liquid." That was all. But he might have something today. You never knew what he was going to come back from college with. Once he'd brought a multicolored model of a protein molecule, which was now in the hideout, along with the Japanese TV and the sodium stockpile, a bunch of old transmission parts from Etienne Cherdlu's father's junkyard, concrete bust of Alf Landon stolen in one of the weekly raids on Mingeborough Park, busted Mies van der Rohe chair salvaged from another of the old estates, not to mention assorted chandelier pieces, fragments of tapestries, teak newels, one fur overcoat they could hang around the neck of the bust and hide under sometimes, like in a tent.

Tim rolled out of the machine and went as quietly as he could into the kitchen to check the clock. It was a little past ten. Grover was never on time himself, but he always wanted other people to be. "Punctuality," he would declaim, rolling the word at you like an invincible purey, "is not one of your salient virtues." All you had to say to him then was "Huh?" and he'd forget it and get down to business. One of the reasons Tim liked him.

Tim's mother wasn't in the living room, the television was off, and at first he thought she might have gone out. He pulled his raincoat down off the hanger in the hall closet and started for the back door. Then he heard her dialing. He came around a corner, and there she was under the back stairs, holding the blue Princess telephone between her jaw and shoulder. She'd been dialing with one hand and holding the other in front of her in a tight, pale fist. There was a look on her face Tim had never seen before. A little - what do you call it, nervous? scared? -he didn't know. If she saw him there she gave no sign, though he'd made noise enough. The receiver stopped buzzing, and somebody answered.

"You niggers," his mother spat out suddenly, "dirty niggers, get out of this town, go back to Pittsfield. Get out before you get in real trouble." Then she hung up fast. The hand that was in a fist had been shaking, and now her other hand, once it let go of the receiver, started shaking a little too. She turned swiftly, as if she'd smelled him like a deer; caught Tim looking at her in astonishment.

"Oh, you," she said, beginning to smile, except for her eyes.

"What were you doing?" Tim said, which wasn't what he'd meant to ask.

"Oh, playing a joke, Tim," she said, "a practical joke."

Tim shrugged and went on out the back door. "I'm going out," he told her, without looking back. He knew she wouldn't give him any trouble now about it, because he'd caught her.

He ran out into the rain and past two wet lilac bushes, down a slope into long grass turned to hay, his sneakers soaked after only a couple-three steps. Grover Snodd's house, an older one than Tim's with a gambrel roof, edged out from behind a big maple to greet him. When he'd been younger Tim used to think of the house as a person, and say hello to it each time he came over, as if it actually were peeking around the maple at him, friendly, in a kind of game between friends. He still was not at the point where he could give this up completely; it would be cruel to the house to stop believing in it. So: "Hi, house," he said, as usual. The house had a face on the end, a pleasant old face, windows for eyes and nose, a face that always seemed to be smiling. Tim ran on by it, for just a moment only a shadow, dwarfed against the towering, benevolent face. The rain was coming down pretty hard. He skidded around a corner and up to another maple with pieces of board nailed to the side of the trunk. Up, slipping once, and out a long limb to Grover's window. Whistling, electronic sounds came from inside. "Grovie," Tim said, banging on the window. "Hey."

Grover opened the window and announced to Tim that he had a lamentable tendency to dilatoriness.

"Wha?" said Tim.

"I just heard a kid in New York," Grover told him as Tim climbed into the room. "There's something funny with the sky today, because — you know — I have trouble most of the time just getting Springfield." Grover was a radio ham. He put together his own transceiver rigs and test equipment. Not only the sky but these mountains, too, made incoming signals capricious. Grover's room, certain nights when Tim stayed over, filled as the hour grew late with disembodied voices, sometimes even from as far away as the sea. Grover liked to listen but he seldom transmitted to anybody. He had road maps stuck up on the wall and each time he heard a new voice he'd mark it on the map, along with the frequency. Tim had never seen him sleep. He'd still be up no matter what time Tim turned in, fooling with dials, pressing a huge pair of rubber earphones to his head. There was a speaker too; sometimes he had that on. Drifting in and out of sleep, Tim would hear, mixed with dreams, cops being called to investigate car wrecks or just noises or shadows that moved where everything should have been still, cabbies out to meet the night's trains and grouching mostly about coffee or cracking dry jokes with their dispatcher, some half of a chess game, tugs across the Dutch Hills taking a string of gravel barges down the Hudson, road workers in the autumn and winter working late getting out snow fence or plowing, a merchantman at sea now and then when the thing in the sky, the Heaviside layer, was right for it — all these coming down, filtering through to populate his dreams, so that in the morning he'd never know which had been real, which he'd hallucinated. Grover never was any help. Waking up, before he was fully out of dreams, Tim would say, "Grovie, what about the lost raccoon? The cops find him?" or, "What about that Canadian logger in the houseboat up the river?" And Grover would always answer, "I don't remember that." When Etienne Cherdlu stayed over too, he'd remember different things than Tim did: singing, or badger-watchers reporting in to some kind of headquarters, or bitter arguments, half in Italian, about pro football.

Étienne was supposed to be here today too. It was a regular Saturday-morning briefing session. Probably his father had kept him late again working over at the junkyard. He was a very fat kid who wrote his name "8oN," usually on telephone poles with "ha, ha" after it, in crayon, yellow keel swiped from road crews. Like Tim and Grover and Carl, Étienne loved to play practical jokes, only with him it was an obsession. Grover was a genius, Tim wanted someday to become a basketball coach, Carl might star on one of his teams, but Etienne, all he could see was a career somehow playing jokes. "That's crazy," kids would tell him. "A career? You mean a comedian or something on TV, a clown, what?" And Etienne, putting his arm around your shoulders (which, if you were alert enough, you realized he was doing not out of friendship but to Scotch-tape a sign to you reading MY MOTHER WEARS COMBAT BOOTS, or KICK HERE, with an arrow), would tell you, "My father says everything's going to be machines when we grow up. He says the only jobs open will be in junkyards for busted machines. The only thing a machine
can't
do is play jokes. That's all they'll use people for, is jokes."

The kids might have been right: maybe he was a little crazy. He took chances nobody else would, letting air out of tires on cop cars, putting on skin-diving gear to stir up silt in the creek the paper mill used (which once stopped production for nearly a week), leaving silly and almost meaningless notes signed "The Phantom" on the principal's desk while she was out of her office teaching eighth grade - stuff like that. He hated institutions. His great enemies, his jokes' perpetual targets, were the school, the railroad, the PTA. He had gathered around him a discontented bunch the principal, when she was yelling at them, never failed to call "uneducable," a word none of them understood and which Grover wouldn't explain to them because it made him mad, it was like calling somebody a wop, or a nigger. Etienne's friends included the Mostly brothers, Arnold and Kermit, who sniffed airplane glue and stole mousetraps from the store, which for fun they would then cock, stand out in the middle of some empty field and throw at each other; Kim Dufay, a slender, exotic-looking sixth-grader with a blond pigtail that hung to her waist and was usually blue on the end from being dunked in inkwells, who had a thing about explosive chemical reactions and was responsible for replenishing the cache of sodium up at the hideout, smuggling the stuff out of the Mingeborough High School lab with the connivance of her boyfriend Gaylord, an infatuated sophomore shot-putter who just liked them young; Hogan Slothrop, the doctor's kid, who at the age of eight had taken to serious after-bedtime beer-drinking and at the age of nine got religion, swore off beer and joined the Alcoholics Anonymous, a step his father, who was what is known as permissive, gave his blessing to and which the local A.A. group tolerated because they thought having a kid around would be inspirational; Nunzi Passarella, who had begun his career in second grade by bringing somehow a full-grown pig in to Show-and-Tell Time, a quarter-ton Poland China sow, in the school bus and everything, and had gone on to found a Crazy Sue Dunham cult, in honor of that legendary and beautiful drifter who last century had roamed all this hilltop country exchanging babies and setting fires and who, in a way, was the patron saint of all these kids.

"Where's Carl?" Tim said after drying his head on one of Grover's sweat shirts.

"Down cellar," Grover said, "fooling with the rhinoceros feet." Which you could wear like shoes and which would be worn so come the first snowfall. "What's the matter?"

"My mother's been" — he had a hard time saying it because you were not supposed to tell on your mother — "bothering people. Again."

"Bothering Carl's folks?"

Tim nodded.

Grover frowned. "My mother has, too. I hear them talking about it, you know" — making a thumb at a pair of earphones running in a direct line off a bug he'd had planted for a year in his parents' bedroom—"it's called the race issue. For a long time I thought they meant a real race, cars or something."

"And she used that word again," Tim said. At which point Carl came in, without the rhinoceros feet, smiling and quiet, as if he'd had some kind of a bug on Grover's room too and knew what they'd been talking about.

"You want to listen?" Grover said, nodding at the ham equipment. "I had New York for a minute."

Carl said yeah, went over and put on the earphones and started tuning.

"Here's Etienne," said Tim. The fat boy hovered at the window like a slick balloon. He had grease on his face and was making cross-eyes. They let him in. "I got something you'll get a real bang out of," Étienne said.

"What?" said Tim, who was still half thinking about his mother and was not too alert.

"This," said Etienne, and socked him with a paper bag full of rain water he'd been hiding in his shirt. Tim grabbed him and they wrestled around, Grover yelling at them to be careful of the radio gear, Carl lifting his feet and laughing whenever they rolled close. When they quit, Carl took off the earphones and hit the power switch and Grovie went to sit cross-legged on the bed, which meant the Inner Junta was in session.

"Progress reports first, I think," said Grover. "What have you got this week, Étienne?" He had this clipboard he always would snap the clip of rhythmically whenever he was thinking hard.

Étienne took out some papers he had folded in his back pocket and read, "Railroad. One new lantern, two torpedoes added to the arsenic."

"Arsenal," muttered Grover, writing on the clipboard.

"Yeah. Me and Kermie went out and did another count on cars at points Foxtrot and Quebec. Foxtrot showed seventeen cars, three trucks between four-thirty and — "

"I'll take the figures later," Grover said. "Can we do anything in that cut, on that stretch of track, then, or do too many cars come by up on the road? - that's the point."

"Oh," said Étienne. "Well, it was pretty heavy traffic, Grovie." He stuck his teeth out and did slant-eyes at Carl and Tim, who started laughing.

"Can you get out any later?" Grover said irritably. "Later at night, say about nine?"

"I don't know," said Étienne. "I'd have to sneak out and—"

"Well, sneak out," Grover said. "We need figures for the night, too."

"But he-he worries about me," Étienne said, "he really does."

Grover frowned at his clipboard, snapped the clip a couple of times, and said, "Well, how about the school? Anything on that?"

"I have a couple of more little kids lined up," Étienne said, "first-graders. They're always getting yelled at. They throw chalk. They throw anything. One of them has a real good arm, Grovie. We'd have to drill them a little with the sodium. That might be a problem."

Grover looked up. "Problem?"