Slow Learner, page 14
“Well,” said Grover, “keep looking. We need somebody, Étienne. It’s a very vital area. We’re going to have to demolish that boys’ latrine. It’s symmetry we’re after.”
“Cemetery?” said Tim, squinting his eyes and wrinkling his nose. “What do you want the cemetery for, Grovie?”
Grover explained the word to him. Sketched a rough plan view of the school building with chalk on his greenboard on the wall. “Symmetry and timing,” he yelled, “coordination.”
“That’s on my report card,” said Étienne, “that word.”
“Right,” said Grover. “It means your arms and legs and head all work together in gym, and it’s the same for us, in this thing, for a gang like ours, as it is for the parts of your body,” but they’d quit listening. Étienne was pulling his mouth wide; Tim and Carl were taking turns socking each other in the arm. Grover snapped his clipboard real loud at them and they quit fooling around. “Étienne, anything more?”
“That’s all. Oh, the PTA meeting Tuesday. I think I’ll send Hogan again.”
“You remember last time,” Grover said with an effort, “what he did.” The original idea had been that Hogan Slothrop would make a better infiltrator into the PTA meetings because of his experience with Alcoholics Anonymous, Grover’s assumption being that Hogan knew most about the kinds of meetings grownups had. It was another miscalculation. It bothered Grover for a week that he’d judged things so wrong. What Hogan had tried to do, instead of just sit quiet, out of sight, taking notes, was horn in on one meeting. “I mean,” said Hogan, “I didn’t see any harm in raising my hand, you know, and saying, ‘My name is Hogan Slothrop, I am a school kid,’ and then telling them what it was like.”
“They don’t want to know,” said Grover.
“My mother does,” Hogan said. “She asks me every day what I did in school, and I tell her.”
“She doesn’t listen,” said Grover. They had thrown Hogan Slothrop out of the PTA meeting about the time he started up front to the podium to see if they’d let him recite the A.A.’s Twelve Steps. Literally threw him out—he was light and easy to lift.
“Why?” Grover screamed.
“There are meetings,” Hogan tried to explain, “and meetings. The PTA does it all different. They have these rules, or something, and everybody is more, more . . .”
“Formal,” suggested Grover. “Official.”
“Like they’re playing some game, a new one I never heard of before,” Hogan said. “At the A.A. we just talk.”
Next PTA meeting Kim Dufay put on lipstick, did her hair in a French twist, dolled up in her most sophisticated clothes and a size 28A padded bra she’d conned her mother into buying her, and went in and did a pretty good job of passing. So she’d become the new infiltrator.
“And now,” Étienne summarized, “Hogan feels bad about being replaced by a girl.”
“I like Hogan,” Grover said, “don’t get me wrong, fellas. But can he function well in a highly structured situation, that’s what I—”
“Wha?” said Tim and Carl in unison. It was a bit they’d worked up between them and it never failed to confound Grover. Grover shrugged, admitted there might be a morale problem and told Étienne OK, Hogan could try it again. Tim’s report was next. His area of concern was money and drilling. At the moment everybody was occupied with the yearly dry run coming up. The code name for it was Operation Spartacus, which Grover had taken from the movie of the same name, having gone all the way over to Stockbridge one time to see it and been so impressed that for the month following he couldn’t go by a mirror without making a Kirk Douglas face at himself in it. This would be the third year for Spartacus, the third dry run for the real uprising of the slaves, referred to only as Operation A. “What’s the A for?” Tim had asked once. “Abattoir,” Grover answered with a funny look. “Armageddon.” “Show-off,” Tim said, and forgot it. You didn’t have to know what initials meant to drill kids.
“How’s it shaping up, Tim?” asked Grover.
Tim wasn’t too enthusiastic. “Without a good mock-up, Grovie, it just won’t be worth much.”
“Just to recap for the others now, Tim,” Grover said, writing on the clipboard, “we’re handling it more or less the same as last year, right?”
“Right. Using Fazzo’s Field again and laying it down”—pointing at the sketch on the greenboard—“full size. But we’re using the little stakes and red flags that Étienne got from the road crew this year instead of the lime.” Last year too many little kids had been doing just great up until they got to the white outline of the school building, then they’d stopped short and stood around scuffing it into the grass with their shoes. In the critique held later Grover advanced the theory that the line figure in the grass might have reminded the little kids of chalk lines on a greenboard. With the lime there’d also been the problem of getting the thing erased when Spartacus was over. But stakes, them you could just pull up. Stakes were better.
“But not,” said Tim, “still not as good as real walls. Even beaver board ones. Running across a line, making believe it’s a door, that’s one thing. But you need the door itself. You need real stairs, and real toilets to throw the sodium in, you know?”
“But two years ago you didn’t feel that way,” Grover pointed out.
Tim shrugged. “It just isn’t that real anymore. For me. How do we know, when it’s time, zero hour, that they’ll do it the same way? Especially the little kids?”
“We don’t,” said Grover. “But we can’t afford to build any real elaborate mock-up.”
“We have about twenty-five bucks,” Tim said. “They’re really starting to come through with their milk money now, even some of the ones who, it isn’t their turn, you know?”
Grover gave him a lidded look. “You been strong-arming them, Tim? I don’t need any of that.”
“No, Grovie, I swear, they’re all doing it on their own. They say—a couple kids did—that they believe in us. Some of them don’t like milk anyway, so they don’t mind passing it up.”
“Just see that they don’t get too enthusiastic,” Grover said. “The teachers might catch on. The idea is to have a more or less constant milk count every day, to rotate it, very gradually, very quietly. The daily take may be small that way but it’s steady. You start getting these wild fluctuations, everybody handing you nickels at once, they’ll get suspicious. Go easy. How’s the other income? How’s our fence in Pittsfield?”
“He wants furniture now,” Tim said. “That’s a problem. We can get furniture, from the Velour estate, from the Rosenzweig place, from two or three others. But how do we carry it to Pittsfield? We can’t. And he’s also quit accepting collect calls.”
“Gah,” said Grover, “then we might as well cross him off too. See? You can’t trust them. They start going cheap on you and that means they don’t want you around anymore.”
“Uh, how about,” Tim put in, trying to keep Grover from getting started, “you know, that mock-up?”
“No, no,” Grover said. “We need that money for other things.” Tim flopped back on the rug and looked at the ceiling. “That’s all, Tim? OK, Carl now. How’s it going up the development?”
Carl was their organizer for all Northumberland Estates, the new part of Mingeborough. The old town would be easy enough to handle when it was time, but this development shopping center with its supermarket and bright new drugstore that sold Halloween masks, and parking lot always full of cars, even late into the night, bothered them. While it was being put up, the summer before last, Tim and Étienne used to go there evenings and play king-of-the-mountain on the piles of fill till it was dark; then they’d steal lumber, drain the gas tanks of graders and bulldozers, even bust a few windows if the peepers and frogs in Corrody’s Swamp down the hill were singing loud enough. The kids didn’t like the development much, didn’t like it being called “estates” when each lot was only fifty by a hundred feet, nowhere near the size of the old Gilded Age estates, real ones, that surrounded the old town the way creatures in dreams surround your bed, higher and hidden but always there. Like Grover’s house, the Big Houses of the estates also had faces, but without such plain, gambreled honesty: Instead there were mysterious deep eyes fringed in gimcrackery and wrought-iron masks, cheeks tattooed in flowered tiles, great port-cullised mouths with rows of dead palm trees for teeth, and to visit one of them was like reentering sleep, and the loot you came away with did not ever seem that real; whether you kept it to furnish the hideout with, or sold it to a fence like this antique shop in Pittsfield, it was the spoils of dream. But there was nothing about the little, low-rambling, more or less identical homes of Northumberland Estates to interest or to haunt, no chance of loot that would be any more than the ordinary, waking-world kind the cops hauled you in for taking; no small immunities, no possibilities for hidden life or otherworldly presence; no trees, secret routes, shortcuts, culverts, thickets that could be made hollow in the middle—everything in the place was out in the open, everything could be seen at a glance; and behind it, under it, around the corners of its houses and down the safe, gentle curves of its streets, you came back, you kept coming back, to nothing; nothing but the cheerless earth. Carl was one of the few kids who lived there that the old-town kids could get along with. It was his job to drum up support, to win new converts, to scout out any strategic importance there might be to crossroads, stores, things like that. It wasn’t a job the others envied him.
“There’ve been these phone calls,” Carl mentioned, after he’d given a rundown on how his week had gone. “Practical jokers.” He told some of the things they’d said.
“Jokes,” Étienne said. “What’s so funny? Call somebody up, call them names, that isn’t a joke. It doesn’t make any sense at all.”
“What about it, Carl?” Grover wanted to know. “Think they suspect anything? Think they caught on what we’re up to?”
Carl smiled and so they knew what he was going to say. “No, it’s safe. Still safe.”
“Then why the phone calls?” Grover said. “If not Operation A, then what?”
Carl shrugged and sat watching them, as if he knew what, knew everything, secrets none of them had even guessed at. As if there were after all some heart-in-hiding, some crypt to Northumberland Estates that had so far managed to elude the rest of them, and which Carl would only someday tell them about, as reward for their having been more ingenious in their scheming, or braver in facing up to their parents, or smarter in school, or maybe better in some way they hadn’t yet considered but which Carl would let them know about when he was ready, through hints, funny stories, apparently casual changes of subject.
“End of the meeting,” Grover announced. “Let’s go over to the hideout.”
The rain had fallen away to a sort of drifting mist. The four of them scrambled down the tree and ran out of Grover’s yard, down the block, into and across a field among rain-flattened holidays of hay. Somewhere en route they picked up a fat basset hound named Pierre, who on sunny days slept in the middle of the state highway that briefly became Chickadee Street as it passed through Mingeborough. But rain did something to him, invigorated him. He romped around them like a puppy, yapping and trying, it looked like, to catch raindrops on his tongue.
The sun would set tonight without anyone’s seeing it—there was that kind of bleakness to the afternoon. You couldn’t see any mountains because the clouds trailed too low. Tim, Grover, Étienne, Carl and Pierre went flickering over the field like shadows, out to a dirt road whose ruts were filled with rain now. The road wound down a little ridge into King Yrjö’s woods, named after a European pretender who’d fled the eclipse then falling over Europe and his own hardly real shadow-state sometime back in the middle Thirties, trading a bucketful of jewels, the yarn went, for all this property. Why it had to be a bucketful, which sounded like an impractical way to carry jewels around, nobody ever explained. There were also supposed to have been three (some said four) wives, one official and the others morganatic, and a fiercely loyal aide, a cavalry officer seven feet tall with a full beard, spurred boots, gold epaulets and a shotgun he always carried with him and would not hesitate to use on anybody, especially a kid, caught trespassing. It was he who haunted the grounds. He still lived there though his king had long gone—at least, everybody believed he did—though no one had ever seen him outright, only heard his heavy boots crashing after you through the dead leaves, among the tree trunks and briers, as you ran in panic. You always got away. The king’s exile, kids could sense, was something their parents were in on but was effectively cut off from the kids: There had been the falling dark, yes, and general flight, and a large war—all this without names and dates, pieced together out of talk overheard from parents, television documentaries, social-studies class if you happened to be listening, marines-in-action comics, but none of it that sharp, that specific; all of it in a kind of code, twilit, forever unexplained. King Yrjö’s estate was the only real connection the kids had with whatever the cataclysmic thing was that had happened, and it helped for the caretaker, the pursuer, to have been a soldier.
Yet he had not bothered the Inner Junta at all. Years ago, somehow, it had become clear to only them that he never would. They’d since been all over the place and had seen no definite trace of him, though plenty of ambiguous ones. Which didn’t disprove his existence, but did mean that they’d found the perfect place for a hideout. Real or make-believe, the giant cavalryman became their protector.
The road passed through a stand of pines, high in whose branches partridges whirred. Water dripped; shoes squished in the mud. After the trees came a sweep of what had once been smooth lawn, smooth as the back of a long wave out at sea, but now was full of weeds, rabbit holes, tall rye. According to Tim’s father, years ago peacocks had come running downhill across the great lawn whenever a carriage had entered this stretch of the road, spreading out their brilliant tails. “Oh, yeah,” Tim said, “like just before a program comes on in color. When are we getting a color TV, Dad?”
“Black and white’s good enough,” his father had said, and that was that. Tim had asked Carl once whether he had a color TV at home. “Why should I?” said Carl, and then almost immediately, “Oh! yeah.” And bust out laughing. Tim knew as well as Étienne, the professional comic, when your listener had guessed your next line, so he didn’t say anything else. He wondered why Carl laughed so hard. It wasn’t that funny and even had a kind of logic to it. He did think of Carl as not only “colored” himself, but somehow more deeply involved with all color. When Tim thought about Carl he always saw him against blazing reds and ochres of this early fall, only last month, when Carl had just come to Mingeborough and they were still getting to be friends, and he thought that Carl must somehow carry around with him a perpetual Berkshire autumn, a Wonderful World of Color. Even in the grayness of this afternoon and this district they had entered (which, it seemed, was deprived of its just measure of light because part of it belonged to the past), Carl brought a kind of illumination, a brightening, a compensation for whatever it was about the light that was missing.
They left the road and plunged down through azalea bushes to the banks of an ornamental canal, part of a system of waterways and islands laid out toward the end of the last century, perhaps with some idea of a miniaturized or toy Venice for the New York candy magnate Ellsworth Baffy, who had caused this place to be built originally. Like many who put castles up among these inland hills, he was a contemporary of Jay Gould and his partner, the jolly Berkshire peddler Jubilee Jim Fisk. Once, right around this time of year, Baffy had held a masquerade ball in honor of the presidential candidate James G. Blaine, from which Blaine had been absent due to a storm and a mix-up in rail schedules. No one missed him. All the moneyed of Berkshire County congregated in the great ballroom of Baffy’s spun-sugar manor house; the party lasted three days and the countryside was visited by the drunken wanderings of Pierrots pale in the light of the moon, hideous Borneo apes toting jugs of the local white lightning, lush and cherry-lipped actresses imported from New York, in silk capes, red corsets, long hose; wild Indians, princes of the Renaissance, characters from Dickens, paisley bulls, bears with nosegays; allegorical, garlanded girls named Free Enterprise, Progress, Enlightenment; a giant Maine lobster that never got to extend its claw to the candidate. It snowed, and the last morning of the party a pretty ballet girl dressed as Columbine was found in a quarry nearly dead; the toes of one foot were frostbitten so badly they had to be amputated. She never danced again, and in November Blaine lost the election and was also forgotten. After Baffy died the estate was bought by a retired train robber from Kansas and in 1932 was sold dirt cheap to a chain of hotels which couldn’t afford to convert the place and eventually decided that King Yrjö’s bucketful of jewels was better than paying the taxes on a white elephant. And now the King too was gone, and the house was empty again, except for the Junta, and one possible cavalry officer.
Hidden among reeds was a flat-bottomed boat they’d found, patched up, and christened the S. S. Leak. They piled aboard, and Tim and Étienne rowed. Pierre sat with his paws up on the front end, like a figurehead. Downstream a frog jumped, and falling rain stippled the dark surface of the water. They splashed along under phony-Venetian bridges, some without floorboards so that you could look up and see the gray sky through them; past little landings whose untarred pilings had rotted and collected green slime; an open summerhouse with screening rusted through, which swayed even in soft winds; corroded statues of straight-nosed, fig-leaved youths and maidens, holding horns of plenty, crossbows, impossible Panpipes and stringed instruments, pomegranates, curling scrolls, and one another. Soon, over the tops of leafless willows, the Big House appeared, growing taller the closer they came—more turrets, crenellations, flying buttresses coming into sight at each stroke of the oars. The outside was in fairly lousy shape: a lot of shingling was off, paint had peeled, roof slates lay broken in piles where they’d slid and fallen. Windows had been mostly busted after years of forays by nervous kids double-dared to go in against the cavalry officer and his shotgun. And everywhere the smell of old—eighty-year-old—wood.
