Slow Learner, page 17
“My things?” he said.
“Somebody’ll take care of them. Come on. You kids too. It’s time you were getting home.”
Tim and Grover followed them down the hall, into the elevator, out through the lobby past the clerk and into the empty street, where the cops put Mr. McAfee into a patrol car. Tim wondered if either of their voices had ever come over the radio rig at Grover’s, had ever figured in any of his dreams. “Be careful,” he yelled at them. “He’s real sick. You got to take care of him.”
“Oh, we’ll take care of him,” said the cop who wasn’t driving. “He knows it too, don’t he? Look at him.” Tim looked. All he could see were the whites of eyes, and cheekbones highlighted in sweat. Then the car took off, leaving the odor of rubber and a long screech hanging at the curb. That was the last they saw of him. They went down to the station house next day, but the cops said he’d been taken to Pittsfield, and there was no way at all of knowing whether they were telling the truth.
A few days later the paper mill started up again, and then there was that year’s Operation Spartacus to worry about, and then the idea Nunzi Passarella came up with of getting car batteries from Étienne’s father’s junkyard, and a couple of old surplus spotlights and some sickly green cellophane, and rigging the lights up by the railroad cut just outside Mingeborough where the train had to slow down for a curve, getting at least fifty kids to put on rubber monster masks of various kinds, and capes and homemade bat outfits and such, then sit around on the slopes of the cut until the train came, switching on the sickly green spotlights just as it appeared around the curve, and see what happened. Only half the expected number of kids showed up but it was still a success, the train coming to a horrible grinding halt, ladies screaming, conductors yelling, Étienne cutting the lights and the kids fleeing away up the sides of the cut and into the fields. Grover, who’d been sporting a zombie mask of his own design, had afterward said something curious: “I feel different now and better for having been green, even sickly green, even for a minute.” Though they never talked about it, Tim felt the same way.
In the spring he and Étienne hopped a freight train for the first time in their lives, and rode to Pittsfield to see a merchant name of Artie Cognomen, a stout, poker-faced, onetime Bostonian who looked like a selectman and smoked a pipe with a bowl carved in the shape of Winston Churchill’s head, complete with cigar. Artie sold practical jokes. “Have a very nice dribble glass in with the spring consignment,” he informed them. “Also a wide selection in whoopee cushions, exploding cigars—” “No,” said Étienne. “What kind of disguises you got?” Artie showed them all he had—wigs, fake noses, glasses with bug eyes on them—but what they finally settled for was a couple of mustaches you could clip to your nose and two little tins of blackface makeup. “You guys must be reactionaries or something,” Mr. Cognomen told them. “This stuff has been sitting around for years. It may even have turned white. You trying to resurrect vaudeville or something?” “We’re trying to resurrect a friend,” Étienne answered right back without thinking, and then he and Tim looked at each other in surprise, as if some fourth person in the room had said it.
Then this summer the Barringtons had moved into Northumberland Estates, and the kids, as usual, had advance word on it. Their parents suddenly seemed to spend more time talking about the coming of the Barringtons than anything else. They began to use words like “blockbusting” and “integration.”
“What’s integration mean?” Tim asked Grover.
“The opposite of differentiation,” Grover said, drawing an x-axis, y-axis and curve on his greenboard. “Call this function of x. Consider values of the curve at tiny little increments of x”—drawing straight vertical lines from the curve down to the x-axis, like the bars of a jail cell—“you can have as many of these as you want, see, as close together as you want.”
“Till it’s all solid,” Tim said.
“No, it never gets solid. If this was a jail cell, and those lives were bars, and whoever was behind it could make himself any size he wanted to be, he could always make himself skinny enough to get free. No matter how close together the bars were.”
“This is integration,” said Tim.
“The only kind I ever heard of,” said Grover. Late that night they tuned in on Grover’s parents’ bedroom, to see if they could find out any thing new about the Negro family that was coming.
“They’re worried up there,” Mr. Snodd said. “They don’t know whether to start selling now or try and stick it out. All it takes is one to panic.”
“Well,” said Grover’s mother, “thank God they don’t have any children, or there’d be a panic in the PTA, too.”
Intrigued, they sent Hogan in to the next PTA meeting to see what was up. Hogan reported back the same thing: “They say there’s no kids this time, but they ought to be looking ahead and making plans in case it ever does happen.”
It was hard to see what their parents were all so scared of. As it turned out, not only scared but also misinformed. The day after the Barringtons finally did move in, Tim, Grover and Étienne went up to their house after school just to look around. They found the house no different from any others in the development; but then, leaning against a steel street light, watching them, they saw the kid. He was kind of rangy and dark, and he was wearing a sweater, even though it was warm out. The others introduced themselves and said they were going up to the overpass to drop water balloons on cars, and would he like to come along?
“What’s your name?” Étienne said.
“Well,” said the kid, snapping his fingers for it, “it’s Carl. Yeah, Carl Barrington.” Turned out he had a perfect eye for getting water balloons to splat right on a guy’s windshield. They went over to the junkyard later and fooled around with ball bearings and busted automatic-transmission units, and then walked Carl home. The next day he was in school, and every day after that. He sat quietly in a seat in the corner that had been empty, and the teacher never called on him, though he was as smart as Grover on some things. A week or so later Grover learned the other meaning for integration, from watching Huntley and Brinkley, the only television show he ever looked at.
“It means white kids and colored kids in the same school,” Grover said.
“Then we’re integrated,” Tim said. “Hey.”
“Yeah. They don’t know it, but we’re integrated.”
Then Tim’s and Grover’s folks, and even, according to Hogan, the progressive Doctor Slothrop, started in with the telephone calls, and the name-calling, and the dirty words they got so angry with kids for using. The only parent who was keeping out of it seemed to be Étienne’s father. “He says why don’t people stop worrying about Negroes and start worrying about automation,” Étienne reported. “What’s automation, Grovie?”
“I start studying it next week,” said Grover. “I’ll tell you then.” But he didn’t, because by that time they were all involved again with the arrangements for this year’s Spartacus maneuvers. They began to spend more and more time up at the hideout at King Yrjö’s, plotting. They knew by now, their third year at it, that the reality would turn out to be considerably less than the plot, that something inert and invisible, something they could not be cruel to or betray (though who would have gone so far as to call it love?) would always be between them and any clear or irreversible step, as much as the powdery fiction of the school’s outline on Fazzo’s Field had stopped the little kids last year. Because everybody on the school board, and the railroad, and the PTA and paper mill had to be somebody’s mother or father, whether really or as a member of a category; and there was a point at which the reflex to their covering warmth, protection, effectiveness against bad dreams, bruised heads and simple loneliness took over and made worthwhile anger with them impossible.
Still, the four of them sat now in the secret room, which had grown cold with the approach of night, while Pierre, the basset hound, nosed restlessly in the corners. They agreed that Carl would run a time-motion study on letting air out of tires in the shopping center’s parking lot, and Étienne would make more of an effort to obtain parts for the gigantic sodium catapult Grover had designed; and that Tim could begin each run-through of Operation Spartacus with a few more limbering-up exercises, taking the Royal Canadian Air Force plan as a point of departure. Grover allotted them the personnel they felt they would need, and then at last they adjourned. In single file they reran the house’s gauntlet of shadows, resonances and dread possibilities, came out into the rain which had not stopped, and re-embarked on the S.S. Leak.
They rowed her as far as the culvert under the state highway, then walked through that, and skirted around a piece of the swamp to Fazzo’s Field, to check out the maneuver site. Then they went over to the stretch of track beyond the point designated Foxtrot, and crouched among barren shadbushes whose berries they had eaten earlier in the year, and lobbed rocks down on the tracks to see how the angle of fire was. They couldn’t tell too much because there was hardly any light left to the sky. So they walked the tracks back almost to the Mingeborough station, then cut over into town, where they came trailing into the candy store, beginning to feel a little tired, sat in a row at the empty counter and ordered four lemon-limes with water. “Four?” said the lady behind the fountain. “Four,” said Grover, and as usual she gave them a funny look. For a while they hung around the revolving wire racks, looking through comics; then they walked Carl home, through the quickening rain.
Even before they reached the Barringtons’ block they felt something was wrong. Two cars and a pickup truck trailing garbage came tearing by from that direction, windshield wipers batting furiously, tires sending up wings of water that splashed the kids even though they jumped up on one of the lawns. Tim looked over at Carl, but Carl didn’t say anything.
When they got to Carl’s house they found the front lawn littered with garbage. For a while they only stood; then, as if compelled to do so, began kicking through it, looking for clues. The garbage was shin-deep all over the lawn, neatly spread right up to the property line. They must have brought it all in the pickup. Tim found the familiar A&P shopping bags his mother always brought home, and the skins of some big yellow oranges an aunt had sent them as a gift from Florida, and the pint box of pineapple sherbet Tim himself had bought two nights ago, and all the intimacy of the throwaway part, the shadow-half of his family’s life for all the week preceding, the crumpled envelopes addressed to his father and mother, the stubs of the black De Nobili cigars his father liked to smoke after supper, the folded beer cans, always with the point coming in between the two e’s of the word “beer,” exactly the way his father did and had taught him how to do—ten square yards of irrefutable evidence. Grover was going around unfolding papers and turning over things and finding out that his garbage was there too. “And Slothrops’ and Mostlys’,” Étienne reported, “and I guess a lot of people from around the development here, too.”
They’d been picking up garbage for about five minutes, throwing it in cans they found by the carport, when the front door opened and Mrs. Barrington started yelling at them.
“But we’re cleaning it up,” Tim said. “We’re on your side.”
“We don’t need your help,” the woman said. “We don’t need any of you on our side. I thank our heavenly Father every day of my life that we don’t have any children to be corrupted by the likes of you trash. Now get out, go on now.” She started to cry.
Tim shrugged and threw away an orange peel he was holding. He considered getting a beer can to confront his father with, but then figured all that would get him was spanked, and hard, so he forgot about it. The three of them walked away, slowly, looking back now and then at the woman, who was still standing in her doorway. They’d gone two blocks before they realized that Carl was still with them.
“She didn’t mean it,” he said. “She just—you know—mad.”
“Yeah,” said Tim and Grover.
“I don’t know”—the boy, now almost faded into the rain, gestured back at the house—“if I should go in now, or what. What should I do?”
Grover, Tim and Étienne looked at one another. Grover, as spokesman, said, “Why don’t you lay low for a while?”
“Yeah,” Carl said. They walked down to the shopping center and across the slick black parking lot that reflected greenish mercury-vapor lights, and a red supermarket sign, and a blue gas-station sign, and many yellow lights. They walked among these colors on the wide black pavement that seemed to stretch to the mountains.
“I guess I’ll—you know—go up to the hideout, then,” Carl said, “up to King Yrjö’s place.”
“At night?” Étienne said. “What about the calvary officer?”
“Cavalry,” said Grover.
“He won’t bother me,” said Carl. “You know.”
“We know,” said Tim. Sure they did: Everything Carl said, they knew. It had to be that way: He was what grownups, if they’d known, would have called an “imaginary playmate.” His words were the kids’ own words; his gestures too, the faces he made, the times he had to cry, the way he shot baskets; all given by them an amplification or grace they expected to grow into presently. Carl had been put together out of phrases, images, possibilities that grownups had somehow turned away from, repudiated, left out at the edges of towns, as if they were auto parts in Étienne’s father’s junkyard—things they could or did not want to live with but which the kids, on the other hand, could spend endless hours with, piecing together, rearranging, feeding, programming, refining. He was entirely theirs, their friend and robot, to cherish, buy undrunk sodas for, or send into danger, or even, as now, at last, to banish from their sight.
“If I like it,” Carl said, “I might stay there awhile too.” The others nodded, and then Carl broke loose and took off at a jogging run across the lot, waving his hand without looking back. When he’d vanished in the rain, the three kids put their hands in their pockets and started back for Grover’s house.
“Grovie,” said Étienne, “are we still integrated? If he doesn’t come back? Hops a freight somewhere or something?”
“Ask your father,” said Grover. “I don’t know anything.” Étienne picked up a handful of wet leaves and stuffed them down Grover’s back. Grover kicked water at him but missed and splashed Tim. Tim jumped up and shook a branch, showering Grover and Étienne. Étienne tried to push Tim over Grover, who’d got down on all fours, but Tim caught on and pushed Grover’s face in the mud. That was how they left the lights of the shopping center and took leave of Carl Barrington, abandoning him to the old estate’s other attenuated ghosts and its precarious shelter; and rollicked away into that night’s rain, each finally to his own house, hot shower, dry towel, before-bed television, good night kiss, and dreams that could never again be entirely safe.
Thomas Pynchon is the author of V., The Crying of Lot 49, Gravity's Rainbow, Slow Learner, a collection of short stories, Vineland, Mason & Dixon, Against the Day, and, most recently, Inherent Vice. He received the National Book Award for Gravity's Rainbow in 1974.
Thomas Pynchon, Slow Learner
