Lizard Music (2 page)

I decided to settle for some chocolate chip cookies and a glass of milk. I was going to clean up the place where I was working on my model, but I remembered that I was all alone in the house, and it wouldn’t be in anyone’s way. I left it just where it was. I turned down the lights and got ready to watch the late news.

The guy who does the late news has a beard! His name is Bob Barney and he’s real good. He giggles, sort of, in the wrong places when he tells news stories, and he’s bald, and you can see the lights in the TV studio shining off the top of his head. I was really impressed with him. I think he’s almost in Walter Cronkite’s class. There’s also a little fat guy who does the weather forecast. He’s good too. And they do news that doesn’t get on the early news show. The show comes from Hogboro, which is just a few miles south of McDonaldsville, and they do stories about things that happen right around here. They even did a story about a guy who got arrested right at the McDonaldsville pool where I go every day! It was a great show.

I wasn’t the least bit tired. I felt just fine, sitting in the dark living room with the set on. The only light in the room was the blue light from the television set. I could see my partly finished model airplane on the sheets of newspaper in front of the set, like Walter Cronkite’s airliner forced down in the snowfields of Tibet.

I was sort of thinking about the airplane, the news had ended, and I wasn’t paying any attention to the ads. A guy dressed up in an apron was in a supermarket telling two ladies how soft this toilet paper was, when a huge gorilla came up behind him and just picked him up and ate him. Like a cookie. Two bites. It all happened so fast that I wasn’t sure if I had really seen it. As I said, I wasn’t really paying attention.

Then a movie came on. It wasn’t stupid like the one about the doctor on a motorcycle. This was a wonderful monster movie about a mad scientist who has an island and does horrible experiments there. This scientist, who is fat and always carries a big whip, takes all kinds of animals and turns them into men. Some of them are more like men, and some of them are more like animals. They all hate the mad scientist, because they would rather have been animals, but they are afraid of him too.

Every night the scientist cracks his whip and makes the man-animals repeat the same thing.

He says, “What is the law?”

They say, “We shall eat no meat. We shall walk on two legs. We shall spill no blood. ARE WE NOT MEN?”

Then they all sort of growl and dance around, and the mad scientist cracks his whip again. At the end all the monsters go crazy and tear the mad scientist to pieces and set the whole island on fire. All in all, it was about the best movie I ever saw. There was a lot of screaming and blood-curdling stuff in it. In fact it was so good that I forgot all about how scary it was and that I was all alone in the middle of the night. Until it was over, that is. Then, during the commercial for a school where you can learn to be a truck driver, I remembered every scary, screaming, blood-curdling thing that happened in the monster movie. I thought about the dreams I was going to have, and all of a sudden I felt a cold chill.

I was almost at the point of running into the kitchen and looking up the number of the resort where Mom and Dad were staying, when the lizard band came onto the screen. These were real lizards, not people dressed up as lizards, and they played regular musical instruments. There were five or six of them. At first it was scarier than the movie, especially the close-ups, but as the lizards played and swayed together, I sort of got used to it. The music was very strange. It wasn’t like anything I’d ever heard before. It sounded funny at first, but I got used to it very fast, and then I liked it more than anything I’d ever heard. I didn’t think about liking it—I didn’t think about anything. I just listened to the music and swayed with the lizards. Every time they stopped playing, I felt afraid that they wouldn’t start again—but I don’t know when they stopped because I woke up on the couch in the morning. The television was still on, hissing, with no picture—just a bunch of little dots jumping around. There was the model airplane, the plate with a few cookie crumbs, and the glass with a little milk at the bottom.

At first, when I woke up, I listened for sounds of people in the house. Then I remembered that everyone was gone. I fixed myself some cornflakes and milk. I sat in the kitchen eating my breakfast. It was very quiet, quieter than it had been the night before. I had always heard people say, “It was so quiet you could hear yourself think,” and I always thought it was a silly figure of speech. How can you hear yourself think? Now, in the quiet kitchen, I really could hear myself think.

I washed the dirty dishes from breakfast and the night before, and then I sat around thinking about what I would do that day. I didn’t feel like going to the pool. It seemed to me that I ought to do something that took advantage of being on my own. One thing I had been planning to try was smoking. Mom had left a pack of her lemon-flavored cigarettes on the kitchen counter. I lit one up. It felt good sitting at the kitchen table holding the cigarette. If I knew how to make coffee, I could have tried that too, but I had to settle for the lemon-flavored cigarette and a glass of milk. I was afraid the cigarette would make me cough. It didn’t though—it just made me sick. I got dizzy and started to sweat, and wound up throwing up my cornflakes and milk. So much for smoking.

I just hung around for a couple of hours, looking at magazines and getting over being sick. I thought about the stuff I had seen on television and wondered what Walter Cronkite was doing on his vacation. I wished I could remember some of the tunes the lizard band was playing. I checked the TV listings for the night before, and there wasn’t anything about them. The last listing was the monster movie,
The Island of Dr. Morbo
.

Then I got the idea of going to Hogboro. Kids from McDonaldsville just about never go to the city of Hogboro, even though there is a bus every twenty minutes, and it takes less than half an hour. I myself had only been in Hogboro a few times, when Mom and Dad took us to dinner and a movie, and once there was a school trip to a museum. Another time I had gone with Mom on the bus, and we went to a couple of big department stores. When we got back, she said that the stores weren’t any better than the ones in McDonaldsville, and being in the city made her feel insecure. I thought the stores in Hogboro were a lot better than the ones in McDonaldsville. For one thing, they weren’t all on one level, and you rode up and down on these moving stairways. And they were crowded. People, all kinds, were everywhere.

In McDonaldsville, you never get to see a crowd. Maybe you will see a whole lot of people at a basketball game, or something like that, but it isn’t a crowd. The people all know each other, or if they don’t, they should. I mean they’re all the same, and they are all there for the same reason, and they all know just what kind of a house everybody else lives in and what sort of car they have, because they have a house and a car just like it. A crowd is a whole bunch of different people, all of them doing something a little bit different—they’re all alone in the middle of a whole lot of people they don’t know. If you were to meet somebody you knew in a real crowd, it would be a big surprise.

The bus stop was four blocks from my house. I picked up one of the forged letters to Mom and Dad to drop in the mailbox and went to wait for the bus.

When the bus came, there was hardly anybody on it. Every morning the buses are full of men going to work in Hogboro, and every night they all ride back. The rest of the day the buses run back and forth, mostly empty, with maybe a few ladies going shopping. I sat by a window and watched as we went through the familiar streets of McDonaldsville, shopping centers, hamburger stands, houses. Then we got to streets I didn’t know. The houses got closer together, and there were fewer trees. The bus passed big factories and apartment buildings. Everything seemed to be made of brick.

I didn’t know exactly why I was going to Hogboro. I just sort of thought of doing it, and did it. The bus was rolling down a big wide street, and I felt very good about the whole idea.

The bus had not picked anyone up for quite a while. I figured that we were already in Hogboro, or close to it. We were stopped at a corner, when the bus driver shouted out the window, “Hey! Chicken Man!” The driver opened the door, and a very old black man got on. He didn’t pay any fare. All the people on the bus were smiling—they seemed to know who the Chicken Man was. He was wearing an old raincoat and a rumpled old hat. There was a string around his neck, and hanging from it were a toy telephone, a baby doll, little bottles of beer, a couple of bells, and a lot of other junk.

I was wondering why he was called the Chicken Man, when he took his hat off, and there on his head, sitting calmly as though she were on a nest, was a big fat white chicken.

“Hey, Chicken Man!” one of the passengers shouted. “Have your chicken do some tricks!” The Chicken Man did a couple of dance steps in the aisle of the bus. Then he tapped his chicken with his long bony finger, and it hopped off onto his shoulder. The chicken did all sorts of tricks. She danced on the old man’s shoulders and clucked into the toy telephone, drank beer from a little bottle, and at the end of the act, hopped onto the old man’s head and settled down so he could put his hat over her.

At the end of the chicken act everybody clapped and cheered. Nobody offered the Chicken Man any money, and he didn’t pass his hat or anything. I guessed he didn’t do that for a living, just to entertain people.

When the Chicken Man had finished his act I noticed we were already inside the Hogboro bus terminal.

The bus terminal was noisy and dirty and crowded. People were carrying suitcases and bundles and babies. A bunch of soldiers were standing together, talking loud and laughing. They had shiny boots. Everybody seemed to be in a big rush, or else bored, waiting for a bus that was hours away.

I went out into the street. Car horns were tooting and buses were rumbling, and everyone was moving fast. I stood still for a while and watched. The people were passing by like a long freight train, and I felt like a car stopped at a crossing. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t really see the street, just the people passing.

Then I was moving too. All of a sudden I was in the stream of people, going fast. I felt as though I were being partly carried. It wasn’t like regular walking. It was almost like swimming in a race. I was going pretty fast, and getting hot and sweaty. Store windows and movie canopies with thousands of little light bulbs flashed past. Sometimes it was a blur, and sometimes things stood out clearly, as I sped past with the crowd—Chop Suey, Pants Pressed, 3 Big Features, Discounts. The signs were red and green and blue, made of light bulbs and neon tubing.

After a while the crowd started to thin out and slow down. There weren’t as many lighted signs, and the buildings were darker and older looking.

I kept walking. There were little private houses between the office buildings, with little gardens in front, mostly weeds. The stores were smaller than the ones near the bus terminal. They didn’t have electric signs. A lot of them were empty. The whole neighborhood was sort of run down. Paint was peeling off the front doors, and there were a lot of cracks in the sidewalk. Grass grew out of the cracks. There weren’t many people walking, and there weren’t many cars. People were leaning out of windows, watching the street with their elbows on pillows. Every window was open—not an airconditioner in sight. The whole place smelled of old bricks.

I had never seen anything like it before. McDonaldsville is all new houses, or neat streets of old houses with fresh paint, and shopping centers with big parking lots. Nobody keeps his window open in the summertime.

I stopped in front of an empty store. There were big glass windows on both sides of the door, which was padlocked. It was dark and dusty inside. I could see right through the store and out the back windows, which opened onto a sort of yard with leafy weeds and trees of paradise swaying in the breeze. It looked like two television screens showing a color picture of a green jungle. I looked at the two bright squares of green in the dark store for a long time—then I noticed something else.

Taped to the window, on the inside, was an old record album cover. It had been in color once, but the sun had faded it until it was all different shades of brownish yellow. It was so faded, you really had to stare at it to make it out. There was a picture of five lizards, and over them was printed, The Modern Lizard Quintet Plays Mozart. It was very faded. It took a long time to figure out what it said, and what the picture showed.

The lizard band had made a record! I decided to look for it. As I said, I’m not all that interested in the records the other kids listen to, but I thought I’d like to have a record of the lizards. I could play it on Leslie’s portable stereo. I was sure there would be a record store near the bus terminal. I turned around and started walking back. It was starting to drizzle. The drops made dark spots on the sidewalk, and the brick smell was getting stronger.