Slow Learner (20 page)

Grover, Tim and Étienne stood around without knowing exactly what to do. Mr. McAfee had started making a noise in his throat, a sound none of them had heard come from a man before, though Norman, a stray, red kind of puppy who hung around with Pierre times when the hound wasn't sleeping, had once got hold of some chicken bones, which had stuck someplace inside him and Norman had lain out in the dark and made a sound something like it until Grover's father put the dog in his car and drove away with him. Mr. McAfee stood with his head resting on the side of the door, making the same sound. "Hey," Grover said finally, and went over and took the man's hand, which was only a little bigger than Grover's own but dark-colored, and pulled, and Tim said, yeah, come on, and little by little they pulled him away from the door, while Étienne turned down the beige spread on the bed, and they got him to lie down, and put the cover back over him. All of a sudden there was a siren outside. "Cops!" Étienne yelled, and took off for the bathroom. The siren went by the hotel, and Tim looked out and saw it was a fire engine heading out north, and by the time it was quiet in the room again they could hear water running in the bathtub, and Mr. McAfee crying. He'd rolled over on his stomach and was holding the pillow with both hands on either side of his head and crying, the way a little kid cries, sucking air in in a croak, then letting it out in a wail, over and over as if he was never going to stop.

Tim closed the door and sat on the desk chair. Grover sat in the armchair next to the bed, and that was how their night's vigil began. First there was the crying: all they could do for that was sit and listen. Once the telephone rang. It was the clerk wanting to know if they were having any trouble, and Grover said, "No, he's all right. He'll be all right." Tim had to go in once to the bathroom, and there he found Étienne cowering submerged in a full tub, dressed in his frogman suit, looking like a black watermelon with arms and legs. Tim tapped him on the shoulder and Etienne started to thrash around, trying to go deeper. "No cops," Tim yelled as loud as he could. "It's Tim."

Étienne surfaced and took off his snorkel mask. "I'm hiding," he explained. "I tried to make soapsuds on top but there was only this real little bar of soap, and I guess it all wore off."

"Come on in and help us," Tim said. So Etienne came back in, trailing pools of water all over the place, and sat on the floor; and then the three of them just sat, listening to the man cry. He cried for a long time, and then dozed off. Sometimes he would wake up and talk for long stretches, then sleep again. Now and then one of the kids would drop off too. For Tim it was a little like staying over at Grovie's house and hearing all those cops and merchant captains and barge tenders over the radio, all those voices bouncing off the invisible dome in the sky and down to Graver's antenna and into Tim's dreams. It was as if Mr. McAfee too were broadcasting from somewhere quite distant, telling about things Tim would not be sure of in the daylight: a brother who'd left home one morning during the depression and got on a freight and disappeared, later sending them this one postcard from Los Angeles, and Mr. McAfee, just a boy, deciding to follow him there the same way, only that first time he got no further than Houston; a Mexican girl he'd been with for a while, and she used to drink some stuff all the time, a word Tim couldn't make out, and she had a baby boy who'd died from a rattlesnake bite (Tim saw the snake, headed for him, and bounced up out of the dream in terror, yelling), and so one morning she'd just gone away, like his brother vanished into the same deserted morning, before the sun was even up; and nights when he would sit by himself down around the docks and look off into the black Gulf, where the lights ended, just cut off and left you this giant nothing; and gang scuffles, day after day, up and down the neighborhood streets, or fights out on the beach in the summer's harsh sun; and gigs in New York, L.A., bad gigs with tenor-sax bands it was better to forget only how do you?; cops who'd picked him up, tanks he had known, tankmates with names like Big Knife, Paco-from-the-Moon, one Francis X. Fauntleroy (who'd taken his last wrinkled half a Pall Mall as he slept one evil morning after mixing pot and wine with a projectionist buddy down under a drive-in movie screen outside Kansas City, a big curving thing, while a John Wayne picture exploded overhead).

"Blood Alley," Tim said, gentle. "Yeah, I saw it. I saw it too."

Mr. McAfee slept a little then, and came awake remembering aloud another girl he'd met on a bus who played tenor and had just left a white musician she'd been with — this was out of Chicago going west. The two of them sat in the back seat over the motor, singing scat choruses of different things back and forth at each other, and later on in the night she slept on his shoulder and her hair was shiny and sweet, and around Cheyenne she got off and said she guessed she'd go down to Denver, so he never saw her again after that last glimpse of her little figure wandering around the old brick railroad depot across the street from the bus station, among all these ancient cowboy-movie-looking baggage carts, carrying her sax case and waving once at him when the bus pulled out. And he remembered then how he'd left Jill once the same way, only then it had been Lake Charles, Louisiana, back then when Camp Polk was still going strong, and the streets were full of drunken soldiers singing:

Mine eyes have seen the misery of the coming of the draft, And the day I got the letter was the day I got the shaft.

They said, "My son, we need you, 'cause the army's understaffed."

And I'm in the F.T.A.

"The what?" said Grover.

"Future Teachers of America," said Mr. McAfee, "very clean-cut organization." And Jill was going on north, to St. Louis or someplace, and he was going back home, back to Beaumont, because his mother was sick. He and Jill had been living in Algiers, across the river from New Orleans, and that time it had been going on two months, not as long as their time in New York, not as short or disastrous as the time in L.A., and this time it had come only to a nostalgic, joint admission that there must be this good-bye at the junction point full of drunks out in the middle of a swamp in the middle of the night. "Hey, Jill," he said. "Hey, baby."

"Who do you want?" Grover said.

"His wife," said Tim.

"Jill?" the man on the bed said. His eyes were closed and he looked as if he were struggling to open them. "Is Jill here?"

"You said she was coming to get you," Tim said.

"No, no, she not coming, man, who told you that?" His eyes flew open suddenly, startling-white. "You got to call her. Hey? Hogan? Call her for me?"

"Tim," Tim said. "What's her number?"

"In my wallet." He took out the wallet, an old brown cowhide one that was bulging apart with papers and stuff. "Here." He looked through it, his fingers scattering things, pulling out old business cards from employment agencies and car dealers and restaurants all across the country, and a calendar from two years ago with dates for University of Texas football games printed on one side, and a four-for-a-quarter photograph of him in his army uniform and smiling, holding a girl in a white coat who was looking down and smiling a little too, and a spare shoelace, and somebody's lock of hair folded into an envelope with part of some hospital's name up in the corner, an old army driver's license that wasn't any good anymore, and a couple of pine needles, a piece of saxophone reed, all kinds of scraps of paper, different colors and shapes. One blue one said "Jill," and had an address in New York, and a telephone number.

"Here." He gave it to Tim. "Call her collect, You know how to make one of them?" Tim nodded. "You got to ask for an outside line. Person-to-person to Miss Jill" — snapping his fingers to call the name back-"ah, Jill Pattison. Yeah."

"It's late," Tim said. "Will she still be up?" Mr. McAfee didn't say anything. Tim got the line, and the long-distance operator, and placed the call. "You don't want me to give them my name."

"No, no, tell them Carl McAfee." Then the line seemed to go dead. When it came back on she was ringing. It rang a long time and then a man answered.

"No," he said, "no, she went out the Coast a week ago."

"Do you have another number where she can be reached?" said the operator.

"There's an address someplace." He went away. Silence fell on the line and it was right around then that Tim's foot felt the edge of a certain abyss which he had been walking close to — for who knew how long? — without knowing. He looked over it, got afraid, and shied away, but not before learning something unpleasant about the night: that it was night here, and in New York, and probably on whatever coast the man was talking about, one single night over the entire land, making people, already so tiny in it, invisible too in the dark; and how hard it would be, how hopeless, to really find a person you needed suddenly, unless you lived all your life in a house like he did, with a mother and father. He turned around to look at the man on the bed and there came to him a hint then of how lost Mr. McAfee really was. What would he do if they couldn't find this girl? And then the man came back and read an address, which Tim copied, and the operator wanted to know if she should try Los Angeles information.

"Yeah," said Mr. McAfee.

"But she can't come get you if she's in Los Angeles."

"But I got to talk to her."

So Tim listened while more clicks and whirs went out like heard fingers, groping across the whole country in the dark, trying to touch one person out of all the millions that lived in it. Finally a girl answered and said she was Jill Pattison. The operator told her she had a collect call from a Carl McAfee.

"Who?" she said.

Somebody knocked on the door, and Grover went and got it. The operator repeated Mr. McAfee's name, and the girl said "Who?" again. There were two policemen at the door. Étienne, who'd been sitting behind the bed, gave a yelp and scuttled away into the bathroom and jumped back in the tub with a great splash.

"Leon, down at the desk, thought we ought to look in," one of the cops said. "Did this man bring you kids up here?"

"The clerk knows he didn't," Grover said.

"What should I — " Tim said, waving the phone.

"Hang up," said Mr. McAfee. "Forget it." He tightened his hands into fists and lay looking at the cops.

"Fella," said the other cop, "bellboy says you didn't have the price of a bottle of whiskey a while ago."

"That's right," said Mr. McAfee.

"Room here's seven dollars a night. How were you going to pay for that?"

"I wasn't," said Mr. McAfee. "I'm a vagrant."

"Come on," said the first cop.

"Hey," Tim said, "you can't. He's sick. Call the A.A. -they know about him."

"Cool off, son," said the other cop. "He's going to get a nice free room tonight."

"Call Doctor Slothrop," Tim said. The cops had taken Mr. McAfee off the bed and were moving him toward the door.

"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 Etienne'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.