The Non-Statistical Man (16 page)

He hadn’t been able to do it very long at that time, and it still frightened him a little. It was one of the things he’d never told anyone about. He couldn’t make it work always, either, but now this ability was functioning perfectly. It was as if he were right inside the skulls of the two men.

Mr. Mooremeister groaned in misery when Mr. Gibbons explained why he had come. “Not a cute little boy genius, Gibbons!” he cried. “Anything but that! Our football team hasn’t a single decent quarterback; our English staff is going to pieces. And you want me to wet nurse a little genius!

“Send him down to Smithers at Central. Smithers
likes
wonder boys who can sit motionless for a day at a time and recite all of ‘Hamlet’ from memory.”

“You’ve got to take him,” Mr. Gibbons said. “He knows more than half my teachers do. He’s in your district; and Webber at the University has an eye on him.”

“Then let Webber take him! I don’t want him!”

“That’ll come in a year or two. But he doesn’t think Jimmy is old enough for University environment right now.”

“Not at nine, but at ten or eleven he will be,” said Mr. Mooremeister sarcastically.

“Yes.” Then Mr. Gibbons was silent for quite a while before he said slowly, “Jimmy’s a queer little cuss. You can’t get close enough to really know him, but somehow I think he’s going to become a very great man. It may turn out that the most valuable thing you or I can do in our otherwise not-very-useful lives is to see that the thing Jimmy has inside
him
is not smothered before it matures.”

Jimmy couldn’t remember when he first heard the word, prodigy. It was certainly long before his school days, but he hadn’t been concerned with its meaning then. He didn’t suppose he was different from other children.

Now he wondered if he had any chance at all to ever be like them.

He remembered the precise moment he found out there was a difference.

In the first grade, Miss Brown printed “run” on the blackboard that first day of school. She took three ridiculous steps to show its meaning. And in midmorning then, Jimmy rose and solemnly announced: “But I already know how to read. I’ve always been able to read.”

He began a recital of the long list of classics, science texts, and Donald Duck comics through which he’d gone with the patient help and guidance of his father. In the midst of it he stopped. Something like a cold wind swept about his feet; Miss Brown and the children were looking at him, utterly silent.

Instinctively, he understood what he had done. He was a strange one in their midst, an outsider; and they hated him for it.

That was what he felt swirling coldly in that room, he knew forever after. The dark penalty of hate for one who was different. He cried in the night when he got to bed. He cried for the immense, nameless ache that had opened up within him.

His mother rocked him in her arms, and his father said it must have been the excitement of the first day at school. They tried to persuade him to tell what was the matter. But he had no words for it.

He stood at the mouth of the great, empty cavern of his life and saw all the dark, lonely years stretching away into timelessness. But he had not the words for it, then or ever.

He could not remember the beginning of wonder, of his great yearning inquiry about the stars and the Earth, the water and the air, and the things that crawled and swam and flew. It was a magic place, this world to which he had come!

And he had always, from the moment of his birth, been able to know everything he wanted to know about it for little more than the asking. Truly, he could not remember learning to read. At the first glimpse of a printed page he had known. But after that first day of school he never told
them, not even his parents, about the things he could do that other boys could not do at all.

He remembered the first time in science class, for instance, when he had been shown a microscope along with the rest of the pupils. It had seemed such a useless object! By narrowing his vision a bit he could see clearly the wriggly amoeba in the little drop of water. But by then he understood he was .the only one in the class who could.

He knew they didn’t understand about the stars, either. He read in his books about great telescopes that men built to stretch their puny vision to the threshold of space. But since infancy—he couldn’t recall the first time—he had strolled in vision across the stifling red sands of Mars. He had picked his way among the ancient ruins and played hide and seek in imagination with the small, brown cubs that scurried there, the only remnants of the proud, fallen race that had built those ruins.

He knew he was the only one who could do these things. And he despised himself for it, for what was the use of such gifts if they shut
him
in a sealed tomb that kept
him
out of the life and friendship of his own kind?

So, carefully, he hid all his strange, wild talents as best he could. But he could not hold himself to the pace of his fellow school pupils by any means at his command. It was impossible to camouflage himself as a common dullard.

He knew he wasn’t normal. Sometimes he wondered if he was even human .. .

In that first year of school, Miss Brown spread the word, and Mr. Gibbons came to see Jimmy’s genius for himself. They sent
him
on, out of the first grade, and that’s the way it began.

He became a kind of celebrated freak, but only Mr. Gibbons showed any genuine
liking
for him. Other teachers never did. His fellow pupils regarded him with a kind of curious contempt. Jimmy had hoped it would turn out differently when he got to know them. But it took him such a long time to get acquainted, and he was shunted to a new group before he had time to know the last one.

As the gap in ages widened, he gave it up. He never had a classmate for a friend. Not until Brick Malloy.

In the archives of the University there was a bound, typewritten manuscript, a full inch and half thick, devoted to a description and analysis of Jimmy Correll. It
had earned its author, Ralph Grosset, a master’s degree in psychology and had given Jimmy a whole summer with someone to talk to.

Ralph Grosset had described in detail Jimmy’s photographic memory and his adult capacity for deductive reasoning, but he had skipped the things Jimmy tried to say about the wonder and the mystery of the universe, and of hating and the loneliness. He didn’t know about these things. He was interested only in preparing a thesis for his degree, and he didn’t really like Jimmy. Grosset feared him a little, almost, and distrusted him.

Jimmy didn’t really expect anything different. He had given up long ago and learned to give coldness for coldness, retreating farther and farther into the clean little world of his own making. But it was lonely there.

It was so lonely that he could stand it no longer.

He drew his legs out of the chill water of the Creek and stretched them in a spot of sunlight filtering through the tree. He lay on his back staring upward at the sky through the net of willows. He was sure of one thing: He wasn’t going to the University next Fall.

He knew what it would be like there. They would laugh when he first came into class and tell him the kindergarten was three doors down the hall. The professors would make a joke of his presence even while trying to reassure him it was normal for eleven year old boys to appear in their lecture rooms. They wouldn’t like him.

And all of them would talk over his head about the ordinary affairs of life, the football games, the dances and the parties, the world he didn’t belong in. They would look through
him
and around him as if to rid themselves of his presence by sheer disbelief in him.

That’s the way it had been at Westwood. He had been afraid, and the rest knew it instantly and without mercy. They called
him
“Professor” and “Four-Eyes” until he wanted to scream in rage.

He hated the gym periods most of all. The white, suffocating steaminess of the dressing room made him gasp and go sick with nausea. He hated the smell of sweat and clothes and dirty shoes. The wild, dark hairiness of the surrounding bodies frightened him and made him ashamed of his own baby nakedness.

And the others were ashamed to have him in their midst. Sometimes they kidded brutally about his little
white skinny body, but mostly they just pretended he wasn’t there. On the field, of course, when sides were chosen for baseball or soccer, he was automatically the last one left. Nobody ever really chose him. When all the others had been picked and the crowd ran for positions, Jimmy would trail along with the side due to get the last man. .

But in the early Fall .of this year the miracle had happened. Jimmy found a friend. Old Mr. Barton was his friend, of course, but Mr. Barton was everybody’s friend. It was different with Brick Malloy. Brick was a classmate. Captain of the football team.

Jimmy could walk with his head high when he was with Brick. Everybody called out and waved when Brick passed. The greetings were not for Jimmy, but he knew the others were watching as he moved by the side of his friend. There had grown, day by day, a new look in their eyes. At first puzzlement—and now almost acceptance and respect.

Jimmy had not hoped for so much when Brick first came to him. He was rude and bitter as he was to everyone then. Brick seemed not to notice. “I’m in trouble, Jimmy,” he said. “You’re the best man around here for my kind of trouble, if you’d be willing to help me out.”

Jimmy remembered Brick had never called him “Professor” or “Four-eyes”, and he’d never laughed at him in the dressing room. Brick was always so sure of making his own way he never needed to stand in anyone else’s.

“I’m going to flunk trig,” he went on, “unless I get somebody to beat it into my thick head. I don’t have enough time to do it alone. It looks like it’s got to be either football or trig—and the way I’m going it’s not likely to be either.”

Without enthusiasm, Jimmy took on the coaching job. Trigonometry was lucidly clear to him, and he had the knack of making it so for the older boy. Brick offered substantial payment, but at the end of the first week, when the warmth was already growing between them, Jimmy made his own proposal.

“I’m in trouble, too,” he said. “I want to learn to throw a ball halfway straight, so the guys will quit razzing mo in gym. I want to learn how to catch and run. Touch mo these things, will you, Brick?”

They made a deal to exchange coaching, and Jimmy
began feeling a measure of control coming into the muscles of his lean body. For the first time he felt his body was his own, with the right to occupy its quota of space. He had a right to the wild playground skills of his companions. Brick respected
him
and taught him to have respect for himself.

And one day, in this same spot, Jimmy confided the great secret of his agonizing wonder about the universe to which they had come. Jimmy had caught his first fish, and in the sky, the sun was pinking the high cirrus.

They watched the color slowly fading. “Don’t you ever wonder about it?” Jimmy said.

“Wonder about what?”

“Everything. . . 1” And then it came with a burst, the outflow of talk so long held back, because there had been no one to understand it.

“The colors,” said Jimmy, “The colors in the sunrise and sunset, the colors in a rainbow, the blue of the sky. Out in space, away from Earth, the sky isn’t blue. It’s black. Did you know that, Brick? Someday I’m going out there. I’m going to walk on the Moon and see what Earth looks like from there. I’m going to go to Mars before I die.

“I’m going to find out why an atom explodes. Nobody knows that, yet. Not really. They don’t know what fission or fusion really is. They only know a little about how to make it happen. Nobody knows what’s really inside an atom. I’m going to find out, Brick.”

“Sure you are,” said Brick quietly. “You’re going to go farther and faster, and higher and deeper than most men have ever dreamed.”

“What are you going to do, Brick? Wouldn’t you like to go there, too? Down into an atom, or out into space?”

“Me? The trig hound of Westwood High? Dad’s got a place all ready for me in his contracting business. I expect to be a civil engineer, that is if I can ever learn which end of a transit you look into.”

“Is that what you want to do?”

“Sure. I grew up on stories of bridges in South America and sewers in Syria. Actually, Dad’s never had an out of stages job yet. His biggest one was a thirty six inch sewer line half way across San Francisco. He had to start too close to scratch. He expects me to build it up; it’s what I want to do.

“And a guy ought to do what he wants to, not what
somebody else thinks he ought to. You’ve got a lot tougher climb than I have to get where you’re going. But maybe not, really. You’re starting from a higher jumping-off place than most of us will ever reach after a lifetime of trying.” "

“Is that why they hate me?”

Brick’s eyes widened in astonishment. “So that’s what’s eating you! For the love of Pete, stop dreaming up such crazy ideas. They’d like you well enough if you’d give them half a chance!” .

Jimmy knew that was a lie, of course. Reclining now in the grass where they had once talked, he knew that Brick was just trying to be kind. He had given them a chance until his heart ached with the sickness of longing for their friendship. Still they hated
him,
and Jimmy was scared of them.

He was too scared to appear for the farce of Jimmy Correll Day Assembly. He was too scared to go to the University next year.

He was too scared to leave Brick.

He wasn’t ashamed of this. For the first time in his life he knew what it was like to walk through the school yard and on the streets of his neighborhood with some feeling of pride and freedom from fear. Brick gave him an honest friendship. It wasn’t shameful to take pride in that— and fear its loss.

Maybe if he stayed at Westwood just this next year— with Brick—he could get up strength enough to go it alone. But if he had to leave now for another world of taunting strangers he would be lost. He would never find his way back to this world of sky and light that Brick had shown him.