Nine Stories (10 page)

"I'm
not worried about it," Sandra interrupted.

"I
know that, but what I'd do, I'd just get me--"

The
swinging door opened from the dining room and Boo Boo Tannenbaum, the
lady of the house, came into the kitchen. She was a small, almost
hipless girl of twenty-five, with styleless, colorless, brittle hair
pushed back behind her ears, which were very large. She was dressed
in knee-length jeans, a black turtleneck pullover, and socks and
loafers. Her joke of a name aside, her general unprettiness aside,
she was-in terms of permanently memorable, immoderately perceptive,
small-area faces-a stunning and final girl. She went directly to the
refrigerator and opened it. As she peered inside, with her legs apart
and her hands on her knees, she whistled, unmelodically, through her
teeth, keeping time with a little uninhibited, pendulum action of her
rear end. Sandra and Mrs. Snell were silent. Mrs. Snell put out her
cigarette, unhurriedly.

"Sandra
. . ."

"Yes,
ma'am?" Sandra looked alertly past Mrs. Snell's hat.

"Aren't
there any more pickles? I want to bring him a pickle."

"He
et 'em," Sandra reported intelligently. "He et 'em before
he went to bed last night. There was only two left."

"Oh.
Well, I'll get some when I go to the station. I thought maybe I could
lure him out of that boat." Boo Boo shut the refrigerator door
and walked over to look out of the lake-front window. "Do we
need anything else?" she asked, from the window.

"Just
bread."

"I
left your check on the hall table, Mrs. Snell. Thank you."

"O.K.,"
said Mrs. Snell. "I hear Lionel's supposeta be runnin' away."
She gave a short laugh.

"Certainly
looks that way," Boo Boo said, and slid her hands into her hip
pockets.

"At
least he don't run very far away," Mrs. Snell said, giving
another short laugh.

At
the window, Boo Boo changed her position slightly, so that her back
wasn't directly to the two women at the table. "No," she
said, and pushed back some hair behind her ear. She added, purely
informatively: "He's been hitting the road regularly since he
was two. But never very hard. I think the farthest he ever got--in
the city, at least--was to the Mall in Central Park. Just a couple of
blocks from home. The least far--or nearest--he ever got was to the
front door of our building. He stuck around to say goodbye to his
father."

Both
women at the table laughed.

"The
Mall's where they all go skatin' in New York," Sandra said very
sociably to Mrs. Snell. "The kids and all."

"Oh!"
said Mrs. Snell.

"He
was only three. It was just last year," Boo Boo said, taking out
a pack of cigarettes and a folder of matches from a side pocket in
her jeans. She lit a cigarette, while the two women spiritedly
watched her. "Big excitement. We had the whole police force out
looking for him."

"They
find him?" said Mrs. Snell.

"Sure
they found him!" said Sandra with contempt. "Wuddaya
think?"

"They
found him at a quarter past eleven of night, in the middle of--my
God, February, I think. Not a child in the park. Just muggers, I
guess, and an assortment of roaming degenerates. He was sitting on
the floor of the bandstand, rolling a marble back and forth along a
crack. Half-frozen to death and looking--"

"Holy
Mackerel!" said Mrs. Snell. "How come he did it? I mean
what was he runnin' away about?"

Boo
Boo blew a single, faulty smoke-ring at a pane of glass. "Some
child in the park that afternoon had come up to him with the dreamy
misinformation, `You stink, kid.' At least, that's why we think he
did it. I don't know, Mrs. Snell. It's all slightly over my head."

"How
long's he been doin' it?" asked Mrs. Snell. "I mean how
long's he been doin' it?"

"Well,
at the age of two-and-a-half," Boo Boo said biographically, "he
sought refuge under a sink in the basement of our apartment house.
Down in the laundry. Naomi somebody--a close friend of his--told him
she had a worm in her thermos bottle. At least, that's all we could
get out of him." Boo Boo sighed, and came away from the window
with a long ash on her cigarette. She started for the screen door.
"I'll have another go at it," she said, by way of goodby to
both women.

They
laughed.

"Mildred,"
Sandra, still laughing, addressed Mrs. Snell, "you're gonna miss
your bus if ya don't get a move on."

Boo
Boo closed the screen door behind her.

She
stood on the slight downgrade of her front lawn, with the low,
glaring, late afternoon sun at her back. About two hundred yards
ahead of her, her son Lionel was sitting in the stem seat of his
father's dinghy. Tied, and stripped of its main and jib sails, the
dinghy floated at a perfect right angle away from the far end of the
pier. Fifty feet or so beyond it, a lost or abandoned water ski
floated bottom up, but there were no pleasure boats to be seen on the
lake; just a stern-end view of the county launch on its way over to
Leech's Landing. Boo Boo found it queerly difficult to keep Lionel in
steady focus. The sun, though not especially hot, was nonetheless so
brilliant that it made any fairly distant image--a boy, a boat--seem
almost as wavering and refractional as a stick in water. After a
couple of minutes, Boo Boo let the image go. She peeled down her
cigarette Army style, and then started toward the pier.

It
was October, and the pier boards no longer could hit her in the face
with reflected heat. She walked along whistling "Kentucky Babe"
through her teeth. When she reached the end of the pier, she
squatted, her knees audible, at the right edge, and looked down at
Lionel. He was less than an oar's length away from her. He didn't
look up.

"Ahoy,"
Boo Boo said. "Friend. Pirate. Dirty dog. I'm back."

Still
not looking up, Lionel abruptly seemed called upon to demonstrate his
sailing ability. He swung the dead tiller all the way to the right,
then immediately yanked it back in to his side. He kept his eyes
exclusively on the deck of the boat.

"It
is I," Boo Boo said. "Vice-Admiral Tannenbaum. Nee Glass.
Come to inspect the stermaphors."

There
was a response.

"You
aren't an admiral. You're a lady," Lionel said. His sentences
usually had at least one break of faulty breath control, so that,
often, his emphasized words, instead of rising, sank. Boo Boo not
only listened to his voice, she seemed to watch it.

"Who
told you that? Who told you I wasn't an admiral?"

Lionel
answered, but inaudibly.

"Who?"
said Boo Boo.

"Daddy."

Still
in a squatting position, Boo Boo put her left hand through the V of
her legs, touching the pier boards in order to keep her balance.
"Your daddy's a nice fella," she said, "but he's
probably the biggest landlubber I know. It's perfectly true that when
I'm in port I'm a lady--that's true. But my true calling is first,
last, and always the bounding--"

"You
aren't an admiral," Lionel said.

"I
beg your pardon?"

"You
aren't an admiral. You're a lady all the time."

There
was a short silence. Lionel filled it by changing the course of his
craft again--his hold on the tiller was a two-armed one. He was
wearing khaki-colored shorts and a clean, white T-shirt with a dye
picture, across the chest, of Jerome the Ostrich playing the violin.
He was quite tanned, and his hair, which was almost exactly like his
mother's in color and quality, was a little sun-bleached on top.

"Many
people think I'm not an admiral," Boo Boo said, watching him.
"Just because I don't shoot my mouth off about it." Keeping
her balance, she took a cigarette and matches out of the side pocket
of her jeans. "I'm almost never tempted to discuss my rank with
people. Especially with little boys who don't even look at me when I
talk to them. I'd be drummed out of the bloomin' service."
Without lighting her cigarette, she suddenly got to her feet, stood
unreasonably erect, made an oval out of the thumb and index finger of
her right hand, drew the oval to her mouth, and--kazoo style--sounded
something like a bugle call. Lionel instantly looked up. In all
probability, he was aware that the call was bogus, but nonetheless he
seemed deeply aroused; his mouth fell open. Boo Boo sounded the
call--a peculiar amalgamation of "Taps" and
"Reveille"--three times, without any pauses. Then,
ceremoniously, she saluted the opposite shoreline. When she finally
reassumed her squat on the pier edge, she seemed to do so with
maximum regret, as if she had just been profoundly moved by one of
the virtues of naval tradition closed to the public and small boys.
She gazed out at the petty horizon of the lake for a moment, then
seemed to remember that she was not absolutely alone. She
glanced-venerably--down at Lionel, whose mouth was still open. "That
was a secret bugle call that only admirals are allowed to hear."
She lit her cigarette, and blew out the match with a theatrically
thin, long stream of smoke. "If anybody knew I let you hear that
call--" She shook her head. She again fixed the sextant of her
eye on the horizon.

"Do
it again."

"Impossible."

"Why?"

Boo
Boo shrugged. "Too many low-grade officers around, for one
thing." She changed her position, taking up a cross-legged,
Indian squat. She pulled up her socks. "I'll tell you what I'll
do, though," she said, matter-of-factly. "If you'll tell me
why you're running away, I'll blow every secret bugle call for you I
know. All right?"

Lionel
immediately looked down at the deck again. "No," he said.

"Why
not?"

"Because."

"Because
why?"

"Because
I don't want to," said Lionel, and jerked the tiller for
emphasis.

Boo
Boo shielded the right side of her face from the glare of the sun.
"You told me you were all through running away," she said.
"We talked about it, and you told me you were all through. You
promised me."

Lionel
gave a reply, but it didn't carry. "What?" said Boo Boo.

"I
didn't promise."

"Ah,
yes, you did. You most certainly did."

Lionel
resumed steering his boat. "If you're an admiral," he said,
"where's your fleet?"

"My
fleet. I'm glad you asked me that," Boo Boo said, and started to
lower herself into the dinghy.

"Get
off!" Lionel ordered, but without giving over to shrillness, and
keeping his eyes down. "Nobody can come in."

"They
can't?" Boo Boo's foot was already touching the bow of the boat.
She obediently drew it back up to pier level. "Nobody at all?"
She got back into her Indian squat. "Why not?"

Lionel's
answer was complete, but, again, not loud enough.

"What?"
said Boo Boo.

"Because
they're not allowed."

Boo
Boo, keeping her eyes steadily on the boy, said nothing for a full
minute.

"I'm
sorry to hear it," she said, finally. "I'd just love to
come down in your boat. I'm so lonesome for you. I miss you so much.
I've been all alone in the house all day without anybody to talk to."

Lionel
didn't swing the tiller. He examined the grain of wood in its handle.
"You can talk to Sandra," he said.

"Sandra's
busy," Boo Boo said. "Anyway, I don't want to talk to
Sandra, I want to talk to you. I wanna come down in your boat and
talk to you."

"You
can talk from there."

"What?"

"You
can talk from there."

"No,
I can't. It's too big a distance. I have to get up close."

Lionel
swung the tiller. "Nobody can come in," he said.

"What?"

"Nobody
can come in."

"Well,
will you tell me from there why you're running away?" Boo Boo
asked. "After you promised me you were all through?"

A
pair of underwater goggles lay on the deck of the dinghy, near the
stem seat. For answer, Lionel secured the headstrap of the goggles
between the big and second toes of his right foot, and, with a deft,
brief, leg action, flipped the goggles overboard. They sank at once.

"That's
nice. That's constructive," said Boo Boo. "Those belong to
your Uncle Webb. Oh, he'll be so delighted." She dragged on her
cigarette. "They once belonged to your Uncle Seymour."

"I
don't care."

"I
see that. I see you don't," Boo Boo said. Her cigarette was
angled peculiarly between her fingers; it burned dangerously close to
one of her knuckle grooves. Suddenly feeling the heat, she let the
cigarette drop to the surface of the lake. Then she took out
something from one of her side pockets. It was a package, about the
size of a deck of cards, wrapped in white paper and tied with green
ribbon. "This is a key chain," she said, feeling the boy's
eyes look up at her. "Just like Daddy's. But with a lot more
keys on it than Daddy's has. This one has ten keys."