The Child Buyer (10 page)

the hills, and above that there were some small soft gray clouds, and when one of them blew across the sun, all the colors in the woods changed their tones, and the yellows took charge over the softer reds which, just a few seconds before, in the full sunlight, had had the intensity of the center of fireplace flames. I've read in books about the sadness of autumn, the way time turns down toward death in the fall, but I was happy through and through; I saw the colors, and they made me happy. I don't know what's happened these last few days; I'm utterly bewildered. I only know I'll never be as happy again as I was the other afternoon in the woods. The white oaks made a kind of backdrop, because, you know, they hold their leaves the longest, like small leather gloves, still solid green; while the elms and hickories had gone brown early in the dry August we had this year, and in the wind on Ella's train the week before they'd been almost stripped, and their skeletons made a blackish mesh, so the displays of the other trees seemed even more prodigal: deep coppers of the sumac and dogwood, pure yellow of birches and, here and there, ironwood and sassafras, and, best of all, the incredible orange glow of hard maples—like the inside of a Halloween pumpkin when the candle's lit. There was a dry breeze blowing, and leaves of all colors were falling slantwise across the old track where I was walking. On the stone walls there were some white lichens that stood out sharply because of all the color around. Once in a while I passed an old cellar hole, with a big lilac bush or overgrown privet bush standing in front of it, incongruous in the woods, remnants of civilization —you know? I came to the ruin of the knife works and walked along the bank of the millpond, and there it was as if I saw two autumns—one real and the other reflected, until for a second a breeze sort of stepped on the water and moved both the mirrored and the floating leaves on the surface a little. I walked to a big dead trunk of a fallen tree lying on the ground at the upper

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end of the pond, and I put my social-studies book down on it, and it seems as if putting my book down was the beginning of my troubles. Anyway I just sat on the log and watched and waited.

Mr. BROADBENT. What were you waiting for?

BARRY RUDD. There's a weasel, a long-tailed weasel, Mustela frenata, that has a burrow through a hole in the stonework of the old mill. I've wanted to see if it would be gathering new dry leaves for its nest. . . .

Mr. BROADBENT. What happened?

BARRY RUDD. Nothing. There were some Penthestes atri-capillus atricapillus flitting from branch to branch.

Senator VOYOLKO. Some who?

BARRY RUDD. Some chickadees. That's a curious name, matter of fact. One of those annoying mixed names, the first past Greek, the rest Latin. I hate mixtures. Ouija. Taurosaurus. Macaronic double-talk gives me the heebie-jeebies. Anyway, this cheerful little bird is 'the black-haired black-haired mourner'— Penthestes, from the Greek, pentheesin, to mourn, and esthes, garment, while atricapillus is from the Latin, ater, black, and capillus, hair.

Senator MANSFIELD. Why do you have to have that black-haired part twice?

BARRY RUDD. That takes you down through genus, species, and sub-species.

Senator SKYPACK. By Christopher, if the taxpayers of this State knew what was going on here!

Senator MANSFIELD. Now, Jack, in fairness, we've got to find out all we can about—

Senator VOYOLKO. That's right, Senator, we got to take this kid apart.

Senator MANSFIELD. Now, sonny, let's get back on the track.

Senator SKYPACK. If it was my taxes, by gorry.

Friday, October 25

Senator MANSFIELD. You were waiting for the weasel.

BARRY RUDD. Mustela frenata. Besides the chickadees, there was a praying mantis, Mantis religiosa, 'the religious prophet/ on a branch of a bush not a foot from my face. Its wings had gone from green to brown with the coming of autumn. It revolved its head to look at me and then took off, like a helicopter, very much like a helicopter.

Mr. BROADBENT. And then?

BARRY RUDD. I got up at last and started off through the woods toward home, and I left the book behind on the trunk of the fallen tree. As I say, I date my troubles from the moment I left my book on that tree trunk.

Mr. BROADBENT. You went home?

BARRY RUDD. I remember I touched every other telephone pole on the way down the Treehampstead Road, because I wanted an A-plus in the oral report I was going to have to give the next morning: I'd chosen the Linnaean System of Binomial Nomenclature as my topic. In town I had to take a detour around off Sycamore Street, because a very unpleasant incident occurred to me last year in front of the shopping center on Sycamore, and I'd rather go out of my way . . .

Mr. BROADBENT. And when you got home?

BARRY RUDD. I didn't go directly home. Along the way I was thinking about nomenclature in general. Names. I once believed the sun, the sky, the mountains, the rivers were all made by hand by the first men. The names of those things sort of radiated from the things themselves, and we knew the names simply by looking at the objects. We needed only to look at a river to know that it was called 'river/ Why? Because it was wet, it ran along between banks. Yes, but how did we know? Because it was a band of water, it was cool; we knew it was called 'river/ But how did we know? Because it was moving water, of course it was a river. How did the first men know it was 'river'? They

THE CHILD BUYER

made it with their hands. But how did they know the name? Well, because it was water, it was dark water, moving along the ground in a regular place. It was a river, and it was called 'river/

Mr. BROADBENT. What are you trying to tell us?

BARRY RUDD. I'm trying to say ... I understand about insect processes—how termites digest wood with the help of protozoa that live in their digestive tracts, and how the protozoa themselves digest food in their tiny vacuoles; what effect the gas produced by the flour beetle has on other insects; how many ladybirds it takes to keep the cottony-cushion scale in check in an acre of orange trees. It's easy enough to observe—but to identify, name, classify! To know that termites are of the order Isoptera, that the gas-producing flour beetle is Tribolium confusum, the cottony-cushion scale is Iserya purchasi, and the ladybird that eats it is Novius cardinally sometimes called Vedalia —to bring order out of chaos! Senator Mansfield, I noticed early in our talk that you love order—you like to have things begin at the beginning and take their courses, as rivers do.

Senator MANSFIELD. I do, sonny, I do.

BARRY RUDD. I do, too. Most of what we encounter is so sloppy. I've just finished reading Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea, by Jules Verne. It was wonderful, having all kinds of scientific names—exempla gratia: Clupanodon, Stenorynchus, et cetera. It was almost entirely different, from the movie, comicbook, and other versions. For instance, in the movie, 20,000 Leagues, the crew fought a giant squid (genus LoKgo), in the View-Master Slides version it was a giant octopus (genus Octopus) , but in the book it was a different cephalopod, the cuttlefish (genus Sepia). Throughout the chapter, with two or three exceptions, Verne kept calling them poulps, which in my French-English Dictionary is French for 'octopus,' though Verne seems to use it for 'any cephalopod.' In those two or three exceptions, however, he did call them cuttlefishes. I say them, because Verne said there were seven.

Senator MANSFIELD. Do you mean to say you read this book in French?

BARRY RUDD. Not really. I read the original and a translation side by side. I like to compare.

Senator MANSFIELD. What languages do you speak?

BARRY RUDD. I don't really speak any but ours. I just collect words. My address on my French notebook is in Chinese characters. The Chinese for America, mei kuo, means 'beautiful country/

Senator SKYPACK. Can you speak Russian, young fellow?

BARRY RUDD. A little. YnpaBJieMe KB.IC. H BojjKa #PJI !

Senator SKYPACK. I thought so! What the hell docs that mean? Damn communist slogan?

BARRY RUDD. It means: 'Administration of Beer and Vodka Production/

Senator MANSFIELD. In other words, sonny, you pick up your languages where you can.

BARRY RUDD. I do, sir. My own keeps me busy enough. I love anomalies, exceptions. Vein, vane, vain. Through, dough, bough, rough, cough. Senator Skypack, do you know how to spell 'fish'?

Senator SKYPACK. What, what, what? What is this? I got out of school second year high school. I don't have to be taught lessons by a doggone little fairy like this. . . . F~i-S'h.

BARRY RUDD. Wrong, Senator. You spell it g-h-o-t-i. You take the gh as pronounced in 'rough/ the o as pronounced in 'women/ and the ti as pronounced in 'nation/ and g-h-o-t-i spells 'fish/ I think it was G. B. Shaw who first pointed that out. He wanted to simplify our absurd spelling.

Senator MANSFIELD. You really love words, don't you?

BARRY RUDD. Oh, yes! Kismet, hieratic, mcllific, nuncupative, sempiternal, mansuetudc, jeremiad, austral, diaphanous, hegemony, exculpatory, homunculus, melanistic, cenobite, prolepsis, platykurtic, mephitic, ceraceous, inspissation, lanate—

Senator MANSFIELD. By the way, what was that common

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eight-letter word you were talking about that only has one vowel?

BARRY RUDD. Do you give up? Do you all give up, Senators? Do you give up, Senator Voyolko?

Senator VOYOLKO. Me? Huh? Yeah, I give up,

BARRY RUDD. Strength.

Mr. BROADBENT. Senator Mansfield, sir, if you'll forgive my saying so, it was you who wanted things kept in a straight line.

Senator MANSFIELD. You're quite right, Mr. Broadbent. I forgot myself. Please carry on. ... Strength. One, two, three-Mr. BROADBENT. You were on your way home, Master Rudd.

BARRY RUDD. Yes, but I stopped off at the Perkonians' on the way to see if Flattop was there, but he's never home. His mother's a laundress, she spends every day of the week in somebody's dark creepy cellar, doing the wash, and she has a morbid dread of rodents, and she drinks. She avoids Flattop and he avoids her; there's a mutual repulsion. But I knew where to find him—at the bowling alleys. We have this twelve-lane bowling center on River Street, with automatic pin spotters, and Flattop hangs around there quite a lot, picks up some change running the house balls through the ball cleaner, sweeping the approaches, so on. I told you he's gone all the way square—even to earning money!

Mr. BROADBENT. He's a pretty tough little character, is he?

BARRY RUDD. Not at all. His haircut sets him apart, and sometimes his behavior does, too. That's all he wants—to be set apart.

Mr. BROADBENT. This haircut.

BARRY RUDD. His head is round, he has a moon face. The hair's blond. The upper surface has been leveled off absolutely flat, a bristling squared-off effect. The hair at the sides has been left rather long, and with the help of some gelatinous hair tonic

Friday, October 25

most of this is combed straight upward and it swoops inward a half-inch or so over the flat area from either side. Then there's a kind of part on each side, just above the ears between the upswept longer hair and the rest that's just combed downwards. There's more to it than that, but that gives you the general impression.

Mr. BROADBENT. What did you two do?

BARRY RUDD. We sat in the spectators' seats and discussed the stickleback.

Senator SYKPACK. My God! Taxpayers' good money.

BARRY RUDD. Gasterosteus aculeatus, the three-spined stickleback. It has a most interesting reproductive ritual.

Senator SKYPACK. In other words, you boys were discussing smut. Right?

BARRY RUDD. After a few minutes I went home and looked—

Senator SKYPACK. Answer my question.

BARRY RUDD. I don't regard sex play as dirty, Senator. It's a natural reproductive drive. . . .

Senator SKYPACK. By God, now he's going to give a lecture on—

Mr. BROADBENT. Go on, Master Rudd. You went home.

BARRY RUDD. And right away I broke Mother's hand mirror. I looked in it, in a purely speculative way, to see what I'd look like with a flattop haircut, and I dropped it, and it smashed, and I was horror-struck, because I have a strong superstitious bent. A mirror looks beyond you—to your background and into your future. If one breaks, then that means that it doesn't want you to see beyond. Once when Napoleon was in the field, the mirror above Josephine's portrait broke, and he couldn't rest until he got home and found that she was all right. ... In any case, I have reason to dislike mirrors. My physical make-up has been ... My fatness has been , . . When I was four, I developed a granulated eyelid, and Mother took me to a pediatrician, and

THE CHILD BUYER

in the course of the examination she suggested to the doctor that perhaps the trouble was eyestrain from reading. I was four, you realize. This seemed to the pediatrician a good joke, until he put one of his own office cards in front of me, and I read off the name, office hours, and address. Tve never seen anything like this in sixteen years of pediatrics/ the doctor said, and he took me down the hall to show me off to a nose-and-throat man. I began to have nosebleeds from my adenoids a few months later, and during a visit this same nose-and-throat man gave me a medical journal to read, and was amazed to hear me deal easily with words like maxillary. Of course I was over five by then. I don't mean to be boasting, the point is that two years ago I went back to the pediatrician who had first noticed my reading. My mother took me in for a thing on my face. Well, the doctor —I don't want to name him—stripped me and stood me in a corner. He pointed out to my mother my knock knees, pendant breasts, fat rolls, underdeveloped genitals. He prodded me and kneaded me. 'Look at him!' he said. 'An endocrine case. When he goes to high school and gets in the locker room, the boys'll take one look at him and say, "What's this?" ' He said, right in front of me, that he suspected a tumor of the pituitary. He showed my mother some photographs of what I would grow up to be like, and she nearly fainted. He sent me to another doctor who was supposed to be an endocrinologist, and I was in the hospital two days and a night, and five doctors checked all over me and said not a thing was wrong except that I was older than the other boys mentally and this tended to make me sedentary. My father got me a baseball mitt. The hospital bill was a hundred dollars. The same thing happened last year. I had flu, and my mother called in a strange doctor, and he was amazed at the excess fat. I was seventeen pounds overweight. He said I needed hormones. So my mother took me to the top endocrinologist here in the capital and she paid sixty-five dollars to learn that I was still sedentary. My father got me a second-