The Complete Roderick (27 page)

‘I shaid I hope thish doesn’t take long becaushe I’ve got a dental appointment.’

‘Dental appointment. I see.’

‘Yah, to have a bridge rebuilt. Shee, what happened was that little bash – that Chaunshy Bangfield hit me in the mouth with a trophy. I was making him voluntarily return it.’

Someone muttered, ‘He reached out to her all right, the little disadvantaged –’

‘Any more suggestions?’

Goun spoke of actualizing the problem within a contextual framework of structured situations ranging from verbal correctives to dis-enrolment. In such an intra-systemic …

The digital clock wiped away another minute, and another.

Pa waved a plate of brass shaped like half a violin. ‘Son, what I’m trying to do here is make me a timepiece, but one that keeps real time. Human time. Like when you’re concentrating hard on one thing and it seems like only a minute goes by, why should you have clocks showing you an hour?’ He laid the brass plate on his bench and started hammering. ‘Other. Times. You wait. For some. Thing to. Happen. Like the. Sunrise. When you. Can’tsleep. You think. One. Hour. Goes by. But ord. Inary clocks. Say one. Minute!’ The coughing fit would not pass; Pa had to sit down. ‘What use is a clock doesn’t tell real time? So. Figure I’ll just hook this one up to a brain-wave gadget, need some other stuff too, fine adjustments for fidgeting, pass me that melon scoop will you?’

Roderick wondered what would happen if somebody spent all his real time watching his own real time clock? Could he make it run fast or slow, stop it? Run it back? Or what if two people watched each other’s clock? What if two clocks were hooked
together? What if the clocks started running the people? And what if …? He could go on with questions like these for ever, and no time lost. Time didn’t have to move here, because he was at the place where he fitted into the world (as the melon scoop fitted into the brass half-violin turning it into the lever that threw the switch that started up the little water-wheel …). Here was Pa, measuring up and marking out all the precise spots on the brass where he was going to bash it with a hammer. Here was the workshop, with dusty autumn light slanting in through the high little window to illuminate a corner piled with forgotten inventions: the pocket calculator (that could add only 0 + 0, 0 + 1 or 1 + 0); the Goethescope with its ebony prism; ‘talking shoes’; the universal voting machine with its tangle of coloured wires leading from hundreds of switches to one dead-end; ‘Maze-opoly’; audible ink; a large abacus (designed for steam power); the ingenious solar-powered cucumber press (virtual perpetual motion, Pa explained); the Odorphone … Here was the friendly workshop itself, one friendly wall bearing the hand-lettered slogans of Miss Violetta Stubbs; another bearing tools (the dover, bit-mace, graduar etc.) below the golden key below the framed photo of Rex Reason below the shelf with the radio. Now the radio hurried through some assassination attempt on some Shah, anxious to get back to its sunshine balloon, but he could hear Ma singing one of her improvised songs, the one she claimed was from the Bow-wow Symphony – whatever that was:

There were other stanzas just as senseless, stuff about poison candy being good for you when you wake up with an electrode up your nose, stuff like that – anyway, how could a woman be Jake!

To find out about the past, Roderick had to ask Ma. Pa would only say, ‘History is a bunk on which I am trying to awaken.’

Ma sketched as she talked:

Once upon a time the town of Newer had been nothing but a flat spot on the flat prairie: no factory, no grain elevator, no town, not so much as a billboard advertising cream substitute. But to those who founded the town, flatness was ideal: it reminded them daily that God had placed the human race upon a planet shaped like a dinner plate.

They came in 1874, Josephus Butts and his followers. They called the place New Ur, themselves the Urites. They builded here a temple with plain glass windows all around, to shew forth the straightness of God’s ruled line.

There were other rules, gradually revealed by Josephus (who now called himself
Jorad):
Urites were forbidden to laugh, marry, call hogs, look with pleasure at the sky or upon one another. Nine-tenths of all they owned or produced belonged to Jorad. No one could speak unless Jorad gave permission. No one but Jorad could sing. No one might
think
unless Jorad allowed him to put on the famous knitted ‘thinking cap’, a device designed to keep thought down to one person at a time. Finally, the Urites were asked to speak, think, sing and pray in a language called Hibble-bibble, the grammatical rules of which were clear only to Jorad.

Jorad was good at this kind of life. In 1888, he defeated a famous orator in debate, a man who had come to New Ur solely to prove the world was round. The Urites would long remember that exchange.

FAMOUS ORATOR:
When a ship sails away, the hull vanishes over the horizon first. Then the lower sails. Then the top-gallant. If the world is
not
round, how do you explain that?

JORAD:
DO you see any ships here in town? Any top-gallants vanishing over any horizon? No?
Well then.

It was their finest moment. The Urites were happy (in their way) as Jorad went off on a round-the-world tour (assuring them as he left that round was only a figure of speech) to promote flatness.

He was gone for ten years. And in the meantime, the Urites grew soft. One of them invented a device which became a standard part of the bicycle, money poured in, the church was rebuilt with stained-glass windows … by the time Jorad returned, the younger Urites were defiantly saying that Hibble-bibble was mumbo-jumbo, and even that
the earth might be a little bit rounded in spots.

In no time at all the town had a dance hall and a Christian Science Reading Room, and all was lost. Jorad smashed the stained-glass windows, called his flock together and tried to urge them back to sense and happiness. But when they looked out of the broken panes, they no longer saw the straight line of the horizon, they saw billboards advertising liver pills, they saw a smoking factory (making beds), they saw steam tractors vanishing over the horizon … well then.

Jorad packed up and left, declaring his intention to travel to the edge of the earth and leap off. Some believed he had, until it turned out that he was only over in the next county, calling himself Baresh and starting up a New Babylon. Some people always learned, Ma said. None of Jorad’s descendants had ever married: Miss Violetta Stubbs and Mr Ferd Joradsen were now the last.

‘Sure it’s sad,’ said Roderick, trying to see the sketch. ‘But what happened to this Hibble-bibble?’

‘Nothing. It vanished.’

‘Heck I liked the other stories better, all about the boy who couldn’t shiver and the girl who couldn’t cry and the little engine that could and – hey, that, is that me? It doesn’t look much like me.’

‘Well who said it has to look like you? Heaven’s sake, Roderick, this is your
ideal
head. The head you might have on your coin – or
in the movie of your life – or when they put up your statue in the park, not to mention the church – but it’s nothing to do with your real head.’

‘Yeah but how come it’s got a nose and a chin and ears when all I got –?’

‘Never mind, you’re too young to understand. Just as you’re too young to understand the history of Newer.’

‘Okay, but I still like the other stories better, the emperor’s new clothes and the constant tin soldier – those are neat, hey.’

‘Well real life isn’t so neat, son.’

Real life at school was now very neat. Every day Captain Fest met him at the school door and conducted him to a janitor’s closet on the top floor where there was nothing but a typewriter keyboard and a television screen.

‘You sit here and
learn,
Wood.
Learn.
I know your name and I’ll be keeping an eye on you. Latrine’s down the hall there but don’t you dare need it.’

Old Festy did check on him now and then, and so did Miz Russo, the young teacher who couldn’t talk much because her jaw was wired shut. He sat. He learned.

It began when he pushed the keyboard button marked
HELLO.
At once words appeared on the screen:

‘Hello. My name is Hank Thoro II. Please type your name.’

‘My whole name?’ he typed.

‘Good. My, do you like baseball? Just type Y for Yes or N for No.’

He typed
Y.

‘Good. later on we’ll have fun playing baseball. First you need a little practice talking to me. Now tell me what’s missing in this sentence: Baseball is fun, but football is even more
–’

‘Fun.’

‘
Very good. My, before every baseball game they play some music, and everyone stands up. The music is called the Star-Spangled Banner. Do you know what a banner is?’

‘Somebody who b –’

‘Just Y or N. My. Y for Yes and N for No. Do you know what a banner is?’

‘What the heck.
N.’

‘Banner means flag. The Star-Spangled Banner is the American flag.
Star-Spangled means it has stars on it, and banner means flag. The American flag is a Star-Spangled
–.’

So it went until recess: Roderick learned all the words of the National Anthem and the Pledge of Allegiance, how to salute the flag, carry it in a procession, display it with State flags, fly it at half-mast, and fold it into a three-cornered hat.

At recess Chauncey beat him up. Nat, his blood-oil brother, was nowhere in sight.

After recess he learned the history of the flag, the names of the fifty States and their capitals. Baseball never came up again.

At lunch hour, he rescued Nat from Chauncey.

After lunch hour, he learned more about the States: their chief exports and imports, populations, gross expenditures, State birds, flowers and songs, present governors and lieutenant governors, forms of capital punishment.

Finally, the ‘baseball’. The machine gave him three questions on what he’d learned. He answered them all, and it replied:

‘Three home runs wow terrific congratulations My you win program ends
…
Bye.’

He went to inform Mr Fest that Utah was the only State with death by firing-squad, that Minnesota’s State bird was the loon.

‘Learned all that, have you?’ Mr Fest scratched his grey crewcut. ‘Pretty quick. Puts me in kind of a bind, though, you know? Now I gotta find some more programs for you. Come on, let’s go see what they got in the office.’

Miss Borden was on the phone when they barged in. ‘Yes sir. Yes. Well, you and I know how people can read into … yes, and reporters cook up anything out of pretty ordinary … of course I could look up the medi – now? My secretary’s on her coffee – sure, yes, if you put it like that I, just hang on a minute, what is it Captain?’ She could not see Roderick over the edge of the desk.

‘Just wanted to find a few programs for the teaching machine, American history maybe?’

She detached a key from her gold chain and threw it, the motion sending a batch of pink forms to the floor where they sprawled in a neat fan. ‘Help yourself, cabinet in corner – get those forms will you, Captain? I’m, I’ve got to go look up some kid’s medical rec – Jenny never gets around to keying anything on our data file so it’s always a matter of digging – oh, and if you
hear any funny noises on the phone, pick it up, will you? And tell them I’m still hunting?’

‘Can do, ma’am.’

She grabbed a handful of blue forms and strode out, saying, ‘Got to get this place organized, every time we get a bigger data base they throw more junk at us, fill it up before we even …’

Fest said, ‘Boy, pick up those forms and put ’em on Miss Borden’s desk.’ He unlocked the cabinet. ‘Boy this could use some organizing too, half the labels you can’t even read, what’s this,
Element. P.
Psychology? Physics?’

‘Hey Mr Fest you know these here grade forms, they –’

‘Not now,
Geo. W.
has to be George Washington, here they got it stuck in with all the global studies stuff.’

‘Yeah but how come everybody gets the same grade, like Norma Lee Dunne here, she’s real good at math and –’

‘Don’t read that stuff, just put it back on the desk. Now what’s this reel supposed to be the shelf label says
Homecraft
and the reel label says
G. Stars,
what the heck here – oh.’ He opened the box to release a shower of gold stars. ‘Damn woman couldn’t organize a cathouse on a Sunday morn –’

‘But shouldn’t she get a better grade than like Jimmy Rittle, he’s never even at school, he’s been sick every day but one.’ Roderick caught his eye. ‘Okay, I’m, look I’m putting ’em right here on the desk.’

‘Here we are,
F. S. Key,
Francis Scott Key composer of the Star-Spangled Banner, boy. Can’t learn too much about your own count – hmm, Lincoln? Naw, think we’ll leave the old hair-splitter for now, get some basics. No use you getting the idea all our forefathers looked like a buncha damn hairy hippies, eh? Come on.’

‘Lincoln.’ said Roderick, ‘is the capital of Nebraska, population –’