The One-in-a-Million Boy (3 page)

He picked up the amp—it weighed nothing—and carried it out of his former neighborhood and all the way down Washington Avenue and around the Boulevard and up the long slope of State Street to the Peninsula and finally to Brackett Street and up the three dark flights to his apartment, which held beautifully tended music equipment, a few sticks of secondhand furniture, and a framed photo of the boy in his Scout uniform, his short teeth bared in earnest cooperation. Someone had told him to smile, and he'd done the best he could.

 

BIRDS

1. Smallest bird. Bee hummingbird. 2.24 inches and 0.056 ounces.
   

2. Fastest bird over land. Ostrich. 45 miles per hour.
   

3. Highest-flying bird. Ruppell's griffon vulture. 37,000 feet.
   

4. Most talkative bird. Prudie. African gray parrot. 800 words.
   

5. Most feathers on bird. Whistling swan. 25,216 feathers.
   

6. Least feathers on bird. Ruby-throated hummingbird. 940 feathers.
   

7. Slowest-flying bird. American woodcock. 5 miles per hour.
   

8. Longest bill on bird. 18.5 inches. Australian pelican.
   

9. Nicest bird. In my opinion. Black-capped chickadee.
   

10. Longest bird flight. Common tern. 16,210 miles.
    

On that first Saturday, at the beginning of the early March thaw, the boy arrived in a gray van commandeered by a well-constructed scoutmaster in a pressed uniform. Water dripped off Ona's gutters, her porch rails, her bird feeders, and the van's sideview mirrors. The scoutmaster disconnected the boy from the rest of the troop—all of them larger and lunkier than the boy—and marched (literally, it seemed) up the steps. He introduced himself as Ted Ledbetter, then presented the slender, crewcutted boy, whose air of willing restraint instantly unsettled her.

The first word plinked into her conscious mind, odd as a stray hailstone:
brolis.
She blinked hard, as if the word had literally hit her on the head.

Brother.

Eleven, he was, though small enough to pass for eight. Over his uniform he wore a ludicrous, water-stained leather jacket from which his neck rose, skinny and naked, an unearthly white. He looked open to wounding. The scoutmaster left the boy with several well-turned instructions and promised a pickup, two hours hence, expressed in military time.

After the van lumbered off, the boy stood wordless and waiting, as reedy and guileless as a grasshopper. “It's a pleasure to meet you,” he said.

“Hmm,” Ona said.

The boy stared. “How old are you?”

The second word dropped:
Å¡imtas.

He blinked once. “What?”

“One hundred.”

“What language is that?”

“I don't know,” Ona said, mystified. “Lithuanian, I surmise. I'm one hundred
four,
not one hundred. One-oh-
four.
”

They stood together in the dripping world, sizing each other up, the boy appearing to marvel at the weight of a century-plus, Ona wondering how in hell she'd unearthed two unrelated words in a tongue she couldn't remember ever speaking.

“Come in, then,” she said, and he did, staying politely on the mat in his trickling shoes.

“I have several jobs for you,” she said, “and if you can't do them, or don't want to, I'd just as soon know now.”

“I can do them.”

“I haven't told you what they are.”

“I can do them anyway.” He enunciated beautifully, though his diction contained barely perceptible pauses in the wrong places, as if he were a foreigner, or short of breath.

But he proved a good worker, willing and persistent and agreeably thorough. Saturday was trash day; he rolled her big trash can all the way from the curb to the shed, which she expected, then replaced the bungee cord over the lid, which she did not expect. He removed all the bird feeders, filled them to brimming, then rehung them with the assiduous care of a window dresser. He cleared straggling blots of snow from the edges of her walk. By the time she got around to offering him a cookie, the scoutmaster had returned.

Ona agreed to take the boy on. Mr. Ledbetter looked relieved; she'd sent the others back on day one.

On the second Saturday—after he'd cleaned and filled the feeders in so precise an imitation of the previous week that she suspected he'd written instructions on his hand—the boy confided his passion for world records. They were sitting at her table, eating animal crackers, which the boy did in stages: tail, legs, head, body. Each one exactly the same.

“Not sports-type records,” he assured her. “Records like . . . One, how long can you spin a coin. Two, largest collection of golf pencils. Three, longest ear hair.” He took a short breath. “Four—”

“Guinness records,” she said. She had no trouble hearing him, which delighted her.

“You've heard of it!” He looked absurdly pleased. “It's harder to get in than people think.”

Normally, Scouts bored her, with their Game Boy stats and soccer scores and lazy, shortcutting ways. This one, though, brought a literal sense of second childhood: she felt as if she were speaking to a child she might have known when she herself was eleven. How easily she placed him at McGovern's, installed at the white marble soda fountain, sipping a chocolate phosphate. She could see him amid the white-shirted boys playing stickball on Wald Street, tagging the door of Joe Preble's black REO. There was something vaguely wrong with him that made him seem like a visitor from another time and place.

He reminded her that she'd once found people fascinating. That she'd lived more than one life.

She pulled a quarter from her pocket. After a few fumbling tries, she got it to spin. “Five seconds plus,” she said, after it wobbled free and succumbed to gravity. “What's the record?”

“Nineteen-point-three-seven seconds,” the boy said. “Mr. Scott Day, country of Great Britain. Your table isn't smooth enough.”

She eyed the sash he wore across his chest, bedecked with shiny patches. “Do you hold the record for merit badges?”

“Mr. John Stanford, country of USA, earned one hundred forty-two merit badges.” He looked out the window. “There's a badge for bird study.”

“Really?” She pointed. “That's a goldfinch.” She had learned the basics from Louise back when life still held its little surprises. She'd kept a list for about ten years but couldn't now recall the last time she'd actually
observed
a bird. She fed them out of pity.

“I already know some regular ones,” he said. “One, crow. Two, robin. Three, cardinal. Four, chickadee. But one, you have to know twenty birds to get a badge. Two, you have to build a birdhouse. Three, you have to name five birds by their song.” His soft mouth slackened. “I'm bad at music.”

“Really? Because of my husband, Howard, who was a failed and frustrated songster, I'm somewhat ambivalent about music myself.” Ona patted her ear. “Birdsong is different, but I've lost the high-pitched ones. Last time I heard a warbler I was seventy-two. Even the robins drop out at times, like a broken radio.”

“That's too bad,” he said. His entire body stilled in a way that telegraphed his sympathy, and she began to feel fully, truly sorry to have lost all those birds, whose fluting notes had apparently escaped for good down a decrepitating hatch in her inner ear. After nursing Louise through the final dregs of cancer, Ona couldn't relocate her former pastimes and believed they had quite literally fled with Louise into the Great Unknowable Somewhere.
Don't turn into an old crab,
Louise warned her in those final days.
It's too predictable.
But that's exactly what Ona
had
turned into: an old crab.

“Mr. John Reznikoff, country of USA, got into Guinness World Records by collecting hair,” the boy said. “One, hair from Abraham Lincoln. Two, hair from Marilyn Monroe. Three, hair from Albert Einstein. Four . . .”

This list was very long, and she waited for him to complete it. His eyes never moved from her face. He'd committed a stunning number of records to memory, all of them of the hair-collecting/coin-spinning variety. He, too, collected things—unsuccessfully, he confessed. Serious collecting apparently took a measure of money and opportunity not readily available to the average fifth-grader. “Mr. John Reznikoff buys his hair,” he informed her. “It's not like he dug up Lincoln's grave.”

“Oh. I wondered.”

“Mr. Ashrita Furman, country of USA, walked eighty-point-nine-six miles with a glass milk bottle balanced on his head.”

“All at once?” Ona asked, incredulous.

“Mr. Ashrita Furman also holds the record for number of records.” He stopped. “One, where would I get a glass milk bottle? Two, how would I measure eighty miles? Three, my mother wouldn't let me walk eighty miles with a bottle on my head even if I wanted to.” He paused again. “Which I sort of do.”

Though he offered little more about himself, Ona gathered that school was a trial, day upon day of skulking in the back row for fear of being called on. Possibly he stood alone at recess. Her own boys had been so easy with their friends, Frankie especially, so sunny and well liked. This boy, with his measured voice and forbearing demeanor, seemed more like someone she could actually be related to.

“I knew a man who juggled mice,” she told him.

His eyes popped open, so she hauled out her midway story.

“You ran away?” the boy said. She could feel herself being deliciously reassessed. “You left your
mother?
”

“Times were funny, war in the air. I hemmed every skirt I owned that year, all the girls in Kimball suddenly flashing their calves.” Felled by the child's listening gray eyes, she went on: “Mr. Holmes was the show's owner, a huckster if ever I knew one. His show wasn't very good, as midway shows went, more like a carnival you might see now at a shopping mall.”

“Oh,” the boy said. “I went to one.”

“How was it?”

“The rides were very fast.”

“Well, we had an old carousel Mr. Holmes won in a poker game—a bona fide Armitage Herschell two-row portable—put-upable and take-downable. Ever seen one?”

“No,” the boy said, goggle-eyed. “I want to.”

Ona had her cards out now and began shuffling. “We did the best we could with the carousel, some third-rate midway games, and a parrot who sang the Sophie Tucker version of ‘Some of These Days.' Ever heard it?”

“Can I?”

“My Victrola's long gone,” she said. “I went to the midway every night for seven nights running. And on the seventh night, I fell in love right there in front of the carousel.”

How could it have been otherwise? The sultry evening, the smell of peanuts and drying mud, the steam carousel with painted horses posed for all eternity in an attitude of escape. “I can still see the wild white eyes on those horses,” she told the boy. “You can't imagine the colors, nothing like the dullards you see nowadays. Pick a card.”

The boy looked startled. “Now?”

“Whenever you're ready. In the meantime, I shall regale you.” She had learned the word
regale
from Maud-Lucy Stokes, her childhood tutor, who had employed a flawless grammar that inspired little Ona's initial, inaccurate, and ultimately disappointing impression of America as a land of precision. Ona loved English from the get-go and paid strict attention, noting the cause-effect of language: her parents' syntactical shipwrecks, the tin peddler's casual profanity, Maud-Lucy's pristine enunciations. Style could move listeners to pity, to reverence, to the purchase of a stewpot they didn't need. Maud-Lucy taught Ona to compose a sentence with intention, and eventually she chose for herself a high-low hybrid that matched her ambivalence toward humankind.

“There I was,” she told the boy, “standing in a huddle with some girls from my neighborhood, watching the handsome horses go round and round, when Viktor, the tattoo man's apprentice, sauntered over as if we'd already met in a dream. Beautiful, blond, Russian Viktor.” He stole first her heart, then her virtue, and finally her money. “I'd never even held a boy's hand. I wasn't that type of girl.”

“What type of girl were you?”

“Oh,” she said. “Well. Innocent. Like you. Now, why on earth would I tell you all that?”

“I don't know.” The boy's gaze fell on her like a strong slat of sunlight. She felt, briefly, unclothed. It was the mention of Viktor that put her in this state. Viktor, who would be one hundred nine. Dead and buried and flirting with her from the grave.

At last, the boy picked a card. He studied it for a full thirty seconds, then gave it back. She pretended to shuffle it into the deck. “Presto,” she said, then flipped his card right side up onto the table.

The boy's mouth dropped open.

“For crumbsake, haven't you ever seen a card trick?”

“Not a good one. There's a kid in my class who does bad ones.” He frowned. “Everybody thinks Troy Packard is so great.”

A bully, Ona surmised. “Well, then,” she said, spreading out the cards. “Look here.”

She laid out the cards for a simple Bottoms Up, as she had for a generation of jittery schoolboys at Lester Academy in her capacity as the headmaster's secretary. To the youngest ones, the smallest and most scared, she taught the very trick she was teaching now to the boy.

He had remarkable fingers, was willing and avid, but possessed no knack whatsoever for misdirection. “You have zero wiles,” she said. “Don't try this at school.”

“The world record for a house of cards is one hundred thirty-one stories.”

“Maybe you can go for that. Set a new one.”

“I tried to set a new one.”

“How many did you get?”

“I got eleven.”