Every Boy Should Have a Man (8 page)

He shook with laughter. “Oh, but wait. This is my man and my dead man talking to me. Hahaha. What a pinhead I am! For a moment there, I was almost listening to you. I have to go to school now. Goodbye and thanks for the lovely song.”

He reached to pet her head and she grabbed his finger and bit it.

“Ouch!” he cried out. “Sneaky man!”

“Listen to me!” she screamed.

“You bit me! I should muzzle you!”

She put her hands on her hips. “You will do no such thing, you big oaf! How dare you threaten to put the muzzle on me. Ask her about her brother! Mother said to ask her about her bad little brother!”

Then, with violent possession of the small singing harp, she dove angrily under the bed.

And he kissed his finger where she had bitten it and left for school, an odd little smile on his face.

* * *

After school the boy went to the mill to work his hours.

After the mill he came home and ate a meal with his parents while his musical man played—the tinny drums this time. Over the years they had acquired most of the orchestral instruments in the wealthy boy’s father’s house because of his fear. But she had never played the drums at mealtime before.

She drummed to make you want to shake your hips.

His father looked up from his bowl. “She’s drumming tonight. It’s nice, though.”

His mother said, “She’s very talented.”

The father said to the boy, who now wore no smile on his face, “You and your girl aren’t going out tonight?”

The boy shook his head.

“What happened?” his mother asked.

The boy shook his head. “At school, we had . . . sort of a fight.”

“Well, that happens. That’s nothing to worry about. That’s nothing at all,” his mother said. “When your father and I were young—”

“Leave him be. Let him eat,” said his father.

And his female man drummed to make you want to shake your hips.

In his bedroom that night, he told his man, “She says her brother, her little brother, has been recently released from incarceration. He is a thief. The authorities have him on their list. But that doesn’t mean you are right. He may be bad, but she is my girl. She wouldn’t do a thing like that to me.”

“They are hungry in this neighborhood.”

“But she loves me, I know it.”

“She is hungry.”

“No.”

“The way she looked at me . . . she says I am worth a lot of money. You know if they sold me for meat how much they would get? You know if they sold me to a circus how much they would get? I play every instrument. I can talk. I should be owned by the wealthy who know how to protect their possessions. In this neighborhood, it is only a matter of time.”

“So you want me to sell you to someone wealthy? For your safety?”

“No. I want to stay forever and ever with you. But you should never have brought her into our home.”

“You’re crazy.”

“I’m crazy. I’m a crazy man.”

“You’re my favorite girl,” said he to her.

“You’re not so bad for an oaf,” said she to him.

She laughed and went under the bed. He laughed and went to bed. He lay in his bed for many minutes, laughing, laughing, laughing, and
thinking
.

His laughter died away, and he took in a deep breath and then let it out. He got up and looked under his bed, where she awaited.

And her lips met his.

“Oh,” he said, his heart filling with confusion.

He went back up to his bed. She was under his bed. Beneath him. His pet. His favorite girl.

Evening turned to night and night turned to morning.

For the boy, it was a morning that followed a sleepless night—a night of waking dreams.

* * *

In the morning he prepared her favorite meal in her favorite bowl and brought it to her, and she played him a sweet tune on the colored flute, a tune that made him feel as sweet as bright pink melting into light blue.

“Does it please you?”

“It pleases me,” he said.

She did not speak of the kiss, he did not speak of the kiss, but he left for school and he thought of it and nothing else all day.

After school he worked his part-time hours at the mill.

When he got home, the authorities were there.

His mother was weeping. His father was angrier than the boy had ever seen him before. The house was turned upside down. Everything was out of place. All of the larger musical instruments were missing. Most of the smaller musical instruments were damaged, and the small singing harp was completely destroyed.

“What happened?” the boy asked.

“Someone burgled us and stole our man,” his father said.

“I know who did it! If we hurry, we can get her back!”

The authorities gathered around as the boy told them about the girl with whom he was in love and her brother who had recently been released from incarceration.

* * *

The brother denied it, of course, but they traced the missing instruments of music to the hot shops, and the clerks at several of them identified the brother as the one who had sold to them, earlier that day, this instrument or that.

But the penalty for theft of a man was more severe than the penalty for theft of any other property, so the little brother of the girl the boy loved continued to deny having stolen the female man.

“I’m really sorry about what I did—but I didn’t steal any man from your house. Maybe she snuck out and ran away. I remember leaving the door open. Don’t they run away all the time? Well, that’s what I heard anyway.”

They knew that he was lying, but he refused to admit the crime.

He shrugged. “In a world without thieves, the wealthy become gods,” he said.

They checked all of the local public kennels, and no one would admit to having purchased a red-haired female man from the brother of the girl with whom the boy was in love.

When the boy got permission from the authorities to check the inventory of all the local public kennels, he did so, but his female man was nowhere to be found.

A sympathetic kennel boss took the boy aside. “You have to understand how it is, son. I see that look on your face and I can only imagine the pain you’re feeling right now, but what I’m going to tell you is as true as the day is long. She is in one of two places. She is in the mines or she is with a circus. These days, most missing mans are never recovered. It’s not like before when there were ample mans to go around. A man would run away and someone would find it and bring it home or bring it here. My shop used to be stocked with as many talking mans as dumb ones. But with all of these new laws protecting the natural habitats of the mans and no laws protecting the natural rights of working people to earn a living in the mines, every talking man is worth its weight in silver. Cheap labor is the law of the land. Whoever stole your talking man got rid of her immediately—and a musical man too! Circus or the mines, and I’m betting the mines. Only the wealthy are still using them as pets. People are too hungry these days. I do not have one single talking man in my shop right now. I take in maybe three a week and they are gone within minutes. Your man would have to be pretty dumb and pretty dull to be a pet, but the smart ones—straight to the mines. Thieves know this. Business is good for thieves these days. A curse on all thieves!”

The boy went home with the horrible vision in his head of his sweet, sarcastic little red-haired female man working in the mines. He wept all the way home. He wept all night.

“Oh Red Locks, oh my little Red Locks!” he cried in his room that night.

In the morning he got up and dressed for school and then he left. After school he went to the mill and he worked his part-time hours. After work he and his father got with their mallets and other tools and they tore down the proper kennel in their backyard.

It was a very long time before the boy courted a girl again. It was a very long time before he loved a girl again. And he never again owned a man.

It hurt too much.

5

Red Man, Red Man, Why Do You Weep?

War is king of your philosophies. Your harvest of blood fills your belly while infants and orphans wail.

—Great Scripture

On the day the red-haired female man arrived at the mines, the boss took the measure of her and liked what he saw.

He would have preferred that she not be so pale. On the other hand, two years in the eastern mines had made her lean, strong, and clever. He put her to work on the load-and-pull and found that she could do it better than any other man, and so he put her to lead it.

They told him she was a vicious fighter, that she had the gift of landing the first blow. The winding scar on her arm, they told him, was proof. He checked the scar and decided he may have been deceived. It may have been got from the lash. She was a talking man, and so he asked her.

“I have been defeated,” she said. “But never by the same man twice.”

Feisty,
he thought, and he patted her head, his lips curling upward in delight. “I shall call you
Red Man
, for you have red hair.”

She winced and he took notice. Fearing a man bite, he withdrew his hand.

* * *

The boss was first among poets.

How serious are her eyes, he thought. They are alert and at the same time so weary.

He peered into her emerald eyes and was afforded a hint of what two years of working in the eastern mines could do to a man—two regular years (six man years) of breaking rock and stone with hammer and club, of hauling the overloaded wheeled carts, of hefting granite, coal, slate, and silver, in the dark bowels of the earth.

“But,” he said to himself, feeling a sudden surge of compassion, “here in the western mines, it shall not be so.”

As soon as he said it, he took it back: “On the other hand, there is much silver to be made.” He rationalized, “She is but a man, after all.”

* * *

The boss was first among gamblers. He made her his favorite so that in lean times she would not be eaten as others had been. He made her his companion in the planning of strategy against the man who would be sent to meet her in the fight yard behind the food wagon.

He would point to the opponent. “Gold Braid does not weigh so very much, but she is tall with sharp teeth.”

His female man would nod. “I will run against her and knock her to the ground. Then I will pounce quickly and pin her arms. I will twist like so to avoid her teeth, and I will bite with mine. Mine are sharp too, you know?”

“Good plan, my little red top,” he would say, and then he would clap his hands. “See to it then!”

That is the way it went in the western mines.

She lived for the day’s labor.

She lived for the day’s opponent.

* * *

He was called
Yellow Fellow
, for his hair and his flesh were yellow-hued, and he was the champion.

Like her, he was a talking man. Like her, he was a man of talent, and his talent was word singing. The boss would watch the mans as they gathered by the fires to listen to the word songs of Yellow Fellow, and he would send Red Man to join him as companion in music. She played on a kind of tinny drum she fashioned out of whispering stones and coal rocks of differing size.

The word songs of Yellow Fellow were very beautiful, and every man listened with attention unflagging.

Even the oafs would gather behind them and hum the parts they knew. But when the food wagon was delayed, the hungry ones entered the tents of mans with their long knives and pick-sticks drawn. The chant of
Pick one, pick one, pick a nice fat one
rang out through the death-still air of the black night, and every man cried out to the great creator for deliverance.

“Let it not be me! Let it not be me!”

The red-haired female man cried out for all mans: “Surely, you cannot eat us! We are your mans! We work by your side in the mines!”

The oafs would have eaten her to silence her cries, which troubled their sleep as well as their minds, but she was spared, for she was a favorite of the boss of the mines.

When they complained to him, he sucked his teeth. “Leave her be. It is but the cry of a man. Sleep through it.”

When she entered his tent and blasted her complaints loudly against his ear, he came to understand what the others meant when they said it was a disturbance to their sleep.

He put the muzzle on her and rolled over with his back to her. It helped but a little. She was his favorite, but as he lay there, a common working oaf, his precious sleep disturbed by the yapping of a man, he hatched a plan to punish her that brought a smile to his lips, if not relief to his ears.

The plan had much to do with her companion in music, Yellow Fellow.

* * *

He had a stout belly and was larger than she was—and he was stronger too, they knew, from his feats in the mines.

One day the boss watched amazed as Yellow Fellow saved her from a heavy stone that was falling, catching it with one hand and shoving her to safety with the other.

But outside the mines, he was sluggish and not much interested in the matches, most of which he won by intimidation into submission with his greater size.

He was not swift. He was not graceful. He quite often stumbled and bumbled into victories. No, he was not a great champion. He was champion by default, and he was the favorite of a lackadaisical and overconfident oaf who needed badly to be relieved of his silver.

“You are quicker than he is, true. But how will you turn advantage to victory?”

“His real weakness is his thin legs. I will knock against them, and when he topples I will wrap my arms around his neck. And then his battle is lost. I may not even have to apply my teeth.”

The boss nodded. “Good plan, little red top. Although,” he suggested, “I think you should apply your teeth regardless.”

She peered back with eyes that were dangerously weary, as though she wanted to apply her teeth to
him
.

“But I guess that is your choice to make.” He sucked in his cheeks and stepped back. “See to it then!”