Silent Boy (12 page)

‘This is a good place,’ he said so softly it could have been a thought said aloud.

I did not reply.

‘This is the best place.’ He still did not look at me. There was a long pause and then he spoke. ‘You’re magic, aren’t you?’

I didn’t understand what he was saying.

‘Nothing happens to me in here when you’re here. You’re magic, aren’t you?’ he said to me. ‘You keep bad things from happening to me.’

That was a very difficult thing to reply to. Because I did not know what might be behind his words, I simply echoed them. There was too much I didn’t understand.

‘You feel safe here,’ I said.

He nodded. Caressing the paper, he nodded again.

And the day after that, the drawing was back.

‘You hate him pretty bad, don’t you?’ I said as he sat tracing bits of the drawing with his finger.

‘He’s a fucking bastard,’ Kevin replied. It was the first time I had heard Kevin swear.

I nodded.

‘I’m going to get him,’ Kevin said. ‘When I get out of here, I’m going to get myself a knife and I’m going to find him and I’ll get him. You just see if I don’t.’

‘You want to kill him.’

‘Kill him? I want to murder the motherfucker so his stupid brains are all over the floor. So his grungy insides are splattered all over the cement like dog food.’

And the following day, the picture returned. Kevin was obsessed with it. It was all he wanted to talk about. He had added a new part. Up in the corner he had penciled in another skull, crushed. The brains were splashed over a distance beyond the fragmented skull, rather as one sees the remains of animals run over on the road. This, too, Kevin had gone over in detail with me. His conversations were terse and tight, his body rigid. Tension crackled around us like the air before an electrical storm.

For the first few days I simply sat with him, echoing his sentiments and trying to figure out what the hell to do next. I watched him carefully, desperate to sort out what was happening to him, to glean some form of understanding from his face, his posture, his behavior, his words. In the back of my mind increasingly was the concern that he might be dangerous. Had I created some sort of Frankenstein’s monster by letting him loose from his self-imposed prison?

The myriad of paralyzing minor fears were gone, at least here in the small white room. And replacing them was what I began to suspect the fears had been protecting all along: hate. As the days went by and Kevin became increasingly obsessed with the brutal drawings of murder and talk of violence, I started to believe that he had used the fears as a method of controlling his hate. Indeed, that was perhaps the reason behind his many years of silence as well. If one did not speak at all, one did not run the risk of letting out dangerous thoughts. Kevin had simply been doing the best he could to manage his emotions. If something proved hazardous and aroused his feelings too much, he became afraid of it, he didn’t talk about it. In the end he had become like a drug addict. It took more and more fears to contain his feelings and more and more silence to keep the things unsaid until suddenly he was trapped and the fears and silence ruled him. But fair dues to the kid. Zoo-boy had done the best he could in the circumstances. He’d caged the responsible party.

This also lent an air of insight to the explosion over the rocket poster. He had dared to make his own feelings known in the situation and perhaps more significantly, he had dared impose his will on me. Then like the proverbial straw on the camel’s back, the resulting fear had proven too much.

But in the end he had survived and so had I.I think he had summed it up well that one day. This small white room was safe. Whatever magical powers he was imbuing me with I had no doubt would pass, but this room, itself, was proving safe. He’d ventured to talk. God had not struck him dead. We had had that horrific explosion over the poster. We both survived. Now he was able to bring in his drawings and say the things he had kept silent and nothing was happening to him. Slowly but surely, Kevin was discovering that the world was a safer place than he had believed, or at least this small part of it was.

This was, of course, all conjecture on my part, the type of introspection I did not usually indulge in about the kids. But it seemed a possible enough conclusion. These were rather rough waters we were riding through at the moment but, on the other hand, it was good to see him put away a little of his fear.

After almost a week of obsessive, rage-torn conversation over the drawing, Kevin still appeared unsated. We were sitting at the table on Friday morning when the aide arrived to escort him back to the ward. The aide had come a little earlier than usual and, thus, startled Kevin when he rattled the lock. Kevin’s shoulders slumped, his head ducked down, he fell protectively over the picture. By the time the door opened, Kevin was plain old loopy Zoo-boy, slithering off the chair and onto the carpet. He dragged the paper and pencil down under the table with him.

‘Won’t you ever get out from there?’ the aide asked as he came across the room to fish Kevin out from under the table. We must have looked an odd pair to him because I was still sitting in a chair at the table and Kevin was now under it. There was a note of good-natured despair in the aide’s voice. ‘Come on, Kevin. Time to go. Madge is going to murder you if you’re late for O.T. again. Come on, get up from under there. Hurry up.’ He put a toe under the table and nudged Kevin.

Kevin dragged himself up. As he prepared to go, he pressed the drawing, now folded up into a small square, into my hand. Obviously, he had not wanted to risk having the aide see him tuck it into his T-shirt. Then he slunk out the door.

Still sitting at the table, I opened the drawing up again for a private look at the thing. There, scribbled hastily across the top, was a note.

Bring me paper! And bring me pencils. Collared pencils, please. I need them!

The following morning I arrived with three sketchpads and a box of Twenty–four colored pencils. Kevin was already there, sitting on the floor on the far side of the room. He turned when I entered.

‘Here,’ I said, coming over and sitting down beside him.

Kevin’s face lit up. ‘Did you get these for me?’

‘Yes.’

‘Because I told you to, huh? Just for me?’

I nodded.

He took the bag and ripped it open. Gleefully, he riffled through the sketchpads and then flipped the top off the box of pencils. He touched the points. ‘Hey, these are good.’ He pulled one pencil out and scribbled a bit on the edge of the sack. ‘Yeah. Yeah, these are real good. I want to try them, all right? Can I take them out and draw with them?’

‘They’re yours. You can do what you want with them.’

‘Yes.’ He dumped the entire box of pencils out onto the floor and opened the sketchpad. ‘Here, I’ll make a picture for you. What do you want me to draw? You name it. I’ll draw you anything.’

I paused in thought. From where I was sitting on the floor, I could see out the window. There was a large tree just beyond the pane, some sort of cottonwood, I think. Weak sunlight had broken through the clouds and was shining among the bare branches. For a moment the flicker of light and shadow transfixed me and I did not answer immediately. When I turned back, Kevin was already bent over the pad drawing. I leaned forward against his arm to see what it was.

It was a young girl, maybe six or seven, with long rather stringy brown hair and parted lips.

As I watched her come alive under his pencil, I was again awed by his obvious artistic talent. How had he gone so many years without anyone noticing? Or had he? Kevin appeared aware of the power of his talent. And he knew good materials and how to use them. His work, too, was undeniably sophisticated. Somewhere, somehow, some way, had his talents been nurtured?

Like the grisly drawing before it, this one had a photographic quality. Given the advantages of color, the picture soon took on subtle shadings and overtones. The child stood startlingly close to real life, yet at the same time there was a mystical quality to her, brought out by the colors.

She was a haunting-looking child, not really pretty, with her straggly, uncombed hair. She was not smiling. Instead, she gazed out intently at us from the drawing, as if we were intruders. Her lips, especially, I noticed. Parted, they were full and rather pouty and gave her an overall sort of infantile sensuality. It was an amazing picture, as accurate as a photograph yet as subtle as only art can be.

‘Who is that?’ I asked.

‘Carol.’

He continued to draw, his hand going rapidly back and forth across the page, almost as if the picture couldn’t get out fast enough. The child reached closer and closer to life.

‘Who’s Carol?’

‘My sister.’

‘She’s lovely.’

He nodded.

There was an infinite silence, disturbed only by the sound of Kevin’s pencil on the paper. I turned around so that I was facing him and leaned back against the wall. I watched him; I studied the way he moved as he drew.

It surprised me to realize as I sat there that he really wasn’t such a bad-looking kid. Not really an ugly kid. He was relaxed over the drawing. The tension of the past few weeks had slipped away from his body and, absorbed in what he was doing, he assumed a freer, more natural posture than I had ever seen him in before.

I wondered about him as I sat there. I wondered what it felt like to be him. I wondered what thoughts he had in his head. More than any other kid I had been with, I was mystified by him.

Still he worked on in silence. I glanced up at the clock. Over at the window. I fiddled with the cuff of my shirt. The quiet wore on, nibbled at by the sound of his pencil.

Finally Kevin held the picture out at arm’s length to examine it. He turned it so I could see it too, but before I got a good look, he was bent back over it to soften one line with his finger.

‘Yeah,’ he said half aloud. Then he glanced up. He smiled. It was a funny little smile, soft and reassuring. Then he returned to the drawing.

‘You know,’ he said, ‘once I was going to buy Carol this boat. Did I ever tell you about that?’

‘No.’ He had never even told me Carol existed before now.

‘Well, I was going to buy her this little boat. You had to go down to the corner store by the garage and they had these little plastic boats you could float in the water. You know. Like in the bathtub or something. But you had to ask to see them. The man there, he kept them up on a shelf behind the counter ’cause otherwise the kids used to steal them. They were good boats.

‘Anyway, they cost $2.98.I had $3.10 and so I told Carol I was going to get her one of them boats. So I went down. And I went in. I thought to myself, now you’re going to ask this guy to see one of them boats. But I couldn’t do it. You know. I had to
ask
. I just couldn’t. I had to walk out of the store and sit on the curb for a while. Then I got back up and went back in and thought
now
you’re going to ask that guy to see one of them boats. But I couldn’t. So I went back out on the curb and sat down for a while more.’

Kevin never looked up from his drawing. I closed my eyes a moment and I could see the little girl in the picture. She looked like so very many of my children had. I could see her with her straggly long hair and her shabby clothes and that provocative expression of self-made dignity that street kids have. I could see the little boy too, who could not work up the courage to speak.

‘And after a bit,’ Kevin continued, ‘I thought to myself, now you
are
going in and ask that guy to see one of them boats. So I went in. But I couldn’t. I just stood there and I could see he thought I was one of the kids who came in to steal and he said, “What do you want, kid?” and I got scared and I ran back outside. And I sat down on the curb again. I kept telling myself, you got to be able to do this. You promised Carol you’d get her that boat. You
got
to, you stupid idiot. So finally, I said to myself, now you are
going
to go in there and ask that guy to see one of them boats and so I walked in and I said, “Can I see one of them boats?” and he showed me one and it was red and Carol hated red, so I said, “Can I see one of them blue boats now?” and he said, “You got money, kid, or you just looking?” And I said, “I’m going to buy one for my sister.” And so he showed me a blue one and I liked it and so I bought it. And I took it home and gave it to Carol.

‘But later when I was outside, my stepfather came up. And Carol comes around the side of the house and she’s got the boat in her hand and he said, “Where did you get that from?” and she said, “Kevin bought it for me from the shop by the garage.” And he said that was a lie. He said, “You couldn’t’ve bought it, Kevin, you must’ve stole it.” I knew he thought that because I didn’t talk to him, I wouldn’t be able to talk to the guy at the shop either. But Carol said, “Yes, he did too buy it for me.” And he told her to shut up. Then he took the boat and he put it on the ground and he stepped on it.’

Again Kevin held the picture out to examine it.

‘Anyway, Carol cried. Not because of the boat or anything because she didn’t cry about things like that. But because of me. She felt sorry for me. I think I could have stood it on my own. But I couldn’t then. Why did he have to make me feel like that? In front of Carol? Why did he have to make Carol cry for me?’