Slow Learner (18 page)

"Black and white's good enough," his father had said, and that was that. Tim had asked Carl once whether he had a color TV at home. "Why should I?" said Carl, and then almost immediately, "Oh! yeah." And bust out laughing. Tim knew as well as Étienne, the professional comic, when your listener had guessed your next line, so he didn't say anything else. He wondered why Carl laughed so hard. It wasn't that funny and even had a kind of logic to it. He did think of Carl as not onlv "colored" himself, but somehow more deeply involved with
all
color. When Tim thought about Carl he always saw him against blazing reds and ochres of this early fall, only last month, when Carl had just come to Minge-borough and they were still getting to be friends, and he thought that Carl must somehow carry around with him a perpetual Berkshire autumn, a Wonderful World of Color. Even in the grayness of this afternoon and this district they had entered (which, it seemed, was deprived of its just measure of light because part of it belonged to the past), Carl brought a kind of illumination, a brightening, a compensation for whatever it was about the light that was missing.

They left the road and plunged down through azalea bushes to the banks of an ornamental canal, part of a system of waterways and islands laid out toward the end of the last century, perhaps with some idea of a miniaturized or toy Venice for the New York candy magnate Ellsworth Baffy, who had caused this place to be built originally. Like many who put castles up among these inland hills, he was a contemporary of Jay Gould and his partner, the jolly Berkshire peddler Jubilee Jim Fisk. Once, right around this time of year, Baffy had held a masquerade ball in honor of the presidential candidate James G. Blaine, from which Blaine had been absent due to a storm and a mix-up in rail schedules. No one missed him. All the moneyed of Berkshire County congregated in the great ballroom of Baffys spun-sugar manor house; the party lasted three days and the countryside was visited by the drunken wanderings of Pierrots pale in the light of the moon, hideous Borneo apes toting jugs of the local white lightning, lush and cherry-lipped actresses imported from New York, in silk capes, red corsets, long hose; wild Indians, princes of the Renaissance, characters from Dickens, paisley bulls, bears with nosegays; allegorical, garlanded girls named Free Enterprise, Progress, Enlightenment; a giant Maine lobster that never got to extend its claw to the candidate. It snowed, and the last morning of the party a pretty ballet girl dressed as Columbine was found in a quarry nearly dead; the toes of one foot were frostbitten so badly they had to be amputated. She never danced again, and in November Blaine lost the election and was also forgotten. After Baffy died the estate was bought by a retired train robber from Kansas and in 1932 was sold dirt cheap to a chain of hotels which couldn't afford to convert the place and eventually decided that King Yrjö's bucketful of jewels was better than paying the taxes on a white elephant. And now the King too was gone, and the house was empty again, except for the Junta, and one possible cavalry officer.

Hidden among reeds was a flat-bottomed boat they'd found, patched up, and christened the
S. S. Leak.
They piled aboard, and Tim and Etienne rowed. Pierre sat with his paws up on the front end, like a figurehead. Downstream a frog jumped, and falling rain stippled the dark surface of the water. They splashed along under phony-Venetian bridges, some without floorboards so that you could look up and see the gray sky through them; past little landings whose untarred pilings had rotted and collected green slime; an open summerhouse with screening rusted through, which swayed even in soft winds; corroded statues of straight-nosed, fig-leaved youths and maidens, holding horns of plenty, crossbows, impossible Panpipes and stringed instruments, pomegranates, curling scrolls, and one another. Soon, over the tops of leafless willows, the Big House appeared, growing taller the closer they came — more turrets, crenellations, flying buttresses coming into sight at each stroke of the oars. The outside was in fairly lousy shape: a lot of shingling was off, paint had peeled, roof slates lay broken in piles where they'd slid and fallen. Windows had been mostly busted after years of forays by nervous kids double-dared to go in against the cavalry officer and his shotgun. And everywhere the smell of old—eighty-year-old - wood.

They tied the boat to an iron rung sunk in a kind of promenade, went ashore, and trooped around to a side entrance of the Big House. No matter how often they came to the hideout there was a feeling of ceremony, more than any of trespass, about going into the house: It took an effort to step from outside to inside. The inside was full of a pressure, an odor, that resisted intrusions, that kept them conscious of itself until they left again. None of them would go so far as to call it by any name, but they all knew it was there. Part of the ceremony was to look at one another and grin, embarrassed, before pushing on into the twilight that waited for them.

They skirted the edges of the room they'd entered, because hung right in the middle of the ceiling was a cobwebbed, flint-glass chandelier with dust piled in thick stalagmites on its upper facets, and they knew what would happen if you walked under it. The house was full of such mute injunctions: blind places you could be jumped out at from; stretches of warped floor that might suddenly open downward into dungeons or simple darknesses with nothing nearby to grab onto; doors that would not stay open behind you but were balanced to close quietly, unless you watched them. These places it was better to stay away from. The route to the hideout was thus like the way into reefed and perilous harbor. If there had been more than four going in, there would have been no danger at all; it would have been just a mob of kids running through an old house. If there had been fewer, it would have been impossible to get beyond the first room.

Creaking, or echoing, or left as dark-ribbed sneaker-prints in a fine layer of damp, the footsteps of the Junta carried them on into King Yrjö's house, past pier glasses that gave them back their images dark and faded, as if some part were being kept as the price of admission; through doorways where old velvet hung whose pile was worn away into maplike patterns, seas and land masses taught in no geography their schools knew; through the scullery, where they'd found a decades-old case of Moxie, of which there were still nine bottles left, Kim Dufay having busted one over the prow of the 5. S. Leak at its christening, the other two drunk solemnly to celebrate last year's more or less successful Spartacus maneuvers and recently Carl Barrington's membership in the gang; then downstairs, between rows of empty wine racks, into empty utility rooms with empty workbenches and dead electric outlets dangling from overhead in the dark like armless spiders; at last to the house's most secret core, the room behind the ancient coal furnace that they'd found and fixed up and Etienne had spent a week booby-trapping. This is where they met and drew up the timetables; this is where they kept the sodium under kerosene in a five-gallon can; and the maps with the objectives marked on them, in an old roll-top desk they'd found empty; and the list of public enemies, which no one but Grover had access to.

So the afternoon got darker, the rain came and went in gusts, sometimes thickening to a downpour, then easing off to a drizzle, and deep in the house, in the dry, cold room, the Junta plotted. Their plot had been going on now for three years, and it reminded Tim sometimes of dreams you got when you were sick and feverish, where there was something you had been told to do — find somebody important in an endless strange city full of faces and clues; struggle down the long, inexhaustible network of some arithmetic problem where each step led to a dozen new ones. Nothing ever seemed to change; no "objectives" were taken that didn't create a need to start thinking about new ones, so that soon the old ones were forgotten and let slip by default back into the hands of grownups or into a public no man's land again, and you would be back where you'd started. So what if Etienne (to take a major example) had managed to stop the paper mill last year for almost a week by messing up the water it used? Other things kept on, as if there were something basically wrong and self-defeating with the plot itself. Hogan Slothrop was supposed to have planted a smoke bomb in a PTA meeting the same evening, smoke them out and make off with all their minutes and financial statements, but he'd got a sudden call to go sit with another A.A. member, a stranger in town who had called the local chapter because he was in trouble and afraid.

"What's he afraid of?" Tim had wanted to know.

It had been a year before, in the early fall, a little past the opening of school. Hogan had come over to Tim's house right after supper, and the sky was still light, though the sun was down, and they had been out in Tim's back yard shooting baskets. Or Tim was: Hogan had had this conflict of commitments on his mind.

"Afraid he'll start drinking again," Hogan said, answering Tim's question. "I'm taking this along" — holding up a carton of milk. "If he wants to drink, he can drink this instead."

"Gah," said Tim, who didn't think much of milk.

"Listen," said Hogan, "you never outgrow your need for milk. Let me tell you about milk. How great it is."

'Tell me about beer," Tim said. Being lately fascinated with the idea of getting drunk.

Hogan took offense. "Don't make fun," he said. "I'm lucky I went through that when I did, that's what my father says. Look at this guy I got to go sit with. He's thirty-seven years old. Look at what a head start I got on him."

"You're supposed to plant that smoke bomb tonight," Tim said.

"Come on, Tim, you can do it for me, can't you?"

"Me and Grovie were going to go throw sodium," Tim said. "Remember? It's all got to come off at the same time."

"Well, then, tell Grovie I can't make it," Hogan said. "I'm sorry, Tim, I just can't." At about which point — wouldn't you know? — Grover showed up. They explained to him as diplomatically as they could — which, as usual, wasn't good enough, because Grover flew into a full-scale snit, called them both an assortment of names and stalked off into the darkness which had crept down off the mountains so slow and shifty they hadn't noticed.

"Looks like no sodium-throwing," ventured Hogan, after a while, "huh, Tim?"

"Yeah," said Tim. That's how it always was. Things never went off the way they should've; nothing progressed. Étienne had played frogman that day for nothing, nothing but laughs. The paper mill would start up again, people would go back to work, the insecurity and discontent Grover needed and had counted on for dark reasons he never confided would vanish, and everything would be the way it was.

"Uh come on, Tim," Hogan suggested in his Yogi Bear voice, which he used for cheering people up, "uh why don't you ride down to the hotel, uh and help me sit with this guy?"

"That where he is?" Tim said. Hoge said yeah, the guy was just passing through, and for some reason nobody else wanted to go. Nancy, the secretary at the central A.A. office, had telephoned Hogan as a last resort. When he said OK, she said, "He'll go," to somebody in the office with her, and Hogan heard what sounded like a couple of people laughing.

Tim got his bike, yelled into the house that he'd be back, and they pedaled downhill through the gathering evening and then coasted into the town. It was good fall weather, a borderline time when some trees have jumped the gun and started to change color, and the insects get louder as the days pass, and some mornings, when the wind is out of the Northwest, you can look over, on the way to school, at the higher mountains and make out a few lonely hawks beginning to drift on South, following the crests of the ridges. In spite of all that day's pointless-ness, Tim could still enjoy the feeling of coasting down toward the yellow clusters of lights, leaving behind two pages of arithmetic homework and a chapter of science he was supposed to read, not to mention a lousy movie, some romantic comedy dating from the 1940's which was on the only channel you could get up here. As Tim and Hogan zoomed by houses with doors and windows still open for the dark's first coolness they could glimpse the bluish fluorescence of screens, all tuned to the same movie, and pick up snatches of dialogue: "... Private, have you gone completely out of your ..."; "... I mean, there
was
a girl back home ...";"... (splash, comical yell) Oh, sorry, sir, thought you were a Jap infiltrator . . .";
"How
can I be a Jap infiltrator when we're five thousand . . ."; "I'll wait, Bill, I'll wait for you as long as ..." and on down, past the firehouse, where a few big kids were sitting around on the old La France engine, telling jokes and smoking, and by the candy store, which neither Tim nor Hogan felt like stopping in tonight, and all of a sudden there were parking meters and several blocks of diagonal parking, which meant you had to put on your brakes and keep an eye out for the traffic, By the time they got to the hotel the night had completely come, had set down on Mingeborough like a lid on a pot, and the stores had begun to close up.

They parked their bikes and went into the lobby. The night clerk, who'd just come on, gave them the fishy eye. "Alcoholics Anonymous?" he said. "You're kidding."

"I swear," said Hogan, showing him the carton of milk. "Call him up. Mr. McAfee, room 217." The clerk, who had the empty night facing him, rang the room and talked to Mr. McAfee. He had a funny look when he hung up.

"Well, it sounds like it's a nigger up there," he informed them.

"Can we go up?" Hogan asked.

The clerk shrugged. "He says he's expecting you. If you have any - you know - trouble, just knock his phone off the hook. See, it'll buzz down here."

"Sure," said Hogan. They went through the empty lobby, between facing rows of armchairs, and got in the elevator. Mr. McAfee was on the second floor. Tim and Hogan looked at each other on the way up but didn't say anything. At his door they knocked for a while before he'd answer. He wasn't much taller than they were. He was a Negro with a small mustache, wearing a gray cardigan and smoking.

"I thought he was kidding," said Mr. McAfee. "You guys really from the A.A. ?"