The One-in-a-Million Boy (9 page)

“I'd have to pass a written test. A baby monkey could do that. And an eye test. My eyes are good. It's the road test that jumbles me up.”

His hands flew to his head. “Miss Vitkus, if you pass the written test, and if you pass the eye test, and if you pass the road test—”

“Keep your shirt on. I'm going to have to practice. I've been driving right along—that's a secret—but not with any plan to pass a test. I'm going to have to brush up.”

“You need a book.”

“What kind of book?”

“The kind that teaches you how to drive,” he said. “Then you can have your license back, and then in four years plus one more day than the record-breaker age of Mr. Fred Hale you'll be an official Guinness world record holder.”

“But in four years I'll have to renew my license yet again. It's every four—”

“Which you will, right? You'll go to the driving place and ask for another road test so you can renew your license for another four years, right?”

“I'll be one hundred eight years old, for crumbsake! And anyway, you'll be fifteen. You'll have moved on to other things.”

“Oh, no,” he assured her. “Every Guinness world record holder has a support team.” He paused. “I'm your support team.” He paused again. “You can do it.”

“Oldest licensed driver. Age one hundred eight. Imagine.”

“But you're going for longest-lived person, too. The all-time record. Don't forget.”

“Rest assured, I shall keep the ultimate goal in mind,” she said. “In the meantime, we've got ourselves a dandy placeholder to shoot for.”

“You might end up with two records!” He grabbed his hair with both hands. “Two times in the book! Two times immortal!” Once again she had this strange, lovely boy hopping in glee. Right in her kitchen. Where glee had not been in residence since Louise's passing. Glee, in the form of this boy who might single-handedly will her to live another two decades.

“Let's call the Department of Motor Vehicles right now. Hand me that phone book.”

He grinned. She loved his short teeth.

Which is how she wound up on the following Saturday, driving the Reliant past the supermarket and back, being coached by an eleven-year-old child. She'd had to talk him into skipping his chores. She felt foolish, but he was a good coach. Calm and methodical.

“How many seconds of following distance are required on slippery roads?” he asked as she edged into the light weekend traffic of Brighton Avenue. He'd been quizzing her from a booklet authorized by the DMV.

“What difference does it make? I never drive in the rain.” But she slowed automatically, for indeed she'd been following a tad close.

“You might get this question on the real test.”

“Fine.” She glanced at him. “Five seconds?”

“I'm sorry, that answer is not correct. The correct answer is three to four seconds.”

“Ask me another.”

“In city traffic, the driver should try to look how many blocks ahead? One, two, or three?”

She was following too closely again. His questions were serving as a guide, she realized. He had her preparing for the road test and written test simultaneously.

“Do your teachers tell you you're smart?”

“Mr. Linkman tells me not to count things.” He was still focused on the booklet, not letting her slide past the question. “Mr. Linkman was my teacher in the fourth grade, also. He told me not to count things then, also.”

“Two?” she said. “Two blocks ahead?”

“I'm sorry,” he said. “That answer is also incorrect. The correct answer is one block ahead.”

“For crumbsake,” she muttered. “Is there a record for oldest unlicensed driver?”

“No,” he said. “They discourage criminals.”

“It's a crime for an old lady to drive herself to the supermarket?”

“You have to have a license. That's why they have practice tests. So you can improve.” He turned a page. “This is practice test one. There's six in all.” He looked up. “Make sure you click the turn signal in time to—”

“I've got it,” she said, turning into an empty neighborhood street. “How is anybody supposed to pass this stupid test? It's full of useless information.”

“You said a baby monkey could pass the written test,” he reminded her. “It's the road test you worried about.”

She pulled over. “My head's all woolly,” she told him. “This is harder than I thought.”

“But you said this was the easy part. What about the eye test? Is the eye test going to be harder than you thought?”

“Now, don't start fretting.”

He looked around. “When you park near a curb—”

“I know this one!” she said. “Park as close as you can to the curb, but no farther than eighteen inches.”

“That's correct!” he crowed. “That's the correct answer!”

“Try me again.”

“When parking in the vicinity of a fire hydrant—”

“Ten feet!”

“That's also correct!”

“Don't act so surprised.” She put the car back in gear. “Okay, I've got my wits back. Let's swing toward my house, and you can quiz me on the way.”

“Miss Vitkus?”

“Wait, I'm concentrating.”

After she crept back out to Brighton Avenue, just a few blocks now from home, he said, “You did very excellent, Miss Vitkus, but you might have to study a little harder.”

“Yes, I know.” She sighed. “Because we're on a mission.”

“That's the correct answer!” She glanced at him and saw he was smiling. He'd made a joke, a pretty good one at that.

When they got back to the house, he insisted on completing his chores—was in fact verging on panic that he'd be doing them out of order—so she called the scoutmaster and asked for a later pickup. She arranged his cookies on a plate, poured some milk, and flipped through the practice manual as she waited. She would study harder; she did not want to disappoint him.

“Take a load off,” she said when he came in at last, and for the first time since they'd met she found herself eager for the recording session.

“This is Miss Ona Vitkus,” he said. They were up to Part Five. She had a pretty good idea how many parts he had in mind.

He began with a question of his own, passed across the table in immaculate penmanship. His handmade questions, the product of silent forethought, invariably unhooked a shut gate, leaving her to brace against an onrush of memory. The surprise was how little she minded. He turned off the recorder when she asked him to, or when she got to a stopping place that satisfied his Byzantine logic, or when the scoutmaster rang the bell. Only then, the tape gone mute between them, did she understand how far she—she, who never went anywhere—had been willing to travel.

Over the following Saturdays, they fell into a pleasant routine that included chores, stories, and driving instruction. They also pored over their ever-changing list of rivals, a gerontological game of musical chairs that was more entertaining than cards.

“Mrs. Difilippo died,” the boy said.

“So I see,” Ona said. She'd been rooting for Mrs. Difilippo, age one hundred eleven, because she'd divorced three husbands and still lived alone.

“What are the two most common types of interchanges?” he asked. He'd taken to giving her pop quizzes, apparently a specialty of Mr. Linkman.

“Diamond and cloverleaf.”

“That's the correct answer. When is it legal to pass a vehicle on the shoulder?”

“Trick question. Never.”

He grinned.

“That's right,” she said. “I studied.”

As her rivals dropped—not like flies, like petals, bright and melting—she felt regret, along with a fragile thrill over her own accumulating days. The names seemed borrowed from a ship's manifest, a list of refugees from a war no one knew was raging until they discovered themselves the last ones standing. Rosalie; Vittorio; Yasu; Clementine. She thought of them as family, as familiar and mysterious as the boy who had introduced them.

 

AMAZING FEATS

1. Oldest chart-topping female singer. Cher. Age 52. Country of USA.
   

2. Oldest Olympic medalist. Oscar Swahn. Age 72. Running Deer shooting team in 1920 Olympics. Country of Sweden.
   

3. Oldest female marathon finisher. Jennie Wood-Allen. Age 90 years and 145 days. Country of Scotland.
   

4. Oldest bridesmaid. Flossie Bennett. Age 97. Country of East Anglia.
   

5. Oldest pilot. Colonel Clarence Cornish. Age 97. Country of USA.
   

6. Oldest parachutist. Hildegarde Ferrara. Age 99. Country of USA.
   

7. Oldest practicing doctor. Leila Denmark. Age 103. Country of USA.
   

8. Oldest bell ringer. Reginald Bray. 100 years and 133 days. Country of UK.
   

9. Oldest serving parish priest. Father Alvaro Fernandez. Age 107. Country of Spain.
   

10. Not oldest but most working guitar player.
    MY OWN RESEARCH
    !!! Quinn Porter. Age 42. Country of USA.
    

By the time the boy arrived on the ninth Saturday, Ona realized she'd been looking for him long before his appointed hour. To hurry the time, she opened the window and listened for birdsong. She caught snippets of robin, the scolding of a crow, a single syllable from a white-throated sparrow's eleven-note call. She thought she heard the distinctive voice of a grackle: like a rusty gate. But everything else was gone and she wished it back.

At last he arrived and after his chores announced that he had news.

“I'm going to be a gerontology researcher,” he told her. He had three voices: monotonic, tremulous, and proclamatory. This was proclamatory.

She put out a cake that had taken her two engaged and fragrant hours to make. “You'll be a jim-dandy gerontology researcher,” she told him.

“One, they need help. Two, there's a lot of imposters trying to get on the list.”

From his bottomless pack he extracted a list of frauds. Buster Balen from Phoenix (claimed age, 105; actual age, 91); Floria Perez from Baja California (claimed age, 114; actual age, 101). The list was long.

“I never thought of imposters,” Ona said, a dismaying oversight beginning to dawn. “How do they—how do they wangle onto the list?”

“They cheat,” the boy said. He showed her: Mr. Balen had been caught passing off his father's papers as his own; Mrs. Perez had been exposed by her daughter, whose proven age put her mother in labor at age fifty-six. “You need three docs,” the boy said. “But they have to be authenticated.”

“Three?” She stared at him, disbelieving. “
Now
you tell me?”

He opened his mouth, equally stunned. “You don't—have docs?”

“I thought you called these people up on your one-hundred-tenth birthday and bingo, you're official.”

The boy shook his head fearfully. “They don't ever believe you! They check your docs! That's what gerontology researchers do!”

Later, Ona would attribute the full flowering of her—desire? competitive spirit?—to the confluence of the bright day, the memory of birdsong, the ongoing recording project, and the boy's sky-pink cheeks; but at the time it seemed an imperative sent directly from the Other Side by Lucy Hannah or Margaret Skeete or even the great Madame Jeanne Louise Calment herself. She snatched her grocery list from the fridge, flipped it over, and started writing.

“I'd like to enjoy my fame
before
I'm dead, thank you very much,” she told the boy, who kept a hawkish eye on her pen. “Let's see. Docs.” She thought a minute. “I've got a current Visa card. And Social Security. My library membership's all kept up.”

He said, “Do those—do those things prove your age?”

Ona stopped writing. “It's ID,” she said. “Proof that I'm who I say I am.”

“ID is one category,” he told her, his body seeming to melt with apology. “Docs is a different category.” He switched to the tremulous voice: “You need
docs.
”

“Such as?”

“One, birth certificate.”

“I'm not sure I have one.”

“Oh, no.” He hesitated, stricken. “I made a big mistake,” he said, collapsing against the chair back. “I thought all Americans had docs.”

“Now, listen,” she said. “You're forgetting my driver's license. If all goes as planned I'll have that shined up in no time, not to mention a head start on my placeholder record, and my birth date will be right there, along with my height and weight. Problem solved.”

“They won't count your driver's license.” He began to quote: “‘We prefer documents obtained in childhood.'”

“We do, do we? Why?”

“Because adults lie about their age.” He glanced at the imposter list, then back at Ona.

“Well, I'm not lying. I know how old I am.”

“But they're a big company!” he said, nearly coming out of his chair. “They have big rules!”

She put her hands on his narrow shoulders. “Let's be calm about this.”

“All right,” he said. But his eyes went huge with alarm.

“We'll need a little more information, that's all,” she told him.

“I can do that. I'm good at information.”

“You are indeed.” She tapped her pen. “Now, it could turn out they need things like fingerprints. Or a baptismal record. I was baptized in a Lithuanian country church that's probably a Burger King by now. I don't know the village, let alone the church, and there isn't a soul left on earth who could tell me.” She laid down her pen, astonished. “I don't know where I come from.”

A rainfall of words pittered down:
Pasienis. Laivas. Kelione.
Border. Ship. Journey.

The boy looked near tears. “What do we do?”