The Orphan Read online

  “He must be crazy,” some of the boys were saying. “Go for a float or something. Get an innertube, a rope,” they shouted, and some of them ran off up the bank looking for something to throw in.

  “He’ll drown sure,” Douglas said, watching the boy’s white face appear and disappear in the billows of water and foam. The boy was a swimmer and was trying hard to get out of it, stroking for all he was worth, but he was taking in water too when the undertow caught him and rolled him under.

  “Damn,” Charles said. “I got to get him out.” He slipped out of his shirt and stood in his cutoff overalls watching the boy go under again. “I wish I didn’t have to do this,” he said to Douglas as he unhooked his overalls and dropped them around his feet. He took three running steps along the ledge and launched out in a long flat dive that took him below the apron of the dam. His naked body flashed brown in the sun before he hit, and he heard Douglas crying after him as the water crashed into his ears.

  Charles was a good swimmer, but not that good. He made it against the current into the thunderous roil of the backwash, but then he could not see the red haired boy in the great waves and spume. He had to fight hard to keep from being drawn into the powerful undertow that would sweep him around underwater into the smashing power of the flood pouring over the dam. Twice he fought his way to the surface after being pulled under so hard that his body was actually hurled against the bedrock of the river bottom. He hit the bottom hard with his thrashing legs and knew he had lost some skin. He pushed off hard trying to get out of the wash and get to the top for a breath. He made it, only to be pulled under again instantly. He hit bottom with his shoulder and the side of his head, lost his breath and gagged on incoming water. He felt his fingers holding to a crack in the scoured rock bottom, the only thing keeping him from being drawn under the falls, and then he lost more breath.

  Shift.

  I force water out of my throat and let the roil carry me back almost to the great pressure of the falling water. I push upward from the bottom right at the edge of the fall, the weight of water just grazing my back. I look but can see nothing in the gray haze of spray. I duck under, letting the water push me to the bottom where I curl up tightly, holding to the edge of the dam apron and feeling through the water with my spatial sense. The buffeting of the water is strong and terrible. There he is. A limp thing with little life left in it, turning over and over at the inner edge of the roll like a drift log. I fix on it and push away from the bottom. It seems that the water is fighting my every movement, but I grab the boy’s body from beneath and give a great thrust of my hind legs to reach up for air. The roil pushes me at the same time, and I seem almost to leap full length from the water with the boy under my arm. I take a deep breath and go under where the roil catches me again. I hit for the bottom, extending my hind claws and scratching on the rock for a hold. The water pushes us back until I feel my claws slide into a crevice. I double up on the bottom and push violently, clawing with one arm and both hind feet. Two of the claws on my left foot snag in the crevice, and I pull away without them. I feel nothing, but the quiet part of my mind tells me it will hurt later. We are off the worst part of the roil, and I head upward, lungs almost empty now, and I feel the downstream current carrying us away from the dam. I hold under the water one more instant, and as I surface, well down into the swift current, I concentrate hard, Charles Cahill, and shift.

  Charles rose in the free current, the red haired boy loosely in the crook of his left arm as he took breath, gasping and looking to the shore. Along the downstream bank he saw a running, confused mass of people. They were shouting and waving their arms.

  Charles grabbed the boy by the hair and jerked him along as he swam sidestroke toward the near shore, his breath panting faster than he thought he was able to breathe. He felt the bottom and tried to walk and fell. Then hands grabbed at him, holding him up, yelling in his ears, the noise sounding like the dam exploding, and he thought he would faint, but he did not.

  When he got some of his breath and awareness back, he was lying on his stomach on the pebbles of the shore halfway between the old power house and the highway bridge. The red haired boy was stretched out on some boards while a muscular looking man gave him artificial respiration. A siren was approaching. Douglas had thrown a shirt over his shuddering body and was saying something, but for a time Charles couldn’t make sense of the words. It seemed to be the same thing over and over.

  “Why’d you do it? Why’d you do it? You could of got killed.”

  Charles felt as though he had been run through a grant egg beater. Pains were appearing like magic, elbows, knees, back, forehead, nose, chest, and his head felt full of water, making all sounds reverberate. It was as if he were wearing a bucket on his head. He turned on his side to look into Douglas’s anxious frog face and grinned.

  “I couldn’t just let the little shit get away, could I?”

  The ambulance took both Charles and the red haired boy whose name was Wayne Ritter to St. Luke’s hospital where Charles was found to have what the reporter for the Beecher Republican called “multiple bruises and minor lacerations.” The Ritter boy was described as being “recalled from a watery grave by the heroic efforts of his playmate,” a misnomer that made Charles laugh until his minor lacerations hurt. The doctor at St. Luke’s was interested to find out how Charles had lost two toenails entirely from his left foot, but Charles could only respond that it was an awful mess and he didn’t know how he even got out alive.

  The officials of the B.P.O.E. chapter who announced that Charles was hereby nominated for their “Young Hero of the Year” award thought it would have made a better story all around if the principals in the adventure had been socially more prominent, or at least less obscure. Charles was assigned “shirt-tail relation” by a dour Mrs. Stumway who would not allow reporters or Elks in her door and talked to everyone through the back screen. So Charles was written up as the “grandnephew of Mrs. Laura Stumway, residing at her farm three miles south of Beecher.” Wayne Ritter’s family was more of an embarrassment by being present: mother an obstinate alcoholic, father a sometime WPA shovel leaner, one brother in CCC and unavailable for comment, the other in the Army. The Ritter listed as being in the Army was a promising candidate for the public platform until it was learned that he was in the Post Stockade at Fort Sill; Oklahoma, serving six months AWOL time.

  The rescued one was no better to deal with publicly, being a filthy mouthed and undernourished twelve-year-old who maintained amid a string of obscenities that Charles had thrown him into the river and tried to kill him. Fortunately this was contradicted by all witnesses who agreed that Charles was at least twelve vertical feet away from the Ritter boy when he leaped from the ledge into the water. The only adult witness, the muscular man who had given Ritter artificial respiration, admitted to being puzzled by the accident, since it appeared to him that the Ritter boy had leaped off the ledge from a kneeling position, shooting out horizontally almost fifteen feet as he dropped into the roil of the dam. This witness thought there had to be someone else on the ledge who had thrown the boy with considerable force, but this was contradicted by all other witnesses and by the victim himself.

  Charles also thought about the horizontal distance the boy would have had to leap to land in the roil, and it seemed to him that he must in some way have helped to propel the boy off the ledge, aside from merely forcing him to do something as he had forced Runt Borsold to pitch him a setup. He understood now that strong emotion was needed to affect the actions of others, and it seemed a less useful thing to have than it had seemed before, because the strong emotion necessary to the power would dictate the nature of the force applied. Charles was disappointed.

  At the PTA special reception and party for “Our Hero” at the red brick schoolhouse, Charles felt there was little else wonderful that could happen to him, with newspaper clippings of his exploit tacked up on the school bulletin board and old Mrs. Stumway coming out of seclusion to attend the receptio
n dressed in a cloche hat and an ankle length Panama print of tropical flowers that made her look like an old wrinkled aviator wearing a trellis in full blossom. Mr. Safford, the local school superintendent, and the three farmers who constituted the school board all shook Charles by the hand, admiring his strength and courage, and the girls looked at him with new eyes now that he was more than just the handsome dolt who was the only twelve-year-old in first grade (“second going on third,” as Miss Wrigley put it).

  The only dissenting note Charles heard was from the real hero of the great river rescue who had lost two hind claws and who cautioned our hero in explicit terms not to be such a fool again, as he and the real hero might well have drowned for Charles’s grandiose gesture.

  Certainly if it had not been for the rescue, Charles would never have been invited to Betty Bailey’s Halloween party a couple of weeks later. Amid the social desert of the rural Illinois cornbelt, Betty’s family had the reputation for being “smart.” Her mother, Cora, was considered a flashy dresser, and her father, Edward, was “fast” as well as having a profile that reminded some of Douglas Fairbanks. Edward Bailey was more nearly a gentleman farmer than most of the other families in the district, having real estate interests in Beecher and some of the small towns in the county so that, in general, to be invited to the Baileys’ was to have arrived socially. Betty Bailey was, as her parents had taught her to be, beautiful, poised as a girl can be at fourteen, and socially at ease. Her older brother, Edward Junior, had just entered Northwestern University, at great expense, it was said, and constituted the family’s most glittering social asset at the moment. If there had been a “coming out” for what were later to be called “sub-debs,” Betty Bailey would have come out. As it was, with the country yet in the fluctuating coils of the Depression, the Baileys in their modest way provided the country community with a social goal to which others could aspire.

  Betty was, of course, sought after by those who imagined themselves to be in her social sphere, dreamed about by those young men and boys beneath her socially, and actually courted by one Alfred Kearney, the offshoot of a local farm family who had taken a job in a grocery store after his graduation from Beecher High with promises of a partnership someday. He owned a 1932 model B coupe with a rumble seat and a V-8 engine, and had painted its hood slats in alternating red and white stripes and had a vacuum wolf whistle that he exercised when he came to pick up Betty at school on Friday afternoons. Additional ornamentation on this chariot was provided by the scrolled name “Betty B.” on the right hand door. Alfred affected polo shirts and an occasional silk scarf, and was far and beyond the grandest thing any of the farm boys had ever seen.

  Charles had admired Betty, of course, but in a comfortably distant way, as she was two years older than his putative age and miles above in social station. Alfred, he thought, did have Clark Gable’s big ears, but the rest of him was nothing more than big nosed, gangly farm boy. He also seemed of an advanced age to be coming around to a country elementary school to pick up a seventh grader on Friday afternoons.

  Charles was astounded, then, to see Betty Bailey stepping across the school yard one lunch time with an envelope in her hand and a smile on her face. She is pretty, Charles throught, hiding the hand that held his sardine sandwich inside his lunch box. Her lips were red and perfectly outlined as if with a sharp pen, and she had her head cocked on one side, her heavy auburn hair hanging to her shoulders. Charles felt an increasing receding of reality as she approached him, her dark brown eyes looking directly into his own. As she stopped in front of him, her skirt still swinging from her parade across the school yard, Charles felt quite hypnotized, and could not have told if he was sitting right side up or if perhaps someone had turned him on his head.

  “Charlie,” Betty said. No one had ever called him Charlie. “I’d like to invite you to my Halloween party next Friday. I hope you can come.”

  She cocked her head the other way, trying to see if Charles was awake or had suddenly become unconscious. “You will try to make it, won’t you?”

  “Uh.” Charles said. “Yeah.” He recovered, taking in breath as if he had been under the falls again. “Oh, yeah, Betty. Thanks a lot for the invitation.” He extended a hand to take the envelope, but the hand was unaccountably full of sardines and squashed bread.

  Betty laughed brightly. “No thanks, Charlie,” she said. “I’ve eaten my lunch already.”

  Charles looked at his hand, jerked it back and began to laugh. “I’m so surprised,” he said, copying Miss Wrigley’s style, “I feel kind of embarrassed I guess.”

  Then they both laughed, and their eyes met, a trick Betty was good at, and Charles felt that strange sense of unreality come over him again. Betty turned and waved after slipping the envelope into the bib pockets of Charles’s overalls. He watched her swinging skirt as she paraded back to the coterie of girls under the big cottonwood beside the ocean wave swing. He found himself saying something under his breath and wondered if he was saying poetry.

  “Oh Charlie,” said a falsetto voice next to him. “I hope you will be able to come to Hollow weenie.” It was “Kick” Jones, the tall bony sixth grader who had been eating lunch with Charles before the world disappeared.

  “She was wearing perfume,” Charles said, ignoring Kick’s remark.

  “Yeah, her and her family and their Packard,” Kick said.

  “They got a Packard?” Charles said absently.

  “Yeah, and Betty says they might get a sho-fur,” Kick said in disgust. “Geeze, they ain’t that rich. My dad says Ed Bailey has got bills all over the state that he can’t pay.”

  “Well, who cares,” Charles said, stuffing a sardine into his mouth. “She doesn’t need money. Wow, she’s really something.”

  “You better not look at her crosseyed,” Kick said. “Alfred’ll turn you inside out. She’s his girl.”

  “Oh, who’s thinkin’ about stuff like that,” Charles said. “I just think she’s a real knockout. Who wants a girlfriend anyway?”

  (3)

  In the days before Halloween, Charles made a few dollars husking corn for some of the local farmers so that he could buy a new shirt for the Bailey party. And then, like a giant distorted mirror image of the elegance the Baileys were to have on the night of the thirty-first, came the annual PTA Halloween party held on the preceding Wednesday night. School was dismissed at noon on Wednesday so the school room could be got ready with streamers of orange and black, arched black cats pasted on all the windows, orange witches on the blackboards, and crude skeletons on strings hung from the ceiling lights. There were also tubs of water to be brought in for apple ducking, the desks to be moved down to the basement so ring dances and games could take place, and a little stage with curtains prepared in the front of the room so that the third, fourth, and fifth grades could act out the ghost story chosen for the occasion. Costumes were optional now, since the party three years ago when the teacher who had retired before Miss Wrigley came demanded costumes and got a schoolhouse full of old sheets of various sizes and degrees of yellowness. Even the poor little Ricci boy whose family lived in an abandoned clapboard church building two miles down the highway was wearing a sheet. The scene had produced a ghostly effect all right, but in the course of the evening all the sheets had been shredded, and the families had complained of the expense. Now it was thought funny to come in a sheet, but the joke was getting old and few families had the imagination or drive to produce their own costumes. Store bought costumes were, of course, out of the question.

  The play turned out to be an elaborate farce involving a knight, a witch, a bumbling king, and his silent (forgot her lines) queen, and any number of retainers dressed in pointed hats and cued for movement by a laughing and harried Miss Wrigley who prompted, pushed, pulled off stage, and supplied props from the wings at stage right. In between times she played appropriate ghostly music at the piano while the witch’s cornsilk hair fell off, the king’s crown came unpasted and drooped into his lap, and
the knight kept knocking people on the head with his lance (the window stick). Just as the witch seemed about to triumph, partly because she had remembered all her lines and most of her costume had held together, the knight stepped forward and threatened her with his lance, a not altogether idle gesture, since he punched Mary Mae Martin (the witch) with considerable force in her plump stomach while he rendered his victory lines. Mary Mae retired defeated with a vindictive look at Harry Bennett (the knight) and a muttered threat about what he was going to get for hurting her with the lance. Harry was victorious, nervously, for a threat from Mary Mae was not brushed off lightly when one was six inches shorter and two years younger than she was. And so, virtue triumphed as Miss Wrigley played a victorious march on the old upright and the audience clapped and laughed appropriately.

  Then the chairs were cleared away and the stage dismantled for the games, the traditional ducking for apples, blindfold games, and string chewing contests where each of a pair of players tried to get the candy tied in the middle, and the flirting game called “wink ’em.”

  Charles was having the time of his life, laughing so hard at the play that he and Douglas knocked their chairs over and were reprimanded by the elder Bent. During the pairing for the string chew, Charles didn’t watch what he was doing and got paired with Mary Mae, still in her witch hair and costume. Her eyes were bright as she grinned widely at Charles, now considered a “catch” at parties and box suppers. Charles took the other end of the string in his teeth, looked into Mary Mae’s little round blue eyes beneath the gray frizzle of cornsilk Witch wig and smiled.

  “I liked the way you did in the play,” he said around the string.

  “Thank you, Charles,” Mary Mae said around her end of the string.