The Orphan Page 3

  I am trailing a female fox, sneaking through the hedges, crossing the creek twice, until I am almost to the railroad bridge south of the town. The fox scent crosses the creek again and seems to head toward the darkness under the bridge. But then it is blotted out by the odor of people, very dirty people. I crouch in the weeds along the creek to scan the area under the arch of the bridge. The smell comes from there. Human excrement, old and new, alcohol, canned food spoiled and fresh, dirty skin and clothing. The mounds are human forms rolled up in rags to keep warm. People asleep under the bridge. Tramps. They walk the highways and railroad tracks, have no place to stay, no way to dig burrows for themselves, and they sleep in places like this. There is a camp for these people in the town. I have heard the farmer and his wife talking about it. It is called a “Roosevelt Roost,” a name I do not understand. I wonder why these people are here in the dirt when they could be roosting with Roosevelt in a dry building? Perhaps they are outcasts.

  I step warily through the weeds, keeping low, wondering at such filth. How can they stand to sleep so near their own excrement? Even dogs … but suddenly, not able to sense much because of the powerful smell that is blocking out part of my mind, I step down on a human hand.

  “Sonuvabitch!”

  I leap sideways and drop into the weeds where I land, startled half out of my skin. It is always humans who remind me of my limitations. They are always surprising me in surprising ways. I flatten, hoping the person will go back to sleep, but the man has gotten up on his hands and knees and is feeling around in the grass near me. I will have to get away without hurting him, and I cannot shift into Robert’s form, for it would be too dangerous to him. His hand blunders into my fur.

  “What the goddamhell?”

  I sense his every movement, the direction of his gaze in the darkness. I know he cannot see much, and I wait for the moment when he is off guard for an instant. It comes.

  “Hey you gays. There’s something like a …”

  At the moment his head turns slightly to look in the direction of the sleeping forms under the bridge, I throw my weight up and against his belly, digging in my back claws, and push him over backwards into the creek. I leap the creek as his form hits the water under me, and I am a hundred yards up the railroad ditch in the tall weeds before he can get out of the water. I lie quiet, controlling my panting, listening to the man’s curses and screams as he wakes the others under the bridge.

  I creep back along the opposite side of the railroad tracks to the other side of the bridge opening. The shapes are sitting up now, three, no, four of them. They are passing cigarettes around, the glowing ends momentarily lighting up the faces, bearded and stubbly, one old man, three younger ones, but all with a common haggard look, as if they might be from the same sickly litter.

  “Dumb shit,” the oldest one says, coughing heavily. “Had you a dream about guys in fur suits and fell in the crick. Too much wine.”

  “It wasn’t no dream. It ’uz a big dog, maybe.”

  “You was dreamin’ about that little gal that give us the bakery bread,” says the skinny younger one.

  “I wasn’t never dreamin’ and I ain’t drunk. It was somebody, maybe a bear,” the one they call Gus says. He is wrapped in an old overcoat, shivering.

  They all laugh.

  “Gus got pushed in the crick by a bear.”

  The hilarity does not last. Their bodies have a rank, sick smell. They are not healthy like the farmer and his wife. The oldest one is sick with something that wastes his body. I smell it, but have no experience of what it might be. After a bit the oldest one lies down again and the short, silent man leans back in the dirt and pulls a wide brimmed hat over his eyes. Gus and the skinny one sit up finishing a cigarette, staring blindly out into the dark weeds where I am crouched looking back at them.

  “Rusty says we ought to get on down to Chi tomorrow,” the skinny one says.

  “Yeah, I reckon,” says the other one. “And workin’ the stem in this town ain’t bad. I made forty cents off one old lady yesterday.” He draws on the cigarette so that his face emerges from its silhouette. He is narrow faced, like a chicken, hardly any forehead, eyes set back almost to the side of his face. He looks pinched.

  “Tommy!” says the voice of the one called Rusty who has his hat over his face. “Getcher ass over here. I’m cold.”

  Tommy says nothing, gets up and goes over to lie close beside Rusty.

  Gus stands up, holding the overcoat around him. His hair almost touches the arched concrete ceiling. He is a big, wide shouldered man with a large head, but when he walks back to his nest in the weeds, his shoulders fall into a stoop and he seems smaller.

  Being close to them, listening to their words, smelling their rancid odors has a strange effect. I have the feeling that if I shifted, I would not be Robert, but someone diiferent. It is an unsettling feeling, and I turn away finally from the little camp under the railway bridge and lope back to the farm without hunting further.

  The next day, Aunt Cat’s older daughter came out to the farm with her little girl, Anne, who was a bit older than Robert. The mother was called Vaire, but that was not her real name. Anne was half a head taller than Robert, with her mother’s golden hair and blue eyes, but her hair was long and curled into ringlets that hung around her face like golden springs. Having been introduced and told to go outside and play, they found themselves at the sandbox beside the garden fence. Anne took a position in the middle of the sand with her hands on her hips. She wore a flouncy pink dress with a white apron over it.

  “Grandpa Nordmeyer made this sandbox for me,” she said.

  “He said I could play in it,” Robert said, standing just outside the box.

  “Well you can’t use my pans,” Anne said, picking up a half-dozen miniature kitchen utensils Robert had found in the sand.

  “I didn’t know they were yours,”.Robert said, watching her stuff the pans and dishes in the pockets of her apron. They made her rattle when she walked. “Are these cars yours too?” he asked. He watched her try to fit the little cars into her pockets too. She settled at last for stacking the cars against one wall of the sandbox and drawing a line in the sand around them.

  “Now,” she said. “Those are mine, and you mustn’t touch them.”

  When Robert did not object to any of these proprietary measures, Anne began to soften somewhat.

  “How old are you?” she asked, taking the pans and dishes and stacking them behind the line with the cars.

  “I don’t know,” Robert said, and then he thought he’d better say about how old Aunt Cat said he was. “Five, I think.”

  “You’re just a little baby,” she said. “I’m going to be six in June, and I’m going to be in the first grade when school starts.” She stepped out of the sandbox and swaggered over to the garden gate, climbing up and swinging on it so that the iron weight on the spring creaked up and down. “And I can already read,” she said.

  “How do you read?” Robert wondered. That was something he wanted to know. Then he could read in the bedtime story books about adventures.

  “It’s pretty hard,” she said, jumping off the gate and letting it bang. “But I’ll show you.” She walked away primly toward her mother’s car. Robert followed, expecting to learn in the next few moments how to read. He tensed his muscles, clenching his fists. If it was hard, he would do it anyway. Anne opened the car door and got a thin book from the door pocket.

  “Here,” she said, putting the book down on the grass under the lilac bush. “See this story?” She opened to the first pages where there was pictured a black Scottie dog and a couple of children, a boy and girl who looked unnaturally clean and hysterically happy. There were some black marks under each picture. Anne put her finger on the first line of marks. “This is the dog’s name. It’s Happy.”

  “His name is happy?” Robert said in wonder. How can a name be happy?”

  Anne looked blank. She looked to see if Robert was smiling. “That’s silly. I s
aid the dog’s name is Happy!”

  “I know, but … Oh, like Martin’s big dog’s name is Biff.” Robert relaxed somewhat, thinking it wasn’t all that hard yet.

  “Now this says,” Anne screwed up her face until one eye was shut. “This says, ah, ‘See Happy run.’ Her face came unscrewed into a smile.

  Robert looked at the marks. He felt baffled. “Which marks say that?”

  Anne pointed to the first line.

  Robert looked harder, trying to force his face into a grimace and squinting his eyes. Nothing happened in his mind. “Read some more, please?”

  “All right. Here on this page it says,” and her face went into the spasm again, “‘Run, Happy, run.’”

  “That’s a funny thing to say,” Robert said. “Is something going to get the dog?”

  Anne looked blank again. “Nothing’s going to get the dog. What do you mean? The boy is telling the dog to run.”

  “But you don’t have to tell a dog to run just for nothing,” Robert said, trying to understand this strange, pointless story.

  Anne decided to ignore his comments. “Here it says, ‘Look, look, Jane.’”

  Robert looked at Anne with respect. “Who is Jane?”

  “She’s the girl. My goodness, I bet you’re never going to school.”

  “I will sometime,” Robert said. He looked at the marks and then at the pictures. He could have told a story from looking at the pictures, but he wouldn’t have known the right names. It wouldn’t be reading. He got up from the grass and walked around the car. It was hard, and not in the way he had thought it would be.

  “What’s this writing on the front of your car, Anne?” Robert said, pointing to some writing on a metal plate fixed to a bar between the headlights.

  She walked around the car. “That’s, ah, let’s see. That’s a B, a Buh sound, and that’s a U, a oo sound.” She brightened. “Oh, it just says Buick, because our car’s a Buick.”

  Robert was incensed. He wanted to read, and I was listening too, intrigued by the marks that made sounds in the mind.

  After they had eaten a bacon sandwich and had some chicken soup for lunch, Anne and Aunt Cat went out to weed the strawberries. Robert sat at the table watching Anne’s mother. He had not seen much of the world, but he recognized that Vaire was beautiful. It was all he could think of. He watched her lips when she spoke, her eyes when she was quiet, and her every move as she walked back and forth from the dining room to the kitchen.

  Her face was more round than Aunt Cat’s was, but she had the same comforting smile. Her body was slender with more flare at the hips than was fashionable. She wore her skirts tight and in bright colors, and Robert thought he had never seen so marvelous a thing as the suppleness of her waist when she did such a simple thing as put a dish in the sink, or the grace of her shoulders as she went down on one knee to wipe off Anne’s milk mustache. Her lips were full like her daughter’s with sharp uptilted corners that made a dimple when she smiled. She did seem happier than anyone Robert had met, singing little bits of songs like “Dream Train” and “The Isle of Capri” in odd moments as she helped her mother in the house.

  Each time she reached to pick up a plate or the silverware, he saw her marvelous, slender fingers, moving as if they played invisible strings, producing harmonies inaudible to all but the thin faced little boy. Once she looked up and accidentally met his gaze, her wide blue eyes caught by his direct stare. He could not look away. His stomach felt as though a drawstring were pulling it tight as he looked for a long moment before she crinkled her eyes as her father did and laughed.

  “Little Robert, why are you watching me? Afraid I’ll fly away?”

  Robert was not able to say why he watched her, but he knew he did not like to stop looking at her. He seemed to be memorizing each golden wave of her bobbed blonde hair, each angle of cheekbone, curve of chin, red of lip, and every tone of her voice. She came over to his chair.

  “Walter and Anne and I are coming to take you to church in the morning, Robert. Did you know that?”

  “No. I’ve never been to church,” he said faintly, inhaling the odor of her hair and skin.

  “Didn’t your mother or father ever take you to hear about God?” she asked, sitting down at the table.

  “I don’t know what God is,” Robert said, his mind still out of focus. Now he was watching her breasts move as she breathed, how the button at the neck of her blouse drew tight and eased slightly each time She breathed. It was a warm day, and a fine bloom of perspiration made the woman’s skin glow as if it emitted light of its own.

  Vaire became aware of the little boy’s absorption in her breathing. She flushed slightly, feeling both amused and guilty, as if she had been caught listening to an off-color joke. She laughed again.

  “Come on, Little Robert. Let’s see what Anne and your Aunt Cat are up to out in thestrawberry patch.”

  That evening Aunt Cat and Martin and Robert took baths in the kitchen. The water was heated in the copper boiler on the stove for hours until it was steaming, and then Martin hefted it by its handle with his husking gloves on because even the handles were hot, and poured a bright steaming fall of water into the wash tub set on the big braided rug in the middle of the linoleum. The hot was tempered with cold water from the pump, and Aunt Cat scrubbed Robert top to bottom with a bar of perfectly transparent soap that smelled like crushed apple blossoms.

  “Are you and Martin going to go and hear about God tomorrow?” Robert asked as Aunt Cat scrubbed each foot with a little brush.

  “No, Robert. We don’t go to church often anymore. Your girlfriend Vaire and her husband and Anne will take you to the Baptist church.”

  Robert did not know what “girlfriend” meant in connection with Vaire, and he felt the emphasis on “Baptist” church was unusual, as if there were a preferable church, but this one had to be gone to instead.

  “Do you only go to hear about God once?”

  “No. People go all the time because they like hearing about God, and because it makes them feel good.”

  Robert was not really concerned about God but with the fact that he would be with Vaire. It was to that he looked forward as he fell asleep, feeling clean and warm between the sheets.

  ***

  There had been a noise. I shift to hear it. The house takes form in the night sounds and in the feeling of spaces and blocks that being inside a house always gives me. The sounds are strange, coming from the room where the farmer and his wife sleep. I slip out of bed and down the hall to their door. It is closed, locked to my soft, tentative paw. Sounds of clothing pulling across skin, happy noises from two people, grunts and soft smiling noises that are not laughter, but are the happy animal sounds and squeaks two creatures make being happy together. Some more rubbing sounds, faint as a hand on the hair, on the breast, on the skin of the back. I try to peer through the cracks around the door, through the hole where the iron key is. My spatial sense will not work through the door. The bed is creaking now with rhythmic movement. I sit on my haunches and cock my head in the dark hallway, figuring what the two people must be doing. They are naked in the dark room, rubbing each others’ skin, pressing together parts of their bodies, murmuring words and little sighing sounds to each other. They are rolling? bouncing? on the bed to make it creak and creak. They are breathing as if they are running hard. Their breaths interlock, move apart, interlock, panting, faster. Words: “Oh, Martin!” “Cat, I love you, I love you.” They are saying the words over and over, a magic chant. They stop.

  I wait. Their breathing becomes slower, but they do not move. I begin to feel prickles of irritation along my back. Robert wants to be here. I feel thwarted, sitting in the dark hallway of a house listening to two humans making themselves happy in some way. Robert wants to be here, but I feel irritable, as if I were chained to a post while a strange dog eats my kill. I move along the bannister to the stairway, silent as smoke in the dark hallway. It is a bemusing thing.

  The porcelain nude stand
s in the center of the oak table, the moon flooding her with a liquid light so that she seems soft, although I know from Robert’s having secretly touched her that she is cold and hard. The farm wife has removed the flowers from the bowl the figure stood in and placed her there on the table as if for me to see when I sneak out at night. Robert calls her the wash-lady. He asked Martin one day what the lady was doing standing on one foot and holding that cloth in a great arc from under her raised foot to over her head. Martin had said she was doing her washing, and that made Aunt Cat laugh. The figure is heavily glazed, her breasts mere humps under the gleaming finish, but there is grace in the curve of her waist, the slender legs like those of some womanly centaur, a woman-gazelle perhaps.

  I lean over the table to sniff the figure. Robert wants to touch her, wants to think about the two people upstairs and their happiness sounds in the dark bedroom. It smells strongly of cold solid, like the doorknob, but without the sweaty hand smells that the doorknob always has. The lingering scent of dying flowers, sweet decay, is around the base of the figure. I touch it with the side of my muzzle, gently, caressing the coolness. That is all it is. But Robert is interested in it because it is a woman figure. It holds power for the little boy. I am curious, but I cannot touch it properly. I shift.