The Orphan Read online

  Willie had spotted Robert immediately as a prime mark, as he was almost wholly innocent, small for his age, pliable and gullible enough to believe the wildest tale Willie could think up. The fact was, Robert was intensely curious about Willie, for he had had no experience of such gratuitous meanness and found it both exciting and repulsive. After a chat over the back fence one morning, Robert managed to slip away from Anne and walked down the alley with Willie and Shirley to the river bank where the old storm drain emptied into the channel. Some ways back in the storm drain, which was over six feet square at the opening, they had a secret hideout. A large chunk of masonry had fallen out of the wall forming a cave that had obviously been used by tramps now and then. Willie had found a blanket for the floor and some candles, and he and Shirley had set up housekeeping in the musty but properly secret hideway. As for Robert, he found the situation so different, dirty, and forbidden that he instantly adopted Willie as his leader.

  The three of them sat in the dark burrow off the storm drain eating an orange Willie had stolen from Capp’s fruit stand. Robert could have brought some from the Woodsons’, but it was more like bandits this way.

  “Don’t eat the white part,” Shirley. said in her squeaky voice. “G’ma says it’ll give you worms.”

  “That’s crap, Shirley.” Willie said, tearing off a big piece of the white and eating it. “It’s raw p’taters that gives you worms. Any dummy knows that.” He split off a section and handed it to Robert who sat on the concrete edge of the cave opening. “Here, Robert, you’re part of our gang now.”

  “Thank you,” Robert said, taking the orange slice. “It’s a great cave you got here. We can play robbers and nobody can ever find us.”

  “We do more than playin’ robbers, don’t we, Shirley?” Willie said, finishing the orange and rubbing his mouth on his sleeve. Shirley giggled and rolled her little dark eyes up so the whites showed, nodding her head so her black hair that looked like it needed washing flopped over her forehead. Robert hadn’t the slightest idea what they were talking about.

  “Do you want to be part of our gang and never tell anybody, not even your dad and ma, where the hideout is and what we do?” Willie said, holding Robert by his shoulders and looking into his eyes.

  Robert looked back into the greenish dark eyes in Willie’s narrow face and nodded his head. “You got to swear on the bones of your ancestors,” Willie said, digging his fingers into Robert’s shoulders so that it hurt.

  “Ow. I swear, I mean how do you swear?”

  “You just did. You just say, ‘I swear.’”

  “I swear. And you’re hurting me, Willie.”

  “Okay. It’s just a little hurt so you’ll remember that anybody in the gang who tells any of our secrets get hurt real bad.”

  “I won’t tell.”

  “Okay. Now you’re part of the gang. But we got to do the initiating stuff to make you a member.” He began unbuttoning Robert’s shirt.

  “Do you have to take your clothes off?” Robert asked.

  “Yeah, we got to do a doctor’s examination to make sure you’re okay.”

  Willie helped Robert take off his shirt, pants, and underpants. They were always barefoot, so this left Robert naked, sitting on the blanket in the cave.

  “Now lie down here so we can examine you,” Willie said.

  Robert lay down on the blanket and Shirley squatted down to watch as Willie began to poke various parts of Robert’s body with his forefinger. Robert was interested, ticklish, and excited by this process, and it brought me to awareness also as his excitement mounted. Willie tickled and rubbed, talking all the time in a doctorish way as if he were checking things out. After a bit, Shirley, who was being his nurse, joined in by taking his pulse and looking in Robert’s mouth so she could count his teeth.

  “Now that you’re all examined,” Willie said, standing up and shucking off his clothes, “we’ll do the sandwich game.”

  Shirley also undressed and Willie directed them so that he and Shirley faced each other and Robert stood behind Shirley facing her back. Then they all clutched each other and began a silly, laughing little dance, hugging each other and jumping up and down and squealing. After a bit they did it lying on the blanket, rolling over each other and tickling and slapping each other with loud smacks. They kept it up until all three were red-faced and panting and hardly able to move. All lay on the blanket in the now sweltering cave, breathing hard and looking at the scratches they had picked up in the struggle. Robert thought he had never done anything that was so much fun, and he lay on the blanket looking up at the clay ceiling blackened with the smoke of many candles and thought it was the best time ever in his life, he felt so good and relaxed, like a little pond of water that has come through a giant storm with white caps and whirlpools and now was relaxing out into little ripples that spread slowly into the evening surface until it was all smooth again and calm. I had been aware of the process, since Robert’s excitement brought me to the surface for a time, and although I enjoyed the sensations, the game seemed peculiarly pointless, so I thought no more about it.

  Robert did indeed feel like one of the gang now, but the good times in the cave took their place in his daily life as another new thing to do, another bit of wonder to be explored along with hikes with Willie to the bluff to drop stones on the tops of cars as they sped by beneath, or chasing the farmer’s cows with Willie and Shirley and laughing at their stampeding with tails in the air and udders banging between their hind legs, or having an intricate game of hop-scotch with Anne and Shirley on the walk in front of the house. But the cave and the gang and the sandwich game did become something of a shadow side in Robert’s life, as he began to realize that the reason he had not told Anne about it was that she was closer to the adult world, that she was intimate with her mother and father, and that the cave and the gang and their games were not things you told adults about, since they would probably find it dangerous and in some adult way would make it impossible. It formed a bond between the three that seemed for a time unbreakable and unshareable. Willie would tell them about making babies sometimes out of his wealth of knowledge gained from being with his father nights in the bar.

  “You have to get some white pee called chissom from a man and some from a woman,” he said one time as they lay in the dark cave. “And you take and put it in a corn shuck so it mixes together, and then you wrap up the shuck and put it in a dark place, like under the porch, and after a long time a baby grows out of it.”

  “Out of the corn shuck?” Robert asked, his eyes wide.

  “Yep.”

  This never failed to make Shirley vaguely angry, since she thought there was more to it than that. She had seen her aunt with a big stomach before her little cousin was born, but she would not dispute with Willie. He was bigger and meaner than she was, and anyway, she didn’t really care at the moment because the faintness in her stomach was hurting her again.

  Robert, on the other hand, spent several times at the toilet in the Woodson house watching his urine to see if it was white. He thought it would be interesting to have a baby if he could catch some of his white pee in a corn shuck sometime. But here again, he was not interested enough to pursue the game very far. It was intriguing at the moment, but there were so many other things to do and think about that he could not often be bothered trying to make a baby.

  The gang would probably have continued their fun through the end of summer if an accident of Shirley’s health had not removed her from the gang. Robert learned one morning at breakfast that the little Stillings girl had been taken to the hospital and that they thought she had a liver condition. Robert did not grasp the significance of this until several days had passed and he and Willie had not visited the hideout. To his questions, Willie was vicious, cuffing him hard on the ear and calling him “queer” for suggesting they go and do the sandwich game by themselves. Robert was more emotionally wounded than physically, for he was used to Willie’s rages and umnotivated blows.

&nb
sp; “But I like to do it, Willie,” Robert said, his ear burning red.

  “We can’t do it without a girl, stupid.”

  Robert thought about that and slipped away to look for Anne. There was more than one girl in the world, he was thinking, and it would be twice as much fun with Anne because she was nicer than Shirley, and he liked her more. He ran about the neighborhood until he found her riding her tricycle in front of the house. Breathlessly he told her that he knew a game that was more fun than anything they ever did, and he would show her how to play it, and Willie would too if she wanted him to play. Anne said she hated Willie because he was mean, but she would play a game with Robert if it didn’t get her dress dirty. He said it certainly would not, but didn’t mention the fact that they would have to take their clothes off, since that detail didn’t seem important. They decided to do the game in the garage with the doors shut. Robert did his best to show Anne how the game went, but it was not the same. The garage was not close and secret as the cave was, the ceiling was too high, so they seemed to be at the bottom of a well instead of inside a cozy place, and he wanted to do it, but it didn’t feel right. Anne did not obiect to taking her clothes off, but she thought the rest of it was kind of silly. She liked the tickling and running around the garage naked, but then she wanted to put her clothes back on and go in for lunch. Robert decided it was not the right place to play the game and that he would have to take her to the cave hideout and make her a part of the gang.

  ***

  August waned in heat. The nights were sultry after the usual late afternoon thunderstorms, and then would come the baking afternoons that broke records all over the midwest. In the hot nights I sulk about, seldom hunting, although the game is torpid with heat and easy to catch, my mind seemingly preoccupied with internal processes, uncomfortable longings that I cannot identify and have never felt before. I spend some nights idiotically lying full length in the river shallows, content just to lie and let the water run over my body, smoothing my pelt into fine bronze runnels of fur in the moonlight. One night I actually catch fish that way, lying in the shallows of the river with my ears submerged listening for the delicate swish of fins as they search the bottom for food. I grab three that night, two of them only carp, but good enough for a few choice bites.

  This night, waiting for the Woodsons to retire so I can slip out again, I hear something of that catastrophic morning a month and a half ago and perk up my hearing.

  “They sentenced that Prokoff fellow to thirty years,” Walter says around the stem of his pipe.

  “Just a boy,” Vaire says, sounding preoccupied.

  “That guy Rustum will never walk again, it says. He’s going to have to wear a brace, like the President,” Walter says and chuckles.

  There is no answer from Vaire, so he goes on. “The old man died last week, it says, and that big fellow, Hamner, they found out he had a family right near here, over in Grand Valley somewhere, wife and four kids.”

  “Walter.” Vaire sounds as if she is about to cry.

  “What? Oh, I’m sorry, dear.” Walter has taken the pipe out and now sounds more normal. “That’s stupid of me. I don’t know what I was thinking of. Not thinking at all, I guess.”

  “Oh it’s not that. It’s Mother.”

  “Drinking?”

  “Yes, that too. But mostly that strange person she’s been seeing in Grand Rapids. I’m afraid she’s going to get cheated some way or lose the farm or something. There are so many cheats and swindlers around. You read about them every day, that one in Chicago that took everybody’s money.”

  “Sam Insull?”

  “Yes, like him.”

  “What sort of person? First I’d heard about her consulting someone.” Walter sounded stiff. “I had always thought if she needed advice, I could help. After all, in my line of business I …”

  “It’s not that kind of person, Walter. It’s, well, he’s, he seems to be some kind of …”

  “Oh what, for heaven’s sake, Vaire?” Walter sounded irritated.

  “A medium.”

  “A what? A medium? A medium what?” Now he was laughing.

  “It’s not a joke.” Vaire’s voice had a dangerous edge to it.

  “Now dear, I’m not making a joke, but what do you mean?”

  I “A medium! A spiritual medium. A person who talks with dead people.”

  “Oh no.”

  “Well she’s not crazy. She loved Dad very much, and it was all so, so unexpected and useless and wrong, and she’s just gone off the deep end for awhile, but she’s not crazy, and Walter, I won’t have you thinking she is. She’s my mother and she’s the finest woman in the world, and …” Vaire is crying now and Walter has rustled his paper, put it down beside his chair. He is making scraping noises, his pipe.

  “I didn’t say she was crazy, dear. I suspect she will get cheated, since there are no such things as spirits that people can contact, and all that sort of thing. Of course it makes her feel better and helps ease the transition.”

  “Walter!” Vaire is standing up. I can tell by the closeness of her voice. “Damn it, Walter! Damn it! Damn it! Damn it!”

  “Vaire! What in the world?” Now he is standing.

  “Transition to what? She’s not transitioning to anything! Her life is broken up, Walter, can’t you understand how terribly this has changed her?”

  “Now wait a minute,” Walter begins.

  “No I won’t.” Vaire is moving back and forth below me. “All I want to know is, will you help me get her away from a person I think is going to cheat her? That’s all I want to know.” I have not heard Vaire who is usually so calm and sweet talk so violently before. Walter is obviously shocked. Pause.

  “Yes, of course I will, sweetheart. Of course I will.”

  There is silence below me as they embrace. Then they both sit down again.

  “She’s going to a medium to get in touch with your father?”

  “Oh I don’t know, really. She goes to see him a couple of times a week and tells me she feels so much better afterwards and that he’s going to show everything in its true reality. I don’t know what she means by that, but I’m afraid for Little Robert.”

  Listening to this, I wonder what a medium can be, what it can do.

  “For Robert?” Walter has apparently forgotten the episode of a couple of weeks ago when his mother-in-law was drunk and accused the boy of being a demon. I begin to think about that.

  “Walter, I do want to help mother, but I don’t know how to handle it. What can we do?”

  Walter’s voice takes on an authoritative edge. “Well, we need to meet this person, to make some estimate of his character and his motive before we try to take any action. Then perhaps even legal action would be in order.”

  The rest of the conversation does not interest me, and I content myself later that night with a long cool swim across the river to tip over a late fisherman in the muddy shallows. I have not been much for tricks up to this time, but I feel this itchiness inside that seems to have no outlet, and it makes me do strange things. I find myself chuckling, lying on my back in the water, dark and invisible as an otter in midstream, listening to the curses and splashings of the fisherman as he wades ashore towing his boat. But then it may have been simple revenge, since the fisherman was running a nightline that I ran afoul of some time back, catching one of the hooks in my right hind foot. I do feel good watching and listening to him weltering in the dark water. The last thing I think before shifting back up in Robert’s bedroom is that it is the boy’s affair, not mine, and that distinction seems a new one also.

  Trading Anne for Shirley turned out to be more complicated than Robert had thought it would be. Anne liked playing doctor with him in the garage, but it never got to be as much fun as the three gang members playing sandwich in the hideout, and Robert wanted that again. The trouble was that Anne hated Willie, and Willie was forbidden to come into the Woodsons’ yard. Willie would not go to the hideout without Shirley, and he became
increasingly vicious when she did not return from the hospital by the end of the week. Robert felt there must be some way to convince Anne that gang life was fun, that Willie was really an exciting person, and that it was worthwhile to have some secrets from one’s family, since Anne was notorious even among other tattle-tales for telling her mother everything that happened. Finally it happened the day of the big hail.

  Robert, in the relative security of his male sex, was allowed to play with Willie, even though Anne was not. He was at Willie’s house right after lunch time playing with Willie in his large unkempt sandbox in the back yard, the house being too sweltering hot to enter, although Willie’s father was sprawled in there somewhere asleep. He worked nights and slept most of the day until mid afternoon. Robert kept bringing up the subject:

  “Why can’t Anne be one of the gang?”

  “She’s a tattle, that’s why.”

  “She won’t if we swear her not to, I bet.”

  “She tells her ma everything.”

  “I bet she won’t this time because she does things for me, and I’ll ask her not to.”

  Willie thought about it for a moment. Apparently Shirley was in the hospital for a long stay, and the hideout was going to waste. School would be starting in two weeks. Two weeks! “Well, I don’t know. She don’t like me, and I don’t like her neither.”