The Orphan Page 9

  The boys hardly noticed how dark it was getting until Willie looked up and said, “Geezus, look at that black cloud.”

  Robert looked up at the huge thunderhead, purple-black on the underside, moving silently over them so that the sun had been blocked out and now the whole sky was being overspread with the black-purple pall. The wind had stopped so that every leaf and grass blade held perfectly still as if the transparent summer air had quietly and completely solidified into glass. Robert felt the stillness in his throat and for a moment he held his breath. There would be a big storm, and he felt goosepimples at the thought, since he had only recently begun to appreciate the awesomeness of nature and liked to watch the lightning and be scared by the thunder. Far off came the deep, husky rumble of the approaching storm.

  “It’s going to be a big rain, isn’t it?” said Robert.

  “Hey, you little farts get on in the house,” Mr. Duchamps called from the back porch. “Goin’ to rain like a cow pissin’ on a flat rock here pretty quick.”

  Willie and Robert dawdled until the first huge drops came splatting down like little bombs, smacking into the sand like birdshot. The boys squealed and ducked as if rocks were being thrown at them. Then the wind hit, bending the trees over as if they had all been suddenly knocked to their knees, and the rain crashed down like a waterfall. They were both screaming, giggling wet before they could get across the back yard.

  “Getcher asses in here,” Mr. Duchamps hollered from the porch.

  They made it to the porch wetter than if they had both been dumped into the river, and Mr. Duchamps agreed they couldn’t get any wetter and let them play in the rain like a couple of skinny little satyrs, their clothes and hair plastered to them so they looked like stick figures prancing in the gray sheets of rain. Then it began to get cold all of a sudden and they ran for the house. It was like ice suddenly, and the hot air trapped inside the house was turning to steam as it flowed outward into the cooling rain. The ground, the sidewalks, the streets, automobiles, everything steamed as if the world were smoldering as the rain turned cold and hit the overheated August land. The rain began to slack back, and as yet there had not been much lightning or thunder, but now it began with a close hit: CRACK-BAMMM! and continued in a cannonade. The lightning flashed like a battery of 105’s on the Duchamp’s roof firing at will, the thundercrashes overlapping so you could, not tell which flash went with which boom. It was deafening. The boys kept pretending to talk to each other, working their mouths in imitation speech while the barrage of sound blocked out everything. The rain and wind increased so that they fell silent, looking out across the humped tar street swept again and again by heavy sheets of rain. Mr. Duchamps continued to drink his breakfast beer and gaze out placidly at the storm. As the rain slacked again, and the thunder began to recede, the crashes further apart, Robert drew in a deep breath as if he had been living on sips of air for the past few minutes. The storm had been exciting, and he was sorry it was about over. The steam was disappearing as the land grew cooler, and it seemed to be getting lighter outside. At that point the paper boy rode by, tossing the afternoon paper into the grass beside the walk. Mr. Duchamps cursed and drained the can of beer.

  “Little shit,” he said. “Throw it in the wet grass.” He opened the screen and clumped heavily down off the front porch and into the wet front yard. And it was as if the rain gods had been waiting for Bart Duchamps to get out from under his roof, waiting for his lumpy bald head and heavy round shoulders to appear in his front yard, flanked by protecting elm trees but open to the sky directly overhead, waiting and being deceptive about the storm being over. Mr. Duchamps had just bent over with great effort to pick up the folded paper from the wet grass when a great booming rattling crashing sound began so suddenly that both boys jumped as if they had been burned. It was not thunder, and for a second they could not believe ears or eyes, as what appeared to be baseballs came flying down through the air, hitting the house, smashing into the tops of cars parked at the curb, splitting off branches from the trees, making a mad dance of bouncing, splitting ice balls in the street and on the sidewalks, driving dogs under porches, people screaming into any shelter, booming on roofs, and on the other side of town destroying every pane of glass in three long greenhouses and every plant inside of them.

  Out in the mad, bouncing, careening flurry of ice chunks, Mr. Duchamps lay full length, full width in his front yard, the prey of the worst hail storm in the history of that area since there had been a history. The first ice ball had been right over the plate, hitting Mr. Duchamps directly on the crown of his head, knocking him senseless and flat on top of the paper he had gone out to pick up. The rest of the brief flurry of huge hail had pummeled his body and head, even ankles, as he would find out when he awoke with bruises everywhere, but did no more damage than that first pitch.

  When they had recovered their wits, the boys found the hailstorm over, the ground covered with unseasonable ice that was even now melting from record size to less than golf ball dimensions. Willie and Robert ran into the yard to the prone Duchamps who had a bloody laceration on the top of his head and several lesser scratches visible on his baldness.

  “Dad! Dad!” Willie screamed, as if his father were the best parent in the world.

  The skinny older boy knelt by his father just as the man regained consciousness and got to hands and knees. The heavy man shook his head, shaking blood on Willie’s face as the boy tried to help his father to his feet.

  “Oh, God,” the elder Duchamps said, rolling to a sitting position and feeling around on his head tenderly. “What the hell?” He looked up at the sky, down at the scatter of melting hail amid which he sat like an old sea lion on a deserted rocky beach.

  “Dad, are you okay?” Willie said, wiping his father’s blood from his face.

  “What d’ya think? Hell yes,” said Duchamps, heaving himself up to his feet. “Get off yer knees, you dumb shit.”

  Willie got up, not yet restored to his usual sanity. “I saw you get clonked and I thought you was dead,” he said, about to cry.

  Robert was standing a few feet behind Willie, but when Mr. Duchamps slapped Willie in the face, Robert felt as if the huge hand had hit his own face. The smacking sound carried out into the street, as an auto accident is heard by a whole block of houses. Willie went down in the melting hail, put his arms over his head and curled up his body. He had found reality again very quickly.

  Duchamps staggered back into the house, muttering about the boy wishing he was dead, and that he would teach his son better. Across the street a woman standing behind a porch trellis screamed at the departing figure, “Duchamps, God will punish you, you rotten terrible thing,” and she would have gone on if an arm had not emerged from her front door and drawn her back to silence.

  Robert stood beside Willie’s curled up form until it uncurled and got to its feet. The large ruddy mark of the father’s hand covered the left cheek giving Willie a birthmarked appearance. He squinted up his left eye in pain and then smeared the tears away with a quick wipe.

  “I’ll meet you at the hideout if you bring Anne,” Willie said out of his squinted up face. “And if you don’t bring her, you’re not part of the gang anymore.”

  “Aw, Willie,” Robert began. But he stopped as Willie turned to walk around to the back of his house. He felt now the whole thing was broken, but he didn’t know. Maybe it would be all right. He would talk Anne into doing it, and she would like the game, and Willie would have a good time, and it would all be right again. He turned and ran out of the yard, sliding in the almost melted hail, and ran for home.

  But it wasn’t all right. Anne had been reluctant, but she liked Robert more than even he supposed, and she went with him, marveling at the old storm drain that was still running knee deep that afternoon with the runoff from the cloudburst. They walked barefooted into the darkness of the drain, listening to the hollow splashing of little waterfalls back in the blackness where the drain tiles and storm sewers from all over town
emptied into the main tunnel. Anne was frightened and held to Robert’s shirt with both hands, making it twice as hard to get to the cave, but also giving the little boy his first taste of being a leader and protector. He liked it. When they arrived at the broken out place, they saw candles burning. Willie had got there before them and had set up four candles, one at each corner of the little cave. Robert thought he had never seen it look so cosy and secret, although the storm had raised all sorts of decay and old rotting things from the drains, and the smell in the tunnel was rank enough to turn an adult stomach.

  “Here it is. See, Willie’s got candles,” Robert said, helping Anne with a boost to climb up over the broken places into the cave.

  Willie looked sourly at both of the smaller children, his face dark purple under the left eye. “You can’t tell anybody about our hideout,” he said harshly to Anne, “or a terrible thing will happen to you.”

  Anne looked at the larger boy with fearful eyes, but she was not going to be cowed. “I promised Robert I wouldn’t tell as long as you act nice.”

  “See,” Robert said excitedly, “this is our gang hideout, and we make raids and steal from the rich so we can have it in our cave.” And he went on telling how they would be outlaws like on the radio until Willie stopped him.

  “Time for the initiating,” he said.

  But this time it was not the same. They took off their clothes and examined Anne much as they had Robert, but Robert felt that Willie was being more rough than he had to, and a couple of times he pinched instead of tickling so so that Anne got tears in her eyes, but she held her lips tight and did not say anything. Then she got to laughing, and Robert thought it would be all right again. But when he wanted to sandwich game and dance as they had before, Willie seemed reluctant. He wanted to lie down first. Finally Robert got his way, and they sandwiched and danced, hugging each other and laughing and slapping and tickling until one very hard slap caught Robert squarely in the nose and made stars go off in his eyes. He felt gone for a moment and sat down on the floor. Willie, who had hit him, stepped back from the game, and Anne turned to look at him in horror.

  “Oh, Robert,” she said. “You’re bleeding a lot.”

  Robert put his hand to his stinging nose and drew it away with a large streak of blood. He looked at it in disbelief. It felt bad, but it didn’t feel that bad. It looked as if in a few minutes he would run out of blood if it kept coming out like that. Willie handed him a rag from the floor and told him to sit down a minute while they finished the game. Robert sat and watched, holding the dirty bit of blanket over his nose and snuffing up great quantities of blood which he partly spat out, partly swallowed.

  Anne was more concerned with Robert than she was with finishing the game, but Willie was holding on to her tightly and doing something she didn’t like. He panted a lot and kept doing it, holding her down while she wiggled, and Robert was just going to say, “Don’t,” when Anne screamed as if she had been stabbed. Willie drew back quickly and got his clothes in his hand.

  “You’re not part of the gang, you little bitch,” he snarled, and stepping into his pants, he stuffed his shirt in his back pocket and leaped out of the cave into the drain water.

  Anne was crying and holding her legs together. Robert waited until she stopped to look at herself, between her legs, and he looked too.

  “Hey, Anne,” Robert said in awe. “You’re bleeding too.”

  Anne looked at herself and then began to gather up her clothes. She stopped crying, but her lips were thin with pain, and her face was white. Robert’s nose had stopped bleeding but two large clots and smears made his face look much worse than it was. Anne got her clothes on, and her white pants showed a blood mark when they looked later, but then it stopped bleeding before they got home.

  They were walking down the alley toward their backyard when Robert thought about the “swearing” they had done.

  “I don’t like Willie anymore,” Robert said. “And he hurt both of us, so I don’t think the swearing counts now.”

  “I’m not going to tell,” Anne said.

  “It’s all right,” Robert said as they paused at the gate. “But I’m sorry anyway, and if you want to tell, it’s all right.”

  Robert felt downcast, and his nose hurt, and he looked at Anne, wondering if between her legs felt like his nose. He felt at that moment that he wanted to be as big as Willie because he wanted to hit Willie, hard.

  Perhaps if it had been a different night that Mr. Sangrom had come with Aunt Cat to visit, Vaire would have noticed the bloody little white pants at once. As it was, the family had been engaged in a tight discussion that had everyone on edge, Walter having come home from work early on that Friday, Vaire and her mother looking at each other from distances they had not known before, and the suave, undertakerish Mr. Sangrom in the midst of it all with his fixed, thin smile and his narrow dark eyes and the black smooth hair that Robert thought looked like a polished car fender. The situation was such that Anne and Robert were told to go upstairs immediately and get washed and dressed in clean clothes. Robert’s nose was given a perfunctory look by Walter who pronounced it nothing more than a boyish accident, after which he gave it a tweak that made Robert wince.

  Having dinner with a spiritualistic medium, as Mr. Sangrom called himself, was not Walter’s idea of an enjoyable evening. The man seemed to have nothing to his face but that damnable smile, and he obviously had insinuated himself into Mrs. Nordmeyer’s good opinion by some sort of chicanery. Such things always made Walter clench his teeth, for he could not abide people who tried to do business with spirits and ghosts and all that jiggery-pokery. Mr. Sangrom seemed quite comfortable, but his eyes would move often to fix on Little Robert who sat across the table and ate what he could with his nose hurting every time he chewed. He noticed the adults seemed more than usually interested in him that night. Aunt Cat and the stranger especially looked at him when they didn’t think he saw them. It began to make him uncomfortable so that before the others were finished, he asked to be excused. Walter excused him and said almost as it it didn’t really matter, “Stay around after supper, kids.”

  Vaire served coffee after the children had gone upstairs to play in Anne’s room, and it seemed as if they had been waiting for the coffee to begin the real business of the evening.

  “You have to know, Mr. Sangrom,” said Walter stiffly, “that I don’t believe in your work, and I don’t particularly like what you are proposing to do with the child.”

  “Mr. Woodson, if everyone believed in what I do,” Mr. Sangrom said sadly, “this world would be a paradise.” And he dropped his gaze to his coffee. “A paradise,” he repeated in a lower tone.

  “Did you feel anything during supper?” Aunt Cat said.

  “It is difficult with so many contradictory vibrations at the same table,” the medium said in a low voice. “Butt I detected certain emanations, and once I saw a strange glow in the little boy’s aura that was not a natural one. Yes, Mrs. N., I think I can say that this will be a fruitful experiment.”

  Walter turned away in disgust, lifting his eyebrows at his wife.

  “Mr. Sangrom,” Vaire began in a nervous voice, “just what is it you are planning to do in your experiment? We really can’t allow the little boy to be frightened to death because of some, well …” She looked at her mother in embarrassment.

  “Vaire, you can’t insult me this evening,” Mrs. Nordmeyer said. “Tonight we’re going to see the proof of what I know is true.” Her long, homely face was thinner than her daughter had ever seen it, and her lips did not smile at all, although they turned up at the corners. It was as if her mother had renounced the living, Vaire thought, feeling a chill in the hot, humid August twilight.

  “There is no danger to the child,” Mr. Sangrom said with his fixed smile. “I am only proposing that Mrs. N. and I be allowed to ask him a few questions about the terrible incident that culminated in Mr. Nordmeyer’s murder.”

  “I think Walter and I should be h
ere,” Vaire began.

  “Of course, Mrs. Woodson,” said Mr. Sangrom. “Your presence is essential. After all, it is your skepticism we are seeking to allay.”

  Vaire felt relieved, but thought that if he got to calling her Mrs. W., she would throw a coffee cup at him. She looked at Walter who was being stern and realistic and thought that at least none of this had touched his calm strength, but then he had not seen … anything. And she felt her reserves of strength and love for Little Robert melting away.

  It was around eight, the children’s bedtime, when Mr. Sangrom stood up and announced that he was ready to begin the questioning. After putting Anne to bed hastily, Vaire brought Robert downstairs in his nightshirt and asked him to sit at the table with Aunt Cat and Mr. Sangrom. Robert said hello to Aunt Cat and looked at the thin dark haired man with the smile printed on his face who got up as he entered and moved to the other side of the table so that he faced the boy directly.

  “If you will turn off the overhead lights, Mr. Woodson,” Sangrom said softly, watching Robert as if he might disappear. “We will have just the one light, that one on the sideboard, if you please,” he said, indicating an ornamental lamp behind him so that from Robert’s point of view the only light in the room was behind Mr. Sangrom’s head.

  “Now, young man,” the dark man said in a thin but kindly voice, “you mustn’t be afraid, for we are only going to ask some questions about the day the bad men came to your house.”

  Robert sat on top of the big medical encyclopedia which made him feel tall, his eyes widening in the dimness of the dining room. Yes, he could bring back very clearly that day in the farm dining room when he had sat at the table and waited while the men were mean to the family, and waited for what he was not sure, but waiting all the same. He looked across at the face of the black haired man whose smile did not change and whose upper lip remained stiff when he talked. This man seemed dangerous too, but not in the same way, so that the scene began to seem mysterious, interesting, like an adventure. Robert almost smiled as he thought that, and the familiar thrill of goosepimples raised up on his skin. No one could hurt him with Vaire and Aunt Cat and Walter there, so it was going to be all right.