by Jerry
“No,” the boy said. “I won’t go.” Blinking, he confronted Ferris, stubborn and rigid as stone.
“Oh, you probably heard a lot of stories about the County Facility. It’s only the warpies, the creepies, that get put to sleep; any nice normal-looking kid’ll be adopted—we’ll cut your hair and fix you up so you look professionally groomed. We want to find you a home. That’s the whole idea. It’s just a few, those who are—you know—ailing mentally or physically that no one wants. Some well-to-do individual will snap you up in a minute; you’ll see. Then you won’t be running around out here alone with no parents to guide you. You’ll have new parents, and listen—they’ll be paying heavy bread for you; hell, they’ll register you. Do you see? It’s more a temporary lodging place where we’re taking you right now, to make you available to prospective new parents.”
“But if nobody adopts me in a month—”
“Hell, you could fall off a cliff here at Big Sur and kill yourself. Don’t worry. The desk at the Facility will contact your blood parents, and most likely they’ll come forth with the Desirability Form (15A) sometime today even. And meanwhile you’ll get a nice ride and meet a lot of new kids. And how often—”
“No,” the boy said.
“This is to inform you,” Ferris said, in a different tone, “that I am a County Official.” He opened his truck door, jumped down, showed his gleaming metal badge to the boy. “I am Peace Officer Ferris and I now order you to enter by the rear of the truck.”
A tall man approached them, walking with wariness; he, like the boy, wore jeans and a T-shirt, but no glasses.
“You the boy’s father?” Ferris said.
The man, hoarsely, said, “Are you taking him to the pound?”
“We consider it a child protection shelter,” Ferris said. “The use of the term ‘pound’ is a radical hippie slur, and distorts—deliberately—the overall picture of what we do.”
Gesturing toward the truck, the man said, “You’ve got kids locked in there in those cages, have you?”
“I’d like to see your ID,” Ferris said. “And I’d like to know if you’ve ever been arrested before.”
“Arrested and found innocent? Or arrested and found guilty?”
“Answer my question, sir,” Ferris said, showing his black flatpack that he used with adults to identify him as a County Peace Officer. “Who are you? Come on, let’s see your ID.”
The man said, “Ed Gantro is my name and I have a record. When I was eighteen, I stole four crates of Coca-Cola from a parked truck.”
“You were apprehended at the scene?”
“No,” the man said. “When I took the empties back to cash in on the refunds. That’s when they seized me. I served six months.”
“Have you a Desirability Card for your boy here?” Ferris asked.
“We couldn’t afford the $90 it cost.”
“Well, now it’ll cost you five hundred. You should have gotten it in the first place. My suggestion is that you consult an attorney.” Ferris moved toward the boy, declaring officially. “I’d like you to join the other juveniles in the rear section of the vehicle.” To the man he said, “Tell him to do as instructed.”
The man hesitated and then said. “Tim, get in the goddamn truck. And we’ll get a lawyer; we’ll get the D card for you. It’s futile to make trouble—technically you’re a stray.”
“ ‘A stray,’ ” the boy said, regarding his father.
Ferris said, “Exactly right. You have thirty days, you know, to raise the—”
“Do you also take cats?” the boy said. “Are there any cats in there? I really like cats; they’re all right.”
“I handle only P.P. cases,” Ferris said. “Such as yourself.” With a key he unlocked the back of the truck. “Try not to relieve yourself while you’re in the truck; it’s hard as hell to get the odor and stains out.”
The boy did not seem to understand the word; he gazed from Ferris to his father in perplexity.
“Just don’t go to the bathroom while you’re in the truck,” his father explained. “They want to keep it sanitary, because that cuts down their maintenance costs.” His voice was savage and grim.
“With stray dogs or cats,” Ferris said, “they just shoot them on sight, or put out poison bait.”
“Oh, yeah, I know that Warfarin,” the boy’s father said. “The animal eats it over a period of a week, and then he bleeds to death internally.”
“With no pain,” Ferris pointed out.
“Isn’t that better than sucking the air from their lungs?” Ed Gantro said. “Suffocating them on a mass basis?”
“Well, with animals the county authorities—”
“I mean the children. Like Tim.” His father stood beside him, and they both looked into the rear of the truck. Two dark shapes could be dimly discerned, crouching as far back as possible, in the starkest form of despair.
“Fleischhacker!” the boy Tim said. “Didn’t you have a D card?”
“Because of energy and fuel shortages,” Ferris was saying, “population must be radically cut. Or in ten years there’ll be no food for anyone. This is one phase of—”
“I had a D card,” Earl Fleischhacker said, “but my folks took it away from me. They didn’t want me any more; so they took it back, and then they called for the abortion truck.” His voice croaked; obviously he had been secretly crying.
“And what’s the difference between a five-month-old fetus and what we have here?” Ferris was saying. “In both cases what you have is an unwanted child. They simply liberalized the laws.”
Tim’s father, staring at him, said, “Do you agree with these laws?”
“Well, it’s really all up to Washington and what they decide will solve our needs in these days of crises,” Ferris said. “I only enforce their edicts. If this law changed—hell. I’d be trucking empty milk cartons for recycling or something and be just as happy.”
“Just as happy? You enjoy your work?”
Ferris said, mechanically. “It gives me the opportunity to move around a lot and to meet people.”
Tim’s father Ed Gantro said, “You are insane. This postpartum abortion scheme and the abortion laws before it where the unborn child had no legal rights—it was removed like a tumor. Look what it’s come to. If an unborn child can be killed without due process, why not a born one? What I see in common in both cases is their helplessness; the organism that is killed had no chance, no ability, to protect itself. You know what? I want you to take me in, too. In back of the truck with the three children.”
“But the President and Congress have declared that when you’re past twelve you have a soul,” Ferris said. “I can’t take you. It wouldn’t be right.”
“I have no soul,” Tim’s father said. “I got to be twelve and nothing happened. Take me along, too. Unless you can find my soul.”
“Jeez,” Ferris said.
“Unless you can show me my soul,” Tim’s father said, “unless you can specifically locate it, then I insist you take me in as no different from these kids.”
Ferris said, “I’ll have to use the radio to get in touch with the County Facility, see what they say.”
“You do that,” Tim’s father said, and laboriously clambered up into the rear of the truck, helping Tim along with him. With the other two boys they waited while Peace Officer Ferris, with all his official identification as to who he was, talked on his radio.
“I have here a Caucasian male, approximately thirty, who insists that he be transported to the County Facility with his infant son,” Ferris was saying into his mike. “He claims to have no soul, which he maintains puts him in the class of subtwelve-year-olds. I don’t have with me or know any test to detect the presence of a soul, at least any I can give out here in the boondocks that’ll later on satisfy a court. I mean, he probably can do algebra and higher math; he seems to possess an intelligent mind. But—”
“Affirmative as to bringing him in,” his superior’s voice on the tw
o-way radio came back to him. “We’ll deal with him here.”
“We’re going to deal with you downtown,” Ferris said to Tim’s father, who, with the three smaller figures, was crouched down in the dark recesses of the rear of the truck. Ferris slammed the door, locked it—an extra precaution, since the boys were already netted by electronic bands—and then started up the truck.
Jack and Jill went up the hill
To fetch a pail of water
Jack fell down
And broke his crown
Somebody’s sure going to get their crown broke, Ferris thought as he drove along the winding road, and it isn’t going to be me.
“I can’t do algebra,” he heard Tim’s father saying to the three boys. “So I can’t have a soul.”
The Fleischhacker boy said, snidely, “I can, but I’m only nine. So what good does it do me?”
“That’s what I’m going to use as my plea at the Facility,” Tim’s father continued. “Even long division was hard for me. I don’t have a soul. I belong with you three little guys.”
Ferris, in a loud voice, called back, “I don’t want you soiling the truck, you understand? It costs us—”
“Don’t tell me,” Tim’s father said, “because I wouldn’t understand. It would be too complex, the proration and accrual and fiscal terms like that.”
I’ve got a weirdo back there, Ferris thought, and was glad he had the pump shotgun mounted within easy reach. “You know the world is running out of everything,” Ferris called back to them, “energy and apple juice and fuel and bread; we’ve got to keep the population down, and the embolisms from the Pill make it impossible—”
“None of us knows those big words,” Tim’s father broke in.
Angrily, and feeling baffled, Ferris said. “Zero population growth; that’s the answer to the energy and food crisis. It’s like—shit, it’s like when they introduced the rabbit in Australia, and it had no natural enemies, and so it multiplied until, like people—”
“I do understand multiplication,” Tim’s father said. “And adding and subtraction. But that’s all.”
Four crazy rabbits flopping across the road, Ferris thought. People pollute the natural environment, he thought. What must this part of the country have been like before man? Well, he thought, with the postpartum abortions taking place in every county in the U.S. of A. we may see that day; we may stand and look once again upon a virgin land.
We, he thought. I guess there won’t be any we. I mean, he thought, giant sentient computers will sweep out the landscape with their slotted video receptors and find it pleasing.
The thought cheered him up.
“Let’s have an abortion!” Cynthia declared excitedly as she entered the house with an armload of synthogroceries. “Wouldn’t that be neat? Doesn’t that turn you on?”
Her husband Ian Best said dryly, “But first you have to get pregnant. So make an appointment with Dr. Guido—that should cost me only fifty or sixty dollars—and have your I.U.D. removed.”
“I think it’s slipping down anyhow. Maybe, if—” Her pert dark shag-haired head tossed in glee. “It probably hasn’t worked properly since last year. So I could be pregnant now.”
Ian said caustically. “You could put an ad in the Free Press; ‘Man wanted to fish out I.U.D. with coathanger.’ ”
“But you see,” Cynthia said, following him as he made his way to the master closet to hang up his status-tie and class-coat, “it’s the in thing now, to have an abortion. Look, what do we have? A kid. We have Walter. Every time someone comes over to visit and sees him, I know they’re wondering. ‘Where did you screw up?’ It’s embarrassing.” She added, “And the kind of abortions they give now, for women in early stages—it only costs one hundred dollars . . . the price of ten gallons of gas! And you can talk about it with practically everybody who drops by for hours.”
Ian turned to face her and said in a level voice. “Do you get to keep the embryo? Bring it home in a bottle or sprayed with special luminous paint so it glows in the dark like a night light?”
“In any color you want!”
“The embryo?”
“No, the bottle. And the color of the fluid. It’s in a preservative solution, so really it’s a lifetime acquisition. It even has a written guarantee, I think.”
Ian folded his arms to keep himself calm: alpha state condition. “Do you know that there are people who would want to have a child? Even an ordinary dumb one? That go to the County Facility week after week looking for a little newborn baby? These ideas—there’s been this world panic about overpopulation. Nine trillion humans stacked like kindling in every block of every city. Okay, if that were going on—” He gestured. “But what we have now is not enough children. Or don’t you watch TV or read the Times?”
“It’s a drag,” Cynthia said. “For instance, today Walter came into the house freaked out because the abortion truck cruised by. It’s a drag taking care of him. You have it easy; you’re at work. But me—”
“You know what I’d like to do to the Gestapo abortion wagon? Have two ex-drinking buddies of mine armed with BARs, one on each side of the road. And when the wagon passes by—”
“It’s a ventilated air-conditioned truck, not a wagon.”
He glared at her and then went to the bar in the kitchen to fix himself a drink. Scotch will do, he decided. Scotch and milk, a good before-“dinner” drink.
As he mixed his drink, his son Walter came in. He had, on his face, an unnatural pallor.
“The ‘bort truck went by today, didn’t it?” Ian said.
“I thought maybe—”
“No way. Even if your mother and I saw a lawyer and had a legal document drawn up, an un-D Form, you’re too old. So relax.”
“I know intellectually,” Walter said, “but—”
“ ‘Do not seek to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee,’ ” Ian quoted (inaccurately). “Listen, Walt, let me lay something on you.” He took a big, long drink of Scotch and milk. “The name of all this is, kill me. Kill them when they’re the size of a fingernail, or a baseball, or later on, if you haven’t done it already, suck the air out of the lungs of a ten-year-old boy and let him die. It’s a certain kind of woman advocating this all. They used to call them ‘castrating females.’ Maybe that was once the right term, except that these women, these hard cold women, didn’t just want to—well, they want to do in the whole boy or man, make all of them dead, not just the part that makes him a man. Do you see?”
“No,” Walter said, but in a dim sense, very frightening, he did.
After another hit of his drink, Ian said, “And we’ve got one living right here, Walter. Here in our very house.”
“What do we have living here?”
“What the Swiss psychiatrists call a kindermorder,” Ian said, deliberately choosing a term he knew his boy wouldn’t understand. “You know what,” he said, “you and I could get onto an Amtrak coach and head north and just keep on going until we reached Vancouver, British Columbia, and we could take a ferry to Vancouver Island and never be seen by anybody down here again.”
“But what about Mom?”
“I would send her a cashier’s check,” Ian said. “Each month. And she would be quite happy with that.”
“It’s cold up there, isn’t it?” Walter said. “I mean, they have hardly any fuel and they wear—”
“About like San Francisco. Why? Are you afraid of wearing a lot of sweaters and sitting close to the fireplace? What did you see today that frightened you a hell of a lot more?”
“Oh, yeah.” He nodded somberly.
“We could live on a little island off Vancouver Island and raise our own food. You can plant stuff up there and it grows. And the truck won’t come there; you’ll never see it again. They have different laws. The women up there are different. There was this one girl I knew when I was up there for a while, a long time ago; she had long black hair and smoked Players cigarettes all the time and never ate anything or
ever stopped talking. Down here we’re seeing a civilization in which the desire by women to destroy their own—” Ian broke off; his wife had walked into the kitchen.
“If you drink any more of that stuff,” she said to him, “you’ll barf it up.”
“Okay,” Ian said irritably. “Okay!”
“And don’t yell,” Cynthia said. “I thought for dinner tonight it’d be nice if you took us out. Dal Rey’s said on TV they have steak for early comers.”
Wrinkling his nose, Walter said, “They have raw oysters.”
“Blue points,” Cynthia said. “In the half shell, on ice. I love them. All right, Ian? Is it decided?”
To his son Walter, Ian said. “A raw blue point oyster looks like nothing more on earth than what the surgeon—” He became silent, then. Cynthia glared at him, and his son was puzzled. “Okay,” he said, “but I get to order steak.”
“Me too,” Walter said.
Finishing his drink, Ian said more quietly, “When was the last time you fixed dinner here in the house? For the three of us?”
“I fixed you that pigs’ ears and rice dish on Friday,” Cynthia said. “Most of which went to waste because it was something new and on the nonmandatory list. Remember, dear?”
Ignoring her, Ian said to his son, “Of course, that type of woman will sometimes, even often, be found up there, too. She has existed throughout time and all cultures. But since Canada has no law permitting postpartum—” He broke off. “It’s the carton of milk talking,” he explained to Cynthia. “They adulterate it these days with sulfur. Pay no attention or sue somebody; the choice is yours.”
Cynthia, eyeing him, said, “Are you running a fantasy number in your head again about splitting?”