“What you goan do about it?”
This was a question. Bill was good at certain subjects but something told him this wasn’t one of them. He glanced at the girl, but he found in her glistening eyes the age-old look of one who says: “In a man-managed world I’ve got to be told where I am being led before I agree to go there or not.” Bill sat down beside the bed and descended to conversation which, marred by pauses, stammers and total stops would have been reported as follows by an adequate court stenographer.
“What do you like?”
“Me?”
Pause while boy looks over doctor.
“What do you like?” the doctor asked again.
“I like books,” says the little boy in an unconvinced voice.
“I like books too.”
“If you don’t mind,” the girl interrupted as she saw the beginning of the tranquil and parental flow, “I’ll go about some things I must do.”
Bill felt that the door behind her shut rather quickly. He wished now that he had gone away when he discovered that Mrs. Brickster was out—he was no psychiatrist, nor was he a moralist—it was as a scientist that he considered himself. He had enough confidence to have dealt sensibly with a sick woman in an emergency—but with a glance at the patient some forgotten revulsion for boys of thirteen arose upon his head like the crest of a rooster and he thought angrily: and I’m not a detective either.
But he kept his temper and offered to the young man in the purest syrup:
“What games do you like?”
“Oh, all right.”
“No, but which ones?”
“Gangster’s the only game I like.”
“Well, that’s fun.”
Like Diamond Dick Bill thought, but something prompted him to ask:
“Who do you like to win—the gangster or the police?”
The boy looked at him scornfully:
“Mobsmen, naturally. You half-witted?”
“Don’t get rude again!”
“What you goan do about it.”
“I’m going to—”
Another dream of his childhood recurred to Bill; this was just like being a pirate anyhow . . .
“What books do you read?” he kept the same control of his face as though he were going over the boy’s body with a stethoscope.
“I don’t know, now.”
“Do you see pictures?” He saw the boy’s face light as if he saw a way out, “Gangster pictures?”
“They don’t allow me much.” But the new tone was too smug to be convincing, “They don’t allow us and the other rich boys to go to anything except comedies and kidnapping and things like that. The comedies are the things I like.”
“Who? Chaplin?”
“Who?”
“Charlie Chaplin.”
Obviously the words failed to record.
“No, the—you know, the comedies.”
“Who do you like?” Bill asked.
“Oh—” The boy considered, “Well, I like Garbo and Dietrich and Constance Bennett.”
“Their things are comedies?”
“They’re the funniest ones.”
“Funniest what?”
“Funniest comedies.”
“Why?”
“Oh, they try to do this passionate stuff all the time.”
“This what?”
“Oh, this looking around.”
“Like what?”
“Oh, you know. This uhm—like on Christmas.”
Bill started to delve into that but he remembered the still unsolved matter of the igloo and thought better of it. It seemed more prudent to return to books.
“What books have you got?” he asked.
The boy looked at him attentively.
“Hey, you’re not a heel, are you?”
Bill considered quickly whether he was or wasn’t a heel.
“No,” he conceded himself.
“Well—” The boy rose in bed, “I got two kina kinds. I got that one about the four girls named Meg who fall down the rabbit hole and that—and I got a lot like that.” He hesitated. “And I got some books of my own.”
“Can I see them?”
The boy considered.
“What you goan do about it?”
For the third time Bill considered, and finally answered:
“Nothing.”
“Lift up the end of the mattress then.”
Bill lifted. Afterwards he debated with himself whether he counted ten or twenty. The ones he remembered were: The Facts of Love; War and Peace, Volume I; Prize Short Stories of 1926; Psychiatry, its Permutations in Eighty Years; Fifty Popular Secret Stories of the World’s Fair of 1876.
The boy’s voice cut soft and sharp over Bill’s meditation upon the cache—“You a heel maybe then. You’ve seen them. What you goan do about it?”
“Take out your tonsils probably,” said Bill; he ducked out of the way as the mattress slammed down, the event being obviously prompted by approaching footsteps.
“It’s all all right with me, old boy,” Bill said, “I haven’t—”
“Old stuff—”
He stopped at the appearance of his sister, to whom he was unused and who vaguely frightened him.
“Mother and father are home,” she announced to Bill, “you want to see them downstairs?”
“You’d make a good doctor’s assistant,” he said.
“I lived with a doctor for three months.”
Bill breathed deeply, as she continued, “His wife became very ill. You know not gravement but chronicquement. I like doctors.”
The little boy was concentrated upon whether or not he had been betrayed as Bill followed her out of the room, looking backward and beginning two trial sentences; but on a last glance at the boy’s incorrigible expression he finished with: “I won’t give you away but I’d like to talk to you some more,” adding at the door: “At least I won’t tell any of your friends that you talked to me confidentially.”
He had done his best but he had never felt clumsier than in the minute of following Miss Mason through the long hall and down the stairs. At their ending he bucked up for he was projected into the scene he had imagined.
An obviously silly, but not quite persecutable, woman stood at the entrance to the main room, for which no adequate name has yet been found in the Republic; she stood there waving him breezily into a study; there they displaced a husband who was being signalled to go away by that hand which was not occupied at the moment in encouraging Bill forward.
“I knew who you were,” said Mrs. Brickster, “I recognized you from Dr. Hines’ prescriptions. He describes everything so well. This movie tonight, he could have described it as well as a reviewer.” He relaxed as he refused her proffered highball and said in a professional voice:
“Now, Mrs. Brickster, what seems to be the trouble?”
She began:
“Of course the thing commenced with a twitching . . .”
And she ended two hours later with:
“. . . probably you’re right, it was just the strain of my daughter coming home.”
She had worn out the false force of her nervous fatigue suddenly and she turned against him.
“And as you’re leaving, Doctor, could I beg you to remind Dr. Hines that when it’s him I want it’s him I want.” The telephone rang and, still talking, she picked it up. “—in future I expect the principal not the assistant—yes, he’s here . . . at 6632 Beaming Avenue . . . very personal and urgent and mention Ellis S. to him.” She pronounced the words as individual discoveries of villainy and said as she rang up: “I hope you discover no more trouble there, Doctor, than you have found here.”
And as the door closed in back of him a few minutes later Bill wondered indeed if he was now to confront difficulties more sinister than those he had left behind.
He rested a minute on the verandah—resting his eyes on a big honeysuckle that cut across a low sickle moon—then as he started down the steps his abstracted glance fell upon
a trailer from it sleeping in the moonlight.
She was the girl from foreign places; she was so asleep that you could see the dream of those places in the faint lift of her forehead. The doctor took out his watch—it was after three. He walked with practiced dexterity across the wooden verandah but he struck the inevitable creaky strip and promptly the map of wonderland written on the surface of women’s eyebrows creased into invisibility.
“I was asleep,” she said. “I slept.”
As if he had told her to wait here for him. Or as if the hair that had brushed his forehead had said stay to him; but she seemed too young to play with so he picked up his satchel and said, “Well, I must—” and left, remembering that he had been a long time in the house and that all the time the girl had been asleep.
II
He drove rapidly for he had far to go—from a spot north of the city, through the city itself, to a colony of suburban houses a dozen miles south: the message on the phone had sounded frightened—perhaps this was not the night to break things off. But his thoughts were still concentrated on the scene from which he drove away to an extent that minutes and miles raced past and it was with surprise that he found his car before the familiar house on the familiar street.
A light burned inside the house; a sedan stood in front of it; as Bill stepped from his own car the door of the sedan opened and a burly figure emerged from it.
“Are you a doctor?” said the figure advancing toward him. “Do you happen to be the doctor who’s a personal friend of Mrs. Dykes?”
“Yes—is she sick?”
“No. But I’m Mr. Dykes. I got home today from Den—from Honolulu.”
So this ghost had materialized at last—and materialized indeed, for in the bright moonlight he seemed eight feet tall with long, prehensile arms. Bill took a preparatory step backward.
“Don’t worry—I’m not going to slam you—not yet. Let’s get into your car and have a little talk before we go in the house.”
“What is this?” Bill demanded, “A hold up?”
The man laughed—formidably.
“Something like that. I want a couple of your signatures—one on a check, and the other on a letter you haven’t written yet.”
Trying to think fast Bill got into the car.
“A letter to who?” he asked.
“To my wife. You were pretty smart, weren’t you, not to write her a letter—I’ve turned the house upside down looking for one.”
“Look here, Mr. Dykes—I’ve known your wife only a month and professionally.”
“Oh yeah? Then why is a picture of you plastered right beside her dressing table?”
Bill gave a spiritual groan.
“That’s her affair,” he explained, “I happen to know she got it from a classmate of mine in medical school who’s married to a friend of hers. I didn’t give it to her—”
“I see, I see,” the big man interrupted scoffingly, “And you’re not the man she wants to marry—with me away in Den—in Honolulu. And I like to come, don’t I, and find my wife has taken up with one of the medical boys? And I’m going to take it lying down like a sap? You’re going to pay off, and you’re going to give me evidence I can get a divorce on. And you’re going to like it.”
Bill was not going to like it at all, but he was in a position that, as he cast about in his mind, seemed at its mildest somewhat circumscribed. Whether his reaction to what happened next was relief or terror he could never afterwards decide, but at the sharp order “Stickum up!” from the rumble seat both men jumped forward as if they had been pricked. But even in the split second before a figure appeared on Bill’s side of the car there was something faintly familiar in the voice. Then the voice said:
“You didn’t know he had one of his rod men along, big boy. Just step out so there won’t be any blood on the upholstery. Quick!”
Trembling piteously the large man fumbled at the handle, and in this moment Bill identified his savior. It was that boy. And at the classic word: “Scram!” he recognized something vaguely recognizable about the instrument which was causing Mr. Dykes to retreat, to stumble to get up and then to tear down the street at the gait of a likely pacemaker. Being closer to the instrument Bill had identified it as something like a revolver and yet not quite a revolver. By the time Mr. Dykes’ heels were faint in the distance he identified it as that mysterious piece of steel which he still thought of as The Gong.
III
The boy got into the car and Bill, somewhat shaken by the heavy grasp of events, turned and started toward the city.
“That guy certainly was yellow,” remarked the boy with satisfaction.
“Yes, he was,” said Bill, rather automatically, as his professional habits began to reassert themselves, “What I’d like to know is what you were doing here.”
“I just came for the ride,” said the boy airily.
“Can’t you ride in the daytime?”
“For your ride. I was pretending to take you for a ride. All the time we were on the road I had a gat pressed so close to your back—”
“Oh, cut it out, cut it out,” said Bill ungratefully, “I don’t like that kind of talk.”
“Oak. But no spill-over to the parents, see? Or I’ll tell what I saw—wolfing that guy’s Jane away from him when he was in Den—in Hula-hula. How’ll that sound to the fair you left on the verandah?”
“The who?” Once more Bill was startled, yet he rode easier to it as he became more accustomed to the shocks.
“Don’t think I didn’t see that last look around. How’d she like to hear about this—”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Bill argued, “You wouldn’t understand this situation if I explained every detail to you.”
“Explain it to her then.”
On second thought Bill decided he wouldn’t; he very definitely wouldn’t care to have to explain it to her; he could at least get some hold on this incorrigible boy.
“I’m going to begin your education here and now,” he announced. “First place I sympathize with you—to some extent. Certainly it’s better to be a fighter than one of these softies brought up full of tender feelings about themselves. And you can pick your cause—there’s good and bad fighting, and a lot in the world to fight for; your beliefs, your honor, your family and—I mean, you’ll find out later there is a lot you’ll decide is worth fighting for. At present confine yourself to the defense. This crime stuff doesn’t touch you—you oughtn’t even to think about it. You ought to be just like older people and put it out of your head—”
He was becoming convinced minute by minute that he didn’t know what he was talking about himself, and he stole a side glance to see if the boy had noticed the fact.
But the boy had dozed—some time back he had dozed.
IV
It was false dawn when they turned into the lane: on the outskirts of the acres Bill awoke his protector.
“We’re here. Now the thing is to hope to God you haven’t been missed—and to try to get you in without anybody seeing you.”
Sluggish from his night’s operations the future criminal stared blank at Bill.
“Wake up!” said Bill impatiently, “It’s practically daylight.”
“What you goan do about it?”
“I’m going to assume you have enough common sense to get in without being noticed.”
“The French girl would.”
“Would what? What French girl?”
“I mean my sister.” The boy pulled himself together visibly. “You know—the fair. She just got back from France or somewhere. She’d let me in.”
This project had the effect of bringing Bill almost up to normal.
“How would you wake her up?” he asked.
“I’ll think of some way.”
“Just to be sure of that I’ll come along.”
Through the new trees, the new quivering life, the new shadows that designed new terrain on the old, through the sounds of different strange ins
ects, they traversed the lawn and stopped under a window.
“Now what?” Bill whispered.
“That’s her room—and the window’s open.”
Bill went through a hasty mental review of the classical ways in which one assaulted a sleeping house.
“We could throw pebbles up,” he suggested doubtfully.
“No—we throw in one of these flowers. You know how frails are—if a stone sails in they put up a yelp—if it’s a rose they think there’s the Prince of Wales at last.”
The first rose missed; the boy missed; then Bill made two perfect throws which cleared the sill. The acoustical result was inaudible below and they waited breathlessly.
“Try another—” began the boy, then paused as a tender trusting face appeared at the window and tried to focus sleepy eyes upon whatever should be below.
There were moments of whispering that could only be reproduced by one of the fabled mimics employed on the radio. After the face disappeared the boy turned to Bill disgustedly: “You see, they’re all alike. Half they understand and half they miss. Just half, that’s all you can ever expect. She’s going to dress herself up in clothes, as if we were going to take her downtown to business.”
Miss Mason, however, dressed herself up in clothes remarkably quickly and remarkably well, opening a side door to them seven minutes later. After seeing her Bill decided he could better explain matters without any comment from a third party, so, taking advantage of a yawn detected on the boy’s face he pointed sternly inward and upward. The boy winked once, started to open his lips, found his unspoken word changing irresistibly into a new yawn, gave up, and disappeared.
“Now Miss Brickster—” began the doctor and stopped.
“Miss Mason,” she corrected him. She countered, “I bet I can half guess already what happened. My brother stayed in the rumble seat; I saw him climb into it just before I went to sleep myself.”
—What an illusion that they only get half of it, Bill thought. That devil doesn’t know everything. Why, this girl—
“Don’t tell your parents on him,” he said, “I’ve come to like him. I don’t want him to get in trouble.”
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