“Can you talk with him? With Billy Kell?”
He knew what I meant, but said uneasily: “How do you mean?”
“When I first saw you, yesterday, you were reading the Crito. I just meant, things like that.”
He said evasively: “Books aren’t everything…. He’s good in school, straight A’s all the time.”
“How is the school? Pretty fair?”
“It’s all right.”
“But you have to put on an act, is that right?”
He rubbed out the cigarette against a stone. He said presently: “They play around an awful lot. Maybe I do. Some of the time. I’m no good in mathematics. Or manual training — honest, you should see a birdhouse I tried to make, looks like a haystack in a blizzard.”
“What are you good at?”
He made a face at me, enjoying it. “The things they don’t teach. All right — like the Crito, Mr. Miles. Philosophy.”
“Ethics?”
“Well, I got a college text on that, out of the library. I didn’t think it got down to cases very much. They’ve got Spinoza there. I didn’t try it.”
“Don’t.” I took hold of his good ankle and hung onto it a moment. “You’re way ahead of your class, my friend, but you’re not ready for Spinoza. Not sure I ever was myself. If you can take him all in at one gulp, I suppose it’s good, but let it wait…. History was my subject when I used to teach school. How about that?”
“They just don’t teach it, not to say teach. Formula stuff. They tell you one thing, and you get something out of the library that says just the opposite, so who’s right? I mean, the teacher dishes it out the way he sees it, and then you’re supposed to wrap it up and give it back to him the same way. Or you’re wrong: E for effort. Schoolbook says we broke away from England in 1776 because British imperialism was strangling the colonies economically. Declaration of Independence says we did it for political reasons. Really both, wasn’t it?”
“Those were two of many reasons, yes.” I can never be reconciled to our deception, Drozma. How I should have loved to tell him that afternoon of the way I saw the French fleet come into the Chesapeake before Yorktown! I remember the early autumn storm too, that came up when the poor devils of redcoats were trying to get across the river — I suppose I might not have wanted to describe that to him completely. Or I might, I don’t know…. “History frustrates all teachers,” I said, “simply because it’s too endlessly big. There has to be selection, and the best of teachers can’t escape his own bias in making that selection. But of course they ought to keep reminding you of that difficulty, and I suppose they don’t.”
“No, they don’t. The Federalist Papers don’t explain everything with economics either. I said I’d read ’em. Wasn’t supposed to. I don’t mean she gave me hell or anything. She said it was fine that I should make such an effort, only she was afraid they were a little over my head. And besides, although the Federalist Papers were ‘quaint and interesting,’ they weren’t part of the course, and wouldn’t I try to be a little more attentive in class and show a better all-around attitude?”
“You mean, Angelo, some days it just don’t pay to get up?”
He liked that, and blew out a grass blade in a puff of laughter and pulled another one to chew. “Level bevel, Mr. Miles.” In the teen-age argot of 30,963, that means you’re all right. Angelo uses that cant very seldom, being far more at home in the precision and beauty of normal English than any adults I have met on this mission.
“Are you a member of that gang you told me about? Billy Kell’s? Not that it’s any of my business.”
He looked away, all pleasure gone. “No, I’m not. I guess they want me to join. I don’t know….” I waited, which was not easy. “I couldn’t let Mama know about it if I did.”
“Joining would mean agreeing to a lot of things, wouldn’t it? It usually does.”
“Maybe so.” He got down off the bank, lounging with his hands in his pockets. I didn’t see again that flash of phony, half-experimental toughness. But I did realize presently that I had intruded on a matter in which he would accept no counsel, and that he wasn’t going to answer the unspoken question. He had taken on a look not distant but almost sleepy; he was hidden in the thousand-colored privacy of a mind I’d never know, yet not far away. At that moment and at others I remember, he reminded me of that slumbrous creature of heaven who leans on the shoulder of another in Michelangelo’s “Madonna, Child, St. John and Angels.” (I bought a fair print of that painting and still have it; sometimes it seems more like him than a snapshot, which is supposed to tell the truth. )
“Any car I get,” I said, “will have to be a jalopy. How were the ’56 Fords?”
“Good, I guess.” He smiled brilliantly, thinking of my promise, and held up circled thumb and forefinger in that American gesture which appears to mean that everything’s jake. “Any old wheeze-on-wheels, you won’t be able to get rid of me.” He limped to the nearest of the graves and rubbed a finger on the eroded carving. “Here’s a guy who ‘sought his reward August 10, 1671, a servant of Christ.’ Name of Mordecai Paxton. Must’ve figured he was pretty sure what reward.” He started to brush a cobweb from the slanted, half-submerged stone, but his hand fell. “Nah, she’d only build it up again, and besides…”
“She and Mordecai get along. Might even be descended from a spider who knew Mordecai personally.”
“Might be. Other people are neglecting Mordecai though.” Angelo picked a few saucy dandelions and tucked them around the stone. “Him and his whiskers.” He glanced up with shyness. “Kind of thing Sharon’s always doing. Looks better, huh?”
“Much.”
“Gaudy whiskers, I’ll bet.”
“A caution to the heathen.” We pushed Mordecai around, I said ginger whiskers, but Angelo claimed Mordecai was roly-poly, with black cooky-brushes, and had been tempted by Satan in the form of a pork chop. We quit when Feuermann returned, not that the old man would have minded laughter.
I thought I saw that gray coupe behind us on the way home. It shot by, again too quickly, when we stopped at a roadstand, where Angelo consumed a forbidding quantity of pistachio ice cream. Back in the car, he burped once, said: “Ah, hydrogen chloride!” And fell asleep.
I was in danger, since he drooped against me. But his head was not directly on my chest; he was too sound asleep to notice that my heart beat only once in sixty seconds. What are we, Drozma? More than human, when we observe them; less, when we batter our wings against the glass.
5
The following week is, in my mind, a kaleidoscope of small events:
Waking late, when Sharon and Angelo were installing a bit of paving stone to mark Bella’s grave in the back yard. If I had not witnessed Angelo’s earlier resentment I should have thought he was enjoying it, until he happened to step behind Sharon and his face abandoned pretense, becoming patient, puzzled, tender like that of any adult watching make-believe, himself remembering the forests and plains and deserts of maturity. Later they strolled down Martin Street into the city’s jungle…. Sitting empty-brained before my typewriter, deciding at length that Mr. Ben Miles would be convincing enough as a guy always on the point of writing a book but never doing it…. Visiting EL CAT SEN with Angelo (Tuesday that was) and finding not Sharon but a harassed little chap, Sharon’s father, who became determinedly hearty talking baseball with Angelo; he didn’t look like a smasher of cast iron…. Meeting Jack McGuire in a bar after his day’s work at a garage. We started with the burglary but wound up with Angelo. “Ain’t healthy,” Mac said. “Nose all the time in a book. Couldn’t ever be an athalete with that bum leg, but all the same it ain’t healthy, irregardless. He’ll grow up lopsided or queer. Soon put a stop to it if he was my kid, but what can you do?” I didn’t know….