“A duck gets tough from running around and exercising and things the same way a… a body builder’s muscles get big and tough.” I had no idea what made a duck tough — or tender. But it sounded good, even scientific.
“I know,” Robert said. “I’ve got a lot of responsibility, now. My mom says so.” There were still tears in his voice, but they were not the tense, terrified tears of someone fighting the descent into deeper and deeper misery but the easier tears of someone rising at last toward reason — a distinction children can all make, though sometimes adults forget it.
“Robert, a duck would have to run around a lot more than five minutes to grow that kind of muscle!”
He actually smiled a little. The notion of those quacking pillows with muscles like the pictures in the Charles Atlas advertisements on the back of the comics we traded was funny.
Inside we got washed up. Looking in the medicine cabinet, I volunteered to put mercurochrome on his scratches, but Robert decided against it.
“It’s iodine that stings — ”
“I know. I still don’t want it. I’ll be all red and look funny.”
That evening, after his mother got back, and we were at the kitchen table eating hot dogs and baked beans (both of us still barefoot, but cleaner and drier), Robert, with a mouthful of frank, told her:
“The ducks got out this afternoon. King almost caught them. But we got them back in.”
“That’s good,” his mother said. “You know, Bill told you, when he said you could take care of them, they’re not supposed to run around too much — or they won’t be fit to eat!”
That was all there was to it.
I could hear, neither in his words nor hers, no trace of the physical exertion or moral despair the adventure had put Robert — and me — through.
That evening Robert’s mother told us she had arranged a trip for us the next morning. The farm’s cows generally produced two full milk cans a day. When the milk driver came to pick up the farm’s milk, we would join him and ride the rest of his run to the dairy. We were to be up and ready by five.
Robert told me he had been on the trip before and that the milk truck driver, Eric, was a great guy. Robert’s mother added that Eric had worked on the farm back when he was a teenager. Her husband had always liked him. Then Eric had gone away for a year — into the armed forces. But he’d been back awhile now, and for the last two months he’d been just as nice and as helpful — well, she didn’t know what she’d have done without him! So that night, I went to sleep in a small room with a sloping ceiling, and Robert went to bed in his own room — “Because you two can’t talk all night if you have to get up at four-thirty in the morning,” Robert’s mother told me, turning out my light.
I’d wondered if I should make another stab at introducing Robert to sex once we were in bed — Robert could be slow about things. But since we weren’t in the same room, I decided — again — to forget it. I turned over under the country comforter, and went to sleep.
Getting up in the middle of the night was kind of interesting.
“Oh, don’t worry,” Robert’s mother said. “It won’t be dark for long.”
Down in the kitchen, by the time we finished our cornflakes, the windows had lightened to an indigo as deep as evening’s.
Robert got in an argument with his mother about whether we could go on the ride barefoot.
“Running around the farm is one thing,” she told us. “But you don’t know where you’re going. So I want you both to put some shoes on. Now!”
“But I know where I’m going!” Robert insisted. “I’ve been there before!”
“And I don’t want to argue anymore! Put your shoes on, or I will phone Eric right this minute and tell him that you’re not coming!” She stepped toward the phone — which got a capitulatory squeal from Robert.
She was angry, too.
Robert’s mother actually had a pretty short temper — shorter than my mom’s, anyway. I wondered if that came from having her husband die.
We sat at the table, bending down, Robert to tie his sneakers, me to lace my shoes.
Then, outside, we heard a truck.
“That’s Eric!” Robert cried. We were both up and out the door, with Robert’s mom behind us.
The milk truck was just a little bigger than a pickup. The back was open, and a dozen upright milk cans stood in it from previous farm stops. A lanky guy with bronze hair under a red cap was already hoisting up our two (filled by the electric milking machine Bill in the barn had shown us working the evening before).
“Mornin’, ma’am. Hey, Robert — this your little friend from New York City? Howdy, there!” Squatting on the open tailgate, Eric grinned. “You two fellas ain’t gonna give me no trouble now, are ya’?” He pushed up his cap visor and reached over to shake my hand.
Robert’s mother said: “I’ve told them they have to do everything you say.”
As I took Eric’s hand to shake, I saw that for all his hard, country-soiled calluses, he was as bad a nail-biter as Robert. It gave me a kind of start.
Twenty-three or twenty-four, with a pleasant smile but not a whole lot of chin, Eric was a gangling, good-natured, upstate farmboy. His jeans were frayed at knee and cuff. His high-laced workshoes were big, scuffed, and muddy. His plaid shirt was rolled up from forearms showing an anchor and an eagle from his Navy stint. “Don’t worry, ma’am,” he said to Robert’s mother, standing now and pulling his cap visor back down. He jumped to the ground. “I’ll have these little guys back here by eight-thirty, nine o’clock in the morning — at the latest.” He pushed up the tailgate, clanked it to, and stuck in the iron bolt on its jingling chain that held it closed, hammered on it once with his big hand’s hard heel, then walked us around to the cab, where the door — the truck sat on a slope — hung open. “Come on, now, you two. Get on up in there. Bye, now, ma’am.”
“Bye, Eric. You two be good, now, and do what Eric tells you!”
That milk run through the paling New Paltz dawn was the most wonderful thing that had ever happened to me.
As Eric grasped the wheel (the top arc covered with oil-blackened carpet, fixed at the ends with electrician’s tape), to haul us round onto the road, one wheel chunked down and up, into and out of, a pothole. “God-damn, if that ain’t some shit!” Eric broke out, then glanced over. “Now you ain’t gonna tell on me, huh? You let your mom know I’m cussin’ around you little fuckers like this, an’ you’ll never see my ass again! You two remember that, you hear me?”
Yeah, sure. We nodded vigorously. Oh, his friend would never say anything about something like that, Robert spoke for me — as if his own assurance had been given long ago.
Over the next thirty yards of bumpy road, however (we were still not off Robert’s property), by the time we reached the highway, I’d realized that, while — if he had to — Eric could maintain country decorum with farmers’ wives and mothers, turned loose in a truck with a pair of boys he became the most foul-mouthed man I’d ever met!
Of course I’d heard “bad words” shouted in anger on Harlem streets. But this open joviality was as heavily weighted with profanity and scatology as speech could bear. Nor was it bawled in the anonymous urban distances. It was directed, without an ounce of ire, straight at Robert and me — “How you little shit-asses doin’ in that fuckin’ school you fuckin’ go to down in that ol’ shit-ass city?… You messin’ ’round with that science-crap, huh? I never knowed shit about no fuckin’ science. Or pretty much about no school-shit either. But you bastards are probably pretty smart little sons of bitches about all that fuckin’ shit now, ain’t ya’?” Then, when he would gun the truck to pass a rare car out on the early road, he’d grunt toward the window, “Suck my fuckin’ asshole, cocksucker!” Then, back to us with mock frustration: “What do these early mornin’ fuckheads think they’re goddamn doin’ anyway, this fuckin’ early, on the fuckin’ highway, gettin’ in shit and everybody’s fuckin’ way besides? Trippin’ over their goddamn dicks like they left their fuckin’ flies open!”