“. . . They’s a whole knot o’ cottonmouths on the island past Miller’s Bend. What’ll you give me if I show you? What, you never seen a cottonmouth? Give me something and I’ll show you. It’s a snake, see, a great big poison snake, and it’s got a mouth like it’s full of cotton, and poison teeth longer’n your finger. C’mon, give me what you got and I’ll show you the cottonmouths,” Dicky said, his voice growing uglier. “. . . What d’you mean, you ain’t got nothing? You been wasting my time? Ever learn the Indian twist, so you can break a growed man’s elbow? All right, boy, I’ll show you for free. . . . Oh, that hurts, does it? Too bad. A bit more pressure and it’ll hurt you for keeps—like that. . . . You still ain’t got nothing to see the cottonmouths all tangled in a knot? . . . Oh, you’ll get it, will you? You’d better. And you owe me an extra dime for learning you the Indian twist. . . . No sir, just for wasting my time I ain’t going to show you them cottonmouths today—not till you bring me twenty cents, you punk, you. And then maybe I’ll show you that nest o’ diamond back rattlesnakes at Geranium Creek. But if you don’t deliver, Malachi Westbrook—mind me now—I’ll show you the Seminole jaw-grip. That takes a man’s head clear off. And I’ll show it to you good, Malachi. Yes sir, me and Teddy Pinchbeck will sure show you good! Mind me, now; meet me and Teddy Pinchbeck at the old Washington boathouse eight o’clock tomorrow morning, and bring Charley Greengrass with you. He better have twenty cents with him, too, or else. . . .”
Mr. Aldous wrote all this down. At about three o’clock in the morning Dicky said, “Okay, kids. You paid up. You’re okay. Okay, I’ll just borrow Three-Finger Mike’s little old boat, and Teddy Pinchbeck and me’ll take you and Charley Greengrass to look at them cottonmouths. Only see here, you kids, me and Teddy Pinchbeck got to pole you way past Burnt Swamp, and all the way to Miller’s Bend. That’ll cost ’em, won’t it, Teddy? . . . You ain’t got it? Get it. And stop crying—it makes me nervous, don’t it, Teddy? And when I’m nervous I’m liable to show you the Indian hip-grip, so you’ll never walk again as long as you live. You mind me now! . . .”
Dicky said no more that night. At about nine o’clock in the morning Mr. Aldous made an appointment with a psychologist, one Dr. Asher who, finding himself caught on the horns of this dilemma—carte blanche and an insoluble problem—double-talked himself into one of those psychiatric serials that are longer than human patience. But what was Dr. Asher to say? Little Dicky Aldous had no vision to remember with; there was nothing in his head upon which juvenile imagination might conceivably fall back.
It was by sheer accident that Mr. Aldous met a lieutenant of detectives named Neetsfoot to whom he confided the matter, hoping against hope, simply because Neetsfoot had worked on the Rurik Duncan case.
The detective said, “That’s very strange, Mr. Aldous. Let’s have it all over again.”
“I have it written down verbatim, Lieutenant.”
“I’d be grateful if you’d let me make a copy, Mr. Aldous. And look—I have children of my own. My boy has had polio, in fact, and I’ve kind of got the habit of talking to kids without upsetting them. Would you have any objection—this is unofficial—would you have any objection to my talking to your son a little bit?”
“What in the world for?” asked Mr. Aldous.
Lieutenant Neetsfoot said, “Mr. Aldous, if you haven’t got a clue to something, well, that’s that. In that case, if you see what I mean, it doesn’t even come within range of being understood. At a certain point you stop trying to understand it. Now sometimes something that makes absolutely no sense at all, flapping about in the dark, throws a switch. And there you’ve got a mystery.”
“I don’t get what you’re driving at, Lieutenant.”
“Neither do I, Mr. Aldous. But I’ll give you the leading points, if you like. A—I know all there is to know about Rurik Duncan; saw him electrocuted, in fact. And a miserable show he made of it. B—I don’t like to dig these matters up, but your son, five years old and born blind, had one of Rurik’s eyes grafted into his head by Dr. Holliday. And now, C—the child is going word for word and point by point into details of things that happened about sixteen years before he was born and two thousand miles away!”
“Oh no, surely not!” cried Mr. Aldous.
“Oh yes, surely so,” said the Lieutenant. “And geographically accurate, at that. What’s more remarkable, your son has got the names right of people that were never heard of and who died before he was born. What d’you make of that? Teddy Pinchbeck was shot in a fight outside a church it must be ten, eleven years ago. A bad boy, that one. And where did I get my information? From Malachi Westbrook—he’s a realtor, now. There was an old Washington boathouse, and Malachi Westbrook’s the man that tore it down to make space for Westbrook Landing. Charley Greengrass runs his late father’s store. There was a Three-Finger Mike, but he just disappeared. There really is a Cottonmouth Island just past a Miller’s Bend, and in the mating season it’s one writhing mass. And Rurik Duncan did break Malachi Westbrook’s arm, before your son was born. Well?”
“This I do not understand,” said Richard Aldous.
“Me neither. Mind if I sit with the boy a bit?”
“No, Lieutenant, no . . . but how on earth could he know about cottonmouths? He never saw one. He never saw anything, poor child. To be frank with you, neither my wife nor I have ever seen a cottonmouth snake. I simply don’t get it.”
“Then you don’t mind?”
“Go ahead by all means, Lieutenant,” said Mr. Aldous.
Neetsfoot went ahead—in other words, he sacrificed two weeks of his vacation in a dead silence, listening by Dicky’s bed while the child slept. Mrs. Aldous was in the grip of a nervous breakdown, so that her husband was present only half the time. But he bears witness—and so, at a later date, does an official stenographer—to what Dicky Aldous said, in what was eventually termed his “delirium.”
First, the child struggled left and right. It appeared to the detective that he was somehow trying to writhe away from something; that he was in the clutch of a nightmare. His temperature went up to 103 degrees, and then he said, “Look. This is the setup, you kids. The Pan keeps the engine running. Get that right from the start, Pan. Little Joe sticks a toothpick under the bell-push. I put the heat on. Okay? Okay!”
Lieutenant Neetsfoot knew what to make of this. The man who was called The Pan on account of his rigid face was driver for several gangsters; Little Joe Ricardo was a sort of assistant gunman who was trying to make the grade with the big mobs. The heat, as Neetsfoot construed it, was put on a union leader named M’Turk, for whose murder Rurik Duncan was tried but acquitted for lack of evidence.
M’Turk was shot down in his own doorway; the street was aroused less by the noise of the shot than by the constant ringing of M’Turk’s doorbell, under which somebody had stuck a toothpick.
But all this had happened at least eight years before Dicky Aldous was born.
“. . . And this I don’t quite get,” said Lieutenant Neetsfoot.
“There is something distinctly peculiar here,” Mr. Aldous said. “But I won’t have the child bothered.”
“I’m not bothering the child, Mr. Aldous, the child’s bothering me. Heaven’s my judge, I haven’t opened my mouth. Not even to smoke! The kid does all the talking, and Gregory takes it down on the machine. You can believe me when I tell you, there’s something funny here. Your little boy has gone into details about the M’Turk shooting; and this I can’t understand. Tell me, Mr. Aldous, do you remember the details of M’Turk?”