“I don’t know,” I said. “His name is Dr. Curtis.”
“He’s heard music before.”
“I should hope so,” Anna said.
“That music?” I asked the Francher kid.
“Yes,” he nearly sobbed. “Yes!”
“He’ll he back,” I said. “He has to get his car.”
“Well,” Anna sighed. “The words are the words of English but the sense is the sense of confusion. Coffee, anybody?”
That afternoon the Francher kid joined me, wordlessly, as I struggled up the rise above the boardinghouse for a little wideness of horizon to counteract the day’s shut-in-ness.
I would rather have walked alone, partly because of a need for silence and partly because he just couldn’t ever keep his-accusing?-eyes off my crutches. But he didn’t trespass upon my attention as so many people would have, so I didn’t mind too much. I leaned, panting, against a gray granite boulder and let the fresh-from-distant-snow breeze lift my hair as I caught my breath. Then I huddled down into my coat, warming my ears. The Francher kid had a handful of pebbles and was lobbing them at the scattered rusty tin
cans that dotted the hillside. After one pebble turned a square corner to hit a can he spoke.
“If he knows the name of the instrument, then-” He lost his words.
“What is the name?” I asked, rubbing my nose where my coat collar had tickled it.
“It really isn’t a word. It’s just two sounds it makes.”
“Well, then, make me a word. ‘Musical instrument’ is mighty unmusical and unhandy.”
The Francher kid listened, his head tilted, his lips moving.
“I suppose you could call it a ‘rappoor,’ ” he said, softening the a. “But it isn’t that.”
” ‘Rappoor,’ ” I said. “Of course you know by now we don’t have any such instrument.” I was intrigued at having been drawn into another Francher-type conversation. I was developing quite a taste for them. “It’s probably just something your mother dreamed up for you.”
“And for that doctor?”
“Ummm.” My mental wheels spun, tractionless. “What do you think?”
“I almost know that there are some more like Mother. Some who know ‘the madness and the dream,’ too.”
“‘Dr. Curtis??’ I asked.
“No,” he said slowly, rubbing his hand along the boulder.
“No, I could feel a faraway, strange-to-me feeling with him. He’s like you. He-he knows someone who knows, but he doesn’t know.”
“Well, thanks. He’s a nice bird to be a feather of. Then it’s all very simple. When he comes back you ask him who he knows.”
“Yes-” The Francher kid drew a tremulous breath. ‘“Yes!”
We eased down the hillside, talking money and music. The Francher kid had enough saved up to buy a good instrument of some kind-but what kind? He was immersed in tones and timbres and ranges and keys and the possibility of sometime finding a something that would sound like a rappoor.
We paused at the foot of the hill. Impulsively I spoke.
“Francher, why do you talk with me?” I wished the words back before I finished them. Words have a ghastly way of shattering delicate situations and snapping tenuous bonds.
He lobbed a couple more stones against the bank and turned away, hands in his pockets. His words came back to me after I had given them up.
“You don’t hate me-yet.”
I was jarred. I suppose I had imagined all the people around the Francher kid were getting acquainted with him as I was, but his words made me realize differently. After that I caught at every conversation that included the Francher kid, and alerted at every mention of his name. It shook me to find that to practically everyone he was still juvenile delinquent, lazy trash, no-good off-scouring, potential criminal, burden. By some devious means it had been decided that he was responsible for all the odd happenings in town. I asked a number of people how the kid could possibly have done it. The only answer I got was, “The Francher kid can do anything-bad.”
Even Anna still found him an unwelcome burden in her classroom despite the fact that he was finally functioning on a fairly acceptable level academically.
Here I’d been thinking-heaven knows why!-that he was establishing himself in the community. Instead he was doing well to hold his own. I reviewed to myself all that had happened since first I met him, and found hardly a thing that would be positive in the eyes of the general public.
“Why,” I thought to myself, “I’m darned lucky he’s kept out of the hands of the law!” And my stomach knotted coldly at what might happen if the Francher kid ever did step over into out-and-out lawlessness. There’s something insidiously sweet to the adolescent in flouting authority, and I wanted no such appetite for any My Child of mine.
Well, the next few days after Dr. Curtis left were typical hunting-weather days. Minutes of sunshine and shouting autumn colors-hours of cloud and rain and near snow and raw aching winds. Reports came of heavy snow across Mingus Mountain, and Dogietown was snowed in for the winter, a trifle earlier than usual. We watched our own first flakes idle down, then whip themselves to tears against the huddled houses. It looked as though all excitement and activity were about to be squeezed out of Willow Springs by the drab grayness of winter.
Then the unexpected, which sometimes splashes our grayness with scarlet, happened. The big dude-ranch school, the Half Circle Star, that occupied the choicest of the range land in our area, invited all the school kids out to a musical splurge. They had imported an orchestra that played concerts as well as being a very good dance band, and they planned a gala weekend with a concert Friday evening followed by a dance for the teeners Saturday night. The ranch students were usually kept aloof from the town kids, poor little tikes. They were mostly unwanted or maladjusted children whose parents could afford to get rid of them with a flourish under the guise of giving them the advantage of growing up in healthful surroundings.
Of course the whole town was flung into a tizzy. There were the children of millionaires out there and famous people’s kids, too, but about the only glimpse we ever got of them was as they swept grandly through the town in the ranch station wagons. On such occasions we collectively blinked our eyes at the chromium glitter, and sighed-though perhaps for different reasons. I sighed for thin unhappy faces pressed to windows and sad eyes yearning back at houses where families lived who wanted their kids.
Anyway the consensus of opinion was that it would be worth suffering through a “music concert” to get to go to a dance with a real orchestra, because only those who attended the concert were eligible for the dance.
There was much discussion and much heartburning over what to wear to the two so divergent affairs. The boys were complacent after they found out that their one good outfit was right for both. The girls discussed endlessly, and embarked upon a wild lend-borrow spree when they found that fathers positively refused to spend largely even for this so special occasion.
I was very pleased for the Francher kid. Now he’d have a chance to hear live music-a considerable cut above what snarled in our staticky wave lengths from the available radio stations. Now maybe he’d hear a faint echo of his rappoor and in style, too, because Mrs. McVey had finally broken down and bought him a new suit, a really nice one by the local standards. I was as anxious as Twyla to see how the Francher kid would look in such splendor.
So it was with a distinct shock that I saw the kid at the concert, lounging, thumbs in pockets, against the door of the room where the crowd gathered. His face was shut and dark, and his patched faded Levi’s made a blotch in the dimness of the room.
“Look!” Twyla whispered. “He’s in Levi’s!”
“How come?” I breathed. “Where’s his new suit?”
“I don’t know. And those Levi’s aren’t even clean!” She hunched down in her seat, feeling the accusing eyes of the whole world searing her through the Francher kid.