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Morón de la Frontera
July 1963
Colonel
Roland Unger, the vice commander of the SAC Reflex Base near Morón de la Frontera, approximately thirty miles southeast of Seville, reminded Jeannette Monegal of Douglas MacArthur
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whittled down to about two-thirds scale. In the light coming through his office windows from the flight line, the hair on his forearms sparkled like aluminum filings and his shoes radiated a dazzling ebony shine.
He stood beside his desk in crisp summer khakis, staring bemusedly at the tiny, dark-skinned child who was pushing his coaster chair into a cabinet on which stood the official photographs of the President of the United States, the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of the Air Force, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the local base commander. The child seemed to be determined to topple these photographs, but Colonel Unger made no move to hinder or distract him.
“I am
not
a social worker,” he told the people who had requested this audience. “None of us was sent out here to see to the daily needs of displaced Spanish nationals. Orphans just aren't our line.”
“What if they're part American?” Jeannette asked. She and her husband, Staff Sergeant Hugo Monegal, had kept the abandoned child in their quarters in Santa Clara for the past five days, and the point of this interview was to make him a permanent member of their family. She had never wanted anything else quite so passionately, and her commitment to her goal both surprised and pleased her.
To the Monegals’ left sat Major Carl Hollis, who, as an agent of military intelligence, routinely wore civilian clothes. Today he had attired himself in cotton ducks and a seersucker sports jacket with blue and white stripes. He had a neat brown moustache, threaded with strands of amber, and a pair of mirror-lensed sunglasses that he was dangling nervously from his right hand. Colonel Unger had invited him to the interview, and Jeannette was uncertain whether to regard him as an ally or an official marplot.
“Look at him, sir,” Hollis encouraged the colonel. “The kid's as red, white, and blue as Willie Mays, if you know what I mean.”
Colonel Unger replied, “He also happens to have been born to a Spanish mother, in a Spanish city, and it's the mother's nationality that traditionally decides these things. We're on pretty shaky ground here. You can't just arbitrarily take custody of a bona fide
Sevillano
, Major Hollis.”
“Maybe not
de jure
, sir, but
de facto
we've already done it. The mother handed him over to Drew Blanchard's kid, Pam, and I'd lay odds he's an indiscretion of Lucky James Bledsoe's. That's Master Sergeant Lavoy Bledsoe's son, sir, and they've already rotated stateside to a base in Alabama.”
“You think we should get in touch with the Bledsoes?”
“Jesus, no,” said Hollis, leaning forward earnestly. “They probably don't even know about little ‘Say Hey’ there.”
“John-John,” Hugo Monegal interjected, touching his wife's hand. He was a man of thirty-two, a Panamanian who had entered the employ of the U.S. government in the Canal Zone. Later he had come to the United States to attend Wichita State University, from which he had dropped out to join the Air Force. In that same year, 1957, he had married Jeannette Rivenbark of Van Luna, Kansas, thereby acquiring, in addition to a handsome and headstrong wife, his American citizenship. “John-John” was the first phrase he had spoken aloud since the initial introductions, and Jeannette watched the way the officers’ eyes gravitated to her husband, grudgingly, as if he had burped or let wind.
“We've been calling him John-John,” she said, hurrying to Hugo's assistance. “For President Kennedy and the late Pope John. He had to have a name. You can't go around every day calling an active kid like this one ‘Hey, you,’ or ‘Say Hey,’ either.”
“We want to keep him,” Hugo added. “What you wish to keep you have to name.”
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“You mean you want to adopt him?” Colonel Unger asked.
“We want him to be ours,” said the sergeant. “I don’ really know about this adoptin’ business, though.”
Because Hugo spoke Spanish fluently—"an accident of birth,” he sometimes joked—the Air Force had sought to coopt this skill by assigning him to installations in Spain. He and Jeannette had already pulled one two-year tour at the rotating SAC unit in Saragosa and were now very close to concluding their second Iberian assignment.
John-John, still struggling with the coaster chair, managed to knock the Secretary of the Air Force off the empty liquor cabinet. Colonel Unger retrieved the secretary's portrait and returned it to its place.
“Don't you have any children of your own?”
“Only Anna,” Jeannette responded. “She's five. We didn't intend to have any more until we saw John-John.”
“Pamela brought the baby to our quarters,” Hugo explained, “because she thought we could maybe, you know, talk to him. He listens very good, but he is still too small to talk in any language.”
“He's just on the verge of being a feral child,” Hollis told the colonel, “if we can deduce anything about his condition from what we know about his background. His mother was a mute, a woman deeply involved in black-market dealings and prostitution. We lost complete track of her about six weeks ago.
The city police arrested her for creating a public disturbance the morning after she gave her baby to Pam—she was in a condemned building, making a godawful hiccupping racket on the roof—but they released her without prejudice before noon, and we haven't seen hide nor hair of her since. Before she deserted her tenement apartment, though, she kept that boy"—nodding at John-John—"locked up inside it both night and day. The isolation, coupled with his mother's muteness, can't have been good for him.”
“What did you just call him?” Jeannette asked. “A feral child?”
“Right,” said Hollis.
“And what is
that
, exactly?”
“Well, it means a wild child, a child raised by animals. Back in the 1920s there was a famous pair in India called the Wolf Children of Midnapore. A couple of young girls abandoned in the jungle and supposedly suckled by wolves. An Anglican missionary named Singh captured them and carried them back to the orphanage he directed. Tried like rip to make human beings of them, but they ran on all fours, ate like dogs, showed their teeth, and occasionally bayed at the moon. One of them died within the year, but the other progressed well enough to wear a dress and attend church services. She never did learn to speak more than fifty words, though, and that in nine years, Mrs. Monegal.”
“Maybe the Reverend Mr. Singh's mother was frightened by the ghost of Rudyard Kipling then, Major Hollis.”
“Ma'am?”
Jeannette was wearing a chocolate-colored dress with a nunnish white bib. Hollis, she could see, had adjudged her, on this fragile basis and the fact that she was married to a noncom, a demure do-gooder whose mind reposed in her husband's calloused fist. He had certainly not expected her to challenge his
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stupid anecdote with sarcasm.
“Are you trying to tell us, Major Hollis, that from henceforward John-John should be known as the Wolf Boy of Andalusia?”
Hollis blinked, then put on his sunglasses. “I just meant to point out that he's been disadvantaged by living with a mother who couldn't talk. Maybe ‘feral child’ was a bad choice of words. Call it ‘social isolation,’ if we have to stick a label on it. The upshot is that he's going to have trouble learning to speak, adjusting to human society. Kids raised in isolation by uncaring or handicapped parents often end up irreversible retardates. It's entirely possible—”
“Where do you get all these words, Major Hollis?”
“Ma'am?”
“John-John's mother wasn't an uncaring parent. Except for her handicap—her muteness—she took beautiful care of this child.”
“She did, did she? Then why didn't she try to expose him to people who didn't share her handicap?”
“What do you think she finally did? She gave John-John to Pamela Blanchard, one of his father's people.
It wasn't hard to see that the folks in Santa Clara enjoyed certain material advantages over her own circumstances. That was pretty damn brave, if you ask me, and Hugo and I would like to honor that bravery by ... by adopting him.”
“Going into any family situation is going to be a big change for him,” Hollis appealed to Colonel Unger, who did not reply.
“He's already made the transition,” Jeannette declared. “He doesn't pee on the drapes or tear live chickens apart with his bare hands. As for learning to talk, he'll make it. He's not a year yet—you can tell by looking at him—but he's already walking. Most kids his age aren't even thinking about walking. Anna didn't begin until she was a year.”
Nudged by the back of the coaster chair, the photograph of President Kennedy toppled to the rug. With the toes of his brand-new Buster Brown shoes overlapping the cheap gilt frame, John-John tried to prise the commander in chief off the carpet. Colonel Unger, mulling certain troublesome legalities, ignored his struggle.
“What do you suggest?” he asked Hollis.
“There's no official alternative to yielding him to the Spanish authorities.”
“What would happen then?”
“Into a charitable institution of some kind, I'd imagine, probably a church-run orphanage.”
“With what chances for adoption?”
“As I said, the kid has a Willie Mays profile. Spanish girls date Negro enlisted men, but usually—if you want my opinion—in the hope of bagging American husbands and ending up in the Land of Levis and Lincoln Continentals. I don't really see the denizens of Seville banging on the orphanage door for the right
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to take John-John home.”
“He belongs with his mother,” Colonel Unger observed.
“Who has completely disappeared, sir.”
“Why didn't you arrest her when you knew where she lived and had her dead to rights on that black-marketeering business?”
“Miss Ocampo was really just small potatoes, sir. We wanted the people who were buying from her, then reselling the stuff at higher prices in other parts of the country.”
“Did you get them?”
“No, sir. Not yet, that is.” Hollis looked uneasy.
“Which brings us back to square one. Still, the boy's at least partly one of ours and the Monegals want to give him a home.”
As if reporting a vivid daydream, Hugo said, “If we had a birth certificate showin’ that John-John was delivered at the clinic in San Pablo, why, it would be easy to take him stateside with us this November.
Very easy.”
“That's something we could do, a birth certificate,” said Hollis.
“Why don't you do it, then?”
“We will,” Hollis said, gesturing abruptly at the Monegals with his sunglasses. “Of course, they'll still appear to be toting someone else's kid out of the country.”
“My hair is as curly as his,” said Hugo Monegal, “and my eyes are as black. A mestizo somewhere in the family past showin’ up in this
niño
. Who would challenge my fathership of John-John, my own wife's baby?” He smiled shyly at Jeannette. “This is a virtuous woman, Major Hollis.”
“God,” murmured the virtuous woman.
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After
my run-in with the Minid sentry, I walked back toward Lake Kiboko, venturing quite often into the savannah bordering the forest strip to the south. Other bands of habilines must be about, I told myself, as well as other specimens of
A. robustus
and surely a few of their ancestral cousins,
A. africanus
. It was impossible to know in what proportions to expect these three primate species to be coinhabiting the landscape, and because I saw only gazelles, antelopes, zebras, and a distant pride of lions, I was not likely to solve this problem in a single afternoon.
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My transcordion did not work, and in the event of its failure Kaprow had advised me to return to the omnibus and signal my well-being by commanding the Backstep Scaffold to retract. However, I could not command what I could not see, and although at the lakeside the sun was dropping toward the violet ramparts of the western Rift, Kaprow and his cohorts had still not extruded the scaffold through the bomb-bay doors of the omnibus. The twilight sky was entire. I wanted a plug to be pushed out of it, exposing the copper and chromium viscera of our time machine—but what I wanted and what I got were two different things.
Because sunset traditionally marks a hair-trigger truce at an African watering site, I found that many large animals—elephants, rhinos, giraffids—were clustering out of the dusk to drink. Knowing that my nevertheless drew it. My vantage above the lake gave me a degree of safety, for the invasion was occurring on either side of my small promontory of tuff—but the scaffold still did not descend, and a hairy elephantine creature not sixty feet away had begun to writhe his trunk at me, as if my smell offended him.
There were trumpetings and snorts from other visitors to the lake, too, and the precariousness of my position would increase as the darkness thickened.
“
I
'
m waiting,
” I tapped out on my transcordion. “
It
'
s sunset, and I
'
m waiting. Please drop the
scaffold.
”
No reply in my transcordion's display window. No miraculous lambent parting of the Pleistocene air.
Had White Sphinx stranded me in this place? I had no one to talk to here, no one to tell my troubles to.