The Child Buyer (28 page)

Mr. BROADBENT. Go on.

BARRY RUDD. Suddenly she whirled and towered over me. 'How do I know you're telling me the truth? It's one of their slimy tricks—sending my little boy in here to scare me!' I was terrified that she would hurl herself at me and crush me in that mass of angry transformed flesh. Susan had begun to cry. The bastards came in here this morning with their sleazy threats, and they told me to call them up and give in to them—they said by seven o'clock—them and their bastardly deadlines and ultimatums; but they don't know Maudie Rudd. By Christ! Let them come, let the sod-hearted bastards come, I'll break every dad-blasted chicken drumstick in their dad-blasted white-meat bodies.' Then Momma burst into tears, and she fell in a heap on the sofa, and she wailed, 'Oh, Paul, Paul, why did you have to go bowling this night of all nights?' I was surprised to hear myself say, during a lull in her typhoon, 'Don't you think we ought to get ready for them?' Momma turned off the torrents, as if with a faucet, and she got up and surged toward me and looked as if she would fling those suddenly huge bear arms

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around me in gratitude and affection, and I was just as fearful of being suffocated by love as I had been of being squashed in her fury, and she shouted, 'Dear Barry!' Momma lurched into the kitchen, where, behind the display of linen, she evidently looked at the clock, because she cried out, 'A quarter to eightf The bastards! . . . First off/ she added in a quieter voice, Til put this wash away so we can have more room to fling around in. Susie! Come here with the big basket. Susie! Lively!' Susan ran into the kitchen. I took off my coat and hat and gloves but not my sweater, because it was chilly in the house; the only heat in the two rooms came from the kitchen stove—though both Susan and Momma only wore cotton dresses. I went in the kitchen. Soon all the clean things were mounded in a huge reed laundry basket, and Momma took the rope down from its hooks and threw it in a box in the corner, and once the linen was out of the way I was hit by the mess in the room; I was saddened, so my hands and feet felt heavy and I thought I'd cry, by the realization that Mother's gentility had all along been only a skin, which she could easily burst and shed—a meaningless thing of touches, like the pot of African violets, Saintpaulia ionantha r on the window sill under the street-side window. The daybed where I slept was unmade, and the things in the room were cheap, crude, and battered, like Momma herself just then— the iron coal-burning stove, the deep, low, galvanized sink for both laundry and dishes, the dented pots and chipped plates; the coal dust on the floor by the scuttle, the glasses on the shelves mottled with soap-and-grease spots. I realized that Momma really is a slattern. In the last few minutes she'd become one for me to see. Little to choose between her and Mrs. Perkonian—sickening idea! I felt weak. Anyway, Momma began thinking out loud, and her thoughts were like thunder. The kitchen door to the street's O.K., it's like the door of a damned old safe in a bank, let 'em try to crack that one! But

the door in the back. I've been nervy about it for months. We've got to back it up. Come on, Sue-sue. Come on, son/ And Momma led us into the living room and lifted one end of the ragbag sofa and roared to the two of us to grab the other end. 'H'ist!' Momma shouted, and we managed to get our end off the floor, and Momma heaved sofa and us and all toward the door. The thing was too wide to cram between the bureau by the door and the side wall, and it had to be canted up on its side, and not only clothes and magazines but also a thimble and two spoons and some change and other odds and ends fell onto the floor and scattered around like fleeing vermin, Cimici lectu-larii or Periplanetae americanae. We got the sofa jammed against the door. We went back into the kitchen. I asked, 'What if they came in a window?' Momma said the windows were all nailed. 'If they come in a window, they'll have to smash it first. If they do that, we'll just have to pick 'em off one by one. Let's see. . . .' Momma began to look around for a weapon. She took a broom from a corner and held it in the air and shook it, but it must have seemed too light; she handed it to me, and I clutched it as tight as I could. 'Aha!' she then shouted. 'I know what's loose.' She went to the kitchen table, lifted one corner, and pulled a thick leg out of its socket. She took it by its bottom end and swung it, and looked pleased. Slowly the table fell awry, with a sliding metallic sound of shifting kitchen cutlery. Susan suggested calling the police, but Momma was scornful of that idea. She said, 'Did you ever hear of calling the firemen before you set the house on fire?' The clock pointed to eight o'clock; the three of us in the kitchen fell silent. Then I had an idea. I asked Momma if we hadn't better turn the lights out. That way we could see them, and they wouldn't be able to see us—there was a moon out. 'You're a darling boy!' Momma said, but it didn't seem to me there was any real love left in her. We turned the lights out, and I thought of Father's long five-

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battery flashlight that he kept under his bed, and I ran out and got it and offered it to Momma. 'Keep it/ she said. 'You can use it to knock the brains out of them, such as they have. Give the broom to Sue.' We stood in the dark then. It was still within and without, except that Momma's breathing, which was beginning to be asthmatic because of her emotion, sounded like wind going intermittently through a Pinus strobus —

Senator SKYPACK. All right, boy, enough of that foreign talk.

BARRY RUDD. A white pine. After a long time she took the flashlight from my perspiring hands and shone it briefly on the clock, which said fourteen minutes past eight; she threw the beam then straight in my face, and she rasped, Tou little bastard, you wouldn't be trying to make a fool of Momma, would you?' She'd never talked to me like that, ever, and I would have cried, I guess, but she suddenly said, 'Bah! You're a good little boy,' and she snapped off the light and handed it back to me. We waited another eternity and then we began to hear something in the far distance, just a hum, at first, remote and low. Gradually the sound increased, until it seemed like a faraway flight of planes. That's them,' Momma whispered with a great wheeze. Then, speaking very loud, in a voice that made me jump, she said, 'We'd best have a lookout in each room. Boy, you stay here in the kitchen. Sue, you go in the bathroom. And I'll take my parlor, and Lord love the bastard that gets in there/ Parlor. It shook me to hear her use that word—a vestige of the gentility that had so suddenly peeled off her. You know about the appearance of that room, yet she always called it her parlor. Susan began to whimper. 'I don't want to go in there alone/ 'Git!' Momma roared, and Susan gat, sniveling and whining. I went to a front window. The moon was shining whitely now, and I could see the bright ribbon of the street beyond the porch and the sidewalk, and beyond that Mr. Zimmer's beautybush, KoZ-

Tuesday, October 29

kwitzia amabilis, and his wayfaringtree, Viburnum lantana, and—

Senator SKYPACK. Now look here.

BARRY RUDD. For a moment I was seized by fear, and I wanted to run into the back room and enfold myself in that strange voluminous flesh in there, but just then the bathroom door creaked, and Susan tiptoed out and came and knelt beside me at my window. She had stopped crying, but when she settled herself beside me she loudly snuffled. I gripped my flashlight, and I whispered, Til bean you/ The noise outside seemed unbearably loud now. There they came! I could see them off to the right. First there were three or four motorcycles, then a small truck, then a car, and some guys on bikes. The machines were moving slowly, and the motorcycles' headlights flashed from side to side as the riders kept their balance on the pavement. Susan put her hand in mine; she was shaking like a passenger in a rickety auto. The first machines had stopped, and I heard a voice shout over the roar, 'Is that it?' And an answer, 'Sure, that's the house. Them fake bricks and the chimney out the side. That's it!' The convoy halted, and the riders dismounted and pushed their machines to the Zimmers' side of the street and leaned them on their stands. The truck parked a little down the street to the left. The motors and lights were being cut off. I could see about a dozen figures milling around the truck. High-school kids, they looked to be. They all seemed to be talking in undertones. One of them stepped a few paces toward the house and shouted to the others, 'Christ, lights all out. What if the old bag ain't home? What the hell fun's an empty house?' I was surprised at how easily I could hear every word; I knew how thin the walls were, but I still was surprised. I knew Momma must have been able to hear in the back room, too, because now I heard her mutter, 'What they'll call a person!' She let out a kind of growl. Another boy called out that maybe she was in bed, and still another shouted, 'You gonna get in it with her? What I

THE CHILD BUYER

hear, she's got room for three-four of you, bub!" Because of my reading in Ellis, Curtis, Wharton, and others, I understood, of course, exactly what he meant, and I could picture it, and it gave me a queer and violent feeling I'd never had in my life before, to picture my own mother—but just then Momma let out a roar which, I swear, shook the pots in the kitchen: 'You just try to come in here and climb in the bed with Maudie Rudd, you knee-pants sophomore hoor-mongers. I'll give you a dose you didn't look for/ There was a second of silence, then the first boy shouted in mock-elegant tones, 'Lah-de-dah. The lady of the house is expecting guests!' At that the boys all started whooping and yodeling and making siren noises and laughing and screaming in falsetto voices like old maids. They swarmed around the truck and picked off it all sorts of things to make noises with— pans and wooden spoons, horns and megaphones, a drum, a watchman's rattle, a whistle, and a frightfully sour old trumpet which I saw flashing in the moonlight as one of the hoods played ridiculous taps. All the time Momma was swearing and Sue was giving out little miserable chirping squeaks like those of a fledgling bird. Two of the boys approached the house with a ladder and went in the alley alongside the house, and I could hear the scrape and thump of the ladder against the side wall, and then I heard a metallic banging at the tin chimney of our stove, and Momma shrieked out, 'If there's property damage, I'll skin your backsides one and all!' But there was such a clatter and whooping that I'm sure her challenge was lost on our assailants. A boy went into the alley with a bucket, and soon I heard a hissing and splashing as whatever had been in the bucket was thrown down the hot chimney pipe and ran into the kitchen stove, putting out the fire there. Soon the house was filled with a steam that had an overpoweringly foul smell on it. 'Skunks! Skunks! Skunks!' Momma shrieked. The trumpet blew a signal, and suddenly the noise all stopped, except for Momma's furious

tirade in the living room. The hoods all ran back to their truck and put down the things they had had and picked up some boxes and baskets and ranged along the street in front of the house. 'No windows yet/ a voice called out. A mournful blast came from the trumpet, and the boys began to pelt the house with things that made soft, squooshy noises when they hit. Tou can come back and paint this house tomorrow/ Momma shouted, 'you damned little schoolboy crab lice, you!' She was in a frenzy, and I could hear the heavy crashes of her feet as she ran back and forth in the other room. Soon the pelting stopped; the attackers apparently ran out of that sort of ammunition. 'By God/ Momma said, 'it's time for cops/ She ran with thudding steps to the telephone, which hangs on the wall by the back door; she must have reached for it over the barricading sofa. I heard her click the receiver once, then again, then rapidly many times. 'What a moment for the damnable telephone machine to go dead!' she shouted. I said, They probably used that ladder to cut the wires on the side of the house/ 'Ah, that's right/ Momma said. 'You're one of this younger generation, Barry, you'd know what these devilish young new-type bastards have thought up in their modernistic dirty minds/ Momma had come to the door of the kitchen, and she saw Susan, whom she had set to guard the bathroom. 'What are you doing in this room?' she screamed at poor Susan, and then she wailed, 'Oh, it don't matter, it don't matter/ and she went back into the living room and began to sob. A sentence she blabbered out hit me like a splash of scalding water. 'Barry! Barry! You've seen me the way I really am/ I saw the swarm of boys convene again at the truck, and this time each one came away with a baseball bat. I could hear some of them run into the alley beside the house, and some along it to the back, so they had us surrounded on three sides. 'What now? What now?' Momma said between groans and sobs, as she evidently saw boys appearing in the back yard. The boys

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in front got down on hands and knees and crept toward the house. I became very frightened, and I dragged Sue back to the wall of the room away from the street. Momma was weeping and moaning, 'Paul oh Paul oh Paul, I need you, Paul, Paul!' Then the trumpet blew a fanfare, like one when a king appears in a movie. With that the boys began their whooping again, and they leaped up, and with the baseball bats they smashed in every window on the ground floor of the house, all at once. Now Momma shrieked as if she'd been stabbed, and Sue began to cry again. The boys were laughing and shouting through the open windows, and they continued to pound at whatever glass remained in the sashes. I could feel cold air rushing across the floor and swirling in the room. I heard the hoods talking about coming in the house. 'Come on/ one of them shouted. 'All together!' 'No, no, no/ Momma cried. 'Stay out of here. I'll sell the boy. They can have the boy. Just stay out, for the love of God, stay out/ And she rocked off in a torrent of sobs. But some of the boys climbed in, anyway. Sue and I—we cringed against the wall. Where the hell's the light switch?' one of the voices asked. Then, 'Shut up!' a sharp voice shouted, and there was an immediate silence. In the distance a siren could be heard—the Zimmers told us later they'd heard the racket and called the police. Excited voices cried, 'Am-scray!' 'Cheese it!' 'Jiggers!' The mob began to pour out the windows faster than they had come in. 'I'll sell him, I'll sell him, I'll sell him/ Momma was shouting over and over in the kitchen. Suddenly I felt I couldn't stand any more of it, and I got to my feet and ran to the window where I'd been kneeling, and I jumped out, and I began to run, I didn't know where to, just to get away. The siren was wailing not far away, and down the road a searchlight was swinging its beam here and there. Motorcycle engines were starting up. The pick-up careened forward and swerved around in a U-turn and barely missed me as it hurtled along River Street in the di-