Firmin Read online

  Well, we already know how Norman let me down. The typewriter ditto. I dug up detailed descriptions and labeled drawings, and I even saw them at work in the movies. The verdict was unequivocal: too big, too heavy. When you are small, it is not enough to be a genius. Even if I could depress the keys, perhaps by jumping on them from a height, I would never be able to wind paper into the roller—rats are not good at knobs—or work the long silver lever that made the carriage rasp back into place. I had learned from the movies that a typewriter really does make a kind of music, and I knew that I was never going to hear it for myself, the bright ping of accomplishment at the end of a line or the long applauding scrape of the carriage slamming back to start another. As things have turned out, when I finish a line I hear nothing, just the silence of thoughts falling endlessly down the hole of memory.

  But as I have said before, I can be very persistent when I want something badly enough, and I did not give up on the idea of conversing with humans. Only a couple of weeks after abandoning the typewriter project, I had discovered under LANGUAGES a slim yellow pamphlet called Say It Without Sound: A Pictionary, and there I found pictures of dozens of the signs used by the deaf to speak. When I first came across this book I was sure that at last I had found what I sought. Common words were arranged alphabetically, as in a dictionary, and opposite each entry as its “definition” was a photo of a pretty woman in a red sweater making the corresponding sign. It was because of her, I suppose, that the idea of signing became associated with Lovelies. Next to the word friend, for example, was a picture of the shapely-sweatered Lovely holding her left and right index fingers together. Friendly fingers close together. So I got my hopes up again. Foolishly, it turned out, since I soon discovered that whoever had devised this silent language had intended it for creatures equipped with fingers. With what I had in the way of feet and claws, I found it impossible to stammer out even the most rudimentary phrases. I could manage at best a kind of digital stutter. I stood in front of the mirror, painful as that was, and balancing on the rim of the sink, struggled to say in sign, “What do you like to read?” I tried letting my body stand for a palm and my legs for fingers and then midway through the phrase changed the principle and let my forelegs stand for arms and my hind legs for thumbs. Slapping my chest now, then crossing my legs, then curling up in a ball, I flung myself frantically about like a man with his clothes on fire. It was useless.

  Desperate situations, however, breed desperate hopes, and so after being nearly poisoned to death by Shine I went back to the idea of signing. At this point I figured a rudimentary phrase might be all I needed, just something to let people know that I was smart and friendly. It had been a long time since my first attempts, and though few things left the store without my knowledge, I was apprehensive that someone might have slipped out with the pamphlet one day when I was away at the Rialto or ratnapping in the ceiling. Someone deaf, of course, and therefore very silent. So as soon as Shine had locked the door that night and coughed once (a habit he had, a kind of hello to the evening), and carried his footfalls down the street, I tumbled to the ground floor and tore across the shop to the corner where the book used to be. And where it was still: a yellow slice sandwiched like cheese between the dark pumpernickel of a Serbo-Croatian dictionary and the paler rye of Langston’s Fundamentals of Business German. When with great effort I had contrived to dislodge it from the shelf, I noticed that the price penciled on the inside cover had shriveled from twenty-five cents to a nickel.

  Turning the pages slowly, I questioned the Lovely. I was looking for the simplest and most intelligible phrase permitted by my physiological limitations, and in no time at all I had learned to say “good-bye zipper.” It wasn’t Shakespeare, but it was the best I could manage. I was able to say this by standing on my hind legs and waving a forepaw—waving good-bye—followed by a zipping motion up my chest with the same paw. I practiced in front of the mirror, wave-zip, wave-zip, until I had it down pat—which brought me face-to-face with a new problem: who was I going to say this to? Obvious answer: a deaf person. Which at least gave me a new goal in life: find a deaf person. Deaf people, however, do not grow on trees. I kept my eyes open, hoping one would just happen to walk into the store, in which case I planned to rush out and introduce myself. I don’t think any ever did, though one day an old man came in and spent a long time browsing and finally picked out a book and paid for it without saying a word. So he might have been deaf. But with Shine around I figured I could not take any chances. The man was old and frail, and had I rushed out and thrown myself at his feet, he might not have been able to protect me.

  I had never physically traveled outside of Scollay Square, but I knew a lot about Boston from books and maps and could see it all in my head stretched out below me, Arlington to Columbus Point, as from an airplane. Now, like a true Axion, my task was to make contact with the dominant species. I had of course already tried that with Shine and had nearly met an Axion’s fate. But wide reading had left no doubt in my mind that in addition to crowds of sadists, fiends, psychopaths, and poisoners, the dominant species also sported exemplars of gentleness and compassion, and that most of the latter were women. I could have sought contact in the streets of the Square, but something in the faces there warned me not to. I have already confessed that at the time I was still very bourgeois, and consequently I wanted as my first interlocutor, as, so to speak, my virginal partner in human converse, what I then thought of as a superior class of person. With the most likely spots for that sort of superior female person—the campuses of Wellesley and Radcliffe and the Saint Claire Nunnery in Jamaica Plain—out of reach, I fell back on the Public Garden, just a few blocks west of the Square. And in this you see again that despite a tendency to pickiness I have all four feet on the ground and can be quite practical when I have to.

  I needed a rainy night for travel, when people would be too busy clinging to the newspapers and umbrellas above their heads as they dashed between cars and doorways to notice a small, low animal creeping its way westward beneath the parked vehicles. I did not have to wait long. The following Saturday, Shine left the shop at five o’clock under the dripping dome of a black umbrella. And sometime after midnight, when I set out for the Public Garden, the rain was coming down hard, though the asphalt beneath the cars was still dry and warm. Only the intersections presented problems, open spaces to be crossed at a sprint. I bided my time at those places—I had not forgotten poor Peewee—and it was nearly dawn when I finally crossed the Common and made my final dash into the Public Garden.

  The grass there was soft and smelled good and sweet. It was my first grass, and I ate some. The rain had stopped, and the sky was paling in the east. After crawling under parked cars, from car to car all the way up Tremont Street, my legs and the underparts of my body were black and matted with grit and oil. I cleaned myself as best I could, then crept under some bushes and slept. When I woke, the sun was shining, and I saw the trees. I had never seen real trees before. The bush I was hiding under was near a concrete path that ran all the way across the Public Garden. I looked out and saw people in nice clothes walking. Church bells were ringing. I had a strange detached feeling, as if I were seeing myself from above. A rat that should be dead was not dead. Weak and dirty but in no way dead, he was alive under a bush, and he had a plan.

  I watched the people walking, watched what they did with their hands. Were their hands talking? All morning I watched hands swing by sides, hide in pockets, pat down wind-ruffled hair, wave hello, point at squirrels, make fists, toss peanuts, pick noses, scratch crotches, and hold other hands. The hands all went busily about these affairs without ever speaking. I ate grass. Twice I darted out and pinched peanuts meant for squirrels. It was not enough. I had not eaten a real meal for over a day. I was feeling weak, and the weakness made me afraid.

  It was nearly dark when I saw them coming, two women and a little girl between them, walking up from Arlington Street. They were wearing nice clothes and had shiny shoes. Above t
he girl’s head the women’s hands were talking. I was sorry that I had not spent more time studying the pictionary so that I could understand what the hands were saying. My heart was pounding. I worried about my weakness, that in my fear and excitement I was going to faint. I watched as they came closer, and when they were close I rushed out into the middle of the walk, and my paws said “good-bye zipper.” I tried to shout it by making my gestures as violent as possible. Good-bye zipper. Good-bye zipper. Absurdly, I tried to heighten the effect by squeaking as loud as I could. I could tell that I was getting through. The women and the girl had stopped and all three were staring open-mouthed. Good-bye zipper. I had to stand on my hind legs to say this, and in my enthusiasm I lost my balance and fell over backward. One of the women started making a breathy grunting sound, huh huh huh, she might have been laughing, and then the little girl screamed. I am not clear on the exact progression of events after that. Some people were shouting “Rat, rat!” A man’s voice said, “Of course it’s not a squirrel,” and another voice said, “It’s having a fit,” and a third said, “Rabies,” and then they all were talking at once. A man came with a walking stick and tried to poke me in the stomach. I was back on my feet and running, and the man tried to strike me with the stick. I heard it crack against the pavement, and then it went up in the air and whooshed and came down on my back just as I made the grass edge, and someone shouted, “Don’t hurt it.” I got into the row of bushes and ran. I did not feel any pain but I knew that I was dragging something heavy behind me. I turned my head and saw that my left leg was twisted the wrong way. It did not move as I ran, and I dragged it behind me like a sack.

  The pain came in the night, and by the next morning I could barely haul myself forward using only my front legs, the pain was so huge. I ate grass. From my hiding place I watched a man feed squirrels. He was sitting on a bench near me with a paper sack in his lap, and the squirrels climbed up and took peanuts from between his fingers. Greed and Degradation among America’s Wildlife. After a while he seemed to get bored. He turned the sack upside down and all the peanuts spilled out on the bench and on the ground. The man walked off and the squirrels rushed around snatching up peanuts, and when they thought there weren’t any more they left too. But they had missed one peanut, I could see it in the grass against the foot of the bench just a few feet from where I was hiding. Someone else came and sat on the bench, someone blue. I didn’t care. I wanted the peanut too much to care about anything but that, and I crawled out and got it. I remember how good it tasted.

  The next things I recall are a swaying motion and a strong human smell. When I came to I found myself swaddled like a papoose in human smell and suffocating layers of wool cloth. It was dark in there, and swaying, and full of pain. Clawing at the folds of rough cloth with my forefeet, I managed to work my head out into the fresh air. Gasping great mouthfuls of it, I saw a blue sky hatched by wires, edged by the tops of buildings. I pulled back another fold, folded it down, and I could see the cars that we were passing on one side, that were passing us on the other. Twisting my head back I looked into the sky straight above, and then, farther back, into a human eye of the same clear blue. It was looking straight at me, while its mate watched the traffic.

  Jerry Magoon was breathing hard with the effort of pedaling and his breath was blowing his mustache out each time he exhaled. The bike swayed from side to side as he pedaled, and the wire basket rocked like a cradle. I rested my head on the redolent wool, which I later learned was Jerry’s sweater, Jerry’s smell, and closed my eyes. The thick cloth of the sweater dulled the jolts of the road but did not stop the pain in my leg. Beneath the basket the front wheel squeaked. I would have liked to tell Jerry good-bye zipper, but I did not have the strength, and anyway I doubted he would understand.

  And that was how I came to Cornhill the second time. I had ridden in first on the swaying waters of Mama’s womb, and now in the folds of Jerry’s sweater. Like Moses, I rode in in a basket.

  When we got to Pembroke Books, Jerry lifted the bike over the curb as gently as he could and leaned it against the shop window. Shine’s scowl flew at us through the glass—his wide face looked like an owl swooping at us through the window. Peering up from my woolly covert in the basket, I was closer to him than I had ever been before, closer even than on that fateful day when our eyes had first met, mine full of love and his full of … what? Looking back, I suppose it was contempt.

  Jerry just ignored him as usual.

  He cradled me in an armful of wool, and we went into the doorway under ROOMS. Using his elbows he pushed open the door that said DR. LIEBERMAN PAINLESS DENTIST on the glass. It closed behind us with a sigh. It was darker inside, with a cold wet smell. Heavily and slowly, placing first his right foot on a tread and then bringing his left up to stand beside it, like a child, he carried me up three flights of dark stairs. His mustache rose and fell with his breathing, and we rested a while on the landings. There were several doors on each floor. All were painted brown except Dr. Lieberman’s, which was green, and each had a frosted glass transom above it.

  Jerry’s room was on the top floor at the back. Shifting the sweater onto a crooked elbow, he dug in his pocket. He excavated a handful of stuff—a book of matches, coins, a piece of white string, some peanuts, a brass screw. Spilling most of it onto the floor, he managed to extract a key. His fingers were short and thick. He unlocked the door, nudging it open with his foot, and we went in. He put me carefully down on the bed, easing his arm out from under the wool so as not to jostle, and arranged the sweater into a kind of nest around me. Then he pushed it down on one side so I could see over without lifting my head.

  The room was not very big, and at first glance its primary function seemed to be storage. Besides the furniture—an iron bedstead, a leather armchair split and spilling white stuffing, a chest of drawers surmounted by a tilting mirror on which someone had drawn, in lipstick perhaps, a walleyed mustachioed face sticking its tongue out, bookshelves constructed of unpainted boards and concrete blocks, a table with a white enamel top chipped black along the edges—there were boxes, cardboard cartons and wooden crates, piled one on top of the other almost to the ceiling. Precariously on top of the tallest stack teetered a child’s red wagon, the kind that is pulled by a long metal handle. The sides of this wagon had been extended by the addition of wooden planks on which someone had painted by hand E. J. MAGOON in big red and yellow letters, as on a circus wagon. A few minutes later Jerry brought up his bicycle and wedged it in with all the rest. I have never seen a human live so much like a rat.

  He opened a door next to the bookshelves and rummaged in a closet, digging with his arms and grunting and throwing things out on the floor behind him—clothes, boots, a partially demolished record player, a toaster, a lot of Life magazines, and more boxes. He reminded me of a dog digging in the dirt. On the other side of the bookshelves from the closet was a kind of alcove with a sink and a counter. A blue cloth hung from the counter to the floor, concealing, I later learned, a metal garbage can. On top of the counter, amid a litter of pans and plates, was a green Coleman camp stove. Daylight struggled through the greasy panes of a single large window. This had a pull shade but no curtains, and beneath it was a radiator that someone had tried—with only partial success—to paint red.

  Jerry found what he was looking for in the closet: a gray Florsheim shoe box, which he upended over the bed, spilling the contents out in a pile next to where I lay—letters, envelopes, a handful of blue and white playing cards with BICYCLE on the back, and lots of photographs. In one I saw upside down a much younger Jerry with short black hair and a long upper lip like Henry Miller’s. He was sitting at a table covered with papers. Interrupted at his writing, still holding a pen to the page, he was looking up and smiling stiffly. He had white teeth. The old gray one smiled too and spoke to me softly and told me not to worry or be frightened, and his mustache moved while the words crept out beneath it. His teeth were long and yellow now and his breath smelled like cigar
ettes and meat.

  He placed a folded towel—it said ROOSEVELT HOTEL—at the bottom of the box and gently lifted me in and put the box on the floor. The towel had blue stripes on it. It did not smell of Jerry. He kept talking to me in that soft cheerful voice—deep and full of gravel—while he poked around in the refrigerator without turning his head.

  “What’s yours, Chief?” he graveled. “Milk? … Milk’s good.” He pulled out a jar with a red lid. “Ever try peanut butter?” He knelt by my box, huge head bending over.

  I never had tried peanut butter. Or milk, apart from the funny stuff I had scrounged from Mama. The milk came in a jar top and the peanut butter in a dollop on a piece of waxed paper. Peanut butter was the best thing I had ever tasted. It was named Skippy. And the milk too was good, so cool and sweet. He watched me eating. He watched me lap the milk, and he smiled. He said, “Yum yum, drink ’em up.”

  Then he fussed around in the alcove. He cooked rice in a pot of water, and when it was cooked he drained it by tipping the pot over the sink while holding the lid on with a toweled hand. A cloud of steam rose from the sink and misted the window. He looked at me and said “Kavoom.” He laughed, shaking the gravel around in his lungs. He shook soy sauce on the rice and stirred it around. He pushed aside stacks of books and papers and dirty dishes to clear a spot for his plate at the table. He ate the rice with a spoon, holding the spoon in his fist like a child and chewing very slowly. I hoped he would talk to me some more, but he did not that night.