The TV Kid (5 page)

The dinosaur’s head would crack the floor, sending Carol Burnett into the stove. She would pull herself out. Her wig would be sideways, her bathrobe scorched. “Did you feel something
then?”

“I didn’t feel nothing.”

Suddenly the dinosaur, full-grown, would explode through the kitchen floor. Tim Conway would be sent flying through space. He would go over the barn, through the chicken coop, past the silo, and into the wood pile. He would look up, dazed. “I think I felt something,” he’d say.

Afterward, Lennie thought, when the series got popular, the dinosaur could do Lassie-type things like saving babies and rescuing forest rangers.

Above him the policeman said, “Could be somebody inside.” Lennie forgot the TV show. The policeman’s foot moved and a little dust shifted down through the cracks in the boards.

“We better take a look.”

The policeman turned the key in the lock and pushed on the door. He didn’t know that you had to lift up on the knob, Lennie thought. Then, abruptly, the door opened and the two policemen entered the house.

Lennie couldn’t hear them as clearly now, but every now and then a board would creak, and Lennie would know they were in the kitchen, looking behind the hot-water heater. Or they were in Lennie’s bedroom or climbing the stairs to the second floor.

“Looks like everything’s in order,” Lennie heard the policeman say as he came out on the porch.

“Mr. Wilkins was right, I guess, about somebody going in these houses.”

“Yeah.”

“Probably some kids.”

“Nothing’s been taken, though. It doesn’t look like it, anyway.”

“Not too much to take, if you ask me.”

In the crawl space Lennie lifted his head in surprise and almost hit the water pipe again. How little those policemen understood! Why, the objects in this house were as valuable as the contents of a museum—to him, anyway. He would give anything to have the contents of the drawers in the chest. To Lennie they would be like a mummy’s possessions, special chosen things to be saved for a later life. Lennie would settle happily for just the old marbles and the Parcheesi set and the worn dominos.

The policemen came down the front steps. “If it was me, I’d rather have a place over on Paradise Lake,” one said. They walked around the left side of the house. They were as perfectly in step as drilling soldiers. “That’s a real nice place. You can’t build a house at Paradise Lake that don’t have metal siding.”

They paused at the corner of the house. Lennie could see their legs perfectly now.

One of them said, “Look at that. The drain pipe’s busted. The steps’ll be rotten by summer.”

Then they walked, still in step, to the patrol car. They got in and the little cop started the engine. Slowly, as Lennie reclined against the smooth stones, the car pulled away from the drive and moved on down the road.

F
or a moment Lennie could not move. He was weak with relief. He had been spared, saved, let off the hook. A fish probably felt like this, Lennie thought, when he was caught by Marlin Perkins for
Wild Kingdom
and then was mercifully thrown back into the water because he was too little.

“Although some fish are too little,
you
are never too little to be insured by Mutual of Omaha,” Marlin Perkins would say later with a quiet smile.

Lennie thought of the rejected fish hitting the sparkling water, sinking, dropping down where the water was dark and cold, and lying there, taking himself for dead. Then Lennie thought of the fish realizing that life was still there and in a burst of power going straight up, breaking the surface of the water like one of those trick porpoises at Sea World.

Lennie rested a moment more because his legs felt weak. Fright took a lot out of a person, turned the legs to rope and the heart to a caged bird.

And also Lennie was waiting. The police car had moved on around the lake, but this could be a trick. At any moment the car could make a U-turn and come back. If the policemen were suspicious, that’s exactly what they would do. Lennie decided he would stay where he was for at least another fifteen minutes.

He rested against the stones. To pass the time he began to think of himself as part of TV shows. He could see the listings in
TV Guide.

He smiled to himself. Now that his fear had lessened, now that he was sure everything was all right, the danger from the cops didn’t seem real. Actually his only real worry had been about his mom. If they’d caught him ... If they’d driven him to the Fairy Land Motel ... If they’d taken him into the office and said, “Ma’am, we just placed your son under arrest” ... That
would
have been terrible.

He remembered that, only the evening before, his mom had said she was proud of him. A family of four had driven into the motel at dusk and Lennie had taken two cots to their room. He had taken ice to the couple in 316, extra linen to 304, and he had made up 311 and 313 without being told. It was, he admitted, mostly to make up for the bad grade he had gotten on his Science test, but his mom hadn’t known that.

“I’m really proud of you,” she had said. “All that studying the other night on Science—it will pay off too, I know it will—and all the help you’re giving me tonight. We’re going to make it, Lennie, I know we are.”

For a moment Lennie lay there staring up at the cobwebs that had formed between the boards of the house. He was thinking about his mother.

Then out of the corner of his eyes he caught sight of movement. He straightened.

The police car was coming back. So silently Lennie hadn’t heard it, moving in that slow, first-gear way, the car came to the driveway of the stone house and turned in.

L
ennie waited. When he did not hear the car door open, he slipped forward until he had a better view. The policemen were not getting out of the car. Perhaps they were sitting there having a smoke, Lennie thought. Maybe a late lunch. The big sagging cop was probably downing a couple of Twinkies. Lennie smiled. He imagined the cop taking a bite, looking at the other cop, saying, “Freshness never tasted so good.”

The smile faded. What were the cops
doing?
Anyway, Lennie thought, it was lucky that he had stayed under the house, that he hadn’t scrambled out right away. If he had, he would have been yanked up by the heels like a newborn baby. “Got you! All right, kid, tell us who your parents are.”

Lennie was lying on his side now. A cobweb beneath the flooring touched Lennie’s cheek, but Lennie didn’t even raise his hand to brush it away. He kept his eyes on the blue strip of the car. There was still no sound or movement.

“Come on, come on,
leave!”
Lennie begged beneath his breath. He crossed his fingers, then uncrossed them.
“Leave!”

Then, abruptly, Lennie heard the engine start. He couldn’t believe it for a moment. The wheels spun a little in the dust of the drive and then the car backed up. It was moving fast.

The car backed onto the road, moved forward, and drove out of Lennie’s vision. It took the first curve in the road so rapidly that Lennie could hear the squeal of tires. He smelled dust. He did not move. He waited.

Five minutes later the car got to the highway and Lennie heard the high wail of the siren as the car headed for Bennetsville.

Now Lennie relaxed for the first time since he had seen the car. It really is over now, he thought. An emergency somewhere—an accident perhaps, a criminal on the loose—and police were called to duty.

He could crawl out in peace now. He turned onto his stomach and got set to scramble out. His left leg touched the pile of stones, and Lennie pushed himself forward.

The pushing started a small slide. The rocks shifted. A few tumbled to the ground and rolled away like balls. Mixed with the sound of the shifting, rolling stones was another sound. A rattle.

No sooner had Lennie heard it than he felt the sharp stab of fangs on his ankle.

He jerked his head around, and in the shadow of the crawl space he saw a snake. It was so nearly the color of the ground that it seemed for a moment to be the ground itself set in motion.

Instantly Lennie twisted away. He rolled over twice. When he stopped and glanced back, the snake was moving behind the tipped-over oil drum. It disappeared in the shadows.

Lennie drew his leg up to his chest and yanked up his pants. There was a yellow stain on his sock. Slowly, as carefully as if he were unwrapping something, Lennie pulled down the sock and looked at the two tiny holes in the inside of his ankle.

Drops of blood oozed out, and instinctively Lennie bent down and sucked the wound and spit out blood and venom. He did this a second time, a third, and then he drew back again and looked at the wound.

A cold chill went up his spine. He said to himself: The main thing I am not supposed to do is panic. He remembered that from when Little Joe got snake-bitten on the Ponderosa. But he knew he already had panicked. Just the sight of those two holes in his ankle had caused his heart to pound like a hammer. Blood rushed through his body with the force of Niagara Falls. His throat had tightened up. Suddenly he couldn’t see because tears were in his eyes.

It seemed to Lennie then that this was the secret of life—the thing man had always been afraid of. Even when man thought he was afraid of the Russians or the atom bomb or some new virus, what he really feared was that he would wind up bitten by a snake—two holes in his ankle. Lennie tried to see the wound through his tears.

It was man’s first fear, Lennie seemed to remem ber, way back in the Bible, and the Bible knew how to scare a person. Lennie almost felt that this was the same snake. It had slithered down the tree in the Garden of Eden, tempted Adam, wound through deserts, around pyramids, stowed away on a banana boat, come to the United States, crossed ditches and parks and burning asphalt roads, and come here to wait for Lennie beneath the stone house.

Lennie blinked, and the two holes came into focus again. “I got to get out of here,” Lennie said.

Then, using the same side-to-side motions the snake had used going behind the oil drum, Lennie pulled himself out of the shadow of the crawl space. He slid into the sunlight. He sat up.

And there in the dappled sunlight, beneath trees that were solid gold, Lennie rolled up his pants leg and took off his shoe. He stripped off the stained sock. He looked again at the two small holes in the pale flesh of his ankle.

L
ennie’s ankle was bleeding freely now. The blood was streaming down his foot, dropping onto the dry, dusty earth. The pain had increased.

Lennie hunched over his foot. This sharp, stinging pain made him even more afraid. His heart started beating harder. His mouth got drier. He kept saying over and over, “I got to keep calm. I got to keep calm.” But this seemed only to make him more frightened.

He reached into his back pocket for his knife. It was there tangled in some string and a red bandana. When he got it loose, he tried to open it one-handed as he always did, but his fingers were trembling too much.

Fumbling, using both hands, he got the knife open. Then it dropped in the dust. In a panic Lennie wiped the dusty knife blade off on his pants. He knew what to do, but he hesitated a moment. He felt physically sick now. Then he bent quickly and cut little x’s over the fang marks.

He moaned. For the first time in his life he wanted to be in a hospital among people who knew what they were doing. Doctors and nurses had always frightened Lennie before, but now in his mind they took on the beauty of painted pictures.