The TV Kid (6 page)

He took three deep breaths. Then he bent down and began to draw out the blood. He spit it into the dust.

Suddenly he thought of a tourniquet, and he wrapped the bandana around his leg and tied it tight. He sucked hard at the snake bite, drawing a mouthful of blood. He spit it out.

His ankle really hurt now. It was a burning pain, sharp and stinging, as if his leg were being slashed by razor blades. He had to get help.

The telephone! Lennie thought. He got up and, hobbling on one foot, made his way around the house and up the steps. The key was gone, but Lennie went straight to the window by the sofa and pulled it up. Lucky he had known about that latch being broken.

Carefully he swung his leg over the sill. The telephone was on the far wall, and Lennie kept his eyes on it as he struggled across the room. Rainbow-like, it seemed to get farther and farther away.

Lennie held on to one piece of furniture after another—the overstuffed chair, the end table, the floor lamp. He had once thought this furniture must have come from at least twenty different people.

“Well, I can get along without this chair, I reckon,” someone had said.

“I got no more use for this table.”

“I was going to give this rug to the Sunday school, but if you can use it ...”

Lennie had liked that. At the time he had thought that if he ever had a house, that’s the way he would have wanted to furnish it—one piece of furniture from everybody he liked.

With a swimming motion, weaving through the furniture, he got to the phone at last. He lifted the receiver. Silence. He jiggled the piece up and down. Silence. He dialed 0. Silence. As he stood there on one foot, he seemed to get smaller in size. The phone had been disconnected for the winter.

Slowly Lennie let himself down into the first chair he came to. It was the brown overstuffed armchair, and he sank as slowly as an old rheumatic man. He didn’t think he would ever get up again. He lifted his leg as gently as he could and rested it on the green plastic footstool. His ankle was turning purple.

He had so wanted to hear the voice of the operator saying, “Number, please.” He had so wanted to reply, “Get me the Fairy Land Motel.”

He laid his head back against the chair. There was a picture hanging on the opposite wall. Lennie had never noticed it before. He would not have noticed it now except that the sunlight from the window was falling on it, lighting it up as if it were in a museum.

The picture was a barnyard scene painted by someone who had never been in a barnyard. No pigs were that pink. No rooster was that red. No cow went around with four golden straws in the side of her mouth.

Tears came to Lennie’s eyes. They spilled over onto his cheeks and rolled down his face. He caught the first one with his tongue. He tasted the salt. Then he gave up and let the tears flow.

It would take a miracle to save him now, he thought. He couldn’t walk. Any movement at all was terribly painful. The police wouldn’t come back. No one knew where he was. He needed a real miracle, a twitch from Samantha’s nose or a visit from the Flying Nun or a nod from Jeannie.

He had always loved those shows. When things went wrong—when Darren got changed into an elephant, Samantha would just twitch her nose and make him a man again. When Jeannie’s master was accidentally sent into space instead of a rhesus monkey, Jeannie would nod him back again. That kind of magic was what he needed.

Slowly he reached down, loosened the tourniquet, let the blood flow back into his leg for a moment. Then he tightened it again.

Suddenly he thought of his mother. He knew how sad she would look when she found out. All the trouble he had caused her—all the vaccinations and school lessons and tooth fillings. She had even signed him up for safety lessons one summer at a municipal pool. She had taken him with her through seven states—and all for what? To have him sink down into an overstuffed chair and die.

Wincing with pain, Lennie got to his feet. Outside, the sun went behind a cloud, and it got dark in the room. For a moment Lennie was terrified. He thought the end had come. He began to shuffle across the room. In a panic he grabbed the sofa, and as he reached for the table, the sun came out again. The room got bright.

By accident, as he leaned there, he saw his face in the mirror by the front door. It scared him. He looked as wild as a man marooned twenty years on a desert island.

Lennie swallowed. He took a deep breath. Then slowly, his shoulders hunched forward, his chest heaving with unspent sobs, he started for the door.

L
ennie struggled out onto the front porch. Every step killed him. He could not even touch his wounded leg to the floor now.

He moved so slowly and carefully it almost seemed that he was not moving at all. Inch by inch he made it across the warped floor boards and caught the porch railing. He hung there for a moment, bent forward, staring down into the ferns below.

He raised his head then and looked across the lake. The sun had gotten lower in the sky. Could it already be setting? How much time
had
passed, Lennie wondered. The lake was shining with the red sun and the reflection of the beech trees. Probably not more than a half hour since he had first felt that piercing sting on his ankle.

The redness of the lake seemed like a bad omen to him, a prediction of terrible things to come. It was like a prophecy. When the waters of the earth turn red ...

Someone he knew had believed in omens. Who was it? His Grandmother Madison probably. When the caterpillars were thick, a bad winter was coming. When an owl cried in the night, somebody was going to die. What would she say about this? When the waters of the earth turn red ...

Or maybe it was his Grandfather Madison. No, his Grandfather Madison had been an old man who ran motels and in his spare time worked at making concrete figures to adorn them.

The thing his Grandfather Madison believed in was not complaining. One time when Lennie had broken his arm and was crying because the cast itched, his Grandfather Madison had told him that there was an old legend that said birds were created without wings. When their wings were put on their bodies as a punishment, the birds complained, but as soon as they stopped complaining, the wings grew to their bodies and lifted them into the air.

Lennie had been so puzzled about what this had to do with the cast on his arm that he had stopped crying at once. He still didn’t understand it.

Lennie’s leg jerked again. The pain was so sharp and sudden that Lennie threw back his head like an animal. He felt like howling, but instead he yelled, “Does anybody hear me?”

He waited, listened to the silence, and then tried again.
“Will somebody please help me?”
He paused.
“I’m over here at the stone house!”

Nobody answered, and the silence frightened Lennie. It was a total silence. He couldn’t even hear any birds or crickets. The leaves had stopped turning in the trees.

It was as if he really were the last person on earth. Even Friend couldn’t help him. Remember, Friend had surrendered to the police. In a flash a picture came to Lennie of Friend sitting in a cell at the station, his batteries gradually getting weaker. (“Don’t forget, kids, to keep spare batteries handy so you’ll never be without a Friend.”) By the time the police got around to questioning him, his voice would be too faint to hear.

“Speak up, son, tell us your name in a good loud voice.”

Hmmmmmm

“I said for you to speak
up!
If you don’t, we’re going to have to take some action.”

Hmm

The silence continued. Even the water no longer lapped at the shore.

Lennie glanced down at his leg. It was swelling now, the skin tight and shiny, and as hot as if it were on fire. His leg twitched again, frog-like, and the pain almost made him faint.

His strength was leaving him rapidly. He was so weak now that he had to sit down or he would collapse. Moving his leg as little as possible, Lennie eased himself down on the top step. With a sigh, he reclined against the porch railing.

After a moment, even weaker, he let himself lie on the porch. He sagged. All his strength was gone. His leg felt like a sausage in a frying pan.

He looked up at the porch ceiling. Rain had seeped through the tar and shingles of the roof and stained the boards. Lennie saw it all in a kind of blur because he had started crying again.

All of a sudden Lennie found himself remembering a poem. Lennie knew only one poem. He had had to learn it for a school assignment.

“If everyone else can memorize a poem, you can too, Lennie,” his teacher had said.

“But why can’t I substitute a TV jingle? They’re poems. They rhyme.”

“No, Lennie.”

“But listen to this. Why isn’t this a poem?

“No, Lennie, that’s not poetry.”

“Well, here’s another one. What’s wrong with this?

“Lennie for the last time, you are to learn a poem. Advertisingjingles are not poetry.”

Lennie could no longer remember the teacher’s name—he had had twenty-three different teachers in all that year—but he could still remember his poem and how bright the sun had been, slanting into the room, as he said it. It was as if the audience were lit up for the occasion instead of the stage.

“I am curious,” the teacher had said when he had finished. “Why did you select that particular poem, Lennie?”

He had selected it because all the months of the year were in it, and that would make it easier to memorize. He already knew the months. “It just appealed to me,” he had said.

“Why, Lennie?”

“I don’t know.”

“What do you think the poet had in mind when he wrote the poem?” The teacher, interested in Lennie for the first time, crossed in front of her desk.

“Let me think.” Lennie put his hand to his chin at this point to give the impression of deep thought. Lennie had always had a hard time arranging his face in the right expression. Looking interested or studious was especially hard for him. He sometimes thought he needed acting lessons on being a person.

“Do you think he was just talking about one year passing?” the teacher went on. “Or do you think, Lennie, that the poet was seeing his whole life as a year, that he was seeing his whole life slipping past?”

“I’m not sure.” Lennie’s hand was still on his chin as if ready to stroke a long gray beard.

“Class?”

“His whole life slipping past,
” the class chorused together. They had had this teacher so long that they could tell, just from the way she asked a question, what they were supposed to answer.

“I was just getting ready to say that,” Lennie mumbled into his hand.

And now, two years too late, Lennie knew what they were talking about. The poet
had
meant his whole life. Lennie knew because he saw his whole life slipping away too. In exactly the same way. July’s sun. August’s moon. September’s stars. October’s noon.

He closed his eyes and the tears came again, hot and fast. He couldn’t remember the rest of the poem. What was it he would miss about November and December? He squeezed his eyes shut tighter in determination. He stuck out his jaw.

Then his body went slack. He sighed. He realized that he would miss everything about the world. He would miss all the reruns of
Bonanza
and
Star Trek.
He would miss shows that hadn’t even come on the air, midwinter replacements he didn’t even know about. He would miss shows that hadn’t even been thought up yet. He would miss his mother.

Lennie sighed again. And his mother would miss him. That was the worst thought. To get his mind off it, he tried to think of something he had seen on TV. All the programs were a blur. He couldn’t even remember what dangers Mannix had faced last week, or Columbo. And Kojak had been in real trouble. What was it?

He groaned, feeling again the pain of separation from his mother.

All Lennie’s life his own feelings had been as hard to get to as the meat in a walnut. His feelings were there—Lennie was sure of that—somewhere inside the hull, probably just as perfectly formed as the rest of the things nature put in a shell.

Lennie remembered that one March morning he and his mom had been burning trash behind the motel. His mom had said, “Why, Lennie, look at this.”

Lennie had come over to where his mom was standing by some bushes. “What is it?”

“It’s an old cocoon. We’ll take it in and cut it open, and you can see where a butterfly grew.”

His mom had broken off the twig and, forgetting the trash fire, had gone into the motel. She had taken her onion knife and sawed through the cocoon. “There,” she had said.

For a moment Lennie and his mom had stared at the cut-open cocoon in silence. Then his mom had said in a sad voice, “Oh, dear. It wasn’t empty. I cut through a butterfly.”

Lennie had stared silently at the two halves, the pale wet center.

“It was the first cocoon I ever saw. I’m sorry, Lennie.”

He could see that it really bothered her, and he’d said, “That’s all right.”

“I just didn’t know.”

Lennie felt that his own feelings had suddenly been laid bare in the same way. Now that it was too late, he found that—He broke off. He had just remembered the last part of the poem.

Anyway, it was something like that.