With (45 page)

She, at twelve, had already outgrown me. That in itself was unsettling enough, although of course she didn’t know it, being unable to see that the top of my head came only to her hairline, and I wasn’t going to tell her that she was taller than I. She seemed to be leaving me behind in her growth, not just physically but intellectually and emotionally.

The
in-habit
, meaning me, was certainly capable of crying, laughing, coughing, sneezing, and, to use that quaint participle created out of the verb, coming (although I preferred Robin’s
reaching
). This might be the proper place to confess that Adam Madewell as he turned thirteen and then fourteen out there in Rutherford, California may have sometimes remembered the self that he willed himself to leave behind on Madewell Mountain, and in such moments of remembrance or at least in his dreams wondered if the
in-habit
was having a good time jacking off, as he’d learned to call it in California.

What frustrated me more than the inability to actually have sex with Robin was the inability to
do
anything physical for her. She needed someone to cut down some trees for her: each winter she had to get her firewood by dragging in limbs of deadwood, usually the result of the ice storms that came nearly every winter. She needed someone to help her spade the garden, although year by year as she grew older and stronger she was able to spade more and more of it by herself. There was so much work to be done around the place, chores that Adam had regularly performed when he lived there but which his puny
in-habit
could not handle. If I’d been able to lift a finger to help, the first thing I would have done, years earlier, would have been to give Sog Alan’s skeleton a burial, but it was still there now, sitting and grinning in the outhouse, although Robin was old enough and strong enough to dig a hole to bury it if she chose. She had the decency, if that is the word, to put one of Sog’s hats on the skeleton’s head, so he wasn’t completely nude, although the result reminded me of Donatello’s
David,
that is, it simply called attention to the rest of the skeleton’s nakedness. Sometimes she went and spoke to it, and of course I eavesdropped, as I pricked up my ears at her every word and gawked at her every act. “I hope you’re satisfied,” was something she often said to it, the skeleton. Just the other morning she said to it, “I think that sometime around now I’m supposed to start eighth grade at Harrison Junior High, but I can’t, because you wanted a little girl to fuck, although you never did, or never could.”

But back to that bear. Another mistake people make when they attempt to “tame” a bear is to feed it. Feeding wild bears simply turns them into greedy, lazy parasites. Robin didn’t have an awful lot around the house that the cub would eat, but she apparently reasoned that since she’d seen bear tracks around the trees where’d she got her honey, bears must be fond of honey, so she spooned up a dollop for Paddington and sure enough he was crazy about the stuff, so much so that before she could stop him he had swiped the honey bucket from her and was dipping his cute little nose into it. And before she could stop him he’d eaten it all. And before she could stop him she learned that she couldn’t stop Paddington from doing whatever he damn well pleased. And he seemed to get angry with her for not being able to furnish a perpetual supply of honey.

He would never look her in the eye, even when she tried to make him do so. He might look overhead or sideways or down or behind him, but he would never look her in the eye. It was easy to believe that Paddington might simply be shy, but I don’t think this was the case. I think he had some peculiar notion that as long as he didn’t look at you, you weren’t there, or you couldn’t see him. And therefore he was safe from you. It wasn’t simply Robin he refused to look at. He wouldn’t make eye contact with
any
of the other inhabitants of the place, even including, for heaven’s sake, the
in-habit
, me. Did he know I had eyes? Could he see my eyes? It always bugged him if I ever tried to look him square in the eye. Maybe, I decided, he was afraid that making eye contact would allow us to “read” the mischief that was brewing in his mind. I’ve heard that many rapists can’t make eye contact with their victims.

Almost a month had gone by since the episode of Robin’s bleeding, and during that month, although she felt itchings and longings, she did not again attempt to touch herself down there, out of fear. But the time came when she simply had to try it again. With soap and plenty of water. And wouldn’t you know it? She started bleeding again, without even reaching. Wouldn’t she ever learn? She got out the supply of rags (Sog’s ripped up shirts) she’d laundered from the previous experience with bleeding. We all assumed that whatever wound she’d suffered had not healed completely. So she was having a relapse. Again, I didn’t know what to do. Adam out there in California would turn fifteen years old before he learned that fertile females bleed each and every month, year around, and it is a non-threatening condition called menstruation. He learned quite a few of the slangy synonyms as well, one of which, “on the rag,” referred literally to Robin’s method of dealing with the problem. But Adam
In-habit
, age twelve, had never heard or imagined that such an affliction would curse all womankind periodically from puberty to menopause, and in his isolation on Madewell Mountain he had been ignorant of all the quaint Ozark superstitions, such as that a menstruating woman must never take a bath and must always bury rather than burn the contaminated rags. Robin went on bathing during her periods, now that there was a plentiful supply of water, and with that water she washed and rinsed her bloody rags, month after month until sometime in her fifteenth year it finally dawned on her that her recurrent bleeding was not caused by her fondling of herself but rather had something to do with being ready for reproduction. She would even attempt to explain it to me, three years her junior by that point and still as ignorant as ever.

Which raises an interesting question. If
in-habits
never change and never grow old, but always remain the age they were when they were installed with their real self’s departure, are they capable of learning anything? Wouldn’t the acquisition of knowledge imply a change? Oh, as we’ll see, I learned as much from Robin as she ever learned from me; we grew in wisdom together, but she would eventually outgrow me in every way. I would always be essentially a boy; she would become a woman. It was fun to watch. I had been able for years before her coming to take pleasure in the mere act of observing the development of an acorn into an oak sapling and thence into a sturdy tree. Robin’s maturity came faster and more spectacularly.

Was she happy? I like to think so. She did not often dwell upon the world she’d left behind in Harrison, or have intolerably painful yearnings for her mother (Karen Kerr had married Hal Knight and reluctantly moved to Little Rock to live with him, despite her fear that Robin might any day return to her old home and find Karen gone from it. Karen and Hal Knight became the parents of a little boy, Robin’s half-brother, Richard Knight, but Karen’s new motherhood, while it eased some of the pain of her loss, did not stop Karen from remaining always active in an organization, called The Robin Kerr League, devoted to the prevention of child molestation and the recovery of kidnapping victims). Of course Robin no longer pined for Paddington the First, now that she had a breathing, snorting Paddington the Second to entertain her. She missed being able to go roller skating and bicycle riding and having a sparring partner for taekwondo, although eventually she’d teach Paddington how to stand up and take it. Sometimes when she had nothing better to do (which was rare) she would fantasize about, and make mental lists of, all the things she would spend her money on if she had an opportunity to spend that nearly half a million dollars. She’d get herself a fabulous wardrobe out of the kind of women’s catalogues her mother used to receive in the mail. She would buy
huge
quantities of all the foods she hadn’t had for years: spaghetti, ice cream, pizza, hot dogs, milk shakes, Kool-Aid, Coca Cola, Pepsi Cola, Dr. Pepper, Seven-Up. She would of course have to have herself fitted for eyeglasses, but she would buy the most attractive and expensive kind, maybe seven pairs so she could wear a different one each day of the week. But all of these expenditures would only make a tiny dent in her fortune. She needed to buy something that really cost a whole lot. What?

One afternoon when she was trying to teach taekwondo to Paddington (he always fell on his butt when he tried to kick a
chagi
), she heard a rumble up in the air, and thought for a while it was only thunder, but as it grew and changed in tone to a rhythmic drone, she looked up and saw a helicopter.

She knew what it was although she could not remember what it was called; she had seen photographs of them during the Vietnamese war. Forgetting that she was stark naked, or having been so long out of the habit of clothing herself that it didn’t even occur to her, she started waving her hands overhead to attract the attention of the pilot. Was this her rescue? Did she really want to be rescued? Even if the helicopter landed in the yard and offered to take her back to the world, would she be willing to leave all her friends? Of course not. But maybe she could tell the helicopter people to let the world know that she was okay.

The pilot and one other man in the helicopter finally caught sight of her and waved back at her. The other man put two of his fingers in his mouth and made a shrill wolf whistle which she could barely hear over the sound of the helicopter’s rotors. Then he made a circle of one thumb and forefinger and took the index finger of his other hand and poked it through the circle and thrust it in and out. The pilot blew her a kiss. Then the helicopter drifted on away and never came back.

I have tried to imagine, or to learn, what might have been going through the heads of those guys. Supposedly during those years there was a hunt for marijuana growers in the Ozarks that involved using one or more helicopters for surveillance. Is that what those two men were doing, hunting for patches of pot? Then what did they think, finding a homestead on a mountaintop at which no marijuana was growing but at which there was plenty of evidence of habitation, including a lovely young nubile nude, waist-length blonde hair barely concealing her breasts, with a rapidly-growing black bear cub in her company? Maybe those guys were smoking pot themselves. Why didn’t they land? I suppose we shall never know.

But that helicopter gave Robin a bright idea for how she would spend her money, if she could. She would buy one of those aircraft and hire a pilot to fly her over Harrison and all the rest of wherever she wanted to go. She would take Paddington with her, to see what he could see. She sang:

The bear flew over the mountain

To see what he could see.

It was an entertaining fantasy to which she often returned whenever she played “How I’ll Spend My Money.”

Around Thanksgiving, Paddington, having fattened himself up on mast and forbs, decided that the best den for his hibernation would be Robin’s bed. Actually black bears don’t truly hibernate, at least not that far south, but they go into a kind of dormancy that amounts to the same thing, except that they can be easily awakened. Robin didn’t try to wake him. She just snuggled up through those cold winter nights, and put herself to sleep each night imagining what she’d have to do to get ready for school in the morning.

Had she been at Harrison Junior High in the eighth grade, she would have had to submit two practice letters for the Language Arts class, one addressed to her Congressman, the other to her best friend; for Social Studies class she would have had to submit a report on the native Americans who inhabited the Ozarks; for Science class she would have had to be prepared for a test in the winter positions of the constellations; and she would have skipped Algebra class because her homework wasn’t done and she needed to practice several a cappella lieder for the concert choir. Of course she would not have been able to do any of these things because she had missed so many years of school leading up to them.

Likewise, I could easily identify with whatever yearning for school had befallen poor Robin. In Rutherford, California, there was a public elementary school just a few blocks from the little house in which Adam lived, but he had not attended school since the fourth grade in Stay More and now he should have been in junior high but was several grades behind, and his father’s stubborn resistance to the whole idea of education continued in the face of the fact that Adam’s hike to school
there
would have been immeasurably easier than his hike to the Stay More school, and he could have ridden a bright yellow school bus to St. Helena. California law prohibited him from holding down a job at the age of twelve, so his father’s idea of having Adam beside him at work as a journeyman cooper was a vain dream. The Madewells had, upon arrival in California, been detained and interviewed by a state agency responsible for resettlement of migrants, principally Okies and Arkies. (Eventually, having fallen in love with cinema and having made a hobby of watching it, Adam saw a movie called “The Grapes of Wrath,” greatly identifying with Henry Fonda as Tom Joad, and he was inspired to read the novel on which the movie was based, and while he didn’t think that Steinbeck had a very good ear for the speech of Ozarkers, he was inspired by the novel to read many other novels.) Because Gabe Madewell was not just a farmer but a highly skilled cooper, he was not sent to the fields to be a picker but found a job in the barrel works of a Rutherford winery called Inglenook. Back home in Stay More, the dominant family (for whom Robin had cut many a paper doll) was named Ingledew, and Gabe Madewell always believed that perhaps the Inglenooks were Ingledews from Stay More who had gone to California and couldn’t spell their name, as he could scarcely spell his own and had to have somebody fill out his application forms for him. Actually the name, which was famous as a label of wine, was bestowed in the 19
^th
Century by a Finnish fur trader named Gustave Neibaum, who had bought a “Nook Farm” on which to grow grapes and called the winery after an “inglenook,” a nook or cranny beside a fireplace.