This Census-Taker(21)

I couldn’t follow what he was telling me and I don’t think he understood his own words at all fully; was, rather, trying to accurately repeat someone else’s intrigue. Whoever slept here, he recited, was trying to find someone, not her boss, no, but someone who tracked him, in real authority. To present evidence of a crime. “She could read instructions.” He shook the envelope he still held.

He pointed in the direction, he said, of the places about which he was trying to inform me. “That way,” he said. “They come from there to count.”

I had chalk in my pocket and I gave him a piece. He kept hold of the red-trimmed paper with his left hand to draw frogs in houses and people with wings with his right. I drew my father’s keys and my house and me alone. The rain stopped.

“Samma’ll have a plan,” he said. “We have to get you away.” But I wanted to stay with her and Drobe in their bridge house.

I grew hungry. I sat and was quiet and watched the men and women on south-side errands swigging from flasks.

Drobe startled me by whispering.

“That lizard,” he said. “They put them in the bottle when they’re newborn or even eggs and they put food and water in for them, and they shake it out carefully to clean out their shit, and they grow in there till they get too big to leave.”

I stared at him but he was looking away from me.

“I seen them do it with fish too,” he said. “Fill a bottle with water. Put it in there when it’s fry. I heard they did it with a hare too but I never saw that. A hare in a bottle.”

He looked at me at last.

“Close your mouth,” he said. He was teasing: it wasn’t harsh. I felt light in my head.

We froze then because we heard a rattle and the wrench of metal. We scuttled to a little balcony inside above the main room. Right at its center, her back to us, watching the stage with bags in her hands, was Samma.

“Hey,” Drobe said. But before she turned to look at us someone shouted, “Stop!” and a man walked out of the shadows.

The window-cleaner in his sash again. For one dreadful instant I thought Samma had brought him but I saw her face as she saw his and I knew that he’d followed her without her knowledge.

Two others emerged behind him: one of the butchers, his smock black with blood smears; and a policeman, a real policeman, from the coast.

I’d never seen one before. He was young and fat with long hair and glasses. His uniform was shabby but it was full: I could see the official sigil on his breast. On his right thigh he wore a pistol. His tour had brought him here. It was our town’s turn.

“What, you got nothing better to do?” Samma managed to say as the men approached. She looked at me in anguish.

“I told you,” the butcher said to the window-cleaner. “Didn’t I say I saw him?”

“Boy,” the window-cleaner called up, “what are you doing?”

“I said if you followed her you’d find him, didn’t I?”

Drobe and Samma tried to insist that I was with them now, but the officer simply gestured impatiently for me to come. Then Drobe started on about my father, about how they couldn’t leave me with him, and the window-cleaner grew angry and stamped up the stairs for me, and Drobe started screaming that he was done, that he was going to light out and leave and come by the key-maker’s house for his mate, that he was done with this town, shouting so loud that Samma dropped whatever it was she’d brought to help me escape and ran to quiet him, and knowing how fast someone might withdraw the indulgence of allowing their presence in the houses of the bridge, Samma and Drobe, as he calmed, in agonies and protesting, let the men take me.

—

There were three other full-time and uniformed officers using the schoolroom as their temporary headquarters. They muttered to each other, they seemed edgy. They all but ignored me, except for the big policeman: he beat me. His attack was offhand and calm. He explained with passionless ill-temper that this was what I got for disobeying the law that made clear I was my father’s.

This was the first time any adult had hit me.

The window-cleaner winced with every strike. I felt better and worse that even a man such as he counted this punishment unfair. He did not intervene.

When he was done, the policeman made me wait while he discussed paperwork and plans with his colleagues. I hoped the hunter would come. I imagined him pushing through the thickets in the foothills. I’ve thought of him like that often since, as if he’s still out there, game in his sights, intending to check on me on his return.

It was early afternoon when they got word to my father and he came to fetch me.

I was sitting red-eyed and fearful when I heard a noise and looked up and he was standing in the schoolroom’s doorway, flanked by part-timers in their sashes, a man and a woman I didn’t recognize, and two of the visitors in full uniform. My father carried bread. His expression was solicitous.

He said, “Boy.” He stepped forward and stopped when he saw my face.

My father turned and screamed at the officers, “Which of you did this?” in a voice much louder than any I’d heard him use before. He slung the bread away and it bounced into a corner where I eyed it. “I’ll kill you if you touch my boy ever again,” my father shouted. “I will kill you.”

The officers blinked at each other in shock.

“It’s those bridge rats he runs with,” the window-cleaner said. “They been scrapping. We ain’t touched him.”