He sat down and re-read the last line he'd written. That was where I learned to read and write. But it hadn't been as simple as that. He lived in a silent world. Writing was code. Speech was the moving of lips, the rise and fall of teeth, the dance of a tongue. His mother had taught him to read lips, and had taught him how to write his name in struggling, sprawling letters. That's your name, she had said. That's you, Nicky. But of course she had said it silently, meaninglessly. The prime connection had come when she tapped the paper, then tapped his chest. The worst part about being deaf-mute was not living in the silent movie world; the worst part was not knowing the names of things. He had not really begun to understand the concept of naming until he was four. He had not known that you called the tall green things trees until he was six: He had wanted to know, but no one had thought to tell him and he had no way to ask: he was INCOMMUNICADO.
When she died he had retreated almost all the way. The orphanage was a place of roaring silence where grim-faced thin boys made fun of his silence; two boys would run up to him, one boy with his hands plastered over his mouth, one boy with his hands plastered over his ears. If none of the staff happened to be near, they would punch him out. Why? No reason. Except that maybe in the vast white class of victims there is a subclass: the victims of victims.
He stopped wanting to communicate, and when that happened the thinking process itself began to rust and disintegrate. He began to wander from place to place vacantly, looking at the nameless things that filled the world. He watched groups of children in the play yard move their lips, raise and lower their teeth like white drawbridges, dance their tongues in the ritual mating of speech. He sometimes found himself looking at a single cloud for as long as an hour at a time.
Then Rudy had come. A big man with scars on his face and a bald head. Six feet, five inches tall, might as well have been twenty to runty Nick Andros. They met for the first time in a basement room where there was a table, six or seven chairs, and a TV that only worked when it felt like it. Rudy squatted, putting his eyes on approximately the same level as Nick's. Then he took his huge, scarred hands and put them over his mouth, his ears.
I am a deaf-mute.
Nick turned his face sullenly away: Who gives a fuck?
Rudy slapped him.
Nick fell down. His mouth opened and silent tears began to leak from his eyes. He didn't want to be here with this scarred troll, this bald boogey. He was no deaf-mute, it was a cruel joke.
Rudy pulled him gently to his feet and led him to the table. A blank sheet of paper was there. Rudy pointed at it, then at Nick. Nick stared sullenly at the paper and then at the bald man. He shook his head. Rudy nodded and pointed at the empty paper again. He produced a pencil and handed it to Nick. Nick put it down as if it were hot. He shook his head. Rudy pointed at the pencil, then at Nick, then at the paper. Nick shook his head. Rudy slapped him again.
More silent tears. The scarred face looking at him with nothing but deadly patience. Rudy pointed at the paper again. At the pencil. At Nick.
Nick grasped the pencil in his fist. He wrote the four words that he knew, calling them forth from the cobwebby, rusting mechanism that was in his thinking brain. He wrote:
NICHOLAS ANDROS
FUCK YOU
Then he broke the pencil in half and looked sullenly and defiantly at Rudy. But Rudy was smiling. Suddenly he reached across the table and held Nick's head steady between his hard, callused palms. His hands were warm, gentle. Nick could not remember the last time he had been touched with such love. His mother had touched him like that.
Rudy removed his hands from Nick's face. He picked up the half of the pencil with the point on it. He turned the paper over to the blank side. He tapped the empty white space with the tip of the pencil, and then tapped Nick. He did it again. And again. And again. And finally Nick understood.
You are this blank page.
Nick began to cry.
Rudy came for the next six years.
… where I learned to read and write. A man named Rudy Sparkman came to help me. I was very lucky to have him. In 1984 the orphanage went broke. They placed as many kids that they could, but I was not one of them. They said I would get in with a family after a while and the state would pay them for keeping me. I wanted to go with Rudy but Rudy was in Africa working for the Peace Corps.
So I ran away. Being sixteen, I don't think they looked for me too hard. I figured if I could stay out of trouble I would be all right, and so far so good. I have been taking the high school correspondence courses one at a time, because Rudy always said education is the most important. When I settle down for a while I'm going to take that high-school equivalency test. I will be able to pass it soon. I like school. Maybe I will go to college someday. I know that sounds crazy, a deaf-mute bum like me, but I don't think it's impossible. Anyway, that's my story.
Yesterday morning Baker had come in around seven-thirty while Nick was emptying wastebaskets. The sheriff looked better.
"How you feeling?" Nick wrote.
"Pretty good. I was burnin up until midnight. Worst fever I've had since I was a kid. Aspirin didn't seem to help it. Janey wanted to call the doc, but around twelve-thirty the fever just broke. I slep like a log after that. How are you doing?"
Nick made a thumb-and-forefinger circle.
"How's our guests?"
Nick opened and closed his mouth several times in a mime jabbering. Looked furious. Made banging gestures on invisible bars.
Baker threw back his head and laughed, then sneezed several times.
"You ought to be on TV," he said. "Did you write your life story down like you said you was gonna try to do?"
Nick nodded and handed the two sheets of longhand over. The sheriff sat down and read them carefully. When he was done he looked at Nick so long and so piercingly that Nick stared down at his feet for a moment, embarrassed and confused.
When he looked up again Baker said: "You've been on your own since you were sixteen? For six years?"
Nick nodded.
"And you've really taken all these high school courses?"
Nick wrote for some time on one of the memo sheets. "I was way behind because I started to read & write so late. When the orphanage closed I was just starting to catch up. I got six h.s. credits from there and another six since then from La Salle in Chicago. I learned about them from a matchbook cover. I need four more credits."
"What courses do you still need?" Baker asked, then turned his head and shouted: "Shut up in there! You'll get your hotcakes and coffee when I'm damned good and ready and not before!"
Nick wrote: "Geometry. Advanced math. Two years of a language. Those are the college requirements."
"A language. You mean like French? German? Spanish?"
Nick nodded.
Baker laughed and shook his head. "Don't that beat all. A deaf-mute learning to talk a foreign language. Nothing against you, boy. You understand that."
Nick smiled and nodded.
"So why you been driftin around so much?"
"While I was still a minor I didn't dare stay in one place for too long," Nick wrote. "Afraid they'd try to stick me in another orphanage or something. When I got old enough to look for a steady job, times got worse. They said the stock-market crashed, or something, but since I'm deaf I didn't hear it (ha-ha)."
"Most places would have just let you ramble on," Baker said. "In hard times the milk of human kindness don't flow so free, Nick. As for a steady job, I might be able to put you onto something around here, unless those boys soured you on Shoyo and Arkansas for good. But … we ain't all like that."
Nick nodded to show he understood.
"How's your teeth? That was quite a shot in the mouth you took."
Nick shrugged.
"Take any of those pain pills?"
Nick held up two fingers.
"Well, look, I got some paperwork to do on those boys. You go on with what you were doing. We'll talk more later."
Dr. Soames, the man who had almost hit Nick with his car, came by around 9:30 A.M. the same morning. He was a man of about sixty with shaggy white hair, a scrawny chicken neck, and very sharp blue eyes.
"Big John tells me you read lips," he said. "He also says he wants to see you gainfully employed, so I guess I better make sure you're not going to die on his hands. Take off your shirt."
Nick unbuttoned his blue workshirt and took it off.
"Holy Jesus, lookitim," Baker said.
"They did a job of work, all right." Soames looked at Nick and said dryly, "Boy, you almost lost your left tit." He pointed to a crescent-shaped scab just above the nipple. Nick's belly and ribcage looked like a Canadian sunrise. Soames poked and prodded him and looked carefully into the pupils of his eyes. At last he examined the shattered remains of Nick's front teeth, the only part of him that really hurt now, in spite of the spectacular bruises.
"That must hurt like a sonofabitch," he said, and Nick nodded ruefully. "You're gonna lose them," Soames went on. "You-" He sneezed three times in quick succession. "Excuse me."
He began to put his tools back into his black bag. "The prognosis is favorable, young man, barring strokes of lightning or further trips to Zack's ginmill. Is your speaking problem physical, or does it come from being deaf?"
Nick wrote: "Physical. Birth defect."
Soames nodded. "Damn shame. Got to think positive, though, and thank God that He didn't decide to give your brains a stir while He was at it. Put your shirt on."