This Census-Taker

7

When he met the man who became his line manager the boy was a child and naïve but not quite ignorant, at least in letters, because of his mother’s lessons.

Sometimes she would bring home from the town new things to read. Catalogues for grain and agricultural machines, and instructions for cleaning metals, and almanacs, or what was left of them when those pages making incorrect predictions and offering unhelpful advice had been torn out. All these in the formal voice of the language I grew up speaking, in which I don’t write this. A few folded cuttings from foreign newspapers — which we occasionally found tucked between pages as bookmarks or secreted in stashes and which were in this language — we ignored.

My mother made slow poems of the words as she read them flatly to show the boy how the letters sounded. When later the man who would become his manager met the boy he improved him by giving him endless dull texts and having him sound them out, asking questions about their context.

His manager taught him that words change with time, by single letters or more, sometimes their whole roots switching — a “y” to an “e” in a name for power, “sun-writing” becomes “light-drawing.” The man eventually gave him this whole other tongue, and he revisited and at last learned from those cuttings about immense foreign wars.

The boy always suspected his father could read and write, at least some, and that suspicion was to grow. Back in the first days of his curiosity the boy found cards tucked between boards in the outhouse, little pornographic pictures with cramped handwriting on the back, but then he was too young to read them and he was never to know if his father wrote them or received them or simply found them and liked the images or if they were his father’s at all. The old camera had demanded a long exposure, so the hand-tinted women and men crawled over each other in stilted and mannered lust. The boy put them back in their crevice and later they were gone.

He didn’t know what if anything it was his mother got from his father’s company. They lived together and passed each other every day and spoke a little to each other when they had to without viciousness or rancor but, so far as the boy saw and so far as he ever remembered, without pleasure or interest. From his father there was always a distant desperation.

His mother seemed always to know, and not to like it, when the boy’s father killed things. It roused in her a cold and anxious distaste. That boy was afraid of her, but at those rare times of his father’s blank-faced interventions he wanted the hurried and uncomfortable caretaking she offered.

—

After I saw him kill the dog I was more afraid of being alone with my father than I’d ever been of anything. But over the course of months every fear, however strong, ebbs or changes. My father treated me with the same flustered abstraction with which he always had.

Every day he was busy in his workroom. When he came up to the middle floor I would lie on the cold boards of the attic and listen to the murmurs of he and my mother talking. I couldn’t discern their words but I could hear them speaking with a care that sometimes sounded a little like affection.

People might come to order keys. When my father went down to deliver them he always went alone.

When my mother descended, one time in three she might take me.

—

In the center of the town was the bridge. Along its western edge ran black railings on which you could lean to overlook the foliage and rock and hills and the river. On the other side were stone buildings, shored up now with wood and concrete and iron girders. The bridge had been inhabited once but some ordinance had forbidden that practice, broken though it was by the parentless children who squatted collapsing derelicts between the shops.

Houses built on bridges are scandals. A bridge wants to not be. If it could choose its shape, a bridge would be no shape, an unspace to link One-place-town to Another-place-town over a river or a road or a tangle of railway tracks or a quarry, or to attach an island to another island or to the continent from which it strains. The dream of a bridge is of a woman standing at one side of a gorge and stepping out as if her job is to die, but when her foot falls it meets the ground right on the other side. A bridge is just better than no bridge but its horizon is gaplessness, and the fact of itself should still shame it. But someone had built on this bridge, drawn attention to its matter and failure. An arrogance that thrilled me. Where else could those children live?

They were a swaggering crew tolerated if their thieving wasn’t too ostentatious, useful to the shopkeepers for the scutwork they’d sometimes perform.

Our town was a petty hub on the routes of mendicant salespeople, so sometimes you could buy unlikely commodities, vegetables other than the tough ones of the hillside, foreign bibelots, cloth in startling colors. The traveling merchants haggled and drank and showboated stories of what they sold from the backs of their wagons in front of the better houses. There were always small crowds at these performances, sometimes parents whose children looked at me during lulls in the patter. Even my mother would watch the traders’ plays, or would let me: I was always utterly caught up by them, by This Fine Borage or An Auger to Dig my Postholes.

The sellers who knew her treated my mother with a cautious courtesy. When she approached, I silent in the wake of her skirt, they’d greet her carefully and might ask after my father, at which she’d blink and try out expressions and nod and wait. “Tell him thank you for that key he did me,” they might continue.

A few turns east of the travelers’ market, the butchers in the meat quarter sometimes stocked cuts from exotic animals and labeled them not with words but with photographs or hand-drawn pictures. That was how I learned that there were giraffes, from a sepia portrait on a pile of dried haunch meat. Once, one of our stops was at a large unlikely warehouse full of cabinets of salted fish come up from the nearest city, from the coast, wherever it was, and shuddering generators and the iceboxes they powered crammed with the gray corpses of big sea fish. There I, who’d known only the fierce spine-backed fish of the mountain streams and their animalcule prey, came to a sudden stop, slack with awe before a glass tank big enough to contain me, transported at some immense cost for I don’t know what market, full not with me or with any person but of brine and clots of black weed and clenching polyps and huge starfish, sluggishly crawling, feeling their way over tank-bottom stones like mottled hands.

There were few trees in the meat quarter, as if the soil between its stones was too bloody for their prim taste, but elsewhere there were many, stunted to fit and strumming the bowing electric wires with their branches, always dirty from carts and the animals and engines which hauled them venting dung or smoke.

Southeast of where the butchers were, fronting a yard full of engine pieces and oily rags, was an iron fence past which I always hoped my mother would take us, because dangling from its railings was an angle of wood, a section of long-dead tree transfixed by the metal and jutting toward a stub in the flagstones, its own dead roots. There, a tree had once grown up and through the fence, sealing itself around the bars until it had provoked the unfriendliness of the owner and been cut down, leaving that part of itself that couldn’t be extricated. That part I would finger at the join of bark and iron when I walked through where the tree had been.

The children from the bridge were often waiting there, eyeing me. They congregated by the stump and played a game involving motions as strange as those of worship. To me it looked as if they were feeling the missing bark for handholds, as if it were an expertise of town children that they could climb ghost trees.

My mother opened the gate one time and I watched in alarm as she bent to pick up a stained metal bolt. From there I followed her to where, in tangled alleys closer to the gulch, it was the architecture and not the plants that accommodated; buildings angled to allow for vegetation that had predated them, that then sometimes died to leave tree-shaped emptinesses in the town walls. I’d run into those nooks to stand cosseted by the bricks while my mother waited.

Little banyans lined one loud market street too steep for carts, smoky from workshops. The branches dropped shaggy creepers that, when they reached the earth, hardened into roots and pried apart paving. Locals would watch us uphillers from shacks tucked under the boughs, selling cigarettes and candies. Where they met the roofs, the dangling sinews hardened around their contours, so when those shops ultimately failed and rotted the trees themselves became open-fronted root boxes into which a boy could also step, to stand under ceilings of tangle, creeping down as if tentative and disbelieving that there was at last no metal to impede them. If you were slow enough, I thought, they’d turn to pillars and anchor you within.

Those bridge children would follow me.

I tried not to look too often but I could always see a girl and a boy at the front of the crew, roughhousing and raucous and seemingly fearless in their cutoff adults’ clothes. I wasn’t precisely afraid of them; I watched them with intense and guarded fascination, finding them inexplicable.

I had no money and my face was not winning enough that I was ever given anything free by candy-sellers. My mother stared as if overwhelmed at everything in the huts we passed, all the bright packets dangling within, with an expression that made me want desperately to be older for her.

A haggard man used one of the huts as a home. He lay on a sagging mattress, his head on his pack, surrounded by rubbish — paper, porcelain shards, food remains, and unidentifiable debris. His hand was over his eyes. He looked like a failed soldier. Dirt seemed so worked into him that the lines of his face were like writing.

Beside him was a green gallon bottle, and something twitched within. I saw leaves in it, a moth’s beating wings. A handwritten sign pleading for money was propped against the glass, a fee for looking. I lurched back as a saggy gray lizard bigger than my hand ran suddenly in crazed circles at the bottle’s bottom.

Claws skittered against the glass like teeth lightly grinding. The bottle’s neck was coin-sized: not even the reptile’s head could have fitted through.

I ran to catch my mother. When I reached her I looked into her bag: she’d exchanged the food she’d brought down for other food, and rattling beneath those vegetables were more bits of trash like the one she’d taken from the metal yard.

There was a catcall. My mother and I looked up to where that leading boy from the bridge was in the scaffolding that held up a ruin. His companions waited under him. He let go of the girder he’d been holding, stayed balanced easily on another, shifted twitchily from foot to foot and watched me. He was short for what I think was his age, not much taller than me, but squat and strong and confident with his body. He called out again but my mother and I didn’t know what to do, what response to give.

My mother looked at the children and back at me. “Do you want to play?” she asked me.

I knew she wanted me to help her understand. Did I want to play?

She said, “Play with them.”

She said she’d come to find me when the sun went low, and she walked away. Horrified, I cried out and tried to go with her, but she pushed me back toward the children and repeated her instruction.

I watched her go. The children approached: they’d seen her point at them.

That first time, what happened was that they continued their own games, always in shouting distance from me, a distance they made sure didn’t grow too great. They performed their games for me. Once, when I grew distressed and made as if to go looking for my mother, the tall solid girl, the boy’s co-leader, shouted at me directly, a warning sound that stopped me.

We were each other’s spectators and performers. I got caught up in the gang’s quick dramas, so thoroughly that when at last I saw my mother at the street’s end below spitting streetlights, I realized she’d been waiting in the shadows for a while. She was standing with her eyes closed, listening to the bulbs’ buzz, leaving it to me to see her.

I was crying at that moment, at some brutal turn of the children’s game, and they were muttering to me with solicitous scorn.

When they shouted at me they called me uphiller. I didn’t call them anything.

—

The girl was Samma, the boy Drobe. It was they who told all the adultless others what to do.

I learned their names quickly because during the gang’s jaunts their companions would sometimes shout “Samma!” or “Drobe!” then cackle and hoot as if those names were curse words, as if they were bad and brave for yelling them.

My mother never spoke to the children. But by the cold kindness she could manage, when she left me for her business, she did so where I could see them and they me.

I’d rarely say more than a few whispered words to them while they bossed each other or wrestled or stole things. Even when they told me what to do directly, or when I obeyed.

“Chuck that bottle at that poster! Go on, uphiller! That was good! Right in the letter A!”

I adored them shyly.

Samma must have been fourteen or thereabouts, around twice my age, and Drobe only a little younger. They might have been friends or girlfriend and boyfriend, though I never saw them kissing, or sister and brother. She stood close to a head taller than Drobe, and she was fleshy and deliberate in her movements where he was nervy and quick, but their faces were similarly dark and angular and heavy browed, as if they had been cut hurriedly from wood. They both kept their black hair shaved close.

I followed them on their runs and provocations — a little theft and the breaking of windows, was all. Locals would toss coins at them sometimes to have them do errands and they’d examine the money before picking it up, assessing the worth and debating whether to accept it for the haulage or cleaning demanded.

As the day closed they would take me back to where I’d joined them. Samma would click her fingers for me to follow and walk me to where my mother stood looking at the men and women passing her by.

Once on our way we crossed the end of the banyan street, and Drobe saw me stare up it. However he knew my thoughts, he said to me, “We ain’t going that way.”

He was wearing a tall flat-topped hat that day, buckled from the trash where he must have found it. He often wore such a thing, or a bright bandana, or the remains of some studded belt, as if auditioning each item. I never saw any of them more than once.

“Drobe!” a boy hallooed behind us.

“How did he put the lizard in the bottle?” I whispered.

“That lizard?” Drobe sort of coughed a laugh and glanced away. “Magic, mate. Come on, you don’t want that shit,” he said, and he and Samma led me to a roofless storehouse where we could throw things around.

—

Sometimes her activities took my mother long enough that we were still in the bridgetown when the sun descended and all the nightlights came up.

If we were by the bridge at dusk, I liked to watch the children batting.

They’d sit up close to the railings with their legs pushed through, dangling them over the treetops of the gulley. A few brave ones would balance on top of the metal, right above the void. Though she looked too big to be safe, seemed almost too adult to risk herself in that manner, Samma always sat like that. My gut would swoop to see her. I could only glance, it made me so sick.

This is how you catch an under-bridge bat: take a pole of hollow plastic or bamboo, two or three meters long; wind old rope or leather around one end to make your handle; attach tough wire to it, or even to a winding spool if you have the skill, and thread it all the way down the tube; pull the length-of-the-rod’s-worth of wire again from the other end, the end you won’t hold, and tie it to a hook; then bait. The best bat-bait’s a big flying insect like a beetle or a thumb-fat cricket.

The gang would lean out and dangle their batting rods and from their ends the cords would swing and circle. There’s skill in attaching the insect so you don’t kill it or harm its wings. And you mustn’t use heavy wire. If you get everything right, your cicada, or whatever you have, will try to fly away and spiral madly in the air, lurching at the limits of its line.

At dusk, the town bridge wore a beard of poles and frenetic tethered insects. The light would end and the bats wake and set off for their night business in bursts from the arches beneath us, from the bridge’s underside. They’d snap at the bugs as they passed. They’d fold their bodies around the bait to push it to their mouths — that’s how they catch things — and the hooks might snare their skins. A hunter would bring each bat in while it jerked and struggled and hurt itself, and would wring its neck, then chitter in triumphant nonsense bat-talk herself, and maybe flap her kill’s parchment wings and thrust its little body at her gangmates.

Sometimes a bat swallowed a hook. You’d haul it in on bloody wire emerging from its mouth as if it were pulled by its own elongated tongue.

The children ate the bats they caught and used their skins for many purposes. I didn’t like the blood or the death but I loved the skill of their careful casts, the wrist-flicks they used to make the bait twitch, the quick smooth drawings-in of caught bats. I didn’t like the blood or the death which sometimes put me in mind of other things, but I tried to dismiss those thoughts because the phenomena were so different, those children killing far more often and doing so with skill and to eat, or for a game or a dare.