No Enemy But Time

Chapter Nine

Lying in bed one night, Anna and John-John long since tucked in and told “sweet dreams” in the other bedroom, Jeannette tried to explain her ambivalent feelings about her hometown to Hugo, who was smoking a cigarette and desultorily following a George Raft and Ida Lupino late movie on the portable TV that sat on the chest of drawers. His cigarette smoke curled eerily in the mirror behind the set.

Hugo stubbed the cigarette in a glass ashtray with a SAC emblem in the bottom. “I am now gettin’ serious, mujer. I am now ready to tell you what the trouble is.”

“Yes?”

“The trouble is that Van Luna is not real.”

“Not real?”

“I said that, yes. Not real. Instead, Van Luna is like a spotless laboratory chamber, very clean. Good air, sweet water, pretty white mice for its population. Stick a little brown mouse in, and what’s the big difference? The white mice stay pretty, and the brown mouse gets fed and sniffed at just like everybody else. It isn’t real, Van Luna. It’s just like a laboratory chamber with little food and water bins.”

Jeannette pulled herself away from Hugo, drew up her knees, and took the ashtray from his hands.

“Little food and water bins? What are you talking about? My father has faced economic reality every day of his life in this town. It’s done things to him, too. That isn’t real?”

“Are we talkin’ about John-John or your father?” Hugo let his eyes drift back to the TV screen, where Ida Lupino was testifying, animatedly, before a packed courtroom.

“Look, you know the reality of supporting a family on a noncom’s pay. That’s why you’ve moonlighted at the store. Are you trying to tell me that sort of thing isn’t real?”

“Not me.”

“And the competition’s beginning to get him down. It’s twisted him—my own father—into stinginess, of all things.”

“Van Luna is very real for your father,” Hugo acknowledged.

“But it’s not real for you, is that what you’re saying?”

“Of course it’s real for me, Jeanie. You were askin’ me—I think—about John-John and these people because his skin is black. You’ve changed the subject out from under me.” He tapped a cigarette from a Marlboro flip-top box, lit it like George Raft, and waggled the burning tip under Jeannette’s nose. “You don’ listen, mujer. You listen sideways, anyway. So I’m gonna repeat this only once: The problem you’ve discovered is that for John-John—not for me or you or Mr. Rivenbark or Mrs. What’s-her-face—Van Luna is not real. If you like to worry about that, Jeanie, go ahead, please. Worry up a storm.”

Jeannette handed the ashtray back to Hugo, then moved closer and put her chin back on his shoulder.

“Do you think we should move into Wichita, then?”

“What for?”

“So that he’d have someplace real to live. A borderline neighborhood, not too run-down. That sort of thing.”

“Hell no. That would be crazy.”

“But I’m trying to—”

“But nothin’, Jeanie. The best place for kids to grow up is a place that ain’ too goddamn real. In Bogotá, you know, I’ve seen the little orphan boys—the gamines—runnin’ in packs, sleepin’ in the streets under newspapers. And Zaragoza, and Sevilla, and other such realities. Screw ’em. You want to take John-John to Mississippi, maybe?”

“I don’t want to take him anyplace. I was just—”

“Good.” He jabbed his cigarette toward the television set. “Look at that Ida Lupino. She’s a real bitch in this one, eh?”

Later, well after midnight, Jeannette went into the children’s room to check on them.

A nightlight glowed in the tiny room. This was a clown with a bulbous nose and a pair of round, upraised fists. Outward from the bedside table on which he stood, his hands and nose shed a circle of pale orange light, a fuzzy nimbus. Anna lay half out of her covers on her trundle bed, while across the room from her, still in a crib, John-John sprawled with one tiny hand extended backwards through the spindles. Jeannette rearranged Anna’s bedding before approaching the boy. She found him in the throes of dream.

Supine, his head seeming to pivot on the knob of bone at the back of his skull, John-John was making a gentle, gargling noise. His eyelids had fallen back, like the eyelids concealing the bright marble eyes of a Madame Alexander doll. Half hidden from view, however, John-John’s eyeballs jiggled from side to side in the upper portions of the sockets, their faintly muddy whites pulsing in time. Jeannette had witnessed this strange phenomenon dozens of times since bringing John-John home from Spain, but it never failed to disconcert her.

“Dear God,” she murmured.

The Air Force doctors at the McConnell dispensary, to whom she had taken the child about both his slowness in learning to speak and these uncanny nocturnal fits, always assured her that John-John was perfectly healthy. He had an especially vivid dream life, perhaps, but the fact that his eyelids rolled back did not imply that he was suffering from epilepsy, petit mal, or any other nervous disorder. In fact, the vividness of his dream life might well be inhibiting—temporarily—his development of certain postinfantile speech patterns. The dreams were a substitute—a temporary substitute—for language development.

Besides, Jeannette was supposed to keep in mind that he was not yet two, and that he was probably still adjusting to his transfer from a Spanish to an English-speaking culture, and that in every other respect he seemed to be completely normal. The doctors, of course, had never had to confront the spectacle of his jiggling eyeballs and pulsing whites at one o’clock in the morning. They did not have to square this upsetting image of the child with their picture of the quick, active, curious kid scooting about their dispensary. Nor did they have to worry very much about the enigma of his first eight or nine months.

“What’s the matter, Jeanie?”

She turned and saw Hugo in the doorway, his boxer shorts ballooned about his hips and another cigarette burning in his fingers. “He’s doing it again,” she told him.

“It’s okay. He always stops.”

“I don’t like it.” She gripped the edge of the crib. “I can’t stand it, in fact. It scares the hell out of me.”

“He’s dreamin’. The doctors have told you. Why do you get so”—he gestured with the cigarette—“so histérica?”

“Because I’m a mother!” Anna stirred in her bed and, whispering, Jeannette asked, “What the hell does he have to dream about? And why do his eyes have to come open like that?”

“Maybe he’s not really asleep, eh? Maybe he likes to watch you get riled up like this.”

“Tell me, for God’s sake, what he’s dreaming about.”

“Puppy dogs, and ridin’ in his stroller, and eatin’ ice cream. Who knows, Jeanie, who knows?”

“It’s none of those things.”

“What do you want me to say, then? He’s dreamin’ of his real mother, of España and poverty? You like that better?”

“I don’t like any of this.” She began to cry.

Hugo, his cigarette between his lips movie-gangster fashion, came into the room and embraced her. “It’s all right, Jeanie. We can wake him up if you want to.”

“No. I won’t do that. Let him dream.”

It hurt her to watch him, though. The real John-John—the lower hemispheres of his eyeballs fluttering, his delicate fingers spastically grasping air—seemed miles and miles away, trapped in an eddy of experience forever beyond her knowledge or comprehension. At such times he was utterly lost to Jeannette, and she wanted to be closer, closer, closer. His dreaming was a barrier to closeness, the dream-racked body he left behind an accusation and a taunt.

Finally, averting her eyes from the child, Jeannette permitted Hugo to lead her back to bed.

The next day she took John-John for a walk through several old neighborhoods to Anna’s elementary school, where the girl was a first-grader. The playground here was a sloping gravel lot, sparsely tufted with grass and cockleburs, enclosed on three sides by a hurricane fence and on the east by the school itself. They left the stroller at home now, and John-John, so eager was he to see the children at recess, trotted the whole last block. Bundled in a nylon parka and a pair of blue corduroy pants, he reminded Jeannette of a penguin sashaying across an ice field. No ice, though; just thousands upon thousands of crinkly fallen leaves. These whirled around him as he ran.

They reached the softball backstop and the solitary set of bleachers at the west end of the playground.

John-John waddled to the fence just as a fourth or fifth-grade boy came running up to retrieve a foul tip, and Jeannette sat down on the first bleacher level.

“Hi,” the boy said, speaking over John-John’s head to Jeannette. “He’s cute. What’s his name?”

Jeannette told him. Almost a year after Kennedy’s assassination, in the middle of Kansas, her son’s name had no special significance for the boy.

“Is he yours?”

“Mine and my husband’s. He’s Anna Monegal’s little brother. Do you know Anna?”

“No.” The boy let John-John hold the softball through the fence. When John-John dropped it, the boy picked it up and returned it to his hands. “You like this softball, fella? Do you? One of these days you’ll be some player, I bet.”

John-John pinned the ball against the other side of the backstop.

“Don’t he talk yet?” The boy’s teammates were demanding that he return the ball, but he ignored them.

When Jeannette confessed that John-John had not begun to talk yet, he said, “You talk to him, don’t you?”

“All the time.”

“Do you read to him, too? Read aloud, I mean.”

Who was this kid, anyway? The Grand Inquisitor? “He’s a little young for that yet. We look at picture books together, though.”

“Throw us the ball, Donnie! Throw the stupid ball!”

Donnie gently removed the ball from John-John’s hands, whirled about and threw it wildly into the infield.

Then, turning back to Jeannette, he said, “You ought to read to him out of real books. He’ll listen to you.

That’s what my mother used to do with me, even before I could talk. The whole first year after I was born she used to read me ‘Tiger, tiger, burning bright’ every night. I could say the whole poem—every line—before I even went to school,” he bragged.

“You like poetry, huh?”

“Come on, Donnie! Hurry up!”

“Not so much. I don’t know what it means, a lot. I can say it, but I still don’t know what it means. I like softball better.” Through the fence he gave John-John an amiable poke in the gut. “’Bye. Nice to meetcha, John-John.”

He sauntered off. John-John remained at the fence, hypnotized by the activity. Jeannette, her hands in her coat pockets, searched the playground for Anna, but could not find her before the bell signaling the end of recess sent the school’s entire student population scrambling up the slope toward the building.

On impulse she led John-John up the leaf-strewn sidewalk, past the school, and eventually into a low-income housing development with a single unpaved road dead-ending on the edge of an open field.

Eight miles away, over a rolling stretch of prairie dotted with cottonwoods, lay Udall, Kansas. The blacktop from Wichita, Highway 15, cut a clean diagonal toward that almost mythical little town. During Jeannette’s senior year in high school, nine years ago, a tornado had completely flattened Udall, killing more than sixty people and distributing kaboodles of outlandish debris all over the countryside.

As they walked into the open field, Jeannette told John-John the story. She embellished the account with colorful details. The farmer who had described the twister as sounding like a thousand jets and looking like a big oil slush. The telephone operator who had died at her switchboard. The man who had been thrown up a tree alive. John-John, his mother noted, appeared to be hanging on every word, as if she were promulgating some obvious but deliciously entertaining lie. Too, the rhythms of her voice had seduced him.

“Today that town looks one-hundred-percent, brand-spanking new,” she concluded. “You’d never know it had once been wiped off the map as surely as Neanderthals and woolly mammoths.”

They stood in the autumn turkey grass together, silent again. A meadowlark flew up from the ground cover, inscribed a parabola on the pale October sky. Jeannette began to feel vulnerable, exposed, as if their uprightness in this place invited either ridicule from the conventional folks in the houses behind them or attack from the cavemen and pachyderms hidden in the bushes beyond the arroyo dividing this small expanse of cow pasture. Crazy thoughts, but the wind was blowing and the world seemed big and hostile.

Now that her tornado story was over, John-John’s interest shifted elsewhere. He took off downhill, toward the gully. He was fast, too. To keep her dress out of the snagging thistles and shrub branches, she grabbed it up by the hem, then plunged down the meadow after him. By seizing his wrist, she halted his single-minded assault on the dry flood bed. The boy strained against her grip. He pointed and made unintelligible noises in his throat.

Phrygian, Hugo facetiously called these vocalizations. We’ve got a kid who speaks Phrygian. That, according to a friend of his in the library at McConnell, had once been thought the first language ever spoken by human beings.

Beyond the arroyo were five or six white-faced heifers placidly chewing their cuds. Despite their bulk, Jeannette had not seen them until just now. Like rhinoceroses or giraffes, they were browsing on the shrubbery that had partly concealed them, stripping the year’s last leaves from their branches. It was weird, this sudden apparition of cattle. Even weirder that they were browsing rather than cropping grass.

It almost seemed that John-John had summoned them into existence by pointing at them.

“Cows,” Jeannette said distractedly. “Cows.”

“Cao,” John-John said, still pointing.

Startled, Jeannette knelt in front of the boy and gripped his shoulders so that she was blocking his view.

“That’s right,” she said eagerly. “That’s right—cow! The word is cow!”

He pulled to the right, not interested in his mother’s efforts to reinforce his accomplishment.

Brushing a strand of wayward hair from her face, Jeannette stood up. Let him see the goddamn cows, for God’s sake! She felt lighthearted and proud. Phrygian, hell! Cao was English, no matter how broadly inflected. A good Anglo-Saxon English word. By uttering this single word he had vindicated her faith in his potential. Even though many children did not speak until well after their second birthday, that “feral child” business of Major so-and-so in Colonel Unger’s office had bugged her for better than a year. She had secretly begun to suspect that John-John’s unmonitored infancy in Seville had taken an insidious toll on his capacity to pick up language. This suspicion, in turn, had riddled her with guilt, because otherwise he was an alert and vivacious child.

“Cow,” she said, laughing. “Cao, cao, cao.”

“I don’t believe it, mujer.”

“It’s true—he spoke.”

“To a herd of cows?”

“Not to them, Hugo. He just saw them and he—”

“He said cow, Daddy!”

They were sitting in the kitchen at a table with a Formica top, part of the dinette set that Hugo had bought last Christmas through the McConnell Base Exchange. John-John was in an aluminum high chair with a yellow plastic tray. With a spoon in his right hand and the greasy fingers of his left, he was eating overdone hamburger granules. His mouth was smeared with mustard.

Hugo addressed Anna with mock stateliness: “‘Four score and seven years ago,’ John-John told the cows, ‘our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nación, conceived in libertad and dedicated to—’ How does the rest of it go, niña?”

“Daddy!”

“He really did speak,” Jeannette insisted. “Not Phrygian, either.”

“Then I think we should be havin’ steak instead of hamburger.” Hugo lifted a piece of hamburger patty on his fork tines. “John-John, this is cao, too. You see this? You’re eatin’ cao, Juanito, all the time eatin’ those big sleepy creatures with those big brown eyes. Say cao for me, pretty please.”

The boy, scattering bits of hamburger on the linoleum, pointed in the direction that Jeannette had taken him on his walk that morning. Toward the elementary school. Toward Udall.

“And at the playground a little boy named Donnie told me I ought to read to John-John—not just alphabet and picture books. Real books, difficult things. I’m going to start doing that, too.”

“When?” Hugo asked warily.

“Right after his bath. Why don’t you and Anna get the dishes?”

“Why don’ I wear high heels and lipstick?” Hugo retorted. But he and Anna did what Jeannette had asked.

Jeannette, meanwhile, supervised John-John’s bath, diapered him, shoehorned him into his terrycloth pajamas, and stood him up in his crib. He folded his arms over the crib’s top railing and watched his mother jockey a rocking chair into place beside him. Although he was old enough to climb out of the crib, Jeannette had taught him that doing so at bedtime would cost him. Two or three evenings a week he made a break for it, anyway.

Tonight, however, Jeannette’s continued presence in his and Anna’s room kept this impulse in check. As his mother removed a garish paperback from the pocket of her sunflower-print apron, he looked on with mounting curiosity. Then Jeannette sat down in the rocking chair and opened the book and began to read: “‘When Mr. Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday with a party of special magnificence, there was much talk and excitement in Hobbiton…’”