by Rich Horton
Dr. Krantor and Pippa come back. He has brought me a lovely piece of cheese, an aged cheddar far richer than what I usually find at the end of the maze. He and Pippa sit and watch me nibble at it, and then he says, “Are you all right, Rodney? Do you feel better now?"
"No,” I tell him. “You aren't really protecting me by keeping me in this cage, are you? You can't protect me. I'm going to die anyway. You aren't keeping me safe from death; you're denying me life.” I think of my memories, the joy of galloping down the road, of chewing through rope, of loving a bird. “You're depriving me of experience. Dr. Krantor, please let me go."
"Let you go?” he says. “Rodney, don't be ridiculous! There are still cats and snakes and mousetraps out there. You'll live much longer this way. And you represent a huge investment of research dollars. I can't let you go."
"I'm not an investment,” I snap at him. “I'm a creature! Let me go!"
Dr. Krantor shakes his head. “Rodney, I can't do that. I really can't. I'm sorry. I'll buy you a new exercise wheel, okay? And a bigger cage? There are all kinds of fancy cages with tunnels and things. We can make you a cage ten times bigger than this one. Pippa, you can help design Rodney's new cage. We'll go to the pet store and buy all the parts. It will be fun."
"I don't want a new exercise wheel,” I tell him. “I don't want a new cage. I want to be free! Pippa, he says he can't let me go, but remember when he said you couldn't go to the zoo? It's the same thing."
"It's not the same thing at all,” Dr. Krantor says. His voice isn't friendly anymore. “Rodney, I'm getting very annoyed with you. Pippa, don't you have more homework to do?"
"No,” she says. “I already did my homework. The page is all filled out."
"Well then,” Dr. Krantor says. “We'll go to the pet store—"
"I don't want you to go to the pet store! I want you to let me go! Pippa—"
"Stop trying to brainwash her!” Dr. Krantor bellows at me.
I can feel my tail flicking in fury. “You're the one brainwashing her!"
"Stop it,” Pippa says. She's put her thumb in her mouth, muffling her words, and she looks like she's going to cry again. “Stop it! I hate it when you fight!"
We stop. I feel miserable. I wonder how Dr. Krantor feels. Pippa goes back to the table where her homework is, and Dr. Krantor goes back to his computer, and I nibble disconsolately on the excellent cheddar. No one says anything. After a while, Dr. Krantor comes back over to my cage and asks wearily, “All right, Rodney. Ready for the maze?"
"Are you out of your mind? I'm not going to run any more mazes! Why should I? What's in it for me?"
"Cheese!"
"I've had enough cheese today.” I'm being ungracious, I know. I should thank him for the excellent cheddar. But I'm too angry to mind my manners.
"It's for my research, Rodney!"
"I don't care about your research, you imbecile!"
Dr. Krantor curses; Pippa, at her table, has covered her ears. Dr. Krantor reaches into my cage. He lifts me by the tail, none too gently, and plunks me down at the beginning of the maze. “Go,” he says.
"Go groom yourself!"
He stomps away. I sit in the maze and clean my whiskers, fastidiously, and then I curl into a ball and take a nap.
I wake to feel myself being lifted into the air again. Dr. Krantor puts me back in my cage, even more roughly than he took me out, and says, “All right, Rodney. Look, this has all been a terrible mess, and I'm very sorry, but if you aren't willing to work tomorrow, we're going to have a problem."
"Going to?” I say.
Dr. Krantor rubs his eyes. “Rodney. Don't do this. You're expendable."
"I am? Even though I represent a tremendous investment of research dollars? Well then, you should have no problem letting me go."
He glares down at me. “Don't do this. Please don't do this. There are things I can do to make you compliant. Drugs. Electric shocks. I don't want to do any of that, and I know you don't want me to either. I want to keep a good working relationship here, all right, Rodney? Please?"
"You're threatening to torture me?” Outrage makes my voice even squeakier than usual. “Great working relationship! Hey, Pippa, did you hear that? Did you hear what your father just said?"
"Pippa isn't here, Rodney. Her mother came to pick her up while you were asleep. They were going to a birthday party. Rodney: will you run the maze tomorrow, or will I have to resort to other methods?"
I'm frightened now. Dr. Krantor's voice is calm, reasonable. He's very matter-of-fact about the prospect of torturing me, and Pippa isn't here as a witness. He's probably bluffing. Coercion would probably compromise his data. But I don't know that for sure.
"Rodney?” he says.
"I'll think about it,” I tell him. I have to buy myself time. Now I know why Stuart bowed and scraped. People are so much bigger than we are.
"Good enough,” he says, his voice gentler, and reaches into the cage to give me another piece of the excellent cheddar. “Have a good night, Rodney.” And then he leaves.
I stay awake all night, fretting. I try to find some way to escape from my cage, but I can't. I wonder if I could escape from the maze; I've never tried, but surely Dr. Krantor has made the mazes secure also. I don't know what to do.
I dread the morning.
But in the morning, when Dr. Krantor usually arrives, I hear three sets of footsteps in the hallway outside, and two voices: Dr. Krantor's and a woman's.
"Why do you have to take her on this trip in the middle of the school year?” Dr. Krantor says. “And why do you have to talk to me about it now?"
"I already told you, Jack! Michael's family reunion in Ireland is in a month, so if we go we have to go then, and I need you to sign this letter saying that you know I'm not kidnapping her. I don't want any trouble."
Dr. Krantor grumbles something, and the lab door opens. Dr. Krantor and the woman—Pippa's mother!—come inside, still arguing. Pippa comes inside too. Pippa's mother walks to the computer; Pippa races to my cage.
"How do I know you aren't kidnapping her?” Dr. Krantor says. “Pippa, there's more of the new cheese over here, if you want to give Rodney a nice breakfast."
"Pippa,” I whisper, “he threatened to torture me! Pippa—"
"Shhhhh,” she whispers back, and opens my cage, and reaches into one of her pockets. “Don't make any noise, Rodney."
She's holding a mouse. A white mouse, just like me. Pippa puts the new mouse in the cage and we stare at each other in surprise, nose to nose, whiskers twitching, but then I feel Pippa grasp the base of my tail. She lifts me, and I watch the new mouse receding, and then she puts me in her pocket. I hear the cage close, and then we're walking across the room.
"All right, Jack, here's the itinerary, see? Here on this map? Jack, look at the map, would you? I'll tell you every single place we're going; it's not like we're spiriting her away without telling you."
"But how do I know you'll really go there? You could take her to, to, Spain or the South Pole or—"
"Michael doesn't have a family reunion in Spain or the South Pole. Jack, be reasonable."
"I'm bored,” Pippa says loudly. “I'm going outside."
"Stay right by the front door, sweetheart!” That's Dr. Krantor, of course.
"I will,” she says, and then I hear the lab door open and we're out, we're in the hallway, and then we go through another door and I smell fresh air and Pippa lifts me out of her pocket. She sits down on a step and holds me up to her face. “Mommy and I went to the pet store last night, Rodney, and we got another mouse who looks just like you. He was in the cage of mice people buy to feed to their snakes. Being here is better for him. Daddy won't feed him to a snake."
"But your father will torture the other mouse,” I say, “or worse. When he realizes it's just an ordinary mouse he'll be very angry. Pippa, he'll punish you."
"No, he won't,” she says cheerfully, “or Mommy and Michael will say he isn't taking good care of me.” She pu
ts me down on the warm cement step. I feel wind and smell flowers and grass. “You're free, Rodney. You can have your very own adventures. You don't have to go back to that stupid maze."
"How will I find you?” I tell her. As much as I yearned for freedom before, I'm terrified. There really are cats and snakes and mousetraps out here, and I've never had to face them. How will I know what to do? “Pippa, you have to meet me so I can tell you my stories, or no one will know what happens to me. I'll be just like all those other mice, the ones whose stories just stop when they stop being useful to the main characters. Pippa—"
But there are footsteps now from inside, forceful footsteps coming closer, and Dr. Krantor's voice. His voice sounds dangerous. “Pippa? Pippa, what did you do to the rodent? It won't talk to me! I don't even think it's the same mouse! Pippa, did you put another mouse in that cage?"
I find myself trembling as badly as I would if a cat were coming. Pippa stands up. The sole of her sneaker is the only thing I can see now. From very far above me I hear her saying, “Run, Rodney."
And I do.
[Back to Table of Contents]
The King of Where-I-Go by Howard Waldrop
—
When I was eight, in 1954, my sister caught polio.
It wasn't my fault, although it took twenty years before I talked myself out of believing it was. See, we had this fight ... ?
* * * *
We were at my paternal grandparents’ house in Alabama, where we were always taken in the summer, either being driven from Texas to there on Memorial Day and picked up on the Fourth of July, or taken the Fourth and retrieved Labor Day weekend, just before school started again in Texas.
This was the first of the two times when we spent the whole summer in Alabama. Our parents were taking a break from us for three entire months. We essentially ran wild all that time. This was a whole new experience. Ten years later, when it happened the second time, we would return to find our parents separated—me and my sister living with my mother in a garage apartment that backed up on the railroad tracks and my father living in what was a former motel that had been turned into day-laborer apartments a half mile away.
Our father worked as an assembler in a radio factory that would go out of business in the early l960s, when the Japanese started making them better, smaller, and cheaper. Our mother worked in the Ben Franklin 5-10-25 store downtown. Our father had to carpool every day into a Dallas suburb, so he would come and get the car one day a week. We would be going to junior high by then, and it was two blocks away.
But that was in the future. This was the summer of 1954.
Every two weeks we would get in our aunt's purple Kaiser and she would drive us the forty-five miles to our maternal grandparents’ farm in the next county, and we would spend the next two weeks there. Then they'd come and get us after two weeks and bring us back. Like the movie title says, two weeks in another town.
We were back for the second time at the paternal grandparents’ place. It was after the Fourth of July because there were burned patches on my grandfather's lower field where they'd had to go beat out the fires started by errant Roman candles and skyrockets.
There was a concrete walk up to the porch of our grandparents’ house that divided the lawn in two. The house was three miles out of town; some time in the 1980s the city limits would move past the place when a highway bypass was built to rejoin the highway that went through town and the town made a landgrab.
On the left side of the lawn we'd set up a croquet game (the croquet set would cost a small fortune now, I realize, though neither my grandparents or aunt was what people called well-off).
My sister and I were playing. My grandfather had gone off to his job somewhere in the county. My grandmother was lying down, with what was probably a migraine, or maybe the start of the cancer that would kill her in a few years. (For those not raised in the South; in older homes the bedroom was also the front parlor—there was a stove, chairs for entertaining, and the beds in the main room of the house.) The bed my grandmother lay on was next to the front window.
My sister Ethel did something wrong in the game. Usually I would have been out fishing from before sunup until after dark with a few breaks during the day when I'd have to come back to the house. Breakfast was always made by my grandfather—who had a field holler that carried a mile, which he would let out from the back porch when breakfast was ready, and I'd come reluctantly back from the Big Pond. My grandfather used a third of a pound of coffee a day, and he percolated it for at least fifteen minutes—you could stand a spoon up in it. Then lunch, which in the South is called dinner, when my aunt would come out from her job in town and eat with me and my sister, my grandmother, and any cousins, uncles, or kin who dropped by (always arranged ahead of time, I'm sure), then supper, the evening meal, after my grandfather got home. Usually I went fishing after that, too, until it got too dark to see and the water moccasins came out.
But this morning we were playing croquet and it was still cool so I must have come back from fishing for some reason and been snookered into playing croquet.
"Hey! You can't do that!” I yelled at my sister.
"Do what?” she yelled back.
"Whatever you just did!” I said.
"I didn't do anything!” she yelled.
"You children please be quiet,” yelled my grandmother from her bed by the window.
"You cheated!” I yelled at my sister.
"I did not!” she hollered back.
One thing led to another and my sister hit me between the eyes with the green-striped croquet mallet about as hard as a six-year-old can hit. I went down in a heap near a wicket. I sat up, grabbed the blue croquet ball, and threw it as hard as I could into my sister's right kneecap. She went down screaming.
My grandmother was now standing outside the screen door on the porch (which rich people called a verandah) in her housecoat.
"I asked you children to be quiet, please,” she said.
"You shut up!” said my sister, holding her knee and crying.
My forehead had swelled up to the size of an apple.
My grandmother moved like the wind then, like Roger Bannister who had just broken the four-minute mile, Suddenly there was a willow switch in her hand and she had my sister's right arm and she was tanning her hide with the switch.
So here was my sister, screaming in two kinds of pain and regretting the invention of language and my grandmother was saying with every movement of her arm, “Don't-you-ever-tell-me-to-shut-up-young-lady!"
She left her in a screaming pile and went back into the house and lay down to start dying some more.
I was well-pleased, with the casual cruelty of childhood, that I would never-ever-in-my-wildest-dreams ever tell my grandmother to shut up.
I got up, picked up my rod and tackle box, and went back over the hill to the Big Pond, which is what I would rather have been doing than playing croquet anyway.
That night my sister got what we thought was a cold, in the middle of July.
Next day, she was in the hospital with polio.
* * * *
My aunt Noni had had a best friend who got poliomyelitis when they were nine, just after WWI, about the time Franklin Delano Roosevelt had gotten his. (Roosevelt had been president longer than anybody, through the Depression the grown-ups were always talking about, and WWII, which was the exciting part of the history books you never got to in school. He'd died at the end of the war, more than a year before I was born. Then the president had been Truman, and now it was Ike.) My aunt knew what to do and had Ethel in the hospital quick. It probably saved my sister's life, and at least saved her from an iron lung, if it were going to be that kind of polio.
You can't imagine how much those pictures in newsreels scared us all—rows of kids, only their heads sticking out of what looked like long tubular industrial washing machines. Polio attacked many things; it could make it so you couldn't breathe on your own—the iron lung was alternately a hypo- and hyperba
ric chamber—it did the work of your diaphragm. This still being in vacuum-tube radio times, miniaturization hadn't set in, so the things weighed a ton. They made noises like breathing, too, which made them even creepier.
If you were in one, there was a little mirror over your head (you were lying down) where you could look at yourself; you couldn't look anywhere else.
Normally that summer we would have gone, every three days or so, with our aunt back to town after dinner and gone to the swimming pool in town. But it was closed because of the polio scare, and so was the theater. (They didn't want young people congregating in one place so the disease could quickly spread.) So what you ended up with was a town full of bored schoolkids and teenagers out of school for the summer with nothing to do. Not what a Baptist town really cares for.
Of course you could swim in a lake or something. But the nearest lake was miles out of town. If you couldn't hitch a ride or find someone to drive you there, you were S.O.L. You could go to the drive-ins for movies. The nearest one was at the edge of the next county—again you needed someone with wheels, although once there you could sit on top of the car and watch the movie, leaving the car itself to the grownups or older teenage brothers and sisters. (They'd even taken away the seats in front of the snack bar where once you could sit like in a regular theater, only with a cloud of mosquitoes eating you all up, again because of polio.)
Me, I had fishing and I didn't care. Let the town wimps stew in their own juices.
* * * *
But that was all before my sister made polio up close and personal in the family and brought back memories to my aunt.
But Aunt Noni became a ball of fire.
I couldn't go into the hospital to see my sister, of course—even though I had been right there when she started getting sick. Kids could absolutely not come down to the polio ward. This was just a small county hospital with about forty beds, but it also had a polio ward with two iron lungs ready to go, such was the fear in those days.
