Every Boy Should Have a Man (13 page)

Now, the mans of the snow I saw in the zoo that day were different from all the other mans I have ever seen before, and I have seen a lot of mans. There are mans who live in the forest, and they are really small and their skin is a very dark color to blend in with the leaves. There are mans who live on the plains, and they have almost no hair on their bodies. There are mans who live in the mountains, and they have long colorful body hairs, long legs, and tiny light-colored eyes. Amazing as these mans are, the mans of the snow are different from all of them.

The mans of the snow are not as tall as most other mans, and they are fairly plump. My teacher says the extra fat is to keep them warm and their pale color is to help them blend in with the snow so that other predators as well as prey can’t see them coming. Unlike other mans, the mans of the snow make actual clothes. They hunt the great white beos and use their hides to protect against the freezing cold. On their feet, they wear the hide of beo like primitive shoes to protect from the snow. And when they remove their shoes, you notice that their feet are different from all other mans on earth—they cannot grasp with their feet, for their feet have no thumbs. In that respect, their feet are similar to our own.

The other thing that makes the mans of the snow different from all other mans is that they are the greatest hunters of all. The people at the zoo brought in a great white beo and we watched as the mans of the snow hunted it. The people in the zoo did not let them actually kill the beo, but we got to see them preparing their tools for the hunt, setting up in attack formation, and then launching their spears. One spear hit the beo and he growled a mighty growl and then they brought down a wall between the two cages so that the mans couldn’t hurl any more spears at it. The mans of the snow are very exciting to watch at a zoo, and it would probably be great to own one as a pet, but they are very expensive.

Even though my parents are not wealthy, I am fortunate that I have owned three mans in my life. My first man was not really mine and I had to give him back. My second man was a musical man and a fighting man, and I loved her very much, but she died. Now I own the best man of all. She has red hair, she is musical, and I know this will be hard to believe, but she is a talking man. Sometimes she and I argue over things because she has strong opinions. I have only had her for six months, but we do everything together and go everywhere together. We are best friends. We will be best friends forever. I never knew I could love anything so much.

In conclusion, I am so happy that I have a man. She is fun to play with. Her music is fun to listen to. She is fun to talk to when she is not being sarcastic. My life has improved a lot since she came into it. I think every child should have a man.

11

Red Locks

Now listen, Red Locks,” the boy told his female man. “I’m going to read something I wrote about you.”

“About me?”

He showed her the paper. “I wrote it for school.”

“Why me?”

“Because I love you,” he said. “You are my favorite thing in the whole world.”

“Then by all means, you should read it to me,” she said.

The boy began to read.

And she listened, enraptured.

12

The Oaf

The boy grew up and was a boy no more.

The boy grew up and became a full-grown oaf, as was his father and his father’s father before him.

He was wed and started a family. And times were hard, so he and his young family were forced to remain with his parents.

For a time, they said.

And one year became two, and two became four, and four became eight, and ten years later, ten regular years, he was still going to bed and waking up in his childhood room, though he had a wife and somewhere scattered around the house were his two children.

He thought often about the mans of his childhood. He thought about them every night, despite all that had happened and how things had changed.

One night in his bed he lay awake thinking about his mans, and there came a persistent tapping on his window. He arose and there was a man looking inside the window at him—a female man with red hair, green eyes, and frecks.

Frecks and wrinkles.

In regular years she would be eighteen. In man years she would be fifty-four.

He rushed out into the backyard and hugged her so tight she begged him to release her, and he did. And then she hugged him back and seemed unwilling to let him go.

She said, “I missed you so.”

The boy who was now an oaf said, “And I missed you.”

In the yard with her were three other mans and an odd-looking little oaf that he had never seen around these parts. She introduced everybody but the oaf, who looked to be a simpleton. She said, “This is my husband Rufus, but everyone calls him Jack. This is my son Bob, and this is my daughter Janet.” And then she told them, “This is my old master, Zloty. He was the best master I ever had.”

He shook all of their little hands and then hugged them all, including Rufus who could also be called Jack.

“Zack?”

“No, I’m Jack,” said Jack. “Adventurer, scholar, and giant-killer at your service.”

Zloty shrugged, for he did not understand. Then he eyed the pinhead oaf again to see if maybe he knew him, and again it was nobody that he knew.

And then he thought,
It is dangerous these days for mans to travel through the streets. It is illegal for them to be out and about without a leash or an escort. So many of them have been killed. So many of them have been stolen. In this neighborhood, so many of them have been stolen and made into a meal. If the scientists don’t work fast, all of the free-range mans will be dead. The swamp of the Eternal Grass has already dried up. In the north, the great white beos are gone and the ice caps are melting. So maybe this pinhead with them is someone she met after being stolen from me, and she contacted him first and made him her escort so that they all could pass through the streets without worrying about the authorities
.

But the oaf was rather short for an oaf, standing a little less than three hla-cubits, while the oaf Zloty, who was considered slightly below average in height by oaf standards of his day, stood four and a half hla-cubits. The pinhead, Zloty figured, was just a little bit taller than a boy at the start of puberty, which made him a
very
short adult male oaf. And he had frecks on his face and arms, which was very unusual for an oaf. In ancient days, frecks were believed to be a sign of bad fortune and the infant born with them was strangled by its parents after its first suckle to please the great creator.

Her family moved to the other side of the backyard to give her some time alone with her old master. She explained to him all that had transpired since she had been stolen from him. She explained to him the new world in which they lived.

“It is a long, long journey that can only be made by foot. We are separated from your world by about 70,000 zlazla hla-cubits of stairs, but in many ways our world is much like yours. We have war, poverty, racism, sexism, religious intolerance, crime—we are destroying our natural environment.”

He asked her to explain religious intolerance.

“You will not understand it because in your world you only have one religion.”

“What is religion?”

“As I said, in your world everyone believes in the great creator. In the world of mans, people believe many different things.”

“How can they believe many different things?”

“It is hard to explain.”

Then he asked her to explain racism, which translated poorly into his language as
hatred of the difference in the hue of the fruit on a single branch
.

She struggled for the words to explain. “Well, as you can see,” she said, “my husband Rufus has dark skin and my skin is pale.”

“Frecked,” he corrected.

“Well, okay, but see, Rufus and I are considered to be from different races, uhm, er, from different family trees, understand? And this causes a problem for some people down there.”

He snorted. “You are pulling my leg, right? I’m no pinhead. You come from the same
racing fruit tree
, or whatever you call it. You are both mans. A little female man and a little man man.”

They both laughed at that but for different reasons; he at the truth in it, and she for the irony of it.

Then since she had mentioned that in her new world she was wealthy and he had always dreamt of being wealthy, he asked, “So how do you earn your money in your world? What do you do for a living, little wealthy man?”

She said, “Nothing. Rufus comes and steals silver from your world every few years.”

“Aha, silver is money in your world too.” For some reason this pleased him. Perhaps because at last here was a thing he understood. Their worlds had something in common—the love of silver.

“I arrived in that new world with wealth. Silver is worth money there, but so is a substance called gold. Gold, in your world, is used to make rope and thread. It is found in most cloth. The hair cloths I went there with were worth a fortune. My loin pouch also. The tunic of war that I wore was lined with it. And the small singing harp I was given by one of the evil soldiers I told you about who owned me before I left—it too was made of pure gold. Your mother’s singing harp would be worth a fortune in my world. In my world you and your family would be wealthy because of that small singing harp alone, which in your world is regarded as the least significant of instruments.”

They talked about many other things, but eventually she asked him, “What has happened to this world? It used to be so vibrant, so green. It looks like a desert everywhere we’ve been. Was it the war? Who won the war?”

He said, “Which war? It has been ten years of wars. There have been four wars in ten years. I fought in one of these.”

Shaking his head sadly, he pulled up his pant leg to show her the scar, as winding and ugly as the one on her arm.

“Nobody ever wins a war. A new one is starting right now, but it is of no concern to us. A war changes nothing for the poor, except that if you are the right age you fight in it and die. And my friend Auutet, my best friend in the whole wide world and your first master, though he was wealthy, he was also noble and earnest and good; and he did fight on the side of the poor in the war and was killed in battle. My heart still aches for him.”

Auutet. Auutet.
Her heart did ache as well, but in silence as the boy of her childhood spoke.

“This desert, as you call it, is because we are going through a worldwide famine. This happens in a cycle every few thousand years—oafenkind has been on earth for 10,000 years. It is nothing to worry about. Things will get better. We will survive.”

“Oh.”

He lowered his voice. “That is what the wealthy say . . . but our sacred speaker says there are people, scientists, who believe that it signals the end of days.”

“What do you mean?”

“They say we have angered the great creator and he has turned his back on us and left us to perish in a world that we have destroyed. We have poisoned the air with our mining and the waters with our waste, we have scorched the face of the earth with our overharvesting and our wars. We have caused the cold places to become warm. Many animals have died and will never return. The free-range mans are almost all gone. There are almost no more mans in the wild. We have hunted them into near extinction. The only mans alive now are mans that we raise for pets and circuses.”

She frowned. “Pets and circuses.”

“I do not mean to hurt your feelings.”

“I know. You are a good oaf.”

“I remember you told me that your mother said this world was going to die. But I do not think I believe it. The great creator would not give the oaf the power to destroy the world. The oaf is but a part of the world. The oaf is a creature of nature too. If the oaf overhunts an animal and it dies out, then that is a natural death because the oaf is a natural creature too.”

“True, but the great creator gave the oaf understanding,” she argued, “which makes him greater than other natural creatures. The oaf, unlike other creatures,
understands
that he is destroying the world for a selfish and temporary purpose, and he is able to correct his actions and halt the destruction. If he does not do that, then maybe he is indeed but a dim-witted pinhead and does not deserve to be called the greatest of the great creator’s creations, right?”

She saw from his expression that he lacked understanding. There was a chasm between them that she could not bridge. But he was soooooo big. She had forgotten how big he was. How big and how handsome.

They looked at each other, and there was something that he wanted to tell her and there was something that she wanted to tell him.

It was she who spoke first.

He knelt close and she whispered into his face: “I have learned of a thing that I did not know before. The way I learned it was painful . . . but now I understand some things about us, you and me. We are not different beings, your people and mine. We come from the same family tree. We are the same people, just different sizes. Man is but a smaller version of the oaf. And there is no such thing as talking mans and mans that cannot talk. Mans that cannot talk are simply mans who speak a different language.”

She saw the look on his face and she knew he was about to ask a question, and she raised a hand for him to be silent.

“You do not know of languages because your people only have one language. So you do not even have a name for the language you speak. You do not even have a word for the word
language
.” She paused to look at his eyes. Did he have understanding? Was it even worth it to keep trying to explain? “In my world,” she went on, “your language would be called Frisian, which is not too different from the language I speak with my husband and my family, which is called English. My husband, who is learned among the mans of our world, speaks English, Frisian, French, Dutch, and German. These are languages. In my world, mans have many languages . . .”

She wanted to tell him that in many ways the humans of her world, and even the mans of his world, were more advanced than the oafs, who lived mostly clumped in large, overpopulated groups instead of spreading out and expanding their civilizations into the wildernesses and other continents of their world. The oafs, who possessed an almost religious fear of the unknown, had a belief that wildernesses were for hunters, adventurers, and scientists, but not for building cities in. Most oafs believed that wildernesses, along with forests, deserts, and mountains, were for plundering and bringing stuff back from, but not for living in. As a result of having lived so close together for such a long time, the oafs had never had their language or their blood stretched out and then comingled. They all looked alike and sounded alike, even when they were mortal enemies facing off in their many and devastating wars.