This Census-Taker (4 page)

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.

I
t didn’t frighten me to walk home in the dark, though I knew there were some nocturnal things on the hill of which we should be afraid. My mother always brought a flashlight to town and on those evenings she would crank it up and send its patch of glow a few meters ahead of us, climbing it across the stones and scuttling it over the path where it would frighten or entice little life. We’d pace toward it to the pattering of insects on its glass.

My mother was never so loquacious as when she climbed at night.

“I’m a southtowner,” she said, “I grew up over there. On the other side, look at it.”

We rarely crossed the bridge. When we did we would go only a very short way into the streets on the other hill, where the shops and the people seemed different to me. That half of the town felt closer to a source of entropy.

I would risk questions. “What’s in the ravine?”

“Down there? Oh…” she said, seeming exhausted by my interruption. “I don’t know, I don’t know. I can’t tell you what’s down there.

“I’ve been all the way to the sea,” she said. “I was at the coast. There’s a…” She sketched something with her hands: a tower. “I was in an office. I don’t know why they took me. They were training me; I was doing papers for them. I could still do it if you paid me.” She walked some more and said, “I shared a house with a white hallway and glass over the door. There were seven of us lived there. It was close to the station. You’ve never seen a train.”

“In a picture,” I said. “Which side of the bridge is my father from?”

She didn’t look at me.

“There’s trains there,” she said, “where I was. I used to ride them.” She raised her hand. “The center was one thing, still carrying on, so you wouldn’t know, but the city was mostly all broken down in a circle around it. Pretty much over. You know what the sea is? The trains go right by the sea there.”

“Which side is he from?”

She considered.

“Why do you want to talk about that?” she said. Her voice was flat and I moved away. “He came from somewhere else,” she said.

“Is that why he talks different?”

“His accent. He used to think in a different language. He came to the port where I was working. He came by boat; he had to leave his own place, which is a bigger city a long way off, because of trouble there. He met me at my office. He told me he wanted to keep going, that he was only coming through. He needed to be somewhere smaller. Further away.” A tone in her voice gave me an instant’s insight into what might have been their attachment. “I took him here in the end.”

It was all the way dark now and looking back you could see how many fewer lights there were south of the divide than north. They were scattered. They sketched the streets in broken lines that curved across the slopes as if trying to encircle the bridge. They extended a kilometer up the other hill to the curious darkness of the generating station. I wondered if any of the lights shone on the house where my mother had been a child.

We heard the irate screaming of a town donkey, or a visitor’s. I could see the guttering of fires and I imagined them in the shells of south-side houses, in the rubble, in the yards of the plant where the night shift was on.

“It should be all gone,” I said. I pointed toward the failing belt. “Or all staying.”

My mother said nothing. Her flashlight lit me up.

“It should be gone or staying,” I said as I breathed out. My voice quavered a little and she looked at me. That wasn’t unfair, I thought; she gave me such careful eyes only when she sensed this kind of particularity in me, as when a cloud of starlings had gone over our house with silent motions so violent that I’d run to her and tried to tell her urgently that the birds above us should have the heads of dogs.

“You take apart all the buildings,” I said. “Take out all the bricks and push them down and set fire to them.”

“Bricks don’t burn.”

“Hot enough like in the sun they do. Right in the sun. You make them ashes.” Bats, I saw bats again, but these ones I imagined in the bricks’ ashes were as big as houses and not flying but walking in their horrid way on the tips of their wings and their claws, and the ash was baked solid so none of it gusted up at their touch. That was where they might live, the bats. Batland between the town and the hill, the country!

“Or…or pull all the
rest
down instead,” I said. “The
middle
of the town.”

“Undome the domes?” she said.

There was only one dome in the bridgetown. Maybe there were more in the coastal city and that was what she spoke of.

Do it there too, then. Take the domes down and unwind the railways until the city was all gone. It wouldn’t have to be a bad mess, you wouldn’t have to explode the buildings in the center; you could take away one brick, then the next, then the next. The grass would come back then. And the ring of ruin beyond would change again, change back, that very bit already gone into decay would unwind its decline. That’s how we could help. In a few months
that
would be the city, a circle of revived tower blocks around a huge field of weeds.

“That’s enough,” said my mother sharply.

I blinked and came back to myself on the dark slope, realized I’d been speaking, was quiet all the way home.

When Samma’s group didn’t come for me, I would accompany my mother through the town at no pace, hesitating under shops’ sun-bleached awnings, acquiring pieces without any logic I could discern. Sometimes, to my anguish, she’d enter fenced-off middens, heaps of junk and rubbish at the corners of streets, and pick through them. She wasn’t the only person to do so, but it wore on me as if she were.

There were higher and steeper roads where some houses were changed on the inside, rooms and floors removed, even, so the shell of what had been a cottage was now a church of some low faith, or a showcase for huge industrial goods. It was on the door of one such that my mother knocked one day, to be let in by a harried young woman in a filthy apron chewing flavored bark. She let us into a dim acrid corridor raucous with throaty sounds. The windows were blackwashed and there was a low wire mesh in each doorway. Every room had been cleared of furniture and thronged with fowl, gathered by age and sex, tiny chicks chirruping pitifully in what had been a bedroom, larger birds jostling in the kitchen. I coughed in air dense with the dust of feathers. I heard the geese upstairs.

The woman spat toward an under-stairs cubby and two cockerels lurched over to investigate.

“Come on then,” she said. Then she said something in another language, but my mother immediately shook her head, and the woman went back to our own. “What do you want?”

My mother bought eggs and a bird for eating. The young woman wrung its neck.

We went to a small stinking house on the run-down valley-side street. Its door was unlocked; my mother pointed for me to stay outside but when I heard her ascend the stairs I followed her inside, into a different reek from that of the chickens.

The house was a dump. People would enter to leave their trash and pick through that of others. Drifts of rubbish received me coldly, layers of moldering remains, grudging hosts silent but for the tiny shifts of rot. I held my breath and picked through to the window, to join spectating flies and the drifts of their dead in staring out into the gap.

There were eyes on me too, from within a mound of refuse. The sight of them made me gulp a mouthful of that awful smell.

Glass circles in a hinge-jawed wooden head, nestled in the garbage. Years of decay had eroded its rudimentary features and drawn it an intricate and terrible new mildew face, from which I ran.

O
n a vivid day as summer hurried in I came down the path from the garbage hole and I saw my father walking up toward me.

I stopped. Sometimes if you stand very still and close your eyes you see rocks behind your eyelids. Or you realize aghast that the shapes of things are other than you’d understood.

“I didn’t go in,” I said. “You didn’t say I couldn’t go
to
the cave just not
in
. I only went to the edge.”

I rarely disobeyed my parents. When either of them discovered me in any transgression I would shake, or I would freeze as still as a wax boy. If my father thought I’d been bad he might make me stand outside, was all, even in the rain. My mother might look at me and mutter with dislike and maybe knock with her knuckles across the back of my hand as if at a door: the painless sanction filled me with shame. Still, when it came time for punishment I’d always be paralyzed as if they would kill me. I didn’t move as my father approached, and I could hear only the wind around my face.

He didn’t even furrow his brow. He didn’t glance at me. I watched how he trudged, not tired. I looked at the hand in which he’d carried the broken dog that last time and I saw that what was in it now, what I’d thought a sack of trash, was a lolling mountain bird.

The hill was always busy with these flightless scavengers we called scunners. A scunnerbird is tough and stringy but there’s much worse eating. Shoot one, you have two or three days of stew. My father had no gun. Scunners are skittish and fast despite their fatness and I couldn’t think how my father had enticed this one to him. I knew that, by whatever means he’d killed it, it was not to eat. I wanted to cry; I stood still.

He had it by the neck. Its brown body was bigger than a baby’s. Its shovel head lolled and its nasty hook beak twitched open and closed to snap faintly with each of my father’s steps. The bird’s broad feet dangled on the ground and bounced on stones as if it were trying to claw itself incompetently to a stop.

My father passed me. He looked briefly at me as you might at a stump or a broken machine or anything that’s specific only in that it’s in your way, to walk around it as my father did me.

I knew he was taking the dead bird to the rubbish hole, that he’d throw it up so it would curve as it had to and descend; I knew that day my father was feeding only the darkness.

The boy went to the low-down part of the attic where he drew, and drew a lizard in a bottle between the stems of the wallpaper’s design. He came back the next day and, beside it, he drew a cat in another bottle and a fox in a third. He drew a fish in a bottle, a crow in a bottle, a mountain lion in a big bottle. He’d never seen a mountain lion but he heard them sometimes and knew he was to be afraid of them. He imagined that deep throaty growl contained by glass and the thought fascinated him. He drew corks tight in the bottles’ necks.

He cramped his drawings together to keep them a secret, and he saw that without intending it he’d drawn his bottles as if neatly lined up in some strange cupboard. So he drew a shelf beneath them, and while daylight reached them and cast across them the shadow of his own drawing hand, he put down the lines of a house around the bottles, to contain them, and he drew another house to either side. He could have filled the whole of the room, covered every wall of it in the smudged lines of rendered streets, that they could be filled in turn with women and men and children in the same lines as their city, some like small women wearing masks, some people squat as if they lived underwater. Someone there would be the keeper of those bottles.

He wanted his pictures to be secret so he kept that city and itemized all its citizens in his head.

I looked out. My mother was digging, and she came into view as she bent to extract unwanted roots. The wind pulled her clothes and tugged scraps of paper from her pocket. She balled something up in her fist and put it into the ground and covered it carefully and very gently with soil.

Soon I’d be too big to do as I liked to, to hunker and perch in the little window’s alcove. I swung my knees up and braced them with my back curved and my head down, so I was bundled up on the sill as if the house itself held me like a baby. I sat like that on the ledge because I still could.

From there I’d look out and down across the edge of the garden and the incline of our hill, the rough up and down of the tree line, the sky. Sometimes people called it a hill, sometimes a mountain. It moved unceasingly. Branches spread, trees twisted behind trees in all the wind. Even the stone moved.

I sat up then because I thought I saw a new green, outlines of tough vegetation, neither needles nor fibrous leaves but spines on bunched and distinct knotty skin, misplaced amid the gray and those dusty greens I knew, swaying, pushing purposefully above the hillside growth at the edge of my sight as if deliberately positioned to be glimpsed against a sky the color of the hill rocks. A quickly moving visitation.

What I saw was gone almost instantly into some dip in the uneven ground.

I came out of the window and ran down the attic stairs and out and up the footpath. I ran as fast as I could to the copse at which I’d been staring. I pushed straight into its empty center to stand alone amid clustering midges. I listened for a long quiet moment, and wondered whether the gap I saw ahead of me was where the bushes and low trees had been pushed apart by someone big, or whether they were even still vibrating from that passage. The shale there didn’t show marks well but there were scuffs between the roots, and I decided they were great footprints. And did the ground shake? As if someone had turned and was retracing their steps toward me?

Then the wind got up very suddenly and hard enough to make me gasp, so it was all I could hear, and all the undergrowth was moving. Nothing came back but those gusts. Turning, I saw two large unfamiliar flowers in the dust, bright petals right for a stronger sun, broken off in a clutch of spines.

I took them and returned. I re-entered the house. Hesitantly calling for my mother, I ascended the stairs, to stop, abruptly silent, by her empty room. I pushed the door, as I was not allowed to, opened it onto her things. Her bed was unmade. The few books with which she did not teach me to read were on her chair. Drawers and clothes and small pieces of trash were laid neatly on the shelf of a window that looked onto the hill from an angle that was new to me.

I could smell her. I wanted to stay and look at everything but I was afraid of her finding me there, and I wanted to know what it was that had passed.

My mother finished patting earth down as I approached her with my hands behind my back and she straightened and put something back in her pocket and waited.

“I saw something,” I said. “A tree was walking.”

She didn’t speak for a while. She stood as tall as she could and looked past me toward where I had been. Not knowing why, I kept the flowers I had picked up in my closed hand.

“Maybe you only thought you saw something,” she said, and paused. I was fascinated by her hesitation, the uncharacteristic way her mouth opened and closed more than once before she continued. “Maybe,” she said, it sounded as if to herself as much as to me, “it was someone from your father’s city.”

She watched the horizon, her brows low.

“Come to see him?” I said.

She looked at me and though her attention brought with it an anxiety as it often did I could see she was not appraising me but a situation. She contemplated saying more, craned her neck again. At last she shook her head.

“You only thought you saw something,” she said. Her calm had relief in it and disappointment, so I too was both sorry and glad that no one was coming, to provoke her into finishing whatever she had started to tell. My mother bent again and returned to her task and I knew she wouldn’t say anything more.

When she went in I planted the petals and their thorns where she’d been digging.