Our Napoleon in Rags. Kirby Gann
his implications, his clever asides and jocularities. He found little help. Only one offering came to his veering mind:
—Hello? Haycraft asked.
Met with silence. The autumn breeze came again, more forcefully now, shushing wrappers along the cracked tar and unmoored cobblestones; the sun’s brassy light pulled along the backs of the houses with it. The boy stared straight ahead, his limp gaze fogged in such unusual light, vaporous, lacking focus. The metal pipe sung out its single steely pitch.
—Hello? Haycraft asked again, emboldened by the boy’s silence, as though such silence suggested vulnerability, a plea for aid. This time his voice registered on the boy’s face; the heavy eyelids blinked slowly, the head moved with a deliberate and indulgent roll of the neck. His round cherub’s chin lifted briefly from his arms. The rag fell free to the ground then, presenting Hay with the only blemish to that perfect face: a cloud of raw, pink skin flamed about the mouth. The boy lay his head back against the wood planks behind him, lazily – demurely, Haycraft would describe it later – and the eyes, glowing with a micalike shine, took the man in.
—Hello boy, Haycraft said yet again, a final time.
The boy answered with his own hello, after a good long pause, apparently forced to go some lengths in search of the word.
He speaks! bellowed Hay. The words came rushing then. Such a handsome and able-bodied young boy, Haycraft said, and here he sits alone? Why, did you have a fight with the parents? I’m not sure I understand what you mean by no parents. Everyone must come from someone, I don’t believe things have changed that much since I was your age. How difficult the young must have it these days if what you tell me is so. What do you mean, you are working? But working how, crouched like this in one of our unfortunate alleyways, when it should be the world crouched before you, crouched at your feet! No, I do not lie! Tell me, have you eaten? Would you like me to give you, boy, something to eat?
Lambret sneered, he mumbled almost incoherently in a soft and broken voice; it would cost the man twenty-five dollars.
Such an exchange made no sense to Haycraft.
—What’s that? You would charge me for the gift of giving you nourishment?
The boy’s eyes crimped as though taken in sudden headache. The chin fell firmly down to his arms again. He worked his lips between his teeth, stretching the irritated skin around them.
—Come on now, I don’t have the entire evening. I am behind schedule as it is, and you see it is very important to stick to a plan as it was designed, mmmhmmm. Let’s get you a good cheeseburger. Glenda makes the best in town and uses only the leanest meat available and buys only from farmers who do not employ growth hormones, and with his hand reaching from beneath the satchelled shoulder he waited. He waited, and wondered, looking over the boy, thinking What have I found here, just look at the sight of him, a prince unanointed, as Lambret asked if a cheeseburger was really all he wanted to give him, his eyes gathering focus now. He took to his feet slowly, slovenly. He admitted he could stand something to eat all right.
All thoughts of The People and The Lost, of land co-ops and entrepreneurship programs and the need to beautify these alleys and to draw patrons to the pleasures of the Don Quixote, disappeared before the prospect of the boy Lambret Dellinger. It would be getting to night soon – Hay could feel the shifting hour like the edge of a blade to his ribs – and there Haycraft was, stuck outside, and so far off schedule that he was humming again, his first hint of agitation. The lengths of his nerves fluttered alive with hummingbird wings. Usually a case of worry. Yet the Don Q was only a few steps away, and twilight had arrived – the hour that always led him to recall the Tennessee farm his family had fled to; when the peacocks leapt to the low branches and screeched their mournful cries; when Haycraft had no concerns further than finishing the nearest book at hand, and arriving home in time for dinner, and the parlor games invented by his parents. It would be night soon, yes, which meant time to allow the day’s duties to slide into memory and to relax one’s wayworn body among fellow strivers and comrades. The nights at the Don Quixote always did evoke in Haycraft the feeling of a reward bestowed.
—Look what I’ve found, Haycraft announced to the regulars upon entry, setting down his satchel on his corner table before approaching an open barstool nearby. A new friend recruited to our aid, plucked right off the street. And hungry, too.
Beau Stiles smiled down to the curiously young face. No doubt he made up his mind in that instant as to Lambret’s condition, station, and the level of surveillance he would require. Beau had the gift of making snap judgments of character while his face betrayed nothing more than considerate attention. He moved the tip jar marked HAY’S RENT outside of Lambret’s reach as he asked the boy what he might like to eat.
—One of Glenda’s famous cheeseburgers, Haycraft said. I promised him already.
The rest of the regulars offered a cautious welcoming as a family takes in a stray dog, undecided on whether it could stay for fear it might be rabid, dying, or belong to someone else. They were willing to keep it fed for the moment, willing to grant the stray a pat on the head. Haycraft had invited in The Lost before. Usually these were yammering bag ladies of the grocery-cart variety, rag-arrayed beneath plastic head covers, the dour and dowdy aged who swooned in sleep at the comfort of a booth and whistled through piano-board mouths, leaving Beau and Glenda to wonder what to do.
Lambret didn’t mind the new faces, the interior decor strangely foreign and otherworldly (all that stained wood, the palms and brick, the hanging paper lamps) filtering through the easy fumes in his head. Happy chance had placed him there, though once darkness fell fully over the city with its shroud of safety, he would need to slide out onto the streets again to Frederick Park. But that would be later. A boy on his own: Lambret was in no position to complain about any help he might stumble upon.
The adults observed Lambret closely, searching for clues in whether he ate his fries by hand or by fork (he ate them by hand), and with what manner he approached the cheeseburger. Lambret tore at the sandwich; he ate with a voracious appetite. That pleased Glenda, who prepared all the food from scratch, using her mother’s basic recipes and channeling her father’s improvisatory panache to make the dishes her own. She was especially proud of her cheese-and-garlic-crammed drop biscuits, and was happy to see that she did not have to force the boy to try them. Moreover, she had not seen her own son since he left for college on a partial scholarship in drama nearly a year before, and so was gratified to speak with a boy not too far from his age. For the recognition; for the memories of her own house once filled with all kinds of loud, rumbustious teenage boys.
The over-twenty-one policy didn’t take hold until nine o’clock. As Lambret sucked down soda after soda, Glenda plied him with questions about schoolwork and family, questions he evaded with shrugs and the phrases it’s okay and they’re all right, evasions that did not bother her (he was a teenager after all), as his silences allowed her to relate stories of her own son, Damon, and the letters he wrote home from Texas, and her worries over the loans he had taken to get by in such a large state as Texas, she said; how could a drama major ever expect to pay off his loans?
—Something about being a Stiles, we’re just built for debt I guess, she fussed, gesturing at the bird’s-eye maple wood trim on the backbar, the mahogany of the bar itself.
—But he does love his education, she continued. At least he does now. I wonder how he’ll feel when the bills come due and he’s working steakhouse theater.
—Or a girl turns his head, Beau added, smiling.
Glenda laughed with delight. It was a shared joke having to do with their own history, though they never let the regulars in on the exact reference.
—He never responds to my letters, grumbled Haycraft.
—You don’t write him letters, Hay, you send off your newsletters, Glenda answered.
—Yet each is a personal missive from me, directed to any individual whose eyes might grace my