• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 407 0

I could simply reel off and watch. But of course, the sentences did not work that way. The sentences suggested scenes to the imagination, which were no sooner repeated than envisioned, and envisioned just as poorly and just as vividly as actual memories. Here was Raggedy Ann, say, an actual memory, with her red-and-white-striped stockings and blunt black feet. And here, say, was a barefoot boy asleep in a car, his cheeks covered thinly with blood. Which was real? The barefoot boy was just as vivid. It was easier to remember a sentence than a sight, and the sentences suggested sights new or skewed. These were dim regions, these submerged caves where waters mingled. On my cheap tablet I was drawing round lips, suns, fish in schools.

Soon someone would call me for dinner. But I would not come, I suddenly realized, and I would not answer the call—ever—for I would have died of starvation. They would find me, having slid off my chair, half under the card table, lying dead on the floor. And so young.

In the blue shoe box on the card table they would find my priceless files. I had written all my data about today’s suspect, drawn his face several times from several angles, and filed it all under his car’s license number. When the police needed it, it was ready.

Privately I thought the reference librarian at the Homewood Library was soft in the head. The week before, she had handed me, in broad daylight, the book that contained the key to Morse code. Without a word, she watched me copy it, pocket the paper, and leave.

I knew how to keep a code secret, if she didn’t. At home I memorized Morse code promptly, and burned the paper.

I had read the library’s collection of popular forensic medicine, its many books about Scotland Yard and the FBI, a dull biography of J. Edgar Hoover, and its Sherlock Holmes. I knew I was not alone in knowing Morse code. The FBI knew it, Scotland Yard knew it, and every sparks in the navy knew it. I read everything I could get about ham radios. All I needed was a receiver. I could listen in on troop maneuvers, intelligence reports, and disasters at sea. And I could rescue other hams from calamity, to which, as a class, they seemed remarkably prone.

I knew that police artists made composite drawings of criminal suspects. Witnesses to crimes selected, from a varied assortment, a stripe of crown hair, a stripe or two of forehead, a stripe of eyes, and so forth. Police artists—of whose ranks I was an oblate—made a drawing that combined these elements; newspapers published the drawings; someone recognized the suspect and called the police.

When Pin Ford and I were running low on suspects, and had run out of things to communicate in Morse code, I sat at my attic table beside the shoe box file and drew a variety of such stripes. I amused myself by combining them into new faces. So God must sit in heaven, at a card table, fingering a heap of stripes—hairlines, jawlines, brows—and joining them at whim to people a world. I began wondering if the stock of individual faces on earth through all of time is infinite.

My sweetest ambition was to see a drawing of mine on a newspaper’s front page: HAS ANYBODY SEEN THIS MAN? I didn’t care about reducing crime, any more than Sherlock Holmes did. I rather wished there were more crime, and closer by. What interested me was the schematic likeness, how recognizable it was, and how startlingly few things you needed to strike a resemblance. You needed only a few major proportions in the head. The soft tissues scarcely mattered; they were merely decorations that children drew. What mattered was the framing of the skull.

And so in that faraway attic, among the boughs of buckeye trees, year after year, I drew. I drew formal, sustained studies of my left hand still on the card table, of my baseball mitt, a saddle shoe. I drew from memory the faces of the people I knew, my own family just downstairs in the great house—oh, but I hated these clumsy drawings, these beloved faces so rigid on the page and lacking in tenderness and irony. (Who could analyze a numb skull when all