Free Mad Boys by Ernest Hebert Page B

myself down by running a mental video of a good Sam who’d pick me up. A feeble, little old man. “Hop in, son,” he says. I can tell that he’s not very strong. I could rob him if I felt like it. But I don’t want to. I give him the money I took from Father, and he brings me home to his feeble, old wife who feeds me a hot meal. They’re farmers. I work with them in the fields. We’re happy together. The day I turn twenty-one, they die in each other’s arms, me kneeling at their deathbed. I inherit the farm. I open an orphanage for lost boys. Royal shows up, and establishes his empire. After that I couldn’t create clear images in my head, so I rewound the mental video of the old folks and ran it again.
    Three or four miles went by and I began to feel the fatigue of the long night, plus I was hungry. Half a mile before the main highway, I came upon a pickup truck hauling a trailer home pulled over to the side of the road. The vanity plate was memorable. In big letters it said FREE over the New Hampshire motto in little letters, “Live Free or Die.” The driver was outside, a pale-skinned, dark-eyed man. He was gazing off into the valley like any gooney tourist. Which was strange, considering the New Hampshire plates. I crept toward him until I reached the trailer, and peeked through a window. Amazing! Books lined every wall of dark wood. The furnishings included a cherry wood desk, a stuffed leather easy chair, a wooden table holding magazines and yet more books. It was as if somebody had built a motor home around a library. At that point, the man sensed my presence and slowly turned around.
    He took a long look at me, the way you’d look at the clock on a time bomb, then in a voice rich as hot chocolate, he said, “Good day.”
    I liked his greeting and answered back with it myself, “Good day to you.”
    He came toward me, and I got a good look at him in the morning sun. He was fifty-five or sixty but husky with a shiny head shaved smooth as a bowling ball, a gigantic salt and pepper mustache, waxed and curled up at the ends, white teeth, basset-hound eyes, sly full mouth in a half-smile.
    “Beautiful, isn’t it?” He seemed to be looking past the valley into the heart of the country.
    “I wouldn’t know,” I said. “I’m near-sighted as a bat, and anyway I like it better at home.”
    The man broke out in a grin. “Is that so? Well, where are you from?”
    “I’m from a little western town called Yonder, Arizona,” I answered.
    “I suppose one way or another we all come from yonder. Your family with you?”
    “Oh sure, I was just taking a walk. My family’s around the corner, collecting firewood and fiddlehead ferns, my brothers, Craig, John, Howard, Frank, Russell, and young Robert, my sisters, Cathy, Carolyn, Annie, Cleopatra, Cynthia, and my mother, Grace, and my father, Tom. My dad’s got tattoos and he’s a gunner on an F-16 fighter plane and a Congressman. My mom’s a school teacher, a lawyer, a singer, and she bakes pies.”
    “Splendid performance. I don’t have a family, unless you count a thousand or so books.”
    “So, you’re a bookworm.”
    “Yes, a bookworm. The way a silkworm spins a web of silk, a bookworm restructures the very web of mind. The result: . . .” He let the answer hang for a minute, tapped his bald head, just above a cliff-overhang brow, and said in a voice full of importance, “an autodidact.”
    I was about floored by the word, but I didn’t show it. “You don’t look like one.”
    “And what do I look like?”
    “A retired boxer.”
    “I’ll take that. And how would you describe yourself?”
    “I’m a spy for the Xi government of the Fourth Dimension,” I said.
    “You spell that the way it sounds? Zy, z-y?”
    “Sorry, I can’t say. The spelling is a secret.”
    “You must have a code name.”
    “Xiphi. But my friends call me Web.”
    “I am known as Professor John LeFauve, Professor Emeritus, Department of Autodidactism, Harvard