“He’s seen the statue?”
“No. I told him to stay away for a while, till the sheriff can figure out what’s going on out there. So you came to see Ira. Well, isn’t that nice. I don’t think he’s had a visitor since he was six. Back in a minute.” Her voice trailed off into the kitchen. As she had promised, a minute later she was back and handing him a cup of coffee. “Black, with three sugars, right?”
“Yes, thank you. Actually, I have a professional interest in Ira. I’ve been on the phone with the director of the Dallheim Project in New Orleans. They explore the gifts of the savant with a view toward learning more about the brain itself. They have a young adult program for autism. It would take years of work, but he might have an independent life.”
“I know all about the Dallheim people.” She sank down on the couch and stared at her coffee cup. “That was my big dream, Ira with a life of his own. The way he is now – ” She looked up at him, her face sad, casting around for words. “If anything should happen to me, he’d wind up in an institution. I begged those people to take him. They told me not to come back until Ira could hold simple conversations.”
“The director told me Ira never sang for them.”
“No, he only does that when he wants to. It’s easy to get him to play the piano. He did that real nice. He played Chopin for them.”
“I told them about his singing. Multiple talents made Ira more interesting. There’s still a long waiting list. It may be months or even a year before they take him, but I have to get his paperwork in before his twenty-fifth birthday. That’s the cutoff age for the program.”
“There’s no point in taking him back if he can’t talk to them.”
“You don’t have to take him anywhere. I have the credentials and their permission to do another screening test – right here.”
“He won’t talk. He might talk at you, but it’s nonsense.”
“Not entirely. Sometimes the echolalia is an effort at direct response. When he echoes what you say, don’t you feel he’s communicating?”
“Well, yes, and I did tell them that, but they said it didn’t count.”
“I faxed them pages from Cass Shelley’s journals on Ira’s therapy. He was remarkably articulate for a small child. No difficulty with personal pronouns – that’s atypical. He showed a normal grasp of grammar and syntax. She rated his intelligence in the upper ten percentile. The Dallheim people didn’t know about that, either.”
“But the screening test – ”
“One simple conversation. There’s a way to get a quick result. It’s a method Cass Shelley used when Ira had his setback. She forced him to talk. It may be very rough on him. I have to get him to focus for a while, but I won’t do anything Cass wouldn’t have done. The director suggested I go for a traumatic event, like the violent death of his doctor. He’ll talk to me just to make it end, to get rid of me, but he will talk. I only need a few direct responses to questions and the screening requirement is satisfied.”
Anyone would talk under torture. Given Ira’s fear and revulsion of the human touch, what he planned to do to the boy was very cruel.
She nodded, looking more hopeful now. “But he stopped talking before that happened. It was the faith healing that did the damage. Cass was real upset with his father for taking him to that freak show.”
He had agreed with the sheriff that it would be a bad idea to mention the certainty that Ira had witnessed the murder. But this should have come out long ago. Ira could not wait forever.
“The death of a mentor is a major trauma, but I could try another approach. I understand Ira lost his father within a year of Cass Shelley’s death. That would have been a devastating event.”
“No, not really. That last year, his father didn’t spend much time with him. He tried taking Ira to a doctor in New Orleans for vitamin therapy. When that didn’t work, I guess he just gave up on the boy. He gave up on everything.”
“And you? Have you given up?”
“No. I guess I – ” She looked down at the tight fists in her lap. “You have to put your hands on him, don’t you? Cass did that. You know that’s like real pain to him? He can’t stand it – it terrifies him.”
“I know that. It’s your decision.”
Darlene shook her head, more in indecision than a negative response. “He’s happy in his own world. I don’t think he’d like this one much, do you?”
“He might never fully appreciate being – ”
“Human?” She seemed tensed for a fight, or at least a reproach.
“He’s always been that. I think Ira’s only more intense about day-to-day life than we are. It’s not that he’s unaware of the world around him. Ira is frighteningly aware of every detail of the universe. It’s threatening to overload his consciousness. He must pull the plug, shut the world down now and then, or he could not survive. And he knows this. Ira is a very sophisticated human being.”
And because of Ira’s gifts and his strange vision, Charles found him to be exquisitely beautiful.
“The program you have him in now is tailored for the mentally retarded. I’m sure he’s making progress, but that type of school has severe limitations.” He produced the faxed forms with the Dallheim letterhead. “Perhaps you could fill in the medical history while I talk to Ira. It’s worth a try, isn’t it?”
Before they reached the door to Ira’s room, the boy had begun to sing. Charles recognized the aria from the cemetery concert. Darlene put her hand on the door and hesitated. She smiled as she hovered on this periphery, basking in the music of her mysterious child. Then the door opened, and Ira, suddenly alarmed, stopped singing.
The door closed, and Ira was left alone with the sandwich man. His large visitor sat down on the bed and talked softly for a while, as Ira rocked back and forth on his heels, not listening, blocking it out and searching for a safe place inside his head.
The man stood up and came toward him.
No! Don’t!
Ira backed up to the wall. The sandwich man grabbed him by the shoulders and repeated the words until they became real, intruding on his mind with sense and weight. He was using Dr. Cass’s words.
He remembered Cass’s face before him, forcing the jarring contact of the eyes, holding him by the shoulders, insisting. “Say one thing that is real, that is you, just one thing, just for me.”
Now he said to the sandwich man, “I am afraid.”
The man dropped his hands away. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a photograph of Dr. Cass. “Look at this, Ira. Tell me about the day she died. I know you were there. What did you see?”
Ira said nothing. The sandwich man grabbed his shoulders again. His face was coming closer. His eyes -
“Rocks!” Ira screamed. And then he went rigid, waiting for the man to keep the old rules of the game.
The sandwich man released him. An hour passed in this way. The big man would come toward him, and Ira would concentrate on the words. If he spoke, the sandwich man would back away.
“Who threw the rocks? Do you remember the deputy being there? Deputy Travis?”
Ira started to flap his hands. The man advanced on him. Ira covered his ears and began to rock frantically. The sandwich man pulled Ira’s hands away from his head. The man’s voice was louder now. “Was the deputy there? A man in a uniform?”
Ira nodded, but the sandwich man still held on to his hands, for nodding was not good enough. There were rules.
“Did he throw rocks at Cass?”
“He threw rocks at the dog.”
The man let go of Ira’s hands and lowered his voice. “Did you see people throwing rocks at Cass Shelley?”
“They listened to the blue letter. Cass never said a word. And then she was red. The dog lay down in the dirt. He cried. The deputy hit him with another rock. He didn’t move again. Cass was all red. They left. All quiet.”