‘But I never saw them trophies.’
‘Jesus Christ, if you never saw them trophies how do you know exactly what they look like, even the engraving, even—?’
‘Oh, easy.’ Roderick laid a shiny little lump of metal on the desk. ‘I found this by the trophy case when I was talking to Mr Goun just now. It must of broken off one of them trophies, and see? It’s a foot wearing a basketball shoe. And it looks like silver, and if you look real close you can see it says Made in Hong Kong. And the statue must be about seven inches high, right?’
Goun nodded. ‘He did pick up something while we were talking.’
‘Okay,’ said Fest. ‘But how about the rest? The spelling medal for instance? You saw the engraving—’
‘Nope. What I saw was one of the kids in Mrs Dorano’s class this morning when we were drawing trees, one of the kids hid something under their drawing, only it came out on the paper when they rubbed a crayon over it. 3rd Place, State Spelling Contest, 1961.’
‘Which kid?’ said Fest.
‘Ask Miss Dorano which kid. I don’t fink.’
‘Okay how about a full-size gold football, you don’t tell me you never saw that?’
‘Nope, never did. But in the creative activities area there’s a picture on the wall of this football team with a banner, 1974 All-County Champs. And a guy in front is holding this gold-coloured thing looks like a football only shiny. So I figured—’
Miss Borden said, ‘Jesus Christ,’ and reached for the phone.
Chauncey and Billy were beating up some littler kid. Chauncey had the kid’s hair in both hands and was using it to bash his head against the kerb. Billy stood by, kicking at the kid’s feet.
‘Hey come on, Rick, let’s get this guy!’
‘Nope. It ain’t hero-ic, picking on a littler kid. Only villains do stuff like that.’
‘Piss on you then, this is fun!’
Roderick decided the really hero-ic thing to do would be to stop them. ‘Okay, stop you guys.’
‘Piss on — ow!’
Roderick shoved Chauncey hard, pushing him over sideways.
‘Ow, Christ I skint my knee!’ Chauncey started to cry. ‘You fuckin’ bully!’
‘Look, I’m sorry Chaunce, I—’ He forgot what he was about to say, for at that moment Billy smashed a brick into his eye.
‘Hey, look, you put his eye out, boy are you gonna get it, hey…’
‘I’m gettin’ the fuck outa here…’
‘Me too, wait up…’
When the vision in his remaining eye cleared, Roderick was alone with the littler kid, who had a bloody nose.
‘Are you a robot or what?’
‘That’s right, I’m Roderick the robot. You okay?’
‘Yeah, thanks. My name’s Nat. I thought they was gonna kill me or something. Boy, they’d be sorry if they did. They wouldn’t have Nat to kick around any more.’ Nat smiled at him. ‘Hey, you know what?’
‘What?’ Roderick knew the next line: You saved my life, pal He waited for it.
‘You look pretty fuckin’ dumb with one eye, you know?’
X
The mechanical clown creaked with senile laughter, every wave of creaks setting up sympathetic waves of nostalgia within Ben Franklin. It reminded him of all the carnivals of his childhood, the candy floss and aluminium ID bracelets engraved by shaky hands, the recorded calliope music fighting the recorded superlaughs from the Hall of Mirrors, the afternoons spent cranking away at a tiny crane ingeniously arranged to avoid gold cigarette-lighters and seize in its clamshell a single grain of popcorn.
Corn, that was the soul of it, and probably the soul of Mr Kratt too. Why else should an important businessman maintain his headquarters in a dirty little trailer in the midst of all this? Corny sentiment. Stuff of the common man, of Goodall Wetts III and God is Good Business, stuff of which fortunes are made. And what was wrong with it? Hadn’t it been said by Abraham Lincoln (if not by a bearded robot in Disneyland) that God must have loved the common man, because He made him so common? Don’t knock, Ben warned himself. For Christ’s sake, boost.
And yet he could not help following a critical line elsewhere. Noticing the irony of a white-faced robot clown whose make-up could be traced through real clowns back to Grimaldi — who wore it in La Statue Blanche where he played a man impersonating an automaton (each turn of the crank produced a new expression). Robot imitates man imitating man playing man impersonating robot: but the tangle of associations would not leave him there. For clowns were playing The White Statue in the streets of London in Mayhew’s time, in the 1840 slum streets, alongside Punch and Judy, marionettes and real clockwork dolls, amid the sounds of hurdy-gurdy and barrel-organ, mechanized street theatre for the new industrial age, where almost the only recognizable features of the past were starving beggars and burning Guys.
Death everywhere, white-faced on every corner, turned into sentiment at home and comedy in the streets: the marionettes always included a Bluebeard and a skeleton; the shadow-puppet man tells how a mob overturned his van and burned it (with his assistant inside); Punch and Judy must always have the hanging in the last act:
He was still scowling at the decrepit clown when Mr Kratt’s thick hand clapped his shoulder. ‘Guess you seen enough here, let’s get back to town. We can take a look at that stock list on the way.’ The V of eyebrows descended on tiny black eyes. ‘Hey, something wrong?’
‘Uh, no sir. No sir. I was just wondering why you still keep your headquarters here? I mean you could easily afford permanent offices instead of this, I mean a tent show after all—’
‘Like to keep on the move, see? Like the gipsies.’
‘Nostalgia, I guessed as much, nost—’
‘Nostalgia hell, saves me five figures in state taxes, not to mention depreciation and all the substantial advantages of running a cash business…’
Roderick didn’t see much from the bus window. His eye on that side was out, and if he tried turning his head to look out with the other eye, something funny happened to his hand which began to twitch open and closed. Seeing the scared look of the woman in the seat in front of him, Ma made Roderick sit still and read his robot book.
It was the story of an iron man who falls apart and puts himself together again — boy this Hughes guy didn’t know the first thing about robots, here they were going two hundred miles to the city for one crummy eye — but Roderick liked the idea of an iron man who goes around scaring people and then turns into a big hero.
In the back of the book he found a blank page where he could work out some alphabet stuff:
‘What does it mean?’ Ma asked, as the bus left the smooth highway to start bucking its way through broken streets.
‘Nothing I guess. Stories. I mean nobody really falls apart and puts themself together again — do they?’
Ma thought the question over, while behind him Roderick heard someone say, ‘…like teeth only… dank wish… the Omaha disaster we decided… a peep in Coventry, was it?’
‘Sure sure sure sure sure.’
Ma continued to think while the bus pulled into a greasy terminal, and the driver ordered them to ‘debark’.