T. Boyle - Wild Child and Other Stories

Somewhere else, not half a mile distant, Itard and the Guérins roamed the streets, stopping pedestrians to inquire of him — Had anyone seen him, a boy of fifteen, his sharp nose, clipped hair the color of earth, in blue shirt and jacket, the wild boy, the Savage escaped from the Institute for Deaf-Mutes? People just stared. Itard turned away from them, calling “Victor, Victor!” with a ringing insistence, even as Madame Guérin’s voice grew increasingly plaintive and hollow.

The city awoke and arose. Fires were lit. Raw dough fell into hot oil, eggs cracked, pike lost their heads, civilization progressed. Victor sat there in the rain, running his hands over his body, over the stiffening thing between his legs and the heavy roll of flesh round his midsection, the miracle of it, and then he pushed himself up and followed his nose across the street to where an open doorway gave onto a courtyard blossoming with the scent of meat in a pan. The rain slackened here, caught and held fast by the eaves. There was pavement underfoot. He could see a woman moving behind a window that was cracked an inch or two to let in the air, and he went to the window and stood watching her as she tended the meat and the pan and the odor of it rose up to communicate with him. It took a moment before she saw him there, his face smeared with mud, his hair wet and hanging, his black eyes fixed on her hands that spoke to the pan on the stove and the licking of the fire and the rhythm of the long two-pronged fork. She said something then, her face flaring in anger, her voice growling out, and in the next moment she vanished, only to reappear at a door he hadn’t seen. There were more words flung out into the rain, and then there was the dog, all teeth and clattering nails, and Victor was running again.

But four legs outrun two, and just as he made the street the animal’s jaws closed on him, on his right leg, in the place where the buttock tapers into the long muscle beneath it. The animal held on, raging in its own language, and he knew he had to stay upright, knew he had to fight it from the vantage of his height and not give in and fall beneath its teeth. They jerked there, back and forth, the animal releasing its grip only to attack again and again, the blood bright on the black ball of its snout, and he beat at the anvil of its head with both lists until something fell away inside him and his own teeth came into play, clamping down on the thing’s ear. Then the snarls turned to pleas, to a high, piping, bewildered protest that was no domesticated sound at all, and he held tight to the furious jerking anvil till the ear was his and the dog was gone. He tasted hair, tasted tissue, blood. People stared. A man came running.

Someone called out to God as his witness, a common-enough phrase, but Victor knew nothing of God or of witness either. For the first time in a long buried while, he chewed without a thought for anything else but that, and he was chewing still as he turned on his heel and trotted up the street in his torn pants, his own blood hot on the back of his thigh.

He thought nothing. He didn’t think of Madame Guérin or the food locker or of Itard or the she who’d offered him the sweet thing in the bleak familiar hallway outside the door of his room, and he didn’t think of the room or the fire or his bed. Walking, he felt the pain in his feet and this new fire burning in the flesh of his thigh, and he limped and shuffled and stayed as close to the walls as he could. Everything that had come before this moment had been erased. He kept walking round the same block, over and over, his head down, shoulders slumped, in search of nothing.

Itard had fallen into a deep, exhausted sleep when one of the deaf-mutes who’d been sent out to scour the neighborhood came to him with a pair of scuffed leather shoes in hand. The boy — he was Victor’s age, lean, clear-eyed, his hair cut too close to the scalp by the Institute’s incompetent barber — was fluent in the manual language of the deaf-mutes and was able to tell Itard where he’d found the shoes and to lead him there and even demonstrate in which direction they’d been pointed. Itard felt stricken. He felt sick. The shoes — he turned them over in his hand — were worn unevenly along the inside seam where Victor’s lurching, pigeon-toed gait punished the leather. There was no doubt. These shoes, these artifacts, were as familiar to him as his own boots.

It was raining, the cobblestones glistening as if they’d been polished. Pigeons huddled on the windowsills and under the eaves.

Itard bent to touch the spot the boy indicated and then looked off down the dripping alley to where the walls seemed to draw together in the distance. He was afraid suddenly. The experiment was over.

Victor was gone for good.

Even as he got to his feet and hurried down the alley, the deaf-mute at his side, he pictured Victor passing swiftly through the city, guided by his nose and ears, throwing off his suit of clothes like a yoke, working his way up along the bank of the Seine till the fields opened around him and the trees went dense in the ravines. He didn’t stop to think what the boy would eat or that he was dependent now and grown heavy with surfeit and luxury, but thought only of Victor’s eyes and teeth and how he would stoop to snatch up a frog or snail and crush it between his jaws — yes, and how well had all the eternal hours of exercises, of matching shapes and letters and forming vowels deep in the larynx prepared him for that? It was nothing. Life was nothing. He — Itard — for all his grand conception of himself and his power and his immutable will, was a failure.

A moment later they emerged from the alley and were back out on a wet, twisting street crowded with people and the baggage they hauled and carried and pressed to their bodies as if each loaf or sausage or block of paraffin was as vital as life itself, no chance of finding him here, no chance, and he thought of Victor’s room, empty, and in the same moment that he was struck by the pang of his loss he felt a clean swift stroke of liberation slice through him.

The experiment was over. Done. Finished. No more eternal hours, no more exercises, no more failure and frustration and battling the inevitable — he could begin to live the rest of his life again. But no.

No. Victor’s face rose up before him, the trembling chin and retreating eyes, the narrowed shoulders and the look of pride he wore when he matched one shape to another, and he felt ashamed of himself. He could barely lift his feet as he made his way back to the Institute through the bleak, unsettled streets.

It was Madame Guérin who wouldn’t give up. She searched the streets, the paths of the Luxembourg Gardens where she took Victor for his walks, the cafés and wineshops and the alleys out back of the grocer’s and the baker’s. She quizzed everyone she met and displayed a crude charcoal sketch she’d made of him one night as he sat rocking by the fire, tending his potatoes, and she alerted her daughters and sent old Monsieur Guérin out to limp along the river and look for the inadmissible in the slow, lethal slip of the current.

Finally, on the third day after he’d gone missing, one of the women who sold produce to the Institute’s kitchens came to her and said she’d seen him — or a boy like him — across the river, begging in the marketplace at Les Halles.

She set out immediately, the woman at her side, her feet chopping so swiftly she was out of breath by the time she reached the bridge, but she went on, her blood clamoring and the color come into her face. The day was warm and close, puddles in the streets, the river a flat, stony gray. She was sweating, her blouse and undergarments soaked through by the time they reached the marketplace, and then, of course, the boy was nowhere to be found.