John Irving - The World According to Garp

“How?” Garp asked.

“They don't like to fly at night,” Hathaway told the boy. It was in Bio. II that Hathaway had learned about the habits of pigeons; Jenny Fields had taken the same course. “I could get up on the roof,” Hathaway told Garp, “at night—when it wasn't raining—and trap them in the rain gutter. That's all they do, just sit in the rain gutter and coo and crap all night.”

“But how would you trap them?” Garp asked.

And Hathaway twirled his lacrosse stick, cradling the ball. He rolled the ball between his legs, he dropped the net of the stick gently over Garp's little head. “Like that,” he said. “With this, I'd get them easy—with my lacrosse stick. One by one, until I got them all.”

Hathaway remembered how Garp had smiled at him—this big friendly boy with his two heroic casts. Hathaway looked out the window, saw that it was indeed dark and not raining. Hathaway rang his buzzer. “Garp!” he cried out. “Oh, God.” He held his thumb on the buzzer button and did not let up.

When Jenny Fields saw it was the fourth-floor light that was flashing, she could only think that Garp had brought Hathaway's lacrosse equipment back to him. What a good boy, she thought, and rode the elevator, up again, to the fourth floor. She ran squeakily on her good nurse's shoes to Hathaway's room. She saw the lacrosse ball in Hathaway's hand. His one eye, which was clearly in view, looked frightened.

“He's on the roof,” Hathaway told her.

“On the roof!” Jenny said.

“He's trying to capture pigeons with my lacrosse stick,” Hathaway said.

A full-grown man, if he stood on the fourth-floor fire escape landing, could reach over the rim of the rain gutter with his hands. When the Steering School cleaned its rain gutters, only after all the leaves were fallen and before the heavy spring rains, only tall men were sent to do the job because the shorter men complained of reaching into the rain gutters and touching things they couldn't see—dead pigeons and well-rotted squirrels and unidentifiable glop. Only the tall men could stand on the fire-escape landings and peek into the rain gutters before they reached. The gutters were as wide and nearly as deep as pig troughs, but they were not as strong and they were old. In those days, everything at the Steering School was old.

When Jenny Fields went out the fourth-floor fire door and stood on the fire escape, she could barely reach the rain gutter with her fingertips; she could not see over the rain gutter to the steep slate roof—and in the darkness and fog, she could not even see the underside of the rain gutter as far down as either corner of the building. She could not see Garp at all.

“Garp?” she whispered. Four stories below, among the shrubbery and the occasional glint from the hood or roof of a parked car, she could hear some of the boys calling him, too. “Garp?” she whispered, a little louder.

“Mom?” he asked, startling her—although his whisper was softer than hers. His voice came from somewhere close, almost within her reach, she thought, but she couldn't see him. Then she saw the netted basket end of the lacrosse stick silhouetted against the foggy moon like the strange, webbed paw of some unknown, nocturnal animal; it jutted out from the rain gutter, almost directly above her. Now, when she reached up, she was frightened to feel Garp's leg, broken through the corroded gutter, which had torn his pants and cut him, wedging him there, one leg through the gutter up to his hip, the other leg sprawled out in the gutter behind him, along the edge of the steep slate roof. Garp lay on his belly in the creaky rain gutter.

When he had broken through the gutter, he'd been too scared to cry out; he could feel that the whole flimsy trough was rotted through and ready to tear apart. His voice , he thought, could make the roof fall down. He lay with his cheek in the gutter, and through a tiny rusted hole be watched the boys in the parking lot and bushes, four stories below him, looking for him. The lacrosse stick, which had indeed held a surprised pigeon, had swung out over the edge of the gutter, releasing the bird.

The pigeon, despite being captured and freed, had not moved. It squatted in the gutter, making its small, stupid sounds. Jenny realized that Garp could never have reached the rain gutter from the fire escape, and she shuddered to think of him climbing up the ivy to the roof with the lacrosse stick in one hand. She held his leg very tightly; his bare, warm calf was slightly sticky with blood, but he had not cut himself badly on the rusty gutter. A tetanus shot, she was thinking; the blood was almost dry and Jenny did not think he would need stitches—though, in the darkness, she could not clearly make out the wound. She was trying to think how she could get him down. Below her, the forsythia bushes winked in the light from the downstairs windows; from so far away, the yellow flowers looked (to her) like the tips of small gas flames.

“Mom?” Garp asked.

“Yes,” she whispered. “I've got you.”

“Don't let go,” he said.

“Okay,” she told him. As if triggered by her voice, a little more of the gutter gave way.

“Mom!” Garp said.

“It's okay,” Jenny said. She wondered if the best way would be to yank him down, hard, and hope that she could pull him right through the rotten gutter. But then the whole gutter could possibly rip free of the roof—and then what? she thought. She saw them both swept off the fire escape and falling. But she knew no one could actually go up on the rain gutter and pull the child out of the hole, and then lower him to her over the edge. The gutter could barely support a five-year-old; it certainly couldn't support a grownup. And Jenny knew that she would not let go of Garp's leg long enough to let someone try.

It was the new nurse, Miss Creen, who saw them from the ground and ran inside to call Dean Bodger. Nurse Creen was thinking of Dean Bodger's spotlight, fastened to the dean's dark car (which cruised the campus each night in search of boys out after curfew). Despite the complaints of the grounds' crew, Bodger drove down the footpaths and over the soft lawns, flashing his spotlight into the deep shrubs alongside the buildings, making the campus an unsafe place for lurkers—or for lovers, with no indoor place to go.

Nurse Creen also called Dr. Pell, because her mind, in a crisis, always ran to people who were supposed to take charge. She did not think of the fire department, a thought that was crossing Jenny's mind; but Jenny feared they would take too long and the gutter would collapse before they arrived; worse, she imagined, they would insist she let them handle everything and make her let go of Garp's leg.

Surprised, Jenny looked up at Garp's small, soggy sneaker, which now dangled in the sudden and ghastly glare of Dean Bodger's spotlight. The light was disturbing and confusing the pigeons, whose perception of dawn was probably not the best and who appeared almost ready to come to some decision in the rain gutter; their cooing and the scrabbling sounds of their claws grew more frantic.

Down on the lawn, running around Dean Bodger's car, the boys in their white hospital smocks appeared to have been bedlamized by the experience—or by Dean Bodger's sharp orders to run here or run there, fetch this or fetch that. Bodger called all the boys “men.” As in “Let's have a line of mattresses under the fire escape, men! Double-quick!” he barked. Bodger had taught German for twenty years at Steering before being appointed dean; his commands sounded like the rapid-fire conjugating of German verbs.

The “men” piled mattresses and oogled through the skeletal fire escape at Jenny's marvelous white uniform in the spotlight. One of the boys stood flush to the building, well under the fire escape, and his view up Jenny's skirt and her spotlit legs must have dazzled him because be appeared to forget the crisis and he just stood there. “Schwarz!” Dean Bodger yelled at him, but his name was Warner and he did not respond. Dean Bodger had to shove him to make him stop staring. “More mattresses, Schmidt!” Bodger told him.