His Illegal Self Read Free Page A

hands of the po-lees. You never do forget a thing like that.
    Cameron Fox was the son of the art dealers in 5D. He had been expelled from Groton on account of the hair he would not cut, maybe something else as well. Grandma paid Cameron to be a babysitter. She had no idea.
    It was in Cameron’s room the boy saw the poster of Che Guevara and learned who he was and why he had no mother and father. Not even Gladys was going to tell him this stuff. After his mother and the Dobbs Street Cell had robbed the bank in Bronxville, a judge had given Che to the permanent care of his grandma. That’s what Cameron said. You got a right to know, man. Cameron was sixteen. He said, Your grandpa threw a Buddha out the D line window. A fucking Buddha, man. He’s a cool old guy. I smelled him smoking weed out on the stairs. Do you get to hang out with him?
    No chance. No way. The one time they found Grandpa and the Poison Dwarf at Sixty-second Street, the boy and his grandma went to the Carlyle.
    Cameron told the boy he was a political prisoner locked up at Kenoza Lake. His grandma made him play ludo which was a game from, like, a century before. Cameron gave him a full-page picture of his father from
Life.
Cameron read him the caption. Beyond your command. His dad was cool looking, with wild fair hair. He held his fingers in a V.
    He looks like you, said Cameron Fox. You should get this framed, he said. Your father is a great American.
    But the boy left 5D by the Clorox stairs and before he entered his grandma’s kitchen he folded up his father very carefully and kept him in his pocket. That was the beginning of his papers more or less.
    In the boy’s pocket there were clear bits and mysteries. Cameron would sometimes try to explain but then he would stop and say, That’s too theoretical right now. Or: You would have to know more words. Cameron was six feet tall with a long straight nose and a long chin and an eye which was just a little to one side. He read to Che from
Steppenwolf
until they both got bored with it, but he would not let him watch TV either. He said television was the devil. They played poker for pennies. Cameron put on Country Joe and the Fish and he sat in ski socks before the electric radiator, spreading the skin condition that he hoped would save him from Vietnam.
    The boy looked out for TV but never saw too much. Once or twice they were in a diner with TV but Grandma made them turn it off. She was a force. She said so.
    So when Dial and Jay came into the Philadelphia Greyhound station, it was a big deal to see the black-and-white TV, high up in the corner of the waiting room. The 76ers were losing to Chicago. Old men were watching. They groaned. They spit. Goddamn. The boy stared also, waiting for the show to change to maybe Rowan and Martin, some other thing he’d heard of, Say good night, Dick. He was excited when the mother went out to find a telephone.
    Don’t talk to anyone, she said, OK?
    OK, he said. He stared at the blue devil, knowing something wonderful would happen next.
    The Bulls fouled three times before the mother came back.
    What next? he asked, noticing she had gotten sad. She crouched in front of him.
    We’ll stay in a hotel, she said. How about that?
    You said we were going to a scuzzy house, he said.
    Plans have changed, she said, getting all busy with a cigarette.
    With room service? He was acting excited, but he was very frightened now, by her smell, by the way she did that thing—kind of hiding her emotions in the smoke.
    I can’t afford room service, she said, and wasted her cigarette beneath her heel.
    In the corner of his eye he could see cartoons. That was nothing to him now.
    Are you listening to me, Jay?
    There’s no one else, he said. He meant, Who else could he listen to, but she understood something else and hugged him to her tightly.
    What’s wrong?
    I like you, Jay. Her eyes had gone all watery.
    I like you, Dial, he said, but he did not want to follow her outside into the dark