“What is that?” I asked Marvin. “What’s your mother making for dinner?”
“Huh? Oh—court bouillon. Redfish court bouillon.”
“What’s red fish?”
“It’s—I don’t know—fish.”
“Is it red?”
“No—actually it’s white.”
“And what’s that other part? Say it again?”
“Coobyon. Coo. Byon.”
“Coo-be-yon.”
“No. Coobyon.”
“Coobyon.”
“That’s it.”
“Is that one thing, or are there parts to it?”
He laughed. “One thing. Oh—I see what you mean. It starts out with parts, of course, when she’s making it. But when it’s done, it’s one thing. I mean, you wouldn’t be eating court bouillon if you just ate the fish. You have to eat it all. You eat it with rice, too. But that’s separate.”
“But you always have it? The rice?”
“Yeah.”
“Now that’s interesting,” I said. “Something with parts that aren’t together—and aren’t the same—with Zwischenraum in between.”
“Yes, it is interesting,” said Marvin.
“I wonder if we should put that in?” I asked, though I was a little reluctant to give us more work.
I took a deep sniff. It smelled great—strange, but yummy. I didn’t have the nerve to ask to taste it, but I sure wanted to.
“Do you eat anything called splines?” I asked, but Marvin’s attention was elsewhere. He had unrolled the plans.
“Hey, this is terrific,” he said.
“Thanks,” I said. “I’m pretty proud of it, I have to admit. I’ll tell you something funny about it, though. I have this friend—Raskol—and he thinks that—”
“It’s just like those prison movies!” said Marvin, with that instantaneous conviction, immediately unshakable, that we see in people when they embrace mistaken ideas. “You know—where the guy’s been convicted for something he didn’t do and he has to get out so he can prove that he’s innocent, and the girl gets a car for the getaway and she’s waiting outside the wall and he’s been digging a tunnel for years and finally he crawls through it and comes out in the prison yard but he still has to make a run for it and go over the wall. They always have these watchtowers,” he said, indicating my lighthouse. “With a big searchlight turning on the top.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“And the guy has to dodge the beam when it sweeps past him.”
“Right,” I said.
There was an explosion of sound from downstairs—whoops and hollers and thundering feet.
“Hey! My father’s home,” said Marvin. He ran downstairs, and I followed.
Mr. Jones was a surprise. He was small and seemed much older than his wife. The greeting the family gave him was loud and physical. The Joneses hugged, tickled, teased, punched one another’s arms, and shouted and squealed an indecipherable mix of mysterious words. It embarrassed me. It seemed like something I shouldn’t watch. I didn’t know where to look.
“Say, Marvin,” said Mr. Jones suddenly. “Who’s your friend?”
“This is Peter,” said Marvin.
“Peter Ler-wah,” said Mrs. Jones. “The king!” She made a little curtsy. “But he calls himself Leroy, because he’s not French. He’s American.”
“Hello there, Peter,” said Mr. Jones. To Marvin he said, “Did you show him the chickens?”
“No,” said Marvin, pulling a face.
“You didn’t show him the chickens?” exclaimed Mr. Jones.
“I don’t think he wants to see the chickens,” said Marvin.
“Sure he does!” said Mr. Jones. “Peter, if I told you that the world’s most amazing chickens were living right in our back yard, you’d want to see them, wouldn’t you?”
“You bet,” I said. Generally, I didn’t care for chickens. The fad of raising and training them had affected most of the fathers in the part of Babbington where I lived. Perhaps they saw it as a way of distinguishing themselves from their fellow fathers in nearly identical houses. They might live matching lives, but they could have the best-bred, best-trained homing flock in the neighborhood. The men generally taught their flocks to respond to whistle signals based on the swing tunes of their heyday, but because they didn’t get home until evening and tended to get right down to their beer then, they didn’t always have time for the day-to-day practice that kept a homing flock sharp, so that job fell to their children, and the weekday evenings in my neighborhood were full of whistling kids, commanding their fathers’ chickens to walk around the block to “Sing, Sing, Sing” or “Pennsylvania 6-5000.” It was a great relief to me when my mother declared one evening, the moment my father walked through the back door, “I’ve had it with those chickens! The dumb clucks are driving me crazy! Either they go or I go!” It was, of course, an even greater relief when the chickens went and my mother stayed. I thought the whole chicken fad was embarrassing, but I had learned that adults had their enthusiasms and thought their children should share them; whether it was two weeks in a tent on a rainy mountainside or swing music or chickens, it was polite to pretend an interest, so I said again, “You bet,” and added, “Sure I would!”
“See that, Marvin?” said Mr. Jones. “Not everybody holds chickens in such low esteem as you do. Let’s go.”
Behind the house were chicken coops, dozens of them, but these were not the jerry-built coops of scrap lumber and chicken wire one usually saw. They were a set of cubes stacked in a clever and varied way, so that they formed an irregular ziggurat in which each chicken had its own garden apartment, one cubical dwelling per chicken, each with a small yard outside its entrance, on the roof of the cubicle below it, with the exception of the ground-level apartments, which had their little yards on the ground. The structure was a handsome and ambitious thing, but something else caught my eye almost at once. In the yard outside each chicken apartment was something turning and sparkling in the sun—a tiny metal tree. The trunks of these trees were made of strands of twisted wire. As they reached upward, the strands unwound from the thick trunk and stretched outward to form branches. Along the branches, wherever a wire came to an end, a bit of shiny metal scrap was fixed to it so that the metal could turn. In even the gentlest breeze, the bits of metal would spin and catch the light. The chickens were sitting in the doorways of their apartments, just sitting there calmly, each watching its own tree, mesmerized by the coruscating bits of tin spinning in the thin evening light.
I knew what I was seeing. I knew immediately. Here was the secret to a prizewinning appearance on “Fantastic Contraptions.”
[to be continued]
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🎧 604: “What is that?”