The Underground Boy

At last, all the suspects had been routed from every decent neighborhood of the city. It was spring and the cherry blossoms were in bloom. In the big park, there were banks of tulips and budding trees and drifting petals. There was a huge municipal celebration going on and happy throngs meandered across the newly-mowed lawns. The police were out in full force, of course, in their blue suits with the brightly-polished gold buttons, circulating pictures of little black boys whom the computer had identified as pickpockets and thieves.

The children were in fact beggars. They were escapees from the preserves that had been built to contain the genetically impoverished, the pathologically poor, and the criminally insane. When the police circulated their photos among the bright, clean, upper-class crowd (for this was a time when the middle and working classes had finally been eliminated and all who were truly deserving were rolling in wealth) the good citizens of the municipality clutched their possessions tighter, covered their picnic baskets, and reeled in their kites.

One of the little boys featured in this group of circulated photos was very little, maybe four or five years old. “Deceptive,” muttered the citizens when they saw his photo, for his little face was filled with something like mischief, and he glowed with a kind of enterprising sweetness. Unbeknownst to anyone, this particular little boy lived in the eaves of a big house belonging to a large, wealthy family. There were twelve people in the family: two parents, four grandparents and six children. That evening, when the family gathered in their great dining hall for the celebratory meal that was the culmination of this holiday, the little boy secretly looked down on their multi-course meal from the rafters.

The first course was goose. Each person received a whole goose, sized from the biggest to the smallest family member. For the next course, each person received a whole turkey, twelve turkeys, again ordered from biggest to smallest. The next course was twelve whole ducks, and so on, through quail, peacock, squab and turtledove.

The little boy sat up in a hidden corner of the ceiling beams looking down on these perfectly calibrated carcasses, this carefully ordered progression of fowls so pretentiously sized for each consumer and yet so excessive.

The little boy sat up in the eaves enjoying the sights and sounds of the feast and enjoying also some strips of meat taken, yes, stolen, from the kitchen. He had collected rich drippings, crisp skins, gooey strings of meat fallen into the gravy, globs of the fruit sauce used to glaze the ducks, little pearl onions and prunes that had dropped into the pan and been left behind. There was even a leftover sweet potato. The little boy stuffed handfuls of his purloined bounty into his mouth and nestled into his warm dry aerie, loving to watch “his” family, as deeply involved in their lives, and as unreproachfully, as though he were watching television.