It was a big room. One wall was rough rock and the rest was logs with stuff shoved between them. There was a big fire going in the rock wall, not in a fireplace, exactly; it was a sort of hollow place. There was an old auto battery on a shelf opposite, with two yellowing electric light bulbs dangling by wires from it. There was a table, some boxes, and a couple of three-legged stools. The air had a haze of smoke and such a wonderful, heartbreaking, candy-and-crackling smell of food that a little hose squirted inside my mouth.
The man said, ‘What have I got here, Baby?’
And the room was full of kids. Well, three of them, but somehow they seemed to be more than three kids. There was a girl about my age—eight, I mean—with blue paint on the side of her face. She had an easel and a palette with lots of paints and a fistful of brushes, but she wasn’t using the brushes. She was smearing the paint on with her hands. Then there was a little Negro girl about five with great big eyes who stood gaping at me. And in a wooden crate, set up on two sawhorses to make a kind of bassinet, was a baby. I guess about three or four months old. It did what babies do, drooling some, making small bubbles, waving its hands around very aimless, and kicking.
When the man spoke, the girl at the easel looked at me and then at the baby. The baby just kicked and drooled.
The girl said, ‘His name’s Gerry. He’s mad.’
‘What’s he mad at?’ the man asked. He was looking at the baby.
‘Everything,’ said the girl. ‘Everything and everybody.’
‘Where’d he come from?’
I said, ‘Hey, what is this?’ but nobody paid any attention. The man kept asking questions at the baby and the girl kept answering. Craziest thing I ever saw.
‘He ran away from a state school,’ the girl said.’ They fed him enough, but no one bleshed with him.’