Polly Plus
(1978)
Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine May-Jun 1978
Randall Garrett
It wasn't the first clue I had, but it was the incident of the parrot that first got me to really thinking about Willy.
Everyone always asks me about Dawn Kelley as soon as they find out that I am the Janet Sadler mentioned in her best-selling autobiography. I can understand that; as her grade-school teacher, I am presumed to be an extraordinary woman myself because I helped to mold the childhood of a truly extraordinary woman.
Dawn Kelley has won three Oscars for the only three pictures she has appeared in, and for two others she directed. She had earned doctorates in medicine, law, and physics; and has made widely-acclaimed contributions to all three fields. Her television program has been in the top ten of the ratings for the last seven years. Everyone who knows her loves her, and she still looks a beautiful twenty-five, although she is only fifteen years younger than I, and I am over seventy.
Yes, Dawn Kelley is a remarkable woman, but everyone has read and heard about her for years. Instead of re-hashing old material, I would like to tell you about an even more remarkable person of whom you have never heard.
As I said, it was the parrot that really got me to thinking, but there were clues before that.
I was in my mid-twenties at the time; I'd only had my teaching certificate three years, and I was still naïve enough to think that four years of college and a year of graduate work had taught me all I needed to know about teaching. I was shy, I know, and I covered that tendency with an over-precise pedantry and an avoidance of emotional involvement with my students. I conceived of myself as a lofty being who knew everything—at least, everything that a child needed to know—and whose job it was to pout as much of that knowledge into childish minds as those receptacles would hold. I was, I fear, a rather stuffy prig.
It was Willy who gave me my first real comeuppance, but the fault was my own, not his. I had always disliked nicknames and diminutives—I still do, but I'm a great deal more tolerant now. When, on Willy's first day in my fifth-grade class, I asked each child to stand and tell me his or her name, Willy stood and said: "Willy Taylor."
"William Taylor," I said, by way of correction. Like a damn fool, I hadn't looked over the prepared roster yet. I had already corrected "Susie" to "Susan" and "Bobby" to "Robert" without repercussions, and expected none now.
"No, ma'am," he said with precision. "Willy, Doubleyou, eye, ell, ell, wye. Willy."
" 'Willy'," I replied with precision, "is a diminutive for 'William',"
"Yes, ma'am, sometimes," he said agreeably, "but not this time. Willy's my real name. It's German. You've heard of Willy Brandt and Willy Ley."
I had, of course. I was caught, and I knew it. I should have had sense enough to drop it right there, but my mouth was moving before I could stop it. "Are you German?"
Now what difference would that make? I had a David who was not Hebrew, a Marguerite who was not French, and a Paula who was not Italian; I hadn't carped at those. Because of my shyness, I was suddenly on the defensive.
"No, ma'am," Still polite. "But my name is."
By then, I had control. "I see. Thank you, Willy. You may sit down."
He did, and that was the end of it. But I remember it.
I sensed from the beginning that Willy was an intelligent child. His intelligence quotient, according to the tests was 136; bright, but hardly brilliant. The transfer record from his previous school showed a nice B+ average. But almost from the very first I had the feeling that he was holding himself back, that he was trying to hide his real abilities. That sort of behavior is not as rare as you might think; the merely bright children show it in school and get themselves thoroughly hated by their duller classmates, while the truly brilliant child is wise enough not to be that offensive.
But Willy did the same thing in sports, which was overdoing it. At softball, touch football, volleyball, and the various track sports that nine- and ten-year-olds can play, he never ranked higher than second best and never lower than fourth… He was trying to keep his B+ average.
Now that, I thought, is ridiculous. A boy might want to keep his mind under cover—no one likes being called "teacher's pet" or "bigdome"—but why do so at sports, where excellence is approved of, lauded, and looked up to by faculty and students alike?
I remember the basketball especially. You see, I lived right across the alley from the Taylors, and I could see the back yard of their house from my second-floor apartment window. His father had set up a basketball hoop on the garage wall, and the boy often went out there after school to practice.
No. Not really to practice. To have fun.
Do you remember how much fun it was to skip stones across a pond? Or to throw snowballs against the side of a house, just to watch them splash? You never missed the pond or the house, did you?
Willy had fun throwing at the hoop, always on the move. Underhand, overhand, one-handed, two-handed, or over his head, facing away from the hoop, it didn't matter. He never missed. Never.
Except when schoolmates came by to play, or when he was playing at school. Then be became merely very good. But not exceptional.
We have a term for that sort of thing in the teaching profession: underachievement. I resolved to speak to his father about it.
I never got around to it, of course. Mr. Taylor never came to PTA meetings and, somehow, I never found any excuse for asking him to see me. It's hard to do that when a boy is, actually and really, doing very well in school. If he'd ever got in a fight—
I often daydreamed that Orville Goldman, a tease and semi-bully would go too far with Willy some day, but he never did.
If Willy would only get caught smoking cigarette or drinking a beer or—
But no.
Damn it, if he would at least tease Paula, or react to the way she teased im. She discovered a series of rhymes which tickled her not-too-bright little mind, a chant that went "Silly Willy, full of chili, has a face like a water-lily!" He responded by helping her with her math lessons, and the chant was dead within three days. And Paula's arithmetic improved.
We had a "nature study" program (call it "biology," and some clot-headed parent will think you're teaching sex) at Kilgore School. A part of that program consisted of teaching the children how to feed and care for small animals. Ann Simons, who was in charge of the program was an absolute genius at it.
One thing that it is important for a human being to learn is that other people hurt. One of the best ways, in my opinion, is to teach them that all animals feel pain. Small children are solipsists at heart; they don't know that those people out there are pretty much like this person in here. Particularly, children are unaware that an adult can be hurt. A adult seems too big, too powerful, to suffer. It takes a child time to learn that an adult can be hurt, both physically and emotionally, by a child.
Ann's theory—and I think it a good one—is to show this with animals.
"A little rabbit may not be able to talk, and he can't learn the things you can learn; but he can feel pain just the way you do, so you must be very careful. It's easy to hurt him because he's so much smaller and you're so much stronger. And even though he's small, he can hurt you, too if you hurt him or tease him. If you're ever unlucky enough to have a rabbit sink his teeth in you, you'll know what I mean. I hope that never happens, because if it does it means you were hurting or teasing the rabbit."
She had many kinds of birds and small beasts; rabbits, white rats, snakes, chickens, ducks, and the like. Plus a few exotics; a kinkajou, an ocelot, a boa constrictor, and a parrot.
Named Jeremiah.
Jeremiah was Ann's personal property and a personal friend, and she'd had him for years. She had originally named him Onan "because he spilled his seed upon the ground," but she changed his name when she brought the bird to school because some parent might catch on to the joke. (I later found that Ann had borrowed the gag from Dorothy Parker."
One of the phrases the bird had learned was "Woe is me," so Ann renamed him Jeremiah.
Part of Ann's program was to allow certain very carefully selected children to "borrow" an animal and take it home for a weekend. (Some were not borrowable; the kinkajou, for instance, You wouldn't believe what a kinkajou can do to your home!) It was something like borrowing a book from the library; the child was supposed to learn from it, and had damn well better bring it back in good condition. Mostly, they did.
But, there again, one had to watch out for the parents.
A white rat, bred for thousands of generations in the laboratory, is about as harmless as an animal can get. But there were mamas and papas who were horrified at the very word "rat"—to say nothing of having one in their home. Believe me, Ann Simons had to be a top-flight diplomat. She felt obliged to teach the parents as well as their children.
Willy Taylor was very good with animals. Ann said that his father must have taught him how to handle them from the very beginning.
"How about his mother?" I asked.
"Didn't you know?" Ann looked a little sad. "Mrs. Taylor—well the way Willy puts it is that she 'went to a better world' right after he was born."
At any rate, it was because of his way with animals that Ann made the decision she did.
Willy, you see, was particularly fond of Jeremiah, and the bird seemed fond of him. A big green parrot can be dangerous; that beak could take off the end of child's finger if the bird put power in it. Jeremiah had no record of that sort of behavior, but Ann was reluctant to loan him out. She had never really put him on the "non-circulating" list, like the kinkajou or the ocelot, but she usually convinced a child that another animal would be more suitable. Somehow, she wasn't able to resist Willy; and one fie spring Friday afternoon, Willy, with his father's permission, took Jeremiah home for the weekend.
Saturday afternoon, I was sitting at home, near the living room window, reading a book on child psychology. (I forget the title and the name of the author, but I remember being convince that the psychologist hadn't been anywhere near a living child for forty years.) I had opened the window to enjoy the cool westerly breeze and the fragrances it carried with it: the tangy smell of cut grass; the mouth-watering aroma of Mrs. Jackson's homemade bread.
Once, as I glanced out, I notice Willy in his back yard playing with Jeremiah. Their voices came clearly.
"Hello, Jeremiah, hello."
"Hello. Hello. Yawwwk! Hello."
The bird's wings had been clipped, and he had a leather collar around one leg, attached to a long least, so it was perfectly safe to let him wander around on the fenced-in lawn of the back yard.
"Jeremiah! Yawwk! Silly bird! Silly bird! Yaawwk!
Wishing I could go out and play on such an afternoon, I went back to my book.
"Dad! How come Jeremiah can talk, but can't really talk?"
I looked out the window and listened carefully. The father's answer to a question like that would tell me a great deal about the man.
I couldn't see him; he was inside the house. But his low tenor voice carried well through the open window.
"You mean he can't carry on a conversation?"
"Yeah, that's right," Willy agreed.
"Well, Jeremiah's brain is something like a tape recorder that's attached to a simple computer. A tape recorder can talk, but it can't think. Jeremiah can't think, either, not like you and I can, but his little computer can make certain responses to certain input signals and come out with recorded sounds."
"Oh, I see. Yeah, that makes sense. Thanks, Dad."
"Anytime."
"Yaawwk! What time is it" Eight bells and all's well!"
Remarkable! I found myself liking Mr. Taylor very much.
But I went back to my book.
It must have been well over an hour later that I heard the screaming.
I want to say here I am fond of cats. I have always lived with at least one, and the sad part is that I have outlived so many of them. The one I had then—Tamantha, I believe it was—was curled up on my lap at the time. In general, cats are nice people.
But there are exceptions.
The big orange tom was one of them. Nobody knew who he belonged to; he'd hang around the neighborhood for a few days, then disappear for a while. He was feral, and he was mean. He only had three things on his mind, and the other two were food and fighting.
When I heard the screaming, I think I knew it was Orange Tom before I looked up.
I almost screamed, myself. All I saw was a flurry of fur and feathers.
What happened took place in far less time than it takes to tell it. The cat had evidently come over the fence and decided that Jeremiah was good for at least two of the things on his mind.
The screaming was from both of them. Jeremiah was fighting back, beak and claw. But he was no match for that big tom. Then Willy came slamming out of the back door, adding his scream to the others, and running straight toward the combat.
He handled it beautifully. If he had tried to kick the two apart, or, worse, pull them apart with his hands, there might have been far worse damage done. He didn't' instead, he came down solidly on Orange Tom's tail with his right foot. It is difficult to step on a cat's ...
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