never taking his eyes off the bird, and then pointed once again without smiling or speaking. After a lengthy pause, the crow said in a diffident rasp, “Jurgen.” Junior pointed at himself. “Junior,” said the bird with a shade more assurance. “I am” and “you are” turned out not to be necessary, despite the examples given by the book and Dubykky. It was confusing that language contained unnecessary words.
Nevertheless, an agreeable satisfaction spread through Junior and with it a strengthened will. The boy liked the bird, wanted him near, wanted to hear him speak, and was glad that Dubykky had left him. He understood that Jurgen, Junior, and Dubykky fit the idea name, although in different ways. There was no similar agreeable sensation attached to the name Junior, no sensation at all in fact, yet there was to Jurgen. And the name Dubykky? Junior repeated it, pondering. He found he wanted to be in Dubykky’s presence again even though the name evoked a different sensation, a mixture of agreeableness and something else. Something that suggested Dubykky would not stand next to him and speak to him as did Jurgen. More than that, there was something that hinted Junior should not want him to. A basic difference divided Jurgen and Dubykky, besides shape.
Junior paged through the book considering the different animals in it and the words describing them—fat, clever, white, bold-faced, dreary, gay, sweet—until he came to a page showing an angular, black bat:
Bat, Bat,
Come under my hat,
And I’ll give you a slice of bacon.
And when I bake
I’ll give you a cake
If I am not mistaken.
The bat reminded him of Jurgen. It was smiling happily as it hovered over the head of a boy doffing a high-crowned cap and holding a rasher. At that point Junior perceived a truth entirely on his own, a truth that Dubykky had not discussed, and the power of it pierced Junior. It made his whole body vibrate. The truth was that Junior liked to have a bird; Dubykky liked to have a bird; and Dubykky had given him the bird, and the bird was happy on his shoulder. Dubykky had given him the bird to like, which is to say, passed on the agreeable sensations of having a bird and having a happy bird. That put Dubykky in a perspective. It was as if the man were still nearby, albeit not physically. Junior liked having something to like from the man who had liked it. Junior concluded that Dubykky liked him, and so he felt likewise.
Next the sound sequence Matthew Gans sprang to mind, which the book lady had assigned him. Dubykky had used it. Junior sensed that it too was a name. What sensation did its sounds carry? He let his mind wrap around Matthew Gans, drift among the sounds, pry them apart to feel out each, rearrange them, and then steep in them, while staring fixedly at Jurgen, who fell asleep in the silence. The sounds did evoke something. It lurked at the very edge of his mind as in a haze, and what there was of it did not seem agreeable. Not Dubykky-like. Definitely not Jurgen-like. Nor were the names Gosse, Gonzales, and Garrison.
When morning was well advanced, Junior decided that he and Jurgen should find food and water. These things he understood even before Dubykky had explained. Junior’s body was now asking for nutrition. As for the crow, he answered Junior’s inquiry about food with “Junior!” From that, the boy surmised that the crow was like him. Hungry. Dubykky had taught him to use his breathing to find food and water. He was to breathe in through his nose. If his body liked an odor, Junior could eat or drink from its source. With Jurgen on his left shoulder, Junior left the shack and walked away from the dirt road and through the sagebrush flats, stopping occasionally to inhale deeply. The day was warm but not hot. Light gusts blew by from time to time, causing Jurgen to tighten his claws on Junior’s shoulder, which produced a mixture of prickling and tickling that the boy found, on balance, agreeable.
“I like Jurgen,” he declared.
The crow cocked his head and answered, “Hickory dickory dock!”
The Hawthorne dump lay just a mile away from the shack over a long slow rise and down a steep slope into a wide ravine. It was one of the innumerable ravines in Nevada, the primordial relicts of deluges, windstorms, and the relentless shifting of sand and rock. Junior paused at the top of the slope and inspected the dump. A gravel road led to it from town and stopped at a turnaround. Along its edge rose hillocks of garbage. Even a hundred yards away the stench was strong. Junior didn’t mind. One smell was much the same to him as another, providing that he didn’t put the source of some into his mouth. Off one side of the turnaround in a small clearing of its own was parked an old shepherd’s trailer. Painted white with blue trim, both colors faded, the trailer had a rounded roof and flat ends, at each of which was a small curtained window. Another window, even tinier, was on the narrow door at the right-hand end. At the other end a rusty stovepipe stuck up.
An old man was sitting on his usual chair by the door in a little parallelogram of shade. His arm resting on a folding card table, he did not move. His chin was on his chest. He wore dark glasses.
Junior waited a full five minutes for the man to move. In that time, Jurgen roused himself, ruffling his neck feathers. He murmured a polite caw to Junior, spread his wings, and glided to the ground. Two adult crows were nearby, standing in the shadow of a large sagebrush and pecking listlessly at the carcass of a lizard. Jurgen hop-walked over to them, squeaking obligingly, but they were unfamiliar and not welcoming. He stopped five feet away and cawed, hoping for an invitation. They ignored him. Jurgen was not discouraged. He was experienced enough to expect strange crows to respond from a limited repertoire: chase him away, flap around him to play, settle next to him to caw in his ear, or let him join them. Eventually. They would not ignore him for long.
As for the old man, his name was Hans Berger, and he was the watchman at the garbage dump. Mineral County paid him by the week to check for fires and illegal ejecta, such as goods, especially munitions cases, from the navy base.
The county commission wanted to charge a fee to leave garbage at the dump, but even though collecting it would mean a little more in wages for him, Berger was against it. He dreaded contact with people. At fifty-five he looked seventy. Wizened with yellowish gray hair and a long head, he wore a pointed beard of the same hue. It added to his aura of elderly peculiarity. That put people off, kept them away. Which was fine with him. It reduced the chances that they would ask about his thick accent.
Explaining! He always shook his head at the idea. How should he explain? He had sunk to nothing more than a junkyard denizen and wanted nothing from others.
Berger was not asleep. On the contrary, he was fully aware of the boy on the ridge and watched him from under his eyebrows, just over the rims of his Wehrmacht-issue smoked glasses. “Go away,” he said quietly, to himself. The boy, thankfully, was too far away to hear. Berger’s accent, his rich Bavarian consonants, tended to attract children. That, he did not want in the least.
He detested children, especially the boys. They taunted him, calling him Hamburger from a safe distance. Die kleine Scheissen! They knew they could stand just ten feet away, and he would be powerless to catch them and give them the beating they deserved.
Taunt him! Feldwebel Hans Berger, tank commander during Germany’s glorious drive for Moscow, until the disaster at the Kursk salient. Then fleeing on foot among infantry, his tank having lost its track to a mine, a piece of Soviet shrapnel slashed open his knee to the bone. For two days he crawled along the muddy ground, hiding in every stinking hole he could find to evade the Soviet advanced guard as his roughly bandaged wound festered. Finally, a German counterattack brought paratrooper units close enough for him to find help. He was bundled off to the rear for medical treatment and then on to Warsaw for surgery. But it had been bungled or it was too late or the damage was just too great. It left him crippled. Now his leg was stiff as a crutch,
