about little ‘Say Hey’ there.”
“John-John,” Hugo Monegal interjected, touching his wife’s hand. He was a man of thirty-two, a Panamanian who had entered the employ of the U.S. government in the Canal Zone. Later he had come to the United States to attend Wichita State University, from which he had dropped out to join the Air Force. In that same year, 1957, he had married Jeannette Rivenbark of Van Luna, Kansas, thereby acquiring, in addition to a handsome and headstrong wife, his American citizenship. “John-John” was the first phrase he had spoken aloud since the initial introductions, and Jeannette watched the way the officers’ eyes gravitated to her husband, grudgingly, as if he had burped or let wind.
“We’ve been calling him John-John,” she said, hurrying to Hugo’s assistance. “For President Kennedy and the late Pope John. He had to have a name. You can’t go around every day calling an active kid like this one ‘Hey, you,’ or ‘Say Hey,’ either.”
“We want to keep him,” Hugo added. “What you wish to keep you have to name.”
“You mean you want to adopt him?” Colonel Unger asked.
“We want him to be ours,” said the sergeant. “I don’ really know about this adoptin’ business, though.” Because Hugo spoke Spanish fluently—“an accident of birth,” he sometimes joked—the Air Force had sought to coopt this skill by assigning him to installations in Spain. He and Jeannette had already pulled one two-year tour at the rotating SAC unit in Saragosa and were now very close to concluding their second Iberian assignment.
John-John, still struggling with the coaster chair, managed to knock the Secretary of the Air Force off the empty liquor cabinet. Colonel Unger retrieved the secretary’s portrait and returned it to its place.
“Don’t you have any children of your own?”
“Only Anna,” Jeannette responded. “She’s five. We didn’t intend to have any more until we saw John-John.”
“Pamela brought the baby to our quarters,” Hugo explained, “because she thought we could maybe, you know, talk to him. He listens very good, but he is still too small to talk in any language.”
“He’s just on the verge of being a feral child,” Hollis told the colonel, “if we can deduce anything about his condition from what we know about his background. His mother was a mute, a woman deeply involved in black-market dealings and prostitution. We lost complete track of her about six weeks ago. The city police arrested her for creating a public disturbance the morning after she gave her baby to Pam—she was in a condemned building, making a godawful hiccupping racket on the roof—but they released her without prejudice before noon, and we haven’t seen hide nor hair of her since. Before she deserted her tenement apartment, though, she kept that boy”—nodding at John-John—“locked up inside it both night and day. The isolation, coupled with his mother’s muteness, can’t have been good for him.”
“What did you just call him?” Jeannette asked. “A feral child?”
“Right,” said Hollis.
“And what is that, exactly?”
“Well, it means a wild child, a child raised by animals. Back in the 1920s there was a famous pair in India called the Wolf Children of Midnapore. A couple of young girls abandoned in the jungle and supposedly suckled by wolves. An Anglican missionary named Singh captured them and carried them back to the orphanage he directed. Tried like rip to make human beings of them, but they ran on all fours, ate like dogs, showed their teeth, and occasionally bayed at the moon. One of them died within the year, but the other progressed well enough to wear a dress and attend church services. She never did learn to speak more than fifty words, though, and that in nine years, Mrs. Monegal.”
“Maybe the Reverend Mr. Singh’s mother was frightened by the ghost of Rudyard Kipling then, Major Hollis.”
“Ma’am?”
Jeannette was wearing a chocolate-colored dress with a nunnish white bib. Hollis, she could see, had adjudged her, on this fragile basis and the fact that she was married to a noncom, a demure do-gooder whose mind reposed in her husband’s calloused fist. He had certainly not expected her to challenge his stupid anecdote with sarcasm.
“Are you trying to tell us, Major Hollis, that from henceforward John-John should be known as the Wolf Boy of Andalusia?”
Hollis blinked, then put on his sunglasses. “I just meant to point out that he’s been disadvantaged by living with a mother who couldn’t talk. Maybe ‘feral child’ was a bad choice of words. Call it ‘social isolation,’ if we have to stick