The Child Buyer by Hersey John

Author:Hersey John.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: LANGUAGE. LINGUISTICS. LITERATURE, Literature, Literature
Publisher: Alfred A Knopf

Senator SKYPACK. There certainly is. I want to ask about these dirty books he's been picking up at the public library. Tell me, boy, when did you first learn the facts of life?

THE CHILD BUYER

BARRY RUDD. If you mean about the reproductive process in humans, I got the first basic information about two months ago.

Senator SKYPACK. Where did you pick this up?

BARRY RUDD. From my friend Charley Perkonian. We were walking home from the movies, a matinee, I remember we were going along Second Street, where there's a series of white picket fences, and Flattop was tapping a stick along the palings, and we got talking about the kissing in the film we'd seen, and how it sort of made you sick to the stomach, when suddenly he launched into kissing as a first step toward copulation—I mean, he used street language; I've acquired a more exact vocabulary since then out of books—and he described the whole process to me. His information, I later learned from my reading, was astonishingly accurate, except for one detail. 'Before a guy can start with a woman/ he said, 'he has to get her ready by he lets her shove her finger into a ring with a precious jool on it. Thing is/ he said, 'this has a lot to do with can they make a baby. They can make one pretty easy if the fool's a diamond, and you take and have a big-size diamond on the ring, about the size of a raisin, it's a pushover. I mean it's like rolling off a log, it's nothing/ I now realize that I went off on my geology kick just after that talk. I'd noticed mica shining in the rocks in the detritus along the river in back of our house, also down near Sandy Point where my father and Mr. Zimmer used to take us on picnics with the boat they made, and now I had a fantasy about fabricating synthetic diamonds, for men to use in this interesting way, out of the mica. I'd been crazy about cacti just before that, but they were wearing off, and the first thing I knew, I was off to the races with rocks. I was directed to a dentist in Tunxis who had a big amateur collection, and he gave me a lot of his extras. Then on two weekends Dr. Gozar drove me to the Agassiz in Cambridge and the Peabody in New Haven, and I saw a billion specimens of rock. I found some stone up on the

Monday, October 28

ridge that crumbled into white powder, and I thought it might be gypsum, and I would 'discover' cement. My big adventure, though, was to go over to the old mica mine near Londonvillc, an open-pit mine which during the last couple of wars supplied mica for electronic uses. I had a prospector's pick, and I took out some rose quartz and garnet and some other pretty subgem stones. And mica. For men.

Senator SKYPACK. All right, boy.

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