Firmin by Sam Savage Page A

and therefore very silent. So as soon as Shine had locked the door that night and coughed once (a habit he had, a kind of hello to the evening), and carried his footfalls down the street, I tumbled to the ground floor and tore across the shop to the corner where the book used to be. And where it was still: a yellow slice sandwiched like cheese between the dark pumpernickel of a Serbo-Croatian dictionary and the paler rye of Langston’s Fundamentals of Business German . When with great effort I had contrived to dislodge it from the shelf, I noticed that the price penciled on the inside cover had shriveled from twenty-five cents to a nickel.
     
    Turning the pages slowly, I questioned the Lovely. I was looking for the simplest and most intelligible phrase permitted by my physiological limitations, and in no time at all I had learned to say ‘good-bye zipper.’ It wasn’t Shakespeare, but it was the best I could manage. I was able to say this by standing on my hind legs and waving a forepaw - waving good-bye - followed by a zipping motion up my chest with the same paw. I practiced in front of the mirror, wave-zip, wave-zip, until I had it down pat - which brought me face-to-face with a new problem: who was I going to say this to? Obvious answer: a deaf person. Which at least gave me a new goal in life: find a deaf person. Deaf people, however, do not grow on trees. I kept my eyes open, hoping one would just happen to walk into the store, in which case I planned to rush out and introduce myself. I don’t think any ever did, though one day an old man came in and spent a long time browsing and finally picked out a book and paid for it without saying a word. So he might have been deaf. But with Shine around I figured I could not take any chances. The man was old and frail, and had I rushed out and thrown myself at his feet, he might not have been able to protect me.
     
    I had never physically traveled outside of Scollay Square, but I knew a lot about Boston from books and maps and could see it all in my head stretched out below me, Arlington to Columbus Point, as from an airplane. Now, like a true Axion, my task was to make contact with the dominant species. I had of course already tried that with Shine and had nearly met an Axion’s fate. But wide reading had left no doubt in my mind that in addition to crowds of sadists, fiends, psychopaths, and poisoners, the dominant species also sported exemplars of gentleness and compassion, and that most of the latter were women. I could have sought contact in the streets of the Square, but something in the faces there warned me not to. I have already confessed that at the time I was still very bourgeois, and consequently I wanted as my first interlocutor, as, so to speak, my virginal partner in human converse, what I then thought of as a superior class of person. With the most likely spots for that sort of superior female person - the campuses of Wellesley and Radcliffe and the Saint Claire Nunnery in Jamaica Plain - out of reach, I fell back on the Public Garden, just a few blocks west of the Square. And in this you see again that despite a tendency to pickiness I have all four feet on the ground and can be quite practical when I have to.
     
    I needed a rainy night for travel, when people would be too busy clinging to the newspapers and umbrellas above their heads as they dashed between cars and doorways to notice a small, low animal creeping its way westward beneath the parked vehicles. I did not have to wait long. The following Saturday, Shine left the shop at five o’clock under the dripping dome of a black umbrella. And sometime after midnight, when I set out for the Public Garden, the rain was coming down hard, though the asphalt beneath the cars was still dry and warm. Only the intersections presented problems, open spaces to be crossed at a sprint. I bided my time at those places - I had not forgotten poor Peewee - and it was nearly dawn when I finally crossed the Common and