down to the school right away.
S OME OF THE OLDER children said they’d seen the boy on the playground but no one talked to him as he edged his way along the fence to watch the kids on and around the jungle gym. He sat on one of the halved dump truck tires in the wood chips, bonging his enormous boots against the rubber. The kids who noticed the boy didn’t speak to him.
Some thirty minutes later Principal Pemberton found him on the second floor, outside Ms. Kelley’s art class. The nurse was with the child now. Pete and Pemberton regarded them from behind the glass of the door.
“He turned to run, I grabbed his arm, and he bit me.”
Pete looked at Pemberton. He showed Pete his hand.
“Didn’t break the skin.”
Pete looked through the window at the kid. He wore brown camouflage pants that were rolled at the cuffs to fit him and a darker brown sweater that hung on him holey as netting. Leaves and pine needles stuck to the wool and his knit cap. His eyes scanned the room, lighting on Pete behind the glass only long enough to look away and study the nurse or the room.
“I got him wrapped up, but just barely,” Pemberton said. “The kid’s strong for his size.”
He tapped on the glass and the nurse came out.
“He’s got bloody gums,” she said to Pemberton. “I think he has scurvy?”
“No one’s seen him before,” Pemberton told Pete.
“He reeks,” the nurse said.
The boy stood with his hands on his hips. He ran a sleeve under his nose. His movements were swiftly mannish, as though he were another species and full-grown for it, a pygmy or some other reduced people.
“Get a name off of him?”
“No. He wouldn’t tell me.”
“How’s he been?” Pete asked the nurse.
“Sweet as a little bell.”
“And no one has any idea where he’s from? None of the other kids know him . . . ?”
Pemberton shook his head.
The boy sat back on the exam table and unlaced his enormous boots, and after he pulled them from his feet, plucked out the rags balled into each to fill the space after his toes ended. He sniffed the second of these rags like it held some information, shook it out as he had the first one, and laid it to the side of him. He tugged off cheesecloth socks. His bare feet were sickening. A thin flap of soleskin hung from his foot and he pulled it off like a piece of wet sack paper. He smelled this too, held it up to the light, and tossed it onto the floor, where it set like a gray cold cut. The rest of his foot like an etiolated stem, a rotten tuber or root.
“My word,” the nurse said.
The boy looked up at their blanched faces and resumed the crude debridement of his feet.
Pete opened a notepad and wrote down the name of a pediatrician, tore off the paper, and handed it to Pemberton.
“This guy’s retired and a little deaf. Let it ring and he’ll eventually answer. Ask if he can come down.”
Pete opened the door and went in. The nurse was about to follow, but he asked her to let him see the boy alone. The boy glanced up, but kept picking at his feet. Pete took a chair across from him.
“Hi. I’m Pete.”
Pete leaned down and saw the gray sags under the child’s eyes on an otherwise clean pale face. There was a taupe grime of dirt and ash all over his clothes. He smelled like a burnt match and salted fatback. His chopped hair shot out in brown shocks.
“What’s your name?”
“Benjamin.”
“Mind if I ask how old you are?”
“Go on ahead.”
Pete grinned.
“How old are you?”
“Eleven.”
“Really? You don’t look more than eight or nine.”
The boy licked his fingers and seemed to be pressing loose skin in place.
“Where’re you from?”
The kid tossed his head.
“In town somewhere?”
The kid shook his head no.
“Where’s your mama and daddy?”
The kid began to roll down his long socks. Light could be seen through them.
“Your feet hurt?”
“Not bad.”
“You must’ve walked a long way for them to get like that.”
The boy