Holding Wonder

"Hey!" Beegun bellowed. "That looks like fun!" And the boys pelted off across the playground after the two girls.
The bus driver-late leaving for the second load-spat reflectively out the window and roared into reverse. "Telephone booths and hula hoops and then this. What next!" Mrs. Quinlan dropped down on the step and smiled up at me weakly. My answering smile broke to laughter as Stringler slouched back up onto the porch from around the corner muttering, "Color film to burn and my camera back at the ranch!"
So that was Vannie. She did stay only a short time. Before Christmas there was a low green fireball slanting down over the Nuevas and, after Christmas-Vannie was the Angel Hosts and got puzzled compliments on her costume-two green fireballs slanted up over the Nuevas. One of them carried a school transfer made out to Vannie Powdang.
And all recess the next day, Ingrid rotated sadly, holding out the thin fluff of her skirts, singing a thin high song without words-a song that bubbled to sobs when she got so dizzy that she had to stop for a while.
THREE-CORNERED AND SECURE
I DIDN'T LIKE the cloverleaf. Sounds foolish, a grown man –almost twenty-one-and presumably in his right mind, taking a dislike to a loop in a road. But it was so. Every time I approached the area, the skin on my arms
from elbow to shoulder prickled and stung, and dread, ulcer-like, gnawed at a corner of my stomach. And, for some reason, I always recalled vividly that there was a spring somewhere here where my grandad always camped, finding water for his horses and shade for the wagon, on his week's journey from the ranch to town. Any my dad patronized the same spring to fill the radiator of his Model A on his six-hour trip over the same route. But now I hardly knew where the spring was, because who ever stopped out here in the middle of nowhere any more? Except to build cloverleaves. So why did I think about the spring? A cloverleaf, at that time, was a curiosity, especially way out here where the side road-the reason for the strange convoluted archings-over and goings-under-might, once a week, emit a pickup truck or a firewood-laden Indian wagon, and maybe once a season, a lost tourist. Of course now all that complication carries only half the traffic through here.
Anyway, aside from its unsightliness, I still couldn't get used to the cloverleaf and I always shot out the other side of it and down the long, almost imperceptible slant of the sonora down from Picacho Grande toward town with a feeling of relief, still conscious of That Thing looming behind me, bulking emotionally larger than the thrust and tumble of the red boulders of Picacho Grande behind it.
But one day it was different. As usual, as I entered the first curve of the cloverleaf, I was absorbed in trying to analyze my uneasiness. Suddenly the sky yanked up sideways into slanting wrinkles! Then it tore diagonally in sudden, soundless gashes!
I hit my brakes and felt a thump as though my front wheels had come back down to the road from somewhere. My whole body felt like a cork starting to pull out of a bottle. There was no place to pull over and stop-not where I was at the moment-so I got my foot back on the accelerator and eased forward. The suction that had been lifting me bodily from the seat of my car was gone and the sky, what I could see of it, was serene and unblemished again. I wiped a wondering hand over the bottom of my face. What was going on?
Then it did it again! As though something had grabbed the film the world was painted on and was dragging it up sideways! This time the slant of my car tilted me back firmly against the seat. I saw the upward drag widen into an opening rip. And before I could blink or think, my car slid right into it.
Sight was gone. Feeling was so distorted that I could relate to nothing except an emptying sink and then an inching forward to be born. Then I came apart and I was a constellation in a bright desert sky. And a spiky jumping-cactus rosette of thorns bounding along a sand wash, my own skin puncturing at every bound.
There was a kind of pokkk and the sky straightened. I was lying on sand. At least I felt the sand under me, though I had more of a feeling of being suspended against the sand rather than resting on it. Anyway, I was lying on the sand by my car. I mean my half car. Because when I scrambled warily to my feet, there was my car, radiator, hood, wheels, front seat-and nothing more. No back seat. No rear wheels. No trunk.
I slid both hands along the side of the car, holding myself up, and groping for some sort of explanation, too. Both my hands passed the front door and touched-nothing. It wasn't that the car ended and my hands slid around in back. There was just nothing where the rest of the car should have been. And I couldn't even get a fingernail in back of it. How could I have? You can't poke a fingernail through the side of a car-but if the side ended– I clamped my hands over both my ears and surged bodily forward against something that surged me back again. All of me was tattering out in ragged lines of tension
that were trying to relax to rest. Staggering away from my curtailed car, I fell face down, my poked-forward elbows crunching; in the sand of the dry wash. I held onto the thought and the feeling of that crunching fall as things slid and wrinkled and the sand became a taste and a smell and I dissolved.
There was a man crouching there in the sand across the narrow pool of water from me, eyeing me warily. I tried to spit the sand off my tongue, but only managed a dry, breathy thppppp. The second attempt went a little better. I wavered to my hands and knees and surged shakily forward against the tension that threatened to yank me back if I relaxed even slightly. It felt as though every corner of me was connected to a tightly drawn elastic band. But I wanted water –the water in the pool beyond which the man crouched. I plodded and plodded on all fours. I made it. My face splashed down into the water.
There was a flare of shadowy lights and echoing rainbows and I nearly drowned myself before I could get strength in my neck and elbows to lift myself. I rolled a little away from the pool's edge and blinked my eyes free of the water. Even my eyelids seemed to work against the stretching tension.
The man still crouched across from me, but now he was staring incredulously at something he clutched in both hands. Shakily he lifted the thing and pointed it at me. It was a weapon and the slight flare of the muzzle wavered hardly three yards away from my face. His hands tightened and the echoes and rainbows and lights came on again. Then his hands dropped and he stared at me. I stared back, tonguing a last sand grain out of my mouth, feeling the water trickling down the sides of my face. The weapon slid to the sand as he slowly got to his feet, his eyes intent on me. He backed away until the outthrust of orangy gold granite boulders stopped him. He glanced up and my eyes followed his.
A long shiny metallic curve pointed down at him. At first glance I thought it was an artillery shell of some kind. Then I saw that it was some kind of vehicle, slanting out of a clear sky-half a vehicle. It stopped just as my car did. Just quit a few inches behind an open hatch. Just wasn't beyond that point. It hung there, stuck through the sky.
"Well," I laughed shakily. "Welcome to the club, only I thought Sputnik was round."
"You can speak!" He was startled. So was I. I could understand him but his mouth didn't match what I heard-like a poorly synchronized sound track. And something was going on between his saying and my hearing.
"Sure I can speak," I said. "What did you expect-smoke signals?" "Are you co-eval with savages?" he asked.
"Co-eval? Oh, brother! Vocabulary!" I grinned. "Savages? What savages?"
"It must be a time warp," he said, "though none was charted-"
"I'll pull the next corny line," I said. "What movie are you making?"