The right ankle becoming increasingly tender, he gradually shifted the burden of his weight from the right foot to the left. Even the present limiting circumstances yielded choices. He had to decide whether to veer from his path to pick up an old broomstick that might, if it weren’t rotted out, be used as a cane.
He cut down the space between himself and the stick in short order, wanting the digression concluded and the real trip resumed. He refused to regret his choice, but a rueful feeling persisted, a sense of unredeemable error.
He squatted to acquire the warped broomstick, heard someone coming and raised his head to look, tilting backwards, restoring his balance as a trick of will. Two other boys, slightly larger than the first, had joined the urchin in his makeshift game. They were shouting at some unseen audience in mock bravado.
Terman claimed the splintery stick and rose like Lazarus to his feet.
“Hey, that’s me private club,” one of the newcomers yelled at him. There was some self-conscious laughter from the others.
He ignored them as a matter of choice, walked conscientiously, using the stick as a third leg, toward the open gate.
He would have liked to avoid crossing paths with the ragged soccer players, but to go out of his way was to call attention to his fear (was he even really afraid of them?), might invite some form of interference. If they decided to mug him — it could come to that without premeditation — there was little he could do to prevent it. (Where were the police the old lady had threatened to call?) He noticed another possible exit, an iron gate on the far right that was closed and possibly locked. He decided — the decision made instinctively — to continue in the direction he was going. Involved in their game, the boys might be willing to overlook his trespass.
The largest one called out to no one in particular. “That gent has got me big stick between his legs.”
He thought to joke back, show them he was one of the boys himself, though held, instinct again predominating, to his decision to ignore them. The cane preceded him, step by step, had become an integral part of his act.
He passed through, had got beyond the arena of the game, without incident.
In the next moment, the ball rode by him, barely missing his leg, buckling the cane. The boys pursued the ball, were rushing helter skelter in his direction, bumping each other as they ran. The implication of the ball being kicked in his direction was hard to avoid.
They brushed him slightly as they went by (did he imagine the contact?), did him no notable damage. It might have been the wind that stroked his elbow. Was that all the harm they meant to do?
One of them, he noticed with a sideglance, was moving the ball toward him with his foot. Terman sidestepped cautiously, a delicate maneuver. The ball skipped by him.
“Goal Rangers,” the boy who had been kicking it called.
They were behind him now, their movements unobservable, their loud chatter announcing the progress of the game. They played to him, their voices too loud for themselves alone, dogged his heels.
The ball again skittered past him, bounded headlong toward the open gate.
“Penalty kick,” one of them called out.
He readied himself for trouble, held the cane in both hands.
In a moment they were past him, scrambling after the ball, calling to it to stop its flight. They disappeared through the open gate, pushing each other for position as they left his view, their cries of complaint hanging in the air, surviving their departure.
He felt a loss of energy like the sudden dying of a wind. Each step required more effort than its achievement seemed to warrant. He inched toward the gate, which was almost directly in front of him, his pace so slow it seemed like virtual immobility. It was curious that the soccer players hadn’t returned. Terman strained to locate their voices but they were silent or had gone away. The more immediate danger became the less it frightened him.
Just as he stepped through the gate — the boys for all he knew were waiting for him on the other side — he thought of Tom hating him.
6
The truth is I had never stolen anything — maybe an occasional quarter from my mother’s pocketbook — until I came to London at my father’s invitation. This is not offered in defense of my behavior which I never thought of as other than indefensible. It was not even that I was driven to do what I did, though there was more than likely some element of compulsion in it. I thought of it as a game I played against myself, a game in which I forced myself to steal as a demonstration of will and a proof of competence. The pleasure, if it could be called that, was in being able to override my own resistance, which is to say I stole because I found it hateful to steal. I stole like a person writing a poem against his predilection to do something else with his time, anything else.
He was in his study when I left, Isabelle lying down in one of the second floor bedrooms. Were they looking for me? I made no serious effort to muffle my steps when I came down the stairs, expected my father to come out of his study after me, continued to expect it after I had let myself out. We’re in this together, I thought.
I was walking home (or toward home, undecided on destination) when I saw him go by on Holland Park Ave. in his Ford Escort, an intense look on his face. The light turns red before he reaches the corner and he rides the brake, then races through. I watched him from the doorway of a second-hand bookstore, then followed his car for a few blocks. I had to hurry to keep the car in view, gun in jacket pocket banging against my thigh. He turned left without signalling, turned as if the decision to turn had not been made in advance.
I walked back to the second-hand bookstore, a place called River-run Booksellers, and looked in the glass door. A blond woman with thick-lensed glasses was sitting at a raised desk halfway back, reading a magazine. There was also an older man in the shop (her father?), but he was even farther away from the door and engrossed in some kind of inventory work. There were no other customers in the shop, which was not ideal though not necessarily disadvantageous. The woman in the glasses glanced up when I came in — a bell jingling with the opening and closing of the door — then in an unbroken gesture returned to her magazine. She didn’t care.
I didn’t see anything I wanted. The paperback shelves appeared to have had all the good stuff winnowed out, contained dated political tracts, old almanacs and the usual smattering of romances and mysteries, sci fi and unremembered popular fiction. I read across each shelf, starting at the top and working down, looking for a discovery or an echo, something worth the risk.
I passed it by at first, then came back to it, a title neither familiar nor unfamiliar, a book called Out of Itself. The title’s very familiarity retarded recognition. The author’s name was Terman, my own name. I thought in a hallucinatory flash that it was a book I had written myself (though of course I haven’t written any books), whose existence I had stupidly forgotten.
It was my father’s third novel — third or fourth — and was an edition (Panther) I’d never seen before. The blurb said, “A painful dreamlike searing work somewhere between Malone Dies and The Maltese Falcon:”
Though I was momentarily unobserved, I would have liked some other people in the shop to deflect attention from me. I had the feeling that the woman at the desk was more aware of me then she pretended. The point was to disguise my intention, though I could have pocketed the book without her noticing, and I continued methodically down the shelves, stopping from time to time to look through a book I had no interest in at all.