Then Tom’s grandfather, Glendenning Upshaw, the most imposing figure in his life, came heavily down the stairs in his black suit, passed his grandson without acknowledging him, and slammed the front door behind him. Tom instinctively knew that the chaos-man had come for his grandfather and no one else, and that only his grandfather could deal with him. Soon his grandfather appeared, making his way down the walkway toward the sidewalk, thumping the tip of his unfurled umbrella against the pavement. The intruder shouted at Tom’s grandfather, but Tom’s grandfather did not shout back. The intruder fired a rock into Gloria Pasmore’s roses. He fell down again as soon as Tom’s grandfather reached the sidewalk. To Tom’s astonishment, his grandfather picked the man up, taking care not to bloody his suit, and shook him like a broken toy. Tom’s mother began yelling incoherently from an upstairs window and then abruptly stopped, as if she had just taken in that the whole neighborhood could hear her. Tom’s father, Victor Pasmore, came down and joined Tom at the window, staring out with a careful neutrality that excluded Tom. Tom slipped out of the living room, index finger still inserted between page 153 and page 154 of Journey to the Center of the Earth, moved through the empty hall, and continued on out through the open door. He feared that his grandfather had killed the chaos-man with the Uncle Henry knife he always carried in his trouser pocket. The heat was the muscular heat of the Caribbean in June, a steady downpouring ninety degrees. Tom went down the path to the sidewalk, and for a moment both the chaos-man and his grandfather stared at him. His grandfather waved him off and turned away, but the other man, Wendell Hasek, hunched his shoulders again and continued to stare fixedly at Tom. His grandfather pushed him backwards, and Hasek jerked away. “You know me,” he said. “Are you gonna pretend you don’t?” His grandfather marched the man to the end of the block and disappeared. Tom looked back at his house and saw his father shaking his head at him. His grandfather came trudging back around the corner of Eastern Shore Road and An Die Blumen, chewing his lip as he walked. The determination in his slow step suggested that he had pitched the chaos-man off the edge of the world. He glanced up and saw Tom, frowned, looked down at the sparkling sidewalk.
When he got back in the house he went wordlessly upstairs with Tom’s father. Tom watched him go, and when both his father and grandfather had closed his mother’s bedroom door behind them, he went into the study and pulled the Mill Walk telephone book onto his lap and turned the pages until he came to Wendell Hasek’s name. Loud voices floated down the stairs. His grandfather said “our” or “hour.”
Tom became aware of a thin sound like the cry of an animal a moment after he had ceased to hear it: then he immediately wondered if he had heard it. The cry lingered in his inner ear, probably the only place it had ever existed. No sound as soft as that had a chance of being heard in the clopping and rattling from Calle Burleigh.
Tom longed to be home, not stranded in a foreign district. The traffic on both sides of the boulevard blocked his passage across Calle Burleigh as effectively as a wall. There were no traffic lights on Mill Walk in those days, and the rows of vehicles extended as far as he could see. He would have to wait for the end of rush hour to cross the street, and by then darkness would be very near.
Then he heard the actual sound, not its sudden absence. It surrounded all the other noises of Calle Burleigh like a membrane. The cry disappeared into itself and vanished by gradations, like an animal that begins by swallowing its tail and ends by devouring itself altogether.
The cry came again, a wavering rose-pink cloud rising up from the block behind Calle Burleigh. The cloud broke into a stuttering series of dots like smoke signals and coalesced into a bright thread that went sailing over the tops of the houses.
Tom began to drift eastward on the pavement, his back to the streaming traffic. He slid his hands into the pockets of his white cotton trousers. His white button-down shirt, streaked with grey here and there by the milk cartons, adhered to his back.
The houses on Calle Burleigh gave him a broken and interrupted view of the forbidden street. Between two massive redbrick houses with wide porches Tom saw the two-story yellow and brown building and a smaller house, of rough white stone joined with thick ropes of mortar, beside it. He found himself before a brown wooden house as ornately ornamented as a cuckoo clock. He kept moving and looked through to the backs of brick houses on the next street. Facing him was a taller, two-story building of dirty cream-colored brick in which a broken first-floor window had been replaced by grease paper. In a sudden cessation of noise as the traffic stopped, he heard chickens clucking in the yard.
The pink cloud rose above the houses and thickened and narrowed, thickened and narrowed.
The traffic started up with clanks and shouts, with heavy hooves striking the ground, with cracking whips and ringing bells.
Tom moved sideways to get to the other side of a gloomy Gothic structure with a turret and a widow’s walk. A curtain shifted, and Tom had an impression of grey hair and a skull-like face peering out. The creature behind the window moved back just enough to become a grey blur.
The thin grey fingers disappeared, and the curtain dropped. Tom moved sideways, thinking in a way that was not quite verbal that he was not in his real life, but in some terrible dreamlike state from which he had to escape before it claimed him forever.
In the next instant the cry went up again, this time clearly from the little street Tom could see between the houses of Calle Burleigh.
At the end of the block he realized that he had been hearing the cries of an unhappy dog. It howled and whined at once, sending up another cloud of pink steam.
Funny, Tom thought—how much that dog managed to sound like a child.
Tom looked up at the street sign on the corner. TOWNSEND was the name of the side street. He knew nothing in this neighborhood; he had not even known of the long green open area with a bandshell, swings, a seesaw, luxuriant shade trees, and a few exhausted animals in tiny cages, which lay half a mile east on Calle Burleigh. The milk driver had been astonished that any resident of Mill Walk would not recognize Goethe Park.