“Boy howdy!” Jim eyed the pages two different ways and thumbed on. “Got any dinosaur pictures?”
Dad shook his head. “That’s over in the next aisle.” He strolled them around and reached out. “Here we are: Pterodactyl, Kite of Destruction! or what about Drums of Doom: The Saga of the Thunder Lizards! Pep you up, Jim?”
“I’m pepped!”
Dad winked at Will. Will winked back. They stood now, a boy with corn-colored hair and a man with moon-white hair, a boy with a summer-apple, a man with a winter-apple face. Dad, Dad, thought Will, why, why, he looks… like me in a smashed mirror!
And suddenly Will remembered nights rising at two in the morning to go to the bathroom and spying across town to see that one single light in the high library window and know Dad had lingered on late murmuring and reading alone under these green jungle lamps. It made Will sad and funny to see that light, to know the old man—he stopped to change the word—his father, was here in all this shadow.
“Will,” said the old man who was also a janitor who happened to be his father, “what about you?”
“Huh?” Will shook himself.
“You need a white-hat or a black-hat book?”
“Hats?” said Will.
“Well, Jim—” they perambulated, Dad running his fingers along the book spines—“he wears the black ten-gallon hats and reads books to fit. Middle name’s Moriarty, right, Jim? Any day now he’ll move up from Fu Manchu to Machiavelli here—medium-size dark fedora. Or over along to Dr. Faustus—extra large black Stetson. That leaves the white-hat boys to you, Will. Here’s Gandhi. Next door is St. Thomas. And on the next level, well… Buddha.”
“You don’t mind,” said Will, “I’ll settle for The Mysterious Island.”
“What,” asked Jim, scowling, “is all this talk about white and black hats?”
“Why—” Dad handed Jules Verne to Will—‘it’s just, a long time ago, I had to decide, myself, which color I’d wear.”
“So,” said Jim, “which did you pick?”
Dad looked surprised. Then he laughed uneasily.
“Since you need to ask, Jim, you make me wonder. Will, tell Mom I’ll be home soon. Get out of here, both of you. Miss Watriss!” he called softly to the librarian at the desk. “Dinosaurs and mysterious islands, coming up!”
The door slammed.
Outside, a weather of stars ran clear in an ocean sky.
“Heck.” Jim sniffed north, Jim sniffed south. “Where’s the storm? That darn salesman promised. I just got to watch that lightning fizz down my drainpipes!”
Will let the wind ruffle and refit his clothes, his skin, his hair. Then he said, faintly, “It’ll be here. By morning.”
“Who says?”
“The huckleberries all down my arms. They say.”
“Great!”
The wind flew Jim away.
A similar kite, Will swooped to follow.
Chapter 3
Watching the boys vanish away, Charles Halloway suppressed a sudden urge to run with them, make the pack. He knew what the wind was doing to them where it was taking them, to all the secret places that were never so secret again in life. Somewhere in him, a shadow turned mournfully over. You had to run with a night like this, so the sadness could not hurt.
Look! he thought. Will runs because running is its own excuse. Jim runs because something’s up ahead of him.
Yet, strangely, they do run together.
What’s the answer, he wondered, walking through the library, putting out the lights, putting out the lights, putting out the lights, is it all in the whorls on our thumbs and fingers? Why are some people all grasshopper fiddlings, scrapings, all antennae shivering, one big ganglion eternally knotting, slip-knotting, square-knotting themselves? They stoke a furnace all their lives, sweat their lips, shine their eyes and start it all in the crib. Caesar’s lean and hungry friends. They eat the dark, who only stand and breathe.
That’s Jim, all bramble-hair and itchweed.
And Will? Why, he’s the last peach, high on the summer tree. Some boys walk by and you cry, seeing them. They feel good, they look good, they are good. Oh, they’re not above peeing off a bridge, or stealing an occasional dime-store pencil sharpener; it’s not that. It’s just, you know, seeing them pass, that’s how they’ll be all their life; they’ll get hit, hurt, cut, bruised, and always wonder why, why does it happen? how can it happen to them?
But Jim, now, he knows it happens, he watches for it happening, he sees it start, he sees it finish, he licks the wound he expected, and never asks why; he knows. He always knew. Someone knew before him, a long time ago, someone who had wolves for pets and lions for night conversants. Hell, Jim doesn’t know with his mind. But his body knows. And while Will’s putting a bandage on his latest scratch, Jim’s ducking, waving, bouncing away from the knockout blow which must inevitably come.
So there they go, Jim running slower to stay with Will, Will running faster to stay with Jim, Jim breaking two windows in a haunted house because Will’s along, Will breaking one instead of none, because Jim’s watching. God, how we get our fingers in each other’s clay. That’s friendship, each playing the potter to see what shapes we can make of the other.
Jim, Will, he thought, strangers. Go on. I’ll catch up, some day…
The library door gasped open, slammed.
Five minutes later, he turned into the corner saloon for his nightly one-and-only drink, in time to hear a man say:
“…I read when alcohol was invented, the Italians thought it was the big thing they’d been looking for for centuries. The Elixir of Life! Did you know that?
“No.” The bartender’s back was turned.
“Sure,” the man went on. “Distilled wine. Ninth, tenth century. Looked like water. But it burnt. I mean, it not only burnt the mouth and stomach, but you could set it on fire. So they thought they’d mixed water and fire. Fire-water, the Elixir Vitae, by God. Maybe they weren’t so far wrong thinking it was the Cure-all, the thing that worked miracles. Have a drink!?”
“I don’t need it,” said Halloway. “But someone inside me does.”
“Who?”
The boy I once was, thought Halloway, who runs like the leaves down the sidewalk autumn nights.
But he couldn’t say that.
So he drank, eyes shut, listening to hear if that thing inside turned over again, rustling in the deep bons that were stacked for burning but never burned.
Chapter 4
Will stopped. Will looked at the Friday night town.
It seemed when the first stroke of nine banged from the big courthouse clock all the lights were on and business humming in the shops. But by the time the last stroke of nine shook everyone’s fillings in his teeth, the barbers had yanked off the sheets, powdered the customers, trotted them forth; the druggist’s fount had stopped fizzing like a nest of snakes, the insect neons everywhere had ceased buzzing, and the vast glittering acreage of the dime store with its ten billion metal, glass and paper oddments waiting to be fished over, suddenly blacked out. Shades slithered, doors boomed, keys rattled their bones in locks, people fled with hordes of torn newspaper mice nibbling their heels.
Bang! they were gone!
“Boy!” yelled Will. “Folks run like they thought the storm was here!”
“It is!” shouted Jim. “Us!”
They stomp-pound-thundered over iron grates, steel trap-doors, past a dozen unlit shops, a dozen half-lit, a dozen dying dark. The city was dead as they rounded the United Cigar Store corner to see a wooden Cherokee glide in darkness, by himself.
“Hey!”
Mr. Tetley, the proprietor, peered over the Indian’s shoulder.
“Scare you, boys?”
“Naw!”