One hot morning, Skyler was crossing an upper field on the Campus when he walked by the vegetable garden and heard his name being whispered. He looked around, but saw no one. Again, he heard it, coming from behind a row of waist-high corn.
He ducked behind it and there was Raisin. He had been sent to do weeding, and his head and cheek were smudged with dirt. His hair was growing back in ungainly clumps, his eyes looked pink and watery, and he was disturbingly gaunt. He had a wild look about the eyes.
"I have to get away," he said, grabbing Skyler's arm and squeezing it so tightly it almost hurt. "You have to come, too. The things I've learned — down there, in the basement. You have no idea what's going on. Horrible things. We all have to get away."
Skyler didn't want this. He was scared. Raisin was acting so strangely — there were little bubbles of spittle at the corner of his lips, and he seemed to be babbling with the urgency of what he wanted to say. The others would be coming right behind him and — Skyler felt a stab of guilt — he knew he would get into trouble for being with him.
Still, Raisin was his friend, his oldest friend. He needed him. Skyler would hear him out and do whatever he wanted.
"I want you to come with me," Raisin said. "I can break out. Tomorrow night. We'll meet at the boathouse and take the boat. We'll go on to the other side. We'll be out of here — for good. We'll be safe."
Skyler agreed. He felt dread in his stomach. The others were approaching.
"Eight o'clock," whispered Raisin. "Eight o'clock at the boathouse. Don't be late!"
The next night Skyler felt his heart pounding as the hour approached. He listened carefully for the chiming of the grandfather clock in the Big House and heard it strike seven. He made a small bundle — two shirts, an extra pair of socks, a small pocketknife, a paperback book on Charles Darwin — to carry with him.
The mainland! What would it be like?
His hands and feet felt cold with fear. I'm a good friend, he told himself — a loyal friend.
Then something unforeseen happened. There was a noise way off in the distance, a thin crash that sounded a bit like glass breaking. It could have come from the Big House, though he wasn't sure. He listened intently, but everything was quiet.
Five or ten minutes later, he heard footsteps, a heavy tread on the pathway leading to the boys' barracks. The door swung open and in stepped an Orderly. He surveyed the room, pulled a chair up against the door and sat in it, his arms folded. The other Jimminies were stunned; nothing like this had ever happened before.
Gradually, they settled down. One by one Skyler heard them drop off to sleep, the sounds of their steady breathing. He stole looks over his blanket at the Orderly, sitting there, implacable.
Skyler waited. He watched. Then he, too, fell asleep.
He awoke sometime in the early morning hours. The chair was beside the door, empty. Otherwise, nothing had changed. He leapt out of bed, dressed and went to the door, leaving the bundle behind under his bed. When he stepped outside, he could see dawn was already coming up in the east.
He ran to the boathouse. And then his heart soared. The lock was broken — the door was swinging open a half foot or so. He crept up to it, softly placed a hand upon the latch and pulled it wider, peering inside. The light was dim. There was the slip inside between two narrow docks that hugged the walls, the sound of water lapping the base of the piers. And on the other side the bay doors were open — he could see straight through to the bay. The boat was gone!
Outside, four feet from the door, he saw a small object. He bent to examine it and then picked it up and held it in his hand. Raisin's toy soldier.
That afternoon, he learned that Raisin had never made it to the mainland. He had lost his way in the marshes, they were told, and at high tide the boat had been caught in the treacherous currents. It had capsized and he had drowned. The boat had been discovered floating upside down a half mile from shore, and when it had been turned upright, Raisin had been found, his lungs filled with water, his face a ghostly blue and one leg caught under the wooden seat.
At the funeral service, Baptiste theorized that the escape had brought on a seizure. He managed to say some good things about Raisin. Julia, Patrick and many of the other Jimminies wept openly; something in Raisin's whole saga touched a chord of tragedy in their world, and they sensed it would never be the same. As for Skyler, he was too devastated even to cry. He felt he had lost his only brother.
He put some of the blame on Kuta. For a while, he stopped coming to the shack, but then, when he found he missed the old man a great deal, he resumed his occasional visits. He still basked in the warmth of his company, but it wasn't the same. When there had been three of them, the old man talking and the two boys drinking it in like wine, it had felt like a family.
Lying in bed, Skyler marveled at the human mind. Here he had tried to avoid thinking about Raisin and his death a decade ago. He had tried to construct roadblocks to prevent thinking about it, and his mind had led him on a back route to that self-same destination.
He felt his hands and feet go cold again, just as they had that fateful night.
He reached under the bed and searched with one hand for the object. When he didn't find it at once, he feared that it was missing, but then he struck it with his finger. He lifted the wooden soldier up and placed it under the thin blanket.
Raisin dead. Now Patrick. Who would be next? How many more would there be? Had Raisin been right: were none of them safe?
Chapter 2
Jude Harley had been on the West Side anyway to conduct an interview, and so he'd decided to walk to his office at the newspaper on Fifth Avenue. He passed a traffic snarl on West Forty-sixth and watched a taxi driver lean on his horn, sending a blast echoing up and down the street. Blocking the road ahead was a flatbed truck piled with steel girders; on top of them stood three construction workers in yellow hard hats, looking up. Jude followed their gaze. Thirty floors above, a girder being hoisted by a crane rocked at the end of a cable like a balancing pencil. The taxi honked again.
Jude was a bit put off by the new, sparkling Midtown. Not that he would have willed it back to the old days of the pushers and the prostitutes — it was simply that so many of the new stores were slick and shallow. Crass commercialism had triumphed again. He passed a shop and peered into the window at statuettes of the Empire State Building and Miss Liberty, plates emblazoned with the skyline, foot-tall dummies of Charlie Chaplin and Madonna and Elvis. Not long ago, it had been one of his favorite bars, a darkened den with wooden booths, a jukebox of Sinatra songs and a painting so blackened by grit that only old-timers knew it was of Joe Louis delivering the knock-out punch to Max Schmeling.
That was another problem with change — it made you feel old. And at the ripe age of thirty, with young adulthood finally behind him, reasonably secure in his career, unattached or free — depending upon your point of view — and standing in the middle of the tumult of the greatest city in the world, one thing he did not want to be feeling was old.
He walked east past the towering office blocks of Sixth Avenue until he came to Fifth Avenue, then turned uptown. The crowd was light for a Saturday morning, but it thickened when he came to Rockefeller Center. He was in no hurry to get to work, so he ducked down the walkway lined with airlines, bookstores and chocolate shops. His reflection popped up in the plate-glass windows, dogging him.