He shrugged, ducked his head, scuffed a foot on the carpet. We were in the hallway, by the telephone stand. I heard my mother’s voice from the room beyond, though the door was closed and she was talking in a whisper. The voice of Casper’s mother came right back at her in raspy collusion. Casper just stared at the closed door as if to say, There, there’s your answer.
After a moment he said, “What’s the matter — you afraid?”
I was twelve now, twelve and a half. How could anyone at that age admit to fear? “No,” I said, “I’m not afraid.”
The Duryea house lay outside the confines of the development. It was a rental house, two stories over a double garage in need of paint and shingles, and it sat on a steep rutted dirt road half a mile away. There were no streetlights along that unfinished road and the trees overhung it so that the deepest shadows grew deeper still beneath them. It was a warm, slick, humid night at the end of May, the sort of night that surprises you with its richness and intensity, smells heightened, sounds muffled, lights blurred to indistinction. When we left Casper’s it was drizzling.
Casper bought the eggs, two dozen, at the corner store out on the highway. His parents were rich — rich compared to mine, at any rate — and he always seemed to have money. The storekeeper was a tragic-looking man with purple rings of puffed flesh beneath his eyes and a spill of gut that was like an avalanche beneath the smeared white front of his apron. Casper slipped two cigars into his pocket while I distracted the man with a question about the chocolate milk — did it come in a smaller size?
As we started up the dirt road, eggs in hand, Casper was strangely silent. When a dog barked from the driveway of a darkened house he clutched my arm, and a moment later, when a car turned into the street, he pulled me into the bushes and crouched there, breathing hard, till the headlights faded away. “Maki Duryea,” he whispered, chanting it as he’d chanted it a hundred times before, “Maki Duryea, Maki Duryea.” My heart was hammering. I didn’t want to do this. I didn’t know why I was doing it, didn’t yet realize that the whole purpose of the exercise was to invert our parents’ values, trash them, grind them into the dirt, and that all ethical considerations were null in the face of that ancient imperative. I was a freedom fighter. The eggs were hand grenades. I clutched them to my chest.
We hid ourselves in the wild tangle of shrubs gone to seed outside the house and watched the steady pale lighted windows for movement. My hair hung limp with the drizzle. Casper squatted over his ankles and fingered his box of eggs. I could barely make him out. At one point a figure passed in front of the window — I saw the hair, the mat of it, the sheen — and it might have been Maki, but I wasn’t sure. It could have been her mother. Or her sister or aunt or grandmother — it could have been anybody. Finally, when I was as tired of crouching there in the bushes as I’ve ever been tired of being anywhere, even the dentist’s, the lights flicked off. Or no, they didn’t just flick off — they exploded in darkness and the black torrent of the night rushed in to engulf the house.
Casper rose to his feet. I heard him fumbling with his cardboard carton of eggs. We didn’t speak — speech would have been superfluous. I rose too. My eggs, palpable, smooth, fit the palm of my hand as if they’d been designed for it. I raised my arm — baseball, football, basketball — and Casper stirred beside me. The familiar motion, the rush of air: I will never forget the sound of that first egg loosing itself against the front of the house, a wetness there, a softness, the birth of something. No weapon, but a weapon all the same.
The summer sustained me. Hot, unfettered, endless. On the first day of vacation I perched in an apple tree at the end of the cul-de-sac that bordered the development and contemplated the expanse of time and pleasure before me, and then it was fall and I was in junior high. Maki Duryea had moved. I’d heard as much from Casper, and one afternoon, at the end of summer, I hiked up that long rutted dirt road to investigate. The house stood empty. I climbed the ridge behind it to peer in through the naked windows and make sure. Bare floors stretched to bare walls.
And then, in the confusion of the big parking lot at the junior high where fifty buses deposited the graduates of a dozen elementary schools, where I felt lost and out of place and shackled in a plaid long-sleeved shirt new that morning from the plastic wrapping, I saw her. She sprang down from another bus in a cascade of churning legs and arms and anxious faces, a bookbag slung over one shoulder, hair ironed to her waist. I couldn’t move. She looked up then and saw me and she smiled. Then she was gone.
That night, as I slapped a hard black ball against the side of the house, thinking nothing, I caught a faint electrifying whiff of a forgotten scent on the air, and there he was, the fog man, rattling by the house in his open jeep. My bike lay waiting at the curb and my first impulse was to leap for it, but I held off. There was something different here, something I couldn’t quite place at first. And then I saw what it was: the fog man was wearing a mask, a gas mask, the sort of thing you saw in war movies. He’d collected the usual escort of knee-pumping neighborhood kids by the time he’d made his second pass down the street in front of our house, and I’d moved to the curb now to study this phenomenon, this subtle alteration in the texture of things. He looked different in the mask, sinister somehow, and his eyes seemed to glitter.
The fog obliterated the houses across from me, the wheeling children vanished, the low black roiling clouds melted toward me across the perfect sweep of the lawn. And then, before I knew what I was doing, I was on my bike with the rest of them, chasing the fog man through the mist, chasing him as if my life depended on it.
SITTING ON TOP OF THE WORLD
PEOPLE WOULD ASK HER what it was like. She’d watch them from her tower as they weaved along the trail in their baseball caps and day packs, their shorts, hiking boots and sneakers. The brave ones would mount the hundred and fifty wooden steps hammered into the face of the mountain to stand at the high-flown railing of the little glass-walled shack she called home for seven months a year. Sweating, sucking at canteens and bota bags, heaving for breath in the undernourished air, they would ask her what it was like. “Beautiful,” she would say. “Peaceful.”
But that didn’t begin to express it. It was like floating untethered, drifting with the clouds, like being cupped in the hands of God. Nine thousand feet up, she could see the distant hazy rim of the world, she could see Mount Whitney rising up above the crenellations of the Sierra, she could see stars that haven’t been discovered yet. In the morning, she was the first to watch the sun emerge from the hills to the east, and in the evening, when it was dark beneath her, the valleys and ridges gripped by the insinuating fingers of the night, she was the last to see it set. There was the wind in the trees, the murmur of the infinite needles soughing in the uncountable branches of the pines, sequoias and cedars that stretched out below her like a carpet. There was daybreak. There was the stillness of 3:00 A.M. She couldn’t explain it. She was sitting on top of the world.
Don’t you get lonely up here? they’d ask. Don’t you get a little stir-crazy?
And how to explain that? Yes, she did, of course she did, but it didn’t matter. Todd was up here with her in the summer, one week on, one week off, and then the question was meaningless. But in September he went back to the valley, to his father, to school, and the world began to drag round its tired old axis. The hikers stopped coming then too. At the height of summer, on a weekend, she’d see as many as thirty or forty in the course of a day, but now, with the fall coming on, they left her to herself — sometimes she’d go for days without seeing a soul.