don’t know what I want.” He looked at me. “Has that ever happened to you? Have
you ever wanted something but you can’t figure out what it is for the life of
you?”
“Yes sir,” I said. “Like sometimes when I think I want a Co’Cola but I
really want root beer.”
“Exactly. My throat’s as dusty as Ahmet’s pillow!” He walked past me and
peered out at the passing forest. There were no lights out there, under the
firmament. “So!” he said. “You know us now. What about you? I presume you’re
running away from home?”
“No sir. I mean… I’m just gettin’ away for a little while, I guess.”
“Trouble with your parents? With school?”
“Both of those,” I said.
He nodded, leaning against the boxcar’s opening. “The universal
tribulations of a boy. I, too, had such troubles. I, too, set out to get away
for a little while. Do you really think this will help your problems?”
“I don’t know. It was all I could think of.”
“The world,” Princey said, “is not like Zephyr, Cory. The world has no
affection for a boy. It can be a wonderful place, but it can also be savage
and vile. We should know.”
“Why is that?” I asked.
“Because we have traveled all over. We’ve seen this world, and we know
the people who live in it. Sometimes it scares me to death, thinking about
what’s out there: cruelty, callousness, utter disregard and disrespect for
fellow human beings. And it’s not getting better, Cory; it’s getting worse.”
He gazed up at the moon, which kept our pace. “‘O world,’” he said. “‘But that
thy strange mutations make us hate thee, life would not yield to age.’”
“Ain’t dat preddy?” Franklin asked.
“It’s Shakespeare,” Princey replied. “Talking about the universal
tribulations of men.” He turned from the moon and stared at me, his pupils
scarlet. “Would you like some advice from an older soul, Cory?”
I didn’t really want it, but I said, “Yes sir” to be polite.
He wore a bemused expression, as if he knew my thoughts. “I’ll give it to
you anyway. Don’t be in a hurry to grow up. Hold on to being a boy as long as
you can, because once you lose that magic, you’re always begging to find it
again.”
That sounded vaguely familiar to me, but I couldn’t remember where I’d
heard it before.
“Do you want to see something of the world, Cory?” he asked me.
I nodded, transfixed by his bloodred pupils.
“You’re in luck, then. I see a city’s lights.”
I stood up and looked out. And there in the distance, over the dragon’s
spine of twisted hills, the stars were washed out by earthly phosphorescence.
Princey explained to me that we would come to a part of that city where
the freight slowed as it entered the yards. It was then that we could abandon
our boxcar without breaking our legs. Gradually the city grew around us, from
wooden houses to brick houses to buildings of stone. Even at this late hour,
the city was alive. Neon signs blinked and buzzed. Cars sped along the
streets, and figures trudged the sidewalks. Then the freight train clattered
over the crisscrossed railyard tracks where other trains lay sleeping and
began to slow. When it was going the speed of a walking man, Franklin’s huge
shoes touched the ground. Then Ahmet went out, dust whuffing from his body as
he hit. “Go on, if you want to go,” Princey told me, standing at my back. I
scrambled out and landed all right, and then Princey made his exit. We had
arrived in the city, and I was a long way from home.
We walked across the railyard, the sounds of whistles and chugging
engines drifting around us. The air smelled burnt, though it was a cold fire.
Princey said we’d better find some shelter for the night. We kept going,
deeper along the gray streets that stood beneath the tall gray buildings,
though several times we had to stop and wait for Franklin, who indeed was a
slow mover.
We came to a place where alleys cut the walls, and neon reflected off
standing pools of water on the cracked concrete. As we were passing an alley,
I heard a grunting noise followed by the smacking of flesh. I stopped to look.
One man was holding another with his arms behind him, while a third
methodically beat the second man in the face with his fist. The second man was
bleeding from the nose and mouth, his eyes dazed and wet with fear. The man
who was doing the beating did this as if it were a common labor, like the
hacking down of a wayward tree. “Where’s the money, you motherfucker?” the
first man said in a voice of quiet evil. “You’re gonna give us the money.” The
beating continued, the third man’s knuckles red with blood. The victim made a
groaning, whimpering noise, and as the fist kept rising and falling, his
bruised face began to change shape.
A pale hand gripped my shoulder. “Let’s move along, shall we?”
Up ahead, a police car had pulled to the curb. Two policemen stood on
either side of a man with long hair and dressed in dirty clothes. They were
stocky and their guns gleamed in their black leather holsters. One of the
policemen leaned forward and shouted in the long-haired man’s face. Then the
other policeman grabbed a handful of that hair, spun him around, and slammed
his head against the windshield’s glass. The glass didn’t break, but the man’s
knees sagged. He didn’t try to fight back as he was shoved into the police
car. As they drove past us, I caught a glimpse of the man’s face peering out,
tendrils of blood creeping from his forehead.
Music throbbed and thumped from a doorway. It sounded like all rhyme and
no reason. A man sat against a wall, a puddle of urine between his legs. He
grinned at the air, his eyes demented. Two young men came along, and one of
them held a tin gasoline can. “Get up, get up!” the other one said, kicking at
the man on the ground. The demented one kept grinning. “Get up! Get up!” he
parroted. In the next second, gasoline sloshed over him. The other young man
pulled a pack of matches from his pocket.
Princey guided me around a corner. Franklin, slogging behind Ahmet,
sighed like a bellows, his face daubed with shadow.
A siren wailed, but it was going somewhere else. I felt sick to my
stomach, my skull pressured. Princey kept his hand on my shoulder, and it was
comforting.
Four women were standing on a corner, under the stuttering neon. They
were all younger than my mother but older than Chile Willow. They wore dresses
that might have been applied with paint, and they appeared to be waiting for
somebody important to come along. As we passed them, I smelled their sweet
perfume. I looked into the face of one of them, and I saw a blond-haired
angel. But something about that face was lifeless, like the face of a painted
doll. “Motherfucker better do me right,” she said to a dark-haired girl.
“Better fuckin’ score me, goddammit.”
A red car pulled up. The blond-haired angel switched on a smile to the
driver. The other girls crowded around, their eyes bright with false hope.
I didn’t like what I saw, and Princey guided me on.
In a doorway, a man in a denim jacket was standing over a woman sprawled
in a doorway. He was zipping up his pants. The woman’s face was a pulped mass
of black bruises. “There you go,” the man said. “Showed you, didn’t I? Showed
you who’s boss.” He reached down and grabbed her hair. “Say it, bitch.” He
shook her head. “Say who’s boss!”
Her swollen eyes were pleading. Her mouth opened, showing broken teeth.
“You are,” she said, and she began to cry. “You’re the boss.”
“Keep going, Cory,” Princey told me. “Don’t stop, don’t stop.”
I staggered on. Everywhere I looked, there was only mean concrete. I saw
not a hill nor a trace of green. I lifted my face, but the stars were blanked
out and the night a gray wash. We turned a corner and I heard a clatter. A
small white dog was searching desperately through garbage cans, its ribs
showing. Suddenly a hulking man was there, and he said, “Now I’ve got you” as
the dog stood staring at him with a banana peel in its mouth. The man lifted a
baseball bat and slammed it down across the dog’s back. The dog howled with
pain and thrashed, its spine broken, the banana peel lost. The man stood over
it, and he lifted the baseball bat and brought it down and then the dog had no
more muzzle or eyes, just a smashed red ruin. The white legs kept kicking, as
if trying to run.
“Little piece a shit,” the man said, and he stomped the skinny ribs with
his boot.
Tears burned my eyes. I stumbled, but Princey’s hand held me up. “Move
on,” he said. “Hurry.” I did, past the carnage. I was about to throw up, and I
fell against a wall of rough stones. Behind me, Franklin rumbled, “Da kid’s
too far from home, Princey. It ain’t right.”
“You think I like this?” Princey snapped. “Numb nuts.”
I came to the edge of the wall, and I stopped. I seemed to be looking
into a small room. I could hear voices raised in argument, but only a boy sat
in the room. He was about my age, I thought, but something in his face looked
older by far. The boy was staring at the floor, his eyes glassy as the arguing
voices got louder and louder. And then he picked up a sponge and a tube of
glue, the kind my buddies and I put plastic models together with. He squeezed
glue into the sponge, and then he pressed the sponge over his nose and closed
his eyes as he inhaled. After a minute he fell backward, his body starting to
convulse. His mouth was open, and his teeth began to clamp down again and
again on his tongue.
I shivered, sobbed, and looked away. Princey’s hand touched the back of
my head, and drew my face into his side.
“You see, Cory?” he whispered, and his voice was tight with strangled
rage. “This world eats up boys. You’re not ready yet to shove a broomstick
down its throat.”
“I want to… I want to…”
“Go home,” Princey said. “Home to Zephyr.”
We were back at the railyard, amid the whistles and chugs. Princey said
they’d go back some of the way with me, to make sure I caught the right train.
Here came a Southern Railroad freight train, with one of its boxcars partway
open. “This is the one!” Princey said, and he jumped up into the opening.
Franklin went next, moving fast on those big old shoes when he had to. Then
Ahmet, his cracked flesh puffing dust with every step.
The train was picking up speed. I started running alongside the boxcar,
trying to find a grip, but there was no ladder. “Hey!” I shouted. “Don’t leave
me!”
It began pulling away. I had to run hard to keep up. The boxcar’s opening
was dark. I couldn’t see Princey, Franklin, or Ahmet in there. “Don’t leave
me!” I shouted frantically as my legs began to weaken.
“Jump, Cory!” Princey urged from the darkness. “Jump!”
The tons of steel wheels were grinding beside me. “I’m scared!” I said,
losing ground.
“Jump!” Princey said. “We’ll catch you!”
I couldn’t see them in there. I couldn’t see anything but dark. But the
city was at my back, part of the world that ate up boys.
I would have to have faith.
I lunged forward, and I leaped upward toward the dark doorway.
I was falling. Falling through cold night and stars.
My eyes opened with a jolt.
I could hear the freight train’s whistle, moving somewhere beyond Zephyr
on its way to that other world.
I sat up, next to Davy Ray’s grave.
My sleep had lasted only ten minutes or so. But I had gone a long way,
and come back shaken and sick inside but safe. I knew the world beyond Zephyr
wasn’t all bad. After all, I read National Geographic. I knew about the beauty
of the cities, the art museums, and the monuments to courage and humanity. But
just like the moon, part of the world lay hidden. As the man who had been
murdered on Zephyr earth lay hidden from the moonlight. The world, like
Zephyr, was not all good and not all bad. Princey—or whatever Princey had
been—was right; I had some growing up to do before I faced that monster. Right
now, though, I was a boy who wanted to sleep in his own bed, and wake up with
his mother and father in the house. The apology to Leatherlungs still stuck in
my craw. I’d hack through that jungle when I got there.
I stood up, under the blazing stars. I looked at the grave, sadly fresh.
“Good-bye, Davy Ray,” I said, and I rode Rocket home.
The next day, Mom commented on how tired I looked. She asked if I’d had a
bad dream. I said it was nothing I couldn’t handle. Then she made me some
pancakes.
The apology remained unwritten. While I was in my room that evening, my
monsters watching me from the walls, I heard the telephone ring four different
times. Dad and Mom came in to talk to me. “Why didn’t you tell us?” Dad asked.
“We didn’t know that teacher was raggin’ the kids so hard.” He was, as I’ve
said before, familiar with being ragged.
One of the callers had been Sally Meachum’s mother. Another had been the
Demon’s mustachioed mater. Ladd Devine’s dad had called, and Joe Peterson’s
mother. They had told my parents what their kids had told them, and suddenly
it appeared that though I was certainly wrong for flying off the handle and
whacking Leatherlungs’ glasses off, Leatherlungs herself was responsible for
some of this.
“It’s not right for a teacher to call anybody’s child a blockhead.
Everybody deserves respect, no matter how old or young they are,” Dad told me.
“Tomorrow I believe I’ll have a little talk with Mr. Cardinale and straighten
this thing out.” He gave me a puzzled look. “But why in the world didn’t you
tell us to begin with, Cory?”
I shrugged. “I guess I didn’t think you’d take my side of it.”
“Well,” Dad said, “it seems to me we didn’t have enough faith in you, did
we, partner?”
He ruffled my hair.
It sure was nice, being back.
3
Snippets of the Quilt
DAD DID GO TO MR. CARDINALE. THE PRINCIPAL, WHO HAD already heard rumors from
the other teachers that Leatherlungs was a burnt-out case two bricks shy of a
load, decided that the time I’d spent away from school was enough. No apology
was necessary.
I returned to find I was a conquering hero. In years to come, no
