Читать книгу The World of Normal Boys - K.M. Soehnlein - Страница 11

Chapter Four

His eyes open, then shut against the bright assault. He hears his name, wags his head to shake off sleep. Even through his eyelids, he can tell the room is holding too much light. Again, a voice. Ruby’s.

“Nana Rena’s here,” she says.

Robin pulls his arms down from above his head—his sleeping position—and props himself up on one elbow. He breathes deep before making the effort of opening his eyes again. A pain somewhere below the back of his neck clamps against his shoulder. He jerks to a sitting position to relieve the pressure, rubs his hand where it hurts. The room looks like a black-and-white photo, all the color sucked out by the sunlight.

Ruby is sitting upright on the edge of Jackson’s bed, watching him. Her heels are kicking backward into the bedspread and the metal frame beneath. Her uncombed hair is straining against a couple of crudely placed barrettes. “We don’t have to go to school today,” she says.

“What time is it?”

“It’s lunch,” she says. “Nana wants you to get up and eat something. Mom and Dad are at the hospital.” He feels instantly annoyed to have been left behind, but also something else—some vague relief.

She says, “Do you feel like eating olive loaf? That’s what Nana’s making. Olive loaf sandwiches.”

He groans and drops his head into his palms, presses his fingertips into his face. “What’s going on with Jackson?” he mutters, filling his cupped hands with his moist, sour breath.

“Uh ... uh ... I don’t know.” Her heels thud faster into the bedframe.

“What do you mean you don’t know?” he says, then wishes he didn’t because when he looks up her face is a guilt-stricken mask.

“I don’t know,” she says. Her voice nearly cracks and her face seems to be growing flatter as she tries to hold back tears or a wail or something.

“OK, sorry,” he says. “Sorry.” Her face relaxes a little. He presses his fingers deep into the gristly shoulder muscle, still aching. He senses another, more familiar pressure in his lap, realizes he’s woken with a boner, realizes he has to pee badly. He wants Ruby to leave, but except for her swinging legs, she isn’t moving. She’s staring past his face at something. “You were doing it again,” she says. “Picking at the paint in your sleep.”

He looks behind at his headboard. A jagged circular patch the size of a dinner plate has been scratched into the blue-black woodgrain varnish. The exposed spot is smooth and pale like hard plastic, and certainly bigger than the last time he took note of it. He scans his fingernails and sees the telltale dark filings embedded there. His father has yelled at him about this but he doesn’t know what to do about it, he can’t very well control what he does in his sleep.

“You were doing it when I came in here,” Ruby says. Her face holds a certain fascination in the midst of everything else it’s telegraphing—the guilt, the anticipation—which pisses him off.

“Yeah, well.” He almost says, At least I don’t wet my bed—which was Ruby’s problem for years—but something tells him that’s the wrong attitude to take with her under the circumstances. Then he remembers his conversation with his mother in the car. He sucks another heavy intake of air and says, “You know, it’s not your fault.” The words don’t come out as comforting as they were supposed to.

Her face freezes again. “What?”

“You know”—he nods his head toward Jackson’s pillow—“what happened.”

“I know.” Her eyes move inside their sockets as if she’s trying to remember something she’s been told. “Umm . . . it was an accident.”

“That’s right.” He nods vigorously, and she mirrors the gesture, matching him nod for nod. This seems to do the trick. Ruby hops to the floor, turns around, and smoothes out the spot where she had been sitting. “See you downstairs,” she says as she exits.

He tears off the covers and makes a dash for the bathroom. He taps his toes on the cold tile until his bladder lets go and he pisses for what seems like forever. The releasing of it actually hurts. At the first sense of his muscles relaxing, it’s as though the air in the room begins to stir, blowing back at him the noisy memories of the day before. “Goddamn it,” he says, suddenly finding himself on the top of the slide, looking down at Jackson’s striped shirt. “Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.”

Ruby is sitting at the kitchen table, studying the flat sandwich on her plate with a degree of scrutiny intense even for her. As far as Robin can tell it’s just the usual pink meat on white bread with a yellow smear of butter—the way she always has it—though Ruby’s lifted off the top slice of bread and is poking at the insides, dropping her head close for a good sniff. When she looks up at him, her eyes bug out a little; it’s that guilty look he saw upstairs in his bedroom. The feeling that the two of them are accomplices in a crime against their brother is so strong it takes all his concentration not to think about it, which he knows doesn’t make very much sense: thinking hard about what you want to forget. With her wounded stare focused on him, Ruby looks like something stuffed with too much of something else, as though she might literally burst open. Robin has a sudden flash that this is the face Ruby will be wearing all the time now, and he feels angry again, wishing she could just play it cool the way they’re supposed to, at least until someone tells them what is going on.

Across the room, at the counter, is their grandmother, her broad back to them, her doughy elbows poking into the air. She is building a pile of sandwiches like the one on Ruby’s plate.

“Robin’s here,” Ruby announces.

“And it’s a good thing, too, with enough food to feed an army of boys twice his size,” Nana Rena says.

Robin hasn’t seen his grandmother since the summer, at a family picnic at her house in Massachusetts. The sight of her, the sound of her peculiar accent—that funny Polish roughness mixed in with the twangy New England vowels—is an instant comfort. She’s the first person, the first anything, he’s seen since the playground that looks and sounds exactly the way it’s supposed to. She’s wearing her “around the house” wig today—the plainer, grayer of the two she has—and her green dress, the one with the hundreds of faded blue flowers printed onto it. In the past Robin and Ruby and Jackson have joked about Nana Rena’s wardrobe, about the three ugly dresses she wears in regular rotation, but today the sight of this dress couldn’t be more welcome.

She turns around slowly, balancing herself carefully in a series of steps that allows her weight to shift in increments. Robin’s never seen her pivot from the waist; in fact he isn’t sure that under her big square frocks she actually has a waist. He thinks of his mother’s joke: “It’s easier to jump over Nana Rena than walk around her.”

“Well I’d like to say good morning,” she says, “but you couldn’t find enough good to kick your boots at today.”

He walks to her open arms and lets himself be clasped into the meat of her, her thick fingers combing through his hair. He smells her predictable smells, the battle between cooking and cleansers, the heaviness of age in her breath. He lets himself stay there against her for a lot longer than usual. Only when his eyelids begin to dampen does he pull back.

“Did you drive all the way down here?”

“Since the crack of dawn,” Nana says, arranging a sandwich and some potato chips on a plate. “I had to fight for a day off, if you can believe. As if those girls couldn’t go a day without me. The world is full of places that need kitchen help and full of bosses who give you a darn day off, and if Smith College won’t let me out when my own grandson is at death’s door—” She cuts herself off suddenly.

“Mom said Jackson’s not going to die,” Robin says.

Nana Rena moves her hand swiftly through the air in front of her face and chest, a blur that Robin recognizes as her abbreviated Sign of the Cross. He knows what the next thing out of her mouth will be—“P.G.,” which means, “Please, God.” She hands him the plate she’s been fixing. He stares at the food and can’t decide if he is very hungry or if it will make him sick. Nana Rena says, “I don’t know what the doctors are telling her today but when I was over there this morning, there wasn’t anyone breaking out the champagne.”

Against his better judgment Robin finds himself looking back over to Ruby, to see what her reaction to these words will be. Her frightened, guilt-stricken face has given way to something more focused and intent, and she opens her mouth to ask a question. “What about a guardian angel?”

“You mean for Jackson?” Robin asks, surprised.

“Well everyone has one. Nana, doesn’t everyone have one?”

Nana Rena nods without a great deal of force and says, “You just say your prayers, young lady, and you’ll get all the guarding you need.”

Ruby looks off into the air, her gaze fixed on nothing in particular. “Can you pray to a guardian angel or does it have to be to God directly?”

Nana puts her hands on her hips and pauses for a moment. “If there’s any doubt, you should go right to the top.”

“What do I do? Just ask God to make him better?”

“What else would you do?” Robin asks, impatient with this discussion. It’s like being in school and one kid keeps asking all the questions, tying up the whole class, and you can’t figure out why the teacher just doesn’t tell him to shut up.

“There are other prayers, you know,” Ruby says. “You know, real prayers like ‘Hail Mary’ and that stuff.”

“Anything will do,” Nana says. “These days, anything will do for the Catholics. We didn’t used to have it so easy; you used to work for your grace. When I think about how many rosaries I’ve said—”

“I think a guardian angel might be more friendly than God,” Ruby says hopefully.

Robin slaps his sandwich to the plate. “We don’t even go to church anymore,” he says to Ruby. “So what makes you think you know so much about it? Since Jackson’s first communion, we never even go.”

“So? I can pray if I want to. It’s a free country.”

Nana speaks up. “Your mother has to live with herself for that. I won’t take the blame. Eighteen years bringing my children to church every Sunday. I did my part.” As she speaks, she repeatedly squirts a mist of blue, all-purpose cleanser from a bottle. She bends into her work, her arm militantly arcing a dishcloth across the countertop. “Of course, things are on the up and up now that we’ve got one of us in the Vatican.” A delighted smile takes hold of her; Nana has treated the recent appointment of the first Polish pope as a kind of modern-day miracle.

Robin bites into his sandwich and stops listening. He likes everything about his grandmother but her unwavering belief. If he prayed to God right now would Jackson get better? If he prays to God and Jackson doesn’t get better what would that prove? Flashes of going to mass: people mumbling lengthy, memorized prayers, standing, sitting, kneeling like robots, the priest trying to convince everyone (even himself?) about the lessons in the Bible. Lessons thousands of years old! What did the Bible have to say about guys like Larry, who bullied and hurt people and got away with it? What did it have to say about high school? Or wet dreams, or Todd Spicer, or thinking about boys the way you’re supposed to think about girls?

He shakes his head to clear his thoughts, hating the fact that one piece of confusion inevitably leads to another: that thought he just had about boys—about liking boys instead of girls—that was a thought he’d never quite made into a sentence before, with a beginning, a middle and an end, even in his head. He concentrates on chewing his sandwich, on the way the slippery meat with the smooth flecks of green olives and pimentos sliced into it wads up into the bread between his teeth. Salt and sweet on his tongue. A lump going down his throat into his belly. A beginning, a middle, and an end. Communion never had any taste at all.

A car is coming up the driveway. Ruby runs to the window and then returns to the kitchen. “It’s Aunt Corinne,” she says. “I think she brought food.”

Nana Rena checks her wig with her hands, rocking the hairpiece from side to side until she judges it just right. “Well, don’t leave them waiting out there, Ruby. Go on. Let them in.”

Ruby remains in place. “She’s with Larry,” she says, her face blanking out again.

The doorbell’s ding-dong-ding chimes around them. “Go on, Ruby,” Nana Rena repeats.

Robin understands that Ruby doesn’t want to see Larry. He stands up dramatically, both hands on the table, hissing an exasperated take-charge sigh. “I’ll get it.”

Corinne’s face is the picture of pity—neck tilting to the side, lips pursed in a frown, eyes glossy and blinking. The softness under her chin is rippled into itself. Her hair is pulled back into a single ponytail, with plastic combs above her ears keeping it all flat and shiny. Robin can detect none of the goofiness he saw Sunday night, when she was dressed up in her World Series outfit.

She holds a Corningware dish covered with its own fitted plastic lid. “I made that one I know you like: green beans and cream of mushroom? Larry’s got the dried onion rings.”

“Thanks. I’ll take it.” Flat heat settles on his palms. Larry is standing behind her, nearly hidden, looking over his shoulder at . . . what? Robin follows his glance for a moment—Corinne’s tan Vega parked halfway up the drive, the row of hedges between his place and the Delatores’, a yellowed copy of the Community News at the curb. He quickly gathers that Larry is probably staring at anything but him.

“Hey,” Robin says to Larry. Their eyes hold for a moment, and Robin imagines that the wide, empty look he sees there could just be another version of what he and Ruby are feeling. But then Larry squints and curls his lip in a way that makes Robin feel as if he’s just been told to shut up.

“Here,” Larry says, dropping a red-and-blue can on top of the casserole. Robin tilts his right hand up to keep the onion rings from rolling off as Larry shoves his way inside.

Nana Rena and Aunt Corinne hug each other. “You’re looking good, Mother. That’s a very nice dress. And how are things at Smith?”

“Except for the Hitler I work for, just fine, just fine. We’ve got a lovely crop of girls in this year’s house. They know how to be ladies at the dinner table. I think the unrest of the past few years is over and done.”

Corinne laughs, “Oh, you know, young people and their self-expression.”

“The time comes to settle down—that’s the truth. Have your fun and settle down. Of course, Dottie’s fun came after she left Smith. She didn’t get to be so wild, what with me working there.”

Robin leaves the two women to their small talk. Larry follows him to the kitchen, maintaining his hands-in-pockets silence.

“Where’s Ruby?” he asks finally.

Robin looks around. “I don’t know. She was just here.”

Larry absorbs this information without a word. Robin goes back to the table to munch on some potato chips. The clock says 1:30. He’s already wondering how long they’ll stay.

“So you been to the hospital?”

“Last night, but I didn’t see Jackson.”

“He’s pretty messed up?”

“What do you think? He took a bad fall.”

Larry stares at him, his face set in a challenge. “I don’t know about you, but I think he jumped. I mean, he went over the bar.”

Robin studies Larry’s face to figure out how serious he’s being. “No way,” he says. “He got knocked off.”

“Bullcrap,” Larry says. “He was always doing that shit: jumping out of trees and running in front of cars and all. He’s crazy.”

Jackson does have that streak to him. Robin remembers the time they went to Howe Caverns in upstate New York and Jackson, who was about five at the time, sneaked off the trail and got lost somewhere deep inside the damp, unlit corners. When the guide found him he was high up on a ledge; he said he’d been playing Tom Sawyer. But something about this doesn’t seem right. “If he jumped, he wouldn’t have landed on his head,” he says. “Maybe he would’ve broke his leg or something.”

“Well, it’s not my fault,” Larry says, grabbing a fistful of chips from Robin’s plate, shoving half of them into his mouth.

“Yeah, that’s what my mother said,” Robin says, watching as the chips turn into golden mulch between Larry’s lips, remembering Stan devouring lasagna the night before. “She told me I’m supposed to tell you that it’s not your fault.” He sours his voice so that Larry understands that he’s repeating something he doesn’t believe.

Larry lowers his voice. “Listen to this: just say he jumped. Otherwise they’ll try to pin it on us. I’m telling you, we should stick together.”

“You’re mental,” Robin says, but he finds something powerful, self-protective, in Larry’s words.

Larry pulls a carton of milk from the fridge. “What’s this ‘two percent’ mean?” he asks. “Is it skim?”

“It’s for people on a diet,” Robin says. “Like my mother.”

Larry pours some in a glass. “I should give some to my mother. All she ever talks about is Weight Watchers.” He raises the pitch of his voice. “‘Myrna said I can eat anything I want as long as it’s in small portions.’ I said, ‘Yeah, Mom, except some of us around here are already skinny.’ ”

“You’re a growing boy,” Robin says, putting on his own fake-mother voice.

“That’s right,” Larry says and chugs the milk. He wipes his mouth on his jacket sleeve and then leans closer to Robin. “I’m growing hair near my dick,” he says, his voice lowered. “Wanna see?”

Robin looks away and then back. Larry’s holding out his jeans from the waist with his thumb. He raises his eyebrows twice. Robin shrugs, then leans forward. Larry takes a step toward him, then another, then unhooks his thumb and bops Robin’s nose with it.

“I bet you do!” He howls contemptuously.

“You reject!” Robin hisses. He grabs Larry’s shirt with one hand and tosses him aside, harder than he thought he could, into the countertop. Larry’s elbow sends the casserole skidding into Nana’s plate of sandwiches.

Corinne’s voice from the living room: “What’s going on in there?”

“Cool out, man,” Larry demands.

“I’m going up to my room,” Robin says.

“Hey, man,” Larry says. “Remember, we gotta stick together. And tell your sister, too!”

Corinne is suddenly there in the doorway. “Tell your sister what?” she asks.

“Nothing,” Larry says.

Robin looks from mother to son and back again. “Yeah, nothing. Just, you know, hope she’s doing OK.”

Corinne smiles. “Well, Robin, you can tell her that from me, too. We’ve got to get going now. Tell your mother I’ll call later. Maybe we’ll stop by tonight with Stan.”

“Sure.” Robin follows them back to the living room, where Nana Rena is holding out Corinne’s coat.

“Maybe there’ll be some good news, P.G.,” she says.

Larry gives Robin a punch on the shoulder as he heads toward the front door. “Later, man.” He adds a final nod—a reminder of the new game plan.

In his room with the door closed, Robin replays the scene with Larry over in his mind. He slams his fists into the bed—enraged at how Larry just gets to him every time. What if Larry’s right? What if there is trouble ahead for all of them and they really ought to blame it on Jackson? No one would question that Jackson gets himself into trouble over and over again. Why should this thing be any different? Still, the image that remains from the day before is of Larry turning Jackson over on the ground, the noise of Jackson’s bones cracking. Whose fault was that?

Jackson’s just got to get better, he’s just got to be all right and then none of this will be a problem. Robin hasn’t been able to think about this with any outcome except Jackson dying or Jackson being retarded, but maybe . . . maybe the doctors will figure something out. They’re doctors after all. That’s what they’re supposed to do. And why haven’t his parents called? He wishes now that they had woken him up this morning and taken him along. Then he wouldn’t have had to deal with any of this . . . Ruby being weird, and Larry being . . .

He lays on his back and pushes down his pants. He’s got hair growing around his dick, too—seems like more every day. Each one is curvy and long. They start in one direction, then twist around like question marks. Darker than on his head or legs, more like the few brownish hairs starting to poke out from his armpits. He wishes he did get a look at Larry’s, and Larry knew it, too. That’s the worst of it. He wishes he got to see Larry again like on Sunday night, naked and shaking it around. He wants to compare, and he wants to know if Larry knows how to jerk it off like he’s discovered. It feels perverted to think this way, but he starts getting hard, pushing his penis up toward his belly, tangling it up with his pubic hair. He lets the heat of his hand increase the stiffness. He does this until he can’t think of anything else, all the pressures of the world lining up behind this one pressure from the core of his body: shuddery, rough, soundless. He closes his eyes and concentrates on himself, just himself getting crazier and stronger at the same time, stronger than anyone, definitely stronger and tougher and bigger than Larry.

Nana Rena is sleeping on the couch in the living room, her feet, misshapen from years of serving meals to rich college girls, propped on a pillow. Ruby crouches on the carpet. A sketchbook she’s been drawing in rests open on the floor, a shock of black and red streaked across it. The TV glows blue-gray from the wall, the volume low, a soap opera sending out images of intrigue and heartache.

When the phone rings, both Ruby and Nana Rena stir, but Robin leaps to his feet first, dashing to the kitchen. “Hello?”

“Hey, champ.” A very deep man’s voice, almost no emotion.

“Dad?”

An attempt at an offended chuckle. “Who’d you think?”

“You sounded different.”

Ruby’s at his side, waiting.

“Well, it’s been a rough day.” Quick sigh. “You holding down the fort?”

Out of the corner of his eye, Robin catches Nana Rena making her way drowsily into the kitchen. “Is that your mother?” she asks. Her wig has slid backward and sideways; wispy white strands poke out at the ears. She shuffles closer to him to take the phone.

He steps away, stretches the cord toward the basement door, and curls more tightly into it. “Wait, Dad. What’d you say?”

“Listen, we’re going to hang around for a couple more hours. They’ve just done some tests and we want to wait for the results.” A pause, a sniffle. “So your mother and I will be here for a while. Waiting.”

“What kind of tests?”

“Oh, you know, to . . . uh ... assess the situation. The brain and all that.” There’s a kind of a choke that gets covered up, a hand over the receiver. Somewhere back there Robin guesses the tears are starting again. He hands off the phone to Nana Rena.

“Hello? Hello?” She has raised her voice as she always does on the phone, forever living in the old days of weak, staticky connections. “Clark?”

Ruby is curling her sketchbook into a tight tube with both hands. “What did he say?” she asks Robin.

“They’re doing tests.”

“What tests?”

“How should I know?” Now his voice is raised.

Nana Rena is waving at both of them, trying to quiet them down. “Dottie? Dottie, what have you got to tell me?” Robin tries to read her face, which reveals only her attentiveness. She nods as she listens, interjects “Mm-hmm” and “Yah” every few seconds, her eyes cast downward.

When Robin senses the conversation winding down, he says, “Let me talk.”

She hands the phone to him with the receiver covered up. “Now don’t trouble her,” she commands.

Robin grabs the phone and stretches the cord past the basement door, closing himself into the darkness. “Mom?”

“Hello, darling. How are you holding up?” He immediately wishes he were with her.

“Fine, you know. I mean, I’m really bored here.”

“Yes, well, the waiting will do that. But it’s best for you to be there for now, with your sister.”

“She’s kind of bugging me.”

“Robin, honey, please. I need you to—”

He cuts her off. “I know, I know. So I told her what you said, about it’s not her fault.”

“That’s very good of you.”

“And I told Larry, so, you know, mission accomplished. So what are these tests?”

“Modern medicine. More tests than you ever imagined.” She says this lightly. He can feel her needing him to take on this same tone but he remains quiet. After a tiny cough she says, “I don’t want to upset you, Robin.”

“I’m already upset.”

“I know, honey. I know. It’s just a bunch of complicated medical hoo-hah. They have to scan the brain to see how well he’s responding.”

“Did Jackson’s brain get smooshed when he fell?” He pictures a mass of scarlet jelly in his brother’s head, bone chunks and brain matter suspended within.

Another sigh. “It’s the spine, the point at which the spine enters the brain. There’s a question about motor skills.”

“Oh, yeah, that.” He’s not sure what this means exactly but waits until she continues.

“There are different parts of the brain that do different things and some of them don’t seem to be working right and some of them they can’t really tell, so the tests will continue until we know everything we can.”

The operator’s voice intrudes suddenly: nasal, impersonal, looking for more money.

“Oh, Christ,” Dorothy says. “Clark? Give me another nickel.”

There’s a knocking on the door behind Robin. It’s Ruby. “I want to talk to her, too.”

“Hold your haystacks,” he shouts and pounds back.

In his ear, he hears the metallic drop of the coin. “What’s going on? Are you still there?” Dorothy asks.

“Can I come to the hospital?” he asks her.

“Maybe tomorrow.”

“This sucks.”

“Robin, I’m going to get off the phone now. I can’t have you come here. It’s just too chaotic. Why don’t you do some reading or help your Nana cook dinner?”

“Yeah, right.”

“Put your sister on the phone and say good-bye, OK?”

He is silent. Along the gray staircase, he can see the lines of wood paneling, line after line like jail bars. His father put up the paneling himself. Robin and Jackson held it in place while his father hammered in skinny nails and the smooth board shuddered under their palms. He recalls laughing with Jackson, the two of them sharing a joke at their father’s expense. The memory confuses him.

“Robin? I love you, dear.”

“Yeah, me, too.” He stands up and kicks back the door. Ruby gasps. The afternoon sun is shining through a window into his eyes.

“You almost hit me!”

He holds out the phone. “Here.” He walks past her, past Nana Rena and the humming refrigerator, out the back door to his bicycle.

Pedaling fast in the fading afternoon sun, Robin is unsure which streets to take to the hospital. He cuts down Schrader and Lewis, which takes him past the shop where his father bought him his bike last winter, past the Episcopal church and the Italian delicatessen. It’s eerie being outside again, because the world is the same as always, yet in some way unfamiliar, slightly shifted, askew. As he speeds by on his bike certain details rise up and surprise him: the sharp angle of the church roof, the gnarly twists of low-hanging tree branches, the broken concrete of sidewalks he’s walked a hundred times but never before studied. He passes a couple of houses where kids he goes to school with live, expecting faces at the window, eyes following his flight. He wonders if the word has gotten out, if people he’ll see in school when he goes back (tomorrow? next week?) will know about the accident. They must know. He can’t imagine that something he’s spent every minute thinking about isn’t already common knowledge. What will they think? They’ll know he caused it all, they’re readying their accusations, it’s only a matter of time. As he comes to a halt at a stop sign, a police car drives across his path, and when the officer in the passenger seat stares his way, he feels his insides tighten up. It’s all in slow motion: the officer’s dark glasses and beaked nose, a finger adjusting the brim of the cap. A touch of breath on the inside of the window. The muffled squawk of the police radio.

Robin drops all his weight on the pedals; he passes the library, where his mother would be working today, moves toward the center of town. He slaloms around the trunk end of cars pulling out of parking spaces. Up ahead, the siren of the nightly commuter train—the one his father usually rides home from the city—blankets every other sound. Red lights flash at the edge of the tracks. Cars obediently slow down and pedestrians freeze at the corner, but Robin doesn’t want to break his momentum. He gauges that he has enough time to get across the train tracks before the wobbly black-and-white warning arms drop. Someone shouts for him to stop as he moves toward the tracks, his wheels slamming over the steel ties, his pelvis vibrating. The train bellows, its dagger of light widening. He sucks in his breath, lowers his head and races under the second descending arm. The train rumbles behind him, squealing to a stretched-out halt at the depot.

“Are you outta your mind?” A woman in a trench coat, her hair piled under a scarf, a briefcase in her hand: she looks familiar. A teller at the bank where he has his Christmas Club? The mother of someone from school? She keeps her disapproving eyes on him. Keep moving, he tells himself.

On Tappan Boulevard, the cars rush past his left side in a continuous, menacing whoosh. He keeps his eyes low, measuring the pace of the traffic by the red taillights ahead of him. Every vehicle pumps the fear of the chase into him, each rumbling auto a possible accident—maybe the last sound he’ll hear before being knocked to the pavement. Maybe I am out of my mind. The glare of oncoming cars has quickened the darkening of the sky. It’s the same spooky half-light that surrounded him as he approached the slide last night. He wants to shake it from his head but he can still feel every angry step he took up the ladder. What happened up there? He can’t make any more sense of it now than he did yesterday: the heat coming off Jackson and Ruby and Larry locked in their struggle, the dull steel railing and chute, the final crazy impression of Jackson flying away. Not jumping, not falling, flying.

At the intersection of Tappan Boulevard and Washington Road he finally stops. Three smaller streets spread out from the two main avenues and drivers are nosing past each other in six different directions. He needs to cross, can’t figure out how. The sensation that an accident is waiting to happen takes over—every car that turns without signaling seems to have his name written on it. For the first time since leaving his house he thinks it was wrong of him to take this trip, that if he gets hurt on his way to see Jackson it would be the absolute worst thing possible, not even for his own injuries but for the proof that he is foolish and can’t take care of himself, much less anyone else. He considers going back but remembers the stifling anxiety of the long afternoon and decides instead to cut through the Shell station at his right. He pedals up a hill that he thinks might get him to the hospital. The traffic here is just as heavy, but the road is only one lane in either direction. There might be a safer chance to cross up ahead.

He’s not familiar with this end of town. There’s a shopping plaza with a big hardware store he’s visited once or twice with his father, and the only Chinese takeout place for miles, the one Uncle Stan insists uses pigeon meat in the chicken dishes. Beyond that, he’s not sure. He keeps moving forward, until the road narrows a bit and the streetlights are less frequent, the houses are smaller and less packed together. In the distance he can see the bright perimeter of a cemetery, a row of gravestones glowing behind a chain link fence and then the impenetrable darkness beyond. It’s so obviously ghostly he snickers a panicky laugh, no way he’s going to ride any closer to that. He cuts sharply to the left, enough distance between him and the nearest approaching car to get him across Green and onto a side street he hopes will lead him back on course.

His thighs are starting to ache, and the underside of his butt where he didn’t even know he had muscles. A persistent itch is circling across his scabbed palms. He slows down a bit to catch his breath and feels the air against his sweaty face. His ears ring before they adjust to the noises fading behind him. Gentler sounds make their way in: the click of a car door, a couple of voices from someone’s front stoop, some muffled TV dialogue drifting from an open window.

A car starts up in a driveway, he glimpses the back of a black man’s head in the orange interior light. Farther down he sees a couple of small figures chasing each other across their lawn, black kids, younger than himself, and a woman, also black, taking out her trash. She squints her eyes at him and watches as he passes by. A sign above a mechanic’s shop on a corner: Marble Road Auto Body. Marble Road: his first reaction is disbelief, that this place really exists beyond the fearsome stories he’s heard—like the one Larry told him about a gang of black girls who jumped a white girl walking down Marble Road and wedged a miniature-golf pencil up her ass. He had an image in his head of high rise apartment buildings, gangs of young men hanging out, and funk music blasting from big cars, like a miniature Harlem, or the opening credits on Good Times. But this place is so quiet, and not even quiet enough to be scary. It’s just another part of Greenlawn. The only thing that strikes him as really different is the road, which is more cracked, and weedy at the curb. The streets in his neighborhood get paved every year.

He turns at the next intersection for no reason at all, just full of doubt, needing to change directions. His bike chinks and rattles over the broken-up macadam. Some lights up ahead: a baseball field, a few cars parked at the edge of the glow. Two girls and two boys on the hood, one of them smoking. A bass line thumping lightly under their conversation. A face turns toward him, a halo of light on slicked down, straightened hair. A girl’s voice: “Hey? Who’s that?”

Another girl: “It’s a white boy.”

A guy’s voice, duller: “Some white boy got lost.”

“Ooo.” This from one of the girls.

“Hey, where you going, boy?”

For a split second, he thinks about asking for directions but his feet impulsively push harder on the pedals—an impulse so old he doesn’t think he’s ever not had it. He rides away, away from a taunt he can’t comprehend and the tail end of bored laughter. And now it seems like he’s been riding for hours, and he’s wondering if he’s going anywhere at all.