Dandelion Wine (14 page)

They sat eating ham sandwiches and fresh strawberries and waxy oranges and Mr. Tridden told them how it had been twenty years ago, the band playing on that ornate stand at night, the men pumping air into their brass horns, the plump conductor flinging perspiration from his baton, the children and fireflies running in the deep grass, the ladies with long dresses and high pompadours treading the wooden xylophone walks with men in choking collars. There was the walk now, all softened into a fiber mush by the years. The lake was silent and blue and serene, and fish peacefully threaded the bright reeds, and the motorman murmured on and on, and the children felt it was some other year, with Mr. Tridden looking wonderfully young, his eyes lighted like small bulbs, blue and electric. It was a drifting, easy day, nobody rushing, and the forest all about, the sun held in one position, as Mr. Tridden's voice rose and fell, and a darning needle sewed along the air, stitching, restitching designs both golden and invisible. A bee settled into a flower, humming and humming. The trolley stood like an enchanted calliope, simmering where the sun fell on it. The trolley was on their hands, a brass smell, as they ate ripe cherries. The bright odor of the trolley blew from their clothes on the summer wind.

A loon flew over the sky, crying.

Somebody shivered.

Mr. Tridden worked on his gloves. “Well, time to go. Parents'll think I stole you all for good.”

The trolley was silent and cool dark, like the inside of an ice-cream drugstore. With a soft green rustling of velvet buff, the seats were turned by the quiet children so they sat with their backs to the silent lake, the deserted bandstand and the wooden planks that made a kind of music if you walked down the shore on them into other lands.

Bing! went the soft bell under Mr. Tridden's foot and they soared back over sun-abandoned, withered flower meadows, through woods, toward a town that seemed to crush the sides of the trolley with bricks and asphalt and wood when Mr. Tridden stopped to let the children out in shady streets.

Charlie and Douglas were the last to stand near the opened tongue of the trolley, the folding step, breathing electricity, watching Mr. Tridden's gloves on the brass controls.

Douglas ran his fingers on the green creek moss, looked at the silver, the brass, the wine color of the ceiling.

“Well … so long again, Mr. Tridden.”

“Good-by, boys.”

“See you around, Mr. Tridden.”

“See you around.”

There was a soft sigh of air; the door collapsed gently shut, tucking up its corrugated tongue. The trolley sailed slowly down the late afternoon, brighter than the sun, all tangerine, all flashing gold and lemon, turned a far corner, wheeling, and vanished, gone away.

“School busses!” Charlie walked to the curb. “Won't even give us a chance to be late to school. Come get you at your front door. Never be late again in all our lives. Think of that nightmare, Doug, just think it all over.”

But Douglas, standing on the lawn, was seeing how it would be tomorrow, when the men would pour hot tar over the silver tracks so you would never know a trolley had ever run this way. He knew it would take as many years as he could think of now to forget the tracks, no matter how deeply buried. Some morning in autumn, spring, or winter he knew he'd wake and, if he didn't go near the window, if he just lay deep and snug and warm in his bed, he would hear it, faint and far away.

And around the bend of the morning street, up the avenue, between the even rows of sycamore, elm and maple, in the quietness before the start of living, past his house he would hear the familiar sounds. Like the ticking of a clock, the rumble of a dozen metal barrels rolling, the hum of a single immense dragonfly at dawn. Like a merry-go-round, like a small electrical storm, the color of blue lightning, coming, here, and gone. The trolley's chime! The hiss like a soda-fountain spigot as it let down and took up its step, and the starting of the dream again, as on it sailed along its way, traveling a hidden and buried track to some hidden and buried destination....

 

“K
ick-the-can after supper?” asked Charlie.

“Sure,” said Douglas. “Kick-the-can.”

T
he facts about John Huff, aged twelve, are simple and soon stated. He could pathfind more trails than any Choctaw or Cherokee since time began, could leap from the sky like a chimpanzee from a vine, could live underwater two minutes and slide fifty yards downstream from where you last saw him. The baseballs you pitched him he hit in the apple trees, knocking down harvests. He could jump six-foot orchard walls, swing up branches faster and come down, fat with peaches, quicker than anyone else in the gang. He ran laughing. He sat easy. He was not a bully. He was kind. His hair was dark and curly and his teeth were white as cream. He remembered the words to all the cowboy songs and would teach you if you asked. He knew the names of all the wild flowers and when the moon would rise and set and when the tides came in or out. He was, in fact, the only god living in the whole of Green Town, Illinois, during the twentieth century that Douglas Spaulding knew of.

And right now he and Douglas were hiking out beyond town on another warm and marble-round day, the sky blue blown-glass reaching high, the creeks bright with mirror waters fanning over white stones. It was a day as perfect as the flame of a candle.

Douglas walked through it thinking it would go on this way forever. The perfection, the roundness, the grass smell traveled on out ahead as far and fast as the speed of light. The sound of a good friend whistling like an oriole, pegging the softball, as you horse-danced, key-jingled the dusty paths, all of it was complete, everything could be touched; things stayed near, things were at hand and would remain.

It was such a fine day and then suddenly a cloud crossed the sky, covered the sun, and did not move again.

John Huff had been speaking quietly for several minutes. Now Douglas stopped on the path and looked over at him.

“John, say that again.”

“You heard me the first time, Doug.”

“Did you say you were—going away?”

“Got my train ticket here in my pocket. Whoo-whoo, clang! Shush-shush-shush-shush. Whooooooooo …”

His voice faded.

John took the yellow and green train ticket solemnly from his pocket and they both looked at it.

“Tonight!” said Douglas. “My gosh! Tonight we were going to play Red Light, Green Light and Statues! How come, all of a sudden? You been here in Green Town all my life. You just don't pick up and leave!”

“It's my father,” said John. “He's got a job in Milwaukee. We weren't sure until today....”

“My gosh, here it is with the Baptist picnic next week and the big carnival Labor Day and Halloween—can't your dad wait till then?”

John shook his head.

“Good grief!” said Douglas. “Let me sit down!”

They sat under an old oak tree on the side of the hill looking back at town, and the sun made large trembling shadows around them; it was cool as a cave in under the tree. Out beyond, in sunlight, the town was painted with heat, the windows all gaping. Douglas wanted to run back in there where the town, by its very weight, its houses, their bulk, might enclose and prevent John's ever getting up and running off.

“But we're friends,” Douglas said helplessly.

“We always will be,” said John.

“You'll come back to visit every
week
or so, won't you?”

“Dad says only once or twice a year. It's eighty miles.”

“Eighty miles ain't far!” shouted Douglas.

“No, it's not far at all,” said John.

“My grandma's got a phone. I'll call you. Or maybe we'll all visit up your way, too. That'd be great!”

John said nothing for a long while.

“Well,” said Douglas, “let's talk about something.”

“What?”

“My gosh, if you're going away, we got a million things to talk about! All the things we would've talked about next month, the month after! Praying mantises, zeppelins, acrobats, sword swallowers! Go on like you was back there, grasshoppers spitting tobacco!”

“Funny thing is I don't feel like talking about grasshoppers.”

“You always did!”

“Sure.” John looked steadily at the town. “But I guess this just ain't the time.”

“John, what's wrong? You look funny.... ”

John had closed his eyes and screwed up his face. “Doug, the Terle house, upstairs, you know?”

“Sure.”

“The colored windowpanes on the little round windows, have they
always
been there?”

“Sure.”

“You
positive
?”

“Darned old windows been there since before we were born. Why?”

“I never saw them before today,” said John. “On the way walking through town I looked up and there they were. Doug, what was I
doing
all these years I didn't see them?”

“You had other things to do.”

“Did I?” John turned and looked in a kind of panic at Douglas. “Gosh, Doug, why should those darn windows scare me? I mean, that's nothing to be scared of, is it? It's just …” He floundered. “It's just, if I didn't see these windows until today, what
else
did I miss? And what about all the things I
did
see here in town? Will I be able to remember them when I go away?”

“Anything you want to remember, you remember. I went to camp two summers ago. Up
there
I remembered.”

“No, you didn't! You told me. You woke nights and couldn't remember your mother's face.”

“
No!
”

“Some nights it happens to me in my own house; scares heck out of me. I got to go in my folks' room and look at their faces while they sleep, to be sure! And I go back to my room and lose it again. Gosh, Doug, oh gosh!” He held onto his knees tight. “Promise me just one thing, Doug. Promise you'll remember me, promise you'll remember my face and everything. Will you promise?”

“Easy as pie. Got a motion-picture machine in my head. Lying in bed nights I can just turn on a light in my head and out it comes on the wall, clear as heck, and there you'll be, yelling and waving at me.”

“Shut your eyes, Doug. Now, tell me, what color eyes I got? Don't peek. What color eyes I got?”

Douglas began to sweat. His eyelids twitched nervously. “Aw heck, John, that's not fair.”

“Tell me!”

“Brown!”

John turned away. “No, sir.”

“What do you mean, no?”

“You're not even close!” John closed his eyes.

“Turn around here,” said Douglas. “Open up, let me see.”

“It's no use,” said John. “You forgot already. Just the way I said.

“Turn around here!” Douglas grabbed him by the hair and turned him slowly.

“Okay, Doug.”

John opened his eyes.

“Green.” Douglas, dismayed, let his hand drop. “Your eyes are green.... Well, that's close to brown. Almost hazel!”

“Doug, don't lie to me.”

“All right,” said Doug quietly. “I won't.”

They sat there listening to the other boys running up the hill, shrieking and yelling at them.

 

T
hey raced along the railroad tracks, opened their lunch in brown-paper sacks, and sniffed deeply of the wax-wrapped deviled-ham sandwiches and green-sea pickles and colored peppermints. They ran and ran again and Douglas bent to scorch his ear on the hot steel rails, hearing trains so far away they were unseen voyagings in other lands, sending Morse-code messages to him here under the killing sun. Douglas stood up, stunned.

“John!”

For John was running, and this was terrible. Because if you ran, time ran. You yelled and screamed and raced and rolled and tumbled and all of a sudden the sun was gone and the whistle was blowing and you were on your long way home to supper. When you weren't looking, the sun got around behind you! The only way to keep things slow was to watch everything and do nothing! You could stretch a day to three days, sure, just by watching!

“John!”

There was no way to get him to help now, save by a trick.

“John, ditch, ditch the others!”

Yelling, Douglas and John sprinted off, kiting the wind downhill, letting gravity work for them, over meadows, around barns until at last the sound of the pursuers faded.

John and Douglas climbed into a haystack which was like a great bonfire crisping under them.

“Let's not do anything,” said John.

“Just what I was going to say,” said Douglas.

They sat quietly, getting their breath.

There was a small sound like an insect in the hay.

They both heard it, but they didn't look at the sound. When Douglas moved his wrist the sound ticked in another part of the haystack. When he brought his arm around on his lap the sound ticked in his lap. He let his eyes fall in a brief flicker. The watch said three o'clock.