Dandelion Wine (15 page)

Douglas moved his right hand stealthily to the ticking, pulled out the watch stem. He set the hands back.

Now they had all the time they would ever need to look long and close at the world, feel the sun move like a fiery wind over the sky.

But at last John must have felt the bodiless weight of their shadows shift and lean, and he spoke.

“Doug, what time is it?”

“Two-thirty.”

John looked at the sky.

Don't! thought Douglas.

“Looks more like three-thirty, four,” said John. “Boy Scout. You learn them things.”

Douglas sighed and slowly turned the watch ahead.

John watched him do this, silently. Douglas looked up. John punched him, not hard at all, in the arm.

 

W
ith a swift stroke, a plunge, a train came and went so quickly the boys all leaped aside, yelling, shaking their fists after it, Douglas and John with them. The train roared down the track, two hundred people in it, gone. The dust followed it a little way toward the south, then settled in the golden silence among the blue rails.

The boys were walking home.

“I'm going to Cincinnati when I'm seventeen and be a railroad fireman,” said Charlie Woodman.

“I got an uncle in New York,” said Jim. “I'll go there and be a printer.”

Doug did not ask the others. Already the trains were chanting and he saw their faces drifting off on back observation platforms, or pressed to windows. One by one they slid away. And then the empty track and the summer sky and himself on another train run in another direction.

Douglas felt the earth move under his feet and saw their shadows move off the grass and color the air.

He swallowed hard, then gave a screaming yell, pulled back his fist, shot the indoor ball whistling in the sky. “Last one home's a rhino's behind!”

They pounded down the tracks, laughing, flailing the air. There went John Huff, not touching the ground at all. And here came Douglas, touching it all the time.

 

I
t was seven o'clock, supper over, and the boys gathering one by one from the sound of their house doors slammed and their parents crying to them not to slam the doors. Douglas and Tom and Charlie and John stood among half a dozen others and it was time for hide-and-seek and Statues.

“Just one game,” said John. “Then I got to go home. The train leaves at nine. Who's going to be ‘it'?”

“Me,” said Douglas.

“That the first time I ever heard of anybody volunteering to be ‘it,'” said Tom.

Douglas looked at John for a long moment. “Start running,” he cried.

The boys scattered, yelling. John backed away, then turned and began to lope. Douglas counted slowly. He let them run far, spread out, separate each to his own small world. When they had got their momentum up and were almost out of sight he took a deep breath.

“Statues!”

Everyone froze.

Very quietly Douglas moved across the lawn to where John Huff stood like an iron deer in the twilight.

Far away, the other boys stood hands up, faces grimaced, eyes bright as stuffed squirrels.

But here was John, alone and motionless and no one rushing or making a great outcry to spoil this moment.

Douglas walked around the statue one way, walked around the statue the other way. The statue did not move. It did not speak. It looked at the horizon, its mouth half smiling.

It was like that time years ago in Chicago when they had visited a big place where the carved marble figures were, and his walking around them in the silence. So here was John Huff with grass stains on his knees and the seat of his pants, and cuts on his fingers and scabs on his elbows. Here was John Huff with the quiet tennis shoes, his feet sheathed in silence. There was the mouth that had chewed many an apricot pie come summer, and said many a quiet thing or two about life and the lay of the land. And there were the eyes, not blind like statues' eyes, but filled with molten green-gold. And there the dark hair blowing now north now south or any direction in the little breeze there was. And there the hands with all the town on them, dirt from roads and bark-slivers from trees, the fingers that smelled of hemp and vine and green apple, old coins or pickle-green frogs. There were the ears with the sunlight shining through them like bright warm peach wax and here, invisible, his spearmint-breath upon the air.

“John, now,” said Douglas, “don't you move so much as an eyelash. I absolutely command you to stay here and not move at all for the next three hours!”

“Doug …”

John's lips moved.

“Freeze!” said Douglas.

John went back to looking at the sky, but he was not smiling now.

“I got to go,” he whispered.

“Not a muscle, it's the game!”

“I just got to get home now,” said John.

Now the statue moved, took its hands down out of the air and turned its head to look at Douglas. They stood looking at each other. The other kids were putting their arms down, too.

“We'll play one more round,” said John, “except this time, I'm ‘it.' Run!”

The boys ran.

“Freeze!”

The boys froze, Douglas with them.

“Not a muscle!” shouted John. “Not a hair!”

He came and stood by Douglas.

“Boy, this is the only way to do it,” he said.

Douglas looked off at the twilight sky.

“Frozen statues, every single one of you, the next three minutes!” said John.

Douglas felt John walking around him even as he had walked around John a moment ago. He felt John sock him on the arm once, not too hard. “So long,” he said.

Then there was a rushing sound and he knew without looking that there was nobody behind him now.

Far away, a train whistle sounded.

Douglas stood that way for a full minute, waiting for the sound of the running to fade, but it did not stop. He's still running away, but he doesn't sound any further off, thought Douglas. Why doesn't he stop running?

And then he realized it was only the sound of his heart in his body.

Stop! He jerked his hand to his chest. Stop running! I don't
like
that sound!

And then he felt himself walking across the lawns among all the other statues now, and whether they, too, were coming to life he did not know. They did not seem to be moving at all. For that matter he himself was only moving from the knees down. The rest of him was cold stone, and very heavy.

Going up the front porch of his house, he turned suddenly to look at the lawns behind him.

The lawns were empty.

A series of rifle shots. Screen doors banged one after the other, a sunset volley, along the street.

Statues are best, he thought. They're the only things you can keep on your lawn. Don't ever let them move. Once you do, you can't do a thing with them.

Suddenly his fist shot out like a piston from his side and it shook itself hard at the lawns and the street and the gathering dusk. His face was choked with blood, his eyes were blazing.

“John!” he cried. “You, John! John, you're my enemy, you hear? You're no friend of mine! Don't come back now, ever! Get away, you! Enemy, you hear? That's what you are! It's all off between us, you're dirt, that's all, dirt! John, you hear me, John!”

As if a wick had been turned a little lower in a great clear lamp beyond the town, the sky darkened still more. He stood on the porch, his mouth gasping and working. His fist still thrust straight out at that house across the street and down the way. He looked at the fist and it dissolved, the world dissolved beyond it.

Going upstairs, in the dark, where he could only feel his face but see nothing of himself, not even his fists, he told himself over and over, I'm mad, I'm angry, I hate him, I'm mad, I'm angry, I hate him!

Ten minutes later, slowly he reached the top of the stairs, in the dark....

T
om,” said Douglas, “just promise me one thing, okay?”

“It's a promise. What?”

“You may be my brother and maybe I hate you sometimes, but stick around, all right?”

“You mean you'll let me follow you and the older guys when you go on hikes?”

“Well … sure … even that. What I mean is, don't go away, huh? Don't let any cars run over you or fall off a cliff.”

“I should say not! Whatta you think I
am,
anyway?”

“'Cause if worst comes to worst, and both of us are real old—say forty or forty-five some day—we can own a gold mine out West and sit there smoking corn silk and growing beards.”

“Growing beards! Boy!”

“Like I say, you stick around and don't let nothing happen.”

“You can depend on me,” said Tom.

“It's not you I worry about,” said Douglas, “It's the way God runs the world.”

Tom thought about this for a moment.

“He's all right, Doug,” said Tom. “He
tries.
”

S
he came out of the bathroom putting iodine on her finger where she had almost lopped it off cutting herself a chunk of cocoanut cake. Just then the mailman came up the porch steps, opened the door, and walked in. The door slammed. Elmira Brown jumped a foot.

“Sam!” she cried. She waved her iodined finger on the air to cool it. “I'm still not used to my husband being a postman. Every time you just walk in, it scares the life out of me!”

Sam Brown stood there with the mail pouch half empty, scratching his head. He looked back out the door as if a fog had suddenly rolled in on a calm sweet summer morn.

“Sam, you're home early,” she said.

“Can't stay,” he said in a puzzled voice.

“Spit it out, what's wrong?” She came over and looked into his face.

“Maybe nothing, maybe lots. I just delivered some mail to Clara Goodwater up the street ….”

“Clara Goodwater!”

“Now don't get your dander up. Books it was, from the Johnson-Smith Company, Racine, Wisconsin. Title of one book … let's see now.” He screwed up his face, then unscrewed it. “
Albertus Magnus
—that's it.
Being the approved, verified, sympathetic and natural
E
GYPTIAN
S
ECRETS
or …
” He peered at the ceiling to summon the lettering. “
White and Black Art for Man and Beast, Revealing the Forbidden Knowledge and Mysteries of Ancient Philosophers!
”

“Clara Goodwater's you say?”

“Walking along, I had a good chance to peek at the front pages, no harm in that. ‘Hidden Secrets of Life Unveiled by that celebrated Student, Philosopher, Chemist, Naturalist, Psychomist, Astrologer, Alchemist, Metallurgist, Sorcerer, Explanator of the Mysteries of Wizards and Witchcraft, together with recondite views of numerous Arts and Sciences—Obscure, Plain, Practical, etc.' There! By God, I got a head like a box Brownie. Got the words, even if I haven't got the sense.”

Elmira stood looking at her iodined finger as if it were pointed at her by a stranger.

“Clara Goodwater,” she murmured.

“Looked me right in the eye as I handed it over, said, ‘Going to be a witch, first-class no doubt. Get my diploma in no time. Set up business. Hex crowds and individuals, old and young, big and small.' Then she kinda laughed, put her nose in that book, and went in.”

Elmira stared at a bruise on her arm, carefully tongued a loose tooth in her jaw.

A door slammed. Tom Spaulding, kneeling on Elmira Brown's front lawn, looked up. He had been wandering about the neighborhood, seeing how the ants were doing here or there, and had found a particularly good hill with a big hole in which all kinds of fiery bright pismires were tumbling about scissoring the air and wildly carrying little packets of dead grasshopper and infinitesimal bird down into the earth. Now here was something else: Mrs. Brown, swaying on the edge of her porch as if she'd just found out the world was falling through space at sixty trillion miles a second. Behind her was Mr. Brown, who didn't know the miles per second and probably wouldn't care if he did know.

“You, Tom!” said Mrs. Brown. “I need moral support and the equivalent of the blood of the Lamb with me. Come along!”

And off she rushed, squashing ants and kicking tops off dandelions and trotting big spiky holes in flower beds as she cut across yards.

Tom knelt a moment longer studying Mrs. Brown's shoulder blades and spine as she toppled down the street. He read the bones and they were eloquent of melodrama and adventure, a thing he did not ordinarily connect with ladies, even though Mrs. Brown had the remnants of a pirate's mustache. A moment later he was in tandem with her.