Mr. Tall (21 page)

Jack felt as if a catamount had clawed out his heart. He went swimmy-headed. Little Jack. By God, there
was
a Little Jack.

Little Jack Little Jack Little Jack.

“No, wait!” he yelled. “Let me get him!”

But before he could take a step toward the hallway the sofa rose from the carpet and whirled onto its end and the window frames twisted from their sockets and lifted off into the darkness. Jill's feet flew from beneath her and she flailed into the air and ripped splayed through the ceiling. The walls of the house lifted from around Jack and the storm jerked him into the howling black. Wild beasts fanged him about the face while he flew and unicorns horned him through the tripes; cuckolded robbers sliced his sinews loose from his bones and a giant sundered his skull bone with a cudgel. He found no joy in the flying and only screaming fear in the falling. And then he lay flat on his back in a field watching pink snow fall from the sky. A flock of blank paper lit gingerly on the ground around him. He listened for Jill to call his name, for Little Jack to cry to be found, but the world was as quiet as a flyleaf. He felt every word he had ever known leaking from his busted crown and he knew that soon he wouldn't know any words at all.

Not quite regular man and not quite
that
Jack, he lay still and considered his condition with the language he had left. The word
death
meant death, of course, and it meant nothing at all. All it said was, there's the door, Jack, you get on now, and what good is a word like that? It said nothing about whatever came next. Jack shook with amazement. He had never before set foot in a story with an honest-to-goodness conclusion. He had lived in one continuous tale. All of his life, one page had turned after another and he had set out down another road—looking, he finally remembered, for Jill. But now he understood that every second of joy in the life of a regular man bloomed from the spreading blight of his dying. And he wasn't ready to leave the page. He had only just set down here, into this brilliant world of numbered mornings, into the finespun possibility of human joy. He wanted to teach Little Jack to play baseball because he had only just learned about it himself. He wanted to brush with his finger the first tress of silver to light up in Jill's dark hair. He wanted to sit with her on the porch in the bug-chanting twilight and share a cold, sweating beer. He wanted to make pancakes on Sunday morning. He wanted to live as a regular man until his ancient heart said, old friend, I can't beat no more. Then he wanted to kiss Jill's hand and laugh out loud because he had chewed every last bit of sweet out of the regular life he had been given. Jack raised his arms toward the tin-colored sky and earnestly spoke to whoever might be listening. “The book,” he whispered. “For God's sake, don't close this book.”

Tony Earley
is the author of the novels
Jim the Boy
and
The Blue Star.
His fiction has earned a National Magazine Award and appeared in
The New Yorker,
Harper's,
Esquire,
and
The Best American Short Stories.
Earley was chosen for both
The New Yorker
's inaugural best 20 Under 40 list of fiction writers and
Granta
's 20 Best Young American Novelists. He lives with his family in Nashville, Tennessee, where he is the Samuel Milton Fleming Professor of English at Vanderbilt University.

The Blue Star

Jim the Boy

Here We Are in Paradise

Somehow Form a Family

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