The Boy Who Could Draw Tomorrow (15 page)

She picked the side that faced against the traffic. But there were no cars when she started out along the narrow walkway, and none came until she'd made it to the first tunnel, their tires throwing the pooled rain against her like sudden curses, as if her presence was an insult, a loathsome trespass in the night.

She ran when she could, her feet slipping and tearing on the cobblestones, and when she could bear it no more, she slowed to a ragged trot, hurling herself against the wall whenever headlights blazed up in front of her, the vehicles then slashing past her, the only lone person in a city of safe millions.

It was madness, but as she stumbled along she counted the jagged complaints of a telephone ringing. How many? Thirty, forty, fifty? Peggy counted because it was a comfort, because it made a noise in her head loud enough to drown out everything else. Again and again she turned to see if the echoing noises behind her were footsteps. But when she strained to look back up the tunnel, all she saw was her own bloated fear sneering back at her and the stone walls running black with seepage.

***

"Sam!" she called sternly, and then, in one fluid movement, like a length of silk swiftly splitting along the fibers, the woman pushed the door wide and presented the cleaver.

The room was empty. Both windows were closed.

But then she saw where one of the Levelor blinds was raised halfway up and the window latch lay meaningfully open.

She advanced across the floor and put her fingertips to the sill, trailing them back and forth through the sooty droplets of rainwater.

She shoved against the frame. When it lifted, wind blew against the soft grey wool of her jumper, and the Peter Pan collar fluttered wildly and then stood up against her hairy, matted throat.

She looked down and then up before she squeezed herself out onto the grating. When she stood—her great height erected against the lights of the city—it was like a four-footed creature trained to stand aloft, the fire escape the carnival grid on which the beast had learned to balance himself.

***

When she saw the lighted windows of the buildings along Fifth, she quickened her pace until she was running again, running past the gaping doormen watching from their lobbies as she raced against the rain that fell crashing to the street between the apartment houses on East Ninety-sixth. At Madison she turned right and cut across partway down the block, two busses nearly colliding when the first one had to swing wide to miss her. She tumbled headlong as she rounded the comer onto Ninety-fifth, her knees ripping open where they scraped along the cement. She clambered to her feet and was running again before she realized she'd dropped her purse. She kept going, counting the whines of a telephone that never stopped. But at Park Avenue she turned around and, gasping, quickly walked off her course back along the windswept block, her eyes searching the blowing shadows for her handbag, for the pair of housekeys she'd need to get inside.

***

She started up the iron steps, sometimes calling for him, sometimes humming to herself, the Mongol 482 back in place now so that both hands might be free to make the slippery ascent. At each landing, she stopped and tried the window, fitting the bulb of her knobby shoulder in against the frame and heaving. When the window would not give, she pressed her snout to the wet glass, her bristled nostrils quivering as they sought to catch the scent.

She went all the way to the top and, still calling him, climbed off onto the roof.

It was here that she smelled him, and readied the meat cleaver.

***

She sprinted the rest of the way, almost falling again just as she staggered in under the canopy. She banged at the door and waved her hands. The doormen turned and looked in her direction. But neither of them moved from his place on the wainscot chairs that stood to either side of the mantelpiece.

"Help me!" she screamed.

Through the glass she could hear one of them shout for her to get away before he called the police.

"Please!" she screamed. "It's Mrs. Cooper!" But neither of them seemed to hear.

She had her hand in her purse and her head down as she scooped blindly for her keys when she felt the door push against her.

She stepped back and looked up.

"Thank God," she sobbed before she saw who it was.

He had his arms reaching for her and he was stepping out under the canopy to enclose her inside.

"Pegs baby," he said, and when she moved to fight her way past him, he punched her in the face.

She circled the roof, making her way stealthily, skirting the places where the rain had collected in small black lakes, her lips parting to show her furry tusks as she paused to call out after him.

"Sam, you have only to do as I say, and I won't harm you."

Again she circled the roof, crouching to sniff beneath the racks of pipe, behind ventilators, around skylights, her snout thrusting in front of her like a foot testing a hot bath.

She stood erect again and backed toward the guard rail, her sow's face slowly lifting to regard the heights that lay above.

She saw the penthouse—and then, higher still, perched atop the tower of wet scaffolding that held it like a massive throne, the gigantic, shingled cylinder of the building's reserve water tank.

She saw the water tank, its gross immensity blotting out a sector of the sky, and then she saw the steel ladder leading straight up its side.

***

She heard his voice first, and she listened for a time before she opened her eyes.

"Just a family squabble," he was saying. "Honestly, you must forgive us. Nothing like this has ever happened before. Honey, wake up and tell them. Hey, Pegs baby, cut it out now, okay? All right, I lost my temper, and I'm honestly and truly sorry. I just popped off, okay? But just look at her—you guys can see for yourselves. She jumped out of the cab and started running around like a crazy woman, and then she ran away. I mean, I had to quiet her down. You can see that, can't you, fellas? It was for her own good. Hey, Pegs, honey. Tell them, baby. Tell them it's really all right."

When she looked, she saw him bending over her, and beyond him, the faces of the doormen looking back down into her own.

"It's not all right," she said. "Let me alone."

"Here," the older doorman said, and shouldering Hal aside, he helped her scramble to her feet and put her purse under her arm.

"Easy now," he said when she pushed herself away from him and made for the elevator. "You're bleeding, Mrs. Cooper."

"I'm all right," she answered. "Just keep him away from me."

"As you say, missus," the younger doorman said, turning to Hal to block his effort to cut her off, ordering him to shut up when Hal shouted after her.

"Pegs!" he shouted. "I tell you it's all right. Just stay out of it! She's not going to hurt anybody, I swear! You interfere and it'll blow the whole deal!"

She pressed the button and saw the light go off behind the B and then come on behind the L. The doors parted, and the operator stood staring.

"Jesus, ma'am," he breathed.

"I'm fine," Peggy said. "Just hurry."

***

She went hand over hand, her impossible face wincing in the flooding lash of the wind, the cleaver slipped through the belt of her jumper.

She hummed as she climbed into the roaring sea of the night, her throat grunting beneath the sinuous melody of the ancient music that drained from her pallid lips.

The boy listened. He listened from where he hung against the ladder inside the tank, his torn feet clinging to the last strip of metal, his fingers locked over the bar that lifted off the hatch.

Beneath him the water spread wide and black. He watched it as she climbed. He saw its surface ripple, registering each pounding step of the beast's steady, patient ascent.

***

She screamed when she found the man, and the elevator operator came running back. When he made it to the entrance to the hallway, he saw the scattered suitcases and the woman bent over the man. He followed her into the room. But by then she was out the window.

He leaned into the rain. He warned her to come back. He might even have reached for her, tried to grab her legs. But he was afraid.

***

"Sam!"
the woman shrieked, and then another woman called his name, the second voice closer and much gentler than the first.

He heard the woman screaming, a voice so far away, and then, right after it, the nearer voice, a dreamy female purring that crooned his special name.

"Old scout, are you in there, dear? Mama's here at last."

He felt like swooning, or maybe just going to sleep.

"Sammy, darling. Mama's here. Up above your head."

He felt the bar in his hands moving.

"Up here, my precious. Can you turn your head and look?"

He thought he'd fall if he tried. But wouldn't she dive in after him and save him if he did?

He threw back his head and looked. He saw the smoking fingernails, the steaming female snout.

"Baby,''
the first voice whispered from a dream so far away.
"Draw a circle. And her. Draw her falling off.''

He looked back at the clangorous liquid that shivered beneath his feet. He thought,
I will die if I dare to draw her.
But a child could let go. He could slip endlessly into the water because the water was only a dream, ceaseless, forever and forever, until you decided the sleep was over.

"Baby,"
the first voice whispered. "
Draw her falling off."

With one hand, he let go of the bar, and felt along the waistband. His special pen. It was there, right where he'd stuck it, held fast by the stretched elastic.

He raised it to his lips. He used his teeth to pry the cap off. He lifted one foot to the next rung up, and lowered the nib to the thin white cotton.

He could smell it as he worked—like corn burning, only with sugar in it, something that smelled both ways at once.

He felt the hatch pulling away from his fingers, and when he looked again to see, he saw the black crescent of the plunging sky, and in it, grunting longingly, he saw the nightmare that was real—Miss Putnam's spectacles ringing the belching eyeballs, and below them the muzzle of a maddened swine, its blistered tongue slavering a veil of wormy saliva onto the lacy scallops of a Peter Pan collar.

He worked by feel, drawing against the easel of his leg, his execution never swifter, his skill never more artful.

In this Sam Cooper was an ordinary child, doing what God had given him to do. First he completed the little circle, and as the bar was swept from his hand, he finished the rest of the figure, arms flung eternally to the heavens, feet inked one infinite inch into the fathomless eclipse of space, the body forever flying from the faraway arc of the world.

It is a place called Boggs, and it is here that the boy goes to school now—second grade, Mrs. Alma Tweety's class. They say she's the meanest woman in the state, the old-timers who had her long ago. Well, the truth is, she is very, very strict. All you have to do is sass her or do anything the least bit out of line, and there's Mrs. Tweety hollering, "Go straight to the principal's office! This minute!''

But the kids all secretly love her, even though they like to make fun of her name. It's a mystery why, year after year, they're all so fond of Mrs. Tweety, despite what the old-timers say. On the other hand, sometimes children see things grownups never imagine; the same child who sees so much is no better than blind by the time he's grown to a man.

At any rate, the boy is just nuts about old Mrs. Tweety, just the way the rest of the kids are. She lets him draw whenever he wants to, so long as it doesn't get in the way of his work.

And as for the boy, he never misses his chance. He takes his special pen and his All-Purpose Jumbo pad, his left hand nimbly delivering to the paper the vision that's come into his head. But somehow he can never quite catch it, not all of it, at least. A line, a curve, a little squiggle—there's never any telling. It's just that some crucial part of the thing simply isn't there.

It makes the boy a tiny bit sad, this absence that's there on the page. Deep down, he knows it's something big. Deep down, he knows that it's everything, the difference between what's true and what's real.

But everyone flatters him anyhow. They all tell him how good he is, no more than a second-grader, and look—he can draw what he sees in the world!

Yet the boy knows better. He knows that he has lost something very special. And sometimes, when he's all by himself, he knows a truth even crazier than that. He knows the thing he lost was lost the instant he tried to know what it was.