"Hats?" said Will.
"Well, Jim--" they perambulated, Dad running his fingers along the book spines--"he wears the black ten-gallon hats and reads books to fit. Middle name's Moriarty, right, Jim? Any day now he'll move up from Fu Manchu to Machiavelli here--medium-size dark fedora. Or over along to Dr. Faustus--extra large black Stetson. That leaves the white-hat boys to you, Will. Here's Gandhi. Next door is St. Thomas. And on the next level, well ... Buddha."
"You don't mind," said Will, "I'll settle for The Mysterious Island."
"What," asked Jim, scowling, "is all this talk about white and black hats?"
"Why--" Dad handed Jules Verne to Will--"it's just, a long time ago, I had to decide, myself, which color I'd wear."
"So," said Jim, "which did you pick?"
Dad looked surprised. Then he laughed, uneasily.
"Since you need to ask, Jim, you make me wonder. Will, tell Mom I'll be home soon. Get out of here, both of you. Miss Watriss!" he called softly to the librarian at the desk. "Dinosaurs and mysterious islands, coming up!"
The door slammed.
Outside, a weather of stars ran clear in an ocean sky.
"Heck." Jim sniffed north, Jim sniffed south. "Where's the storm? That darn salesman promised. I just got to watch that lightning fizz down my drainpipes!"
Will let the wind ruffle and refit his clothes, his skin, his hair. Then he said, faintly, "It'll be here. By morning."
"Who says?"
"The huckleberries all down my arms. They say."
"Great!"
The wind flew Jim away.
A similar kite, Will swooped to follow.
Chapter 3
WATCHING THE boys vanish away, Charles Halloway suppressed a sudden urge to run with them, make the pack. He knew what the wind was doing to them, where it was taking them, to all the secret places that were never so secret again in life. Somewhere in him, a shadow turned mournfully over. You had to run with a night like this, so the sadness could not hurt.
Look! he thought. Will runs because running is its own excuse. Jim runs because something's up ahead of him.
Yet, strangely, they do run together.
What's the answer, he wondered, walking through the library, putting out the lights, putting out the lights, putting out the lights, is it all in the whorls on our thumbs and fingers? Why are some people all grasshopper fiddlings, scrapings, all antennae shivering, one big ganglion eternally knotting, slip-knotting, square-knotting themselves? They stoke a furnace all their lives, sweat their lips, shine their eyes and start it all in the crib. Caesar's lean and hungry friends. They eat the dark, who only stand and breathe.
That's Jim, all bramblehair and itchweed.
And Will? Why, he's the last peach, high on a summer tree. Some boys walk by and you cry, seeing them. They feel good, they look good, they are good. Oh, they're not above peeing off a bridge, or stealing an occasional dime-store pencil sharpener; it's not that. It's just, you know, seeing them pass, that's how they'll be all their life; they'll get hit, hurt, cut, bruised, and always wonder why, why does it happen? how can it happen to them?
But Jim, now, he knows it happens, he watches for it happening, he sees it start, he sees it finish, he licks the wound he expected, and never asks why: he knows. He always knew. Someone knew before him, a long time ago, someone who had wolves for pets and lions for night conversants. Hell, Jim doesn't know with his mind. But his body knows. And while Will's putting a bandage on his latest scratch, Jim's ducking, weaving, bouncing away from the knockout blow which must inevitably come.
So there they go, Jim running slower to stay with Will, Will running faster to stay with Jim, Jim breaking two windows in a haunted house because Will's along, Will breaking one window instead of none, because Jim's watching. God, how we get our fingers in each other's clay. That's friendship, each playing the potter to see what shapes we can make of the other.
Jim, Will, he thought, strangers. Go on. I'll catch up, some day....
The library door gasped open, slammed.
Five minutes later, he turned into the corner saloon for his nightly one-and-only drink, in time to hear a man say:
"... I read when alcohol was invented, the Italians thought it was the big thing they'd been looking for for centuries. The Elixir of Life! Did you know that?"
"No." The bartender's back was turned.
"Sure," the man went on. "Distilled wine. Ninth, tenth century. Looked like water. But it burnt. I mean, it not only burnt the mouth and stomach, but you could set it on fire. So they thought they'd mixed water and fire. Fire-water, the Elixir Vitae, By God. Maybe they weren't so far wrong thinking it was the Cure-all, the thing that worked miracles. Have a drink!?"
"I don't need it," said Halloway. "But someone inside me does."
"Who?"
The boy I once was, thought Halloway, who runs like the leaves down the sidewalk autumn nights.
But he couldn't say that.
So he drank, eyes shut, listening to hear if that thing inside turned over again, rustling in the deep bons that were stacked for burning but never burned.
Chapter 4
WILL STOPPED. Will looked at the Friday night town.
It seemed when the first stroke of nine banged from the big courthouse clock all the lights were on and business humming in the shops. But by the time the last stroke of nine shook everyone's fillings in his teeth, the barbers had yanked off the sheets, powdered the customers, trotted them forth; the druggist's fount had stopped fizzing like a nest of snakes, the insect neons everywhere had ceased buzzing, and the vast guttering acreage of the dime store with its ten billion metal, glass and paper oddments waiting to be fished over, suddenly blacked out. Shades slithered, doors boomed, keys rattled their bones in locks, people fled with hordes of torn newspaper mice nibbling their heels.
Bang! they were gone!
"Boy!" yelled Will. "Folks run like they thought the storm was here!"
"It is!" shouted Jim. "Us!"
They stomp-pound-thundered over iron grates, steel trapdoors, past a dozen unlit shops, a dozen half-lit, a dozen dying dark. The city was dead as they rounded the United Cigar Store corner to see a wooden Cherokee glide in darkness, by himself.
"Hey!"
Mr. Tetley, the proprietor, peered over the Indian's shoulder.
"Scare you, boys?"
"Naw!"
But Will shivered, feeling cold tidal waves of strange rain moving down the prairie as on a deserted shore. When the lightning nailed the town, he wanted to be layered under sixteen blankets and a pillow.
"Mr. Tetley?" said Will, quietly.
For now there were two wooden Indians upright in ripe tobacco darkness. Mr. Tetley, amidst his jest, had frozen, mouth open, listening.
"Mr. Tetley?"
He heard something far away on the wind, but couldn't say what it was.
The boys backed off.
He did not see them. He did not move. He only listened.
They left him. They ran.
In the fourth empty block from the library, the boys came upon a third wooden Indian.
Mr. Crosetti, in front of his barber shop, his door key in his trembling fingers, did not see them stop.
What had stopped them?
A teardrop.
It moved shining down Mr. Crosetti's left cheek. He breathed heavily.
"Crosetti, you fool! Something happens, nothing happens, you cry like a baby!"
Mr. Crosetti took a trembling breath, snuffing. "Don't you smell it?"
Jim and Will sniffed.
"Licorice!"
"Heck, no. Cotton candy!"
"I haven't smelled that in years," said Mr. Crosetti.
Jim snorted. "It's around."
"Yes, but who notices? When? Now, my nose tells me, breathe! And I'm crying. Why? Because I remember how a long time ago, boys ate that stuff. Why haven't I stopped to think and smell the last thirty years?"
"You're busy, Mr. Crosetti," Will said.
"You haven't got time."
"Time, time." Mr. Crosetti wiped his eyes. "Where does that smell come from? There's no place in town sells cotton candy. Only circuses."
"Hey," said Will. "That's right!"
"Well, Crosetti is done crying." The barber blew his nose and turned to lock his shop door. As he did this, Will watched the barber pole whirl its red serpentine up out of nothing, leading his gaze around, rising to vanish into more nothing. On countless noons Will had stood here trying to unravel that ribbon, watch it come, go, end without ending.
Mr. Crosetti put his hand to the light switch under the spinning pole.
"Don't," said Will. Then, murmuring, "Don't turn it off."
Mr. Crosetti looked at the pole, as if freshly aware of its miraculous properties. He nodded, gently, his eyes soft. "Where does it come from, where does it go, eh? Who knows? Not you, not him, not me. Oh, the mysteries, by God. So. We'll leave it on!"
It's good to know, thought Will, it'll be running until dawn, winding up from nothing, winding away to nothing, white we sleep.
"Good night!"
"Good night."
And they left him behind in a wind that very faintly smelled of licorice and cotton candy.
Chapter 5
CHARLES HALLOWAY put his hand to the saloon's double swing doors, hesitant, as if the gray hairs on the back of his hand, like antennae, had felt something beyond slide by in the October night. Perhaps great fires burned somewhere and their furnace blasts warned him not to step forth. Or another Ice Age had loomed across the land, its freezing bulk might already have laid waste a billion people in the hour. Perhaps Time itself was draining off down an immense glass, with powdered darkness falling after to bury all.
Or maybe it was only that man in a dark suit, seen through the saloon window, across the street. Great paper rolls under one arm, a brush and bucket in his free hand, the man was whistling a tune, very far away.
It was a tune from another season, one that never ceased making Charles Halloway sad when he heard it. The song was incongruous for October, but immensely moving, overwhelming, no matter what day or what month it was sung:
I heard the bells on Christmas Day
Their old, familiar carols play.
And wild and sweet
Their words repeat
Of peace on earth, good will to men!
Charles Halloway shivered. Suddenly there was the old sense of terrified elation, of wanting to laugh and cry together when he saw the innocents of the earth wandering the snowy streets the day before Christmas among all the tired men and women whose faces were dirty with guilt, unwashed of sin, and smashed like small windows by life that hit without warning, ran, hid, came back and hit again.
Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:
"God is not dead, nor doth He sleep!
The Wrong shall fail,
The Right prevail,
With peace on earth, good will to men!"
The whistling died.
Charles Halloway stepped out. Far up ahead, the man who had whistled the tune was motioning his arms by a telegraph pole, silently working. Now he vanished into the open door of a shop.
Charles Halloway, not knowing why, crossed the street to watch the man pasting up one of the posters inside the unrented and empty store.
Now the man stepped out the door with his brush, his paste bucket, his rolled papers. His eyes, a fierce and lustful shine, fixed on Charles Halloway. Smiling, he gestured an open hand.
Halloway stared.
The palm of that hand was covered with fine black silken hair. It looked like--
The hand clenched, tight. It waved. The man swept around the corner. Charles Halloway, stunned, flushed with sudden summer heat, swayed, then turned to gaze into the empty shop.
Two sawhorses stood parallel to each other under a single spotlight.
Placed over these two sawhorses like a funeral of snow and crystal was a block of ice six feet long. It shone dimly with its own effulgence, and its color was light green-blue. It was a great cool gem resting there in the dark.
On a little white placard at one side near the window the following calligraphic message could be read by lamplight:
Cooger & Dark's Pandemonium Shadow Show--
Fantoccini, Marionette Circus, and Your
Plain Meadow Carnival. Arriving
Immediately! Here on Display, one of our many attractions:
THE MOST BEAUTIFUL WOMAN IN THE WORLD!
Halloway's eyes leaped to the poster on the inside of the window.
THE MOST BEAUTIFUL WOMAN IN THE WORLD!
And back to the cold long block of ice.
It was such a block of ice as he remembered from traveling magician's shows when he was a boy, when the local ice company contributed a chunk of winter in which, for 12 hours on end, frost maidens lay embedded, on display while people watched and comedies toppled down the raw white screen and coming attractions came and went and at last the pale ladies slid forth all rimed, chipped free by perspiring sorcerers to be led off smiling into the dark behind the curtains.
THE MOST BEAUTIFUL WOMAN IN THE WORLD!
And yet this vast chunk of wintry glass held nothing but frozen river water.
No. Not quite empty.
Halloway felt his heart pound one special time.
Within the huge winter gem was there not a special vacuum? a voluptuous hollow, a prolonged emptiness which undulated from tip to toe of the ice? and wasn't this vacuum, this emptiness waiting to be filled with summer flesh, was it not shaped somewhat like a ... woman?
Yes.
The ice. And the lovely hollows, the horizontal flow of emptiness within the ice. The lovely nothingness. The exquisite flow of an invisible mermaid daring the ice to capture it.
The ice was cold.
The emptiness within the ice was warm.
He wanted to go away from here.
But Charles Halloway stood in the strange night for a long time looking in at the empty shop and the two sawhorses and the cold waiting arctic coffin set there like a vast Star of India in the dark....
Chapter 6
JIM NIGHTSHADE stopped at the corner of Hickory and Main, breathing easily, his eyes fixed tenderly on the leafy darkness of Hickory Street.
"Will ...?"
"No!" Will stopped, surprised at his own violence.
"It's just there. The fifth house. Just one minute, Will," Jim pleaded, softly.
"Minute ...?" Will glanced down the street.
Which was the street of the Theater.
Until this summer it had been an ordinary street where they stole peaches, plums and apricots, each in its day. But late in August, while they were monkey-climbing for the sourest apples, the "thing" happened which changed the houses, the taste of the fruit, and the very air within the gossiping trees.
"Will! It's waiting. Maybe something's happening!" hissed Jim.
Maybe something is. Will swallowed hard, and felt Jim's hand pinch his arm.
For it was no longer the street of the apples or plums or apricots, it was the one house with a window at the side and this window, Jim said, was a stage, with a curtain--the shade, that is--up. And in that room, on that strange stage, were the actors, who spoke mysteries, mouthed wild things, laughed, sighed, murmured so much; so much of it was whispers Will did not understand.
"Just one last time, Will."
"You know it won't be last!"
Jim's face was flushed, his cheeks blazing, his eyes green-glass fire. He thought of that night, them picking the apples, Jim suddenly crying softly, "Oh, there!"
And Will, hanging to the limbs of the tree, tight-pressed, terribly excited, staring in at the Theater, that peculiar stage where people, all unknowing, flourished shirts above their heads, let fall clothes to the rug, stood raw and animal-crazy, naked, like shivering horses, hands out to touch each other.
What're they doing! thought Will. Why are they laughing? What's wrong with them, what's wrong!?
/> He wished the light would go out.
But he hung tight to the suddenly slippery tree and watched the bright window Theater, heard the laughing, and numb at last let go, slid, fell, lay dazed, then stood in dark gazing up at Jim, who still clung to his high limb. Jim's face, hearth-flushed, cheeks fire-fuzzed, lips parted, stared in. "Jim, Jim, come down!" But Jim did not hear. "Jim!" And when Jim looked down at last he saw Will as a stranger below with some silly request to give off living and come down to earth. So Will ran off, alone, thinking too much, thinking nothing at all, not knowing what to think.
"Will, please ..."
Will looked at Jim now, with the library books in his hands.
"We been to the library. Ain't that enough?"
Jim shook his head. "Carry these for me."
He handed Will his books and trotted softly off under the hissing whispering trees. Three houses down he called back: "Will? Know what you are? A darn old dimwit Episcopal Baptist!"
Then Jim was gone.
Will seized the books tight to his chest. They were wet from his hands.
Don't look back! he thought.
I won't! I won't!
And looking only toward home, he walked that way. Quickly.
Chapter 7
HALFWAY HOME, Will felt a shadow breathing hard behind him.
"Theater closed?" said Will, not looking back.
Jim walked in silence beside him for a long while and then said, "Nobody home."
"Swell!"
Jim spat. "Darn Baptist preacher, you!"
And around the corner a tumbleweed slithered, a great cotton ball of pale paper which bounced, then clung shivering to Jim's legs.
Will grabbed the paper, laughing, pulled it off, let it fly! He stopped laughing.
The boys, watching the pale throwaway rattle and flit through the trees, were suddenly cold.
"Wait a minute ..." said Jim, slowly.
All of a sudden they were yelling, running, leaping. "Don't tear it! Careful!"
The paper fluttered like a snare drum in their hands.
"COMING, OCTOBER TWENTY-FOURTH!"
Their lips moved, shadowing the words set in rococo type.
"Cooger and Dark's ..."
"Carnival!"
"October twenty-fourth! That's tomorrow!"
"It can't be," said Will. "All carnivals stop after Labor Day--"