‘You know very well it’s the only convenient park for miles around.’
‘I don’t care about that. All I care is I saw a dozen kinds of bats and clubs and air guns. By the end of the first day, Jim would be in splinters. They’d have him barbecued, with an orange in his mouth.’
She was beginning to laugh. ‘How you exaggerate.’
‘I’m serious!’
‘You can’t live Jim’s life for him. He has to learn the hard way. He’s got to take a little beating and beat others up; boys are like that.’
‘I don’t like boys like that.’
‘It’s the happiest time of life.’
‘Nonsense. I used to look back on childhood with great nostalgia. But now I realize I was a sentimental fool. It was nothing but screaming and running in a nightmare and coming home drenched with terror, from head to foot. If I could possibly save Jim from that, I would.’
‘That’s impractical and, thank God, impossible.’
‘I won’t have him near that place, I tell you. I’ll have him grow up a neurotic recluse first.’
‘Charlie!’
‘I will! Those little beasts, you should’ve seen them. Jim’s my son, he is: he’s not yours, remember.’ He felt the boy’s thin legs about his shoulders, the boy’s delicate fingers rumpling his hair. ‘I won’t have him butchered.’
‘He’ll get it in school. Better to let him take a little shoving about now, when he’s three, so he’s prepared for it.’
‘I’ve thought of that, too.’ Mr Underhill held fiercely to his son’s ankles which dangled like warm, thin sausages on either lapel. ‘I might even get a private tutor for him.’
‘Oh, Charles!’
They did not speak during dinner.
After dinner, he took Jim for a brief walk while his sister was washing the dishes. They strolled past the Playground under the dim street lamps. It was a cooling September night, with the first dry spice of autumn in it. Next week, and the children would be raked in off the fields like so many leaves and set to burning in the schools, using their fire and energy for more constructive purposes. But they would be here after school, ramming about, making projectiles of themselves, crashing and exploding, leaving wakes of misery behind every miniature war.
‘Want to go in,’ said Jim, leaning against the high wire fence, watching the late-playing children beat each other and run.
‘No, Jim, you don’t want that.’
‘Play,’ said Jim, his eyes shining with fascination as he saw a large boy kick a small boy and the small boy kick a smaller boy to even things up.
‘Play, Daddy.’
‘Come along. Jim, you’ll never get in that mess if I can help it.’ Underhill tugged the small arm firmly.
‘I want to play.’ Jim was beginning to blubber now. His eyes were melting out of his face and his face was becoming a wrinkled orange of color.
Some of the children heard the crying and glanced over. Underhill had the terrible sense of watching a den of foxes suddenly startled and looking up from the white, hairy ruin of a dead rabbit. The mean yellow-glass eyes, the conical chins, the sharp white teeth, the dreadful wiry hair, the brambly sweaters, the iron-colored hands covered with a day’s battle stains. Their breath moved out to him, dark licorice and mint and Juicy Fruit so sickeningly sweet, so combined as to twist his stomach. And over this the hot mustard smell of someone tolerating an early chest cold: the greasy stink of flesh smeared with hot camphorous salves cooking under a flannel sheath. All these cloying and somehow depressing odors of pencils, chalk, grass and slate-board erasers, real or imagined, summoned old memory in an instant. Popcorn mortared their teeth, and green jelly showed in their sucking, blowing nostrils. God! God!
They saw Jim, and he was new to them. They said not a word, but as Jim cried louder and Underhill, by main force, dragged him like a cement bag along the walk, the children followed with their glowing eyes. Underhill felt like pushing his fist at them and crying, ‘You little beasts, you won’t get my son!’
And then, with beautiful irrelevance, the boy at the top of the blue metal slide, so high he seemed almost in a mist, far away, the boy with the somehow familiar face, called out to him, waving and waving.
‘Hello, Charlie…!’
Underhill paused and Jim stopped crying.
‘See you later, Charlie…!’
And the face of the boy way up there on that high and very lonely slide was suddenly like the face of Thomas Marshall, an old business friend who lived just around the block, but whom he hadn’t seen in months.
‘See you later, Charlie.’
Later, later? What did the fool boy mean?
‘I know you, Charlie!’ called the boy. ‘Hi!’
‘What?’ gasped Underhill.
‘Tomorrow night, Charlie, hey!’ And the boy fell off the slide and lay choking for breath, face like a white cheese from the fall, while children jumped him and tumbled over.
Underhill stood undecided for five seconds or more, until Jim thought to cry again, and then, with the golden fox eyes upon them, in the first chill of autumn, he dragged Jim all the way home.
The next afternoon Mr Underhill finished at the office early and took the three o’clock train, arriving out in Green Town at three twenty-five, in plenty of time to drink in the brisk rays of the autumnal sun. Strange how one day it is suddenly autumn, he thought. One day it is summer and the next, how could you measure or tell it? Something about the temperature or the smell? Or the sediment of age knocked loose from your bones during the night and circulating in your blood and heart, giving you a slight tremble and a chill? A year older, a year dying, was that it?
He walked up toward the Playground, planning the future. It seemed you did more planning in autumn than any other season. This had to do with dying, perhaps. You thought of death and you automatically planned. Well, then, there was to be a tutor for Jim, that was positive; none of those horrible schools for him. It would pinch the bank account a bit, but Jim would at least grow up a happy boy. They would pick and choose his friends. Any slam-bang bullies would be thrown out as soon as they so much as touched Jim. And as for this Playground? Completely out of the question!
‘Oh hello, Charles.’
He looked up suddenly. Before him, at the entrance to the wire enclosure, stood his sister. He noted instantly that she called him Charles, instead of Charlie. Last night’s unpleasantness had not quite evaporated. ‘Carol, what’re you doing here?’
She flushed guiltily and glanced in through the fence.
‘You didn’t,’ he said.
His eyes sought among the scrabbling, running, screaming children. ‘Do you mean to say…?’
His sister nodded, half amused. ‘I thought I’d bring him early—’
‘Before I got home, so I wouldn’t know, is that it?’
That was it.
‘Good God, Carol, where is he?’
‘I just came to see.’
‘You mean you left him there all afternoon?’
‘Just for five minutes while I shopped.’
‘And you left him. Good God!’ Underhill seized her wrist. ‘Well, come on, find him, get him out of there!’
They peered in together past the wire to where a dozen boys charged about, girls slapped each other, and a squabbling heap of children took turns at getting off, making a quick run, and crashing one against another.
‘That’s where he is, I know it!’ said Underhill.
Just then, across the field, sobbing and wailing. Jim ran, six boys after him. He fell, got up, ran, fell again, shrieking, and the boys behind shot beans through metal blowers.
‘I’ll stuff those blowers up their noses!’ said Underhill. ‘Run, Jim! Run!’
Jim made it to the gate. Underhill caught him. It was like catching a rumpled, drenched wad of material. Jim’s nose was bleeding, his pants were ripped, he was covered with grime.
‘There’s your Playground,’ said Underhill, on his knees, staring up f
rom his son, holding him, at his sister. ‘There are your sweet, happy innocents, your well-to-do piddling Fascists. Let me catch this boy here again and there’ll be hell to pay. Come on, Jim. All right, you little bastards, get back there!’ he shouted.
‘We didn’t do nothing,’ said the children.
‘What’s the world coming to?’ Mr Underhill questioned the universe.
‘Hi! Charlie!’ said the strange boy, standing to one side. He waved casually and smiled.
‘Who’s that?’ asked Carol.
‘How in hell do I know?’ said Underhill.
‘Be seeing you, Charlie. So long,’ called the boy, fading off.
Mr Underhill marched his sister and his son home.
‘Take your hand off my elbow!’ said Carol.
He was trembling, absolutely, continually trembling with rage when he got to bed. He had tried some coffee, but nothing stopped it. He wanted to beat their pulpy little brains out, those gross Cruikshank children, yes, that phrase fit them, those fox-fiend, melancholy Cruikshank children, with all the guile and poison and slyness in their cold faces. In the name of all that was decent, what manner of child was this new generation! A bunch of cutters and hangers and bangers, a drove of bleeding, moronic thumbscrewers, with the sewage of neglect running in their veins? He lay violently jerking his head from one side of his hot pillow to the other, and at last got up and lit a cigarette, but it wasn’t enough. He and Carol had had a huge battle when they got home. He had yelled at her and she had yelled back, peacock and peahen shrieking in a wilderness where law and order were insanities laughed at and quite forgotten.
He was ashamed. You didn’t fight violence with violence, not if you were a gentleman. You talked very calmly. But Carol didn’t give you a chance, damn it! She wanted the boy put in a vise and squashed. She wanted him reamed and punctured and given the laying on of hands. To be beaten from playground to kindergarten, to grammar school, to junior high, to high school. If he was lucky, in high school, the beatings and sadisms would refine themselves, the sea of blood and spittle would drain back down the shore of years and Jim would be left upon the edge of maturity, with God knows what outlook to the future, with a desire, perhaps, to be a wolf among wolves, a dog among dogs, a fiend among fiends. But there was enough of that in the world, already. The very thought of the next ten or fifteen years of torture was enough to make Mr Underhill cringe; he felt his own flesh impaled with BB shot, stung, burned, fisted, scrounged, twisted, violated, and bruised. He quivered, like a jellyfish hurled violently into a concrete mixer. Jim would never survive it. Jim was too delicate for this horror.
Underhill walked in the midnight rooms of his house thinking of all this, of himself, of the son, the Playground, the fear; there was no part of it he did not touch and turn over with his mind. How much, he asked himself, how much of this is being alone, how much due to Ann’s dying, how much to my need, and how much is the reality of the Playground itself, and the children? How much rational and how much nonsense? He twitched the delicate weights upon the scale and watched the indicator glide and fix and glide again, back and forth, softly, between midnight and dawn, between black and white, between raw sanity and naked insanity. He should not hold so tight, he should let his hands drop away from the boy. And yet—there was no hour that looking into Jim’s small face he did not see Ann there, in the eyes, in the mouth, in the turn of the nostrils, in the warm breathing, in the glow of blood moving just under the thin shell of flesh, I have a right, he thought, to be afraid. I have every right. When you have two precious bits of porcelain and one is broken and the other, the last one, remains, where can you find the time to be objective, to be immensely calm, to be anything else but concerned?
No, he thought, walking slowly in the hall, there seems to be nothing I can do except go on being afraid and being afraid of being afraid.
‘You needn’t prowl the house all night,’ his sister called from her bed, as she heard him pass her open door. ‘You needn’t be childish, I’m sorry if I seem dictatorial or cold. But you’ve got to make up your mind. Jim simply cannot have a private tutor. Ann would have wanted him to go to a regular school. And he’s got to go back to that Playground tomorrow and keep going back until he’s learned to stand on his own two feet and until he’s familiar to all the children; then they won’t pick on him so much.’
Underhill said nothing. He got dressed quietly, in the dark, and, downstairs, opened the front door. It was about five minutes to midnight as he walked swiftly down the street in the shadows of the tall elms and oaks and maples, trying to outdistance his rage and outrage. He knew Carol was right, of course. This was the world, you lived in it, you accepted it. But that was the very trouble! He had been through the mill already, he knew what it was to be a boy among lions; his own childhood had come rushing back to him in the last few hours, a time of terror and violence, and now he could not bear to think of Jim’s going through it all, those long years, especially if you were a delicate child, through no fault of your own, your bones thin, your face pale, what could you expect but to be harried and chased?
He stopped by the Playground, which was still lit by one great overhead lamp. The gate was locked for the night, but that one light remained on until twelve. He wanted to tear the contemptible place down, rip up the steel fences, obliterate the slides, and say to the children, ‘Go home! Play in your back yards!’
How ingenious, the cold, deep Playground. You never knew where anyone lived. The boy who knocked your teeth out, who was he? Nobody knew. Where did he live? Nobody knew. How to find him? Nobody knew. Why, you could come here one day, beat the living tar out of some smaller child, and run on the next day to some other Playground. They would never find you. From Playground to Playground, you could take your criminal tricks, with everyone forgetting you, since they never knew you. You could return to this Playground a month later, and if the little child whose teeth you knocked out was there and recognized you, you could deny it. ‘No, I’m not the one. Must be some other kid. This is my first time here! No, not me!’ And when his back is turned, knock him over. And run off down nameless streets, a nameless person.
What can I possibly do? thought Underhill. Carol’s been more than generous with her time; she’s been good for Jim, no doubt of it. A lot of the love she would have put into a marriage has gone to him this year. I can’t fight her forever on this, and I can’t tell her to leave. Perhaps moving to the country might help. No, no, impossible; the money. But I can’t leave Jim here, either.
‘Hello, Charlie,’ said a quiet voice.
Underhill snapped about. Inside the Playground fence, seated in the dirt, making diagrams with one finger in the cool dust, was the solemn nine-year-old boy. He didn’t glance up. He said. ‘Hello Charlie,’ just sitting there, easily, in that world beyond the hard steel fence.
Underhill said, ‘How do you know my name?’
‘I know it.’ The boy crossed his legs, comfortably, smiling quietly. ‘You’re having lots of trouble.’
‘How’d you get in there so late? Who are you?’
‘My name’s Marshall.’
‘Of course! Tom Marshall’s son Tommy! I thought you looked familiar.’
‘More familiar than you think.’ The boy laughed gently.
‘How’s your father. Tommy?’
‘Have you seen him lately?’ the boy asked.
‘On the street, briefly, two months ago.’
‘How did he look?’
‘What?’
‘How did Mr Marshall look?’ asked the boy. It seemed strange he refused to say ‘my father.’
‘He looked all right. Why?’
‘I guess he’s happy,’ said the boy. Mr Underhill saw the boy’s arms and legs and they were covered with scabs and scratches.
‘Aren’t you going home, Tommy?’
‘I sneaked out to see you. I just knew you’d come. You’re afraid.’
Mr Underhill didn’t know what to say.
‘Those l
ittle monsters,’ he said at last.
‘Maybe I can help you.’ The boy made a dust triangle.
It was ridiculous. ‘How?’
‘You’d give anything, wouldn’t you, if you could spare Jim all this? You’d trade places with him if you could?’
Mr Underhill nodded, frozen.
‘Well, you come down here tomorrow afternoon at four. Then I can help you.’
‘How do you mean, help?’
‘I can’t tell you outright,’ said the boy. ‘It has to do with the Playground. Any place where there’s lots of evil, that makes power. You can feel it, can’t you?’
A kind of warm wind stirred off the bare field under the one high light. Underhill shivered. Yes, even now, at midnight, the Playground seemed evil, for it was used for evil things. ‘Are all Playgrounds like this?’
‘Some. Maybe this is the only one like this. Maybe it’s just how you look at it, Charlie. Things are what you want them to be. A lot of people think this is a swell Playground. They’re right, too. It’s how you look at it, maybe. What I wanted to say, though, is that Tom Marshall was like you. He worried about Tommy Marshall and the Playground and the kids, too. He wanted to save Tommy the trouble and the hurt, also.’
This business of talking about people as if they were remote made Mr Underhill uncomfortable.
‘So we made a bargain,’ said the boy.
‘Who with?’
‘With the Playground. I guess, or whoever runs it.’
‘Who runs it?’
‘I’ve never seen him. There’s an office over there under the grandstand. A light burns in it all night. It’s a bright, blue light, kind of funny. There’s a desk there with no papers in it and an empty chair. The sign says MANAGER, but nobody ever sees the man.’
‘He must be around.’
‘That’s right,’ said the boy. ‘Or I wouldn’t be where I am, and someone else wouldn’t be where they are.’
‘You certainly talk grown-up.’