At last he was ready to go to the counter. The uniformed girl there stared at him while he gave his order--his wet hair, he thought. While she waited for the order to come through, the girl stepped back and leaned against the service hatch, still unabashedly looking at him.
He was biting into the first Whopper as he turned away toward the glass doors. Juice ran down his chin. He was so hungry he could scarcely bother to chew. Three enormous bites took most of the big sandwich. He had just worked his mouth far enough around the remainder to take a fourth when he saw through the doors that Wolf had attracted a crowd of children. The meat congealed in his mouth, and his stomach slammed shut.
Jack hurried outside, still trying to swallow his mouthful of ground chuck, limp bread, pickles, lettuce, tomatoes, and sauce. The kids stood in the street on three sides of Wolf, staring at him every bit as frankly as the waitress had stared at Jack. Wolf had hunched down on the curb as far as he was able, bowing his back and pulling in his neck like a turtle. His ears seemed flattened against his head. The wad of food stuck in Jack's throat like a golfball, and when he swallowed convulsively, it dropped down another notch.
Wolf glanced at him out of the side of his eye, and visibly relaxed. A tall blue-jeaned man in his twenties opened the door of a battered red pick-up five or six feet away down the curb, leaned against the cab, and watched, smiling. "Have a burger, Wolf," Jack said as carelessly as he could. He handed Wolf the box, which Wolf sniffed. Then Wolf lifted his head and took a huge bite out of the box. He began methodically to chew. The children, astounded and fascinated, stepped nearer. A few of them were giggling. "What is he?" asked a little girl with blond pigtails tied with fuzzy pink gift-wrapping yarn. "Is he a monster?" A crewcut boy of seven or eight shoved himself in front of the girl and said, "He's the Hulk, isn't he? He's really the Hulk. Hey? Hey? Huh? Right?"
Wolf had managed to extract what was left of his Whopper from its cardboard container. He pushed the whole thing into his mouth with his palm. Shreds of lettuce fell between his upraised knees, mayonnaise and meat juices smeared over his chin, his cheek. Everything else became a brownish pulp smacked to death between Wolf's enormous teeth. When he swallowed he started to lick the inside of the box.
Jack gently took the container out of his hands. "No, he's just my cousin. He's not a monster, and he's not the Hulk. Why don't you kids get away and leave us alone, huh? Go on. Leave us alone."
They continued to stare. Wolf was now licking his fingers.
"If you keep on gawping at him like that, you might make him mad. I don't know what he'd do if he got mad."
The boy with the crewcut had seen David Banner's transformation often enough to have an idea of what anger might do to this monstrous Burger King carnivore. He stepped back. Most of the others moved back with him.
"Go on, please," Jack said, but the children had frozen again.
Wolf rose up mountainously, his fists clenched. "GOD POUND YOU, DON'T LOOK AT ME!" he bellowed. "DON'T MAKE ME FEEL FUNNY! EVERYBODY MAKES ME FEEL FUNNY!"
The children scattered. Breathing hard, red-faced, Wolf stood and watched them disappear up Daleville's Main Street and around the corner. When they were gone, he wrapped his arms around his chest and looked dartingly at Jack. He was miserable with embarrassment. "Wolf shouldn't have yelled," he said. "They were just little ones."
"Big fat scare'll do them a lot of good," a voice said, and Jack saw that the young man from the red pick-up was still leaning against his cab, smiling at them. "Never saw anything like that before myself. Cousins, are you?"
Jack nodded suspiciously.
"Hey, I didn't mean to get personal or anything." He stepped forward, an easy, dark-haired young man in a sleeveless down vest and a plaid shirt. "I especially don't want to make anybody feel funny now, ya know." He paused, lifted his hands, palm-out. "Really. I was just thinking that you guys look like you've been on the road awhile."
Jack glanced at Wolf, who was still hugging himself in embarrassment but also glowering through his round glasses at this figure.
"I've been there myself," the man said. "Hey, dig it--the year I got out of good old DHS--Daleville High, you know--I hitched all the way to northern California and all the way back. Anyhow, if you're sort of going west, I can give you a lift."
"Can't, Jacky." Wolf spoke in a thunderous stage whisper.
"How far west?" Jack asked. "We're trying to make it to Springfield. I have a friend in Springfield."
"Hey, no probleema, seenyor." He raised his hands again. "I'm going just this side of Cayuga, right next to the Illinois border. You let me scarf a burger, we gone. Straight shot. An hour and a half, maybe less--you'll be about halfway to Springfield."
"Can't," Wolf rasped again.
"There's one problem, okay? I got some stuff on the front seat. One of you guys'll have to ride behind. It's gonna be windy back there."
"You don't know how great that is," Jack said, speaking nothing more than the truth. "We'll see you when you come back out." Wolf began to dance in agitation. "Honest. We'll be out here, mister. And thanks."
He turned to whisper to Wolf as soon as the man went through the doors.
And so when the young man--Bill "Buck" Thompson, for that was his name--returned to his pick-up carrying the containers for two more Whoppers, he found a sedate-looking Wolf kneeling in the open back, his arms resting on the side panel, mouth open, nose already lifting. Jack was in the passenger seat, crowded by a stack of bulky plastic bags which had been taped, then stapled shut, and then sprayed extensively with room freshener, to judge by the smell. Through the translucent sides the bags were visible long frondlike cuttings, medium green. Clusters of buds grew on these amputated fronds.
"I reckoned you still looked a little hungry," he said, and tossed another Whopper to Wolf. Then he let himself in on the driver's side, across the pile of plastic bags from Jack. "Thought he might catch it in his teeth, no reflection on your cousin. Here, take this one, he already pulverized his."
And a hundred miles west they went, Wolf delirious with joy to have the wind whipping past his head, half-hypnotized by the speed and variety of the odors which his nose caught in flight. Eyes blazing and glowing, registering every nuance of the wind, Wolf twitched from side to side behind the cab, shoving his nose into the speeding air.
Buck Thompson spoke of himself as a farmer. He talked nonstop during the seventy-five minutes he kept his foot near the floor, and never once asked Jack any questions. And when he swung off onto a narrow dirt road just outside the Cayuga town line and stopped the car beside a cornfield that seemed to run for miles, he dug in his shirt pocket and brought out a faintly irregular cigarette rolled in almost tissuelike white paper. "I've heard of red-eye," he said. "But your cousin's ridiculous." He dropped the cigarette into Jack's hand. "Have him take some of this when he gets excited, willya? Doctor's orders."
Jack absently stuffed the joint into his shirt pocket and climbed out of the cab. "Thanks, Buck," he called up to the driver.
"Man, I thought I'd seen something when I saw him eat," Buck said. "How do you get him to go places? Yell mush! mush! at him?"
Once Wolf realized that the ride was over, he bounded off the back of the truck.
The red pick-up rolled off, leaving a long plume of dust behind it.
"Let's do that again!" Wolf sang out. "Jacky! Let's do that again!"
"Boy, I wish we could," Jack said. "Come on, let's walk for a while. Someone will probably come along."
He was thinking that his luck had turned, that in no time at all he and Wolf would be over the border into Illinois--and he'd always been certain that things would go smoothly once he got to Springfield and Thayer School and Richard. But Jack's mind was still partially in shed-time, where what is unreal bloats and distorts whatever is real, and when the bad things started to happen again, they happened so quickly that he was unable to control them. It was a long time before Jack saw Illinois, and during that time he found himself back in the
shed.
2
The bewilderingly rapid series of events which led to the Sunlight Home began ten minutes after the two boys had walked past the stark little roadsign telling them that they were now in Cayuga, pop. 23,568. Cayuga itself was nowhere visible. To their right the endless cornfield rolled across the land; to their left a bare field allowed them to see how the road bent, then arrowed straight toward the flat horizon. Just after Jack had realized that they would probably have to walk all the way into town to get their next ride, a car appeared on this road, travelling fast toward them.
"Ride in back?" Wolf yelled, joyfully raising his arms up over his head. "Wolf ride in back! Right here and now!"
"It's going the wrong way," Jack said. "Just be calm and let it pass us, Wolf. Get your arms down or he'll think you're signalling him."
Reluctantly Wolf lowered his arms. The car had come nearly to the bend in the road which would take it directly past Jack and Wolf. "No ride in the back now?" Wolf asked, pouting almost childishly.
Jack shook his head. He was staring at an oval medallion painted on the car's dusty white doorpanel. County Parks Commission, this might have said, or State Wildlife Board. It might have been anything from the vehicle of the state agricultural agent to the property of the Cayuga Maintenance Department. But when it turned into the bend, Jack saw it was a police car.
"That's a cop, Wolf. A policeman. Just keep walking and stay nice and loose. We don't want him to stop."
"What's a coppiceman?" Wolf's voice had dropped into a dark brown range; he had seen that the speeding car was now coming straight toward him. "Does a coppiceman kill Wolfs?"
"No," Jack said, "they absolutely never kill Wolfs," but it did no good. Wolf captured Jack's hand in his own, which trembled.
"Let go of me, please, Wolf," Jack pleaded. "He'll think it's funny."
Wolf's hand dropped away.
As the police car advanced toward them, Jack glanced at the figure behind the wheel, and then turned around and walked back a few paces so that he could watch Wolf. What he had seen was not encouraging. The policeman driving the car had a wide doughy domineering face with livid slabs of fat where he'd once had cheekbones. And Wolf's terror was plain on his face. Eyes, nostrils flared; he was showing his teeth.
"You really liked riding in the back of that truck, didn't you?" Jack asked him.
Some of the terror disappeared, and Wolf nearly managed a smile. The police car roared past--Jack was conscious of the driver turning his head to inspect them. "All right," Jack said. "He's on his way. We're okay, Wolf."
He had turned around again when he heard the sound of the police car suddenly begin to grow louder again.
"Coppiceman's coming back!"
"Probably just going back to Cayuga," Jack said. "Turn around and just act like me. Don't stare at him."
Wolf and Jack trudged along, pretending to ignore the car, which seemed to hang behind them deliberately. Wolf uttered a sound that was half-moan, half-howl.
The police car swung out into the road, passed them, flashed its brake lights, and then cut in diagonally before them. The officer pushed open his door and got his feet planted on the ground. Then he hoisted himself out of the seat. He was roughly Jack's height, and all his weight was in his face and his stomach--his legs were twig-skinny, his arms and shoulders those of a normally developed man. His gut, trussed in the brown uniform like a fifteen-pound turkey, bulged out on both sides of the wide brown belt.
"I can't wait for it," he said, and cocked an arm and leaned on the open door. "What's your story, anyhow? Give."
Wolf padded up behind Jack and hunched his shoulders, his hands shoved deep into the pockets of his overalls.
"We're going to Springfield, officer," Jack said. "We've been hitching--I guess maybe we shouldn't."
"You guess maybe you shouldn't. Hol-eee shit. What's this guy tryinna disappear behind you, a Wookie?"
"He's my cousin." Jack thought frantically for a moment--the Story had to be bent far enough to accommodate Wolf. "I'm supposed to be taking him home. He lives in Springfield with his Aunt Helen, I mean my Aunt Helen, the one who's a schoolteacher. In Springfield."
"What'd he do, escape from somewhere?"
"No, no, nothing like that. It was just that--"
The cop looked at him neutrally, his face sizzling. "Names."
Now the boy met a dilemma: Wolf was certain to call him Jack, no matter what name he gave the cop. "I'm Jack Parker," he said. "And he's--"
"Hold it. I want the feeb to tell me himself. Come on, you. You remember your name, basket case?"
Wolf squirmed behind Jack, digging his chin into the top of his overalls. He muttered something.
"I couldn't hear you, sonny."
"Wolf," he whispered.
"Wolf. Prob'ly I should have guessed. What's your first name, or did they just give you a number?"
Wolf had squeezed his eyes shut, and was twisting his legs together.
"Come on, Phil," Jack said, thinking that it was one of the few names Wolf might remember.
But he had just finished it when Wolf pulled up his head and straightened his back and yelled, "JACK! JACK! JACK WOLF!"
"We call him Jack sometimes," the boy put in, knowing it was already too late. "It's because he likes me so much, sometimes I'm the only one who can do anything with him. I might even stay there in Springfield a few days after I get him home, just to make sure he settles down okay."
"I sure am sick of the sound of your voice, Jack boy. Why don't you and good old Phil-Jack get in the back seat here and we'll go into town and straighten everything out?" When Jack did not move, the policeman put a hand on the butt of the enormous pistol which hung from his straining belt. "Get in the car. Him first. I want to find out why you're a hundred miles from home on a school day. In the car. Right now."
"Ah, officer," Jack began, and behind him Wolf rasped, "No. Can't."
"My cousin has this problem," Jack said. "He's claustrophobic. Small spaces, especially the insides of cars, drive him crazy. We can only get rides in pick-ups, so he can be in the back."
"Get in the car," the policeman said. He stepped forward and opened the back door.
"CAN'T!" Wolf wailed. "Wolf CAN'T! Stinks, Jacky, it stinks in there." His nose and lip had wrinkled into corrugations.
"You get him in the car or I will," the cop said to Jack.
"Wolf, it won't be for long," Jack said, reaching for Wolf's hand. Reluctantly, Wolf allowed him to take it. Jack pulled him toward the back seat of the police car, Wolf literally dragging his feet across the surface of the road.
For a couple of seconds it looked as though it would work. Wolf got close enough to the police car to touch the doorframe. Then his entire body shook. He clamped both hands onto the top of the doorframe. It looked as though he were going to try to rip the top of the car in half, as a circus strongman tears a telephone book in two.
"Please," Jack said quietly. "We have to."
But Wolf was terrified, and too disgusted by whatever he had smelled. He shook his head violently. Slobber ran from his mouth and dripped onto the top of the car.
The policeman stepped around Jack and released something from a catch on his belt. Jack had time only to see that it was not his pistol before the cop expertly whapped his blackjack into the base of Wolf's skull. Wolf's upper body dropped onto the top of the car, and then all of Wolf slid gracefully down onto the dusty road.
"You get on his other side," the cop said, fastening the sap to his belt. "We're gonna finally get this big bag of shit into the vehicle."
Two or three minutes later, after they had twice dropped Wolf's heavy unconscious body back onto the road, they were speeding toward Cayuga. "I already know what's gonna happen to you and your feeb cousin, if he is your cousin, which I doubt." The cop looked up at Jack in his rear-view mirror, and his eyes were raisins dipped in fresh tar.
All the blood in Jack's body seemed to swing down, down in his veins, and his heart
jumped in his chest. He had remembered the cigarette in his shirt pocket. He clapped his hand over it, then jerked his hand away before the cop could say anything.
"I gotta put his shoes back on," Jack said. "They sort of fell off."
"Forget it," the cop said, but did not object further when Jack bent over. Out of sight of the mirror, he first shoved one of the split-seamed loafers back up on Wolf's bare heel, then quickly snatched the joint out of his pocket and popped it in his mouth. He bit into it, and dry crumbly particles with a oddly herbal taste spilled over his tongue. Jack began to grind them between his teeth. Something scratched down into his throat, and he convulsively jerked upright, put his hand in front of his mouth, and tried to cough with his lips together. When his throat was clear, he hurriedly swallowed all of the dampened, now rather sludgy marijuana. Jack ran his tongue over his teeth, collecting all the flecks and traces.
"You got a few surprises ahead of you," the policeman said. "You're gonna get a little sunlight in your soul."
"Sunlight in my soul?" Jack asked, thinking that the cop had seen him stuff the joint into his mouth.
"A few blisters on your hands, too," the cop said, and glared happily at Jack's guilty image in the rear-view mirror.
The Cayuga Municipal Building was a shadowy maze of unlighted hallways and narrow staircases that seemed to wind unexpectedly upward alongside equally narrow rooms. Water sang and rumbled in the pipes. "Let me explain something to you kids," the policeman said, ushering them toward the last staircase to their right. "You're not under arrest. Got that? You are being detained for questioning. I don't want to hear any bullshit about one phone call. You're in limbo until you tell us who you are and what you're up to," the cop went on. "You hear me? Limbo. Nowhere. We're gonna see Judge Fairchild, he's the magistrate, and if you don't tell us the truth, you're gonna pay some big fuckin consequences. Upstairs. Move it!"