For a moment he’s puzzled, then realizes his shirt must have ridden up his stomach during his no-hands descent. Straddling the seat, he looks down at his white cotton T-shirt and suddenly knows he doesn’t want to do it. The shadow of the brown bird flits across the gray plank. He pinches the hem of the shirt between a thumb and forefinger and slowly lifts. He gasps. His tattoo, the open eye, identical to that of every other kid in Hokey Pokey, is down to a couple of eyelashes and a gray smudge where the sharp dime of the eyeball used to be. It’s all but gone. And he hears that sound again. A whistle.
Next thing he knows, he’s on his butt in the dust and someone is calling, “Hey, Jack! Look what we got!”
AMIGOS
DUSTY CAN’T FIGURE OUT what he’s looking at. On the one hand, Jack wobbles and tumbles comically backward from his seat on the seesaw; on the other hand, little Lopez, before she drops down, was definitely not laughing, not with that look on her face. Whatever. Dusty crackles with news and nothing is going to stop him, especially not LaJo, who refused to help and now glumps along twenty feet behind. “Hey, Jack!” Dusty calls. “Look what we got!”
Jack doesn’t turn around, just sits in the dust. Maybe he doesn’t hear. Dusty comes alongside. “Jack, look.”
Heavily, as if his head weighs too much, Jack turns. His face is pale. His eyes land on the bike but somehow don’t seem to see it. Dusty pats its rump. “It’s a new bike, Amigo.”
Jack doesn’t respond. He seems to be in a fog. “We cut it from the herd. Well, I did.”
It’s old. Slow. “Hey”—he buddyclamps Jack’s shoulder—“listen, I ain’t saying we’re giving up on Scramjet. We’ll get it back, Jack, we’ll get it back. I’m just saying, hey, it don’t hurt to have a backup, right? Plan B. Just in case.” He ignores LaJo’s background slur—“It’s a nag”—plows on: “We can fix it, dude. Clean this baby up. Shine ’er up.” Even as he pats the lopsided saddle, a spring falls off. “We’ll paint it, Jack. Black. Just like Scramjet. Maybe stripes!”
Jack is on his feet, walking away.
“You can call it Scramjet Two, Jack!” Dusty calls. “Waddaya think? Huh?”
They watch Jack go off, wanting to follow but leery. “I told you he didn’t want it, ya dumb turdbrain,” says LaJo.
“We can paint it,” Dusty says weakly, more to himself than anyone else.
LaJo wags his head. “Let it go.”
“No.” Dusty’s answer comes fast and firm, but when LaJo lifts his hand from the bike’s rump, Dusty doesn’t resist. LaJo gives a gentle push, sending the creaking, leaking nag off in the general direction of Great Plains.
They watch Jack. Dusty’s eyes brim. “I just thought—”
LaJo waves him off. “Forget it.”
Jack’s slumpshouldered figure recedes. The boys feel a vague unwinding, themselves helpless spindles.
“He knows,” says LaJo.
“What?” says Dusty absently. Then, turning, startled: “What?”
“He saw it.”
Dusty blinks a rainbow: tears, sun. As always, little kids are coming up to Jack, tugging, pestering, asking to play, but he ignores them. “You think?”
“Yeah.”
Dusty squints after Jack. His lips move with unspoken words. He scuffs off, kicks dirt, picks up a stone, throws it, returns to LaJo. “What … what …” LaJo turns aside, Dusty pulls him back. His eyes are bright. “What’s going on?” LaJo shrugs. Dusty grabs his shirt, wrenches. “Huh?”
LaJo sends Dusty reeling with a shove. “What do I look like, the freakin answer man?” He stomps to the seesaw and jerks down the high end, sending Lopez and her running nose on her quickest up and down ever.
JUBILEE
DROPS ALBERT OFF at Cartoons. Up on the giant outdoor screen twenty-foot-tall Sylvester the Cat is chasing Tweety Bird. So what’s new? Kids on trikes mob the front, Albert’s favorite place, so he heads back to the walkers and in a moment disappears among the cross-legged grass-sitters. Jubilee turns and pedals off.
The first thing she did after getting the bike was make a beeline for the tree hole and leave a note for Ana Mae: Meet me at The Kid. But then she got caught up in her joyride and Albert, and now she wonders if Ana Mae has bothered to wait this long.
She has. There she is, napping on the pedestal of the great statue, her back against The Kid’s stony shin, her brimmed cap down over her face. The great outstretched arm and famously pointing finger appear to shelter her.
She calls: “Ana Mae!” Ana Mae’s cap falls as she jerks awake, looks around. Her eyes locate Jubilee, lock in as Jubilee heads straight for her like a shot arrow, rumppumping and yelling “Yeeeeeee-haaaaaaaah!” In a swirl of dust the bike skidbrakes a one-eighty and comes to a stop directly beneath the stone finger, the front tire kissing her pal’s sneaker toe.
Expecting boggle-eyed stupendiment, Jubilee is disappointed. Ana Mae is staring, but with nothing more than routine curiosity. “New bike?” she says. “You made me wait here for this?”
Jubilee remembers: the bike is yellow now. Ana Mae doesn’t recognize it. “It’s not just any bike,” she says.
Ana Mae yawns. “Really.”
Jubilee rolls the front tire lightly onto Ana Mae’s sneaker top. She grins. “Gimme an S … gimme a C … gimme an R … gimme an A … gimme an M … gimme a J …”
And there it is: the boggle-eyed stupendiment, and more. Ana Mae is on her feet, cupping her face, screeching. “Scramjet?”
Jubilee gives a smuggy nod. “Hazel to you.”
Ana Mae goes bananas, apples, kumquats. She screams, twirls, cartwheels. This is what Jubilee loves most about bestfriendship: when something great happens to one, it happens to both. She kickstands Hazel and joins the celebration. They do their special fingermess handslap, their special shimmyshakejive butt-bump. Ana Mae thrusts her arms toward the bike: “Yellow?”
“Albert did it!”
More howls. The girls drop to their knees and bow grandly to the bike as if to a Supreme Sultan of All. They squat like linebackers, bark into each other’s faces:
Boys! Boys! They’re worse than toys!
They’re only good
For making noise!
They hold hands and dance around the bike. Again Ana Mae pulls away. She’s beginning to think. Jubilee has known it was coming. Jack and Scramjet were like peanut butter and jelly. So familiar were they, so often together, they seemed like a single two-wheeled creature. Some even gave them one name: Scramjack. No wonder the disbelief in Ana Mae’s eyes. No wonder the question coming. But Jubilee isn’t ready to answer it yet, if she even knows the answer, so when Ana Mae says, hands imploring, “How … like … how? …”
Jubilee waves it off and changes the subject: “How, schmow—who cares?” She kicks up the stand, offers a handlebar. “Here. Take ’er for a spin.”
Ana Mae goes into shock. She backs up, stares at the bike, stammers: “Will he … she … let me? I thought only Jack could …”
Jubilee rolls the bike up to Ana Mae. “Girl, look at me. Do I look like Jack?” She takes Ana Mae’s hand and wraps her fingers around a grip. She lets go so Ana Mae has no choice but to take control of the bike. There’s a brief shudder in the flank, a faint snort, but that’s all. “Go … go,” says Jubilee. Ana Mae, always the more emotional of the two, is sobbing. If Jubilee lets this nonsense go on any longer, she’s going to start bawling too. She jerks Ana Mae’s leg off the ground, hoists it over the saddle and onto the farside pedal and smacks her shoulder. “Go!”
With a deep sigh and the plaintive whimper that precedes a plunge into the unknown, Ana Mae pushes off. Within moments she’s yipping like a crazed cowgirl and framing The Kid in widening circles of dust ruts. She gives Jubilee a start when, briefly, she gallops so far she’s out of sight, but she comes roaring back and skids to a halt, flush-faced and gasping, “Hey—why stop with yellow? Let’s girl it up some more!”
So they do. They head off to Stuff’s rumpled dump, and before long t
he bike is sparkling with glitter, pink ribbons stream from pink handlegrips, the saddle has a white fuzzy cover, HAZEL is painted on left and right flanks, and a string of pink and white bunnytail pompoms gives the rear end a tail that flies straight out at full speed.
Ana Mae perches clapping atop the sliding board as Jubilee zips and skitters through Playground. Little kids drop like apples from monkey bars and swings and come running. Jubilee pulls up, rears her mount on its hind tire and twirls the front. Frenzy grips the crowd. Jubilee thrusts a fist to the sky. “Hail Hazel!” she cries, and a hundred little girlfists shoot skyward and the mobdin echoes, “Hail Hazel!”
JACK
FINDS HIMSELF STANDING in a patch of soil: Flowers. He looks down. White and yellow blooms are flattened beneath his feet. In the distance he hears cries of “Hail Hazel!” He shivers. He wonders where the cold is coming from. He doesn’t want to move. Not ever again.
But he does. Somehow he lifts a foot, then another, and leaves the patch behind and wanders … wanders …
The world is rushing at him, confusing him, alarming him. The whispered voice in his ear. Scramjet. The sound no one else hears. It’s a train whistle—he knows that now. But it makes no sense—no train ever comes to Hokey Pokey. The looks on the faces of LaJo and Dusty and Lopez. The feeling that has no name, as if he’s being poured from a bottle. The giant fossilized wheel and sprocket. But most of all the horror under his shirt. He is tempted to look again. Maybe it was a hallucination. Maybe the eye is clear and sharp and complete as ever. But he doesn’t really believe that. He doesn’t look because he’s afraid it may have faded even more.
What’s happening?
What does it all mean?
He doesn’t know. He doesn’t want to know. He only wants things to be the way they were. Cruising Hokey Pokey on Scramjet. Tarzancalling his Amigos. Tossing grounders to Kiki. Seesawing Lopez. Cruising and playing and laughing all the sun long in a shower of shouts: “Hey, Jack! Hey, Jack!” Cartoony noises come to him dimly: the endless squabble of Sylvester and Tweety Bird. “I tawt I taw a putty tat. I did! I did! …”
Sun. Dust. Sun. Dust.
it’s … time
JUBILEE
THEY’VE BEEN CRUISING AROUND, or, as Ana Mae likes to say, pokin the Hokey. Now they’re doing one of their favorite things: picking blackberries.
And Ana Mae is laughing. “You’re jealous!”
Jubilee has just told Ana Mae about Albert shouting “I’m Jack!” as he rode Hazel, which he persisted in calling Scramjet. Already Jubilee regrets she said anything. She laughs back. “Jealous? Not.”
Ana Mae laughs harder.
“What?”
“You’re so funny, Ace. You should see your face. You’re the world’s worst actor. You”—she pops a berry into her mouth—“are jealous”—another pop—“of Jack.”
Jubilee throws a berry at Ana Mae. “I am not!”
Ana Mae rolls her eyes, tosses up a berry, catches it in her mouth, sighs, “Whatever.”
“Don’t whatever me,” Jubilee growls. “Listen to what you’re saying. What’s that supposed to mean—me, jealous? You think my little brother likes that … male … better than me? His own sister?”
“Hey, don’t get your pants in a bunch.” As a peacemaking gesture, Ana Mae tosses a berry for Jubilee to mouth-catch. To show she’s not ready for peace, Jubilee swats it away. So Ana Mae flips one to herself. “No big deal, Jubie Jube. Albert’s a boy. Jack’s a boy. Boys side with boys. So, like, what’s new?”
Jubilee snaps, “Albert is not a boy. He’s a brother. Mine.”
Ana Mae gapes at her pal with open amusement, breaks out laughing. “Ace, girl, I think you’re a little, like, confused?”
Jubilee’s shock-face may or may not be fake—it’s hard to tell. “Oh really? So first I’m jealous and now I’m confused.”
Which sends Ana Mae into another howl. “I guess. You are one messed-up—” Before she lands on the word chickie, three blackberries pelt her face.
Jubilee sneers, “Say your prayers, girlfriend,” and the berry fight is on.
Round the thorny tangle of berrywhips they go. Screaming. Laughing. Flinging. Trash-talking. Pickerpoke-yipping, “Ow! Ow!” Suddenly, as Ana Mae fires one over the thicket, Jubilee vanishes.
JACK
WANDERS …
JUBILEE
ANA MAE CIRCLES the thicket warily, suspecting a trick, berries ready. It’s not a trick. Jubilee is picking herself up from the ground. She’s tripped in a hole. Her ammo lies scattered in the dust. She flexes her ankle. “Some little snotface was digging around here.” As she says this, she spots something in the berry tangle. She reaches in carefully and pulls it out. It’s a shovel. Red, metal, wooden handle.
With no digger to yell at, Jubilee glares angrily at the spade. She winds up and is about to heave it when she abruptly stops and pulls the spade in close. She inspects it. She knocks it against the ground. She stares off, blinking, thinking. She walks to the edge of the bluff.
“Jube, what—”
Jubilee is pointing. Ana Mae doesn’t have to ask where. Across the tracks and the jungle to the creek. To the grassy, egg-shaped island in the creek. To Forbidden Hut on the island in the creek.
“Let’s do it,” says Jubilee.
Ana Mae groans. “What’s the point? Nothing ever works.”
But Jubilee is already slipsliding down the steep bluffside to the tracks, waving the spade, calling back: “I got a new idea!”
Ana Mae stuffs her unfired handful into her mouth. “Wait for me!”
JACK
WANDERS …
DESTROYER
SWAGGERS THROUGH PLAYGROUND. Triple-clicks a few screaming Snotsippers and a Gappergum. High on the monkey bars two Groundhog Chasers snicker and go back to their business. He points Exploder at the black-haired girl on the down end of the seesaw.
Click
The girl laughs.
Click
Click
Click
Now the girl gets serious, puts a look of shock on her face, throws her arms into the air and falls backward off her seat. She lies spread-eagle on the ground, croaking, “He got me … he got me … I’m dead.…” He’s not sure what to make of her. She’s playing along, but it’s not playing along that he wants. He wants believers. Real prey. Victims.
He puts away Exploder. From another pocket he pulls his slingshot. The remaining Snotsippers scream and take off. The Groundhog Chasers, upside down now and watching him, reach into their own pockets. Time to vamoose.
Search and destroy.
Ammo is plentiful: stones on the ground. He fires at passing pedal-trucks. At Jailhouse. At abandoned dolls. He passes under the outstretched arm of The Kid. He thinks about it, decides he better not.
The brown bird is flying overhead. He fires. Misses. He can’t remember ever hitting it.
He’s so hungry for targets he takes aim at his own shadow. But the sun is high and his shadow just a slim tide in front of him. He hits his foot. “Ow!”
Where are groundhogs when you need them? Maybe he can spot one from the bluff. He heads over there.
JACK
ON GREAT PLAINS. Not alone. Surrounded by mustangs. He has wandered into the midst of the wild herd. They stand facing the four directions. A muted nicker here, a shudder of flank there—otherwise a stillness so perfect they might be posing for a picture. So why aren’t they running? Can’t they see him? Is he a ghost? Invisible? He claps his hands, shouts “Hey!” The herd bolts as one, scattershot, regroups, boils dust for the Mountains.
Alone now. He wishes they would come back. He wishes yesterday would come back. A tumbleweed rolls over his foot, rolls on. Even the tumbleweed seems to know where it is, where it’s going. Calibrated to ride, his muscles misfire. They grope for the wheel turn, but there is no wheel. The soles of his feet feel the pedal’s press, but there is no pedal.
He senses something behind. He turns. Nothing. His eyes skim the scr
uff of Great Plains and Tantrums and Cartoons and come to rest on The Kid, the statue commanding even at this distance. Something is different. It takes a moment for Jack to realize what it is. All his life The Kid has been pointing toward the creek and the tracks. Now he’s pointing this way. Or is Jack imagining things again? No. And he’s not just pointing this way, he’s pointing directly, unmistakably, at Jack himself. “No!” he shouts at the finger, and sprints a hundred yards to the left. He looks. The finger is still on him, dead center. He turns his back on it. Thunder rumbles beyond the Mountains. He falls to his knees. He scoops handfuls of dirt, flings them into the air and cries out, “NOOOOOOOOOOOO!” as the bitter dust of Hokey Pokey rains down upon his head.
JUBILEE
THEY RACE DOWN THE TRACKS, veer left through the jungle and burst onto the narrow, pebbled beach of the creek. A gang of kids is already on the island. They’re lugging a ten-foot log. They back up to water’s edge. Someone barks, “One! Two! Three!” and they advance, a many-legged kidderpillar lumbering toward the Hut. The log smashes into the door, bounces off. They back up and try again. Five times they try before giving up. They drop the log and stagger away, brushing bark from themselves. Some don’t even bother to step on rocks as they slosh across the stream and slump past the girls into the jungle.
Jubilee needles: “Strike out, boys?”