Toybox

by Al Sarrantonio

  “We'll have a good time, momma.”

  She held his hand tightly, though he wanted to leap ahead shouting. As the hill curved away to reveal the town a shout went up in his throat. “Momma, it's beautiful!” He tried to pull away, but she held him tight.

  The next hour flashed by in an instant. Robert saw a group of his friends and begged his mother to let him go to them. She did, after making him promise not to leave the square. But there was no need to leave the square. With a leap Robert was in the midst of them, their leader. They showed him everything. He sailed a corncake through the moon clock's mouth on the first try. He did the same on the second and third try. His friends agreed that he was the best they'd ever seen. They played Johnny-ride-the-pony, and Robert won. They played corn soccer, and he scored the first goal. They played trace-the-wire, trying to find the origin of a particularly tortuously-wound thread of corn silk, and Robert got there first.

  They were beginning to play hide and seek when Robert heard his mother call.

  He tried at first to ignore her; he knew her eyes had been on him every moment. But when she called again he turned to go. As he did so one of his friends called out to him, throwing something at him.

  “Robert, your corn dolly!”

  He caught something stiff and crackly, and looked down to see the little mass of dried cornstalk and corn silk staring up at him. “See you tonight!” his friend called.

  Robert held up his corn dolly in farewell, and as he did so he felt it pulled from his hand.

  “Time to go, Robert.”

  “But Momma—”

  “We talked about it yesterday,” she said. “We've come to the Festival, as I promised, and now we must go home.” She had tossed the corn dolly on the ground, trampling it with her foot, and was dragging him, with amazing strength, by the arm from the square.

  “Momma, you're hurting me!”

  “Robert, we must go home.” Her eyes were the eyes of a wild person, and her grip tightened. Some of the revelers around them had stopped to watch silently.

  “Momma, my corn dolly!”

  At this her grip tightened even more, and she turned to look at him.

  “Leave it!” she hissed. Once again, Robert saw fear behind her eyes. “I will not let you have it in the house. It is evil. And I'll hear no more of it!” Her voice had risen to a hysterical whine, only tempered by the looks of those around them.

  Robert saw with shame that his friends had followed them and were standing, horrified, in a line, watching as he was pulled away. “Momma, please—”

  She struck him then, once across the mouth, and he gasped in pain. They had nearly reached the edge of the village, and Robert could see through the tears in his eyes the curve of the hill leading back to their house. At the top of the hill the corn patch, a tall yellow crewcut, sat in the lowering sun.

  All at once Robert felt something pressed into his hand, and looked down to see a small corn dolly. The little girl who had passed it to him was already running, barefoot, to hide in the crowd of people that watched them from a short distance away; she looked back at him coyly from under her golden, dirty locks before disappearing behind two of his friends.

  He quickly hid the dolly under his shirt and gave a short wave of thanks before his mother pulled him around the hill and the town was lost to view.

  ~ * ~

  When they returned home she locked him in his room. For an hour he heard her crying and praying aloud, moving around the outer room and bumping into things as if she were mad. Then there was a short silence, before she knocked on the door to his room. For a quick moment Robert was frightened, thinking that perhaps she had lost her mind and would beat him; but when she came in her tears had been dried and she came to him, holding him tighter than she ever had before.

  “Robert,” she said, “I love you so much it hurts me. I didn't mean to hit you. Please believe me.” She sobbed over him then, after a few moments pulling him back and looking into his face to see if the resentment and defiance he had shown was there again. But he had no heart to hurt her then, seeing the look of abject terror and loss in her face, and so he said that no, he was all right.

  “I just wanted to see what it was like today, momma,” he said quietly.

  “I know, I know,” she said, and then she pulled him to her again, and then went away, locking him in again.

  “I still must punish you,” she explained softly from behind the door, and then she was gone.

  The moon had risen now, fat and white, over the cornfield. Through the crack in the window, Robert heard the festivities continuing in the village behind it.

  Come to me, lad.

  It came as a whisper.

  The voice again, from the corn patch.

  Corn is ripe, lad.

  With effort, Robert edged the window up a little higher. Wind-chilled corn silk caught his face. In the village, behind the hill, a sudden bright light went on, and a sudden cheer erupted, and Robert knew that the Corn King and Queen had been officially crowned. The torches had been lit and the procession up to the cornfield had begun.

  Corn is ripe, lad.

  In a moment, the whisper was drowned by the singing of the procession.

  And then, in the gray-blue moonlight, the procession wound around and up the hill and climbed into view.

  In every hand a corn dolly was held aloft. Robert felt under his shirt for his own. There were songs, and Robert mouthed the words along with the singers. There was the beating of drums, and Robert beat time on the windowsill.

  Without knowing completely what he was doing, he forced open the windowsill and found himself making his way up the hill.

  He danced. A fever seemed to have shot into him, a Festival fever. He twirled as he ran, and his mouth sang high and loud. A light not altogether moonlight seemed to radiate on him. He held his corn dolly aloft, and a white mass of light beams seemed to emanate from it.

  Come to me, lad.

  The voice crooned quietly in his ear.

  At the top of the hill, above him, the revelers had stopped, unaware of Robert but waiting silently as the Corn King and Queen approached the cornfield. Each held a dolly high, and then each tossed it into the air into the center of the patch. A cheer went up.

  The procession, in a straight line, moved slowly along now, each processioner stopping momentarily before the corn to toss his dolly in. Under each breath a silent wish was made. And suddenly at the end, unseen, came Robert.

  An energy filled his bones; he grasped his corn dolly so tight it nearly burst in his hand. It crackled in his grip. The line moved slowly, so slowly—a hundred corn dollys, a hundred wishes—and Robert wanted to be there now.

  Suddenly, he knew what his wish would be.

  Down below, at the bottom of the hill, a cry rang out. The procession stopped, and all, including Robert, looked down to see Robert's mother, her hand to her breast, darkly outlined in the doorway of the cottage. She began to make her way frantically up the hill. There was a terrible urgency in her movement but she seemed, perversely, to be moving through water of her own making, clutching at her skirts to keep from falling.

  “Robert!” she screamed out.

  The line of processioners now was beginning to turn toward him. He knew that this moment would be lost. They were beginning to move away from him—but he realized that they were not making a path for his mother to get to him, but rather for him to run to the front of the line.

  “Robert! No!”

  With a rise of feeling he leaped toward the corn patch. He jumped, and at the high point of his arc the dolly left his hand and sailed into the center of the field. The dried stalks, that line of stick soldiers, almost seemed to stretch upward to catch and caress it.

  He made his wish.

  “My father!” Robert shouted; “I want to see my father!”

  “Robert!”

  All eyes turned to the hysterical mother, and then back again.

  Robert was gone.

 
In the corn patch, there was a rustle. A sigh.

  “I only wished for him to be mine!” Robert's mother cried. “I only wanted a son!”

  Another sigh.

  Somewhere in the center of the cornfield, propped up where the dark rains of coming November would turn it to wet straw and dark mold, sat a ten-year-old corn dolly.

  And somewhere, far off under the moon, carried away on the edge of the wind, the word Lad.

  And, farther away yet, the answering word Yes.

  . . . a robot, a dusting of snow, a length of noosed rope . . .

  THE ELECTRIC FAT BOY

  “Fat, Fat, go away

  “Don't comeback on any dale

  “If we want to, then we will

  “Roll old Chubby clown the hill...”

  The chorus died away. Twenty linked hands fell to ten young sides. Within the circle, at the hub of twenty round, stinging eyes above ten sharp, cruel mouths, Chubby sobbed.

  His body was huge. He cried with his full weight, pushed great wet tears out of his eyes from a deep and bottomless well lodged somewhere in his heart.

  His sobbing pleased them. In ones and twos, they drifted off to corners of the schoolyard, content in their first chore of the lunch period. Now they wanted other things—games of tag, baby gossip, a game of ball-against-the-wall.

  When they were gone a voice, a tiny squeaky voice, spoke up, sounding like nothing so much as a gnat against Chubby's ear. “I'm sorry,” it whispered.

  “It's all right, Roy,” Chubby managed to sob out. His soft fists were balled tight into his eyes, and when he pulled them away he saw that his cotton madras shirt, out at the waist, was wet with tears.

  Roy spoke again, edging closer from out of the shade of the elm he had been pushed under. Chubby saw that his glasses were broken, their black frames peaked at the bridge. A grass stain bleached one knee of Roy's baggy chinos.

  “At least I got them to leave you alone,” Chubby said, grinning tepidly through a long sniffle. He attempted to push his shirttail into his pants but quickly gave up.

  “You're my friend.” Roy pushed his glasses up on his nose, and they fell off in two pieces. He picked them up and put them into his pocket, and then suddenly, timidly, he put his hand on his friend's shoulder.

  “Chubby,” he said, “I'm going to make it up to you. If it takes me the rest of my life, I'm going to do something for you.”

  School days passed into summer days. The bullies bullied; on the last day of school they took Chubby's belt, and the gold star Roy had gotten for being a good speller. But then, miraculously, they disappeared. The schoolyard emptied and soon was padlocked against the heat and summer boys doing mischief. The battlefield was quiet.

  June passed quietly into July, July leaped out of the frying pan into August. Deep green turned to light green which turned to brown. Thundershowers played lightning fiddles against the clouds, danced on to make loud music elsewhere. It was time for baseball and horseshoes, the era of saltwater and hot dogs.

  Chubby and Roy, the best of friends, made summer together. They caught lightning bugs when the sun went away. When the sun came back they climbed down into cellars, yanked out chemistry sets and model racing cars, built plastic airplanes and plastic monsters. They flipped baseball cards and always ended up even. Roy's mother had a pool in the backyard, and they spent hours squirting water at each other from their mouths and playing dive bomber off the ladder. They looked at the moon through Chubby's telescope by night, by day rigged it to project sunspots onto a white sheet of paper. They went to the movies, and they read magazines in the shade that Chubby's house made in the afternoon.

  One day, when August had turned from mean to mild and when the stores were beginning to stock high with black and white marbled note books and Bic pens, Roy suddenly jumped up from his stack of Mad and Cracked and Archie and Popular Mechanics and gave a yell. “I've found it, Chubby! I've been looking all summer and I've finally found it!”

  He pressed a folded magazine under Chubby's eyes. It was a back page of a science magazine, filled with block ads for mini-bikes and do-it-yourself helicopter kits. But there in one corner, lined by a thin black border under a badly drawn picture of a fat person with his arms over his face as another boy, thin, pushed him aside, was something else:

  Tired of being pushed around just because you're fat?

  Tired of people laughing; and calling you names?

  Tired of taking all the guff?

  Try

  ELECTRIC FAT BOY

  Not a puppet or robot, but a REAL device

  Send $18.95 to Electric Enterprises, Box L, Electric City

  Electric Enterprises

  Makers of Electric Fat Boy and other fine Electrics

  “Don't be foolish,” Chubby said, pushing the magazine away.

  “But it's what I want to do!” Roy insisted in his timid, squeaky voice.

  “It's dumb. And it wouldn't help.”

  “I've got $18.95.”

  “Give me the money,” Chubby said. “We'll go to the movies.” Roy was silent as a mouse.

  That night, after dinner, they caught more lightning bugs than ever before.

  August came to the brink, sighed, and fell over into September.

  Chubby didn't see Roy for the last two weeks of summer vacation. The butterflies moved faster, out of Chubby's reach; the lightning bugs became dimmer and dimmer, dots in the night. The magazines all started to look the same. But on the first day of school, when the playground was un-padlocked and the new black tar that had been spread on it waited eagerly for the dusty scuffmarks of brand new sneakers, Roy was there, new glasses, wire-rimmed, and all.

  So were the bullies.

  Roy and Chubby saw their circle through the chainfence gate, waiting to knock their untracked schoolbooks, their new yellow pencils with ends sharp as hummingbird heads, from their hands and kick them out of the way. They would pull Chubby's new shirt out of his pants. They would circle Roy and when they retreated Roy would stand with his new glasses twisted on the ground.

  “They're going to hurt us,” Chubby said.

  “No they aren't.” There was a new kind of smile on Roy’s face. His voice didn't squeak, but was even and sure. He pulled Chubby into the bushes outside the schoolyard fence, made him close his eyes and count to ten.

  “Open your eyes,” Roy said.

  Chubby yelped. For a moment there before him was a fat body with a silver football for a face; then, suddenly, the face and body was his own. Chubby looked into the eyes of an exact duplicate of himself, down to the untucked blue and red checked shirt and uncombed hair.

  Chubby gasped: “Electric Fat Boy.”

  “Try to push him around,” Roy said.

  Chubby shrugged, stepped forward to muss up the Fat Boy's hair. The Fat Boy growled, pushed Chubby to the ground and stood over him. “Leave off,” he said in a no-nonsense voice.

  Roy said, “You wait here and let the Fat Boy take care of them, and I'll come back later for you.”

  “Wow,” Chubby said, and then he said it again as the circle formed as always at the entrance to the yard and then suddenly there were shouts and parts of the circle were flying off everywhere.

  ~ * ~

  When Roy came out from school Chubby was not in the bushes, and couldn't be found anywhere. The Electric Fat Boy was in the schoolyard the next morning, taking money from everyone who came in the gate. Roy tried to sneak up behind him, but the Fat Boy caught him, and took all his money.

  Roy was scared.

  Chubby didn't show up at school or at home the next day, or the next. It was then, in the night, that Roy left home behind, left the models and the card flips and the swimming pool and magazines in the shade. The weather had turned cool. He knew that soon it would be time to carve pumpkins and talk about Santa Claus. The world was turning its back on summer.

  The train was crowded at first. After hours of green and yellow countryside, countryside putting on its fall clothes and
covering its makeshift baseball diamonds with tarps of grown grass and end-of-summer neglect, all of the passengers had been spit out like seeds and Electric City loomed ahead. It was big and small—big to Roy who had never seen a city but just a baby to other cities. Big with a cab stand and a news shanty at the train station, small enough so that Roy had no trouble finding Box L or what it led to.

  As noon struck in an old bell in an old belltower, Roy stood before the Electric Fat Boy warehouse. An ancient building, old with time and seeming disuse. The front was flaking, but there was evidence that part of it had just been painted with fresh green paint; and the white letters of THE ELECTRIC FAT BOY COMPANY stood out sharply. The front was quiet, but Roy heard noises around back—banging and shouting and loading sounds, a lot of men at work. He had his hand on the front doorknob but removed it, moving to an alleyway thick with trucks three, four, five deep. Roy edged past them, snaking his body along the wall till he rounded a sharp corner, nearly falling into the back yard.

  There were Electric Fat Boys everywhere. Forty in a row they were, with fat silver footballs for faces and huge, round silver globes for bodies. One after another, a long line of Electric Fat Boys rolled out of a conveyor belt from the bowels of the factory. Each lined up to be packed in a box and packed in a truck and packed into someone's life.

  “What the hell you doing?”

  Roy turned around to see a man, not at all fat, but grizzled and sweaty with a cigar in the middle of his teeth, glaring at him. “I bought one of these....”

  “You ain't fat,” the man said suspiciously.

  “For my friend. Something went wrong; it went amok”

  “Read your warranty; go away,” the man said, taking Roy's arm and pulling him toward the street.

  “I want to see the president of Electric Enterprises.”

  The man barked a laugh. “Won't be here for weeks. Out at one of the other plants—Electric Ugly Boy, Electric Stumble Boy, Electric Four-Eye Boy. New plant opens every day. Electric Club Foot Boy, Electric Stutter Boy, Electric No-Sports Boy. Electric Fat Girl and Electric Ugly Girl.” He suddenly realized he was talking to Roy. “And don't come back,” he said around his cigar, pointing to the mouth of the alley.