The crowd left, the cameras, the police, the sighing women.
But he wasn't alone.
The field stretched ahead of him, longer now from down here, and at the far end, in the ten-foot tunnel in the thick brick wall whose heavy wooden gates were still open at both ends, he could see something standing there. Deep in the shadows. Watching him. Waiting. Not moving a muscle.
There was no light behind it though the streetlamps were on; it cast no shadow darker than itself.
But it was there. He could see it.
And it was watching him. Waiting.
Not making a sound.
He blinked the sweat from his eyes, wiped his face with a forearm, and looked again.
It was gone.
The stadium was empty, and he was lying on the grass.
He puffed his cheeks and blew out, blinked again rapidly, and stared at the tunnel. "Oxygen, kid," he told himself as he stumbled to his feet.
"You need a little of the old O2, if you know what I mean."
His jacket was gone.
He looked down on the spot at the fifty-yard line where he had dropped it, stared with a perplexed frown, and finally looked up to scan the field. Then he turned and scanned the stands. It was gone. He knew he had left it right here; he could feel it leaving his hands and could hear it striking the ground. And now it was gone. He waited a moment for someone to start laughing, waited until he was sure it was not a joke.
And when he was sure, when he knew he wasn't even safe on his track anymore, he put his hands into his pockets and started for home.
This, Tracey thought, is the pits.
She sat alone on a crumbling stoop in front of a crumbling brownstone, one of a whole block that could just as easily have been in any of the city's boroughs. The curbs were lined with cars, the pavement packed with children, and there wasn't a single face she recognized, not a single voice she knew.
The pits.
This was supposed to be Long Island—trees and beaches and elegant houses and developments, a place you visited to get away from it all. But even Ashford was better than this, for god's sake. At least it had the football game she was supposed to be playing the flute for right now; it had her books and her stuffed animals and the seclusion of her room; Ashford had Don Boyd.
She squirmed, thinking of the way she had kissed him before she'd known what she was doing. He'd looked as if she'd punched him in the stomach; she felt as if she'd been punched herself, and had run straight to her room without giving her mother the usual minute-by-minute account of her time out of the house. She must have been blushing, though, because her sisters began a teasing that hadn't let up, not even on the trip over, until her father had finally laid down the law—no talking, he was driving, he needed to concentrate on the idiots who were on the road with him.
She clasped her hands between her knees, watching a game of stick ball grow dangerously close to a brawl, suddenly thinking of the Howler and what he could do to these kids. A shudder. A swallow. A look over her shoulder to the windows above, to the window where she saw her father's face looking down. She smiled at him, waved, and sighed when he gestured her off the steps and into the building.
Damn, she thought. If he's such a macho cop, why the hell can't he get the old lady to move? At least to a place that had trees instead of garbage cans.
Long Island was the pits.
At the doorway she stopped and turned, and a sour smile parted her lips.
Good-bye, twentieth century, she said to the noisy street. I'm going in my time machine now. Fasten your chastity belts, please, it's going to be a rough, boring ride.
The house's original porch had been torn down long before Don and his family had moved in, the previous owner claiming the wood had been rotted, and he didn't want anyone hurt in case a board or the steps gave way. It had been replaced by one that barely reached to either side of the door, and its roof was peaked, the railing up the steps twisted black wrought iron. It was the only house on the block with a porch like that, and Norman had once insisted he was going to restore the old one; that was before Sam had died. Now he said nothing beyond a grumbling that what was there did little to protect him from the rain or the snow.
Don sat on the top step. He had been inside only long enough to towel himself off and fetch a sweater, had intended on going back to his room, when he saw that his parents hadn't yet returned. They would never know he was gone. They would assume they had been obeyed. He had actually sat down on the bed and stared at the blank wall where the stallion had been; then he felt the weight of the empty shelves, and the hollow sound his breathing made, and the chill that seemed to drift from the white-painted walls. He looked into his parents' room, into Sam's room, then opened the attic door and went up.
They were there. Piled on cartons, helter-skelter on the dusty floor, dropped on a trunk that belonged to his grandfather. He had swallowed, stood, and finally picked up the poster and brought him back down. Taped him up over the desk and stared at him, wondering.
He saw little save the withdrawing of the light.
He heard only the leaves, and the shadows, and the silence of the house rising behind him.
An automobile or two had sped past, but he paid them no heed; a flock of kids shrieked through the twilight, but he didn't smile at their greetings; a red convertible crawled down the street, radio on full, and it wasn't until he realized it had pulled into a driveway a few houses down that he turned his head slowly, as if it were too heavy to move.
The driver's door slammed.
Chris. He blinked. It was Chris Snowden, and she wasn't with Tar. She was still in her dark cheerleader's sweater, still had on her saddle shoes, but her pleated skirt had been replaced by a pair of faded-to-white jeans.
And she wasn't going into her house; she was walking across the intervening yards directly toward him.
He cleared his throat and wondered what she had planned for him—a bit of teasing, a little temptation, a breathless request for his zoology homework.
He could wait; and he did, until she stopped at the foot of the stairs, leaned on the railing and crossed one foot over the other, toe down.
"Hi!"
Her pale hair was parted down the center and gathered in two braids that flopped over her chest. Her face was flushed, her eyes wide and of a blue so dark they seemed nearly black.
Warily he smiled a greeting. He recalled her brief show of solicitude when she'd seen the damage done to his eye, saw it again as she examined his face closely, a half smile at her lips.
"Looks better," she said.
"I barely feel it," he admitted, unconsciously poking around the discoloration. She turned to look at the empty street; he couldn't take his eyes from her profile. "I, uh, saw you and Tar before. I figured you guys were going to the city."
A shrug, and a sideways look of disgust. "He got sick. Brian had some beer in his car, and after the game they had a he-man chugging contest. Tar lost." She pointed down the street. "So did my car."
"Gross."
"The creep wouldn't even help me clean it out. Last time I saw him he was falling into the park." A grin full of humor, touched with malice.
"If there's a god, he'll end up in the pond."
He chuckled and shook his head at the foolishness of kids, and did his best not to stare when she turned back to him and leaned forward on the railing, folding her arms on it and putting her chin on a wrist. This wasn't happening, he knew; this was something his mind had dreamed up to punish him for thinking he could somehow rule the world and make it fair again.
"Were you at the game?"
"No. I had ... other things to do."
An eyebrow lifted. "We won."
"We always win."
"Really?"
"Every year," he said, making it clear there was a book somewhere filled with things he thought more important, or less boring. "Especially since Brian and Tar got on the team."
"Oh?" Her eyes drifted closed. "You gonna be do
wn at Beacher's later?"
"I don't know. Maybe. It depends on my folks."
She pushed abruptly upright and he almost gasped, thinking he had said something to make her mad. The expression on her face was a dark one, the lines stabbing from the corners of her eyes deeper and longer, giving her age, turned her soft white-blonde hair into a hag's wig, her softly pointed chin into a boney dagger. The transformation startled him, and he leaned away from it slightly, could not meet her gaze.
Instead, he turned to the right where he saw in dismay the station wagon approaching.
Aw shit, he thought; not now!
"You're in trouble, huh?" she said sympathetically.
He couldn't help himself, he nodded.
"Shit. So am I."
"Huh? You?"
"Oh sure," she said with venomous disgust, each word the swing and crack of a bull whip. "It happens all the time, I'm getting used to it. They say get to know the kids, go to the parties, join the clubs. You're gonna need it, Christine, on your college applications. You're gonna need all that stuff." She snorted and managed a patently false smile as the station wagon pulled slowly into the drive. "Y'know, Don, no offense but there's a lot of scuz in your school."
"No offense. There is."
The smile, when she turned it on him, was genuine just long enough for him to notice; then it faded as Norman and Joyce opened their doors and got out, Norman pointing stiff armed to Don, then to the grocery bags in back.
"A girl," she said quietly, "can't even get a decent lay around here."
He wanted to laugh, to grab her, to find someplace dark and deep where he could hide and start this conversation over. He wanted to tell her he knew exactly how she felt. What he did was stand meekly and murmur a good-bye when his father gestured again for help with the bags. Chris touched his arm in farewell, smiled again and introduced herself to the Boyds as she headed for home. Norman watched her; Don grabbed the two heaviest bags and grunted back to the house where his mother had the door open and waiting.
In the kitchen he lowered them onto the counter and backed into a corner while he waited for the storm.
Norman dropped his load solidly on the table, Joyce did the same, and they proceeded to move awkwardly about the room, putting things in their places and not looking at him save for a flat glance or two.
"I thought you were to stay in the house," his father said.
"Chris seems like a very nice girl," his mother said with an anxious smile.
"She is," Don told her. Guess what, Ma, she wants to get laid and I'm still a goddamn virgin.
"You're grounded," Norman reminded him.
"Well, maybe you should get to know her a little better, what do you think?"
Back and forth. Figurines on a clock.
"I guess, Mom. I don't know."
"Her father is a surgeon, you know. He works in New York. A fairly important man from all I hear."
"How come he lives here then?" he said, flinching when Norman opened a cupboard next to his head and gave him a look that demanded a response.
"I don't know," Joyce said, frowning over a box of cake mix, weighing it in her hand before putting it aside. "From what I'm told, he isn't lacking for the old green. And it certainly isn't because this is the perfect suburb. There is, I gather, something about the mother that-''
Norman slammed a can of soup on the table and faced his son. "I want to know what you were doing outside, Donald, when you were specifically told not to leave the house."
He lowered his gaze to his shoe tops and swallowed the burrs that climbed into his throat. His left hand began thumping lightly against the wall.
There was heat in his chest, and heat on his neck, and he could feel the seconds skip by like rocks dropped into a puddle. Without seeing her he could sense his mother shifting toward the doorway, fussing meaninglessly with something, staying because she had to, wanting to leave because she knew what was coming.
That was the Rule: the family never ran out on a discussion.
"I'm grounded," he said. "That doesn't mean I can't sit on the dumb porch, does it?"
"You know damned well what it means," Norman said.
"No," Donald said, "I don't know damned well what it means because you never told me before because I was never damned well grounded before."
Joyce put a hand to her mouth; Norman took hold of the table's edge and for a moment Don thought he was going to tip it over and come for his throat.
Don looked past him to his mother. "Mom, why are my things in the attic?"
"Things?"
"From my shelves. The animals. You took them away, remember? I'd like to know why they're in the attic. Am I ever going to get them back?"
"Go to your room," Norman said before she could answer. "Go to your room and don't come down until you have a civil tongue in your head."
"Sam," Joyce said.
There was no time then; no sound; no air.
Don raised a fist, and Norman looked at his wife in shock and disgust.
"Oh," she whispered, and ran out of the room.
There was red, briefly, before Don became aware of what he was thinking.
He lowered the fist, forced the fingers to open, and headed for the staircase, his father behind him. At the landing he looked down.
"What if I'm not sorry?" he said flatly.
Norman swallowed and came up a step.
He knew it then, he knew as surely as he could see the red gathering in the corners that if his father lifted his foot one more time, one more step, there was going to be a fight. He was going to hit his father, or his father was going to throw the first punch. He had seen it in the movies and thought it stupid, that it never happened in real life. But he hadn't been able to feel it until now, until he saw this stranger looking up at him, not even the courtesy of hatred in his eyes, this stranger fighting with himself because all the rules said you can't hit your son when he's almost eighteen.
"Do as I tell you," Norman said tightly.
"I'll go," he answered, not conceding a thing.
He sat cross-legged on the bed, his back against the wall, his hands in his lap.
He deliberately avoided looking at the shelves, the neat desktop, the window, the floor.
He looked at the stallion, forever charging through the forest, and he thought.
First he thought about what it would be like to be an orphan and how he might accomplish the fact without leaving school to take a job; He thought about Tracey and why she hadn't said anything to him about going out again, or seeing him at school, or even seeing him around; He thought about Brian and Tar and the not-always-rotten Fleet, and why he had to be known as Donny Duck when he wasn't the only Don in the school, when there were others who had worse and funnier names, when there were others who were clearly meant to be the butt of stupid jokes; He thought about Chris, thought about what she was like under that sweater, and wondered how many there were who knew exactly what was there and why did she have to talk to him and ruin everything about her; He thought about the Rules.
He thought about how he could get all these people off his back before it broke in half and he was left lying in bed, crippled and dying.
Finally he thought about nothing.
At midnight he stirred.
There was nothing left in his mind he could cling to for more than a few seconds, but he smiled when he felt a curious settling inside. He looked down at his chest and was amazed to see how wet his clothes were; he touched his hair and it was matted to his scalp; he touched the bed and it was unpleasantly damp. But he didn't move because he still felt himself settling. It was the only way he could describe it to himself- a mass of something light piled high on a plain that had nothing but horizon, something that shifted and settled and eventually became a small something else, a nugget, compact and incredibly hard.
He reached without moving his arms, and he touched it, and it was hot, and it was red, and it was perfectly fitted to the palm of his hand when he picked
it up and stared, and knew what it was.
There was a moment as he watched it—all the rage, all the frustration—when fear hovered over him, a storm cloud rumbling before the first clap of thunder. Yet despite the heat, the red, the hardness it had, it was more than anything something comforting, something familiar.
It was his, and it was him.
A smile, just barely.
He shifted to the edge of the bed, let his feet touch the floor, let his hands grip the mattress.
He switched on the light over the headboard and turned away from the bulb until his eyes adjusted. Eagerly he leaned forward, ready to explain to his friend what he thought had just happened.
But he couldn't.
He could only open his mouth in a scream that was never more than silent.
The poster was still there, taped over his desk.
The forest, the road, the darkening sky.
The poster was there.
But someone had tried to destroy the black horse. It was streaked, barely visible, as if a knife or a pen had attempted to scrape the picture off and leave only the background.
Chapter Seven
Sunday's dawn never showed the sun; there was rain instead, a driving downpour that filled the gutters swiftly and washed driveways into black rivers. Leaves dropped sodden into the streets and onto the pavement, the Ashford Day medallions on the boulevard lampposts were twisted on their wires in the wind that followed. The park was deserted. A handful of pedestrians ran from shop doorway to shop doorway, heading for the bakeries and their hot cross buns, their dinner cakes and breakfast rolls. Cars hissed. Buses sprayed the shoulders. Headlamps were weak in the not-quite-daylight.
And when the downpour was over, the drizzle remained. Colder somehow, more touched with gloom. It prevented the puddles from holding clear reflections, prevented the windows from seeing clearly outside; the wind was gone, but collars were kept up and umbrellas stayed unfurled, and when a church bell tolled on the far side of town, it sounded like a buoy heralding the fog.
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