And Douglas and Charlie and Tom and all the boys and girls on the block saw the gray glove waving, and dropped: from trees and left skip ropes in white snakes on lawns, to run and sit in the green plush seats, and there was no charge. Mr. Tridden, the conductor, kept his glove over the mouth of the money box as he moved the trolley on down the shady block, calling.
“Hey!” said Charlie. “Where are we going?”
“Last ride,” said Mr. Tridden, eyes on the high electric wire ahead. “No more trolley. Bus starts to run tomorrow. Going to retire me with a pension, they are. So-a free ride for everyone! Watch out!”
He ricocheted the brass handle, the trolley groaned and swung round an endless green curve, and all the time in the world held still, as if only the children and Mr. Tridden and his miraculous machine were riding an endless river, away.
“Last day?” asked Douglas, stunned. “They can’t do that! It’s bad enough the Green Machine is gone, locked up in the garage, and no arguments. And bad enough my new tennis shoes are getting old and slowing down! How’ll I get around? But . . .But . . .They can’t take off the trolley! Why,” said Douglas, “no matter how you look at it, a bus ain’t a trolley. Don’t make the same kind of noise. Don’t have tracks or wires, don’t throw sparks, don’t pour sand on the tracks, don’t have the same colors, don’t have a bell, don’t let down a step like a trolley does!”
“Hey, that’s right,” said Charlie. “I always get a kick watching a trolley let down the step, like an accordion.”
“Sure,” said Douglas.
And then they were at the end of the line, the silver tracks, abandoned for eighteen years, ran on into rolling country. In 1910 people took the trolley out to Chessman’s Park with vast picnic hampers. The track, never ripped up, still lay rusting among the hills.
“Here’s where we turn around,” said Charlie.
“Here’s where you’re wrong!” Mr. Tridden snapped the emergency generator switch. “Now!”
The trolley, with a bump and a sailing glide, swept past the city limits, turned off the street, and swooped downhill through intervals of odorous sunlight and vast acreages of shadow that smelled of toadstools. Here and there creek waters flushed the tracks and sun filtered through trees like green glass. They slid whispering on meadows washed with wild sunflowers past abandoned way stations empty of all save transfer-punched confetti, to follow a forest stream into a summer country, while Douglas talked.
“Why, just the smell of a trolley, that’s different. I been on Chicago buses; they smell funny.”
“Trolleys are too slow,” said Mr. Tridden. “Going to put busses on. Fusses for people and busses for school.”
The trolley whined to a stop. From overhead Mr. Tridden reached down huge picnic hampers. Yelling, the children helped him carry the baskets out by a creek that emptied into a silent lake where an ancient bandstand stood crumbling into termite dust.
They sat eating ham sandwiches and fresh strawberries and waxy oranges and Mr. Tridden told them how it had been twenty years ago, the band playing on that ornate stand at night, the men pumping air into their brass horns, the plump conductor flinging perspiration from his baton, the children and fireflies running in the deep grass, the ladies with long dresses and high pompadours treading the wooden xylophone walks with men in choking collars. There was the walk now, all softened into a fiber mush by the years. The lake was silent and blue and serene, and fish peacefully threaded the bright reeds, and the motorman murmured on and on, and the children felt it was some other year, with Mr. Tridden looking wonderfully young, his eyes lighted like small bulbs, blue and electric. It was a drifting, easy day, nobody rushing and the forest all about, the sun held in one position, as Mr. Tridden’s voice rose and fell, and a darning needle sewed along the air, stitching, restitching designs both golden and invisible. A bee settled into,flower, humming and humming. The trolley stood like an enchanted calliope, simmering where the sun fell on it. The trolley was on their hands, a brass smell, as they ate ripe cherries. The bright odor of the trolley blew from their clothes on the summer wind.
A loon flew over the sky, crying.
Somebody shivered.
Mr. Tridden worked on his gloves. “Well, time to go. Parents’ll think I stole you all for good.”
The trolley was silent and cool dark, like the inside of an ice-cream drugstore. With a soft green rustling of velvet buff, the seats were turned by the quiet children so they sat with their backs to the silent lake, the deserted bandstand and the wooden planks that made a kind of music if you walked down the shore on them into other lands.
Bing! went the soft bell under Mr. Tridden’s foot and they soared back over sun-abandoned, withered flower meadows, through woods, toward a town that seemed to crush the sides of the trolley with bricks and asphalt and wood when Mr. Tridden stopped to let the children out in shady streets.
Charlie and Douglas were the last to stand near the opened tongue of the trolley, the folding step, breathing electricity, watching Mr. Tridden’s gloves on the brass controls.
Douglas ran his fingers on the green creek moss, looked at the silver, the brass, the wine color of the ceiling.
“Well . . . so long again, Mr. Tridden.”
“Good-by, boys.”
“See you around, Mr. Tridden.”
“See you around.”
There was a soft sigh of air; the door collapsed shut, tucking up its corrugated tongue. The trolley sc slowly down the late afternoon, brighter than the sun, tangerine, all flashing gold and lemon, turned a far con wheeling, and vanished, gone away.
“School busses!” Charlie walked to the curb. “Won’ even give us a chance to be late to school. Come get you a your front door. Never be late again in all our lives. Think of that nightmare, Doug, just think it all over.”
But Douglas, standing on the lawn, was seeing how it would be tomorrow, when the men would pour hot tar over the silver tracks so you would never know a trolley had e run this way. He knew it would take as many years as could think of now to forget the tracks, no matter how deeply buried. Some morning in autumn, spring, or winter he kn he’d wake and, if he didn’t go near the window, if he just lay deep and snug and warm, in his bed, he would hear it, faint and far away.
And around the bend of the morning street, up the avenue, between the even rows of sycamore, elm and maple, it the quietness before the start of living, past his house h would hear the familiar sounds. Like the ticking of a doe the rumble of a dozen metal barrels rolling, the hum of single immense dragonfly at dawn. Like a merry-go-round like a small electrical storm, the color of blue lightning, coming, here, and gone. The trolley’s chime! The hiss like a sc fountain spigot as it let down and took up its step, and starting of the dream again, as on it sailed along its way, traveling a hidden and buried track to some hidden and buried destination . . .
Kick-the-can after supper?” asked Charlie.
“Sure,” said Douglas. “Kick-the-can.”
The facts about John Huff aged twelve. are simple and soon stated. He could pathfind more trails than any Choctaw or Cherokee since time began, could leap from the sky like a chimpanzee from a vine, could live underwater two minutes and slide fifty yards downstream from where you last saw him. The baseballs you pitched him he hit in the apple trees, knocking down harvests. He could jump six-foot orchard walls, swing up branches faster and come down, fat with peaches, quicker than anyone else in the gang. He ran laughing. He sat easy. He was not a bully. He was kind. His hair was dark and curly and his teeth were white as cream. He remembered the words to all the cowboy songs and would teach you if you asked. He knew the names of all the wild flowers and when the moon would rise and set and when the tides came in or out. He was, in fact, the only god living in the whole of Green Town, Illinois, during the twentieth century that Douglas Spaulding knew of.
And right now he and Douglas were hiking out beyond town on another warm and marble-round day, the sky blue blown-glass reaching high, the cree
ks bright with mirror waters fanning over white stones. It was a day as perfect as the flame of a candle.
Douglas walked through it thinking it would go on this way forever. The perfection, the roundness, the grass smell traveled on out ahead as far and fast as the speed of light. The sound of a good friend whistling like an oriole, pegging the softball, as you horse-danced, key-jingled the dusty paths, all of it was complete, everything could be touched; things stayed near, things were at hand and would remain.
It was such a fine day and then suddenly a cloud crossed the sky, covered the sun, and did not move again.
John Huff had been speaking quietly for several minutes. Now Douglas stopped on the path and looked over at him.
“John, say that again.”
“You heard me the first time, Doug.”
“Did you say you were—going away?”
“Got my train ticket here in my pocket. Whoo-whoo, clang! Shush-shush-shush-shush. Whooooooooo . . .”
His voice faded.
John took the yellow and green train ticket solemnly from his pocket and they both looked at it.
“Tonight!” said Douglas. “My gosh! Tonight we were going to play Red Light, Green Light and Statues! How come, all of a sudden? You been here in Green Town all my life. You just don’t pick up and leave!”
“It’s my father,” said John. “He’s got a job in Milwaukee. We weren’t sure until today . . .”
“My gosh, here it is with the Baptist picnic next week and the big carnival Labor Day and Halloween—can’t your dad wait till then?”
John shook his head.
“Good grief!” said Douglas. “Let me sit down!”
They sat under an old oak tree on the side of the hill looking back at town, and the sun made large trembling shadows around them; it was cool as a cave in under the tree. Out beyond, in sunlight, the town was painted with heat, the windows all gaping. Douglas wanted to run back in there where the town, by its very weight, its houses, their bulk, might enclose and prevent John’s ever getting up and running off.
“But we’re friends,” Douglas said helplessly.
“We always will be,” said John.
“You’ll come back to visit every week or so, won’t you?”
“Dad says only once or twice a year. It’s eighty miles.”
“Eighty miles ain’t far!” shouted Douglas.
“No, it’s not far at all,” said John.
“My grandma’s got a phone. I’ll call you. Or maybe we’ll all visit up your way, too. That’d be great!” John said nothing for a long while.
“Well,” said Douglas, “let’s talk about something.”
“What?”
“My gosh, if you’re going away, we got a million things to talk about! All the things we would’ve talked about next: month, the month after! Praying mantises, zeppelins, acrobats, sword swallowers! Go on like you was back there, grasshoppers spitting tobacco!”
“Funny thing is It don’t feel like talking about grasshoppers.”
“You always did!”
“Sure.” John looked steadily at the town. “But It guess this just ain’t the time.”
“John, what’s wrong? You look funny . . .”
John had closed his eyes and screwed up his face. “Doug, the Terle house, upstairs, you know?”
“Sure.”
“The colored windowpanes on the little round windows, have they always been there?”
“Sure.”
“You positive?”
“Darned old windows been there since before we were born. Why?”
“I never saw them before today,” said John. “On the way walking through town I looked up and there they were. Doug, what was I doing all these years I didn’t see them?”
“You had other things to do.”
“Did I?” John turned and looked in a kind of panic at Douglas. “Gosh, Doug, why should those dam windows scare me? I mean, that’s nothing to be scared of, is it? It’s just . . .” He floundered. “It’s just, if I didn’t see these windows until today, what else did I miss? And what about all the things I did see here in town? Will I be able to remember them when I go away?”
“Anything you want to remember, you remember. T went to camp two summers ago. Up there I remembered.”
“No, you didn’t! You told me. you woke nights and couldn’t remember your mother’s face.”
“No!”
“Some nights it happens to me in my own house; scares heck out of me. I got to go in my folks’ room and look at their faces while they sleep, to be sure! And I go back to my room and lose it again. Gosh, Doug, oh gosh!” He held onto his knees tight. “Promise me just one thing, Doug. Promise you’ll remember me, promise you’ll remember my face and everything. Will you promise?”
“Easy as pie. Cot a motion-picture machine in my head. Lying in bed nights I can just turn on a light in my head and out it comes on the wall, clear as heck, and there you’ll be, yelling and waving at me.”
“Shut your eyes, Doug. Now, tell me, what color eyes I got? Don’t peek. What color eyes I got?”
Douglas began to sweat. His eyelids twitched nervously. “Aw heck, John, that’s not fair.”
“Tell me!”
“Brown!”
John turned away. “No, sir.”
“What do you mean, no?”
“You’re not even close!” John closed his eyes.
“Turn around here,” said Douglas. “Open up, let me see.”
“It’s no use,” said John. “You forgot already. Just the way I said.
“Turn around here!” Douglas grabbed him by the hair and turned him slowly.
“Okay, Doug.” John opened his eyes.
“Green.” Douglas, dismayed, let his hand drop. “Your eyes are green . . . Well, that’s close to brown. Almost hazel!”
“Doug, don’t lie to me.” “All right,” said Doug quietly. “I won’t.”
They sat there listening to the other boys running up the hill, shrieking and yelling at them.
They raced along the railroad tracks, opened their lunch in brown-paper sacks, and sniffed deeply of the wax-wrapped deviled-ham sandwiches and green-sea pickles and colored peppermints. They ran and ran again and Douglas bent to scorch his ear on the hot steel rails, hearing trains so far away they were unseen voyagings in other lands, sending Morse-code messages to him here under the killing sun. Douglas stood up, stunned.
“John!”
For John was running, and this was terrible. Because if you ran, time ran. You yelled and screamed and raced and rolled and tumbled and all of a sudden the sun was gone and the whistle was blowing and you were on your long way home to supper. When you weren’t looking, the sun got around behind you! The only way to keep things slow was to watch everything and do nothing! You could stretch a day to three days, sure, just by watching!
“John!”
There was no way to get him to help now, save by a trick.
“John, ditch, ditch the others!”
Yelling, Douglas and John sprinted off, kiting the wind downhill, letting gravity work for them, over meadows, around barns until at last the sound of the pursuers faded.
John and Douglas climbed into a haystack which was like a great bonfire crisping under them.
“Let’s not do anything,” said John.
“Just what I was going to say,” said Douglas.
They sat quietly, getting their breath.
There was a small sound like an insect in the hay.
They both heard it, but they didn’t look at the sound. When Douglas moved his wrist the sound ticked in another part of the haystack. When he brought his arm around on his lap the sound ticked in his lap. He let his eyes fall in a brief flicker. The watch said three o’clock.
Douglas moved his right hand stealthily to the ticking, pulled out the watch stem. He set the hands back.
Now they had all the time they would ever need to look long and close at the world, feel the sun move like a fiery wind
over the sky.
But at last John must have felt the bodiless weight of their shadows shift and lean, and he spoke.
“Doug, what time is it?”
“Two-thirty.”
John looked at the sky.
Don’t! thought Douglas.
“Looks more like three-thirty, four,” said John. “Boy Scout. You learn them things.”
Douglas sighed and slowly turned the watch ahead.
John watched him do this, silently. Douglas looked up. John punched him, not hard at all, in the arm.
With a swift stroke a plunge, a train came and went so quickly the boys all leaped aside, yelling, shaking their fists after it, Douglas and John with them. The train roared down the track, two hundred people in it, gone. The dust followed it a little way toward the south, then settled in the golden silence among the blue rails.
The boys were walking home.
“I’m going to Cincinnati when I’m seventeen and be a railroad fireman,” said Charlie Woodman.
“I got an uncle in New York,” said Jim. “I’ll go there and be a printer.”
Doug did not ask the others. Already the trains were chanting and he saw their faces drifting off on back observation platforms, or pressed to windows. One by one they slid away. And then the empty track and the summer sky and himself on another train run in another direction.
Douglas felt the earth move under his feet and saw their shadows move off the grass and color the air.
He swallowed hard, then gave a screaming yell, pulled back his fist, shot the indoor ball whistling in the sky. “Last one home’s a rhino’s behind!”
They pounded down the tracks, laughing, flailing the air. There went John Huff, not touching the ground at all. And here came Douglas, touching it all the time.
It was seven o’clock, supper over, and the boys gathering one by one from the sound of their house doors slammed and their parents crying to them not to slam the doors. Douglas and Tom and Charlie and John stood among half a dozen others and it was time for hide-and-seek and Statues.
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