Mystery

nonsmiling smile. “Well, ho hum,” she said. “And what are you gonna do now, Jerry Fairy?”

“Shut up,” the boy said.

“Poor Jerry Fairy.”

She was close enough now to examine Tom, and peered at him through the black sunglasses as if he were gunk on a laboratory slide. “Well, is that what Eastern Shore Road boys look like?”

“Shut up, Robyn.”

Robyn slid the sunglasses down her nose and peered at Tom through amused dark eyes. For a second Tom thought she was going to stroke his cheek. Instead she pushed her glasses back up over her eyes. “What are you gonna do with him?”

“I don’t know,” said Jerry.

“Well, here comes the cavalry,” said Robyn, smirking over her brother’s shoulder. Jerry turned sideways, and Tom saw coming around the side of a native house a fat, angry-looking boy, with a striped T-shirt and stiff new jeans rolled up at least a foot, alongside another boy several inches shorter and almost skeletally thin. The second boy’s shirt was so much too large for him that the shoulders fell halfway to his elbows and his neck swayed up out of the gaping collar. The smaller boy trotted beside the other, grinning widely. “They’ll be a big help,” Robyn said.

“More than you,” said her brother.

“I wish you’d tell me what’s going on,” Tom said.

“You shut up too,” Jerry fired at him. He blinked rapidly several times. “You want to know what’s going on? Why don’t you tell me, huh? What are you doing here?”

Tom opened his mouth and found that he had no answer to that question.

“Huh? Huh? All right, okay?” Jerry’s tongue flicked over his lips again. “You tell me, okay?”

“I was just—”

Jerry’s eyes flashed up at Tom, and the fury in his face killed the sentence.

Robyn made a gesture of distaste and stepped away.

“I’m going home,” Tom said to the side of Jerry’s outsized head. He moved backwards. Jerry’s eyes flashed at him again, and then his arm flashed out, and before Tom knew what was happening the other boy had struck him in the chest. The blow almost knocked Tom off his feet. Before he had time to react or recover, Jerry shifted his feet and punched the side of his head.

Wholly instinctively, Tom pivoted on his left foot and with all his strength sent his right hand straight at the other’s face. His fist landed squarely on Jerry’s nose, and broke it. Blood began squirting down Jerry’s face.

“Asshole!” screamed his sister.

Jerry dropped his hand from his face and began lumbering toward Tom. Blood jumped from his nose and spattered onto the T-shirt.

“Nappy! Robbie! Get him!” Jerry screamed in a high-pitched voice.

Tom stopped trotting backwards, suddenly angry enough to take on Jerry and his friends too. He lowered his hands and saw doubt move in Jerry’s worried eyes. Again he threw out his right hand without actually aiming at anything, and this time struck Jerry’s Adam’s apple. Jerry went down on his knees. Fifteen yards away and gaining fast, the fat boy in the rolled jeans had taken a knife from his pocket and was waving it as he ran. The smaller boy also had a knife, one with a long narrow blade.

A red-gold gleam from the low sun bounced off the skinny knife. Tom skipped backwards, turned around virtually in midair, and ran.

The boys behind him began yelling. When Tom drew level with the brown and yellow house, the front door opened, and the man who had been leaning against the window came out on the front stoop. His face, as flat and impersonally unhappy as Jerry’s, swiveled to track Tom’s progress. He gestured to the running boys to hurry up, catch him, drag him down. All of this was communicated in a gloomy gestural shorthand.

The world beneath this one …

Tom managed to pick up speed, and the boys behind him yelled for him to stop, they would not hurt him. They just wanted to talk to him, they were putting away their knives. Look, the knives were gone, they could talk now.

What’s the matter, was he too scared to talk?

Tom looked over his shoulder and saw with surprise that the smaller boy was standing in the middle of the street, canted on one hip and grinning. The pudgy boy in the new jeans was still charging after him. The chaos-man had left his front steps and was wobbling across the sidewalk toward his son, who was hidden behind the figure of the running boy. The fat boy still held his knife, and did not at all look as if he was interested in a friendly talk. His belly surged up and down with each step, his eyes were slits, and so much sweat came from his head that he was surrounded by an aureole of glistening drops. The skinny one pushed himself forward into a run a moment after Tom looked back, and began gaining at once on the fat boy and Tom.

The afternoon had passed into its last stage with tropical swiftness, and the air had turned a darkening purple. When Tom approached the next corner, the white of the cross street’s name gleamed out with an unnatural clarity and spelled AUER, a word that seemed to reverberate with ominous lack of meaning.

Auer.

Our.

Hour.

Tom wheeled wide around the corner, and a block away saw the continuous stream of vehicles that filled Calle Burleigh. The haze of dust had vanished into the purple dark, and headlights, bicycle lamps, and shining lanterns moved along with the traffic like a swarm of attendant fireflies. An unhappy horse whinnied and stamped a foot.

One of the boys pounded around the corner, and, far sooner than Tom had expected, the other followed. Another glance over his shoulder showed him that the skeletal teenager had managed to run past the fat one and was now only some fifteen yards behind. He was lifting his arms and legs high in a natural runner’s lope, the fish knife back in his hand, and he was still gaining on Tom. He had been so sure of being able to outrun Tom that he had pretended to get winded and drop out. The arrogance of this charade terrified Tom nearly as much as the knife: it was as if the boy could never be defeated. In a moment or two he would close in on Tom, and by then it would be so dark that the people leaning out of their windows, curious about all this running, would not be able to see what would happen next.

A stitch like a hot sword entered Tom’s side.

At the corner of Auer and Calle Burleigh he could have turned right or left and tried to escape by running up or down Calle Burleigh. Either way, he thought, the skinny boy would get him. The clattering footsteps were so close to him now that he was afraid to look back. When he reached the corner, he simply kept running straight ahead.

Tom flew off the curb and held out his arms as he plunged into the traffic. Horns instantly blew all about him, and a man yelled something incomprehensible. Tom thought that his pursuer, already almost at the curb, shouted too. He dodged around the rear tire of a high black bicycle, and was aware of a horse rearing somewhere off to his left. Another bicycle, virtually at his elbow, tilted over to one side like a trick in the circus, but did not right itself and continued tilting until, with unnatural slowness, its rider was two feet from the ground, then a foot. The rider’s grey hair flew back from his forehead, and his face expressed only the deep concentration of a man trying to think his way out of a particularly interesting puzzle, as his shoulder struck the ground. Then his bicycle slid straight out from beneath him. A horse the size of a mountain made of lather and hair appeared directly in front of Tom. He ducked to the left. The panicked horse bounded forward, and the wheels of its cab passed over the grey-haired man’s body. Tom heard the thump of collisions and the screech of metal all around him; then an empty illuminated space magically opened before him, and he sprang forward into this empty space. A horn blatted twice. Tom looked sideways and saw a pair of headlights coming toward him with the same dreamy slowness as the falling bicycle. He was entirely incapable of moving. Between the headlights he could see the mesh of a tall metal grille, and beneath