He is nine years old, walking home from school, and in his right hand he holds clenched two dozen baseball cards which he has traded for that afternoon. He has several Dodgers and this particularly delights him, the Dodgers are his favorite team—Pee Wee Reese and Billy Cox and Carl Furillo; and he has a rare Bob Feller, too.
He walks quickly, because he wants to get home and arrange these cards with the others he has, he is very close to the complete set, perhaps he even has it now with these new acquisitions. He turns the corner, and Tommy Franklin is there, hands on pudgy hips, scowling.
A tremor of fear rushes through him and he stops. “Hey, Lennox,” Franklin yells at him, and advances several steps. “You got my baseball cards.”
“These are mine,” he shouts back. “I traded for them.”
“No, they’re mine, I was supposed to get ‘em first and you butted in and now I want ’em.”
“It’s not fair, it’s not fair ...”
“You better give me my cards, Lennox. I’ll beat you up if you don’t give me my cards.”
He tries to stand his ground. He tries to tell himself he can lick Tommy Franklin. But the fear is too strong within him. He chokes back the sob that rises in his throat and flings the cards down on the sidewalk— Pee Wee Reese and Billy Cox and Carl Furillo and the rare Bob Feller, scattered out like bright leaves.
And he turns and flees, with Tommy Franklin’s derisive laughter ringing in his ears.
He runs all the way home.
How many hours has it been now? Five, six, a dozen? He does not know. He knows only that the skin of his neck and face and arms is painfully blistered, knows only that a burning thirst rages in his throat, knows only that the sun has swollen his eyelids to mere slits and the dusty sweat streaming in is like an acid-based astringent blurring and distorting his vision.
He has no idea where he is, the terrain all looks the same to him, he could be wandering in endless circles and yet he has been following the sun, angling toward it until it climbed to the center of the amethyst sky, and then moving away from it, keeping it at his left shoulder, as it began its descent. East, he knows he has been moving that way even though he has never been much good at directions—east, not in a circle, he is not lost.
And yet—where are the roads? Where is the town? He should have come upon them by now, he should have found help by now, maybe he is lost, oh God, maybe he’ll never find his way out, maybe he’ll die out here with the juices of his life sucked out of him by that monstrous sphere overhead—
The panic rears up inside him again, a flashing burst of it, and he cries out softly between lips that have long ago cracked and bled and dried and cracked and bled again. But the exhaustion, the dehydration of his flesh prevent him from plunging into headlong flight. He stumbles sideways, into a long shadow cast by a protuberance of granite, and clings to the hot stone with clawed fingers until the fear ebbs and leaves him weak and breathless.
The desert shimmers, shimmers, and a memory dances once more across the surface of his mind.
He is seventeen and very drunk. He and some of his friends are drinking beer in the prewar Ford which his father has bought him, road-racing in an abandoned development known as Happy Acres north of town. The radio is playing Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis and Fats Domino, and empty bottles fly periodically out of the open windows, and scrawny little Pete Tamazzi is telling this story about how he got into Nancy Collins the week before, Nancy Collins being a very proper Catholic girl and president of the Student Body and obviously a virgin and obviously intending to stay that way, Pete being full of bullshit as usual and as usual the others urging him on to more and more graphic lies.
He sends the Ford into a sliding curve, and over his shoulder he shouts to Hal Younger, “Crack me another one, bartender.”
Hal opens a bottle and starts to pass it forward, and suddenly the interior of the car is filled with eerily fiashing red light. He looks up at the rear-view mirror, and laughter dies on his lips and the beer turns sour in his stomach. “Oh Christ!” he says.
The others are looking out through the rear window, and Pete says “Cops” and begins to hiccup.
“Well,” Hal says, “we’re screwed, guys.”
He knows he should stop. The police car is not far behind them, coming fast, the red light swirling hellish shadows over the black weed-tossed development, turning the faces of the boys in the car into demonic caricatures, visions in a nightmare.
He knows he should stop—and yet his beer-numbed thoughts are those of blue uniforms with shiny brass buttons, and small barred cells, and his mother crying and his father shouting. His hands grip the wheel and his foot bears down on the accelerator. The Ford has been modified, bored and stroked, three jugs, Mallory ignition, but it is no match for the new Chryslers the local police are using and he knows it. Still, he can’t stop himself, he can’t slow down, and now there is the sound of a siren to splinter the night around them, feeding his need to escape, to be free of these sudden pursuers.
He fights the wheel into a turn, gearing down, switching off the headlights. There is a pale moon, but it does not shed enough light by which to see sufficiently. But he knows the crosshatched roads in Happy Acres, he has been here many times with Cassy Sunderland and Karen Akers and with Hal and Pete and the others ...
“Jack, what are you doing, for God’s sake!” Hal shouts.
And Gene Turner’s voice: “You can’t outrun them, you’ll kill us all!”
And Pete’s: “Jack, those are cops, they’re cops!”
He hears the voices and yet they are meaningless, they do not penetrate the thick haze of desperation which seems to have gained control of him. The Ford spins wildly forward under his guiding hands, rocking, pitching, engine whining, plunging through darkness into darkness, gear down, gear up, skid right, fishtail left, shortcut across that flat grassy stretch, and now he can see the road, the Western Avenue Extension. He looks into the rear-view mirror—and suddenly there are no stabbing white cones seeking out the Ford, no crimson wash to the landscape. He’s lost them, he’s beaten them, he’s won!
Exhilaration sweeps through him. He down-shifts into second as he reaches the Extension, slowing, but instead of turning right, toward town, he turns left and drives two thousand yards and swings down a rutted tractor lane; the lane borders a grassy-banked stream in which he had once picked watercress when he was younger, and there is a small grove of willows there. He takes the Ford in amongst the low-hanging branches, cuts the engine, and the black of the night enfolds them.
He turns to look at the others then, grinning, and their faces seem to shine whitely through the ebon interior of the car. The smile fades. He is looking not at admiration, not at gratitude—he is looking at trembling anger.
“You crazy bastard!” Hal says thickly.
“What the hell?” he says. “I saved you guys, didn’t I? Those cops were too far back to get a clear look at the car or the license. They don’t know who it was. If I’d stopped we’d be busted now, on our way to jail.”
“You could have killed us, you could have rolled this car right off the road,” Pete says.
“And suppose they’d caught us?” Gene snaps. “It would have gone twice as bad for trying to run away.”
He stares at them. “Listen,” he says, “we did get away. We had to get away and we got away. That’s all that matters. Don’t you see that, you guys? That’s all that matters, getting away.”
But they do not answer, and they do not speak again even after he leaves the willows a half- hour later and drives them slowly back to town.
