Locker room
It is Christmas Eve and Toby is alone in the locker room. The old YMCA building has been sold and only a few boys still stay on. They have moved into the locker room because it is warmer and the showers are there.
Now all the other boys have gone away somewhere for Christmas and Toby knows that most of them will not be coming back, since the building has to be vacated by January 18, 1924. Toby is reading
I gave it a last tap, tried all the screws again, put one more drop of oil on the quartz rod, and sat myself in the saddle. I suppose a suicide who holds a pistol to his skull feels much the same wonder at what will come next as I felt then ...
I seemed to reel; I felt a nightmare sensation of falling ...
I am afraid I cannot convey the peculiar sensations of time travelling. They are excessively unpleasant. There is a feeling exactly like that one has upon a switchback—of a helpless headlong motion! I felt the same horrible anticipation, too, of an imminent smash. As I put on pace, night followed day like the flapping of a black wing ...
The twinkling succession of darkness and light was exceedingly painful to the eye.... The sky took on a wonderful deepness of blue, a splendid luminous color like that of early twilight; the jerking sun became a streak of fire, a brilliant arch, in space; the moon a fainter fluctuating band.... Minute by minute the white snow flashed across the world, and vanished, and was followed by the bright, brief green of spring ...
There is a stew simmering on a gas ring and occasionally Toby stirs it, listening to the chimes from the Salvation Army mission across the street playing 'Silent Night.' He remembers other Christmases, the smell of pine and plum pudding and the old smell of his steam engine.
He had been brought up in a three-story red brick house in a middle-western town. When he was six years old his parents died, in the flu epidemic of 1918. After that, a series of uncles and foster parents took care of him.
Nobody wanted Toby for long, though he was a beautiful boy with yellow hair and huge blue eyes like deep lakes. He made people uneasy. There was a sleepy animal quiescence about him. He never talked except in answer to a question or to express a need. His silence seemed to hold a threat or a criticism, and people didn't like it.
And there was something else: Toby smelled. It was a sulfurous rank animal smell that permeated his room and drifted from his clothes. His father and mother had had the same smell about them, and they kept a number of pets: cats, raccoons, ferrets and skunks. 'The little people,' his mother called them. Toby took the little people with him wherever he went, and his uncle John, an executive on the way up, liked big people.
'John, we have to get rid of that boy. He smells like a polecat,' Toby's aunt would say.
'Well, Martha, perhaps there's something wrong with his glands.' The uncle blushed, feeling that
'That's not all. There's something in his room. Something he carries about with him. Some sort of
'Now Martha....'
'I tell you, John, he's
Mr. Norton was John's boss. He had indeed been visibly discomfited by Toby's silent appraising stare.
Looking back, Toby could see the twinkle of Christmas-eve ornaments. Far away his father points to Betelgeuse in the night sky. The locker room holds the silence of absent male voices like a deserted gymnasium or barracks.
The boys have built a partition of beaverboard and set up their cots in this improvised room. There is a long table with initials carved in the top, folding chairs, and a few old magazines in the main room where the gas ring is located. In one corner is a withered Christmas tree that Toby pulled out of a trash can. This is part of his stage set. He is waiting for someone.
He tastes the stew. It is flat and the meat is tough and stringy. He adds two bouillon cubes. Another fifteen or twenty minutes. Meanwhile, he will take a shower. Naked, waiting for the water to heat up, he is examining the
