“Just that I cracked that big one behind the ears.”
“Ummmmm.” Gardener stepped backward, steepling his fingers before his chest.
As Williams prodded the boys up the steps to the long porch, Gardener cocked his head and regarded his new arrivals. Jack and Wolf reached the top of the steps and moved tentatively onto the surface of the porch. Franky Williams wiped his forehead and huffed himself up beside them. Gardener was smiling mistily, but his eyes switched back and forth between the boys. The second after something hard, cold, and familiar jumped out of his eyes at Jack, the Reverend again twitched the sunglasses out of his pocket and put them on. The smile remained misty and delicate, but even wrapped as he was in a sense of false security, Jack felt frozen by that glance—because he had seen it before.
Reverend Gardener pulled the sunglasses below the bridge of his nose and peered playfully over the tops of the frames. “Names? Names? Might we have some names from you two gentlemen?”
“I’m Jack,” the boy said, and then stopped—he did not want to say one more word until he had to. Reality seemed to fold and buckle about Jack for a moment: he felt that he had been jerked back into the Territories, but that now the Territories were evil and threatening, and that foul smoke, jumping flames, the screams of tortured bodies filled the air.
A powerful hand closed over his elbow and held him upright. Instead of the foulness and smoke, Jack smelled some heavy sweet cologne, applied too liberally. A pair of melancholy gray eyes were looking directly into his.
“And have you been a bad boy, Jack? Have you been a very bad boy?”
“No, we were just hitching, and—”
“I think you’re a trifle stoned,” said the Reverend Gardener. “We’ll have to see that you get some special attention, won’t we?” The hand released his elbow; Gardener stepped neatly away, and pushed the sunglasses up over his eyes again. “You do possess a last name, I imagine.”
“Parker,” Jack said.
“Yesss.” Gardener whipped the glasses off his head, executed a dancing little half-turn, and was scrutinizing Wolf. He had given no indication whether he believed Jack or not.
“My,” he said. “You’re a healthy specimen, aren’t you? Positively strapping. We’ll certainly be able to find a use for a big strong boy like you around here, praise the Lord. And might I ask you to emulate Mr. Jack Parker here, and give me your name?”
Jack looked uneasily at Wolf. His head was bowed, and he was breathing heavily. A glistening line of slobber went from the corner of his mouth to his chin. A black smudge, half-dirt, half-grease, covered the front of the stolen Athletic Department sweatshirt. Wolf shook his head, but the gesture seemed to have no content—he might have been shaking away a fly.
“Name, son? Name? Name? Are you called Bill? Paul? Art? Sammy? No—something exceedingly foursquare, I’m sure. George, perhaps?”
“Wolf,” said Wolf.
“Ah, that
“Jack,” Wolf said in a low voice.
“Yes.”
“My head hurts, Jack. Hurts bad.”
“Your little head pains you, Mr. Wolf?” Reverend Sunlight Gardener half-danced toward Wolf and gently patted his arm. Wolf snatched his arm away, his face working into an exaggerated reflex of disgust. The cologne, Jack knew—that heavy cloying odor would have been like ammonia in Wolf’s sensitive nostrils.
“Never mind, son,” said Gardener, seemingly unaffected by Wolf’s withdrawal from him. “Mr. Bast or Mr. Singer, our other steward, will see to that inside. Frank, I thought I told you to get them into the Home.”
Officer Williams reacted as if he had been jabbed in the back with a pin. His face grew more feverish, and he jerked his peculiar body across the porch to the front door.
Sunlight Gardener twinkled at Jack again, and the boy saw that all his dandified animation was only a kind of sterile self-amusement: the man in white was cold and crazy within. A heavy gold chain rattled out of Gardener’s sleeve and came to rest against the base of his thumb. Jack heard the whistle of a whip cutting through the air, and this time he recognized Gardener’s dark gray eyes.
Gardener was Osmond’s Twinner.
“Inside, young fellows,” Gardener said, half-bowing and indicating the open door.
2
“By the way, Mr. Parker,” Gardener said, once they had gone in, “is it possible that we’ve met before? There must be some reason you look so familiar to me, mustn’t there?”
“I don’t know,” Jack said, looking carefully around the odd interior of the Scripture Home.
Long couches covered with a dark blue fabric sat against the wall on the forest-green carpet; two massive leather-topped desks had been placed against the opposite wall. At one of the desks a pimply teenager glanced at them dully, then returned to the video screen before him, where a TV preacher was inveighing against rock and roll. The teenage boy seated at the adjoining desk straightened up and fixed Jack with an aggressive stare. He was slim and black-haired and his narrow face looked clever and bad-tempered. To the pocket of his white turtleneck sweater was pinned a rectangular nameplate of the sort worn by soldiers: SINGER.
“But I do think we have met each other somewhere, don’t you, my lad? I assure you, we must have—I don’t forget, I am literally incapable of forgetting, the face of a boy I have encountered. Have you ever been in trouble before this, Jack?”
