Then it reversed itself. The man was now flying upward and outward, the wings going up so high they almost touched—like the crowns on the heads of that Henny Youngman parrot—and then driving downward again with immense power, like the arms of a swimmer in a finishing sprint.
Oh wow, Jack thought, driven back to the dumbest cliche he knew by his total, utter amazement. This topped everything; this was an utter pisser. Oh wow, look at that, oh wow.
Now a second man leaped from the diving board at the top of the tower; now a third; now a fourth. In less than five minutes there must have been fifty men in the air, flying complicated but discernible patterns: out from the tower, describe a figure-eight, back over the tower and out to the other side, another figure-eight, back to the tower, alight on the platform, do it all again.
They spun and danced and crisscrossed in the air. Jack began to laugh with delight. It was a little like watching the water ballets in those corny old Esther Williams movies. Those swimmers—Esther Williams herself most of all, of course—always made it look easy, as if you yourself could dip and swirl like that, or as if you and a few of your friends could easily come off the opposite sides of the diving board in timed choreography, making a kind of human fountain.
But there was a difference. The men flying out there did not give that sense of effortlessness; they seemed to be expending prodigious amounts of energy to stay in the air, and Jack felt with sudden certainty that it hurt, the way some of the calisthenics in phys ed—leg-lifts, or halfway sit-ups, for instance—hurt. No pain, no gain! Coach would roar if someone had the nerve to complain.
And now something else occurred to him—the time his mother had taken him with her to see her friend Myrna, who was a real ballet dancer, practicing in the loft of a dance studio on lower Wilshire Boulevard. Myrna was part of a ballet troupe and Jack had seen her and the other dancers perform—his mother often made him go with her and it was mostly boring stuff, like church or Sunrise Semester on TV. But he had never seen Myrna in practice . . . never that close up. He had been impressed and a little frightened by the contrast between seeing ballet on stage, where everyone seemed to either glide or mince effortlessly on the tips of their pointes, and seeing it from less than five feet away, with harsh daylight pouring in the floor-to-ceiling windows and no music—only the choreographer rhythmically clapping his hands and yelling harsh criticisms. No praise; only criticisms. Their faces ran with sweat. Their leotards were wet with sweat. The room, as large and airy as it was, stank of sweat. Sleek muscles trembled and fluttered on the nervous edge of exhaustion. Corded tendons stood out like insulated cables. Throbbing veins popped out on foreheads and necks. Except for the choreographer’s clapping and angry, hectoring shouts, the only sounds were the thrup-thud of ballet dancers on pointe moving across the floor and harsh, agonized panting for breath. Jack had suddenly realized that these dancers were not just earning a living; they were killing themselves. Most of all he remembered their expressions—all that exhausted concentration, all that pain . . . but transcending the pain, or at least creeping around its edges, he had seen joy. Joy was unmistakably what that look was, and it had scared Jack because it had seemed inexplicable. What kind of person could get off by subjecting himself or herself to such steady, throbbing, excruciating pain?
And pain that he was seeing here, he thought. Were they actual winged men, like the bird-people in the old Flash Gordon serials, or were the wings more in the Icarus and Daedalus line, something that you strapped on? Jack found that it didn’t really matter . . . at least, not to him.
Joy.
They live in a mystery, these people live in a mystery.
It’s joy that holds them up.
That was what mattered. It was joy that held them up, no matter if the wings grew out of their backs or were somehow held on with buckles and clamps. Because what he saw, even from this distance, was the same sort of effort he had seen in the loft on lower Wilshire that day. All that profligate investment of energy to effect a splendid, momentary reversal of natural law. That such a reversal should demand so much and last such a short time was terrible; that people would go for it anyway was both terrible and wonderful.
And it’s all just a game, he thought and suddenly felt sure of it. A game, or maybe not even that—maybe it was only practice for a game, the way that all the sweat and trembling exhaustion in the Wilshire loft that day had just been practice. Practice for a show that only a few people would probably care to attend and which would probably close quickly.
Joy, he thought again, standing now, his face turned up to look at the flying men in the distance, the wind spilling his hair across his forehead. His time of innocence was fast approaching its end (and, if pressed, even Jack would have reluctantly agreed that he felt such an end approaching—a boy couldn’t go on the road for long, couldn’t go through many experiences such as the one he had gone through in Oatley, and expect to remain an innocent), but in those moments as he stood looking into the sky, innocence seemed to surrounded him, like the young fisherman during his brief moment of epiphany in the Elizabeth Bishop poem, everything was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow.
Joy—damn, but that’s a cheerful little word.
Feeling better than he had since all of this began—and only God knew just how long ago that had been—Jack set off along the Western Road again, his step light, his face wreathed in that same silly, splendid grin. Every now and then he looked back over his shoulder, and he was able to see the fliers for a very long time. The Territories air was so clear it almost seemed to magnify. And even after he could no longer see them, that feeling of joy remained, like a rainbow inside his head.
7
When the sun began to go down, Jack realized he was putting off his return to the other world—to the American Territories—and not just because of how terrible the magic juice tasted, either. He was putting it off because he didn’t want to leave here.
A streamlet had flowed out of the grasslands (where small groves of trees had again begun to appear—billowy trees with oddly flat tops, like eucalyptus trees) and had hooked a right so that it flowed along beside the road. Farther off, to the right and ahead, was a huge body of water. It was so huge, in fact, that until the last hour or so Jack had thought it was a patch of sky that somehow had a slightly bluer color than the rest. But it wasn’t sky; it was a lake. A great lake, he thought, smiling at the pun. He guessed that in the other world that would be Lake Ontario.
He felt good. He was headed in the right direction—maybe a little too far north, but he had no doubt that the Western Road would bend away from that direction soon enough. That feeling of almost manic joy—what he had defined as cheerfulness—had mellowed to a lovely sort of calm serenity, a feeling that seemed as clear as the Territories air. Only one thing marred his good feeling, and that was the memory
(six, is six, Jack was six)
