I caught myself with barked knuckles as Dr. Curtis braked to a sudden stop.
“Now look,” he said, “let’s get this straight. You’re talking wilder than I am. Do you mean to say that that kid is swiping a whole orchestra?”
“Yes, don’t ask me how. I don’t know how, but he can do it-” I grabbed his sleeve. “But he said you knew! The day you left on your trip, I mean, be said you knew someone who would know. We were waiting for you!”
“Well, I’ll be blowed!” he said in slow wonder. “Well, dang me!” He ran his hand over his face. “So now it’s my turn!” He reached for the ignition key. “Gangway, Jemmy!” he shouted.
“‘Here I come with another! Yours or mine, Jemmy? Yours or mine?”
It was as though his outlandish words had tripped a trigger. Suddenly all this strangeness, this out-of-stepness became a mad foolishness. Despairingly I wished I’d never seen Willow Creek or the Francher kid or a harmonica that danced alone or Twyla’s tilted side glance, or Dr. Curtis or the white road dimming in the rapid coming of night. I huddled down in my coat, my eyes stinging with weary hopeless tears, and the only comfort I could find was in visualizing myself twisting my hated braces into rigid confetti and spattering the road with it.
I roused as Dr. Curtis braked the jeep to a stop.
“It was about there,” he said, peering through the dusk.
“It’s mighty deserted up here-the raw end of isolation. The kid’s probably scared by now and plenty willing to come home.”
“Not the Francher kid,” I said. “He’s not the run-of-the-mill type kid.”
“Oh, so!” Dr. Curtis said. “I’d forgotten.”
Then there it was. At first I thought it the evening wind in the pines, but it deepened and swelled and grew into a thunderous magnificent shaking chord-a whole orchestra giving tongue. Then, one by one, the instruments soloed, running their scales, displaying their intervals, parading their possibilities. Somewhere between the strings and woodwinds I eased out of the jeep.
“You stay here,” I half whispered. “I’ll go find him. You wait.”
It was like walking through a rainstorm, the notes spattering all around me, the shrill lightning of the piccolos and the muttering thunder of the drums. There was no melody, only a child running gleefully through a candy store, snatching greedily at everything, gathering delight by the handful and throwing it away for the sheer pleasure of having enough to be able to throw it.
I struggled up the rise above the road, forgetting in my preoccupation to be wary of unfamiliar territory in the half-dark. There they were, in the sand hollow beyond the rise-all the instruments ranged in orderly precise rows as though at a recital, each one wrapped in a sudden shadowy silence, broken only by the shivery giggle of the cymbals which hastily stilled themselves against the sand.
“Who’s there?” He was a rigid figure, poised atop a boulder, arms half lifted.
“Francher,” I said.
“Oh.” He slid through the air to me. “I’m not hiding any more,” be said. “I’m going to be me all the time now.”
“Francher,” I said bluntly, “you’re a thief.”
He jerked in protest. “I’m not either-“
“If this is being you, you’re a thief. You stole these instruments.”
He groped for words, then burst out: “They stole my money! They stole all my music.”
” ‘They’?” I asked. “‘Francher, you can’t lump people together and call them ‘they.’ Did I steal your money? Or Twyla-or Mrs. Frisney-or Rigo?”
“Maybe you didn’t put your hands on it,” the Francher kid said. “But you stood around and let McVey take it.”
“That’s a guilt humanity has shared since the beginning. Standing around and letting wrong things happen. But even Mrs. McVey felt she was helping you. She didn’t sit down and decide to rob you. Some people have the idea that children don’t have any exclusive possessions but what they have belongs to the adults who care for them. Mrs. McVey thinks that way. Which is quite a different thing from deliberately stealing from strangers. What about the owners of all these instruments? What have they done to deserve your ill will?”
“They’re people,” he said stubbornly. “And I’m not going to be people any more.” Slowly he lifted himself into the air and turned himself upside down. “See,” he said, hanging above the hillside. “People can’t do things like this.”
“No,” I said. “But apparently whatever kind of creature you have decided to be can’t keep his shirttails in either.”
Hastily he scrabbled his shirt back over his hare midriff and righted himself. There was an awkward silence in the shadowy hollow, then I asked:
“What are you going to do about the instruments?”
“Oh, they can have them back when I’m through with them-if they can find them,” he said contemptuously. “I’m going to play them to pieces tonight.” The trumpet jabbed brightly through the dusk and the violins shimmered a silver obbligato.
“And every downbeat will say ‘thief,’” I said. “And every roll of the drums will growl ‘stolen.’”
“I don’t care, I don’t care!” he almost yelled. ” ‘Thief’ and ‘stolen” are words for people and I’m not going to be people any more, I told you!”
“What are you going to be?” I asked, leaning wearily against a tree trunk. “An animal?”
“No sir.” He was having trouble deciding what to do with his hands. “I’m going to be more than just a human.”
