had he gone back to fight the king who had wanted to kill him? Little Tib could not be sure, but he did not think Krishna had run. Jesus had fled into Egypt; he remembered that. But Jesus had come back. Not to Bethlehem, where he had run from, but to Nazareth, because that was his real home. Little Tib remembered talking about the Jesus story to his father, when they were sitting on the stage. His father had brushed it aside; but Little Tib felt it might be important somehow. He put his chin on his hands to think about it.
The chair was hard—harder than any rock he had ever sat on. He felt the unyielding wood of its arms stretching to either side of him while he thought. There was something horrible about those arms, something he could not remember. Just outside the door the bell rang, and he could hear the noise the children’s feet made in the hall. It was recess; they were pouring out the doors, pouring out into the warm fragrance of spring outside.
He got up, and found the door edge with his fingers. He did not know whether anyone was seeing him or not. In an instant he was in the crowd of pushing children. He let them carry him down the steps.
Outside, games went on all around him. He stopped shuffling and shoving now, and began to walk. With the first step he knew that he would go on walking like this all day. It felt better than anything else he had ever done. He walked through all the games until he found the fence around the schoolyard, then down the fence until he found a gate, then out the gate and down the road.
When he had gone about five kilometers, as well as he could judge, he heard the whistle of a train far off and turned toward it. Railroad tracks were better than roads—he had learned that months ago. He was less likely to meet people, and trains only went by once in a while. Cars and trucks went by all the time, and any one of them could kill.
After a while he picked up a good stick—light but flexible, and just the right length. He climbed the embankment then, and began to walk where he wanted to walk, on the rails, balancing with his stick. There was a little girl ahead of him, and he could see her, so he knew she was an angel. “What’s your name?” he said.
“I mustn’t tell you,” she answered, “but you can call me Dorothy.” She asked his, and he did not say “George Tibbs” but “Little Tib,” which was what his mother and father had always called him.
“You fixed my leg, so I’m going with you,” Dorothy announced. (She did not really sound like the same girl.) After a time she added: “I can help you a lot. I can tell you what to look out for.”
“I know you can,” Little Tib said humbly.
“Like now. There’s a man up ahead of us.”
“A bad man?” Little Tib asked. “Or a good man?”
“A nice man. A shaggy man.”
“Hello.” It was Nitty’s voice. “I didn’t really expect to see you here, George, but I guess I should have.”
Little Tib said, “I don’t like school.”
“That’s just the different of me. I do like it, only it seems like they don’t like me.”
“Didn’t Mr. Parker get you your job back?”
“I think Mr. Parker kind of forgot me.”
“He shouldn’t have done that,” Little Tib said.
“Well, little blind boy, Mr. Parker is white, you know. And when a white man has been helped out by a black one, he likes to forget it sometimes.”
“I see,” Little Tib said, though he did not. Black and white seemed very unimportant to him.
“I hear it works the other way too.” Nitty laughed.
“This is Dorothy,” Little Tib said.
Nitty said, “I can’t see any Dorothy, George.” His voice sounded funny.
“Well, I can’t see you,” Little Tib told him.
“I guess that’s right. Hello, Dorothy. Where are you an’ George goin’?”
“We’re going to Sugar Land,” Little Tib told him. “In Sugar Land they know who you are.”
“Is Sugar Land for real?” Nitty asked. “I always thought it was just some place you made up.”
“No, Sugar Land is in Texas.”
“How about that,” Nitty said. The light of the sun, now setting, made the railroad ties as yellow as butter. Nitty took Little Tib’s hand, and Little Tib took Dorothy’s, and the three of them walked between the rails. Nitty took up a lot of room, but Little Tib did not take much, and Dorothy hardly took any at all.
When they had gone half a kilometer, they began to skip.
This story began when I mentioned Sugar Land at some science fiction convention and the woman I was talking to thought it an imaginary land, like Cockaigne.
Or Oz for that matter.
Sugar Land is a perfectly real town in Texas; there is or was a big sugar mill there.
For years there was a sad sign quite near my house: BLIND CHILD AREA. I used to tell visitors that I had never seen the blind child, nor had the child seen me. Most would nod sympathetically and move on to other topics.
Now and then I wished that I could; blindness is one of those haunting tragedies no writer ever deals with adequately. I won’t pretend I have in this story; I only say that the thought of the blind child, who must have been kept inside day and night for years, no longer haunts me quite as much as it once did.
