Shadowland

trumpet players immediately plugged cigarettes into their mouths. Most of the other musicians shrugged and set down their horns.

24

Tom Said Later

When the rest of the school and the band filed out into the cold air — Tom said later — Skeleton stole away from whatever he had been doing at the back of the stage and took a chair fifteen feet from the hall door, to one side of the refectory table. He was leaning back smiling at them when Tom and Del returned from the bathroom. 'Cleaned up now?' he asked. 'Must have been pretty uncomfortable, all that crap going down your shirt.'

    'Leave him alone,' Tom said. Both boys skirted Ridpath and went to the far side of the long table.

    'Shut up, stupid. You think I'm talking to you?' Ridpath twisted his chair so that he was looking directly at them again. A few musicians smoked on an otherwise empty stage; a few couples bent toward each other at the far end of the auditorium. 'You're afraid of me, aren't you, Florence?'

    The question was devastatingly simple.

    'Yes,' Del answered.

    'Yes, what?'

    'Yes, Mr. Ridpath.'

    'Yeah. That's good. Because you'll do anything I tell you to, just the way you're supposed to. I get sick looking at you, you know that. You look like a little bug, Florence, a shitty little cockroach. . . . ' Ridpath stood up, and Tom saw flecks of white at the edges of his mouth. He had somehow strolled up to the front of the table without their seeing him move: he threw out a stabbing punch, and Del jumped backward to avoid it.

    Tom opened his mouth, and Skeleton whispered fierce­ly: 'Keep out of this, Flanagan, or I'll tear you apart.' He turned his shining gaze toward Del again.

    'You saw him too.'

    Del shook his head.

    'I know you did. I saw you. Who is he? Come on, runt. Who is he? He wants me to do something, doesn't he?'

    'You're crazy,' Del said.

    'Oh no I'm not oh no I'm not oh no I'm not,' Skeleton said softly, all in a rush, leaning over the table toward Del. 'See, nobody's watching. We might as well be all alone here.' He snatched at Del's hand and clamped his fingers around the wrist. 'Who was he?'

    Del shook his head.

    'You saw him. You know him.'

    Del's whole being constricted with revulsion, and he tried to wrench himself away. Skeleton changed his grip with a wrestler's quickness and began to squeeze Del's hand in his. 'Little girl,' he muttered. 'Trying to hide from me, aren't you, little girl?' Ridpath did his best to break the bones in Del's hand.

    Tom lunged at Skeleton's wrist.

    Skeleton jerked his hand aloft, nearly lifting Del off the floor. Then he looked at Tom in fury and despair and still with that sick gladness and swung his arm down hard into the side of the punch bowl. At the last second he released his fingers and used his palm to smack Del's hand against the heavy bowl.

    Del screamed. The bowl shattered, and purple-brownish liquid gouted into the air. The two boys were instantly soaked, Skeleton less so because he had jumped back immediately after the impact; Del half-fell into the mess on the table.

    'I want to know,' Skeleton said, and ran out through the hall door.

When the rest of us came back into the auditorium, after seeing a red speck drift far above Over the field house, Tom and Del were mopping the floor. Del's hand, not broken, bled in a straight line across his knuckles: his face stricken, he wielded the mop with one hand while awkwardly holding his torn hand out from his side, letting it bleed into a bucket.

    'Jeez, you monkeys are clumsy,' Mr. Robbin said, and ordered his wife to get cotton and tape from the first-aid box in the office.

25

Night

'But why not tell me? I'm your best friend.'

    'There's nothing to tell.'

    'But I bet I know who it is already.'

    'Dandy.'

    'What's the big mystery?'

    'Don't ask me, ask Skeleton. I don't even know what he's talking about.'

26

Alis Volat

The next weekend we had an away game at Ventnor Prep, which was just over a hundred miles to the north, in a suburb even more affluent than our own, and was indisputably a first-rate school: unlike Carson, Ventnor was known all over the Southwest. It was the only school for three states around with a crew team. They also had a fencing squad and a rugby team. We thought of Ventnor as a school for intolerable snobs. It owned a famous collection of antique porcelain and glassware which was supposed to exert a refining influence on the students there.

    The bus ride took two and a half hours, and when we arrived we were soon given refreshment — presumably we needed Cokes and watercress sandwiches to toughen us up for the game. Members of the Ventnor Mothers' Committee served the waferlike sandwiches in a reception room that appeared to have been modeled on Laker Broome's office. This was a 'pregame mixer,' to be followed by a 'postgame tea,' but there was no mixing. The Ventnor boys clustered on one side of the reception room, we on the other.

    Skeleton Ridpath spoke to no one on the way down and in the reception room drank five or six glasses of Coke and prowled around looking at the ornaments on the shelves. These were a display of some of the famous antiques, but Skeleton remained unrefined. He grinned whenever he looked at Del. He looked ghastly, ready for a hospital bed.

    Del's hand was still bandaged, and the white gauze flashed like a lamp against his olive skin. He wore a tailored blue blazer, a white shirt, a blue-and-red-striped tie. In this sober outfit he somehow appeared prematurely sophisticated. The dazzling whiteness of new gauze against his skin was dashing as a medal — romantic as an eyepatch. He suddenly appeared to already — novelizing me in the role of one destined to be famous.

    Mr. Ridpath coughed into his hand, said, 'Well, boys,' and began to herd us toward the locker room.

Once again, both games ended in disaster. The JV's lost by three touchdowns; the varsity made a touchdown in the first quarter, but the Ventnor quarterback snapped off two passes which brought them ahead, and in the second half a fullback named Creech recovered a fumble and ran thirty yards. After that our defense fell to bits. Ventnor simply marched down the field every time they had the ball. 'This place is so rich they buy athletes,' Chip Hogan told me as we filed out of the stands to walk across several hundred yards of manicured field to return to the recep­tion room and the tea. 'Did you see those two huge guys in the line . . . and that enormous fullback? I know those guys from the city. They get scholarships and living allowances, and uniform allowances. They even get a training table at meals. Nobody stuffs them full of veal birds.' He gritted his teeth. 'See you at the shitty tea,' he said, and began to run because he could not bear to move more slowly.

    At the bottom of the stands, I could go either the way Chip was running, directly across the football field and over a hill to the main building, or along a path which followed the landscaped contours of the grounds and trailed up and down the little rises past the artificial lake. About half my class was visible on this path, too embar­ rassed by our failure to want to appear at the tea before they had to. I turned away from the school buildings and went down the path toward my friends.

'Jesus, I don't want any of their tea,' Bobby Hollingsworth said after I had caught up with them.

    'We don't have any choice, really,' said Morris. 'But to tell you the truth, I'd rather lie down here and go to