Shadowland

    He swiveled around on his bar stool and surveyed the empty room. Light from the windows fell like a spotlight on the stage at the far end. He did not want to look at me while he said the rest of it.

    'I knew I couldn't keep him from going, so I had to go with him.'

    He sighed, still watching the yellow ray of light on the vacant stage as if he expected to see a vision there.

    'There was one thing I really didn't know. But should have. The school was Shadowland too.'

And for months, for nearly two years, in other bars or in hotel rooms, other cities, other countries, wherever we caught up with each other: Let me tell you what happened then.

PART TWO

Shadowland

We are back at the foot of the great narrative tree, where stories can go . . . anywhere.

Roger Sale, Fairy Tales and After

ONE

The Birds Have Come Home

Del was quiet the whole first day of the trip. . . .

1

Del was quiet for the first day of their journey, and Tom eventually gave up trying to make him talk. Whenever he commented on the vast, empty scenery rolling past the train's windows, Del merely grunted and buried himself deeper in a two-hundred-page mimeographed manuscript which Coleman Collins had mailed him. This was about something called the Triple Transverse Shuffle. Apart from grunts, his only remark about the desert landscape was, 'Looks like a million cowboy hats.'

    During this time Tom read a paperback Rex Stout mystery, walked through the cars looking at the other passengers — a lot of old people and young women with babies around whom buzzed talkative soldiers with drawl­ ing, suntanned accents. He inspected the bar and dining car. He sat in the observation bubble. There the desert seemed to engulf everything, changing colors as the day and the train advanced. It moved through yellow and orange to gold and red, and in the instant before twilight threw blue and gray over the long distances, flamed — dyed itself a brilliant rose-pink and burst thunderously into brilliance. This endured only a heart-stopping sec­ond, but it was a second in which the whole world seemed ablaze. When Tom came hungry back to their seats, Del looked up from a page full of diagrams and said, 'Poor Dave Brick.' So he had seen it too.

    Night came down around them, and the windows gave them back their faces, blurred into generalities.

    'Booger,' Tom muttered, almost in tears: the complex of feelings lodged in his chest was too dense to sort out. He had somehow missed Dave Brick in the smoky pandemonium of the auditorium, must have gone right past him half a dozen times and left him back there, behind them, in the country they were leaving a little more with each click of the wheels. The sensation of moving forward, of being propelled onward, was as strong as the sense of threat outside Del's house that noon before Del had risen into the air — it was the sense of being mailed like a parcel to a destination utterly un­known. He met his mild blurred eyes in the dirty window and saw darkness rocking past him in the form of a telegraph pole's gloomy exclamation point.

    'You did a lot,' Del said.

    'Sure,' Tom growled, and Del went back to his pages of diagrams.

    After twenty more minutes in which Del fondled cards and Tom held tightly to his feelings, fearing that they would break and spill, Del looked up and said, 'Hey, it must be way past dinnertime. Is there anywhere to eat on this train?'

    'There's a dining car up ahead,' Tom said. He looked at his watch and was startled to see that it was nine o'clock: they had been rocked past time, while they had been busy leaving behind and back there.

'Great,' Del said, and stood up. 'I want to show you something. You can read it when we're eating.'

    'I don't get any of that stuff you're looking at,' Tom said as they started walking down the aisle toward the front of the car.

    Del grinned at him over his shoulder. 'Well, you might not get this either. It's something else,' leaving Tom to wonder.

Any stranger looking at them would have known that they went to the same school. They must have looked touchingly young, in their blue Gant shirts and fresh haircuts; they were unlike anyone else on the train. Cowboys with dusty clothes and broken hats and cardboard suitcases had climbed on at every stop. With names like Gila Bend and Edgar and Redemption, these were just brown-board shacks in the desert.

    In the dining car Tom first realized how odd he and Del appeared, here on this train. As soon as they walked in, he felt exposed. The women with their children, the soldiers, the cowboys, stared at them. Tom wished for a uniform, for ten more years on his body. A few people smiled: being cute was hateful. He promised himself that for the rest of the trip he would at least wear a shirt a different color from Del's.

    Del commandeered a small side table, snapped the napkin off his plate, and accepted the menu without looking at the waiter. Intent on some private matter, he had never noticed the stares. 'Ah, eggs Benedict,' he said. 'Wonderful. Will you have them too?'

    'I don't even know what they are,' Tom said.

    'Then try them. They're great. Practically my favorite meal.'

    When the waiter returned, they both ordered eggs Benedict. 'And coffee,' Del said, negligently proffering the menu to the waiter, who was a glum elderly black man.

    'You want milk,' the waiter said. 'Coffee stunt your growth.'

    'Coffee. Black.' He was looking Tom straight in the eye.

    'You, son?' The waiter turned his tired face to Tom.

    'Milk, I guess.' Del rolled his eyes. Tom asked, 'Do you drink coffee?'

    'In Vermont, I do.'

    'And the princes and the ravens bring it in gold cups every morning.'

    'Sometimes. Sometimes Rose Armstrong brings it,' Del smiled.

    'Rose Armstrong?'

    'The Rose Armstrong. Just wait. Maybe she'll be there, maybe she won't. I hope she is.'

    'Yeah?' Now it was Tom who smiled.

    'Yeah. If you're lucky, you'll see what I mean.' Del adjusted the cloth on his lap, looked around as if to make sure no one was eavesdropping, and then looked across the table and said, 'Before you get your first taste of paradise, maybe you ought to see what he sent me.'

    'If you think I'm old enough.'

    Del plucked a folded sheet of typing paper from his shirt pocket and passed it to Tom. He was positively smirking.

    Tom unfolded the sheet.

    'Don't ask any questions until you read all of it,' Del said.

    Typed on the sheet was: