The pine needles, whispering in the breeze. Some small creature rustling through the twigs. Behind him, the sounds of people laughing together. There, off to the right, a dog barking.
He turned thirty degrees, tilted his head to catch other sounds: the almost inaudible thrumming of wind in an owl’s wings, the chirping of a cicada. A car door slamming far away. A rustling, gurgling sound of a mountain stream, only a few feet away.
How often did he get a chance to just stand alone in the darkness, not thinking about anything, just listening? How often did he have the chance to breathe deep of clean air, feel the movement of air on his face and not be afraid?
Sometimes it was good for a man to be alone.
For a little while, anyway. Shaking off the mood, he opened his eyes again and oriented himself on the neon lights of the Polar Bar, sighed and stuck his hands in his pockets and began to trudge back.
He was beginning to wonder about Al. He couldn’t remember—well, he couldn't, eidetic memory notwithstanding, and a lot of good it did him with holes punched into it—the last time Al had let more than twenty-four hours go by before renewing contact with him. Sometimes it took a while for Ziggy to find him, but once the computer locked on, Al was always prompt to appear. And once he made first contact, he maintained it.
Not this time, though. Well, granted that he’d chased the Observer off, but that was an old story by this time, and it shouldn’t have kept Al away this long.
He rounded the back of Wickie’s cabin, wondering, and a pile of bricks fell on him.
Well, it felt like a pile of bricks, anyway. It was Davey, jumping from the roof in the darkness, a sheet tied around his neck to make a great, flapping, lightweight cloak. He grunted as he hit Sam, flailing around and getting more and more tangled up in the sheet. Sam picked himself up, brushed himself off, and looked from the boy still sprawled in the dirt to the low roof of the cabin and back again.
“I did that once,” he admitted to no one in particular.
Davey stopped thrashing long enough to give him a sidelong glance and went back to fighting the sheet.
“Hey, wait a minute,” Sam said, becoming alarmed as the sheet, as if with a mind of its own, twisted around the boy’s neck. “Hold on. Calm down.”
He found himself using the same tone he’d use to a frightened animal, even, soothing, steady. Davey responded in much the same way. His face was curiously blank through it all, showing no anger or fear; he held still while Sam worked the knot loose and unwrapped the material, then he got up and grabbed the sheet away.
“Hey, wait a minute!” Sam repeated. “Where do you think you’re going with that?”
“Gonna fly,” Davey said. He stepped away.
“Not with that, you’re not. It doesn’t work. Didn’t you just figure that out?”
“Gonna fly.” Now the boy was shaking the sheet out, taking two of the corners to tie around his neck once more. Sam had a sudden chilling vision of it getting caught on something, of Davey hanging—
“No,” he said. “Give it to me, Davey.”
“Gonna fly.” Davey swung the sheet around behind himself.
“No," Sam said again. He caught at the boy’s hands. “No, Davey.”
“Fly.”
“No. This won’t help you fly.” When Sam was three, he tested a Superman hypothesis. He wondered what cartoons Davey watched that still featured superheroes who wore capes and flew, for truth, justice, and putting things right that once went wrong.
Davey was still looking at him blankly. He wasn’t getting through. Sam took a deep breath and a good hold on the sheet and tried to take it away.
Davey was small, and wiry, and tough, and not about to give up his dream. He fought back, or rather pulled away, and Sam found himself engaged in a tug-of-war across the half-empty rear parking lot of the bar. Against Davey’s wiriness he pitted Wickie’s size and weight. In short order he was nose to nose with Davey, who would not surrender his last few inches of cotton sheet. Sam had to pry his fingers loose, one by one, and then hope the kid wouldn’t come around behind him to pick up the excess and start the whole thing over again.
But Davey didn’t. He looked down at his hands once the sheet had been prized loose, and then at the swath of cotton material, and turned and shambled away without speaking, leaving Sam with his hands full of bedsheet, feeling silly and sad and a lot like a bully. All the kid wanted to do was fly, after all. It wasn’t so very much.
He wadded up the sheet—he wasn’t sure it could be salvaged after being dragged around and ground into the asphalt and gravel, but he had to try—and went back to Wickie’s cabin, wishing there was some way to get through to the boy. When he paused for a last look over his shoulder, Davey had disappeared around the end of the building. Sam shook his head. His cabin door was unlocked. He flicked on the light and paused.
He stood in the doorway and looked around. He might not be able to remember locking the door, but he knew he hadn’t left the cabin in this condition.
The few books Wickie had were in tatters, the leaves scattered as if a tornado had hit the room. White powder, a mixture of flour and sugar, drifted over everything. Everything breakable was broken; shards of glass glittered on the floor. Unidentifiable, stinking liquids stained the walls, the furniture, pooled on flat surfaces. Obscene words were scrawled on the pictures. A pile of excrement sat in the middle of the rug, still steaming.
He didn’t even
