Lawrence Block - Enough Rope

“I—”

“I can teach you,” she said.

“I think he’sgot a natural talent for it,” she told Cory.

“Sure,” he said. “Everybody does.”

“Well, maybe his strength is as the strength of ten because his heart is pure. Maybe he has the simple single-mindedness of a child. Whatever he’s got, the clouds of America aren’t safe with him on the loose.”

“Hmmm,” he said.

“What’s the matter?”

“Nothing. I was just going to say not to expect miracles. You gave him a great gift, but that doesn’t mean he’s going to be elected class president or captain of the football team. He’ll still be a basically shy boy with a basically difficult situation at home and not too much going for him in the rest of the world. Maybe he can disappear clouds, but that doesn’t mean he can move mountains.”

“Killjoy.”

“I just—”

“He can do something rare and magical,” she said, “and it’s his secret, and it’s something for him to cling to while he grows up and gets out of that horrible household. You should have seen his face when that very first cloud caved in and gave up the ghost. Cory, he looked transformed.”

“And he’s still a nice quiet boy?”

“He’s a lovely boy,” she said.

The window glasswas no problem.

She’d thought it might be, that was why they’d gone all the way out into the country, but it turned out the glass was no problem at all. Whatever it was that got the cloud, it went right through the glass the same way your vision did.

She was in the front of the room now, thrusting a pointer at the pulled down map of the world, pointing out the oil-producing nations. He turned and looked out the window.

The clouds were the wrong kind.

A tree surgeon’s pickup truck, its rear a jumble of sawn limbs, slowed almost to a stop, then moved on across the intersection. Jeremy looked down at the stop sign. A few days ago he’d spent most of math period trying to make the stop sign disappear, and there it was, same as ever, slowing the cars down but not quite bringing them to a halt. And that night he’d sat in his room trying to disappear a sneaker, and of course nothing had happened.

Because that wasn’t how it worked. You couldn’t take something and make it stop existing, any more than a magician could really make an object vanish. But clouds were masses of water vapor held together by — what? Some kind of energy, probably. And the energy that he sent out warred with the energy that held the water vapor particles together, and the particles went their separate ways, and that was the end of the cloud. The particles still existed but they were no longer gathered into a cloud.

So you couldn’t make a rock disappear. Maybe, just maybe, if you got yourself tuned just right, you could make a rock crumble into a little pile of dust. He hadn’t been able to manage that yet, and he didn’t know if it was really possible, but he could see how it might be.

In the front of the room Ms. Winspear indicated oil-producing regions of the United States. She talked about the extraction of oil from shale, and he smiled at the mental picture of a rock crumbling to dust, with a little stream of oil flowing from it.

He looked out the window again. One of the bushes in the foundation planting across the street had dropped its leaves. The bushes on either side of it looked healthy, but the leaves of the one bush had turned yellow and fallen overnight.

Two days ago he’d looked long and hard at that bush. He wondered if it was dead, or if it had just sickened and lost its leaves. Maybe that was it, maybe they would grow back.

He rubbed his wrist. It had been out of the cast for months, it never bothered him, but in the past few days it had been hurting him some. As if he was feeling pain now that he hadn’t allowed himself to feel when the wrist broke.

He was starting to feel all sorts of things.

Ms. Winspear asked a question, something about oil imports, and a hand went up in the fourth row. Of course, he thought. Tracy Morrow’s hand always went up. She always knew the answer and she always raised her hand, the little snot.

For a moment the strength of his feeling surprised him. Then he took two deep breaths, in and out, in and out, and stared hard at the back of Tracy’s head.

Just to see.

In a sense,what happened to Royce Arnstetter wasn’t the most unusual thing in the world. What happened to him was that he got to be thirty-eight years old. That’s something that happens to most people and it isn’t usually much, just a little way station on the road of life, a milepost precisely halfway between thirty-two and forty-four, say.

Not the most significant milestone in the world for most of us either. Since the good Lord saw fit to equip the vast majority of us with ten fingers, we’re apt to attach more significance to those birthdays that end with a nought. Oh, there are a few other biggies — eighteen, twenty-one, sixty-five — but usually it’s hitting thirty or forty or fifty that makes a man stop and take stock of his life.

For Royce Arnstetter it was old number thirty-eight. The night before he’d gone to bed around ten o’clock — he just about always went to bed around ten o’clock — and his wife Essie said, “Well, when you wake up you’ll be thirty-eight, Royce.”

“Sure will,” he said.

Whereupon she turned out the light and went back to the living room to watch a rerun of Hee Haw and Royce rolled over and went to sleep. Fell right off to sleep too. He never did have any trouble doing that.

Then just about exactly eight hours later he opened his eyes and he was thirty-eight years old. He got out of bed quietly, careful not to wake Essie, and he went into the bathroom and studied his face as a prelude to shaving it.

“Be double damned,” he said. “Thirty-eight years old and my life’s half over and I never yet did a single thing.”

While it is given to relatively few men to know in advance the precise dates of their death, a perhaps surprising number of them think they know. Some work it out actuarially with slide rules. Some dream their obituaries and note the date on the newspaper. Others draw their conclusions by means of palmistry or phrenology or astrology or numerology or some such. (Royce’s birthday, that we’ve been talking about, fell on the fourth of March that year, same as it did every year. That made him a Pisces, and he had Taurus rising, Moon in Leo, Venus in Capricorn, Mars in Taurus, and just a shade over three hundred dollars in the First National Bank of Schuyler County. He knew about the bank account but not about the astrology business. I’m just putting it in in case you care. He had lines on the palms of his hands and bumps on the top of his head, but he’d never taken any particular note of them, so I don’t see why you and I have to.)

It’s hard to say why Royce had decided he’d live to be seventy-six years old. The ages of his four grandparents at death added up to two hundred and ninety-seven, and if you divide that by four (which I just took the trouble to do for you) you come up with seventy-four and a quarter change. Royce’s pa was still hale and hearty at sixty-three, and his ma had died some years back at fifty-one during an electric storm when a lightning-struck old silver maple fell on her car while she was in it.

Royce was an only child.

Point is, you can juggle numbers until you’re blue in the face and get about everything but seventy-six in connection with Royce Arnstetter. Maybe he dreamed the number, or maybe he saw The Music Man and counted trombones, or maybe he was hung up on the Declaration of Independence.