Дэймон Найт: Orbit 8

I thought I’d left myself behind, but little Gus had followed me out of the woods. Having done it, I now remembered: why had I remembered none of it before? As I drove off down Mentor Avenue, I came out of the woods and saw the big green car starting up, and I ran wildly forward, crouching low, wanting only to go with him, my friend, me. I threw in the clutch and dropped the stick into first and pulled away from the curb as I reached the car and climbed onto the rear fender, pulling my legs up, hanging onto the trunk latch. I drove weaving, my eyes watering and things going first blue then green, hanging on for dear life to the cold latch handle. Cars whipped around, honking madly, trying to tell me that I was on the rear of the car, but I didn’t know what they were honking about, and scared their honking would tell me I was back there, hiding.

After I’d gone almost a mile, a car pulled up alongside, and a woman sitting next to the driver looked down at me crouching there, and I made a please don’t tell sign with my finger to my freezing lips, but the car pulled ahead and the woman rolled down her window and motioned to me. I rolled down my window and the woman yelled across through the rushing wind that I was back there on the rear fender. I pulled over and fear gripped me as the car stopped and I saw me getting out of the door, and I crawled off the car and started running away. But my legs were cramped and cold from having hung on back there, and I ran awkwardly; then coming out of the dark was a road sign, and I hit it, and it hit me in the side of the face, and I fell down, and I ran toward myself, lying there, crying, and I got to him just as I got up and ran off into the gravel yard surrounding the Colony Lumber Company.

Little Gus was bleeding from the forehead where he’d struck the metal sign. He ran into the darkness, and I knew where he was running ... I had to catch him, to tell him, to make him understand why I had to go away.

I came to the hurricane fence and ran and ran till I found the place where I’d dug out under it, and I slipped down and pulled myself under and got my clothes all dirty, but I got up and ran back behind the Colony Lumber Company, into the sumac and the weeds, till I came to the condemned pond back there. Then I sat down and looked out over the black water. I was crying.

I followed the trail down to the pond. It took me longer to climb over the fence than it had taken him to crawl under it. When I came down to the pond, he was sitting there with a long blade of saw grass in his mouth, crying softly.

I heard him coming, but I didn’t turn around.

I came down to him, and crouched behind him. “Hey,” I said quietly. “Hey, little Gus.”

I wouldn’t turn around. I wouldn’t.

I spoke his name again, and touched him on the shoulder, and in an instant he was turned to me, hugging me around the chest, crying into my jacket, mumbling over and over, “Don’t go, please don’t go, please take me with you, please don’t leave me here alone...”

And I was crying, too. I hugged little Gus, and touched his hair, and felt him. holding onto me with all his might, stronger than a seven-year-old should be able to hold on, and I tried to tell him how it was, how it would be: “Gus...hey, hey, little Gus, listen to me ... I want to stay, you know I want to stay...but I can’t.”

I looked up at him; he was crying, too. It seemed so strange for a grown-up to be crying like that, and I said, “If you leave me I’ll die. I will!”

I knew it wouldn’t do any good to try explaining. He was too young. He wouldn’t be able to understand.

He pulled my arms from around him, and he folded my hands in my lap, and he stood up, and I looked at him. He was gonna leave me. I knew he was. I stopped crying. I wouldn’t let him see me cry.

I looked down at him. The moonlight held his face in a pale photograph. I wasn’t fooling myself. He’d understand. He’d know. I turned and started back up the path. Little Gus didn’t follow. He sat there looking back at me. I only turned once to look at him. He was still sitting there like that.

He was watching me. Staring up at me from the pond side. And I knew what instant it had been that had formed me. It wasn’t all the people who’d called me a wild kid, or a strange kid, or any of it. It wasn’t being poor or being lonely.

I watched him go away. He was my friend. But he didn’t have no guts. He didn’t. But I’d show him! I’d really show him! I was gonna get out of here, go away, be a big person and do a lot of things, and some day I’d run into him someplace and see him and he’d come up and shake my hand and I’d spit on him. Then I’d beat him up.

He walked up the path and went away. I sat there for a long time, by the pond. Till it got real cold.

I got back in the car, and went to find the way back to the future, where I belonged. It wasn’t much, but it was all I had. I would find it ... I still had the dragoon...and there were many stops I’d made on the way to becoming me. Perhaps Kansas City; perhaps Matawatchan, Ontario, Canada; perhaps Galveston; perhaps Shelby, North Carolina.

And crying, I drove. Not for myself, but for myself, for little Gus, for what I’d done to him, forced him to become. Gus...Gus!

But...oh, God...what if I came back again...and again? Suddenly, the road did not look familiar.

“The winter meat is about all gone,” said Mrs. Robinson.

“So’s the winter, for that matter,” her husband said. “Al most...”

“...and the potatoes...”

Mr. Robinson got up rather quickly and looked in the bin. “Guess there’s enough, though. I can do without greens with my meat. If I have to. But I sure hate to do without potatoes.”

“Yes,” she said, drily. “I’ve noticed.”

He looked at her, as though for a moment mildly surprised or puzzled. Then, with a faint smile, he put his arm around her. For a moment she stood there, her head bent and touching his. With a little sound of content, next, she moved away. She gestured toward one of the cabinets. “There’ll be all that to do.”

He nodded. “Not time yet, though...Alice...”

“Yes?”

Mr. Robinson coughed. “Boy was trying to get in the girl’s room again last night.”

She whirled around, quicker than you might have thought. A look of alarm or concern faded from her face. “He didn’t, though...”

Mr. Robinson shook his head. “Scuttled off quick enough, he heard me coming.” And did quick brief mimicry of himself, bleary-eyed, clutching an imaginary bathrobe, coughing a rheumy, old-man’s-nighttime cough, and shuffling along noisily. Abruptly he stopped and straightened up, ceased to be an ill and probably querulous old man, was once again stalwart, thickset, and vigorous, for all his grey hairs. He and his wife chuckled.

“Well,” he said, “it’s natural enough. Healthy young boy. Pretty young girl.”

“That,” she said, “is beside the point— You speak to him, now, Henry. I’ll speak to her.”

“Done and done and Bradstreet,” said Mr. Robinson. He looked out the tightly closed windows. “Getting to be about that time of the season. Fact, it is that time of the season. Oh, I shouldn’t be surprised...any day now...Boy out to the shed?”

His wife nodded. As he started getting into his sweater and jacket, she said, “Button up warm now.”

Mr, Robinson stepped out the back door and started across the yard. The remnants of last year’s vegetable garden lay stark and dead beneath his feet. Looking down, he said, “Well, old friend, we’ll put new life into you very soon now.” He pushed open the door of a weathered and sturdy old outbuilding. Its smell was cold and faint. Hanging from a beam was a block and tackle and rope and chain. Mr. Robinson pulled, tested, made adjustments, grunted his approval, and went out.