Зенна Гендерсон - Holding Wonder

"I'm sorry," she said. "I forgot. I like you and-and-I forgot."
"Forgot-" snorted Strangler, a rusty attempt at a blush scraping its way across his thin cheeks. "Okay, no harm." He rescued his hat from the floor and slapped it against his leg. "But if one kid in this school gets scared by this-this-" The Powdangs straightened slowly. The ceiling began to look awfully low. "-this child," Strangler went on. "Out it goes." And he stomped out of the office.
Mr. and Mrs. Powdang had hardly left, drifting like sedate tumbleweeds across the malapai toward the Nuevas before Mrs. Quinlan hurried to the door.
"Here comes the first bus!" She dithered on the threshold, wetting her lips nervously. The station wagon swirled up in a cloud of dust and erupted in several directions, spilling kids out like shelling peas.
Vannie stepped out of the door and stood there waiting-all fluffy, all blue-eyed, all eager and shy. The thundering herd plowed to a stop a few feet from the porch.
"Hey! Lookit! What's that?" Beegun Andresen's voice could have been heard back of the Nuevas. The kids all bunched together, wary of the unknown. There was a sharp, waiting moment, and Vannie drooped a little. Then Ingrid Andresen backed out of the station wagon, rassling with her own lunch pail and those of her three brothers always left to her. She turned around to see the silence and the pails clattered to the ground.
"Ooo!" she said. "Who is it?"
"Ingrid," said Mrs. Quinlan, her hand on Vannie's shoulder. "This is our new girl, Vannie. Would you like to take care of her this first day?"
"A girl!" bugled Beegun. "Looks more like a-"
"Charles!" Mrs. Quinlan didn't have to lift her voice. It cut him off in mid-speech.
"Hello," said Vannie, fluffing up a little more.
"You're pretty," said Ingrid, moving closer. "Is that your dress?" "No," said Vannie, "it's me." "It's like your hair, Ingrid," said Mrs. Quinlan. "Isn't it lovely?" "Can I touch it?" asked Ingrid.
"Sure," said Vannie, and Ingrid gingerly patted the softness. The boys crowded
around then, to see, to touch. Beegun tried a little yanking, too, but recoiled with a yell, and a nettle-stung palm.
"Thorns to that rose, Beegun," I laughed. He made a friendly face at me and the boys ran in to get the balls and bats.
Ingrid moved closer to Vannie. "Why have you got so many eyes?" she asked.
"I don't know," said Vannie. "Why have you only got two?"
"God made me this way," said Ingrid.
"He made me this way, too," said Vannie.
"God's bigger than the sky," confided Ingrid.
"I know it," said Vannie, "cause we came from clear across to the other side of it and He's there, too, Mommie says"
"And He's littler than a tear-of-sorrow, too," said Ingrid.
"What's a tear-of-sorrow?" asked Vannie.
"Don't you know how to cry?" asked Ingrid.
"I know how to dance," said Vannie. And she fluffed up wider and wider, swinging around and around, trilling a happy little song.
"Gee!" said Ingrid, wide-eyed.
"I can carry you," said Vannie. "Then you'll be dancing, too. Jump on!" Ingrid giggled and clutched at Vannie. Vannie caught her up and swirled off across the yard, cradling the ecstatically shrieking Ingrid in her fluff.
"Hey!" Beegun bellowed. "That looks like fun!" And the boys pelted off across the playground after the two girls.
The bus driver-late leaving for the second load-spat reflectively out the window and roared into reverse. "Telephone booths and hula hoops and then this. What next!" Mrs. Quinlan dropped down on the step and smiled up at me weakly. My answering smile broke to laughter as Stringler slouched back up onto the porch from around the corner muttering, "Color film to burn and my camera back at the ranch!"
So that was Vannie. She did stay only a short time. Before Christmas there was a low green fireball slanting down over the Nuevas and, after Christmas-Vannie was the Angel Hosts and got puzzled compliments on her costume-two green fireballs slanted up over the Nuevas. One of them carried a school transfer made out to Vannie Powdang.
And all recess the next day, Ingrid rotated sadly, holding out the thin fluff of her skirts, singing a thin high song without words-a song that bubbled to sobs when she got so dizzy that she had to stop for a while.
THREE-CORNERED AND SECURE
I DIDN'T LIKE the cloverleaf. Sounds foolish, a grown man –almost twenty-one-and presumably in his right mind, taking a dislike to a loop in a road. But it was so. Every time I approached the area, the skin on my arms
from elbow to shoulder prickled and stung, and dread, ulcer-like, gnawed at a corner of my stomach. And, for some reason, I always recalled vividly that there was a spring somewhere here where my grandad always camped, finding water for his horses and shade for the wagon, on his week's journey from the ranch to town. Any my dad patronized the same spring to fill the radiator of his Model A on his six-hour trip over the same route. But now I hardly knew where the spring was, because who ever stopped out here in the middle of nowhere any more? Except to build cloverleaves. So why did I think about the spring? A cloverleaf, at that time, was a curiosity, especially way out here where the side road-the reason for the strange convoluted archings-over and goings-under-might, once a week, emit a pickup truck or a firewood-laden Indian wagon, and maybe once a season, a lost tourist. Of course now all that complication carries only half the traffic through here.
Anyway, aside from its unsightliness, I still couldn't get used to the cloverleaf and I always shot out the other side of it and down the long, almost imperceptible slant of the sonora down from Picacho Grande toward town with a feeling of relief, still conscious of That Thing looming behind me, bulking emotionally larger than the thrust and tumble of the red boulders of Picacho Grande behind it.
But one day it was different. As usual, as I entered the first curve of the cloverleaf, I was absorbed in trying to analyze my uneasiness. Suddenly the sky yanked up sideways into slanting wrinkles! Then it tore diagonally in sudden, soundless gashes!
I hit my brakes and felt a thump as though my front wheels had come back down to the road from somewhere. My whole body felt like a cork starting to pull out of a bottle. There was no place to pull over and stop-not where I was at the moment-so I got my foot back on the accelerator and eased forward. The suction that had been lifting me bodily from the seat of my car was gone and the sky, what I could see of it, was serene and unblemished again. I wiped a wondering hand over the bottom of my face. What was going on?
Then it did it again! As though something had grabbed the film the world was painted on and was dragging it up sideways! This time the slant of my car tilted me back firmly against the seat. I saw the upward drag widen into an opening rip. And before I could blink or think, my car slid right into it.
Sight was gone. Feeling was so distorted that I could relate to nothing except an emptying sink and then an inching forward to be born. Then I came apart and I was a constellation in a bright desert sky. And a spiky jumping-cactus rosette of thorns bounding along a sand wash, my own skin puncturing at every bound.
There was a kind of pokkk and the sky straightened. I was lying on sand. At least I felt the sand under me, though I had more of a feeling of being suspended against the sand rather than resting on it. Anyway, I was lying on the sand by my car. I mean my half car. Because when I scrambled warily to my feet, there was my car, radiator, hood, wheels, front seat-and nothing more. No back seat. No rear wheels. No trunk.
I slid both hands along the side of the car, holding myself up, and groping for some sort of explanation, too. Both my hands passed the front door and touched-nothing. It wasn't that the car ended and my hands slid around in back. There was just nothing where the rest of the car should have been. And I couldn't even get a fingernail in back of it. How could I have? You can't poke a fingernail through the side of a car-but if the side ended– I clamped my hands over both my ears and surged bodily forward against something that surged me back again. All of me was tattering out in ragged lines of tension
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