ONE
Standing in the doorway, looking in past the principal waiting to introduce him, Asa could see that his new fourth-grade class was just starting Rome. On one side of the room the boys were waving cardboard swords and wooden spears with tinfoil points; on the other side, the girls were wrapping themselves in white bedsheets. It had to be Rome. In his previous school they had already whipped through this part of history. But glancing around the room, he sensed a big difference here, a difference that gave him a little boost of excitement. The spears and togas, the number of fat books in the bookcases, the radiant messiness of wild drawings on the art bulletin board, the absence of the cardboard flashcards showing how the alphabet was formed in cursive—these were all good signs. Asa could tell about a classroom’s spirit almost by sniffing the air. Mrs. Brock, a short, plump, young woman who had waved at the principal and finished fastening a spearpoint before coming over, was going to be fine.
In his previous fourth grade the teacher had not been very good. She would not have dared to split the class up this way into groups. And swords? Never. They had spent two days sitting in their five rows of six desks, talking only about the splendor of Roman banquets, as if the entire civilization had been based on eating a lot while lying down. The other teacher had also been pretty bad at bringing Asa into the class, though he had arrived only four days after the beginning of the school year. She sagged when he came to the door, shaking her head at the rows of neatly occupied desks. He knew she did not dislike him; she was just not up to the task of stirring a new kid into her stew. That’s how it usually was: Two teachers in the second grade, two in the third, and now he was on his second in the fourth: he felt sorry for them all. He wanted to reassure them, the first time he appeared at the doors of their classrooms in the middle of a lesson—he wanted to tell them it was okay if they just let him be: he would find a way in all by himself, just far enough in to satisfy everyone, and then before long he would be gone.
Mrs. Brock glanced a quick smile at him, then gave her attention to the principal. It was a good smile that said Let’s get this official guy out of the way and well have plenty of time to get together. Asa exhaled silently with relief.
As soon as the principal withdrew, Mrs. Brock pulled Asa into the room and guided him over to the huddle of boys. A waft of soft perfume rose warmly from the arm that lay across his shoulders. “All right,” she said, handing him a sword, “you’ll be—let’s see—oh, Antonius. Thursday you and these three senators will present a report to the tribunal on the prospects for war with Carthage. You be the one to talk about the elephants, okay? Okay, guys?”
“I was going to do the elephants,” said a large boy with a thick shirt, eyeing Asa.
“Then you do the weapons of Carthage now, Mark,” said Mrs. Brock. “You’re the wicked type, so that ought to keep you happy. Do pikes and hooks and scimitars and whatever else the Carthaginians planned on sticking into your flabby pink Roman rib cage. Have you,” she said, turning to Asa with what he could only recognize as brilliant intuition, “ever seen an elephant?”
“African or Indian?” he said. He blushed, ashamed of showing off, for he had seen both in the National Zoo.
“Lord help us, a smarty-pants,” she said, turning away to go rewrap the girls in togas.
“So,” said Mark, pointing at Asa with his sword and bringing him across the threshold of the class with the easy nature of the threat, “you better give us a good idea what we should use to kill those suckers.”
He did. His report a few days later stunned them all. Oh, Asa knew how to make the most of an opportunity for debut. He was aware that every time he came to a new class he had the chance to create himself in the eyes of the strangers with whom he would spend the next little while—a chance the hometown kids never got, being familiar with each other since the beginning of kindergarten or earlier. Asa, by now, knew what land of attention would be aimed at him, knew which aspects of curiosity to exploit and which to deflect. He was good. He could put on a show.
In the middle of the tribunal presentation he unfurled huge drawings done on the floor of his bedroom on sheets of manila paper, taped together to twelve times the usual size—strangely colored drawings of grotesque exaggerations of elephants as they might have been imagined by Romans who had, after all, never seen one. He struck a senatorial tone that vacillated between military bravado and fascinated fear, emphasizing with wonder the fabulous violence that could be wrought by these wild things driven by wild men. He finished with a roaring challenge to the citizens to “see to our defenses lest we be torn, gored, and rent asunder by the ravaging fury of unknown forces not so distant in time and place!” The boys rose spontaneously to their feet with a roar, shaking their weapons defiantly, devotedly. The girls stared, impressed; they could appreciate a good report. One girl later asked soberly where he had acquired the archaic language. He confessed it was from the Bible. She nodded thoughtfully.
Even before his debut Asa had found ways into and out of the needs and enthusiasms of quite a few of his classmates. Steve was afraid of being stupid; so when talking to Steve, he used words that were long but common, and left sentences unfinished, groping for a word Steve could leap to provide. Cheryl liked to laugh at things no one else would find funny, so Asa dotted their talks with quirky details and reacted with a surprised thrill when she cackled. Lee was a comic-book freak who mystified other kids by comparing the subject of every conversation to some obscure subplot from a superhero tale, which he related with awkward, rushed specificity. Asa, who knew all the subplots, brightened Lee’s eyes by providing a detail here and there (and a crisp translation, for Lee’s confused listeners).
Everyone had an opening. Finding it only took alertness. As for slipping through the openings—well, it just seemed to happen. Asa was not being artificial or even artful. He did not pretend or dupe. With Steve, for example, it seemed he really couldn’t think of that missing word, though at another time he had words by the hundreds to fill every blank. It was all managed above anyone’s notice. This gave the illusion of naturalness, even, sometimes, to Asa himself.
After Rome was finished, he imagined he had made up for the weeks lost at the beginning of the year, if not for the years lost from kindergarten on. He had roles; he could be counted on for certain things. On the playground he had shown what he could do with the various tops, yo-yos, pocketknives, and harmonicas that demanded demonstrations of proficiency from every boy, in every school. Though he had never been anywhere long enough to learn team sports, when it came to portable skills, he could play. In the classroom his strengths had come out clearly, too, as he was called on for this and that. He could be counted on to whip through big-number multiplications and divisions in his head with an arrogant immediacy. And his long sentences—which filled themselves in as they wound their way around the subject of a question, opening impossible challenges of tense and sense in their early clauses but always, always coming to a brilliant conclusion—became a kind of group exercise in suspense and release as everyone felt the momentum pick up, heard the possibilities for error accrue, kept track of the bits that would be required for final resolution, and applauded with laughter as he boisterously provided them. He would have bet that his classmates, if asked about him, would not have recalled in their first thought, or even their fifth, that he had been inserted into the class six weeks into the year.
So it was something of a shock when Mrs. Brock clapped her hands one afternoon early in his third week and said, “All right, my little prima donnas, we’ve been taking it easy, but now it’s time to rehearse for Show Night,” and everyone separated into configurations he had never seen, twos, fives, boys with girls, singletons. He stood at his desk, blinking, uncertain. Right away Mrs. Brock noticed him, and put her hands on her cheeks in mock horror.
“Asa, what a chucklehead I am,” she said. “I completely forgot.”
She explained that every year the PTA kicked off its membership drive in the late fall with a variety show put on by a single class. This year was the fourth grade’s turn. During the second week of school, each child had chosen something to do for the show. Six of them together were enacting a play they had written about the first Thanksgiving. Two others were putting together a clown act, in which, she suspected, they planned to throw a few of the pies used as props by the earlier pilgrims. One girl was dressing up as Robert E. Lee and giving short speeches about how the South actually had won the Civil War. What, she asked, did Asa want to do?
What did Asa want to do? Well, his project had been making friends, his concentration so keen that, at this moment, he was unable to think of himself doing something alone.
It did not take Mrs. Brock long to sense that he was at a loss. She motioned to the three solo acts, two boys and the girl who would be Robert E. Lee. They came over. “Okay,” she said. “Who wants a partner? Amy Louise?”
“Mrs. Brock I cannot possibly,” said the girl, clearly offended, perhaps by the implication that Robert E. Lee could be joined as an equal by anyone, or perhaps by the implication that she herself could.
“Fine. Generals can be very difficult colleagues anyway, Asa,” said Mrs. Brock. “How about you, Harold?”
Harold looked confused. He often did. “It ain’t nothing but radio,” he said.
“Of course, of course.” Mrs. Brock patted his shoulder. “Harold is a ham radio nut. His performance is to set up his receiver and pull in a broadcast from Russia. Very exciting, but not the sort of thing that invites collaboration. Well, Joel?”
Joel was a tall boy with fuzzy hair and a red face, all the parts of which seemed to be straining outward in a parody of aggressive friendliness toward all: his eyes popped, his nose arched, his cheeks bulged, even his teeth seemed to reach. He had spoken to Asa often, especially in his first days in the class; he had even invited the new boy over to play at his house after school two or three times. Asa had not been much interested; he had more challenging conquests to mount. Now, at the prospect of sharing, Joel was about to burst with goodwill.
“Mrs. Brock, Asa would be welcome to recite with me.” He shifted his grin to Asa and held out a very old book.
“Joel is going to recite a poem,” she explained. As Asa made no move, she took the book herself and thumbed through it. “Something by Eugene Field, wasn’t it?”
Joel nodded. “ ‘Little Boy Blue,’” he said. “Not the nursery rhyme with the ‘come blow your horn’ stuff. This is a really neat poem. We can say it together, if you like. That would be fun. We can practice so we match. Like the Everly Brothers.”
Mrs. Brock winced slightly. “That might, well, be a little much, boys. I mean, two voices in unison would sort of draw attention away from the—the lonesome sadness of the single child passing away, you see. Break up the effect. But maybe you could alternate stanzas….” She held the book out to Asa. He had no choice but to take it.
“Sure!” said Joel.
Asa frowned into the text. “Well,” he heard himself say, “okay. Thanks.”
At home, in his room alone, he thought of a dozen things he would rather do for the show than recite a poem called “Little Boy Blue” with Joel. Each inspired him to get up and go to the telephone. He even looked up Mrs. Brock’s number. Look, he would tell her, I want to juggle large chrome rings, or I want to present the calls of twenty birds, or I want to play my guitar. He would make a point of sounding very simply excited, as if Joel did not enter into it at all, as if his own sheer creativity were driving him to nix the deal he had made that afternoon.
The only thing that made Asa pause before dialing Mrs. Brock’s number was the fact that he could not juggle, he could not imitate the calls of birds, he owned no guitar. There was no doubt in his mind that he could scramble and master one of these tasks by the time he needed to perform; he could do anything he thought of doing, he was certain. But Joel had told him Mrs. Brock asked the other students to give a quick demonstration of their tricks so that she could approve or redirect their showmanship. In fact, she had suggested that two of them make changes: Susan, a haughty, religious girl, had wanted to sing three Baptist hymns; but she could not carry a tune, so she was now slated to recite three psalms; and Peter, whose voice-and-gesture impressions of John Wayne, President Eisenhower, and Ed Sullivan had all seemed exactly alike, was now going to sing “The Yellow Rose of Texas” and “The Streets of Laredo” while dressed as a cowboy. However, Joel reported with ecstasy, however, Asa was approved without audition to recite “Little Boy Blue.” Imagine! Well, Asa, who had a feeling Mrs. Brock knew she was taking a pretty slim risk in letting him mumble a few lines unapproved, did not want to test that faith. He had a feeling it would not extend to juggling and birdcalls.
He sat in his room looking out the window. Outside, the moon sat high and round and white in the dense, dark sky. The moon was isolated, touching nothing, having no effect on the darkness around it; it seemed as if any minute the vastly greater darkness would simply take over, and the moon would be no more. Yet down in his backyard a small apple tree was casting a thick shadow on the lawn. The shadow was there because the tree was standing in the way of the moonlight, which shone bright as lightning on everything in sight. How could this be? How could the moonlight get all the way here through the sky without leaving some silver trace? Asa felt his curiosity and intelligence quicken, and he knew he could figure it out in time, and after he did, he would love moonlight. From insight to love was not a big step.
This is what he was good at, he realized. This is what he did. He placed himself in the world, and the world drew his thoughts outside himself, where they multiplied and spiraled and led him in silent, thrilling flights. And as he expanded into the world, he expanded inside. At these moments an endlessness beyond thought opened inside him. Outside, his mind was whizzing through things, but inside, he was silent, still; sometimes, he knew he was not even breathing.
How do you put on a show of that? Asa felt that these abilities and experiences must appear, somehow, in everything he did, in what he was; but how could anyone be expected to know what he was? He was alone. That was it, really. Even when he was scurrying around figuring the angles and openings of other people, he was operating alone. He was a singleton, not a showman.
He got up from the window and found Joel’s book. He thought of taking it back to the window and reading it by the moonlight, but he could not do it—not a poem called “Little Boy Blue.” The ghost of Eugene Field was probably hovering somewhere begging him to read it in the moonlight, then cry silver tears. He switched on his overhead light.
He found the poem and read it. When he finished, he stared at the wall. It was difficult to believe that someone had written this. He read it again, and this time, he found it difficult to believe that someone else, even a kid, had chosen it to recite, on a stage, in front of other people. A sweet little boy pats his stuffed animals and drops dead in the night, and oh what a sad, sad world it is. Asa tried to laugh, but found that despite his scorn, he could not easily shake the heavy sadness the poem labored so shamelessly to create. This made him furious.
A few months ago, he and his mother and stepfather had been at a restaurant. While they were waiting for their food, Dave had gotten up and gone to the jukebox. He studied the selections for a moment, dropped in a coin, and pressed two buttons. A song bloomed from the small speaker over their booth, a song his mother apparently recognized, for as Dave sat down again next to Asa, she looked across at him and said, “Oh, honey, thanks.”
The song was sung by a man with a high, rather nasal voice. It was a personal narrative about his darling young wife. She had come to him one spring, they had been in love for a year, then for some reason—something woeful that happened between the second chorus and the third verse, during the violin solo—she died. In the last verse, he was looking at a tree in the yard and noticing that it had grown. She, of course, being dead, had not, which (Asa thought) must be what made his mother so sad. For she was crying by the time the violins—hundreds of them by now—faded back into the speaker.
They sat in silence, except for his mother’s snufflings. Asa said nothing. The air at the table was suddenly very tense; there was danger popping like ions. Asa would not have spoken for a hundred dollars. He held his breath and hoped the food would come. He saw the waitress emerge from the kitchen, carrying a tray with three plates. He let his breath out as she approached. He had made it.
But then, just before she arrived, Dave held up a hand to stop her. He turned his head slightly and looked sideways at Asa with a thin, amused smile. “Well?” he said.
Asa stared at the waitress. She stood, holding the heavy tray. “Well what?” the boy said, innocently.
Dave lifted his chin in a little nod at him. The smile held. “Well, what did you think of the song?”
Asa looked at his stepfather. Across the table, his mother had sniffed to a halt, and was wiping her eyes with a napkin. “I’m hungry,” the boy said. “Please let’s just eat.”
The waitress made a move to put the tray down, but Dave held his hand out again and stopped her. “Now, I think it’s a fair question to ask a boy, don’t you? Just a simple question. And a boy ought to answer when he’s spoken to.” He lifted his chin again, and the smile tightened. “So answer me, unless you want to be reminded of your manners when we get home.”
Asa took a deep breath and tried to hold it. He couldn’t hold it forever. “All right,” he burst out, louder than he wanted to be. “Okay. It’s a stupid song designed to suck the easy stupid sad feelings out of people who have plenty of other things to feel sad about, and it’s about as real as the sunshine in cigarette commercials, and I hate every stinking word.”
He sat, breathing hard and quaking, his eyes bulging hard against the insides of his eyelids with every pounding heartbeat, making the restaurant disappear in flashes of white, white, white. His mother exploded into sobs once more, but worse this time: real. Dave apparently gave the waitress a signal, for she now began to place the food in front of them. Asa stared down at his plate of spaghetti and said, “I have to get up. I’m going to be sick.” Dave did not move to let him out of the booth, but leisurely stuck his fork into his own spaghetti, and twirled until a large mass hung on the end. This he raised until it was just in front of his face. He studied it. Asa’s mother wailed across the table.
Dave said, “Well, yes. I guess—I guess you have to have a heart to like that song. Not just a brain.”
Now, it seemed, Asa would once again have to make public his heartlessness: he hated every word of “Little Boy Blue,” which, probably, all other human beings on the planet adored, and unless he wanted to recite “And that was the time when our Little Boy Blue/Kissed them and put them there” about a toy dog and a tin soldier, he would have to say so.
Before he knew it, he was standing on his bed. He bounced up and came down, hard. This was forbidden; Dave and his mother could hear in their bedroom below. It was sure to bring Dave up, scowling and storming. “ ‘Now don’t you go till I come,’” Asa recited loudly, bouncing again, “ ‘And don’t you make any noise!’” He bounced one, two, three times, found a comfortable rhythm, bowm, bowm, bowm, bowm.
“ ‘And toddling off to his trundle bed,’” Asa shouted, “ ‘He dreamt of the pretty toys.’ Hoo boy! Are those poor little toys in for a big surprise!” He cackled and lifted his knees, dropping even deeper into the mattress, whong!, springing even higher. Again he laughed, louder and wilder, and as long as his mouth was open and his voice sounded good, why not go ahead and holler this stupid poem that seemed to have stuck in his memory after only two readings? So he launched into a full-blown recitation, emphasizing the special moments of pathos with hoots or moans; except for a line or two (which he filled in by singing “Blue-d’dee blue-d’dee” bowm, bowm, bowm) he had the whole thing by heart. He built up to a big finish by bouncing higher, shouting louder, higher, louder, higher…until he arrived at the end and sprang spread-eagled off his bed out into the air of his room, singing “What has become of our Little Boy Blue?” in falsetto as he soared. Then his heels hit the floor with a stunning jolt, and he sprawled. He lay there, panting, waiting.
From below there was no sound. That was odd. He sat up, still panting. What was the matter down there? Perhaps they were weeping with the sadness of it all. Poor Little Boy Blue! Maybe they’d like to hear it again. He got up and found the book, intending to brush up on the couple of lines he’d blown. He snatched it open and scratched roughly through the pages, looking for the poem, intending to read it aloud with volume and sarcasm. He held the text up close to his face.
It was not “Little Boy Blue” he was on the wrong page. But before he could flip it, he had read a line or two, and he stopped. The lines were “And dark in the dark old inn-yard a stable wicket creaked/Where Tim the ostler listened; his face was white and peaked.”
Asa read the lines again. He didn’t know what an ostler was. He didn’t even know what a stable wicket was. But he knew they were better than toy dogs and tin soldiers, and he knew above all that when an ostler with a white, peaked face listened by a creaking wicket dark in a dark old inn-yard, something was afoot. He read the next lines: “His eyes were hollows of madness, his hair like moldy hay/But he loved the landlord’s daughter/The landlord’s red-lipped daughter,/Dumb as a dog he listened,/And he heard the robber say…”
Now, thought Asa, springing up with the book in his hand and shaking a fist, now by God we are onto something. Just ahead of his thoughts he saw a solution to his problem, he saw poor Little Boy Blue dying alone and unsung in the darkness far from voice and stage, but at the moment he did not want to think it through. To heck with Little Boy Blue. He wanted to read. So, quietly, he turned out his overhead light, and quietly pulled a chair into the moonlight coming through his window.
TWO
“‘A coat of the claret velvet,’” came Joel’s voice over his shoulder, “‘and boots of the brown doe-skin.’”
“No,” said Asa, stopping on the leafy path. “No. Not boots, and not ‘the brown doe-skin.’ It’s his breeches that are made of that: ‘breeches of brown doe-skin.’” As an afterthought he added, “You had the right sense of the rhythm, though. You added that ‘the’ to make up for the difference in syllables between ‘boots’ and ‘breeches.’”
Joel had stopped now too, and he came walking back, snapping a withering leaf shaped like a mitten from a sassafras bush. “I forget what breeches are again,” he said. He stuck the leafs stem in his mouth.
“Pants,” said Asa. Every time they went over this, he was tempted to mention the obvious clue; but he was afraid that if he called Joel’s attention to the similarity between the familiar word “britches” and the unknown word, Joel would just start saying “britches.” He supposed that would be better than “boots,” but he hated the way it sounded.
Joel twirled the leaf in front of his face by rolling the stem between his pink lips. The leaf fell. “You know why I can never remember that? Because it doesn’t make any sense. I mean, doeskin is like leather, right? Well, whoever heard of leather pants?”
Asa sighed, and sat on a fallen tree trunk. “It’s very soft,” he said. “Doeskin I mean. It’s as soft as cashmere.”
“How do you know?” Joel asked, taking a seat up the trunk from Asa. There was no challenge in his voice, Asa knew; Joel didn’t doubt, he just wondered.
“My mother has some doeskin gloves.”
“Ah.” Joel looked around, sighed contentedly, and began to whistle. Asa said nothing. He felt bad for an instant; his mother had never had doeskin gloves, at least as far as he knew. He had lied.
“Shall we try it again?” he asked.
“You know,” said Joel, “you are the only kid I ever knew who actually says things like ‘shall.’ Is it because you’re a Yankee?”
“I’m not a Yankee,” Asa said patiently. “Washington is below the Mason-Dixon line.”
“May be,” said Joel, “but it’s a big city. Seems like all big cities are Yankee, really.”
“What about Atlanta?”
“Well, I guess you got me there.” Joel stood up and stretched slowly, smiling at the woods all around. “You got to admit,” he said, “that this is better than a stuffy room.”
“Yes, it is,” said Asa. “But the reason we stopped working in my room was that you said you couldn’t learn anything in there but you could learn anything outside.” He paused, then added: “It’s only a week away, Joel.”
“I know,” Joel said, with a heavy sigh Asa hoped was faked for his benefit. “I’m not doing too very good.”
“You’re doing fine,” Asa said, “but you just need to speed up.”
“And you gave me all the hot verses.”
“Stanzas,” said Asa. It was true: in an effort to engage Joel’s enthusiasm, and thereby his concentration, Asa had abandoned their initial scheme of simple alternation, coming up instead with an arrangement that favored Joel with the exciting parts. Joel was now responsible for telling the audience about the moon being a ghostly galleon, about Tim the ostler’s white peaked face, about the brave robber with the twinkling pistol butts rising in the saddle to kiss his bonny sweetheart while his face burnt and her perfumed hair tumbled all over him, and, best of all, about the gallant, galloping fellow turning back on the murderous red-coats, shrieking a curse to the sky with the white road smoking behind him and his rapier brandished high. But instead of rising to the thrill of this amazing privilege, Joel scattered his attention at every strange, marvelous old word, unable to keep his ostlers and rapiers and breeches straight. He still couldn’t really grasp why they called a robber a “highwayman.” He said it sounded like a highwayman ought to be a guy doing road work.
The switch hadn’t worked, but Asa wasn’t willing after two weeks of effort to undo whatever odd bits of memorization Joel had accomplished by reclaiming the choice stanzas for himself. Besides, he was still deeply grateful for the easygoing way Joel had agreed to drop “Little Boy Blue” and take on the much longer poem. Sometimes, though, he was tempted to wish for a way he could recite the whole thing himself.
Joel had started walking back in the direction of the house; it appeared that today’s rehearsal was about to end. Asa shook his head, and fell into step behind the larger boy.
After a few minutes, Joel asked, “Do you think I’ll make it?”
Without thinking, Asa said, “Yes.”
“I don’t. I’m sorry I’m so dumb.”
“You’re not dumb.”
“I had ‘Little Boy Blue’ down cold.”
Asa doubted this; he doubted Joel had his own telephone number down cold; but he only said, “I know. It was tough on you to switch.”
“It’s worth it,” said Joel brightly. “We’re better friends because we have to work so hard on this one.”
Asa doubted this, too. He hated to doubt it, but he did. While it was true that he had changed his mind about Joel—coming to appreciate the boy’s open-minded readiness to like anyone or try anything with a foil heart and reckless energy, at the slightest encouraging sign—he had been unable to slip into the relaxed carelessness of friendship. Joel needed too much handling for that. The responsibilities Asa had to adopt toward him simply prevented spontaneity, trust—equality. The role was set. He was Joel’s manager.
The week zipped away. Joel missed two of their daily practice sessions, once so that he could work on a tree house his younger brother was building in their backyard. Asa called him on the phone and complained. Joel said, “But I promised him I’d help. It was a deal.”
“What about your deal with me?”
Joel thought about it. “It’s different. See, I’m not helping you. The guy who’s doing the helping, it’s, it’s like—”
“I know,” said Asa drily.
“Sure,” said Joel, “I guess you do. And, boy, do I know what a good helper you are. You’re my idol when it comes to helping, believe me.” He laughed. “Anyway,” he added casually, “he’s my brother, see.”
“That,” said Asa, despising himself, even as he spoke, for the obvious self-pity, “is of course something I know nothing about,” and he hung up softly.
Later that night, Joel called him back and recited twelve new lines, making no mistakes. Asa praised him gratefully. He also suspected that perhaps Joel had been reading to him—not in the spirit of cheating, for Joel was not deceitful, but to make Asa happy. He wished the idea of Joel fudging had not been so automatic, but there it was.
The next day at school Joel was as bright and breezy as ever, and Asa was contrite. He suggested that they make up for the missed time by pounding through two tremendous sessions over the weekend. Joel agreed happily. So, on Saturday morning, Asa made lemonade and baked a whole sheet of chocolate-chip cookies, while his mother assembled two huge submarine sandwiches, her specialty. Everything was cooling in the refrigerator when the telephone rang. Asa answered.
“Tlot-tlot,” said a dramatic voice.
“Hi man,” Asa said, looking at the clock, Joel was due in ten minutes. Obviously, he would be late. “What’s up?”
“Hey, what’s up is just the question to ask. What’s up, what’s way up, is the tree house. We finished it. Right now it’s swarming with second graders, but guess who reserved it for a solid hour this afternoon, so we can practice our robbers and red-coats?”
“You’re supposed to come here. You’re—you’re supposed to be here. Now! For three hours. What’s the matter with you? Are you crazy?”
“An hour in a tree house is worth three in a stuffy old room any day. Come on. Get your mom to bring you. We can scare the little guys and stuff. It’ll be fun.”
So Asa packed his knapsack with the subs and cookies and a thermos of the lemonade. Dave was off with the car, playing golf, so he had to ride his bicycle. Joel lived five or six miles across town, in an area of fine old houses that seemed as big as ships to Asa. It took him almost an hour to get there, and the only thing that kept him from pumping with anger was the chance to pretend that he was himself the highwayman, narrating his own harsh and noble deeds with the wind in his teeth.
After arriving at Joel’s house and parking his bike, he headed toward the sounds of wild hooting and howling far behind the house. From fifty feet away he saw the tree house, about twelve feet up in a big beech. Around the trunk were eight or ten younger kids, looking up and yelling, jumping and shaking knotty little fists. Most of them were quite wet. As he watched, Joel’s head and shoulders suddenly shot up over one wall made of an old tin sign bearing a peeling portrait of the Sinclair gasoline brontosaurus. Joel’s face was a beaming, bursting cartoon expression of devilish delight at finding the young kids beneath him; he wagged his eyebrows and shook his hair and roared, and the kids howled back and started laughing in fright and pleasure. At just the right moment, when it seemed they would all incinerate with happy dread, he stood up tall and began lofting water balloons at them. Wobbling in their arcs like live things, the balloons—shiny green, blue, red, yellow—caught sunlight in their watery interiors and held it in a glow. Then each of them exploded on the head or shoulders of a shrieking second grader.
Asa found he was crying. He left unseen.
THREE
His mother called him to the telephone. The caller was an adult woman with a rich Carolina accent who identified herself with her entire name, then added that she was Joel’s mother.
“Ah,” said Asa. “Hello.”
“Asa,” said the woman rather musically, “I’m sure you know why I’m calling.”
“Well, not exactly.” He hesitated, then said innocently, “Perhaps it’s something to do with the presentation Joel and I are making tomorrow night?”
“You’re sweet to be so optimistic, son.”
“Ma’am?”
“Now, Asa, bright as you must be, I’m sure I don’t have to spell it out for you. I’m well aware of what you’ve been trying to do for my Joel, so I know you’re aware of—well, let’s see—shall we say, the peculiar nature of the dear boy’s intellectual gifts.”
“Ma’am?”
“My, you are going to make me pull the flag all the way up the pole, aren’t you? Look, my dear. Joel is full of sweetness and light, he was born full of sweetness and light, he’ll live to be a hundred and the angels will be waiting for him with robes of gold, but—as his father and I and his teachers and I suspect you too know—while he’s on this earth Joel could not find his own fanny with both hands. He is as close to helpless as you can get without being put on a leash. I love him more than any human since Clark Gable, but honey, let’s be frank: when it come to little things like time and space and words and numbers, Joel is missing something between the I. and the Q.”
“You’re telling me he hasn’t memorized his part of ‘The Highwayman.’”
“See? I told you you were bright. Indeed, Joel has not memorized his part of that dreadful endless poem you two lit on reciting.” She sighed dramatically. “We had him all set up with something simpler, which was hard enough, mind you—and it took him a week to remember what color ‘Little Boy Blue’ was, but we got almost all of it memorized somehow. Then you come along, all good intentions I’m sure, and of course it is a much finer piece of writing, but my God! it’s long as a catfish’s old age. He was all excited and eager to try it, and, of course, he looks on you as something between Mickey Mantle and Jesus. I couldn’t tell him no—it’s hard to keep saying no when he wants to try something, and the child is eat up with gumption—so I held my breath and prayed you were the kind of young man you’ve turned out to be. He’s told me. You’ve been a saint. You understand him. But I can’t help noticing you’ve given up your practices, and I wonder what you’re thinking now about tomorrow.”
Well, Asa had been wondering that himself. She was right: since his visit that Saturday, he had not tried to schedule any practice sessions with Joel. They had talked in class, Joel always eager to speak a couple of lines to show his readiness—tlot-tlot!—and Asa always complimentary and encouraging. But he had given up. Joel was on his own. Asa figured their part of the show would be a disaster.
On the surface, in the daylight of his public self, he had accepted this. On the surface, he was calm, resigned, cool. But just out of view, in the shadows where the real thinking was done, his scheming mind spent every hour trying to figure out a way to dump Joel and do it all himself. This was awful of him, but he could not stop wishing: maybe Joel will get chicken pox, maybe Joel will get stage fright, maybe Joel will move to Nebraska. Asa told himself he wasn’t wishing like this for his own sake. Somehow, he felt, it was just for the sake of the poem itself, and the act of reciting it. There simply was a right way to do it, and when there was a right way, it should be done. It was as if there were a perfect movie of this event floating in the air somewhere in advance, and it was up to him to match it, word for word, motion for motion.
Now, on the phone with this odd woman, he sensed something like opportunity opening up before him. It was coming, if he could play this right. He said, “Well, to tell you the truth, I was just kind of going to show up and see what happened.”
“Ha.” She was silent for a moment. “Am I correct, Asa, in assuming that you know this entire poem, all by yourself?”
Carefully, as innocent as possible, he said, “Well—yes, I guess I do.”
“You guess you do, do you. I get the feeling maybe you’re about three curves ahead of me here, but you’d just as soon I did the suggesting, so I will. Here’s what I think. I think Joel ought to kind of miss the big show and leave you to struggle bravely on. What do you think about that?”
“I think he’d feel terrible.”
“Well, that’s nice, but if I took care of things just right, it would probably be a week before he even remembered, and then it would be so far gone, he’d tend to regard it as a pleasant memory of what might have been. Even if he faced it straight up, he wouldn’t get too low about missing out; he snaps back faster than a fat man’s suspenders, Joel does.”
“Well…” said Asa. And he let her talk him into it. She had it all worked out: she would give Joel the day off from school, and they would go out and buy a football he wanted, then eat lunch at his favorite restaurant, then take in a submarine movie that was playing downtown—“Just a good old day of a boy and his momma being sweet on each other.” She’d make sure his father and brother didn’t mention anything about the show at dinner, after which they’d have a checkers tournament. That was Joel’s favorite family activity, she said; he played the three of them at once on three boards, and murdered them.
He let her talk. And as she talked, he tested every seam of her plan, first figuring whether or not it would fool Joel, and then whether or not it would hurt him. In his head, the plan worked. Joel would be fooled; and as far as pain went—well, she knew Joel better than he, didn’t she? Okay: Joel would not know. Okay: Joel would not be hurt. Okay. Okay.
He would do it alone.
FOUR
Onstage, two girls were dancing in taffeta costumes. One of them had been allowed to wear makeup, and she was dancing much better than her friend, whose pale face was streaked with the trail of dried tears; she had been forbidden to “doll up,” and her misery threw her steps off. In the wings, boys were laughing as the pale girl stumbled. Asa watched, sympathetic.
From his position in the dark he could see out into the auditorium, across a band of the audience slanting from the front row to the rear. He did not recognize anyone, but he had guessed the identities of a few groups by seeing how they perked up as particular performers took the stage. His mother and Dave were out there somewhere. Asa did not know where they were sitting; they had dropped him off early, gone out for Chinese food, and come back in time for the show. Asa had gone to “green room,” which was what Mrs. Brock called their classroom tonight. Everyone was in there, the girls squealing and fidgeting, the boys looking pointedly disdainful and nervous. Mrs. Brock, wearing a shiny blue dress and rather more makeup than usual herself, darted from one performer to the next with quizzes, reminders, stagecraft tips. After everyone knew without exception to lick his lips, to hold her chin up, to look straight into the audience without actually focusing on a face, fifteen minutes remained before they could take their places backstage. Everyone was too finely tuned to relax, too close to fever to back coolly off, so after a couple of beats Mrs. Brock stood on a desk and sang them songs in a perfect alto voice that sounded as if it had been roasted. They were not children’s songs; the lyrics were full of desperate inquiry about strange love, and the tunes meandered like smoke from a slow-burning cigarette. The children sat and stood, holding their juggling stuff or their instruments, silent, wondering. The minutes passed. Finally Mrs. Brock closed a verse on a low, full note, hummed a whole chorus, and stopped. She looked at them as if she were somewhere else. Then she smiled and said, “Songs by a lady named Holiday. Oooh—sad songs. Now, people, go to your places.”
So far, most of the performances had been better than anyone could have hoped. Hands caught and tossed precisely, memories flashed, voices found a key and held it. Asa was amazed. Something about the oddness of Mrs. Brock’s impromptu singing had cleared the nerves of his classmates. He had a feeling he too would be enjoying the same ebullience if his nervousness merely came from the prospect of standing up in front of a bunch of adults and doing something artificial. But his nervousness was different. He was thinking about Joel.
Asa was worried that of all the performances onstage tonight, his would be the only one with consequences that stretched into the future. He knew hurt feelings could last. And the more he thought about it, the more he was certain Joel would be hurt. What could his mother have been thinking? Or, more to the point, what could he have been thinking?
The ballet dancers finished with twin spins, each slashing the air with a satin foot held high and curved. The girl without makeup had recovered her enthusiasm toward the end of their dance: her last few steps were sharper, and her leaps higher, than those of her partner, and as they stood panting slightly, grinning at the audience’s applause, her face shone with a pink radiance that shamed the powder and technique offered beside her. Asa, breaking the rules, clapped. The girl waiting to go on in front of him—Amy Louise, dressed in a baggy gray uniform that might have fit General Lee—turned in horror and shook her head. He stopped. The ballerinas curtsied twice and came off. In her joy, the second of them gave a flip to the velvet side curtain with her hand. Asa happened to be looking at her, and as the curtain swayed, it gave him a glimpse of the rear doors of the auditorium. In that instant, he saw Joel’s mother dash in, looking distraught.
Amy Louise was already walking out toward the center of the stage. In a second he overtook her, pulling her by the elbow and mumbling an apology as he passed. She took one look at his face and turned back to the wings without a word.
He found himself standing in bright lights, facing perhaps 800 people. He looked past them to the back and located Joel’s mother. She raised her hands at him and shook her head. Then she pointed at the back door. Then she held her hands as if she were riding a bicycle, and pointed at the back door. Once more she held up her hands as if helpless. Then, finally, urgently, she motioned him to start.
He nodded. From the wings he heard Mrs. Brock’s voice: “Asa. What the dickens are you doing out there?” Asa realized she had not asked about Joel’s absence; this meant she had been squared by Joel’s mom. Asa did not look at her. Instead, he stepped up to the apron of the stage and lifted his chin.
“Good evening,” he said. He noticed several people looking at their yellow mimeographed programs, noting he was out of order. He gave them a second to stop rustling. Then, just as his tongue touched his top teeth to make the first sound in announcing “ ‘The Highwayman,’ by Alfred Noyes,” the same back door flew open and in ran Joel.
He was panting and his face was even redder than usual. He was wearing a blue blazer hitched back on his shoulders as if the wind were blowing down the back of his neck, a very wrinkled white shirt, and an orange clip-on tie fastened only on one side of the knot: his right leg had a rubber band around it at the ankle, to keep his good gray trousers out of his bicycle chain. His eyes shot to the stage and found Asa. Right away all the haste and tension left him, and he grinned: Hey! I made it! He gave a little wave and started to trot down the center aisle. But somewhere on the way another thought hit him and he stopped. This time, when he looked up at Asa, Joel wasn’t grinning.
Asa had not moved; his expression had not changed. He took a quick reading of his own face and decided it showed surprise, and a frustration he was ashamed of, frozen there the instant Joel burst in. He knew it was clear, what he had been about to do. And it was too late to shift into some sort of welcoming smile now. So he kept Joel’s eye straight on, and watched as his friend came to realize his treachery.
He saw Joel get it, reject the idea, then get it again. Joel looked around, and found his mother leaning against the back wall. In the auditorium, no one else moved or spoke; it was as if a sudden lightning storm were flashing incomprehensibly above their heads.
Joel swung his eyes back to Asa. And there, in those bright eyes, Asa watched the flutter of pain disappear, replaced in a flicker by cheery acquiescence. Joel smiled, a huge one, genuine, frank, full of acceptance of himself and the strategies necessary to get around him; he shrugged, gestured for Asa to go on. Then he looked down the rows to his left for a seat.
From the wings, Mrs. Brock now said, “Go ahead, Asa. Go on, now.” Asa swallowed. He looked around the auditorium, taking in the expectant faces. One of them was Joel’s, already watching him with the same expression of readiness to be thrilled. The quick lightning storm was over. Showtime.
“Good evening,” he repeated. His voice was thin; he swallowed, licked his lips, took a breath that felt like water. He looked at Joel. Joel nodded. “All right,” Asa said. “Okay.” He decided, and drew another breath. This one felt warm and dry. “Now. A change. The next item in the program was to have been a dual recitation of ‘The Highwayman’ by Alfred Noyes, performed by Joel Prescott and Asa Hill. There has been a change.” He glanced around the room. The faces waited. “Instead of ‘The Highwayman,’ Joel and I will now recite ‘Little Boy Blue’ by Eugene Field. We think you will like it.” He paused. “Joel?”
Joel was already hustling down the aisle, fingers at his tie, lips moving confidently over remembered words.