Roy, the Viper, and Jimmy Boyle were sitting on top of the back of a bench at Heart-of-Jesus Park drinking grape Nehis after playing a football game. Their team had lost that afternoon to Our Father of Fearful Consequences, a school from Kankakee, and they were not happy about it.
“We shouldn’ta run the ball so much,” said Jimmy. “We needed to throw it more.”
“Three yards and a cloud of dust,” said Roy. “Except we could only get two.”
“It’s what worked in ancient times,” said the Viper, “when Coach was playin’, but not no more.”
It was a little windy and cold, but the boys didn’t want to go home yet. Stan Yemen, the park janitor, came out of the fieldhouse carrying a long-handled rake and walked over to them. Yemen was in his midthirties and had been a janitor at Heart-of-Jesus ever since he had dropped out of high school at sixteen. He always wore a dark brown windbreaker zipped up to his neck, dark brown trousers, white socks and dark brown clodhopper shoes. He never wore a hat, even in winter and even though he had a crewcut. Yemen’s most outstanding feature was his missing left ear. His family was from Arabia and Yemen said they were desert people. He had lived over there until he was nine.
The Viper had once gotten up the nerve to ask him how come he didn’t have a left ear, and Yemen said, “When I was seven, an elder of our tribe tried to circumcise me, but I dodged his dagger and he sliced off my ear instead.”
The boys didn’t know whether or not to believe him, but all Yemen had where his ear should have been was a small lump of congealed flesh that looked like somebody had thrown a mudball at his head and part of it had stuck there.
“Hey, fellas,” Stan Yemen said.
“Hi, Stan,” said Jimmy Boyle. “You see our game?”
“No, I had to work. Lots of leaves to clean out of the gutters and rake up this time of year. I heard you tried to run on ’em and got beat.”
“It was ugly,” said Roy.
“Tell the truth, Stan,” said the Viper. “You really lost your ear when they tried to circumcise you?”
Yemen smiled at him. The janitor had big brown eyes that matched his clothing; they jiggled in their sockets as he spoke.
“All Arab boys are expected to submit to circumcision in order to pass into manhood,” he said, “but I had witnessed this ceremony performed on my two older brothers and seen and heard their suffering, and I vowed then not to allow it to happen to me.”
“Didn’t your father or mother try to make you?” asked Jimmy.
“Not really. They had already decided to try to leave the country, and my mother, especially, was not a true believer in many traditional Muslim customs. It is thanks to her, not Allah, that I still have my foreskin.”
“What about your ear?” Roy said.
Again, Stan Yemen smiled.
“I confess,” he said, “about that I lied. The truth is, it was bitten off by a lion one night when I was sleeping in the desert. In fact, on the same night I ran away from the circumcision ceremony to hide.”
The janitor walked away, holding his rake over his right shoulder like a rifle.
“No way,” said Jimmy Boyle. “A lion would have bitten off his whole head, not just an ear.”
“You think he can hear out of the left side of his head,” said the Viper, “even though he don’t got an ear there?”
The wind picked up and suddenly the sky darkened. Roy jumped off the bench.
“Ask him next time,” he said.
The little plane was barely visible through dense night fog as it sat on the ground. Then the engine turned over and the single propeller started to rotate, scattering mist as the plane nudged forward, feeling its way toward the runway. Chinese soldiers suddenly burst out of the airport terminal and began firing their rifles furiously in an attempt to prevent the plane from taking off. Tiny lights from the aircraft’s cabin winked weakly from within its whitish shroud while the plane taxied, desperately attempting to gather speed sufficient for takeoff. The soldiers stood confused, firing blindly and futilely until the aircraft lifted into blackness and escape.
Roy fell asleep with the television on after watching this opening scene of the film Lost Horizon. He liked to watch old movies late at night and in the early morning hours, even though he had to be up by seven a.m. in order to be at school by eight. On this particular night, Roy dreamed about four boys his age, fourteen, in Africa, who discover a large crocodile bound by rope to a board hidden in bushes, abandoned by the side of a dusty dirt road. A stout stick was placed vertically in the crocodile’s mouth between its upper and lower jaws in order to keep the mouth open as widely as possible and prevent its jaws from snapping shut.
The crocodile could not move or bite, so the boys decided to drag it by the tail end of the board to a nearby river and release it. As they approached the river’s edge, it began raining hard and the ground suddenly became mushy and very slippery. To free the crocodile, they placed the board so that the croc’s head faced the river. One of the boys tore a long, sinewy vine from a plant and cautiously wound it around the stick. Another boy had a knife and prepared to cut the rope. The other two boys kept a safe distance. The boy with the knife sliced the rope in two at the same time the other boy tugged forcefully on one end of the vine, pulling out the stick. The crocodile did not immediately move or close its enormous mouth. The boys stood well away from it, watching. After a few moments, the crocodile hissed loudly and slowly slithered off the board and wobbled to the water’s edge, slid into the dark river and disappeared from view. The boys ran off as the downpour continued.
When Roy woke up, it was a few minutes before seven. He turned off the alarm before it could ring and thought about both the plane fleeing Chungking and the African boys rescuing the crocodile. What was the difference, he wondered, between waking life and dream life? Which, if any, was more valid or real? Roy could not make a clear distinction between the two. He decided then that both were of equal value, two-thirds of human consciousness, the third part being imagination. The last plane out of Chungking took off with Roy aboard, bound for the land of dreams. What happened there only he could imagine.