like that.
Plans have changed, she said. She did not say, Your mommy screwed us both.
When he had his papers in their proper place she led him down toward the washrooms, out through the pizza parlor, out into another street. She had no idea where she was, or where they were going, but when they came to a hotel she knew this had to be the one. The stairs smelled like the woman with blood poisoning, of disinfectant and the thing the disinfectant was there to hide. She paid out her own money. She took the key which was wired to a huge link of chain and she led him along the hallway past numbered doors each one of which she expected contained someone vile or sad.
There were no shadows in their room.
Where are you going now? he asked and she hugged him too hard, and then acted casual, checking her purse for the Massachusetts money. All she knew was she was in trouble. She had been tricked. The only witness who could save her had just killed herself with her messy habits. Crumbelina, Dial had called her, secretly of course. Crumbelina had smeared butter across the countertops in Somerville. She could not make a bed, let alone a revolution.
She was sorry she had to abandon this boy. She kissed him and locked herself out. She was the Alice May Twitchell Fellow. She was an assistant professor at Vassar College. So this could not be true, that she was apparently a fugitive, fleeing down a creepy hallway in Philadelphia.
11
The mother and the boy were adrift, together in a trailer, with her Harvard book bag hugged between them, and the boy pretended that the prowling storm was just boat spray on Kenoza Lake, in his face and on his feet, and the mother was warm and foggy and he held her tight, his lips against her arm no matter what. He slept and when he woke the light was gray as East River mist and the trailer was fluttering but no longer rocking. Water dripped beside him, pooling in the bright green lake of rug.
How could he have been happy? It was in almost every sense impossible. He had been torn from his soil, thrown through the sky. In spite of which he remembered, vividly, years later—a brief period of deep tranquillity.
The door was in the ceiling, opening to a pale gray sky. He was washed clean of worry, restored.
Then a rooster crowed. Then someone tried to start a chain saw. And then the kitten came, and the kitten was in no way calm.
At first the boy did not even recognize it as a creature with a heart, but something sprung and needled, metal, plastic, a scratchy noise that had to bring itself to him to be identified, a tiny rib cage with drowned rat fur and wild green eyes and it came along the top of the kitchen drawers on which he and Dial were lying and the boy saw all its fright and made a purring noise himself and opened his mouth, O.
Poor kitty. How did you get here?
He took off his T-shirt and wrapped it around the kitty—pink mouth asking, green eyes blaming, sharp teeth threatening revenge.
Dial gave over her cardigan for the cat to travel in, gray with blue stripes, one pocket big enough for a book, the other for a kitten. Thus the boy carried him to the upside-down door with the glass in its bottom panel. See that? Wild trees had been stripped bare, a power line had fallen, showers of yellow sparklers in the rain. The straights not really doing anything but standing with their arms folded against the roaring brown river which was now lapping around the edge of the toilets.
He’s lucky he found us, Dial.
Who?
Buck.
Buck?
Dial never knew this, but the boy nearly named the cat Kipling, for the Cat That Walked by Himself, for Grandma, for the red-and-gold book upstairs, for the smell of paper one hundred years of age. Instead he named him Buck, for the dog in Jack London’s book—He had been suddenly jerked from the heart of civilization and flung into the heart of things primordial.
What’s primordial, Dial.
She bit her lip. You crazy little thing, she said. Primordial.
What is it.
Wild
Plans have changed, she said. She did not say, Your mommy screwed us both.
When he had his papers in their proper place she led him down toward the washrooms, out through the pizza parlor, out into another street. She had no idea where she was, or where they were going, but when they came to a hotel she knew this had to be the one. The stairs smelled like the woman with blood poisoning, of disinfectant and the thing the disinfectant was there to hide. She paid out her own money. She took the key which was wired to a huge link of chain and she led him along the hallway past numbered doors each one of which she expected contained someone vile or sad.
There were no shadows in their room.
Where are you going now? he asked and she hugged him too hard, and then acted casual, checking her purse for the Massachusetts money. All she knew was she was in trouble. She had been tricked. The only witness who could save her had just killed herself with her messy habits. Crumbelina, Dial had called her, secretly of course. Crumbelina had smeared butter across the countertops in Somerville. She could not make a bed, let alone a revolution.
She was sorry she had to abandon this boy. She kissed him and locked herself out. She was the Alice May Twitchell Fellow. She was an assistant professor at Vassar College. So this could not be true, that she was apparently a fugitive, fleeing down a creepy hallway in Philadelphia.
11
The mother and the boy were adrift, together in a trailer, with her Harvard book bag hugged between them, and the boy pretended that the prowling storm was just boat spray on Kenoza Lake, in his face and on his feet, and the mother was warm and foggy and he held her tight, his lips against her arm no matter what. He slept and when he woke the light was gray as East River mist and the trailer was fluttering but no longer rocking. Water dripped beside him, pooling in the bright green lake of rug.
How could he have been happy? It was in almost every sense impossible. He had been torn from his soil, thrown through the sky. In spite of which he remembered, vividly, years later—a brief period of deep tranquillity.
The door was in the ceiling, opening to a pale gray sky. He was washed clean of worry, restored.
Then a rooster crowed. Then someone tried to start a chain saw. And then the kitten came, and the kitten was in no way calm.
At first the boy did not even recognize it as a creature with a heart, but something sprung and needled, metal, plastic, a scratchy noise that had to bring itself to him to be identified, a tiny rib cage with drowned rat fur and wild green eyes and it came along the top of the kitchen drawers on which he and Dial were lying and the boy saw all its fright and made a purring noise himself and opened his mouth, O.
Poor kitty. How did you get here?
He took off his T-shirt and wrapped it around the kitty—pink mouth asking, green eyes blaming, sharp teeth threatening revenge.
Dial gave over her cardigan for the cat to travel in, gray with blue stripes, one pocket big enough for a book, the other for a kitten. Thus the boy carried him to the upside-down door with the glass in its bottom panel. See that? Wild trees had been stripped bare, a power line had fallen, showers of yellow sparklers in the rain. The straights not really doing anything but standing with their arms folded against the roaring brown river which was now lapping around the edge of the toilets.
He’s lucky he found us, Dial.
Who?
Buck.
Buck?
Dial never knew this, but the boy nearly named the cat Kipling, for the Cat That Walked by Himself, for Grandma, for the red-and-gold book upstairs, for the smell of paper one hundred years of age. Instead he named him Buck, for the dog in Jack London’s book—He had been suddenly jerked from the heart of civilization and flung into the heart of things primordial.
What’s primordial, Dial.
She bit her lip. You crazy little thing, she said. Primordial.
What is it.
Wild
Similar Books
