His Illegal Self

38

He listened for the sound of the Peugeot coming to get him back, the wheeze, the whir, the cough. He would have heard it above the pounding blood, the air tearing at his chest. When he arrived at the ford, he stopped and waited more. Had the mumbo jumbos called to him just then he would have gone to them. Their voices would have echoed along the creek like saws or hammers, but nothing came along the water except a brilliant breathless nameless bird-blue back, orange chest, flying about two inches above the ford. His grandma would have known it-she knew the names of everything, water strider, Atlas moth. She could show you a dead bee through a magnifying glass. His grandma loved him, stroked his head, was always there, still swimming across the lake, her heart just broke in pieces as Jed Schitcher said.

Past the ford, the road got steep and mean as murderers but he was not going back. Soon enough he was up on the plateau where dirt tracks ran off among the gray spiky grass between the big fire-blackened trees.

When he was hosed down on the lawn in Seattle, the water hit him hard as stones. She was not his mother. She just watched. Her face was way too big. The color of her skin was darker, her smell was dusty, like apricot beneath the jasmine.

He must have walked an hour, he figured, and still it seemed he got no farther. When he heard a car coming from the direction of the redneck town, he was pleased at first but then he climbed up the dry clay bank and squatted in the broken bush. One minute the road was empty, then it was full of brilliant blue-a new auto towing a trailer and a curling tail of pinkish dust.

When the car came around the bend, he lay down on the scratchy dirt, pebbles on his cheek and stomach. The car stopped and waited, hissing quietly to itself, just out of sight, below the cutting. Then it set off crawling, bumping onto a bandit track on the far side of the road. When the engine quit, the quiet was big and still as water on a lake so he clearly heard the magpies and the brown and black and yellow birds the size of wrens.

A door opened, then slammed shut. He could now see the driver-about the distance to first base, not a mumbo jumbo but a redneck with glasses thick as soda bottles and hair oiled flat on his tiny shrunk old head. His neck was thin and did not fill his collar and he poked his nose forward, sort of sniffing. Then he peed real loud, like a creature on a farm.

The rednecks in Sullivan County had plaid shirts and baseball caps with DIESEL something written on the front. This one was not like that. He walked around some. Then he was kneeling on the ground. The boy’s hair pulled at his scalp. But then he heard the sound of a saw.

The man worked for about an hour. Once he sat and smoked a cigarette. Once he had a drink of something.

Once he said, Mary.

There were nasty small black ants crawling along the boy’s arms. He would have killed them except there was no point. The sun went behind the clouds leaving everything dull dead green, burned black, tarnished silver. The boy stood very carefully and began to make his way through the low worn-out scrub, planning to get behind the ridge, then come back on the road a ways ahead.

Coo-ee! The cry burst out in the silence, a dreadful sound.

The man had his hands up to his glasses, pretending to have binoculars.

Hello young man, he called.

The boy walked quickly, covered with a prickly coat of fright.

You come down here, the man said.

He could hear the man coughing and clambering up the bank to get him. He ran then, until he got down behind the ridge. Trees with dinosaur feathers-wattles-he cut around to the left, trying to be quiet among all the crackling sticks. For a long time he could hear the breathing, but around the bottom of the ridge it got quiet and even the high ocean of gloomy trees was still.

He had been certain of where he was headed but the road was not in its expected place. If he had been born in Australia he would have known to retrace his steps before he died, but he was from New York and there was a long dry rocky gully ahead of him, and at the end of that was a view of cane fields and some high electric pylons.

He was positive he had seen those pylons and that sugarcane before, and then it came to him what he must do.