The boy was gone. The basketball court in the woods was empty. The only sound was that
faint rumble of machinery, and Jake didn’t like it. There was something wrong with that
sound, and he thought that what was wrong with the machinery was affecting the rose, or vice-versa. It was all hooked together somehow.
He picked up the old, scuffed-up basketball and shot. It went neatly through the hoop . . .
and disappeared.
A river, the strange boy’s voice sighed. It was like a puff of breeze. It came from nowhere
and everywhere. The answer is a river.
4
JAKE WOKE IN THE first milky light of dawn, looking up at the ceiling of his room. He
was thinking of the guy in The Manhattan Restaurant of the Mind—Aaron Deepneau,
who’d been hanging around on Bleecker Street back when Bob Dylan only knew how to
blow open G on his Hohner. Aaron Deepneau had given Jake a riddle.
What can run but never walks,
Has a mouth but never talks,
Has a bed but never sleeps,
Has a head but never weeps?
Now he knew the answer. A river ran; a river had a mouth; a river had a bed; a river had a
head. The boy had told him the answer. The boy in the dream.
And suddenly he thought of something else Deepneau had said: That’s only half the
answer. Samson’s riddle is a double, my friend.
Jake glanced at his bedside clock and saw it was twenty past six. It was time to get moving
if he wanted to be out of here before his parents woke up. There would be no school for him
today; Jake thought that maybe, as far as he was concerned, school had been cancelled
forever.
He threw back the bedclothes, swung his feet out onto the floor, and saw that there were
scrapes on both knees. Fresh scrapes. He had bruised his left side yesterday when he
slipped on the bricks and fell, and he had banged his head when he fainted near the rose, but
nothing had happened to his knees.
“That happened in the dream,” Jake whispered, and found he wasn’t surprised at all. He began to dress swiftly.
5
IN THE BACK OF his closet, under a jumble of old laceless sneakers and a heap of
Spiderman comic books, he found the packsack he had worn to grammar school. No one
would be caught dead with a packsack at Piper—how too, too common, my death—and as
Jake grabbed it, he felt a wave of powerful nostalgia for those old days when life had
seemed so simple.
He stuffed a clean shirt, a clean pair of jeans, some underwear and socks into it, then added
Riddle-De-Dum! and Charlie the Choo-Choo. He had put the key on his desk before
foraging in the closet for his old pack, and the voices came back at once, but they were
distant and muted. Besides, he felt sure he could make them go away completely by
holding the key again, and that eased his mind.
Okay, he thought, looking into the pack. Even with the books added, there was plenty of
room left. What else?
For a moment he thought there was nothing else . . . and then he knew.
6
His FATHER’S STUDY SMELLED of cigarettes and ambition.
It was dominated by a huge teakwood desk. Across the room, set into a wall otherwise
lined with books, were three Mitsubishi television monitors. Each was tuned to one of the
rival networks, and at night, when his father was in here, each played out its progression of
prime-time images with the sound off.
The curtains were drawn, and Jake had to turn on the desk lamp in order to see. He felt
nervous just being in here, even wearing sneakers. If his father should wake up and come in
(and it was possible; no matter how late he went to bed or how much he drank, Elmer
Chambers was a light sleeper and an early riser), he would be angry. At the very least it
would make a clean getaway much tougher. The sooner he was out of here, the better Jake
would feel.
The desk was locked, but his father had never made any secret of where he kept the key.
Jake slid his fingers under the blotter and hooked it out. He opened the third drawer,
reached past the hanging files, and touched cold metal.
A board creaked in the hall and he froze. Several seconds passed. When the creak didn’t
come again, Jake pulled out the weapon his father kept for “home defense”—a .44 Ruger
automatic. His father had shown this weapon to Jake with great pride on the day he had
bought it—two years ago, that had been. He had been totally deaf to his wife’s nervous
demands that he put it away before someone got hurt.
Jake found the button on the side that released the clip. It fell out into his hand with a
metallic snak! sound that seemed very loud in the quiet apartment. He glanced nervously
toward the door again, then turned his attention to the clip. It was fully loaded. He started to slide it back into the gun, and then took it out again. Keeping a loaded gun in a locked desk
drawer was one thing; carrying one around New York City was quite another.
He stuffed the automatic down to the bottom of his pack, then felt behind the hanging files
again. This time he brought out a box of shells, about half-full. He remembered his father
had done some target shooting at the police range on First Avenue before losing interest.
The board creaked again. Jake wanted to get out of here.
He removed one of the shirts he’d packed, laid it on his father’s desk, and rolled up the clip
and the box of .44 slugs in it. Then he replaced it in the pack and used the buckles to snug
down the flap. He was about to leave when his eye fixed on the little pile of stationery
sitting beside his father’s In/Out tray. The reflectorized Ray-Ban sunglasses his father liked
to wear were folded on top of the stationery. He took a sheet of paper, and, after a moment’s
thought, the sunglasses as well. He slipped the shades into his breast pocket. Then he
removed the slim gold pen from its stand, and wrote Dear Dad and Mom beneath the
letterhead.
He stopped, frowning at the salutation. What went below it? What, exactly, did he have to
say? That he loved them? It was true, but it wasn’t enough—there were all sorts of other
unpleasant truths stuck through that central one, like steel needles jabbed into a ball of
yarn.
That he would miss them? He didn’t know if that was true or not, which was sort of
horrible. That he hoped they would miss him?
He suddenly realized what the problem was. If he were planning to be gone just today, he
would be able to write something. But he felt a near-certainty that it wasn’t just today, or
this week, or this month, or this summer. He had an idea that when he walked out of the
apartment this time, it would be for good.
He almost crumpled the sheet of paper, then changed his mind. He wrote: Please take care of yourselves. Love, J. That was pretty limp, but at least it was something.
Fine. Now will you stop pressing your luck and get out of here?
He did.
The apartment was almost dead still. He tiptoed across the living room, hearing only the
sounds of his parents’ breathing: his mother’s soft little snores, his father’s more nasal
respiration, where every indrawn breath ended in a slim high whistle. The refrigerator
kicked on as he reached the entryway and he froze for a moment, his heart thumping hard
in his chest. Then he was at the door. He unlocked it as quietly as he could, then stepped out
and pulled it gently shut behind him.
A stone seemed to roll off his heart as the latch snicked, and a strong sense of anticipation
seized him. He didn’t know what lay ahead, and he had reason to believe it would be
dangerous, but he was eleven years old—too young to deny the exotic delight which
suddenly filled him. There was a highway ahead—a hidden highway leading deep into
some unknown land. There were secrets which might disclose themselves to him if he was
clever . . . and if he was lucky. He had left his home in the long light of dawn, and what lay
ahead was some great adventure.
If I stand, if I can be true, I’ll see the rose, he thought as he pushed the button for the
elevator. I know it . . . and I’ll see him, too.
This thought filled him with an eagerness so great it was almost ecstasy.