“No!” Wolf once again seemed to rouse himself to a great
effort. “Go on . . . you go on . . .”
“Not without you, Wolf!” All the lights had blurred double, treble. He held Wolf ’s head in his burned hands. “Not without you, huh-uh, no way—”
“Wolf . . . doesn’t want to live in this world.” He pulled a great, shuddering breath into his broad, shattered chest and tried another smile. “Smells . . . smells too bad.”
“Wolf . . . listen, Wolf—”
Wolf took his hands gently; as he held them, Jack could
feel the hair melting from Wolf ’s palms. It was a ghostly, terrible sensation.
“I love you, Jacky.”
“I love you, too, Wolf,” Jack said. “Right here and now.”
Wolf smiled.
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“Going back, Jacky . . . I can feel it. Going back . . .”
Suddenly Wolf ’s very hands felt insubstantial in Jack’s
grip.
“Wolf!” he screamed.
“Going back home . . .”
“Wolf, no!” He felt his heart stagger and wrench in his chest. It would break, oh yes, hearts could break, he felt that.
“Wolf, come back, I love you!” There was a sensation of lightness in Wolf now, a feeling that he was turning into something like a milkweed pod . . . or a shimmer of illusion. A Daydream.
“. . . goodbye . . .”
Wolf was fading glass. Fading . . . fading . . .
“Wolf!”
“ . . .love you J . . .”
Wolf was gone. There was only a bloody outline on the
floor where he had been.
“Oh God,” Jack moaned. “Oh God, oh God.”
He hugged himself and began to rock back and forth in the
demolished office, moaning.
27
Jack Lights Out Again
1
Time passed. Jack had no idea how much or how little. He sat with his arms wrapped around himself as if he were in the
strait-jacket again, rocking back and forth, moaning, wondering if Wolf could really be gone.
He’s gone. Oh yes, he’s gone. And guess who killed him, Jack? Guess who?
At some point the feedback hum took on a rasping note. A
moment later there was a high-gain crackle of static and
everything shorted out—feedback hum, upstairs chatter,
idling engines out front. Jack barely noticed.
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Go on. Wolf said to go on.
I can’t. I can’t. I’m tired, and whatever I do is the wrong thing. People get killed—
Quit it, you self-pitying jerk! Think about your mother, Jack.
No! I’m tired. Let me be.
And the Queen.
Please, just leave me alone—
At last he heard the door at the top of the stairs open, and that roused him. He did not want to be found here. Let them take him outside, in the back yard, but not in this stinking, blood-spattered, smokey room where he had been tortured
and his friend killed.
Barely thinking about what he was doing, Jack took up
the envelope with JACK PARKER written across the front. He
looked inside and saw the guitar-pick, the silver dollar, his beat-up wallet, the Rand McNally road atlas. He tilted the envelope and saw the marble. He stuck everything in the pack
and slipped it on, feeling like a boy in a state of hypnosis.
Footfalls on the stairs, slow and cautious.
“—where’s the damn lights—”
“—funny smell, like a zoo—”
“—watch it, boys—”
Jack’s eyes happened on the steel file-tray, neatly stacked with envelopes reading I’LL BE A SUNBEAM FOR JESUS. He
helped himself to two of them.
Now when they grab you coming out, they can get you for robbery as well as murder.
Didn’t matter. He was moving now for the simple sake of
movement, no more than that.
The back yard appeared completely deserted. Jack stood at
the top of the stairs that exited through a bulkhead and looked around, hardly able to believe it. There were voices from the front, and pulses of light, and occasional smears of static and dispatchers’ voices from police radios that had been cranked up all the way to high gain, but the back yard was empty. It made no sense. But he supposed if they were confused
enough, rattled enough by what they had found inside . . .
Then a voice, muffled, less than twenty feet away on Jack’s left, said, “Christ! Do you believe this?”
Jack’s head snapped around. There, squatting on the beaten
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dirt like a crude Iron Age coffin, was the Box. A flashlight was moving around inside. Jack could see shoe-soles sticking out. A dim figure was crouching by the mouth of the Box, examining the door.
“Looks like this thing was ripped right off ’n its hinges,”
the fellow looking at the door called into the Box. “I don’t know how anyone coulda done it, though. Hinges are steel.
But they’re just . . . twisted.”
“Never mind the damn hinges,” the muffled voice came
back. “This goddam thing . . . they kept kids in here, Paulie! I really think they did! Kids! There’s initials on the walls . . .”
The light moved.
“. . . and Bible verses . . .”
The light moved again.
“. . . and pictures. Little pictures. Little stick-men and
-women, like kids draw . . . Christ, do you think Williams
knew about this?”
“Must have,” Paulie said, still examining the torn and
twisted steel hinges on the Box’s door.
Paulie was bending in; his colleague was backing out.
Making no special attempt at concealment, Jack walked
across the open yard behind them. He went along the side of the garage and came out on the shoulder of the road. From
here he had an angle on the careless jam of police cars in the Sunlight Home’s front yard. As Jack stood watching, an am-bulance came tearing up the road, flashers whirling, siren
warbling.
“Loved you, Wolf,” Jack muttered, and wiped an arm
across his wet eyes. He set off down the road into darkness, thinking he would most likely be picked up before he got a
mile west of the Sunlight Home. But three hours later he was still walking; apparently the cops had more than enough to
occupy them back there.
2
There was a highway up ahead, over the next rise or the rise after that. Jack could see the orangey glow of high-intensity sodium arcs on the horizon, could hear the whine of the big rigs.
He stopped in a trash-littered ravine and washed his face
and hands in the trickle of water coming out of a culvert. The
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water was almost paralyzing cold, but at least it silenced the throbbing in his hands for a while. The old cautions were
coming back almost unbidden.
Jack stood for a moment where he was, under the dark
night sky of Indiana, listening to the whine of the big trucks.
The wind, murmuring in the trees, lifted his hair. His heart was heavy with the loss of Wolf, but even that could not
change how good, how very good it was to be free.
An hour later a trucker slowed for the tired, pallid boy
standing in the breakdown lane with his thumb cocked. Jack
climbed in.
“Where you headed, kiddo?” the trucker asked.
Jack was too tired and too sick at heart to bother with the Story—he barely remembered it, anyway. He supposed it
would come back to him.
“West,” he said. “Far as you’re going.”
“That’d be Midstate.”
“Fine,” Jack said, and fell asleep.
The big Diamond Reo rolled through the chilly Indiana
night; Charlie Daniels on the tape-player, it rolled west, chas-ing its own headlights toward Illinois.
28
Jack’s Dream
1
Of course he carried Wolf with him. Wolf had gone home, but a big loyal shadow rode beside Jack in all the trucks and
Volkswagen vans and dusty cars pounding along the Illinois
highways. This smiling ghost pierced Jack’s heart. Sometimes he could see—could almost see—Wolf ’s huge hairy form
bounding alongside, romping through the stripped fields.
Free, Wolf beamed at him with pumpkin-colored eyes. When
he jerked his eyes away, Jack felt the absence of a Wolf-hand folding itself around his. Now that he missed his friend so
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completely, the memory of his impatience with Wolf shamed
him, brought the blood to his face. He had thought about
abandoning Wolf more times than he could count. Shameful,
shameful. Wolf had been . . . it took Jack a long time to take it in, but the word was noble. And this noble being, so out of place in this world, had died for him.
I kept my herd safe. Jack Sawyer was the herd no longer. I kept my herd safe. There were times when the truckdrivers or insurance salesmen who had picked up this strange, com-pelling boy on the side of the road—picked him up even