It came again, seeming almost to dance, for a moment re-
minding him of some animated Disney cartoon-figure in the
chancy moonlight. Crazily, Jack began to laugh. The thing
snarled and leaped at him. The swipe of those heavy hoof-
claws again missed him by barest inches as he danced back
through the weeds and litter. The Elroy-thing came down on
the bedspring and somehow became entangled in it. Howling,
snapping white gobbets of foam into the air, it pulled and
twisted and lunged, one foot buried deep in the rusty coils.
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Jack groped inside his pack for the bottle. He dug past
socks and dirty undershorts and a wadded, fragrant pair of
jeans. He seized the neck of the bottle and yanked it out.
The Elroy-thing split the air with a howl of rage, finally
pulling free of the bedspring.
Jack hit the cindery, weedy, scruffy ground and rolled over, the last two fingers of his left hand hooked around one pack-strap, his right hand holding the bottle. He worked at the cap with the thumb and forefinger of his left hand, the pack dangling and swinging. The cap spun off.
Can it follow me? he wondered incoherently, tipping the bottle to his lips. When I go, do I punch some kind of hole through the middle of things? Can it follow me through and finish me on the other side?
Jack’s mouth filled with that rotten dead-grape taste. He
gagged, his throat closing, seeming to actually reverse direction. Now that awful taste filled his sinuses and nasal passages as well and he uttered a deep, shaking groan. He could hear the Elroy-thing screaming now, but the scream seemed
far away, as if it were on one end of the Oatley tunnel and he, Jack, were falling rapidly toward the other end. And this time there was a sense of falling and he thought: Oh my God what if I just flipped my stupid self over a cliff or off a mountain over there?
He held on to the pack and the bottle, his eyes screwed
desperately shut, waiting for whatever might happen next—
Elroy-thing or no Elroy-thing. Territories or oblivion—and
the thought which had haunted him all night came swinging
back like a dancing carousel horse—Silver Lady, maybe Ella
Speed. He caught it and rode it down in a cloud of the magic juice’s awful smell, holding it, waiting for whatever would happen next; feeling his clothes change on his body.
Six oh yes when we were all six and nobody was anything else and it was California who blows that sax daddy is it Dexter Gordon or is it is it what does Mom mean when she says we’re living on a fault-line and where where oh where do you go Daddy you and Uncle Morgan oh Daddy sometimes he
looks at you like like oh like there is a fault-line in his head and an earthquake going on behind his eyes and you’re dying in it oh Daddy!
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Falling, twisting, turning in the middle of limbo, in the
middle of a smell like a purple cloud, Jack Sawyer, John Benjamin Sawyer, Jacky, Jacky
—was six when it started to happen, and who blew that sax Daddy? Who blew it when I was six, when Jacky was six,
when Jacky—
11
The Death of Jerry Bledsoe
1
was six . . . when it really started, Daddy, when the engines that eventually pulled him to Oatley and beyond began to
chug away. There had been loud saxophone music. Six. Jacky was six. At first his attention had been entirely on the toy his father had given him, a scale model of a London taxi—the toy car was heavy as a brick, and on the smooth wooden floors of the new office a good push sent it rumbling straight across the room. Late afternoon, first grade all the way on the other side of August, a neat new car that rolled like a tank on the strip of bare wood behind the couch, a contented, relaxed feeling in the air-conditioned office . . . no more work to do, no more phone calls that couldn’t wait until the next day. Jack pushed the heavy toy taxi down the strip of bare wood, barely able to hear the rumbling of the solid rubber tires under the soloing of a saxophone. The black car struck one of the legs of the couch, spun sideways, and stopped. Jack crawled down and
Uncle Morgan had parked himself in one of the chairs on the other side of the couch. Each man nursed a drink; soon they would put down their glasses, switch off the turntable and the amplifier, and go downstairs to their cars.
when we were all six and nobody was anything else and it was California
“Who’s playing that sax?” he heard Uncle Morgan ask,
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and, half in a reverie, heard that familiar voice in a new way: something whispery and hidden in Morgan Sloat’s voice
coiled into Jacky’s ear. He touched the top of the toy taxi and his fingers were as cold as if it were of ice, not English steel.
“That’s Dexter Gordon, is who that is,” his father an-
swered. His voice was as lazy and friendly as it always was, and Jack slipped his hand around the heavy taxi.
“Good record.”
“Daddy Plays the Horn. It is a nice old record, isn’t it?”
“I’ll have to look for it.” And then Jack thought he knew
what that strangeness in Uncle Morgan’s voice was all
about—Uncle Morgan didn’t really like jazz at all, he just
pretended to in front of Jack’s father. Jack had known this fact about Morgan Sloat for most of his childhood, and he thought it was silly that his father couldn’t see it too. Uncle Morgan was never going to look for a record called Daddy Plays the Horn, he was just flattering Phil Sawyer—and maybe the reason Phil Sawyer didn’t see it was that like everyone else he never paid quite enough attention to Morgan Sloat. Uncle
Morgan, smart and ambitious (“smart as a wolverine, sneaky
as a courthouse lawyer,” Lily said), good old Uncle Morgan
deflected observation—your eye just sort of naturally slid off him. When he was a kid, Jacky would have bet, his teachers
would have had trouble even remembering his name.
“Imagine what this guy would be like over there,” Uncle
Morgan said, for once fully claiming Jack’s attention. That falsity still played through his voice, but it was not Sloat’s hypocrisy that jerked up Jacky’s head and tightened his fingers on his heavy toy—the words over there had sailed straight into his brain and now were gonging like chimes. Because over there was the country of Jack’s Daydreams. He had known that immediately. His father and Uncle Morgan
had forgotten that he was behind the couch, and they were going to talk about the Daydreams.
His father knew about the Daydream-country. Jack could
never have mentioned the Daydreams to either his father or
his mother, but his father knew about the Daydreams because he had to—simple as that. And the next step, felt along Jack’s emotions more than consciously expressed, was that his dad
helped keep the Daydreams safe.
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But for some reason, equally difficult to translate from
emotion into language, the conjunction of Morgan Sloat and
the Daydreams made the boy uneasy.
“Hey?” Uncle Morgan said. “This guy would really turn
em around, wouldn’t he? They’d probably make him Duke of
the Blasted Lands, or something.”
“Well, probably not that,” Phil Sawyer said. “Not if they
liked him as much as we do.”
But Uncle Morgan doesn’t like him, Dad, Jacky thought, suddenly clear that this was important. He doesn’t like him at all, not really, he thinks that music is too loud, he thinks it takes something from him. . . .
“Oh, you know a lot more about it than I do,” Uncle Mor-
gan said in a voice that sounded easy and relaxed.
“Well, I’ve been there more often. But you’re doing a good
job of catching up.” Jacky heard that his father was smiling.
“Oh, I’ve learned a few things, Phil. But really, you
know—I’ll never get over being grateful to you for showing
all that to me.” The two syllables of grateful filled with smoke and the sound of breaking glass.
But all of these little warnings could not do more than dent Jack’s intense, almost blissful satisfaction. They were talking about the Daydreams. It was magical, that such a thing was
possible. What they said was beyond him, their terms and vocabulary were too adult, but six-year-old Jack experienced
again the wonder and joy of the Daydreams, and was at least old enough to understand the direction of their conversation.