knock anything down. She saw Jerry Bledsoe set his feet (so he felt it, too, though no one else did), shake his head, then gently insert the tip of the screwdriver into a hive of wires.
And then the entry and downstairs corridor of the Sawyer
& Sloat building turned into a holocaust.
The entire wiring panel turned instantly to a solid rectangular body of flame; bluish-yellow arcs of what looked like lightning shot out and encased the workman. Electronic horns
bawled and bawled: KA-WHAAAAM! KA-WHAAAM! A
ball of fire six feet high fell right out of the wall, slammed the already dead Jerry Bledsoe aside, and rolled down the corridor toward the lobby. The transparent front door blew into flying glass and smoking, twisted pieces of frame. Lorette Chang
dropped her bike and sprinted toward the pay telephone across the street. As she told the fire department the building’s address and noticed that her bicycle had been twisted neatly in half by whatever force had burst through the door, Jerry Bledsoe’s roasted corpse still swayed upright back and forth before the devastated panel. Thousands of volts poured through his body, twitching it with regular surges, snapping it back and forth in a steady pulse. All the handyman’s body hair and most of his clothes had fried off, and his skin had become a cooked blotchy gray. His eyeglasses, a solidifying lump of brown plastic, covered his nose like a poultice.
Jerry Bledsoe. Who plays those changes, daddy? Jack made his feet move until he had gone half an hour without seeing another of the little thatched cottages. Unfamiliar stars in unfamiliar patterns lay all over the sky above him—messages in a language he could not read.
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Jack Goes to the Market
1
He slept that night in a sweetly fragrant Territories haystack, first burrowing his way in and then turning around so the
fresh air could reach him along the tunnel he had made. He
listened apprehensively for small scuttering sounds—he had
heard or read somewhere that fieldmice were great haystack
fans. If they were in this one, then a great big mouse named Jack Sawyer had scared them into silence. He relaxed little by little, his left hand tracing the shape of Speedy’s bottle—he had plugged the top with a piece of springy moss from a
small stream where he had stopped to drink. He supposed it
was entirely possible that some of the moss would fall into the bottle, or already had. What a pity, it would spoil the piquant flavor and the delicate bouquet.
As he lay in here, warm at last, heavily sleepy, the feeling he was most aware of was relief . . . as if there had been a dozen ten-pound weights strapped to his back and some kind
soul had undone the buckles and allowed them to fall to the ground. He was in the Territories again, the place which such charming folks as Morgan of Orris, Osmond the Bullwhipper,
and Elroy the Amazing Goat-Man all called home, the Terri-
tories, where anything could happen.
But the Territories could be good, too. He remembered that
from his earliest childhood, when everyone had lived in California and no one had lived anyplace else. The Territories
could be good, and it seemed he felt that goodness around
him now, as calmly, inarguably sweet as the smell of the
haystack, as clear as the smell of the Territories air.
Does a fly or a ladybug feel relief if an unexpected gust of wind comes along and tilts the pitcher plant just enough to allow the drowning insect to fly out? Jack didn’t know . . . but
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he knew that he was out of Oatley, away from Fair Weather
Clubs and old men who wept over their stolen shopping carts, away from the smell of beer and the smell of puke . . . most important of all, he was away from Smokey Updike and the
Oatley Tap.
He thought he might travel in the Territories for a while,
after all.
And so thinking, fell asleep.
2
He had walked two, perhaps three miles along the Western
Road the following morning, enjoying the sunshine and the
good, earthy smell of fields almost ready for the harvests of summer’s end, when a cart pulled over and a whiskery farmer in what looked like a toga with rough breeches under it pulled up and shouted:
“Are you for market-town, boy?”
Jack gaped at him, half in a panic, realizing that the man
was not speaking English—never mind “prithee” or “Dost
thou go cross-gartered, varlet,” it wasn’t English at all.
There was a woman in a voluminous dress sitting beside
the whiskery farmer; she held a boy of perhaps three on her lap. She smiled pleasantly enough at Jack and rolled her eyes at her husband. “He’s a simpleton, Henry.”
They’re not speaking English . . . but whatever it is they’re speaking, I understand it. I’m actually thinking in that language . . . and that’s not all—I’m seeing in it, or with it, or whatever it is I mean.
Jack realized he had been doing it the last time he had
been in the Territories, too—only then he had been too con-
fused to realize it; things had moved too fast, and everything had seemed strange.
The farmer leaned forward. He smiled, showing teeth
which were absolutely horrid. “Are you a simpleton, laddie?”
he asked, not unkindly.
“No,” he said, smiling back as best he could, aware that he had not said no but some Territories word which meant no—
when he had flipped, he had changed his speech and his way
of thinking (his way of imaging, anyway—he did not have that word in his vocabulary, but understood what he meant
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just the same), just as he had changed his clothes. “I’m not simple. It’s just that my mother told me to be careful of people I might meet along the road.”
Now the farmer’s wife smiled. “Your mother was right,”
she said. “Are you for the market?”
“Yes,” Jack said. “That is, I’m headed up the road—west.”
“Climb up in the back, then,” Henry the farmer said. “Day-
light’s wasting. I want to sell what I have if I can and be home again before sunset. Corn’s poor but it’s the last of the season.
Lucky to have corn in ninemonth at all. Someone may buy it.”
“Thank you,” Jack said, climbing into the back of the low
wagon. Here, dozens of corn ears were bound with rough
hanks of rope and stacked like cordwood. If the corn was
poor, then Jack could not imagine what would constitute good corn over here—they were the biggest ears he had ever seen
in his life. There were also small stacks of squashes and
gourds and things that looked like pumpkins—but they were
reddish instead of orange. Jack didn’t know what they were, but he suspected they would taste wonderful. His stomach
rumbled busily. Since going on the road, he had discovered
what hunger was—not as a passing acquaintance, something
you felt dimly after school and which could be assuaged with a few cookies and a glass of milk souped up with Nestlé’s
Quik, but as an intimate friend, one that sometimes moved
away to a distance but who rarely left entirely.
He was sitting with his back to the front of the wagon, his sandal-clad feet dangling down, almost touching the hard-packed dirt of the Western Road. There was a lot of traffic this morning, most of it bound for the market, Jack assumed.
Every now and then Henry bawled a greeting to someone he
knew.
Jack was still wondering how those apple-colored pump-
kins might taste—and just where his next meal was going to
come from, anyway—when small hands twined in his hair
and gave a brisk tug—brisk enough to make his eyes water.
He turned and saw the three-year-old standing there in his
bare feet, a big grin on his face and a few strands of Jack’s hair in each of his hands.
“Jason!” his mother cried—but it was, in its way, an indul-
gent cry (Did you see the way he pulled that hair? My, isn’t he strong!)—“Jason, that’s not nice! ”
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Jason grinned, unabashed. It was a big, dopey, sunshiney
grin, as sweet in its way as the smell of the haystack in which Jack had spent the night. He couldn’t help returning it . . . and while there had been no politics of calculation in his returning grin, he saw he had made a friend of Henry’s wife.
“Sit,” Jason said, swaying back and forth with the uncon-
scious movement of a veteran sailor. He was still grinning at Jack.
“Huh?”
“Yap.”
“I’m not getting you, Jason.”