the other world in the middle of some road over there, maybe getting run down by a highballing semi or a UPS truck.
Jack shambled over to the side of the road . . . and then
walked ten or twenty paces into the thigh-high grass for good measure. He took one final deep breath, inhaling the sweet
smell of this place, groping for that feeling of serenity . . .
that feeling of rainbow.
Got to try and remember how that felt, he thought. I may need it . . . and I may not get back here for a long time.
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He looked out at the grasslands, darkening now as night
stole over them from the east. The wind gusted, chilly now but still fragrant, tossing his hair—it was getting shaggy now—as it tossed the grass.
You ready, Jack-O?
Jack closed his eyes and steeled himself against the awful
taste and the vomiting that was apt to follow.
“Banzai,” he whispered, and drank.
14
Buddy Parkins
1
He vomited up a thin purple drool, his face only inches from the grass covering the long slope down to a four-lane highway; shook his head and rocked backward onto his knees, so
that only his back was exposed to the heavy gray sky. The
world, this world, stank. Jack pushed himself backward, away from the threads of puke settling over the blades of grass, and the stench altered but did not diminish. Gasoline, other nameless poisons floated in the air; and the air itself stank of exhaustion, fatigue—even the noises roaring up from the
highway punished this dying air. The back end of a roadsign reared like a gigantic television screen over his head. Jack wobbled to his feet. Far down the other side of the highway glinted an endless body of water only slightly less gray than the sky. A sort of malignant luminescence darted across the surface. From here, too, rose an odor of metal filings and tired breath. Lake Ontario: and the snug little city down there
might be Olcott or Kendall. He’d gone miles out of his way—
lost a hundred miles or more and just about four and a half days. Jack stepped under the sign, hoping it was no worse
than that. He looked up at the black letters. Wiped his mouth.
ANGOLA. Angola? Where was that? He peered down at the
smoky little city through the already nearly tolerable air.
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•
•
•
And Rand McNally, that invaluable companion, told him that
the acres of water way down there were Lake Erie—instead of losing days of travel time, he had gained them.
But before the boy could decide that he’d be smarter after
all if he jumped back into the Territories as soon as he thought it might be safe—which is to say, as soon as Morgan’s diligence had roared long past the place he had been—before he
could do that, before he could even begin to think about doing that, he had to go down into the smokey little city of Angola and see if this time Jack Sawyer, Jack-O, had played any of those changes, Daddy. He began to make his way down the
slope, a twelve-year-old boy in jeans and a plaid shirt, tall for his age, already beginning to look uncared-for, with suddenly too much worry in his face.
Halfway down the long slope, he realized that he was
thinking in English again.
2
Many days later, and a long way west: the man, Buddy
Parkins by name, who, just out of Cambridge, Ohio, on U.S.
40, had picked up a tall boy calling himself Lewis Farren,
would have recognized that look of worry—this kid Lewis
looked like worry was about to sink into his face for good.
Lighten up, son, for your own sake if no one else’s; Buddy wanted to tell the boy. But the boy had troubles enough for ten, according to his story. Mother sick, father dead, sent off to some schoolteacher aunt in Buckeye Lake . . . Lewis Farren had plenty to trouble him. He looked as though he had not seen as much as five dollars all together since the previous Christmas. Still . . . Buddy thought that somewhere along the line this Farren kid was jiving him.
For one thing, he smelled like farm, not town. Buddy
Parkins and his brothers ran three hundred acres not far from Amanda, about thirty miles southeast of Columbus, and Buddy knew that he could not be wrong about this. This boy smelled like Cambridge, and Cambridge was country. Buddy had
grown up with the smell of farmland and barnyard, of manure and growing corn and pea vineries, and the unwashed clothes of this boy beside him had absorbed all these familiar odors.
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And there were the clothes themselves. Mrs. Farren must
have been awful sick, Buddy thought, if she sent her boy off down the road in ripped jeans so stiff with dirt the wrinkles seemed bronzed. And the shoes! Lewis Farren’s sneakers were about to fall off his feet, the laces all spliced together and the fabric split or worn through in a couple of places on each shoe.
“So they got yore daddy’s car, did they, Lewis?” Buddy
asked.
“Just like I said, that’s right—the lousy cowards came out
after midnight and just stole it right out of the garage. I don’t think they should be allowed to do that. Not from people who work hard and really are going to start making their payments as soon as they can. I mean, do you? You don’t, do you?”
The boy’s honest, sunburned face was turned toward him
as if this were the most serious question since the Nixon Pardon or maybe the Bay of Pigs, and all Buddy’s instincts were to agree—he would be inclined to agree with any generally
good-hearted opinion uttered by a boy so redolent of farm
work. “I guess there’s two sides to everything when you come down to it,” Buddy Parkins said, not very happily. The boy
blinked, and then turned away to face forward again. Again
Buddy felt his anxiety, the cloud of worry that seemed to
hang over the boy, and was almost sorry he had not given
Lewis Farren the agreement he seemed to need.
“I suppose yore aunt’s in the grade school there in Buckeye Lake,” Buddy said, at least in part hoping to lighten the boy’s misery. Point to the future, not the past.
“Yes, sir, that’s right. She teaches in the grade school.
Helen Vaughan.” His expression did not change.
But Buddy had heard it again—he didn’t consider himself
any Henry Higgins, the professor guy in that musical, but he knew for certain sure that young Lewis Farren didn’t talk like anyone who had been raised in Ohio. The kid’s voice was all wrong, too pushed-together and full of the wrong ups and
downs. It wasn’t an Ohio voice at all. It especially was not a rural Ohioan’s voice. It was an accent.
Or was it possible that some boy from Cambridge, Ohio,
could learn to talk like that? Whatever his crazy reason might be? Buddy supposed it was.
On the other hand, the newspaper this Lewis Farren had
never once unclamped from beneath his left elbow seemed to
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validate Buddy Parkins’s deepest and worst suspicion, that his fragrant young companion was a runaway and his every word
a lie. The name of the paper, visible to Buddy with only the slightest tilt of his head, was The Angola Herald. There was that Angola in Africa that a lot of Englishmen had rushed off to as mercenaries, and there was Angola, New York—right up
there on Lake Erie. He’d seen pictures of it on the news not long ago, but could not quite remember why.
“I’d like to ask you a question, Lewis,” he said, and cleared his throat.
“Yes?” the boy said.
“How come a boy from a nice little burg on U.S. Forty is
carrying around a paper from Angola, New York? Which is
one hell of a long way away. I’m just curious, son.”
The boy looked down at the paper flattened under his arm
and hugged it even closer to him, as if he were afraid it might squirm away. “Oh,” he said. “I found it.”
“Oh, hell,” Buddy said.
“Yes, sir. It was on a bench at the bus station back home.”
“You went to the bus station this morning?”
“Right before I decided to save the money and hitch. Mr.
Parkins, if you can get me to the turnoff at Zanesville, I’ll only have a short ride left. Could probably get to my aunt’s house before dinner.”
“Could be,” Buddy said, and drove in an uncomfortable si-