dark brown range; he had seen that the speeding car was now coming straight toward him. “Does a coppiceman kill
Wolfs?”
“No,” Jack said, “they absolutely never kill Wolfs,” but it did no good. Wolf captured Jack’s hand in his own, which
trembled.
“Let go of me, please, Wolf,” Jack pleaded. “He’ll think
it’s funny.”
Wolf ’s hand dropped away.
As the police car advanced toward them, Jack glanced at
the figure behind the wheel, and then turned around and
walked back a few paces so that he could watch Wolf. What
he had seen was not encouraging. The policeman driving the
car had a wide doughy domineering face with livid slabs of
fat where he’d once had cheekbones. And Wolf ’s terror was
plain on his face. Eyes, nostrils flared; he was showing his teeth.
“You really liked riding in the back of that truck, didn’t
you?” Jack asked him.
Some of the terror disappeared, and Wolf nearly managed
a smile. The police car roared past—Jack was conscious of
the driver turning his head to inspect them. “All right,” Jack said. “He’s on his way. We’re okay, Wolf.”
He had turned around again when he heard the sound of
the police car suddenly begin to grow louder again.
“Coppiceman’s coming back!”
“Probably just going back to Cayuga,” Jack said. “Turn
around and just act like me. Don’t stare at him.”
Wolf and Jack trudged along, pretending to ignore the car,
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which seemed to hang behind them deliberately. Wolf uttered a sound that was half-moan, half-howl.
The police car swung out into the road, passed them,
flashed its brake lights, and then cut in diagonally before them. The officer pushed open his door and got his feet
planted on the ground. Then he hoisted himself out of the
seat. He was roughly Jack’s height, and all his weight was in his face and his stomach—his legs were twig-skinny, his arms and shoulders those of a normally developed man. His gut,
trussed in the brown uniform like a fifteen-pound turkey,
bulged out on both sides of the wide brown belt.
“I can’t wait for it,” he said, and cocked an arm and leaned on the open door. “What’s your story, anyhow? Give.”
Wolf padded up behind Jack and hunched his shoulders,
his hands shoved deep into the pockets of his overalls.
“We’re going to Springfield, officer,” Jack said. “We’ve
been hitching—I guess maybe we shouldn’t.”
“You guess maybe you shouldn’t. Hol-eee shit. What’s this
guy tryinna disappear behind you, a Wookie?”
“He’s my cousin.” Jack thought frantically for a moment—
the Story had to be bent far enough to accommodate Wolf.
“I’m supposed to be taking him home. He lives in Springfield with his Aunt Helen, I mean my Aunt Helen, the one who’s a
schoolteacher. In Springfield.”
“What’d he do, escape from somewhere?”
“No, no, nothing like that. It was just that—”
The cop looked at him neutrally, his face sizzling.
“Names.”
Now the boy met a dilemma: Wolf was certain to call him
Jack, no matter what name he gave the cop. “I’m Jack
Parker,” he said. “And he’s—”
“Hold it. I want the feeb to tell me himself. Come on, you.
You remember your name, basket case?”
Wolf squirmed behind Jack, digging his chin into the top
of his overalls. He muttered something.
“I couldn’t hear you, sonny.”
“Wolf,” he whispered.
“Wolf. Prob’ly I should have guessed. What’s your first
name, or did they just give you a number?”
Wolf had squeezed his eyes shut, and was twisting his legs
together.
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“Come on, Phil,” Jack said, thinking that it was one of the few names Wolf might remember.
But he had just finished it when Wolf pulled up his head
and straightened his back and yelled, “JACK! JACK! JACK
WOLF!”
“We call him Jack sometimes,” the boy put in, knowing it
was already too late. “It’s because he likes me so much, sometimes I’m the only one who can do anything with him. I might even stay there in Springfield a few days after I get him home, just to make sure he settles down okay.”
“I sure am sick of the sound of your voice, Jack boy. Why
don’t you and good old Phil-Jack get in the back seat here and we’ll go into town and straighten everything out?” When Jack did not move, the policeman put a hand on the butt of the
enormous pistol which hung from his straining belt. “Get in the car. Him first. I want to find out why you’re a hundred miles from home on a school day. In the car. Right now.”
“Ah, officer,” Jack began, and behind him Wolf rasped,
“No. Can’t.”
“My cousin has this problem,” Jack said. “He’s claustropho-
bic. Small spaces, especially the insides of cars, drive him crazy.
We can only get rides in pick-ups, so he can be in the back.”
“Get in the car,” the policeman said. He stepped forward and opened the back door.
“CAN’T!” Wolf wailed. “Wolf CAN’T! Stinks, Jacky, it
stinks in there.” His nose and lip had wrinkled into corrugations.
“You get him in the car or I will,” the cop said to Jack.
“Wolf, it won’t be for long,” Jack said, reaching for Wolf ’s hand. Reluctantly, Wolf allowed him to take it. Jack pulled him toward the back seat of the police car, Wolf literally dragging his feet across the surface of the road.
For a couple of seconds it looked as though it would work.
Wolf got close enough to the police car to touch the door-
frame. Then his entire body shook. He clamped both hands
onto the top of the doorframe. It looked as though he were going to try to rip the top of the car in half, as a circus strong-man tears a telephone book in two.
“Please,” Jack said quietly. “We have to.”
But Wolf was terrified, and too disgusted by whatever he
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had smelled. He shook his head violently. Slobber ran from
his mouth and dripped onto the top of the car.
The policeman stepped around Jack and released some-
thing from a catch on his belt. Jack had time only to see that it was not his pistol before the cop expertly whapped his black-jack into the base of Wolf ’s skull. Wolf ’s upper body dropped onto the top of the car, and then all of Wolf slid gracefully down onto the dusty road.
“You get on his other side,” the cop said, fastening the sap to his belt. “We’re gonna finally get this big bag of shit into the vehicle.”
Two or three minutes later, after they had twice dropped
Wolf ’s heavy unconscious body back onto the road, they were speeding toward Cayuga. “I already know what’s gonna happen to you and your feeb cousin, if he is your cousin, which I doubt.” The cop looked up at Jack in his rear-view mirror, and his eyes were raisins dipped in fresh tar.
All the blood in Jack’s body seemed to swing down, down
in his veins, and his heart jumped in his chest. He had remembered the cigarette in his shirt pocket. He clapped his hand over it, then jerked his hand away before the cop could say anything.
“I gotta put his shoes back on,” Jack said. “They sort of
fell off.”
“Forget it,” the cop said, but did not object further when
Jack bent over. Out of sight of the mirror, he first shoved one of the split-seamed loafers back up on Wolf ’s bare heel, then quickly snatched the joint out of his pocket and popped it in his mouth. He bit into it, and dry crumbly particles with a oddly herbal taste spilled over his tongue. Jack began to grind them between his teeth. Something scratched down into his
throat, and he convulsively jerked upright, put his hand in front of his mouth, and tried to cough with his lips together.
When his throat was clear, he hurriedly swallowed all of the dampened, now rather sludgy marijuana. Jack ran his tongue
over his teeth, collecting all the flecks and traces.
“You got a few surprises ahead of you,” the policeman
said. “You’re gonna get a little sunlight in your soul.”
“Sunlight in my soul?” Jack asked, thinking that the cop
had seen him stuff the joint into his mouth.
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“A few blisters on your hands, too,” the cop said, and
glared happily at Jack’s guilty image in the rear-view mirror.
The Cayuga Municipal Building was a shadowy maze of un-
lighted hallways and narrow staircases that seemed to wind
unexpectedly upward alongside equally narrow rooms. Water
sang and rumbled in the pipes. “Let me explain something to you kids,” the policeman said, ushering them toward the last staircase to their right. “You’re not under arrest. Got that? You are being detained for questioning. I don’t want to hear any bullshit about one phone call. You’re in limbo until you tell us who you are and what you’re up to,” the cop went on. “You