had no urge to see what its Territories counterpart looked like unless he had to.
But there might be a way.
Wolf and Jack and the other boys not lucky enough to be
on the Outside Staff—and that was most of them—spent their
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days in what the long-timers called Far Field. It was about a mile and half down the road, at the edge of Gardener’s property, and there the boys spent their days picking rocks. There was no other field-work to be done at this time of year. The last of the crops had been harvested in mid-October, but as Sunlight Gardener had pointed out each morning in Chapel
Devotions, rocks were always in season.
Sitting in the back of one of the Home’s two dilapidated
farm-trucks each morning, Jack surveyed Far Field while
Wolf sat beside him, head down, like a boy with a hangover. It had been a rainy fall in the midwest, and Far Field was a
gluey, sticky, muddy mess. Day before yesterday one of the
boys had cursed it under his breath and called it a “real boot-sucker.”
Suppose we just take off? Jack thought for the fortieth time. Suppose I just yell “Go for it!” at Wolf and we start busting our buns? Where? North end, where those trees are, and the rock wall. That’s where his land ends.
There might be a fence.
We’ll climb over it. For that matter, Wolf can throw me over it, if he has to.
Might be barbed wire.
Wiggle under it. Or—
Or Wolf could tear it apart with his bare hands. Jack didn’t like to think of it, but he knew Wolf had the strength . . . and if he asked, Wolf would do it. It would rip up the big guy’s hands, but he was getting ripped up in worse ways right now.
And then what?
Flip, of course. That was what. If they could just get off the land that belonged to the Sunlight Home, that undervoice
whispered, they would have a fighting chance all the way
clear.
And Singer and Bast (whom Jack had come to think of as
the Thuggsy Twins) would not be able to use one of the trucks to run them down; the first truck to turn wheels into Far Field before the deep frosts of December would mire itself rocker-panel deep.
It’d be a footrace, pure and simple. Got to try it. Better than trying it back there, at the Home. And—
And it wasn’t just Wolf ’s growing distress that was driving him; he was now nearly frantic about Lily, who was back in
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New Hampshire dying by inches while Jack said hallelujah
under duress.
Go for it. Magic juice or no magic juice. Got to try.
But before Jack was quite ready, Ferd Janklow tried.
Great minds run in the same channel, can you say amen.
2
When it happened, it happened fast. At one moment Jack was
listening to Ferd Janklow’s usual line of cynical, amusing
bullshit. At the next, Ferd was pelting north across the murky field toward the stone wall. Until Ferd went for it, the day had seemed as drearily ordinary as any other at the Sunlight
Home. It was cold and overcast; there was a smell of rain,
possibly even snow in the air. Jack looked up to ease his
aching back, and also to see if Sonny Singer was around.
Sonny enjoyed harassing Jack. Most of the harassment was of the nuisance variety. Jack had his feet stepped on, he was
pushed on the stairs, his plate had been knocked out of his hands for three meals running—until he had learned to simultaneously cradle it on the inner side of his body and hold it in a death-grip.
Jack wasn’t completely sure why Sonny hadn’t organized a
mass stomping. Jack thought maybe it was because Sunlight
Gardener was interested in the new boy. He didn’t want to think that, it scared him to think that, but it made sense.
Sonny Singer was holding off because Sunlight Gardener had
told him to, and that was another reason to get out of here in a hurry.
He looked to his right. Wolf was about twenty yards away,
grubbing rocks with his hair in his face. Closer by was a
gantry-thin boy with buck teeth—Donald Keegan, his name
was. Donny grinned at him worshipfully, baring those amaz-
ing buck teeth. Spit dribbled from the end of his lolling
tongue. Jack looked away quickly.
Ferd Janklow was on his left—the boy with the narrow
Delftware hands and the deep widow’s peak. In the week
since Jack and Wolf had been incarcerated in the Sunlight
Home, he and Ferd had become good friends.
Ferd was grinning cynically.
“Donny’s in love with you,” he said.
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“Blow it out,” Jack said uncomfortably, feeling a flush rise in his cheeks.
“I bet Donny’d blow it out if you let him,” Ferd said.
“Wouldn’t you, Donny?”
Donny Keegan laughed his big, rusty yuck-yuck, not hav-
ing the slightest idea of what they were talking about.
“I wish you’d quit it,” Jack said. He felt more uncomfort-
able than ever.
Donny’s in love with you.
The bloody hell of it was, he thought that maybe poor, re-
tarded Donny Keegan really was in love with him . . . and Donny was maybe not the only one. Oddly, Jack found himself thinking of the nice man who had offered to take him
home and who had then settled for dropping him off at the
mall exit near Zanesville. He saw it first, Jack thought. Whatever’s new about me, that man saw it first.
Ferd said, “You’ve gotten very popular around here, Jack.
Why, I think even old Heck Bast would blow it out for you, if you asked him.”
“Man, that’s sick,” Jack said, flushing. “I mean—”
Abruptly, Ferd dropped the rock he had been working at
and stood up. He looked swiftly around, saw none of the
white turtlenecks were looking at him, and then turned back to Jack. “And now, my darling,” he said, “it’s been a very dull party, and I really must be going.”
Ferd made kissing noises at Jack, and then a grin of amaz-
ing radiance lit and broadened Ferd’s narrow, pale face. A moment later he was in full flight, running for the rock wall at the end of Far Field, running in big gangling storklike strides.
He did indeed catch the guards napping—at least to a de-
gree. Pedersen was talking about girls with Warwick and a
horse-faced boy named Peabody, an Outside Staffer who had
been rotated back to the Home for a while. Heck Bast had
been granted the supreme pleasure of accompanying Sunlight
Gardener to Muncie on some errand. Ferd got a good head-
start before a startled cry went up:
“Hey! Hey, someone’s takin off!”
Jack gaped after Ferd, who was already six rows over and
humping like hell. In spite of seeing his own plan co-opted, Jack felt a moment of triumphant excitement, and in his heart
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he wished him nothing but well. Go! Go, you sarcastic son of a bitch! Go, for Jason’s sake!
“It’s Ferd Janklow,” Donny Keegan gurgled, and then
laughed his big, whooping laugh.
3
The boys gathered for confession in the common room that
night as they always did, but confession was cancelled. Andy Warwick strode in, announced the cancellation with abrupt
baldness, and told them they could have an hour of “fellow-
ship” before dinner. Then he strode out.
Jack thought Warwick had looked, under his patina of
goose-stepping authority, frightened.
And Ferd Janklow was not here.
Jack looked around the room and thought with glum hu-
mor that if this was “fellowship one with the other,” he would hate to see what would happen if Warwick had told them to
have “a quiet hour.” They sat around the big long room,
thirty-nine boys between age twelve and age seventeen, looking at their hands, picking at scabs, morosely biting their nails. They all shared a common look—junkies robbed of
their fix. They wanted to hear confessions; even more, they wanted to make confessions.
No one mentioned Ferd Janklow. It was as though Ferd,
with his grimaces at Sunlight Gardener’s sermons and his
pale Delftware hands, had never existed.
Jack found himself barely able to restrain an impulse to
stand and scream at them. Instead, he began to think as hard as he ever had in his life.
He’s not here because they killed him. They’re all mad. You think madness isn’t catching? Just look what happened at that nutty place down in South America—when the man in the reflector sunglasses told them to drink the purple grape drink, they said yassuh, boss, and drank it.