movie? Sleeping? Dying?
Dead? an evil voice added before he could stop it. Dead, Jack? Already dead?
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Stop it.
He felt the burning sting of tears.
“Why so sad, my little lad?”
He looked up, startled, and saw the rug salesman looking
at him. He was as big as the meat-vendor, and his arms were also tattooed, but his smile was open and sunny. There was no meanness in it. That was a big difference.
“It’s nothing,” Jack said.
“If it’s nothing makes you look like that, you ought to be
thinking of something, my son, my son.”
“I looked that bad, did I?” Jack asked, smiling a little. He had also grown unselfconscious about his speech—at least
for the moment—and perhaps that was why the rug salesman
heard nothing odd or off-rhythm in it.
“Laddie, you looked as if you only had one friend left on
this side o’ the moon and you just saw the Wild White Wolf
come out o’ the north an’ gobble him down with a silver
spoon.”
Jack smiled a little. The rug salesman turned away and
took something from a smaller display to the right of the
largest rug—it was oval and had a short handle. As he turned it over the sun flashed across it—it was a mirror. To Jack it looked small and cheap, the sort of thing you might get for knocking over all three wooden milk-bottles in a carnival
game.
“Here, laddie,” the rug salesman said. “Take a look and see if I’m not right.”
Jack looked into the mirror and gaped, for a moment so
stunned he thought his heart must have forgotten to beat. It was him, but he looked like something from Pleasure Island
in the Disney version of Pinocchio, where too much pool-shooting and cigar-smoking had turned boys into donkeys.
His eyes, normally as blue and round as an Anglo-Saxon her-
itage could make them, had gone brown and almond-shaped.
His hair, coarsely matted and falling across the middle of his forehead, had a definite manelike look. He raised one hand to brush it away, and touched only bare skin—in the mirror, his fingers seemed to fade right through the hair. He heard the vendor laugh, pleased. Most amazing of all, long jackass-ears dangled down to below his jawline. As he stared, one of them twitched.
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He thought suddenly: I HAD one of these!
And on the heels of that: In the Daydreams I had one of these. Back in the regular world it was . . . was . . .
He could have been no more than four. In the regular world
(he had stopped thinking of it as the real world without even noticing) it had been a great big glass marble with a rosy center. One day while he was playing with it, it had rolled down the cement path in front of their house and before he could catch it, it had fallen down a sewer grate. It had been gone—
forever, he had thought then, sitting on the curb with his face propped on his dirty hands and weeping. But it wasn’t; here was that old toy rediscovered, just as wonderful now as it had been when he was three or four. He grinned, delighted. The
image changed and Jack the Jackass became Jack the Cat, his face wise and secret with amusement. His eyes went from
donkey-brown to tomcat-green. Now pert little gray-furred
ears cocked alertly where the droopy donkey-ears had dan-
gled.
“Better,” the vendor said. “Better, my son. I like to see a happy boy. A happy boy is a healthy boy, and a healthy boy
finds his way in the world. Book of Good Farming says that, and if it doesn’t, it should. I may just scratch it in my copy, if I ever scratch up enough scratch from my pumpkin-patch to
buy a copy someday. Want the glass?”
“Yes!” Jack cried. “Yeah, great!” He groped for his sticks.
Frugality was forgotten. “How much?”
The vendor frowned and looked around swiftly to see if
they were being watched. “Put it away, my son. Tuck it down deep, that’s the way. You show your scratch, you’re apt to lose the batch. Dips abound on market-ground.”
“What?”
“Never mind. No charge. Take it. Half of em get broken in
the back of my wagon when I drag em back to my store come
tenmonth. Mothers bring their little ’uns over and they try it but they don’t buy it.”
“Well, at least you don’t deny it,” Jack said.
The vendor looked at him with some surprise and then
they both burst out laughing.
“A happy boy with a snappy mouth,” the vendor said.
“Come see me when you’re older and bolder, my son. We’ll
take your mouth and head south and treble what we peddle.”
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Jack giggled. This guy was better than a rap record by the
Sugarhill Gang.
“Thanks,” he said (a large, improbable grin had appeared
on the chops of the cat in the mirror). “Thanks very much!”
“Thank me to God,” the vendor said . . . then, as an after-
thought: “And watch your wad!”
Jack moved on, tucking the mirror-toy carefully into his
jerkin, next to Speedy’s bottle.
And every few minutes he checked to make sure his sticks
were still there.
He guessed he knew what dips were, after all.
3
Two stalls down from the booth of the rhyming rug-vendor, a depraved-looking man with a patch askew over one eye and
the smell of strong drink about him was trying to sell a farmer a large rooster. He was telling the farmer that if he bought this rooster and put it in with his hens, the farmer would have
nothing but double-yolkers for the next twelve-month.
Jack, however, had neither eyes for the rooster nor ears for the salesman’s pitch. He joined a crowd of children who were staring at the one-eyed man’s star attraction. This was a parrot in a large wicker cage. It was almost as tall as the youngest children in the group, and it was as smoothly, darkly green as a Heineken beer-bottle. Its eyes were a brilliant gold . . . its four eyes. Like the pony he had seen in the pavillion stables, the parrot had two heads. It gripped its perch with its big yellow feet and looked placidly in two directions at once, its two tufted crowns almost touching.
The parrot was talking to itself, to the amusement of the
children—but even in his amazement Jack noted that, while
they were paying close attention to the parrot, they seemed neither stunned nor even very wondering. They weren’t like
kids seeing their first movie, sitting stupefied in their seats and all eyes; they were more like kids getting their regular Saturday-morning cartoon-fix. This was a wonder, yes, but
not a wholly new one. And to whom do wonders pall more
rapidly than the very young?
“Bawwwrk! How high is up?” East-Head enquired.
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“As low as low,” West-Head responded, and the children
giggled.
“Graaak! What’s the great truth of noblemen?” East-Head now asked.
“That a king will be a king all his life, but once a knight’s enough for any man!” West-Head replied pertly. Jack smiled
and several of the older children laughed, but the younger
ones only looked puzzled.
“And what’s in Mrs. Spratt’s cupboard?” East-Head now
posed.
“A sight no man shall see!” West-Head rejoined, and al-
though Jack was mystified, the children went into gales of
laughter.
The parrot solemnly shifted its talons on its perch and
made droppings into the straw below it.
“And what frightened Alan Destry to death in the night?”
“He saw his wife— growwwwk! —getting out of the bath!”
The farmer was now walking away and the one-eyed sales-
man still had charge of the rooster. He rounded furiously on the children. “Get out of here! Get out of here before I kick your asses square!”
The children scattered. Jack went with them, sparing a last bemused look over his shoulder at the wonderful parrot.
4
At another stall he gave up two knuckles of wood for an apple and a dipper of milk—the sweetest, richest milk he had ever tasted. Jack thought that if they had milk like that back at home, Nestlé’s and Hershey’s would go bankrupt in a week.
He was just finishing the milk when he saw the Henry
family moving slowly in his direction. He handed the dipper back to the woman in the stall, who poured the lees thriftily back into the large wooden cask beside her. Jack hurried on, wiping a milk moustache from his upper lip and hoping uneasily that no one who had drunk from the dipper before him had had leprosy or herpes or anything like that. But he somehow didn’t think such awful things even existed over here.