than a good, cheerful feeling as he walked alone up the Western Road with his shadow gradually growing longer behind
him. It did not occur to him that part of his emotional radiance might stem from the fact that hardly less than twelve hours before he had been a prisoner of Updike’s Oatley Tap (the blood-blisters from the last keg to land on his fingers were still fresh); that hardly less than twelve hours ago he had escaped—
barely!—some sort of murdering beast that he had begun to
think of as a were-goat; that for the first time in his life he was on a wide, open road that was utterly deserted except for him; there was not a Coca-Cola sign anywhere in view, or a Budweiser billboard showing the World-Famous Clydesdales; no
ubiquitous wires ran beside the road on either side or crisscrossed above it, as had been the case on every road Jack Sawyer had ever travelled in his entire life; there was not so much as even the distant rolling sound of an airplane, let alone the rolling thunder of the 747s on their final approaches to LAX, or the F-111s that were always blasting off from the
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Portsmouth Naval Air Station and then cracking the air over the Alhambra like Osmond’s whip as they headed out over the Atlantic; there was only the sound of his feet on the road and the clean ebb and flow of his own respiration.
Jeez, I feel good, Jack thought, wiping absently at his eyes, and defined it all as “cheerful.”
6
Now there was this tower to look at and wonder about.
Boy, you’d never get me up on that thing, Jack thought. He had gnawed the apple right down to the core, and without
thinking about what he was doing or even taking his eyes off the tower, he dug a hole in the tough, springy earth with his fingers and buried the apple-core in it.
The tower seemed made of barn-boards, and Jack guessed
it had to be at least five hundred feet high. It appeared to be a big hollow square, the boards rising on all sides in X after X.
There was a platform on top, and Jack, squinting, could see a number of men strolling around up there.
Wind pushed by him in a gentle gust as he sat at the side of the road, his knees against his chest and his arms wrapped
around them. Another of those grassy ripples ran away in the direction of the tower. Jack imagined the way that rickety
thing must be swaying and felt his stomach turn over.
NEVER get me up there, he thought, not for a million bucks.
And then the thing he had been afraid might happen since
the moment he had observed that there were men on the tower now did happen: one of them fell.
Jack came to his feet. His face wore the dismayed, slack-
jawed expression of anyone who has ever been present at a
circus performance where some dangerous trick has gone
wrong—the tumbler who falls badly and lies in a huddled
heap, the aerialist who misses her grip and bounces off the net with a thud, the human pyramid that unexpectedly collapses, spilling bodies into a heap.
Oh shit, oh cripes, oh—
Jack’s eyes suddenly widened. For a moment his jaw
sagged even farther—until it was almost lying on his breastbone, in fact—and then it came up and his mouth spread in a
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dazed, unbelieving grin. The man hadn’t fallen from the
tower, nor had he been blown off it. There were tonguelike
protrusions on two sides of the platform—they looked like
diving boards—and the man had simply walked out to the end
of one of these and jumped off. Halfway down something be-
gan to unfurl—a parachute, Jack thought, but it would never have time to open.
Only it hadn’t been a parachute.
It was wings.
The man’s fall slowed and then stopped completely while
he was still some fifty feet above the high fieldgrass. Then it reversed itself. The man was now flying upward and outward, the wings going up so high they almost touched—like the
crowns on the heads of that Henny Youngman parrot—and
then driving downward again with immense power, like the
arms of a swimmer in a finishing sprint.
Oh wow, Jack thought, driven back to the dumbest cliché he knew by his total, utter amazement. This topped everything; this was an utter pisser. Oh wow, look at that, oh wow.
Now a second man leaped from the diving board at the top
of the tower; now a third; now a fourth. In less than five minutes there must have been fifty men in the air, flying complicated but discernible patterns: out from the tower, describe a figure-eight, back over the tower and out to the other side, another figure-eight, back to the tower, alight on the platform, do it all again.
They spun and danced and crisscrossed in the air. Jack be-
gan to laugh with delight. It was a little like watching the water ballets in those corny old Esther Williams movies. Those swimmers—Esther Williams herself most of all, of course—
always made it look easy, as if you yourself could dip and
swirl like that, or as if you and a few of your friends could easily come off the opposite sides of the diving board in
timed choreography, making a kind of human fountain.
But there was a difference. The men flying out there did
not give that sense of effortlessness; they seemed to be ex-pending prodigious amounts of energy to stay in the air, and Jack felt with sudden certainty that it hurt, the way some of the calisthenics in phys ed—leg-lifts, or halfway sit-ups, for instance—hurt. No pain, no gain! Coach would roar if someone had the nerve to complain.
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And now something else occurred to him—the time his
mother had taken him with her to see her friend Myrna, who
was a real ballet dancer, practicing in the loft of a dance studio on lower Wilshire Boulevard. Myrna was part of a ballet troupe and Jack had seen her and the other dancers perform—
his mother often made him go with her and it was mostly boring stuff, like church or Sunrise Semester on TV. But he had never seen Myrna in practice . . . never that close up. He had been impressed and a little frightened by the contrast between seeing ballet on stage, where everyone seemed to either glide or mince effortlessly on the tips of their pointes, and seeing it from less than five feet away, with harsh daylight pouring in the floor-to-ceiling windows and no music—only the choreographer rhythmically clapping his hands and yelling harsh
criticisms. No praise; only criticisms. Their faces ran with sweat. Their leotards were wet with sweat. The room, as large and airy as it was, stank of sweat. Sleek muscles trembled and fluttered on the nervous edge of exhaustion. Corded tendons stood out like insulated cables. Throbbing veins popped out on foreheads and necks. Except for the choreographer’s clapping and angry, hectoring shouts, the only sounds were the
thrup-thud of ballet dancers on pointe moving across the floor and harsh, agonized panting for breath. Jack had suddenly realized that these dancers were not just earning a living; they were killing themselves. Most of all he remembered their
expressions—all that exhausted concentration, all that
pain . . . but transcending the pain, or at least creeping around its edges, he had seen joy. Joy was unmistakably what that look was, and it had scared Jack because it had seemed inexplicable. What kind of person could get off by subjecting himself or herself to such steady, throbbing, excruciating pain?
And pain that he was seeing here, he thought. Were they
actual winged men, like the bird-people in the old Flash Gordon serials, or were the wings more in the Icarus and Daedalus line, something that you strapped on? Jack found
that it didn’t really matter . . . at least, not to him.
Joy.
They live in a mystery, these people live in a mystery.
It’s joy that holds them up.
That was what mattered. It was joy that held them up, no
matter if the wings grew out of their backs or were somehow
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held on with buckles and clamps. Because what he saw, even
from this distance, was the same sort of effort he had seen in the loft on lower Wilshire that day. All that profligate investment of energy to effect a splendid, momentary reversal of
natural law. That such a reversal should demand so much and last such a short time was terrible; that people would go for it anyway was both terrible and wonderful.