lence for several miles. Finally he could bear it no longer, and he said, very quietly and while looking straight ahead, “Son, are you running away from home?”
Lewis Farren astonished him by smiling—not grinning
and not faking it, but actually smiling. He thought the whole notion of running away from home was funny. It tickled him.
The boy glanced at him a fraction of a second after Buddy
had looked sideways, and their eyes met.
For a second, for two seconds, three . . . for however long that moment lasted, Buddy Parkins saw that this unwashed
boy sitting beside him was beautiful. He would have thought himself incapable of using that word to describe any male human being above the age of nine months, but underneath the
road-grime this Lewis Farren was beautiful. His sense of humor had momentarily murdered his worries, and what shone
out of him at Buddy—who was fifty-two years old and had
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three teenage sons—was a kind of straightforward goodness
that had only been dented by a host of unusual experiences.
This Lewis Farren, twelve years old by his own account, had somehow gone farther and seen more than Buddy Parkins,
and what he had seen and done had made him beautiful.
“No, I’m not a runaway, Mr. Parkins,” the boy said.
Then he blinked, and his eyes went inward again and lost
their brightness, their light, and the boy slumped back again against his seat. He pulled up a knee, rested it on the dashboard, and snugged the newspaper up under his bicep.
“No, I guess not,” Buddy Parkins said, snapping his eyes
back to the highway. He felt relieved, though he was not quite sure why. “I guess yore not a runaway, Lewis. Yore something, though.”
The boy did not respond.
“Been workin on a farm, haven’t you?”
Lewis looked up at him, surprised. “I did, yeah. The past
three days. Two dollars an hour.”
And yore mommy didn’t even take the time out from bein
sick to wash yore clothes before she sent you to her sister, is that right? Buddy thought. But what he said was “Lewis, I’d like you to think about coming home with me. I’m not saying yore on the run or anything, but if yore from anywhere around Cambridge I’ll eat this beat-up old car, tires and all, and I got three boys myself and the youngest one, Billy, he’s only about three years older’n you, and we know how to feed boys around my house. You can stay about as long as you like, depending on how many questions you want to answer. ’Cuz I’ll be asking
em, at least after the first time we break bread together.”
He rubbed one palm over his gray crewcut and glanced
across the seat. Lewis Farren was looking more like a boy and less like a revelation. “You’ll be welcome, son.”
Smiling, the boy said, “That’s really nice of you, Mr.
Parkins, but I can’t. I have to go see my, ah, aunt in . . .”
“Buckeye Lake,” Buddy supplied.
The boy swallowed and looked forward again.
“I’ll give you help, if you want help,” Buddy repeated.
Lewis patted his forearm, sunburned and thick. “This ride
is a big help, honest.”
Ten nearly silent minutes later he was watching the boy’s
forlorn figure trudge down the exit ramp outside Zanesville.
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Emmie would probably have brained him if he’d come home
with a strange dirty boy to feed, but once she’d seen him and talked to him, Emmie would have brought out the good glasses and the plates her mother had given her. Buddy Parkins didn’t believe that there was any woman named Helen Vaughan in
Buckeye Lake, and he wasn’t so sure this mysterious Lewis
Farren even had a mother—the boy seemed such an orphan,
off on a vast errand. Buddy watched until the boy was taken by the curve of the off-ramp, and he was staring out at space and the enormous yellow-and-purple sign of a shopping mall.
For a second he thought of jumping out of the car and run-
ning after the kid, trying to get him back . . . and then he had a moment of recall of a crowded, smokey scene on the six-o’clock news. Angola, New York. Some disaster too small to
be reported more than once, that was what had happened in
Angola; one of those little tragedies the world shovels under a mountain of newsprint. All Buddy could catch, in this short, probably flawed moment of memory, was a picture of girders
strewn like giant straws over battered cars, jutting up out of a fuming hole in the ground—a hole that might lead down into
hell. Buddy Parkins looked once more at the empty place on
the road where the boy had been, and then stamped on his
clutch and dropped the old car into low.
3
Buddy Parkins’s memory was more accurate than he imag-
ined. If he could have seen the first page of the month-old Angola Herald “Lewis Farren,” that enigmatic boy, had been holding so protectively yet fearfully beneath his arm, these are the words he would have read:
FREAK EARTHQUAKE KILLS 5
by Herald staff reporter Joseph Gargan
Work on the Rainbird Towers, intended to be Angola’s
tallest and most luxurious condominium development
and still six months from completion, was tragically
halted yesterday as an unprecedented earth tremor col-
lapsed the structure of the building, burying many con-
struction workers beneath the rubble. Five bodies have
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been retrieved from the ruins of the proposed condo-
minium, and two other workers have not yet been found
but are presumed dead. All seven workers were welders
and fitters in the employ of Speiser Construction, and
all were on the girders of the building’s top two floors at the time of the incident.
Yesterday’s tremor was the first earthquake in An-
gola’s recorded history. Armin Van Pelt of New York
University’s Geology Department, contacted today by
telephone, described the fatal quake as a “seismic bub-
ble.” Representatives of the State Safety Commission
are continuing their examinations of the site, as is a
team of . . .
The dead men were Robert Heidel, twenty-three; Thomas
Thielke, thirty-four; Jerome Wild, forty-eight; Michael Ha-
gen, twenty-nine; and Bruce Davey, thirty-nine. The two
men still missing were Arnold Schulkamp, fifty-four, and
Theodore Rasmussen, forty-three. Jack no longer had to look at the newspaper’s front page to remember their names. The
first earthquake in the history of Angola, New York, had occurred on the day he had flipped away from the Western Road and landed on the town’s border. Part of Jack Sawyer wished that he could have gone home with big kindly Buddy Parkins, eaten dinner around the table in the kitchen with the Parkins family—boiled beef and deep-dish apple pie—and then snug-gled into the Parkinses’ guest bed and pulled the homemade
quilt up over his head. And not moved, except toward the
table, for four or five days. But part of the trouble was that he saw that knotty-pine kitchen table heaped with crumbly
cheese, and on the other side of the table a mouse-hole was cut into a giant baseboard; and from holes in the jeans of the three Parkins boys protruded thin long tails. Who plays these Jerry Bledsoe changes, Daddy? Heidel, Thielke, Wild, Hagen, Davey; Schulkamp and Rasmussen. Those Jerry changes? He knew who played them.
4
The huge yellow-and-purple sign reading BUCKEYE MALL
floated ahead of Jack as he came around the final curve of the
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off-ramp, drifted past his shoulder and reappeared on his
other side, at which point he could finally see that it was erected on a tripod of tall yellow poles in the shopping-center parking lot. The mall itself was a futuristic assemblage of ochre-colored buildings that seemed to be windowless—a
second later, Jack realized that the mall was covered, and
what he was seeing was only the illusion of separate build-
ings. He put his hand in his pocket and fingered the tight roll of twenty-three single dollar bills which was his earthly fortune.
In the cool sunlight of an early autumn afternoon, Jack
sprinted across the street toward the mall’s parking lot.
If it had not been for his conversation with Buddy Parkins, Jack would very likely have stayed on U.S. 40 and tried to
cover another fifty miles—he wanted to get to Illinois, where Richard Sloat was, in the next two or three days. The thought of seeing his friend Richard again had kept him going during the weary days of nonstop work on Elbert Palamountain’s
farm: the image of spectacled, serious-faced Richard Sloat in his room at Thayer School, in Springfield, Illinois, had fueled him as much as Mrs. Palamountain’s generous meals. Jack