still wanted to see Richard, and as soon as he could: but
Buddy Parkins’s inviting him home had somehow unstrung
him. He could not just climb into another car and begin all over again on the Story. (In any case, Jack reminded himself, the Story seemed to be losing its potency.) The shopping mall gave him a perfect chance to drop out for an hour or two, especially if there was a movie theater somewhere in there—
right now, Jack could have watched the dullest, soppiest Love Story of a movie.
And before the movie, were he lucky enough to find a the-
ater, he would be able to take care of two things he had been putting off for at least a week. Jack had seen Buddy Parkins looking at his disintegrating Nikes. Not only were the running shoes falling apart, the soles, once spongy and elastic, had mysteriously become hard as asphalt. On days when he had to walk great distances—or when he had to work standing up all day—his feet stung as if they’d been burned.
The second task, calling his mother, was so loaded with
guilt and other fearful emotions that Jack could not quite al-
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low it to become conscious. He did not know if he could keep from weeping, once he’d heard his mother’s voice. What if she sounded weak—what if she sounded really sick? Could he
really keep going west if Lily hoarsely begged him to come
back to New Hampshire? So he could not admit to himself
that he was probably going to call his mother. His mind gave him the suddenly very clear image of a bank of pay telephones beneath their hairdryer plastic bubbles, and almost
immediately bucked away from it—as if Elroy or some other
Territories creature could reach right out of the receiver and clamp a hand around his throat.
Just then three girls a year or two older than Jack bounced out of the back of a Subaru Brat which had swung recklessly into a parking spot near the mall’s main entrance. For a second they had the look of models contorted into awkwardly elegant poses of delight and astonishment. When they had
adjusted into more conventional postures the girls glanced in-curiously at Jack and began to flip their hair expertly back into place. They were leggy in their tight jeans, these confident little princesses of the tenth grade, and when they
laughed they put their hands over their mouths in a fashion which suggested that laughter itself was laughable. Jack
slowed his walk into a kind of sleepwalker’s stroll. One of the princesses glanced at him and muttered something to the
brown-haired girl beside her.
I’m different now, Jack thought: I’m not like them anymore. The recognition pierced him with loneliness.
A thickset blond boy in a blue sleeveless down vest
climbed out of the driver’s seat and gathered the girls around him by the simple expedient of pretending to ignore them.
The boy, who must have been a senior and at the very least in the varsity backfield, glanced once at Jack and then looked appraisingly at the facade of the mall. “Timmy?” said the tall brown-haired girl. “Yeah, yeah,” the boy said. “I was just
wondering what smells like shit out here.” He rewarded the
girls with a superior little smile. The brown-haired girl looked smirkingly toward Jack, then swung herself across the asphalt with her friends. The three girls followed Timmy’s arrogant body through the glass doors into the mall.
Jack waited until the figures of Timmy and his court, visi-
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ble through the glass, had shrunk to the size of puppies far down the long mall before he stepped on the plate which
opened the doors.
Cold predigested air embraced him.
Water trickled down over a fountain two stories high set in a wide pool surrounded by benches. Open-fronted shops on
both levels faced the fountain. Bland Muzak drifted down
from the ochre ceiling, as did the peculiar bronzy light; the smell of popcorn, which had struck Jack the moment the
glass doors had whooshed shut behind him, emanated from
an antique popcorn wagon, painted fire-engine red and sta-
tioned outside a Waldenbooks to the left of the fountain on the ground level. Jack had seen immediately that there was no movie theater in the Buckeye Mall. Timmy and his leggy
princesses were floating up the escalator at the mall’s other end, making, Jack thought, for a fast-food restaurant called The Captain’s Table right at the top of the escalator. Jack put his hand in his pants pocket again and touched his roll of
bills. Speedy’s guitar-pick and Captain Farren’s coin nested at the bottom of the pocket, along with a handful of dimes and quarters.
On Jack’s level, sandwiched between a Mr. Chips cookie
shop and a liquor store advertising NEW LOW PRICES for Hiram Walker bourbon and Inglenook Chablis, a Fayva shoe store
drew him toward its long table of running shoes. The clerk at the cash register leaned forward and watched Jack pick over the shoes, clearly suspicious that he might try to steal something. Jack recognized none of the brands on the table. There were no Nikes or Pumas here—they were called Speedster or
Bullseye or Zooms, and the laces of each pair were tied to-
gether. These were sneakers, not true running shoes. They
were good enough, Jack supposed.
He bought the cheapest pair the store had in his size, blue canvas with red zigzag stripes down the sides. No brand name was visible anywhere on the shoes. They seemed indistin-guishable from most of the other shoes on the table. At the register he counted out six limp one-dollar bills and told the clerk that he did not need a bag.
Jack sat on one of the benches before the tall fountain and toed off the battered Nikes without bothering to unlace them.
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When he slipped on the new sneakers, his feet fairly sighed with gratitude. Jack left the bench and dropped his old shoes in a tall black wastebasket with DON’T BE A LITTERBUG stencilled on it in white. Beneath that, in smaller letters, the wastebasket read The earth is our only home.
Jack began to move aimlessly through the long lower ar-
cade of the mall, searching for the telephones. At the popcorn wagon he parted with fifty cents and was handed a quart-size tub of fresh popcorn glistening with grease. The middle-aged man in a bowler hat, a walrus moustache, and sleeve garters who sold him the popcorn told him that the pay phones were
around a corner next to 31 Flavors, upstairs. The man ges-
tured vaguely toward the nearest escalator.
Scooping the popcorn into his mouth, Jack rode up behind
a woman in her twenties and an older woman with hips so
wide they nearly covered the entire width of the escalator, both of them in pants suits.
If Jack were to flip inside the Buckeye Mall—or even a
mile or two from it—would the walls shake and the ceiling
crumble down, dropping bricks and beams and Muzak speak-
ers and light fixtures down on everybody unlucky enough to
be inside? And would the tenth-grade princesses, and even arrogant Timmy, and most of the others, too, wind up with skull fractures and severed limbs and mangled chests and . . . for a second just before he reached the top of the escalator Jack saw giant chunks of plaster and metal girders showering
down, heard the terrible cracking of the mezzanine floor, the screams, too—inaudible, they were still printed in the air.
Angola. The Rainbird Towers.
Jack felt his palms begin to itch and sweat, and he wiped
them on his jeans.
THIRTY-ONE FLAVORS, gleamed out a chilly incandescent
white light to his left, and when he turned that way he saw a curving hallway on its other side. Shiny brown tiles on the walls and floor; as soon as the curve of the hallway took him out of sight of anyone on the mezzanine level, Jack saw three telephones, which were indeed under transparent plastic bubbles. Across the hall from the telephones were doors to MEN
and LADIES.
Beneath the middle bubble, Jack dialed 0, followed by the
area code and the number for the Alhambra Inn and Gardens.
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“Billing?” asked the operator, and Jack said, “This is a collect call for Mrs. Sawyer in four-oh-seven and four-oh-eight.
From Jack.”
The hotel operator answered, and Jack’s chest tightened.
She transferred the call to the suite. The telephone rang once, twice, three times.
Then his mother said “Jesus, kid, I’m glad to hear from
you! This absentee-mother business is hard on an old girl like me. I kind of miss you when you’re not moping around and