telling me how to act with waiters.”
“You’re just too classy for most waiters, that’s all,” Jack said, and thought that he might begin to cry with relief.
“Are you all right, Jack? Tell me the truth.”
“I’m fine, sure,” he said. “Yeah, I’m fine. I just had to
make sure that you . . . you know.”
The phone whispered electronically, a skirl of static that
sounded like sand blowing across a beach.
“I’m okay,” Lily said. “I’m great. I’m not any worse, any-
how, if that’s what you’re worried about. I suppose I’d like to know where you are.”
Jack paused, and the static whispered and hissed for a mo-
ment. “I’m in Ohio now. Pretty soon I’m going to be able to see Richard.”
“When are you coming home, Jack-O?”
“I can’t say. I wish I could.”
“You can’t say. I swear, kid, if your father hadn’t called you that silly name—and if you’d asked me about this ten minutes earlier or ten minutes later . . .”
A rising tide of static took her voice, and Jack remembered how she’d looked in the tea shop, haggard and feeble, an old woman. When the static receded he asked, “Are you having
any trouble with Uncle Morgan? Is he bothering you?”
“I sent your Uncle Morgan away from here with a flea in
his ear,” she said.
“He was there? He did come? Is he still bothering you?”
“I got rid of the Stoat about two days after you left, baby.
Don’t waste time worrying about him.”
“Did he say where he was going?” Jack asked her, but as
soon as the words were out of his mouth the telephone uttered a tortured electronic squeal that seemed to bore right into his head. Jack grimaced and jerked the receiver away from his
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ear. The awful whining noise of static was so loud that anyone stepping into the corridor would have heard it. “MOM!” Jack shouted, putting the phone as close to his head as he dared.
The squeal of static increased, as if a radio between stations had been turned up to full volume.
The line abruptly fell silent. Jack clamped the receiver to his ear and heard only the flat black silence of dead air. “Hey,”
he said, and jiggled the hook. The flat silence in the phone seemed to press up against his ear.
Just as abruptly, and as if his jiggling the hook had caused it, the dial tone—an oasis of sanity, of regularity, now—
resumed. Jack jammed his right hand in his pocket, looking
for another coin.
He was holding the receiver, awkwardly, in his left hand as he dug in his pocket; he froze when he heard the dial tone
suddenly slot off into outer space.
Morgan Sloat’s voice spoke to him as clearly as if good old Uncle Morgan were standing at the next telephone. “Get your ass back home, Jack.” Sloat’s voice carved the air like a
scalpel. “You just get your ass back home before we have to take you back ourselves.”
“Wait,” Jack said, as if he were begging for time: in fact, he was too terrified to know quite what he was saying.
“Can’t wait any longer, little pal. You’re a murderer now.
That’s right, isn’t it? You’re a murderer. So we’re not able to give you any more chances. You just get your can back to that resort in New Hampshire. Now. Or maybe you’ll go home in a bag.”
Jack heard the click of the receiver. He dropped it. The telephone Jack had used shuddered forward, then sagged off the
wall. For a second it drooped on a network of wires; then
crashed heavily to the floor.
The door to the men’s room banged open behind Jack, and
a voice yelled, “Holy SHIT!”
Jack turned to see a thin crewcut boy of about twenty star-
ing at the telephones. He was wearing a white apron and a
bow tie: a clerk at one of the shops.
“I didn’t do it,” Jack said. “It just happened.”
“Holy shit.” The crewcut clerk goggled at Jack for a split-
second, jerked as if to run, and then ran his hands over the crown of his head.
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Jack backed away down the hall. When he was halfway
down the escalator he finally heard the clerk yelling, “Mr.
Olafson! The phone, Mr. Olafson!” Jack fled.
Outside, the air was bright, surprisingly humid. Dazed,
Jack wandered across the sidewalk. A half-mile away across
the parking lot, a black-and-white police car swung in toward the mall. Jack turned sideways and began to walk down the
pavement. Some way ahead, a family of six struggled to get a lawn chair in through the next entrance to the mall. Jack
slowed down and watched the husband and wife tilt the long
chair diagonally, hindered by the attempts of the smaller children to either sit on the chair or to assist them. At last, nearly in the posture of the flag-raisers in the famous photograph of Iwo Jima, the family staggered through the door. The police car lazily circled through the big parking lot.
Just past the door where the disorderly family had suc-
ceeded in planting their chair, an old black man sat on a
wooden crate, cradling a guitar in his lap. As Jack slowly
drew nearer, he saw the metal cup beside the man’s feet. The man’s face was hidden behind big dirty sunglasses and beneath the brim of a stained felt hat. The sleeves of his denim jacket were as wrinkled as an elephant’s hide.
Jack swerved out to the edge of the pavement to give the
man all the room he seemed to warrant, and noticed that
around the man’s neck hung a sign handwritten in big shaky
capital letters on discolored white cardboard. A few steps
later he could read the letters.
BLIND SINCE BIRTH
WILL PLAY ANY SONG
GOD BLESS YOU
He had nearly walked past the man holding the beat-up old
guitar when he heard him utter, his voice a cracked and juicy whisper, “Yeah-bob.”
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Snowball Sings
1
Jack swung back toward the black man, his heart hammering
in his chest.
Speedy?
The black man groped for his cup, held it up, shook it. A
few coins rattled in the bottom.
It is Speedy. Behind those dark glasses, it is Speedy.
Jack was sure of it. But a moment later he was just as sure that it wasn’t Speedy. Speedy wasn’t built square in the shoulders and broad across the chest; Speedy’s shoulders were
rounded, a little slumped over, and his chest consequently had a slightly caved-in look. Mississippi John Hurt, not Ray
Charles.
But I could tell one way or the other for sure if he’d take off those shades.
He opened his mouth to speak Speedy’s name aloud, and
suddenly the old man began to play, his wrinkled fingers, as dully dark as old walnut that has been faithfully oiled but never polished, moving with limber speed and grace on both
strings and frets. He played well, finger-picking the melody.
And after a moment, Jack recognized the tune. It had been on one of his father’s older records. A Vanguard album called
Mississippi John Hurt Today. And although the blind man didn’t sing, Jack knew the words:
O kindly friends, tell me, ain’t it hard?
To see ole Lewis in a new graveyard,
The angels laid him away. . . .
The blond football player and his three princesses came
out of the mall’s main doors. Each of the princesses had an ice
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cream cone. Mr. All-America had a chili-dog in each hand.
They sauntered toward where Jack stood. Jack, whose whole
attention was taken up by the old black man, had not even noticed them. He had been transfixed by the idea that it was
Speedy, and Speedy had somehow read his mind. How else
could it be that this man had begun to play a Mississippi John Hurt composition just as Jack happened to think Speedy
looked like that very man? And a song containing his own
road-name, as well?
The blond football player transferred both chili-dogs to his left hand and slapped Jack on the back with his right as hard as he could. Jack’s teeth snapped on his own tongue like a
bear-trap. The pain was sudden and excruciating.
“You just shake her easy, urine-breath,” he said. The
princesses giggled and shrieked.
Jack stumbled forward and kicked over the blind man’s
cup. Coins spilled and rolled. The gentle lilt of the blues tune came to a jangling halt.
Mr. All-America and the Three Little Princesses were al-
ready moving on. Jack stared after them and felt the now-
familiar impotent hate. This was how it felt to be on your