“Pills!” Singer snatched at them.
“Don’t be an idiot, Sonny,” Gardener said.
“You made me look like a jerk,” Singer said in low but vehement tones to Jack as soon as they were on the staircase to the upper floors. These stairs were covered with a shabby rose-patterned carpet. Only the principal downstairs rooms of the Sunlight Scripture Home had been decorated, dressed up—
the rest of it looked rundown and ill cared for. “You’re gonna be sorry, I promise you that—in this place, nobody makes
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Sonny Singer into a jackass. I practically run this place, you two idiots. Christ!” He pushed his burning narrow face into Jack’s. “That was a great stunt back there, the dummy and his fuckin stones. It’ll be a long time before you get over that one.”
“I didn’t know he had anything in his pockets,” Jack said.
A step ahead of Jack and Wolf, Singer abruptly stopped
moving. His eyes narrowed; his entire face seemed to con-
tract. Jack understood what was going to happen a second before Singer’s hand slapped stingingly over the side of his face.
“Jack?” Wolf whispered.
“I’m okay,” he said.
“When you hurt me, I’ll hurt you back twice as bad,”
Singer said to Jack. “When you hurt me in front of Reverend Gardener, I’ll hurt you four times as bad, you got that?”
“Yeah,” Jack said. “I think I got it. Aren’t we supposed to get some clothes?”
Singer whirled around and marched upward, and for a sec-
ond Jack stood still and watched the other boy’s thin intense back go up the stairs. You, too, he said to himself. You and Osmond. Someday. Then he followed, and Wolf trudged after.
In a long room stacked with boxes Singer fidgeted at the
door while a tall boy with a passionless bland face and the de-meanor of a sleepwalker researched the shelves for their
clothes.
“Shoes, too. You get him into regulation shoes or you’re
gonna be holding a shovel all day,” Singer said from the doorway, conspicuously not looking at the clerk. Weary disgust—
it would have been another of Sunlight Gardener’s lessons.
The boy finally located a size thirteen pair of the heavy
square black lace-ups in a corner of the storeroom, and Jack got them on Wolf ’s feet. Then Singer took them up another
flight to the dormitory floor. Here there was no attempt to disguise the real nature of the Sunlight Home. A narrow corridor ran the entire length of the top of the house—it might have been fifty feet long. Rows of narrow doors with inset eye-level windows marched down either side of the long corridor.
To Jack, the so-called dormitory looked like a prison.
Singer took them a short way up the narrow hall and
paused before one of the doors. “On their first day, nobody works. You start the full schedule tomorrow. So get in here for
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now and look at your Bibles or something until five. I’ll come back and let you out in time for the confession period. And change into the Sunlight clothes, hey?”
“You mean you’re going to lock us in there for the next
three hours?” Jack asked.
“You want me to hold your hand?” Singer exploded, his
face reddening again. “Look. If you were a voluntary, I could let you walk around, get a look at the place. But since you’re a ward of the state on a referral from a local police department, you’re one step up from being a convicted criminal. Maybe in thirty days you’ll be voluntaries, if you’re lucky. In the meantime, get in your room and start acting like a human being
made in God’s image instead of like an animal.” He impa-
tiently fitted a key into the lock, swung the door open, and stood beside it. “Get in there. I got work to do.”
“What happens to all our stuff?”
Singer theatrically sighed. “You little creep, do you think we’d be interested in stealing anything you could have?”
Jack kept himself from responding.
Singer sighed again. “Okay. We keep it all for you, in a
folder with your name on it. In Reverend Gardener’s office
downstairs—that’s where we keep your money, too, right up
until the time you get released. Okay? Get in there now before I report you for disobedience. I mean it.”
Wolf and Jack went into the little room. When Singer
slammed the door, the overhead light automatically went on, revealing a windowless cubicle with a metal bunkbed, a small corner sink, and a metal chair. Nothing more. On the white
Sheetrock walls yellowing tape marks showed where pictures
had been put up by the room’s previous inhabitants. The lock clicked shut. Jack and Wolf turned to see Singer’s driven face in the small rectangular window. “Be good, now,” he said,
grinning, and disappeared.
“No, Jacky,” Wolf said. The ceiling was no more than an
inch from the top of his head. “Wolf can’t stay here.”
“You’d better sit down,” Jack said. “You want the top or the bottom bunk?”
“Huh?”
“Take the bottom one and sit down. We’re in trouble here.”
“Wolf knows, Jacky. Wolf knows. This is a bad bad place.
Can’t stay.”
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“Why is it a bad place? How do you know it, I mean?”
Wolf sat heavily on the lower bunk, dropped his new
clothes on the floor, and idly picked up the book and two
pamphlets set out there. The book was a Bible bound in some artificial fabric that looked like blue skin; the pamphlets, Jack saw by looking at those on his own bunk, were entitled The High Road to Everlasting Grace and God Loves You! “Wolf knows. You know, too, Jacky.” Wolf looked up at him, almost scowling. Then he glanced back down at the books in his
hands, began turning them over, almost shuffling them. They were, Jack supposed, the first books Wolf had ever seen.
“The white man,” Wolf said, almost too softly for Jack to
hear.
“White man?”
Wolf held up one of the pamphlets, its back cover showing.
The whole rear cover was a black-and-white photograph of
Sunlight Gardener, his beautiful hair lifting in a breeze, his arms outstretched—a man of everlasting grace, beloved of
God.
“Him,” Wolf said. “He kills, Jacky. With whips. This is one of his places. No Wolf should ever be in one of his places. No Jack Sawyer, either. Never. We have to get away from here,
Jacky.”
“We’ll get out,” Jack said. “I promise you. Not today, not
tomorrow—we have to work it out. But soon.”
Wolf ’s feet protruded far past the edge of his bunk.
“Soon.”
3
Soon, he had promised, and Wolf had required the promise.
Wolf was terrified. Jack could not tell if Wolf had ever seen Osmond in the Territories, but he had certainly heard of him. Osmond’s reputation in the Territories, at least among members of the Wolf family, appeared to be even worse than Morgan’s. But though both Wolf and Jack had recognized Osmond in Sunlight Gardener, Gardener had not recognized them—which brought
up two possibilities. Either Gardener was just having fun with them, pretending ignorance; or he was a Twinner like Jack’s mother, profoundly connected to a Territories figure but unaware of the connection at any but the deepest level.
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And if that was true, as Jack thought it was, then he and
Wolf could wait for the really right moment to escape. They had time to watch, time to learn.
Jack put on the scratchy new clothes. The square black
shoes seemed to weigh several pounds apiece, and to be
suited to either foot. With difficulty, he persuaded Wolf to put on the Sunlight Home uniform. Then the two of them lay
down. Jack heard Wolf begin to snore, and after a while, he drifted off himself. In his dreams his mother was somewhere in the dark, calling for him to help her, help her.
22
The Sermon
1
At five that afternoon, an electric bell went off in the hallway, a long, toneless blare of sound. Wolf leaped from his bunk, thudding the metal frame of the upper with the side of his
head hard enough to wake up Jack, who had been dozing,
with a jolt.
The bell stopped shrieking after fifteen seconds or so; Wolf went right on.
He staggered over into the corner of the room, his hands
wrapped around his head.
“Bad place, Jack!” he screamed. “Bad place right here and now! Gotta get outta here! Gotta get outta here RIGHT
HERE AND NOW!”
Pounding on the wall.
“Shut the dummy up!”
From the other side, a shrieking, whinnying, horsey laugh.
“You gittin some sunlight in you souls now, boys! And from
de way dat big fella soun, it sho feel fine! ” The giggling, whinnying laugh, too much like a horrified scream, came