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Wham!
The gangplank fell.
The people weren’t trapped on land, no.
He was trapped on water.
The steamboat shrieked away from the dock. The band played ‘Columbia, Gem of the Ocean.’
‘Goodbye, Douglas,’ cried the town librarians.
‘So long,’ whispered everyone.
Douglas stared around at the picnic put by in wicker hampers on the deck and remembered a museum where he had once seen an Egyptian tomb with toys and clumps of withered fruit placed around a small carved boat. It flared like a gunpowder flash.
‘So long, Doug, so long …’ Ladies lifted their handkerchiefs, men waved straw hats.
And soon the ship was way out in the cold water with the fog wrapping it up so the band faded.
‘Brave journey, boy.’
And now he knew that if he searched he would find no captain, no crew as the ship’s engines pumped belowdecks.
Numbly, he sensed that if he reached down to touch the prow he would find the ship’s name, freshly painted:
FAREWELL SUMMER.
‘Doug …’ the voices called. ‘Oh, goodbye … oh, so long …’
And then the dock was empty, the parade gone as the ship blew its horn a last time and broke his heart so it fell from his eyes in tears as he cried all the names of his loves on shore.
‘Grandma, Grandpa, Tom, help!’
Doug fell from bed, hot, cold, and weeping.
CHAPTER THREE (#ub400fd8f-08b5-5bf1-a6d3-28eb256f00b1)
Doug stopped crying.
He got up and went to the mirror to see what sadness looked like and there it was, colored all through his cheeks, and he reached to touch that other face, and it was cold.
Next door, baking bread filled the air with its late–afternoon aroma. He ran out across the yard and into his grandma’s kitchen to watch her pull the lovely guts out of a chicken and then paused at a window to see Tom far up in his favorite apple tree trying to climb the sky.
Someone stood on the front porch, smoking his favorite pipe.
‘Gramps, you’re here! Boy, oh boy. The house is here. The town’s here!’
‘It seems you’re here, too, boy.’
‘Yeah, oh, yeah.’
The trees leaned their shadows on the lawn. Somewhere, the last lawnmower of summer shaved the years and left them in sweet mounds.
‘Gramps, is—’
Douglas closed his eyes, and in the darkness said: ‘Is death being on a ship sailing and all your folks left back on the shore?’
Grandpa read a few clouds in the sky.
‘That’s about it, Doug. Why?’
Douglas eyed a high cloud passing that had never been that shape before and would never be that shape again.
‘Say it, Gramps.’
‘Say what? Farewell summer?’
No, thought Douglas, not if I can help it!
And, in his head, the storm began.
CHAPTER FOUR (#ub400fd8f-08b5-5bf1-a6d3-28eb256f00b1)
There was a great rushing sliding iron sound like a guillotine blade slicing the sky. The blow fell. The town shuddered. But it was just the wind from the north.
And down in the center of the ravine, the boys listened for that great stroke of wind to come again.
They stood on the creek–bank making water in the cool sunlight and among them, preoccupied, stood Douglas. They all smiled as they spelled their names in the creek sand with the steaming lemon water. CHARLIE, wrote one. WILL, another. And then: BO, PETE, SAM, HENRY, RALPH, and TOM.
Doug inscribed his initials with flourishes, took a deep breath, and added a postscript: WAR.
Tom squinted at the sand. ‘What?’
‘War of course, dummy. War!’
‘Who’s the enemy?’
Douglas Spaulding glanced up at the green slopes above their great and secret ravine.
Instantly, like clockwork, in four ancient gray–flaked mansion houses, four old men, shaped from leaf–mold and yellowed dry wicker, showed their mummy faces from porches or in coffin–shaped windows.
‘Them,’ whispered Doug. ‘Oh, them!’
Doug whirled and shrieked, ‘Charge!’
‘Who do we kill?’ said Tom.
CHAPTER FIVE (#ub400fd8f-08b5-5bf1-a6d3-28eb256f00b1)
Above the green ravine, in a dry room at the top of an ancient house, old Braling leaned from a window like a thing from the attic, trembling. Below, the boys ran.
‘God,’ he cried. ‘Make them stop their damned laughing!’
He clutched faintly at his chest as if he were a Swiss watchmaker concerned with keeping something running with that peculiar self–hypnosis he called prayer.
‘Beat, now; one, two!’
Nights when he feared his heart might stop, he set a metronome ticking by his bed, so that his blood would continue to travel on toward dawn.
Footsteps scraped, a cane tip tapped, on the downstairs porch. That would be old Calvin C. Quartermain come to argue school board policy in the husking wicker chairs. Braling half fell down the stairs, emerging onto the porch.
‘Quartermain!’
Calvin C. Quartermain sat like a wild mechanical toy, oversized, rusty, in a reed easy chair.
Braling laughed. ‘I made it!’
‘Not forever,’ Quartermain observed.
‘Hell,’ said Braling. ‘Some day they’ll bury you in a California dried–fruit tin. Christ, what’re those idiot boys up to?’
‘Horsing around. Listen!’
‘Bang!’
Douglas ran by the porch.
‘Get off the lawn!’ cried Braling.
Doug spun and aimed his cap–pistol.
‘Bang!’
Braling, with a pale, wild look, cried, ‘Missed!’
‘Bang!’ Douglas jumped up the porch steps.
He saw two panicked moons in Braling’s eyes.
‘Bang! Your arm!’
‘Who wants an arm?’ Braling snorted.
‘Bang! Your heart!’
‘What?’
‘Heart – bang!’
‘Steady … One, two!’ whispered the old man.
‘Bang!’
‘One, two!’ Braling called to his hands clutching his ribs. ‘Christ! Metronome!’
‘What?’
‘Metronome!’
‘Bang! You’re dead!’
‘One, two!’ Braling gasped.
And dropped dead.
Douglas, cap–gun in hand, slipped and fell back down the steps onto the dry grass.
CHAPTER SIX (#ub400fd8f-08b5-5bf1-a6d3-28eb256f00b1)
The hours burned in cold white wintry flashes, as people scuttled in and out of Braling’s mansion, hoping against hope that he was Lazarus.
Calvin C. Quartermain careened about Braling’s porch like the captain of a wrecked ship.
‘Damn! I saw the boy’s gun!’
‘There’s no bullet–hole,’ said Dr. Lieber, who’d been called.
‘Shot dead, he was! Dead!’
The house grew silent as the people left, bearing away the husk that had been poor Braling. Calvin C. Quartermain abandoned the porch, mouth salivating.
‘I’ll find the killer, by God!’
Propelling himself with his cane, he turned a corner.
A cry, a concussion! ‘No, by God, no!’ He flailed at the air and fell.
Some ladies rocking on the nearest porch leaned out. ‘Is that old Quartermain?’
‘Oh, he can’t be dead, too – can he?’
Quartermain’s eyelids twitched.
Far off, he saw a bike, and a boy racing away.
Assassin, he thought. Assassin!
CHAPTER SEVEN (#ub400fd8f-08b5-5bf1-a6d3-28eb256f00b1)
