Boy, Snow, Bird(61)
Sam went next, then Jerry, I think—I’m not sure of the order because I didn’t open my eyes—then Ruth, their footsteps promising that they’d be back in a few seconds. They didn’t come back. When Louis got up, I opened my eyes. I was on my own beside the brook and the splash of the water was like fast, soft hand claps, keeping time with my heart. I sat up and the flag rolled up around me. I didn’t pull it up around my shoulders, it tucked itself around them. I looked over my shoulder, hoping I’d see the others in the distance, perched up in the trees grinning ghoulishly. They weren’t there. But as I breathed I felt a hand crumpling my shirt, fingers and thumb spread wide across my back. My eyes were open, and I looked right at him, the owner of the hand. But I couldn’t see anyone. He was there all right, but somehow it was like trying to see all of the sky at once. That was nonsense, so I tried to turn and look at him again, but an arm crossed my other shoulder and held me still. He wasn’t playing rough, whoever he was; it was more like he was shy, or just teasing me.
I was still trying to decide whether it’s smarter to scream before you start getting scared when he touched his lips to the back of my neck. Five times, maybe more, each kiss a little lower down. Slow, light, soft. All I saw was red, white, and blue above us, the flag streaming high as fountain jets. When he stopped, I shuddered and was breathless and warm all over. The flag lay flat and after a few minutes I felt tough enough to run my hands along the cotton, checking, but nothing moved inside it.
It wasn’t Louis who kissed me. It was a boy, as far as I could tell. Those arms, still a little unsure of their own strength. I don’t know who he was. He smelled of lemon peel, and I don’t know any boys who go around smelling of lemon peel. Louis doesn’t need to know about it, either. I doubt those kisses were even meant for me. They must belong to Mom. You know when you put on someone else’s coat and old train tickets fall out of the pockets? I think maybe it was like that. Not really anything to do with me at all. Mom looked the flag over very closely when I brought it back to her, even held the seams up to the light. Once she was sure there was no damage she said I could borrow it anytime. I said thanks. And thought: But no, thanks. We were Whitmans. That was how I liked it—that n I sometimes add to my name doesn’t mean much after all, it’s just a frill—and that must have been how Mom liked it too, because she talks as if Flax Hill is where her memory begins. Whenever we’re out of town, she compares everything to Flax Hill. Parks, stores, fountains. If that changed, I’d really have to wonder why.
It was the following Saturday that a man with an un-American accent phoned the house and asked to speak to Boy Novak. “Sorry,” I said. “No Novaks around here.” I thought it was a prank call, somebody calling from “deepest Transylvania” to remind me that an ancient prophecy was supposed to come true tonight. There’d been a storm going on for hours—a dark sky with lightning jumping across it, and rain coming down so hard you couldn’t see exactly who was coming toward you on the street; it turned your friends into tall, damp figures scurrying around on secret business. Dad and Louis had decided it was perfect weather to grab a baseball glove and go play catch in the backyard. For everyone else the weather was right for staying home and making stupid phone calls.
“Who is this?” the man asked, in a hollow, B-movie-sorcerer voice. I told him it was the Queen of Sheba and hung up.
But that was really the way he talked. The next day Gee-Ma Agnes came round for breakfast and brought a pan of hominy pudding with her, brimming with lemons and cream. Phoebe had made it and it was so good that nobody even said anything when I licked my bowl. When Gee-Ma threatened to take me to church, Dad told her I’d go if she could catch me; it must’ve been the pudding that made him think it was all right to just give away a chunk of your daughter’s Sunday like that. Gee-Ma made a grab at me and I ran out of the house and along the riverbank with my hula hoop, a desperate heathen in polka-dotted rubber boots, yelling Keep laughing, Dad. You’re gonna pay for this. Gee-Ma was a lot faster than I’d expected, but she ran out of steam about ten steps away from a tree I’d planned to climb to escape her.
“I’m gonna pray for your soul, Bird Whitman,” she puffed. She bent over and put her hands on her knees, letting her breath find its way back to her.
“Don’t chase me, Gee-Ma,” I said. “I’m not worth it.” I threw my hula hoop into the air a few times until it found a branch to spin around. Then I scrambled up into the heart of that old tree. It was a linden tree, and it didn’t mind being climbed—its bark had little pegs in it, pegs that held steady beneath the sole of your foot. There’s a lot of privacy up there too, with the green leaves pouring down all around you. I was cold; the mist kept creeping in under my clothes. “It’s not natural to flee like that when you’re offered a chance to praise the Lord,” Gee-Ma said. “You come down from there!”
“I can’t, Gee-Ma. I’m stuck. Hey, look at all this mud.”
The rainstorm had swollen the water level. I forget how tall water can be until I see it standing above earth, lifting leaves and stones off the grass and floating them away. Gee-Ma stayed back because she didn’t dare get wet all the way up to her knees. My hula hoop was close by, but I didn’t start swirling it around my ankle until she realized she’d be late for church and went away. That’s what the man who’d phoned our house must have seen as he walked under the trees talking to himself in that B-movie voice of his (I heard him before I saw him). He must’ve been following us. He must’ve looked up and seen a hot-pink circle working its way from one end of a branch to the other, slowly, like it was searching for something. I knew he’d seen me because he stopped talking to himself. I think he was in the middle of a sentence, but he stopped. A second later he knocked the hula hoop into the mud. At first I thought he’d thrown a stone, but it was a walking stick he struck out with—he struck out more than once, more than twice, and by the time I realized that knocking my hula hoop out of the tree was only the first stage of his plan, he’d hooked the handle of the walking stick around my ankle and was pulling, pulling—