“Sure,” said Douglas.
And then they were at the end of the line, the silver tracks, abandoned for eighteen years, ran on into rolling country. In 1910 people took the trolley out to Chessman’s Park with vast picnic hampers. The track, never ripped up, still lay rusting among the hills.
“Here’s where we turn around,” said Charlie.
“Here’s where you’re wrong!” Mr. Tridden snapped the emergency generator switch. “Now!”
The trolley, with a bump and a sailing glide, swept past the city limits, turned off the street, and swooped downhill through intervals of odorous sunlight and vast acreages of shadow that smelled of toadstools. Here and there creek waters flushed the tracks and sun filtered through trees like green glass. They slid whispering on meadows washed with wild sunflowers past abandoned way stations empty of all save transfer-punched confetti, to follow a forest stream into a summer country, while Douglas talked.
“Why, just the smell of a trolley, that’s different. I been on Chicago buses; they smell funny.”
“Trolleys are too slow,” said Mr. Tridden. “Going to put busses on. Fusses for people and busses for school.”
The trolley whined to a stop. From overhead Mr. Tridden reached down huge picnic hampers. Yelling, the children helped him carry the baskets out by a creek that emptied into a silent lake where an ancient bandstand stood crumbling into termite dust.
They sat eating ham sandwiches and fresh strawberries and waxy oranges and Mr. Tridden told them how it had been twenty years ago, the band playing on that ornate stand at night, the men pumping air into their brass horns, the plump conductor flinging perspiration from his baton, the children and fireflies running in the deep grass, the ladies with long dresses and high pompadours treading the wooden xylophone walks with men in choking collars. There was the walk now, all softened into a fiber mush by the years. The lake was silent and blue and serene, and fish peacefully threaded the bright reeds, and the motorman murmured on and on, and the children felt it was some other year, with Mr. Tridden looking wonderfully young, his eyes lighted like small bulbs, blue and electric. It was a drifting, easy day, nobody rushing and the forest all about, the sun held in one position, as Mr. Tridden’s voice rose and fell, and a darning needle sewed along the air, stitching, restitching designs both golden and invisible. A bee settled into,flower, humming and humming. The trolley stood like an enchanted calliope, simmering where the sun fell on it. The trolley was on their hands, a brass smell, as they ate ripe cherries. The bright odor of the trolley blew from their clothes on the summer wind.
A loon flew over the sky, crying.
Somebody shivered.
Mr. Tridden worked on his gloves. “Well, time to go. Parents’ll think I stole you all for good.”
The trolley was silent and cool dark, like the inside of an ice-cream drugstore. With a soft green rustling of velvet buff, the seats were turned by the quiet children so they sat with their backs to the silent lake, the deserted bandstand and the wooden planks that made a kind of music if you walked down the shore on them into other lands.
Bing! went the soft bell under Mr. Tridden’s foot and they soared back over sun-abandoned, withered flower meadows, through woods, toward a town that seemed to crush the sides of the trolley with bricks and asphalt and wood when Mr. Tridden stopped to let the children out in shady streets.
Charlie and Douglas were the last to stand near the opened tongue of the trolley, the folding step, breathing electricity, watching Mr. Tridden’s gloves on the brass controls.
Douglas ran his fingers on the green creek moss, looked at the silver, the brass, the wine color of the ceiling.
“Well . . . so long again, Mr. Tridden.”
“Good-by, boys.”
“See you around, Mr. Tridden.”
“See you around.”
There was a soft sigh of air; the door collapsed shut, tucking up its corrugated tongue. The trolley sc slowly down the late afternoon, brighter than the sun, tangerine, all flashing gold and lemon, turned a far con wheeling, and vanished, gone away.
“School busses!” Charlie walked to the curb. “Won’ even give us a chance to be late to school. Come get you a your front door. Never be late again in all our lives. Think of that nightmare, Doug, just think it all over.”
But Douglas, standing on the lawn, was seeing how it would be tomorrow, when the men would pour hot tar over the silver tracks so you would never know a trolley had e run this way. He knew it would take as many years as could think of now to forget the tracks, no matter how deeply buried. Some morning in autumn, spring, or winter he kn he’d wake and, if he didn’t go near the window, if he just lay deep and snug and warm, in his bed, he would hear it, faint and far away.
And around the bend of the morning street, up the avenue, between the even rows of sycamore, elm and maple, it the quietness before the start of living, past his house h would hear the familiar sounds. Like the ticking of a doe the rumble of a dozen metal barrels rolling, the hum of single immense dragonfly at dawn. Like a merry-go-round like a small electrical storm, the color of blue lightning, coming, here, and gone. The trolley’s chime! The hiss like a sc fountain spigot as it let down and took up its step, and starting of the dream again, as on it sailed along its way, traveling a hidden and buried track to some hidden and buried destination . . .
Kick-the-can after supper?” asked Charlie.
“Sure,” said Douglas. “Kick-the-can.”
The facts about John Huff aged twelve. are simple and soon stated. He could pathfind more trails than any Choctaw or Cherokee since time began, could leap from the sky like a chimpanzee from a vine, could live underwater two minutes and slide fifty yards downstream from where you last saw him. The baseballs you pitched him he hit in the apple trees, knocking down harvests. He could jump six-foot orchard walls, swing up branches faster and come down, fat with peaches, quicker than anyone else in the gang. He ran laughing. He sat easy. He was not a bully. He was kind. His hair was dark and curly and his teeth were white as cream. He remembered the words to all the cowboy songs and would teach you if you asked. He knew the names of all the wild flowers and when the moon would rise and set and when the tides came in or out. He was, in fact, the only god living in the whole of Green Town, Illinois, during the twentieth century that Douglas Spaulding knew of.
And right now he and Douglas were hiking out beyond town on another warm and marble-round day, the sky blue blown-glass reaching high, the creeks bright with mirror waters fanning over white stones. It was a day as perfect as the flame of a candle.
Douglas walked through it thinking it would go on this way forever. The perfection, the roundness, the grass smell traveled on out ahead as far and fast as the speed of light. The sound of a good friend whistling like an oriole, pegging the softball, as you horse-danced, key-jingled the dusty paths, all of it was complete, everything could be touched; things stayed near, things were at hand and would remain.
It was such a fine day and then suddenly a cloud crossed the sky, covered the sun, and did not move again.
John Huff had been speaking quietly for several minutes. Now Douglas stopped on the path and looked over at him.
“John, say that again.”
“You heard me the first time, Doug.”
“Did you say you were—going away?”
“Got my train ticket here in my pocket. Whoo-whoo, clang! Shush-shush-shush-shush. Whooooooooo . . .”
His voice faded.
John took the yellow and green train ticket solemnly from his pocket and they both looked at it.
“Tonight!” said Douglas. “My gosh! Tonight we were going to play Red Light, Green Light and Statues! How come, all of a sudden? You been here in Green Town all my life. You just don’t pick up and leave!”
“It’s my father,” said John. “He’s got a job in Milwaukee. We weren’t sure until today . . .”
“My gosh, here it is with the Baptist picnic next week and the big carnival Labor Day and Halloween—can’t your dad wait till then?”
John shook his head.
“Good grief!” said Douglas. “Let me sit down!”
They sat under an old oak tree on the side of the hill looking back at town, and the sun made large trembling shadows around them; it was cool as a cave in under the tree. Out beyond, in sunlight, the town was painted with heat, the windows all gaping. Douglas wanted to run back in there where the town, by its very weight, its houses, their bulk, might enclose and prevent John’s ever getting up and running off.
“But we’re friends,” Douglas said helplessly.
“We always will be,” said John.
“You’ll come back to visit every week or so, won’t you?”
“Dad says only once or twice a year. It’s eighty miles.”
“Eighty miles ain’t far!” shouted Douglas.
“No, it’s not far at all,” said John.
“My grandma’s got a phone. I’ll call you. Or maybe we’ll all visit up your way, too. That’d be great!” John said nothing for a long while.
“Well,” said Douglas, “let’s talk about something.”
“What?”
“My gosh, if you’re going away, we got a million things to talk about! All the things we would’ve talked about next: month, the month after! Praying mantises, zeppelins, acrobats,
