“Funny thing is It don’t feel like talking about grasshoppers.”
“You always did!”
“Sure.” John looked steadily at the town. “But It guess this just ain’t the time.”
“John, what’s wrong? You look funny . . .”
John had closed his eyes and screwed up his face. “Doug, the Terle house, upstairs, you know?”
“Sure.”
“The colored windowpanes on the little round windows, have they always been there?”
“Sure.”
“You positive?”
“Darned old windows been there since before we were born. Why?”
“I never saw them before today,” said John. “On the way walking through town I looked up and there they were. Doug, what was I doing all these years I didn’t see them?”
“You had other things to do.”
“Did I?” John turned and looked in a kind of panic at Douglas. “Gosh, Doug, why should those dam windows scare me? I mean, that’s nothing to be scared of, is it? It’s just . . .” He floundered. “It’s just, if I didn’t see these windows until today, what else did I miss? And what about all the things I did see here in town? Will I be able to remember them when I go away?”
“Anything you want to remember, you remember. T went to camp two summers ago. Up there I remembered.”
“No, you didn’t! You told me. you woke nights and couldn’t remember your mother’s face.”
“No!”
“Some nights it happens to me in my own house; scares heck out of me. I got to go in my folks’ room and look at their faces while they sleep, to be sure! And I go back to my room and lose it again. Gosh, Doug, oh gosh!” He held onto his knees tight. “Promise me just one thing, Doug. Promise you’ll remember me, promise you’ll remember my face and everything. Will you promise?”
“Easy as pie. Cot a motion-picture machine in my head. Lying in bed nights I can just turn on a light in my head and out it comes on the wall, clear as heck, and there you’ll be, yelling and waving at me.”
“Shut your eyes, Doug. Now, tell me, what color eyes I got? Don’t peek. What color eyes I got?”
Douglas began to sweat. His eyelids twitched nervously. “Aw heck, John, that’s not fair.”
“Tell me!”
“Brown!”
John turned away. “No, sir.”
“What do you mean, no?”
“You’re not even close!” John closed his eyes.
“Turn around here,” said Douglas. “Open up, let me see.”
“It’s no use,” said John. “You forgot already. Just the way I said.
“Turn around here!” Douglas grabbed him by the hair and turned him slowly.
“Okay, Doug.” John opened his eyes.
“Green.” Douglas, dismayed, let his hand drop. “Your eyes are green . . . Well, that’s close to brown. Almost hazel!”
“Doug, don’t lie to me.” “All right,” said Doug quietly. “I won’t.”
They sat there listening to the other boys running up the hill, shrieking and yelling at them.
They raced along the railroad tracks, opened their lunch in brown-paper sacks, and sniffed deeply of the wax-wrapped deviled-ham sandwiches and green-sea pickles and colored peppermints. They ran and ran again and Douglas bent to scorch his ear on the hot steel rails, hearing trains so far away they were unseen voyagings in other lands, sending Morse-code messages to him here under the killing sun. Douglas stood up, stunned.
“John!”
For John was running, and this was terrible. Because if you ran, time ran. You yelled and screamed and raced and rolled and tumbled and all of a sudden the sun was gone and the whistle was blowing and you were on your long way home to supper. When you weren’t looking, the sun got around behind you! The only way to keep things slow was to watch everything and do nothing! You could stretch a day to three days, sure, just by watching!
“John!”
There was no way to get him to help now, save by a trick.
“John, ditch, ditch the others!”
Yelling, Douglas and John sprinted off, kiting the wind downhill, letting gravity work for them, over meadows, around barns until at last the sound of the pursuers faded.
John and Douglas climbed into a haystack which was like a great bonfire crisping under them.
“Let’s not do anything,” said John.
“Just what I was going to say,” said Douglas.
They sat quietly, getting their breath.
There was a small sound like an insect in the hay.
They both heard it, but they didn’t look at the sound. When Douglas moved his wrist the sound ticked in another part of the haystack. When he brought his arm around on his lap the sound ticked in his lap. He let his eyes fall in a brief flicker. The watch said three o’clock.
Douglas moved his right hand stealthily to the ticking, pulled out the watch stem. He set the hands back.
Now they had all the time they would ever need to look long and close at the world, feel the sun move like a fiery wind over the sky.
But at last John must have felt the bodiless weight of their shadows shift and lean, and he spoke.
“Doug, what time is it?”
“Two-thirty.”
John looked at the sky.
Don’t! thought Douglas.
“Looks more like three-thirty, four,” said John. “Boy Scout. You learn them things.”
Douglas sighed and slowly turned the watch ahead.
John watched him do this, silently. Douglas looked up. John punched him, not hard at all, in the arm.
With a swift stroke a plunge, a train came and went so quickly the boys all leaped aside, yelling, shaking their fists after it, Douglas and John with them. The train roared down the track, two hundred people in it, gone. The dust followed it a little way toward the south, then settled in the golden silence among the blue rails.
The boys were walking home.
“I’m going to Cincinnati when I’m seventeen and be a railroad fireman,” said Charlie Woodman.
“I got an uncle in New York,” said Jim. “I’ll go there and be a printer.”
Doug did not ask the others. Already the trains were chanting and he saw their faces drifting off on back observation platforms, or pressed to windows. One by one they slid away. And then the empty track and the summer sky and himself on another train run in another direction.
Douglas felt the earth move under his feet and saw their shadows move off the grass and color the air.
He swallowed hard, then gave a screaming yell, pulled back his fist, shot the indoor ball whistling in the sky. “Last one home’s a rhino’s behind!”
They pounded down the tracks, laughing, flailing the air. There went John Huff, not touching the ground at all. And here came Douglas, touching it all the time.
It was seven o’clock, supper over, and the boys gathering one by one from the sound of their house doors slammed and their parents crying to them not to slam the doors. Douglas and Tom and Charlie and John stood among half a dozen others and it was time for hide-and-seek and Statues.
“Just one game,” said John. “Then I got to go home. The train leaves at nine. Who’s going to be ‘it’?”
“Me,” said Douglas.
“That the first time I ever heard of anybody volunteering to be ‘it,’ “said Tom.
Douglas looked at John for a long moment. “Start running,” he cried.
The boys scattered, yelling. John backed away, then turned and began to lope. Douglas counted slowly. He let them run far, spread out, separate each to his own small world. When they had got their momentum up and were almost out of sight he took a deep breath.
“Statues!”
Everyone froze.
Very quietly Douglas moved across the lawn to where John Huff stood like an iron deer in the twilight.
Far away, the other boys stood hands up, faces grimaced, eyes bright as stuffed squirrels.
But here was John, alone and motionless and no one rushing or making a great outcry to spoil this moment.
Douglas walked around the statue one way, walked around the statue the other way. The statue did not move.
It did not speak. It looked at the horizon, its mouth half smiling.
It was like that time years ago in Chicago when they had visited a big place where the carved marble figures were, and his walking around them in the silence. So here was John Huff with grass stains on his knees and the seat of his. pants, and cuts on his fingers and scabs on his elbows. Here was John Huff with the quiet tennis shoes, his feet sheathed in silence. There was the mouth that had chewed many an: apricot pie come summer, and said many a quiet thing or: two about life and the lay of the land. And there were the eyes, not blind like statues’ eyes, but filled with molten green- · gold. And there the dark hair blowing now north now south or any direction in the little breeze there was. And there the % hands with all the town on them, dirt from roads and bark-slivers from trees, the fingers that smelled of hemp and vine and green apple, old coins or pickle-green frogs. There were the ears with the sunlight shining through them like bright warm peach wax and here, invisible, his spearmint-breath upon the air.
“John, now,” said Douglas, “don’t you move so much as an eyelash. I absolutely command you to stay here and not move at all for the next three hours!”
“Doug . . .”
John’s lips moved.
“Freeze!” said Douglas.
John went back to looking at the sky, but he was not smiling now.
“I got to go,” he whispered.
“Not a muscle, it’s the game!”
“I just got to get home now,” said John.
Now the statue moved, took its hands down out of the air and turned its head to look at Douglas. They stood looking at each other. The other kids were putting their arms down, too.
“We’ll play
