1992
The dark shadow ran toward her somehow, though it was on wheels. She could see it moving up and down as if from footfalls; she imagined the sweating brow. But that couldn’t be. They could all hear its whine. The doors wouldn’t open and the engine wouldn't start. The car's intoxicated hostages were all too stunned to scream or maybe you just couldn't hear them above the call of the train. The train was a bull coming toward their red sedan, a bull that raged with the flattening force of tons of steel. And within the smallest second, they existed only in memory.
These cut threads of Andy, a popular woman from Three Peak, and her friends, was the kind of tragedy that is expected to change the flow of others' day to day. In those anecdotal stories, it is the impetus to help the grocer realize that he can't wait twenty years to be happy. He must ask that special waitress for a date. But in this town, the group funeral of thirty-somethings was nothing more than an event to attend. Perhaps the march of society itself depended on the citizens' stoic plans of the future, keeping the current disappointment at bay. Perhaps the town was unusual.
But Andy did have a little boy who was eight years old. His name was Sam and he had known all his mother's moods intimately and had loved her love. Alone, he wondered what the world looked like now. In a rapid turn from contentment, he no longer expected the future. This wasn’t conducive to planning and Sam was to do poorly in school for the rest of his stay in Three Peak, Idaho.
When he was sent to live with his father, Sam only needed to move three miles away. Father and son didn't know each other very well due to the frequent stints of Andy's ex-husband in jail and upwards. Sam's father wasn't an unusually mean or violent man, but he was feckless and often forgot to come home from the bar at night. So Sam read. Books and magazines, at first because they didn't have cable TV, and then because he thought of books as portable worlds that required no one's help or approval. Steinbeck was one of his favorites, and so was Stephen King.
Time passed at a repetitive crawl. The little boy didn't really need very much and his school was within walking distance from home. Once they got cable, the neighbor's daughter Tanya started to come over after school to do her homework with Sam. He didn't mind because she didn't speak much. Sometimes she annoyed him when she watched MTV and danced on the couch. Her teenage awkwardness embarrassed him. She had long hair that tended to tangle and pink plastic rimmed glasses. She was pneumatic in a growing sort of way. Sam thought her face looked very serious when she was studying; he liked her then and felt safe.
Tanya started bringing Sam books from her library at the high school. He didn't always like them, but he appreciated that she tried, and he read each one to the end. In one month he read six Babysitter's Club books, The Call of the Wild, the Tommyknockers, Ender's Game, 1984, Fahrenheit 451, Lord of the Flies, three Nancy Drew mysteries, and Island of the Blue Dolphins. From these, Sam learned an appreciation for women's intuition and the menstrual cycle and felt confused about why anyone ever thought to start smiling when imagination and life seemed so dark.
One day when Sam was reading and Tanya was studying for a test on the couch, she put down her book with a sigh and said, “Do you have any cards?”
“What kind of cards?” asked Sam.
“You know, regular playing cards, like for poker, or crazy eights.”
“I think maybe in my room. In a box with my mom’s stuff in it.”
“Oh, no that’s okay,” hesitated Tanya.
“Do you want to play cards?”
“Do you?”
“Yeah,” said Sam, running off to his room. He found the worn cards in their blue and white box that looked like something leaked on one side of it, and handed them to Tanya.
“What do you want to play,” asked Tanya.
“I only know ‘go fish’,” answered Sam.
“Sounds good.” Tanya dealt out seven cards to both of them and put the rest in a stack on the carpet between their cross-legged forms. They played two games as the daylight grew to dusk.
“How about I teach you poker. It’s a good life skill,” said Tanya.
“Okay,” agreed Sam.
That night, Sam heard a noise in the living room that didn't sound like the usual crashing of his father coming home from the bar. He heard what sounded like a girl yelping and his father talking angrily. Stepping gingerly from his bedside to the floor, he pushed off his forgotten book with a light splat. Sam tried not to breathe too loudly. He slowly opened his door just a little bit so that he could squeeze through and not make the door creak, and stepped into the hallway. Thinking it would make less noise and be more secret, he hunched down to the floor and crawled on the carpet to the end corner of the hallway. Peeking his head around the corner, he saw Tanya being thrust against the wall by his father, who seemed to be pushing her repeatedly into the wall and saying she was a dirty girl. Afraid that they were arguing and he wouldn't see Tanya again, Sam rushed at his father. With the force of the hit, he promptly landed on his behind while his father looked down at him in surprise.
----
That weekend, Sam went to stay with Nana, his father's mother. She lived in a clapboard house that was always entered from the laundry room in the back. At the left side of the house sat two acres of land farmed in plots by Nana and her daughter Carolyn. Watermelon, corn, pea pods, squashes, pears and tomatoes were marked out. An old school bus separated the house from the produce. Migratory pickers had slept in the rusted vehicle in the seventies when Nana's farm had been much larger.
Looking him up and down for the first meeting’s appraisal, Nana said, "Come on, I'm taking you shopping." Following her gaze, Sam looked down at his shoes, two inches of sock and then finally, the bottom of his jeans. She had a point, he looked ridiculous even by little boy standards. He followed her out to the beige pick-up truck parked on the street and she opened the door for him to hop in. Sunshine had been magnified by the front windshield and the hot, cracking leather seats burned his fingers as he steadied himself to budge into sitting position. The interior smelled of Nana and dust. As they drove the few miles to Wal-Mart, there was a general feeling of shabbiness in the yellowness of the Exxon signs and un-illuminated letters of the strip-mall shops passing by the windows. This was the town. Sam felt freer than he had since before his mother had died. He hadn't been outside a two street perimeter in months, but he hadn't noticed the time go by until now. Unexpectedly, he started to cry.
"We don't have to get clothes now if you don't want," said Nana. He continued to sob, unable to speak for a few minutes, and just when he thought he would be able to say something, a wail came from his mouth instead. Sam looked up at his grandmother with shock in his eyes, and she knew there was no magic word for him. They stayed in the cab of the truck, in the parking lot of the Wal-Mart, for two hours. When the light started to dim and the fluorescent lamps came on, Sam awoke groggily to see his grandmother facing out the front of the truck, her eyes boring steadfast into the windshield.
"Is it still open?" he asked. Nana turned without surprise to look at him and said, "Sure is, let's get you some proper things." They walked in hand in hand, calmed by the catharsis of the grief. And when they came out, Sam proudly owned two new pairs of shoes, one for play and one for work, as Nana said, five shirts, two pairs of pants, and a Walkman with two tapes: The Beatles' Yellow Submarine and something Nana didn't understand called Kriss Kross. And lots of underwear. You could almost see the layer of hope on their faces.
On the drive home, Sam resolved to be more adventurous. He didn’t want to feel like crying all the time, and in his books the problems were always solved by some kind of action by the hero or heroine. If he wanted something to change, he was going to have to act out his own story. It never occurred to the boy that anyone else would be his hero.
----
In the morning, after a good night’s sleep and a couple hours of daydreaming snuggled underneath the covers, Sam went downstairs for breakfast. He smelled the slight stench of boiling green beans.
“There he is, just in time for lunch,” said Aunt Carolyn.
“S’about time, we were gonna call in the doctor to make sure you weren’t ailing or dead,” said Nana, but turned quickly around to the stove when she realized that wasn’t the direction she wanted the boy’s mind to take. Her grandson didn’t notice, and just pulled up a chair and sat at the kitchen table, with his hair in stand-up tufts on the crown of his head.
After his cereal-Nana took pity and didn’t force the green beans on him- Sam asked if he could go play outside. Nana agreed in surprise. The little boy ran out the door, his hair still in light brown derangement. Once off the property he slowed to a walk, recognizing that he was going to have to make a decision about where to go next. The streets were bordered with yellow-green weeds poking up through the cement. For the first time, Sam wondered why his town was called Three Peak. It was as flat as a pancake, populated sporadically with dried scraggly trees and tall dead grass, with nothing peak-ish about it.
He got to the end of his street and stood at the crossroads of Granada and Alpine, optimistically named by pioneers from other corners of the world. He felt his quest beginning at last. A train called from somewhere to the west of him, and as he went left towards it, his heart began to pound.
----
Tanya woke up for school the next Monday with a heavy pressure between her eyeballs. She had been asleep since Sunday dusk, having exhausted herself crying. After raising her head slowly, she swung her legs over to the side of the bed and sat for awhile looking at a spot that wasn't there, fuzzing her setting. Her room was a large display case for unicorns; on her dresser, on her shelves, and on her wallpaper was every variation she had been able to find in her fourteen years.
"Silly animals," she said. "Umpa, umpa, umpity doo, I've got a present fo-or-or you," she sing-songed. She turned and looked into her dresser mirror. "Slut," she called.
School was getting to Tanya, and now she wasn’t sure she should have trusted her neighbour. It hadn’t felt as sexy as her dreams had led her to believe. Actually, she kind of wanted to vomit.
With many episodes of yelling and huffing and puffing, Tanya’s older sister and guardian convinced the girl to go to school. In second period, Tanya’s English teacher told the class that they were going to have school assembly, and mumbled something about not knowing what it was about, because teachers are always the last to know. She had the class line up and walk down the hall to the stairs and down to the first floor auditorium. When they got there, she directed the class to sit in the first three rows in the far right section according to a seating chart she was holding. Tanya sat herself in the furthest seat from the stage, but was still uncomfortable at being too close. She hated sitting next to the stage because she worried the whole time that the speaker would pick her for audience participation.
After the school was seated class by class, the lights dimmed and the stage presented its speaker. Tanya started forward as Sam’s father walked out on stage. He began to speak with hesitation, reading aloud from a piece of paper:
“Hello. I am here today to talk to you about staying in school. As a reformed convict, I know a lot about the dangers of running off the rails. I dropped out of high school at sixteen. I was more interested in cars and girls than in getting somewhere in life. By the time I was 20, I had been in and out of prison three times. But that year I was put away for five years in the pen. I missed my kid’s first steps. Today I work in construction or wherever I can. I am fully reformed, but have to make a new start at almost 30 years of age. If I had stayed in school, I could be a doctor today.”
“I don’t think they allow people like you to be doctors!” came a shout from the third row. He squinted into the darkness of the audience.
“Hey, I've done my time. I'm on show today for my parole, not to take your snot-nosed shit.”
But unlike the speaker, the audience could see who had shouted, because she was standing up in the corner of the third row. She moved to sit back down with her hand clasped to her mouth. She felt adrenaline make her want to double over and her face tingled with the rush of blood. Like a zombie, Tanya’s legs stood her back up and walked her down the aisle to the stairs of the stage, up the stairs and across the stage to the speaker and she looked him in the face. She was aware that the spotlights would make her look anything but glamorous and her face burned red with embarrassment, but she stayed steady. Her neck lengthened as if puppeted by some unknown force. She couldn’t move, mesmerized an inch from his face. Her English teacher ran up on stage and grabbed her arm.
“You insolent girl. Who do you think you are?” exclaimed the horrified teacher. She pulled Tanya back to the seats, but Tanya broke free of her and ran out of the auditorium and into the hallway.
----
On Wednesday, the doorbell rang at the front door, but the door had become so disused that it was merely a boarded entrance into the back of the living room. Nana sent Sam around the house to see who it was.
“Tell them I’m not home. Anyone I care about would know not to ring that bell!” puffed Nana.
Sam did as he was told and came back with a letter for a Mrs.Geneva Harmon.
“Nana, he gave me a letter, but I don’t think it’s for us,” said Sam, giving her the envelope.
Nana laughed, “Sam, this is me, what did you think my name was?”
“Nana,” he mumbled, head down.
“He’s a smart one,” sniped Aunt Carolyn, sitting at the table. Sam was getting tired of the sharp voiced woman and felt brave enough to give her a dirty look. She responded in kind.
“What nonsense is this?” called Nana into the air, looking at the opened letter.
“Slimy men with a tiny bit of power…monsters!” she cried.
Carolyn and Sam looked at her with wide eyes awaiting an explanation, but she walked out of the kitchen. She went straight to her bedroom and slammed the door, dropping the piece of paper to the kitchen floor in the flurry. Sam was closest and was the first to pick it up, but his aunt snatched it from his hands. She read it aloud:
“Notice to Property Owner of 420 Granada Road. Harper and Hawk are currently proposing plans for Interstate 84, including the easement from the land at above stated property. Please be advised.
Sincerely yours,
County Clerk Alan Deeben.”
Carolyn ran up to her mother. Sam, confused at most of what his aunt had read, sensed he could be of no help and went out the back door to head for his new retreat. He had found a place where he could truly be himself on his previous outing.
The sky had a laminated quality that was colored gray with shining white edges. When Sam walked down the hill he saw clear white beams touch the corner of his eye. He blinked at the floating pollen and focused on a long crack running through the middle of the road. Nana had told him they were made in the winter when the rain water that was trapped inside small cracks froze and overnight pushed apart the concrete. It reminded him of the way his chest felt sometimes, especially in the presence of Aunt Carolyn. He knew she was just bitter about being too fat for a man, but sometimes when he didn't realize he cared, he suddenly felt ripped open inside with desperation.
Something jerked through the dead grass on the side of the road and Sam stopped to look. He waited, eyes investigating the potential wonderland, and found something he’d been seeking for awhile: a friend. It was small dry toad. Sam named him Virgil without hesitation and placed him inside the pocket of his khaki shorts.
----
The kitchen table had a turquoise Formica top and triple-bevelled aluminium sides with rounded corners. Perhaps once flashy like a fifties diner, the turquoise was yellowed now, bleached and more speckled than it once was. The metal had been dulled and scratched enough to reveal particle board underneath. Sitting on top of the table was a salt shaker, a pepper shaker, a bottle of HP steak sauce and a spouted bottle of vinegar. Sitting at the table was Carolyn and her greasy plate of fried breakfast. Sam wasn’t feeling up to such an assault that morning and walked back up the stairs to go look for Nana. Carolyn called up to him, “A letter came today from your dad.” Sam retraced his steps back down the stairs to see Carolyn’s gloating face. “From prison,” she said, her smile broadening.
Sam was pretty sick of letters after yesterday’s fallout about the easement. Nana had stayed in her room making phone calls all day. That had left Sam alone with Carolyn if he wanted to watch television, so he had holed up with his books in his temporary room for the day. But his aunt had still come into his room and put her two cents in about how his eyes would go bad if he kept reading so much. He had noticed out loud that she didn’t have any friends.
Carolyn placed the envelope in front of her at the table. Her eyes bored into him with triumph. Sam decided that it was time she met his new friend Virgil.
Time spun out of control as Carolyn jumped up from her chair, scraping its legs along the kitchen floor in a staccato of low squeaks. She knocked over her extra-sweetened iced tea in the hysteria of Virgil and the letter from prison was soaked through. Sam saw all of this happen very slowly and his stomach ached with the anticipation of the domino reaction of events. His escape felt almost instantaneous, however, as he grabbed his toad and the liquid pulp that was the letter, and ran down the street. The look on Carolyn’s face told him he was running for his life.
There was a figure advancing on Sam from the railroad, too busy sniffling and shuffling through pebbles to notice the little boy. Within a few steps, Tanya was almost on top of Sam, who had developed a habit of saying nothing until he was noticed.
“Oh! Sam, I’m, I-,” she broke off, unable to make recognizable speech come out of her mouth. Her face was swollen, but her eyes looked like they could cry for another week as they entreated understanding from Sam’s quizzical face. “Sam! I’m sorry!”she finally yelped and buried her face in t-shirt. He didn’t know what to do. As far as he was concerned, there was nothing to be sorry for; he walked up to her and hugged her, his face turned to the side and buried in her hot stomach. They stood there, primally holding tight.
“Hey,” said Tanya after a few minutes, pulling away and looking down at the boy’s flushed face, “what have you been doing since…well, I mean, where are you living now?”
“I don’t know,” said Sam, looking seriously off into the distance with a precocious finger on his chin. Tanya tilted her head questioningly. “This letter came today, and Aunt Carolyn hates me, so I don’t know,” Sam explained, leaving out most of the sense of what he was trying to say. The girl didn’t seem to notice.
“I’m going camping,” she said, pointing behind her at the backpack she was wearing. Sam started to speak and Tanya nodded her head, guessing the question.
“Can I come?”
----
Sam followed Tanya in silence as they walked to a camping ground in some woods he hadn't heard of. The heat was getting uncomfortable and he hesitated before going further. “I need to feed Virgil,” he called to his guide. The runaway Girl Scout, Cadette level, turned around with her walking stick poised to hit the ground.
“Who is Virgil? Can I see him?” she asked, willing to accept whatever mechanism he had developed to deal with his family problems. Sam reached into his pocket and pulled out Virgil. Tanya leant forward, wiping sweat from underneath her glasses. “You can’t leave him in your pocket like that,” she said matter-of-factly.
“He likes it just fine,” replied Sam, feeling sheepish.
He had been worried that Virgil would escape and only now recognized that he hadn’t put any thought into his new friend’s living conditions. Virgil had been kept in pockets for almost two days.
“What do you feed him? There’s not much around here,” replied Tanya, looking to the sandy brush surrounding them.
“I fed him bits out of Nana’s garden yesterday. Bits of vegetables.”
“Well, I don’t think Virgil is going to like the plants out here. I bet he’ll eat a bug though!” she said, bending down and rubbing her hand through the dirt. She found a small bug and coaxed it into her grasp with a Trojan Horse finger. “How ‘bout this ladybug?” Sam wrinkled his nose up and stepped back from the proffered live sacrifice.
“But aren’t they lucky?” he protested.
“I’d say it’s lucky your toad isn’t dead yet. Are you going to feed him or not,” Tanya said, her patience depleted. “We need to set up camp before it gets dark.” The little boy was tired and hungry and thirsty and generally sad all over, but he had promised himself he wouldn’t cry.
“Give it to him,” he said and presented Virgil to Tanya in two cupped hands. Tanya dropped in the ladybug. Nothing happened. The wayward pair stood, heads bent, and watched the bored creatures ignoring each other. “He’s not eating her.”
“I think Virgil’s a vegetarian, Sam,” said Tanya gravely. “We’re going to have to find him food on the way.” He nodded thoughtfully in response and went to re-pocket the toad, but hesitated.
“What do I do with him…should I let him go?”
“I think that’s up to you. You’re a smart kid.”
“It doesn’t seem okay to leave him here with no food. I’ll carry him to the woods and let him go there,” he said. Tanya flipped her backpack off her shoulder, placed it on the ground and unzipped it. She took a folded brown paper lunch bag out from the jumble and handed it to Sam.
“My troop leader always says you can never have enough of these,” she explained. “Put him in there and he’ll be able to breathe and hop around.” Doing what he was told, the little boy was visibly relieved at the way his moral conundrum had ended and fell back into step behind his guide, his paper bag in hand. “If we walk quickly, we will get there in time to make dinner before the bears come!” she said as she sauntered ahead.
“What?!” Sam shrieked and chased after her.
By dusk, the tramping children had set up their tent and Tanya had sent Sam to gather kindling for the fire. The calm and ease she felt was some of the first in her life. There were no kids to point out her varying levels of weirdness or tangled hair or glasses. Camping, she could be in control of their survival without fear because she knew what she was doing; she had a sash full of ironed-on badges to prove it. During the journey, there had been a few unexpected moments of sharp body-memory from her encounters with Sam’s dad that left her with a shock of guilt and disgust. But she had known she could not dwell in such extreme emotions and the details of the events were starting to fall off into a void, leaving only a fat needle jab of memory that made her gasp from time to time. Sam returned with a good collection of small dry sticks for the fire.
They had hardly any funds, so their camp was necessarily hidden away from the designated camp fire areas and Tanya worried that she was going to have to break the Girl Scout rules for conscientious camping. She was confident that she had tried her best to find them a place within a small clearing, away from low branches, but Sam was worried that they were leaving little chance to be rescued in case they were attacked by a bear. Having forgotten that she had teased the boy about wild animals, Tanya focused on methodically making a criss-crossing triangle in Lincoln Logs fashion from the kindling and within minutes had successfully started a tiny fire. Sam, who was watching from a nearby log, breathed out so forcefully his stomach deflated and he slumped forward. If she saw his surprised relief, she didn’t let on. Everything was working out as she had planned it in ten full pages of her diary and her face glowed with self-belief. Sam had been a surprise, but they would have to worry about that in the morning. Now, it was time for dinner. From out of the backpack, Tanya carefully chose their canned dinner: green beans and beef stew.
Pulling out her camping cookware, she explained, “We can go fishing tomorrow in the daylight, but we need to be careful with our canned vegetables because there aren’t really any edible plants out here.”
Sam beamed and said, “That’s fine with me, I hate vegetables!”
But the little boy’s smile faded in conditioned response, as Tanya’s face sprung into a knowing babysitter’s lordly expression. “You have to start thinking about your health. If you get sick because you didn’t get enough vitamins, what will we do?” she pointed out. It dawned on Sam that the adventure he had just embarked on, though exciting, was very real. He was going to have to make some decisions. He sat, staring at patterns in the log to help him think.
“Did he hurt you?” he looked up and asked.
Tanya poked at her fire with a stick, sending up small popping sparks. The stew was coming to a boil and the cold green beans were drained and separated into the tin bowl and plate from her kit. Dusk was completely gone and the children were surrounded by darkness and lightning bugs. Inertia was heavy in Tanya’s mouth.
“Sam,” she paused and took so long to continue, she frightened the boy. “I’m leaving this place. I’m not coming back. You should probably go home…back to school. School is important.”
“You should be in school too, though!” protested the boy.
“I can’t. There are things. Things that you don’t know. I don’t have any friends. Except for Cherie, but she’s really Christian, if you know what I mean.” Sam didn’t, nor did he see why friends were such a big deal. All the kids in his class were obsessed with strange notes passed behind the teacher’s back and arguments and competitions surrounding freeze tag. That was his residual image of them, from what he could tell when he looked up from his books. There had been a stand-off between him and the kids in his elementary school over the past year. Only once was it broken when he’d made the biggest kid, Jon, so angry he’d surrounded Sam’s throat with his hand and threatened to kill him. It had been scary, but Sam hadn’t believed him. Jon’s older brother had been sniffing around a young girl in an alley Sam passed on his way home from school and Sam had calmly informed Jon that his brother was probably gay. He didn’t know why he’d done that.
He wanted to tell these things to Tanya, but knew he didn't know enough of the words in her personal vocabulary. The definitions wouldn't be the same for words like 'help' and 'beautiful'.
"I'm your friend," he said and Tanya believed him. She served up the soup.
----
Geneva sat alone at her kitchen table. She had just explained to Carolyn through clenched teeth that she needn't let everybody know all their business, and her jaw was hurting. The patience God had bestowed upon Geneva was running out. Working her way around the house, pulling weeds, she had caught Carolyn bent over and forcing her hot breath into the ear of the kneeling electricity company's meter-reader, complaining about the easement and her brother's ungrateful child. Geneva had been extremely close to slapping her daughter, who was three times her size.
She'd slapped Carolyn once, and had been immediately horrified. Carolyn had cried, "You and Daddy deserve each other!" Which was somewhat melodramatic. A sixteen year old, less corpulent Carolyn had stolen her mother's pearl necklace to buy drugs for a boy who'd promised to take her to the prom. But Geneva had always known she would have to work off the sins of her husband, and blamed herself for letting his nature influence her children. She certainly had no business emulating him.
Carolyn had been a scrawny baby and then a scrappy child thirty or more years ago. Practically a miracle to her mother, who had been maligned in her twenties with four miscarriages, Carolyn had not fulfilled anymore of anybody's wishes so far. She grew lazier with time, as her situation became more absolute in its desperation, and she expected her fellow humans to respect this with heavy doses of pity. They had a hard time complying and not understanding the intricacies of her nature, saw her as plain mean. She seemed to have been born that way. To the residents of Three Peak, her mother was a saint for putting up with her. Albeit a saint you got the feeling you shouldn't cross; Geneva was no martyr.
But at the kitchen table, as she sat alone and all of the pressure from reigned-in emotion turned her jaw-ache into a headache, she had a hard time seeing a way through the mess her life had become. She had given up her dreams and her beauty to the sun in return for a farm that would make a profit. But her children had become just as messed up as everyone else’s in town. Her once charming husband had grown bitter as a two-faced cop and eventually left her for a woman who wasn’t a floozy because she ‘had her own trailer’. They weren’t any better than the people on that Oprah show.
A roving preacher with a cantering English accent was standing on a wooden box, yelling to the crowd with a definite oratorical command.
“My new brothers and sisters! Beware of those uncaring brothers of Philadelphia: the Anglicans, who would have you taxed and me silenced! Did you leave your homes of oppression to be taken advantage of?”
Fourteen year-old Peter, Jr. spoke almost no English so he did not understand what the preacher was saying. But he did understand that he was angry. He looked up to his father in bewilderment and pointed out the red-faced man on his street pulpit.
“Don’t worry son, there will be plenty of friends here who speak our language.”
The bustle of the people, their determined looks staring into the distance at unknowable fortunes, frightened Peter, Jr. The boy, tall and dark, looked sceptically around at the swiftly passing men and women until he saw a sight he knew his father couldn’t explain with his customary platitudes about the future being full of everything. Surely not for these people, on their very own street stage: dark people who were bound together. Children younger than him. He felt that he had to put all his energy into remaining inside his body or the people of Philadelphia could and would scavenge his body parts to make their own creations.
