The Running Boy (Excerpt)

[Copyright, etc. etc., by John E. Simpson]

It’s 1927, late on a mid-June morning. The sun hangs mid-sky; brilliant-white clouds frame it, staking out blue territories they guard jealously and strolling along only when your attention wanders.

A broad meadow, ringed with trees. Couple of rabbits, a fox. Birds seem hung from the ceiling on invisible wires. Time itself seems suspended.

Suddenly a small boy, no more than 11 years of age, bursts from the trees. He races across the field, leaving a jagged path behind him, grass and weeds momentarily flattened in his wake. His every-which-way straw-colored hair could have sprung from the meadow; except for the fact that he’s moving and moving fast, his slender build echoes the arc of a [variety of?] tree trunk at the meadow’s edge. Now with his feet pounding, his face ruddy, his breath rasping, the boy accelerates across the field, nearly falling twice on the uneven ground. His mouth gasps, almost like he’s laughing. But then he looks back over his shoulder towards the trees, eyes wide, and what looked like laughter becomes something else: terror.

The boy disappears over a hill. Trampled stalks of grass behind him spring tentatively upright. A bird whistles. A different bird on the opposite side of the meadow picks up the theme and they call back and forth for a moment and then their duet abruptly halts. The air, recently stirred into a light breeze with the boy’s passing, seems to pause to catch its breath. Time once again comes to a standstill.

At the exact point of the boy’s exit from the trees, bushes shake. They part, low to the ground.

And into the field strides a silvery seven-inch figure.

—-

Told, you, Robert. I said, I don’t, know.”

It’s just a few minutes later. Panting, the boy is speaking to an older and bigger boy, mid-teens. The young boy alternately holds his sides — he’s got one of those stitches — and bends over, placing his hands on his knees. Under his armpits and around his collar, sweat darkens the fabric: not even noon and it’s already hot as nobody’s business.

Robert sprawls at the top of five gray-painted wooden steps which lead up to a gray porch the breadth of a large white house at the end of Jericho Street. His strong upper body, well visible because he’s wearing only coveralls buckled at his shoulders, leans against a white column; down towards the base of the column the whitewash fades raggedly into bare wood, like it’s been leaned against often and over a long span of time. Brushing back a lick of black hair which has fallen down over his eyes, he grins down at the young boy. He shakes his head and says, “I were you, Beanie, I wouldn’t go tellin’ your Daddy ’bout this.” Beanie’s Daddy — a stern carpenter, wheelwright, and occasional field hand — has little patience with impractical childhood adventures. Something about the imagined scene — Beanie scuffling the dirt, looking down at his feet, mumbling, while his Daddy looms over him like a frowning Goliath — something about it strikes Robert as hilarious. He starts to chuckle, bends at the waist, outright starts to laugh, puts his hands over his knees, blunt strong fingers curled over the knees of his dungarees, cut short and pinned up where his legs end.

“Little metal man!” Robert hoots, now gasping himself, “Chasin’ Beanie! Outta the woods! Oooooh boy, no, don’t go tellin’ your Daddy!”

Beanie stands erect at the foot of the porch stairs, glaring up at Robert. “Wouldn’t’ve thought it was so funny it’d been you,” he says, but catches himself before adding, draggin’ them stumps across the field behind you.

So Robert doesn’t hear the words but he hears the spite, all right, and his laughter winds down. The grin still splays over his mouth but his eyes flash darkly. “Well now,” he says after a pause, “I s’pose you did the best thing you could think of — you come right to me, didn’t you?” He reaches out, contemplatively strokes the ruddy-veined leaves of a potted caladium on the porch. “So what’re we gonna do? What’re you gonna do, now you got your breath back?”

Beanie kicks at the bottom step of his friend’s porch. Thunk, thunk. “Well. I think I oughta, we oughta I mean, I think we oughta… investigate.”

Robert’s about to answer this when the magnolia bush at the foot of his front sidewalk suddenly rattles. Beanie jumps and turns around, almost tripping over his feet. Headed up the sidewalk in their direction, his feet shuffling, is no little metal man but instead just old Deacon Black. Not a real Deacon, that’s just his name, and not old either but an indeterminate sort of young, somewhere between eighteen and thirty-five. A little slow in the head but everybody agrees a nicer more hard-working young man they’d never seen, all things considered. Deacon Black tows behind him, as he usually does, a rusty banged-up Radio Flyer wagon heaped up with old rags.

Robert nods at him. “Mornin’, Deacon Black.”

“Hey old Deac,” adds Beanie.

Deacon Black stops, seems to be trying to remember something. His eyes scan the clapboard siding across the front of the house. A trickle of sweat runs down the side of his face. It’s already a hot one, all right, but Deacon Black is wearing — as on every morning — heavy corduroy pants and a dark green cardigan over his shirt, a cardigan he’d been tossed some winter day by a kindly old Christian lady who didn’t want him any closer but couldn’t stand to see a grown man or grown boy, whichever he was, couldn’t stand to see Deacon Black shivering. That was some years ago. The cardigan must’ve been pretty stylish in its day but now had big holes not just in the elbows but blotched at random across the front, back, and sleeves. Deacon Black doesn’t seem to mind. Suits his purposes, whatever they are, just fine.

Light breaks in Deacon Black’s face. “Good mornin’ to you, Robert,” he brings out finally, “and hey you, you Beanie.” Not taking his eyes from them but not quite looking at them either, smiling, he reaches behind him, crouching a bit, grabs hold of whatever rag’s at the top of the pile, then stands up straight and mops his face with it, mops the pink sunburned top of his prematurely bald noggin. The sweat’s gone now, in its place a lopsided slash of axle grease across his cheek.

In the silent moment which follows, Robert glances down at Beanie, who’s looking back at him. Beanie shrugs. Robert looks back at the man with the wagon, smiles himself, asks, “What you up to this mornin’.”

Deacon Black ignores him. “You got any rags today, Robert?”

“Naw, no rags. But say here, why don’t you come set over here with us for a minute, come visit.”

Beanie rolls his eyes but doesn’t let Robert see. He’s resigned to the fact of his older friend’s blind generosity, but still. Aren’t gonna be able to investigate nothin‘ with Deacon Black stuck to them.

Wagon in tow, Deacon Black grins and walks right up to the porch. Hikes up those corduroys, exposing bare pink hairy ankles in the four-inch gap between trouser hem and heavy brown field shoes. Plunks himself down right there on the bottom step, gets himself all comfortable maybe but he’s sitting erect, one hand on a knee and the other one still gripping the wagon handle as if it might wander off and continue its morning rounds without him. Still smiling, he stares at nothing at all off in the distance.

“You been all right, Deacon Black?” Robert asks. “What you been up to anyhow, ain’t seen you a few days now.”

Beanie frowns. He hunkers down at the end of Deacon Black’s wagon, plucks a rag from the pile. Doesn’t like the way this is going. Deacon Black in conversation is like talking to your own echo across a mile-wide valley: takes forever for the voice to come back and never adds anything to the social content of the occasion.

Just this once Deacon Black surprises him. “Well Robert,” he says, grinning but not turning to look up the stairsteps at Robert, “you ain’t seen me for a few days ’cause I ain’t been around. Workin’ on something.”

Coming from Deacon Black, this constitutes a virtual hailstorm of language and information, and Beanie winces under the force of it, rocks back on his heels. “Workin‘ on somethin’?” he says. “That right, Deacon Black? Somethin’ with them rags of yours you mean?”

Robert is making a face at Beanie over Deacon Black’s shoulder but Deacon Black himself doesn’t seem to mind. Continues to stare into space behind Beanie, still grinning his Deacon Black grin.

“Nawp, ain’t them rags neither.” Beanie and Robert wait a few moments but that seems to be the end of it. Deacon Black is rocking a little to and fro.

Beanie speaks first. “Well you know that’s nice Deacon Black,” he says. He’s starting to continue But you gotta move along now, when Robert cuts him off after the first couple words.

“Real nice,” Robert says. Beanie can scarcely believe his ears when Robert goes on, “Say listen Deacon Black, we’re workin’ on somethin’ too. Got a mystery, you wanna help?”

Deacon Black’s grin gets swallowed up in a one hundred percent blank puzzled look. Now he does turn to look back up at Robert. “What’s a… mis… a mis—-”

“Mystery. Miss, ter, ee. It’s like when you can’t figure somethin’ out but you got to, otherwise it takes your mind over and it won’t let it go. Keeps you tossin’ and turnin’ in your bed at night, inflames your thinkin’ so even when you do finally drop off it still comes walkin’ in your dreams. See?”

Beanie’s never been in Deacon Black’s busted-down shack out on the edge of town but somehow doubts it’s got anything recognizable as a bed. Couple-three wagonloads of rags maybe, heaped up on a dirt floor. He can scarcely even imagine Deacon Black sleeping, let alone what — or even that — he’d be dreaming. No: more likely just staring up at the ceiling in the dark with those spooky wobbly eyes of his. As for Deacon Black, he considers for a moment what Robert has said, still looking back up at him. He turns his head back facing down the sidewalk, still staring off into space. Beanie might just as well be invisible. Deacon Black’s jaw works back and forth a bit.

Finally he brings it out. “I know,” he says, and then he repeats it: “I know, Robert. I know exactly what you mean.”