Lost in the Funhouse (7 page)

This afternoon he had meant to tell her the truth of the matter in an off-hand way with a certain sigh that he could hear clearly in his fancy, but in the telling his sigh stuck in his throat, and such a hurt came there that he remarked to himself: “This
is what they mean when they say they have
a lump in their throat.
”

Two mischances had disgraced him on the way from school. Half through Scylla and Charybdis, on the Scylla side, he had heard a buzzing just behind his hip, which taking for a bee he had spun round in mortal alarm and flailed at. No bee was there, but at once the buzzing recurred behind him. Again he wheeled about—was the creature in his pocket!—and took quick leaps forward; when the bee only buzzed more menacingly, he sprinted to the corner, heedless of what certain classmates might think. He had to wait for passing traffic, and observed that as he slowed and halted, so did the buzzing. It was the loose chain of his own jacknife had undone him.

“What’s eating you?” Wimpy James hollered, who till then had been too busy with Crazy Alice to molest him.

Ambrose had frowned at the pointing fingers of his watch. “Timing myself to the corner!”

But at that instant a loose lash dropped into his eye, and his tears could be neither hidden nor explained away.

“Scared of Kocher’s dog!” one had yelled.

Another sing-sang: “Sissy on Am-brose! Sissy on Am-brose!”

And Wimpy James, in the nastiest of accents:

There was no saving face then except by taking on Wimpy, for which he knew he had not courage. Indeed, so puissant was that fellow, who loved to stamp on toes with all his might or twist the skin of arms with a warty hot-hand, Ambrose was obliged to play the clown in order to escape. His father, thanks to the Kaiser, walked with a limp famous among the schoolboys of East Dorset, scores of whom had been chastized for mocking it; but none could imitate that walk as could his son. Ambrose stiffened his leg so, hunched his shoulders and pumped his arms,
frowned and bobbed with every step—the very image of the Old Man! Just so, when the highway cleared, he had borne down upon his house as might a gimpy robin on a worm, or his dad upon some youthful miscreant, and Wimpy had laughed instead of giving chase. But the sound went into Ambrose like a blade.

“You are not any such thing!” his mother cried, and hugged him to her breast. “What you call brave, a little criminal like Wimpy James?”

He was ready to defend that notion, but colored Hattie walked in then, snapping gum, to ask what wanted ironing.

“You go on upstairs and put your playclothes on if you’re going down to the Jungle with Peter.”

He was not deaf to the solicitude in his mother’s voice, but lest she fail to appreciate the measure of his despair, he climbed the stairs with heavy foot. However, she had to go straighten Hattie out.

When vanilla-fudge Hattie was in the kitchen, Mother’s afternoon programs went by the board. Hattie had worked for them since a girl, and currently supported three children and a husband who lost her money on the horses. No one knew how much if anything she grasped about his betting, but throughout the afternoons she insisted on the Baltimore station that broadcast results from Bowie and Pimlico, and Ambrose’s mother had not the heart to say no. When a race began Hattie would up-end the electric iron and squint at the refrigerator, snapping ferociously her gum; then she acknowledged each separate return with a
hum
and a shake of the head.

“Warlord paid four-eighty, three-forty, and two-eighty …”

“Mm hm.”

“Argonaut, four-sixty and three-forty …”

“Mm
hm.
”

“Sal’s Pride, two-eighty …”

“Mmmm
hm!
”

After which she resumed her labors and the radio its musical selections until the next race. This music affected Ambrose
strongly: it was not at all of a stripe with what they played on Fitch Bandwagon or National Barn Dance; this between races was classical music, as who should say: the sort upper-graders had to listen to in class. Up through the floor of his bedroom came the rumble of tympani and a brooding figure in low strings. Ambrose paused in his dressing to listen, and thinking on his late disgrace frowned: the figure stirred a dark companion in his soul. No man at all! His family, shaken past tears, was in attendance at his graveside.

“I’ll kill that Wimpy,” Peter muttered, and for shame at not having lent his Silver King bike more freely to his late brother, could never bring himself to ride it again.

“Too late,” his father mourned. Was he not reflecting how the dear dead boy had pled for a Senior Erector Set last Christmas, only to receive a Junior Erector Set with neither electric motor nor gearbox?

And outside the press of mourners, grieving privately, was a brown-haired young woman in the uniform of a student nurse: Peggy Robbins from beside Crazy Alice’s house. Gone now the smile wherewith she’d used to greet him on her way to the Nurse’s Home; the gentle voice that answered “How’s my lover today?” when he said hello to her—it was shaken by rough, secret sobs. Too late she saw: what she’d favored him with in jest he had received with adoration. Then and there she pledged never to marry.

But now stern and solemn horns empowered the theme; abject no more, it grew rich, austere. Cymbals struck and sizzled. He was Odysseus steering under anvil clouds like those in
Nature’s Secrets.
A reedy woodwind warned of hidden peril; on guard, he crept to the closet with the plucking strings.

“Quick!” he hissed to his corduroy knickers inside, who were the undeserving Wimpy. If they could tiptoe from that cave before the lean hounds waked …

“But why are you saving my life?”

“No time for talk, Wimp! Follow me!”

Yet there! The trumpets flashed, low horns roared, and it
was slash your way under portcullis and over moat, it was lay about with mace and halberd, bearing up faint Peggy on your left arm while your right cut a swath through the chain-mailed host. And at last, to the thrill of flutes, to the high strings’ tremble, he reached the Auditorium. His own tunic was rent, red; breath came hard; he was
more weary than exultant.

“The truth of the matter is,” he declared to the crowd, “I’m just glad I happened to be handy.”

But the two who owed him their lives would not be gainsaid! Before the assembled students and the P.T.A. Wimpy James begged his pardon, while Peggy Robbins—well, she hugged and kissed him there in front of all and whispered something in his ear that made him blush! The multitude rose to applaud, Father and Mother in the forefront, Uncle Karl, Uncle Konrad, and Aunt Rosa beside them; Peter winked at him from the wings, proud as punch. Now brass and strings together played a recessional very nearly too sublime for mortal ears: like the word
beyond
, it sounded of flight, of vaulting aspiration. It rose, it soared, it sang; in the van of his admirers it bore him transfigured from the hall, beyond, beyond East Dorset, aloft to the stars.

For all it was he and not his brother who had suggested the gang’s name, the Occult Order of the Sphinx judged Ambrose too young for membership and forbade his presence at their secret meetings. He was permitted to accompany Peter and the others down to the rivershore and into the Jungle as far as to the Den; he might swing with them on the creepers like Tarzan of the Apes, slide down and scale the rooty banks; but when the Sphinxes had done with playing and convened the Occult Order, Peter would say “You and Perse skeedaddle now,” and he’d have to go along up the beach with Herman Goltz’s little brother from the crabfat-yellow shacks beside the boatyard.

“Come on, pestiferous,” he would sigh then to Perse. But indignifying as it was to be put thus with a brat of seven, who moreover had a sty in his eye and smelled year round like pee and old crackers, at bottom Ambrose approved of their exclusion. Let little kids into your Occult Order: there would go your secrets all over school.

And the secrets were the point of the thing. When Peter had mentioned one evening that he and the fellows were starting a club, Ambrose had tossed the night through in a perfect fever of imagining. It would be a secret club-that went without saying; there must be secret handshakes, secret passwords, secret initiations. But these he felt meant nothing except to remind you of the really important thing, which was—well, hard to find words for, but there had to be the
real
secrets, dark facts known to none but the members. You had to have been initiated to find them out—that’s what
initiation
meant—and when you were a member you’d know the truth of the matter and smile in a private way when you met another member of the Order, because you both knew what you knew. All night and for a while after, Ambrose had wondered whether Peter and the fellows could understand that that was the important thing. He ceased to wonder when he began to see just that kind of look on their faces sometimes; certain words and little gestures set them laughing; they absolutely barred outsiders from the Jungle and said nothing to their parents about the Occult Order of the Sphinx. Ambrose was satisfied. To make his own position bearable, he gave Perse to understand that he himself was in on the secrets, was in fact a special kind of initiate whose job was to patrol the beach and make sure that no spies or brats got near the Den.

By the time he came downstairs from changing his clothes Peter and the gang had gone on ahead, and even at a run he couldn’t catch up to them before they had got to the seawall and almost into the Jungle. The day was warm and windy; the river blue-black and afroth with whitecaps. Out in the
channel the bell buoy clanged, and the other buoys leaned seaward with the tide. They had special names, red nun, black can, and sailors knew just what each stood for.

“Hey Peter, hold up!”

Peter turned a bit and lifted his chin to greet him, but didn’t wait up because Herman Goltz hit him one then where the fellows did, just for fun, and Peter had to go chase after him into the Jungle. Sandy Cooper was the first to speak to him: they called him Sandy on account of his freckles and his red hair, which was exactly as stiff and curly as the fur of his Chesapeake Bay dog, but there was something gritty too in the feel of Sandy Cooper’s hands, and his voice had a grainy sound as if there were sand on his tonsils.

“I hear you run home bawling today.”

Sandy Cooper’s dog was not about, and Peter was. Ambrose said: “That’s a lie.”

“Perse says you did.”

“You did, too,” Perse affirmed from some yards distant. “If Wimpy was here he’d tell you.”

Ambrose reflected on their narrow escape from the Cave of Hounds and smiled. “That’s what
you
think.”

“That’s what I know, big sis!”

One wasn’t expected to take on a little pest like Perse. Ambrose shied a lump of dirt at him, and when Perse shied back an oystershell that cut past like a knife, the whole gang called it a dirty trick and ran him across Erdmann’s cornlot. Then they all went in among the trees.

The Jungle, which like the Occult Order had been named by Ambrose, stood atop the riverbank between the Nurses’ Home and the new bridge. It was in fact a grove of honey locusts, in area no larger than a schoolyard, bounded on two of its inland sides by Erdmann’s cornlot and on the third by the East Dorset dump. But it was made mysterious by rank creepers and honeysuckle that covered the ground and shrouded every tree, and by a labyrinth of intersecting footpaths. Jungle-like too, there
was about it a voluptuous fetidity: gray rats and starlings decomposed where B-B’d; curly-furred retrievers spoored the paths; there were to be seen on occasion, stuck on twig-ends or flung amid the creepers, ugly little somethings in whose presence Ambrose snickered with the rest; and if you parted the vines at the base of any tree, you might find a strew of brown pellets and fieldmouse bones, disgorged by feasting owls. It was the most exciting place Ambrose knew, in a special way. Its queer smell could retch him if he breathed too deeply, but in measured inhalations it had a rich, peculiarly stirring savor. And had he dared ask, he would have very much liked to know whether the others, when they hid in the viny bowers from whoever was It, felt as he did the urging of that place upon his bladder!

With Tarzan-cries they descended upon the Den, built of drift-timber and carpet from the dump and camouflaged with living vines. Peter and Herman Goltz raced to get there first, and Peter would have won, because anybody beat fat Herman, but his high-top came untied, and so they got there at the same time and dived to crawl through the entrance.

“Hey!”

They stopped in mid-scramble, backed off, stood up quickly.

“Whoops!” Herman hollered. Peter blushed and batted at him to be silent. All stared at the entryway of the hut.

A young man whom Ambrose did not recognize came out first. He had dark eyes and hair and a black moustache, and though he was clean-shaved, his jaw was blue with coming whiskers. He wore a white shirt and a tie and a yellow sweater under his leather jacket, and had dirtied his clean trousers on the Den floor. He stood up and scowled at the ring of boys as if he were going to be angry—but then grinned and brushed his pants-knees.

“Sorry, mates. Didn’t know it was your hut.”

The girl climbed out after. Her brown hair was mussed, her face drained of color, there were shards of dead leaf upon her coat. The fellow helped her up, and she walked straight off
without looking at any of them, her right hand stuffed into her coat pocket. The fellow winked at Peter and hurried to follow.

“Hey, gee!” Herman Goltz whispered.

“Who was the guy?” Sandy Cooper wanted to know.

Someone declared that it was Tommy James, just out of the U. S. Navy.

Peter said that Peggy Robbins would get kicked out of nurse’s training if they found out, and Herman told how his big sister had been kicked out of nurse’s training with only four months to go.

“A bunch went buckbathing one night down to Shoal Creek, and Sis was the only one was kicked out for it.”