Authors: Peter Straub
'Can I see you for a second?'
'Any assistance,' Mr. Broome said, and followed the chief out into the center of the lot.
'Where's Del?' Tom asked. 'Did you see Del?'
'A
deceased?'
Broome said loudly, as if he had never heard the word.
The two firemen who had rushed past us earlier were coming out of the side door carrying a body on a stretcher.
'The label in his jacket says Flanagan,' the fire chief said.
'Flanagan is not deceased,' Mr. Broome said airily. 'Flanagan is very much with us. I helped him out of the auditorium myself.'
'Oh, no,' Tom said, but not in contradiction to the headmaster's lie. Mr. Fitz-Hallan and Mrs. Olinger, closely followed by Mr. Thorpe, were already at theambulance door. Four boys who had passed out in the smoke groaned from bunk-bed-like stretchers in the white metal interior. I heard a crash as the last of the field house collapsed. The boys watching yelled as they would at fireworks. Mr. Fitz-Hallan leaned over and gently lifted the top of the blanket. I could not hear the two or three soft words he uttered.
'Let these men get on with their work, Flanagan,' Mr. Broome shouted.
As they lifted the covered body into the ambulance, the slide rule in its charred leather holster slipped over the edge of the cot and bounced against the white steel.
Which is the last of the three images that stay with me from the first year at Carson — a composite image, really. Dave Brick's slide rule banging against the bottom of the ambulance doors, the boys cheering at the last gasp of the field house, Mr. Broome yelling impatiently: that was what all the ironic civility had come down to. A dead boy, a few shouts, a madman's yell.
Tom and I found Del sitting on the lawn at the front of the school. He was guarding the magic equipment, the bass, and Phil Hanna's drums, all of which he had managed to get out while Tom had been saving lives. He had watched the arrival of the fire trucks and the ambulance, but had not come down into the lot himself because he had been afraid that someone might steal Brown's bass. 'It seemed awfully important to him,' he said. 'And anyhow, I could hear everybody coughing and yelling, so I knew they were all right.' He looked at Tom's face, then mine. 'They are all right, aren't they?'
Tom sat down beside him.
22
Graduation
Four teachers, including Mr. Fitz-Hallan and Mr. Thorpe, stayed overnight in the hospital because of smoke inhalation; so did twenty-four boys. The morning edition of thecity's biggest paper bore the headline'society schoolHEADMASTER LEADS 100 BOYS TO SAFETY.'
'Freshman Lost,'
was the subhead. Nobody ever mentioned expulsion or theft again, as if the fire had solved that question. In any case, there was no one to whom to mention it: the rest of the year's classes were canceled, and teachers made up their final grades by averaging all the work up to the day of the fire. Many boys half-believed Laker Broome's story of saving most of the school single-handedly because the newspapers made a chaotic event seem clearer than it had been to any of those involved. But they remembered what Tom Flanagan had done; only the board of directors and most of the parents assumed that the newspapers were absolutely correct. They wanted to believe that the school's administration had behaved in a crisis the way they themselves would like to.
A news photographer snapped Mr. Broome's picture at the reception on the lawn after commencement. When we looked up the hill toward the Upper School we could see the enormous hole in the landscape where the Field House had been. Parents and students moved around on the grass, taking sandwiches from the long tables attended by the dining-room maids. I had just left my parents, who stood in a little group with Morris and Howie Stern and their parents near the impromptu stage where a member of President Eisenhower's last Cabinet had implored us to work hard and build a better America. I happened to be beside Mr. Broome when the photographer took his picture, and when the man walked off, Broome looked indulgently down at me. 'What do you think of our school?' he asked. 'You'll be a sophomore in a few months. That entails more responsibility.'
We looked at each other for a moment.
'You will all be great men. All of you.' Even the long creases in his face were different, less defined. Many years later I realized that he had been heavily tranquilized.
I said good-bye to him and went back to my friends and parents. Tom and his mother walked past, accompanied by Del and the Hillmans. In the middle of the crowd, even with a parent and godparents beside them, Tom andDel looked alone. Laker Broome stared straight through them and smiled at a tray of sandwiches.
'Remember?' Tom said in the Zanzibar. 'Of course I remember what we were talking about. We were working out the arrangements for me to go with Del to Shadowland. My mother didn't want me to fly, so we were going to take the train. It sounded like fun — getting on a train in Phoenix and taking it all across the country.'
'Why did you want to go?' I asked.
'Only one reason,' Tom said. 'I wanted to protect Del. 1 had to do it.'
He swiveled around on his bar stool and surveyed the empty room. Light from the windows fell like a spotlight on the stage at the far end. He did not want to look at me while he said the rest of it.
'I knew I couldn't keep him from going, so I had to go with him.'
He sighed, still watching the yellow ray of light on the vacant stage as if he expected to see a vision there.
'There was one thing I really didn't know. But should have. The school was Shadowland too.'
And for months, for nearly two years, in other bars or in hotel rooms, other cities, other countries, wherever we caught up with each other:
Let me tell you what happened then.
PART TWO
Shadowland
We are back at the foot of the great narrative tree, where stories cango . . .
anywhere.
Roger Sale,
Fairy Tales and After
ONE
The Birds Have Come Home
Del was quiet the whole first day of the trip. . . .
1
Del was quiet for the first day of their journey, and Tom eventually gave up trying to make him talk. Whenever he commented on the vast, empty scenery rolling past the train's windows, Del merely grunted and buried himself deeper in a two-hundred-page mimeographed manuscript which Coleman Collins had mailed him. This was aboutsomething called the Triple Transverse Shuffle. Apart from grunts, his only remark about the desert landscape was, 'Looks like a million cowboy hats.'
During this time Tom read a paperback Rex Stout mystery, walked through the cars looking at the other passengers — a lot of old people and young women with babies around whom buzzed talkative soldiers with drawling, suntanned accents. He inspected the bar and dining car. He sat in the observation bubble. There the desert seemed to engulf everything, changing colors as the day and the train advanced. It moved through yellow and orange to gold and red, and in the instant before twilight threw blue and gray over the long distances, flamed — dyed itself a brilliant rose-pink and burst thunderously into brilliance. This endured only a heart-stopping second, but it was a second in which the whole world seemed ablaze. When Tom came hungry back to their seats, Del looked up from a page full of diagrams and said, 'Poor Dave Brick.' So he had seen it too.
Night came down around them, and the windows gave them back their faces, blurred into generalities.
'Booger,'
Tom muttered, almost in tears: the complex of feelings lodged in his chest was too dense to sort out. He had somehow missed Dave Brick in the smoky pandemonium of the auditorium, must have gone right past him half a dozen times and left him back there, behind them, in the country they were leaving a little more with each
click
of the wheels. The sensation of moving forward, of being propelled onward, was as strong as the sense of threat outside Del's house that noon before Del had risen into the air — it was the sense of being mailed like a parcel to a destination utterly unknown. He met his mild blurred eyes in the dirty window and saw darkness rocking past him in the form of a telegraph pole's gloomy exclamation point.
'You did a lot,' Del said.
'Sure,' Tom growled, and Del went back to his pages of diagrams.
After twenty more minutes in which Del fondled cards and Tom held tightly to his feelings, fearing that they would break and spill, Del looked up and said, 'Hey, it must be way past dinnertime. Is there anywhere to eat on this train?'
'There's a dining car up ahead,' Tom said. He looked at his watch and was startled to see that it was nine o'clock: they had been rocked past time, while they had been busy leaving
behind
and
back there.
'Great,' Del said, and stood up. 'I want to show you something. You can read it when we're eating.'
'I don't get any of that stuff you're looking at,' Tom said as they started walking down the aisle toward the front of the car.
Del grinned at him over his shoulder. 'Well, you might not get this either. It's something else,' leaving Tom to wonder.
Any stranger looking at them would have known that they went to the same school. They must have looked touchingly young, in their blue Gant shirts and fresh haircuts; they were unlike anyone else on the train. Cowboys with dusty clothes and broken hats and cardboard suitcases had climbed on at every stop. With names like Gila Bend and Edgar and Redemption, these were just brown-board shacks in the desert.