LaJo shrugs. “Fine. He ain’t going nowhere.”
Dusty kicks more dandelions. He wheels. “So where, huh? Where’s he going?”
LaJo shrugs. “How should I know?”
Dusty turns, arms outstretched. “Where is there to go to? … This is it.… Where else is there?” He points to the sky. “The moon? Is that where he’s going? The moon?” LaJo is picking dirt from his fingernails. Dusty jutjaws. “So how do you know all this anyway? Huh? How do you know he’s going away?”
“I didn’t say know. You did. I just think it. It reminds me of something.”
“Reminds you? What’s it remind you of?”
LaJo lets out a long breath. “The Story.”
Dusty picks his cap up from the dust. He takes special care replacing it. He is vaguely pleased to find, on this crazy day, that his head remains atop his neck. “Story? What story?”
LaJo snorts, doesn’t bother to answer. It’s a dumb question, as even Dusty knows. Because there is only one story. The one that comes out of the walnut shells. Sometime before the end of the first day, every Newbie discovers more than a tattoo on his or her stomach. It’s pockets. Pants with pockets. And in the right front pocket of every pair of pants is half a walnut shell.
There are no instructions. There is only eternal instinct, two voiceless commands:
Never throw away your shell.
At bedtime hold it to your ear.
When they do, they hear The Story.
THE STORY
IT IS A TALE OF HOKEY POKEY. Of The Kid. Of The Kid’s early days as a Newbie and a crybaby Snotsipper and his adventurous growth into a lisping Gappergum, an endlessly laughing Sillynilly, a Longspitter, a Groundhog Chaser and, finally, a Big Kid. By this time The Kid, like most Big Kids, no longer listened to The Story at night. But, as The Story goes, he carried his walnut shell everywhere he went.
Little kids never tire of The Story. Every night they hear it for the first time. Every night they are both horrified and thrilled by the ending. For in the end The Kid announces: I am going away.
The Hokey Pokers in The Story do not understand. Away to where? they say. To Great Plains? The Mountains?
Away from Hokey Pokey, The Kid says.
They laugh. No way!
Tomorrow I will be gone, he says.
Tomorrow? they say. What’s tomorrow?
There is no answer. There is only a growing dread, a conviction that something must be done. For they love The Kid—from Newbies to Big Kids. They don’t want him to go. When The Kid is the caller, boys and girls dance the hokey pokey together:
You put your right foot in,
You put your right foot out;
You put your right foot in,
And you shake it all about.
You do the hokey pokey,
And you turn yourself around.
That’s what it’s all about!
And then The Kid says, You will forget me.
That does it.
So they trick him. They lure him out to Thousand Puddles, to stomp and splash. One last time, they say. They tell him to lie down on the ground, they have a surprise for him. And then they attack him with tickles. No one, not even The Kid, can withstand a mass tickle attack. His laughter blows the fuzz off dandelions a half-mile away. But more important, he is helpless—and the attack goes into its second stage: mud. As The Kid helplessly howls, they cover him in puddle mud. They don’t stop until every inch of him is slathered in a thick coat of sludge. They back off and watch the mud dry and then harden in the sun. It happens quickly. They touch it. It’s like stone. The Kid, on his back, is pointing straight up at the sky. They haul him to an open spot between Tantrums and Hippodrome, a bare, dusty mini-desert inhabited only by hot-rodding trikers. They prop him up—and there he is today. The Kid. Pointing to who knows where. Some say he’s pointing to Forbidden Hut. Some say he’s the only one who knows how to get in. But now he’s not going anywhere.
Though little kids are horrified at the way The Story ends, at the same time they love it. It satisfies something deep inside them. If they had to use a word, they might say delicious. But in fact it sweetens them beyond the belly, beyond the reach even of the Hokey Pokey Man.
Big Kids know something little kids do not: The Story ends not with a period, but with a question mark. It’s as if there’s an ending beyond the ending, a suspicion that there’s more to The Story than the walnut shell is telling. The older you get, the closer you feel to the real ending—but you never quite get there. And so rumors fill in the blanks:
The walnut shell does finish The Story, but only after the listener falls asleep.
If you give the statue of The Kid a good whack, it will crack open and reveal a still-beating heart.
Under cover of darkness The Kid’s ghost oozes out of the statue and catches a ghost train out of Hokey Pokey.
The voice in the walnut shell belongs to your sleep monster.
Rumors and questions: kids suck the juice from them like syrup from a soaked hokey pokey. They fall asleep, some in favorite spots, some where they drop, shell in hand. Curiously, there is one question no one ever thinks to ask: How is it that when you wake up every morning, the walnut shell is back in your pocket?
AMIGOS
DUSTY LAUGHS, screeches. “It’s a story! It’s a fairy tale!”
LaJo shrugs. “Is it?”
Dusty is speechless. He looks around. There are no fuzzballs left to kick. “So what are you saying? Jack’s gonna turn into a statue?”
With his finger LaJo traces the letter J in the dust. “ ‘One day when he woke up things were different.’ ”
Dusty screeches. “Huh?”
LaJo traces an A in the dust. “You heard me.”
Dusty did hear, and now, as he stares at LaJo, he remembers. He’s heard the words before, hundreds of times. He may no longer listen carefully to his shell every night, but like every other Hokey Poker, he can recite The Story word for word. And there they are, at the start of The Kid’s last day: One day when he woke up things were different.
“So?” says Dusty.
LaJo ticks them off on his fingers. “So. Bike gone. Tattoo gone. Him crying. What we just saw with him and the girl. Different.”
Dusty swells defiantly. “Jack ain’t a story. Jack is Jack.”
LaJo traces a C in the dust. “ ‘Big Boy was gone.’ ”
Big Boy was gone too.
Big Boy: The Kid’s bike. As precious to him as Scramjet was to Jack.
Dusty gapes, blinks, gushes half a laughball. “Aw, c’mon, man … that don’t mean—”
“ ‘The Kid was not himself.’ ”
It’s right there, in The Story. For the first time in his life it strikes Dusty that these are the most chilling words of all: The Kid was not himself.
He watches LaJo trace the final letter in the dust: K. Dusty feels his heart borne off on an irresistible zephyr as he whispers the name of his friend, his Amigo—“Jack”—and from the far horizon of his soul, his heart calls back: … is not himself.
JACK
IS THERE WIND in a whistle?
Jack feels himself nudged along like tumbleweed across the dusty flats of Hokey Pokey. Until today Jack has steered his own way through this life. Each day has been a parade of decisions. Now I’ll saddle up and go riding with my Amigos. Now I’ll give Kiki a baseball lesson. Now I’ll skip stones across the creek. Suddenly, today, now is out of his hands. He’s at the mercy of some unseen force blowing him from moment to moment. He no longer goes to a place; he simply, helplessly, finds himself there. Tumbleweed.
Behind him he hears the familiar tick and whir of Scramjet’s wheels. Then her voice: “Hey, Jacko! Jacko!” He keeps walking. There are things he must do, though he’s not sure what. She circles him, leaning, carving tracks in the dust, squawking: “Jacko! Jacko!” He plods on. She circles, circles, closer with each pass. Each time she passes before him, he notices the ponytail flying from the hole in the back of her
baseball cap. This is not new. He’s noticed it before. And the yellow ribbon that bunches her toasted honeywheat hair as it streams from the cap—that’s not new either. What’s new is his eyes—he can’t take them off the ribbon. They see how it’s bowed like a shoelace. But not like a shoelace too, because the ribbon is so wide. He didn’t know ribbon could be so wide, so … ribbony. And yellow! He’s seen bananas and he’s seen lemons, but he doesn’t think he’s ever seen yellow as yellow as the yellow of that ribbon. It’s like the sun painted itself into a knot around her streaming hair. These new eyes of his, so used to watching the flight of a ball, now follow the fluttering tails of the golden bow.
Now, passing closer than ever, she reaches out and clips his cap—“Jacko!”—and it spins to the ground. He stops, picks it up, resumes his trek. She pulls up ten feet away, directly in his path, her eyes flashing, her grin wicked, waiting, daring, mocking, her foot on the pedal, poised to bolt. She passes from his sight as he detours around her. He feels a thump between his shoulder blades. “Chick-ken! Ba-bawlllk! Ba-bawlllk!” He walks on. Silence behind him. He discovers that his face is smiling.
JUBILEE
ANA MAE, who has been watching from a distance, rides up. “What happened?”
Jubilee’s puzzled eyes follow the retreating boy. “I don’t know.”
“What did he say?”
“Nothing.”
“Not even when you knocked his cap off?”
“Nope.”
“Didn’t even call you a name? He always calls you names.”
Jubilee shakes her head.
Ana Mae looks upward, giggles with fond remembrance. “The way he calls you girl? Makes it sound like a badword.”
“Not this time.”
Ana Mae fingerjabs. “At least he gave you a dirty look, right? Or spit at you? Remember that one time?”
Jubilee shakes her head. “Nuh. Thing.”
Ana Mae joins her friend staring after the boy. Her voice, even as it speaks, gropes for a handhold. “You took his bike. Ace … you took his bike.”
“Not really took,” says Jubilee. Time to tell the truth. “I woke up this morning and it was just”—she shakes her head, still not believing—“there.”
Ana Mae thinks on it, throws up her hands. “OK, fine, it was there. But you didn’t exactly give it back, did you?” She pokes Jubilee. “Did you?”
Jubilee’s stare is no longer puzzled, just empty. “No.”
Ana Mae walks her bike off a ways, stands and stares, loops back. She lightly bumps her front tire into Jubilee’s. “Ace?”
Jubilee is staring beyond the boy now, to the way things were. “Huh?” she says absently.
“Maybe he doesn’t hate you anymore.”
Jubilee does not seem to have heard. She blinks, turns to Ana Mae, stares, turns away, says nothing.
Ana Mae follows Jubilee’s gaze to the horizon. Thunder rumbles beyond the Mountains. Panic lays a cold finger on the back of her neck. “Jubilee? … Ace? …” She smooths out the shake in her voice. “You still hate him”—she swallows—“don’t you?”
She waits one eternity. Two. No answer. “Ace, you’re creeping me out. You still hate him, don’t you?”
The distant tootle of Hippodrome tints the silence. At last Jubilee’s lips slide into their famously wicked grin. “He’s a boy, ain’t he?”
KIKI
JACK IS SCARED. He doesn’t know what of.
Jack is thrilled. He doesn’t know why.
He tumbles on. He drains the last of his root beer hokey pokey. He crumples the paper cone.
He is here and he must do things but he doesn’t know what. He is here and he is going somewhere but he doesn’t know where.
Sayonara, kid.
He doesn’t know what and he doesn’t know where and he doesn’t know why, but that’s OK because he doesn’t need to know, just move, move. The force he has felt behind him now seems within, driving him: a second, tumbledown heart.
Kids call. “Hey, Jack! … Hey, Jack!”
He waves.
Tumbles.
Comes to Kiki.
Kiki is at The Wall. The Wall, about five spits long and a spit high, is made of brick. It is for bouncing things off of (tennis balls, soccer balls, junked tires, tin cans, dolls’ heads) or crashing things into (trucks, model airplanes, jawbreakers, cantaloupes, cantaloupe-filled wagons). Today, like most days, Kiki is bouncing a moldy green tennis ball off The Wall, catching it with his cheap scrap of a fielder’s glove. As soon as he spots Jack, he drops the tennis ball, grabs his black-taped baseball, tosses it. “Hey, Jack!”
Jack is already pulling Mr. Shortstop from his belt. They move away from The Wall. They take their positions, fall silently into the routine. The kid readies himself: tilted forward, balanced, fingers spread and twitching, ready for anything. Jack goes through the progression: ground balls, pop flies. And finally into the long windup for the skyscraper—and suddenly, not even thinking about it, Jack finds his right arm snapping a surprise ground ball at the kid. Only this time it’s no ordinary grounder. It’s an evil, hissing dust ripper that catches the kid totally off guard, caroms off the heel of his mitt, slams into his shoulder and skitters away.
The kid drops his glove, grabs his shoulder, squeals in pain. He looks at Jack, eyes brimming, lip trembling. Clearly he expects something from Jack: a comforting word, a gentle hand, an explanation. But all he gets is a single, dry question: “Surprised?”
The kid doesn’t trust his voice. He sniffles, nods.
“Why surprised?” Jack’s voice is calm, steady. “You’re supposed to be ready for anything, right? Didn’t I tell you a thousand times to be ready for anything?”
The kid nods, kneads his shoulder, winces.
“So you weren’t ready for anything, were you?”
The kid shakes his head.
“OK. So what’s the next thing you did wrong?”
The kid bleats: “I missed it.”
Jack smiles. “Wrong.”
Confusion piles onto shock and hurt. “Wrong?”
Jack wags his head. “You’re allowed to miss. Did I ever tell you you’re not allowed to miss?”
The kid thinks about it. He’s wondering if this is a trick question. His answer sounds like a question: “No?”
“No. Right. Nobody’s perfect. So, let’s try again—what did you do wrong?”
The kid is feeling better now. But he’s still stumped. “I don’t know.”
“I’ll give you a hint,” says Jack. “You’re still doing it.”
The kid is flummoxed. He’s ready to cry again.
“OK,” says Jack, taking pity, “look around you.” The kid looks around. “What do you see?”
He sees weeds and scraggly bushes and of course The Wall, but he knows none of these is the answer. Now he sees it. “The ball?” It’s sitting in the dust a spit and a half away.
Jack nods. “The ball. Right. And what’s it doing over there?”
The kid blinks, gropes. “I missed it?”
Jack nods. “You missed it. And what did you do after you missed it?”
Another tricky question. “Uh … nothing?”
“You gave up!” Jack says it so sharply the kid jumps. “You missed it and the ball rolled over there and you did not go running after it … did you?”
“No.”
“No. You gave up. You stood there like a big baby looking at your empty glove and crying like a baby—Oh boo-hoo boo-hoo I missed it—and while you’re feeling all sorry for your baby self because the big bad baseball didn’t bounce like you thought it would, the ball’s sitting over there in the dirt and the other team’s players are circling the bases and your team is now losing. Why? Because … You. Gave. Up.”
Jack wonders if he’s gone too far. Maybe. But these things need to be said—now.
The kid’s lip is trembling. He stares at Jack, silently pleading for more words, softer words. But Jack looks away. It’s in the kid’s hands now.
In his heart. Suddenly the kid darts for the ball, snatches it, fires him a strike.
Jack rolls the dusty black-taped ball in his fingers. “So, let’s try again. What did you do wrong?”
“I didn’t chase it.” The kid’s voice is steady.
“You just stood there going boo-hoo. You gave up.”
The kid barks: “I gave up!”
“You quit.”
“I quit!”
“From now on, when you make a mistake, you’re gonna chase the ball down—right? You’re gonna clean up your mess and not be a big boo-hoo baby—right?”
“Right!”
Jack cups his ear. “What?”
“Right!”
Jack whips another grounder at the kid, harder even than the last. It takes a bad hop and bounces off the kid’s chest, but this time the kid scrambles after it, plucks it, fires it back, the ball shedding yellow dust. He peppers the kid with more hard ones. He knows the kid won’t catch them. Heck, Jack himself probably couldn’t catch them. The kid is scared. Who wouldn’t be, ball coming at you that fast, badhopping off stones? But that’s not the thing. The thing is, the kid hangs in there. Frog-eyed terrified as he is of taking one in the chops, he holds his ground, he chases down every miss. No quitting. No boo-hooing.
Finally he rewards the kid with the skyscraper. The moment he slings it into the air, he knows it’s different from all the others. It rises majestically into the blue, arcing toward the sun. The kid just stands there gaping, glove at his side, as the ball dwindles to the size of a peppercorn before vanishing, a pupil in the golden eye that looks down on Hokey Pokey’s days. The kid shades his eyes, squints, readies himself for the catch. A posse of Snotsippers on trikes has stopped, gaping upward, scanning the sky for the ball, the ball that is not coming down. Jack wonders, What’s going on? But not for long, for he senses that whatever is going on, it’s just another strange thing in this strangest of all days.
He’s done now. He’s said the words to the kid, all of them. There’s only one thing left to do. He gazes fondly at the glove that cradles his left hand. He smells for one last time the sweet oiled leather. He kisses it. Gently he slips the disgraceful rag from the kid’s dangling hand. The kid, staring skyward in stupefied wonder, never notices. Jack slips Mr. Shortstop onto the kid’s hand, gives the kid a light rumptap and moves on.
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