The path turned and seemed to become less dark. What was happening? Orange mushrooms grew on top of a rotting stump, overhead the sky was gray-white and pale blue, and it seemed to Harter that a darkness was lifting from inside him, too. He had done a bad thing. He had never meant to hurt anyone, but he’d done it anyway. He had hurt Martha, and then the little husband, and now he would make amends. It seemed to Harter that if only he could find the right words, he might be the instrument of their reconciliation, and even of a new and deeper life between them. A new life! Yes, and what of his own life? What about that? He breathed deep, taking in the pungent earthy-green smell. He’d allowed himself to fall into shabbiness. He would change all that. He had become stuck in his life and now he saw a way out. It was all connected somehow with the sharp-smelling air, and the strange orange mushrooms, and the brightening sky; and he felt a warm, melting friendliness for these men who had shaken him out of his torpor and were leading him toward a revelation they couldn’t be expected to understand. The world was opening up, bursting with details he had never bothered to notice. He would pay attention to things. He would change his life. And at the thought of the immensity of what he had to say, a doubt came over him and a funny feeling rippled across his stomach. I’ve got to get a grip on myself, thought Harter, and as the path began to climb he sucked in sharp, deep drafts of air.
“This way. Over here,” said the leader, and Harter followed him off the path and through a space of trees with nearly smooth places between them. Harter saw everything very sharply. It all seemed to have a meaning for him, a meaning that had always been there but that he had failed to understand, as if he had spent his life with his head turned in the wrong direction. Suddenly he stepped into a clearing. Morning light lay on a broad sweep of cuff-high grass. The tops of the highest trees were in sunlight. In the darkness at one end of the clearing stood the little man, stiff and unmoving. He wore a dark suit and held a trench coat over one arm.
The two men walked over to him. A yellow butterfly rose from the grass and Harter watched its crazed, nervous flight in astonishment.
The two men walked to the middle of the clearing and spoke for a moment before the older man walked slowly and deliberately away from the other. No one seemed to be paying attention to Harter, who felt a sudden shyness, as if he were a schoolboy waiting to be noticed by the principal in his leathery brown office. The older man had stopped and was digging in the grass with his heel. Harter could feel a morning warmth beginning to penetrate the chill. It was going to be a hot, sunny autumn day.
The older man was now coming toward Harter, who looked up in surprise, as if he had forgotten where he was. In the shade the little husband stood motionless, staring straight ahead. And it seemed to Harter that never, never would he be able to speak to this man, locked away in his stiff white anger. Harter felt how nice it would be to lie down in the soft grass for a moment and close his eyes; and a nervousness came over him, as he tried to remember what it was he had wanted to say.
“… at this mark,” said the man, who had led Harter across the grass and was pointing to the ground. Harter noticed that the man was placing something in his hand, and he was surprised at how heavy it was, for an object so small. Bang bang you’re dead. Somewhere in the woods a bird was banging a spoon against a wooden bowl, and suddenly Harter remembered his father striding into the room with a new comic book as he lay in bed with the mumps beside the open window. Through the window screen he could look down at the backyard swing with its two dirt patches, at the two crab-apple trees, at the garden with its rows of corn and its tall sticks for tomatoes, and on top of one of the sticks sat a bird that suddenly rose into the air and flew higher and higher into the blue sky. Harter looked down at the gun in his hand. He was standing in a field with a gun in his hand, and it was all absurd, so absurd that he wanted to laugh out loud, but the thought of his loud laughter ringing through the quiet clearing made him uneasy and he reminded himself to pay close attention to what was happening. The man had explained something to him and was walking away, and now from the shade emerged the little husband in his dark suit and without his coat—where was his coat?—and strode into the field in the pale morning light, and stopped. In the light his face was very pale. The exposed temples seemed fragile as eggshell. Harter tried to remember what he had wanted to tell him back on the path, long ago, but he felt exhausted, his chest heaved, and he stared with fascination at the pale little man across from him who stood at attention with his arm pressed to his side. Harter had the sensation that if he stepped up to the man and tapped him on the temple with a forefinger he would fall over in the grass. All at once Harter understood very clearly what was happening and he wondered whether he should shout or run away, but a giddiness seized him and he imagined himself bursting into loud, hysterical laughter—in another second they would all burst into laughter and big, fat tears would roll down their cheeks. One of the men was saying something to him and with a quick shake of his head Harter said “No” and threw the gun away. He watched it move through the air and sink into high grass. He took a step forward and saw the little man raise his stiff arm. The arm reminded him of something, he had seen it long ago, back in his childhood, or maybe some other time, yes now he had it: it was the arm of the cowboy in the penny arcade. But how long ago was long ago? Harter heard a sound like a shot. “That’s all over,” Harter said aloud, and took another step before the ground slipped away from him. He had a fierce desire to explain something, something of immense importance, but it was difficult to collect his thoughts because his chest itched, somewhere a train was roaring, hundreds of yellow butterflies were beating their wings like mad.
FLYING CARPETS
IN THE LONG summers of my childhood, games flared up suddenly, burned to a brightness, and vanished forever. The summers were so long that they gradually grew longer than the whole year, they stretched out slowly beyond the edges of our lives, but at every moment of their vastness they were drawing to an end, for that’s what summers mostly did: they taunted us with endings, marched always into the long shadow thrown backward by the end of vacation. And because our summers were always ending, and because they lasted forever, we grew impatient with our games, we sought new and more intense ones; and as the crickets of August grew louder, and a single red leaf appeared on branches green with summer, we threw ourselves as if desperately into new adventures, while the long days, never changing, grew heavy with boredom and longing.
I first saw the carpets in the back yards of other neighborhoods. Glimpses of them came to me from behind garages, flickers of color at the corners of two-family houses where clotheslines on pulleys stretched from upper porches to high gray poles, and old Italian men in straw hats stood hoeing between rows of tomatoes and waist-high corn. I saw one once at the far end of a narrow strip of grass between two stucco houses, skimming lightly over the ground at the level of the garbage cans. Although I took note of them, they were of no more interest to me than games of jump rope I idly watched on the school playground, or dangerous games with jackknives I saw the older boys playing at the back of the candy store. One morning I noticed one in a back yard in my neighborhood; four boys stood tensely watching. I was not surprised a few days later when my father came home from work with a long package under his arm, wrapped in heavy brown paper, tied with straw-colored twine from which little prickly hairs stuck up.
The colors were duller than I had expected, less magical—only maroon and green: dark green curlings and loopings against a maroon that was nearly brown. At each end the fringes were thickish rough strings. I had imagined crimson, emerald, the orange of exotic birds. The underside of the carpet was covered with a coarse, scratchy material like burlap; in one corner I noticed a small black mark, circled in red, shaped like a capital H with a slanting middle line. In the back yard I practiced cautiously, close to the ground, following the blurred blue directions printed on a piece of paper so thin I could see my fingertips touching the other side. It was all a
matter of artfully shifted weight: seated cross-legged just behind the center of the carpet, you leaned forward slightly to send the carpet forward, left to make it turn left; right, right. The carpet rose when you lifted both sides with fingers cupped beneath, lowered when you pushed lightly down. It slowed to a stop when the bottom felt the pressure of a surface.
At night I kept it rolled up in the narrow space at the foot of my bed, alongside old puzzle boxes at the bottom of my bookcase.
For days I was content to practice gliding back and forth about the yard, passing under the branches of the crab-apple trees, squeezing between the swing and ladder of the yellow swing set, flying into the bottoms of sheets on the clothesline, drifting above the row of zinnias at the edge of the garden to skim along the carrots and radishes and four rows of corn, passing back and forth over the wooden floor of the old chicken coop that was nothing but a roof and posts at the back of the garage, while my mother watched anxiously from the kitchen window. I was no more tempted to rise into the sky than I was tempted to plunge downhill on my bike with my arms crossed over my chest. Sometimes I liked to watch the shadow of my carpet moving on the ground, a little below me and to one side; and now and then, in a nearby yard, I would see an older boy rise on his carpet above a kitchen window, or pass over the sunlit shingles of a garage roof.
Sometimes my friend Joey came skimming over his low picket fence into my yard. Then I followed him around and around the crab-apple trees and through the open chicken coop. He went faster than I did, leaning far forward, tipping sharply left or right. He even swooped over my head, so that for a moment a shadow passed over me. One day he landed on the flat tar-papered roof of the chicken coop, where I soon joined him. Standing with my hands on my hips, the sun burning down on my face, I could see over the tall backyard hedge into the weed-grown lot where in past summers I had hunted for frogs and garden snakes. Beyond the lot I saw houses and telephone wires rising on the hill beside the curving sun-sparkling road; and here and there, in back yards hung with clotheslines, against the white-shingled backs of houses, over porch rails and sloping cellar doors and the water-arcs of lawn sprinklers shot through with faint rainbows, I could see the children on their red and green and blue carpets, riding through the sunny air.
One afternoon when my father was at work and my mother lay in her darkened bedroom, breathing damply with asthma, I pulled out the carpet at the foot of the bed, unrolled it, and sat down on it to wait. I wasn’t supposed to ride my carpet unless my mother was watching from the kitchen window. Joey was in another town, visiting his cousin Marilyn, who lived near a department store with an escalator. The thought of riding up one escalator and down the next, up one and down the next, while the stairs flattened out or lifted up, filled me with irritation and boredom. Through the window screen I could hear the sharp, clear blows of a hammer, like the ticking of a gigantic clock. I could hear the clish-clish of hedge clippers, which made me think of movie swordfights; the uneven hum of a rising and falling bee. I lifted the edges of the carpet and began to float about the room. After a while I passed through the door and down the stairs into the small living room and big yellow kitchen, but I kept bumping into pots and chair-tops; and soon I came skimming up the stairs and landed on my bed and looked out the window into the back yard. The shadow of the swing frame showed sharp and black against the grass. I felt a tingling or tugging in my legs and arms. Dreamily I pushed the window higher and raised the screen.
For a while I glided about the room, then bent low as I approached the open window and began to squeeze the carpet through. The wooden bottom of the raised window scraped along my back, the sides of the frame pressed against me. It was like the dream where I tried to push myself through the small doorway, tried and tried, though my bones hurt, and my skin burned, till suddenly I pulled free. For a moment I seemed to sit suspended in the air beyond my window; below I saw the green hose looped on its hook, the handles and the handle-shadows on the tops of the metal garbage cans, the mountain laurel bush pressed against the cellar window; then I was floating out over the top of the swing and the crab-apple trees; below me I saw the shadow of the carpet rippling over grass; and drifting high over the hedge and out over the vacant lot, I looked down on the sunny tall grass, the milkweed pods and pink thistles, a green Coke bottle gleaming in the sun; beyond the lot the houses rose behind each other on the hill, the red chimneys clear against the blue sky; and all was sunny, all was peaceful and still; the hum of insects; the far sound of a hand mower, like distant scissors; soft shouts of children in the warm, drowsy air; heavily my eyelids began to close; but far below I saw a boy in brown shorts looking up at me, shading his eyes; and seeing him there, I felt suddenly where I was, way up in the dangerous air; and leaning fearfully to one side I steered the carpet back to my yard, dropped past the swing, and landed on the grass near the back steps. As I sat safe in my yard I glanced up at the high, open window; and far above the window the red shingles of the roof glittered in the sun.
I dragged the heavy carpet up to my room, but the next day I rose high above Joey as he passed over the top of the swing. In a distant yard I saw someone skim over the top of a garage roof and sink out of sight. At night I lay awake planning voyages, pressing both hands against my heart to slow its violent beating.
One night I woke to a racket of crickets. Through the window screen I could see the shadow of the swing frame in the moonlit back yard. I could see the streetlamp across from the bakery down by the field and the three streetlamps rising with the road as it curved out of sight at the top of the hill. The night sky was the color of a dark blue marble I liked to hold up to a bulb in the table lamp. I dressed quickly, pulled out my carpet, and slowly, so as not to make scraping noises, pushed up the window and the screen. From the foot of the bed I lifted the rolled rug. It suddenly spilled open, like a dark liquid rushing from a bottle. The wood of the window pressed against my back as I bent my way through.
In the blue night I sailed over the back yard, passing high over the hedge and into the lot, where I saw the shadow of the carpet rippling over moonlit high grass. I turned back to the yard, swooped over the garage roof, and circled the house at the level of the upper windows, watching myself pass in the glittery black glass; and rising a little higher, into the dark and dream-blue air, I looked down to see that I was passing over Joey’s yard toward Ciccarelli’s lot, where older boys had rock fights in the choked paths twisting among high weeds and thornbushes; and as when, standing up to my waist in water, I suddenly bent my legs and felt the cold wetness covering my shoulders, so now I plunged into the dark blue night, crossing Ciccarelli’s lot, passing over a street, sailing over garage roofs, till rising higher I looked down on telephone wires glistening as if wet with moonlight, on moon-greened tree-tops stuffed with blackness, on the slanting rafters and open spaces of a half-built house crisscrossed with shadows; in the distance I could see a glassy stream going under a road; spots of light showed the shapes of far streets; and passing over a roof close by a chimney, I saw each brick so sharp and clear in the moonlight that I could make out small bumps and holes in the red and ocher surfaces; and sweeping upward with the wind in my hair I flew over moon-flooded rooftops striped with chimney shadows, until I saw below me the steeple of a white church, the top of the firehouse, the big red letters of the five-and-dime, the movie marquee sticking out like a drawer, the shop windows dark-shining in the light of streetlamps, the street with its sheen of red from the traffic light; then out over rows of rooftops on the far side of town, a black factory with lit-up windows and white smoke that glowed like light; a field stretching away; gleaming water; till I felt I’d strayed to the farthest edge of things; and turning back I flew high above the moonlit town, when suddenly I saw the hill with three streetlamps, the bakery, the swing frame, the chicken coop—and landing for a moment on the roof of the garage, sitting with my legs astride the peak, exultant, unafraid, I saw, high in the blue night sky, passing slowly across the white moon, anoth
er carpet with its rider.
With a feeling of exhilaration and weariness—a weariness like sadness—I rose slowly toward my window, and bending my way through, I plunged into sleep.
The next morning I woke sluggish and heavy-headed. Outside, Joey was waiting for me on his carpet. He wanted to race around the house. But I had no heart for carpets that day, stubbornly I swung on the old swing, threw a tennis ball onto the garage roof and caught it as it came rushing over the edge, squeezed through the hedge into the vacant lot where I’d once caught a frog in a jar. At night I lay remembering my journey in sharp detail—the moon-glistening telephone wires above their shadow-stripes, the clear bricks in the chimney—while through the window screen I heard the chik-chik-chik of crickets. I sat up in bed and shut the window and turned the metal lock on top.
I had heard tales of other voyages, out beyond the ends of the town, high up into the clouds. Joey knew a boy who’d gone up so high you couldn’t see him anymore, like a balloon that grows smaller and smaller and vanishes—as if suddenly—into blue regions beyond the reach of sight. There were towns up there, so they said; I didn’t know; white cloud-towns, with towers. Up there, in the blue beyond the blue, there were rivers you could go under the way you could walk under a bridge; birds with rainbow-colored tails; ice mountains and cities of snow; flattened shining masses of light like whirling discs; blue gardens; slow-moving creatures with leathery wings; towns inhabited by the dead. My father had taught me not to believe stories about Martians and spaceships, and these tales were like those stories: even as you refused to believe them, you saw them, as if the sheer effort of not believing them made them glow in your mind. Beside such stories, my forbidden night journey over the rooftops seemed tame as a stroll. I could feel dark desires ripening within me; stubbornly I returned to my old games, as carpets moved in back yards, forming bars of red and green across white shingles.
The Knife Thrower Page 7