Fling and Other Stories Read online

  Finally, one afternoon, on the most delicious day of the summer, with a sky like the inside of a beautiful seedless Concord grape and air so calm that time seemed to have stopped, I waited until we were in a good mood after having routed Chang Tso-lin for the hundredth time, and then I said to Billy, “Tell you what, let’s do something big.”

  “Oh, no,” Billy said, the blood fleeing from his cheeks. “What now?”

  I grabbed him by the shirt and whispered, “Tonight, after everyone’s asleep, we’ll strike the tent and take it down to the arboretum and pitch it in, you know, that open clearing. And sleep there. Wouldn’t that be neat?”

  Billy looked as if I had stabbed him. I kept whispering. I told him I’d take my new little alarm clock with us; we could get up at five and bring the tent back up, and no one would ever know. It would be easy. Sleeping so near the house had gotten boring.

  “It’s so dark down there,” Billy said.

  “I’ve thought about that,” I said. “Listen, Billy, you know that coal miner’s hat of your father’s, the one with the little kerosene lamp fastened to it over the visor? I’ve noticed it’s in that jumbled heap of stuff in the corner of your what-do-you-call-it, spare room?—where he just throws junk—you know?—that he’s never going to use again? That he’s completely forgotten about? We could borrow that.”

  I was pushing Billy into the very pith of danger, and I knew it. And I know now that this awareness was the knife-edge of my excitement. Another thing I knew then was that Billy would in time come round to doing what I asked. It took a lot of whispering, but Billy came round.

  It was about eleven o’clock, and the lights had long been out in both our houses, when we surreptitiously pulled up the tent pegs and collapsed the poles and folded the canvas. I had sneaked a tin of wick oil out to the tent and had filled the miner’s lamp, and I had a box of wooden matches in the pocket of my shorts. (A couple of tent-nights ago we had given up changing into pajamas, though each time we would bundle them up and use them as pillows, so that our mothers could see the next day that they were wrinkled and soiled.) Of course we would wait until later to light the lamp, but I put the hat on Billy’s head. There was a dim glow from a gibbous moon high in the sky. I looked up at it and shivered. It had a strange misty ring around it. It was like an eye in the sky, looking right at us. It knew everything. It must have been able to make out, as I could in its cold glare, that the miner’s hat was too big for Billy’s head but that it somehow stayed in place. He was going to be the one to wear it.

  When we got the tent over the wall and had gone over ourselves, I lit the lamp. It created a magical sphere of soft visibility, into the fuzzy outer membrane of which, as we stole toward the glade, all the varieties of evergreens reached their feathery hands to greet us. I felt blissful, and even Billy was moved; he said in a trembling voice, “Say, this is keen.” We pitched the tent with no trouble, crept in, snuffed the lamp, and bedded down on the fragrant carpet. We whispered awhile, but soon I drifted off into the deepest sleep I’d ever had on this earth.

  I was having a frightful dream. The entire tent was snatched away from over us in a sudden swoop, like a single beat of the wings of a huge condor, and I heard a deep roaring, as of some great natural cataclysm. But no, no, I wasn’t dreaming, I was all too awake. I sat up, my buttocks aprickle, and I sensed that Billy was sitting up beside me, whimpering. Dr. Wyman stood over us, glowing in the moonlight in his pajamas. The words of his rage broke on me like rough waves roiling me in the sand. With a grip on the ridgepole, he held the whole tent high in his right hand. “Up! Up!” he shouted. “Pick up your things!” he roared. As we scrambled about, he saw the miner’s hat. “You brought a flame into my arboretum,” he said in a kind of groan. “You lit matches under these trees.” Then he leaned his huge face down toward me and shouted twice, “You little devil! You little devil!”

  In my bed on our sleeping porch, much, much later, I could still hear, all the way from the Wymans’ house, Billy crying out till I thought his lungs must burst.

  The next afternoon I could only imagine that Mrs. Wyman felt her youngest duckling had been too severely punished in the night, and that she had begged the Reverend in the morning for Christian forgiveness. Because, to my astonishment, Billy was allowed to come over to play with me. The rims of his eyes were purple. I was sincere in my apologies to him and promised I would never get him in trouble again, and he, with his gentle, fragile nature, forgave me. But our play around the tent, which we repitched in its “safe” place twenty feet from our sleeping porch, was halfhearted. I didn’t feel like singing out commands to Billy with my usual bravura. The day was sticky, and depressing. Despite a lack of wind on our cheeks, swift clouds scudded in from the sea, low overhead. We perspired. Chang Tso-lin languished in the enemy camp. I kept thinking that although Dr. Wyman had leaned down and spoken those last few words to me in sermon tones the night before, he must surely have meant the word “devil” only in a slangy sort of way, to be written in my heavenly record with a lowercase initial. Not the real thing. I sniffed my arm and could not smell burning sulfur. Billy was sympathetic. He saw how bad I felt, and to cheer me up he kept making suggestions: we could send a scouting party around the other side of the house, we could radio the sub to search toward Lighthouse Point….

  Later I was in the tent. “Hey,” Billy said, “come out here.”

  I knew the various timbres of his voice, and I heard a ring in this summons that made me scramble out pell-mell on my hands and knees.

  “Look,” he said, pointing out to the gulf.

  Above the horizon, along its whole span, rolled a cloud as black as charcoal, with a sickish viridian light between it and the sea, and then I saw what had alarmed Billy, as if the endless cloud itself weren’t bad enough. On a bearing straight out from the submarine there hung down from the black cloud a slender conical tendril, equally black, which seemed at first to weave slightly back and forth. Then it grew longer, like a finger poking down, down. Next, in horror, as if we, too young, were watching a primal scene of unspeakable obscenity, sea mating with sky, we saw a cone rise up from the water and move in a wavering way toward the shore, dancing in response to the finger above, separate from it but following directly beneath it. With a sudden spurt, vapor and water flew together, and the sky began to suck up the sea.

  Now we realized that the sinuous spout was coming close to the shore. Miraculously it took a detour around the submarine, which lay calmly at anchor at the rim of the vortex of violent whitecaps surrounding the column. I heard my mother screaming my name. The twister reached land, half a mile from us, and Billy and I saw a cottage seem to explode. Its roof—all the foreigners’ cottages at Peitaiho had corrugated tin roofs—was ripped off in pieces, and huge sheets of metal and scraps of wood and branches of trees and a million fragments of everything rose and revolved and fell, until another house was hit, and after that…but Billy and I turned away and ran for it. My mother hugged me, and my father shouted, “You boys hold the sleeping-porch door shut!” We two, glad to have work to do, ran to that door, which, though it was latched, was already trembling. We braced ourselves against it. I was thinking how glad I was not to be able to see what was happening outside, when with a splitting sound the jamb gave way and the door flew open, throwing Billy and me to the floor halfway across the room. On hands and knees in the indoor gale, I looked up and saw the roof of the McAlisters’ house, beyond and to the left of the Wymans’, lifted off whole, almost exactly as the pup tent had been ripped from above us the night before, and I heard a roar that sounded to me just like Dr. Wyman’s rage. The typhoon was calling me names. I closed my eyes. I heard a terrible crash but felt no pain. Then the ministerial roar seemed to move on toward other devils in other houses. The wind suddenly died. Torrents of water came down as the sky’s buckets of salt sea fell back on us. Our house had held.

  An hour after the wind subsided, but while it
was still pouring, my oldest brother, Peter, the most adventurous of the three of us boys, rushed out of the house to scout the wreckage on our Rocky Point hill. My mother called to him to come back, but he ran on. He had not gone far when he noticed a knot of people in the Wymans’ lot, and he ran to them and saw that they were standing in a soaked circle around Dr. Wyman’s dead body. Of course Peter rushed back to tell us about it. He used to boast about the accuracy of his observations, and he described the cadaver to us in gruesome detail. A huge sheet of metal from the McAlisters’ roof, skimming along over the ground “at a hundred miles an hour,” Peter said, had cut Dr. Wyman in two at the waist and then had flipped away, leaving the two halves of the pastor prone in what still seemed to be something like a running position. The driving rain had washed away all the blood.

  “And, oh, by the way,” Peter said, “every single tree in the arboretum was uprooted. You should see the mess—trunks in all directions. It’s a rat’s nest.”

  Hearing these things, I experienced a surge of the greatest joy I had ever known. The Grandfather in Heaven was, after all, capable of love, and He loved me. He had brought this typhoon for me. The roar of the storm’s rage had not been meant for me at all; it had been aimed at Billy’s father. This God whom I welcomed at last was both merciful and angry, for He had forgiven me my trespasses and punished Dr. Wyman for his. I was sorry, deeply sorry, about the arboretum, but it seemed to me that in destroying it, God may have been pointing a finger at one of Dr. Wyman’s sins of pride. From my Sunday-school lore I conjured up a dim sense that Dr. Wyman had tried to create—with only his coolies’ help, not God’s—a Garden of Eden of his own, which he had wanted to keep forever for Adam’s own selfish use.

  My joy, my conversion, my perfect faith, lasted only a day. The next morning, though the downpour was by no means over, my other brother, Amos, went across to the Wymans’ house, and when he came back, he told me he’d heard Mrs. Wyman say that the reason the Reverend had been out there in the fury of the storm was that he had gone to look for Billy, to rescue him from danger. That changed everything. I began to have nightmares every night.

  We had three solid days of torrential rain. Miraculously, our house had suffered only minor damage. A six-foot-square piece of roofing had struck our porch roof—the crash I had heard. The skirts of the twister must have swerved just enough to miss us; the McAlisters’ house in one direction and two on the other side of us were hit hard. Dr. Wyman’s little storm-proof box had taken the full force of the wind, with no damage but some broken windows. A few days later Amos found the canvas of the pup tent undamaged in a sorghum field a quarter of a mile from the house. The ridgepole was still in it but was broken; we never found the uprights.

  I didn’t see Billy for a fortnight. Because of the bad dreams I was having, my mother thought I should probably not go to the funeral. (After it, I overheard her scolding Peter for having told us all a fib the day of the storm: she had learned that Dr. Wyman had not been cut in two at all, though he had indeed been mortally wounded at the midriff.) The weather turned lovely. Our Number One Boy, Wang, was a clever carpenter, and he liked me; he made new poles and pegs for the tent, and I finally set it up in the “safe” place, but I had no fun playing around it alone.

  The very next day Billy came over. I hardly recognized him. He had on brand-new white shorts, I could see his nubby knees, and he was wearing Keds. His hair was brushed. When we started our war game, he had some rather impertinent suggestions—they proved to be good ones, I had to admit—about maneuvers against Chang Tso-lin.

  Before he left for home, he said, “Let’s sleep in the arboretum tonight.”

  I was astonished at his taking that kind of initiative. “Gee, Billy,” I said, “it’s a ruin.”

  “I know,” he said. “It belongs to me now. My brothers aren’t interested. Mama said I could replant it.”

  “Replant it? What are you going to use for seeds?”

  “Daddy has—I mean he had—masses of seeds. And I’ve already sent for some seedlings from Szechuan. One of the China Inland Missions advertises them in the Recorder, you know—jolly good cedars just like those in the Holy Land.”

  I slept poorly that night in what had been the clearing in the arboretum. Billy snored. In the morning he boiled water on a Sterno rack that he had brought in his knapsack, and made tea for us. Dr. Wyman’s squad of coolies showed up with two-man saws. Billy had the key to the gate and let them in, and he told them where to start cutting up the trunks. He said he was going to try to right some of the very young trees, which still seemed to have life in them, and he asked me to help him with one of the smaller ones. He grabbed hold of the trunk with me and began straining, and I saw that his teeth were clenched and his pathetic jaw muscles and neck muscles were all tightened up.

  Peggety’s Parcel of Shortcomings

  “I well remember,” said Miss Peg, the pastry cook, with a coffee éclair hovering in her fingers, “the night I fell into the embrace of the United States Merchant Marine. I weighed scant two hundred eight pounds at that time. I was, you might say, thin as a shelf.”

  Probably Miss Peg meant to say “sylph.” In fairness, you had to grant to Miss Peg that she was always willing to risk elegance, if there was any of it handy. Only sometimes her tongue slipped—especially if it was all lubricated to receive an éclair or a napoleon.

  They were gathered—Miss Peg, Mrs. Manterbaum, and Johnny the second busboy—in the pantry locker down in the basement. As pastry chef, Miss Peg kept the key to the locker, and late each evening, about eleven o’clock, when the clubhouse was quite deserted and lay black and junky on the Florida beach, like a tremendous shipwreck, she would ghost in through the service entrance to the basement with one or two guests, unlock the wire mesh door to her locker, light up the single bare bulb that hung down from the ceiling, get out a few good things, seat the party on the wooden crates she kept her pans in, and then she would begin to talk. Mrs. Manterbaum, whose job was to keep the cabañas clean, was notorious among the help for her sweet tooth, a regular sugar-thief, and she had worked herself into the position of being invited by Miss Peg almost every night to taste a few “extra” pastries. Miss Peg used to ask Johnny the second busboy about once a week, because he was good-natured about pushing her pastry cart around to the Big People in the dining room for her. If there was one thing she hated in life, it was cart-pushing. That, and bending down to slide her pans in and out of her ovens.

  “I was twenty-three,” Miss Peg said, “and I was then doing scullery for a certain Mrs. Charles Saunders in Old Bridge Harbor, on Long Island. Mr. Saunders was in asphalt and, as we used to say, he couldn’t get out. Though in truth he was prosperous. Mrs. Saunders had seven in help. I remember one thing about Mr. Saunders, which was, he was very particular about the way his shoes were laid out in the mornings—the laces had to be real loose and the tongues lifted out and bent forward, so he could more or less walk right into his shoes. If Mr. Saunders had any difficulty about walking into his shoes, any morning, he was liable to a very bad state of mind at breakfast, and goodness knew who would feel the shock of it. You understand, I only heard these things. Small Peggety, as they called me—the ‘Small’ was belittling, you might say, considering my heft—never advanced beyond the Near Pantry, and had no occasion to see Mr. Saunders standing in his own shoes, laced or unlaced. Fact is, the first time I ever laid eyes on him, close by, was the day the United States Merchant Marine and I had our little heave-to.

  “It happened in the following particulars. My cousin Bob, who never came across with the rest of us, lives some short distance outside Greenock, by Glasgow, and he being a familiar of certain public houses on the waterfront, travels, you might say, victoriously—by talking with those who go to sea.”

  “Vicariously,” Johnny said.

  “I beg your pardon?” Miss Peg said, very grand.

  Johnny realized one of the reasons Mi
ss Peg liked him was that he had gone through third year high school and was, in her words, “a bookish lad”; he did read a good bit. Miss Peg had never had any schooling, and her elegance had been picked up over the years of service while she was passing the peas, so to speak. Johnny dared, now and then, to catch her up on some of her errors of overreaching.

  “Your cousin Bob,” Johnny said, “travels vicariously.”

  “Well?” said Miss Peg, with rising tone, as if to ask why the young scoundrel felt it necessary to repeat something that had already been said. “So one evening,” she went on, “Bob met this tidy, small-boned Yank, a Boatswain’s Mate, Third Class, in the United States Merchant Marine, named Bufano. A swarthy sort. Talking of one big thing and another, they landed at last upon me, so it was necessary—Bob thought—to tell the fellow all about me. I will say, Bob has a straight tongue, he did not dangle any pretty marionette before this Bufano’s eyes. To be blunt about it, he said his cousin Peggety was fat. ‘So much the better,’ says this Bufano. ‘I always was squeamish about getting myself bruised against sharp and knobby things. I am glad to hear that you have a nice soft cousin.’

  “The first thing I knew,” said Peg, “I received a postcard written in a fine Eyetalian hand, all curlicues and scrolls on the capital letters, like a birthday cake, saying, ‘Meet me outside Ritz corner 46 and Mad six pm Thursday evening. Assume this is helps night out. I have grand news of your cousin Bob from other side. Bufano, Bsns Mate 3/c, S.S. Parton.’ This ‘grand news,’ ” Miss Peg said, leaping ahead in her narrative, as she sometimes did, “was that our Bob was spending much time in the public houses and was a two-hump camel when it came to the ale; he could drink twice as much and hold it twice as long as anyone else. ‘Grand news’!