HARLAN ELLISON

ONE LIFE, FURNISHED IN EARLY POVERTY

And so it was—strangely, strangely—that I found myself standing in the backyard of the house I had lived in when I was seven years old. At thirteen minutes till midnight on no special magical winter’s night, in a town that had held me only till I was physically able to run away. In Ohio, in winter, near midnight—certain I could go back.

Not truly knowing why I even wanted to go back. But certain that I could. Without magic, without science, without alchemy, without supernatural assistance; just go back. Because I had to, I needed to … go back.

Back; thirty-five years and more. To find myself at the age of seven, before any of it had begun; before any of the directions had been taken; to find out what turning point in my life it had been that had wrenched me from the course all little boys took to adulthood and set me on the road of loneliness and success that ended here, back where I’d begun, in a backyard at now-twelve minutes to midnight.

At forty-two I had come to the point in my life I had struggled toward since I was a child: a place of security, importance, recognition. The only one from this town who had made it. The ones who had had the most promise in school were now milkmen, used-car salesmen, married to fat, stupid dead women who had themselves been girls of exceeding promise in high school. They had been trapped in this little Ohio town, never to break free. To die there, unknown. I had broken free, had done all the wonderful things I’d said I would do.

Why should it all depress me now?

Perhaps it was because Christmas was nearing and I was alone, with bad marriages and lost friendships behind me.

I walked out of the studio, away from the wet-ink-new fifty-thousand-dollar contract, got in my car and drove to International Airport. It was a straight line made up of inflight meals and jet airliners and rental cars and hastily purchased winter clothing. A straight line to a backyard I had not seen in over thirty years.

I had to find the dragoon to go back.

Crossing the rime-frosted grass that crackled like cellophane, I walked under the shadow of the lightning-blasted pear tree. I had climbed in that tree endlessly when I was seven years old. In summer, its branches hung far over and scraped the roof of the garage. I could shinny out across the limb and drop onto the garage roof. I had once pushed Johnny Mummy off that garage roof…not out of meanness, but simply because I had jumped from it many times and I could not understand anyone’s not finding it a wonderful thing to do. He had sprained his ankle, and his father, a fireman, had come looking for me. I’d hidden on the garage roof.

I walked around the side of the garage, and there was the barely visible path. To one side of the path I had always buried my toy soldiers. For no other reason than to bury them, know I had a secret place, and later dig them up again, as if finding treasure.

(It came to me that even now, as an adult, I did the same thing. Dining in a Japanese restaurant, I would hide small pieces of pakkai or pineapple or terriyaki in my rice bowl and pretend to be delighted when, later in the meal, my chopsticks encountered the tiny treasures down in among the rice grains.)

I knew the spot, of course. I got down on my hands and knees and began digging with the silver penknife on my watch chain. It had been my father’s penknife—almost the only thing he had left when he died.

The ground was hard, but I dug with enthusiasm, and the moon gave me more than enough light. Down and down I dug, knowing eventually I would come to the dragoon.

He was there. The bright paint rusted off his body, the saber corroded and reduced to a stub. Lying there in the grave I had dug for him thirty-five years before. I scooped the little metal soldier out of the ground and cleaned him off as best I could with my paisley dress handkerchief. He was faceless now, and as sad as I felt.

I hunkered there, under the moon, and waited for midnight, only a minute away, knowing it was all going to come right for me. After so terribly long.

The house behind me was silent and dark. I had no idea who lived there now. It would have been unpleasant if the strangers who now lived here had been unable to sleep and, rising to get a glass of water, had idly looked into the backyard. Their backyard. I had played here and built a world for myself here, from dreams and loneliness. Using talismans of comic books and radio programs and matinee movies and potent charms like the sad little dragoon in my hand.

My wristwatch said midnight, one hand laid straight on the other.

The moon faded. Slowly, it went gray and shadowy, till the glow was gone, and then even the gray afterimage was gone.

The wind rose. Slowly, it came from somewhere far away, and built around me. I stood up, pulling the collar of my topcoat around my neck. The wind was neither warm nor cold, yet it rushed, without even ruffling my hair. I was not afraid.

The ground was settling. Slowly, it lowered me the tiniest fractions of inches. But steadily, as though the layers of tomorrows that had been built up were vanishing.

My thoughts were of myself: I’m coming to save you. I’m coming, Gus. You won’t hurt anymore…you’ll never have hurt.

The moon came back. It had been full; now it was new. The wind died. It had carried me where I’d needed to go. The ground settled. The years had been peeled off.

I was alone in the backyard of the house at 89 Harmon Drive. The snow was deeper. It was a different house, though it was the same. It was not recently painted. The Depression had not been long ago; money was still tight. It wasn’t weather-beaten, but in a year or two my father would have it painted. Light yellow.

There was a sumac tree growing below the window of the dinette. It was nourished by lima beans and soup and cabbage.

“You’ll just sit there until you finish every drop of your dinner. We’re not wasting food. There are children starving in Russia.”

I put the dragoon in my topcoat pocket. He had worked more than hard enough. I walked around the side of the house. I smiled as I saw again the wooden milk box by the side door. In the morning, very early, the milkman would put three quarts of milk there, but before anyone could bring them in, this very cold winter morning in December, the cream would push its way up and the little cardboard caps would be an inch above the mouths of the bottles.

The gravel talked beneath my feet. The street was quiet and cold. I stood in the front yard, beside the big oak tree, and looked up and down.

It was the same. It was as though I’d never been away. I started to cry. Hello.

Gus was on one of the swings in the playground. I stood outside the fence of Lathrop Grade School, and watched him standing on the seat, gripping the ropes, pumping his little legs. He was smaller than I’d remembered him. He wasn’t smiling as he tried to swing higher. It was serious to him.

Standing outside the hurricane fence, watching Gus, I was happy. I scratched at a rash on my right wrist, and smoked a cigarette, and was happy.

I didn’t see them until they were out of the shadows of the bushes, almost on him.

One of them rushed up and grabbed Gus’s leg, and tried to pull him off the seat, just as he reached the bottom of his swing. Gus managed to hold on, but the chain ropes twisted crazily and when the seat went back up, it hit the metal leg of the framework.

Gus fell, rolled face down in the dust of the playground, and tried to sit up. The boys pushed through between the swings, avoiding the berserk one that clanged back and forth.

Gus managed to get up, and the boys formed a circle around him. Then Jack Wheeldon stepped out and faced him. I remembered Jack Wheeldon.

He was taller than Gus. They were all taller than Gus, but Wheeldon was beefier. I could see shadows surrounding him. Shadows of a boy who would grow into a man with a beer stomach and thick arms. But the eyes would always remain the same.

He shoved Gus in the face. Gus went back, dug in and charged him. Gus came at him low, head tucked under, fists tight, arms braced close to the body. He hit him in the stomach and wrestled him around. They struggled together like inept club fighters, raising dust.

One of the boys in the circle took a step forward and hit Gus hard in the back of the head. Gus turned his face out of Wheeldon’s stomach, and Wheeldon punched him in the mouth. Gus started to cry.

I’d been frozen, watching it happen, but he was crying—

I looked both ways down the fence and found the break far to my right. I threw the cigarette away as I dashed down the fence, trying to look behind me. Then through the break and I was running toward them the long distance from far right field of the baseball diamond, toward the swings and seesaws. They had Gus down now, and they were kicking him.

When they saw me coming, they started to run away. Jack Wheeldon paused to kick Gus once more in the side; then he, too, ran.

Gus was lying there, on his back, the dust smeared into mud on his face. I bent down and picked him up. He wasn’t moving, but he wasn’t really hurt. I held him very close and carried him toward the bushes that rose on a small incline at the side of the playground. The bushes were cool overhead and they canopied us, hid us; I laid him down and used my handkerchief to clean away the dirt. His eyes were very blue. I smoothed the straight brown hair off his forehead. He wore braces; one of the rubber bands hooked onto the pins of the braces, used to keep them tension-tight, had broken. I pulled it free.

He opened his eyes and started crying again.

Something hurt in my chest.

He started snuffling, unable to catch his breath. He tried to speak, but the words were only mangled sounds, huffed out with too much air and pain.

Then he forced himself to sit up and rubbed the back of his hand across his runny nose.

He stared at me. It was panic and fear and confusion and shame at being seen this way. “Th-they hit me from in back,” he said, snuffling,

“I know. I saw.”

“D’jou scare’m off?”

“Yes.”

He didn’t say thank you. It wasn’t necessary. The backs of my thighs hurt from squatting. I sat down.

“My name is Gus,” he said, trying to be polite.

I didn’t know what name to give him. I was going to tell him the first name to come into my head, but heard myself say, “My name is Mr. Rosenthal.”

He looked startled. “That’s my name, too. Gus Rosenthal!”

“Isn’t that peculiar,” I said. We grinned at each other, and he wiped his nose again.

I didn’t want to see my mother or father. I had those memories. They were sufficient. It was little Gus I wanted to be with. But one night I crossed Into the backyard at 89 Harmon Drive from the empty lots that would later be a housing development.

And I stood in the dark, watching them eat dinner.

There was my father. I hadn’t remembered him being so handsome. My mother was saying something to him, and he nodded as he ate. They were in the dinette. Gus was playing with his food. Don’t mush your food around like that, Gus. Eat, or you can’t stay up to hear Lux Presents Hollywood.

But they’re doing “Dawn Patrol.”

Then don’t mush your food.

“Momma,” I murmured, standing in the cold, “Momma, there are children starving in Russia.” And I added, thirty-five years late, “Name two, Momma.”

I met Gus downtown at the newsstand.

“Hi.”

“Oh. Hullo.”

“Buying some comics?”

“Uh-huh.”

“You ever read Doll Man and Kid Eternity?”

“Yeah, they’re great. But I got them.”

“Not the new issues.”

“Sure do.”

“Bet you’ve got last months. He’s just checking in the new comics right now.”

So we waited while the newsstand owner used the heavy wire snips on the bundles, and checked off the magazines against the distributor’s long white mimeographed sheet. And I bought Gus Air boy and Jingle Jangle Comics and Blue Beetle and Whiz Comics and Doll Man and Kid Eternity.

Then I took him to Isaly’s for a hot fudge sundae. They served it in a tall tulip glass with the hot fudge in a little pitcher. When the waitress had gone to get the sundaes, little Gus looked at me. “Hey, how’d you know I only liked crushed nuts, an’ not whipped cream or a cherry?”

I leaned back in the high-walled booth and smiled at him.

“What do you want to be when you grow up, Gus?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know.”

Somebody put a nickel in the Wurlitzer in his booth, and Glenn Miller swung into “String of Pearls.”

“Well, did you ever think about it?”

“No, huh-uh. I like cartooning, maybe I could draw comic books.”

“That’s pretty smart thinking, Gus. There’s a lot of money to be made in art.” I stared around the dairy store, at the Coca-Cola posters of pretty girls with pageboy hairdos, drawn by an artist named Harold W. McCauley whose style would be known throughout the world, whose name would never be known.

He stared at me. “It’s fun, too, isn’t it?”

I was embarrassed. I’d thought first of money, he’d thought first of happiness. I’d reached him before he’d chosen his path. There was still time to make him a man who would think first of joy, all through his life.

“Mr. Rosenthal?”

I looked down and across, just as the waitress brought the sundaes. She set them down and I paid her. When she’d gone, Gus asked me, “Why did they call me a dirty Jewish elephant?”

“Who called you that, Gus?”

“The guys.”

“The ones you were fighting that day?”

He nodded. “Why’d they say elephant?”

I spooned up some vanilla ice cream, thinking. My back ached, and the rash had spread up my right wrist onto my forearm. “Well, Jewish people are supposed to have big noses, Gus.” I poured the hot fudge out of the little pitcher. It bulged with surface tension for a second, then spilled through its own dark-brown film, covering the three scoops of ice cream. “I mean, that’s what some people believe. So I suppose they thought it was smart to call you an elephant, because an elephant has a big nose…a trunk. Do you understand?”

“That’s dumb. I don’t have a big nose … do I?”

“I wouldn’t say so, Gus. They most likely said it just to make you mad. Sometimes people do that.”

“That’s dumb.”

We sat there for a while and talked. I went far down inside the tulip glass with the long-handled spoon, and finished the deep dark, almost black bittersweet hot fudge. They hadn’t made hot fudge like that in many years. Gus got ice cream up the spoon handle, on his fingers, on his chin, and on his T-shirt. We talked about a great many things.

We talked about how difficult arithmetic was. (How I would still have to use my fingers sometimes even as an adult.) How the guys never gave a short kid his “raps” when the sandlot ball games were in progress. (How I overcompensated with women from doubts about stature.) How different kinds of food were pretty bad-tasting. (How I still used ketchup on well-done steak.) How it was pretty lonely in the neighborhood with nobody for friends. (How I had erected a facade of charisma and glamor so no one could reach me deeply enough to hurt me.) How Leon always invited all the kids over to his house, but when Gus got there, they slammed the door and stood behind the screen laughing and jeering. (How even now a slammed door raised the hair on my neck and a phone receiver slammed down, cutting me off, sent me into a senseless rage.) How comic books were great. (How my scripts sold so easily because I had never learned how to rein in my imagination.)

We talked about a great many things.

“I’d better get you home now,” I said.

“Okay.” We got up. “Hey, Mr. Rosenthal?”

“You’d better wipe the chocolate off your face.”

He wiped. “Mr. Rosenthal…how’d you know I like crushed nuts, and not whipped cream or a cherry?”

We spent a great deal of time together. I bought him a copy of a pulp magazine called Startling Stories and read him a story about a space pirate who captures a man and his wife and offers the man the choice of opening one of two large boxes—in one is the man’s wife, with twelve hours of air to breathe, in the other is a terrible alien fungus that will eat him alive. Little Gus sat on the edge of the big hole he’d dug, out in the empty lots, dangling his feet, and listening. His forehead was furrowed as he listened to the marvels of Jack Williamson’s “Twelve Hours to Live,” there on the edge of the fort he’d built.

We discussed the radio programs Gus heard every day: Tennessee Jed, Captain Midnight, Jack Armstrong, Superman, Don Winslow of the Navy. And the nighttime programs: I Love a Mystery, Suspense, The Adventures of Sam Spade. And the Sunday programs: The Shadow, Quiet, Please, The Molle Mystery Theater.

We became good Mends. He had told his mother and father about “Mr. Rosenthal,” who was his friend, but they’d spanked him for the Startling Stories, because they thought he’d stolen it. So he stopped telling them about me. That was all right; it made the bond between us stronger.

One afternoon we went down behind the Colony Lumber Company, through the woods and the weeds to the old condemned pond. Gus told me he used to go swimming there, and fishing sometimes, for a black oily fish with whiskers. I told him it was a catfish. He liked that. Liked to know the names of things. I told him that was called nomenclature, and he laughed to know there was a name for knowing names.

We sat on the piled logs rotting beside the black mirror water, and Gus asked me to tell him what it was like where I lived, and where I’d been, and what I’d done, and everything.

“I ran away from home when I was thirteen, Gus.”

“Wasn’t you happy there?”

“Well, yes and no. They loved me, my mother and father. They really did. They just didn’t understand what I was all about.”

There was a pain on my neck. I touched a fingertip to the place. It was a boil beginning to grow. I hadn’t had a boil in years, many years, not since I was a…

“What’s the matter, Mr. Rosenthal?”

“Nothing, Gus. Well, anyhow, I ran away, and joined the carny.”

“Huh?”

“A carnival. The Tri-State Shows. We moved through Illinois, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Missouri, even Kansas…”

“Boy! A carnival! Just like in Toby Tyler or Ten Weeks with the Circus? I really cried when Toby Tyler’s monkey got killed, that was the worst part of it, did you do stuff like that when you were with the circus?”

“Carnival.”

“Yeah. Uh-huh. Didja?”

“Something like that. I carried water for the animals sometimes, although we only had a few of those, and I mostly in the freak show. But usually what I did was clean up and carry food to the performers in their tops—”

“What’s that?”

“That’s where they sleep, in rigged tarpaulins. You know, tarps.”

“Oh. Yeah, I know. Go on, huh.”

The rash was all the way up to my shoulder now. It itched like hell, and when I’d gone to the drugstore to get an aerosol spray to relieve it, so it wouldn’t spread, I had only to see those round wooden display tables with their glass centers, under which were bottles of Teel tooth liquid, Tangee Red-Red lipstick and nylons with a seam down the back, to know the druggist wouldn’t even know what I meant by Bactine or Liquid Band-Aid.

“Well, along about K.C. the carny got busted because there were too many moll dips and cannons and paperhangers in the tip …” I waited, his eyes growing huge.

“What’s all thaaat mean, Mr. Rosenthal?”

“Ah-ha! Fine carny stiff you’d make. You don’t even know the lingo.”

“Please, Mr. Rosenthal, please tell me!”

“Well, K.C is Kansas City, Missouri…when it isn’t Kansas City, Kansas. Except, really, on the other side of the river is Weston. And busted means thrown in jail, and…”

“You were in jail?”

“Sure was, little Gus. But let me tell you now. Cannons are pickpockets and moll dips are lady pickpockets, and paperhangers are fellows who write bad checks. And a tip is a group.”

“So what happened, what happened?”

“One of these bad guys, one of these cannons, you see, picked the pocket of an assistant district attorney, and we all got thrown in jail. And after a while everyone was released on bail, except me and the Geek. Me, because I wouldn’t tell them who I was, because I didn’t want to go home, and the Geek, because a carny can find a wetbrain in any town to play Geek.”

“What’s a Geek, huh?”

The Geek was a sixty-year-old alcoholic. So sunk in his own endless drunkenness that he was almost a zombie…a wetbrain. He was billed as The Thing, and he lived in a portable pit they carried around, and he bit the heads off snakes and ate live chickens and slept in his own dung. And all for a bottle of gin every day. They locked me in the drunk tank with him. The smell. The smell of sour liquor, oozing with sweat out of his pores, it made me sick, it was a smell I could never forget. And the third day, he went crazy. They wouldn’t fix him with gin, and he went crazy. He climbed the bars of the big freestanding drunk tank in the middle of the lockup, and he banged his head against the bars and ceiling where they met, till he fell back and lay there, breathing raggedly, stinking of that terrible smell, his face like a pound of raw meat.

The pain in my stomach was worse now. I took Gus back to Harmon Drive and let him go home.

*

My weight had dropped to just over a hundred and ten. My clothes didn’t fit. The acne and boils were worse. I smelled of witch hazel. Gus was getting more antisocial.

I realized what was happening.

I was alien to my own past. If I stayed much longer, God only knew what would happen to little Gus…but certainly I would waste away. Perhaps just vanish. Then…would Gus’s future cease to exist, too? I had no way of knowing; but my choice was obvious. I had to return.

And couldn’t! I was happier here than I’d ever been before. The bigotry and violence Gus had known before I came to him had ceased. They knew he was being watched over. But Gus was becoming more erratic. He was shoplifting toy soldiers and comic books from the Kresge’s and constantly defying his parents. It was turning bad. I had to go back.

I told him on a Saturday. We had gone to see a Lash La Rue Western and Val Lewton’s The Cat People at the Lake Theater. When we came back I parked the car on Mentor Avenue, and we went walking in the big, cool, dark woods that fronted Mentor where it met Harmon Drive.

“Mr. Rosenthal,” Gus said. He looked upset

“Yes, Gus?”

“I gotta problem, sir.”

“What’s that, Gus?” My head ached. It was a steady needle of pressure above the right eye.

“My mother’s gonna send me to a military school.”

I remembered. Oh, God, I thought. It had been terrible. Precisely the thing not to do to a child like Gus.

“They said it was ‘cause I was rambunctious. They said they were gonna send me there for a year or two. Mr. Rosenthal…don’t let’m send me there. I didn’t mean to be bad. I just wanted to be around you.”

My heart slammed inside me. Again. Then again. “Gus, I have to go away.”

He stared at me. I heard a soft whimper.

“Take me with you, Mr. Rosenthal. Please. I want to see Galveston. We can drive a dynamite truck in North Carolina. We can go to Matawatchan, Ontario, Canada, and work topping trees, we can sail on boats, Mr. Rosenthal!”

“Gus …”

“We can work the carny, Mr. Rosenthal. We can pick peanuts and oranges all across the country. We can hitchhike to San Francisco and ride the cable cars. We can ride the boxcars, Mr. Rosenthal… I promise I’ll keep my legs inside an’ not dangle ‘em. I remember what you said about the doors slamming when they hook’m up. I’ll keep my legs inside, honest I will…”

He was crying. My head ached hideously. But he was crying!

“I’ll have to go, Gus!”

“You don’t care!” He was shouting. “You don’t care about me, you don’t care what happens to me! You don’t care if I die…you don’t—”

He didn’t have to say it: you don’t love me.

“I do, Gus. I swear to God, I do!”

I looked up at him; he was supposed to be my friend. But he wasn’t. He was going to let them send me off to that military school.

“I hope you die!”

Oh, dear God, Gus, I am! I turned and ran out of the woods as I watched him run out of the woods.

I drove away. The green Plymouth with the running boards and the heavy body; it was hard steering. The world swam around me. My eyesight blurred. I could feel myself withering away.

I thought I’d left myself behind, but little Gus had followed me out of the woods. Having done it, I now remembered: why had I remembered none of it before? As I drove off down Mentor Avenue, I came out of the woods and saw the big green car starting up, and I ran wildly forward, crouching low, wanting only to go with him, my friend, me. I threw in the clutch and dropped the stick into first and pulled away from the curb as I reached the car and climbed onto the rear fender, pulling my legs up, hanging onto the trunk latch. I drove weaving, my eyes watering and things going first blue then green, hanging on for dear life to the cold latch handle. Cars whipped around, honking madly, trying to tell me that I was on the rear of the car, but I didn’t know what they were honking about, and scared their honking would tell me I was back there, hiding.

After I’d gone almost a mile, a car pulled up alongside, and a woman sitting next to the driver looked down at me crouching there, and I made a please don’t tell sign with my finger to my freezing lips, but the car pulled ahead and the woman rolled down her window and motioned to me. I rolled down my window and the woman yelled across through the rushing wind that I was back there on the rear fender. I pulled over and fear gripped me as the car stopped and I saw me getting out of the door, and I crawled off the car and started running away. But my legs were cramped and cold from having hung on back there, and I ran awkwardly; then coming out of the dark was a road sign, and I hit it, and it hit me in the side of the face, and I fell down, and I ran toward myself, lying there, crying, and I got to him just as I got up and ran off into the gravel yard surrounding the Colony Lumber Company.

Little Gus was bleeding from the forehead where he’d struck the metal sign. He ran into the darkness, and I knew where he was running … I had to catch him, to tell him, to make him understand why I had to go away.

I came to the hurricane fence and ran and ran till I found the place where I’d dug out under it, and I slipped down and pulled myself under and got my clothes all dirty, but I got up and ran back behind the Colony Lumber Company, into the sumac and the weeds, till I came to the condemned pond back there. Then I sat down and looked out over the black water. I was crying.

I followed the trail down to the pond. It took me longer to climb over the fence than it had taken him to crawl under it. When I came down to the pond, he was sitting there with a long blade of saw grass in his mouth, crying softly.

I heard him coming, but I didn’t turn around.

I came down to him, and crouched behind him. “Hey,” I said quietly. “Hey, little Gus.”

I wouldn’t turn around. I wouldn’t.

I spoke his name again, and touched him on the shoulder, and in an instant he was turned to me, hugging me around the chest, crying into my jacket, mumbling over and over, “Don’t go, please don’t go, please take me with you, please don’t leave me here alone…”

And I was crying, too. I hugged little Gus, and touched his hair, and felt him. holding onto me with all his might, stronger than a seven-year-old should be able to hold on, and I tried to tell him how it was, how it would be: “Gus…hey, hey, little Gus, listen to me … I want to stay, you know I want to stay…but I can’t.”

I looked up at him; he was crying, too. It seemed so strange for a grown-up to be crying like that, and I said, “If you leave me I’ll die. I will!”

I knew it wouldn’t do any good to try explaining. He was too young. He wouldn’t be able to understand.

He pulled my arms from around him, and he folded my hands in my lap, and he stood up, and I looked at him. He was gonna leave me. I knew he was. I stopped crying. I wouldn’t let him see me cry.

I looked down at him. The moonlight held his face in a pale photograph. I wasn’t fooling myself. He’d understand. He’d know. I turned and started back up the path. Little Gus didn’t follow. He sat there looking back at me. I only turned once to look at him. He was still sitting there like that.

He was watching me. Staring up at me from the pond side. And I knew what instant it had been that had formed me. It wasn’t all the people who’d called me a wild kid, or a strange kid, or any of it. It wasn’t being poor or being lonely.

I watched him go away. He was my friend. But he didn’t have no guts. He didn’t. But I’d show him! I’d really show him! I was gonna get out of here, go away, be a big person and do a lot of things, and some day I’d run into him someplace and see him and he’d come up and shake my hand and I’d spit on him. Then I’d beat him up.

He walked up the path and went away. I sat there for a long time, by the pond. Till it got real cold.

I got back in the car, and went to find the way back to the future, where I belonged. It wasn’t much, but it was all I had. I would find it … I still had the dragoon…and there were many stops I’d made on the way to becoming me. Perhaps Kansas City; perhaps Matawatchan, Ontario, Canada; perhaps Galveston; perhaps Shelby, North Carolina.

And crying, I drove. Not for myself, but for myself, for little Gus, for what I’d done to him, forced him to become. Gus…Gus!

But…oh, God…what if I came back again…and again? Suddenly, the road did not look familiar.