Ghost Boy Read online

  “He’s awake now,” shouted Tina. He hadn’t seen her on the sofa, as tiny as she was, camouflaged against its beige ulphostery in a shabby housecoat. “Say, we thought you’d sleep the day away.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Harold.

  “I don’t know why you should be. You have to sleep, you know.” She laughed. “It’s not like we’re going anywhere.”

  “Why not?” asked Harold.

  “Well, take a look outside.” She gestured with her little hand vaguely toward the window. “It’ll clear your head. Go on and take a look.”

  He folded his blankets and left them on the chair. Then he pulled on his helmet and stumbled out through the door, down a step to sodden grass.

  The storm had passed, and the sky was full of ragged clouds. The truck and trailer were pulled off beside a dirt road—now only mud—that ended just yards away, at the edge of a swollen river. Water swept around the stumps of a washed-out bridge and covered the road from shoulder to shoulder. Samuel stood there, but to Harold he looked like only a stump, until he turned and came across the grass.

  “Almost drove right off the road,” he said. “The rain the way it was, mud all over the headlights, I couldn’t see a thing. Not a thing.” He was rubbing his hairy fists together. “I just hope old Bob saw it. What if he rode himself straight into the river?”

  “The horse wouldn’t let him,” said Harold.

  “Maybe not. Maybe not.” Samuel’s claws clicked as he wrung his hands. “No, I suppose you’re right. Of course that’s true.”

  The river went by in a dark, silent rush. Harold watched it oozing through the grass, and he thought what a sad, tiny thing the Rattlesnake was. And suddenly he felt very far from home, and remembered his dog and his mother.

  Samuel was watching him, staring down from his great height. “What’s wrong with your eyes?” he asked.

  “Nothing,” said Harold.

  “They’re kind of moving. They’re jumping like Mexican beans.”

  Harold blushed. He felt in his pockets for his glasses.

  “Do things look wobbly?” asked Samuel, bending closer. “Is everything you see sort of moving?”

  “No,” said Harold.

  Samuel straightened. “Can you see what I look like?”

  He was the ugliest thing that Harold had ever seen. Below the big, thick brows his face was squashed and flat. The hair that grew from it hung in tufts, thickened by dirt and rain.

  “Can you?” asked Samuel again.

  “Not really,” lied Harold.

  “You’re lucky.” The little eyes seemed sad. “You wouldn’t believe how lucky you are.”

  THE CLOUDS BROKE UP and the sun came out, but the river didn’t fall; it rose higher. Samuel drove a stick into the ground at its edge, and they sat on a bit of canvas—the midget, the monster and Harold the Ghost—watching the water creep up the stick. It spread through the grass toward them.

  A milking stool went past, and then a chicken coop turning circles, with a rooster crowing at its top.

  “If a rocking chair goes by,” said Samuel, “I’m going to fetch it. I always wanted a rocking chair.”

  “And a chest of drawers,” said Princess Minikin. “With a big old mirror that tilts and turns. That’s what I’d like.” Then she looked at Harold. “What about you?”

  Harold leaned back on his arms. He thought of all the things he wanted, and imagined it would take a raft to hold them all. He tried to picture it coming slowly down the river, stacked with fishing poles and Daisy rifles, towing kites with long tails of red ribbons. He saw a television set and an army of toy soldiers. He saw a huge heap of boxes. And then, balanced on top of it all, his brother, David, was sitting in his uniform, waving as he came, and there at the front was Honey. He even heard her bark.

  Suddenly he was crying. He wasn’t making a sound, but tears were trickling out from his glasses. The raft disappeared and he saw Honey instead, lying on the floor where he’d left her.

  “Say, I’m sorry,” said Tina. “Gosh, I didn’t want to make you feel bad.”

  “I guess he misses his home,” said Samuel.

  “Of course he does, you lug.”

  Samuel shifted to his knees. “Jolly jam!” he said. “Let’s give him a jolly jam.”

  They closed around him, Tina standing up to throw her arms around his neck, Samuel folding down to take him in those enormous, hairy fists. They crushed him from either side; they rocked him back and forth.

  They squeezed the sadness from the Ghost. They squeezed it up so it filled him at first—more than it ever had—then poured from him like the sour juice of a lemon. In its place came a glow of warmth and peace, and Harold smiled and hugged them back.

  “You see?” said Samuel. “That’s what he needed. A good old geezer-squeezer.” He smiled, his teeth so sharp and crooked, his eyes bright as little stars. Harold stared back at them, and for the first time saw something other than ugliness. He saw—or thought he did—a normal person inside those eyes, a different person trapped in all that hair and sagging flesh. It was a funny little man in there, one he would love in a moment if he looked the way he should.

  Tina’s hands clung to Harold’s wrists. “Don’t you worry,” she said. “Everything goes for the best. The Gypsy Magda said it would. Tell him, Samuel. Didn’t she say that anyway?”

  Samuel nodded. “Yes, she did.”

  “She said a boy would come. He would be on a journey, she said. He would start in the dead of night, and at the end he would find contentment.”

  “I’ve never met her,” said Harold.

  “Say, you think that matters? The Gypsy Magda sees visions. She can look at your hand and tell you everything that’s happened and everything that will.”

  “She’s never wrong,” said Samuel.

  They sat in a row, facing the river. It crawled through the grass and rippled past Samuel’s stick, hardly an inch from its top.

  “Where’s the Gypsy Magda now?” asked Harold.

  Samuel grunted. “I guess she’s lost. She’s always getting lost somewhere.”

  Chapter

  10

  The river crept higher, and then no farther. It flowed past like a great moving lake, carrying whole trees from a distant forest, carrying a horse trough and a bucket and an old wagon with its wheels poking up in the air.

  Then the sun went down, and a silver curve of moon drifted up behind it. Far away the coyotes called.

  “Listen,” said Samuel suddenly.

  The prairie seemed to hum with the noise of the night. The crickets, the frogs, the river in the grass; a rush of tiny noises churned in Harold’s ears.

  Samuel stood up. “The Gypsy Magda’s coming.”

  Harold felt a tingle through his back and down his arms. Walter Beesley had made him scared of Gypsies; he saw them as thieves that came crawling in packs.

  Above the prairie noises he heard the growl of the engine and looked up, to the east. A prick of light floated there, between the land and sky. It split in two, a pair of yellow eyes. They glared down the road and shone in leaping flashes on the trailer. And Samuel ran to meet them. He sprinted through the grass, hunched and gangly, like something prehistoric. The eyes caught him and pinned him on the road, and his shadow stretched for a quarter mile, rippled on the river.

  The truck slowed, grinding through its gears. It shimmied sideways, straightened again, then stopped beside the other one. It was shorter and fatter than the Ford that Samuel drove, clotted with mud around its fenders. The lights went out and the engine stopped. A door creaked open.

  “That boy, is he here?” said the Gypsy Magda. “That boy on his journey, that traveling boy. Is he here?”

  “Yes,” said Samuel. He stood below the door, reaching up into a void of shadows. “We were worried about you,” he said.

  “Has he seen the Cannibal King?”

  “No.”

  “Much I have to tell him.”

  Samuel stretched his arms
toward the cab. A hand floated out of the darkness, a face above it, but nothing to join them. The hand fluttered down like a moth and lighted on Samuel’s shoulder. He took the woman in his arms and set her down on the grass.

  She came into the light from the trailer windows, a woman dressed all in black, in layers of scarves that flowed around her. She was thin and shriveled and gray; her arms were nothing but bones. But on her wrists and her ankles she wore silver bracelets, and bells below the scarves, and she walked with a jingling and a tingling of metal. Tina ran to greet her, and the Gypsy Magda dropped to her knees to hug the little princess.

  “Where have you been?” asked Tina.

  “She’s so big, this land of America,” said the Gypsy Magda. “I drive and drive across her steppes. The same fence post, thirteen times he passes me.” Her face turned, gaunt and yellow in the light. She found Harold in the darkness, and her eyes seemed to burn. “Why does he stand in shadows?”

  “He’s kind of shy,” said Tina.

  With a shimmering of bells the Gypsy Magda stood. She beckoned to Harold, and he went to her, his arms in a cross on his chest, his feet scuffing, as though she dragged him to her.

  “Yes, you’re the one,” she said, and smiled a toothless grin. “Let me see your hands.”

  She didn’t wait; she snatched them. She took them and turned them sharply over, and her thumbs—with thick, yellow nails—scraped across his palms. Then she shook, and her bracelets rang. Her voice went high and keening, and it shivered through his skin. “Beware the ones with unnatural charm. And the beast that feeds with its tail.”

  Gooseflesh rose on Harold’s skin. He saw his snow-white hands, her dark thumbs laid across them. He saw her head roll back. And again her voice scraped at his spine like a fiddler’s bow.

  “A wild man’s meek and a dark one’s pale. And there comes a monstrous harm.”

  Her voice faded off. Then a coyote called, and then another, in the same shrill and eerie tones as the Gypsy Magda. A third answered them, and a fourth in the distance, as though they sang her warning across the prairie, from den to lonely den.

  “Gosh!” said Tina. “Jeepers, that was good.” Her little face was smiling, her adult’s face like a child’s again, gazing up at Harold. “Say, didn’t I tell you she was something else?”

  Harold couldn’t answer. He felt a heat from the old Gypsy’s thumbs, but it was the look in her eyes that startled him. The Gypsy, he thought, was frightened.

  Chapter

  11

  They sat at the trailer’s small table, in rickety chairs that squeaked and chattered on the floor, a tall one for Tina, a low little stool for Samuel. They drank the Gypsy Magda’s tea, a wicked brew as dark as the night, from china cups with painted roses on the side. She had cast a handful of leaves in the pot, and they swirled on the surface of each white cup.

  Samuel was happy, even jolly. He towered above the Gypsy, his china cup like a thimble in his hand. “We might as well make the best of it,” he said. “We could be here for days.”

  “Why?” asked the Gypsy Magda.

  “The river. It hasn’t even crested yet.” He drank his tea in slurps, spilling it down his beard. “It’ll take three days at least to fall. There’s not a chance we’ll cross before that. Not a hope in the world.”

  “Ach,” said the Gypsy Magda. “She’s nothing, that river. Just a trickle, just a nothing.”

  Samuel laughed. “Then it’s a whole lot of nothing,” he said, and finished his tea. He put the cup on the table and poked it, with a claw, toward the Gypsy Magda.

  “Not now,” she said.

  “But you always read my leaves.” He sounded disappointed, so pathetically so that the Gypsy Magda in all her scarves took his cup and set it upside down.

  She turned it slowly; four times she turned it, so the handle faced north and then west, south and then east. Her lips shrunken in around her toothless mouth, she chanted as she turned. “Withershins we go. Back to where we start. Withershins we turn. To see inside the heart.”

  Samuel leaned forward as she picked up the cup. “What does it say?” he asked.

  “I see a storm. Much rain, much thunder. I see trouble, a person in trouble.”

  “Me?” asked Samuel.

  “Someone else. He comes to you with trouble.”

  “When?”

  “Soon,” she said, and put down the cup. “That is all.”

  “It wasn’t very much,” he said, pouting.

  She shrugged. “You spill too many leaves.”

  “Now me,” said Tina. “You did Samuel, you’ve got to do me.” Her cup seemed too big, her fingers loose inside the tiny handle. She put it down and slid it over the table.

  Bracelets jangled. The Gypsy Magda turned the cup onto its brim. There was a stain of tea on the table. Again she turned it, and again she chanted.

  Tina grinned at Harold. Little fists clunked together, knuckles to knuckles. The Gypsy Magda took the cup in her hands.

  “What do you see?” asked Tina. “What do you see?”

  “Happiness. Great happiness.” The Gypsy Magda leaned forward, peering at the cup.

  “What else do you see?”

  “Kindness. Love. It is dripping from you, this kindness.”

  “Money? Do you see money?”

  “No.”

  “Nuts!” said Tina. “What else?”

  “A game. A great game and much laughing.”

  “What kind of a game?”

  “It is hard to see.” The Gypsy Magda tipped the cup. “You are running. Shouting.” Suddenly her head shot back. She looked sharply at Harold. “That is all.”

  “What do you mean, that’s all?” asked Tina. “Say, what’s in there anyway?”

  The Gypsy Magda shook the cup, hard. Leaves sprayed across the floor in a smear of black and tea. She tugged at her scarves, at her bracelets. “It’s not enough, this happiness? You will be more happy than you ever dreamed. But it’s not enough?”

  “Sure,” said Tina. She sat back, not as happy as Harold might have thought.

  He held his cup close to his chest, tightly in his hands. He wasn’t sure if he wanted to know what was in there.

  “I’m tired,” said the Gypsy Magda. “I must sleep.” She pushed back her chair and stood wobbling by the table. “The boy, he will walk with me.”

  They went out into the darkness and the soft chirruping of crickets. The Gypsy Magda slipped her arm through Harold’s, and they walked across the grass.

  “Are you frightened of me?” she asked.

  “No,” said Harold.

  “Of the future, then?”

  He nodded. She leaned against him, her weight not half of his.

  Her bracelets and her bells made a music in the night. “It is good you ask no questions. You are brave to go in darkness without the lamp to show your way.”

  Harold shivered. He wasn’t brave. He was scared to know his future.

  He helped the Gypsy Magda into the high, covered back of her truck. There was a little door that she crawled through, into a cave that smelled of spices and candles. She looked down at him from above.

  “Hurry back,” she said. “Your friends, they have something for you.”

  He walked through the darkness, into the trailer, and saw that his friends had gone to bed. Down the narrow corridor, underneath the cabin doors, slits of light sprayed across the floor. But in the little living room a blanket was hung from the ceiling, suspended in front of the sofa. Pinned to it was a piece of paper, and on it was written Harrolds Rume.

  The cabin doors banged open. Samuel came through one, the princess through the other. “Surprise!” she shouted, her hands in the air. “Do you like it?”

  Harold squinted at the bit of the paper and the curtain. “What is it?” he asked.

  Tina frowned. “Why, it’s your room,” she said. “What do you think?”

  He was touched by the gesture. The Airstream trailer was small and cramped, but this little bi
t of it was his. He thought of the tiny woman and the monstrous man, and how they must have planned it out, then waited for a chance to give him this small surprise.

  He pulled the blanket aside and sat on the sofa; there wasn’t room to stand. His bundle of clothes had been opened, everything unpacked and set neatly on little shelves. The baseball bat, the glove and the painted ball, everything was there. A coverlet and pillow were laid out for him.

  Harold the Ghost stretched out on the sofa, in the first room that had ever been his own.

  “You like it?” asked Tina.

  “Very much,” he said. “Thank you, Samuel. Thank you, Princess Minikin.”

  Tina laughed. “You don’t have to call me that,” she said. “Just call me Tina, okay?”

  Chapter

  12

  The Gypsy Magda was right. In the morning the river was gone. Just a thin, dark line of water flowed through its wide channel, the banks and the prairie on either side blackened with mud and debris.

  The trucks started in coughs of smoke, with rattles of fenders and cowlings. They lurched across the river, spewing mud from whirling wheels, and staggered up the other side. They gained the road and headed west, with the morning sun behind them.

  “I love traveling days,” said Tina, wedged between Samuel and Harold. She sat on an apple box, her fat little legs braced across it. “Sometimes I wish we could travel forever.”

  The day was hot and bright, the roads covered again in dust. It rose from the wheels in feathers at first, and then in a cloud that thickened behind them, bubbling over the trailer.

  All that day and all the next they drove toward the west. They sang “Roll Out the Barrel” as the telephone poles went whooshing past and the wind came hot through the windows. They sang “When Johnny Comes Marching Home,” and Samuel made the sound of a drum with his fist on the wheel, and Tina had tears in her eyes.

  Then Harold saw the mountains. He pushed back his helmet and gazed at them rising from the prairie far ahead, a blur in his poor, bad eyes. “The mountains!” he cried, and pointed. “That must be Oregon, I bet.”