Shadowland (11 page)

 
   'What the hell are you, Florence Nightingale?' Ridpath screamed.

 
   
Florence.
That absurdly Victorian name: Ridpath laughed at his own invention, and all of us laughed too: Del hadbeen christened. At that moment Whipple appeared, cherubic and red-faced in his satiny coaching jacket, and Mr. Ridpath ran across to the field where the varsity team was just now beginning to do calisthenics; but the change of coaches had come too late for Del.

 
   'Stand on my shoulders, Florence — I'll move it for you,' shouted a muscular, amiable boy named Pete Bayliss. And that sealed the name for Del.

 
   For the rest of the hour we desultorily ran through plays.

 
   We shared a locker room with the older boys, and after practice, when the pads and sweatshirts had been put away and we had just returned from the showers, the varsity boys came noisily into that sweat-smelling, echoing place. Skeleton Ridpath was among them, covered in dirt and with a bruise on his left cheek — he played only because his father made him, and in the last quarter of the varsity game which had followed ours, he had committed two fouls.

 
   The seniors and juniors began throwing their helmets into their lockers, shouting back and forth. Skeleton Ridpath undressed more slowly than the others, and was just untying his pads when most of the other varsity players were already in the shower across the hall. I saw him looking across the room at us, smiling to himself. When he had stripped down to his jockstrap, he stood up, stepped across the bench, and walked halfway over to us.. 'I guess this is a coed school now,' he said, his hands on the bones of his hips.

 
   'He looks like a graveyard,' Sherman whispered in my ear. Ridpath glanced at us, irritated that he had missed Sherman's comment, but too inflamed by his hostility to be distracted.

 
   'We take girls now, I guess,' he said, staring at Del Nightingale. Del had tucked his chin down and was wriggling into his trousers.

 
   'Hey, Florence. Do you know what happens to girls when they're caught in locker rooms? Huh?'

 
   'Shut up,' Tom Flanagan said.

 
   Ridpath raised a hand as if to slap Flanagan — he was at least seven feet away. 'You little creep. I'm talking to your date. Is that what you are, Florence? His date?' Hestepped forward: he was almost half again as tall as Del, and he looked like an elongated bony white worm. He also looked crazy, caught up in some spiraling private hatred: it was obvious that his remarks were not just casual school insults, and the dozen of us left in the room froze, really unable to imagine what he might force himself to do. For a second he seemed a demented, furious giant.

 
   His bruised face twisted, and he said, 'Why don't you suck — '

 
   Tom Flanagan catapulted himself off the bench and rushed toward him.

 
   Skeleton put out a startled fist and jabbed Tom in the chest. Then saliva flew from his mouth, his face worked in fury and bafflement, and he knocked Tom backward into our bench.

 
   Bryce Beaver, one of two juniors who would later be expelled for smoking, came in from the shower naked, with a green school towel around his neck. 'Hey, Skeleton, what the shit are you
doing?'
he asked, amazed. 'Your old man'll be here in a second.'

 
   'I hate these little farts,' Skeleton said, his bruised dirty face still a mask of loathing, and turned away. From the back he looked skinned and fragile.

 
   The outside door opened and clanked shut. Mr. Whippie's voice carried to us, saying, ' . . . work on all the Y plays, get Hogan to find those receivers . . . ' Bryce Beaver shook his head and began toweling his legs.

 
   Mr. Ridpath and Mr. Whipple came into the locker room, carrying with them a scent of fresh air, which lingered only a moment. I saw Mr. Ridpath struggle to keep his smile as he glanced at his son.

 
16

 
Two weeks later, when the JV team played the varsity scrubs in a practice game, I saw Tom Flanagan repeatedly bringing down Skeleton Ridpath, bowling him off his feet even when the play was on the other side of the field. Thethird time it happened, Skeleton waited until Whipple looked away and kicked Tom in the face. On the next play, Tom Flanagan tackled and wrenched him to the ground so savagely that I could hear the noise from the bench,

 
   'Great play! Great play!' shouted Mr. Ridpath. 'That's spirit!'

 
17

 
Midnight, Saturday: Two Bedrooms

 
In Del's room, the boys lay on their separate beds, talking in the dark. Tim and Valerie Hillman were making too much noise for them to sleep: Tom could hear Tim Hillman shouting
Bitch! Bitch!
at intervals. Both Hillmans had been drunk at dinner, Tim more so than Valerie. Bud Copeland had served the boys at a table in the kitchen, and clearing up, had said, 'Trouble tonight. You fellas jump into bed early and close up your ears.'

 
   But that was not possible. Tim's shouts and Valerie's abrupt rejoinders winged through the house.

 
   'Uncle Cole says Tim drinks so much to make himself into another person,' Del said in the darkness. 'If he's drunk, he's another person. One he'd rather be.'

 
   'He'd rather be
that?'

 
   'I guess so.'

 
   'Boy.'

 
   'Well, Uncle Cole is always right. I mean it. He's never wrong about things. Do you want to know what he says about magic?'

 
   'Sure.'

 
   'It's like what he said about Tim. He says a magician must be apart from ordinary life — he has to make himself new, because he has a special project. To do magic, to do great magic, he has to know himself as a piece of the universe.'

 
   'A piece of the universe?'

 
   'A little piece that has all the rest of it in it. Everything outside him is also inside him. You see that?'

 
   'I guess.'

 
   'Well, if you do, then you can see why I want to be a magician. Science is all
head,
right? Sports is all body. A magician uses all of himself. Uncle Cole says a magician is in synthesis.
Synthesis.
He says you're part music and part blood, part thinker and part killer. And if you can find all that in you and control it, then you deserve to be set apart.' 'So it's about control. About power.'

 
   'Sure it is. It's about being God.'

 
   Tom knew that Del was waiting for him to respond, but he could not. Though he was not religious and had not entered a church since the previous Christmas, Del's last remark had upset him profoundly.

 
   Across the room, he could
hear
Del's smile. 'I saw what you did to Skeleton, you know. You're a killer too.'

 
The subject of these last sentences, who was sure that he was a killer, lay like the two younger boys in a bed in a darkened room. What was going through his mind was surprisingly similar — the similarity would certainly have surprised Del Nightingale — to the content of the boys' conversation. Music, not shouts, filled the air about him — a Bo Diddley record.
Strong:
music so dense and pounding that it seemed to push itself into his skin, force itself between himself and the bed and pick his laden body up and make it float.

 
   . Skeleton
knew
that he was a piece of the universe, and that the hatred which was the strongest and best part of him ran through the universe like a bar of steel. Skeleton too had seen desert vultures, and violent bands of color in the desert sky; and he had seen the sand far out of town turn purple and red when night came on. Even in his baffled and empty childhood, he had known that such things were in his key, that they struck the same note as the deep well of black feelings within himself. Other people were blinkered, self-deluded rabbits: they looked at the desert and saw what they called 'beauty,' walling themselves off from it. Other people were afraid of the truth in themselves, which was also the truth at the world's heart. Every man was a killer — that was what Skeleton knew. Every, leaf, every grain of sand, had akiller in it. If you touched a tree, you could feel a wave of blackness pumping through it, drawn up from the ground and breathed out through the bark.

 
   And lately, as he worked more and more on his 'things,' as he varnished images of pain and fear onto his walls, he had come closer and closer to that truth. Skeleton had begun to have new ideas about his 'things,' ideas he could scarcely bear to peep at. They were a unity, they were the unity which was Skeleton Ridpath, but there was something more.

 
   And lately . . .

 
   lately . . .

 
   he had, peeping at his new ideas, seen glimpses of their power. A man was showing him how right he was, and how little he still knew. It was as if the man had stepped off his walls, walked out of the 'things' and lifted his broad-brimmed hat from his head to show the face of a beast. The man, who was everywhere and nowhere, in his dreams and hovering just out of sight as he prowled from one room to another, was animal, tree, desert, bird . . . he wore a long belted coat, his hat shaded his face — he was what was real. He spoke to Skeleton when Skeleton thought about him: and what he said was:
Ihave come to save your life.
He wanted something of poor Skeleton, his will drove out at poor Skeleton, and poor Skeleton would have cut off all the fingers of one hand for him. He had power to make a king's look feeble. He was like the music at the heart of the music, what the musicians would play if they were twelve feet tall and made of thunder, and rain.

 
   He is
me,
Skeleton thought.
Me.
He grinned up in the darkness at a picture of a giant bird.

 
18

 
'Goose Girl'

 
''There was once an old queen, whose husband had long been dead, and she had a beautiful daughter,'' Mr. Fitz-Hallan read. 'First sentence of the story 'Goose Girl.' What does that tell you the story is going to be about?'

 
   'The beautiful daughter,' Bobby Hollingsworth said, his arm up in the air.