The Boy With Penny Eyes (16 page)

He took another drag on the cigarette and then dropped it, crushing it with his sneaker. He walked into the park.

Cautiously, Mary made her way to the park entrance and looked in. He had stopped under a lamp and stood motionless. He looked as though he was measuring the night, sniffing it, almost.

He resumed walking.

She kept a good distance behind him. The path wound gently, with a light every thirty feet. Soon the entrance was lost to sight. Another shiver passed through Mary.

What if he wanted me to follow him? What if he knows I'm here?

Satan could do that, couldn't he?

No, even Satan could not do all things. Only God could do that. But Satan could try to trick her.

She remembered her Aunt Stella, Uncle Henry's wife, with her Bible stories. It was this big woman with thick legs and shoes that always hurt her ("Blast it, Eleanor," she would always tell Mary's mother, "I think the Lord gave me two feet on each leg, the way mine feel!") who had finally convinced Mary that she should use her gift of reading. "Can't see why He would have given it to you if He didn't want you to use it. Just keep your head about it," she'd said with the kind of simple logic that Mary's mother, or Uncle Henry, with his constant, inscrutable head nodding and mutterings that everything, no matter how trivial or monumental, was "God's way," did not possess.

One night Aunt Stella, with her shoes off and her bunioned, aching feet propped on a pillow set on a cane-backed chair, pulled close to the sofa, told Mary about Jesus being tempted by the devil. "Oh, Satan was a wise-tail, he was. He tried to tempt Jesus every which way he could think of. He thought that Jesus would be so hungry after fasting for forty days and nights that he could get just about anything out of Him. He says to Jesus, 'If you're God's son, turn these stones to bread.' But Jesus, He ain't fooled at all. He tells Satan that man doesn't need bread to live, only the word of God." Aunt Stella laughed, a throaty sound, like a bull-frog's. "Guess after forty days without food, Jesus was used to not eating. Anyway, then Satan tries to get Jesus to kill Himself, telling Him that if He throws Himself off a high place, angels will come to catch Him in midair. But Jesus tells him to forget it. He's not going to fall for that. Then Satan takes Him up to the highest place around, and shows Him all that there is to see, and tells Jesus that he'll give it all to Him if Jesus'll just fall down and worship him. Satan must have been weak from the heat! Heck, Jesus owned it all already! He tells Satan so, and then tells him to beat his horned tail out of there."

Aunt Stella lifted her feet off the pillow with a grunt, and rubbed at them for a few moments. "Well, little girl," she said at last, "the thing is, you can't trust old Satan. He'll say anything, do anything, to get you to follow him. Then—wham! He's got you. Heck, if he thought he could fool Jesus Himself, think what he'd try to do to you and me! Lord, these feet hurt so!"

Mary thought how Satan had fooled Aunt Stella.

It was Aunt Stella who had told her to marry Jacob Beck when everyone else was set against it. With her direct manner she'd said simply, "Heck, any pig in his pen can see you love the man. That's God's way if anything is. Was the same way with your Uncle Henry and me—though Lord knows why I ever fell for that man." She laughed. "All he ever does anymore is mumble and stare at the sky looking for God's judgment. Wasn't like that till your momma started filling his soft head with all kinds of strange ideas. Them being brother and sister and all, must run in the family. 'Fraid your momma filled your own head with some strange thoughts, but I pray you'll get over them. Heck! Go away with this Jacob—marry him! And him being a man of the cloth, can't see how you could lose!"

How wrong Aunt Stella had been.

The last time Mary saw Aunt Stella she was sitting on the front porch waving goodbye with one hand, the other rubbing at her foot, the rest of the family locked tight and silent in the house. She had only heard from her once since, in the letter her aunt had written to tell her her mother had died, and to tell her in her direct way not to get any foolish ideas that her leaving had had anything to do with it. "Your momma was sad to see you go," the letter read, "but when the Lord rings your telephone, you answer, and there's not anybody else in the world has anything to do with it one way or another."

She thought about how wrong Aunt Stella had been about that, too.

Up ahead, the boy stopped. He stood half in, half out of a sharp cone of light from a park lamp. He reached into his black golf jacket and drew out his pack of cigarettes. He put one to his mouth and expertly lit it.

He was still as a statue, only the glowing coal of the tip of the cigarette showing life. Again he appeared to be testing the world around him.

He walked on, the cigarette still in his mouth.

Mary's sense told her to turn back, but she followed until he stepped off the path suddenly and disappeared into the gloom.

Mary froze; and then she heard a sound: someone walking toward her.

A figure passed into and out of the lamplight just ahead. Mary quietly left the walkway, stepping behind a convenient stand of bushes.

She looked behind her, trying to find Billy, but he was nowhere to be seen. She thought again of Aunt Stella's words. Maybe he was right behind her now, reaching out in the darkness. But then she spied the glowing tip of his cigarette, off away from her, near to where he'd abandoned the footpath.

The approaching figure walked into the illumination of the next lamp. It was a heavyset old man, his shirttail showing beneath his dirty jacket. He stopped and belched, a long, self-absorbed sound. Then he turned toward Mary's hiding place and began to talk.

Paralyzed with fear, Mary thought she had been discovered. Then she saw in the man's hand a long clear bottle, half filled with sloshing clear liquid, and she realized that he was talking to no one in particular.

"So I coulda done it," he said, holding the bottle out before him as if offering it to a friend. "I coulda. An' he knew it."

Behind Mary, the still-glowing end of Billy's cigarette did not move.

"An' he tol' me no. He tol' me no." By now the drunk had his head bowed on his chest, his speech taking on a melancholy inflection. "Wha' the heck," he said. Suddenly he put down his bottle unsteadily on the flagstone path and stumbled toward the bush behind which Mary hid.

He pushed into the front branches, mumbling an apology to himself. Mary heard the zip of his fly. He urinated on the other side of the bush, singing as he did so: "So Molly, she says she's a hooker, an' Fred, he says she's a whore . . ."

Mary backed away, looking for Billy's cigarette as the drunkard finished his song: "So Captain O'Malley says, 'Book her!' and Sergeant O'Rourke says, 'Wha' for?' "

The drunk zipped up his fly and stepped away from the bushes, tripping as the heel of his shoe caught the edge of the stone path. " 'Scuse me, beg your pardon," he said, laughing. He located his bottle, picked it up on the second try, and stumbled away.

Mary turned to look for Billy's cigarette, but it was gone.

She stood where she was.
Satan's tricks.
She had never felt so alone in her life. Maybe this is how he had tricked her, using the passing drunkard to take her attention away from himself. Maybe he had lit that cigarette knowing she would look for it, and then he had put it out. Maybe he was coming toward her in the dark, getting closer with each breath she took, each breath Satan drawing closer . . .

She stepped out onto the footpath and walked quickly toward the exit. She didn't care if the boy saw her now.

Night sounds assaulted her. There were trees bordering a turn of the trail ahead. A solid clutch of fear gripped her. She slowed, passing them.

She ran, sure she heard a sound close behind, as if someone had stepped out from behind one of the trees.

"Mary," she thought she heard her mother's voice call.

Satan's tricks.

She cried out and ran faster.

The stone pillars at the exit became visible and, beyond them, the comforting light of the street.

"Mary," the voice called once more.

"No!"

Closer. Her legs carried her faster. She fled toward the pillars and then was between them, feeling a rush of relief.

Someone stepped from behind one of them and took hold of her.

She screamed, throwing her fists out blindly.

"'Scuse me, lady," the old drunk said, stumbling back against the pillar. He raised his hand to a nonexistent hat. He tilted his bottle into his mouth, then slid purposefully down the pillar until he sat at its base. Again he began to sing his barroom song: "An' Molly she says she's a hooker . . ."

Gasping, Mary stumbled up the street away from him.

God, help me! Tell me what to do!

Ahead, she saw the dark mass of the church and parish house, the comforting iron line of the fence. Still sobbing, she reached the gate.

It was open.

And, as she looked up, she saw the window to Billy's room, up on the second floor, closing and the shadow of the boy moving away from it.

Danny French was still in front of the classroom when the bell rang.

"Hurry up!" Fred Grainger, who was sitting next to Billy, shouted, and French got back to his seat as the doorknob turned and Mr. Gleason walked into the room.

"Today—" Gleason began, setting his briefcase down on his desk, but suddenly Martha Mifflin stood up.

"Danny French drew something on the blackboard," she said. She smiled primly and sat down, hands folded on her desk.

Danny French's thin face turned red.

"Well," Mr. Gleason said, "let's see how Mr. French's art career is coming along." He pushed his thick glasses up on his nose, a habitual action that he performed every minute or so since they continuously slipped down. He was balding and going to fat.

Gleason went to the chart covering the blackboard. He gave it a sharp tug downward at one corner, but it wouldn't rise. He tried again, but nothing happened. He pulled it down from the middle, and then from the other end, succeeding finally in gently raising it above the blackboard.

There was a burst of laughter, mostly from the back, where Danny French and his friends sat. Gleason studied the characterization on the blackboard. It showed a small body with two clownish shoes on, one filled in with white chalk, the other left blank. The rest of the figure was rumpled. The most prominent feature was the huge head on top of the body. It made up nearly the entire top half of the image. There were two little eyes and a round mouth, with a curl of hair at the very top. The drawing was labeled, "Egghead."

"I'll see you after class," Gleason said to Danny French. He erased the caricature.

From his seat behind Billy, Danny French leaned over and whispered in his ear, "My buddy John Mifflin tells me you've been buggin' his ass."

Billy stared at the front of the room.

"You hear me, weirdo?" French said. He took the sharpened tip of his pencil and pressed it into Billy's back.

"He heard you," Fred Grainger said. "He's just too tough to answer."

Both boys, along with another who sat behind French, laughed.

"Listen, weirdo," French said, pressing the pencil tip harder into Billy's back, "John Mifflin's a friend of mine. If you even breathe near him, I'll beat your fucking brains out."

He jammed the pencil into Billy's back, eliciting more laughter from the others.

As Gleason, with help from another boy, got the chart in front straightened out, French took the pencil away from Billy's back.