Craig waited.
“That’s rich,” he said. “The bottle right here, and old Beck not even around to take it.” He shook the blue container.
It gurgled.
“Yes, sir! Just the way it was before. Full of bourbon, by God!” He opened it, drank, wiped his mouth.
He held the bottle carelessly.
“All that trouble for a little bourbon. I’ll wait right here for old Beck and give him his damn bottle. Meanwhile—have an other drink, Mr. Craig. Don’t mind if I do.”
The only sound in the dead land was the sound of liquid running into a parched throat. The Blue Bottle flashed in the sun.
Craig smiled happily and drank again.
That week, so many years ago, I thought my mother and father were poisoning me. And now, twenty years later, I’m not so sure they didn’t. There’s no way of telling.
It all comes back to me through the simple expedient of an examined trunk in the attic. This morning I pulled back the brass hasps and lifted the lid, and the immemorial odor of mothballs shrouded the unstrung tennis rackets, the worn sneakers, the shattered toys, the rusty roller skates. These implements of play, seen again through older eyes, make it seem only an hour ago that I rushed in from the shady streets, all asweat, the cry of “Ollie, Ollie, Oxen Free!” still excitedly trembling on my lips.
I was a weird and ridiculous boy then with brooding and uncommon ideas; the poison and the fear were only part of me in those years. I began making notes in a lined nickel tablet when I was only twelve. I can feel the stubby pencil in my fingers now, writing in those timeless spring mornings.
I paused to lick my pencil, thoughtfully. I sat in my upstairs room at the beginning of a clear endless day, blinking at the rose-stamped wallpaper, my feet bare, my hair shorn to a hairbrush stubble, thinking.
“I didn’t know I was sick until this week,” I wrote. “I’ve been sick for a long time. Since I was ten. I’m twelve now.”
I scrouged up my face, bit my lips hard, focused blurrily on the tablet. “Mom and Dad have made me sick. Teachers at school also gave this—” I hesitated. Then I wrote: “Disease to me! The only ones who don’t scare me are the other kids. Isabel Skelton and Willard Bowers and Clarisse Mellin; they aren’t very sick yet. But I’m really bad off ….”
I laid the pencil down. I went to the bathroom mirror to see myself. My mother called me from downstairs to come to breakfast. I pressed close to the mirror, breathing so fast I made a big damp fog on the glass. I saw how my face was—changing.
The bones of it. Even the eyes. The pores of my nose. My ears. My forehead. My hair. All the things that’d been me for such a long time, starting to become something else. (“Douglas, come to breakfast, you’ll be late for school!”) As I took a quick wash I saw my body floating under me. I was inside it. There was no escape. And the bones of it were doing things, shifting, mixing around!
Then I began singing and whistling loud, so I wouldn’t think about it; until Father, rapping on the door, told me to quiet down and come eat.
I sat at the breakfast table. There was a yellow box of cereal and milk, white-cold in a pitcher, and shining spoons and knives, and eggs planked with bacon, Dad reading his paper, Mom moving around the kitchen. I sniffed. I felt my stomach lie down like a whipped dog.
“What’s wrong, son?” Dad looked at me casually. “Not hungry?”
“No, sir.”
“A boy should be hungry in the morning,” said Father.
“You go ahead and eat,” said Mother at me. “Go on now. Hurry.”
I looked at the eggs. They were poison. I looked at the butter. It was poison. The milk was so white and creamy and poisonous in its pitcher, and the cereal was brown and crisp and tasty in a green dish with pink flowers on it.
Poison, all of them, poison! The thought ran in my head like ants at a picnic. I caught my lip in my teeth.
“Unh?” said Dad, blinking at me. You said?”
“Nothing,” I said. “Except I’m not hungry.”
I couldn’t say I was ill and that food made me ill. I couldn’t say that cookies, cakes, cereals and soups and vegetables had done this to me, could I? No, I had to sit, swallowing nothing, my heart beginning to pound.
“Well, drink your milk at least, and go on,” said Mother. “Dad, give him money for a good lunch at school. Orange juice, meat, and milk. No candy.”
She didn’t have to warn me on candy. It was worst of all the poisons. I wouldn’t touch it again, ever!
I strapped my books and went to the door.
“Douglas, you didn’t kiss me,” said Mom.
“Oh,” I said, and shuffled to kiss her.
“What’s wrong with you?” she asked.
“Nothing,” I said. “’Bye. So long, Dad.”
Everybody said good-bye. I walked to school, thinking deep inside, like shouting down a long, cold well.
I ran down through the ravine and swung on a vine, way out; the ground dropped away, I smelled the cool morning air, sweet and high, and I screamed with laughter, and the wind threw away my thoughts. I tossed myself in a flip against the embankment and rolled down as birds whistled at me and a squirrel hopped like brown fuzz blown by the wind up around a tree trunk. Down the path the other kids fell like a small avalanche, yelling. “Ahh—eee—yah!” Pounding their chests, skipping rocks on the water, jumping their hands down to catch at crayfish. The crayfish jetted away in dusty spurts. We all laughed and joked.
A girl passed by on the green wooden bridge above us. Her name was Clarisse Mellin. We all hee-hawed at her, told her to go on, go on, we didn’t want her with us, go on, go on! But my voice caught and trailed off, and I watched her going, slowly. I didn’t look away.
From way off in the morning we heard the school bell ring.
We scrambled up trails we’d made during many summers over the years. The grass was worn; we knew each snake hole and bump, each tree, every vine, every weed of it. After school we’d made tree huts here, high up over the shining creek, jumped in the water naked, gone on long hikes down the ravine to where it emptied lonely and abandoned into the big blue of Lake Michigan, near the tannery and the asbestos works and the docks.
Now, as we panted up to school, I stopped, afraid again. “You go on ahead,” I said.
The last bell tolled. The kids ran. I looked at the school with vines growing on it. I heard the voices inside, making a high, all-the-time noise. I heard little desk bells tinkle and sharp teacher voices reaching out.
Poison, I thought. The teachers, too! They want me sick! They teach you how to be sicker and sicker! And—and how to enjoy being sick!
“Good morning, Douglas.”
I heard high-heeled shoes on the cement walk. Miss Adams, the principal, with her pince-nez and wide, pale face and close-cropped dark hair, stood behind me.
“Come along in,” she said, holding my shoulder firmly. “You’re late. Come along.”
She guided me, one two, one two, one two, upstairs, up the stairs to my fate….
Mr. Jordan was a plump man with thinning hair and serious green eyes and a way of rocking on his heels before his charts. Today he had a large illustration of a body with all its skin off. Exposed were green, blue, pink, and yellow veins,