“Well? Can I do the cloud-shaped one?”
She did, and caused it to vanish. This time she could tell that it was her energy that was making the cloud disperse. She could actually feel that something was happening, although she didn’t know what it was and couldn’t understand how it worked. She did a third cloud, dispatching it in short order, and when it fell to her withering gaze she felt a remarkable surge of triumph.
She also felt drained. “I’ve got a headache,” she told Cory. “I suppose the sun and the wine would do it, but it doesn’t feel like the usual sort of headache.”
“You’re using some mental muscles for the first time,” he explained. “They say we only use a small percentage of the brain. When we learn to use a new part, it’s a strain.”
“So what I’ve got is brain fatigue.”
“A light case thereof.”
She cocked her head at him. “You think you know a person,” she said archly, “and then you find he’s got hitherto undreamt-of talents. What else can you do?”
“Oh, all sorts of things. Long division, for example. And I can make omelets.”
“What other occult powers have you got?”
“Thousands, I suppose, but that’s the only one I’ve ever developed. Oh, and sometimes I know when a phone’s about to ring, but not always.”
“When I’m in the tub,” she said, “that’s when my phone always rings. What a heavenly spot for a picnic, incidentally. And private, too. The ants didn’t even find us here.”
She closed her eyes and he kissed her. I have psychic powers, she thought. I knew you were going to do that.
She said, “I’ll bet you can make inhibitions disappear, too. Can’t you?”
He nodded. “First your inhibitions,” he said. “Then your clothes.”
The hardest part was waiting for the right sort of day. For a full week it rained. Then for two days the sky was bright and cloudless, and then it was utterly overcast. By the time the right sort of clouds were strewn across the afternoon sky, she had trouble trusting the memory of that Saturday afternoon. Had she really caused clouds to break up? Could she still do it? And could she teach her Jeremy, her nice quiet boy?
Toward the end of the last class period she walked to the rear of the room, moved over toward the windows. She had them writing an exercise in English composition, a paragraph on their favorite television program. They always loved to write about television, though not as much as they loved to watch it.
She watched over Jeremy’s shoulder. His handwriting was very neat, very precise.
Softly she said, “I’d like you to stay for a few minutes after class, Jeremy.” When he stiffened she added, “It’s nothing to worry about.”
But of course he would worry, she thought, returning to the front of the room. There was no way to stop his worrying. No matter, she told herself. She was going to give him a gift today, a gift of self-esteem that he badly needed. A few minutes of anxiety was a small price for such a gift.
And, when the room had cleared and the others had left, she went again to his desk. He looked up at her approach, not quite meeting her eyes. He had the sort of undefined pale countenance her southern relatives would call po-faced. But it was, she thought, a sweet face.
She crouched by the side of his desk. “Jeremy,” she said, pointing, “do you see that cloud?”
He nodded.
“Oh, I don’t know,” she said, thinking aloud. “The glass might be a problem. You used to be able to open classroom windows, before everything got climate-controlled. Jeremy, come downstairs with me. I want to take you for a ride.”
“A ride?”
“In my car,” she said. And when they reached her car, a thought struck her. “Your mother won’t worry, will she? If you’re a half hour or so late getting home?”
“No,” he said. “Nobody’ll worry.”
When she stopped the car, on a country road just past the northern belt of suburbs, the perfect cloud was hovering almost directly overhead. She opened the door for Jeremy and found a patch of soft grass for them both to sit on. “See that cloud?” she said, pointing. “Just watch what happens to it.”
Sure, she thought. Nothing was going to happen and Jeremy was going to be convinced that his teacher was a certifiable madwoman. She breathed deeply, in and out, in and out. She stared hard at the center of the cloud and visualized her energy as a beam of white light running from her Third Eye chakra directly into the cloud’s middle. Disappear, she thought. Come on, you. Disappear.
Nothing happened.
She thought, Cory, damn you, if you set me up like this to make a fool of myself—she pushed the thought aside and focused on the cloud. Disappear, disappear—
The cloud began to break up, crumbling into fragments. Relief flowed through her like an electric current. She set her jaw and concentrated, and in less than a minute not a trace of the cloud remained in the sky.
The other clouds around it were completely undisturbed.
She looked at Jeremy, whose expression was guarded. She asked him if he’d been watching the cloud. He said he had.
“What happened to it?” she asked.
“It broke up,” he said. “It disappeared.”
“I made it disappear,” she said.
He didn’t say anything.
“Oh, Jeremy,” she said, taking his hand in both of hers, “Jeremy, it’s easy! You can do it. You can make clouds disappear. I can teach you.”
“I—”
“I can teach you,” she said.
“I think he’s got a natural talent for it,” she told Cory.
“Sure,” he said. “Everybody does.”
“Well, maybe his strength is as the strength of ten because his heart is pure. Maybe he has the simple single-mindedness of a child. Whatever he’s got, the clouds of America aren’t safe with him on the loose.”
“Hmmm,” he said.
“What’s the matter?”
“Nothing. I was just going to say not to expect miracles. You gave him a great gift, but that doesn’t mean he’s going to be elected class president or captain of the football team. He’ll still be a basically shy boy with a basically difficult situation at home and not too much going for him in the rest of the world. Maybe he can disappear clouds, but that doesn’t mean he can move mountains.”
“Killjoy.”
“I just—”
“He can do something rare and magical,” she said, “and it’s his secret, and it’s something for him to cling to while he grows up and gets out of that horrible household. You should have seen his face when that very first cloud caved in and gave up the ghost. Cory, he looked transformed.”
“And he’s still a nice quiet boy?”
“He’s a lovely boy,” she said.
The window glass was no problem.
She’d thought it might be, that was why they’d gone all the way out into the country, but it turned out the glass was no problem at all. Whatever it was that got the cloud, it went right through the glass the same way your vision did.
She was in the front of the room now, thrusting a pointer at the pulled down map of the world, pointing out the oil-producing nations. He turned and looked out the window.
The clouds were the wrong kind.
A tree surgeon’s pickup truck, its rear a jumble of sawn limbs, slowed almost to a stop, then moved on across the intersection. Jeremy looked down at the stop sign. A few days ago he’d spent most of math period trying to make the stop sign disappear, and there it was, same as ever, slowing the cars down but not quite bringing them to a halt. And that night he’d sat in his room trying to disappear a sneaker, and of course nothing had happened.
Because that wasn’t how it worked. You couldn’t take something and make it stop existing, any more than a magician could really make an object vanish. But clouds were masses of water vapor held together by—what? Some kind of energy, probably. And the energy that he sent out warred with the energy that held the water vapor particles together
, and the particles went their separate ways, and that was the end of the cloud. The particles still existed but they were no longer gathered into a cloud.
So you couldn’t make a rock disappear. Maybe, just maybe, if you got yourself tuned just right, you could make a rock crumble into a little pile of dust. He hadn’t been able to manage that yet, and he didn’t know if it was really possible, but he could see how it might be.
In the front of the room Ms. Winspear indicated oil-producing regions of the United States. She talked about the extraction of oil from shale, and he smiled at the mental picture of a rock crumbling to dust, with a little stream of oil flowing from it.
He looked out the window again. One of the bushes in the foundation planting across the street had dropped its leaves. The bushes on either side of it looked healthy, but the leaves of the one bush had turned yellow and fallen overnight.
Two days ago he’d looked long and hard at that bush. He wondered if it was dead, or if it had just sickened and lost its leaves. Maybe that was it, maybe they would grow back.
He rubbed his wrist. It had been out of the cast for months, it never bothered him, but in the past few days it had been hurting him some. As if he was feeling pain now that he hadn’t allowed himself to feel when the wrist broke.
He was starting to feel all sorts of things.
Ms. Winspear asked a question, something about oil imports, and a hand went up in the fourth row. Of course, he thought. Tracy Morrow’s hand always went up. She always knew the answer and she always raised her hand, the little snot.
For a moment the strength of his feeling surprised him. Then he took two deep breaths, in and out, in and out, and stared hard at the back of Tracy’s head.
Just to see.
Change of Life
In a sense, what happened to Royce Arnstetter wasn’t the most unusual thing in the world. What happened to him was that he got to be thirty-eight years old. That’s something that happens to most people and it isn’t usually much, just a little way station on the road of life, a milepost precisely halfway between thirty-two and forty-four, say.
Not the most significant milestone in the world for most of us either. Since the good Lord saw fit to equip the vast majority of us with ten fingers, we’re apt to attach more significance to those birthdays that end with a nought. Oh, there are a few other biggies—eighteen, twenty-one, sixty-five—but usually it’s hitting thirty or forty or fifty that makes a man stop and take stock of his life.
For Royce Arnstetter it was old number thirty-eight. The night before he’d gone to bed around ten o’clock—he just about always went to bed around ten o’clock—and his wife Essie said, “Well, when you wake up you’ll be thirty-eight, Royce.”
“Sure will,” he said.
Whereupon she turned out the light and went back to the living room to watch a rerun of Hee Haw and Royce rolled over and went to sleep. Fell right off to sleep too. He never did have any trouble doing that.
Then just about exactly eight hours later he opened his eyes and he was thirty-eight years old. He got out of bed quietly, careful not to wake Essie, and he went into the bathroom and studied his face as a prelude to shaving it.
“Be double damned,” he said. “Thirty-eight years old and my life’s half over and I never yet did a single thing.”
While it is given to relatively few men to know in advance the precise dates of their death, a perhaps surprising number of them think they know. Some work it out actuarially with slide rules. Some dream their obituaries and note the date on the newspaper. Others draw their conclusions by means of palmistry or phrenology or astrology or numerology or some such. (Royce’s birthday, that we’ve been talking about, fell on the fourth of March that year, same as it did every year. That made him a Pisces, and he had Taurus rising, Moon in Leo, Venus in Capricorn, Mars in Taurus, and just a shade over three hundred dollars in the First National Bank of Schuyler County. He knew about the bank account but not about the astrology business. I’m just putting it in in case you care. He had lines on the palms of his hands and bumps on the top of his head, but he’d never taken any particular note of them, so I don’t see why you and I have to.)
It’s hard to say why Royce had decided he’d live to be seventy-six years old. The ages of his four grandparents at death added up to two hundred and ninety-seven, and if you divide that by four (which I just took the trouble to do for you) you come up with seventy-four and a quarter change. Royce’s pa was still hale and hearty at sixty-three, and his ma had died some years back at fifty-one during an electric storm when a lightning-struck old silver maple fell on her car while she was in it.
Royce was an only child.
Point is, you can juggle numbers until you’re blue in the face and get about everything but seventy-six in connection with Royce Arnstetter. Maybe he dreamed the number, or maybe he saw The Music Man and counted trombones, or maybe he was hung up on the Declaration of Independence.
Point is, it hardly matters why Royce had this idea in his head. But he had it, and he’d had it for as many years as he could remember. If you could divide seventy-six by three he might have had a bad morning some years earlier, and if he’d picked seventy-five or seventy-seven he might have skipped right on by the problem entirely, but he picked seventy-six and even Royce knew that half of seventy-six was thirty-eight, which was what he was.
He had what the French, who have a way with words, call an idée fixe. If you went and called it a fixed idea you wouldn’t go far wrong. And you know what they say about the power of a fixed idea whose time has come.
Or maybe you don’t, but it doesn’t matter much. Let’s get on back to Royce, still staring at himself in the mirror. What he did was fairly usual. He lathered up and started shaving.
But this time, when he had shaved precisely half of his face, one side of his neck and one cheek and one half of his chin and one half of his mustache, he plumb stopped and washed off the rest of the lather.
“Half done,” he said, “and half to go.”
He looked pretty silly, if you want to know.
Now I almost said earlier that the only thing noteworthy about the number thirty-eight, unless you happen to be Royce Arnstetter, is that it’s the caliber of a gun. That would have had a nice ironical sound to it, at least the first time I ran it on by you, but the thing is it would be a fairly pointless observation. Only time Royce ever handled a pistol in his whole life was when he put in his six months in the National Guard so as not to go into the army, and what they had there was a forty-five automatic, and he never did fire it.
As far as owning guns, Royce had a pretty nice rimfire .22 rifle. It was a pretty fair piece of steel in its day and Royce’s pa used to keep it around as a varmint gun. That was before Royce married Essie Handridge and took a place on the edge of town, and Royce used to sit up in his bedroom with the rifle and plink away at woodchucks and rabbits when they made a pass at his ma’s snap beans and lettuce and such. He didn’t often hit anything. It was his pa’s gun, really, and it was only in Royce’s keeping because his pa had taken to drinking some after Royce’s ma got crushed by the silver maple. “Shot out a whole raft of windows last Friday and don’t even recall it,” Royce’s pa said. “Now why don’t you just hold onto this here for me? I got enough to worry about as it is.”
Royce kept the gun in the closet. He didn’t even keep any bullets for it, because what did he need with them?
The other gun was a Worthington twelve gauge, which is a shotgun of a more or less all-purpose nature. Royce’s was double-barrel, side by side, and there was nothing automatic about it. After you fired off both shells you had to stop and open the gun and take out the old shells and slap in a couple of fresh ones. Once or twice a year Royce would go out the first day of small-game season and try to get himself a rabbit or a couple pheasant. Sometimes he did and sometimes not. And every now and then he’d try for a deer, but he never did get one of them. Deer have been thin in this part of the state since a few yea
rs after the war.
So basically Royce wasn’t much for guns. What he really preferred was fishing, which was something he was tolerably good at. His pa was always a good fisherman and it was about the only thing the two of them enjoyed doing together. Royce wasn’t enough of a nut to tie his own flies, which his pa had done now and then, but he could cast and he knew what bait to use for what fish and all the usual garbage fishermen have to know if they expect to do themselves any good. He knew all that stuff, Royce did, and he took double-good care of his fishing tackle and owned nothing but quality gear. Some of it was bought second-hand but it was all quality merchandise and he kept it in the best kind of shape.
But good as he was with a fishing rod and poor as he might be with a gun, it didn’t make no nevermind, because how in blue hell are you going to walk into a bank and hold it up with a fly rod?
Be serious, will you now?
Well, Royce was there at twenty minutes past nine, which was eleven minutes after the bank opened, which in turn was nine minutes after it was supposed to open. It’s not only the First National Bank of Schuyler County, it’s the only bank, national or otherwise, in the county. So if Buford Washburn’s a handful of minutes late opening up, nobody’s about to take his business across the street, because across the street’s nothing but Eddie Joe Tyler’s sporting goods store. (Royce bought most of his fishing tackle from Eddie Joe, except for the Greenbriar reel he bought when they auctioned off George McEwan’s leavings. His pa bought the Worthington shotgun years ago in Clay County off a man who advertised it in the Clay County Weekly Republican. I don’t know what-all that has to do with anything, but the shotgun’s important because Royce had it on his shoulder when he walked on into the bank.)
There was only the one teller behind the counter, but then there was only Royce to give her any business. Buford Washburn was at his desk along the side, and he got to his feet when he saw Royce. “Well, say there, Royce,” he said.
“Say, Mr. Washburn,” said Royce.
Buford sat back down again. He didn’t stand more than he had to. He was maybe six, seven years older than Royce, but if he lived to be seventy-six it would be a miracle, being as his blood pressure was high as July corn and his belt measured fifty-two inches even if you soaked it in brine. Plus he drank. Never before dinner, but that leaves you a whole lot of hours if you’re a night person.