and prop her on the edge of the tub. I needed towash her before anyone else came up.
I cut away her dress with the sewing shears. She was wearing an elasticgirdle beneath, and an enormous brassiere, and they were too tough --too tight -- to cut through, so I struggled with their hooks, each onegoing *spung* as I unhooked it, revealing red skin beneath it, pinchedand sore-looking.
When I got to her bra, I had a moment's pause. She was a modest person-- I'd never even seen her legs without tan compression hose, but thesmell was overwhelming, and I just held to that vision of her in anightie and clean sheets and, you know, *went for it*.
Popped the hooks. Felt it give way as her breasts forced it off herback. Found myself staring at.
Two little wings.
The size of my thumbs. Bent and cramped. Broken. Folded. There, over hershoulder blades. I touched them, and they were cold and hard as a turkeyneck I'd once found in the trash after she'd made soup with it.
#
"How did you get out?"
"With my wings?"
"Yeah. With your wings, and with no shoes, and with the old lady deadover the tub?"
She nuzzled his neck, then bit it, then kissed it, then bit itagain. Brushed her fingers over his nipples.
"I don't know," she breathed, hot in his ear.
He arched his back. "You don't know?"
"I don't know. That's all I remember, for five years."
He arched his back again, and raked his fingertips over her thighs,making her shudder and jerk her wings back.
That's when he saw the corpse at the foot of the bed. It was George.
#
He went back to school the day after they buried Davey. He bathed allthe brothers in the hot spring and got their teeth brushed, and he fedthem a hot breakfast of boiled mushroom-and-jerky stew, and he gatheredup their schoolbooks from the forgotten corners of the winter cave andput them into school bags. Then he led them down the hillside on aspring day that smelled wonderful: loam and cold water coursing down themountainside in rivulets, and new grass and new growth drying out in ahard white sun that seemed to spring directly overhead five minutesafter it rose.
They held hands as they walked down the hill, and thenElliot-Franky-George broke away and ran down the hill to the roadside,skipping over the stones and holding their belly as they flew down thehillside. Alan laughed at the impatient jig they danced as they waitedfor him and Brad to catch up with them, and Brad put an arm around hisshoulder and kissed him on the cheek in a moment of uncharacteristicdemonstrativeness.
He marched right into Mr. Davenport's office with his brothers in tow.
"We're back," he said.
Mr. Davenport peered at them over the tops of his glasses. "You are, areyou?"
"Mom took sick," he said. "Very sick. We had to go live with our aunt,and she was too far away for us to get to school."
"I see," Mr. Davenport said.
"I taught the littler ones as best as I could," Alan said. He likedMr. Davenport, understood him. He had a job to do, and needed everythingto be accounted for and filed away. It was okay for Alan and hisbrothers to miss months of school, provided that they had a good excusewhen they came back. Alan could respect that. "And I read ahead in mytextbooks. I think we'll be okay."
"I'm sure you will be," Mr. Davenport said. "How is your mother now?"
"She's better," he said. "But she was very sick. In the hospital."
"What was she sick with?"
Alan hadn't thought this far ahead. He knew how to lie to adults, but hewas out of practice. "Cancer," he said, thinking of Marci's mother.
"Cancer?" Mr. Davenport said, staring hard at him.
"But she's better now," Alan said.
"I see. You boys, why don't you get to class? Alan, please wait here amoment."
His brothers filed out of the room. and Alan shuffled nervously, lookingat the class ring on Mr. Davenport's hairy finger, remembering the timethat Davey had kicked him. He'd never asked Alan where Davey was afterthat, and Alan had never offered, and it had been as though they shareda secret.
"Are you all right, Alan?" he asked, settling down behind his desk,taking off his glasses.
"Yes, sir," Alan said.
"You're getting enough to eat at home? There's a quiet place where youcan work?"
"Yes," Alan said, squirming. "It's fine, now that Mom is home."
"I see," Mr. Davenport said. "Listen to me, son," he said, putting hishands flat on the desk. "The school district has some resourcesavailable: clothes, lunch vouchers, Big Brother programs. They're notanything you have to be ashamed of. It's not charity, it's just a littlebooster. A bit of help. The other children, their parents are well andthey live in town and have lots of advantages that you and your brotherslack. This is just how we level the playing field. You're a very brightlad, and your brothers are growing up well, but it's no sin to accept alittle help."
Alan suddenly felt like laughing. "We're not underprivileged," he said,thinking of the mountain, of the feeling of being encompassed by love ofhis father, of the flakes of soft, lustrous gold the golems produced bythe handful. "We're very well off," he said, thinking of home, now freeof Davey and his hateful, spiteful anger. "Thank you, though," he said,thinking of his life unfolding before him, free from the terror ofDavey's bites and spying and rocks thrown from afar.
Mr. Davenport scowled and stared hard at him. Alan met his stare andsmiled. "It's time for classes," he said. "Can I go?"
"Go," Mr. Davenport said. He shook his head. "But remember, you canalways come here if you have anything you want to talk to me about."
"I'll remember," Alan said.
#
Six years later, Bradley was big and strong and he was the star goalieof all the hockey teams in town, in front of the puck before it arrived,making desperate, almost nonchalant saves that had them howling in thestands, stomping their feet, and sloshing their Tim Horton's coffee overthe bleachers, to freeze into brown ice. In the summer, he was the starpitcher on every softball team, and the girls trailed after him like along comet tail after the games when the other players led him away to apark to drink illicit beers.
Alan watched his games from afar, with his schoolbooks on his lap, andEric-Franz-Greg nearby playing trucks or reading or gnawing on a sucker.
By the ninth inning or the final period, the young ones would be tootired to play, and they'd come and lean heavily against Alan, like a bagof lead pressing on him, eyes half open, and Alan would put an armaround them and feel at one with the universe.
It snowed on the afternoon of the season opener for the town softballleague that year, fat white wet flakes that kissed your cheeks andmelted away in an instant, so soft that you weren't sure they'd be thereat all. Bradley caught up with Alan on their lunch break, at thecafeteria in the high school two blocks from the elementary school. Hehad his mitt with him and a huge grin.
"You planning on playing through the snow?" Alan said, as he set downhis cheeseburger and stared out the window at the diffuse white radianceof the April noontime bouncing off the flakes.
"It'll be gone by tonight. Gonna be *warm*," Bradley said, and nodded athis jock buddies sitting at their long table, sucking down Cokes andstaring at the girls. "Gonna be a good game. I know it."
Bradley knew. He knew when they were getting shorted at the assayers'when they brought in the golems' gold, just as he knew that showing upfor lunch with a brown bag full of dried squirrel jerky and mushroomsand lemongrass was a surefire way to end up social roadkill in the highschool hierarchy, as was dressing like someone who'd been caught in anexplosion at the Salvation Army, and so he had money and he had burgersand he had a pair of narrow-leg jeans from the Gap and a Rootssweatshirt and a Stussy baseball hat and Reebok sneakers and he looked,basically, like a real person.
Alan couldn't say the same for himself, but he'd been making an effortsince Bradley got to high school, if only to save his brother theembarrassment of being related to the biggest reject in the building --but A
lan still managed to exude his don't-fuck-with-me aura enough thatno one tried to cozy up to him and make friends with him and scrutinizehis persona close in, which was just as he wanted it.
Bradley watched a girl walk past, a cute thing with red hair andfreckles and a skinny rawboned look, and Alan remembered that she'd beensitting next to him in class for going on two years now and he'd neverbothered to learn her name.
And he'd never bothered to notice that she was a dead ringer for Marci.
"I've always had a thing for redheads," Bradley said. "Because of you,"he said. "You and