Some nights, abed, Will put his ear to the wall to listen, and if his folks talked things that were right, he stayed, and if not right he turned away. If it was about time and passing years or himself or town or just the general inconclusive way God ran the world, he listened warmly, comfortably, secretly, for it was usually Dad talking. He could not often speak with Dad anywhere in the world, inside or out, but this was different. There was a thing in Dad's voice, up, over, down, easy as a hand winging soft in the air like a white bird describing flight patterns, made the ear want to follow and the mind's eye to see.
And the odd thing in Dad's voice was the sound truth makes being said. The sound of truth, in a wild roving land of city or plain country lies, will spell any boy. Many nights Will drowsed this way, his senses like stopped clocks long before that half-singing voice was still. Dad's voice was a midnight school, teaching deep fathom hours, and the subject was life.
So it was this night, Will's eyes shut, head leaned to the cool plaster. At first Dad's voice, a Congo drum, boomed softly, horizons away. Mother's voice, she used her water-bright soprano in the Baptist choir, did not sing, yet sang back replies. Will imagined Dad sprawled talking to the empty ceiling:
"... Will ... makes me feel so old... a man should play baseball with his son.... "
"Not necessary," said the woman's voice, kindly. "You're a good man."
"--in a bad season. Hell, I was forty when he was born! And you. Who's your daughter? people say. God, when you lie down your thoughts turn to mush. Hell!"
Will heard the shift of weight as Dad sat up in the dark. A match was being struck, a pipe was being smoked. The wind rattled the windo
ws.
"... man with posters under his arm ..."
"... carnival ..." said his mother's voice, "... this late in the year??"
Will wanted to turn away, but couldn't.
"... most beautiful ... woman ... in the world," Dad's voice murmured.
Mother laughed softly. "You know I'm not."
No! thought Will, that's from the handbill! Why doesn't Dad tell!!?
Because, Will answered himself. Something's going on. Oh, something is going on!
Will saw that paper frolicked in the trees, its words THE MOST BEAUTIFUL WOMAN, and fever prickled his cheeks. He thought: Jim, the street of the Theater, the naked people in the stage of that Theater window, crazy as Chinese opera, darn odd crazy as old Chinese opera, judo, jujitsu, Indian puzzles, and now his father's voice, dreaming off, sad, sadder, saddest, much too much to understand. And suddenly he was scared because Dad wouldn't talk about the handbill he had secretly burned. Will gazed out the window. There! Like a milkweed plume! White paper danced in the air.
"No," he whispered, "no carnival's coming this late. It can't!" He hid under the covers, switched on his flashlight, opened a book. The first picture he saw was a prehistoric reptile trap-drumming a night sky a million years lost.
Heck, he thought, in the rush I got Jim's book, he's got one of mine.
But it was a pretty fine reptile.
And flying toward sleep, he thought he heard his father, restless, below. The front door shut. His father was going back to work late, for no reason, with brooms, or books, downtown, away ... away....
And mother asleep, content, not knowing he had gone.
Chapter 9
NO ONE else in the world had a name came so well off the tongue.
"Jim Nightshade. That's me."
Jim stood tall and now lay long in bed, strung together by marsh-grass, his bones easy in his flesh, his flesh easy on his bones. The library books lay unopened by his relaxed right hand.
Waiting, his eyes were dark as twilight, with shadows under the eyes from the time, his mother said, he had almost died when he was three and still remembered. His hair was dark autumn chestnut and the veins in his temples and brow and in his neck and ticking in his wrists and on the backs of his slender hands, all these were dark blue. He was marbled with dark, was Jim Nightshade, a boy who talked less and smiled less as the years increased.
The trouble with Jim was he looked at the world and could not look away. And when you never look away all your life, by the time you are thirteen you have done twenty years taking in the laundry of the world.
Will Halloway, it was in him young to always look just beyond, over or to one side. So at thirteen he had saved up only six years of staring.
Jim knew every centimeter of his shadow, could have cut it out of tar paper, furled it, and run it up a flagpole--his banner.
Will, he was occasionally surprised to see his shadow following him somewhere, but that was that.