15

Two Saturdays after that, Tom Flanagan left his mother's side for the first time since the funeral. From the morning of Hartley Flanagan's death, his son and wife had been as if welded together: they had gone together to the funeral director and made the burial arrangements, had eaten every meal together, lingered together in the living room at night, talking. Mr. Bowdoin, the insurance man, had explained to both of them that Hartley Flanagan had left enough to pay all the bills for years to come. Together they had conferred with the Reverend Dawson Tyme, planned the funeral - Tom sat beside Rachel while she made all the telephone calls. He sat beside her while she cried, sat beside her and said nothing when she said, 'It's better he's gone, he was in so much pain.' Sat across the room in an uncomfortable Victorian chair when the fat Reverend Mr. Tyme returned and crowded beside his mother on the couch and blew out little minty breaths and said, 'Every tragedy has its place in his plan.' Saw that she, like himself, doubted the plan and mistrusted any man who would invoke it. Shopped with her; with her opened the front door to their visitors; stood beside her in the crowded funeral parlor during what the director called 'the visitation'; stood beside her finally at the grave on a wanning Sunday and realized that it was April first - April Fool's Day. And watched the crowd of Hartley's fellow lawyers and their wives and Hartley's friends and cousins and saw grief on some faces, restlessness on others, even embarrassment on others; there was no time to talk to any of the mourners, not even Del. They had to get back to the house and serve the food keeping warm in the oven. Chin yourself up out of that grave, he said to his father, just get out of there and be like yourself again, but the dry sun came down on them, the Reverend Mr. Tyme talked too much and pretended that he had been a friend of his father's, an April wind blew sand onto the graves and stirred the flowers. The grass looked sharp enough to inflict wounds. When it was over, he too cried and did not want to leave the grave. He looked at fat, minty Dawson Tyme and the lawyers - all of them were sleek, well - fed beasts, carnivores. A wall had crumbled, an anchor had snapped; he was without protection. The vulture had won and now it was Tom's turn to begin the walk into that long valley.

'You don't have to go to school for a while, do you?' asked his mother once they were back in the spiritless house. No. He did not.

After the fourth day his mother said, 'Don't you want to get out of the house, Tom?' and he said no. After the fifth day she repeated her question and said that they had to think about his going back to school and making up his lost work: again he said no. Resuming his normal life seemed a betrayal of his loss. When Rachel Flanagan repeated, her question after the sixth day, he recognized that he was now no longer a temporary adult. 'You haven't seen your handsome little friend Del since the funeral,' she said. 'Don't you want to practice for your show? And anyhow, it'll do you good to get away for a while.' 'He lives in Quantum Hills now,' he said. 'The Hillmans finally bought a house. It has a pool and a tennis court.'

'Quantum Hills.' Her voice was faintly ironic. 'Isn't that nice? And the suburban bus line g-s right to the shopping center.'

'Yeah,' he said. 'Maybe I'll go out there.'

She embraced him.

Once out of the shopping center, he walked for half an hour along a street so black it shone. Enormous houses, some on landscaped hills and others in landscaped valleys, hovered like dream palaces far back on endless lawns. Whipping sprinklers whirred and sprayed, making rainbows which kept the grass green. Striped awnings shaded the vast windows. It was a suburb where no one ever walked. What was Del doing here, in the city's most artificial and dream-struck setting, this place of pools and tennis dresses? It suited the Hillmans, but it could not possibly be what Del wanted for himself. But - this came to him as he turned into the curving banked street - it was what Carson wanted for them: already many of their classmates lived here. Howie Stern and Marcus Reilly, Tom Pinfold and Pete Bayliss, six sophomores, took the bus the school sent out to Quantum Hills. All the stringency of life at Carson was meant to lead them to a place like this. If he had not met Del, if his father had not died, he would never have seen its absolute remoteness from him. He would have (he imagined) slid toward Quantum Hills as if on greased rails. He could not, now. He could only invent his future as Del was doing; he had been shaken from his frame.

Then just for an instant it seemed to Tom as if the shining blackness of the street was lapping at the cuffs of his trousers, the pale sky dark with witches. From a thin branch a starling screeched and fixed him with its black eyes. The world tilted.

This passed as quickly as it had come. The street subsided, the air cleared, the houses righted themselves. None of it could give a warning, because it represented a way of life in which warnings were obsolete. Tom realized that he was directly before the house Del's godparents had bought.

It was the classic Quantum Hills house, and the largest on the street, set far back on a rising treeless lawn. A wide asphalt drive curved up before it, marked by carriage lamps on tall dark poles. Where the drive met the two wide steps up to the entrance, the iron figure of a small black jockey held out a bright metal ring toward the rear bumper of a Jaguar. Modern, vaguely Moorish in design, the house sprawled behind these signs of a new Arizona prosperity.

Tom began to trudge up the drive, walked past the Hillmans' car and the sightless boy holding out his shining ring, mounted the steps. Something in his chest seemed to be trembling. He pushed the bell and jerked back his hand as if he had expected a shock.

The white door swung open, and Bud Copeland was looking down at him, smiling. 'Hello, son. You here to see Del? Come on in, I'll take you up. You don't exactly need a map, but the first time, you might need a guide.'

'Hello.' Tom said tonelessly.

'You get yourself in here, young man, you look like you need a friend. Come on, get yourself through this doorway.'

Tom moved through the doorway and into a wide entry which revealed half of an enormous living room, a stone fireplace nine feet high, furniture and boxes dumped here and there before a window the size of a wall. That it looked much as he had imagined it was reassuring - the odd unplaceable fear subsided.

'I heard about your father, son,' Bud's velvet voice said beside him. 'Terrible thing for a boy to lose his dad. If there's anything I can do to help, just ask.'

'Thanks,' Tom said, surprised and moved by the real sympathy in the man's face and voice. 'I will.'

'You do that. I'll do anything I can. Now. What do you think of our new quarters?'

'It's a big place,' Tom answered, and thought he saw buried amusement in Bud's civilized face.

'My mother always told me to be careful too, Tom Flanagan,' Bud said, and took him up a floating staircase at the side of the living room. 'You and Del should have your tricks all polished up by now for your performance. If you still plan on giving it.'

'Yeah, sure, but we still have to do some work,' Tom said, following Bud's enormous back down an eggshell-white hall. 'Oh, yeah, we're going to give it. You bet we are.'

'Happy to hear it, son.'

'Say, Bud,' he said, and the black man heard something in his voice and turned around to face him. 'You don't have to answer if you don't want to.'

'I'll remember that,' Bud said, smiling.

'Why do you stay here? Why do you do work like this?'

Bud's smile broadened, and he reached out to rasp Tom lightly on the top of the head. 'It's a job, Red. I don't mind it. If I was twenty years younger, I'd likely be doing something else, but this berth suits me fine, the way I am. And I think maybe I can do some good for your friend in there.' He nodded toward a door at the end of the hall. 'Maybe I can do some good for you sometime too. Reason enough?' He raised his eyebrows, and again there was that unsettling look of recognition, as if Bud knew all about the birds and the visions.

'I'm sorry for prying,' Tom said. His ears burned.

'I'd say you were interested, not prying. Don't look so embarrassed. You want a Coke or anything?'

Tom shook his head.

'Then I'll see you on your way out.' Bud smiled again and went past him back toward the floating staircase.

Tom hesitated a second, dreading the conversation about his father he would have to have with Del before they could get to work. He heard Bud moving swiftly down the stairs, from an open window heard a far-off splash as someone dived into the pool. He went the rest of the way down the hall and stopped at Del's door.

No noises, no sound at all came from behind it. Through the unseen window floated the drawling voice of Valeric Hillman. Del's room was so quiet Tom thought his friend must be asleep. Tom raised his fist, lowered it, then raised it again and knocked.

Del did not respond, and Tom thought at first that his friend must be out by the pool with his godmother. But Bud would have known that. 'Del?' he half-whispered, and knocked again.

Over or under a ripple of laughter from outside, he heard Del very quietly saying, 'Come in.' Del too was nearly whispering, but the quiet in his voice was that of effort - of concentration and force.

Tom turned the handle and gently pushed the door. The room was so dark as to be nearly black, and Tom. again had the sense of being drawn into that separate world which was Del's - of stepping from sunlight and Arizona directly into mystery.

'Del?'

'In.'

Tom walked slowly into the darkness. His first glance around the room showed him only the big fish tank before drawn curtains, the looming faces of the magicians up on a shadowy wall. He saw that it was nearly twice the size of Del's old room; looking to the right, he saw a jumble of boxes and wooden things that must have been the kit. He turned his head to the left and saw shadowy space.

'Look,' Del commanded from the center of the shadows.

'Hey,' Tom said, for at first he could see only the outline of a bed.

Then he could not say anything, for he had suddenly seen Del's rigid body, and it was suspended in the empty air four feet above the bed. Del snapped his head sideways. He was grinning like a shark.

Tom could not imagine what expression his own face wore, but it sent Del off into gleeful laughter. Laughing, he descended, first falling nearly a foot and stopping sharply, as if he had hit a ledge, then slipping down more slowly another eighteen inches. Tom held out a hand as if to catch him, but was not capable of moving nearer. Del's laughter bubbled up again; his feet dropped onto the bed, and the rest of his body followed.

Tom watched, so scared he thought he might faint or vomit, as Del's face drew back into itself and his body lifted up off the bed again and hovered a handbreadth above it.

'Now, that's how we end our magic show,' Del managed to say, and this time could stay up while he laughed.