Farewell Summer

"Yes, I think so. Two girls and a boy. Grown now. Got children of their own."

"You could write a letter."

"What kind?"

"Invite them for a visit. You've got a big house. And one of those children, God help them, might seem like you. It struck me, if you can't have any private sense of destiny, immortality, you name it-you could get it secondhand from your brother's house. Seems to me you'd want to connect up with a thing like that."

"No, common sense. You're too old for marriage and children, too old for everything except experiments. You know how things work. Some children look like their fathers, or mothers, or grandfathers, and some take after a distant brother. Don't you think you'd get a kick out of something like that?"

"Think on it, anyway. Don't wait, or you'll sink bitch again."

"So that's what I've been! Well, well. I didn't start out intending to be mean, but I got there somehow. Are you mean, Bleak?"

"No, because I know what I did to myself. I'm only mean in private. I don't blame others for my own mistakes. I'm bad in a different way than you, of course, with a sense of humor developed out of necessity." For a moment, Bleak's eyes seemed to twinkle, but maybe it was only the passing sun.

"I'll need a sense of humor from here on out. Bleak, visit me more often." Quartermain's gnarled fingers grasped Bleak's hand.

"Why would I visit you, you sorry old bastard, ever again?"

"Because we're the Grand Army, aren't we? You must help me think."

"The blind leading the sick," said Bleak. "Here we

He paused at the walk leading up to the gray, flake-painted house.

"Is that my place?" said Quartermain. "My God, it's ugly, ugly as sin. Needs paint."

"You can think about that, too."

"My God, what a Christ-awful ugly house! Wheel me in, Bleak."

And Bleak wheeled his friend up the walk toward his house.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

DOUGLAS STOOD WITH TOM AND CHARLIE IN THE moist-smelling warm late-summer-green ravine. Mosquitoes danced their delicate dances upon the silence. A dancing idiot hum-tune.

"Everyone's gone," said Tom.

Douglas sat on a rock and took off his shoes.

"Bang, you're dead," said Tom, quietly.

"I wish I was, oh, I wish I was dead," said Doug.

Tom said, "Is the war over? Shall I take down the flag?"

"What flag?"

"Just the flag, that's all."

"Yeah. Take it down. But I'm not sure if the war is really over yet… but it sure has changed. I've just got to figure out how."

Charlie said, "Yeah, well, you did give cake

to the enemy. If that wasn't the strangest thing…"

"Ta-ta-tahhhh," hummed Tom. He made furling motions in the warm empty silent air. He stood solemnly by the quiet creek in the summer evening with the sun fading. "Ta-ta-tahhhh. Ta-ta-tahhhh." He hummed "Taps." A tear fell off his cheek.

"Oh, for gosh sakes!" cried Douglas. "Stop!" Douglas and Tom and Charlie climbed out of the ravine, and walked through the boxed and packaged town, through the avenues and streets and alleys, among the thousand-celled houses, the bright prisons, down the definite sidewalks and the positive lanes, and the country seemed far away and it was as if a sea had moved away from the shore of their life in one day. Suddenly there was the town and their lives to be lived in that town in the next forty years, opening and shutting doors and raising and lowering shades, and the green meadow was distant and alien. Douglas looked over at Tom getting taller every minute, it seemed. He felt the hunger in his stomach and he thought of the miraculous foods at home and he thought of Lisabell blowing out the candles and sitting there with fourteen years burnt behind her and not caring, very pretty and solemn and beautiful. He thought of the Lonely One, very lonely indeed, wanting love, and now gone.

Douglas stopped at Charlie's house, feeling the season change about them.

"Here's where I leave you guys," said Charlie. "See you later, at the haunted house with those dumb girls." "Yeah, see you later, Charlie." "So long, Charlie," said Tom.

"You know something," said Charlie, turning back toward his friends, as if he'd suddenly remembered something important. "I been thinkin'. I got an uncle, twenty-five years old. Came by earlier today in a big Buick, with his wife. A really nice, pretty lady. I was thinkin' all morning: Maybe I'll let them make me twenty-five. Twenty-five strikes me as a nice medium age. If they'll let me ride in a Buick with a pretty lady like that, I'll go along with them. But that's it, mind! No kids. It stops at squalling kids. Just a nice car and a pretty lady with me, ridin' along out toward the lake.

Boy! I'll take about thirty years of that. I'm puttin' in my order for thirty years of being twenty-five. Fill 'er up and I'm on my way."

"It's something to think about," said Douglas. "I'm goin' in the house to think about it right now," said Charlie.

"So, when do we start the war again?" said Tom. Charlie and Douglas looked at each other.