Mystery

“Well, here comes the cavalry,” said Robyn, smirking over her brother’s shoulder. Jerry turned sideways, and Tom saw coming around the side of a native house a fat, angry-looking boy, with a striped T-shirt and stiff new jeans rolled up at least a foot, alongside another boy several inches shorter and almost skeletally thin. The second boy’s shirt was so much too large for him that the shoulders fell halfway to his elbows and his neck swayed up out of the gaping collar. The smaller boy trotted beside the other, grinning widely. “They’ll be a big help,” Robyn said.

“More than you,” said her brother.

“I wish you’d tell me what’s going on,” Tom said.

“You shut up too,” Jerry fired at him. He blinked rapidly several times. “You want to know what’s going on? Why don’t you tell me, huh? What are you doing here?”

Tom opened his mouth and found that he had no answer to that question.

“Huh? Huh? All right, okay?” Jerry’s tongue flicked over his lips again. “You tell me, okay?”

“I was just—”

Jerry’s eyes flashed up at Tom, and the fury in his face killed the sentence.

Robyn made a gesture of distaste and stepped away.

“I’m going home,” Tom said to the side of Jerry’s outsized head. He moved backwards. Jerry’s eyes flashed at him again, and then his arm flashed out, and before Tom knew what was happening the other boy had struck him in the chest. The blow almost knocked Tom off his feet. Before he had time to react or recover, Jerry shifted his feet and punched the side of his head.

Wholly instinctively, Tom pivoted on his left foot and with all his strength sent his right hand straight at the other’s face. His fist landed squarely on Jerry’s nose, and broke it. Blood began squirting down Jerry’s face.

“Asshole!” screamed his sister.

Jerry dropped his hand from his face and began lumbering toward Tom. Blood jumped from his nose and spattered onto the T-shirt.

“Nappy! Robbie! Get him!” Jerry screamed in a high-pitched voice.

Tom stopped trotting backwards, suddenly angry enough to take on Jerry and his friends too. He lowered his hands and saw doubt move in Jerry’s worried eyes. Again he threw out his right hand without actually aiming at anything, and this time struck Jerry’s Adam’s apple. Jerry went down on his knees. Fifteen yards away and gaining fast, the fat boy in the rolled jeans had taken a knife from his pocket and was waving it as he ran. The smaller boy also had a knife, one with a long narrow blade.

A red-gold gleam from the low sun bounced off the skinny knife. Tom skipped backwards, turned around virtually in midair, and ran.

The boys behind him began yelling. When Tom drew level with the brown and yellow house, the front door opened, and the man who had been leaning against the window came out on the front stoop. His face, as flat and impersonally unhappy as Jerry’s, swiveled to track Tom’s progress. He gestured to the running boys to hurry up, catch him, drag him down. All of this was communicated in a gloomy gestural shorthand.

The world beneath this one …

Tom managed to pick up speed, and the boys behind him yelled for him to stop, they would not hurt him. They just wanted to talk to him, they were putting away their knives. Look, the knives were gone, they could talk now.

What’s the matter, was he too scared to talk?

Tom looked over his shoulder and saw with surprise that the smaller boy was standing in the middle of the street, canted on one hip and grinning. The pudgy boy in the new jeans was still charging after him. The chaos-man had left his front steps and was wobbling across the sidewalk toward his son, who was hidden behind the figure of the running boy. The fat boy still held his knife, and did not at all look as if he was interested in a friendly talk. His belly surged up and down with each step, his eyes were slits, and so much sweat came from his head that he was surrounded by an aureole of glistening drops. The skinny one pushed himself forward into a run a moment after Tom looked back, and began gaining at once on the fat boy and Tom.

The afternoon had passed into its last stage with tropical swiftness, and the air had turned a darkening purple. When Tom approached the next corner, the white of the cross street’s name gleamed out with an unnatural clarity and spelled AUER, a word that seemed to reverberate with ominous lack of meaning.

Auer.

Our.

Hour.

Tom wheeled wide around the corner, and a block away saw the continuous stream of vehicles that filled Calle Burleigh. The haze of dust had vanished into the purple dark, and headlights, bicycle lamps, and shining lanterns moved along with the traffic like a swarm of attendant fireflies. An unhappy horse whinnied and stamped a foot.