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You don t care if I die& you don t& 
He didn't have to say it:
you don't love me.
 I do, Gus. I swear to God, I do!
I looked up at him; he was supposed to be my friend. But he wasn't. He was
going to let them send me off to that military school.
 I hope you die!
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Oh, dear God, Gus, I am! I turned and ran out of the woods as I watched him
run out of the woods.
I drove away. The green Plymouth with the running boards and the heavy body;
it was hard steering. The world swam around me. My eyesight blurred. I could
feel myself withering away.
I thought I'd left myself behind, but little Gus had followed me out of the
woods. Having done it, I
now remembered: why had I remembered none of it before? As I drove off down
Mentor Avenue, I came out of the woods and saw the big green car starting up,
and I ran wildly forward, crouching low, wanting only to go with him, my
friend, me. I threw in the clutch and dropped the stick into first, and pulled
away from the curb as I reached the car and climbed onto the rear fender,
pulling my legs up, hanging onto the trunk latch. I drove weaving, my eyes
watering and things going first blue then green, hanging on for dear life to
the cold latch handle. Cars whipped around, honking madly, trying to tell me
that I was on the rear of the car, but I didn't know what they were honking
about, and scared their honking would tell me I was back there, hiding. After
I'd gone almost a mile, a car pulled up alongside, and a woman sitting next to
the driver looked down at me crouching there, and I made a please don't tell
sign with my finger to my freezing lips, but the car pulled ahead and the
woman rolled down her window and motioned to me. I rolled down my window and
the woman yelled across through the rushing wind that I was back there on the
rear fender. I
pulled over and fear gripped me as the car stopped and I saw me getting out of
the door, and I crawled off the car and started running away. But my legs were
cramped and cold from having hung on back there, and
I ran awkwardly; then coming out of the dark was a road sign, and I hit it,
and it hit me in the side of the face, and I fell down, and I ran toward
myself, lying there, crying, and I got to him just as I got up and ran off
into the gravel yard surrounding the Colony Lumber Company.
Little Gus was bleeding from the forehead where he'd struck the metal sign. He
ran into the darkness, and I knew where he was running...I had to catch him,
to tell him, to make him understand why I
had to go away.
I came to the hurricane fence, and ran and ran till I found the place where
I'd dug out under it, and
I slipped down and pulled myself under and got my clothes all dirty, but I got
up and ran back behind the
Colony Lumber Company, into the sumac and the weeds, till I came to the
condemned pond back there.
Then I sat down and looked out over the black water. I was crying.
I followed the trail down to the pond. It took me longer to climb over the
fence than it had taken him to crawl under it. When I came down to the pond,
he was sitting there with a long blade of saw-grass in his mouth, crying
softly.
I heard him coming, but I didn't turn around.
I came down to him, and crouched down behind him.  Hey, I said quietly.  Hey,
little Gus.
I wouldn't turn around. I wouldn't.
I spoke his name again, and touched him on the shoulder, and in an instant he
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was turned to me, hugging me around the chest, crying into my jacket, mumbling
over and over,  Don't go, please don't go, please take me with you, please
don't leave me here alone...
And I was crying, too. I hugged little Gus, and touched his hair, and felt him
holding onto me with an his might, stronger than a seven year old should be
able to hold on, and I tried to tell him how it was, how it would be:  Gus...
hey, hey, little Gus, listen to me...I
want to stay, you know
I want to stay...but I
can't.
I looked up at him; he was crying, too. It seemed so strange for a grownup to
be crying like that, and I said, If you leave me

I'll die. I will!
I knew it wouldn't do any good to try explaining. He was too young. He
wouldn't be able to understand.
He pulled my arms from around him, and he folded my hands in my lap, and he
stood up, and I
looked at him. He was gonna leave me. I knew he was. I stopped crying. I
wouldn't let him see me cry.
I looked down at him. The moonlight held his face in a pale photograph. I
wasn't fooling myself.
He'd understand. He'd know. I turned and started back up the path. Little Gus
didn't follow. He sat there looking back at me. I only turned once to look at
him. He was still sitting there like that.
He was watching me. Staring up at me from the pond side. And I knew what
instant it had been that had formed me. It hadn't been all the people who'd
called me a wild kid, or a strange kid, or any of it. It wasn't being poor, or
being lonely.
I watched him go away. He was my friend. But he didn't have no guts. He
didn't. But I'd show him! I'd really show him! I was gonna get out of here, go
away, be a big person and do a lot of things, and some day I'd run into him
someplace and see him and he'd come up and shake my hand and I'd spit on him.
Then I'd beat him up.
He walked up the path and went away. I sat there for a long time, by the pond.
Till it got real cold.
I got back in the car, and went to find the way back to the future; where I
belonged. It wasn't much, but it was all I had. I would find it...I still had
the dragoon...and there were many stops I'd made on the way to becoming me.
Perhaps Kansas City; perhaps Matawatchan, Ontario, Canada; perhaps Galveston;
perhaps Shelby, North Carolina.
And crying, I drove. Not for myself, but for myself, for little Gus, for what
I'd done to him, forced him to become. Gus...Gus!
But...oh, God...what if I came back again.., and again? Suddenly, the road did
not look familiar.
Madeira Beach, Florida/1969
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9 ECOWARENESS
Once upon a time-something between 1,800,000,000 and 3,000,000,000 years
ago-after the Earth had partly liquefied through loss of heat by radiation
from the outside and partly by adiabatic expansion, its
Mommy said gaey schluffen, the Earth had a cookie, spit up, and went to bed.
It slept soundly (save for a moment in 1755 when a Kraut named Kant made a
whole lot of noise trying to figure out how the sun had been created) and
didn't wake up till a Tuesday in 1963 at which time-about four in the morning,
a shitty
hour of the night except for suicides-it realized it was having a hard time
breathing.
 Kaff kaff, it said, wiping out half the Trobriand Islands and whatever lay
East of Java.
Casting about to discover what had wakened it, the Earth realized it was the
All-Night Movie on
Channel 11, snippets of a Maria Montez film
(Cobra Woman, 1944) interrupting an aging cruiser king hustling '55 Mercs with
pep pills in their gas tanks and lines of weariness in their grilles.
The Earth waited till dawn and began to look around. Everywhere it looked the
rivers smelled like the grease traps in Army kitchens, the hills had been
sheared away to provide clinging space for American
Plywood cages with indoor plumbing, the watershed had been scorched flat,
valleys had been paved over causing a most uncomfortable constriction of the
Earth's breathing, the birds sang off-key and the bullfrogs sounded like Eddie
Cantor, whom the Earth had never much cared for anyway. And overhead, the
light hurt the Earth's eyes.
Everything looked gray and funky.
 Boy, the Earth said, in its rustic way,  I don't like this a whole lot, and [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]