Don’t worry, Lennie, he said to Krasner. There’s no need to be scared. I’m going to put an end to this noise right now.
Without pausing to tell anyone what he was about to do, Ferguson leapt off his bed and ran for the door, which he yanked open with a hard, two-handed tug, and even though he could hear Bill’s voice shouting behind him—What the hell, Archie! Are you crazy! — he didn’t stop. He understood that it was indeed a crazy thing to be doing, but the fact was that he wanted to be crazy just then, and he wanted to be out in the storm, to taste the storm, to be part of the storm, to be inside the storm for as long as it took for the storm to be inside him.
The rain was superb. Once Ferguson crossed the threshold and stepped out onto the ground, he realized that no rain had ever fallen harder, that the drops of this rain were thicker and traveling faster than any other drops he had known, that they were rushing down from the sky with the force of lead pellets and were heavy enough to bruise his skin and perhaps even dent his skull. A magnificent rain, an all-powerful rain, but in order to savor it to the fullest, he figured he should run to the cluster of oaks that stood about twenty yards in front of him, for the leaves and branches would protect his body from those falling bullets, and so Ferguson made a break for it, dashing across the soggy, slippery ground toward the trees, splashing through ankle-deep puddles as thunder boomed above him and around him and bolts of lightning shot down within yards of his feet. He was thoroughly soaked by the time he got there, but it felt good to be soaked, it was the best of all good feelings to be soaked like that, and Ferguson felt happy, happier than he had been at any time that summer or any other summer or any other time of his life, for surely this was the greatest thing he had ever done.
There was little or no wind. The storm wasn’t a hurricane or a typhoon, it was a raging downpour with thunder to stir up his bones and lightning to dazzle his eyes, and Ferguson wasn’t the least bit afraid of that lightning, since he was wearing sneakers and had no metal objects with him, not even a wristwatch or a belt with a silver buckle, and therefore he felt safe and exultant under the shelter of the trees, looking out at the gray wall of water that stood between him and the cabin, watching the dim, almost entirely obscured figure of his counselor Bill, who was standing in the open doorway and seemed to be shouting to him, or shouting at him as he gestured for Ferguson to come back to the cabin, but Ferguson couldn’t hear a word he was saying, not with the noise of the rain and the thunder, and especially not when Ferguson himself began to howl, no longer George on his mission to save Lennie but simply Ferguson himself, a thirteen-year-old boy wailing in exaltation at the thought of being alive in such a world as the one he had been given that morning, and even when a shaft of lightning struck the top branch of one of the trees, Ferguson paid no attention to it, for he knew he was safe, and then he saw that Bill had left the cabin and was running toward him, why in the world would he do that, Ferguson asked himself, but before he could answer the question, the branch had broken off from the tree and was falling toward Ferguson’s head. He felt the impact, felt the wood crack down on him as if someone had clubbed him from behind, and then he felt nothing, nothing at all or ever again, and as his inert body lay on the water-soaked ground, the rain continued to pour down on him and the thunder continued to crack, and from one end of the earth to the other, the gods were silent.
2.3
His grandfather called it a curious interregnum, meaning a time that stood between two other times, a time of no time when all the rules about how you were supposed to live had been thrown out the window, and even though the fatherless boy understood that it couldn’t last forever, he wished it could have gone on longer than the two months he had been given, another two months on top of the first two, perhaps, or another six months, or maybe even a year. It had been good to live in that time of no school, that curious gap between one life and the next when his mother was with him from the second he opened his eyes in the morning until the second he closed them at night, for she was the only person who felt real to him anymore, the only real person left in the world, and how good it had been to share those days and weeks with her, those strange two months of eating out in restaurants and visiting empty apartments and going to the movies nearly every afternoon, so many movies watched together in the darkness of the balcony, where they could cry whenever they wanted to and not have to explain themselves to anyone. His mother called it wallowing in the mud, and by that Ferguson supposed she meant the mud of their unhappiness, but sinking into that unhappiness could be eerily satisfying, he discovered, as long as you sank into it as far as you could and weren’t afraid to drown, and because the tears kept pushing them back into the past, they had protected them from having to think about the future, but then one day his mother said it was time to start thinking about it, and the crying came to an end.
Unfortunately, school was inevitable. Much as Ferguson would have wished to prolong his freedom, it was not in his power to control such things, and once he and his mother decided to rent the apartment on Central Park West, the next order of business was to place him in a good private school. Public school was out of the question. Aunt Mildred was emphatic about that point, and in a rare instance of accord between the sisters, Ferguson’s mother followed her advice, knowing that Mildred was better informed on matters of education than she was, and why throw Archie onto the rugged asphalt of a public school playground when she could afford the expense of private school tuition? She only wanted what was best for her boy, and New York had turned into a grimmer, more dangerous city than the one she had left in 1944, with youth gangs roaming the streets of the Upper West Side armed with switchblades and deadly zip guns, just twenty-five blocks north of where her parents lived and yet another universe, a neighborhood that had been transformed by the influx of Puerto Rican immigrants in the past few years, a dirtier, poorer, more colorful place than it had been during the war, the air now charged with unfamiliar smells and sounds, a different sort of energy animating the sidewalks on Columbus and Amsterdam Avenues, one had only to step outdoors to feel an undercurrent of menace and confusion, and Ferguson’s mother, who had always felt so comfortable in New York as a child and young woman, worried about her son’s safety. The second half of the curious interregnum was consequently devoted to more than just shopping for furniture and going to the movies, there were also the half dozen private schools on Mildred’s list to be looked at and discussed, the tours of classrooms and facilities, the interviews with headmasters and admissions directors, the I.Q. tests and entrance exams, and when Ferguson was accepted by Mildred’s number one choice, the Hilliard School for Boys, there was such rejoicing in the family, such a wave of warmth and enthusiasm washing over him from his grandparents and his mother and his aunt and uncle and his Great-aunt Pearl that the nearly eight-year-old fatherless boy figured school might not be such a bad way to pass the time, after all. It wasn’t going to be easy to fit in, of course, not when it was late February and the school year was almost two-thirds finished, and it wasn’t going to be fun having to wear a jacket and tie every day, but perhaps it wouldn’t be a problem, and perhaps he would begin to get used to the clothes, but even if it was a problem and he didn’t get used to the clothes, it wasn’t going to make any difference, for he was on his way to the Hilliard School for Boys whether he liked it or not.