“Have your picture taken on a real live cowpony!” the photographer called to the girls, but by now they were already past number 37 and out of earshot.
“Isn’t it a little late for that?” said Miss Vicks.
“For some people, yes,” he said.
“I mean isn’t it too dark?”
“The night shots are the best,” he explained, training the camera first on the horse, then on Miss Vicks. “They’re the most atmospheric.”
The horse craned its neck to stare at her. Its coat was dapple gray, its eyes blue. She could see the soft pink nostrils expand and contract, like something you’d want to stick your finger in. Maybe she was thinking this way because of the way she’d just been thinking about Mary and the sorcerer. The horse’s skin really did look like velvet. “Go ahead. Climb on,” the photographer said. “Give it a try.”
Miss Vicks shook her head.
“I can tell you’re dying to,” he said.
“It’s been years,” she said, arising from the glider.
The horse slowly closed its eyes and opened them again, even slower, making it seem like the eyes that had been there before had been replaced with newer, better eyes. Miss Vicks put her foot in the stirrup and swung herself into the saddle.
“Look at me,” the photographer said. “No need to smile.” He focused the lens and as he began to shoot, Miss Vicks followed his instructions. She rarely smiled with her mouth, in any case. Then he walked over and gave the horse a pat on the rump. “Watch yourself,” he said. “Between now and tomorrow lies a long, long night.”
“Tomorrow?” said Miss Vicks. Already the horse was starting down the street toward the vacant lot, in the opposite direction of where the sorcerer had been headed. “I don’t understand,” she said.
“Tomorrow!” the photographer said. “You will understand tomorrow what that word means.”
The girls stopped their singing long enough to stare. At some point they’d all been in Miss Vicks’s classroom, but none of them had ever seen their teacher do anything like this before and they were embarrassed for her.
Disabled List
WHAT IS IT LIKE TO LIVE WITHOUT A SOUL? THE robots gave this a lot of thought, it being their condition. Roy told Eddie that sometimes Cindy cried herself to sleep. How could she cry? How could she sleep, for that matter? Often what you don’t have breaks your heart. The thing about souls is that with just the one exception, every one has one. The gaping hole gets passed around, like the missing chair in musical chairs. Eddie had been a good person to begin with; the material part of his body including his brain cells and his memory couldn’t forget that fact, even while the cold black wind of soullessness kept blowing through the empty space inside. Besides, baseball is a soulful game and at some point, despite how rich and famous he’d become, Eddie decided he’d had enough.
There had been a great tent of blue sky above the ballpark, there had been a field of green turf beneath his feet. Walter Woodard and Mary had just entered the owner’s box. “I want it back,” Eddie said, at the exact moment the batter connected with the ball, sending it high into the outfield. “Look!” Mary exclaimed, to which Walter replied, “We’ll see about that.”
BY NOW MARY HAD GROWN USED TO HEARING HER HUSBAND converse with people who weren’t there. Still, she couldn’t help but wonder who was to blame when Eddie collided with a teammate as they both came flying toward the same ball, crash-landing in front of the Alka-Seltzer sign.
It was midseason; the game had gone into extra innings. Midges clouded the stadium lights; the fans, in a body, held their breath. Of course Eddie had the ball, he always had the ball. The teammate should never have been there in the first place. A tie game and without Eddie’s game-ending play the Rockets wouldn’t have stood a chance; as it was, they ended up winning. The other player broke four ribs and had been back in the outfield for a while now — he wasn’t anywhere near as popular as Eddie had been, but the accident happened long enough ago that Eddie’s fans had all but forgotten him.
If the planets are in alignment sometimes what they do is crash into one another, Eddie’s physical therapist explained. When that happens, she told him, you can’t always see the damage.
She was standing at the foot of the bed, vigorously rubbing his feet with witch hazel, her yellow hair in a heavy braid that draped over one shoulder. When he’d asked her if that was why he was on the disabled list, she’d laughed. “Yes,” she said, “I suppose you could say that.” She seemed to find most of Eddie’s questions hilarious.
For a while after the collision he had been nowhere, in the same place he’d been when he was a boy on the street and got taken away, a place that wasn’t a place, without shape or color or dimension, but — for all that — so beautiful that for the rest of his life the memory of it could make him cry. It was like he saw nothing and then, very small and very far away at first, an avenue of trees and at its foot a triangle of grass with a small pool in the center, its water catching fire in the moonlight. There was a moon overhead, a gold-horned moon — there were fireflies, there were mosquitoes. A girl in a crown of stars was coming toward him, but before she could see who he was he slipped through his curtains of flesh.
Later he was tired; someone put him to bed. When he opened his eyes he saw a door and an arched window and a woman’s head on the pillow beside him. Their brains weren’t fully formed yet. He had been on his way somewhere; the gates to the city were barred but when he sounded his horn he’d been allowed to enter. To be brave and strong, he knew, was the most wonderful thing of all.
Something happened. The sky was deep black like at midnight but with a sun in it. The bladed leaves of the plants, the twigs of the sycamores, the tree trunks, and the whole world radiated from where he lay curled on his side looking out the arched window, everything just beginning to settle back into stillness after a period of terrible agitation, as if for a while nothing had remained itself but had spun into shining bits and the bits themselves had gotten mixed together, so that whoever he was lying there had pieces mixed into him of trees and plants and sky.
He was pretty sure he’d never before seen the woman who was lying beside him, but when she moved closer there was something about the temperature of her skin that felt familiar.
“I didn’t think you were awake,” he said.
“I’m not,” she replied, and they both laughed.
Laughing, he could feel the gate of his jaw move, reminding him that he was living in a body. An image arose in his brain that made no sense, a field lit from above and the sky farther away than usual, pasted across the top of impossibly high palings. People were screaming with excitement and there was a falling star coming at him, falling right toward him through the black night sky. He was supposed to catch it. It was his job to catch it and he didn’t.
Instead it got trapped behind one of the room’s many woven tapestries and the sound it made trying to escape kept him from falling back asleep. The room was round in shape, the walls built of stone. The tapestries quivered; he was aware of his tongue in his mouth, how heavy it was, and there was a taste like honey at the back of it.
“Eddie!” a woman’s voice said. “Enough is enough. You have to wake up now!”
The physical therapist wore a uniform like a nurse would wear, though she also had on black fishnet stockings and high-heeled shoes; temptingly, as if it were whiskey, she unscrewed the cap from a bottle of smelling salts and waved it in his face.