He got up, and found the door edge with his fingers. He did not know whether anyone was seeing him or not. In an instant he was in the crowd of pushing children. He let them carry him down the steps.
Outside, games went on all around him. He stopped shuffling and shoving now, and began to walk. With the first step he knew that he would go on walking like this all day. It felt better than anything else he had ever done. He walked through all the games until he found the fence around the schoolyard, then down the fence until he found a gate, then out the gate and down the road.
I’ll have to get a stick, he thought.
When he had gone about five kilometers, as well as he could judge, he heard the whistle of a train far off and turned toward it. Railroad tracks were better than roads—he had learned that months ago. He was less likely to meet people, and trains only went by once in a while. Cars and trucks went by all the time, and any one of them could kill.
After a while he picked up a good stick—light but flexible, and just the right length. He climbed the embankment then, and began to walk where he wanted to walk, on the rails, balancing with his stick. There was a little girl ahead of him, and he could see her, so he knew she was an angel. “What’s your name?” he said.
“I mustn’t tell you,” she answered, “but you can call me Dorothy.” She asked his, and he did not say “George Tibbs” but “Little Tib,” which was what his mother and father had always called him.
“You fixed my leg, so I’m going with you,” Dorothy announced. (She did not really sound like the same girl.) After a time she added: “I can help you a lot. I can tell you what to look out for.”
“I know you can,” Little Tib said humbly.
“Like now. There’s a man up ahead of us.”
“A bad man?” Little Tib asked. “Or a good man?”
“A nice man. A shaggy man.”
“Hello.” It was Nitty’s voice. “I didn’t really expect to see you here, George, but I guess I should have.”
Little Tib said, “I don’t like school.”
“That’s just the different of me. I do like it, only it seems like they don’t like me.”
“Didn’t Mr. Parker get you your job back?”
“I think Mr. Parker kind of forgot me.”
“He shouldn’t have done that,” Little Tib said.
“Well, little blind boy, Mr. Parker is white, you know. And when a white man has been helped out by a black one, he likes to forget it sometimes.”
“I see,” Little Tib said, though he did not. Black and white seemed very unimportant to him.
“I hear it works the other way too.” Nitty laughed.
“This is Dorothy,” Little Tib said.
Nitty said, “I can’t see any Dorothy, George.” His voice sounded funny.
“Well, I can’t see you,” Little Tib told him.
“I guess that’s right. Hello, Dorothy. Where are you an’ George goin’?”
“We’re going to Sugar Land,” Little Tib told him. “In Sugar Land they know who you are.”
“Is Sugar Land for real?” Nitty asked. “I always thought it was just some place you made up.”
“No, Sugar Land is in Texas.”
“How about that,” Nitty said. The light of the sun, now setting, made the railroad ties as yellow as butter. Nitty took Little Tib’s hand, and Little Tib took Dorothy’s, and the three of them walked between the rails. Nitty took up a lot of room, but Little Tib did not take much, and Dorothy hardly took any at all.
When they had gone half a kilometer, they began to skip.
This story began when I mentioned Sugar Land at some science fiction convention and the woman I was talking to thought it an imaginary land, like Cockaigne.
Or Oz for that matter.
Sugar Land is a perfectly real town in Texas; there is or was a big sugar mill there.
For years there was a sad sign quite near my house: BLIND CHILD AREA. I used to tell visitors that I had never seen the blind child, nor had the child seen me. Most would nod sympathetically and move on to other topics.
Now and then I wished that I could; blindness is one of those haunting tragedies no writer ever deals with adequately. I won’t pretend I have in this story; I only say that the thought of the blind child, who must have been kept inside day and night for years, no longer haunts me quite as much as it once did.
Seven American Nights
Esteemed and learned madame:
As I last wrote you, it appears to me likely that your son Nadan (may Allah preserve him!) has left the old capital and traveled—of his own will or another’s—north into the region about the Bay of Delaware. My conjecture is now confirmed by the discovery in those regions of the notebook I enclose. It is not of American manufacture, as you see, and though it holds only the records of a single week, several suggestive items therein provide us new reason to hope.
I have photocopied the contents to guide me in my investigations, but I am alert to the probability that you, madame, with your superior knowledge of the young man we seek, may discover implications I have overlooked. Should that be the case, I urge you to write me at once.
Though I hesitate to mention it in connection with so encouraging a finding, your most recently due remission has not yet arrived. I assume that this tardiness results from the procrastination of the mails, which is here truly abominable. I must warn you, however, that I shall be forced to discontinue the search unless funds sufficient for my expenses are forthcoming before the advent of winter.
With inexpressible respect,
Here I am at last! After twelve mortal days aboard the Princess Fatimah—twelve days of cold and ennui, twelve days of bad food and throbbing engines—the joy of being on land again is like the delight a condemned man must feel when a letter from the shah snatches him from beneath the very blade of death. America! America! Dull days are no more! They say that everyone who comes here either loves or hates you, America—by Allah I love you now!
Having begun this record at last, I find I do not know where to begin. I had been reading travel diaries before I left home; and so when I saw you, O Book, lying so square and thick in your stall in the bazaar—why should I not have adventures too, and write a book like Osman Aga’s? Few come to this sad country at the world’s edge after all, and most who do land farther up the coast.
And that gives me the clue I was looking for—how to begin. America began for me as colored water. When I went out on deck yesterday morning, the ocean had changed from green to yellow. I had never heard of such a thing before, neither in my reading, nor in my talks with Uncle Mirza, who was here thirty years ago. I am afraid I behaved like the greatest fool imaginable, running about the ship babbling, and looking over the side every few minutes to make certain the rich mustard color was still there and would not vanish the way things do in dreams when we try to point them out to someone else. The steward told me he knew. Golam Gassem the grain merchant (whom I had tried to avoid meeting for the entire trip until that moment) said, “Yes, yes,” and turned away in a fashion that showed he had been avoiding me too, and that it was going to take more of a miracle than yellow water to change his feelings.
One of the few native Americans in first class came out just then: Mr.—as the style is here—Tallman, husband of the lovely Madam Tallman, who really deserves such a tall man as myself. (Whether her husband chose that name in self-derision, or in the hope that it would erase others’ memory of his infirmity, or whether it was his father’s, and is merely one of the countless ironies of fate, I do not know. There was something wrong with his back.) As if I had not made enough spectacle of myself already, I took this Mr. Tallman by the sleeve and told him to look over the side, explaining that the sea had turned yellow. I am afraid Mr. Tallman turned white himself instead, and turned something else too—his back—looking as though he would have struck me if he dared. It was comic enough, I suppose—I heard some of the other passengers chuckling about it afterward—but I don’t believe I have seen such hatred in a human face before. Just then the captain came strolling up, and I—considerably deflated but not flattened yet, and thinking that he had not overheard Mr. Tallman and me—mentioned for the final time that day that the water had turned yellow. “I know,” the captain said. “It’s his country” (here he jerked his head in the direction of the pitiful Mr. Tallman), “bleeding to death.”