Free The Stone War by Madeleine E. Robins Page A

He thought wistfully of the tree full of green, boughs heavy with leaves, saw himself improbably swinging in the branches. Laughing. Grow, he thought again. In his imagining he was not hiding, the Park was not peopled by streetgangs and the babbling homeless, there were people under the trees picnicking, playing games; a young woman feeding a baby, the boy who had named Jit playing ball with other leather-jacketed kids, an older group of gang-kids circled and talking intently, removed from the pastoral; over all of them, high in the generous green of the maple, Jit himself watching like a benign godling. Grow, he thought one more time at the tree.
    By the time Jit had turned his back on the tree, satisfied, a few fragile buds of green had begun to show on the white branches, and death was receding from the limbs of the tree. This was a new game, but he was very pleased with it. If the magic stayed, he would work on the other trees later. Now he set off in his nervous scuttle, dodging from tree to lamppost, exploring. A squirrel chittered by in the distance, its simple incoherent thoughts loud in the silence. Still no trace, no taste of people. The air was cold and clear and sharp enough to scour the skin inside his nose. There were no human smells, not the sour tang of ozone and exhaust, not the more localized odors of hot grease and meat from the vendors who ordinarily lined the Fifth Avenue wall of the Park; not even the individual scents of people, fearful, swaggering, sexual, that Jit normally picked up in the Park. The air was as dead as the trees. As quiet as the place in his mind where the voices usually were.
    Gradually, Jit gathered the courage to walk openly on a pathway. There was no one to see, report him, turn him in to the Uniforms. Jit had no memory of how he had come to live in the caves and tunnels under the Park; it was as if he had always been there. Long ago there had been an old man who took slipshod care of him, but old Nogai had drifted away over time. And there was a woman who had wanted to take him home with her, who used to come to the Park every day and sit, staring straight in front of her and talking to Jit in a low voice of how it would be, how she would civilize him. She had stopped coming too, when the cops stopped patrols inside the Park walls.
    Worst was the time when one of the Uniforms found him asleep inside a maintenance shed; Jit had wakened in the echoing din of a police station, washed in voices and thoughts, unable to make them understand his halting pidgin speech. There had been words about Homes and Law, questions that made no sense. Whose Little Boy Are You? Jit had heard a jumble of thoughts, perhaps well-meaning, all terrifying. At last he had blasted out at them, all the people who bent solicitously over him. He cut through Who’s Your Mommy with his fear and his anger, knocking them all back away from him, and in the confusion he had escaped, run through the maze of corridors and out to the street, run until he found one of his hiding places. He had stayed there for three days, until hunger drove him out to forage, and he had never been caught again.
    There were many people living in the Park, but Jit had the neatest hiding places, the best home. Those others lived in nervous packs; everything they did was makeshift, a pale imitation of life remembered from somewhere else. Jit only remembered the Park and his tunnel, a warm burrow, secure and comforting.
    In the waning afternoon light Jit made a circuit of the lower Park, ready at any moment to dart behind a tree, disappear upward or downward at the sight of another person. No one. A few times he stopped and played with a tree, thinking at it until pale green buds began to cluster on the dead white limbs. The game grew easier as he played it. He heard thoughts, meatier than the squirrel’s but not human: a pair of dogs running through the Park, disoriented without People, maddened by the subsonic howl of the earth in their