Free A Good and Happy Child by Justin Evans

Harris’s craggy, greasy face, the angrier I grew. “Why won’t anybody tell me?”
    “Because some things are not for little boys to hear!” he said loudly. He was angry now, too.
    “Oh my God,” my head was spinning. “You mean murder !”
    “Stop saying that! Stop it!” Tom Harris towered over me and shook his finger. “How do you know these things, George? Tell me!”
    But I could not. I ran from the room, with the hall, the stairs, swimming past in a blur. Tom Harris was close behind. I was near swooning. In my room, in the dark, I slammed the door and propped up a chair against the handle like I’d seen in movies. I heard Tom Harris’s voice outside, calling my name, and I blocked it out, repeating,
    “Get away! Get away!”
    Get away. Get away.
    That scowling face.
    a g o o d a n d h a p p y c h i l d
    55
    It was quiet now. Dark in my room, but there was light under the door, meaning that my mother was still out and Tom Harris was still in the house. I was in my room, in pajamas, but roused into the heady, world-warped atmosphere of my Friend. I felt like a patient under the ether, when the tables and chairs in the operating room shimmy in excitement and the fear hooks of surgery loosen and let go, amplifying the delicious drumming in mind and ear and spine. My Friend stood at the bottom of the bed. He was staring at me from out of the dark, among the moonlit shadows. His face was vivid to me: he had hair like straw, and a sooty face.
    You scared me, I said.
    I can’t scare you anymore, he said into my mind. Are we going into the night? I asked.
    Yes.
    Next I was floating unattached in the ethereal night, as before, and the “upless” feeling passed almost immediately. The gray night swirled around me, and this time, it caressed me. I felt a powdery, choking sweetness at the back of my throat. All of it felt higher pitched than before; it was musical, soaring, climactic. My Friend pointed, I followed. We passed the great black shipwreck, the earth. All the little windows were alight, blazing, as if the shipwreck were aflame. Why is it so much brighter?
    It’s not brighter, he said. You just see it better. Am I a Beacon?
    He grinned. Oh yes.
    And then into my mind poured a whole new vision. It came into me like music—richer, more complex than what I had felt before, serious and somber, like a cello sonata. I felt sorrow here. I began to feel like weeping. The cello music was so passionate and sad, I trembled. Grief was all around me.
    What is this?
    We’re going deeper.
    The very atmosphere began to take on words. It was my Friend speaking to me: This is what you wanted.
    56
    J u s t i n E v a n s
    Suddenly I was in a room.
    It was a dry place, painted white, with bare floorboards. Muted daylight, as from an overcast day, radiated from a window I could not see. The room was familiar, and yet was not a room at home or school: it was some neutral space, like a waiting room.
    My father was there.
    He was just as he was before he left for Honduras. Sad, deep-set eyes, with crow’s-feet at the corners, and thick brown hair. His nose was long, strong and pointed, and his skin was brownish, almost swarthy. To me, he was an Indian warrior: lean-limbed, tall, and grim. In life, when he was working or thinking, he stalked around the house in khaki pants and a ratty blue sweater, in forbidding silence. Now his dark eyes stared at the floorboards. He was garbed in pajamas. It felt like I was visiting him in a hospital.
    George, he said.
    You’re tired, I realized.
    Very tired, he said. I’ve been carrying a secret. He placed a hand on my shoulder. I could sense the comfortable cotton rustle of his pajamas. Then he began to speak, his brown eyes blazing.
    I am caught on a threshold, George, he told me. This is a way station. I pictured a train station where the train does not come. There are no other travelers, no noise or movement, no clocks to measure the passing time, and no people. Just stifling silence.