Free A Cry of Angels by Jeff Fields

squealing, lunging, scratching at the steep metal sides. The minutes dragged by, his strength was going, but still he fought, raising his head higher as the fat little body sank deeper in the water, and he continued to fight, struggling fishlike with the stronger muscles of his back until there was only the head moving in the cottonseeds, giving violent shakes, snorting water.
    Far beyond the strength of the body was the will to that last instinctive spark, and only when that was used, and the powerful life force extinguished, did the blunt little snout sink below the surface. There was the unshakable feeling that the rat didn't drown. He was dead before that.
    With the Indian I wandered farther and farther from the yard. We met Tio and other black boys, went fishing with them and had maypop battles, dug caves in the red hills, scrounged the dump for scrap iron, and stole watermelons from the farms across the river, hiding in cornfields and gouging out the warm hearts with our hands. We slept when we felt like it, mostly in late afternoon, and ate on the same schedule. At the boardinghouse they took little notice of my absence, glad to have me out from underfoot and no longer running up doctor bills.
    After a night of rat hunting and breakfast before sunrise, we would burst from the garage for long, loping walks through the blue steel dawn, stopping in the Ape Yard to pass the time with a whitehaired old black man leaning on his gate, mumbling low, so as not to wake the village, trudging along the marsh grass, listening to the river discover morning, or up through town before anyone was about, clapping our bands to hear the sound bounce off the darkened buildings. Em was always feeling for echoes. We rambled and searched the surrounding hills shouting in the wind, stomping devil's huts, beating trash piles to flush a snake. Nothing of consequence but feeling air and motion, a breaking of time, something centering inside me.
    Em got me to climbing trees, despite my weak arm, claiming his weight made us even in the races. Once, on a dare I climbed to the top with my good arm tied to my belt. He could dare with such sarcasm, such persistence that you would kill yourself to prove him wrong. One dizzy June day, under his taunts and jeers, I actually crossed from one tree to another! Riding the limber top, swaying back and forth, rocking on the wind, I forgot myself in the giddy moment of exhilaration and anger and suddenly plunged away and crashed into the other's branches. Later when I looked at the height and realized what I had done, I was so shaky I had to sit down.
    He taught me to swim that summer in an abandoned quarry fed by springs. And again, as always, the goading, the challenging, bobbing below me and spouting like a whale: "Come on, Early boy, when you the most scared, that's the time to dive !"
    The pressure of leg muscles tightening, the vertigo, the far-away glistening water . . . the instant of almost committing myself . . . then settling back, to the safety of heels planted, giving up . . . and running and climbing down the side to a lower ledge and jumping off onto the jeering head, sinking it . . . the Indian bellowing and thrashing water, the sounds bouncing back from the granite walls, then both of us shouting, our voices ringing around us . . . echoings of joy.
    On winter nights we piled slabs in the heater until the flue sucked and roared and glowed bright red around the damper, and I shook the wire corn popper over the top while Em practiced his hand shadows on the wall, at which he was terrible. "Look, it's a rooster, don't you see it?" I saw nothing but the blobby shadow of locked hands, and said so. Waggling a thumb then, persisting, "There now, there's his comb—you see him now, then, don't you?"
    Other times he made things, at which he was better. With a broom handle, wire and tines from a discarded pitchfork he could turn out a better frog gig than you could buy at the hardware store, or whittle a