Free Mad Boys by Ernest Hebert

an icy wind, although the air was still and warm.
    “Your picture. It’s no big deal.”
    “You’re lying to me.”
    Father wound up to knock me, but I didn’t flinch and he didn’t throw the blow. I knew right then and there that he didn’t love me anymore. I wanted to beg him to beat me, but I knew it wouldn’t do any good.
    When we got home in the woods, he made me take off my shirt, and he took a whole bunch of pictures of me outside. I stood amidst ferns. I sat on rocks. I swung from branches. Finally, we ended up at the huge, fallen maple. “Strip to your shorts,” Father said. I stripped to my shorts. “Straddle the maple.” I straddled the maple. “Look wistful.” I looked wistful. “Good.” He took my picture. I didn’t feel cold. I didn’t feel anything. There was a great silence within me, a great stillness, a huge nothingness, an immensity of white light taking up the space of a limitless void. From the light emerged a figure, walking toward me.
    “Langdon?” I wasn’t sure it was him.
    “Stop mumbling!” shouted father.
    Kill him in his sleep! Kill him in his drunken sleep! Kill him in his stoned sleep .
    “What? What did you say?” I said.
    “I didn’t say anything,” Father said. “Stop mumbling and be still.”
    Langdon tore off his cap. It vanished after a noiseless explosion. His dark hair was on fire. He unzipped his magnificent suit. A second later: fireworks. When they faded, I saw a boy covered with black, slimy mud.
    “Langdon?” I whispered.
    “Langdon is gone,” said the boy as muck dripped from him. “I am the real dead boy, I am Xiphi.”
    A second later he was gone, and Father was yelling at me to stop babbling.
    The next day, Father went out of his way to make it seem as if nothing unusual had happened. He didn’t yell at me, didn’t hit me, hardly even talked to me. He wasn’t my father; I wasn’t his son; I was just a boarder who was staying with him, and he didn’t have any strong feelings about me one way or another. I felt like an android. In a way, everything was easier. For several days, we walked through our routines, cold to each other, cold to our own feelings, cold to the world outside.
    One afternoon after Father had bought a case of beer and we were driving back to the land he said, “Web, I’ve got some business that’s going to keep me on the move for quite a while.”
    I could tell that he’d chosen to talk to me while he drove because that way he didn’t have to look at me.
    “Where we going?” I said.
    “Not we. Me. I can’t take you along. You’ll be staying with a friend.”
    “Who? The one who sends you the money. Is it the Alien?”
    “I don’t know who it is. But I’ve heard his voice. He’s a friend, I’m sure of that. I can’t take care of you anymore, Web.”
    “When is he going to come?”
    “I’ll let you know. It’s not decided yet.”
    I could tell it was decided. “When?” I said. I was trying to work up some anger, some fear, some alarm, but all I could feel was a clamminess.
    “Tomorrow, first thing in the morning.”
    “What if I don’t want to go?”
    “You don’t have to go if you don’t want to go, but you do want to go. I know you do.”
    “Okay, I want to go. But what if I didn’t?”
    “I can’t take care of you anymore. I just don’t have the. . . wherewithal. You just do what he says and everything is going to be all right. He’s going to take care of you. Good care, he promised. I have his solemn word, and I believe it.”
    Father never looked at me when he delivered this speech.
    “Okay, no problem,” I said, kind of cheerfullike.
    That night in our school bus home, Father got even more drunk and stoned than usual. It was way past midnight, and he was on his bed about to pass out when he called me over. It was real dark.
    “Listen,” he said in a wet whisper, “I’m far out, far out.”
    “I know,” I said, and I could just barely see his face in the darkness.
    “I should