Before They Were Giants Read Free Page A

poltergeist action, who knows? I mean, what’s the sense of talking about it, anyway? Didn’t any of you guys ever just want to run away?”
     
    “Sure thing,” said Callahan. “Sometimes I do it too. But I generally run someplace I can find my way back from.” It was said so gently that the kid couldn’t take offense, though he tried.
     
    “Run away from what, son?” asked Slippery Joe.
     
    The kid had been bottled up tight too long; he exploded. “From what?” he yelled. “Jesus, where do I start? There was this war they wanted me to go and fight, see? And there’s this place called college, I mean they want you to care, dig it, care about this education trip, and they don’t care enough themselves to make it as attractive as the crap game across the street. There’s this air I hear is unfit to breathe, and water that ain’t fit to drink, and food that wouldn’t nourish a vulture and a grand outlook for the future. You can’t get to a job without the car you couldn’t afford to run even if you were working, and if you found a job it’d pay five dollars less than the rent. The T.V. advertises karate classes for four-year-olds and up, the President’s New Clothes didn’t wear very well, the next depression’s around the corner and you ask me what in the name of God I’m running from?
     
    “Man, I’ve been straight for seven months, what I mean, and in that seven god damned months I have been over this island like a fungus and there is nothing for me. No jobs, no friends, no place to live long enough to get the floor dirty, no money and nobody that doesn’t point and say “Junkie” when I go by for seven months and you ask me what am I running from? Man, everything is all, just everything.”
     
    It was right then that I noticed that guy in the corner, the one with the eyes. Remember him? He was leaning forward in rapt attention, his mouth a black slash in a face pulled tight as a drumhead. Those ghastly eyes of his never left the Janssen kid, but somehow I was sure that his awareness included all of us, everyone in the room.
     
    And no one had an answer for the Janssen boy. I could see, all around the room, men who had learned to listen in Callahan’s Place, men who had learned to empathize, to want to understand and share the pain of another. And no one had a word to say. They were thinking past the blurted words of a haunted boy, wondering if this crazy world of confusion might not after all be one holy hell of a place to grow up. Most of them already had reason to know damn well that society never forgives the sinner, but they were realizing to their dismay how thin and uncomforting the straight and narrow has become these last few years.
     
    Sure, they’d heard these things before, often enough to make them into clichés. But now I could see the boys reflecting that these were the clichés that made a young man say he liked to feel dead, and the same thought was mirrored on the face of each of them: My God, when did we let these things become clichés? The Problems of Today’s Youth were no longer a Sunday supplement or a news broadcast or anything so remote and intangible, they were suddenly become a dirty, shivering boy who told us that in this world we had built for him with our sweat and our blood he was not only tired of living, but so unscared of dying that he did it daily, sometimes, for recreation.
     
    And silence held court in Callahan’s Place. No one had a single thing to say, and that guy with the eyes seemed to know it, and to derive some crazy kind of bitter inner satisfaction from the knowledge. He started to settle back in his chair, when Callahan broke the silence.
     
    “So run,” he said.
     
    Just like that, flat, no expression, just, “So run.” It hung there for about ten seconds, while he and the kid locked eyes.
     
    The kid’s forehead started to bead with sweat. Slowly, with shaking fingers, he reached under his leather vest to his shirt pocket.