Dreaming Jewels Read Free Page A

the boy bound up his hand again and for quite a while afterward.
    The fat boy sat back on a roll of new canvas to wait for Horty to calm down. Once Horty subsided a little and the boy winked at him, and Horty, profoundly susceptible to the least kindness, began to wail again. The boy picked up the paper bag, looked into it, grunted, closed it carefully and put it out of the way on the canvas. Then to Horty’s astonishment, he removed from his inside coat pocket a large silver cigar case, the kind with five metal cylinders built together, took out a cigar, put it all in his mouth and turned it to wet it down, and lit up, surrounding himself with sweet-acrid blue smoke. He did not try to talk, and after a while Horty must have dozed off, because he opened his eyes to find the fat boy’s jacket folded as a pillow under his head, and he could not remember its being put there. It was dark then; he sat up, and immediately the fat boy’s voice came from the blackness.
    “Take it easy, kid.” A small pudgy hand steadied Horty’s back. “How do you feel?”
    Horty tried to talk, choked, swallowed and tried again. “All right, I guess. Hungry… gee! We’re out in the country!”
    He became conscious of the fat boy squatting beside him. The hand left his back; in a moment the flame of a match startled him, and for an etched moment the boy’s face floated before him in the wavering light, moonlike, with delicate pink lips acrawl on the black cigar. Then with a practiced flick of his fingers, he sent the match and its brilliance flying out into the night. “Smoke?”
    “I never did smoke,” said Horty. “Some corn-silk, once.” He looked admiringly at the red jewel at the end of the cigar. “You smoke a lot, huh.”
    “Stunts m’growth,” said the other, and burst into a peal of shrill laughter. “How’s the hand?”
    “It hurts some. Not so bad.”
    “You got a lot of grit, kid. I’d be screamin’ for morphine if I was you. What happened to it?”
    Horty told him. The story came out in snatches, out of sequence, but the fat boy got it all. He questioned briefly, and to the point, and did not comment at all. The conversation died after he had asked as many questions as he apparently wanted to, and for a while Horty thought the other had dozed off. The cigar dimmed and dimmed, occasionally sputtering around the edges, once in a while brightening in a wavery fashion as vagrant air touched it from the back of the truck.
    Abruptly, and in a perfectly wide-awake voice, the fat boy asked him, “You lookin’ fer work?”
    “Work? Well—I guess maybe.”
    “What made you eat them ants?” came next.
    “Well, I—I don’t know. I guess I just—well, I wanted to.”
    “Do you do that a lot?”
    “Not too much.” This was a different kind of questioning than he had had from Armand. The boy asked him about it without revulsion, without any more curiosity, really, than he had asked him how old he was, what grade he was in.
    “Can you sing?”
    “Well—I guess so. Some.”
    “Sing something. I mean, if you feel like it. Don’t strain y’self. Uh—know Stardust?”
    Horty looked out at the starlit highway racing away beneath the rumbling wheels, the blaze of yellow-white which turned to dwindling red tail-light eyes as a car whisked by on the other side of the road. The fog was gone, and a lot of the pain was gone from his hand, and most of all he was gone from Armand and Tonta. Kay had given him a feather-touch of kindness, and this odd boy, who talked in a way he had never heard a boy talk before, had given him another sort of kindness. There were the beginnings of a wonderful warm glow inside him, a feeling he had had only once or twice before in his whole life—the time he had won the sack-race and they gave him a khaki handkerchief, and the time four kids had whistled to a mongrel dog, and the dog had come straight to him, ignoring the others. He began to sing, and because the truck rumbled so, he had to