Like People in History Read Free Page A

make it look legit, a box of Gold Dust cleanser.
    I moped, eating in front of the grocery until several local women passed by and one of them asked me why I wasn't at home. I noticed the time on the "Moderne" 7-Up advertising clock in the window. I was late for Augie.
    He was changed into his dungarees, in his backyard, playing with his metal dump trucks when I arrived, and he immediately asked why I was still in my school clothing. When I explained that my mother wasn't home and my house was locked up, he said I could borrow a pair of his overalls. I did, and they were so large I could wear them easily over my school pants and shirt.
    The next hour was misery. I was too depressed to think about all the neat things I'd previously planned to do with the large magnet we'd found in his father's toolshed. Every once in a while I would sigh, and when Augie asked what was wrong, I'd reply, "Oh, nothing!" Then I mysteriously asked if he thought his folks would let me move in until I could find a job.
    "Sure!" Augie said. But Augie would have replied the same if I'd asked him for all the blood in his body. Worse, he seemed to take my plight altogether too lightly, continuing to fill up, move along, and empty his toy metal trucks with exasperating imperturbability. In Augie's world my anxieties were unthinkable: "You're nuts to worry, your mother probably went out to get her hair done." I suddenly saw myself as Augie must see me: exotic and neurasthenic. And I suddenly saw Augie clearly: too unimaginative, too plain stupid to recognize that a future existed; possibly a not very pretty one.
    This led to new guilt at my failure even to be a good friend, and I began talking about Ronny Taskin's pals and the upcoming game. Finally I let Augie pitch balls to me and tried batting them. We were in the middle of that when he was called inside to do his homework and I was sent home.
    I didn't run all the way; I loitered on street corners staring at caterpillars fallen to the sidewalk. I counted bicycles dropped willy-nilly on front lawns or parked in tiers upon kickstands in driveways. I dreaded reaching our block. I turned into it reluctantly, so afraid to see the kitchen door still shut against me I wouldn't look up until I was directly in front of it.
    It was still locked. I collapsed onto my schoolbag and contemplated suicide.
    "His shirt was out of his pants. His shoes were caked with dirt. His mouth was a mélange of pineapple and some brown goo. His hair hadn't been combed all day. He looked like an urchin photographed outside some shanty in Appalachia"—that's how Alistair later on described me at our first meeting.
    Alistair, on the other hand, was superb in a brand-new complete Hopalong Cassidy outfit, midnight-black with silver trim, including the arabesque-studded leather holster and silver-plated six-shooter, the authentic black-and-white pony Western boots, and the cream-colored felt ten-gallon hat with black embroidery.
    He stepped out of the front seat of my mother's old Roadmaster, dropped a suitcase on the flagstones, and waited until my mother— carrying a larger suitcase—joined him before he said, "We used to have tramps in our neighborhood too. My mother usually gives them a five and tells them to get a haircut."
    Astonished by this effrontery, as well as by the apparition that had uttered the words, I jumped up ready to punch him to the ground.
    "You poor thing!" My mother suddenly dropped the suitcase and swept me up in a hug. "You must have been here an hour!" she said into my hair. "And I forgot to tell you I was going to the airport."
    The airport? I pulled away from my mother. "What airport?"
    "Idlewild," replied the monstrosity in my favorite cowboy star's outfit.
    "It all happened so quickly," my mother said, trying to defend herself. "I knew he was coming in sometime today, but not exactly when. Then his mother called and I wasn't sure I knew the way and I got lost twice going there..."
    "You flew in a plane?"