A Good and Happy Child by Justin Evans Read Free Book Online Page B

jerk my head to the side and catch a glimpse of that tremor or flicker on the border of my vision. We’ll go for a walk, and I’ll show you something. All right.
    That feeling of hyperreality came over me. Two tiny, identical, scruffy houses lay ahead, where a girl I went to school with lived with her nine brothers and sisters (lore had it the family was so large they lived in two houses). The afternoon sun struck the whitewashed walls a g o o d a n d h a p p y c h i l d
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    and they glowed a despairing yellow-gold— Like the color of surrender, my Friend suggested. He was filling my mind with pictures, sensations. I tried to focus on walking—the lunchbox under my arm and the French horn in my hand—but I could not keep my eyes from the yellow houses; the intensity of the color was almost overwhelming, hypnotizing; the quarter mile down Ruby Hill dragged like five. I wondered whether I would ever reach the bottom.
    It’s because it’s daytime, came the voice. What is?
    The harshness.
    I reached the grounds of Early College. That campus, normally a French garden of a university—all red colonial brick and whitewashed Doric columns rising over trim lawns—became a rage of noise. They surfeited my senses: the students, young men in khakis and baseball caps boisterously crowded at picnic tables eating junk food; the bulletin boards overstapled with flyers announcing a Fiji Night or a concert by The Bar Codes; yards of chained bicycles; the boxwoods planted in banks of pine mulch, their cloying odors rising. It was too much; Too much, I told him, though he continued to lead me with his voice, that whisper just slightly beyond my hearing, until I reached the footbridge, and then at last the harshness and the grating colors and the noise began to peel away. I knew from my father that the bridge was the longest footbridge in the United States, a stone-and-concrete structure fifteen feet wide and some three hundred feet long, spanning the gorge dug by Slopers Creek and offering a view of the mountains that sprang up beyond the football and soccer fields of campus. That day the footbridge was empty, or nearly so; there ahead of me at the midpoint, my Friend waited for me. He stood bareheaded, his sandy hair scruffy and wild, his face obscured by a smudge. We crossed the bridge together in silence. We passed all those landmarks of order and community that the university imposed on this fringe of the countryside—its modest football gridiron, the tennis courts with their broken fences and weeds choking the pavement, the chalklined green sports fields—toward the wilder places, beyond campus. We climbed the hill on a dusty track, until the ruins of the old Revolution 40
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    Hall stood before us, that husk of hearth and stone wall, held together by preservationists’ wire. Beyond it was a brush of thistles and bracken and reeds, cooked brown by the autumn sun, giving way to uninterrupted miles of rolling forest.
    Ready?
    Okay okay okay okay.
    We plunged into the brush, following a narrow dirt path. My vulnerability to sensation, here in the woods, was rewarded by heightened perception—every twig snap, fluttering bird, or subtle shift in afternoon light caught my eye and caused me to shiver with pleasure. We were tromping downward, on a path cut by cross-country runners, toward the river. It’s about your father, said my Friend.
    What is?
    All of this. I understood at once that he meant the walk. My father and I had followed this route many times.
    What about him? I was breathless.
    We were down by the James River now, at the bottom of the trail where the river opened up fat and sluggish under a thick overhang of pines. My Friend was serious, importunate, showing me yet another side of himself. Suddenly his voice was like a hiss. His blurry face was close to mine—though I could not make out its features, I sensed a grimace—and he spoke with such wild urgency it was almost a shriek. Somebody knows what