Greenville by Dale Peck Read Free Book Online

the schoolyard for—
    There he is!
    By now the students had trickled down to ones and twos, and Bruce’s voice carried all the way down the sidewalk. The three boys started to run toward him, then slowed to a walk when they registered that it was Mr. Humboldt who stood between them and their prey. They didn’t stop though. Robert Sampson had a smirk on his face and Vinnie Grasso smacked his right fist into the palm of his left hand while Bruce St. John, the most timid of the three, shoved his hands in his pockets and lagged a little behind the other two.
    Mr. Humboldt— the boy began, but then something stopped him.
    He thought again of the dilemma the stick had brought tomind. It wasn’t that he didn’t know how to ask for help: he just didn’t know whether he wanted that help for himself, or against his enemies. He wanted … he
didn’t
want to have to ask. He wanted Mr. Humboldt to offer to protect him. Wanted it badly enough to seal his lips shut and stare at his math teacher with wide-open pleading eyes.
    Yes Dale?
    Mr. Humboldt wrinkled his nose again. He looked at the boy impatiently, if not simply with distaste.
    Go on now, he said when the boy still didn’t speak. Get on home.
    By now Vinnie and Robert and Bruce had stationed themselves on the opposite side of the sidewalk. Vinnie had tucked a cigarette behind his ear as though he were Marlon Brando in
On the Waterfront
and Bruce hung even farther back, his glance shifting nervously between his friends’ backs and Mr. Humboldt’s. As Mr. Humboldt turned toward the door they shuffled to the left Three Stooges style, keeping out of the math teacher’s line of vision. The boy knew he had only a few seconds’ head start and turned and started running. It was half a block to Fifth Avenue, where the boy had the choice of turning left and trying to lose them in the Barrens or turning right and running for home. It was his shoes that made up his mind. As soon as he’d started running his feet had protested inside the pinching leather, and at Fifth he veered right, running across the street at a wide diagonal.
    In a fight he didn’t stand a chance—at least not when there were three of them—but in a race he knew from experience the three boys behind him could never catch him. For a moment heeven allowed himself to enjoy the chase, too tight shoes or no. He sucked in air through his mouth and shot it out his legs as though they were pistons, and in his mind’s eye the old man’s ridiculous coat flapped behind him like the cape of Zorro. He even took the time to turn and flip off his pursuers once he’d crossed Fifth, and when he did he saw that the other boys had already given up the chase. But not because they knew they were outgunned. Instead they stood on the corner of the schoolyard, Robert Sampson and Bruce St. John methodically tearing pages out of the schoolbooks he’d dumped by the bulletin board, Vinnie Grasso holding the old man’s hat by the brim like a prop in a vaudeville show. As soon as he saw the boy was looking, he lifted his fist with a flourish and punched it through the crown, and then he waved his hand in front of his crinkled nose and threw the hat into the street like a frisbee. It landed ten feet in front of the boy, the top of the ripped crown angling up like the lid on a half-opened can of peas. Across the street the pages of the boy’s books fell straight to the ground. There was no breeze, he realized then. The old man’s coat had fallen closed around his body, encircling him in a cocoon of hot dead air, and the pages of the boy’s books lay on the dirt as still as fallen tombstones—and when he remembers that the boy starts in the bed in his uncle’s house, suddenly remembering the broken windowpanes in the garage door from early this morning. It occurs to him that he is even farther away from home than he’d realized.
    The threesome’s obsession with the boy was inexplicable, coming and going on a schedule he never