Farewell Summer (5 page)

The last vibration of the great clock bell faded.

A wind swayed the trees outside and the pekoe curtain hung out on the air, a pale ghost.

Douglas felt his breath siphon.

You
, he thought.
How come I never noticed?

The great and terrible courthouse clock.

Just last year, hadn't Grandpa laid out the machinery's blueprint, lecturing?

The huge round lunar clock was a gristmill, he'd said. Shake down all the grains of Time – the big grains of centuries, and the small grains of years, and the tiny grains of hours and minutes – and the clock pulverized them, slid Time silently out in all directions in a fine pollen, carried by cold winds to blanket the town like dust, everywhere. Spores from that clock lodged in your flesh to wrinkle it, to grow bones to monstrous size, to burst feet from shoes like turnips. Oh, how that great machine at the town's center dispensed Time in blowing weathers.

The clock!

That was the thing that bleached and ruined life, jerked people out of bed, hounded them to schools and graves! Not Quartermain and his band of old men, or Braling and his metronome; it was the clock that ran this town like a church.

Even on the clearest of nights it was misted, glowing, luminous, and old. It rose above town like a great dark burial mound, drawn to the skies by the summoning of the moon, calling out in a grieved voice of days long gone, and days that would come no more, whispering of other autumns when the town was young and all was beginning and there was no end.

‘So it's you,' whispered Douglas.

Midnight
, said the clock.
Time
, it said,
Darkness
. Flights of night birds flew up to carry the final peal away, out over the lake and into the night country, gone.

Doug yanked down the shade so Time could not blow through the screen.

The clock light shone on the sidings of the house like a mist breathing on the windows.

‘Boy, I just heard the craziest things.' Charlie strolled up, chewing on a clover–blossom. ‘I got me a secret service report from some girls.'

‘Girls!'

Charlie smiled at how his ten–inch firecracker had blown the laziness off his pals' faces. ‘My sister said way back last July they got old lady Bentley to admit she never
was
young. I thought you'd like
that
news.'

‘Charlie,
Charlie
!'

‘Burden of proof,' said Charlie. ‘The girls told me that old lady Bentley showed some pictures, junk and stuff, which didn't prove nothin'. Fact is, when you think on it, fellas, none of these old ginks look like they were
ever
young.'

‘Why didn't
you
think of that, Doug?' said Tom.

‘Why don't
you
shut up?' said Douglas.

‘I guess this makes me a lieutenant,' said Charlie.

‘You just moved up to sergeant
yesterday
!'

Charlie stared hard at Douglas for a long moment.

‘Okay, okay, you're a lieutenant,' said Douglas.

‘Thanks,' said Charlie. ‘What'll we do about my sister? She wants to be part of our army – a special spy.'

‘To heck with her!'

‘You got to admit that's great secret stuff she turned in.'

‘Boy, Charlie, you sure
think
of things,' said Tom. ‘Doug, why don't
you
think of things?'

‘Darn it!' cried Douglas. ‘Whose idea was the graveyard tour, the candy, the food, the chess pieces, all
that
?'

‘Hold on,' said Tom. ‘The graveyard tour, I said that. The candy, yeah, was yours, but I gotta tell ya, the food experiment was a failure. Heck, you haven't said anything new in a coupla hours. And all the chessboards are full of chess pieces again and those old men are busy pushing the pieces – us – around. Any moment now we'll feel ourselves grabbed and moved and we won't be able to live our own lives anymore.'

Douglas could feel Charlie and Tom creeping up on him, taking the war out of his hands like a ripe plum. Private, corporal, sergeant, lieutenant. Today, lieutenant; tomorrow captain. And the day after?

‘It's not just ideas that count.' Douglas wiped his brow. ‘It's how you stick 'em together. Take this fact of Charlie's – it's secondhand. Heck,
girls
thought of it
first
!'

Everybody's eyebrows went up.

Charlie's face fell.

‘And anyway,' Douglas went on, ‘I'm puttin' ideas together for a real bang–up revelation.'

They all looked at him, waiting.

‘Okay, Doug, go on,' said Charlie.

Douglas shut his eyes. ‘And the revelation is: Since old people don't
look
like they were ever kids, they never
were
! So they're not humans at
all
!'

‘What
are
they, Doug?'

‘Another
race
!'

Everybody sat, stunned by the vast sunburst caused by this explosion, this incredible revelation. It rained upon them in fire and flames.

‘Yes, another race,' said Douglas. ‘Aliens. Evil. And we, we're the slaves they keep for nefarious odd jobs and punishments!'

Everybody melted with the after–effects of this announcement.

Charlie stood up solemnly and announced: ‘Doug, old pal, see this beanie on my head? I'm taking my beanie
off
to
you
!' Charlie raised his beanie to applause and laughter.

They all smiled at Doug, their general, their leader, who took out his pocketknife and casually started a philosophical game of one–finger mumblety–peg.

‘Yeah, but …' said Tom, and went on. ‘The last thing you said didn't work out. It's okay to
say
the old people
are from another planet, but what about Grandpa and Grandma? We've known them all our lives. Are you saying that they're aliens, too?'

Doug's face turned red. He hadn't quite worked this part out, and here was his brother – his second–in–command, his junior officer – questioning his theory.

‘And,' Tom went on, ‘what do we have new in the way of
action
, Doug? We can't just sit here. What do we do next?'

Doug swallowed hard. Before he had a chance to speak, Tom, now that everybody was looking at him, said slowly, ‘The only thing that comes to mind right now is maybe we stop the courthouse clock. You can hear that darned thing ticking all over town. Bong! Midnight! Whang! Get outta bed! Boom! Jump into bed! Up down, up down, over and over.'

Ohmigosh
, thought Douglas.
I saw it last night. The clock! Why in heck didn't I say so first?

Tom picked his nose calmly. ‘Why don't we just lambaste that darn old clock – kill it dead! Then we can do
whatever
we want to do
whenever
we want to do it. Okay?'

Everyone stared at Tom. Then they began to cheer and yell, even Douglas, trying to forget it was his younger brother, not himself, who was saving the day.

‘Tom!' they all shouted. ‘Good old Tom!'

‘Ain't nothin',' said Tom. He looked to his brother. ‘When do we kill the blasted thing?'

Douglas bleated, his tongue frozen. The soldiers stared, waiting.

‘Tonight?' said Tom.

‘
I
was just going to say that!' Douglas cried.

The courthouse clock somehow knew they were coming to kill it.

It loomed high above the town square with its great marble façade and sun–blazed face, a frozen avalanche, waiting to bury the assassins. Simultaneously, it allowed the leaders of its religion and philosophy, the ancient gray–haired messengers of Time and dissolution, to pass through the thundering bronze doors below.

Douglas, watching the soldiery of death and mummification slip calmly through the dark portals, felt a stir of panic. There, in the shellac–smelling, paper–rustling rooms of Town Hall, the Board of Education slyly unmade destinies, pared calendars, devoured Saturdays in torrents of homework, instigated reprimands, tortures, and criminalities. Their dead hands pulled streets straighter, loosed rivers of asphalt over soft dirt to make roads harder, more confining, so that open country and freedom were pushed further
and further away, so that one day, years from now, green hills would be a distant echo, so far off that it would take a lifetime of travel to reach the edge of the city and peer out at one lone small forest of dying trees.

Here in this one building, lives were slotted, alphabetized in files and fingerprints; the children's destinies put under seal! Men with blizzard faces and lightning–colored hair, carrying Time in their briefcases, hurried by to serve the clock, to run it with great sprockets and gears. At twilight they stepped out, all smiles, having found new ways to constrict, imprison, or entangle lives in fees and licenses. You could not even prove your death without these men, this building, this clock, and a certificate duly inked, stamped, and signed.

‘Here we are,' whispered Douglas, all his pals clustered around him. ‘It's almost quittin' time. We gotta be careful. If we wait too long it'll be so shut up there'll be no way to get in. Right at twilight, when the last doors are being locked, that's when we make our move, right? As they come out, we go in.'

‘Right,' said everyone.

‘So,' said Douglas. ‘Hold your breath.'

‘It's held,' said Tom. ‘But Doug, I got something to say.'

‘What?' said Doug.

‘You know that no matter when we go in, if we go
in all together, someone's going to see us and they're going to remember our faces and we're going to get in trouble. It was bad enough with the chess pieces out front of the courthouse. We were seen, and we had to give everything back. So, why don't we wait until it's all locked up?'

‘We can't do that. I just said why.'

‘Tell you what,' said Tom. ‘Why don't I go in now and hide in the men's until everyone's gone home? Then I'll sneak upstairs and let you in one of the windows near the clock tower. Up there, on the third floor.' He pointed to a spot high up the ancient brick walls.

‘Hey!' said all the gang.

‘That won't work,' said Doug.

‘Why not?' said Tom.

Before Doug had time to think of a reason, Charlie piped up.

‘Sure it'll work,' said Charlie. ‘Tom's right. Tom, you want to go in and hide now?'

‘Sure,' said Tom.

Everyone was looking at Doug, still their general, and he had to give his approval.

‘What I don't like,' said Doug, ‘is smart alecks who think they know everything. Okay, go in and hide. When it gets dark, let us in.'

‘Okay,' said Tom.

And he was gone.

People were coming out through the big bronze doors and Doug and the others pulled back around the corner of the building and waited for the sun to go down.

The courthouse was finally completely quiet and the night was dark and the boys climbed up the fire escape on the side of the building, very quietly, until they got up to the third floor, near the clock tower.

They stopped at the window where Tom was supposed to appear, but no one was there.

‘Gosh,' said Doug. ‘I hope he didn't get locked in the men's room.'

‘They never lock the men's room,' said Charlie. ‘He'll be here.'

And sure enough, all of a sudden, there was Tom behind the glass pane, waving to them and opening and shutting his mouth, but they couldn't hear what he was saying.

At long last he raised the window and the smell of the courthouse rushed out into the night around them.

‘Get in,' commanded Tom.

‘We are,' said Doug, angrily.

One by one the boys crawled inside the courthouse
and snuck along the hallways till they reached the clock machinery door.

‘I bet you,' said Tom, ‘this darned door's locked, too.'

‘No bets,' said Doug, and rattled the doorknob. ‘Good grief! Tom, I hate to say it, but you're right. Has anybody got a firecracker?'

Suddenly six hands reached into six dungaree pockets and just as suddenly reappeared with three four–inchers and a few five–inch crackers.

‘It's no good,' said Tom, ‘unless someone has matches.'

More hands reached out with matches in each.

Doug stared at the door.

‘How can we fix the crackers so they'll really do some good when they go off?'

‘Glue,' said Tom.

Doug shook his head, scowling.

‘Yeah, glue, right,' he said. ‘Does anyone just happen to have any
glue
on them?'

A single hand reached out on the air. It was Pete's.

‘Here's some Bulldog glue,' he said. ‘Bought it for my airplane models and because I like the great picture of the bulldog on the label.'

‘Let's give it a try.'

Doug applied glue along the length of one of the five–inchers and pressed it against the outside of the machinery room door.

‘Stand back,' he said, and struck a match.

With his mob back in the shadows and his hands over
his ears, Doug waited for the cracker to go off. The orange flame sizzled and zipped along the fuse.

There was a beautiful explosion.

For a long moment they all stared at the door in disappointment and then, very slowly, it drifted open.

‘I was right,' said Tom.

‘Why don't you just shut up,' said Doug. ‘C'mon.'

He pulled the door and it opened wide.

There was a sound below.

‘Who's there?' a voice cried from deep down in the courthouse.

‘Ohmigosh,' whispered Tom. ‘I bet that's the janitor.'

‘Who's up there?' the voice cried again.

‘Quick!' said Doug, leading his army through the door.

And now, at last, they were inside the clock.

Here, suddenly, was the immense, frightening machinery of the Enemy, the Teller of Lives and Time. Here was the core of the town and its existence. Doug could feel all of the lives of the people he knew moving in the clock, suspended in bright oils and meshed in sharp cogs and ground down in clamped springs that clicked onward with no stopping. The clock moved silently. And now he knew that it had
never
ticked. No one in the town had ever actually heard it counting to itself; they had only listened so hard that they had heard their own hearts and the time of their lives moving in their wrists and their hearts and their heads. For here was only cold metal silence, quiet motion,
gleams and glitters, murmurs and faint whispers of steel and brass.

Douglas trembled.

They were together at last, Doug and the clock that had risen like a lunar face throughout his life at every midnight. At any moment the great machine might uncoil its brass springs, snatch him up, and dump him in a grinder of cogs to mesh its endless future with his blood, in a forest of teeth and tines, waiting, like a music box, to play and tune his body, ribboning his flesh.

And then, as if it had waited just for this moment, the clock cleared its throat with a sound like July thunder. The vast spring hunched in upon itself as a cannon prepares for its next concussion. Before Douglas could turn, the clock erupted.

One! Two! Three!

It fired its bells! And he was a moth, a mouse in a bucket being kicked, and kicked again. An earthquake shook the tower, jolting him off his feet.

Four! Five! Six!

He staggered, clapping his hands over his ears to keep them from bursting.

Again, again –
Seven! Eight!
– the tempest tore the air. Shaken he fell against the wall, eyes shut, his heart stopped with each storm of sound.

‘Quick!' Douglas shouted. ‘The crackers!'

‘Kill the darn thing!' shouted Tom.

‘I'm supposed to say that,' said Doug. ‘Kill it!'

There was a striking of matches and a lighting of fuses and the crackers were thrown into the maw of the vast machine.

Then there was a wild stomping and commotion as the boys fled.

They bolted through the third–floor window and almost fell down the fire escape and as they reached the bottom great explosions burst from the courthouse tower; a great metal racketing clangor. The clock struck again and again, over and over as it fought for its life. Pigeons blew like torn papers tossed from the roof.
Bong!
The clock voice chopped concussions to split the heavens. Ricochets, grindings, a last desperate twitch of hands. Then …

Silence.

At the bottom of the fire escape all the boys gazed up at the dead machine. There was no ticking, imagined or otherwise, no singing of birds, no purr of motors, only the soft exhalations of sleeping houses.

At any moment the boys, looking up, expected the slain tower face, hands, numerals, guts, to groan, slide, and tumble in a grinding avalanche of brass intestines and iron meteor showers, down, down upon the lawn, heaping, rumbling, burying them in minutes, hours, years, and eternities.

But there was only silence and the clock, a mindless ghost, hanging in the sky with limp, dead hands, saying naught, doing nothing. Silence and yet another long
silence, while all about lights blinked on in houses, bright winks stretching out into the country, and people began to come out on porches and wonder at the darkening sky.

Douglas stared up, all drenched with sweat, and was about to speak when:

‘I
did
it!' cried Tom.

‘Tom!' cried Doug. ‘
We!
All of us did it. But, good grief, what did we do?'

‘Before it falls on us,' said Tom, ‘we'd better run.'

‘Who says?' said Douglas.

‘Sorry,' said Tom.

‘Run!' cried Doug.

And the victorious army ran away into the night.