Guerrillas Read Online Free PDF Page B

had followed him; andnow more than half the beds were empty, with bare mattresses that looked alike, and with only the newspaper and magazine pinups glued to the wall above (the yellow glue making what was printed on the other side of the paper show through) speaking of the boys who had occupied those beds.
    The boys who had left were boys who had places to go back to; somewhere in the city they had mothers or aunts or women they called aunts. Those who had stayed had nowhere to go. They were like Bryant, boys spawned by the city, casually conceived, and after the back yard drama and ritual of their birth gradually abandoned, attaching themselves as they grew up to certain groups and through the groups to certain houses that offered occasional shelter or food.
    Bryant grieved for Stephens. Stephens had made Thrushcross Grange a happy place. Stephens talked a lot; Stephens read books; Stephens had ideas and a lot of common sense. Little Stephens, with the funny blob of a pimply nose: funny, until he began to talk. Stephens didn’t have to stay in a place like the Grange; he had a mother and a house. But Stephens had come to the Grange because of his ideas; and that had made a lot of the boys feel better. Bryant didn’t understand all the things Stephens said; he knew only that he felt happy and safe being where Stephens was. Stephens knew how to give a man courage. And now Stephens had gone away. He hadn’t gone back to his mother’s house in the city; Bryant had checked. No one knew where Stephens had gone.
    Without Stephens, and the boys who had left one by one after Stephens, Bryant didn’t like being in the Grange at night. He didn’t like being with the boys who had stayed behind. They were too much like himself; with them he felt lost. He wanted to be outside, among other people. He had the dollar the woman had given him, and some other money; and the money made him restless.
    Almost as soon as he had seen the woman he had decided to take the risk and ask her for money. He wasn’t sure that she would give; she might even complain; but as soon as he had seen the fright in her face, when he had called to her, he knew it was going to be all right. The little victory had set him apart from the otherboys in the hut. But then he had begun to feel that the victory might somehow turn sour, and he became nervous. He didn’t talk; he kept to himself and behaved as though something had happened to offend him.
    They ate early, rice and a meat stew. When he was finished he took his plate out to the thatched lean- to at the back of the hut, dipped the plate in the bucket and put it on the wash stand. He didn’t go back inside. He walked round to the front and, avoiding the light from the doorway, went down to the road. Soon he had left the dim lights of the hut behind and was walking in the dark to the highway. He didn’t like the dark and the nighttime scuttlings and squeaks of the bush, but his excitement gave him courage. It was a three-mile walk. He walked fast and was sweating when he carne to the highway.
    He knew it wouldn’t be easy to get a taxi. Thrushcross Grange had a reputation; he remembered how, in the time of Stephens, on occasions like this, they had relished that reputation and sometimes acted up to it. The cars went by, four or five a minute, and their headlights picked him out: a young black man in jeans and a striped jersey, small and venomous in appearance, with his twisted face sweated and shiny, deliberately ugly with his pigtails, the pigtails like serpents, signals of aggression. He waved and the cars didn’t stop; and there on the highway, the bush all around him, he began to feel lonely and frightened, excitement turning to a sick sensation in his stomach at the thought of the evening being lost, going sour, of having to walk back unsatisfied the way he had come.
    At last a taxi stopped. It was nearly full; that was no doubt why the driver had risked stopping. He sat next to a fat woman and he