My Mistress's Sparrow Is Dead Read Online Free PDF Page A

springy,” Preston would mumble. “Bad for the muscles.” Preston was a miler. He was thickset and without natural grace; Mackyz said he had no talent, but he ran doggedly, and he became a good miler. I ran the 440. I was tall and thin, and even Mackyz said I ought to be good at it, but I wasn’t. Mackyz said I didn’t have the spirit. “All you smart boys are alike,” he said. “You haven’t got the heart for it. You always hold back. You’re all a bunch of goldbricks.” I tried to cure my maimed enthusiasm. As I ran, Mackyz would bawl desperately, “Hit the ground harder. Hit with your toes! Spring, boy! spring! Don’t coddle yourself, for Christ’s sake. . . .” After a race, I’d throw myself down on a knoll near the finish line, under a sycamore tree, where the track manager dug a new hole every day for us to puke in. Three or four others would join me, and we’d lie there wearily, our chests burning, too weak to move.
Among my other problems was that I was reduced nearly to a state of tears over my own looks whenever I looked at a boy named Joel Bush. Joel was so incredibly good-looking that none of the boys could quite bear the fact of his existence; his looks weren’t particularly masculine or clean-cut, and he wasn’t a fine figure of a boy—he was merely beautiful. He looked like a statue that had been rubbed with honey and warm wax, to get a golden tone, and he carried at all times, in the neatness of his features and the secret proportions of his face and body that made him so handsome in that particular way, the threat of seduction. Displease me, he seemed to say, and I’ll get you. I’ll make you fall in love with me and I’ll turn you into a donkey. Everyone either avoided him or gave in to him; teachers refused to catch him cheating, boys never teased him, and no one ever told him off. One day I saw him saying goodbye to a girl after school, and as he left her to join me, walking toward the locker room, he said to her, “Meet you here at five-thirty.” Track wasn’t over until six, and I could tell that he had no intention of meeting her, and yet, when he asked me about some experiments we had done in physics, instead of treating him like someone who had just behaved like a heel, I told him everything I knew.
He never joined us under the sycamore tree, and he ran effortlessly. He would pass the finish line, his chest heaving under his sweat-stained track shirt, and climb into the stands and sit in the sunlight. I was watching him, one afternoon, as he sat there wiping his face and turning his head from side to side. At one moment it was all silver except for the charred hollows of his eyes, and the next it was young and perfect, the head we all recognized as his.
Mackyz saw him and called out to him to put his sweatshirt on before he caught a cold. As he slipped the sweatshirt on, Joel shouted, “Aw, go fry your head!” Mackyz laughed good-naturedly.
Sprinkled here and there on the football field were boys lifting their arms high and then sweeping them down to touch their toes, or lying on their backs and bicycling their legs in the air. I got up and walked toward them, to do a little jog-trotting and high-knee prancing. I looked at Joel. “I’m cooling off,” he said to me. I walked on, and just then a flock of crows wheeled up behind the oak tree on the hill and filled the sky with their vibrant motion. Everyone—even Preston—paused and looked up. The birds rose in a half circle and then glided, scythe like, with wings outspread, on a down current of air until they were only twenty feet or so above the ground; then they flapped their wings with a noise like sheets being shaken out, and soared aloft, dragging their shadows up the stepped concrete geometry of the stands, past Joel’s handsome, rigid figure, off into the sky.
“Whaddya know about that?” Mackyz said. “Biggest flock of crows I ever saw.”
“Why didn’t you get your gun and shoot a couple?” Joel called