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

boys straightened up and started toward the track. The sun’s light poured in long low rays over the roof of the school. Jostling and joking, we started to run. “Faster!” Mackyz yelled. “Faster! Whatsa matter—you all a bunch of girls! Faster! For Christ’s sake, faster!”
 
Since Preston, in his dogged effort to become a good miler, ran three laps to everyone else’s one, he was usually the last in the locker room. He would come in, worn out and breathing heavily; sometimes he even had to hold himself up with one hand on his locker while he undressed. Everyone else would long since have showered and would be almost ready to leave. They might make one or two remarks about Preston’s running his legs down to stumps or trying to kill himself for Mackyz’ sake. Preston would smile numbly while he tried to get his breath back, and somehow, I was always surprised by how little attention was paid to Preston, how cut off and how alone he was.
More often than not, Joel would be showing off in the locker room—walking around on his hands, singing dirty songs, or engaged in some argument or other. Preston would go into the shower. I would talk to Joel, dressing slowly, because I usually waited for Preston. By the time I was all dressed, the locker room would be empty and Preston would still be towelling himself off. Then, instead of hurrying to put his clothes on, he would run his hand over his chest, to curl the few limp hairs. “Oh come on!” I would say, disgustedly.
“Hold your horses,” he would say, with his maddening physicist’s serenity. “Just you hold your horses.”
It took him half an hour to get dressed. He’d stand in front of the mirror and flex his muscles endlessly and admire the line his pectorals made across his broad rib cage, and he always left his shirt until last, even until after he had combed his hair. I found his vanity confusing; he was far from handsome, with his heavy mouth and bushy eyebrows and thick, sloping shoulders, but he loved his reflection and he’d turn and gaze at himself in the mirror from all sorts of angles while he buttoned his shirt. He hated Joel. “There’s a guy who’ll never amount to much,” Preston would say. “He’s chicken. And he’s not very smart. I don’t see why you want him to like you—except that you’re a sucker. You let your eyes run away with your judgment.” I put up with all this because I wanted Preston to walk me part way home. It seemed shameful somehow to have to walk home alone.
Finally, he would finish, and we would emerge from the now deserted school into the dying afternoon. As we walked, Preston harangued me about my lack of standards and judgment. The hunger I had for holding school office and for being well thought of he dismissed as a streak of lousy bourgeois cowardice. I agreed with him (I didn’t like myself anyway); but what was to be done about it? “We might run away,” Preston said, squinting up at the sky. “Hitchhike. Work in factories. Go to a whorehouse. . . .” I leaned against a tree trunk, and Preston stood with one foot on the curb and one foot in the street, and we lobbed pebbles back and forth. “We’re doomed,” Preston said. “Doom” was one of his favorite words, along with “culture,” “kinetic,” and “the Absolute.”  “We come from a dying culture,” he said.
“I suppose you’re right,” I said. “It certainly looks that way.” But then I cheered up. “After all, it’s not as if we were insane or anything.”
“It wouldn’t show yet,” Preston said gloomily. “It’s still in the latent stage. It’ll come out later. You’ll see. After all, you’re still living at home, and you’ve got your half-assed charm—”
I broke in; I’d never had a compliment from him before.
“I didn’t say you were charming,” he said. “I said you have a half-assed charm. You behave well in public. That’s all I meant.”
At the corner where we separated, Preston stood a moment or