The Year the Lights Came On Read Online Free PDF Page A

smiled and stepped aside. “Freeman,” he said.
    Freeman rose slowly. Blood seeped over his top lip. The crowd became silent.
    “C’mon,” teased Mason, motioning Freeman toward him.
    “Get him,” Dupree urged. “Get him, Mason.”
    Freeman stepped in, ducked a jab, reached through Mason’s defense and slapped him on the face with an open hand. Mason rolled to his right, stunned. Freeman lunged forward and landed five bruising blows so fast it sounded like an automatic rifle. Mason crumpled to the ground.
    No one moved. Mason swayed on his knees, looked at Freeman through two glass eyes, then fell playfully on his side.
    “Dupree,” Wesley said quietly, “you ought to know better.”

4
    THE GREAT DEPRESSION and World War Number Two had been our only experience with the Larger World, and we had inherited—through some curious process of osmosis—a possessed sense of belonging. Belonging was our constant defense, our way of warding off the suspected Great End. The Larger World had issued messages that we lived in a temporary time, that we, ourselves, were temporary. (The atomic bomb was one thing; now, in 1947, there was rumor about a bomb of such unpredictable destruction that certain international scientists were afraid it would create a molecular reaction and Earth would disintegrate in a series of explosions, like a string of Chinese firecrackers.)
    Because of the Larger World, and what it said to us in the voices of the Radio Evening News Network and eight-point type of The Anderson Independent, we had been mightily influenced and had adopted the habit of clustering, as though clustering was an affirmation of our existence: if we saw one another, spoke with one another, then it must be true—we had survived.
    In clustering, we became isolationists; in isolation, we assumed identities; in identity, we were assigned value; in value, we learned of imperatives; and, in imperatives, we realized perspective.
    To the members of Our Side, perspective was conditioned by boundaries. Boundaries gave us reach, held us, dared us; boundaries tutored us in the deeper significance of belonging.
    Wesley and I lived by the boundaries of Black Pool Swamp, circling us in a horseshoe from the south and east and west. To the north we were somehow contained by Banner’s Crossing and Rakestraw Bridge Road.
    There was a sense of being centrifugally leashed to the center of our north and south, east and west boundaries; the center was Home and Home would spin us out, but only to the invisible, protective edges of where we wandered, and then Home would draw us back again.
    We could not mark those boundaries by stake and flag. They were not taught by a line drawn in shoe-edge, or plotted on some map from the Official Office of Official Boundaries. Our boundaries were established by instinct. We knew. We simply knew. We could chase after laughter and echoes of laughter until we were exhausted with exhilaration, and we could wander farther and farther away, safe, protected, until that one step—that one step too far, too threatening—and then we would retreat. No one told us to return. We knew. We simply knew. We knew when we had ventured too far, as though our sense of equilibrium had been savagely attacked.
    But the Highway 17 Gang did not understand about boundaries. Highway 17 was alive with people moving, going great distances, and once having passed, whizzing by in their automobiles, they were not likely to return that way again. The Highway 17 Gang watched those passing people and believed directions—north and south, east and west—were gray concrete roads drawn in heavy lines on service station maps.
    The Highway 17 Gang did not have boundaries. They had yards. Somehow, they believed they were blessed.
    *
    To Dupree and his friends, we were mutants, outsiders, and when we argued or fought, it was to defend against the hurt of our treatment. We won our battles, those private, quick, angry battles, but we could not assuage