Wonderland Read Online Free PDF Page B

Fuller, is standing at the doors. Jesse whispers that he doesn’t feel well, may he be excused? But Mr. Fuller can’t hear him and so he has to say aloud, in his raspy, hoarse, frightened voice, “I feel sick … may I be excused …?”
    Mr. Fuller nods gravely, suspiciously. But he does not allow Jesse to open the door himself; he goes to it and opens it wide, so that Jesse must pass through close to him, half stooping beneath his arm.
    Jesse hurries down the corridor. His heart is still pounding, his face flushed. The skin of his face is almost painful, it is so flushed. Behind him the choir is singing now of a little town that is filling up softly with snow, its music misty and unreal, fading now behind the closed doors; outside there is hail, real snow, violent and wild. Jesse stares out a window. The sidewalk is trod upon by a thousand angry feet—invisible feet; there is a raucous ringing to the air that drowns out the choir’s song for Jesse.
Bethlehem. Christmas
. His mind jumps from high school and Yewville to the highway, to his home, his father’s gas station and the house a hundred yards behind it, off the highway, meager and dull in the storm. The gas station is now closed. Closed permanently. Jesse’s father had closed it, boarded it up, just the day before.
    Closed:
a sign Jesse’s father had painted himself with old black paint.
    Jesse helped him nail up the boards without being asked. He wanted to say to his father’s angry, silent back: “Why are you hammering so hard? Why are you making so much noise?” Nails struck deep into the wood, nails struck sideways and bent, twisted helplessly … nails dropped and lost in the tall grass.… But Jesse said nothing. He helped his father board up the little gas station, with lumber from an old pile behind the house, and his father hammered the boards in place, in a row, then crisscrossing on top, as if there were thieves who might want to break into this old place, cunning thieves who might be watching them right at this moment, plotting. Jesse wanted to say to his father gently: “But nobody will break in
here.…
” He wanted to ask, while his father hammered so loudly: “Why are you so … why are you so strange today?”
    Why are you so strange?
he thinks now.
    The high school is seven miles from home. Out there, at the intersection of the highway and the Moran Creek Road, the gas station is boarded up,
closed permanently
, and behind it is the old jumble ofwrecked cars and motorcycles and lumber and tires, and behind that the small frame house is gleaming with a sudden freakish burst of sunlight, hail bouncing on its roof.…
    He must leave school and go home. Closing his eyes, he imagines the house: the gleaming roof, the hailstones, the rotting lumber pile. His father had bought the gas station, but he had built the house himself over the years. Hard work. There were a few sheds, and a garden ragged from late fall, a few trees. Wild bushes. Then the fence of rusted wire and the beginning of Mike Brennan’s farmland … but it was not Brennan’s any longer, it had been sold to someone else, a stranger, who did not live in the area or even in Yewville. A stranger. Everyone talked about this stranger for a while, wondering when he would show up. Jesse’s mother said, “It’s somebody with money to throw away, that’s for sure. What would he want with that old dead farm!” She always spoke of other people’s farms and businesses with a certain haughty, mocking look.
    Jesse can hear her voice plainly.
    She is seven miles away.
    School will be dismissed in another hour, but Jesse won’t be able to go home then. He has to work at Harder’s, then get a ride home with a neighbor at five o’clock. That is four hours away. His heart pounds, seems to lunge in his chest.… He thinks of his mother: her light, red-blond hair, her eyes almond-shaped and clever and frank. He takes after her, people say, more than after his father. But he is