Maniac Magee: Part III

Maniac drifted from hour to hour, day to day, alone with his memories, a stunned and solitary wanderer.

He returned only long enough to pick up a few things: a blanket, some nonperishable food, the glove, and as many books as he could squeeze into the old black satchel that had hauled Grayson’s belongings around the Minor Leagues.

But sometimes he would suddenly sprint, furious ten or twenty-second bursts, as though trying to leave himself behind.

Even so, in his mind’s eye he saw the red and yellow trolley careening from the high track, plunging to the water, killing his parents over and over.

He would retrieve the satchel from wherever he had stashed it and find a place to endure the night.

Other times his overnight quarters might be an abandoned car, an empty garage, a basement stairwell.

When his original supply of food ran out, he fed himself at the zoo or at the soup kitchen down at the Salvation Army.

Here the Continental Army had suffered through a winter of their own, and the vast, stark, frozen desolation itself seemed a more proper monument than statues and stones.

Dreams pursued memories, courted and danced and coupled with them and they became one, and the gaunt, beseeching phantoms that called to him had the rag-wrapped feet of Washington’s regulars and the faces of his mother and father and Aunt Dot and Uncle Dan and the Beales and Earl Grayson.

Screecher retaliated, and Maniac had to step back while a two-kid tornado swirled around the cabin.

Then the brothers had to do some more trembling and clinging while John finished lambasting them for running away, which apparently they did about every other week.

Really little kids referred to him as “Mr. Maniac.”

To the utter amazement of all, when Russell finally croaked, “Time,” Maniac Magee was still there, alive, smiling, apparently unharmed.

He took off his sneaks and socks and walked — nonchalant as you please — through the rat-infested dump at the foot of Rako Hill.

He climbed the fence at the American bison pen at the zoo — he had suggested this feat himself, everyone else scoffing — and, while the mother looked on, kissed the baby buffalo.

As for Maniac, he understood early on that he was being used for the greater glory of Piper and Russell.

And then one day they gave him the most perilous challenge of all.

Forlorn, marooned on concrete and asphalt, no place to burrow, April’s orphans.

But there were other considerations: whom he was racing against, and where, and what the consequences might be if he won.

These were heavy considerations, heavy enough to slow him down — until the hysterical crowd and the sight of Mars Bar’s sneaker bottoms and the boiling of his own blood ignited his afterburners, and before you could say, “Burn ’im, Magee!” he was ahead, the pink thread bobbing in his sights.

His only recollection was a feeling of sheer, joyful exuberance, himself in celebration: shouting “A-men!” in the Bethany Church, bashing John McNab’s fastballs out of sight, dancing the polka with Grayson.

Maniac kept moving, embarrassed, wishing he could just break out and sprint for the West End, wishing he could duck into the Beales’ house and be sanctuaried there and not fear reprisals on them — and just about then, miraculously, two little hands were worming into his, two familiar voices squealing, “Maniac! Maniac!”

In spite of their twisted, ludicrous impressions of East Enders, the concern and the tears in their eyes had been genuine.

“What’s gonna happen is, one of these days they’re gonna revolt.”

Maniac tried to picture Amanda and Hester and Lester and Bow Wow storming the barricades.

And he told Maniac what he often imagined, lying in bed: the blacks sweeping across Hector one steaming summer night; torches, chains, blades, guns, war cries; marauding, looting, overrunning the West End; climbing in through smashed windows, doors, looking for whites, bloodthirsty for whites, like Indians in the old days, Indians on a raid.

So easily he could picture the Beales’ brown faces around this dinner table, and the little Pickwell kids’ white bodies in the bathtub at 728 Sycamore. Whoever had made of Hector Street a barrier, it was surely not these people.

He took them to the library, then scrapped that idea after their shenanigans left the librarian blubbering and blue-faced.

One day he heard frenzied horn-honking and screaming.

It was a maddening, chaotic time for Maniac.

Running in the mornings and reading in the afternoons gave him just enough stability to endure the zany nights at the McNabs’.

Whites never go inside blacks’ homes. Much less inside their thoughts and feelings. And blacks are just as ignorant of whites.

Mars Bar allowed himself to be dragged into them, but his jaw was clenched and his eyes kept straying to the gaping hole in the ceiling — and to the Cobras, who were slouching against the walls and baseboards, sipping beers and watching his every move.

The Cobras stayed, and Maniac, clamping the struggling Mars Bar for dear life, lugged him down a gauntlet of seething eyes to the door and the street.

This was the first in a series of apparently random mergings.

Stride for stride, shoulder to shoulder, breath for breath, till they were matching on all points, a harnessed pair, two runners become one.

He shrieked and babbled at them, but he made no sense, so they just followed as he raced frantically back up the street.

“Even when we got off, the midget wouldn’t let me go. ‘We’re off it,’ I says to him. ‘You’re rescued.’ But all he does is grab me harder, like he’s a octopus or somethin’. Off the platform, down the steps, out to the street — he’s still doin’ it. I couldn’t pry him off nohow.”

But the voice of the buffalo was the voice of Amanda Beale, and its teeth were her fingers pulling and wrenching his poor ear till he was sitting upright.

He was quite content to let Amanda do the talking, for he knew that behind her grumbling was all that he had ever wanted.