Boys Life

admiral in the ice fleet navy. Oh, all the royalty knew about this boy. They knew there’d never be another boy just exactly like him, even if all the stars and planets burned out and were struck to light again a million times. Because he was the only one on the whole earth who could walk on the planets, and he was the only one whose name was written in their invitation books.”
    “Hey, Cory?”
    “Yes?”
    His voice was getting drowsy. “I’d kinda like to see a cloud castle, wouldn’t you?”
    “I sure would,” I said.
    “Gosh.” He wasn’t looking at me anymore. He was looking somewhere else, like a solitary traveler about to wish himself to a fabled land. “I never was afraid of flyin’, was I?”
    “Not a bit.”
    “I’m awful tired, Cory.” He frowned, the red saliva beginning to thread down his chin. “I don’t like bein’ so tired.”
    “You oughta rest, then,” I said. “I’ll come see you tomorrow.”
    His frown vanished. A smile sneaked across his mouth. “Not if I go to the sun tonight. Then I’ll have me a suntan and you’ll be stuck here shiverin’.”
    “Cory?” It was Mrs. Callan. “Cory, the doctor needs to get in here with him.”
    “Yes ma’am.” I stood up. Davy Ray’s cold hand clung to mine for a few seconds, and then it fell away. “I’ll see you,” I said through the oxygen tent. “Okay?”
    “Good-bye, Cory,” Davy Ray said.
    “Good-” I stopped myself. I was thinking of Mrs. Neville, on the first day of summer. “I’ll see you,” I told him, and I walked past his mother to the door. A sob welled up in my throat before I got out, but I clenched it down. As Chile Willow’s mother had said, I could take it.
    There was nothing more we could do. We drove home, along misty Route Sixteen, where Midnight Mona arrowed in search of love. We didn’t say much; at a time like this, words were empty vessels. At home, the green feather lay on the floor where it had drifted; it went back to its cigar box.
    On Sunday morning I awakened with a start. Tears were in my eyes, the sunlight lying in stripes across the floor. My father was standing in the doorway, wearing the same clothes he’d had on all day yesterday.
    “Cory?” he said.
    Traveling, traveling: to see Kings Ludwig, Nicholas, Zanthas, Damon, Farron, Burl, and Swane. Traveling, traveling: to castles of red sand, hewn of blue trees, formed of fire, shaped of sculpted clouds. Traveling, traveling, with planets and stars beyond and invitation books open to a single name. The solitary traveler has left this world. He will not pass this way again.

XXVI – Faith
    I THOUGHT I HAD KNOWN DEATH.
    I had walked with it, ever since I could remember sitting in front of the television set, or hunkered down with a box of buttered popcorn before the Lyric’s silver screen. How many hundreds of cowboys and Indians had I witnessed fall, arrow-pierced or gut-shot, into the swirling wagon train dust? How many dozens of detectives and policemen, laid low by the criminal bullet and coughing out their minutes? How many armies, mangled by shells and burp guns, and how many monster victims screaming as they’re chewed?
    I thought I had known Death, in Rebel’s flat, blank stare. In the last good-bye of Mrs. Neville. In the rush and gurgle of air as a car with a man at the wheel sank into cold depths.
    I was wrong.
    Because Death cannot be known. It cannot be befriended. If Death were a boy, he would be a lonely figure, standing at the playground’s edge while the air rippled with other children’s laughter. If Death were a boy, he would walk alone. He would speak in a whisper and his eyes would be haunted by knowledge no human can bear.
    This was what tore at me in the quiet hours: We come from darkness, and to darkness we must return.
    I remembered Dr. Lezander saying that as I’d sat on his porch with him facing the golden hills. I didn’t want to believe it. I didn’t want to think that Davy Ray was in a place where he could see no light, not even the candle that burned for him at the Presbyterian church. I didn’t want to think of Davy Ray confined, closed away from the sun, unable to somehow breathe and laugh even if doing so was only shadow play. In the days that followed the death of Davy Ray, I realized what fiction I had been a witness to. The cowboys and Indians, the detectives and policemen, the armies and the monster victims, would all rise again, at the dimming of the stage lights. They would go