Fiction from The Literary Review
Boys: A New African Fable
PETER LaSALLE
B
uma said it was crazy. But for once, the Boy told himself, Buma did not know. Because the Boy knew it would be easy to steal into the school at night. The Portuguese saint ladies who ran the school would be sleeping, and the girls themselves would be dreaming, maybe of boys like these, the rebels in the bush.
* * *
Because they were strong, brave boys, he knew. And they were fighting against the aristocracy people of the government and the man named Dihidjo who called himself President. Dihidjo was a thief, and surely the Portuguese saint ladies realized that. Dihidjo lived the life of a king in the whiter-than-white palace in the Other City, and Dihidjo had so many Mercedes-Benz automobiles, even some Rolls Royce automobiles, that nobody could count just how many anymore, it was said. Dihidjo's soldiers in their green camouflage uniforms were called Crocodiles by the boys, and like those savage, big-toothed beasts, they fed on the flesh of the people, with Dihidjo himself maybe demanding a golden goblet of the warm spilled blood now and then. The Boy had once actually seen Dihidjo deliver a speech to a crowd in the central square of the Other City. Dihidjo was not a very big man, and he wore a sport shirt, slacks, and sunglasses. It was said that nobody had ever seen Dihidjo without those sunglasses, and the Boy could believe the story that he always wore them, because to peel them away from his mahogany face would be to witness just two deep holes undeneath-Dihidjo had no eyes in his face, and to have eyes even for a thief like Dihidjo would mean to have to openly witness and therefore admit to his own greed, as well as that of his military officers and government ministers, the aristocracy people. A man with no eyes was for all intents and purposes a dead man, a talking skull, as far as the Boy was concerned. Dihidjo and his aristocracy people would soon be defeated, and the homeland would have freedom at last. Field Lieutenant M. promised that. But at last wasn't now. And the Boy believed that as good fighters, he and his rebel brothers needed to have girls for companionship in the camp where they lived among themselves, Field Lieutenant M. showing up only occasionally. The Boy had always listened to Buma, and he had always known Buma was the brightest of all of them.
But this time the Boy knew better about the girls. Buma was wrong.
* * *
In the camp one evening, the subject came up again.
It was a beautiful night. The stars were flames; the sky was bulging purple; the breeze from the baobabs carried the magic of the rare spices once transported along the ancient trade trails in this part of the world. It was the kind of night that a boy would wish to have a family, but, again, he was too old for that now, so it was a night that a boy needed a girl. The Boy was twelve, the others about the same age.
"With the Portuguese saint ladies," Buma said, "it is a different thing. They are not like the soldiers, and they are not lazy or easily frightened. They will come after us if we take their girls."
All the leader boys lay around the red dirt there. The Boy. Buma. Jabo. And the twins, Hakee and Ned.
In truth, the twins were not as strong as the other leader boys. But simply by being twins they wielded a certain power that demanded respect. Twins were like that, special in their own way. The Boy remembered a scene one idle afternoon. In the heat Hakee walked around aimlessly on the red dirt of the encampment, shirtless and shoeless, his hands jammed in the pockets of his ragged khaki schoolboy shorts. Meanwhile, under a tree, Ned slept soundly, shirtless and shoeless, too, in the same kind of shorts. They were skinny, toothy boys. The Boy wondered if Ned sleeping like that in the tree's green shade was dreaming that Hakee was walking around that way, and so his twin was really himself. Or, to reverse it, if the boy walking there, Hakee idly kicking up tiny clouds of dirt that puffed like magician's smoke, if Hakee was awake but also letting himself snooze to be ready for an attack, any emergency, so that Ned sleeping there was actually himself. Yes, twins were very special.
"Soldiers are one thing," Buma said, "Portuguese saint ladies another thing."
"And this is the most important thing," Jabo said. "Maybe I take this thing and put it under the long dress of one of those Portuguese saint ladies, and then what do you think she will say?"
He sat cross-legged now, a gruff boy with a barrel chest. He patted the blue snout of the AK-47 on his lap. The twins laughed and Jabo smiled.
Jabo was the bravest of the boys, and Jabo never hesitated. It was Jabo who took it upon himself to sneak into villages at night and punish anybody who might be rumored to have been supplying information to the Crocodiles about the movement of the boys. Jabo had done the same thing to exactly six people. With a chrome-bladed knife, serrated and intended for cleaning river fish, he carved off the lips of the first informer as neatly as stripping a peel from a banana, and when he was praised for such by Field Lieutenant M. on one of his visits, Jabo did the same to five others suspected of the same behavior. All ages and both sexes. So that it was not unusual lately to spot somebody with unevenly healed scars around a mouth straining to spit out syllables at the North Crossroads market place. That served as a good warning to anybody else who might entertain plans of consorting with the Crocodiles. Jabo patted his gun again now.
The twins laughed some more. Buma tried to talk seriously of the Portuguese saint ladies. He tried to get the Boy to enter into an argument with him, to reply to his, Buma's, charges of the craziness of this scheme to capture the girls from the school. But the Boy realized this wasn't the moment to argue; he got up and shuffled over to his blanket to sleep.
* * *
Sleep as he did other nights, before and after that. The sky purple, the stars like flames indeed.
* * *
One thing Buma did eventually agree on was Jabo's belief that the old uncle was causing the real trouble. For a while now there had been suspicions that news of the movements of the boys on attacks or stealing supplies was reaching the Crocodiles very far ahead of time. The Crocodiles seemed to know where the boys had been scouting, where they might be taking action next. This wasn't simply the usual whispering by some casual informer who had observed them and told what he or she knew when the green-uniformed thugs showed and started asking around a village; this informing was certainly more organized and ongoing. Jabo was convinced from the start that the betrayer was the old uncle, the aging man on the creaking blue bicycle.
"Where does he go all the time on that bicycle?" Jabo asked. "He leaves in the morning and then he doesn't return until just before the sun is behind the hills. He is the one. He goes to the Other City and he talks."
"It could be a lorry driver," Buma said, weighing the argument himself. "A lorry driver moves faster than an old man on a bicycle."
"The lorry drivers don't care," Jabo said, "the lorry drivers do not live here and they do not know any news to carry. Because the only thing they really know about in these villages is where to find the diseased whores, and the only thing they really carry away from the villages is the disease itself. Besides, don't the lorry drivers give us what we ask of them from their loads most of the time? No, they don't care all. It has to be the old uncle."
"You could be right," Buma conceded, but remained unconvinced.
Until there came a terrible skirmish beside the scummed-over Divisional Reservoir Pond. Two of their boys were killed, younger ones, and the Crocodiles were lying in wait for the pack of them going to fetch water that day. The Crocodiles must have had information, and the uncle must be taken care of.
There was a week of storms, loud thunder and hosing rainfall at the end of every scorching afternoon. During that time even the old uncle didn't risk going anywhere on his bicycle. The boys waited for him every afternoon by the Big Curve in the crumbling two-lane asphalt road built by the colonizers, but he never came. Then after a full week of weather especially hot and achingly dry, they had their chance at last to intercept him. Buma and the Boy had positioned themselves as lookouts on a flat-topped hill above the Big Curve. The twins were hiding, one of them in a gully on either side of the road. Their job would be to trip the old uncle. They had covered a sturdy braided nylon rope with gravel on the grayed asphalt and they would tug it up taut when he was upon them, with Jabo himself hiding and ready to pitch in to do the kind of work he certainly did better than any of the rest of them.
The Boy watched the old uncle approaching.
A white-haired man of just bones and wrinkled black skin, he wore baggy flour-sack trousers and a torn golf shirt. The red flip-flop sandals loose on his feet seemed to make the pedaling more difficult, and the blue bicycle was truly ancient, probably salvaged from a trash heap and the tires rotting and half-flat. What the Boy would remember was the sprocket's creaking-it grew louder and louder as he approached: first no more than a bird's chirp in the distance, then it was almost a dog's rhythmic yelping. From that vantage point, the Boy could see the twins crouched low on each side of the road; Jabo was there beside Ned, directing the whole operation. The old uncle looked hot, and the golf shirt, yellow, was darkened with perspiration. Nevertheless, the way that he pedaled and pedaled in that constant squeaking, you could have wagered that he had come all the way from one end of the earth and, if he had to, he would venture all the way to the other end of it. A sack dangled from the rusted handlebars, and one second he was lumpily moving along and the next second he had tumbled over against the nylon rope pulled flat across the front tire, the uncle no more than an animal snagged in a net. The man at first tried to fight the trio of attackers; he wildly flailed with more energy than you would have expected to come from such a pathetic specimen, though before long he lost heart. They dragged him to the gully at the far side of the two-lane. The Boy appreciated the distance, and when they moved behind a cluster of brush, the Boy was relieved that he would not have to witness what was about to transpire at the hands of Jabo. Of course, Jabo had the long serrated knife, the mirroring chrome blade of which he polished constantly with a rag while in the camp, and before long the old uncle's wailing began. It was interrupted only by one of the twins-Ned or Hakee, and sometimes the Boy really couldn't tell the difference-coming out to fetch the blue bicycle from the road. The Boy thought that even while Jabo was lost in his savage work, and even if Jabo often seemed outright crazed, Jabo was the sole one in the three of them down there who had the sense in the course of this to announce that somebody should go out and retrieve the bicycle-the sight of it would cause a passing lorry driver (there were seldom automobiles on this route) to stop and start looking around. Buma and the Boy remained on the hill.
The yelling of the old man was so loud. And it continued on when the blackened slabs of clouds moved in and started emptying the wall of hissing blue rain again, the thunder detonating.
"This is not good," Buma said to the Boy.
The Boy did not answer.
Then it was over. Jabo, his teeth like broken shells in his grinning, emerged first from behind the bushes in the gully. He had the bloodied knife in one hand, and in the other hand, held over his head in triumph, was the foot of the old uncle, which had been sawed off several inches above the ankle.
The rain poured. Jabo pumped the thing into the air a few more times, the worn red rubber sandal still dangling from it. The twins emerged from the gully on all fours to make the climb. They were smiling themselves.
If Buma didn't relish the brutality of it, the Boy knew, Buma did finally admit that he had been wrong and Jabo had been right-the old uncle had definitely been the problem, and he would no longer be pedaling anywhere on the creaking blue bicycle. And, true, their raids on the occasional lorry driver for supplies after that, plus the one direct encounter with the Crocodiles, a prolonged shooting skirmish, went well and nothing like the earlier mess in which two of the young boys had been shot at the Divisional Reservoir Pond.
* * *
"It was a nice thing," Buma said about the incident he had told the Boy of often before. "Very nice."
"Tell me the story again," the Boy said. "I like to hear it so many times."
They were stretched out in their filthy blankets. The other boys in the camp were dozing. The Boy and Buma were talking idly.
Buma began the narration. It was his favorite story, and somehow it became the Boy's favorite story, too. This was about Buma when he had been a child, not a rebel and a dedicated fighter as he was now. He had a family then, and like most of these orphan boys, he had lived with his family in the Other City. (Field Lieutenant M., the rebel chief, insisted that they call it such now; they were never to refer to it by the old name given to the capital by the colonizers, which Dihidjo and his set used so readily and without any qualms.) Buma had four sisters. Dressed up on Sundays, when their own parents were with relatives relaxing or possibly taking a nap late in the day, the children liked to walk over to the embassy club of the European King Country. There was a chain-link fence surrounding the grounds, and the grounds were as watered and green and perfectly well-groomed as anything in a picture magazine-that pure vegetation in a region of dryness (except for this annual shower season) always smelled of sweet, uncut chlorophyl. The embassy club of the European King Country had white buildings with red-tiled roofs; it had three tennis courts and a small rectangular pool, a shimmering electric-blue oasis that in itself was magical.
"We would just watch, my sisters and I," Buma said. "And it was all beautiful. As I told you before, my sisters were very pretty, and they wore fine Sunday frocks. Sometimes we stood by the fence and looked at the people swimming, and they dove from a high diving plank and, better, they had this special way of swimming on their backs sometimes, almost as if they were doing it while fast asleep. Or we stood beside the fence over at the tennis courts, which I liked more than even the swimming pool. They wore white clothes and white shoes, and they slapped the bright yellow ball, a furry thing, back and forth and back and forth, like it was happy work they had to do. When they finished they looped towels around their necks and they sat out on the back verandah, drinking from glasses such a clear, clear liquid that it was no liquid at all, a slice of lime on each glass. They looked like antelopes, it is true, the way that all white persons do look like long-faced antelopes. Still, sitting around like that, laughing and talking and drinking, they were very happy antelopes, even if they did, I am sure, miss their real homes far away back in the European King country."
"Tell me about that one day," the Boy said, because that was the best part of this tale every time Buma recounted it. "Tell me about that one day one came right up to the bunch of you standing at the fence."
"The tea party?"
"Yes, there was no clear liquid that day, it was a tea party," the Boy said.
As they lay there, the blankets to their chins, Buma told him once more how one of the white women invited them to come around to the front gate, then onto that back verandah. There Buma sat with his sisters who showed good manners in handling the tiny china cups with the milky tea when it was offered to them. There were other women in tennis clothes who agreed how "adorable" the girls were, and the woman who had invited them offered them all biscuits with cherries on top. Buma had always been proud of how wonderfully his sisters handled the whole thing, how with no prompting they proved to be real ladies themselves.
The Boy thought this was the time to try to win Buma's support on the plan of taking the girls from the school run by the Portuguese saint ladies. But when he mentioned that, when he said that sisters were girls, too, and it would be good to have girls as company in this ramshackle camp, Buma became angry.
"Sisters are not girls that way," he chided the Boy.
"I know," the Boy answered, low and apologetically.
He knew Buma's sisters had been killed in the Second Tribal War, his whole family was gone. None of the boys had families.
However, the Boy detected that Buma was softening on this. And maybe, the Boy thought, Jabo having been right about the old uncle constantly betraying them was helping the Boy make his case in arguing now-Buma having come around once, he might do the same again. (Much later did they learn from other villagers that the old uncle on the road was traveling to the Other City every day only to bring his even older mother a proper meal packed in the sack that dangled from the handlebars of the blue bicycle; she was in some sort of hospital there, the villagers said.) A few days after the talk about the sisters, Buma announced that the Boy could be right concerning this matter. Jabo and the twins enthusiastically supported the plan-they said they had been behind it since the first suggestion. The boys would have girls at last, from the Portuguese saint ladies' school.
* * *
The evening before the raid, the Boy dreamt he was alone in the Other City, at night. In the dream he had been summoned to Dihidjo's place, and as he approached the edifice it looked so essentially white that you would have sworn they gave it a fresh painting every day, had done the same that very morning. He was escorted by several Crocodiles through the courtyard filled with the expensive automobiles he had heard about, then through the hallways and to the cavernous room where Dihidjo himself sat perched on a throne. There was red marble and frilled gold inlay everywhere, and Dihidjo wore his usual sport shirt and slacks and the inevitable wraparound sunglasses. In the dream the Boy approached the throne set very high on a platform, alone now and without the Crocodiles, and behind the reflecting dark sunglasses Dihidjo waited for him to shakingly come nearer. It was then that the Boy noticed that one of Dihidjo's legs was but a stump below the knee, the foot of it having been severed at the calf, and it was then that the Boy reached into a plastic mesh go-to-marketplace sack he had apparently been carrying all the while. He lifted out of the sack a withered, amber-soled foot, which seemed very much the foot that Jabo had been showing around as a trophy for the past couple of weeks. The Boy held out the foot in both hands like an offering; he started slowly up the red marble steps to give it to Dihidjo, who was as small as he looked that one time that the Boy, when a child, had heard him give a speech in the central square. Dihidjo waited for him. And then Dihidjo appeared so moved by the gesture that he suddenly wasn't the Dihidjo of the many Rolls Royce automobiles and Mercedes-Benz automobiles, Dihidjo of the thieving aristocracy people and Dihidjo who enjoyed an occasional sip from a golden goblet of the blood of the masses of those murdered in the homeland over the years. He was only a little man thankful that his foot was being returned to him. He was weeping, in fact, dabbing at his own eyes, and the tears streamed below the sunglasses, which is when Dihidjo slowly started to peel them away from his face, and . . . and the Boy woke with a start.
* * *
The Boy wasn't so sure anymore of the idea of attacking the school to capture the girls.
* * *
Those they called the Portuguese saint ladies were, of course, the nuns who ran the institution for orphan girls at the edge of the attempt at a suburb in the Other City. What became the infamous raid went smoothly-too smoothly, maybe-the night they snuck into the school.
The school was a compound of yellow stuccoed buildings. The older girls, who were their age, slept in a separate dormitory house. The boys were amazed at how the girls themselves there, amid the rows of steel-framed cots, were entirely complaisant, giggling when first woken in the darkness and soon quite understanding that the guns meant this was serious and they best behave. They were told to take whatever they needed, because they would be gone for a long while, but a tall girl with pink eyes wasn't so complaisant. And when she flatly ordered out of the dormitory Jabo and the twins and three of the younger boys-the contingent in charge of rounding up the girls-the Boy looked from where he was again keeping watch, this time in the corridor. He was surprised to see the always brutal Jabo cower, even stutter a little in agreement with her. The tall girl said they needed some privacy to dress properly. Jabo nodded some more. The other girls-most stuffing clothing into matching orange athletic duffel bags, maybe given to the school by a sport shop because the school had produced so many female long-distance runners-one of them puffing up her hair before the single tarnished mirror at the end of the big screened-in room-stopped what they were doing almost in unison at this turn of events. It was as if they couldn't believe this looming brute of a boy in the ragged khaki shorts and khaki shirt, Jabo, had taken seriously the suggestion of the pink-eyed girl.
"Jabo," one of the boys who wasn't even a leader boy, a younger boy, called to him, warning, "Jabo!"
Jabo wasn't fazed. He was for once at a loss for a plan of action-Jabo was totally unsure of himself, brave Jabo. The Boy knew that he couldn't let the situation stand, if just for the fact that he realized, above all, that it was never wise to let one of the regular boys have to tell a leader boy how to behave.
The Boy entered the room from the corridor. He had enough sense to suspect that this tall girl, with those pink eyes, seemed the type who would like to herd the whole bunch of the boys back out of the dormitory room, so she could slam the door and dispatch somebody to climb out a window and go over to the shadowy huge houses where the Portuguese saint ladies lived.
"We will stay," the Boy said to Jabo. Jabo was still lost, no clue as to how to respond, and this wasn't a matter of the usual informer who would soon lose his lips to Jabo's fishing knife, or a matter of a worthless old uncle-these were girls. "Come on, now," the Boy said with military harshness, making his voice loud and firm in addressing the girls, "Get yourselves ready."
The girl who had been arranging her hair at the mirror smiled. She was skinny, very pretty, and she had managed to smear her lips with a touch of scarlet gloss that she must have kept hidden where the strict Portuguese saint ladies had never discovered it. She showed deep dimples when she smiled, her eyes giant as a doll's. She stood in flimsy green gym shorts and a flimsier child's white camisole shirt; a little satin bow studded the neck of the camisole shirt, the Boy noticed. She looked right at the Boy.
"What's your name?" she asked him, tilting her head to one side.
"Let's go," the Boy growled. Or, he tried to growl, and he wasn't sure if his breath powering the syllables came out right. "Come on."
"But what's your name, boy?" she asked again. She continued to smile.
The Boy waved his AK-47, a genuine Soviet Kalishnakov with a steel rather than a wooden stock; he looped it as if to rope in the entire mess of strewn clothes and schoolbooks, white sheets shoved to the tile flooring during the commotion of the supposed raid.
"I said, let's go," the Boy repeated it, more firmly.
Jabo and the twins made much theater out of poking around with their own AK-47's, the younger boys following suit. They all exuded only brusqueness now, and they directed the girls into the deserted corridor, more of the cold tile flooring, and out into the school yard. The frames of the two soccer goals glowed bright white in the moonlight; dew sparkled like diamonds.
The Boy was glad that Buma had stationed himself as a lookout by the house where the Portuguese saint ladies lived. The Boy was glad that Buma had not been on hand to see the sorry performance of everybody concerned back in the dormitory. But that was nothing compared to the sorrier performance surrounding what followed. It seemed that when they were finally out of the suburban neighborhood, Jabo noticed that the twins were missing. Hearing that, Buma volunteered to go back; he risked everything to return on his own to rescue his beloved comrades from whatever danger they had encountered. As it turned out Ned and Hakee had lingered in order to break into the school offices to search for a treasure that one of the girls had told them was hidden on a shelf behind the Sister Superior's desk: boxes and boxes of candy bars, kept by the Portuguese saint ladies to reward a girl for good behavior-an assignment well done or a race well run, and the like. Buma, in time, brought the twins back with him, and while he seemed angry with them, nobody else did. Soon the twins were magnanimously passing out the candy bars to everybody, gooey chocolate-and-coconut things in lurid orange-and-blue wrappers, and the Boy knew that Buma had been right to originally doubt the worth of the raid. The idea of taking the girls was indeed a crazy one from the start, crazier if you actually saw the whole giddy procession disappearing into the darkness of the bush, over the red-dirt trails that only the boys knew about and that led to their camp. Totally crazy.
The so-called Portuguese saint ladies were not to be deterred as easily as the Crocodiles. If the Crocodiles didn't particularly care about what happened to orphan girls, the Portuguese saint ladies did, and they were the ones who convinced the visiting television reporter with his camera crew from the European King Country to look into it.
* * *
On the path to the camp that night, the girl with the smeared lipstick kept close to the Boy. She kept asking him his name, her dimples deep when she smiled. "You must have a name. Every boy has a name." But the Boy didn't answer. He wasn't quite himself. None of the boys were themselves, and it wasn't simply Jabo being tongue-tied earlier or the Boy being, well, a little baffled at the moment about why his stomach felt like a den of baby grass snakes, how the whole episode had somehow metamorphosed into a true party. The twins didn't even have their AK's combat-ready, but kept them slung over the shoulder like arrow quivers; they were too busy handing out more candy bars to anybody who asked for another of the heat-softened things. Each carried a large box of them.
"What's your name, boy?" the girl said again.
"Shush," the Boy said, embarrassed.
Scared as well. And why did the Boy have to remember the images from that dream of the villain Dihidjo crying behind his sunglasses? That scene of the Boy approaching the man on his throne? The Boy had no idea what it meant.
"Give me one more of the candy," Buma said to one of the twins, Hakee.
"Here you go," Ned responded, taking one from his own supply. "One for Buma."
"That boy is a pig boy," the pink-eyed girl laughed, "He eats too many candy bars."
There was general laughter. From Buma, too.
The skinny girl continued to keep in step with the Boy.
"Everybody has to have a name," she said.
The Boy tried to ignore her. He tried to avoid thoughts of the dream. Instead, he strained to entertain himself with the variety of minor incongruities that had formerly entertained him, fascinated him, such as Buma asking one twin for a candy bar and then the other twin producing it, as if the pair were one and the same all along. But it wasn't working.
The Boy bit from the bar in his own hand.
* * *
The Boy couldn't fall into sleep that night. He was excited at last, happy. He lay on his back and stared at the stars, inhaled the spicy air blowing gently from behind those baobabs. (Two weeks later, with the foreign television crew in tow, the nuns in their simple coarse-cloth habits followed the trail of crumpled blue-and-orange candy-bar wrappers. That is how they found the secret camp that the boys had always managed to keep well hidden, completely cut off from any access by the Crocodiles. A few of the girls returned to the Other City with the nuns, but most chose to stay, and three weeks after that the nuns admitted their mistake and took it upon themselves to file formal complaints with the international agencies-not against the boys, but against the government of the self-proclaimed President for Life, Iko Kor Dihidjo. Because once the TV crew discovered the camp, Dihidjo sent in troops to slaughter anybody found living there, boys and girls included; the bodies were heaped into a mass grave layered with quick lime. Meanwhile, smooth Dihidjo publicly proclaimed that the mission had started as a humanitarian one before fighting broke out, an attempt to bring the frail orphans of the Second Tribal War back to the capital for rehabilitation and rescue from their strange life in the bush. When Field Lieutenant M. was contacted for comment, he denied any knowledge of the boys, and by that point rumors already circulated that Field Lieutenant M. had decided to abandon his rebellion and take a post in the capital as one of the president's important ministers, a joining of forces, so to speak. The international agencies, and other outside authorities, approved of such a peace wholeheartedly, so an investigation never came.)
The Boy rolled one way in the blanket. Then he rolled the other way. He thought of the girls, especially the pretty one who had tagged after him on the path, and he thought of how Buma himself, the boy of such constant pondering and such constant worry, had seemed happy for once in his life. The Boy still couldn't sleep.
The Boy heard a noise. He heard somebody moving. He tensed, thrust his arm out of the blanket to reach for his Kalishnakov, then relaxed again when he saw it was only Jabo strutting around. Jabo was a silhouette, and the Boy could see that Jabo was playing not with the foot but with his other prize-the string of dried lips. He twirled it on one finger, the dead flesh clicking, and he whistled low, surely not wanting to disturb anybody. You couldn't blame Jabo, the Boy thought, and Jabo was just Jabo. The Boy suspected that Jabo was happier than he had ever been.
* * *
"I will surprise her when I tell her my name tomorrow," the Boy said half-aloud, and with that he finally fell asleep.