The Centaurus

But beside Peter’s head there is a small round blondness. Caldwell recognizes the ninth-grade Fogleman girl. He had had her brother two years ago, the Foglemans were the kind who would eat your heart and then wash the rest down the sink. Brutal Germans, brrr. It dawns upon him that she and Peter are not sitting next to each other by accident. With that kid’s brains, can it be? Now Caldwell remembers seeing Peter and Pe

Olinger wins.

Peter rarely takes his eyes from the game but hardly sees it, so possessed is his i

And when he and his lather at last leave the school and go into the snow the multitude of flakes seems to have been released by his profanation. In the pervasive descent an eddy of air now and then angrily flings a tinkling icy handful upward into his warm face. Peter had forgotten what snow is. It is an immense whispering whose throat seems to be now here, now there. He looks at the sky and it answers his eyes with a mauve, a lilac, a muffled yellow-pearl. Only after some moments of focusing does the downflow visually materialize for him, as an edge of a wing, and then an entire broadening wing of infinitesimal feathers, broadening into the realization that this wing is all about them and crowds the air to four hidden horizons and beyond. Wherever he looks, now that his eyes are attuned to its frequency, there is this vibration. The town and all its houses are besieged by a murmuring multitude.

Peter pauses under the high light that guards the near corner of the parking lot. What he sees at his feet puzzles him. On the whiteness that has already fallen small dark spots are swarming like gnats. They dart this way and that and then vanish. There seems to be a center where they vanish. As his eyes travel outward he sees dots speeding toward this center; the further away they are, the faster they speed inward. He traces a few: all vanish. The phenomenon seems totally ghostly. Then the constriction of his heart eases as the rational explanation comes to him. These are the shadows of snowflakes cast by the light above him. Directly under the light, the wavering fall of the particles is projected as an erratic oscillation, but away from the center, where the light rays strike obliquely, the projection parabolically magnifies the speed of the shadow as it hastens forward to meet its flake. The shadows stream out of infinity, slow, and, each darkly sharp in its last instant, vanish as their originals kiss the white plane. It fascinates him; he feels the universe in all its plastic and endlessly variable beauty pi

He crawls into the cave of the car with his father and slips off his soaked loafers and tucks his damp stockinged feet under him. Hurriedly his father backs out of the lot and heads up the alley toward Buchanan Road. At first he over-accelerates, so that on the slightest rise the back tires spin. “Boy,” Caldwell says, “this is duck soup.”

Revelations have ski

What were you doing at the game so long after the tickets were taken?”

“I talked to Zimmerman tonight,” Caldwell tells his son slowly, wondering how not to seem to scold the boy. “He said he’d had a talk with you.”

Guilt makes Peter’s voice shrill. “I had to, he grabbed me in the hall.”

“You told him about the missing tickets.”

“I just mentioned it. I didn’t tell him anything.”

“Jesus kid, I don’t want to cramp your freedom, but I wish you hadn’t told him.”

“What harm did it do?-it’s the truth. Don’t you want me to tell the truth? Do you want me to lie all my life?”

“Did you-now it doesn’t matter, but did you tell him about my seeing Mrs. Herzog come out of his office?”

“Of course not. I’ve forgotten all about it. Everybody’s forgotten about it except you. You seem to think the whole world’s some sort of conspiracy.”

“I’ve never gotten to the bottom of Zimmerman, is I guess my trouble.”

“There’s no bottom to get to! He’s just a befuddled old lech who doesn’t know what he’s doing. Everybody sees that except you. Daddy, why are you so-” He was going to say “stupid” but a vestige of the fourth commandment checks his tongue. “-superstitious? You make everything mean something it isn’t. Why? Why can’t you relax? It’s so exhaustingl” In his fury the boy kicks one foot against the dashboard, making the glove compartment tingle. His father’s head is a considering shadow pinched into the pinheaded cap that is for Peter the essence of everything obsequious and absurd, careless and stubborn about his father.

The man sighs and says, “I don’t know, Peter. I guess it’s part heredity, part environment.” From the weariness of his voice, it seems his final effort of explanation.

I’m killing my father, Peter thinks, amazed.

The snow thickens around them. As it dashes into their headlights it flares like a spatter of sparks, swoops upward, vanishes, and is replaced by another spatter of sparks. The onrush is continuously abundant. They meet few other cars on the road now. The lights of homes, thi

Going down the hill beside the Jewish Cemetery, where Abe Cohn, Alton’s famous Prohibition gangster, lies buried, they skid. Caldwell fights the wheel as the chassis slithers. They slip safely to the bottom, where Buchanan Road ends at Route 122. On their right, Coughdrop Hill dissolves up wards. A trailer truck like a fleeing house pours down past them and on into Alton, the rapidfire clunk of its chains panicked. When its taillights wink out of sight they are alone on the highway.