Gemini Summer by Iain Lawrence Page B

back. Creepy was like a big, raging bear, bellowing at them as he thrashed out with his arms. He was like a big bear trying to get into the house, and Danny—terrified that he would break loose from the men—hid trembling under the kitchen table.
    That evening, the men in suits sat in Danny’s living room. As the Old Man and Mrs. River watched, one of the men had his last talk with Danny. “Look,” he said, “it’s all up to you, son. If you say the Colvig boy pushed your brother, he’ll be put away. Maybe for a long time. Now, are you sure that’s what you want to happen, Danny? Are you absolutely sure about this?”
    Danny started crying. He thought of Creepy shouting on the lawn, and saw him twice as big and twice as mean as ever, towering over the men in their suits. He imagined that if he said yes right now and Dopey was put away, Creepy would come back and kill him. He was sure of it. Creepy would find him one day in the Hollow, or come one night to his bedroom, and kill him for what he had said.
    “Well, son?” asked the man. He was sitting on the sofa beside Danny, his arm on its back. His fingers, very lightly, touched Danny’s shoulder. “It’s all up to you. You’re the only one who was there.”
    Through his tears, Danny looked at Flo and said, “Oh, Mom!”
    The Old Man leapt up. “This has got to stop!” he shouted. “It’s got to stop right now. My boy’s dead; he’s gone. Don’t you think it’s punishment enough for the other one?”
    In a calm and quiet voice, the man in the suit answered. “It’s one more question, sir. Just one last question.” He turned again to Danny. “Did the Colvig boy push your brother?”
    Danny slowly shook his head. “I don’t remember,” he said. “I don’t remember what happened.”
    The men in the suits went away then, and didn’t come back. It was decided that the cause of Beau’s death was “undetermined.”
    In the Hollow, people thought that Danny was paying dearly for a terrible accident. Mrs. Elliot put her pale hand on top of Flo’s and said, “I’m so sorry. Poor Danny must feel terrible.”
    Danny was there, and he didn’t argue. He wasn’t sure himself what had really happened anymore; it hardly felt real. He knew that Beau was dead, but he couldn’t stop thinking that someone would come along at any moment and tell him that it hadn’t happened at all, or shake him from a nightmare.
    It felt that way through the funeral service, and the burial, and the horrible afternoon when people came to the house and ate sandwiches and smoked cigarettes and told him what a brave little boy he was.
    His father made a phone call, and a yellow machine arrived. It pushed all the dirt into the pit, then trundled and clanked back and forth on its Caterpillar tracks. It smoothed the lawn to its old flatness, leaving the dirt pressed into long lines of little brown cakes.
    Danny found no pleasure in watching the machine. He found no pleasure in anything.
    It was terrible to lie in his bed at night and not have Beau there beside him. But it was worse to wake in the mornings and see that Beau’s bed hadn’t been touched, and to see the model rockets hanging from the ceiling, and Beau’s schoolbooks on the chair, where Beau had put them down on his last Friday. It was terrible to sit at the breakfast table, and terrible to watch TV.
    It was terrible to go back to school, and to have all the children look at him, all the teachers touch him. No one called him Polluto or Stinky River, but he almost wished they would. He took the big bridge there and back, trekking across the heights. More scared than ever that Dopey would find him, he never went along the trails.
    There was not a moment he didn’t think of Beau. Even asleep, he had Beau in his mind, and saw him in all sorts of dreams. He would dream that the front door opened, and there would be Beau. Or he would dream that he was outside, playing in the creek, and suddenly he would look up and see