—Maniac Magee—
by Jerry Spinelli

PART THREE

Chapter 33

 

January of that year was too cold and dry for snow. It was a month of frozen hardness, of ice.

Maniac drifted from hour to hour, day to day, alone with his memories, a stunned and solitary wanderer. He ate only to keep from starving, warmed his body only enough to keep it from freezing to death, ran only because there was no reason to stop.

Even if the Superintendent had allowed it, he could not have brought himself to stay at the band shell. 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. Before he left for good, he got some paint and angrily brushed over the 101 on the door.

During the days, he ran, usually a slow jog. But sometimes he would suddenly sprint, furious ten- or twenty-second bursts, as though trying to leave himself behind. Sometimes he walked. He crossed and recrossed the river. He wandered in all directions through all the surrounding communities and townships, Bridgeport, Conshohocken, East Norriton, West Norriton, Jeffersonville, Plymouth, Worcester.

Whenever he crossed the bridge over the Schuylkill, he turned his eyes so as not to see the nearby P&W trestle. 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. After a while he stopped crossing the bridge.

Other than that, he went wherever there was room to go forward --- along roads and alleys and railroad tracks, across fields and cemeteries and golf courses. From high above, a tracing of his routes would have looked as hopelessly tangled as Cobbles Knot.

By nightfall he was back in Two Mills. He would retrieve the satchel from wherever he had stashed it and find a place to endure the night. A few times he revisited the buffalo pen, where he covered himself with a second blanket of straw. 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. He did odd jobs for housewives, ran errands for shopkeepers. He would not beg.

One day he found himself among monuments and cannon and rolling hills. He was in Valley Forge. 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. The only buildings here were tiny log-and-mortar cabins, replicas of the army's shelters. Maniac could feel the ache swelling outward from his breast and filling the enormous, bounding spaces.

He returned to town for the satchel and put himself up in one of the cabins. It was scarcely bigger than a large doghouse. The floor was dirt. There was a doorway, but no door.

Several saltines fell from the blanket. He threw them outside. Let the birds have them. He wrapped himself in the blanket and lay down. He lay there all night and all the next day. 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. In that bedeviled army there would be no more recruits. No one else would orphan him.

The second evening came and went. Maniac never stirred. Knowing it would not be fast or easy, and wanting, deserving nothing less, grimly, patiently, he waited for death.