—Maniac Magee—
by Jerry Spinelli

Chapter 43

 

He slept in the park that night, and for the next dozen or so. Sometimes in the buffalo shed; other times the band shell benches or the pavilion. The nights were warm now. June was on the way.

He ate when and where he could. For apples and carrots and day-old hamburger buns, you couldn't beat the deer and buffalo pens. A new Acme had opened, and the bakery section always had a tray of free samples sitting on the counter.

And then there were always the Pickwells. It may have been an illusion, but it seemed that the hungrier he got, the farther Mrs. Pickwell's whistle traveled. Some dinnertimes, there was hardly a spot in town from which he could not hear it.

He read in the library. He joined pickup games in the park --- baseball, basketball. School was letting out. There were more kids.

Mornings were the best. He would rise with the sun's color, before the sun itself, before the bison, and set out. He came to think of these appleskin hours as his special time with the town. There was not a street or alleyway or house or store, not even a garage, that he did not recognize. His footsteps fell everywhere but on the bridge over the Schuylkill, his eyes everywhere but on the P&W trolley trestle.

And the people --- most of them he did not know by name or face, yet they revealed themselves to him even as they slept. He knew them by their windows and cars and porches and toys they left outside. But most of all, he knew them by their backyards. Flowers, weeds, junk, pet houses, tree houses, vegetable gardens, rubber tires, grass ranging from desert-sparse to shaggy to trim as a marine's haircut --- the backyards were as different, as individual as faces.

East End and West End, black and white would begin only when the alarm clocks rang. For now, before sunrise, there were no divisions, no barriers. There were only the people, the families, the town. His town. As much his town as anyone's.

He knew he could be sleeping right then in the Beales' house, or the Pickwells', or even the McNabs'. But beyond that, for a few enchanted moments each newborn morning, he believed there was not a single home in Two Mills, not a single one, that would not happily welcome him to enter and to go upstairs and curl up between its sleepers. Maybe that's why he left his band shell bench late one night in mid June and went to someone's backyard on Hamilton Street, someone whose leaf lettuce he had watched growing, and quietly opened the gate and closed it behind him and laid himself down on a white wicker loveseat on the back porch.

From then on, he slept in a different backyard or back porch every night. Once, finding the back door unlocked, he slept in a kitchen.