Charlie returned noiselessly with the first gray of dawn, gliding over the rimed turf to where Old Lady sprawled like a bleached stick before the scattered ashes.
He sat on some creek pebbles and stared at her.
She didn’t dare look at him or beyond. He had made no sound, so how could she know he was anywhere about? She couldn’t.
He sat there, tear marks on his cheeks.
Pretending to be just waking—but she had found no sleep from one end of the night to the other—Old Lady stood up, grunting and yawning, and turned in a circle to the dawn.
“Charlie?”
Her eyes passed from pines to soil, to sky, to the far hills. She called out his name, over and over again, and she felt like staring plumb straight at him, but she stopped herself. “Charlie? Oh, Charles!” she called, and heard the echoes say the very same.
He sat, beginning to grin a bit, suddenly, knowing he was close to her, yet she must feel alone. Perhaps he felt the growing of a secret power, perhaps he felt secure from the world, certainly he was pleased with his invisibility.
She said aloud, “Now where can that boy be? If he only made a noise so I could t
ell just where he is, maybe I’d fry him a breakfast.”
She prepared the morning victuals, irritated at his continuous quiet. She sizzled bacon on a hickory stick. “The smell of it will draw his nose,” she muttered.
While her back was turned he swiped all the frying bacon and devoured it tastily.
She whirled, crying out, “Lord!”
She eyed the clearing suspiciously. “Charlie, that you?”
Charlie wiped his mouth clean on his wrists.
She trotted about the clearing, making like she was trying to locate him. Finally, with a clever thought, acting blind, she headed straight for him, groping. “Charlie, where are you?”
A lightning streak, he evaded her, bobbing, ducking.
It took all her will power not to give chase; but you can’t chase invisible boys, so she sat down, scowling, sputtering, and tried to fry more bacon. But every fresh strip she cut he would steal bubbling off the fire and run away far. Finally, cheeks burning, she cried, “I know where you are! Right there! I hear you run!” She pointed to one side of him, not too accurate. He ran again. “Now you’re there!” she shouted. “There, and there!” pointing to all the places he was in the next five minutes. “I hear you press a grass blade, knock a flower, snap a twig. I got fine shell ears, delicate as roses. They can hear the stars moving!”
Silently he galloped off among the pines, his voice trailing back, “Can’t hear me when I’m set on a rock. I’ll just set!”
All day he sat on an observatory rock in the clear wind, motionless and sucking his tongue.
Old Lady gathered wood in the deep forest, feeling his eyes weaseling on her spine. She wanted to babble: “Oh, I see you, I see you! I was only fooling about invisible boys! You’re right there!” But she swallowed her gall and gummed it tight.
The following morning he did the spiteful things. He began leaping from behind trees. He made toad-faces, frog-faces, spider-faces at her, clenching down his lips with his fingers, popping his raw eyes, pushing up his nostrils so you could peer in and see his brain thinking.
Once she dropped her kindling. She pretended it was a blue jay startled her.
He made a motion as if to strangle her.
She trembled a little.
He made another move as if to bang her shins and spit on her cheek.
These motions she bore without a lid-flicker or a mouth-twitch.
He stuck out his tongue, making strange bad noises. He wiggled his loose ears so she wanted to laugh, and finally she did laugh and explained it away quickly by saying, “Sat on a salamander! Whew, how it poked!”
By high noon the whole madness boiled to a terrible peak.
For it was at that exact hour that Charlie came racing down the valley stark boy-naked!