There was no one in the jerzyck back yard.
Wilma, undoubtedly encouraged by the improving weather, had hung out her wash before leaving for work or wherever she had gone. It flapped on three lines in the sunshine and freshening breeze. Brian went to the back door and peered in, shading the sides of his face with his hands to cut the glare. He was looking into a deserted kitchen.
He thought of knocking and decided it was just another way to keep from doing what he had come to do. No one was here. The best thing was to complete his business and then get the hell out.
He walked slowly down the steps and into the jerzyck back yard.
The clotheslines, with their freight of shirts, pants, underwear, sheets, and pillow-cases, were to the left. To the right was a small garden from which all the vegetables, with the exception of a few puny pumpkins, had been harvested. At the far end was a fence of pine boards. On the other side, Brian knew, was the Haverhills' place, only four houses down from his own.
The heavy rain of the night before had turned the garden into a swamp; most of the remaining pumpkins sat half-submerged in puddles.
Brian bent, picked up a handful of dark-brown garden muck in each hand, and then advanced on the clothesline with dribbles of brown water running between his fingers.
The clothesline closest to the garden was hung with sheets along its entire length. They were still damp, but drying quickly in the breeze. They made lazy flapping sounds. They were pure, pristine white.
Go on, Mr. Gaunt's voice whispered in his mind. Go for it, Brian-just like Sandy Koufax. Go for i't!
Brian drew his hands back over his shoulders, palms up to the sky.
He was not entirely surprised to find he had a hard-on again, as in his dream. He was glad he hadn't chickened out. This was going to be fun.
He brought his hands forward, hard. The mud slung off his palms in long brown swoops that spread into fans before striking the billowing sheets. It splattered across them in runny, ropy parabolas.
He went back to the garden, got two more handfuls, threw them at the sheets, went back, got more, and threw that, too. A kind of frenzy descended on him. He trundled busily back and forth, first getting the mud, then throwing it.
He might have gone on all afternoon if someone hadn't yelled.
At first he thought it was him the someone was yelling at. He hunched his shoulders and a terrified little squeal escaped him. Then he realized it was just Mrs. Haverhill, calling her dog from the other side of the fence.
Just the same, he had to get out of here. And quick.
He paused for a moment, though, looking at what he had done, and he felt a momentary quiver of shame and unease.
The sheets had protected most of the clothes, but the sheets themselves were plastered with muck. There were only a few isolated white patches left to show what color they had originally been.
Brian looked at his hands, which were caked with mud. Then he hurried over to the corner of the house, where there was a faucet bib.
It hadn't been turned off yet; when he turned the handle, a cold stream of water poured from the spigot. He thrust his hands into it and rubbed them together hard. He washed until all the mud was gone, including the goo under his fingernails, unmindful of the spreading numbness. He even held his shirt-cuffs under the spigot.
He turned off the faucet, went back to his bike, put up the kickstand, and walked it back down the driveway. He had a very bad moment when he saw a small yellow compact car coming, but it was a Civic, not a Yugo. It went past without slowing, its driver unmindful of the little boy with the red, chapped hands frozen beside his bike in the jerzyck driveway, the little boy whose face was nearly a billboard with one word-GUILTY!-screaming across it.
When the car was gone, Brian mounted his bike and began to I pedal, hellbent for leather. He didn't stop until he was coasting up his own driveway. The numbness was leaving his hands by then, but they itched and smarted... and they were still red.
When he went in, his mother called, "That you, Brian?" from the living room.
"Yes, Ma." What he had done in the jerzyck back yard already seemed like something he might have dreamed. Surely the boy standing here in this sunny, sane kitchen, the boy who was now going to the refrigerator and taking out the milk, could not be the same boy who had plunged his hands up to the wrists in the mud of Wilma jerzyck's garden and then flung that mud at Wilma Jerzyck's clean sheets again and again and again.
Surely not.
He poured himself a glass of milk, studying his hands as he did.
They were clean. Red, but clean. He put the milk back. His heart had returned to its normal rhythm.
"Did you have a good day at school, Brian?" Cora's voice floated out.
"It was okay."
"Want to come in and watch TV with me? Santa Barbara will be on pretty soon, and there's Hershey's Icsses."