Stop it.
He felt the burning sting of tears.
'Why so sad, my little lad?'
He looked up, startled, and saw the rug salesman looking at him. He was as big as the meat-vendor, and his arms were also tattooed, but his smile was open and sunny. There was no meanness in it. That was a big difference.
'It's nothing,' Jack said.
'If it's nothing makes you look like that, you ought to be thinking of something, my son, my son.'
'I looked that bad, did I?' Jack asked, smiling a little. He had also grown unselfconscious about his speech - at least for the moment - and perhaps that was why the rug salesman heard nothing odd or off-rhythm in it.
'Laddie, you looked as if you only had one friend left on this side o' the moon and you just saw the Wild White Wolf come out o' the north an' gobble him down with a silver spoon.'
Jack smiled a little. The rug salesman turned away and took something from a smaller display to the right of the largest rug - it was oval and had a short handle. As he turned it over the sun flashed across it - it was a mirror. To Jack it looked small and cheap, the sort of thing you might get for knocking over all three wooden milk-bottles in a carnival game.
'Here, laddie,' the rug salesman said. 'Take a look and see if I'm not right.'
Jack looked into the mirror and gaped, for a moment so stunned he thought his heart must have forgotten to beat. It was him, but he looked like something from Pleasure Island in the Disney version of Pinocchio, where too much pool-shooting and cigar-smoking had turned boys into donkeys. His eyes, normally as blue and round as an Anglo-Saxon heritage could make them, had gone brown and almond-shaped. His hair, coarsely matted and falling across the middle of his forehead, had a definite manelike look. He raised one hand to brush it away, and touched only bare skin - in the mirror, his fingers seemed to fade right through the hair. He heard the vendor laugh, pleased. Most amazing of all, long jackass-ears dangled down to below his jawline. As he stared, one of them twitched.
He thought suddenly: I HAD one of these!
And on the heels of that: In the Daydreams I had one of these. Back in the regular world it was . . . was . . .
He could have been no more than four. In the regular world (he had stopped thinking of it as the real world without even noticing) it had been a great big glass marble with a rosy center. One day while he was playing with it, it had rolled down the cement path in front of their house and before he could catch it, it had fallen down a sewer grate. It had been gone - forever, he had thought then, sitting on the curb with his face propped on his dirty hands and weeping. But it wasn't; here was that old toy rediscovered, just as wonderful now as it had been when he was three or four. He grinned, delighted. The image changed and Jack the Jackass became Jack the Cat, his face wise and secret with amusement. His eyes went from donkey-brown to tomcat-green. Now pert little gray-furred ears cocked alertly where the droopy donkey-ears had dangled.
'Better,' the vendor said. 'Better, my son. I like to see a happy boy. A happy boy is a healthy boy, and a healthy boy finds his way in the world. Book of Good Farming says that, and if it doesn't, it should. I may just scratch it in my copy, if I ever scratch up enough scratch from my pumpkin-patch to buy a copy someday. Want the glass?'
'Yes!' Jack cried. 'Yeah, great!' He groped for his sticks. Frugality was forgotten. 'How much?'
The vendor frowned and looked around swiftly to see if they were being watched. 'Put it away, my son. Tuck it down deep, that's the way. You show your scratch, you're apt to lose the batch. Dips abound on market-ground.'
'What?'
'Never mind. No charge. Take it. Half of em get broken in the back of my wagon when I drag em back to my store come tenmonth. Mothers bring their little 'uns over and they try it but they don't buy it.'
'Well, at least you don't deny it,' Jack said.
The vendor looked at him with some surprise and then they both burst out laughing.
'A happy boy with a snappy mouth,' the vendor said. 'Come see me when you're older and bolder, my son. We'll take your mouth and head south and treble what we peddle.'
Jack giggled. This guy was better than a rap record by the Sugarhill Gang.
'Thanks,' he said (a large, improbable grin had appeared on the chops of the cat in the mirror). 'Thanks very much!'
'Thank me to God,' the vendor said . . . then, as an afterthought: 'And watch your wad!'
Jack moved on, tucking the mirror-toy carefully into his jerkin, next to Speedy's bottle.
And every few minutes he checked to make sure his sticks were still there.
He guessed he knew what dips were, after all.