John D. MacDonald

Saturday’s Child

He awoke in the first gray light of an October dawn, and he was immediately alert, remembering it was Saturday, knowing it was not like other mornings. This day had a special size and texture, so that it was impossible for him to take a breath that seemed deep enough; yet he could think of no planned event, no anticipated surprise that should give it this flavor. There was no school, of course, but it seemed to be more than a Saturday. If there was some special thing about this day, it was something you had to go out and find, before it had vanished.

He dressed in jeans, sneakers, T shirt, and an old gray sweater. Looking out, he saw the flame of the big maple in the yard, autumn color showing through a mistiness of morning, like an old painting of holocaust.

As he reached the kitchen, he became a bandit, closely pursued by the police, faint with hunger and exhaustion, who had broken into a home where the family sleeps. He looked around the kitchen and made shrewd estimates about this unknown family and cunning guesses about where the food would be kept. Moving with stealth, he made himself three huge peanut-butter sandwiches and put two of them into a paper bag. He stood at the sink and ate the third sandwich and drank two glasses of milk, listening for the screaming of sirens in the distance and for any stir of life within this house that was the home of strangers.

He went to the living room and took one of his books, The Sword in the Stone, from the shelf. He let himself out of the house, placed the book and the paper bag in the basket of his bike, and stealthily walked it down the driveway. The rear wheel made a soft, ticking sound.

The bicycle became a spirited horse just stolen from the corral, but made docile by the skill of the man stealing it. Horse theft on the frontier was a hanging offense, but great was his need. He had run his own horse to death, and the sheriff’s posse was only an hour behind, sworn to hang him for a crime he had not committed.

When he reached the highway, he swung into the saddle and galloped away from the sleeping ranch, leaving behind him, on the corral post, a nugget of gold as big as a walnut — in payment for the roan stallion.

Five miles from home, he turned west on the old county road to Sayresville. He leaned forward over the handle bars, pedaling with the steely determination that characterized the greatest cross-country racer in all of France. This was the thirteenth day of grueling competition. The Alps lay far behind him. The finish line was ten miles ahead. This was his last race. They had said the famous legs could not survive such torment; but the crowds along the road shouted and wept and cheered when the cyclists approached and they saw who was in the lead.

He pedaled along the country road as fast as he was able. He pedaled until he reached the limit of his endurance and, through an effort of will, forced himself to keep going long after his left side was splintered with pain. Only when he became so faint the road began to tilt and shift, did he coast to a halt.

He turned off into a wide, dry ditch, propped the bike against a bank, and crawled up in watery weakness, to collapse, prone, his chest heaving. After a long time, he opened his eyes, propped his chin on the back of his hand, and peered into a jungle of grass and weeds.

He had made a crash landing on Venus, due to malfunction, and had escaped the roaring furnace of his space ship just in time, saving only one pack of iron rations and a pistol with three shells in the clip. He crouched at the base of one of the tall, rank Venusian trees and watched the shiny brown beetle-thing blundering slowly through the underbrush. It was the size of a limousine and heavily armored. It stopped, antennas waving as it sensed him.

He rolled onto his back, brushed a dry leaf from his cheek, and looked up through October leaves at the deepening blue of a cloudless morning sky. In a little while, he got back onto his bike and pedaled the rest of the way to Brandt State Park. Nearly all the summer campers were gone. He wheeled deep into the park toward the small lakes, hid the bike in the brush, and walked the rest of the way to a place he had visited before. He walked without cracking a twig or shifting a pebble. The Kiowas had left the plains and in the hills had war parties, composed of blood-hungry fiends. They would invent new tortures to inflict on this young mountain man who dared enter their domain. But Jim Bridger had trained him well. He watched for animal tracks as he moved with his limber, ground-eating stride, and he listened for the alarm cries of birds and squirrels. The wild creatures could tell you much. They could save your life.

Suddenly he darted off the trail and swung up onto a low limb and climbed with reckless, frantic haste until he was up in the swaying, slender top of the oak. He could look across the hills and see the distant beetle-glint of trucks on the turnpike. He recognized them as enemy ammunition trucks, and his eyes narrowed as he planned where the partisans would mine the road this night and then escape back into the hills.

After he dropped from the lowest limb, he picked up his book and sandwiches and walked around the lake to the side where a cliff of sheer, pale granite stood high over black-green water. He stripped to his shorts and left his clothes under a tree. He walked to a familiar edge of the cliff. Suddenly he knew that this was a very important part of this day. He was determined it would not be like last time. There had been no one to watch, but defeat had shamed him in a way he sensed might be worse the second time. The sun had warmed the edge of rock under his bare toes.

He looked down. Fifty feet below him was the shallow tank, and they had floated the kerosene on the water and lighted it. The searchlights all focused on him. The band music stopped. The prolonged roll of the snare drums began. He saw the upturned faces of the carnival throng. He smiled down at them. His lips felt stiff and dry. For a moment, he thought he might not be able to do it this time, either.

He dived. He fell through a great emptiness, through a long brightness of morning. The fall took all games and dreams out of his mind. He smashed into the icy lake water at a bad angle; it felt as if he had been slammed across the belly with an iron club. He surfaced, gasping, and floated until the pain had lessened. Then he swam to the rocky beach. Without thinking beyond anything except the physical effort involved and the slow subsiding of the pain, he climbed and dived twice again, striking the water cleanly. He knew he could do it again at any time, without fear.

He stretched out in a hollow and let the sun dry him. Then he dressed. After he had eaten his lunch, he turned to his book, with a feeling of pleasure and anticipation. He had read it lour times, and he knew it was a book he could read with the same pleasure as long as he lived.

He began at the beginning; but after half an hour, he had such a strange sense of dissatisfaction that he began to skip to favorite parts. These, too, failed him.

He closed the book and laid it aside and wondered what had happened. Perhaps he would never meet Merlin. Perhaps he had no magic destiny. For him, there might be no sword, strangely inscribed, which he could draw easily from the heart of the stone after the strongest men of the kingdom had failed.

Though he had the feeling the day had grown misty, he looked up and found the sky as crystalline blue as before.

When he awoke from a long nap, a jay was side-stepping along the lowest branch of a birch, calling him evil names. He sat up, and it flew away, yelling derision over its shoulder.

The trail, which led all the way around the lake, took longer than he had estimated, and so the autumn woods were in a smoky-blue shadow of dusk when he retrieved the hidden bicycle and began coasting down the long curves toward the park entrance.

He still could have been home before very late, but an oncoming car passed another car carelessly, and he had to take to the black ditch. The jar knocked the chain off the sprocket, and it wedged so tightly he snapped the blade of his pocket knife trying to pry it loose. He gave up and began walking the bike home.

The bombers had smashed the city, and before the troops and tanks entered, the refugees left, fleeing west and south. He plodded along with the stream of fearful, starving people, pushing all his possessions on a rickety cart. He was made up to look like a poor man from the slums, but cleverly hidden in the cart was the powerful transmitter. He was vectoring the night fighters in onto the invader aircraft, which were strafing the homeless and helpless.

When he walked into the kitchen and his mother turned quickly from the sink, he knew at once she was trying to be so angry it would hide her relief.

“In exactly another five minutes, we were going to start calling the police and the hospital. Where were you, Davey?”

“Well, I left the note about taking my lunch.”

“You march right in there and talk to your father about this.”

He walked into the living room. He felt dull, shambling, guilty, incapable of dreams, his hands enormous, fleshy, awkwardly dangling.

His father gave him a quick, narrow look, one black eyebrow at a familiarly dangerous slant. He put his magazine aside, gestured toward the couch, and said, “Sit!”

Davey sat humbly on the couch and tried to find a suitable place to rest his hands. “I would have been okay, Dad. I mean, I would have been back before anybody got upset, but the chain came off the sprocket and jammed. I couldn’t get it out. I had to walk the bike, so — I’m an hour later than I figured on.”

“Who were you with? Where were you? What were you doing?”

“Well — nobody. I... I went to Brandt Park. I was just — fooling around.”

His father went over and stood looking down at him. “Coming from that direction, you must have passed a dozen pay phones. Do you have a dime on you?”

“Yes... but—”

“David, there is such a thing as simple, thoughtful consideration for others. Sympathetic imagination. Is that beyond your capacities?”

He looked down at his bulky, clumsy fists. He wished he could shrink to such smallness he could slide down between the cushions of the couch. “I thought of phoning.”

“Don’t mumble!”

“I thought of calling, but when I would think of it, I wasn’t near a phone, and I guess when I was near a phone, I wasn’t thinking of it.”

“And what was keeping your mind in such turmoil you couldn’t remember a simple courtesy?”

“Nothing much. Just thinking, I guess.”

“Son, you are living in a real world. You are stuck here, just as we all are. You have to cope with it. All this — drifting and dreaming can work hardship on your mother and me, as it did tonight. Wake up!”

“Yes, sir.”

“Your mother saved dinner. You can go out there and eat now.”

He was glad to get out of the range of such direct disapproval. He went to the kitchen. His dinner was on the table. As he sat down, his mother touched his shoulder lightly and then went into the living room. He could hear them talking in low tones. All his hunger was gone. He chewed mechanically. He felt lost, condemned, inadequate, unworthy of love.

His father came strolling into the kitchen and said, with mildness and a slight awkwardness, “Davey, we just want you to be a little more considerate.”

“I know.”

“When you scare us, I tend to come down on you pretty hard,” he said. “Daydreams aren’t silly, son. It would be a dreary world without them, and you would be a tiresome boy if there were no fantasies fermenting in your mind. On the whole, your mother and I approve of you, proudly, almost fatuously. But don’t let the dreams obscure reality. Do you understand?”

He looked at his father and said. “I guess so.” And the two smiled at each other, easily, simultaneously.

His father left the kitchen. Hunger returned, and he attacked the cooling food ravenously. He heard them talking again, heard his mother laugh.

The guards stood outside the death cell and whispered in an awed way about the unshakable composure and healthy appetite of this strange man who still proclaimed an innocence no one believed, no one except those two bold friends, who, throughout these last hours, were tirelessly seeking the mystery witness, hoping to find her, make her talk, and get word to the governor in time.

He finished his milk, put down his empty glass, turned his head slowly, and stared through the bars at them, with the brave and slightly contemptuous smile of a strong, innocent man.

Content

John D. MacDonald
Saturday’s Child