Thief of Dreams by John Yount Page A

easier to make him alive again. I mean, if the sun started with nothing but clay and made it finally into something as tall and complicated as a man, the poet wants to know why it would bother, if the man was only going to die; I mean, the poet doesn’t understand why the sunbeams went to all the trouble in the first place.” His head between his hands, as though between the jaws of a vice, James waited for her to go on to someone else, waited for the bell to ring, or something, anything, to come along and release him.
    â€œWould you tell the class what ‘fatuous’ means, please?” she asked.
    â€œI can’t,” he said. “I don’t know what it means. I just left it out when I read that line.”
    â€œAnd ‘futility’?”
    â€œI think it means hopeless,” he said.
    â€œThat’s very close. It really means useless, and ‘fatuous’ means unconscious or silly. But you did beautifully with the poem, kind sir, and I’m sure we’re all impressed and grateful.”
    â€œI sure-the-fuck-am,” Earl said under his breath just as the bell began ringing as long and loud as a fire alarm.
    While the class shuffled noisily into the hall, James sat at his desk with his head down, and when at last he took a deep breath and looked up, the room was empty except for Mrs. Arents, who in her shaky, ineffectual way was trying to tidy her desk; and Lester, who was waiting patiently by the door. James gathered his books. She told them to be sure and have a lovely weekend. And he and Lester left by the rear of the building, since both of them knew without having to discuss it, that Earl and the twins rode the first bus and would be waiting out front.
    Without speaking, they crossed the ballfield and the trestle over the creek, following an abandoned, narrow-gauge railroad track toward Lester’s house. After a quarter of a mile they left the faded cinders and rotten ties to go cross-country, Lester spreading the strands of a barbed-wire fence for James to climb through and James returning the courtesy.
    Lester was worn down by his own brand of misery, and James knew it. In the eighth grade or no, Lester could scarcely read or write, and he would accept no help from James. He meant only to endure this last year until he was sixteen and could quit school forever, just as he had endured every year since he’d given up jumping out of windows. He’d simply made up his mind, long ago, that school and books were not for him, that he could not and would not learn those things that were taught in a classroom, and neither James nor anyone else could convince him otherwise. He was determined to wait it out like some exquisite torture.
    Sometimes James nearly envied him, if only because he’d taught himself to be almost invisible. Anyway his classmates didn’t seem to see him. He never spoke to them, or acknowledged them, or asked anything from them; and somehow, over the years, he’d taught them to look beyond him or around him just as they might have looked past a fence post or a tree. Never mind that she’d called on him that day, even Mrs. Arents wasn’t immune to his magic. Already she seldom asked him a question, and when she did forget and call his name, something peculiar seemed to happen to her, as though she realized she’d called on an empty seat, and she never pressed it. The trick was all the more remarkable because Lester looked even sillier than Virginia and Clara had claimed. On his own ground or out fishing or doing chores, he looked okay, but at school his clothes were suddenly so ill-fitting and ragged, he resembled a clown. Roy had made the whole thing worse by buying a huge pair of reddish-yellow, high-top work shoes for Lester to grow into that seemed almost to glow and emitted an outrageous odor of leather James could smell all the way across the classroom. But Effie’s haircut was the cruelest joke of all. Lester had