Thief of Dreams by John Yount Page B

been woolly-headed all summer, and James hadn’t been prepared to find him looking like a bottle brush, cropped on top and shaved from the tops of his ears down, straight around his head. It took talent, mystifying talent, James thought, to be inconspicuous, almost invisible, when you looked like Lester.
    When they came to the fence around Roy’s land, James spread the strands of barbed wire first so Lester could slip through. On the other side they climbed up on a granite outcropping and sat down as they had done every day that week, looking silently out across the valley, each of them locked in his own particular brand of trouble. They would part here, Lester going off to the right athwart the grade of the mountain and James going straight up the valley toward his grandmother’s table and the trailer. Still, they sat together for a long time, not saying anything but merely thinking and smelling the sweet scent of ragweed and ripening apples and all that went into the faint but real perfume of the approaching fall.
    It had been unseasonably and steadily cool, and on the mountaintops there was already a little color, which would spread and get richer and deeper until, by the first week of October, it would have come creeping down into the valleys. Almost every night had been in the thirties, and on the second of September there had been enough frost to singe the leaves of his grandfather’s squash, even if it had left almost everything else in the garden untouched. When he had time to notice this sweet, sad change of season, it was almost enough to break James’s heart, although he couldn’t have said why.
    â€œWant to do something tomorrow?” he asked at last and without looking at Lester.
    â€œTomorrow afternoon, I expect,” Lester said, gazing off in the distance himself, “got to help Poppa grade tobacco in the mornin.”
    â€œWell,” James said after another long pause, “I’d better get going I guess,” and he slid off the face of the outcropping to the ground.
    â€œSee you, buddy,” Lester said.
    â€œSee you,” James said.
    It was just that his summer had been stolen from him, he thought after he’d walked a while. That was why the fall seemed unusually sad. He had borne the unhappiness between his mother and father and therefore merely existed through the summer, and so it had slipped away. It seemed to him he’d spent most of his time sitting up in a huge, grimy catalpa tree on the edge of the trailer park in Knoxville, watching traffic slip under the blue haze of its exhaust, either west into the city or east toward the country. After supper he nearly always climbed into the ancient, half-dead catalpa and stayed until it was time to go in and try not to notice the deadly silence his parents maintained between them like the aftermath of a gunshot. Oh, he’d gotten to go to a movie now and then, and sometimes his troubles seemed kind enough to wait for him outside while he went in where magic could happen, his spirit could still rejoice and even note the earmarks and mannerisms of the hero’s courage, as though for future use. And once his father and his mother and he, all three, spent a grand spectacle of an evening at the Barnum & Bailey Circus. But if there had been more to June, July, and part of August than that, then he couldn’t remember it. Somehow both the beginning and the end of summer had come when he’d gotten to his grandparents’ house, and he’d had only a small taste before his mother was buying him school clothes at Green’s Department Store, he was getting a haircut in the barber shop down the street, and a heartbeat later, he was in Mrs. Arents’s eighth-grade classroom. So. No wonder the cool air and smell of fall saddened him, he thought. No wonder his stomach seemed to hurt.
    But as he climbed over a fence and came up out of the ditch into the road, some chamber of his heart seemed to