cable 'barrier' plug @ $2.40 ea (No. 19776-C)
If it hadn't been for her headache and general feeling of listlessness, Marie would have doubtless wondered what this stuff was for. She would have doubtless wondered how Hilly could have gotten his information so exactly - right down to the inventory numbers - without making a long-distance call to the Augusta Radio Shack. She might even have suspected that Hilly had finally found it.
In a terrible sense, this was exactly what had happened.
Instead, she simply agreed to pick the stuff up and 'kinda loan him' the extra four dollars or so.
By the time she and David came back from Augusta, some of these questions had occurred to her. The trip had made her feel much better; her headache had blown completely away. And David, who had been silent and introspective - not at all his usual bouncy, babbly, bubbly self - ever since Hilly had pushed him out of his room, also seemed to cheer up. He talked her ear off, and it was from David that she learned Hilly had scheduled his SECOND GALA MAGIC SHOW for the back yard nine days hence.
'He's gonna do lots of new tricks,' David said, looking glum.
'Is he?'
'Yes,' David said.
'Do you think they'll be good?'
'I don't know,' David said, thinking of the way Hilly had pushed him from the room. He was on the verge of tears, but Marie didn't notice. Ten minutes before they had passed from Albion back into Haven, and her headache was coming back ... and with it, that previous sense - now a little stronger - that her thoughts were somehow not under control the way they should be. There seemed to be too many, for one thing. For another, she couldn't even tell what a lot of them were. They were like - she thought carefully, and finally came up with it. In high school she had been in the dramatics society (she thought Hilly must get much of his love of dramatics from her), and the thoughts in her mind now were like the murmur of an audience heard through the curtain before the show started. You didn't know what they were saying, but you knew they were there.
'I don't think they'll be so hot,' David finally said. He was looking out through the window, and his eyes were suddenly prisoner's eyes, lonely and trapped. David saw Justin Hurd out in his field, chugging along on his tractor, harrowing. Harrowing even though it was already the second week of July. For a moment forty-two-year-old Justin Hurd's mind was totally open to four-year-old David Brown's, and David understood that Justin was ripping his entire garden to pieces, plowing the unripened corn back under, tearing up the pea-patch, squashing the new melons to pulp under the wheels of his tractor. Justin Hurd thought it was May. May of 1951, in fact. Justin Hurd had gone crazy.
'I don't think they'll be good at all,' David said.
8
There had been roughly twenty people at Hilly's FIRST GALA MAGIC SHOW.
There were only seven at the second: his mother, his father, his grandfather, David, Barney Applegate (who was, like Hilly, ten), Mrs Crenshaw from the village (Mrs Crenshaw had dropped by in hopes of selling Marie some Avon), and Hilly himself. This drastic drop in attendance was not the only contrast with the first show.
The audience at that first one had been lively - even a little cheeky (the sarcastic applause which greeted the Munchie Money when it fell from Hilly's sleeve, for instance). The audience at the second was glum and listless, sitting like department-store mannequins on the camp chairs that Hilly and his 'assistant' (a pale and silent David) had set up. Hilly's dad, who had laughed and applauded and raised hell at the first show, interrupted Hilly's opening speech about 'the mysteries of the Orient' by saying that he couldn't spare a whole lot of time for those mysteries, if Hilly didn't mind; he had just finished mowing the lawn and weeding the garden, and he wanted a shower and a beer.
The weather had changed, too. The day Of THE FIRST GALA MAGIC SHOW had been clear and warm and green, the most gorgeous sort of late spring day northern New England can offer. This day in July was hot and sullenly humid, with hazy sun beating down from a sky the color of chrome. Mrs Crenshaw sat fanning herself with one of her own Avon catalogues and waited for this to