to talk about it, especially to outsiders. But since you live here now…”
Henry nodded solemnly, acknowledging the privilege.
“It was the Monday right after Easter vacation. The whole class was outside, just like this. It looked like it was gonna rain any minute, so nobody wanted to start any games—everybody was just standing around waiting for the first drop. Suddenly we hear this loud noise coming down the hillside, crashing through the bushes like an avalanche.”
“It was a bison!” the skinny kid erupted.
“Shut up, Wade. Yeah, we turn around, and out of the trees comes this total mother of a buffalo, just charging down onto the playground.”
“Wow,” said Henry. “A wild buffalo?”
“Yeah. It stank, man. It was like all black and slimy with blood, and had this bloody shit coming out of its nose and big red eyes rolling around like crazy in its ugly-ass head—”
“Its tongue was hanging out like three feet!” said the other boy, drooling in imitation.
“Gross,” said Henry.
“It looked fuckin’ berserk, dude,” said Kevin, “like it wanted to kill somebody, which it did. It was blowing smoke like a fuckin’ locomotive.”
“What did you do?”
“Duh, what do you think I did? Same thing as everybody else: Ran like hell.” Kevin lowered his voice. “But one kid didn’t move fast enough—this fourth-grade girl named Margo Pond. She was wearing a red dress, and the buffalo went right for her.”
“Oh man,” Henry said, feeling queasy.
“It ran her down and just trampled her to bits. I mean it just kept grinding her, you know? It kept on grinding and grinding her with its hooves, scattering her around until there was nothing left but this kind of...glop.”
The way he described it made Henry flash queasily on the cat in the road, the one that had been run over again and again in front of the Del Monte Hotel. That trampled pulp like raw hamburger. He really didn’t want to hear this.
The boy went on, “In a way it was lucky for the rest of us, because it gave us time to get indoors. We all hid in the building while they called for the sheriff to come shoot it and put it out of its misery. Bastard took nine bullets, and then they had to scrape Margo up with a shovel.”
Trying to dispel the ghastly image, Henry asked, “What was wrong with the buffalo? Was it sick?”
Before the heavy kid could speak, the skinny one piped up, “It had a spear in it!”
“A spear?”
“From hunters,” the other said. “They hunt them at the Isthmus; there’s a hunting lodge there. It must have gotten away.”
“They use spears?”
“Well…not usually. I don’t know.” Glossing over the subject, he said, “But it was wicked, dude, the way this thing was snorting and stamping around. It made kind of a victory lap around the playground after it finished with Margo, tracking little bits of her everywhere, like it was showing off for us. It flipped over the whole bike rack with its horns and shook it—thing weighs a ton. You should have seen its eyes, dude; it was pure loco. You just knew that if you went out there, that thing would come at you with those giant horns and hooves, and that would be it. You’d be gone like that. You just shoulda seen it is all.”
Henry was very glad he hadn’t—he wished he couldn’t picture it so clearly now. “Wow,” he said, dry-mouthed.
“Yeah. For a long time I couldn’t stand with my back to the hill there—not just me, but a lot of people. We kept thinking we could hear something up there that sounded like big hooves.”
The boy slugged Henry in the arm, breaking into a grin. “But most of the time it’s boring as shit here.”
Chapter Fourteen
THE OFFICE
The rebellion lasted exactly two days. By Wednesday, both his new comrades caved to the pressure, abandoning Henry to join teams. Suddenly he was alone again.
“You better get with a team,” Miss Graves said. “You can’t just sit out here doing nothing. If I have to warn you again, you’ll be sent to the principal.”
Willing to accept defeat, Henry did make an effort. Approaching first one team and then another, he asked, “Can I play with you guys?”
Caught up in the heat of the game, the boys brushed him off: “We have enough players.”
After a few such snubs, Henry decided that he was making it too easy for them to turn him down—the trick was not to ask. So he planted himself in the midst of