They entered the woods, the children ranging ahead like shrill,
bloodhungry little pups, poking and peeping and rustling. Pete tried to
lie like a stone beneath the leaves.
The adults might not have found him, but the children hunted him
eagerly and fiercely, like some huge prize Easter egg, and the sudden
screech of little Sally Doolittle skirled his discovery.
Mr. Fobey came up first. Pete stood up, leaf-cluttered, and screamed at
him. "You're a stupid fat crot!" he shrilled. "A crot! A godamn stupid
fat crot, and leave me alone, I'm not going with you!"
But he did go with them.
On Indian Hill, Fobey set up his air sluice, stripping off the soil as
dust and laying it back down as dirt. They turned up flint arrowheads
and pestels and they found a buried skeleton, an orange smear on the
breast bone where a talisman bag had lain. The children cheered and
laughed and quarrelled--all but Pete. Pete climbed a tall pine.
All afternoon he watched the black glass rocket lift high on its fine
blue skirt and streak toward the cold black place of stars, and come
dropping back like a needle that is light as a feather, to take on more
joyriders and swoop back upward. It was like watching unfolding poems
in motion.
_I'll be a spaceman_, he told himself. _I don't care what happens, I'm
going to be a spaceman!_ He stayed in the tree all day and watched
the Hester rise and return and on the last flight, when she lifted on
a voyage that would terminate in some other part of the country in
some other field, he saw the regal blue of the jet suddenly flush to a
deep rose orange, then back to blue, and he thought of Murph and was
suddenly happy. His day would come.