"Doc said this morning that I ought not to move any more stars," the
kid said. "He says I ought to concentrate instead on learning how to
walk again so I can go to Michigan and find Charlie."
For a minute I was mad enough to brain Doc Shull if he'd been handy.
Anybody that would pull a gag like that on a crippled, helpless
kid....
"Doc says that if I can do what I've been doing to the stars then it
ought to be easy to move my own feet," Joey said. "And he's right,
Roy. So I'm not going to move any more stars. I'm going to move my
feet."
He looked up at me with his small, solemn smile. "It took me a whole
day to learn how to move that first star, Roy, but I could do this
after only a couple of hours. Look...."
And he wiggled the toes on both feet.
It's a pity things don't happen in life like they do in books, because
a first-class story could be made out of Joey Pond's knack for moving
things by looking at them. In a book Joey might have saved the world
or destroyed it, depending on which line would interest the most
readers and bring the writer the fattest check, but of course it
didn't really turn out either way. It ended in what Doc Shull called
an anticlimax, leaving everybody happy enough except a few astronomers
who like mysteries anyway or they wouldn't be astronomers in the first
place.
The stars that had been moved stayed where they were, but the pattern
they had started was never finished. That unfinished pattern won't
ever go away, in case you've wondered about it--it's up there in the
sky where you can see it any clear night--but it will never be
finished because Joey Pond lost interest in it when he learned to walk
again.
Walking was a slow business with Joey at first because his legs had
got thin and weak--partially atrophied muscles, Doc said--and it took
time to make them round and strong again. But in a couple of weeks he
was stumping around on crutches and after that he never went near his
wheelchair again.
Ethel sent him to school at Sarasota by bus and before summer vacation
time came around he was playing softball and fishing in the Gulf with
a gang of other kids on Sundays.
School opened up a whole new world to Joey and he fitted himself into
the routine as neat as if he'd been doing it all his life. He learned
a lot there and he forgot a lot that he'd learned for himself by being
alone. Before we realized what was happening he was just like any
other ten-year-old, full of curiosity and the devil, with no more
power to move things by staring at them than anybody else had.
I think he actually forgot about those stars along with other things
that had meant so much to him when he was tied to his wheelchair and
couldn't do anything but wait and think.
For instance, a scrubby little terrier followed him home from Twin
Palms one day and Ethel let him keep it. He fed the pup and washed it
and named it Dugan, and after that he never said anything more about
going to Michigan to find Charlie. It was only natural, of course,
because kids--normal kids--forget their pain quickly. It's a sort of
defense mechanism, Doc says, against the disappointments of this life.
When school opened again in the fall Ethel sold her trailer and got a
job in Tampa where Joey could walk to school instead of going by bus.
When they were gone the Twin Palms trailer court was so lonesome and
dead that Doc and I pulled out and went down to the Lake Okechobee
country for the sugar cane season. We never heard from Ethel and Joey
again.
We've moved several times since; we're out in the San Joaquin Valley
just now, with the celery croppers. But everywhere we go we're
reminded of them. Every time we look up at a clear night sky we see
what Doc calls the Joey Pond Stellar Monument, which is nothing but a
funny sort of pattern roughed in with a hundred or so stars of all
sizes and colors.
The body of it is so sketchy that you'd never make out what it's
supposed to be unless you knew already what you were looking for. To
us the head of a dog is fairly plain. If you know enough to fill in
the gaps you can see it was meant to be a big shaggy dog with only one
eye.
Doc says that footloose migratories like him and me forget old
associations as quick as kids do--and for the same good reason--so I'm
not especially interested now in where Ethel and Joey Pond are or how
they're doing. But there's one thing I'll always wonder about, now
that there's no way of ever knowing for sure.
I wish I'd asked Joey or Ethel, before they moved away, how Charlie
lost that other eye.
* * * * *