Lost Echoes

26

Harry practiced with Tad in the yard for a week, when he wasn’t in school or at his job, which it turned out he had not lost. They wanted to fire him—he was sure of that—but workers were hard to come by, and for the most part he was pretty dependable.

He stayed with Tad at his place, so he wouldn’t be tempted in the middle of the night to take a stroll to the liquor store, and he could make sure Tad didn’t take a stroll or a ride to the store himself.

Harry discovered he wasn’t so fond of liquor that he thought about it all the time, but he did miss it some. Tad, on the other hand, paced at night and cussed and rubbed his mouth and went out into the yard and moved slowly across it, with loose steps, just doing his thing, working hard to reconnect to the universe. “It’s the way we all are right before we’re born, in the womb,” Tad told him. “Natural. Then we lose it.”

Harry would find himself watching Tad, decked out in an old T-shirt, sweatpants, and tennis shoes, admiring the simple, loose sort of steps he made across the yard and the way the moonlight painted him and the way the leaves turned and sailed about him. Sometimes they spun as if in a little tornado, Tad at their center, the calm, smooth eye of the storm, moving across the yard, his entourage of dry, crackling leaves in swirling pursuit, he and the earth, the moonlight, and the air, all the same.

And finally there were more than steps across the yard.

Tad would move in other ways. His arms would flash out, loose like a monkey moves, then the legs would move, never high and never in some kind of cocked kicking motion, just quick and easy, his hips moving with it, his body flowing across the ground, and even when Tad did this, these moves with arms, legs, and hips, he never seemed to disconnect from the fabric of the night, the fabric of time. He was all and the same, him and the big ol’ universe.

It was just too cool to see.

And there was another thing.

A very nice thing.

Harry slowly discovered, in that week, he wasn’t as afraid as before. He was still up there in the scared-as-shit department, but not quite into the scared-shitless range. This, though minor, was an improvement.

Oh, he wasn’t throwing away his well-worn paths. He stayed on those. But he wasn’t thinking about it all the time, the hidden sounds.

Even found he was moving better. Felt better as he walked to class or moved around the bookstore. Maybe, he thought, it was all in his head, but even if it was bullshit, it was better than the other thing.

The sounds, with their deep wells of memories.