Mary turned the key in the ignition. The engine cranked briskly and started almost at once. She grinned and clapped her hands.

“David. Ready to go.”

“Sure. I guess.”

“Hey.” Cynthia put a hand on the back of his neck. “You all right, my man.”

He nodded, not looking up.

Cynthia bent over and kissed his cheek. “You have to fight it,” she whispered in his ear.

“You have to fight it, you know.”

“I’ll try,” he said, but the days and weeks and months ahead looked impossible to him.

Go to your friend Brian, Johnny had said. Go to your friend and make him your brother.

And that might be a place to start, yes, but after that.

There were holes in him that cried out in pain, and would go on crying out for so much of the future. One for his mother, one for his father, one for his sister. Holes like faces.

Holes like eyes.

In the sky, the wolf had gone except for a paw and what might have been-perhaps-the tip of a tail. Of the rep-tilian thing in its mouth there was no sign.

“We beat you,” David whispered, starting around to the passenger side of the car. “We beat you, you son of a bitch, there’s that.”

Tak, whispered a smiling, patient voice far back in his mind. Tak ah lah. Tak ah wan.

He turned his mind and heart from it with an effort.

Go to your friend and make him your brother.

Maybe. But Austin first. With Mary and Steve and Cynthia. He intended to stay with them as long as pos-sible. They, at least, could understand… and in a way no one else would ever be able to. They had been in the pit together.

As he reached the passenger-side door, he closed the small metal box and slipped it absently into his pocket. He stopped suddenly, free band frozen in midair as it reached for the doorhandle.

Something was gone; the shotgun shell.

Something bad been put in its place: a piece of stiff paper.

“David.” Steve called from the open window of the truck. “Something wrong.”

He shook his head, opening the car door with one hand and taking the folded paper from his pocket with the other. It was blue. And there was something familiar about it, although he couldn’t remember having a paper like this in his pocket yesterday. There was a ragged hole in it, as if it had been punched onto something. As if—Leave your pass.

It was the last thing the voice had said on that day last fall when he had prayed for God to make Brian better. He hadn’t understood, but he had obeyed, had hung the blue pass on a nailhead. The next time he’d shown up at the Viet Cong Lookout-a week later. two.-it had been gone. Taken by some kid who wanted to write down a girl’s telephone number, maybe, or blown off by the wind. Except… here it was.

All I want is lovin’, all I need is lovin”.

Felix Cavaliere on vocal, most severely cool.

No, he thought. This can’t be.

“David.” Mary. Far away. “David, what is it.”

Can’t be, he thought again, but when he unfolded it, the words printed at the top were completely familiar:

WEST WENTWORTH MIDDLE SCHOOL 100 Viland Avenue Then, in big black tabloid type:

EXCUSED EARLY

And, last of all:

Parent of excused student must sign this pass.

Pass must be returned to attendance office.

Except now there was more. A brief scrawled message below the last line of printing.

Something moved inside him. Some huge thing. His throat closed up, then opened to let out a long, wailing cry that was only grief at the top. He swayed, clutching at the Acura’s roof, lowered his forehead to his arm, and began to sob. From some great distance be heard the truck doors opening, heard Steve and Cynthia racing toward him. He wept. He thought of Pie, holding her doll and smiling up at him. He thought of his mother, dancing to the radio in the laundry room with the iron in one hand, laughing at her own foolishness. He thought of his father, sitting on the porch with his feet cocked up on the rail, a book in one hand and a beer in the other, waving to him as he came home from Brian’s, pushing his bike up the drive-way toward the garage in the thick twilight. He thought of how much he had loved them, how much he would always love them.

And Johnny. Johnny standing on the dark edge of the China Shaft, saying Sometimes he makes us live.

David wept with his head down and the EXCUSED EARLY pass now crumpled in his closed fist, that huge thing still moving inside him, something like a landslide… but maybe not so bad.

Maybe, in the end, not so bad.

“David.” It was Steve, shaking him. “David!”

“I’m all right,” he said, raising his head and wiping his eyes with a shaking hand.

“What happened.”

“Nothing. I’m okay. Go on. We’ll follow you.” Cynthia was looking at him doubtfully.

“Sure.” He nodded.

They went back, looking over their shoulders at him.

David was able to wave. Then he got into the Acura and closed the door.

“What was it.” Mary asked. “What did you find.”

She reached for the folded piece of stiff blue paper, but David held it in his own hand for the time being. “Do you remember when the cop threw you into the holding area where we were.” he asked. “How you went for the gun.”

“I’ll never forget it.”

“While you were fighting with him, a shotgun shell fell off the desk and rolled over to me. When I had a chance, I picked it up. Johnny must have stolen it out of my pocket when he was hanging onto me. In the mineshaft. After my dad was killed. Johnny used the shell to set off the ANFO. And when he took it out of my pocket, he put this in.”

“Put what in. What is it.”

“It’s an EXCUSED EARLY pass from my school back in Ohio. Last fall I poked it on a nail in a tree and left it there.”

“A tree back in Ohio. Last fall.” She was looking at him thoughtfully, her eyes very large and still. “Lastfall!”

“Yes. So I don’t know where he got it… and I don’t know where he had it. When he was in the powder maga-zine, I made him empty out all his pockets. I was afraid he might have picked up one of the can tahs. He didn’t have it then. He stripped right down to his underwear, and he didn’t have it then.”

“Oh, David,” she said.

He nodded and handed the blue pass over to her. “Steve will know if this is his handwriting,” he said. “I bet you a million dollars it is.”

David—Stay ahead of the mummy IJohn 4/8 Remember!

She read the scrawled message, her lips moving. “I’d bet a million of my own that it’s his, if I had a million,”

she said. “Do you understand the reference, David.”

David took the blue pass. “Of course. First John, chapter four, verse eight. ‘God is love.’”

She looked at him for a long time. “Is he, David. Is he love.”

“Oh, yes,” David said. He folded the pass along its crease. “I guess he’s sort of…

everything.”

Cynthia waved. Mary waved back and gave her a thumbs-up. Steve pulled out and Mary followed him, the Acura’s wheels rolling reluctantly through the first ridge of sand and then picking up speed.

David put his head back against the seat, closed his eyes, and began to pray.

Bangor, Maine November 1, 1994—December 5, 1995