Eleanor Clark
THE HEART OF THE AFTERNOON
On a blazing run-down street in Washington D.C. a boy
of nine or ten is leaning patiently against the stoop of a dirty brick
house. For the moment the traffic is stilled, but on the juke-box in the
place next door the same record has been playing over and over for
an hour, leading around interminably to the same high howled note
at the end that the singer holds so long, it has become the natural
sound of the landscape, as in some other place the tickling of water
on the shore of a lake.
At the boy's feet, in the tiny iron-railed yard beside the stoop,
is lying a headless doll that a few minutes ago fell for the twentieth
time that day from one of the third-storey windows above, and after
a while he will have to take it back into the house. But just now he
only moves to sop up the sweat that forms under his belt and behind
his
ears, and now and then closes his eyes to squeeze out the heat.
On the hedge in front of the house on the other side is a dead starling
with angry open eyes that he and his sister propped up there in the
morning, but all he is looking at now is the sun-spots over the street,
and when there is an accident down at the corner he only turns
his
eyes.
It is the very heart of the afternoon, the point when the day
goes dead and nothing matters and it seems that nothing will ever
change. It struck him all of a sudden just after the doll fell the last
time, when in a lull on the juke-box he heard a rooster crow some–
where down the street, and since then everything has been the same
to him. He doesn't bother about what he is supposed to be doing,
nor about what has happened do·wn at the crossing of the avenues
where a minute before there was only an empty expanse of concrete
bright as a lake.
A man on a motorcycle with an empty sidecar was trying to
turn too quickly and has spilled over on
his
head. The machine
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