The Quick-Change Artist: Stories

Jane's Hat

Jane’s Hat BACK WHEN STOCKING caps were in fashion, those long knit caps of bright yarn with tassels on the end, back when my friend Jane had the best stocking cap in school, Mr. Overton Underhill came biking up behind us and snatched Jane’s cap right off her head. It was February . Just that afternoon, Mr. Underhill, who was the principal, had lectured our class on earthquakes. “The ground opens up in a sneer,” he had said, and thus I had learned the word sneer. And now he had stolen Jane’s hat. “Ha!” he said and pedaled away with it, his face—with its stubbly cheeks and eyebrows like check marks—swiveling back to gloat at us, the cap rippling in his grasp. Jane and I were on bikes, too, and we gave chase, pumping our legs hard as we could, keeping him in sight, once getting near enough to see that one of his shoes was untied. He was too  burly for his bike, but he was so fast. Sweet wind blew through the broom sedge on either side of the road, and the overarching trees were rusty with winter. Yet it was a warm, fine day. He beat us to the railroad tracks, where a train came by. It was such a long, long train. Jane and I stood straddling our bikes in its smoky breeze, and when it was past, we rolled across the tracks, but he was gone. He wasn’t at the grocery store or the post office or on the porch of the old hotel—the public parts of Glen Allen—or if he were, he’d hidden the bike and gone inside. He must have been far down Mountain Road by then, or off on one of the side roads that still felt like country. “Where’s your hat, Jane?” her mother asked when we burst into her house. “Mr. Underhill’s got it,” Jane said, but her mother wasn’t listening . She was fitting a cowgirl dress on Jane’s sister Tammy. “Where’s my boots?” Tammy demanded. “Mr. Underhill’s got ’em,” I said, and we all laughed, even Jane’s mother with her mouth full of pins. Tammy giggled, but carefully because of her lipstick. In my mind I heard what Mama always said about Tammy: Five years old and lipstick on, and the way she dances. Jane never did get her hat back. From then on, whenever we couldn’t find something, we’d say, “Mr. Underhill’s got it!” But hadn’t he given us something, too—the beautiful chase with the sweet wind and the trees overhead and only the three of us on that empty road almost too narrow for two cars to pass? The intervening train was only fate, and the world was about to change anyway, so why worry about a hat? “Have you ever seen a blackbird fly with a dove?” Mr. Underhill asked everybody, in assembly, the day after he stole Jane’s stocking cap. “No, and you never will. Still, we must  The Quick-Change Artist accept the decisions the government makes for us, however misguided.” I thought of the earthquake lecture, how he had interrupted Miss Stancil in the middle of her math lesson to deliver the information about the earth opening up like a sneer. “I must ask you to make them welcome,” he said, turning to address the teachers, who sat very straight in the aisle seats of the auditorium as he strode back and forth on the stage, “but I don’t ask you to fly with them.” The blackbirds would not come in a flock, just a few at a time, we learned: a trial period. There would be a girl, Dorothy , in the sixth grade, and her brother, Herman, in Miss Stancil ’s fifth-grade class—Jane’s and my class. Mr. Underhill said, “Any questions?” How vast the silence was, with a hundred children and six teachers thinking about blackbirds and doves. I stood up and said, “What about Jane’s stocking cap?” But the instant I spoke, the bell rang, just as the train had hurtled between Mr. Underhill and Jane and me on our bikes, twenty-three hours earlier. So nobody heard me. They just got up and shuffled out the double doors at the rear of the auditorium . Back in the classroom, Miss Stancil announced that...