Read Online The Abundance by Annie Dillard - Free Book Online Page B

boys and I considered it unfair actually to throw an iceball at somebody but it had been known to happen.)
    I had just embarked on the iceball project when we heard tire chains come clanking from afar. A black Buick was moving toward us down the street. We all spread out, banged together some regular snowballs, took aim, and, when the Buick drew nigh, fired.
    A soft snowball hit the driver’s windshield right in front of the driver’s face. It made a smashed star with a hump in the middle.
    Often, of course, we hit our target, but this time, the only time in all of life, the car pulled over and stopped. Its wide black door opened; a man sprang out of it, running. He didn’t even close the car door.
    He ran after us, right up the snowy Reynolds sidewalk, and we ran away from him. At the corner, I looked back; incredibly, he was still after us. He was in city clothes: a suit and tie, street shoes. Any normal adult would have quit, having sprung us into flight and made his point. This man, though, was gaining on us. He was a thin man, all action. All of a sudden, we were running for our lives.
    Wordless, we split up. We were on our turf; we could lose ourselves in the neighborhood backyards, everyone for himself. I paused and considered. Everyone had vanished except Mikey Fahey, who was just rounding the corner of a yellow brick house. Poor Mikey, I trailed him, and the driver of the Buick sensibly picked the two of us to follow. The man apparently had all day.
    He chased Mikey and me around the yellow house and up a backyard path we knew by heart: under a low tree, up a bank, through a hedge, down some snowy steps, and across the grocery store’s delivery driveway. We smashed through a gap in another hedge, entered a scruffy backyard, and ran around its back porch and tight between houses to Edgerton Avenue; we ran across Edgerton to an alley and up our own sliding woodpile to the Halls’ front yard; he kept coming. We ran up Lloyd Street and wound through mazy backyards toward the steep hilltop at Willard and Lang.
    He chased us silently, block after block. He chased us silently over picket fences, through thorny hedges, between houses, around garbage cans, and across streets. Every time I glanced back, choking for breath, I expected he would have quit. He must have been as breathless as we were. His jacket strained over his body. It was an immense discovery, pounding into my hot head with every sliding, joyous step, that this ordinary adult evidentlyknew what I thought only children who trained at football knew: that you have to fling yourself at what you’re doing, you have to point yourself, forget yourself, aim, dive.
    Mikey and I had nowhere to go, in our own neighborhood or out of it, but away from this man who was chasing us. He impelled us forward; we compelled him to follow our route. The air was cold; every breath tore my throat. We kept running, block after block; we kept improvising, backyard after backyard, running a frantic course and choosing it simultaneously, failing always to find small places or hard places that might slow him down, and discovering always, exhilarated, dismayed, that only bare speed could save us—for he would never give us up, this man—and we were beginning to lose speed.
    Ten blocks he chased us through the backyard labyrinths before he finally caught us by our jackets. He caught us and we all stopped.
    We three stood staggering, half-blinded, coughing, in an obscure hilltop backyard, a man in his twenties, a boy, a girl. He had released our jackets, our pursuer, our captor, our hero: for he knew we weren’t going anywhere. We all played by the rules. Mikey and I unzipped our jackets. I pulled off my sopping mittens. We looked back over our tracks multiplied in the backyard’s newsnow. All morning we had been breaking that soft white surface. We didn’t look at each other. I was cherishing my excitement. The man’s lower pants legs were wet;