The Glass Ball on the Levee

Act I: The River

The Mississippi did not look like much that afternoon. It was brown and slow and wide, the kind of river that does not impress you until you realize it is the biggest thing you have ever seen and that it does not care about you at all. Cole Harper was eleven and he had seen it every day of his life and it still did not impress him. It was just the river. It was the thing behind his house, the thing that smelled like mud and algae and old gasoline, the thing that flooded sometimes and did not flood other times.

He was walking along the levee, kicking at the gravel and thinking about nothing, because thinking was something you did when you had something to think about and Cole did not. His mother was at work—Walmart, checkout lane four, 3:00 to 11:00, forty hours a week if they gave her forty, which they usually didn't. She would be home in seven hours. He had seven hours to do nothing.

The glass ball was half buried in the mud near the waterline, blue-green, with bubbles trapped inside that looked like tiny worlds. Cole picked it up. It was smooth and heavy and real. He turned it over in his hands. It was the kind of thing that someone would want.

He put it in his pocket and walked home.

Act II: The Counter

He put the glass ball on the kitchen counter. His mother, Barbara, came home at ten thirty and looked at it.

"Where'd you get that?"

"From the river."

"Did you steal it?"

"No."

She picked it up. It was pretty. She put it down. "Okay. But if somebody comes asking, you didn't see it."

Cole nodded. He ate a bowl of cereal and went to bed.

The next morning, there was a dollar on the counter, next to the glass ball. Cole stared at it. He picked it up. It was real. He put it in his pocket. He went to the corner store and bought a pack of gum and had sixty cents left over.

When he came home, he looked at the counter. There was another dollar. Then two. Then, on the fourth day, three.

It was not magic. It was not a trick. It was just—there was money there every morning, next to the glass ball, as if someone had put it there. Cole did not know who. He did not ask. He bought things. He saved some. He ate better.

Fat Larry heard about it from his wife's sister whose friend worked at Walmart where Barbara worked and her son had seen Cole with the ball and someone had said there was money in the ball and Fat Larry's wife said money in a ball and Fat Larry said what kind of ball and his wife said a glass ball and Fat Larry said why is there money in a glass ball and his wife said she didn't know and Fat Larry said I know who has the ball and he drove to Harper's house.

Act III: The Pocket

Fat Larry's truck pulled up at about two in the afternoon on a Thursday. It was a red Ford that had seen better decades. It idled in front of Harper's house for five minutes, then parked. Fat Larry got out. He was a man who had built his body the way he built his business—one small acquisition at a time, until he was bigger than he had been.

He knocked on the door. Barbara answered. She was wearing her Walmart vest. She looked tired.

"Mrs. Harper," Fat Larry said. "Your son—he got something. Something that's not his."

Barbara felt her stomach go tight. "What are you talking about?"

"The ball. The glass ball with money in it."

"I don't—"

"My wife saw your son with it. At Walmart. Three days ago. He's got a ball. The ball has money. And I want the ball."

Barbara closed the door. She locked it. She went into the kitchen and looked at the counter. The glass ball was there. It looked innocent. It was the kind of thing you would give to a child at a party.

Cole was in the living room. He heard Larry through the wall. He heard what Larry said. He heard "I want the ball."

He picked up the glass ball. He did not think. Thinking was for later. Thinking was for when you had time. He did not have time. He put the ball in his mouth and bit down and swallowed.

It was not heroic. It was not brave. It was a child being a child—panicked, confused, doing the only thing that felt like control in a situation where he had no control. The ball went down wrong. It caught in his throat. He coughed. He gagged. He swallowed again and it went further but not all the way.

Barbara came into the living room. "Cole—"

"I'm okay," he said, and he wasn't, but he said it.

Larry came back five minutes later, looked through the window, saw Cole standing in the kitchen looking pale and holding his throat, and said, "That's not gonna help," and drove away.

Act IV: The Bowl

Cole was in the hospital for two weeks. The glass ball had scratched his esophagus. They had to do an endoscopy to get it out. It came out broken—the ball had cracked in his throat, and the shards had cut him. He needed stitches. He needed antibiotics. He needed two weeks of soft food and no talking and no laughing and no crying.

Barbara's back got worse while he was gone. Not from the hospital—she did not go to the hospital. From the weight of it. Two weeks of cooking for one, of coming home to an empty house, of locking the door and sitting in the kitchen and wondering if her son was going to come home able to swallow or not at all. Her back seized up. She could not stand without pain.

When Cole came home, he was sixteen years old in a body that was eleven. His throat was raw. His hands were dirty from two weeks in a hospital that did not clean very well. He sat at the kitchen table and looked at his mother, who was sitting in a chair with a heating pad on her back and a cup of tea on the table that she had not drunk.

"Mom," he said. His voice was different—hoarse, damaged. The doctors said it might be permanent.

She looked at him. "You okay?"

"I think so."

She looked at the kitchen. She looked at the stove. She looked at her back. "What are we gonna eat tonight?"

Cole looked at the cupboard. He looked at the速食面 in the bottom shelf. He looked at his mother.

"I'll make it," he said.

He opened the cabinet. He took out a bowl. He filled it with water. He put it in the microwave. He waited three minutes. He took it out. He ate the noodles with his left hand—his right hand was bandaged from the IV. The noodles were salty and warm and not very good but they were food and his mother was eating too and they ate in silence and the Mississippi flowed past their house, brown and slow and indifferent.