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Show Blue Run/42 6. Josephine Afternoons, we'd walk to MacArthur Park, not far from Dee's, where there was a swing and slide and big sweet black ladies pushing their babies in strollers with good luck mojos tied into their pigtails This was summer, 1964, two years after the killer tornado when Buddy came dressed as the postman Dee'd had him thrown in jail, but that hadn't stopped the last message, addressed to me, each letter thrumming. "Dead or alive?" it said, the strange handwriting slanted left, the letters falling west. MacArthur Park had this grand museum built on premises, a gift from the General's family They kept a mummy inside behind a glass case, and Joey loved that, the mummy with writing that said he was a little boy, a prince who'd lived on the Nile in Egypt three thousand years ago. "Is he happy in there?" Joey asked. "Is he hungry?" The Pima County Library'd been thin on Egyptology, but I'd read how Pharaoh's priests packed food for the voyage to this imperishable place with a new heaven and earth, which was here I guess, Arkansas. How strange to have ended up here, the dead child riding a sun chariot across eternity to Pulaski County, Arkansas. But here he was, a little boy. Joey stared through |