Moonchasers and Other Stories

i

Yes, sir, it was just about the best sort of summer you could ask for, when you were fifteen, that is, and it was 1958 and you were living in Somerton, Iowa, which is forty miles due east of Waterloo, where just a month earlier I’d seen Buddy Holly, Little Richard and Gene Vincent and his Blue Caps all perform at the Electric Light Ballroom.

Of course, neither Barney nor I let on that it was a good summer because if there is one thing that Barney and I liked to do it was bitch about living our lives out in Somerton, Pop. 16, 438. There were maybe five pretty girls our age, none of whom would have a darn thing to do with us, and one mean and muscular seventeen-year-old named Maynard whom Barney and I had in some way offended (if Maynard wanted to be pissed at anybody, it should have been his parents for giving him that name). Fortunately for us, Hamblin’s Rexall had a good supply of science fiction magazines and Gold Medal suspense novels and Ace Double Books. And the Garden Theater likewise had the usual good supply of movies with monsters in them. And Robert Mitchum.

That was the big thing Barney and I had in common. Sure we liked Amazing and Fantastic with all those nifty Valigursky covers, and sure we liked all those teen monster movies with all those Southern California bikini girls, and sure we thought that Marlon Brando and Montgomery Clift and the late James Dean were really cool, but the coolest guy of all was Robert Mitchum. The Garden brought back Thunder Road for a week and Barney and I went four days running. And the same for when the Garden brought back Night of the Hunter and Blood on the Moon. We were there because Mitch was there.

Anyway, that’s sort of the picture of how things were in our lives before that hot August night when Barney and I walked along the railroad tracks out on the east edge of town, smoking on a fresh contraband package of Lucky Strikes, and sipping at two ice-dripping eight-cent bottles of Pepsi.

Wey’sd pretty much decided that this was going to be the night we broke into the abandoned warehouse and found out just what was in there. According to most of the little kids in Somerton, the warehouse was home to various kinds of spooks. Older kids, who didn’t just have driver’s ed learner permits like ours, took a different slant. They said that the migrant workers from the next town over snuck their daughters in there at night and ran a whorehouse that put all others to shame.

In the moonlight, the railroad tracks shone silver for a quarter of a mile. The air smelled of hot creosote from the railroad ties that had baked all day in the sun. Between tracks and warehouse was a winding creek, along the dark banks of which you could smell summer mud and hear throaty frogs and see the silhouette of the willow tree bent and weeping.

“We’re gonna get our butts kicked,” Barney said, “if they catch us.”

Of course that’s what Barney said before just about everything we ever did. Everything that was any fun, anyway.

But I didn’t like to think uncharitable thoughts about Barney because he had it rough. His father had tried and failed in business several times. The family was pretty poor. And whenever his father quit going to his Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, he always got drunk for two or three days and beat up Barney’s mom pretty bad. A couple of times somebody had to call the chief of police and have him come over.

The warehouse was this big corrugated steel building with loading docks on both the west and east sides. There was a large window on the north end revealing the shadowy space where the office had been.

The window had long ago been smashed out, of course, and most of the exterior warehouse walls bore the chalk scrawlings of various kids — Class of ’58, BG + FH, I Luv Judy! The kind of stuff, I’m told by my army corporal and former Eagle Scout brother, Gerald, is proof positive of immature minds.

So there it sat like a big monument left behind by some alien species. When the warehouse was first closed down, back in ’56, kids of every age trooped out there to smash windows and hurl rocks at the steel walls, which were pretty obliging about making neat sounds when the rocks struck. But then the kids got sort of bored with the place and quit coming. Now they mostly spent time at the abandoned grain elevator on the west edge of town. The elevator was more fun because it was more dangerous. One kid had already fallen off the interior ladder and broken a leg and an arm. It was only a matter of time till some poor overenthusiastic kid got killed in there and so the place had developed a certain dark aura that the warehouse could never match.

As we were climbing through the office window, Barney said, “You don’t really think there are ghosts and stuff in here, do ya?” I just shook my head. Barney just kept moving.

We spent the first ten minutes inside walking around the front of the place and stepping on crunchy little rat droppings. It was pretty neat, actually, sort of like in those movies where they drop the atomic bomb and the few survivors walk around inside empty grocery stores and places like that and take everything they want.

Of course, there wasn’t much to take inside this warehouse.

I remember my dad, who owned the haberdashery in town, saying once that the two guys who built this warehouse had no head for business, which was why they went broke so fast. And their creditors must have cleaned them out because when we went through the door leading to the back, all we saw was this huge empty concrete floor with moonlight splashing through six dirty, broken windows.

“This is where I’m going to bring Janie Mills,” Barney said, “and screw her brains out.”

“Good idea,” I said, “and I’ll double with you and bring Sharon Waggoner.”

Barney had the grace to laugh. Janie Mills and Sharon Waggoner were the two most stuck-up girls in our class. They wouldn’t come out here with us if we had them at gunpoint.

The place smelled of dust and heat and rain-soaked wood and truck oil and a turd-clogged toilet somewhere that hadn’t been flushed in a long time.

“Hey!” Barney shouted suddenly.

And then laughed his ass off when the word echoed back to us through the moonlight and shadows.

“Hey!” I shouted, too, and listened as my own sound likewise began repeating itself.

This was another Somerton bust and we both knew it, which was why wey’sd both been shouting. Because there was nothing else to do. Because, as usual in Somerton, nothing was as it had been advertised. There were no spooks, no ghosts; and there were most definitely no voluptuous whores eager to free us from the prison of our virginity.

Barney took the Lucky Strike pack from the pocket of my short-sleeved shirt (we traded off the privilege of carrying the pack) and took a book of matches from his own shirt and lit up and that was when I saw the door move.

The door was way at the other end of the wide, empty warehouse floor, some kind of closet, I guessed. Barney’s match had pointed my eye in that direction and that was how I came to notice the partially open door move a few inches closer to the frame.

Or I thought I had, anyway. Maybe, because I was so bored, I just wanted to think that something like that had happened.

“Let’s go,” Barney said. “We still got time to hit Rexall for a cherry Coke.”

I nudged him in the ribs and nodded toward the end of the moon-painted floor.

“Huh?” he said out loud.

I whispered to him, “Somebody’s in the closet up there.”

He whispered back. “Bullshit.”

“Bullshit yourself. I saw that door move.”

Barney squinted his eyes and looked down the length of floor. He stared a long time and then whispered. “I didn’t see it move.”

“Somebody’s in that closet.”

And this time when he looked at me, I saw the beginnings of fear in his eyes.

You’re in a shadowy, empty building on the edge of nowhere and you suddenly realize that not too far away is somebody or something lurking in a dark closet. Probably watching every move you make.

“Let’s go,” Barney whispered.

I shook my head. “I want to find out who’s in there.”

Barney gulped. “You’re crazy.”

“No, I’m just bored.”

“You really gonna walk up there?”

I nodded and started walking.

At first it was sort of a lark. I could sense Barney behind me, watching with a kind of awe. That crazy sumbitch Tom was going to walk right up to that closet door, just the way Mitch would, and back here stood that A-1 chicken Barney. He would positively be ashamed of himself.

It was a great feeling, it really was. For the first twenty steps or so anyway.

Then I felt this sickening feeling in my stomach and bowels and a cold shudder went through me.

Hell, I wasn’t brave. I was just some dumb-ass fifteen-year-old from Somerton, Iowa, and if I really believed that somebody was in that closet then I should turn around and get the hell out of here.

“I’ll tell you, you’re one ballsy guy and I mean that,” Barney said.

And then I knew I would go over and open that closet door because Barney’s admiration was just too much to lose.

Besides, I was starting to convince myself that I had just imagined the door moving anyway.

We reached the metal door and I put my hand out and took the knob.

“God, Tom, you really gonna open it?”

For an answer, I yanked the door open.

And there, in the middle of the chill deep closet darkness, sitting with his back against the far wall, was a man holding in his left hand a big cop-style flashlight and in his right a big criminal-style pistol.

“God,” Barney said.

“Anybody else with you?” the man said. And right away he looked sort of familiar but I wasn’t sure why. He was a tall guy, a little on the beefy side, with a kind of handsome face and dark hair and the saddest eyes I’d ever seen on a man except for maybe my Uncle Pete when Doc Anderson told him that Aunt Clarice had only two months to live.

The guy was pointing the gun directly at me. Or so it seemed. “N-no, sir.”

“Howy’sd you boys find out about me?”

“We didn’t find out about you, sir,” I said. “I mean not till we got in the warehouse here.”

He asked our names and we told him.

And then for the first time I saw him get all seized up and heard him give out with a hard little grunt, the way you do when somebody hits you in the stomach. Or when you’re in an awful lot of pain.

He tried to sit up and still keep both his gun and his flashlight on us but he wasn’t having an easy time of it. I knew right away it was because of the blood all over the side of his dirty white shirt, and the green pussy stuff that was all mixed up in it.

I’d seen enough gangster movies to know what was going on here, especially when I let my eyes wander over to the big canvas bag sitting maybe half a foot from him, just on the edge of the light.

“You going to kill us?” Barney said.

Which was just like something Barney would say.

The guy just looked at Barney and said, “You got any candy bars or anything like that on you?”

“No, sir.”

“How about you?”

I shook my head.

The guy grimaced again. The pain must have been pretty bad. The smell sure was.

“Sir,” Barney said. “I don’t mean to be nosey or anything, but you look like you should see a doctor.”

For the first time the guy smiled. And when he did, and just in the way he did, I realized who he looked like. “You know any doctors whoy’sd be willing to come out here?”

“No, but we could help you into town to see Doctor Anderson. He’s real nice.”

Barney was just jabbering, terrified.

“You boys know who I am?”

“I don’t think so,” I said.

“Danton’s my name. Roy Danton. Yesterday in Des Moines there was a bank robbery. That was me and my brother. He set the whole thing up. We were careful not to hurt anybody but one of the guards there thought he saw a chance to stop us so he opened fire as we were leaving. He killed my brother and wounded me.” The grimace again. “The whole state’s looking for me by now.” He let his eyes drift over to the money satchel. “Hell, I don’t even know how much we got. And now I don’t even care. With Mike dead, I mean.”

There was this real long dusty silence in the closet with the guy just staring off and all and you could feel how sad he was about his brother.

“I’m sorry,” Barney said. “About Mike, I mean. I’ve got a kid brother named Glenn and I’d sure feel bad if somebody shot him.”

I didn’t think it was the right time to point out that a lot of people in Somerton wanted the pleasure of shooting his obnoxious little brother, Glenn.

Danton looked us over again. You had the sense his mind was always working hard, always trying to figure things out. “You boys have probably never met anybody like me, have you?”

“No, sir,” Barney said.

“Your folks are probably real respectable, aren’t they?”

“Yessir,” Barney said.

“And nobody in the family’s ever been in any serious trouble, have they?”

“Except for my older brother Kenny,” Barney said. “He got arrested for shooting off firecrackers the night before it was legal.”

Danton laughed softly. “They give him the electric chair?”

“No, sir.”

“I envy the hell out of you boys.”

“Us?”

“That’s right, Barney. You. It’s summer and you don’t have anything to think about except how you’re going to spend all these long, lazy days, and what movie you’re going to see downtown, and maybe what girl you hope you run into out at the swimming pool.” His gaze was faraway now, as if what he was describing was more real than him being in this closet with a bullet in his side and a satchel of cash near his hand and two small-town hayseeds standing in front of him.

“I never had that,” he said. “But nobody’s to blame for how I turned out except me. I don’t hold with all the blame people put on each other. When you do something wrong, there’s only one person to blame and that’s yourself.”

“Your folks still alive?” Barney said.

But Danton didn’t say any more. He just grimaced once from the pain and then sat there and took a few deep shuddering breaths.

I could see how weak he was. The flashlight was shaking a little and the gun looked as if it was about to fall from his hand.

“How far from town are we?” Danton said.

“Mile and a half or so,” I said.

“You boys interested in making a few dollars?”

Barney said, “Huh?”

“Getting me some things. A little food and a little medicine.”

Barney looked over at me and I looked over at him right back. Him being my best friend and all it was easy to tell that he was thinking the same thing I was. This guy had to be really crazy, letting us walk right out of here with the understanding that wey’sd get him some stuff and bring it back.

What wey’sd do, of course, was race back to town and run up the four wide steps of the one-story redbrick police station and tell McCorkindale, the night-duty desk cop, just where he could find himself a bank robber.

“Sure, wey’sd be glad to do that,” I said. “And you wouldn’t even have to pay us.”

Danton laughed. “You must really think I’m dumb.”

We didn’t say anything.

“I let you boys walk out of here and you go right to the cops. And then the cops come back here with shotguns and surround this place and then tomorrow morning, I find myself in jail. Where I’ll be for the rest of my life probably.”

Danton raised his eyes. “How old are you boys?”

“Fifteen and a half,” Barney said. “I am, anyway. Tom is fifteen and a quarter.”

“You two ever known anybody who killed himself?”

Barney gulped. “No, sir.”

“How about you, Tom?”

“I guess not.”

Danton stared at me with those sad eyes of his and all I could think of was Uncle Pete and how he came over late one night to tell Dad, who is his brother, about Aunt Clarice, and how he just sat in the recliner in the living room and cried like a baby.

“Well, I’m going to leave it up to you boys. How I’m going to handle things, I mean.” He nodded to the bank satchel. “Barney, you come over here and dig out some money.”

“Yessir.”

Barney went over and knelt down. Being out of flashlight range, he worked mostly in the dark but a minute or so later he shoved his hand into the range of the flashlight. His tight fist was crammed full of green cash, bills sticking out every which way there were so many.

“That should do it,” Danton said.

Barney stood up, real unsteady on his feet, and came back over next to me.

“You have a good memory, Tom?”

“Pretty good.”

“See if you can remember this, then.” And he sailed right into this long list of stuff like gauze and boric acid and bandages, things to take care of his wound, and food, a lot of stuff with sugar in it and then hot dogs because, he said, he could eat them cold. And at the end, he added, “And get me some kind of writing tablets and some envelopes.” Pain tightened his face again. “I want to write my brother’s, wife, Peg, a letter. Theyy’sve got a six-month-old kid and I figure Peg could use some money.” He nodded to the satchel.

“We’ll take this money and get what you want and then come right back.”

And then Danton laughed again and it was spooky, crazy laughter really, like the kind madmen always laugh in science fiction movies after theyy’sve created a monster or something, except in Danton’s case it was real.

“Kid, I wish you could see how obvious you are. You just can’t wait to get your ass out of here and go to the cops, can you?”

Barney gulped but didn’t say anything.

“And you know what? I’d probably do the same thing if I was you. In fact, I’m sure I would.” Then he quit smiling. “But you’re going to have to make a real adult decision, both of you boys. I don’t want to go to prison. I really don’t. I’d never survive in there and I know it. I want to get up to Alaska where I’ve got a cousin and try living the way regular people do, the way I’ve never been able to before. That’s why I need those medical supplies and that food. Ity’sll at least get me going again.”

He stopped talking. He just stared at us a long dusty sad time and then he raised the gun and put the barrel of it right to his temple and said, “If you bring the cops back, I’ll end it right here. And that isn’t a bluff. And I’m sorry to put it on you like this but I don’t have any choices left in my life. I’m leaving it up to you to decide.”

Then there was just the dust and shadow and quiet of the closet and the sad (and I saw now) sort of crazy blue eyes of Roy Danton.

“You mean we can go?” Barney said.

“You can go.”

“Just like that?”

“Just like that.”

“Just walk right out of here?”

“Just walk right out of here.”

“And you won’t shoot us in the back?”

“And I won’t shoot you in the back.”

“Jeez,” Barney said.

We turned around and left the closet and walked the moonlit length of the warehouse floor, rat droppings crunching beneath our feet, without saying a word.

And then we started running like hell.

Five minutes later we were on the railroad ties and smoking Lucky Strikes and hurrying back to town. There was an owl on the night, and phantom clouds across the quarter moon, and a far rumbling train we could feel trembling in the tracks themselves.

“You think we’ll get a reward?” Barney said.

“Probably.”

“Whaty’sll you do with yours?”

“Save up for a car.”

“You think Clarence will let you have your own car when you’re sixteen?”

We always referred to our fathers by their first names. Clarence and George.

“Sure. Wouldn’t George let you have one?”

“Not since Kenny knocked up his girlfriend in the backseat of that old Plymouth George bought him for his birthday.”

“But Kenny and Donna are married.”

“Now theyy’sre married. But they weren’t then. And that’s what George got so pissed about. Kenny was supposed to go on to college. But now he’s working at the factory and he’s got two kids and he isn’t even twenty-one yet.”

“Well, I’m pretty sure Clarence’ll let me have a car.”

We walked a little more, both of us tossing rocks still warm from sunlight down the silver beams of tracks.

“You know who he looks like?” Barney said.

“Who who looks like?”

“Roy Danton. Who he looks like?”

And then we stopped. We were just at the junction where the tracks swung eastward and went around Somerton.

By now my clothes were stuck to me because it was not only a hot summer, it was a humid summer.

“Yeah,” I said. “I know.”

“Robert Mitchum.”

I nodded.

“That’s the only thing that sort of bothers me about turning him in,” Barney said. “It’s kind of like turning in Mitch.”

We just stared at each other for awhile, just a couple of small-town teenagers, neither one of us wanting to say what we felt, and consequently not saying anything at all.

We left the tracks and walked into town. The houses started right away, neat little blocks of them, living rooms all aglow with black-and-white picture tubes, an occasional Elvis record on the air from an upstairs bedroom window, a few front porch swings squeaking in the darkness.

“You see the way he made those faces when the pain got him?” Barney said.

“Yeah.”

“We’re doing him a favor, turning him in.”

By now we reached the town square. The shops and stores that surrounded it stayed open till nine because it was Friday night and night was about the only time farmers in the nearby towns could get in here.

The Dairy Queen was open, and so was Hamblin’s Pharmacy, and Henry’s Hawkeye Supermarket, and the big Shell station where they had four bays and where most of the drag-strip guys took their cars, and Seldon’s International TV (he took a lot of kidding about that “International” bit believe me) and the Western Auto store and the Earle’s Cigars and Billiards and four taverns so noisy they sounded like they were having jukebox wars inside or something.

People sat everywhere, on park benches and car hoods and curbsides, fanning themselves with paper fans of the sort that the funeral home gives you at wakes, with Jesus on one side and a message (plus the address and phone number) from the funeral parlor on the other.

The night smelled of cigar smoke and beer and heat and summer lightning and perfume. And there were old people and young people and pretty people and ugly people and rich people and poor people and people who loved each other and people who hated each other all caught up in those smells.

And Barney and I just stood on the corner across from the red brick building with the big Police sign over the double-wide front door... just stood and stared in through the front windows at the uniformed men on night duty.

“You really think he looks like Mitch?” Barney said.

“A little. Not a lot. But a little.”

“Wey’sd really get our butts kicked if we didn’t turn him in.”

“I know.”

“You really think he’ll kill himself if the cops come?”

“What am I, a swami? How would I know?”

But right away Barney got that patented hangdog look in his eyes, the one that makes you feel bad even when Barney’s at fault, and I said, in a lot more friendly way, “I guess I’m afraid he would. Kill himself, I mean.”

“Mitch would kill himself.”

“You think so?”

“I know so. No prison bars for him. I think he said that in one of his movies.”

“In several of his movies, actually.”

“Mitch would definitely do it. Definitely.”

I sighed. “I wish hey’sd killed somebody.”

“Huh?”

“Roy Danton. I wish he’d killed somebody.”

“Why?”

“ ’Cause then it’d be easier to turn him in.”

“Yeah?”

“Sure. Robbery’s pretty bad but it’s not like killing anybody.”

“I never thought of it that way, I guess.”

“So even though he’s a bad guy he isn’t a real bad guy. You know?” Barney shook his head. “I don’t want to turn him in either, Tom, but we gotta. We just gotta.”

“I know.”

“So let’s get it over with.”

The police station was real bright inside. And noisy. Phones were ringing and there was some kind of Teletype deal in the corner and it was clacking away and three uniformed men were rushing around, their rubber heels squeaking on the tile floors the way nurse’s shoes do in hospitals.

It was so cold from the air-conditioning that I nearly froze on the spot.

We walked up to the front desk where Sergeant McCorkindale normally sits only it wasn’t Sergeant McCorkindale, it was the new recruit named Meeks who wore glasses and was pudgy and was already getting bald.

“Hi, boys.”

“Hi,” I said.

“Help you with something?”

“We need to talk to Sergeant McCorkindale.”

“You don’t look like fishes to me.”

“Huh?” Barney said.

“Onliest people talking to Sergeant McCorkindale right about now would be the carp or the blue gill. He’s up to Kahler’s Lake fishing for two days.”

And right then I saw Cushing coming out of his office down the hall.

“Well,” he said, “look who’s here. My two favorite little girls.”

I suppose every town has a cop like Cushing, a real slick operator that all the ladies think is cute, and the kind of cruel and cunning man that other men are always sucking up to out of plain undignified fear.

Clarence always said that he used to feel sorry for Cushing, the way Cushing’s parents were both killed in that automobile accident when Cushing was just ten. But Clarence had long ago forgotten all about the accident and concentrated on what a jerk Cushing had grown up into.

Cushing was a decorated marine in Korea. He got home late from the war because of an injury to his leg and they had a parade just for him because not only was he a wounded war hero he’d also been the best high school quarterback this valley has ever seen.

He went six foot easy and if his gut was a little loose now and there was a little fleshy pad beneath the line of chin and jaw, he was still an impressive man, always dressed nattily in one of the many suits Bruce Harcourt over at Harcourt’s Men Shop gave him a discount on, and always cracking his chewing gum with a certain malicious delight. He had black black eyes that shone with a very strange light.

The summer previous Barney and I had broken into the deserted high school out near the highway. Assistant Police Chief (which generally meant the man who was in charge at night) Stephen B. Cushing happened to be cruising by at the very same time we were crawling in one of the windows.

And parked his car. And came in after us.

There are a lot of stories going around about what happened that night, some of them pretty juicy of course, but our version, and after all we were there, is pretty simple: he came in after us and we ran away. He called for us to stop but, given what we knew about Cushing we were afraid to stop, and so we climbed out of the building again and took off running.

Cushing hadn’t been so lucky. He’d crawled out the window after us but instead of hitting the ground running, he’d simply hit the ground, falling one story to hard hard pavement and breaking his arm in the process.

I don’t need to tell you how bad it looks for a cop to chase two punk teenagers and have those punk teenagers get away. But for a tough marine and former football hero to break his arm in the process—

My father, the respectable haberdasher, was not happy that his son had gotten into trouble with the law. I was grounded for two weeks, shorn of allowance, and ordered to leave the living room every time something good came on TV (I even had to miss the Maverick show where they made fun of Gunsmoke).

But even given his embarrassment about his son having to appear in juvenile court, my father at dinner one night broke into a grin and said, “You should see Cushing these days, dear. He won’t look any of us merchants in the eye, and he’s cut out his swaggering entirely. I’m not saying I think what Tom here did was right but maybe this was the only way to cut Cushing down a peg or two.” Cushing used to come in all the stores and let it be known in various ways that as assistant police chief, he expected favors and discounts from the men he was sworn to protect. The merchants didn’t like it but you didn’t say anything against Cushing in this town. Not without Cushing getting even, anyway.

So now here we stood one year later and Cushing was still referring to us as “girls,” which he did loudly whenever he saw us on the street. He couldn’t get real mean with us, the way he got mean with that Negro who ended up in the hospital a few years back — I mean, haberdasher may not sound like much to you but in a town the size of Somerton, a haberdasher has some influence and Cushing had to be careful — but he could and did harass us whenever he got the chance.

Cushing watched us with his strange black eyes as Meeks said,

“These boys were asking for Sergeant McCorkindale.”

“They were?” Cushing grinned. “You girls come in to confess to something?”

Meeks looked uncomfortable when Cushing called us girls. He kind of wriggled and waggled around in his desk chair.

“They were real polite,” he said. “I mean, they weren’t causing any trouble or anything.”

“That’s the nice thing about little girls,” Cushing said. “They’re usually well-behaved.”

He took out a pack of Cavaliers and tamped one down on the pack and then put it to his mouth and took out this really nice silver Zippo.

“So how can I help you two?” He apparently had other things to do. Now he sounded as if he just wanted to rush us out of here.

Barney’s gaze strayed over to mine. We had the same thought. We couldn’t tell Cushing about Roy Danton because if Danton didn’t kill himself, Cushing would be glad to do it for him.

“He said he’d help us with this term paper we’re gonna write next year,” I said.

“Yeah, about the police.”

Cushing grinned. He couldn’t let an opportunity like this go by. “So you nice little girls are also A students, huh?”

A students? God, Barney and I together barely got passing grades. If they’d given courses in Ray Bradbury, Edgar Rice Burroughs and Robert Mitchum, we would have been hailed as geniuses. But unfortunately our school board was hopelessly square.

Cushing lit his cigarette. He was still looking us over. You got the impression that he’d have liked to start beating on us right then and there.

But all he said was, “Why don’t you girls go on home? We’re busy.”

And with that, he turned around and went back to his office.

Meeks said, kind of sheepish, “He just gets in a bad mood sometimes.”

And right then I liked the hell out of Meeks because he was the same kind of geek we were, fist fodder for all the Cushings in the world.

“Thanks, Meeks,” I said.

“Yeah,” Barney said. “Thanks.”

When we were outside in the steaming night again, Barney said, “You know, if God gave me permission to kill three people you know who I’d name?”

“Cushing and who else?”

“Cushing, Cushing and Cushing.”

I laughed. “Me, too.”

Barney nodded to Hamblin’s Pharmacy down the block. “We’d better hurry up if we’re going to get Danton that stuff.”

“I was thinking,” I said.

“Yeah?”

“I’ll bet if Danton didn’t have that bullet in him, he could kick the living shit right out of Cushing.”

“With one hand tied behind his back.”

“And blindfolded.”

“Let’s go,” Barney said, “and get that stuff.”

“Yeah,” I laughed. “Like good little girls.”

Hamblin’s was where I first read Ray Bradbury and Theodore Sturgeon and Robert Bloch and John D. MacDonald and Mickey Spillane so even given the fact that Mr. Hamblin, the shriveled-up little guy who owns it is something of a grouch, I’ll always like the place. There’s a soda fountain with twelve stools where one day Patty Lake accidentally leaned against my arm with one of her breasts and I fell in love with her for the whole school year; and the magazine stand where Popular Photography once had a nude shot of a very pretty young woman, and she wasn’t even African; and the sacred wire paperback rack that kind of creaks when you turn it around; and the sandwich board where Ina makes the most incredible tuna salad sandwiches I’ve ever had, no offense Mom.

I was hoping Becky Martin would be working, Becky being not only the tallest girl in junior class but the most beautiful, too, reminding me a lot of Dana Wynter in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, who even two years later I still had a sort of crush on.

But Becky wasn’t working, Hamblin himself was.

He was up on a stepladder putting boxes of storage away. I guess it was a sign of our growing maturity that neither Barney nor I smirked or poked each other when we saw it was boxes of Kotex he was putting away.

“Help you, boys?”

“Need some things, Mr. Hamblin,” I said.

“Be right down.”

A few minutes later he was behind the counter, this rabbity bald little guy who always reminded me of Andy Clyde who was Hopalong Cassidy’s sidekick in the movies, and he got the first two items, bandages and gauze, and set them up but then he stopped all of a sudden, wiping his hands on his clean white apron and said, “Boric acid?”

“Yes, Mr. Hamblin.”

“This for your folks?”

“Huh?” Barney said.

“Your folks. Is this stuff for your folks?”

“Yeah,” I lied. “Yeah. My dad fell down and—”

“—broke his leg,” Barney said.

Barney could sometimes be real dumb. My dad Clarence came into Hamblin’s at least once a day. And when he wasn’t sporting a broken leg—

“At least we think it’s broken,” I said. “You never can tell with a broken leg. One minute it’s broken and the next it’s—”

“And the next it’s what?” Hamblin said. “Huh?” Barney said.

By now Hamblin was watching us very carefully. “You’re up to something, aren’t you?”

“Huh?”

“Your pop don’t have a broken leg any more than I do, does he?”

“Huh?”

“I ain’t talkin’ to you, Barney. I’m talkin’ to Tom.”

“No, sir,” I said, “he doesn’t have a broken leg. We’re just getting this stuff so we can learn first aid.”

“You two troublemakers learn first aid? For what? So you can patch up all the people you play jokes on?”

“We don’t do that anymore, Mr. Hamblin.”

“No, sir, we don’t,” Barney said.

“We want to join the Civil Air Patrol and one of the requirements is that you learn first aid.”

“Civil Air Patrol, huh?”

“Yessir,” I said. Actually, I had a cousin over in Cedar Rapids who was in the Civil Air Patrol, and he got up before dawn three mornings a week and went out to this little office on top of the broadcast booth at the football stadium and scanned the sky with his binoculars. He was supposed to be looking for Russian bombers that had somehow gotten through our radar but what he mostly saw was UFOs. According to him there were a lot more UFOs than most people realized.

“I’m going to give you boys this stuff but if I find out that you pulled any practical jokes on anybody tonight—”

“We don’t do stuff like that anymore,” I said. “We’re in high school now.”

We ordered six more items, all medical-type stuff, and Hamblin slammed each one down as he set it on the glass top of the display case.

He put it all in a paper bag and then without thinking I opened my fist, the one I had all the new green money inside of, and then the money all fluttered to the ground.

“God!” Barney said. And we were both on the floor picking it up.

I kept looking up at Hamblin. He kept staring at all the fifties and twenties in disbelief.

“Where’d you boys get money like that?”

“Huh?” Barney said.

“Savings,” I said. “I’ve been saving my Christmas money for the past five years and here it is.”

Which he didn’t believe at all, of course. Not at all.

I took a twenty and paid him but he took it without looking at it, his eyes still fixed on all the other bills fanned out in my hand.

I stuffed the bills in my pocket and watched Hamblin go down to the cash register and punch the amounts up. The register bell dinged when the cash drawer opened. Barney started to say something but I shook my head.

Hamblin came back with my change, counted it out and handed over the bag.

“Your pop at home, Tom?”

“Yes, sir.”

And that was all he said. But of course he didn’t have to say any more at all.

I picked up the bag and Barney and I walked out.

Barney said, “Old man Hamblin’s gonna call Clarence.”

“I know.”

“And Clarence is gonna have a lot of questions for you when you get home tonight.”

“I know.”

“And then the cops are gonna find out about Roy.”

“I know.”

“Sonofabitch,” Barney said, “I don’t want to see the cops get Roy, do you?”

“I sure don’t,” I said.

We went inside Henry’s Hawkeye Supermarket and did the grocery shopping fast, getting stuff Roy could eat without cooking, cold cuts and Roman Meal bread and Hostess cupcakes and freezing Pepsis from the cooler and then Barney said, “You go ask the checkout girl to help you find something.”

“Huh?” I said, sounding just like Barney.

“Go on.”

So I did. She was the only employee I could see anywhere in the store. She helped me find paper lunch sacks, which I made a big fuss about needing desperately. I kept wondering what Barney was doing.

Then he was back and said, “Well, I’d better be going, Tom. George wants me home early tonight.”

So we all went up to the lanes and she checked us out and Barney kept giving me this look I’d never seen before and without knowing quite why, I knew I wanted to get the hell out of there and fast.

On the street, Barney said, “I got ’em.”

“Got what?”

“Cigarettes. Three packs. Chesterfields. I couldn’t reach anything else. That’s why I had you distract her.”

There’s this older kid, Lem, who usually buys cigarettes for Barney and me. He’s real poor and sort of ugly and everybody laughs at him but he’s actually a good guy and he has a six-year run of Amazing Stories and we pay him a dime every time he buys us a pack. But we didn’t have time for Lem tonight.

We walked fast going back to the warehouse. And we walked a little scared.

The warehouse was just as dark as we’d left it. We climbed in through the window and went over to the closet. “Roy, Roy, we’re back.”

The door was still open but there was no answer from the darkness inside. No flashlight clicked on, and there wasn’t any noise, either, that cramped pained noise Roy made every time he breathed.

“Roy?” Barney said.

No answer.

“Here,” I said, handing Barney the sack of groceries.

“What’re you gonna do?”

“Go in there. See what’s wrong.”

We both stared at the dark, dark closet.

I took two, three steps into the closet. I couldn’t see anything.

The dust made me sneeze. What I didn’t need now was an allergy attack.

And then I tripped over something and fell forward, putting my hands up flat against the back wall.

I stood there panting, sweating.

And then I heard him. It was real faint but I knew right away it was him because of the labored, reedy sound of his breathing.

“You OK?” Barney said.

“Get in here,” I said.

By the time Barney made it into the closet, I was on the floor picking up the flashlight and getting it clicked on and shining the beam in Roy’s face.

If he hadn’t been breathing, I would have thought he was dead. One afternoon a few years back Barney and I snuck into the back of the Devlin Mortuary and peeked at two corpses old man Devlin had laid out on gurneys. It was pretty gross, the pasty fish-belly color of the flesh, that is, and the way they didn’t move at all. But then I guess when you think about it, that’s what being dead means, that you don’t move. Never again.

“Hold this,” I said to Barney and gave him the flashlight.

He kept the beam on Roy. I grabbed one of the Pepsis and got it open and put the bottle to Roy’s lips and forced a little into his mouth.

It took him maybe a full minute but his eyes finally came open. And then it was maybe another twenty seconds before he showed any signs of recognizing us. His wound was starting to take its toll. He looked real pale and there was a kind of crust on his lips and his sweat was cold-looking and greasy and, to be honest, he kind of smelled pretty bad. That’s one thing movies can’t give you — smell. When John Dillinger and Pretty Boy Floyd and Al Capone die up there on the screen, the audience doesn’t have any idea of how bad they smell.

“Hey, slugger,” Roy said to me.

“We got your stuff,” Barney said.

Roy raised his eyes to Barney. Even that seemed to take a lot of effort. “Thanks, kid.”

So we fed him. Barney propped the light up on top of the money sack and sat on one side of Roy and I sat on the other. We put the grocery sack between us and took turns feeding him, the way we once fed a hawk. We were out in the woods one bright fall morning and we heard this big booming gun go off and it was this hunter of course and then we heard something fall into the bushes beside us and it was this hawk. He was all covered with blood and his dark eyes were frantic and wild and we were scared for him and scared for us because we didn’t know what to do. And so we just grabbed all these colorful autumn leaves and made him this little bed and he just sat there staring up at us and we tried feeding him grass and we tried feeding him leaves and Barney even dug up some night crawlers with his fingers but the hawk wouldn’t eat any of them and so all we could do was pet him and say soft little things to him like the soft little things you say to sick kitties and we knew he was dying and he knew he was dying and then he started twitching and shuddering and making these tiny scared noises and so Barney picked him up and put him in his lap, not caring about the blood or anything, and sort of started rocking him, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth till I had to say, very softly, “Barney, I think he’s dead” and Barney looked down at the unmoving bird and said, “You’re a fucking liar, Tom, he isn’t dead!” but he was dead, of course, the poor bastard, and so I took him from Barney’s hands, lifted him real gentle, and all the time I did Barney just kept screaming at me “You’re a fucking liar, Tom! That’s what your fucking problem is, buddy-boy! You’re a fucking liar!” And I took the hawk down to the river bank where the earth was softer and I scooped out this grave with my hands and I put him in it and even all the way down to the blue run of river, even above the jays and the owls and the ravens, I could hear Barney crying.

So it was sort of like that now, feeding Roy. I mean, because he was so weak he couldn’t even hold a piece of cold meat in his fingers.

“It’s so goddamned cold in here,” he said.

On the bank Time and Temperature sign downtown about twenty minutes earlier the Temp had been 89.

Barney fed him the Twinkies and the Pepsi and I fed him the Oscar Mayer sliced bologna and dutch loaf. And then we both took turns feeding him the Cracker Jacks which Barney had said would be a good way to finish off the meal.

When he was finished eating, Roy said, “You boys bring the bandages and stuff?”

“Yessir,” I said. “We sure wouldn’t forget something like that.” And right then, just the way he gave me this almost imperceptible nod of thanks, he looked a whole lot like Mitch.

“You boys think you can clean a wound?”

“Sure,” Barney said.

I looked over at him and frowned. What the hell did we know about cleaning a wound?

“You just take the hydrogen peroxide and let it soak into some of those cotton balls I told you to get and then you just kind of clean the wound,” Roy said.

We cleaned the wound.

I’ll tell you, it was unlikely either Barney or I were ever going to get scholarships to medical school, the way we poured too much peroxide on the cotton balls and spilled the stuff all over, and the way we grimaced when we had to tear the blood-soaked part of his shirt away from the wound.

“Oh, God,” Barney said when we finally got a good look at the wound. So much for a quiet, steady manner.

I wanted to say oh, God, too, but I just bit down real hard on my lip and took one of the soaked cotton balls and put it up to the wound.

Where the bullet had gone in everything was kind of scabby and you could see green pus leaking from the hole.

In all, we went through eleven cotton balls. I got rid of as much of the scabbing as I found, and at least temporarily I stopped the pus from seeping.

And then we were done and Roy sat back against the wall and felt in his shirt pocket for a cigarette but he was all out so Barney handed over the Chesterfields he’d taken from the supermarket and said, “This was the only brand I could steal.”

“They’re fine. I appreciate it.” He got a cigarette in his mouth, looking a whole lot like Mitch just then, and then he took his Zippo out and thumbed it into lighting. He set the lighter down on the floor and I looked at it. Somebody had carved a skull and crossbones into it, with two little fake red diamonds for the eyes. It was the coolest lighter I’d ever seen.

“There’s one Twinkle left, Roy,” Barney said. “You want it?”

“You eat it, kid,” Roy said.

I laughed. “He was hoping you’d say that.”

Barney gulped it down in two bites.

Roy kept dragging on his cigarette but he did it with his eyes closed. His breathing was starting to get real noisy again and you could tell he was exhausted.

“You think you could bring me some more food tomorrow night?” Roy said. He kept his eyes closed.

“Sure,” I said. “But we can do better than that. We can bring you some rolls for breakfast.”

“Yeah,” Barney said. “From Emma’s Cafe. She makes ’em fresh every morning.”

Eyes closed, he shook his head very gently. “Somebody might see you in the daylight. You don’t want to make anybody suspicious. Wait till night to come out here.”

When he used the word “suspicious” my stomach knotted up. I kept thinking of old man Hamblin at the pharmacy just staring at all the money I had.

“Roy,” Barney said.

“Yeah?”

“Could I use your lighter?”

“Sure.”

“I really appreciate it,” he said, leaning forward and taking the lighter from where it sat on top of the pack of Chesterfields on the floor.

The way the three of us sat, we might have been around a campfire.

Barney picked up the lighter and stared at the skull and crossbones and a low whistle came from his lips. “Cool.”

Barney got a cigarette going and I got a cigarette going and then Barney said, “Roy?”

“Yeah.” Eyes still closed.

“Would you really have killed yourself if we’d brought the law back?”

Roy thought a long moment. “You want an honest answer?”

“Uh-huh.”

“I don’t know if I got the guts to kill myself. I’ve thought about it all my life off and on, and one night when I caught my girlfriend in bed with this guy, I put a gun in my mouth but I couldn’t pull the trigger. I wanted to and I think in a strange way she wanted me to, too, but I couldn’t. I just couldn’t.”

And then he made a little grunting sound again and he took the cigarette from his mouth and jabbed it out on the floor. And then he gave out with this deep sigh that made his chest shudder.

“I don’t think I can talk anymore, boys. I need some sleep.”

“We’ll be back tomorrow night, Roy,” I said. “We’ll bring you better food, too.”

We left him, left the warehouse, and went back to town.

“You think he’s gonna die?” Barney said, just as we started down the tracks.

“I don’t know.”

“Maybe we should turn him in. Maybe that really would be doing him a favor.”

“What if he killed himself?”

“You heard him. He said he didn’t have the guts.”

“No, he said maybe he didn’t have the guts. There’s a difference.”

We came to Spring Street, my street.

“Night,” Barney said.

“Night,” I said, and started to walk away.

When I was out of the streetlight and walking in the shadows, I heard Barney say, “You really think he looks like Mitch?” and I called back, “Yeah, I think he looks a lot like Mitch,” and then we were both lost to our respective blocks, just footsteps now in the summer night.

Our house has a lot of gables and gingerbreading which should make it a Victorian, I guess, but my mom says it’s not really a Victorian, at least not a regular one anyway. She always says this whenever somebody visits us for the first time and says “I just love Victorian houses.” Most of us in the family just close our ears when she starts in.

Mom and Dad were in the living room with my eight-year-old sister, Debbie, watching the Late News with Earle Rochester who my dad says is a) a Democrat and b) a funny-looking gink who can’t keep his opinions to himself (“See how he sneers whenever he says the name Eisenhower?” he always says to my mom, by which you can guess that Clarence is a Republican).

Dad was sitting in the leather recliner, which is his sacred chair, and wearing his Purple Passion (as Mom calls them) Bermuda shorts and a sport shirt.

The first thing he said to me was, “How come you were buying hydrogen peroxide and boric acid and gauze and stuff like that at Hamblin’s tonight?”

He kept staring right at the TV, as if he wasn’t missing a word, but asking me his question and then waiting for an answer.

I was ready for him. On the walk home I’d thought up a good one. “Barney and I were going to fix up this tackling dummy like it got all beaten up and then hang a sign on it that said ‘This is what happens to bullies, Maynard’ but Barney got scared and chickened out.”

“You’re just begging Maynard to come after you again,” Clarence said.

I said good night to everybody and went upstairs. Things had gone much easier than I thought they would with Dad, I thought, as I went in the bathroom and peed and brushed my teeth and washed my face.

Mom had turned the fan on in my bedroom so it was going to be pretty good for sleeping.

I got the light on and stripped down to my underwear and picked up a new issue of Imagination, which had a lead novel by one of my favorite writers, Dwight V. Swain. I started to lie down when the door eased open and Dad stuck his head in.

“All right if I come in and talk a minute?”

“Sure.” So it wasn’t over. And I knew what was coming.

He sat on the edge of the bed and looked at me. He’s not a very big guy but boy can he scowl.

“I’m going to ask you one question, one time only and if you ever told the truth in your life, it had better be this time. You understand?”

“I understand.”

“Hamblin said you had a lot of money on you. Twenties and fifties. Is that true?”

“Yessir.”

“Care to tell me just where the hell you found that kind of money?”

“Out by the old fairgrounds.” I’d been ready for that one, too.

“The fairgrounds?”

“Down by the crick. In a paper bag. Nearly three hundred dollars.”

“Is that the truth?”

I didn’t feel good about lying to Clarence but I didn’t have any choice. “That’s the truth.”

“That money should have been turned over to the police.”

“We tried. We went to the police station and asked for Sergeant McCorkindale but he went fishing for a couple of days.”

“There are other policemen there.”

“Yeah but then Cushing came in and started calling us girls and insulting us the way he usually does.”

“Cushing’s a jerk. You shouldn’t pay any attention to him.”

I shrugged. “I get tired of being insulted.”

“I’m going to speak to the chief about that. I’ll tell him I want Cushing to keep his tongue off my son.”

I shook my head. “That’ll just make it worse, Dad. Cushing’ll get me alone somewhere and then make fun of me for siccing you on the chief.”

He nodded. “I suppose you’re right.” He glanced around the room. “Where’s the rest of the money?”

“In my jeans pocket.”

“How much did you spend?”

“Fourteen bucks.”

“I’ll take the rest of it over to the chief in the morning.”

“Fine.”

He thought a minute and said, “I wish I could tell you that the next time Cushing says something to you I’d clean his clock for him.”

“I know, Dad.”

“I’m just not very tough.”

“Neither am I, Dad. I guess it runs in the family.”

“But guys like that usually get theirs in the end. One way or another, they get it.”

ii

The next morning around ten, I met Barney by the water fountain in the town square. As usual, a lot of the old men who play checkers all day long had pulled their green park benches up so they could be closer to the fountain. I’ve never figured that out. All these old-timers must have had a bad drought when they were kids because they sure do treat the fountain like somebody was going to sneak up and take it away.

The first thing Barney asked, his red hair brilliant in the hot August sun, his blue-and-white striped polo shirt already showing little patches of sweat here and there, was “Clarence ask you about the money?”

“Uh-huh.”

“You tell him what we talked about?”

“He was pretty cool about it, actually. I’m going to get a paper bag and stuff the rest of the money in it and give it to him. Roy won’t need it. He’s got plenty more.”

“So old man Hamblin called him then?” Barney said.

“Sure. Did you think he wouldn’t?”

“I wish we could go out there. To see Roy, I mean.”

“So do I.”

“I woke up in the middle of the night. I had this dream that Roy was dead.”

“He’s pretty tough. Did you read the newspaper this morning?” My dad subscribes to the Des Moines Register. Even though it’s pretty much a “Democratic rag” as he frequently calls it, it’s the only daily we can get in this part of the state.

“Yeah,” Barney said. “He really is a tough guy.”

Right there on the front page, in a big black blaring headline, it had said: State Police Seek Fugitive and just below this was a picture of Roy looking more like Mitch than ever. The story told of how Roy had been a war hero in Korea but that he’d drifted into crime with his older brother and how authorities suspected that they’d been responsible for at least ten bank robberies in the past six months.

“He’s a pretty cool guy, no doubt about it,” Barney said.

“Very cool guy,” I said.

“What’re we gonna do all day?”

“You wanna see a flick?”

“Which one?”

“Blackboard Jungle is back at the Rialto.”

“And there’s another one,” Barney said.

“What’s the other one?” In those days, the Rialto always played two and sometimes three movies. Of course, when they had three of them, you could bet that two of them were real dogs, usually something with Bing Crosby and a lot of nuns.

“It’s a western with Rory Calhoun.”

“I still say,” I said, “that Rory is a fake name.”

“You wanna go or not?”

I shrugged. “Guess there isn’t much else to do.”

So we killed two hours before going to the movies by riding our bikes all over town and seeing who was out and around. We saw Maynard the bully unloading peat moss at his uncle’s hardware store and just as we were passing him, Barney said, “I’ll give you a buck if you give him the finger.”

“I’ll give you two bucks if you give him the finger.”

But of course, wanting to live till sundown, neither one of us gave him the finger.

The Blackboard Jungle was still a pretty cool movie. The only problem was that I couldn’t see myself as any of those kids. They were really kind of whiny and immature. I mean I’d much rather be Glenn Ford than any of the kids. (For one thing, Glenn had made two movies with Rita Hayworth, who I still think is the most beautiful and sexy and in some strange way saddest woman I’ve ever seen, her sadness being a part of her beauty.)

And Rory Calhoun was pitiful as usual. He looks like a decent guy and I’m sure he is a decent guy but he sure can’t act. And when a fifteen-year-old kid from Somerton, Iowa, knows you can’t act then you really can’t act.

But it was air-conditioned and three rows ahead of us sat two really cute girls from Catholic school (Dad has never liked Catholics much but Mom says except for the Pope they’re very fine people) and there were some especially neat coming attractions for two new monster movies. (Later on, I’d learn that coming attractions are a lot like life — the buildup is usually better than the payoff.)

When we got out, the sunlight was blinding and my body felt like some invisible demon had taken this huge paint roller and covered me with glue.

We got on our bikes and started down the block. We stopped at the corner for a red light and that was when the black Plymouth sedan pulled up to the curb. The window was rolled down on the passenger side. Cushing had to lean way over. “Afternoon, ladies.”

Neither of us said anything.

“I want you to ride those bikes of yours over to the square and wait for me there. I’ll meet you by the drinking fountain.”

Even Cushing was fixated on the drinking fountain. “You girls understand me?”

We didn’t nod or anything but obviously we were going to do what he told us.

When he pulled away, Barney said, “I think we’re in trouble.”

“I think you’re right.”

“That jerk.”

We rode over to the square.

Since it was nearing suppertime, the square was pretty quiet, except for a couple of squirrels running around the edges of the wading pool where I used to go when I was five or so. But one day I saw some little kid’s turd floating in there and I got out of the water and I never got back in again. I mean never.

We sat on the bench next to the fountain. Cushing parked down by the railroad tracks so it took him a few minutes to get up here.

He had on a straw fedora and a baby blue — colored summer weight suit and his usual big mean grin.

He went over to the fountain and had himself a drink and then flicked some water from his hand (everybody gets wet at that fountain) and then he took out this long pack of Viceroys and knocked one out on the edge of his fist and then he put it in his mouth and lit it and said, “Where’d you girls get all that money?”

“Huh?” Barney said.

“Last night at Hamblin’s. Hamblin told me all about it.”

“Found it,” I said.

“Found it where?”

“Laying near the crick.”

“What crick?”

“Out by the fairgrounds.”

“It was just laying there?”

“In a sack.”

“What kind of sack?”

“Paper sack.”

“How much was in it?”

“About three hundred dollars.”

“Where is it now?”

“At my house. My dad made me make up the money I spent from this savings account he keeps for me. He’s gonna take it to the chief tonight.”

“You could be in a lot of trouble.”

“I know,” I said.

But I knew better than that and so did Cushing. The Chief and Dad are in Rotary and Lions and Odd Fellows and the Masons together and twice a year they go hunting and fishing and they’re real good friends and so I’d practically have to kill somebody before the chief did anything to me. I guess that’s what Roy meant when he said I was respectable.

Cushing dragged on his cigarette a few times and swatted flies with his big hand a few times and just kept staring at us.

“You know what I think?” he said.

“What?” I said.

“That there’s more money somewhere and that you’re just not telling your dad about it.”

The shadows were getting longer and a yellow passenger train was just pulling into the depot, furious with August heat and oil and power, and the people sat in the windows looking out at our little town, city people most likely, wondering how folks could live in such a small place. Once in a while I’d see really pretty girls in those windows and I’d have dreams about them for long days after the train had pulled out.

Cushing looked at Barney now. “How about you?”

“Huh?”

“You gonna tell me?”

“Tell you what?”

“About the rest of the money.”

“About the rest of what money?”

“About the rest of the money by the crick.”

“He wasn’t lying, Tom wasn’t, Detective Cushing. We gave everything back except what we spent at Hamblin’s.”

“How about what you spent at Henry’s supermarket?”

“How’d you know about that?” Barney said.

“When old man Hamblin told me about you being in there with all that crisp, green cash I just naturally got curious. I went to every store in town that was open last night and asked if you girls had been in there.”

I guess that while he was one real big loud-mouthed showboat, Cushing was also a pretty good detective.

“So how about it?” Cushing said.

He was back to looking at me.

“How about what?” I said.

“How about telling me where the rest of the money is.”

I don’t know why but something about the way he said that — the words he chose, I mean — seemed odd to me but right then I didn’t have time to think about it. I just had time to say, “There isn’t any rest of the money. There’s nearly three hundred dollars in a sack at my house that my dad is taking over to the chief’s tonight.”

“So that’s how it’s gonna be, huh, girls?”

“Honest, Detective Cushing,” Barney said, getting that kind of whiny tone in his voice. “Tom’s telling the truth.”

Cushing held his cigarette up high and then dropped it straight down to the wet ground around the drinking fountain. Like he was dropping a bomb or something. And then he ground it out with the toe of his snappy black-and-white wingtips.

And then he stared at us.

“This is gonna get real bad, girls. Real bad.”

“What is?” Barney said.

“This whole thing. With the money.”

“But—”

Cushing held up his hand. “The last time I had a run-in with you little girls, everything went your way. The chief wouldn’t press charges and the juvenile officers didn’t see your breaking into that place as any big deal. It’s going to be different this time. And I think you know what I’m talking about.”

And then he left. No more words. Just left.

When Cushing had vanished on the other side of the bandstand, Barney said, “You think he knows about Roy?”

“I don’t know. But I think he thinks there’s a lot more money and that we have it.”

“You gonna tell Clarence about Cushing?”

“No, because if I tell Clarence he’ll start asking me a lot more questions.”

We sat quiet for quite awhile, just watching the town at supper-time, merchants closing down, rolling up their striped awnings and turning out the display lights in the windows. Every summer seemed to get shorter the older I got, and at warm day’s end there’s a melancholy about everything, long purple shadows and mothers calling their kids in for dinner, and I felt this kind of sadness I can’t explain, even though I was only fifteen I felt real old and I sensed that in just a few summers more all of us would be gone, I mean everybody I passed on the street young and old alike and all the people I loved including Mom and Dad and Gram and Debbie, all gone to ground and utterly forgotten with nobody to remember how beautiful the wine-colored dusk was on a snow-covered January night or how people laughed at Jack Benny on the radio or how neat it was to get a brand-new Ace Double Book or how the bonfire glowed on Homecoming night out at the football stadium or how lonely I felt the night Emmy Chambers told me that she liked Bobby Criker better than me or how much fun it was to chase fireflies with a jar on a July night with your aunt and uncle from Minneapolis sitting on the screened-in porch watching or how one spring night walking by the river I was so overwhelmed by the moonsilver water and the scent of apple blossoms and the friendly yips and yaps of neighborhood dogs that I knew absolutely positively that there was a God or how I sometimes had really corny dreams about saving some girl I loved from a burning house or how beautiful and neat and clean Main Street looked after a night rain — all those people and thoughts and memories would be dead. Mom and Dad would likely go first, and then all their friends and relatives, and then me and all my friends and relatives, and then Debbie and all her friends and relatives, generations born and generations dying until there was absolutely no trace of us left, almost as if we hadn’t existed, absolutely nobody who could remember us at all, the people of Somerton with all their wishes and dreams and desires and fears would be at best a rotted skeleton or two to be dug up three thousand years hence and looked at and shrugged over and then forgotten utterly once again.

“You all right?”

Barney brought me back. “I’m fine,” I said. But I wasn’t. I never am when I start thinking of eternity that way.

“What time we going out to see Roy?”

“How about seven?”

“Meet you by the tracks?”

“Fine. But let’s walk.”

“OK by me.”

“I’ll stop by Henry’s and pick up Roy’s stuff and meet you then.” I rode home. Douglas Edwards and the CBS News was on. Mom was serving the first sweet corn of the year along with broccoli and Jell-O. Usually Mom doesn’t let us eat in front of the TV — she’d read a piece in Parents magazine about how the American family was going to hell in a handbasket largely because of TV and rock and roll — but the heat evidently changed her mind for tonight at least, the living room being a lot cooler than the family room.

I sat beside Debbie on the couch. We both had metal TV trays which were kind of wobbly. She said, “It’s hard to eat this corn with that tooth gone, Mom.”

Which was when I figured out why she’d looked so strange when I’d come in. One of her front teeth was missing. In case I forgot to mention it, she’s eight.

“Just do your best, honey,” which is what Mom usually said to stuff like that.

“Let’s see,” I said.

Debbie put her little face with the big thick glasses she had to wear up for me to see. There was a hole in the top row.

“You still have the tooth?”

“Upstairs.”

“Be sure and put it under your pillow.”

“How much do you think he’ll leave this time?”

“Maybe fifty cents.”

“Boy!”

Last time she lost a tooth, Dad put a quarter under her pillow while she was asleep, then I went in my room and took a quarter from my Roy Rogers savings bank (I never got around to throwing things away, I guess) and then slipped it under her pillow, too.

We went back to eating. After Douglas Edwards, the local news came on which of course set Dad off griping about how every single person in the news business was a Democrat if not a Communist. Dad had never forgiven the press for what they did — or what he said they did, anyway — to his idol Robert Taft. You know, when Ike “stole” the Republican nomination from him.

The phone rang. Mom, who was on her way to the kitchen, got it and said, “For you, Tom.”

“Guess who’s been cruising past my house?” Barney said. “Who?”

“Who do you think? Cushing.”

“Cushing? You sure?”

“Positive.”

“When you leave, go out the back door. And then go down the alley. I’ll meet you at our old clubhouse.”

“Maybe he’ll start cruising past your house, too.”

“I’ll see you in twenty minutes.”

When I went back into the living room, a commercial was on so Dad was talking to everybody. “I took that money over to the chief and told him how you found it out by the crick and all. He wants you to stop in in the next couple days and talk to him.”

“Is he mad?”

“Not mad but kinda disappointed, I think. That you didn’t turn it in as soon as you found it. He said something I didn’t even think about.”

“Like what?”

“Like about that bank robber. The FBI thinks he’s up in the northern part of the state but now the chief thinks maybe he’s around here somewhere, the way you found that money and all. Anyway, if you’d brought the money in right away, the chief could’ve put some men on looking for the robber. Now the guy’s probably long gone.”

I made a quick pit stop upstairs and in five minutes was ready to go.

In the kitchen, I worked fast. I grabbed a paper sack from a drawer and dropped an apple in it, and then followed the apple with two slices of wheat bread, three slices of summer sausage, two bottles of Pepsi, a slice of Mom’s chocolate cake with white frosting that I wrapped in wax paper, and some carrot sticks that Mom always kept in this plastic bowl. I didn’t have to worry about them hearing me because the window air-conditioner sounded like a B-52 but I didn’t want Mom to wander out in the kitchen and see me loading up and then start asking all these questions.

I went out the back way, down the three back porch steps, under the clotheslines, past the dog house, along the row of garbage cans next to the small white garage whose shingles smelled as if they’d melted some in the heat, and out into the narrow gravel chalk-dust alley where I used to be Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, Allan “Rocky” Lane and Lash LaRue, sometimes all on the same day.

It took me twenty minutes to get to the clubhouse, which was this long-abandoned garage on the downwind side of the city dump which, as you might think, did not smell exactly wonderful during a windless sundown of eighty-six degrees. I’d smoked my first cigarette in this garage, and then got so sick that I couldn’t get out of bed for a day, and got my first glimpse of a Playboy foldout which Barney’s sixteen-year-old cousin Stan had copped from his dad’s bureau drawer.

The clubhouse resembled this old sagging weatherworn outhouse in this small field of burned grass and empty tin cans and jagged broken pop bottles.

Barney was inside, squatted over in a shadowy corner with a bottle of Pepsi and a Lucky Strike. The last of the dusty sunlight peeped through the spaces between the boards. I’d brought along my old Boy Scout flashlight, which is the color a baby shits when he’s got the trots, and I shined it all over the dirt floor. About the only thing to see were a couple of squirming night crawlers who looked like my light had just woken them up.

“You see Cushing?” Barney said.

“Huh-uh.”

“I didn’t, either.”

I asked him for a cigarette and when I got it going, I told him what the chief had said, about the found money maybe belonging to the bank robber.

“No wonder Cushing’s following us,” Barney said.

“He probably thinks we can lead him to the robbery money.”

“And to the robber. Wouldn’t he get some kind of award?”

“Reward, Barney. You always say that. It’s reward.”

“Up yours.”

“Spoken like a truly mature person.”

Barney said, “How we gonna get to Roy without Cushing finding out?”

“We’ll just have to be careful.”

He poked the sack. “You swipe him some pretty good stuff?”

“He’s probably so hungry he’d eat shoe leather.”

“You wanna go?”

“Let’s look for Cushing first.”

One nice thing about the clubhouse, you’ve got spy holes all over the place. I wish my house had a few spy holes, too. You never know when they’ll come in handy.

Barney took one wall and I took the other. We both looked for any sign of Cushing’s car. But there was just blanched prairie and the burning malodorous city dump and small frame houses on this particular edge of town.

So we went. We cut wide around the dump, Barney saying what he always said (“I’ll bet there’s a lot of valuable stuff in there if you just had the time to look through it all”) and then saw the railroad tracks gleaming in the last few minutes of fiery sunlight.

All that separated us from the tracks was a wide area of dusty gravel. We were just walking over to it when Barney said, “Oh, God! Look!”

And there, maybe three hundred yards behind us, came Cushing’s unmarked police car.

“What’ll we do?” Barney said.

“Just calm down.”

“Huh?”

“Just calm down, Barney, or he’ll know something’s wrong for sure. Just keep walking. But instead of turning up toward the tracks, we’ll turn the other way to the crick.”

Cushing’s tires made a lot of slow crunching noise on the gravel.

He got alongside us, doing maybe five, six miles an hour, and said, “How’re my little girl friends doing tonight?” He had on dark shades and he grinned like a killer.

We didn’t say anything. We just kept walking toward the hill that would eventually slope down to the crick. There was a pussy willow tree there that gave a lot of shade during the day.

“You girls stop right there. I want to talk to you.”

I heard him jerk on his emergency brake and then get out of the car. You could smell the gas and oil and heat of the motor.

He walked over in front of us. We’d stopped walking, just like he’d told us to.

“The sack. What’s in it?”

“Nothing special,” I said. Then, “We’re going hiking tonight so we brought some food for a snack.” I was getting so good at this lying business that I was starting to scare myself.

He took the sack, opened it and then shoved his hand way down inside it. I thought of the time Johnny Worchester did that with this old sack he’d found near the crick one day and this giant milk snake was coiled up inside. Legend has it that Johnny filled his pants right on the spot.

Cushing found the piece of chocolate cake. “Look here what I found.” He grinned. “I always heard that your mom was a real fine cook, Tom.”

“She is.”

“Why don’t I find out for myself and try this piece of cake?”

“That isn’t yours, Cushing, it’s mine.”

“That’s right, darling, it is your cake, isn’t it?” At which point he took the cake and squeezed it in his fist, squishing and scrunching till there would be no way to separate the cake from the waxed paper. Now it was just this little brown ball.

He threw the cake back into the sack and then dropped the sack at my feet. “That story of yours is bullshit,” he said.

“What story?” I said.

“About finding that money by the crick.”

“That’s where we found it,” I said.

“You know where the rest of that money is, don’t you?”

“Rest of what money?” Barney said.

“Rest of the bank robbery money, that’s what money,” Cushing said. “That’s where you little girls are going tonight, isn’t it? To get some more of that money?”

“We’re going for a hike,” Barney said.

“To Hampton Hill,” I said.

“Watch the stars,” Barney said.

“Have a little snack,” I said.

We were pissing him off and it was great. He just stood there, this bully-boy cop with his bully-boy gun and his bully-boy Hollywood shades, and he knew we were lying to him and there wasn’t a goddamn thing he could do about it.

“You girls have yourselves a real nice time tonight,” he said.

And right away I knew something was wrong, the sly way he said it.

“I’ll see you later.”

And then he turned around and walked back to his car and got in and drove away.

I watched his tail lights flare as he turned the corner, then go out of sight behind the Solar Oil Company depot.

Gone. Cushing was gone. And he shouldn’t have been. Not that fast anyway. Not without ragging us a lot more than he did.

“Pretty cool the way you stood up to him,” Barney said. “Maybe he’ll leave us alone now.”

“Barney, he’s up to something.”

“Up to what?”

“I don’t know and that’s what scares me.”

“Maybe he’ll go talk to Clarence.”

“Nah. He wouldn’t do that. He’s up to something else.”

We walked and night lifted us up gently in the palm of its dark hand. The tracks thrummed again with the energy of distant trains and the jays and wrens and ravens sang their birdy asses off. It was cooler now, and so the night smelled not just of heat but of flowers and mown grass and fast chill creek water.

We crossed the tracks and jumped over the water and went up the slope to the warehouse that sat silent all in deep shadow and moonlight.

I felt nervous about everything but I couldn’t exactly say why so I just kept walking to the warehouse, gripping the sack tighter.

We went in through the front window the way we had last night and then walked the length of the floor to the closet.

Roy wasn’t there. I shined my Boy Scout flashlight all over the inside. There was no sign of him. Everything was gone except for two stubbed-out cigarette butts and dried red spots on the dirty, tiled floor. No doubt what the red spots were. Everything else he’d taken with him. Leaving no traces made sense, I thought. That way the cops would never know he’d even been here.

But it all bothered me. Roy hadn’t looked too good last night, certainly not good enough to travel. Not very far anyway.

And then Barney said, “Listen.”

I didn’t hear it at first, not with all the electricity humming in the power lines above us and the frogs by the creek and an airplane somewhere up by the round golden moon.

But then I heard it.

Some faint noise at the front of the building.

Barney wasn’t quite inside the closet. Now he peeked his head out the door.

“See anything?” I whispered.

He shook his head.

We were getting spooked was all, I thought. Came in here and found Roy gone. No wonder we were getting spooked.

And then I heard it again. Some faint scuffing sound somewhere at the front of the building.

“In here,” I whispered, pulling him into the closet.

We waited in the darkness. Our breaths came in huge ragged gasps. We smelled of night and heat and sweat. Faintly, I could smell the food we’d brought Roy last night.

The scuffing sound came closer.

By now I knew what it was. Somebody walking across the floor, trying to be quiet.

Then somebody said, voice echoing in the darkness of the empty warehouse, “You girls having fun in there?”

“Shit,” I said to myself.

Cushing had followed us.

We didn’t make a big deal of it. I mean we didn’t put our hands up or anything. We just walked out and stood in this little patch of moonlight with all the rat droppings crunching beneath our feet and then Cushing just came out of the shadows and said, “You girls are pretty easy to track. All I had to do was park my car on the other side of the oil depot and give you a few minutes and then start following you.”

He pointed to the left cuff of his buff blue summer suit. The cuff was all muddy. “Except I took a wrong step when I got to the crick.” He smiled. “I should send you little ladies the cleaning bill.”

“How come you followed us?” Barney said.

“No more of your bullshit, OK?” Cushing said. “I’m sick and fucking tired of your bullshit. When I ask you a question this time, I want a straight fucking answer or there’ll be hell to pay. You two little girls understand me?”

He’d just exploded like that, no warning at all. He was a scary guy, no doubt about it.

“Now,” he said, “where’s Roy Danton?”

“Who’s Roy Danton?” I said.

He took one step forward and slapped me so hard I couldn’t see for maybe a minute.

The whole side of my face felt hot and numb and I couldn’t get rid of the stars flashing in my eyes.

“Where is Roy Danton?”

I wasn’t sure I could do it but I wanted to try. I opened my mouth, eager to see what I’d say next. “I don’t know any Roy Danton.”

Before he could slap me again, Barney jumped in between us. “Leave him alone!”

This time he grabbed Barney and shoved him all the way back into the closet where he bounced off the back wall and dropped to the floor. Then he grabbed me and started slapping again. Two, three times, hard vicious slaps. I saw more stars. I tried hitting back and kicking back but he was too big and too skilled, like some mutant older brother.

“That’s what this bag was for, wasn’t it?” he said. “You were bringing Danton some food.”

He’d let me go now and I started backing up to the closet.

Cushing took a flashlight from his jacket, a small silver one like Doc Anderson uses when he wants you to say Ahhh and look at your tonsils, and then he pushed past me and went into the closet.

All I kept thinking of were the dried drops of blood on the floor.

Cushing looked up and down, his flashlight like a giant firefly in the darkness, and Barney just sat on the floor and watched him and rubbed the back of his head where it had collided with the wall.

I stood inside the door, to the right of Cushing, and that was how I saw the water drop from the ceiling to the top of Barney’s head. Barney reached up and patted his head and then brought his finger away. There was a dark smear on the back of his fingers.

I looked up. It wasn’t water dripping from the ceiling. It was blood. And I had a pretty good idea whose blood it was, too.

A few seconds later, Cushing found the blood from yesterday. He kept his light pointed down to the floor, right on it.

He got down on his haunches for a closer look.

“How bad was his wound?” he said.

“Whose wound?” Barney said.

For a moment, Cushing looked as if he was going to hit Barney again.

“Do you little girls have any idea how much trouble you’re in?”

We didn’t say anything.

“This means Wayland, the juvenile detention home. You know the kind of boys you’ll meet in that home? Did you hear about the stabbing they had there last year? Two kids just about your age stabbed to death in their sleep? And Wayland’s just where you’ll be going once I tell the chief that you’ve been helping that bank robber hide out.”

And right then another drop of blood fell. I saw Barney’s head jerk up and his eyes scan the ceiling and his hand go up and touch his scalp again.

Cushing had been watching me, not Barney.

“Your old man won’t be able to help you out of this one, believe me,” he said. “And neither will the chief, even if he wants to, which he probably won’t.”

Barney was staring at me and pointing to his head.

“You’ve only got one choice,” Cushing droned on. “And that’s to tell me the truth. Tell me everything that happened. And then tell me where he was going when he left here.”

“Milwaukee,” I said.

“Milwaukee?”

“He knows people there and when he left this morning, that’s where he was headed.”

“He left this morning?”

“Right.”

“What time?”

“Just about dawn. That’s what he said he’d do anyway.”

The lies were coming so good and so quick I was scaring myself again.

“If he left this morning, how come you came out here tonight?”

“He said he’d leave some money for us,” Barney said.

He was getting good at it, too.

“Did he?”

“No,” Barney said, making himself look real dejected.

Cushing smiled. “That’s where you girls are naive. Trusting a bank robber like that.”

We were silent.

“Milwaukee,” Cushing said again. “He say who he knew there?”

“Some name. I don’t remember exactly,” I said.

“Try.”

“John,” I said.

“I thought it was Don,” Barney said.

“John or Don or something like that,” I said.

“John or Don or something like that, huh?” Cushing said, and then backhanded me hard enough to push me all the way across the closet floor. I banged my head against the back wall just the way Barney had.

He turned off the light. “You little girls have yourselves a real nice hike.”

And then he left.

He went out of the closet and back across the wide, moonlit floor and out the front window.

We just sat there, frozen, listening to his footsteps recede, listening to him become just one more faint noise in the night.

“Shit,” Barney said.

I got my Boy Scout flashlight out and aimed it up at one of the ceiling tiles, which were very wide and very dark, which was why the dripping blood hadn’t shown.

“Roy?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Be careful. This may be a trick. He may be right outside. One of you boys go watch for him, all right?”

“I’ll go watch,” Barney said.

It took Roy several minutes to get down. He was dirty and sweaty and he looked even weaker than he had yesterday. He clutched his satchel of bank money tight against his wound. Some of his blood was smeared on the satchel.

In case you’re wondering how he got up and down, he had a rope tied to a paint-splattered aluminum stepladder he’d found. After he used the ladder to climb up to the beams above the ceiling panels, he pulled the ladder up behind him.

“I wondered if you boys could keep our little secret so I thought I’d better get up there in case the law came looking for me,” he said, as he started in on the food.

He didn’t eat much and that’s one way I knew he was worse than he’d been last night. When you’re real sick, you lose your appetite. He was in a lot of pain. Every few seconds a spasm would come and make him groan.

When he was done trying to eat, he took the pack of Chesterfields Barney had stolen and put one in his mouth.

He took out his Zippo. He got the lighter to his cigarette but when he tried to flick the spark up—

The lighter tumbled from his hands, a dim flash of metal in the weak dusty beam of my flashlight. The lighter made a metallic chinking sound when it hit the floor.

I picked it up right away and lit his Chesterfield for him.

“Thanks,” he said, weakly.

Pretty soon, he was unconscious again and as I sat there staring at him in the beam of my flashlight, I saw that even when he was sleeping he looked a lot like Mitch.

I picked up the flashlight and moved the beam real close to his wound and got a good look at it. The pussy stuff covered the blood now like an oil slick. His whole body trembled. The smell was awful.

I knew what I was seeing, of course. I was seeing a man in the final stages of his life. I felt sorry as hell for him.

“Barney?” I said.

A moment later he was in the doorway. “Look at him.”

“God, he looks terrible.”

“You know what we have to do?”

“Yeah. How long you think he’s got?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “But not long if we don’t get an ambulance and a doctor real soon.”

We took a last look at Roy. He just sat there. His body was still twitching, his right leg especially. Even his eyelids, closed in sleep, twitched a little.

Then we got out of there.

We were going to get Roy some help and right then we didn’t think of him having to stand trial or going to prison or anything. We just wanted him to live.

We were a few hundred yards from the warehouse when the two shots rang out somewhere behind us in the prairie night.

And then I was running, running faster than I ever had in my life, down to the creek and across the grassy flat to the warehouse, and then straight up to the warehouse window. Barney was right behind me.

By the time I reached the closet, my lungs were heaving so hard I thought I might throw up.

Then I knelt next to Roy and played the flashlight over his face and chest. Touched the artery on his neck. Touched the artery in his wrist.

“He’s dead, isn’t he?” Barney said.

“Yeah.”

“Sonofabitch. Money’s gone, too.”

I looked. He was right. The money satchel was gone.

I brought the light down Roy’s torso, to see where he’d been shot. The first wound had been in his side. This one was right in his chest. There was a tiny black hole right in the center of this huge blooming flower of blood.

I shone the light to the floor where his right hand lay turned up, his gun grasped in his fingers.

I thought of him being unconscious when we left, of him being so weak that he couldn’t hold his lighter up.

There was no way he’d come to and grabbed his gun. Even a dumb teenager like me could figure out what had happened here.

“Cushing killed him in cold blood and then put that gun in Roy’s hand,” I said.

“And took the money.”

“And took the money.”

I guess until then the whole thing had been an adventure. When you grow up in a small town like Somerton, you keep hoping that something really remarkable will happen to you. And it sure did for us, finding Roy and all, and bringing him food and helping him hide out.

But now it was different. Now it was scary. One day outside one of the downtown taverns I saw two drunks get into it so viciously that one bit a piece of an ear off the other. Nobody could seem to get them apart. Finally, the tavern owner had to get out a hose and spray them down the way he would have two angry dogs. I remember thinking that for all the movie violence I’d seen, I really didn’t know much about the real thing — the way men beat on each other with a frenzy and a relish that makes me sick inside.

The way Roy had been killed made me sick inside. The way Cushing made me sick inside.

“What’re we gonna do?” Barney said.

“Tell the chief.”

“Everything?”

“Everything.”

Barney and I took one last look at Roy, bloody and waxen and dead, propped up sad and awkward against the wall. There was just this silence, a deeper silence than I’d ever heard before, and then I figured out what I was listening to — eternity. That’s what I was hearing, something I’d always heard about but never heard for myself before. Eternity.

iii

On the way in, Barney and I decided to tell our dads first — and let them tell the chief. It would be better that way, at least for us, even though telling Clarence and George wasn’t going to be easy.

There was a fight on TV when I reached the front porch. Clarence was a boxing fanatic. He sat there in those purple Bermudas of his and whaled away at empty air just like he was Marciano whaling away at an opponent. He liked Negro boxers fine, especially if they reminded him in any way of Joe Louis, whom he inevitably called “poor Joe Louis,” but for some reason he hated Mexican fighters. Maybe a Mexican beat him up once or something.

Anyway, that was the scene when I got home that night, Clarence alone in the living room in his purple Bermudas throwing lefts and rights and jumping up and down in his recliner and grunting and groaning loud enough to make the family cat look real spooked. Mom and Debbie were long gone, of course. They knew better than to watch Clarence at the fights.

Anyway, Clarence in his purple Bermuda shorts and throwing punches with great and noisy abandon — he turned and looked at me and said—

“Somethin’ wrong, son?”

“I need to talk to you, Dad.”

“Son, there’s a fight on.”

“I know there’s a fight on.”

“It’s Hurricane Jackson. He’s getting ready to throw his bolo punch.”

“Dad—”

His attention roamed back to the screen where two Negroes were pounding on each other.

“Dad—”

Glancing over at me desperately: “Son, is it anything that can wait?”

“No, Dad, I’m sorry but it can’t.”

“Is this real serious or something?”

“Real serious, Dad.”

“You want me to get your mom?”

“No, Dad. I just want to talk to you. Alone.”

“Then let’s go out to the kitchen. I need a beer.”

So we went out to the kitchen and sat down and—

He had a beer and I had a Pepsi.

“So, son, what is it?” Clarence said as we sat in the kitchen where it was at least ten degrees hotter than the living room. The kitchen was great in the winter but in the summer it was a sweat box with only one tiny window for a breeze.

“You know that money I told you I found?” I said.

“Uh-huh.”

“I didn’t find it. Somebody gave it to me.”

“Gave it to you? Who gave it to you?”

So I told him. Every single bit of it, right up to tonight where we left Roy dead in the warehouse.

“And Cushing killed him?”

“Yessir.”

“And it wasn’t self-defense, you don’t think?”

“Nosir, Roy couldn’t even hold up his lighter a few minutes earlier.”

“So Cushing murdered him in cold blood?”

“Yessir.”

“And then took the money?”

“Yessir.”

“You don’t have any doubt about that?”

“Nosir.”

He pawed sweat from his face. “You’re going to be in a lot of trouble, son.”

“Yessir.”

“Why the hell’d you help out a bank robber, anyway? And don’t tell me it was because he looked like Robert Mitchum. That’s the craziest goddamn thing I’ve ever heard of.” He shook his head. “Jesus, Mary and Joseph, because he looked like fucking Mitch?”

Until that very moment in my young life, I had never heard Clarence use the F word. And issuing from his lips, it sounded both more vile and more silly than it ever had before.

“Chief Pike’ll probably bring charges against both you and Barney.”

“I know.”

“This is going to be pretty embarrassing at the Rotary.”

“I’m sorry, Dad.”

“A goddamn bank robber. Haven’t I raised you better than that?”

“Yessir.”

And then we heard the first sirens, loud and near on the hot dark night.

“They’re probably going to get the body.”

“Yessir.”

He swigged more beer. “You let me go talk to Pike first. I’ll tell him everything and then I’ll call and have you come down.”

“All right.”

“He won’t be happy when I tell him about Cushing. He’s got a blind spot for that guy. Thinks he walks on water. I guess it’s because his own son died in that tractor accident awhile back and Cushing sort of fills the void. And Cushing’s own folks died in that car accident when he was ten.”

“Yessir.”

He stood up. “I’m going to go get ready. Put on a clean shirt and all.”

“Yessir.”

“I’m also going to tell your mother.”

I nodded.

He stood looking at me for a long time in silence then he shook his head and left the kitchen.

I went into the living room. I could feel this awful sadness come over me. I just kept thinking of Roy and how sad and frail he looked when he dropped the lighter because he’d been too sick to hold it up—

And right then I became aware of the lighter in my pocket. I dug it out and then turned on the floor lamp and held the lighter up to the round yellow bulb.

It was Roy’s, the Zippo with the skull and crossbones designed into the silver surface. I must have stuck it in my pocket after I lit his cigarette. I shoved it back in my pocket. I wasn’t going to mention it to anybody. It was something I intended to keep.

Clarence came down with Mom right behind him. They looked the way they usually do at funerals, grim in a very formal way. Clarence had on a short-sleeved white shirt and a dark pair of pants. He reeked of Old Spice. He walked over to me and said, “I’ll call you in a little while.”

I nodded.

Clarence went over and gave Mom a quick small peck on the cheek and then went out, the screen door banging behind him.

Mom went over and sat primly on the edge of the couch. I could tell she wanted to talk. I could also tell she didn’t know what to say.

After a time, she cleared her throat and said, “You’ve hurt your father very deeply.”

“I know.”

“He has to maintain a certain reputation in this town.”

“I know.”

“And he’s worried that you might—”

“I know what he’s worried about, Mom. That I might have to go to reform school.”

And then she broke into tears and in the light from the floor lamp she looked suddenly old and haggard and even more frail than Roy had there at the last, and so I went over to her and took her in my arms and held her and just let her cry the way Clarence would have in this circumstance. There really wasn’t much else I could do.

Every few minutes while we waited, I’d touch the lighter and think of Roy dying and I’d get sad all over again. I’d never see him or hear him again. That’s the strange part. How people just vanish from your life like that. Forever.

Just after eleven, the phone rang. Mom insisted on getting it.

After she spoke a few words standing next to the stairway, I knew she was talking to Clarence.

She still looked pretty old, as if some kind of age transformation had taken place just in the last hour and a half.

Then she said, “Your father wants to speak with you,” and held the phone out to me.

Clarence said, “You’d better get your butt over here fast. This isn’t turning out the way I thought.”

“I’m not sure what that means.”

“I can’t explain right now, son. But you get over here to the police station right now.”

“How about Barney?”

“You let Barney’s folks worry about Barney. Right now my only concern is you.”

“Yessir.”

This late at night, the old town was pretty neat. Almost nothing moved, all the cars were parked, all the people were inside, and the streetlight shadows gave everything the texture and depth of a very gentle painting of a small town all asleep.

I rode my bike through the empty town square and down the block past all the storefronts where the mannequins watched me go. Only the taverns were open, big hot smoky machines grinding out chilly neon light and jukebox wisdom and hard desperate laughter. As I went by I smelled yeasty beer and dirty cigars.

There was a Channel 3 station wagon parked in the No Parking space in front of the police station. Up on the top of the steps stood Chief Pike and Detective Cushing being interviewed by a whole gaggle of reporters. Everything was a blaze of light and a click and clack of still cameras and motion picture cameras. The mayor was there and all the city council and maybe six local gendarmes in uniform and—

And Barney.

He stood right between Pike and Cushing.

And as I dropped my bike on the sidewalk and started walking toward the front of the station, Barney started talking into this microphone this reporter had put in his face.

“How does it feel to be a hero, Barney?”

A hero? What the hell was going on here? All I could think of was how strange Clarence had sounded on the telephone, how he’d said, “This isn’t turning out the way I thought.”

And then Chief Pike saw me and shouted, “Look! There’s our other hero now!”

Fifty faces turned to look at me. Me — the most self-conscious guy I knew. Even walking up in front of a class to read a paper makes me sick to my stomach. All those eyes staring, staring — and right at me.

And the reporters deserted Pike and Cushing and Barney and came running down the stairs toward me.

I wasn’t sure what to do. I wanted to run but I knew I’d better not do that.

“How does it feel to be a hero?” asked this guy in a bow tie and straw hat.

“I’m afraid I—” I started to say.

Flashbulbs went nova in my face. I was blinded.

“No need to be modest,” another reporter said. “Detective Cushing told us all about it. How you and Barney called him and told him where to find Roy Danton. You boys are heroes!”

“Too bad Detective Cushing didn’t find the money, though,” said a third reporter.

“Danton hid it somewhere around here, you can be sure of that,” an auxiliary cop named Michaelson said. He was one of Cushing’s friends, or liked to pretend he was anyway. But mostly he was a fat, pushy jerk.

My sight was starting to come back.

I raised my eyes and looked up the stairs to Barney. He just shrugged, seeming just as confused about all this as I was.

“Even without the money, though,” the reporter with the bow tie said, “you boys’ll get some kind of reward. You just wait and see.”

And then I felt an arm slide around my shoulder and when I turned my head I saw Clarence.

“How does that boy of yours make you feel?” asked a reporter.

“Proud. Darned proud.”

“Let’s get a picture of you two just like that,” said a photographer.

Then they all started snapping pictures.

And then somebody had the notion of me and Clarence going up the steps for a group shot. And after the group shot—

“How about you two boys standing over there on either side of Detective Cushing? We’ll get a good shot of just you three.”

It was all kind of like a movie, real and unreal at the same time, especially the part where Barney and I stood on the step beneath Cushing so he could put his hands on our shoulders.

“That’s great! Just great!” cried the photographer. “Now if I could just get you boys to smile a little!”

Cushing dug his hands into our shoulders and leaned down and whispered, “I saved you two little assholes from going to reform school. So smile!”

So we smiled. Or tried to, anyway, but right now all I could think about was what a clever sonofabitch Cushing was, one hell of a lot cleverer than I ever would have thought.

And when the reporters were through with us they concentrated on Cushing alone. They sounded like high school girls cooing over Elvis.

“Were you scared going into that dark warehouse when you knew somebody like Roy Danton was in there?”

“Well, scared, sure, but that’s what the folks in this community pay me to do.”

“How’d you finally bag him, Detective Cushing?”

Another self-effacing shrug. “Just kind of snuck up on the closet where my two good friends Tom and Barney told me he’d be. Then I just told him that I was giving him twenty-five seconds to come out with his hands above his head or I’d be coming in.”

“He say anything to that?”

Boyish grin. “Well, yes, he did say something to that but it sure isn’t something I could repeat here.”

“Then what happened?”

“Well, a policeman’s only as good as his word. I’d warned him that I’d be coming in and that’s just what I did. I kicked the door open and went in.”

“Is that when he shot at you?”

He nodded. “One shot was all he had time to get off. That’s when I killed him.”

Barney and Clarence and I stood there and watched this Academy Award performance and I’m sure we were all thinking the same thing. Good ol’ Cushing was going to have it every which way he wanted it. He’d killed a man in cold blood and he’d stolen nearly $50,000 in cash yet he was being treated as a hero.

And the only two people who could testify against him couldn’t say a word because by now nobody would believe them. They were all running after Cushing like kids after a Fourth of July float.

I couldn’t take any more. I just kept thinking of Roy and how eternity had talked back to me. I said to Clarence, “I’m going home.”

I was about to say something else when people started turning their heads to the old white Buick ambulance slowly making its way around the far edge of the town square.

It was headed to the hospital. With Roy inside.

If Cushing saw it, he didn’t let on. He still stood at the top of the stairs, showing his gun to reporters and letting them get close-ups of it. The chief just walked around shaking everybody’s hand as if Cushing had given birth to a fifteen-pound baby or something. Just then Cushing did look up. He stared right at me. Ordinarily, what I saw in his eyes would have frightened me. But right now I didn’t care. Right now all I could think about was Roy.

He held my gaze for a long time, giving me a full dose of his threatening look. Then he went back to a reporter who was snapping yet another picture.

More people kept coming. By now all the parking spaces around the square had been taken up. Some people didn’t even seem to know what was going on. They’d just heard the noise and seen the lights and drifted over from their humid summer beds. It all reminded me of the scene in Invasion of the Body Snatchers where all the people in town come to the square so they can be made into pod people. I guess I was pissed off enough at the moment to think of Somerton that way — exulting in Detective Cushing’s bravery without questioning it for a moment. Or wondering how it was that an already badly wounded man had needed to be shot to death. No, they didn’t know these things but in their frenzy to have a hero, they wouldn’t listen to them, either, even if I’d brought them up.

I went down to my bike and rode home.

Mom and Debbie were up in the living room. I went over and kissed them good night and started up the stairs. “Aren’t you going to tell me what happened?” Mom asked.

“Dad’ll tell you,” I said. “I just really don’t want to talk.”

In my room, I turned off the lights and sat next to the window and smoked a Lucky. This way I could blow the smoke out the screen. Mom was less likely to notice the smell.

I used Roy’s lighter to get my cigarette going and then I just sat there a long time, three or four cigarettes long, and thought of how much I hated Cushing. I could still see him smiling for the cameras. I could still see him pointing the gun dramatically for the reporters.

I Shot Jesse James. There was a film made with that title once, a good film as I remembered it, and Cushing was just as much of a fink as Bob Ford — the man who shot Jesse in the back — had ever been.

Roy hadn’t needed to die. Hell, he’d been unconscious. But if he’d lived, he would have been able to tell Chief Pike that Detective Cushing had stolen the money.

Finally, I went to bed. I tried to stop thinking about Cushing by thinking about the new girl everybody said was coming to school this fall. I’d always had this dream that this really elegant girl, like Audrey Hepburn say, would come to our school from some real sheltered background, a convent or something like that, and she wouldn’t judge boys by the standards the other girls used — good looks or money or status or muscles — she’d just judge them by what was in their hearts. And so guess who the new girl, at least in my dreams, always fell madly in love with? Right.

I lay there a long time that night thinking about the new girl.

A long time later, the three of them came up and went to sleep. I waited until I thought it was safe and then I went into Debbie’s room and put a silver dollar beneath her pillow. She snored in a cute little way and muttered something far below my ability to hear. I kissed her on the forehead and went back to my room, done with my job as Tooth Fairy.

When I got up in the morning, Clarence was there.

Usually, Clarence would have been at work by now but this morning he’d waited for me.

I had Wheaties and wheat toast and orange juice (or “Or” as Debbie called it) and a vitamin and half a cup of coffee. I felt exhausted. Coffee helped sometimes.

“The governor’s coming next Tuesday.”

“The governor?” I said.

“The governor,” Clarence said. “There’s going to be a picnic for you and Barney and Cushing in the square and then the governor’s going to give you each some kind of award.”

“You know Cushing’s got the money?”

“I know.”

“And you know he killed Roy in cold blood?”

“I know.”

“And you’re not mad?”

“Son,” he said, glancing up at Mom. “Son, your mother and I had a good long talk last night.”

Whenever Clarence and Mom had a “good long talk” about anything, it always meant that I would have to do something I didn’t want to.

“More Wheaties, hon?” Mom said.

I shook my head.

“We think you should go along with everything, Tom,” Clarence said.

Mom came over and put her hands on my shoulders. “If Cushing had told the truth, you’d be in a lot of trouble, dear. A lot of trouble. This way—”

“This way, Cushing gets away with murder and gets to keep all the money!” I pushed back from the table and stood up, looking at them in disbelief and disgust.

“You aren’t any better than Cushing! You’re willing to go along with lies, too!”

“Tom, listen—” Clarence started to say.

But I was already on the far side of the banging screen door off the kitchen.

I got on my bike and rode over to Barney’s. About halfway there I started feeling badly about yelling at my folks the way I had. They weren’t perfect, true, but then I’d heard rumors to the effect that I wasn’t perfect, either. Hard as that was to believe.

People always call Barney’s area “the poor section” but I actually like it better than where we live. I guess it’s the bluffs, all the woodsy hills that run right up to the backyards of most of the houses. Of course, the houses themselves aren’t the best — old frame jobbies long in need of paint and roof shingles and uncracked window glass. But I would happily have traded our fancy new carport for just one of those bluffs.

Barney sat on the porch. He wasn’t reading or eating. He was just staring.

When he saw me, he said, “You hear about the governor?”

“Yeah.”

“God.”

“Yeah.”

“I’ll bet Cushing buys a new suit.”

“I’ll bet he does, too.”

I went up and sat next to him on the porch.

“You tell George the truth yet?” I said. Obviously, he hadn’t told his father the truth last night.

“Not yet.”

“When you going to?”

Barney didn’t say anything for a long time. We just watched the traffic.

“I’ve been thinking,” Barney said.

“About what?”

“About maybe not telling George the truth.”

“What?”

He looked over at me. “Who’d believe us, anyway?”

“That’s not the point.”

“Sure it’s the point. My mom says the governor’s probably going to give us a reward or something. Wouldn’t you like to get a reward?”

“Not this way. God, Barney, we owe it to Roy.”

“I’ve also been thinking about Roy.”

“What about him?”

“Now, don’t go getting pissed.”

“I’m going to sock you right in the mouth, Barney. You wait and see.”

“All I mean is—”

“All you mean is that you’re a chickenshit little bastard with no principles at all.”

And then I hit him, and hard enough to bring forth some blood from his nose.

And right away I was sorry. And said so: “I’m sorry, Barney.”

“Fuck yourself.” He sat there dabbing at his nose with a finger. He looked like he wanted to cry.

“Maybe I’d better go,” I said.

“Yeah. Maybe you’d better.”

“You wanna go to a movie this afternoon?”

“No.”

“You wanna—”

“I don’t wanna anything, Tom. You’re a spoiled prick is what you are. Maybe you don’t need the reward but I do. I don’t live in any fancy-ass house the way you do.”

“Our house isn’t fancy. It’s plain.”

“Plain hell.”

Every time we got in a fight, no matter what it was about, it ended up about where I lived and where he lived. I tried to understand but I couldn’t. Where I lived didn’t make any difference to me; and I sure didn’t care where Barney lived.

I went down the stairs and got on my bike. “I’m sorry I hit you.”

“Yeah.”

“I am.”

“Just go, Tom. Just go.”

“OK. And if you change your mind about going to the pool tonight—”

“I won’t.”

Everywhere I went that day, people kept stopping me on the street and congratulating me for helping brave Detective Cushing capture the notorious bank robber.

When I couldn’t stand it anymore, I went home and sat on the screened-in porch reading Double Star and thinking about how Barney looked just after I’d slugged him.

A couple times I got up and went inside and called Barney but his mom very carefully told me that he was out somewhere, which meant that he was hanging around the house but that he didn’t want to talk to me.

After I finished Heinlein, I picked up a Rex Stout novel. I really liked Nero Wolfe, which is to say that like a lot of mystery readers I really hated Nero Wolfe... but I thanked Rex Stout for giving me so many opportunities to hate the fat man in such a pleasant way. I hoped I could be just like Archie when I grew up — acid-tongued and really successful with women.

The Stout novel gave me the idea for the letter. Nero Wolfe was looking into some poison pen letters and I started thinking... what if somebody left the governor an anonymous letter on the podium next Tuesday? And what if the letter told the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth about Roy Danton and how he’d come to be shot and where the money really was right now?

Wouldn’t such a letter force the governor to look into the case more closely?

Around four that afternoon, the sunlight just starting to cool, I got up and mowed the lawn. Mom had been after Dad for two years to buy a power mower. Western Auto always has them on sale, she’d say. But Clarence could be real stubborn about some things and power mowers was one of them. I don’t want to see any of Tom’s fingers or toes getting ground up in those blades, he’d say. And when he put it that way, I wasn’t sure I wanted a power mower, either.

That night I called Barney three times. He still wouldn’t come to the phone. The next day I called him six times and the day after that I called him four — and he still wouldn’t come to the phone. He was still mad at me for hitting him.

I spent most of Sunday cruising around on my bike and about two in the afternoon, I ended up at the Dairy Queen.

And who should be sitting on one of the benches, surrounded like two teenage rock-and-roll stars, but Barney and Cushing?

They each had tall twenty-five-cent cones and they each had their own little gaggle of admirers. Barney’s were girls our age... and Cushing’s were older women in their early twenties.

That’s when I decided I wanted to punch Barney all over again. The way he was looking over at Cushing, it was easy to see they’d become friends.

Didn’t Barney remember what Cushing had done to Roy?

Didn’t Barney care anymore?

Monday, the day before Labor Day, I didn’t do much. I didn’t call Barney because I was afraid that if he did come on the phone I’d start yelling at him. I went down to the drugstore and bought a Lionel White Gold Medal novel called Murder Takes the Bus and went home and read it. At the time, I had just started reading Gold Medals and this one was very, very good. Not as good as Shell Scott, who managed to be tough and funny and sexy, but good nonetheless.

I guess I should tell you that people were still stopping me on the street and pumping my hand and saying how proud they were and wasn’t it neat that the governor was coming — and what else could I say? I said I was glad they were proud and I pumped their hands right back and I said it was indeed neat that the governor was coming.

Monday night, I wrote the letter. Four times I wrote the letter. I knew it had to be short and to the point but I also knew that it had to shake him up when he read it.

Now all I had to do was figure out how I was going to get it up on the podium without anybody seeing me.

As I was sealing it, there was a tiny, soft knock on my door. I said come in and Debbie appeared. She wore her old faded WinkyDink T-shirt (remember the TV show where you drew on this plastic sheet you put over the TV screen?) and a pair of jeans and no shoes. Her hair was done in pigtails.

“I’ve been thinking,” she said.

“About what?”

“The Tooth Fairy.”

“What about him?”

“Well, on Christmas Eve Santa Claus gets around on a sleigh and on Halloween witches get around on brooms — but how does the Tooth Fairy get around?”

“He takes the bus.”

She giggled.

“Really,” I said. “He’s got one of those twenty-trip passes you can buy for two bucks.”

She giggled some more.

“I think you left that dollar under my pillow.”

“Me? Nah. Where would I get a dollar?”

“I just wanted to thank you.”

“Thank him. Not me.”

“The Tooth Fairy? The one who rides the bus all the time?”

“That’s the guy.”

She smiled. And then she said it: “Mrs. Kelvin at the church is having me carry some flowers up and set them on the platform just before the governor gets there.”

“God.”

“What?”

“You suppose you could do me a favor?”

So I told her about the letter and how I needed to get it up there.

“You’d have to be fast.”

“I will be,” she said.

“And you’ll have to be crafty.”

“I will be,” she said.

“And you could get in some trouble if you get caught.”

“It’ll be neat,” she said.

So we went through it a couple of times, how she’d set the flowers down and then look around to see if anybody was watching her, and then how she’d set the letter down on the podium and get out of there, fast.

“You scared?”

“A little bit,” she said.

“You won’t tell Mom?”

“Huh-uh.”

“Or Clarence?”

“Huh-uh.”

“Promise?”

She held up her fingers in the Bluebird pledge. “I promise.”

That night, I actually got some sleep. When I woke up, the letter was the first thing I thought of.

Today it was all going to come tumbling down for Cushing. I couldn’t wait.

The event was right at noon. The only problem I had was passing the hours till that time came.

I rode over town and watched the city hall people put the final touches on the town square. There was so much red-white-and-blue it was almost blinding. The bandstand was draped in bunting and already a couple of chubby guys in red sport coats from the Dixieland band were there sliding their trombones and walking around as if they were pretty hot stuff, butch wax on their hair and real loud heel clips on their shoes. I guess I don’t like them because the time Clarence tried to get in with his clarinet they wouldn’t take him. Clarence acted like it didn’t bother him but I knew it did. Clarence is too nice a guy to get his feelings hurt like that. Anyway, they have a lousy band — every other song seems to be “Muskrat Ramble” and Clarence sure couldn’t have made it any worse, even though, I have to admit, his clarinet playing is pretty lousy.

Then I heard somebody say, “Hey! Here comes the heroes!”

And when I turned to look over by the bird-shit-speckled Civil War statue, there was Barney and his new best friend Detective Cushing.

Barney saw me but he pretended he didn’t. He just kept walking right up to the bandstand with Cushing.

I went home and lay down on my bed.

Debbie came in wearing a white blouse and red shorts and blue Keds. “Red, white and blue. Get it?”

I nodded.

“Where’s the letter?”

“On top of the desk.”

“You OK?”

“Not really,” I said. “But I’d rather not talk about it.”

She went over and picked up the letter. “You ever going to tell me what it says?”

“Maybe someday.”

“Boy, everybody sure is excited about the governor coming to town.” She smiled. “Everybody except Pop.”

Governor Hamling was a Democrat, a fact that Clarence wasn’t exactly crazy about.

She came over and stood above me. “You ever going to be all right again?”

“Someday.”

“It’s been a long time.”

“Just a couple days.”

“Well, that’s a long time, isn’t it?”

“I guess.”

“Come on.”

“What?”

“You can walk me over to the square. It’s about time, anyway.” And so it was.

I went into the bathroom and got ready and then we went out to the garage and got my bike and Debbie got on the handlebars and we took off.

“Boy, look,” Debbie said when we were two blocks from the square.

The highway runs right through town. Right now an entire block of traffic was crawling along with motorcycle cops at the front and back and this long black limousine right in the middle. Emergency lights — but no sirens — flashed. The motorcycle cops wore sunglasses and looked real mean.

I’d never seen — or felt — this kind of fervor before, not even for Little Richard.

Women stood on street corners waving handkerchiefs at the governor. Grumpy old men waved wrinkled old arms. And little kids jumped up and down and laughed and shouted and pointed.

And it was all for a lie, a damnable lie.

For the next half hour, people came to the square. They came from in town and the small villages surrounding the town and they came from the farms and they came from places as distant as Des Moines. The Dixieland band was already whooping it up and a guy with a torpedo-like tank of oxygen sold red and yellow and green balloons and Harvey at his little white popcorn shack didn’t have enough arms to keep up with all the business and up on the bandstand itself the mayor was showing off his familiar pot belly and his brand-new Panama hat. It was just like the county fair only there wasn’t any cow-shit smell floating on the breeze from the livestock barns.

I’d gotten there early enough to get a front row seat. I wanted to get a real good view of the governor opening that envelope, reading the letter and then announcing to everybody that he would have to call off the ceremonies — “And why?” he’d thunder. “Because this man—” And here he’d point like God with a lightning bolt shooting from his finger — “Because this man Cushing is a liar and a thief and a murderer!” And the crowd would ooooo and aaaaa and the chief would take out his gun and arrest Cushing and—

“You belong on the stage, son.”

An older, male voice brought me out of my fantasy.

It was the mayor. “You hear me, Tom?”

“Uh, yeah, I guess.”

The mayor led me up the steps to the stage of the bandstand. The Dixieland band — “The Hellcats” was what they called themselves though in the newspaper letters column one day, Mrs. J. D. Bing, who was always writing letters, suggested for the sake of propriety that they rename themselves the “Heckcats” — the band was rolling out on “When the Saints Go Marching In.” The noise was deafening. And I’m a guy who plays “Summertime Blues” by Eddie Cochran so loud even our cats go down to the basement to hide.

Cushing and Barney sat to the right of the podium. The governor, who looked vaguely like the mayor with his big belly and his Panama hat, stood on the edge of the steps shaking hands and waggling his pudgy fingers at little babies and saying over and over and over what a fine lovely day it was for a festivity like this. That’s what he called it. A “festivity.”

The mayor led me to the front row. Cushing and Barney sat in folding chairs near the podium. Cushing was talking. Barney was laughing. The best of buddies. Didn’t Barney remember Roy at all?

The mayor had me sit next to Barney. I started to object — but what was the use?

I could feel Barney and Cushing staring at me as I sat down. They’d quit talking and laughing. They just sat there now.

People came over and shook our hands and clapped us on the shoulders. A newspaper guy snapped several pictures. Aunts, uncles and cousins in the crowd out there would spot me and wave and I’d wave back, feeling self-conscious and awkward but not wanting them to think that being a “hero” had gone to my head, the way it had to my second cousin Larry’s head the time he saved that dog from a burning building, and then had his friend in a country western band write a song about him. Larry had that damned thing recorded and pressed and four years later was still handing out copies of “Larry Baines, A Roy Rogers Kinda Guy.” And his wife, at every single family gathering I’d attended ever since, always talked about Larry’s “political plans” which he’d be announcing any day she always breathlessly confided. Larry pumped gas out at the Clark station on Highway 2.

Then the mayor brought the governor over to meet the three of us. The governor seemed like a real nice guy but shaking hands with him was like picking up a real fatty, greasy patty of sausage.

“This is a real thrill for me,” he said to the three of us. “Our country needs more people like you.”

I glared over at Cushing. Yeah, he was just what the country needed more of, all right.

And then I saw Debbie, half hidden behind this huge vase of yellow and blue and amber summer flowers. She brought them right up to the podium, setting them down on the railing of the bandstand.

Then she looked over at me and gave a little nod and then leaned up and set the white envelope down on the podium itself.

And then she was gone, half running, back down the steps and into the crowd.

I was starting to sit down again — you had to stand up to meet a governor, I guess — and that’s when I saw him watching me... Cushing.

His eyes strayed over to the podium and then back to me.

He’d obviously seen me watching Debbie and had gotten curious... and now he wanted to know about the envelope.

Just then the band, which had given us all a blessed break, sailed into the “Chattanooga Choo-Choo” and then there was just the confusion that results from nobody being able to hear anything. The band guys were puffing their cheeks out and bugging their eyes and spitting all over the place and making everybody on the bandstand silently plead for mercy.

Barney still wouldn’t look at me but I saw him frown as soon as the music exploded. He hated Dixieland even more than I did.

Then the mayor stepped over to the center of the bandstand.

And then I saw Cushing get up and kind of edge over to the podium and I knew right away what he was going to do.

He was going to snatch the letter I’d written the governor and make sure that the governor never got to see it.

I got up, too. I had to stop him.

Cushing did it the right way. He didn’t make any bold play for the podium, he just eased his way over by shaking a few hands, patting a few backs, grinning a few grins. Even before becoming a “hero,” he’d been a popular guy with many of the townspeople. War heroes never went out of fashion.

I got as close to him as I could without stepping on the backs of his shoes.

I knew now that I was going to have to take the envelope myself. I’d just hold on to it till I had the chance to slip it back up there.

Cushing was now maybe a foot from the podium. He was trying to inch his hand behind the broad back of the mayor, who was waving his hands at the band to wrap things up — inch it behind the mayor’s back and pick off the white envelope Debbie had just set on the podium.

That was when I moved, moved so fast that I bumped into Cushing.

He looked down at me and scowled. He knew what I was trying to do. The same thing he was trying to do.

His eyes raised and settled on the envelope.

The bandstand was crowded. It was hard to move past all the bodies.

But he took a final step forward, put his hand out, his fingers started to close on the edge of the envelope.

I lunged — and snapped the letter from his fingers. I’d moved quickly enough that he hadn’t been able to stop me.

But just as I turned to go back to my seat, he reached down and locked his hand around my wrist.

The odd thing was, the stage was so packed with people standing around gabbing that nobody could see how he was twisting my wrist. We stood in the middle of maybe twenty people. It was like smothering to death inside this tiny hot sweaty box.

Nobody had ever twisted my wrist like that.

“You little bastard,” he whispered in my ear. I could hear him even above the band. “Give that to me.”

His face was pure rage — but controlled rage — he couldn’t afford to lose his poise in front of everybody.

He twisted my wrist harder.

And then the band stopped abruptly.

And the sweaty, important dignitaries made for their seats again.

And there we were, suddenly exposed so everybody could see us.

And Cushing let go immediately. What choice did he have? Here was this supposed hero and he was twisting the hell out of some poor kid’s arm.

He let go.

And then I let go, too, my entire hand and wrist so numb from pain that I didn’t feel the letter flutter from my grasp.

There it was on the floor—

And I was bending to pick it up—

And Cushing was bending to pick it up—

But before either of us got to it, the mayor stooped — no small feat, given his gut — and retrieved it from the floor.

He held it up and read aloud, “To the Governor.”

Cushing glared at me and I glared right back.

“Your Honor,” the mayor said, “somebody wrote you a letter.”

And the mayor of this fair city personally hand-delivered my letter to the governor for me.

“What’s this?” the governor said.

But the mayor was already stepping to the podium and giving a little 1-2-3 test to the public address system.

Cushing stared at the letter in the governor’s hand. For a second, I had the sense that he was going to jump the governor and rip the letter from him. Cushing looked highly pissed and at least a little bit crazy.

With the mayor already going into his introduction of the governor — “One of the favorite sons in this land of plenty of ours” — all Cushing and I could do was go back to our seats.

Which we did.

When I looked at the governor again, he was opening the envelope.

He took out the letter—

Unfolded it—

Scanned it quickly—

And just then the mayor said, “Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you our own beloved governor!”

The band played. And grown-ups applauded. And teenagers tried to make it look as if they were applauding. And babies cried because all the hoopla was scaring the hell out of them. And a cop turned on a siren. And several of the town dogs standing on the edge of the square started barking.

And the governor just kept reading and rereading the letter.

Just the way I’d wanted him to.

Everything died down, finally.

The governor stepped up to the podium, adjusted the microphone to his own height, the entire PA system ringing with the adjustment, and then he leaned forward and held the letter up for all the crowd to see and then he said—

“Over the years, I’ve noted that no matter what the occasion or what the event, there’s always somebody who tries to spoil it. Out of envy or spite or plain mendacity, they want to ruin a splendid event that everybody else is enjoying. A few minutes ago somebody handed me this letter — and I’ll tell you, I’ve never read such a pack of lies in my life. And if you don’t mind, I’m going to take care of this matter right now.”

And right then and right there, our own beloved governor of our own beloved state ripped the shit out of the letter I’d sent him.

White pieces of paper fluttered to the ground and our own beloved governor said, “Now I want to thank you for inviting me here and letting me have the honor of handing out these awards to these fine citizens of yours.”

To be honest, I didn’t pay a lot of attention to the rest of the ceremony. I only knew that the few times I looked at Cushing, he was smirking.

And when the governor went to shake my hand, Cushing, who was right behind me, kicked me so hard in the ankle I could barely stand up.

iv

Autumn came and with it all the pleasures of that season — the smoky air, the Indian summer sunlight, the ring of the school bell in the crisp morning, the snap and crackle and glow of the bonfire on the prairie night at the Homecoming ceremony behind the stadium, and all the quick excited laughter of the little kids scurrying along the street on Halloween night, tripping on their too-long costumes and hoping that Mrs. Grundy was still giving out shiny new quarters, and shoving Tootsie Rolls and Clark bars and sticky sweet popcorn balls into their mouths — my favorite season.

The new girl came to school and she was almost painfully pretty and just as painfully stuck-up. I went up to her twice and tried to introduce myself but she saw me coming and then pretended to fall into deep conversation with the other stuck-up girl she was walking down the hall with. Stuck-up girls have this secret club they all belong to, and it runs coast-to-coast.

Then in the mornings on the way to school, you’d suddenly see skins of ice on the creek water, and the wraith of your breath as you spoke. Dad had his two best months ever at the store in September and October, Mom finally got the wall-to-wall carpeting she’d always wanted (a combined birthday-anniversary-Christmas gift, Dad explained) and Debbie got her first boyfriend, this very shy chunky kid who walked her home from school every night and then took off like an arrow whenever he saw me or Mom.

Somerton itself changed, too. The town square, for instance, had a naked and lonely look, shorn as it was of blooming trees and growing foliage. Litter skittered across the dead, brown grass and the bandstand took on the look of a home that had been mysteriously (and perhaps violently) abandoned. Even a little Dixieland music was preferable to this.

A few store owners started putting up Christmas decorations in early November, with the expected number of old ladies complaining about it — “Show some proper respect. The Lord’s birthday is in December, not November” — and there was the expected number of letters in the local paper about how crass Christmas had become.

Hunting season opened and while I could never kill an animal that way, I had to admit there was something thrilling about the stalking part of it, all dressed up in red-and-black checkered caps and jackets and armed with a long rifle and creeping through the fallen cornstalks and along the frozen creek and up the red clay hills, the air pure and fine and chill, and the chestnut roans beautiful as they ran the pasture land nearby.

And you’re no doubt wondering about Barney and Cushing.

As of November 10, Barney still hadn’t spoken to me. We had several classes a day together, we had the same lunch period, we took the same route home, but Barney always managed to avoid me.

His friendship with Cushing ended right after the governor’s appearance. At least I think it did. At any rate, you never saw him with Cushing anywhere. About the only person you ever did see Barney with was a country kid that everybody was always pretty cruel to, a cross-eyed boy who wore Big Mac bib overalls and who had a bad stutter. Jennings, his name was.

As for Cushing, he got himself a snazzy new aqua Plymouth two-door and gave the gossips some very good news by dating the town’s only femme fatale, a very dramatic divorcee named Babe Holkup, who had once been the exclusive property of one R. K. “Buddy” Holkup, former high school football great and now resident of Ft. Madison Penitentiary because he kept taking home samples from the bank where he worked. Babe, whose real name was actually Elberta, divorced Buddy when he still had five years to go on his sentence. About this same lime, at least according to the gossips I mentioned above, Elberta also started wearing falsies and hose without seams. And getting threatening letters from Buddy. It all sounded like one of those old George Raft movies they play on late-night TV. The times Cushing saw me, he just smirked a bit. He didn’t call me a girl anymore and he didn’t try to look scary. He just moved on. Apparently he didn’t think I was any kind of threat to him.

And I guess I wasn’t, not until I had the dream, the strangest dream of my life.

Here was Mitch and here was Roy and damned if they didn’t look more alike than I’d even thought.

And Mitch said, “It’s time you grow up, Tom. It’s time you do right by Roy.”

Well, first of all, I’d never had a movie star in my dreams before, so that part of it was startling enough, especially since it was Robert Mitchum himself.

And second of all, Roy looked kind of pissed off. Like maybe I really hadn’t done right by him.

“I’m sorry, Roy.”

And Roy said, “He’s got the money.”

“I know.”

And then Mitch said, “You can get the money, Tom. You’re a young man now. You’re not a boy anymore.”

And what was I going to do? Argue with Robert Mitchum, for whom there was no cooler guy in the entire known universe?

And then Roy said, “It’s in his house somewhere. That’s where you’ll find it.”

And then the dream was over and it was November 13 of a gray and frosty morning and I was just waking up and needing very badly to urinate and Mom was calling upstairs for breakfast and Debbie was in the bathroom gargling, which she always did very, very loudly.

— It’s in his house somewhere, Tom.

— You’re a young man now, Tom. You’re not a boy anymore.

in his house somewhere in his house somewhere in his house somewhere kept echoing through my mind the way it does in the movies sometimes.

And all the time I peed and all the time I showered and all the time I dressed and all the time I teased Debbie about her insistence on taking the first bowl of Sugar Frosted Flakes and all the time I walked along to school and all the time I played basketball in gym class during first period—

— all that time I just kept hearing it over and over and over and over again—

in his house somewhere in his house somewhere in his house somewhere.

After school, I went home and got out my bike. Strictly speaking, it was a little late in the year for the old Schwinn. People were bundled up inside parkas already. And the Offenberger kids had already built their first snowman of the year — they built them so tall that sometimes the Des Moines Register put them in the paper — and the streets were so icy in spots they were dangerous.

Cushing lived on the east edge of town where the houses grew much farther apart, and where the yards looked more like acreages because most of them had scrawny white chickens and grunting quick little hogs running around enclosed areas.

Cushing’s place was an old two-story white clapboard house with a big red barn in the back. It sat on four acres of farmland which somebody down the road owned and farmed. There was a fat oak tree across from it, so I pulled in over there so I could look more closely at the house.

A screened-in porch covered the front. On the right side of the place was another door. The windows were all dark in the drab gray November afternoon. Smoke curled from the chimney. There was no garage nor a driveway as such but there were two strips of concrete that the tires of a car would fit. The strips ran along the left side of the house. A lost and lonely-looking stray mutt ran around in frantic circles in the winter-flat cornfield.

Unless Cushing had his car out back or something, nobody was home. His night shift would start in another twenty minutes, just at four. He was probably already at the station.

I wanted to walk over to that side door, jimmy it open, go in and find the cash and then carry it straight to the chief’s office, drop it on his desk and then tell him where I got it.

Then I saw a black-and-white patrol car coming from a block and a half away so I quickly ran my bike down a slanting hill under a small bridge nearby. I waited there until I heard and felt the patrol car rumble over the ties overhead.

I didn’t want a patrolman telling Cushing that he’d seen me standing across the street from Cushing’s house.

It was completely dark and no more than twenty-five degrees when I left the house on foot that night.

It was a long walk to Cushing’s. I smoked three cigarettes on the way.

With no nearby streetlight, and no cars washing their headlight beams over the place, Cushing’s house was lost in shadow. There was only a quarter moon and a few stars bright above the flat fallen cornfield.

I went up to the front door. I had expected to find it securely locked and it was. I also expected to find the side door securely locked and, you guessed it, it was, too.

I went around back where against the left side of the small, enclosed back porch there was a latticework ensnarled with dead, spiky vines of some kind.

I was a good climber. At Scout camp I took merit badges in climbing — of course I also took merit badges, of the unofficial sort, in leading the most snipe hunts, using the most unique dirty words (a lot of which, to be honest, I more or less made up) and armpit farting, which is not necessarily something I’m proud of these days but I sure was at the time.

I went right up the latticework. I stood on the porch roof which was high enough so I could walk right over to the second-story window. I gave it a try. It was unlocked. I raised the bottom pane with no trouble at all.

One minute later, I stood in Cushing’s bedroom.

It smelled of: gas heat, sleep, cigarette smoke, minty aftershave, Wildroot hair oil and the same kind of bunion medicine Clarence used.

What I saw was: a well-made double bed, a large crucifix hanging above the headboard, a five-drawer bureau, two framed photographs of Cushing 1) in his marine uniform 2) in his Somerton police uniform. There was a shaggy throw rug on the floor, a tightly packed closet that smelled of mothballs, and a box filled with magazines and paperbacks, the former mostly Cavalier and the latter running to Gold Medals by people like David Goodis and Peter Rabe. It was tough to admit but Cushing and I liked the same kind of reading material.

I saw all these things in the narrow beam of my flashlight.

I spent twenty minutes in the room and found nothing spectacular except an extra handgun he kept in one drawer of the bureau and a can of lighter fluid and some underwear and socks and things in another. I then proceeded to go through the rest of the house.

I was there about an hour and a half. I learned that Cushing a) kept a tidy house b) was the proud owner of six fifths of Old Grandad bourbon c) used Trojans.

What I didn’t learn was where he kept the money he’d stolen from Roy. I looked in all the obvious places — cupboards, closets, the bottom of his clothes hamper — and then in all the not-so-obvious places... behind the couch... and under the three throw rugs on the living-room floor (in the Hardy Boys books, there were always lots of trapdoors sitting around).

And — nothing.

I stood in his dark living room, my beam off. I’d been going at it hard enough to work up a sweat. My heart pounded.

I still had the dream of taking the money to the chief and throwing it on his desk and—

The phone rang and scared the hell out of me.

I stood there trembling and feeling foolish for jumping up the way I had. It was loud and alien-sounding in the darkness of somebody else’s house...

It rang ten times and then was quiet. I decided now was the time to go. Maybe I hadn’t found the money but I hadn’t been caught, either.

I went back upstairs and out the window. Half a minute later, I stood on the porch roof looking at the barn out back. Talk about a perfect place to hide bank robbery loot.

Next time, I’d concentrate on the barn.

I climbed down the latticework and started around the side of the house and ran straight into Barney.

“What the hell’re you doing here?” I said.

“I followed you.”

“Followed me? For what?”

“I walk by your place just about every night after dinner but I’m always scared to come up to the door.”

“I shouldn’t have hit you that time, Barney. I’m sorry.”

“No, you should’ve hit me. You should’ve beat the shit out of me. The way I let Roy down, I mean. I’m the one who should be sorry.”

We didn’t say anything then, just stood in shadow and moonlight and kind of slugged each other on the arm. Good old Barney. He was a pain in the ass sometimes but he was the only kid in town who knew who Ed Emsh the magazine cover artist was — so how could you turn your back on him?

I took out a cigarette and lit it and Barney looked at the lighter and said, “Roy’s lighter, huh?”

He took it and held it up to the moonlight. “Pretty cool. Those little red jewels for eyes and all.” He handed it back. “I spent my hundred bucks already. Did you?”

The governor had given us both one-hundred-dollar U.S. savings bonds last summer.

“Nah. I gave mine to Debbie. I didn’t feel right about spending it—” I knew this would make Barney feel bad and I wanted it to — then I thought about how poor his family was and how Barney always wore pretty old clothes and how Clarence always called Barney’s father “luckless” and I said, “But I don’t blame you for spending yours, Barney.”

“You really don’t?”

“No, Barney, I really don’t.” I socked him on the arm a few more times, like it was some kind of Olympic event I was training for, good old all-American arm-socking, and then we left.

We took a back road home, one that ran along the tracks, one that wouldn’t get us seen by any wandering cop cars, one that shone with frost.

“You didn’t find the money, huh?” he said.

“Huh-uh.”

“You going back?”

“Yeah. Tomorrow I’m gonna try the barn.”

“You mind if I come?”

“I’ll be pissed if you don’t.”

The next afternoon I got chewed out when the teacher found out that I had Halo for Satan by John Evans, which is a very good mystery, tucked down behind my history textbook.

Mrs. Morrissey, hoping to humiliate me, said, “And just what does Mr. Evans have to say about Napoleon?”

I just sat there and squirmed, the way she wanted me to. “Or what does Mr. Evans have to say about Mozart?”

More squirming.

“Or Woodrow Wilson?”

You get the point. She threw out several more historical names and asked me what Mr. Evans had to say about each one of them and all I could do was sit there and take it, all the while wanting to tell her that he was actually a good writer and that she should try reading him sometime but of course you don’t talk to teachers that way.

Finally the bell rang and when I went up to the door, she said, “Tom, come here, please, and bring that so-called book of yours.”

That’s what she always called paperbacks: so-called books.

I went over to her desk. Five years ago, I would have known what to do. Put my hands out, palms down, so she could beat them with a ruler. But we were both too old for that.

“This is the third time this semester I’ve caught you reading these so-called books in class. They’re trash.”

I knew I was getting red and hot, the way I do when I get mad and can’t do anything about it.

She grabbed the book from my hands and tore it in two and then dropped the two halves in her wastebasket. “Just where it belongs.”

Last year, she’d taught us George Orwell’s 1984, and how the thought police worked. Mrs. Morrissey apparently didn’t know that she’d become one of them.

I told Barney about this at lunch. Barney looked sort of depressed today, the way he usually does when something bad happened at home, usually meaning that George had quit going to his AA meetings and was drinking again.

On the way home, a gray and frozen afternoon, Barney said, “You scared?”

“About tonight?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Huh-uh.”

“Really?”

“Really. Just pissed.”

“Because Cushing’s getting away with it?”

“Uh-huh.”

“You know those two days when he was taking me for rides and stuff?”

“Uh-huh.”

“He wasn’t that bad a guy.”

“Yeah, he only killed Roy in cold blood and stole all that money.”

“My mom says that’s my problem.”

“What is?”

“That I feel sorry for too many people.”

“I feel sorry for a lot of people, too, Barney, but Cushing sure isn’t one of them.”

“When you watch him up close sometimes there’s this kind of sadness about him. You know that book by Cain that I liked so much?”

Barney couldn’t ever remember titles. “Double Indemnity?”

“Yeah. That’s who Cushing reminds me of. The guy in that. He’s real angry and tough but he’s kind of sad, too, in a strange way. You know, how George gets when he gets drunk and cries sometimes about World War Two and how his buddies died and all that stuff. You ever notice how there’s something sad about real mean guys, even like Maynard? Like they get so pissed that they don’t know what to do with themselves?”

And I had to admit that I had noticed that.

When we got to the corner where he went east and I went west, I said, “I’ll meet you here right at six-fifteen.”

“OK.” He looked at me then and said, “George went after Mom again last night.”

“Beat her up?”

“Yeah.”

“Bad?”

“Pretty bad. Black eye. Got a bruise on her cheek. Chipped tooth.”

I could see he wanted to cry.

“I’m sorry, Barney.”

“My little brother saw it and he really got scared.”

“God, Barney.”

“You know the worst thing?”

“What?”

“I feel sorry for him, too.”

“For your old man?”

“Yeah.”

I smiled bleakly and said, “Your mom’s right, Barney, you feel sorry for too many people.”

Barney called just as we were finishing dinner.

He was whispering and that usually meant only one thing. George was still drunk and on a rampage. I heard Barney’s mom crying softly in the background. Barney sounded like he was crying, too. “I better not go out tonight, Tom. I better stay with my mom.”

“She gonna be OK?”

“Long as I’m here to protect her,” he said. Then, “I better go.” I went up to my room and did my homework. A couple hours later I heard the phone ring and Mom called from downstairs and said it was for me.

Barney said, “Sorry I had to whisper when I called.”

“Is everything all right?”

“He passed out. That’s when everything gets back to normal. He sleeps it off for a day and then he’s real sorry. You know how it goes.”

“Did he hurt your mom?”

“He slapped her a couple of times is all.”

That would sound funny to anybody who didn’t know Barney and his family — how George had slapped her a couple of times “is all” but given the fact that he’d put her in the hospital a few times, “is all” was pretty modest.

“You up for tomorrow night?” Barney said.

“Yeah. Are you?”

“Can’t wait. I need some excitement.”

That was the only time Barney really liked to get into trouble, after a bout with George. It was like the only way Barney could forget it all was to lose it in doing something risky.

The next night, Barney was at the right corner at the right time. We took alleys and back roads out to Cushing’s, not wanting anybody to see us, liking the idea that we were skulking even when we didn’t necessarily have to.

We stood behind the oak tree across the street from Cushing’s. All the windows were dark.

The wind in the chimney made a neat moaning sound.

“You ready?”

“Yeah,” Barney said.

So we stepped out from behind the oak tree and started to cross the street and just then the car turned the corner several yards away, and shone its headlights on us.

“Just keep walking,” I said.

And so we did. Across the street. Onto Cushing’s lawn.

And then the car stopped even with us and somebody rolled down the passenger window — you could hear a radio play low and smell cigarette smoke — and then a voice said, “You boys up to anything in particular?”

I couldn’t make out a face inside the car. “Who is it?”

“It’s Michaelson, is who is it. And I’m curious what you boys are doing out here at this time of night.”

And then he hit us right in the face with the spotlight he had mounted on his driver’s door.

Michaelson was this fat slob who sold appliances during the day and was an auxiliary policeman on the side. Now everybody in Somerton knew that the most an auxiliary policeman ever did was direct traffic at the county fair and things like that. What they got was a uniform and a badge and a billy club. What they didn’t get was a gun or a car or any respect. Michaelson had been on the steps of the police department the night Roy was killed — hanging around his supposed friend Cushing. Even Cushing didn’t seem to like him all that much.

Of course, Michaelson pretended he was a pretty big deal strutting around the fair city of Somerton. He had a whip antenna on his ’53 Ford fastback and he wore his uniform just to go buy a loaf of bread and the way he walked around with his gut hanging over his hand-tooled western belt, he gave the impression that he was one tough guy.

“You boys hear me?”

“Huh?” Barney said.

“I asked you what you was doing out here?”

I dug in my pocket and took out my Lucky pack and held it up in the beam of the spotlight.

“This is what we’re doing out here. Smoking. We don’t want our folks to find out.”

“Oh,” he said. Then, “You’re too young to smoke.”

“That’s why we’re sneaking around.”

“I could run you two in.”

Michaelson always said that. About running people in.

Then he did just what you’d expect somebody like Michaelson to do. He killed the spotlight, rolled up the passenger window, and then took off — laying a strip of rubber that must have run thirty feet.

“What a clink,” I said.

We were in the dark again.

“I don’t think we’d better go down to the barn tonight.”

“Neither do I,” I said.

“He’s gonna tell Cushing he saw us out here sure as hell.”

I agreed.

We walked back home.

On the way, he said, “Mom said she’s gonna get a divorce.”

“She always says that after something happens.”

“He knocked her down and kicked her this time. Then I jumped him. This was the other night.”

He sounded confused, and like he wanted to cry again. “I wish I was like Mitch. I wouldn’t take shit from anybody. Not from anybody.”

When we reached the corner where we always said good-bye, I said, “You’re a good guy, Barney, you know that?”

“If I was a good guy, I’d help my mom better.”

“You’re doing all you can.”

“Yeah but when I see her down there on the floor with blood all over her face—”

And this time he took off running, vanished in the darkness outside the small circle of streetlight, loping slapping footsteps in the winter gloom.

Because of Michaelson telling Cushing about us, we decided to wait for another week before going back out to the barn.

The night was somewhere in the low teens. Barney was in a better mood, anyway. George was deep into his penitent role now, begging his wife to forgive him and not toss him out. This was the only time the family really had any peace, when George was like this.

We got to Cushing’s about 7:30. There was a frosty half moon and a sky low and bright with Midwestern stars. No lights shone in the house. No car was parked in the driveway. We checked the corner. We didn’t see Michaelson parked there waiting for us to make our move.

“Ready?”

“Yeah,” Barney said.

We ran across the street and along the walk that paralleled the house and then Barney stopped.

“I’m freezing my ass off.”

“You’ll be fine. You got the whistle?”

“Yeah.”

We’d agreed that Barney would scout — if he saw anything strange, he’d take this basketball whistle that belonged to my older brother, the right honorable Corporal Gerald, and blow the hell out of it.

“Hurry up,” he said.

He was starting to irritate me, the way only somebody you really like can irritate you.

I took off running. The ground was winter-hard between house and barn.

I pushed the big sliding barn door back only far enough so I could slip in. The place smelled of hay and kerosene and sweet horseshit and winter. I got my flashlight on and moved the beam around the place.

It was pretty well empty, actually. From the ancient horsecollars on the walls and the hay rakes and manure shovels stuck in the corners, you could see that somebody had probably kept animals here at one time. Probably had farmed it, too. But that was long ago. Everything was now dusty and stiff and faded.

I’ll skip over the next half hour. It was a bitch but it was also pretty boring. I must have covered every single inch of that barn, as well as the haymow. I had no idea what I was looking for, just something that looked like it would be a good hiding place. I remembered the tarpaulin sack Roy had had the money in. A guy could hide that without too much trouble.

I went up and down the haymow ladder twice, making sure that I hadn’t overlooked anything up there. I went into each stall with the rake and cleared the floor of hay and looked for any kind of trapdoor. A lot of the older barns in this area had them. About halfway through all this, my flashlight started flickering on and off, which reminded me of a pretty neat way the Hardy Boys had sent signals in one of their books. At least it had seemed pretty neat to me when I was a little kid.

I found a lot of dead stuff, too: a cat, two rats, a sparrow and this really obese possum. Poor bastard probably ate himself to death.

And then I was walking straight down the center of the barn and I turned my ankle and I acted real mature about it — I stood right there, pain traveling up my ankle and calf and thigh like thunderbolts — and I must have strung somewhere between fifty and sixty swearwords together. I didn’t know who to be pissed off at, but I was sure pissed off at somebody.

And then I tried to put pressure on my foot and ankle again and I realized that the reason I tripped was that below all the hay, there was a slight indentation in the ground.

I dropped to my knees and started digging up the hay like a dog searching for a lost bone.

I dug up hay and then I dug up earth with the help of the rake tines and then I felt a piece of cold unyielding wood below the level of dirt.

Among all the long-deserted gardening tools, I found a shovel and I went right to work. I was so excited I forgot all about my ankle.

I dug for about ten minutes. The hole grew wide, wide enough that I could reach down and feel the shape of a wooden box.

I set the shovel down. I started to bend over to raise the box from the hole when Barney said, “Tom.”

I turned around.

Barney stood in the door of the barn.

“What’re you doing in here?” I said.

And then a second silhouette stepped up behind Barney. “He didn’t have any choice. Neither of you little girls have any choice now.”

“Aw, shit,” I said. “Aw, shit.”

“Get in there,” Cushing said to Barney and pushed him into the barn.

“Michaelson cruised by and saw me, I guess. He musta gone and got Cushing,” Barney said.

The three of us stood around the hole in the middle of the barn. Wind slammed the hay doors against the barn.

Cushing stepped into the light, such as it was, the flashlight lying on its side on the ground. He wore a nice new overcoat. He always looked spiffy. He also had a gun in his gloved hand.

“Get that box up from there,” he said. “And hurry up.”

“Why?”

He kicked me. There was no warning, there was no threat. He just kicked me. Right in the mouth, and so hard that my mouth filled up immediately with hot, thick blood.

“Leave him alone!” Barney said.

“You get down there and help him,” Cushing said, and shoved Barney down next to me.

I didn’t want to get kicked again, so I got to work. I worked fast and I worked good and in less than five minutes, I had the long, square box sitting up on the ground. There was a padlock on it the size of a catcher’s mitt.

Cushing threw me a key. “Open it up, girls.”

We got it open. Inside was the bag filled with cash.

“Take it out of there.”

We took it out.

“Set it on the ground.”

We set it on the ground.

“This time when I hide it, you little girls’ll never find it. Believe me. Now stand up.”

We stood up.

“Next time I see you little girls around here, you’re really gonna get hurt. You understand me?”

I couldn’t talk real well. I just sort of nodded. Barney just sort of nodded, too.

All I could think of was how much I hated Cushing, how smug and violent he was, and how he’d killed Roy when Roy had no chance of defending himself—

And that was when I remembered the lighter, Roy’s lighter, in my pocket.

“Now you two little girls get the hell out of here and never set foot on my property again.”

He waved his gun at us.

We got.

My ankle hurt and my mouth hurt and my head hurt. I felt angry and humiliated and terrified.

We went maybe a quarter mile and I said, and it wasn’t any too easy for me to speak, “I’m going back, Barney.”

“Huh?”

“Back into his house.”

“For what?”

I told him.

“You’re crazy, Tom.”

“Maybe so but I’m goin’ back.”

I turned around and started back in the darkness toward the house. Cushing wouldn’t have had time to hide it yet.

A minute or two later Barney was right alongside of me.

“I know you’d be pissed if I didn’t go along.”

He was right.

Cushing’s police car was parked along the side of his house. The kitchen light was on. I could see him, more shadow than substance, moving around in there.

We went to the back of the house and got on the latticework and went up real quiet. It wasn’t difficult at all, not even with my ankle in the condition it was.

We got in his bedroom and then stood very still. All I could hear was our ragged breathing; all I could smell was our sweat.

I remembered right where it was, what drawer it was in, and where he kept the bullets, too.

Barney stood by the door watching and listening while I got Cushing’s extra gun and loaded it up. My brother, Gerald, had taught me how to shoot, even if I didn’t want to kill animals, which he said I’d “grow out of someday.” Then I grabbed the small yellow can of Zippo lighter fluid, which Cushing kept in the drawer below.

When I got the gun all loaded up we crept down the hallway and then crept down the stairs and then crept across the darkened living room and crept out to the kitchen.

Cushing’s back was to us. In the bright light, he sat at the table. He poured Old Grandad straight from the bottle into a small water glass. His gun was on the table. So was the bag of money.

“You make one move, Cushing, and I’m going to blow your fucking head off. You understand me?”

I thought I sounded pretty good for a guy with a mouthful of blood.

I moved into the kitchen fast, so that he could see that I held a gun on him.

Barney came in right behind me.

“Well,” Cushing said, smirking, “if it isn’t my two little girlfriends.”

“Get the money, Barney, and put it over in the sink.”

Mention of the money ended Cushing’s smirk.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

He started to get up from his chair but I eased the hammer back on the pistol.

“I’m not real good with firearms, Cushing. I might just blow your head off by accident.”

He saw the wisdom of that.

Barney took the sack over to the big white sink. He unzipped the top of the sack and started filling the sink with small bundles of cash.

“What the hell’re you two doing?” Cushing said.

“Douse it, Barney,” I said.

Barney took the can of Zippo lighter fluid I’d given him and squirted clear fluid all over the money.

“You crazy bastard,” Cushing said to me, now that he’d figured out what we were going to do.

From my pocket I took Roy’s lighter and held it up for Cushing to see.

And then I set the money on fire.

It went up in this huge whoof of flame and smoke.

Cushing jumped up and tried to get past me at the money.

But he was already too late. Barney had done a good job of soaking all the bills.

“You stupid little bastard,” he said.

And that’s when he made his lunge for his gun and that’s when I shot him.

He screamed and dropped immediately to the floor, his gun falling away from his grasp.

I’d shot him somewhere in the shoulder, apparently in a place that was pretty painful judging by the way he kept rolling around and moaning.

“You little prick,” he said when he saw me walk around the table and stand over him. “All that money — wasted.”

“We better call somebody,” Barney said.

I nodded, looked down with great disgust at Cushing and then remembered what Barney had said the other night — about feeling sorry for him.

And I did, too, just then because his face was different now — instead of rage and arrogance, there was this terrible sorrow.

I thought of the hawk that day, and how the hunters had brought him down.

“You had it coming, Cushing. You killed Roy.”

I started to walk back to where Barney stood in the kitchen doorway, setting the gun down on the counter on my way.

I started to go call the chief but then Barney saw something behind me and shouted, “Watch out, Tom! He’s got his gun!”

Cushing had inched his fingers to his gun and had tightened his hand around it.

I looked over to the gun I’d just set on the counter. And realized that I’d never be able to reach it before Cushing killed us.

“The chief’s gonna know about you, Cushing,” I said. “He’s gonna know you killed us and know you killed Roy, too.”

And then something pretty strange happened. Cushing tried to pull himself to an upright position, the way Roy had right before he died... and when he did this, just for a second, he looked just like Roy. And even a little bit like Mitch.

And then something even stranger happened.

Cushing raised his gun and started to point it straight at my heart but then stopped and pointed it right at—

He was—

putting it—

tight against his—

forehead—

and pulling the—

trigger and—

And I heard Barney scream. And then I heard myself scream, too, and I heard the boom of the weapon discharging and heard the splat and splatter of his brains splash against the bottom of the wall like dishwater being emptied—

Then there was just this silence.

I’d only heard this silence one other time, those moments right after I realized Roy was dead and I was trying to call him back from eternity, shouting down this long dark endless corridor—

“God,” Barney said. “God.”

Because there really wasn’t anything else to say. There really wasn’t.

Here Roy hadn’t had nerve enough to kill himself and was killed by Cushing who, in the end, did have nerve enough—

I tried not to think of how Cushing’s folks had both been killed when Cushing was only ten. I didn’t want to be like Barney. I didn’t want to feel sorry for people I should hate...

v

Well, it took several long weeks to learn what the county attorney had in mind, but finally he told Clarence that he wasn’t going to press any charges after all, and that given how it had all ended, we’d probably learned our lessons, Barney and I.

We were celebrities of sorts at school again. The new girl even asked if she could interview me for the school paper. Of course when I asked her if she’d like to stop at Hamblin’s some time for a soda, she said, (very politely) No Thank You.

In the spring, Barney’s mom did finally divorce George, and then Barney and all of his family except George moved to Pennsylvania. For the first two months, he wrote every other week. Then I didn’t hear much from him anymore until, eight years later, he was killed in fighting in Vietnam. His wife, a very nice woman named Diedre, called to tell me how much I’d meant to him and to say that she hoped we’d meet some day. Four years after that, Clarence died of liver cancer. Mom went to move in with Debbie, whose husband was a professor at the state university where Debbie was a junior. The professor had left his wife and two daughters for Debbie and Mom wasn’t exactly what you called thrilled about it all.

I was the only one to stay in Somerton. I became Clarence’s business partner in the haberdashery and when he died, I took over completely. I have one son who was born with spina bifida and another son who, I am happy to say, was born in perfect health. My wife, Myrna, is the sweetest, most gentle person I have ever known.

About every five or six years, whenever there’s turnover at the local paper, some twenty-four-year-old reporter comes over to the store and says he’d like to talk to me about the Roy Danton incident. The folks of Somerton never seem to tire of hearing about it. I always agree. My sons, who always like to hear about it, too, would give me hell if I didn’t.

On those occasions when I go to the cemetery to speak with my dead father and my dead friend Barney, I sometimes stop and look at the grave of Stephen B. Cushing. I’m not sure why. Perhaps because I’ve never quite been able to forget how Barney felt sorry for him — and how I, too, felt sorry for him right there at the very end — this man I so despised.

I see his desperate eyes right there at the last — and hear the lone gunshot...

It’s a lot less trouble sometimes, when you just plain and simple hate somebody.

I still go for walks along the tracks sometimes, out where the warehouse is now a small manufacturing plant, and I think of that long-ago summer and it is like a dream somehow — lived out by somebody who was not exactly me, not the me in the mirror today anyway...

And I think of Roy, too, of course. But it’s funny, you know. A few years ago I saw an old Robert Mitchum picture on the tube... and the truth is, Roy hadn’t looked a damn thing like him. Not a damn thing like him at all...