Other Voices, Other Rooms

1

Now a traveler must make his way to Noon City by the best means he can, for there are no buses or trains heading in that direction, though six days a week a truck from the Chuberry Turpentine Company collects mail and supplies in the next-door town of Paradise Chapel: occasionally a person bound for Noon City can catch a ride with the driver of the truck, Sam Radclif. It's a rough trip no matter how you come, for these washboard roads will loosen up even brand new cars pretty fast; and hitchhikers always find the going bad. Also, this is lonesome country; and here in the swamplike hollows where tiger lilies bloom the size of a man's head, there are luminous green logs that shine under the dark marsh water like drowned corpses; often the only movement on the landscape is winter smoke winding out the chimney of some sorry-looking farmhouse, or a wing-stiffened bird, silent and arrow-eyed, circling over the black deserted pinewoods.

Two roads pass over the hinterlands into Noon City; one from the north, another from the south; the latter, known as the Paradise Chapel Highway, is the better of the pair, though both are much the same: desolate miles of swamp and field and forest stretch along either route, unbroken except for scattered signs advertising Red Dot 5ў Cigars, Dr. Pepper, NEHI, Grove's Chill Tonic, and 666. Wooden bridges spanning brackish creeks named for long-gone Indian tribes rumble like far-off thunder under a passing wheel; herds of hogs and cows roam the roads at will; now and then a farm-family pauses from work to wave as an auto whizzes by, and watch sadly till it disappears in red dust.

One sizzling day in early June the Turpentine Company's driver, Sam Radclif, a big balding six-footer with a rough, manly face, was gulping a beer at the Morning Star Cafй in Paradise Chapel when the proprietor came over with his arm around this stranger-boy.

"Hiya, Sam," said the proprietor, a fellow called Sydney Katz. "Got a kid here that'd be obliged if you could give him a ride to Noon City. Been trying to get there since yesterday. Think you can help?"

Radclif eyed the boy over the rim of his beer glass, not caring much for the looks of him. He had his notions of what a «real» boy should look like, and this kid somehow offended them. He was too pretty, too delicate and fair-skinned; each of his features was shaped with a sensitive accuracy, and a girlish tenderness softened his eyes, which were brown and very large. His brown hair, cut short, was streaked with pure yellow strands. A kind of tired, imploring expression masked his thin face, and there was an unyouthful sag about his shoulders. He wore long, wrinkled white linen breeches, a limp blue shirt, the collar of which was open at the throat, and rather scuffed tan shoes.

Wiping a mustache of foam off his upper lip, Radclif said: "What's your name, son?"

"Joel. Jo-el Har-ri-son Knox." He separated the syllables explicitly, as though he thought the driver deaf, but his voice was uncommonly soft.

"That so?" drawled Radclif, placing his dry beer glass on the counter. "A mighty fancy name, Mister Knox."

The boy blushed and turned to the proprietor, who promptly intervened: "This is a fine boy, Sam. Smart as a whip. Knows words you and me never heard of."

Radclif was annoyed. "Here, Katz," he ordered, "fillerup." After the proprietor trundled away to fetch a second beer, Sam said kindly, "Didn't mean to tease you, son. Where bouts you from?"

"New Orleans," he said. "I left there Thursday and got here Friday… and that was as far as I could go; no one come to meet me."

"Oh, yeah," said Radclif. "Visiting folks in Noon City?"

The boy nodded. "My father. I'm going to live with him."

Radclif raised his eyes ceilingward, mumbled «Knox» several times, then shook his head in a baffled manner. "Nope, don't think I know anybody by that name. Sure you're in the right place?"

"Oh, yes," said the boy without alarm. "Ask Mister Katz, he's heard about my father, and I showed him the letters and… wait." He hurried back among the tables of the gloomy cafй, and returned toting a huge tin suitcase that, judging by his grimace, was extremely heavy. The suitcase was colorful with faded souvenir stickers from remote parts of the globe: Paris, Cairo, Venice, Vienna, Naples, Hamburg, Bombay, and so forth. It was an odd thing to see on a hot day in a town the size of Paradise Chapel.

"You been all them places?" asked Radclif.

"No-o-o," said the boy, struggling to undo a worn-out leather strap which held the suitcase together. "It belonged to my grandfather; that was Major Knox: you've read about him in history books, I guess. He was a prominent figure in the Civil War. Anyway, this is the valise he used on his wedding trip around the world."

"Round the world, eh?" said Radclif, impressed. "Musta been a mighty rich man."

"Well, that was a long time ago." He rummaged through his neatly packed possessions till he found a slim package of letters. "Here it is," he said, selecting one in a watergreen envelope.

Radclif fingered the letter a moment before opening it; but presently, with clumsy care, he extracted a green sheet of tissue-like paper and, moving his lips, read:

The proprietor arrived with the beer just as Radclif, frowning puzzledly, sighed and tucked the paper back in its envelope. There were two things about this letter that bothered him; first of all, the handwriting: penned in ink the rusty color of dried blood, it was a maze of curlicues and dainty i's dotted with daintier o's. What the hell kind of a man would write like that? And secondly: "If your Pa's named Sansom, how come you call yourself Knox?"

The boy stared at the floor embarrassedly. "Well," he said, and shot Radclif a swift, accusing look, as if the driver was robbing him of something, "they were divorced, and mother always called me Joel Knox."

"Aw, say, son," said Radclif, "you oughtn't to have let her done that! Remember, your Pa's your Pa no matter what."

The proprietor avoided a yearning glance for help which the boy now cast in his direction by having wandered off to attend another customer. "But I've never seen him," said Joel, dropping the letters into his suitcase and buckling up the strap. "Do you know where this place is? Skully's Landing?"

"The Landing?" Radclif said. "Sure, sure I know all about it. " He took a deep swallow of beer, let forth a mighty belch, and grinned. "Yessir, if I was your Pa I'd take down your britches and muss you up a bit. " Then, draining the glass, he slapped a half-dollar on the counter, and stood meditatively scratching his hairy chin till a wall clock sounded the hour four: "O. K., son, let's shove," he said, starting briskly towards the door.

After a moment's hesitation the boy lifted his suitcase and followed.

"Come see us again," called the proprietor automatically.

The truck was a Ford of the pick-up type. Its interior smelled strongly of sun-warmed leather and gasoline fumes. The broken speedometer registered a petrified twenty. Rain-streaks and crushed insects blurred the windshield, of which one section was shattered in a bursting-star pattern. A toy skull ornamented the gear shift. The wheels bump-bumped over the rising, dipping, curving Paradise Chapel Highway.

Joel sat scrunched in a corner of the seat, elbow propped on window frame, chin cupped in hand, trying hard to keep awake. He hadn't had a proper hour's rest since leaving New Orleans, for when he closed his eyes, as now, certain sickening memories slid through his mind. Of these, one in particular stood out: he was at a grocery counter, his mother waiting next to him, and outside in the street January rain was making icicles on the naked tree limbs. Together they left the store and walked silently along the wet pavement, he holding a calico umbrella above his mother, who carried a sack of tangerines. They passed a house where a piano was playing, and the music sounded sad in the grey afternoon, but his mother remarked what a pretty song. And when they reached home she was humming it, but she felt cold and went to bed, and the doctor came, and for over a month he came every day, but she was always cold, and Aunt Ellen was there, always smiling, and the doctor, always smiling, and the uneaten tangerines shriveled up in the icebox; and when it was over he went with Ellen to live in a dingy two-family house near Pontchartrain.

Ellen was a kind, rather gentle woman, and she did the best she knew how. She had five school-aged children, and her husband clerked in a shoe store, so there was not a great deal of money; but Joel wasn't dependent, his mother having left a small legacy. Ellen and her family were good to him, still he resented them, and often felt compelled to do hateful things, such as tease the older cousin, a dumb-looking girl named Louise, because she was a little deaf: he'd cup his ear and cry "Aye? Aye?" and couldn't stop till she broke into tears. He would not joke or join in the rousing after-supper games his uncle inaugurated nightly, and he took odd pleasure in bringing to attention a slip of grammar on anyone's part, but why this was true puzzled him as much as the Kendalls. It was as if he lived those months wearing a pair of spectacles with green, cracked lenses, and had wax-plugging in his ears, for everything seemed to be something it wasn't, and the days melted in a constant dream. Now Ellen liked to read Sir Walter Scott and Dickens and Hans Andersen to the children before sending them upstairs, and one chilly March evening she read "The Snow Queen." Listening to it, it came to Joel that he had a lot in common with Little Kay, whose outlook was twisted when a splinter from the Sprite's evil mirror infected his eye, changing his heart into a lump of bitter ice: suppose, he thought, hearing Ellen's gentle voice and watching the firelight warm his cousins' faces, suppose, like Little Kay, he also were spirited off to the Snow Queen's frozen palace? What living soul would then brave robber barons for his rescue? And there was no one, really no one.

During the last weeks before the letter came he skipped school three days out of five to loaf around the Canal Street docks. He got into a habit of sharing the box-lunch Ellen fixed for him with a giant Negro stevedore who, as they talked together, spun exotic sea-life legends that Joel knew to be lies even as he listened; but this man was a grown-up, and grown-ups were suddenly the only friends he wanted. And he spent solitary hours watching the loading and unloading of banana boats that shipped to Central America, plotting of course a stowaway voyage, for he was certain in some foreign city he could land a good-paying job. However, on his thirteenth birthday, as it happened, the first letter from Skully's Landing arrived.

Ellen had not shown him this letter for several days. It was peculiar, the way she'd behaved, and whenever her eyes had met his there was a look in them he'd never seen before: a frightened, guilty expression. In answering the letter she'd asked assurance that, should Joel find himself discontented, he would be at once allowed to return; a guarantee his education would be cared for; a promise he could spend Christmas holidays with her. But Joel could sense how relieved she was when, following a long correspondence, Major Knox's old honeymoon suitcase was dragged down from the attic.

He was glad to go. He could not think why, nor did he bother wondering, but his father's more or less incredible appearance on a scene strangely deserted twelve years before didn't strike him as in the least extraordinary, inasmuch as he'd counted on some such happening all along. The miracle he'd planned, however, was in the nature of a kind old rich lady who, having glimpsed him on a street-corner, immediately dispatched an envelope stuffed with thousand-dollar bills; or a similar Godlike action on the part of some goodhearted stranger. And this stranger, as it turned out, was his father, which to his mind was simply a wonderful piece of luck.

But afterwards, as he lay in a scaling iron bed above the Morning Star Cafй, dizzy with heat and loss and despair, a different picture of his father and of his situation asserted itself: he did not know what to expect, and he was afraid, for already there were so many disappointments. A panama hat, newly bought in New Orleans and worn with dashing pride, had been stolen in the train depot in Biloxi; then the Paradise Chapel bus had run three hot, sweaty hours behind schedule; and finally, topping everything, there had been no word from Skully's Landing waiting at the cafй. All Thursday night he'd left the electric light burning in the strange room, and read a movie magazine till he knew the latest doings of the Hollywood stars by heart, for if he let his attention turn inward even a second he would begin to tremble, and the mean tears would not stay back. Toward dawn he'd taken the magazine and torn it to shreds and burned the pieces in an ashtray one by one till it was time to go downstairs.

"Reach behind and hand me a match, will you, boy?" said Radclif. "Back there on the shelf, see?"

Joel opened his eyes and looked about him dazedly. A perfect tear of sweat was balanced on the tip of his nose. "You certainly have a lot of junk," he said, probing around the shelf, which was littered with a collection of yellowed newspapers, a slashed inner tube, greasy tools, an air pump, a flashlight and… a pistol. Alongside the pistol was an open carton of ammunition; bullets the bright copper of fresh pennies. He was tempted to take a whole handful, but ended by artfully dropping just one into his breast pocket. "Here they are."

Radclif popped a cigarette between his lips, and Joel, without being asked, struck a match for him.

"Thanks," said Radclif, a huge drag of smoke creeping out his nostrils. "Say, ever been in this part of the country before?"

"Not exactly, but my mother took me to Gulfport once, and that was nice because of the sea. We passed through there yesterday on the train."

"Like it round here?"

Joel imagined a queerness in the driver's tone. He studied Radclif's blunt profile, wondering if perhaps the theft had been noticed. If so, Radclif gave no sign. "Well, it's… you know, different."

"Course I don't see any difference. Lived hereabouts all my life, and it looks like everywhere else to me, ha ha!"

The truck hit suddenly a stretch of wide, hard road, unbordered by tree-shade, though a black skirt of distant pines darkened the rim of a great field that lay to the left. A far-off figure, whether man or woman you could not tell, rested from hoeing to wave, and Joel waved back. Farther on, two little white-haired boys astride a scrawny mule shouted their delight when the truck passed, burying them in a screen of dust. Radclif honked and honked the horn at a tribe of hogs that took their time in getting off the road. He could swear like nobody Joel had ever heard, except maybe the Negro dock-hand.

A while later, scowling thoughtfully, Joel said: "I'd like to ask you something, o. k.?" He waited till Radclif nodded consent. "Well, what I wanted to ask was, do you know my… Mister Sansom?"

"Yeah, I know who he is, sure," said Radclif, and swabbed his forehead with a filthy handkerchief. "You threw me off the track with those two names, Sansom and Knox. Oh sure, he's the guy that married Amy Skully." There was an instant's pause before he added: "But the real fact is, I never laid eyes on him."

Joel chewed his lip, and was silent a moment. He was crazy with questions he wanted answered, but the idea of asking them embarrassed him, for to be so ignorant of one's own blood-kin seemed shameful. Therefore he said what he had to in a very bold voice: "What about this Skully's Landing? I mean, who all lives there?"

Radclif squinted his eyes while he considered. "Well," he said at last, "they've got a coupla niggers out there, and I know them. Then your daddy's wife, know her: my old lady does dressmaking for her now and again; used to, anyway." He sucked in cigarette smoke, and flipped the butt out the window. "And the cousin… yes, by God, the cousin!"

"Oh?" said Joel casually, though never once in all the letters had such a person been mentioned, and his eyes begged the driver to amplify. But Radclif merely smiled a curious smile, as if amused by a private joke too secret for sharing.

And that was as far as the matter went.

"Look sharp now," said Radclif presently, "we're coming into town."

A house. A grey clump of Negro cabins. An unpainted clapboard church with a rain-rod steeple, and three Holy panes of ruby glass. A sign: The Lord Jesus Is Coming! Are You Ready? A little black child wearing a big straw hat and clutching tight a pail of blackberries. Over all the sun's stinging glaze. Soon there was a short, unpaved and nameless street, lined with similar one-floored houses, some nicer-looking than others; each had a front porch and a yard, and in some yards grew scraggly rose bushes and crepe myrtle and China trees, from a branch of which very likely dangled a child's play swing made of rope and an old rubber tire. There were Japonica trees with waxy blackgreen polished leaves. And he saw a fat pink girl skipping rope, and an elderly lady ensconced on a sagging porch cooling herself with a palmetto fan. Then a red-barn livery stable: horses, wagons, buggies, mules, men. An abrupt bend in the road: Noon City.

Radclif braked the truck to a halt. He reached across and opened the door next to Joel. "Too bad I can't ride you out to the Landing, son," he said hurriedly. "The company'd raise hell. But you'll make it fine; it's Saturday, lotsa folks living out thataway come into town on Saturday."

Joel was standing alone now, and his blue shirt, damp with sweat, was pasted to his back. Toting the sticker-covered suitcase, he cautiously commenced his first walk in the town.

Noon City is not much to look at. There is only one street, and on it are located a General Merchandise store, a repair shop, a small building which contains two offices, one lodging a lawyer, the other a doctor; a combination barbershop-beautyparlor that is run by a one-armed man and his wife; and a curious, indefinable establishment known as R. V. Lacey's Princely Place where a Texaco gasoline pump stands under the portico. These buildings are grouped so closely together they seem to form a ramshackle palace haphazardly thrown together overnight by a half-wit carpenter. Now across the road in isolation stand two other structures: a jail, and a tall queer tottering ginger-colored house. The jail had not housed a white criminal in over four years, and there is seldom a prisoner of any kind, the Sheriff being a lazy no-good, prone to take his ease with a bottle of liquor, and let trouble-makers and thieves, even the most dangerous type of cutthroats, run free and wild. As to the freakish old house, no one has lived there for God knows how long, and it is said that once three exquisite sisters were raped and murdered here in a gruesome manner by a fiendish Yankee bandit who rode a silver-grey horse and wore a velvet cloak stained scarlet with the blood of Southern womanhood; when told by antiquated ladies claiming onetime acquaintance with the beautiful victims, it is a tale of Gothic splendor. The windows of the house are cracked and shattered, hollow as eyeless sockets; a rotted balcony leans perilously forward, and yellow sunflower birds hide their nests in its secret places; the scaling outer walls are ragged with torn, weather-faded posters that flutter when there is a wind. Among the town kids it is a sign of great valor to enter these black rooms after dark and signal with a match-flame from a window on the topmost floor. However, the porch of this house is in pretty fair condition, and on Saturdays the visiting farm-families make it their headquarters.

New people rarely settle in Noon City or its outlying parts; after all, jobs are scarce here. On the other hand, seldom do you hear of a person leaving, unless it's to wend his lonesome way up onto the dark ledge above the Baptist church where forsaken tombstones gleam like stone flowers among the weeds.

Saturday is of course the big day. Shortly after daylight a procession of mule-drawn wagons, broken-down flivvers, and buggies begins wheeling in from the countryside, and towards midmorning a considerable congregation is gathered. The men sport their finest shirts and store-bought breeches, the women scent themselves with vanilla flavoring or dime-store perfume, of which the most popular brand is called Love Divine; the girls wear dodads in their cropped hair, inflame their cheeks with a lot of rouge, and carry five-cent paper fans that have pretty pictures painted on them. Though barefoot and probably half-naked, each little child is washed clean and given a few pennies to spend on something like a prize-inside box of molasses popcorn. Finished poking around in the various stores, the womenfolk assemble on the porch of the old house, while their men mosey on over to the livery stable. Swift and eager, saying the same things over and over, their voices hum and weave through the long day. Sickness and weddings and courting and funerals and God are the favorite topics on the porch. Over at the stable the men joke and drink whiskey, talk crops and play jackknife: once in a while there are terrible fights, for many of these men are hot-tempered, and if they hold a grudge against somebody they like to wrestle it out.

When twilight shadows the sky it is as if a soft bell were tolling dismissal, for a gloomy hush stills all, and the busy voices fall silent like birds at sunset. The families in their vehicles roll out of town like a sad, funeral caravan, and the only trace they leave is the fierce quiet that follows. The proprietors of the different Noon City establishments remain open an hour longer before bolting their doors and going home to bed; but after eight o'clock not a decent soul is to be seen wandering in this town except, maybe, a pitiful drunk or a young swain promenading with his ladylove.

"Hey, there! You with the suitcase!"

Joel whirled round to find a bandy-legged, little one-armed man glowering at him from the doorway of a barbershop; he seemed too sickly to be the owner of such a hard, deep voice. "Come here, kid," he commanded, jerking a thumb at his aproned chest.

When Joel reached him, the man held out his hand and in the open palm shone a nickel. "See this?" he said. Joel nodded dumbly. "O. K.," said the man, "now look up the road yonder. See that little gal with the red hair?"

Joel saw whom he meant all right. It was a girl with fiery dutchboy hair. She was about his height, and wore a pair of brown shorts and a yellow polo shirt. She was prancing back and forth in front of the tall, curious old house, thumbing her nose at the barber and twisting her face into evil shapes. "Listen," said the barber, "you go collar that nasty youngun for me and this nickel's yours for keeps. Oh-oh! Watch out, here she comes again…"

Whooping like a wildwest Indian, the redhead whipped down the road, a yelling throng of young admirers racing in her wake. She chunked a great fistful of rocks when she came opposite the spot where Joel was standing. The rocks landed with a maddening clatter on the barbershop's tin roof, and the one-armed man, his face an apoplectic color, hollered: "I'll getcha, Idabel! I'll getcha sure as shooting; you just wait!" A flourish of female laughter floated through the screen door behind him, and a waspish-voiced woman shrilled: "Sugar, you quit actin' the fool, and hie yourself in here outa that heat. " Then, apparently addressing a third party: "I declare but what he ain't no better'n that Idabel; ain't neither one got the sense God gave 'em. Oh shoot, I says to Miz Potter (she was in for a shampoo a week ago today and I'd give a pretty penny to know how she gets that mop so filthy dirty), well, I says: 'Mis Potter, you teach that Idabel at the school, I says, 'now how come she's so confounded mean? I says: 'It do seem to me a mystery, and her with that sweet sister-speakin' of Florabel-and them two twins, and noways alike. Wellsir, Miz Potter answers me: 'Oh, Miz Caulfield, that Idabel sure do give me a peck of trouble and it's my opinion she oughta be in the penitentiary. Uh huh, that's just what she said. Well, it wasn't no revelation to me cause I always knew she was a freak, no ma'am, never saw that Idabel Thompkins in a dress yet. Sugar, you come on in here outa that heat…"

The man made a yoke with his fingers and spit fatly through it. He gave Joel a nasty look, and snapped, "Are you standing there wanting my money for doing nothing whatsoever, is that it, eh?"

"Sugar, you hear me?"

"Hush your mouth, woman," and the screen door whined shut.

Joel shook his head and went on his way. The redheaded girl and her loud gang were gone from sight, and the white afternoon was ripening towards the quiet time of day when the summer sky spills soft color over the drawn land. He smiled with chilly insolence at the interested stares of passersby, and when he reached the establishment known as R. V. Lacey's Princely Place, he stopped to read a list that was chalked on a tiny, battered blackboard which stood outside the entrance: Miss Roberta V. Lacey Invites You to Come in and Try Our Tasty Fried Catfish and Chicken-Yummy Dixie Ice Cream-Good Delicious Barbecue-Sweet Drinks & Cold Beer.

"Sweet drinks," he said half-aloud, and it seemed as if frosty Coca-Cola was washing down his dry throat. "Cold beer." Yes, a cold beer. He felt the lumpy outline of the change purse in his pocket, then pushed the swinging screen door open and stepped inside.

In the box-shaped room that was R. V. Lacey's Princely Place there were about a dozen people standing around, mostly overalled boys with rawboned, sun-browned faces, and a few young girls. A hubbub of talk faded to nothing when Joel entered and self-consciously sat himself down at a wooden counter which ran the length of the room.

"Why, hello, little one," boomed a muscular woman who immediately strode forward and propped her elbows on the counter before him. She had long ape-like arms that were covered with dark fuzz, and there was a wart on her chin, and decorating this wart was a single antenna-like hair. A peach silk blouse sagged under the weight of her enormous breasts; a zany light sparkled in the red-rimmed eyes she focused on him. "Welcome to Miss Roberta's." Two of her dirty-nailed fingers reached out to give his cheek a painful pinch. "Say now, what can Miss Roberta do for this cute-lookin fella?"

Joel was overwhelmed. "A cold beer," he blurted, deafly ignoring the titter of giggles and guffaws that sounded in the background.

"Can't serve no beer to minors, babylove, even if you are a mighty cute-lookin fella. Now what you want is a nice NEHI grapepop," said the woman, lumbering away.

The giggles swelled to honest laughter, and Joel's ears turned a humiliated pink. He wondered if the woman was a lunatic. And his eyes scanned the sour-smelling room as if it were a madhouse. There were calendar portraits of toothy bathing beauties on the walls, and a framed certificate which said: This is to certify that Roberta Velma Lacey won Grand Prize in Lying at the annual Double Branches Dog Days Frolic. Hanging from the low ceiling were several poisonous streamers of strategically arranged flypaper, and a couple of naked lightbulbs that were ornamented with shredded ribbons of green-and-red crepe paper. A water pitcher filled with branches of towering pink dogwood sat on the counter.

"Here y'are," said the woman, plunking down a dripping wet bottle of purple sodapop. "I declare, little one, you sure are hot and dusty-lookin." She gave his head a merry pat. "Know somethin, you must be the boy Sam Radclif brung to town, say?"

Joel admitted this with a nod. He took a swallow of the drink, and it was lukewarm. "I want… that is, do you know how far it is from here to Skully's Landing?" he said, realizing every ear in the place was turned to him.

"Ummm," the woman tinkered with her wart, and walled her eyes up into her head till they all but disappeared. "Hey, Romeo, how far you spec it is out to The Skulls," she said, and grinned crazily. "I call it The Skulls on accounta…" but she did not finish, for at that moment the Negro boy of whom she's asked the information, answered: "Two miles, more like three, maybe, ma'am."

"Three miles," she parroted. "But if I was you, babylove, I wouldn't go traipsin over there."

"Me neither," whined a yellow-haired girl.

"Is there anyway I could get a ride out?"

Somebody said, "Ain't Jesus Fever in town?"

Yeah, I saw Jesus-Jesus, he parked round by the Livery-What? Y'all mean old Jesus Fever? Christamighty, I thought he was way gone and buried! — Nah, man. He's past a hundred but alive as you are.-Sure, I seen Jesus-Yeah, Jesus is here…

The woman grabbed a flyswatter and slammed it down with savage force. "Shut up that gab. I can't hear a thing this boy says."

Joel felt a little surge of pride, tinged with fright, at being the center of such a commotion. The woman fixed her zany eyes on a point somewhere above his head, and said: "What business you got with The Skulls, babylove?"

Now this again! He sketched the story briefly, omitting all except the simplest events, even to excluding a mention of the letters. He was trying to locate his father, that was the long and short of it. Could she help him?

Well, she didn't know. She stood silent for some time, toying with her wart and staring off into space. "Hey, Romeo," she said finally, "you say Jesus Fever's in town?"

"Yes'm." The boy she called Romeo was colored, and wore a puffy, stained chefs cap. He was stacking dishes in a sink behind the counter.

"Come here, Romeo," she said, beckoning, "I got something to discuss." Romeo joined her promptly in a rear corner. She began whispering excitedly, glancing over her shoulder now and then at Joel, who could not hear what they were saying. It was quiet in the room, everyone was looking at him. He took out the bullet thefted from Sam Radclif and rolled it nervously in his hands.

Suddenly the door swung open. The skinny girl with fiery, chopped-off red hair swaggered inside, and stopped dead still, her hands cocked on her hips. Her face was flat, and rather impertinent; a network of big ugly freckles spanned her nose. Her eyes, squinty and bright green, moved swiftly from face to face, but showed none a sign of recognition; they paused a cool instant on Joel, then traveled elsewhere.

Hi, Idabel-watchasay, Idabel?

"I'm hunting sister," she said. "Anybody seen her?" Her voice was boy-husky, sounding as though strained through some rough material: it made Joel clear his throat.

"Seen her sitting on the porch a while back," said a chinless young man.

The redhead leaned against the wall, and crossed her pencil-thin, bony-kneed legs. A ragged bandage stained with mercurochrome covered her left knee. She pulled out a blue yo-yo and let it unwind slowly to the floor and spin back. "Who's that?" she asked, jerking her head towards Joel. When nobody answered, she loopty-looped the yo-yo, shrugged and said: "Who cares, pray tell?" But she continued to watch him cagily from the corners of her eyes. "Hey, hows about a dope on credit, Roberta?" she called.

"Miss Roberta," said the woman, momentarily interrupting her confab with Romeo. "I don't need to tell you you have a right smart tongue, Idabel Thompkins, and always did have. And till such time as you learn a few ladylike manners, I'd be obliged if you'd keep outa my place, hear? Besides, since when have you got all this big credit? Ha! March now… and don't come back till you put on some decent female clothes."

"You know what you can do," sassed the girl, stomping out the door. "This old dive'll have a mighty long wait before I bring my trade here again, you betcha." Once outside, her silhouette darkened the screen as she paused to peer in at Joel.

And now dusk was coming on. A sea of deepening green spread the sky like some queer wine, and across this vast green, shadowed clouds were pushed sluggishly by a mild breeze. Presently the trek homeward would commence, and afterwards the stillness of Noon City would be almost a sound itself: the sound a footfall might make among the mossy tombs on the dark ledge. Miss Roberta had lent Romeo as Joel's guide. The two kept duplicate pace; the Negro boy carried Joel's bag; wordlessly they turned the corner by the jail, and there was the stable, a barnlike structure of faded red which Joel had noticed earlier that day. A number of men who looked like a gang of desperadoes in a Western picture-show were congregated near the hitching post, passing a whiskey bottle from hand to hand; a second group, less boisterous, played a game with a jackknife under the dark area of an oak tree. Swarms of dragonflies quivered above a slime-coated watertrough; and a scabby hound dog padded back and forth, sniffing the bellies of tied-up mules. One of the whiskey drinkers, an old man with long white hair and a long white beard, was feeling pretty good evidently, for he was clapping his hands and doing a little shuffle-dance to a tune that was probably singing in his head.

The colored boy escorted Joel round the side of the stable to a backlot where wagons and saddled horses were packed so close a swinging tail was certain to strike something. "That's him," said Romeo, pointing his finger, "there's Jesus Fever."

But Joel had seen at once the pygmy figure huddled atop the seat plank of a grey wagon parked on the lot's further rim: a kind of gnomish little Negro whose primitive face was sharp against the drowning green sky. "Don't less us be fraid," said Romeo, leading Joel through the maze of wagons and animals with timid caution. "You best hold tight to my hand, white boy: Jesus Fever, he the oldest ol buzzard you ever put eyes on."

Joel said, "But I'm not afraid," and this was true.

"Shhh!"

As the boys approached, the little pygmy cocked his head at a wary angle; then slowly, with the staccato movements of a mechanical doll, he turned sideways till his eyes, yellow feeble eyes dotted with milky specks, looked down on them with dreamy detachment. He had a funny derby hat perched rakishly on his head, and in the candy-striped ribbon-band was jabbed a speckled turkey feather.

Romeo stood hesitantly waiting, as if expecting Joel to take the lead; but when the white child kept still, he said: "You lucky you come to town, Mister Fever. This here little gentman's Skully kin, and he going out to the Landing for to live."

"I'm Mister Sansom's son," said Joel, though suddenly, gazing up at the dark and fragile face, this didn't seem to mean much. Mr. Sansom. And who was he? A nothing, a nobody. A name that did not appear even to have particular significance for the old man whose sunken, blind-looking eyes studied him without expression.

Then Jesus Fever raised the derby a respectful inch. "Say I should find him here: Miss Amy say," he whispered hoarsely. His face was like a black withered apple, and almost destroyed; his polished forehead shone as though a purple light gleamed under the skin; his sickle-curved posture made him look as though his back were broken: a sad little brokeback dwarf crippled with age. Yet, and this impressed Joel's imagination, there was a touch of the wizard in his yellow, spotted eyes: it was a tricky quality that suggested, well, magic and things read in books. "I here yestiday, day fore, cause Miss Amy, she say wait," and he trembled under the impact of a deep breath. "Now I can't talk no whole lot; ain't got the strenth. So up, child. Gettin' towards night, and night's misery on my bones."

"Right with you, Mister Jesus," said Joel without enthusiasm. Romeo gave him a boost into the wagon, and handed up the suitcase. It was an old wagon, wobbly and rather like an oversized peddler's cart; the floor was strewn with dry cornhusks and croquer sacks which smelled sweetly sour.

"Git, John Brown," urged Jesus Fever, gently slapping the reins against a tan mule's back. "Lift them feet, John Brown, lift them feet…"

Slowly the wagon pulled from the lot and groaned up a path onto the road. Romeo ran ahead, gave the mule's rump a mighty whack and darted off; Joel felt a quick impulse to call him back, for it came to him all at once that he did not want to reach Skully's Landing alone. But there was nothing to be done about it now. Out in front of the stable the bearded drunk had quit dancing, and the hound dog was squatting under the water trough scratching fleas. The wagon's rickety wheels made dust clouds that hung in the green air like powdered bronze. A bend in the road: Noon City was gone.

It was night, and the wagon crept over an abandoned country road where the wheels ground softly through deep fine sand, muting John Brown's forlorn hoofclops. Jesus Fever had so far spoken only twice, each time to threaten the mule with some outlandish torture: he was going to skin him raw or split his head with an axe, possibly both. Finally he'd given up and, still hunched upright on the seat-plank, fallen asleep. "Much further?" Joel asked once, and there was no answer. The reins lay limply entwined round the old man's wrists, but the mule skillfully guided the wagon unaided.

Relaxed as a rag doll, Joel was stretched on a croquer-sack mattress, his legs dangling over the wagon's end. A vine-like latticework of stars frosted the southern sky, and with his eyes he interlinked these spangled vines till he could trace many ice-white resemblances: a steeple, fantastic flowers, a springing cat, the outline of a human head, and other curious designs like those made by snowflakes. There was a vivid, slightly red three-quarter moon; the evening wind eerily stirred shawls of Spanish moss which draped the branches of passing trees. Here and there in the mellow dark fireflies signaled one another as though messaging in code. He listened contented and untroubled to the remote, singing-saw noise of night insects.

Then presently the music of a childish duet came carrying over the sounds of the lonesome countryside: "What does the robin do then, poor thing…" Like specters he saw them hurrying in the moonshine along the road's weedy edge. Two girls. One walked with easy grace, but the other moved as jerky and quick as a boy, and it was she that Joel recognized.

"Hello, there," he said boldly when the wagon overtook them.

Both girls had watched the wagon's approach, and slowed their step perceptibly; but the one who was unfamiliar, as if startled, cried, "Gee Jemima!" She had long, long hair that fell past her hips, and her face, the little he could see of it, smudged as it was in shadow, seemed very friendly, very pretty. "Why, isn't it just grand of you to come along this way and want to give us a ride?"

"Help yourself," he said, and slid over to make a seat.

"I'm Miss Florabel Thompkins," she announced, after she'd hopped agilely up beside him, and pulled her dress-hem below her knees. "This is the Skullys' wagon? Sure, that's Jesus Fever… is he asleep? Well, don't that beat everything." She talked rapidly in a flighty, too birdlike manner, as if mimicking a certain type of old lady. "Come on, sister, there's oodles of room."

The sister trudged on behind the wagon. "I've got two feet and I reckon I'm not such a flirt I can't find the will-power to put one in front of the other, thanks all the same," she said, and gave her shorts an emphatic hitch.

"You're welcome to ride," said Joel weakly, not knowing what else to do; for she was a funny kid, no doubt about it.

"Oh, folderol," said Florabel Thompkins, "don't you pay her no mind. That's just what Mama calls Idabel Foolishness. Let her walk herself knock-kneed for what it means to the great wide world. No use trying to reason with her: she's got willful ways, Idabel has. Ask anybody."

"Huh," was all Idabel said in her defense.

Joel looked from one to the other, and concluded he liked Florabel the best; she was so pretty, at least he imagined her to be, though he could not see her face well enough to judge fairly. Anyway, her sister was a tomboy, and he'd had a special hatred of tomboys ever since the days of Eileen Otis. This Eileen Otis was a beefy little roughneck who had lived on the same block in New Orleans, and she used to have a habit of waylaying him, stripping off his pants and tossing them high into a tree. That was years gone by, but the memory of her could infuriate him still. He pictured Florabel's redheaded sister as a regular Eileen Otis.

"We've got us a lovely car, you know," said Florabel. "It's a green Chevrolet that six persons can ride in without anybody sitting on anybody's lap, and there are real window-shades you can pull up or down with darling toy babies. Papa won this lovely Chevrolet from a man at a cock-fight, which I think was real smart of him, only Mama says different. Mama's as honest as the day is long, and she don't hold with the cock-fights. But what I'm trying to say is: we don't usually have to hitch rides, and with strangers, too… course we do know Jesus Fever… kinda. But what's your name? Joel? Joel what? Knox… well, Joel Knox, what I'm trying to say is my Papa usually drives us to town in our lovely car…" She jabbered on and on, and he was content to listen till, turning his head, he saw her sister, and thought she was looking at him peculiarly. As this exchange of stares continued, a smileless but amused look that passed between them was lighted by the moon; it was as if each were saying: I don't think so much of you, either."… but one time I just happened to slam the door on Idabel's hand," Florabel was still talking of the car, "and now her thumbnail won't grow the least bit: it's all lumpy and black. But she didn't cry or take on, which was very brave on her part; now me, I couldn't stand to have such a nasty old… show him your hand, sister."

"You let me alone or I'll show it to you o. k.: in a place you're not expecting."

Florabel sniffed, and glanced peevishly at Joel because he laughed. "It don't pay to treat Idabel like she was a human being," she said ominously. "Ask anybody. The tough way she acts you'd never suppose she came from a well-to-do family like mine, would you?"

Joel held his peace, knowing no matter what he said it would be the wrong thing.

"That's just what I mean," said Florabel, turning the silence to her own advantage, "you'd never suppose. Naturally she is as we're twins: born the same day, me ten minutes first, so I'm elder; both of us twelve, going on thirteen. Florabel and Idabel. Isn't it tacky the way those names kinda rhyme? Only Mama thinks it's real cute, but…"

Joel didn't hear the rest, for he suddenly noticed Idabel had stopped trailing the wagon. She was far back and running, running like a pale animal through the lake of weeds lining the wayside towards a flowering island of dogwood that bloomed lividly some distance off like seashore foam on a black beach. But before he could point this out to Florabel, her twin was gone and lost between the shining trees. "Isn't she afraid to be out there all alone in the dark?" he interrupted, and with a gesture indicated where Idabel had disappeared.

"That child is afraid of nothing," stated Florabel flatly. "Don't you fret none over her; she'll catch up when she gets to feeling like it."

"But out in those woods…"

"Oh, sister takes her notions and there's no sense in asking why. We were born twins, like I told you, but Mama says the Lord always sends something bad with the good." Florabel yawned and leaned back, the long hair sprawling about her shoulders. "Idabel will take any kind of a dare; even when we were real little she'd go up and poke around the Skullys' and peek in all the windows. One time she even got a good look at Cousin Randolph." Lazily she reached up and seized a firefly that was pulsing goldenly in the air above her head, then: "Do you like living at that place?"

"What place?"

"The Landing, silly."

Joel said: "I may, but I haven't seen it yet." Her face was close to his, and he could tell she was disappointed with the answer. "And you, where's your house?"

She waved an airy hand. "Just a little ways up yonder. It's not far from the Landing, so maybe you could come visit sometime." She tossed the firefly into the air where it hung suspended like a small moon. "Naturally I didn't know whether to think you lived at the Landing or not. Nobody ever sees any of them Skullys. Why, the Lord himself could be living there with none the wiser. Are you kin to…" but this was cut short by a terrible, paralyzing wail, and wild crashing in the all-around darkness.

Idabel bounded into the road from the underbrush. She was flailing her arms and howling loud and fierce.

"You darn fool!" her sister screamed, but Joel did nothing, for his heart was lodged somewhere in his throat. Then he turned to check Jesus Fever's reaction, but the old man still snoozed; and strangely the mule had not bolted with fright.

"That was pretty good, eh?" said Idabel. "I'll bet you thought the devil was hot on your trail."

Florabel said: "Not the devil, sister… he's inside you." And to Joel: "She'll catch it when I tell Papa, cause she couldn't have got up here without us seeing unless she cut through the hollow, and Papa's told her and told her about that. She's all the time snooping around in there hunting sweetgum: some day a big old moccasin is going to chew off her leg right at the hip, mark my word."

Idabel had returned carrying a spray of dogwood, and now she smelled the blooms exultantly. "I've already been snake-bit," she said.

"Yes, that's the truth," her sister admitted. "You should've seen her leg, Joel Knox. It swelled up like a watermelon; all her hair fell out; oh, she was dogsick for two months, and Mama and me had to wait on her hand and foot."

"It's lucky she didn't die," said Joel.

"I would've if I was you and didn't know how to take care of myself," said Idabel.

"She was smart, all right," conceded Florabel. "She just went smack in the chicken yard and snatched up this rooster and ripped him wide open; never heard such squawking. Hot chicken blood draws the poison."

"You ever been snakebit, boy?" Idabel wanted to know.

"No," he said, feeling somehow in the wrong, "but I was nearly run over by a car once."

Idabel seemed to consider this. "Run over by a car," she said, her woolly voice tinged with envy.

"Now you oughtn't to have told her that," snapped Florabel. "She's liable to run straight off and throw herself in the middle of the highway."

Below the road and in the shallow woods a close-by creek's sliding, pebble-tinkling rush underlined the bellowed comments of hidden frogs. The slow-rolling wagon cleared a slope and started down again. Idabel picked the petals from the dogwood spray, dripping them in her path, and tossed the rind aside; she tilted her head and faced the sky and began to hum; then she sang: "When the northwind doth blow, and we shall have snow, what does the robin do then, poor thing?" Florabel took up the tune: "He got to the barn, to keep he-self warm, and hide he-self under he wing, poor thing!" It was a lively song and they sang it over and over till Joel joined to make a trio; their voices pealed clear and sweet, for all three were sopranos, and Florabel vivaciously strummed a mythical banjo. Then a cloud crossed the moon and in the black the singing ended.

Florabel jumped off the wagon. "Our house is over in there," she said, pointing toward what looked to Joel like an empty wilderness. "Don't forget… come to visit."

"I will," he called, but already the tide of darkness had washed the twins from sight.

Sometime later a thought of them echoed, receded, left him suspecting they were perhaps what he'd first imagined: apparitions. He touched his cheek, the cornhusks, glanced at the sleeping Jesus-the old man was trance-like but for his body's rubbery response to the wagon's jolting-and was reassured. The guide reins jangled, the hoofbeats of the mule made a sound as drowsy as a fly's bzzz on a summer afternoon. A jungle of stars rained down to cover him in blaze, to blind and close his eyes. Arms akimbo, legs crumpled, lips vaguely parted-he looked as if sleep had struck him with a blow.

Fence posts suddenly loomed; the mule came alive, began to trot, almost to gallop down a graveled lane over which the wheels spit stone; and Jesus Fever, jarred conscious, tugged at the reins: "Whoa, John Brown, whoa!" And the wagon presently came to a spiritless standstill.

A woman slipped down the steps leading from a great porch; delirious white wings sucked round the yellow globe of a kerosene lantern that she carried high. But Joel, scowling at a dream demon, was unaware when the woman bent so intently towards him and peered into his face by the lamp's smoky light.

2

Falling… falling… falling! a knifelike shaft, an underground corridor, and he was spinning like a fan blade through metal spirals; at the bottom a yawning-jawed crocodile followed his downward whirl with hooded eyes: as always, rescue came with wakefulness. The crocodile exploded in sunshine. Joel blinked and tasted his bitter tongue and did not move; the bed, an immense four-poster with different rosewood fruits carved crudely on its high headboard, was suffocatingly soft and his body had sunk deep in its feathery center. Although he'd slept naked, the light sheet covering him felt like a wool blanket.

The whisper of a dress warned him that someone was in the room. And another sound, dry and wind-rushed, very much like the beat of bird wings; it was this sound, he realized while rolling over, which had wakened him.

An expanse of pale yellow wall separated two harshly sunlit windows which faced the bed. Between these windows stood the woman. She did not notice Joel, for she was staring across the room at an ancient bureau: there, on top a lacquered box, was a bird, a bluejay perched so motionless it looked like a trophy. The woman turned and closed the only open window; then, with prissy little sidling steps, she started forward.

Joel was wide awake, but for an instant it seemed as if the bluejay and its pursuer were a curious fragment of his dream. His stomach muscles tightened as he watched her near the bureau and the bird's innocent agitation: it hopped around bobbing its blue-brilliant head; suddenly, just as she came within striking distance, it fluttered its wings and flew across the bed and lighted on a chair where Joel had flung his clothes the night before. And remembrance of the night flooded over him: the wagon, the twins, and the little Negro in the derby hat. And the woman, his father's wife: Miss Amy, as she was called. He remembered entering the house, and stumbling through an odd chamber of a hall where the walls were alive with the tossing shadows of candleflames; and Miss Amy, her finger pressed against her lips, leading him with robber stealth up a curving, carpeted stairway and along a second corridor to the door of this room; all a sleepwalker's pattern of jigsaw incidents; and so, as Miss Amy stood by the bureau regarding the bluejay on its new perch, it was more or less the same as seeing her for the first time. Her dress was of an almost transparent grey material; on her left hand, for no clear reason, she wore a matching grey silk glove, and she kept the hand cupped daintily, as if it were crippled. A wispy streak of white zigzagged through the dowdy plaits of her brownish, rather colorless hair. She was slight, and fragile-boned, and her eyes were like two raisins embedded in the softness of her narrow face.

Instead of following the bird directly, as before, she tiptoed over to a fireplace at the opposite end of the huge room, and, artfully twisting her hand, seized hold of an iron poker. The bluejay hopped down the arm of the chair, pecking at Joel's discarded shirt. Miss Amy pursed her lips, and took five rapid, lilting, ladylike steps…

The poker caught the bird across the back, and pinioned it for the fraction of a moment; breaking loose, it flew wildly to the window and cawed and flapped against the pane, at last dropping to the floor where it scrambled along dazedly, scraping the rug with its outspread wings.

Miss Amy trapped it in a corner, and scooped it up against her breast.

Joel pressed his face into the pillow, knowing that she would look in his direction, if only to see how the racket had affected him. He listened to her footsteps cross the room, and the gentle closing of the door.

He dressed in the same clothes he'd worn the previous day: a blue shirt, and bedraggled linen trousers. He could not find his suitcase anywhere, and wondered whether he'd left it in the wagon. He combed his hair, and doused his face with water from a washbasin that sat on a marble-topped table beside the rosewood four-poster. The rug, which was bald in spots and of an intricately oriental design, felt grimy and rough under his bare feet. The stifling room was musty; it smelled of old furniture and the burned-out fires of wintertime; gnat-like motes of dust circulated in the sunny air, and Joel left a dusty imprint on whatever he touched: the bureau, the chiffonier, the washstand. This room had not been used in many years certainly; the only fresh things here were the bedsheets, and even these had a yellowed look.

He was lacing up his shoes when he spied the bluejay feather. It was floating above his head, as if held by a spider's thread. He plucked it out of the air, carried it to the bureau, and deposited it in the lacquered box, which was lined with red plush; it also occurred to him that this would be a good place to store Sam Radclif's bullet. Joel loved any kind of souvenir, and it was his nature to keep and catalogue trifles. He'd had many grand collections, and it pained him sorely that Ellen persuaded him to leave them in New Orleans. There had been magazine photos and foreign coins, books and no-two-alike rocks, and a wonderful conglomeration he'd labeled simply Miscellany: the feather and bullet would've made good items for that. But maybe Ellen would mail his stuff on, or maybe he could start all over again, maybe…

There was a rap at the door.

It was his father, of that he was sure. It must be. And what should he say: hello, Dad, Father, Mr Sansom? Howdyado, hello? Hug, or shake hands, or kiss? oh why hadn't he brushed his teeth, why couldn't he find the Major's suitcase and a clean shirt? He whipped a bow into his shoelace, called, "Yeah?" and straightened up erect, prepared to make the best, most manly impression possible.

The door opened. Miss Amy, her gloved hand cradled, waited on the threshold; she nodded sweetly, and, as she advanced, Joel noticed the vague suggestion of a mustache fuzzing her upper lip.

"Good morning," he said, and, smiling, held out his hand. He was of course disappointed, but somehow relieved, too. She stared at his outstretched hand, a puzzled look contracting her puny face. She shook her head, and skirted past him to a window where she stood with her back turned. "It's after twelve," she said.

Joel's smile felt suddenly stiff and awkward. He hid his hands in his pockets.

"Such a pity you arrived last night at so late an hour: Randolph had planned a merrier welcome." Her voice had a weary, simpering tone; it struck the ear like the deflating whoosh of a toy balloon. "But it's just as well, the poor child suffers with asthma, you know: had. a wretched attack yesterday. He'll be ever so peeved I haven't let him know you're here, but I think it best he stay in his room, at least till supper."

Joel rummaged around for something to say. He recalled Sam Radclif having spoken of a cousin, and one of the twins, Florabel, of a Cousin Randolph. At any rate, from the way she talked, he supposed this person to be a kid near his own age.

"Randolph is our first cousin, and a great admirer of yours," she said, turning to face him. The hard sunshine emphasized the pallor of her skin, and her tiny eyes, now fixing him shrewdly, were alert. There was lack of focus in her face, as though, beneath the uningratiating veneer of fatuous refinement, another personality, quite different, was demanding attention; the lack of focus gave her, at unguarded moments, a panicky, dismayed expression, and when she spoke it was as if she were never precisely certain what every word signified. "Have you money left from the check my husband sent Mrs. Kendall?"

"About a dollar, I guess," he said, and reluctantly offered his change purse. "It cost a good bit to stay at that cafй."

"Please, it's yours," she said. "I was merely interested in whether you are a wise, thrifty boy." She appeared suddenly irritated. "Why are you so fidgety? Must you use the bathroom?"

"Oh, no." He felt all at once as though he'd wet his pants in public. "Oh, no."

"Unfortunately, we haven't modern plumbing facilities. Randolph is opposed to contrivances of that sort. However," and she nodded toward the washstand, "you'll find a chamber pot in there… in the compartment below."

"Yes'm," said Joel, mortified.

"And of course the house has never been wired for electricity. We have candles and lamps; they both draw bugs, but which would you prefer?"

"Whichever you've got the most of," he said, really wanting candles, for they brought to mind the St. Deval Street Secret Nine, a neighborhood detective club of which he'd been both treasurer and Official Historian. And he recalled club get-togethers where tall candles, snitched from the five 'n' dime, flamed in Coca-Cola bottles, and how Exalted Operative Number One, Sammy Silverstein, had used for a gavel an old cow bone.

She glanced at the firepoker which had rolled halfway under a wing chair. "Would you mind picking that up and putting it over by the hearth? I was in here earlier," she explained, while he carried out her order, "and a bird flew in the window; such a nuisance: you weren't disturbed?"

Joel hesitated. "I thought I heard something," he said. "It woke me up."

"Well, twelve hours sleep should be sufficient." She lowered herself into the chair, and crossed her toothpick legs; her shoes were low-heeled and white, like those worn by nurses. "Yes, the morning's gone and everything's all hot again. Summer is so unpleasant." Now despite her impersonal manner, Joel was not antagonized, just a little uncomfortable. Females in Miss Amy's age bracket, somewhere between forty-five and fifty, generally displayed a certain tenderness toward him, and he took their sympathy for granted; if, as had infrequently happened, this affection was withheld, he knew with what ease it could be guaranteed: a smile, a wistful glance, a courtly compliment: "I want to say how pretty I think your hair is: anice color."

The bribe received no clear-cut appreciation, therefore: "And how much I like my room."

And this time he hit his mark. "I've always considered it the finest room in the house. Cousin Randolph was born here: in that very bed. And Angela Lee… Randolph's mother: a beautiful woman, originally from Memphis… died here, oh, not many years ago. We've never used it since." She perked her head suddenly, as if to hear some distant sound; her eyes squinted, then closed altogether. But presently she relaxed and eased back into the chair. "I suppose you've noticed the view?"

Joel confessed that no, he hadn't, and went obligingly to a window. Below, under a fiery surface of sun waves, a garden, a jumbled wreckage of zebrawood and lilac, elephant-ear plant and weeping willow, the lace-leafed limp branches shimmering delicately, and dwarfed cherry trees, like those in oriental prints, sprawled raw and green in the noon heat. It was not a result of simple neglect, this tangled oblong area, but rather the outcome, it appeared, of someone having, in a riotous moment, scattered about it a wild assortment of seed. Grass and bush and vine and flower were all crushed together. Massive chinaberry and waterbay formed a rigidly enclosing wall. Now at the far end, opposite the house, was an unusual sight: like a set of fingers, a row of five white fluted columns lent the garden the primitive, haunted look of a lost ruin: Judas vine snaked up their toppling slenderness, and a yellow tabby cat was sharpening its claws against the middle column. Miss Amy, having risen, now stood beside him. She was an inch or so shorter than Joel.

"In ancient history class at school, we had to draw pictures of some pillars like those. Miss Radinsky said mine were the best, and she put them on the bulletin board," he bragged.

"The pillars… Randolph adores them, too; they were once part of the old side porch," she told him in a reminiscing voice. "Angela Lee was a young bride, just down from Memphis, and I was a child younger than you. In the evening we would sit on the side porch, sipping cherryade and listen to the crickets and wait for the moonrise. Angela Lee crocheted a shawl for me: you must see it sometime, Randolph uses it in his room as a tablescarf: a waste and a shame." She spoke so quietly it was as though she intended only herself to hear.

"Did the porch just blow away?" asked Joel.

"Burned," she said, rubbing a clear circle on the dusty glass with her gloved hand. "It was in December, the week before Christmas, and at a time when there was no man on the place but Jesus Fever, and he was even then very old. No one knows how the fire started or ended; it simply rose out of nothing, burned away the dining room, the music room, the library… and went out. No one knows."

"And this garden is where the part that burned up was?" said Joel. "Gee, it must've been an awful big house."

She said: "There, by the willows and goldenrod… that is the site of the music room where the dances were held; small dances, to be sure, for there were few around here Angela Lee cared to entertain… And they are all dead now, those who came to her little evenings; Mr. Casey, I understand, passed on last year, and he was the last."

Joel gazed down on the jumbled green, trying to picture the music room and the dancers ("Angela Lee played the harp," Miss Amy was saying, "and Mr. Casey the piano, and Jesus Fever, though he'd never studied, the violin, and Randolph the Elder sang; had the finest male voice in the state, everyone said so"), but the willows were willows and the goldenrod goldenrod and the dancers dead and lost. The yellow tabby slunk through the lilac into tall, concealing grass, and the garden was glazed and secret and still.

Miss Amy sighed as she slipped back into the shade of the room. "Your suitcase is in the kitchen," she said. "If you'll come downstairs, we'll see what Missouri has to feed you."

A dormer window of frost glass illuminated the long top-floor hall with the kind of pearly light that drenches a room when rain is falling. The wallpaper had once, you could tell, been blood red, but now was faded to a mural of crimson blisters and maplike stains. Including Joel's, there were four doors in the hall, impressive oak doors with massive brass knobs, and Joel wondered which of them, if opened, might lead to his father.

"Miss Amy," he said, as they started down the stairs, "where is my dad? I mean, couldn't I see him, please, ma'am?"

She did not answer. She walked a few steps below him, her gloved hand sliding along the dark, curving bannister, and each stairstep remarked the delicacy of her footfall. The strand of grey winding in her mousy hair was like a streak of lightning.

"Miss Amy, about my father…"

What in hell was the matter with her? Was she a little deaf, like his cousin Louise? The stairs sloped down to the circular chamber he remembered from the night, and here a full-length mirror caught his reflection bluely; it was like the comedy mirrors in carnival houses; he swayed shapelessly in its distorted depth. Except for a cedar chest supporting a kerosene lantern, the chamber was bleak and unfurnished. At the left was an archway, and a large crowded parlor yawned dimly beyond; to the right hung a curtain of lavender velvet that gleamed in various rubbed places like frozen dew on winter grass. She pushed through the parted folds. Another hall, another door.

The kitchen was empty. Joel sat down in a cane-bottom chair at a large table spread with checkered oilcloth, while Miss Amy went out on the backstops and stood there calling, "Yoo hoo, Missouri, yoo hoo," like an old screech owl.

A rusty alarm clock, lying face over on the table, ticktucked, ticktucked. The kitchen was fair-sized, but shadowed, for there was a single window, and by it the furry leaves of a fig tree met darkly; also, the planked walls were the somber bluegray of an overcast sky, and the stove, a woodburning relic with a fire pulsing in it now, was black with a black chimney flute rising to the low ceiling. Worn linoleum covered the floor, as it had in Ellen's kitchen, but this was all that reminded Joel of home.

And then, sitting alone in the quiet kitchen, he was taken with a terrible idea: what if his father had seen him already? Indeed, had been spying on him ever since he arrived, was, in fact, watching him at this very moment? An old house like this would most likely be riddled with hidden passages, and picture-eyes that were not eyes at all, but peepholes. And his father thought: that runt is an imposter; my son would be taller and stronger and handsomer and smarter-looking. Suppose he'd told Miss Amy: give the little faker something to eat and send him on his way. And dear sweet Lord, where would he go? Off to foreign lands where he'd set himself up as an organ grinder with a little doll-clothed monkey, or a blind-boy street singer, or a beggar selling pencils.

"Confound it, Missouri, why can't you learn to light in one place longer than five seconds?"

"I gotta chop the wood, Aint' I gotta chop the wood?"

"Don't sass me."

"I ain't sassin nobody, Miss Amy."

"If that isn't sass, what is it?"

"Whew!"

Up the steps they came, and through the back screen door, Miss Amy, vexation souring her white face, and a graceful Negro girl toting a load of kindling which she dropped in a crib next to the stove. The Major's suitcase, Joel saw, was jammed behind this crib.

Smoothing the fingers of her silk glove, Miss Amy said: "Missouri belongs to Jesus Fever; she's his grandchild."

"Delighted to make your acquaintance," said Joel, in his very best dancing-class style.

"Me, too," rejoined the colored girl, going about her business. "Welcome to," she dropped a frying pan, "the Landin."

"If we aren't more careful," stage-whispered Miss Amy, "we're liable to find ourselves in serious difficulty. All this racket: Randolph will have a conniption."

"Sometime I get so tired," mumbled Missouri.

"She's a good cook… when she feels like it," said Miss Amy. "You'll be taken care of. But don't stuff, we have early supper on Sundays."

Missouri said: "You comin to Service, Ma'am?"

"Not today," Miss Amy replied distractedly. "He's worse, much worse."

Missouri placed the pan on a rack and nodded knowingly. Then, looking square at Joel: "We countin on you, young fella."

It was like the exasperating code-dialogue which, for the benefit and bewilderment of outsiders, had often passed between members of the St. Deval Street Secret Nine.

"Missouri and Jesus hold their own prayer meeting Sunday afternoons," explained Miss Amy.

"I plays the accordion and us sings," said Missouri. "It's a whole lota fun."

But Joel, seeing Miss Amy was preparing to depart, ignored the colored girl, for there were certain urgent matters he wanted settled. "About my father…"

"Yes?" Miss Amy paused in the doorway.

Joel felt tongue-tied. "Well, I'd like to… to see him," he finished lamely.

She fiddled with the doorknob. "He isn't well, you know," she said. "I don't think it advisable he see you just yet; it's so hard for him to talk." She made a helpless gesture. "But if you want, I'll ask."

With a cut of cornbread, Joel mopped bone-dry the steaming plate of fried eggs and grits, sopping rich with sausage gravy, that Missouri had set before him.

"It sure do gimme pleasure to see a boy relish his vittels," she said. "Only don't spec no refills cause I gotta pain lickin my back like to kill me: didn't sleep a blessed wink last night; been sufferin with this pain off and on since I'm a wee child, and done took enough medicine to float the whole entire United States Navy: ain't nona it done me a bita good nohow. There was a witch woman lived a piece down the road (Miz Gus Hulie) usta make a fine magic brew, and that helped some. Poor white lady. Mis Gus Hulie. Met a terrible accident: fell into an ol Injun grave and was too feeble for to climb out." Tall, powerful, barefoot, graceful, soundless, Missouri Fever was like a supple black cat as she paraded serenely about the kitchen, the casual flow of her walk beautifully sensuous and haughty. She was slant-eyed, and darker than the charred stove; her crooked hair stood straight on end, as if she'd seen a ghost, and her lips were thick and purple. The length of her neck was something to ponder upon, for she was almost a freak, a human giraffe, and Joel recalled photos, which he'd scissored once from the pages of a National Geographic, of curious African ladies with countless silver chokers stretching their necks to improbable heights. Though she wore no silver bands, naturally, there was a sweat-stained blue polka-dot bandanna wrapped round the middle of her soaring neck. "Papa-daddy and me's countin on you for our Service," she said, after filling two coffee cups and mannishly straddling a chair at the table. "We got our own little place backa the garden, so you scoot over later on, and we'll have us a real good ol time."

"I'll come if I can, but this being my first day and all, Dad will most likely expect me to visit with him," said Joel hopefully.

Missouri emptied her coffee into a saucer, blew on it, dumped it back into the cup, sucked up a swallow, and smacked her lips. "This here's the Lord's day," she announced. "You believe in Him? You got faith in His healin power?"

Joel said: "I go to church."

"Now that ain't what I'm speaking of. Take for instance, when you thinks bout the Lord, what is it passes in your mind?"

"Oh, stuff," he said, though actually, whenever he had occasion to remember that a God in heaven supposedly kept his record, one thing he thought of was money: quarters his mother had given him for each Bible stanza memorized, dimes diverted from the Sunday School collection plate to Gabaldoni's Soda Fountain, the tinkling rain of coins as the cashiers of the church solicited among the congregation. But Joel didn't much like God, for He had betrayed him too many times. "Just stuff like saying my prayers."

"When I thinks bout Him, I thinks bout what I'm gonna do when Papadaddy goes to his rest," said Missouri, and rinsed her mouth with a big swallow of coffee. "Well, I'm gonna spread my wings and fly way to some swell city up north like Washington, D. C."

"Aren't you happy here?"

"Honey, there's things you too young to unnerstand."

"I'm thirteen," he declared. "And you'd be surprised how much I know."

"Shoot, boy, the country's just fulla folks what knows everythin, and don't unnerstand nothin, just fullofem," she said, and began to prod her upper teeth: she had a flashy gold tooth, and it occurred to Joel that the prodding was designed for attracting his attention to it. "Now one reason is, I get lonesome: what I all the time say is, you ain't got no notion what lonesome is till you stayed a spell at the Landin. And there ain't no mens round here I'm innerested in, leastwise not at the present: one time there was this mean buzzard name of Keg, but he did a crime to me and landed hisself on the chain gang, which is sweet justice considerin the lowdown kinda trash he was. I'm only a girl of fourteen when he did this bad thing to me. " A fist-like knot of flies, hovering over a sugar jar, dispersed every whichaway as she swung an irritated hand. "Yessir, Keg Brown, that's the name he go by. " With a fingertip she shined her gold tooth to a brighter luster while her slanted eyes scrutinized Joel; these eyes were like wild foxgrapes, or two discs of black porcelain, and they looked out intelligently from their almond slits. "I gotta longin for city life poisonin my blood cause I was brung up in St. Louis till Papadaddy fetched me here for to nurse him in his dyin days. Papadaddy was past ninety then, and they say he ain't long for this world, so I come. That be thirteen year ago, and now it look to me like Papadaddy gonna outlive Methusaleh. Make no mistake, I love Papadaddy, but when he gone I sure aimin to light out for Washington, D. C., or Boston, Coneckikut. And that's what I thinks bout when I thinks bout God."

"Why not New Orleans?" said Joel. "There are all kinds of good-looking fellows in New Orleans."

"Aw, I ain't studyin no New Orleans. It ain't only the mens, honey: I wants to be where they got snow, and not all this sunshine. I wants to walk around in snow up to my hips: watch it come outa the sky in gret big globs. Oh, pretty… pretty. You ever see the snow?"

Rather breathlessly, Joel lied and claimed that he most certainly had; it was a pardonable deception, for he had a great yearning to see bona fide snow: next to owning the Koh-i-noor diamond, that was his ultimate secret wish. Sometimes, on flat boring afternoons, he'd squatted on the curb of St. Deval Street and daydreamed silent pearly snowclouds into sifting coldly through the boughs of the dry, dirty trees. Snow falling in August and silvering the glassy pavement, the ghostly flakes icing his hair, coating rooftops, changing the grimy old neighborhood into a hushed frozen white wasteland uninhabited except for himself and a menagerie of wonder-beasts: albino antelopes, and ivory-breasted snowbirds; and occasionally there were humans, such fantastic folk as Mr. Mystery, the vaudeville hypnotist, and Lucky Rogers, the movie star, and Madame Veronica, who read fortunes in a Vieux Carrй tearoom. "It was one stormy night in Canada that I saw the snow," he said, though the farthest north he'd ever set foot was Richmond, Virginia. "We were lost in the mountains, Mother and me, and snow, tons and tons of it, was piling up all around us. And we lived in an ice-cold cave for a solid week, and we kept slapping each other to stay awake: if you fall asleep in snow, chances are you'll never see the light of day again."

"Then what happened?" said Missouri, disbelief subtly narrowing her eyes.

"Well, things got worse and worse. Mama cried, and the tears froze on her face like little BB bullets, and she was always cold…" Nothing had warmed her, not the fine wool blankets, not the mugs of hot toddy Ellen fixed. "Each night hungry wolves howled in the mountains, and I prayed…" In the darkness of the garage he'd prayed, and in the lavatory at school, and in the first row of the Nemo Theatre while duelling gangsters went unnoticed on the magic screen. "The snow kept falling, and heavy drifts blocked the entrance to the cave, but uh…" Stuck. It was the end of a Saturday serial that leaves the hero locked in a slowly filling gas chamber.

"And?"

"And a man in a red coat, a Canadian Mountie, rescued us… only me, really: Mama had already frozen to death."

Missouri denounced him with considerable disgust. "You is a gret big story."

"Honest, cross my heart," and he exed his chest.

"Uh uh. You Mama die in the sick bed. Mister Randolph say so."

Somehow, spinning the tale, Joel had believed every word; the cave, the howling wolves, these had seemed more real than Missouri and her long neck, or Miss Amy, or the shadowy kitchen. "You won't tattle, will you, Missouri? About what a liar I am."

She patted his arm gently. "Course not, honey. Come to think, I wish I had me a two-bit piece for every story I done told. Sides, you tell good lies, the kind I likes to hear. We gonna get along just elegant: me, I ain't but eight years older'n you, and you been to the school." Her voice, which was like melted chocolate, was warm and tender. "Les us be friends."

"O. K.," said Joel, toasting her with his coffee cup, "friends."

"And somethin else is, you call me Zoo. Zoo's my rightful name, and I always been called by that till Papadaddy let on it stood for Missouri, which is the state where is located the city of St. Louis. Then, Miss Amy 'n Mister Randolph, they so proper: Missouri this 'n Missouri t'other, day in, day out. Huh! You call me Zoo."

Joel saw an opening. "Does my father call you Zoo?"

She dipped down into the blouse of her gingham dress, and withdrew a silver compact. Opening it, she took a pinch of snuff, and sniffed it up her wide nose. "Happy Dip, that's the bestest brand."

"Is he awful sick-Mister Sansom?" Joel persisted.

"Take a pinch," she said, extending her compact.

And he accepted, anxious not to offend her. The ginger-colored powder had a scalding, miserable taste, like devil's pepper; he sneezed, and when water sprang up in his eyes he covered his face ashamedly with his hands.

"You laughin or cryin, boy?"

"Cryin," he whimpered, and this came close to truth. "Everybody in the house is stone deaf."

"I ain't deaf, honey," said Zoo, sounding sincerely concerned. "Have the backache and stomach jitters, but I ain't deaf."

"Then why does everybody act so queer? Gee whiz, every time I mention Mister Sansom you'd think… you'd think… and in the town…" He rubbed his eyes and peeked at Zoo. "Like just now, when I asked if he was really ill…"

Zoo glanced worriedly at the window where fig leaves pressed against the glass like green listening ears. "Miss Amy done tol you he ain't the healthiest man."

The flies buzzed back to the sugar jar, and the ticktuck of the defective clock was loud. "Is he going to die?" said Joel.

The scrape of a chair. Zoo was up and rinsing pans in a tub with water from a well-bucket. "We friends, that's fine," she said, talking over her shoulder. "Only don't never ax me nothin bout Mister Sansom. Miss Amy the one take care of him. Ax her. Ax Mister Randolph. I ain't in noways messed up with Mister Sansom; don't even fix him his vittels. Me and Papadaddy, us got our own troubles."

Joel snapped shut the snuff compact, and revolved it in his hands, examining the unique design. It was round and the silver was cut like a turtle's shell; a real butterfly, arranged under a film of lime glass, figured the lid; the butterfly wings were the luminously misty orange of a full moon. So elegant a case, he reasoned, was never meant for ordinary snuff, but rare golden powders, precious witch potions, love sand.

"Yessir, us got our own troubles."

"Zoo," he said, "where'd you get this?"

She was kneeling on the floor cursing quietly as she shoveled ashes out of the stove. The firelight rippled over her black face and danced a yellow light in her foxgrape eyes which now cut sideways questioningly. "My box?" she said. "Mister Randolph gimme it one Christmas way long ago. He make it hisself, makes lotsa pretty dodads long that line."

Joel studied the compact with awed respect; he would've sworn it was store-bought. Distastefully he recalled his own attempts at hand-made gifts: necktie racks, tool kits, and the like; they were mighty sorry by comparison. He comforted himself with the thought that Cousin Randolph must be older than he'd supposed.

"I usta been usin it for cheek-red," said Zoo, advancing to claim her treasure. She dipped more snuff before redepositing it down her dress-front. "But seein as I don't go over to Noon City no more (ain't been in two years), I reckoned it'd do to keep my Happy Dip good 'n dry. Sides, no sense paintin up less there's mens round a lady is innerested in… which there ain't." A mean expression pinched her face as she gazed at the sunspots freckling the linoleum. "That Keg Brown, the one what landed on the chain gang cause he did me a bad turn, I hope they got him out swingin a ninety-pound pick under this hot sun." And, as if it were sore, she touched her long neck lightly. "Well," she sighed, "spec I best get to tendin Papadaddy: I'm gonna take him some hoecake and molasses: he must be powerful hungry."

Joel watched apathetically while she broke off a cold slab of cornbread, and poured a preserve jar half-full of thick molasses. "How come you don't fix yourself a slingshot, and go out and kill a mess of birds?" she suggested.

"Dad will probably want me in a minute," he told her. "Miss Amy said she'd see, so I guess I'd better stick around here."

"Mister Randolph likes the dead birds, the kinds with pretty feathers. Won't do you no good squattin in this dark ol kitchen." Her naked feet were soundless as she moved away. "You be at the Service, you hear?"

The fire had waned to ashes, and, while the old broken clock ticked like an invalid heart, the sunspots on the floor spread and darkened; the shadows of the fig leaves trellising the walls swelled to an enormous quivering shape, like the crystal flesh of a jellyfish. Flies skittered along the table, rubbing their restless hair-feet, and zoomed and sang round Joel's ears. When, two hours later, two that seemed five, he raised the clock off its battered face it promptly stopped beating and all sense of life faded from the kitchen; three-twenty its bent hands recorded: three, the empty, middle hour of an endless afternoon. She was not coming. Joel plowed his fingers through his hair. She was not coming, and it was all some crazy trick.

His leg had gone numb from resting so long in one position, and it tingled bloodlessly as he got up and limped out of the kitchen, and down the hall, calling plaintively: "Miss Amy. Miss Amy."

He swished the lavender curtains apart, and moved into the bleak light filling the barren, polished chamber towards his image floating on the watery-surfaced looking glass; his formless reflected face was wide-lipped and one-eyed, as if it were a heat-softened wax effigy; the lips were a gauzy line, the eyes a glaring bubble. "Miss Amy… anybody!"

Somewhere in a school textbook of Joel's was a statement contending that the earth at one time was probably a white hot sphere, like the sun; now, standing in the scorched garden, he remembered it. He had reached the garden by following a path which led round from the front of the house through the rampart of interlacing trees. And here, in the overgrown confusion, were some plants taller than his head, and others razor-sharp with thorns; brittle sun-curled leaves crackled under his cautious step. The dry, tangled weeds grew waist high. The sultry smells of summer and sweet shrub and dark earth were heavy, and the itchy whirr of bumblebees stung the silence. He could hardly raise his eyes upward, for the sky was pure blue fire. The wall of the house rising above the garden was like a great yellow cliff, and patches of Virginia creeper greenly framed all its eight overlooking windows.

Joel tramped down the tough undergrowth till he came up flat against the house. He was bored, and figured he might as well play Blackmail, a kind of peeping-tom game members of the Secret Nine had fooled around with when there was absolutely nothing else to do. Blackmail was practiced in New Orleans only after sunset, inasmuch as daylight could be fatal for a player, the idea being to approach a strange house and peer invisibly through its windows. On these dangerous evening patrols, Joel had witnessed many peculiar spectacles, like the night he'd watched a young girl waltzing stark naked to victrola music; and again, an old lady drop dead while puffing at a fairyland of candles burning on a birthday cake; and most puzzling of all, two grown men standing in an ugly little room kissing each other.

The parlor of Skully's Landing ran the ground-floor's length; gold draperies tied with satin tassels obscured the greater part of its dusky, deserted interior, but Joel, his nose mashed against a pane, could make out a group of heavy chairs clustered like fat dowagers round a tea-table. And a gilded loveseat of lilac velvet, an Empire sofa next to a marble fireplace, and a cabinet, one of three, the others of which were indistinct, gleaming with china figurines and ivory fans and curios. On top of a table directly before him were a Japanese pagoda, and an ornate shepherd lamp, chandelier prisms dangling from its geranium globe like jeweled icicles.

He slipped away from the window and crossed the garden to the slanting shade of a willow. The diamond glitter of the afternoon hurt his eyes, and he was as slippery with sweat as a greased wrestler; it stood to reason such weather would have to break. A rooster crowed beyond the garden, and it had for him the same sad, woebegone sound as a train whistle wailing late at night. A train. He sure wished he were aboard one headed far from here. If he could get to see his father! Miss Amy, she was a mean old bitch. Stepmothers always were. Well, just let her try and lay a hand on him. He'd tell her off soon as look at her, by God. He was pretty brave. Who was it licked Sammy Silverstein to a frazzle a year ago come next October? But gee, Sammy was a good kid, kind of. And he wondered what devilment old Sammy was up to right this minute. Probably sitting in the Nemo Theatre stuffing his belly with popcorn; yeah, that's where you'd find him, because this was the matinee they were going to show that spook picture about a batty scientist changing Lucky Rogers into a murderous gorilla. Of all the pictures he would have to miss that one. Hell! Now supposing he did suddenly decide to make dust tracks on the road? Maybe it would be fun to own a barrel organ and a monkey. And there was always the soda-jerking business: anybody that liked ice-cream sodas as much as he did ought to be able to make one. Hell!

"Ra ta ta ta," went his machine gun as he charged toward the five broken porch columns. And then, midway between the pillars and a clump of goldenrod, he discovered the bell. It was a bell like those used in slavedays to summon field-hands from work; the metal had turned a mildewed green, and the platform on which it rested was rotten. Fascinated, Joel squatted Indian-style and poked his head inside the bell's flared mouth; the lint of withered spider webs hung everywhere, and a delicate green lizard, racing liquidly round the rusty hollow, swerved, flicked its tongue, and nailed its pinpoint eyes on Joel, who withdrew in disordered haste.

Rising, he glanced up at the yellow wall of the house, and speculated as to which of the top-floor windows belonged to him, his father, Cousin Randolph. It was at this point that he saw the queer lady. She was holding aside the curtains of the left corner window, and smiling and nodding at him, as if in greeting or approval; but she was no one Joel had ever known: the hazy substance of her face, the suffused marshmallow features, brought to mind his own vaporish reflection in the wavy chamber mirror. And her white hair was like the wig of a character from history: a towering pale pompadour with fat dribbling curls. Whoever she was, and Joel could not imagine, her sudden appearance seemed to throw a trance across the garden: a butterfly, poised on a dahlia stem, ceased winking its wings, and the rasping F of the bumblebees droned into nothing.

When the curtain fell abruptly closed, and the window was again empty, Joel, reawakening, took a backward step and stumbled against the bell: one raucous, cracked note rang out, shattering the hot stillness.

3

"HEY, Lord!" STAMP. "Hey, Lord!" STAMP. "Don't wanna ride on the devil's side… jus wanna ride with You!"

Zoo squeezed the music from a toylike accordion, and pounded her flat foot on the rickety cabin-porch floor. "Oh devil done weep, devil done cried, cause he gonna miss me on my last lonesome ride." A prolonged shout: the fillet of gold glistened in the frightening volcano of her mouth, and the little mail-order accordion, shoved in, shoved out, was like a lung of pleated paper and pearl shell. "Gonna miss me…"

For some time the rainbird had shrilled its cool promise from an elderberry lair, and the sun was locked in a tomb of clouds, tropical clouds that nosed across the low sky, massing into a mammoth grey mountain.

Jesus Fever sat surrounded by a mound of beautiful scrap-quilt pillows in a rocker fashioned out of old barrel-staves; his reverent falsetto quavered like a broken ocarina-note, and occasionally he raised his hands to give a feeble, soundless clap.

"… on my ride!"

Perched on a toadstool-covered stump growing level with the porch, Joel alternated his interest between Zoo's highjinks and the changing weather; the instant of petrified violence that sometimes foreruns a summer storm saturated the hushed yard, and in the unearthly tinseled light rusty buckets of trailing fern which were strung round the porch like party lanterns appeared illuminated by a faint green inward flame. A damp breeze, tuning in the boles of waterbays, carried the fresh mixed scent of rain, of pine and June flowers blooming in far-off fields. The cabin door swung open, banged closed, and there came the muffled rattle of the Landing's window-shutters being drawn.

Zoo mashed out a final gaudy chord, and put the accordion aside. She had varnished her upended hair with brilliantine, and exchanged the polka-dot neckerchief for a frayed red ribbon. Different colored threads darned her white dress in a dozen spots, and she'd jeweled her ears with a pair of rhinestone earrings.

"If you gotta thirst, and the water done gone, PRAY to the Lord, pray on and on." Outstretching her arms, balanced like a tightrope walker, she stepped into the yard, and strutted round Joel's tree stump. "If you gotta lover, and the lover done gone, PRAY to the Lord, pray on and on."

High in chinaberry towers the wind moved swift as a river, the frenzied leaves, caught in its current, frothed like surf on the sky's shore. And slowly the land came to seem as though it were submerged in dark deep water. The fern undulated like sea-floor plants, the cabin loomed mysterious as a sunken galleon hulk, and Zoo, with her fluid, insinuating grace, could only be, Joel thought, the mermaid bride of an old drowned pirate.

"If you gotta hunger, and the food done gone, PRAY to the Lord, pray on and on."

A yellow tabby loped across the yard, and sprang nimbly into Jesus Fever's lap; it was the cat Joel had seen skulking in the garden lilac. Clambering to the old man's shoulder, it smooched its crafty mug next to the puny cheek, its tawny astonished eyes blazing at Joel. It rumbled as the little Negro stroked the striped belly. Minus his derby hat, Jesus Fever's skull, except for sparse sprouts of motheaten wool, was like a ball of burnished metal; a black suit double his size sagged dilapidatedly on his delicate frame, and he wore tiny high-button shoes of orange leather. The spirit of the service was rousing him mightily, and, from time to time, he honked his nose between his fingers, tossing the discharge into the fern.

The rhythmic chain of Zoo's half-sung, half-shouted phrases rose and fell like her pounding foot, and her earrings, dangling with the sway of her head, shot flecks of sparkle. "Listen oh Lord when us pray, kindly hear what us has to say…"

Silent lightning zigzagged miles away, then another bolt, this a dragon of crackling white, now not too distant, was followed by a crawling thunder-roll. A bantam rooster raced for the safety of a well-shed, and the triangular shadow of a crow flock cut the sky.

"I cold," complained Jesus petulantly. "Leg all swole up with rain. I cold…" The cat curled in his lap, its head flopped over his knee like a wilted dahlia.

The off-on flash of Zoo's gold tooth made Joel's heart suddenly like a rock rattling in his chest, for it suggested to him a certain winking neon sign: R. R. Oliver's Funeral Estb. Darkness. R. R. Oliver's Funeral Estb. Darkness. "Downright tacky, but they don't charge too outlandish," that's what Ellen had said, standing before the plate window where a fan of gladiolas blushed livid under the electric letters publicizing a cheap but decent berth en route to the kingdom and the glory. Now here again he'd locked the door and thrown away the key: there was conspiracy abroad, even his father had a grudge against him, even God. Somewhere along the line he'd been played a mean trick. Only he didn't know who or what to blame. He felt separated, without identity, a stone-boy mounted on the rotted stump; there was no connection linking himself and the waterfall of elderberry leaves cascading on the ground, or, rising beyond, the Landing's steep, intricate roof.

"I cold. I wants to wrap up in the bed. It gonna storm."

"Hold your tater, Papadaddy."

Then an unusual thing occurred: as if following the directions of a treasure map, Zoo took three measured paces toward a dingy little rose bush, and, frowning up at the sky, discarded the red ribbon binding her throat. A narrow scar circled her neck like a necklace of purple wire; she traced a finger over it lightly.

"When the time come for that Keg Brown to go, Lord, just you send him back in a hounddog's nasty shape, ol hound ain't nobody wants to trifle with: a haunted dog."

It was as though a brutal hawk had soared down and clawed away Joel's eyelids, forcing him to gape at her throat. Zoo. Maybe she was like him, and the world had a grudge against her, too. But christamighty he didn't want to end up with a scar like that. Except what chance have you got when there is always trickery in one hand, and danger in the other. No chance whatsoever. None. A coldness went along his spine. Thunder boomed overhead. The earth shook. He leaped off the stump, and made for the house, his loosened shirt-tail flying behind; run, run, run, his heart told him, and wham! he'd pitched headlong into a briar patch. This was a kind of freak accident. He'd seen the patch, known it for an obstacle, and yet, as though deliberately, he'd thrown himself upon it. But the stinging briar scratches seemed to cleanse him of bewilderment and misery, just as the devil, in fanatic cults, is supposedly, through self-imposed pain, driven from the soul. Realizing the tender concern in Zoo's face as she helped him to his feet, he felt a fool: she was, after all, his friend, and there was no need to be afraid. "Here, little old bad boy," she said kindly, plucking briar needles off his breeches, "how come you act so ugly? Huh, hurt me and Papadaddy's feelins." She took his hand, and led him to the porch.

"Hee hee hee," cackled Jesus, "I tumble thataway, I bust every bone."

Zoo picked up her accordion and, reclining against a porch-pole, presently, with careless effort, produced a hesitant, discordant melody. And her grandfather, in a disappointed child's wheedling singsong, reiterated his grievances; he was about to perish of chill, but what matter; who gave a goldarn whether he lived or died? and why didn't Zoo, inasmuch as he'd performed his Sabbath duty, tuck him in his good warm bed and leave him in peace? oh there were cruel folk in this world, and heartless ways.

"Hush up and bow that head, Papadaddy," said Zoo. "We gonna end this meetin proper-like. We gonna tell Him our prayers. Joel, honey, bow that head."

The trio on the porch were figures in a woodcut engraving: the Ancient on his throne of splendid pillows, a yellow pet relaxed in his lap gazing gravely in the drowning light at the small servant bowed at its master's feet, and the arms of the black arrow-like daughter lifted above them all, as if in benediction.

But there was no prayer in Joel's mind; rather, nothing a net of words could capture, for, with one exception, all his prayers of the past had been simple concrete requests: God, give me a bicycle, a knife with seven blades, a box of oil paints. Only how, how, could you say something so indefinite, so meaningless as this: God, let me be loved.

"Amen," whispered Zoo.

And in this moment, like a swift intake of breath, the rain came.

4

"Can't we be more specific?" said Randolph, languidly pouring a glass of sherry. "Was she fat, tall, lean?"

"It was hard to tell," said Joel.

Outside in the night, rain washed the roof with close slanted sounds, but here kerosene lamps spun webs of mellow light in the darkest corner, and the kitchen-window mirrored the scene like a golden looking glass. So far Joel's first supper at the Landing had gone along well enough. He felt very much at ease with Randolph, who, at each conversational lag, introduced topics which might interest and flatter a boy of thirteen: Joel found himself holding forth exceedingly well (he thought) on Do Human Beings Inhabit Mars? How Do You Suppose Egyptians Really Mummified Folks? Are Head-hunters Still Active? and other conversational subjects. It was due more or less to an overdose of sherry (disliking the taste, but goaded by the hope of getting sure enough drunk… now wouldn't he have something to write Sammy Silverstein!… three thimble glasses had been drained) that Joel mentioned the Lady.

"Heat," said Randolph. "Exposing one's bare head to the sun occasionally results in minor hallucinations. Dear me, yes. Once, some years ago, while airing in the garden, I seemed quite distinctly to see a sunflower transformed into a man's face, the face of a scrappy little boxer I admired at one point, a Mexican named Pepe Alvarez." He fondled his chin reflectively, and wrinkled his nose, as if to convey that this name had for him particular implications. "Stunning experience, so impressive I cut the flower, and pressed it in a book; even now, if I come across it I fancy… but that is neither here nor there. It was the sun, I'm sure. Amy dearest, what do you think?"

Amy, who was brooding over her food, glanced up, rather startled. "No more for me, thank you," she said.

Randolph frowned in mock annoyance. "As usual, out picking the little blue flower of forgetfulness."

Her narrow face softened with pleasure. "Silvertongued devil," she said, unreserved adoration brightening her sharp little eyes, and making them, for an instant, almost beautiful.

"To begin at the beginning, then," he said, and burped("Excusez-moi, s'il vous plaоt. Blackeyed peas, you understand; most indigestible"). He patted his lips daintily. "Now where was I, oh yes… Joel refuses to be persuaded we at the Landing aren't harboring spirits."

"That isn't what I said," Joel protested.

"Some of Missouri's chatter," was Amy's calm opinion. "Just a hotbed of crazy nigger-notions, that girl. Remember when she wrung the neck off every chicken on the place? Oh, it isn't funny, don't laugh. I've sometimes wondered what would happen if it got into her headhis soul inhabited one of us."

"Keg?" said Joel. "You mean Keg's soul?"

"Don't tell me!" cried Randolph, and giggled in the prim, suffocated manner of an old maid. "Already?"

"I didn't think it was so funny," said Joel resentfully. "He did a bad thing to her."

Amy said: "Randolph's only cutting up."

"You malign me, angel."

"It wasn't funny," said Joel.

Squinting one eye, Randolph studied the spokes of amber light whirling out from the sherry as he raised and revolved his glass. "Not funny, dear me, no. But the story has a certain bizarre interest: would you care to hear it?"

"How unnecessary," said Amy. "The child's morbid enough."

"All children are morbid: it's their one saving grace," said Randolph and went right ahead. "This happened more than a decade ago, and in a cold, very cold November. There was working for me at the time a strapping young buck, splendidly proportioned, and with skin the color of swamp honey." A curious quality about Randolph's voice had worried Joel from the first, but not till now could he put a finger on it: Randolph spoke without an accent of any kind: his weary voice was free of regional defects, yet there was an emotional undercurrent, a caustic lilt of sarcasm which gave it a rather emphatic personality.

"He was, however, a little feeble-minded. The feeble-minded, the neurotic, the criminal, perhaps, also, the artist, have unpredictablility and perverted innocence in common." His expression became smugly remote, as though, having made an observation he thought superior, he must pause and listen admiringly while it reverberated in his head. "Let's compare them to a Chinese chest: the sort, you remember, that opens into a second box, another, still another, until at length you come upon the last… the latch is touched, the lid springs open to reveal… what unsuspected cache?" He smiled wanly, and tasted the sherry. Then, from the breastpocket of the taffy-silk pyjama top that he wore, he extracted a cigarette, and struck a match. The cigarette had a strange, medicinal odor, as though the tobacco had been long soaked in the juice of acid herbs: it was the smell that identifies a house where asthma reigns. As he puckered his lips to blow a smoke ring, the pattern of his talcumed face was suddenly complete: it seemed composed now of nothing but circles: though not fat, it was round as a coin, smooth and hairless; two discs of rough pink colored his cheeks, and his nose had a broken look, as if once punched by a strong angry fist; curly, very blond, his fine hair fell in childish yellow ringlets across his forehead, and his wide-set, womanly eyes were like sky-blue marbles.

"So they were in love, Keg and Missouri, and we had the wedding here, the bride all clothed in family lace…"

"Nice as any white girl, I'll tell you," said Amy. "Pretty as a picture."

Joel said: "But if he was crazy…"

"She was never one for reasoning," sighed Randolph. "Only fourteen, of course, a child, but decidedly stubborn: she wanted to marry, and so she did. We lent them a room here in the house the week of their honeymoon, and let them use the yard to have a fishfry for their friends."

"And my dad… was he at the wedding?"

Randolph, looking blank, tapped ash onto the floor. "But then one night, very late…" lowering his eyelids sleepily, he drew a finger round the rim of his glass. "Does Amy, by chance, recall the veryoriginal thing I did when we heard Missouri scream?"

Amy couldn't make up her mind whether she did or not. Ten years, after all, was a long time.

"We were sitting like this in the parlor, doesn't that come back? And I said: it's the wind. Of course I knew it wasn't." He paused, and sucked in his cheeks, as though the memory proved too exquisitely humorous for him to maintain a straight face. He aimed a gun-like finger at Joel, and cocked his thumb: "So I put a roller in the pianola, and it played the Indian Love Call."

"Such a sweet song," said Amy. "So sad. I don't know why you never let me play the pianola any more."

"Keg cut her throat," said Joel, a mood of panic bubbling up, for he couldn't follow the peculiar turn Randolph's talk had taken; it was like trying to decipher some tale being told in a senseless foreign language, and he despised this left-out feeling, just when he'd begun to feel close to Randolph. "I saw her scar," he said, and all but shouted for attention, "that's what Keg did."

"Uh yes, absolutely."

"It went like this," and Amy hummed. "When I'm calling yoo boo de da dum de da…"

"… from ear to ear: ruined a roseleaf quilt my great-great aunt in Tennessee lost her eyesight stitching."

"Zoo says he's on the chain gang, and she hopes he never gets off: she told the Lord to make him into an old dog."

"Will you answer da de de da… that isn't quite the tune, is it, Randolph?"

"A little off-key."

"But how should it go?"

"Haven't the faintest notion, angel."

Joel said: "Poor Zoo."

"Poor everybody," said Randolph, languidly pouring another sherry.

Greedy moths flattened their wings against the lamp funnels. Near the stove rain seeped through a leak in the roof, dripping with dismal regularity into an empty coal scuttle. "It's the kind of thing that happens when you tamper with the smallest box," observed Randolph, the sour smoke from his cigarette spiraling toward Joel, who, with discreet hand-waves, directed it elsewhere.

"I do wish you'd let me play the pianola," said Amy wistfully. "But I don't suppose you realize how much I enjoy it, what a comfort it is."

Randolph cleared his throat, and grinned, dimples denting his cheeks. His face was like a round ripe peach. He was considerably younger than his cousin: somewhere, say, in his middle thirties. "Still, we haven't exorcized Master Knox's ghost."

"It wasn't any ghost," muttered Joel. "There isn't any such of a thing: this was a real live lady, and I saw her."

"And what did she look like, dear?" said Amy, her tone indicating her thoughts were fastened on less far-fetched matters. It reminded Joel of Ellen and his mother: they also had used this special distant voice when suspicious of his stories, only allowing him to proceed for the sake of peace. The old trigger-quick feeling of guilt came over him: a liar, that's what the two of them, Amy and Randolph, were thinking, just a natural-born liar, and believing this he began to elaborate his description embarrassingly: she had the eyes of a fiend, the lady did, wild witch-eyes, cold and green as the bottom of the North Pole sea; twin to the Snow Queen, her face was pale, wintry, carved from ice, and her white hair towered on her head like a wedding cake. She had beckoned to him with a crooked finger, beckoned…

"Gracious," said Amy, nibbling a cube of watermelon pickle. "You really saw such a person!"

While talking, Joel had noticed with discomfort her cousin's amused, entertained expression: earlier, when he'd given his first flat account, Randolph had heard him out in the colorless way one listens to a stale joke, for he seemed, in some curious manner, to have advance knowledge of the facts.

"You know," said Amy slowly, and suspended the watermelon pickle midway between plate and mouth, "Randolph, have you been…" she paused, her eyes sliding sideways to confront the smooth, amused peach-face. "Well, thatdoes sound like…"

Randolph kicked her under the table; he accomplished this maneuver so skillfully it would have escaped Joel altogether had Amy's response been less extreme: she jerked back as though lightning had rocked the chair, and, shielding her eyes with the gloved hand, let out a pitiful wail: "Snake a snake I thought it was a snake bit me crawled under the table bit me foot you fool never forgive bit me my heart a snake," repeated over and over the words began to rhyme, to hum from wall to wall where giant moth shadows jittered.

Joel went all hollow inside; he thought he was going to wee wee right there in his breeches, and he wanted to hop up and run, just as he had at Jesus Fever's. Only he couldn't, not this time. So he looked hard at the window where fig leaves tapped a wet windy message, and tried with all his might to find the far-away room.

"Stop it this instant," commanded Randolph, making no pretense of his disgust. But when she could not seem to regain control he reached over and slapped her across the mouth. Then gradually she tapered off to a kind of hiccuping sob.

Randolph touched her arm solicitously. "All better, angel?" he said. "Dear me, you gave us a fright." Glancing at Joel, he added: "Amy is so very highstrung."

"So very," she agreed. "It was just that I thought… I hope I haven't upset the child."

But the walls of Joel's room were too thick for Amy's voice to penetrate. Now for a long time he'd been unable to find the far-away room; always it had been difficult, but never so hard as in the last year. So it was good to see his friends again. They were all here, including Mr. Mystery, who wore a crimson cape, a plumed Spanish hat, a glittery monocle, and had all his teeth made of solid gold: an elegant gentleman, though given to talking tough from the side of his mouth, and an artist, a great magician: he played the vaudeville downtown in New Orleans twice a year, and did all kinds of eerie tricks. This is how they got to be such buddies. One time he picked Joel from the audience, brought him up on the stage, and pulled a whole basketful of cotton-candy clean out of his ears; thereafter, next to little Annie Rose Kuppermann, Mr Mystery was the most welcome visitor to the other room. Annie Rose was the cutest thing you ever saw. She had jet black hair and a real permanent wave. Her mother kept her dressed in snow white on Sundays and all clear down to her socks. In real life, Annie Rose was too stuck up and sassy to even tell him the time of day, but here in the far-away room her cute little voice jingled on and on: "I love you, Joel. I love you a bushel and a peck and a hug around the neck." And there was someone else who rarely failed to show up, though seldom appearing as the same person twice; that is, he came in various costumes and disguises, sometimes as a circus strong-man, sometimes as a big swell millionaire, but always his name was Edward R. Sansom.

Randolph said: "She seeks revenge: out of the goodness of my heart I'm going to endure a few infernal minutes of the pianola. Would you mind, Joel, dear, helping with the lamps?"

Like the kitchen, Mr Mystery and little Annie Rose Kuppermann slipped into darkness when the lifted lamps passed through the hall to the parlor.

Ragtime fingers danced spectrally over the upright's yellowed ivories, the carnival strains of "Over the Waves" gently vibrating a girandole's crystal prism-fringe. Amy sat on the piano stool, cooling her little white face with a blue lace fan which she'd taken from the curio cabinet, and rigidly watched the mechanical thumping of the pianola keys.

"That's a parade song," said Joel. "I rode a float in the Mardi Gras once, all fixed up like a Chink with a long black pigtail, only a drunk man yanked it off, and set to whipping his ladyfriend with it right smack in the street."

Randolph inched nearer to Joel on the loveseat. Over his pyjamas he wore a seersucker kimono with butterfly sleeves, and his plumpish feet were encased in a pair of tooled-leather sandals: his exposed toenails had a manicured gloss. Up close, he had a delicate lemon scent, and his hairless face looked not much older than Joel's. Staring straight ahead, he groped for Joel's hand, and hooked their fingers together.

Amy closed her fan with a reproachful snap. "You never thanked me," she said.

"For what, dearheart?"

Holding hands with Randolph was obscurely disagreeable, and Joel's fingers tensed with an impulse to dig his nails into the hot dry palm; also, Randolph wore a ring which pressed painfully between Joel's knuckles. This was a lady's ring, a smoky rainbow opal clasped by sharp silver prongs.

"Why, the feathers," reminded Amy. "The nice bluejay feathers."

"Lovely," said Randolph, and blew her a kiss.

Satisfied, she spread the fan and worked it furiously. Behind her, the girandole quivered, and shedding lilac, loosened by the ragged pounding of the pianola, scattered on a table. A lamp had been placed by the empty hearth, so that it glowed out like a wavery ashen fire. "This is the first year a cricket hasn't visited," she said. "Every summer one has always hidden in the fireplace, and sang till autumn: remember, Randolph, how Angela Lee would never let us kill it?"

Joel quoted: "Hark to the crickets crying in grass, Hear them serenading in the sassafras."

Randolph bent forward. "A charming boy, little Joel, dear Joel," he whispered. "Try to be happy here, try a little to like me, will you?"

Joel was used to compliments, imaginary ones originating in his head, but to have some such plainly spoken left him with an uneasy feeling: was he being poked fun at, teased? So he questioned the round innocent eyes, and saw his own boy-face focused as in double camera lenses. Amy's cousin was in earnest. He looked down at the opal ring, touched and sorry he could've ever had a mean thought like wanting to dig his nails into Randolph's palm. "I like you already," he said.

Randolph smiled and squeezed his hand.

"What are you two whispering about?" said Amy jealously. "I declare you're rude." Suddenly the pianola was silent, the trembling girandole still. "May I play something else, Randolph, oh please?"

"I think we've had quite enough… unless Joel would care to hear another."

Joel bided time, tasting his power; then, recalling the miserable lonesome afternoon, spitefully gave a negative nod.

Amy pursed her lips."…the last chance you'll ever have to humiliate me," she told Randolph, flouncing over to the curio cabinet, and replacing her blue fan. Joel had inspected the contents of this cabinet before supper, and had yearned to have as his own such treasures as a jolly Buddha with a fat jade belly, a two-headed china crocodile, the program of a Richmond ball dated 1862 and autographed by Robert E. Lee, a tiny wax Indian in full war regalia, and several plush-framed daintily painted miniatures of virile dandies with villainous mustaches. "It's your house, I'm perfectly aware…"

But a queer sound interrupted: a noise like the solitary thump of an oversized raindrop, it drum-drummed down the stairsteps. Randolph stirred uneasily. "Amy," he said, and coughed significantly. She did not move.

"Is it the lady?" asked Joel, but neither answered, and he was sorry he'd drunk the sherry: the parlor, when he did not concentrate hard, had a bent tilted look, like the topsy-turvy room in the crazyhouse at Pontchartrain. The thumping stopped, an instant of quiet, then an ordinary red tennis ball rolled silently through the archway.

With a curtsy, Amy picked it up, and, balancing it in her gloved hand, brought it under close scrutiny, as if it were a fruit she was examining for worms. She exchanged a troubled glance with Randolph.

"Shall I come with you?" he said, as she hurried out.

"Later, when you've sent the boy to bed." Her footsteps resounded on the black stairs; somewhere overhead a doorlatch clicked.

Randolph turned to Joel with a desperately cheerful expression. "Do you play parcheesi?"

Joel was still puzzling over the tennis ball. He concluded, finally, that it would be best just to pretend as though it were the most commonplace thing in the world to have a tennis ball come rolling into your room out of nowhere. He wanted to laugh. Only it wasn't funny. He couldn't believe in the way things were turning out: the difference between this happening, and what he'd expected was too great. It was like paying your fare to see a wild-west show, and walking in on a silly romance picture instead. If that happened, he would feel cheated. And he felt cheated now.

"Or shall I read your fortune?"

Joel held up a clenched hand; the grimy fingers unfurled like the leaves of an opening flower, and the pink of his palm was dotted with sweat-beads. Once, thinking how ideal a career it would make, he'd ordered from a concern in New York City a volume called Techniques of Fortune-Telling, authored by an alleged gypsy whose greasy earringed photo adorned the jacket; lack of funds, however, cut short this project, for, in order to become a bonafide fortune-teller, he had to buy, it developed, a generous amount of costly equipment.

"Sooo," mused Randolph, drawing the hand out of shadow nearer lamplight. "Is it important that I see potential voyages, adventure, an alliance with the pretty daughter of some Rockefeller? The future is to me strangely unexciting: long ago I came to realize my life was meant for other times."

"But it's the future I want to know," said Joel.

Randolph shook his head, and his sleepy sky-blue eyes, contemplating Joel, were sober, serious. "Have you never heard what the wise men say: all of the future exists in the past."

"At least may I ask a question?" and Joel did not wait for any judgment: "There are just two things I'd like to know, one is: when am I going to see my dad?" And the quietness of the dim parlor seemed to echo when? when?

Gently releasing the hand, Randolph, a set smile stiffening his face, rose and strolled to a window, his loose kimono swaying about him; he folded his arms like a Chinaman into the butterfly sleeves, and stood very still. "When you are quite settled," he said. "And the other?"

Eyes closed: a dizzy well of stars. Open: a bent tilted room where twin kimonoed figures with curly yellow hair glided back and forth across the lopsided floor. "I saw that Lady, and she was real, wasn't she?" but this was not the question he'd intended.

Randolph opened the window. The rain had stopped, and cicadas were screaming in the wet summer dark. "A matter of viewpoint, I suppose," he said, and yawned. "I know her fairly well, and to me she is a ghost." The night wind blew in from the garden, flourishing the drapes like faded gold flags.

5

Wednesday, after breakfast, Joel shut himself in his room, and went about the hard task of thinking up letters. It was a hot dull morning, and the Landing, though now and again Randolph's sick cough rattled behind closed doors, seemed, as usual, too quiet, too still. A fat horsefly dived toward the Red Chief tablet where Joel's scrawl wobbled loosely over the paper; at school this haphazard style had earned him an F in penmanship. He twitched, twirled his pencil, paused twice to make water in the china slopjar so artistically festooned with pink-bottomed cupids clutching watercolor bouquets of ivy and violet; eventually, then, the first letter, addressed to his good friend Sammy Silverstein, read, when finished, as follows: "You would like the house I am living in Sammy as it is a swell house and you would like my dad as he knows all about airplanes like you do. He doesn't look much like your dad though. He doesn't wear specs or smoke cigars, but is tall like Mr Mystery (if Mr Mystery comes to the Nemo this summer write and tell all about it) and smokes a pipe and is very young. He gave me a.22 and when winter comes we will hunt possum and eat possum stew. I wish you could come and visit me as we would have a real good time. One thing we could do is get drunk with my cousin Randolph. We drink alcohol bevrages (sp?) and he is a lot of fun. Its sure not like New Orleans, Sammy. Out here a person old as us is a grown up person. You owe me 20ў. I will forget this det if you will write all news every week. Hello to the gang, remember to write your friend…" and with masterly care he signed his name in a new manner: J. H. K. Sansom. Several times he read it aloud; it had a distinguished, adult sound, a name he could readily imagine prefixed by such proud titles as General, Judge, Governor, Doctor. Doctor J. H. K. Sansom, the celebrated operating specialist; Governor J. H. K. Sansom, the peoples' choice ("Hello, warden, this is the Governor, just called to say I've given Zoo Fever a reprieve"). And then of course the world and all its folks would love him, and Sammy, well, Sammy could sell this old letter for thousands of dollars.

But searching for i's not dotted, t's uncrossed, it came to him that almost all he'd written were lies, big lies poured over the paper like a thick syrup. There was no accounting for them. These things he'd said, they should be true, and they weren't. At home, Ellen was forever airing unwelcome advice, but now he wished he could close his eyes, open them, and see her standing there. She would know what to do.

His pencil traveled so fast occasional words linked: how sorry he was not to have written sooner; he hoped Ellen was o. k., and ditto the kids… he missed them all, did they miss him? "It is nicehere," he wrote, but a pain twinged him, so he got up to walk the floor and knock his hands together nervously. How was he going to tell her? He stopped by the window and looked down at the garden where, except for Jesus Fever's tomcat, parading before the ruined columns, all seemed stagnant, painted: the lazy willows, shadowless in the morning sunshine; the hammered slave-bell muffled in the high weeds. Joel shook his head, as if to rock his thoughts into sensible order, then returned to the table, and angrily penciling out "It is nicehere," wrote: "Ellen, I hate this place. I don't know where he is and nobody will tell me. Willyou believe it Ellen when I say I have notseen him? Honest; Amy says he's sick but I don't believe oneword as I don't likeher. She lookslike that mean Miss Addie down the street that use to be making suchalot of unecesary stink. Another thing is, there are no radios, picture shows, funny papers and if you want to take a bath you got to fill a washtub with water from the well. I can't see how Randolph keeps clean as he does. I like him o. k. but I don't like it here onebit. Ellen did mama leave enough $ so I could go away to a school where you can live? Like a military school. Ellen I miss you. Ellen please tell me what to do. Love from Joel XXXXXXXX."

He felt better now, easier in his mind; say what you will, Ellen had never let him down. He felt so good that, stuffing the letters in their envelopes, he began to whistle, and it was the tune the twins had taught him: when the north wind doth blow, and we shall have snow… What was her name? And that other one, the tomboy? Florabel and Idabel. There was no reason why he had to mope around here all day: hadn't they invited him to visit? Florabel and Idabel and Joel, he thought, whistling happy, whistling loud.

"Quiet in there," came Randolph's muffled complaint. "I'm desperately, desperately ill…" and broke off into coughing.

Ha ha! Randolph could go jump in the lake. Ha ha! Joel laughed inwardly as he went to the old bureau where the lacquered chest, containing now his bullet, the bluejay feather, and coins amounting to seventy-eight cents, was hidden in the bottom drawer. Inasmuch as he had no stamps, he figured it would be legal simply to put six cents cash money in the r. f. d. box. So he wadded a nickel and a penny in toilet tissue, gathered his letters and started downstairs, still whistling.

Down by the mailbox he ran into Zoo, and she was not alone, but stood talking with a short, bullet-headed Negro. It was Little Sunshine, the hermit. Joel knew this, for Monday night at suppertime Little Sunshine had appeared tapping at the kitchen window; he'd come to call on Randolph, for they were, so Randolph said, "dear friends." He was extra-polite, Little Sunshine, and had brought gifts to all the family: a bucket of swamp honey, two gallons of home-brew, and a wreath of pine needles and tiger lilies which Randolph stuck on his head and galavanted around in the whole evening. Even though he lived far in the dark woods, even though he was a kind of hermit, and everybody knows hermits are evil crazy folks, Joel was not afraid of him. "Little Sunshine, he got more purentee sense 'n most anybody," said Zoo. "Tell the truth, honey, if my brain was like it oughta be, why, I'd marry him like a shot." Only Joel couldn't picture such a marriage; in the first place, Little Sunshine was too old, not so ancient as Jesus Fever, to be sure, but old all the same. And ugly. He had a blue cataract in one eye, hardly a tooth in his head, and smelled bad: while he was in the kitchen, Amy kept the gloved hand over her nose like a sachet-handkerchief, and when Randolph had carted him away to his room (from which sounds of drunken conversation came till dawn), she'd breathed a sigh of relief.

Little Sunshine raised his arm: "Hurry, child, make a cross," he said in a trombone voice, "cause you done come up on me in the lighta day." Awed, Joel crossed himself. A smile stretched the hermit's thick wrinkled lips: "Spin round, boy, and you is saved."

Meanwhile Zoo tried unsuccessfully to conceal a necklace-like ornament the hermit had knotted about her giraffish neck. She looked very put out when Joel asked: "What's that you've got on, Zoo?"

"Hit's a charm," volunteered the hermit proudly.

"Hush up," snapped Zoo. "Done just told me it don't work iffen I goes round tellin everybody." She turned to Joel. "Honey, I spec you best run along; got business with the man."

O. K., if that's how she felt. And she was supposed to be his friend! He stalked over to the mailbox, threw up the red flag, and put his letters inside, using the tissue-wrapped coins as a paperweight. Then, determining from memory the general direction of the twins' house, he trudged off down the road.

Sand dust eddied about his feet where he walked in the misty forest shade skimming the road's edge. The sun was white in a milkglass sky. Passing a shallow creek rushing swift and cool from the woods, he paused, tempted to take off his tight shoes and go wading where soggy leaves rotated wildly in pebbled whirlpools, but then he heard his name called, and it scared him. Turning, he saw Little Sunshine.

The hermit hobbled forward, throwing his weight against a hickory cane; he carried this cane always, though Joel could not see its necessity since, aside from the fact they were very bowed, nothing seemed wrong with his legs; but his arms were so long his fingertips touched his knees. He wore ripped overalls, no shirt, no hat, no shoes. "Gawd Amighty, you walks fast, boy," he said, panting up alongside. "Else hit's me what ain't use to this daytime; ain't nothin coulda got me out cept Zoo needed that charm mighty bad."

Joel realized that his curiosity was being purposely aroused. So he pretended to be uninterested. And presently, as he expected, Little Sunshine, of his own accord, added: "Hit's a charm guarantee no turrible happenins gonna happen; makes it myself outa frog powder 'n turtle bones."

Joel slackened his gait, for the hermit moved slow as a cripple; in certain ways he was like Jesus Fever: indeed, might have been his brother. But there was about his broad ugly face a slyness the old man's lacked. "Little Sunshine," he said, "would you makeme a charm?"

The hermit sucked his toothless gums, and the sun shone dull in his gluey blue eyes. "They's many kinda charms: love charms, money charms, what kind you speakin of?"

"One like Zoo's," he said, "one that'll keep anything terrible from happening."

"Dog take it!" crowed the hermit, and stopped still in his tracks. He jabbed the road with the cane, and wagged his big bald head. "What kinda troubles a little boy like you got?"

Joel's gaze wandered past the ugly man, who was rocking on his cane, and into the bordering pines. "I don't know," he said, then fixed his eyes on the hermit, trying to make him understand how much this charm meant. "Please, Little Sunshine…"

And Little Sunshine, after a long moment, indicated, with a tilt of his head, that yes, the charm would be made, but: "You gotta come fetch it yoself, cause ain't no tellin when Little Sunshine gonna be up thisaway soon. Sides, thing is, trouble charms won't work noways less you wears them when theys most needed."

But how would Joel ever find the hermit's place? "I'd get lost," he argued, as they continued along the road, the dust rising about them, the sun spinning toward noon.

"Naw you ain't: humans go huntin Little Sunshine, the devilman guide they feet." He lifted his cane skyward, and pointed to a sailing shark-like cloud: "Lookayonder," he said, "hit travelin west, gonna past right over Drownin Pond; once you gets to Drownin Pond, can't miss the hotel."

All the hermits Joel had ever heard about were unfriendly say-nothings. Not Little Sunshine: he must've been born talking. Joel thought how, on lonesome evenings in the woods, he must chatter to toads and trees and the cold blue stars, and this made him feel tenderly toward the old man, who began now an account of why Drownin Pond had so queer a name.

Years past, sometime before the turn of the century, there had been, he boasted, a splendid hotel located in these very woods, The Cloud Hotel, owned by Mrs Jimmy Bob Cloud, a widow lady bloodkin to the Skullys. Then known as Cloud Lake, the pond was a diamond eye sprouting crystal cold from subterranean limestone springs, and Mrs Jimmy Bob's hotel housed gala crowds come immense distances to parade the wide white halls. Mulberry parasols held aloft by silk-skirted ladies drifted all summer long over the lawns rolling round the water. While feather fans rustled the air, while velvet dancing slippers polished the ballroom floor, scarlet-coated househands glided in and out among the guests, wine spilling redly on silver trays. In May they came, October went, the guests, taking with them memories, leaving tall stacks of gold. Little Sunshine, the stable boy who brushed the gleaming coats of their fine teams, had lain awake many a starry night listening to the furry blend of voices. Oh but then! but then! one August afternoon, this was 1893, a child, a Creole boy of Joel's years, having taken a dare to dive into the lake from a hundred-foot oak, crushed his head like a shell between two sunken logs. Soon afterwards there was a second tragedy when a crooked gambler, in much trouble with the law, swam out and never came back. So winter came, passed, another spring. And then a honeymoon couple, out rowing on the lake, claimed that a hand blazing with rubies (the gambler had sported a ruby ring) reached from the depths to capsize their boat. Others followed suit: a swimmer said his legs had been lassoed by powerful arms, another maintained he'd seen the two of them, the gambler and the child, seen them clear as day shining below the surface, naked now, and their hair long, green, tangled as seaweed. Indignant ladies snapped their fans, assembled their silks with fearful haste. The nights were still, the lawns deserted, the guests forever gone; and it broke Mrs. Jimmy Bob's heart: she ordered a net sent from Biloxi, and had the lake dragged: "Tol her it ain't no use, tol her she ain't never gonna catch them two cause the devilman, he watch over his own." So Mrs. Jimmy Bob went to St. Louis, rented herself a room, poured kerosene all over the bed, lay down and struck a match. Drownin Pond. That was the name colored folk gave it. Slowly old creek-slime, filtering through the limestone springs, had dyed the water an evil color; the lawns, the road, the paths all turned wild; the wide veranda caved in; the chimneys sank low in the swampy earth; storm-uprooted trees leaned against the porch; and water-snakes slithering across the strings made night-songs on the ballroom's decaying piano. It was a terrible, strange-looking hotel. But Little Sunshine stayed on; it was his rightful home, he said, for if he went away, as he had once upon a time, other voices, other rooms, voices lost and clouded, strummed his dreams.»

The story made for Joel a jumbled picture of cracked windows reflecting a garden of ghosts, a sunset world where twisting ivy trickled down broken columns, where arbors of spidersilk shrouded all.

Miss Florabel Thompkins pulled a comb through her red waist-length hair, the blunt noon-sun paling each strand, and said: "Now don't you know I'm just tickled to see you. Why, only this morning I was telling sister: 'Sister, I got a feeling we're going to have company. Said, 'So let's wash our hair' which naturally made no hit whatsoever: never washes nothing, that girl. Idabel? Oh, she's off to the creek, gone to get the melon we've got cooling down there: first of the summer; Papa planted early this year." Florabel wasn't nearly so pretty as moonlight had made her seem. Her face was flat and freckled, like her sister's. She was kind of snaggle-toothed, and her lips pouted in prissy discontent. She was half-reclining in a hammock ("Mama made it herself, and she makes all my lovely clothes, except for my dotted swiss, but she doesn't make any for sister: like Mama says, it's better to let Idabel troop around in what-have-you cause she can't keep a decent rag decent: I tell you this frankly, Mister Knox, Idabel's a torment to our souls, Mama's and mine. We could've been so cute dressed alike, but…") swung between shady pecan trees in a corner of the yard. She picked up a pair of Kress tweezers and, with a pained expression, began plucking her pink eyebrows. "Sister's avowed… ouch!… ambition is she wants to be a farmer."

Joel, who was squatting on the grass nibbling a leaf, stretched his legs, and said: "What's wrong with that?"

"Now, Mister Knox, surely you're just teasing," said Florabel. "Whoever heard of a decent white girl wanting to be a farmer? Mama and me are too disgraced. Course I know what goes on in the back of her mind." Florabel gave him a conniving look, and lowered her voice. "She thinks when Papa dies he'll leave her the place to do with like she pleases. Oh, she doesn't fool me one minute."

Joel glanced about at what Idabel hoped to inherit: the house stood far away in a grove of shade trees; it was a nice house, simple, solid-looking, painted a white now turned slightly grey; an open shotgun hall ran front to back, and on the porch were geranium boxes, and a swing. A small shed housing a green 1934 Chevrolet was at one side. Chickens pecked around in the clean yard of flowerbeds and arranged rocks. At the rear was a smoke house, a water-pump windmill, and the first swelling slope of a cottonfield.

"Ouch!" cried Florabel, and tossed the tweezers aside. She gave the hammock a push and swung to and fro, her lips pouting absurdly. "Now me, I want to be an actor… or a schoolteacher," she said. "Only if I become an actor I don't know what we'll do about sister. When somebody's famous like that they dig up all the facts on their past life. I really don't want to sound mean about her, Mister Knox, but the reason I bring this matter up is she's got a crush on you…" Florabel dropped her gaze demurely, "and, well, the poor child does have a reputation."

Though he would never have admitted it, not even secretly, Joel felt sweetly flattered. "A reputation for what?" he said, careful not to smile.

Florabel straightened up. "Please, sir," she intoned, her old-lady mannerisms frighteningly accurate. "I thought you were a gentleman of the world." Suddenly, looking rather alarmed, she collapsed back in the hammock. Then: "Why, hey there, sister… look who's come to call."

"Howdy," said Idabel, surprise or pleasure very absent from her woolly voice. She carried a huge watermelon, and an old black-and-white bird dog trotted close at her heels. She rolled the melon on the grass, rubbed back her cowlicked bangs, and slumping against a tree, cocked her thumbs in the belt rungs of the dungarees which she wore. She had on also a pair of plowman's boots, and a sweatshirt with the legend DRINK COCA COLA fading on its front. She looked first at Joel, then at her sister, and, as though making some rude comment, spit expertly between her fingers. The old dog flopped down beside her. "This here's Henry," she told Joel, gently stroking the dog's ribs with her foot. "He's fixing to take a nap, so let's us not talk loud, hear?"

"Pshaw!" said the other twin. "Mister Knox oughta see what happens when I'm trying to get a wink in edgewise: wham bang whomp!"

"Henry feels kinda poorly," explained Idabel. "I'm fraid he's right sick."

"Well, I'm right sick myself. I'm sick of lotsa things."

Joel imagined that Idabel smiled at him. She did not smile in the fashion of ordinary people, but gave one corner of her mouth a cynical crook: it was like Randolph's trick of arching an eyebrow. She hitched up her pants leg and commenced picking the scab off a kneesore. "How you making out over at the Landing, son?"

"Yes," said Florabel, bending forward with a rather sly smirk, "haven't youseen things?"

"Nothing except that it's a nice place," he said discreetly.

"But…" Florabel slid out of the hammock, and sat down beside him with her elbow propped against the melon. "But what I mean is…"

"Watch out," warned Isabel, "she's only trying to pick you."

And this gave Joel an opportunity to ease the moment with a laugh. Among his sins were lying and stealing and bad thoughts; disloyalty, however, was not part of his nature. He saw how cheap it would be to confide in Florabel, though there was nothing he needed more now than a sympathetic ear. "Does it hurt?" he asked her sister, anxious to show his gratitude by assuming an interest in the sore.

"Why, this old thing?" she said, and clawed the scab. "Shoot, boy, one time I had me a rising on my butt big as a baseball, and didn't pay it any mind whatsoever."

"Hmm, squalled loud enough when Mama smacked you and it busted," reminded Florabel, bunching her lips prissily. She thumped the melon and it made a ripe hollow report. "Hmm, sounds green as grass to me. " With her fingernails she scratched her initials on the rind, drew a ragged heart, arrowed it, and carved M. S., which eyeing Joel coyly, she announced stood for Mysterious Stranger.

Idabel displayed a jackknife. "Look," she demanded, releasing a thin vicious blade. "I could kill somebody, couldn't I?" And with one murderous stab the melon cracked, spraying icy juice as she chopped off generous portions. "Leave Papa a hunk," she said, retiring under the tree to gorge in peace.

"Cold," said Joel, a trickle of red dyeing his shirt. "That creek must be freezing like an icebox; where's it come from: does it flow down from Drownin Pond?"

Florabel looked at Idabel and Idabel looked at Florabel. Neither seemed able to make up her mind which should answer. Idabel spit pulp, and said: "Who told you?"

'Told me?"

"About Drownin Pond?"

A touch of hostility in her tone made him wary. But in this case he could not see where the truth would cost more than a lie. "Oh, the man who lives there. He's a friend of mine."

Idabel responded with a hoarse, sarcastic laugh. "I'm the only person in these parts that'll go anywhere near that creepy hotel; and, son, I've never even got so much as a peek at him."

"Sister's right," added Florabel. "She's always had a hankering to see the hermit; Mama used to say he'd grab us good if we didn't act proper. But lately I've come to think he's just somebody grown people made up."

It was Joel's turn for sarcasm. "If you'd been out on the road an hour ago I would've been glad to introduce you. His name is Little Sunshine, and he's going to make me…" but he recalled that to mention the charm was forbidden.

Against such testimony Idabel had no comeback. She was stumped. And jealous. "Huh," she snorted, and shoved a chunk of melon in her mouth.

Rings of sunlight, shifting through the tree, dappled the dark grass like fallen gold fruit; bluebottle flies swarmed over melon rinds, and a cowbell, somewhere beyond the windmill, tolled lazily and long. Henry was having a nightmare. His fretful snores seemed to annoy Florabel; she spit seed into her hand, and chanting, "Nasty old nasty," hurled them at him.

Idabel did nothing for a moment. Then, rising, she closed the blade of her knife, and stuck it in her pocket. Slowly, without expression, she moved toward her sister who went quite pink in the face and began to giggle nervously.

Hands on hips, Idabel stared at her with eyes like granite. She did not say a word, but her breathing hissed between clenched teeth, and a vein throbbed in the hollow of her neck. The old dog padded forward, and looked at Florabel reproachfully. Joel inched several feet backwards: he didn't want to become involved in any family fracas.

"You're going to bug-out those eyes too far someday," sassed Florabel. But as the rock-like stare continued her impertinent pose gradually dissolved. "I don't see why you want to take on about that nasty hound thisaway," she said, looping a curl in her strawberry hair, blinking her eyes innocently. "Mama's going to make Papa shoot him anyway cause he's liable to give us all some mortal disease."

Idabel sucked in her breath, and lunged, and over and over they rolled tussling on the grass. Florabel's skirt got hiked up so high Joel's cheeks reddened: then, scratching, kicking, screaming, she managed to break loose. "Sister, please… please, sister… I beg of you!" She ran behind a pecan tree: like figures on a two-ponied carousel they whirled around the trunk, first one way, then the other. "Mama, get Mama… oh, Mister Knox, she's loony… DO something!" Henry set up a barking commotion, and commenced to chase his tail. "Mister KNOX…"

But Joel was afraid of Idabel himself. She was about the maddest human he ever saw, and the quickest: nobody at home would believe a girl could move this fast. Also, he knew from experience that, if he interfered, the finger of blame would ultimately point in his direction: he started the whole thing, that's how the tale would read. Besides, Florabel had no call to throw those seeds: deep in his heart he didn't care if she got the daylight whammed out of her.

She cut across the yard, and made a desperate sprint for the house, but it was useless, for Idabel hedged her off. Close together they went whooping past Joel, who suddenly became, like the pecan tree, and through no fault of his own, a shield. Idabel tried to push him aside: when he did not budge, she tossed her sweaty hair, and fixed him angrily with her bold green eyes: "Outa the way, sissy-britches."

Joel thought of the knife in her pocket, and despite Florabel's pleas, concluded it might be wise to move elsewhere.

So they went off again, running in circles, zigzagging between trees, Florabel's hair jouncing on her back. When they reached the pecan tree, tallest of two, she began to climb. Idabel pulled off her clumsy boots. "Ha, won't get far that way," she hollered, and agile as a monkey shinnied up the trunk.

The branches swayed, broken twigs, torn leaves showered at Joel's feet: as he darted around hunting a clearer view the sky seemed to crash bluely through the tree, and the twins, climbing nearer the sun, grew smaller and dizzy bright.

Florabel had gone as far as she could, the top; but it was a safe and fortified position: here, balanced in the crotch of forked limbs, she was immune to any assault, for to force the enemy's retreat she had only to kick.

"I can wait," said Idabel, and straddled a branch. She glanced down at Joel irritably. "Go on home you."

"Please, disregard her altogether, Mister Knox."

"Go on home and cut out paper dolls, sissy-britches."

Joel stood there hating her, wishing she'd fall from the tree and bust her neck. Like every other tomboy, Idabel was mean, just gut-mean: the haircut man in Noon City sure had her number. So did the husky woman with the wart. So did Florabel. Then he shrugged, and hung his head.

"Come back whenshe's not around," called Florabel as he started for home. "And Mister Knox, remember what I said about you-know-what. Well, a word to the wise…"

A pair of chicken hawks wheeled with stiffened wings above smoke, dimly yellow in the distance, rising spirelike out the Landing's kitchen chimney: that would be Zoo fixing dinner, he guessed, pausing by the roadside to stampede a colony of ants feeding on a dead frog. He was tired of Zoo's cooking: always the same stuff, collards, yams, black-eyed peas, cornbread. Right now he would like to meet up with the Snowball Man. Every afternoon at home in New Orleans the Snowball Man came pushing his delicious cart, tinkling his delicious bell; and for pennies you could have a dunce-hat of flaked ice flavored with a dozen syrups, cherry and chocolate, grape and blackberry all mingling like a rainbow.

The ants scurried like shooting sparks: thinking of Idabel, he hopped about mashing them underfoot, but this sinful dance did nothing toward lessening the hurt of her insults. Wait! Wait till he was Governor: he'd sic the law on her, have her locked in a dungeon cell with a little trapdoor cut in the ceiling where he could look down and laugh.

But when the Landing came in full view, its rambling outline darkened by foliage, he forgot Idabel.

Like kites being reeled in, the chicken hawks circled lower till their shadows revolved over the slanting shingled roof. The shaft of smoke lifting from the chimney mounted unbroken in the hot windless air; a sign, at least, that people lived here. Joel had known and explored other houses quiet with emptiness, but none so deserted-looking, silent: it was as though the place were captured under a cone of glass; inside, waiting to claim him, was an afternoon of endless boredom: each step, and his shoes were heavy as though soled with stone, carried him closer. A whole afternoon. And how many more for how many months?

Then, approaching the mailbox, seeing its cheerful red flag still upraised, the good feeling came back: Ellen would make things different, she would fix it so he could go away to a school where everybody was like everybody else. Singing the song about snow and the northwind, he stopped and jerked open the mailbox; deep inside lay a thick stack of letters, sealed, as he found, in watergreen envelopes. It was like the stationery his father had used when writing Ellen. And the spidery handwriting was identical: Mr Pepe Alvarez, c/o the postmaster, Monterrey, Mexico, Then Mr Pepe Alvarez, c/o the postmaster, Fukuoka, Japan. Again, again. Seven letters, all addressed to Mr Pepe Alvarez, in care of postmasters in: Camden, New Jersey; Lahore, India; Copenhagen, Denmark; Barcelona, Spain; Keokuk, Iowa.

But his letters were not among these. He certainly remembered putting them in the box. Little Sunshine had seen him. And Zoo. So where were they? Of course: the mailman must've come along already. But why hadn't he heard or seen the mailman's car? It was a half-wrecked Ford and made considerable racket. Then, in the dust at his feet, torn from the toilet-paper wrapping, he saw his coins, a nickel and a penny sparkling up at him like uneven eyes.

At this same instant the sound of bullet fire cracked whip-like on the quiet: Joel, stooping for his money, turned a paralyzed face toward the house: there was no one on the porch, the path, not a sign of life anywhere. Another shot. The wings of the hawks raged as they fled over tree tops, their shadows sweeping across the road's broiling sand like islands of dark.