Saul and Patsy

Thirteen

A squirrel squatted in the birdbath. Another squirrel was hanging by its claws onto the birdfeeder. The girl, looking out her bedroom window at the backyard, cleaned her fingernails halfheartedly with the nail file and thought of the end of the world, and then she wondered why, if there was a word “ruthless” that was often applied to enemies of the U.S.A., then what happened to its opposite, its lost positive, “ruth,” which would have to mean “kindness” but didn’t mean anything because no one used it? We had ruthless enemies but no ruthful friends.

If some people were “unruly,” then who was “ruly”? Nobody. When her room was messy, her mother said it was “unkempt,” but when it was clean, it was never “kempt” because the word didn’t exist. Disgruntled postal workers were everywhere. Where were the gruntled ones? Everybody had a word for the wrong thing, but silence prevailed for the right.

Early in the morning just after the sun was up, the squirrels looked like boys, somehow, she couldn’t say why. Maybe because of the way they moved, skittering and chasing each other, twitching. Or maybe it was the fur. Something.

Her name was Gina, she was sixteen years old, and it was Sunday, Family Day. After staring at the squirrels, she remembered to feed her guinea pig his breakfast food pellets. Wilbur squeaked and squealed softly as she dropped the pellets down the cage bars into the red plastic tray. It didn’t take much to make him happy.

On the other side of her room was a picture of Switzerland her mom had put up years ago. The picture had a lake in it, which was ruthlessly blue. Gina felt funny when she looked at this picture, so she didn’t look at it very often. She couldn’t take it down because her mom had given it to her.

Family Day. The plan was, her dad would show up and take them— her brother, her mom, herself — to the beach. Gina threw on a T-shirt and a pair of jeans. She grabbed her flute and went into the basement to practice for the school marching band, of which she was a member.

Ten minutes later she heard the thud of the morning newspaper flung against the front screen door. Gina put her flute on top of her dad’s workbench (he had never bothered to move it to his apartment after he moved out) and went upstairs to read the headlines. The news consisted of Iraq (bombs), Cuba (jails), Ireland (more bombs), and then there was something about Gordy Himmelman.

Gordy Himmelman! He had shot himself. To death. It was permanent. Why hadn’t anyone called her about it?

She had been in classes with Gordy Himmelman since kindergarten, but he was in a class by himself, and she hadn’t seen much of him since he’d dropped out. He muttered and swore and blew his nose on notebook paper, and he talked to himself in long strings of garble and never had any friends you could show in public. You could feel sorry for him, but he would never notice how sorry you felt, and he wouldn’t care. Pity was lost on him. It was a total waste of time. In third grade he had brought a pen-light battery into school and, standing next to the monkey bars, he had swallowed it during recess to attract attention to himself. The battery was only a double-A, but even so. He had black-and-blue marks all over him most days. His breath smelled of dill pickles that had gone unfresh. You couldn’t even talk to him about the weather because he never noticed it — it didn’t make any difference to him what the sky was doing or how it was doing it. He had this human-junkyard-don’t-mess-with-me look on his face and would kick anyone who got in his way, though he did have one comic routine: slugging himself in the face so hard that his head jerked backward. He had bicycled to that teacher, Mr. Bernstein’s house, where he had blown his brains out in the yard, in front of a tree, in the morning, a matinee suicide. On the front page of the paper was a picture of the tree. It was a color picture, and you could sort of see the blood if you looked closely.

There hadn’t been a suicide note. A suicide note would have been like a writing assignment. Way too hard. He would have had to get his aunt to write it for him.

Gina felt something stirring inside her. She was kind of interested in death. Gordy was the first person she’d ever known who had entered it. He had gone from being Mr. Nothing to being Mr. Something Else: a temporarily interesting person. She sat at the kitchen counter eating her strawberry Pop-Tart, wondering whether Gordy was lying on a bed surrounded by virgins, or eternal fire, or what.

It was sort of cool, him doing that. Maybe the smartest thing he’d ever done. Adventuresome and courageous.

If you didn’t have a life, maybe you got one by being dead.

Her dad was late. Finally he showed up at eleven-thirty in his red Durango, saying, “Ha ha, I’m late.” He and Gina’s mom were divorced, but they were still “friends,” and her dad had never really committed himself to the divorce, in Gina’s opinion. He was halfhearted about it, a romantic sad sack. They had cooked up this Family Day scheme two years ago. Every weekend he’d come to pick up Gina and Bertie, her little brother, and their mom — Gina envied most divorced kids who went from their moms to their dads, without the cheesiness of Family Day — and then they’d do bowling-type activities for the sake of togetherness and friendliness, which of course was a total fraud, since they weren’t together or friendly at all. Usually Saturday was Family Day but sometimes Sunday was. Today they were going to the beach. Wild excitement. She had meant to bring a magazine.

In the car, Gina studied her father’s face. She had wanted to drive, but no one trusted her behind the wheel. For once she had been allowed to sit up front: semi-adult, now that she had filled out, so they gave her front-seat privileges sometimes, occasional woman privileges. Her mom and Bertie were in the back, Bertie playing with his Game Boy, her mom with her earphones on, listening to music so she wouldn’t have to hear the plinks and plunks of the Game Boy, or talk to her ex, Gina’s dad, the driver, half-committed to his divorce, an undecided single man, driving the car. He would fully commit to the divorce when he found a girlfriend he really liked, which he hadn’t, yet. Gina had met one of the girlfriends whom he had only half-liked, a woman who tried way too hard to be nice, and who looked like a minor character on a soap opera who would eventually be hit by a rampaging bus.

Gina had mentioned Gordy Himmelman to her dad, and her dad had said yeah, it was way too bad.

She was interested in her father’s face. Because it was her father’s, she didn’t know if he was handsome or plain. You couldn’t always tell when they were your parents, though with her friend Gretchen Mullen you sure could, since Gretchen’s father looked like a hobgoblin. At first she thought her own father had a sort of no-brand, standard-issue father face; now she wasn’t so sure.

He was possibly handsome. There was no way of knowing. Her dad was a master plumber. Therefore his hands often had cuts or grease under the fingernails. Very large hands, made big by genetic fate. His hair was short and brown, cut so it bristled, and near his temples you could see a change in color, salty. On his right cheek her dad had a crease, as if his skin had been cut by a knife or a sharp piece of paper, but it was only a wrinkle, a wrinkle getting started, the first canal in a network of creases-to-come, his face turning slowly but surely into Mars, the Red Planet. His teeth were very white and even, the most Rock Star thing about him. His eyes were brown and spaced wide apart, not narrow the way teenaged boys’ eyes are usually narrow, and they drilled into you so that sometimes you had to turn away so you wouldn’t be injured by the Father Look. Her father’s beard line was so distinct and straight it looked put in with a ruler, and was so heavy that even if he shaved in the morning, he usually needed another shave around dinnertime, an interestingly bearlike feature of the masculine father type. His nose was exciting. His breath had a latent smell of cigarettes, which he smoked in private. You couldn’t find the boy in him anymore. It wasn’t there. He was growing a belly from the beer he drank nights and weekends, and most of the time he seemed comfortable with it, though it seemed to tire him out also. He didn’t smile much and only when he had to. He had once told Gina, “Life is serious.”

On winter weekends he watched football on television speechlessly.

He looked like a plumber on a TV show who comes in halfway through the program and who someone, though not the main character, falls in love with, because he’s so manly and can replace faucet washers. He would be the kind of plumber who wisecracks and makes the whole studio audience break up, but he would be charming, too, when he had to be. But then sometimes at a stoplight, or when he saw a car pull in front of him, her dad’s face changed out of its TV sitcom expression: suddenly he grimaced like someone had started to do surgery on him right over his heart without anesthetic, and he was pretending that nothing was happening to him even though his chest was being cut open, bared to fresh air. And then that expression vanished like it had never been there. What was that about? His pain. His secret squirrel life, probably.

Still, there was no point in talking to him about Gordy Himmelman.

At the lake they settled in on their beach towels. Bertie, who was oblivious to everything, went on playing with his Game Boy. Gina’s mom stretched out on her back in an effort to immerse herself in lethal tanning rays. Her dad carried the picnic basket into the shade and started to read his copy of Car and Driver, sitting on the picnic-table bench. Gina went to the concession stand to get herself an ice cream cone, which she would buy with her own money.

The stand itself had been constructed out of concrete blocks, painted white, covered overhead by a cheap corrugated roof. Under it, everything seemed to be sun-baking. Behind the counter was a popcorn machine with a high-intensity yellow heat lamp shining on the popped kernels in their little glass house, making them look radioactive. The sidewalk leading up to and away from the stand, stained with the residue of spilled pink ice cream and ketchup, felt sticky on the soles of Gina’s feet. The kid who worked at the stand, selling snack food and renting canoes, was a boy she didn’t recognize — about her age, maybe a year or two older, with short orange hair and an earring — and he stood behind the counter next to the candy display, staring, in pain and boredom, at the floor. He was experiencing summer-job agony. He had a rock station blaring from his battery-powered radio perched on top of the freezer, and his body twitched quietly to the beat. When Gina appeared, the boy looked at her with relief, relief followed by recognition and sympathy, recognition and sympathy followed by a leer as he checked out her tits, the leer followed by a friendly smirk. It all happened very fast. He was like other boys: they shifted gears so quickly you couldn’t always follow them into those back roads and dense forests where they wanted to live with the other varmints and wolves.

Raspberry, please, single scoop. She smiled at him, to tease him, to test out her power, to give him an anguished memory tonight, when he was in bed and couldn’t sleep, thinking of her, in the density of his empty, stupid life.

Walking back to the sand and holding her ice cream cone, she started to think about Gordy Himmelman, and when she did, the crummy lake and the public beach with the algae floating in it a hundred feet offshore in front of her, she felt weird and dizzy, as if: What was the point? She kept walking and taking an occasional, personal, lick at the ice cream. There weren’t too many other people in the sand, but most of the men were fat, and their wives or girlfriends were fat, too, and already they had started to yell at each other, even though it was just barely lunchtime.

She kept walking. It was something to do. Nobody here was beautiful. It all sucked.

The lake gave her a funny feeling, just the fact that it was there. The sky was sky blue, and her mother had said it was a perfect day, but if this was a perfect day, if this was the best that God could manage with the available materials, then. . well, no wonder Gordy Himmelman had shot himself, and no wonder her mother had put up that picture of Switzerland in her bedroom. Gina saw her whole life stretched out in front of her, just like that, the deck of fifty-two cards with Family Day printed on one side, like the picture of the lake in Switzerland that she could barely stand to glance at, vacuuming her up. Why couldn’t anything ever be perfect? It just wasn’t possible. This wasn’t perfect. It was its opposite: fect. A totally fect day. Just to the side, off on another beach towel, somebody’s mom was yelling at and then slapping a little boy. Slapping him, wham wham wham, out in public and in front of everybody, and of course the kid was screaming now, screaming screaming screaming screaming.

Everybody having their own version of Family Day.

Gina carried the ice cream cone to the water’s edge.

Right there, she saw herself in the algaed water, walking upside down holding a raspberry ice cream cone, and, next to her own water-image, another water-image, the sun this time. Gina walked into the water, out to where the algae dispersed, staring first at her diminishing reflection and then at the sun. It’d be interesting to go blind, she thought, people and seeing-eye dogs would take care of you and lead you through the rest of your life forever. You’d be on a leash. The dog would make all the big decisions. Then she noticed that when she walked into the water her images were sucked into it. As the water got deeper, there was less of you above it, as if you had gone on an instant diet. Okay, now that her legs had disappeared, you didn’t have to look at her legs, because they weren’t there anymore. Well, they were underwater, but the water was so dirty she couldn’t see them as well as she could see her reflection at the surface: of her waist, her head, her chest, the ice cream cone. She wished she were prettier, movie-pretty, but walking into the water was a kind of solution, watching your girl-image get all swallowed up, until there was no image left, just the water.

She held the ice cream cone above the water and then after another lick let it go as she went under.

Under the surface she held her breath as long as she could, and then she thought of Gordy Himmelman, and, sort of experimentally, she tried breathing in some water, just to see what it was like, and she choked. She felt herself panicking and going up to the surface but then she fought the panic when she imagined she saw somebody like Gordy Himmelman, though better-looking, more like her dad, under the water with her, holding her hand and telling her it was better down here, and all the problems were solved, so she tried to relax and breathe in a little more water. She registered thunderbolts of panic, then some peace, then panic. Then it was all right, and Family Day was finally over, and, because she wasn’t a very good swimmer anyway, she began to sink to the bottom, though there were all those annoying voices. She would miss Wilbur, the guinea pig, but not much else, not even the boys who had tried to feel her up.

She drifted down and away.

Her father and the lifeguard had seen the cone of ice cream floating on the surface of the lake at the same time. They both rushed in, and Gina’s dad reached her body first. He pulled her up, thrashed his way to the beach, where, without thinking, he gave his daughter the Heimlich maneuver. Water erupted out of her mouth. Gina’s eyes opened, and her father laid her down on the sand, and she said, “Gordy?” but what she said was garbled by the water still coming out of her lungs into her mouth and out of her mouth into the sand. As she came around, her hair falling around her eyes, she seemed disarrayed somehow, but pleased by all the fuss, and then she smiled, because she had seen her father’s face, smeary with love.

Fourteen

When she arrived back home, having survived her near-death experience, Gina was supposed to lie down, but she didn’t want to be horizontalized. She couldn’t see the point to it since she wasn’t particularly tired and she certainly wasn’t dead, either. Her throat hurt; that was about it. What she really wanted to do was to call a few people. She took her cell phone along with four cookies into her room, closed the door, and sat cross-legged on her bedspread with two of the cookies hidden beneath one knee and the other two cookies behind the other knee, and she wondered which of her friends she would call first to tell about her near-death. She was glad to see Wilbur again, scrabbling in his corner. He welcomed her back with a few quiet, loving little squeals.

She bit into the first cookie, leaving three and a half.

She decided to give her friend April the first call, but April wasn’t at home — nobody was (and they didn’t have an answering machine or voicemail over there, it was medieval) — so she tried Danni instead. Danni took it on the second ring. Danni did all the phone-answering at the Wiesiewski house. Danni was pretty and stuck-up like the rest of the Wiesiewskis, but she was a good listener when she had to be. When Danni asked Gina, “Whassup?” Gina told her that they’d been out at Copper Lake, and she’d been swimming, and — this was a secret, Danni absolutely could not tell anyone — she thought she saw this ghost-person under the water who looked exactly like Gordy Himmelman, and, no, she couldn’t describe how it had happened, but it was like he had dragged her down under the water, and it was incredibly beautiful down there — it was not ugly — and she almost drowned, but her father or somebody had brought her back to life.

Gordy Himmelman? Danni asked. You’re kidding. That freak? Besides, he’s dead. Are you crazy? What are you saying?

No. Gina said that she was not kidding, swear to God, and not crazy. Did she sound crazy? No. This was weirder than being crazy. In fact, she said, it would be just exactly like Gordy Himmelman to be a ghost, because when he was alive, or semi-alive, or whatever it was he had been when he had been living, he had always wandered into places where he wasn’t wanted, and it would therefore be like him now to show up here, there, and everywhere. She ate her cookie and bit into another one, which left two and a half. She touched her hair. It was still damp and probably dirty from the lake water. She would have to shampoo it soon.

It’s like he’s in charge of something real interesting, Gina said.

Danni asked Gina if she could tell anyone, and Gina said, well, no, not really, or: well, you can tell some people, but only as long as you get my permission first, and they have to promise not to tell. “I don’t want everybody to know,” Gina said. “It sounds too weird.”

Danni said she understood perfectly.

Within four days Gina’s telephone was ringing every half-hour from kids she knew who thought they had seen Gordy or someone like him: Ron Burr told Chrystal Chambers that he thought he had seen Gordy in the Elysian Fields Shopping Mall, walking as if he were battery-powered and under remote control from Mars, into one of the theaters at the multiplex, but when he followed him in, Gordy wasn’t there. He had just vanished like shit in a shitstorm. Ron said he was a loser. Losers disappear on you, but now that he was dead maybe he wasn’t such a total loser after all. Death could revise you. The day after that, April, Gina’s friend April Cumming, claimed that she had seen Gordy Himmelman outside her window, looking in, like some creep stalker jackoff; then ugly little Georgette Novak, who wanted to be popular and who worked at McDonald’s because people claimed that her parents wouldn’t give her an allowance for clothes, said that she had served Gordy Himmelman a Coke and fries, and that he looked verifiably dead, which at least was convincing, and he paid her with money that totally disappeared after she put it into the cash drawer. He had paid her with bogey money. Rona Elliott said she had seen him out in the park, where she had been walking her dog, Buster, who barked hysterically at him. Gordy stood on the other side of the park, waving at her, as if he were signaling. She turned away, and when she turned back, he was gone.

Other reports put Gordy in a tree, way up where you couldn’t reach him, Gordy moving around in the house at night, Gordy’s image appearing suddenly on the computer screen, Gordy calling in the middle of the night and asking for the time, Gordy appearing on a three-A.M. infomercial — in the background in a kitchen, staring at the camera, while in the foreground they were selling a kitchen gadget.

They said he looked like himself. They said he was everywhere.

Danni told Gina that April had said that all these sightings were, like, mass hysteria, and that the Justice Department was looking into it, because it might be the work of terrorists. You had to be on a twenty-four-hour alert.

And it would have died down, too, Gina thought, if one of the nicest boys in her class, Sam Cole, who was sweet and a good athlete and really good-looking — he wasn’t like most of the other boys, and the boys knew it, and because he was both tough and goodhearted, nobody ever said anything bad about him — hadn’t been riding home from a dentist’s appointment on his bicycle and hadn’t been hit by a newspaper truck backing down a driveway. Because, after that, all the kids in Five Oaks who were even close to Sam’s age knew that Gordy Himmelman had pushed him into the path of that truck. They didn’t exactly tell their parents, but they told each other, and that was how they knew.

This is how it was: there were terrorists for their parents, and there was Gordy Himmelman for them.

Fifteen

The woman in front of Patsy at the VitaDrug prescription counter had been taking antipsychotics for so long that she had apparently lost control of her tongue. Patsy didn’t even pretend to look away. While the woman waited for her credit-card number to go through, her tongue emerged from her mouth like a snake from its nest, angled left and right experimentally as if testing the air for bugs or oxygen density, then retreated back into her mouth before emerging again, this time staying out as it continued its ceaseless explorations. Her purchases were piled on the counter in a haphazard fashion. Along with the drugs nestled in their bar-coded, stapled bags with the “Ask the Pharmacist” cartoon on the front, showing a bald-headed man with a small-town smiley face (none of the pharmacists here looked like that: they were all East Indian), the woman had bought three cylindrical containers of potato chips, four cans of tuna, and two six-packs of diet cola. She made Patsy think of a lizard-lady preparing for a party with the other lizard-ladies, all of them sitting outside on the terrace, passing the tin cans from lap to lap, their tongues wagging, the fat of their ankles spilling out over the tops of their shoes.

All through October, when she was alone, or running errands after work like this, after having picked up Emmy from day care, Patsy somehow found herself at the end of her goodwill. This falling-away from sympathetic feelings for the helpless was new for her. Random compassion without any outlet now struck her as a Saul-like indulgence. Against strangers, she could feel her heart slowly hardening, developing a shellac. Her charity was failing her. If any woman deserved her pity, this woman did. But her pity seemed unavailable to her. Everything she had was directed toward her children these days: this one, and the one to come. And Saul, too, of course.

After picking up her prescription for Dorylaeum, a vitamin supplement and sleep aid for pregnant women whose occasional side effect was that it made time speed up, Patsy wheeled Emmy in her stroller down the aisles past the magazine rack, where two middle school girls were talking quietly to each other as they flipped through the new issue of Gloor. They appeared to be dressed for Halloween, and it was now late October, and their white hair, kohl-darkened eyes, bleached skin, and black raggedy clothes accessorized with pins displaying cryptic symbols gave them the aspect of ghosts. When Patsy passed them, they gazed at her with the fixedness of the dead. They were part of the growing number of middle schoolers and high school kids who were affecting the gothic mortuary look. In the space of several weeks, a small but significant cult of Gordy Himmelman had surfaced, and this style, Patsy had heard, was meant either to ward him off or to evoke him. They called themselves Himmels. All over town, out of the corner of your eye, you could see these neo-goths, these Himmels, with their staring-fish expressions. Saul and Patsy’s paperboy, Darryl Anderson, was now a part-time Himmel. He was a nice kid and hadn’t quite mastered the doom-laden frown yet. Some of the others talked in a kind of code, the way they imagined that the dead might.

The school superintendent, Floyd Vermilya, had sent home a notice to parents encouraging them to celebrate life, not death, at the level of family. He had threatened suspensions. Students who ghouled their way into school with Himmel-haircuts, Himmel-overcoats, or even Himmel-like expressions on their faces could just ghoul their way out again until they were ready to dress and act like normal young people. Unfortunately, the new restrictions were hard to enforce. Himmelism had spread to both of Five Oaks’s high schools — though who would know? So many of those kids acted and dressed like that anyway. An underground goth cell had established itself there some time ago. Besides, adolescents could disguise themselves as ordinary, decent American kids and then, when school was out, turn into Himmels in the privacy of their homes. At that age, they all wore masks anyway. Masking was the pride of adolescence. Himmel-speak, the language of the dead that the Himmels had fabricated, was forbidden in the classroom or the athletic field, though none of the athletes were Himmels anyway. Probably. You could never tell. There was an unsubstantiated rumor of a Himmel sleeper-cell on the football team, the second-stringers and bench-warmers, though it strained credulity: What would a would-be dead football player say? And to whom? Himmel-athletes didn’t bleach their hair, but many of them had the trademark blank look. And their cheers lacked conviction. The school guidance counselor had suggested to parents at the latest PTA meeting that they motivate their kids to participate in more upbeat sports activities. Playing a musical instrument, he said, might also overcome the recent community-wide tendency to morbid display.

Vermilya had told Saul, and Saul had told Patsy, that he feared national attention to this phenomenon. If that happened, if the networks showed up, there’d be no stopping it. He feared Himmel websites, Himmel chat rooms, docudramas on Himmelism. .

Something has gone wrong with our children, he had told Saul. Something is spreading, and I don’t even know what it is.

The door flipped open electronically, and Patsy walked out onto the sidewalk. She crossed the street into Governor John Engler Park, a square city block decorated with a few surviving petunias planted in an uneven row on the south border. To the north was a stage and a band-stand. Skateboarders leapt up and down the benches and roared across the proscenium. The air felt autumnal and cool. In the center of the park stood an eight-foot-high statue of the former governor, holding his hand out in welcome. On his face was a smile contaminated with a dubious affability. This statue was now permanently blocked off from the sun by the WaldChem building, under construction across the street, a bright yellow steel crane perched on the topmost beam, and by the AddiData building to the west, whose windows had the rectangular shape of the holes in IBM punch cards. The WaldChem building would be the highest structure in Five Oaks. Although the Chamber of Commerce had lobbied for its construction with the zoning board, both the mayor and the City Council had complained mildly about the architecture, which was in a downsized Black Rock style. It was considered by many to be dour and not suitable for the Midwest. It did not glorify the heartland.

In the park Patsy took Emmy out of the stroller and bounced her on her lap. She was being fussy today. “Down me,” Emmy said. Patsy let her down. Emmy walked experimentally around the bench, singing her toothpaste song. With a mild shock, Patsy saw Anne McPhee sitting on the park bench opposite her, and Anne’s son, Matt, running back and forth before her, as if he were searching for some interesting trouble to get into but hadn’t yet found it. Anne was visibly pregnant and wore a besieged expression: she was still a beautiful young woman, Patsy thought, with great features that her pregnancy had not diminished, but she seemed distracted and solitary. Her blouse was stained with apple juice. She looked used. She had a rash on her wrist that she scratched absentmindedly. Something about her suggested helplessness and excessive brooding. She waved at Patsy without enthusiasm.

Five Oaks might boast of the new WaldChem building, but it was still a city where you kept running into the same people. You would have to move at least as far away as the Caspian Sea to avoid them.

Patsy had wanted to be Anne’s friend ever since she and Saul had shown up, muddy and in shock, at the McPhees’ door after their car turned over following the party at Mad Dog’s, but the friendship couldn’t last.

The day had arrived some months back when the McPhees announced themselves at Patsy’s office at the bank, presenting their case for a home loan. Patsy couldn’t tell if they had concocted a plan to trade on what they assumed to be her friendship. Maybe so. Emory had been holding Matt’s hand, and the young father wore his baseball cap with the visor in back. He had just shaved, and he gave off a first-date odor of drugstore cologne. Very proudly, speaking in married-couple relays, first the husband, then the wife, they announced that they wanted to buy a house in a new development, Maple Meadows. They were tired of paying rent for their current house, they said. They wanted this as a real investment; it was time to build a future. They recited these sentences as if they had rehearsed them, fanfare, emphases, and all. But Patsy, as one of the bank’s loan officers, had to refuse the loan almost on the spot. They had virtually nothing in savings or collateral, and Emory’s employment as a housepainter was sporadic. He was a high school dropout. Their credit rating was dismal. When Patsy had told Anne and Emory the bad news, Anne cried. She began her sobbing slowly, then really worked up a storm of tears. It went on and on.

You tried to create a community, but money always got in the way, and finally lines were drawn. Friendship ended at the bank’s front door, at least for working people.

Like some lovers who get romantically entangled young, in high school, both the McPhees, Emory and Anne, had an intense, greedy physicality. They always reminded Patsy of two healthy animals who had mated, almost without thinking. Their stories were always stories about the body; they never got past it.

Patsy took Emmy’s hand and walked over to where Anne McPhee was sitting in the park. North of the women, on the block bordering the park in which they sat, the yellow construction crane turned slowly, lifting a steel beam. A man, small in the distance, standing on another beam and wearing a hardhat appeared to be watching them. He appeared to wave.

“Some of those construction workers get rich, if they live long enough,” Anne said. She checked Patsy out, then smiled halfheartedly. “I see we both got ourselves knocked up again.” There was a brief pause. “Congratulations.”

“I didn’t think I was showing that much yet,” Patsy said.

“You aren’t. Not in front,” Anne pointed. “Only if a person is looking. A mom would know. It’s the way you’re walking.”

“Do you mind if I sit down?” Patsy asked. She would be the soul of politeness.

“Go ahead.” Anne patted the bench. “Please.”

“Thanks, Anne.” She sat down.

“Want a cookie?” Anne pulled an Oreo out of her purse. Matt grabbed it out of her hand before curling up at her feet. She smiled indulgently at her son. “Public space. It’s free to everybody. Hey, I see Emmy’s getting real big.” Anne smiled at Mary Esther, who was folding herself for protection against strangers into her mother’s lap.

“Matt, too. Good-looking boy.” He was, of course. He looked like a three-year-old James Dean, a little pint-sized greaser heartthrob. His mouth was smeared with cookie crumbs, but he was beautiful anyway. “Where’s Saska?”

“Saska? She’s home with Emory. Yeah, well.” Over to their right, the skateboarders made their racket, and when one of them fell, the others yelled encouragement. “I got another one coming. My third. Another hell on wheels, I guess.”

“Boy?” Patsy asked.

“Yeah. I think so.”

“When’d you find out?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, the ultrasound. . the amnio?”

“Oh, I haven’t had any of that. I’m just guessing. You?”

“This one’s a boy. For sure. I suppose I always knew it, but I did have my doctor do an ultrasound, and she asked me if I wanted the big news, and I said I did, and she said, ‘It’s a boy,’ so that’s how I know.”

“Our medical insurance ran out,” Anne McPhee said. “No ultrasound for me.”

In front of them, a squirrel scurried up the pedestal of the governor’s statue, stopped, then scurried down again. A whistle blew near the construction site’s trailer. Quitting time. The construction worker seemed to wave at them again, two pregnant women sitting in the park.

“I’m sorry,” Patsy said. The man on the steel beam continued to watch her.

“Oh, you don’t have to be sorry for us. It’s not your fault. And in case you’re wondering, I’ve forgotten all about that business with the home loan.”

“Really, Anne, it wasn’t personal. My apologies.”

“No need to be so sorry so much,” Anne McPhee said, mirthlessly laughing. “Besides, it’s not your fault, not giving us that loan. You work for a bank. We went to the other banks. Same thing. Besides, it’s Emory. It’s who Emory is, as a provider. Years ago we had the red-hots for each other and we got married and I got knocked up, and now here I am, sitting on this park bench with you.” She shot Patsy a huge disarming smile. She had a quality of dishonest sincerity. “We kissed ourselves right out of school into having a family before we had prospects. Same old story. Story of the ages. Story of the sower and the seedbed. We couldn’t help ourselves.”

“You get married, you struggle for a while,” Patsy sighed, scratching at her own arm in sympathy.

“It’s different for you,” Anne said. “You and Saul have two incomes. You at the bank, him at the school. No offense, Patsy. Emory and me, we had so much love so fast it just kept us ignorant about other things. The whole rest of the world.”

Patsy nodded. This conversation was like an old cat that wouldn’t get up from the carpet, that wouldn’t move anywhere at all. Anne McPhee scratched and scratched and scratched at her rash. Finally Patsy said, struggling against the silence, “How is Emory?”

“Oh, he’s okay. He’s thinking of getting his equivalency, then going to the Community College, get a degree in commercial art. We’re sort of fine. We’re still happy, you could say. No problem with each other. We worry about money, though.” She touched Patsy on the knee. “ All the time. Which is more your department. You still ever ride that motorcycle you bought — what, two years ago?”

“No,” Patsy said. “Not for months and months. Not since I became a mom. It’s getting dusty in the garage.”

There was a long pondering silence. The silence was about being able to buy a motorcycle that you then didn’t use. It was about that luxury. “Sometimes I wonder,” Anne said.

“Wonder about what?”

“How long it’ll last.”

“What?”

Anne said nothing. She wasn’t talking about the motorcycle anymore.

Her voice now came out very quietly and slowly. “How long it can last without enough money.”

“Depends, doesn’t it, how strong it is?” Patsy asked.

“I don’t think so. It’s strange how I loved him without exactly wanting to. Because of him, I couldn’t help myself back then, all that time when I didn’t have a clue about anything. Sometimes I think he resents me. You ever think that the sex thing is like a trap, that it cages you? Well, considering the way it happened,” she laughed, “you can’t say we didn’t have the grand passions. If love was dollars, we’d be millionaires, and us not even voting age yet. Before I got pregnant again, he was still lovin’ me up so often and so strong I couldn’t hardly sit down in the morning. We’d do it whenever Matt and Saska were sleeping. Pardon my language. Perpetual honeymoon, is what it is,” she sighed. “I’m the envy of the county. How’s that for weird? And me a Christian, too. Doesn’t add up.”

“Married life,” Patsy said. “No one can tell you anything about it.”

“That’s for sure. Listen. I’ve gotta go.” Anne stood, and her son raced in circles around her like a tiny courtier. She was like a princess rising, Venus out of the half-shell, a pregnant Persephone with apple juice stains. Patsy gaped at her. No wonder Emory had carried her off into the underworld of marriage and kept her there. “You and Saul, you sure are the center of attention right now, all these Himmel kids sprouting up everywhere.”

“Oh,” Patsy said. “That’s not about us.” The sun was setting with unexpected speed. Night was racing toward them on its chopper.

“Not what I heard. You should talk to that Brenda Bagley, Patsy. This thing’ll keep growing if you don’t do something. Somebody’ll come along and do some real harm to Saul. I mean it. That kid, that Gordy, he must’ve loved Saul. Or you. Or something. I think it was Saul he loved, though. That’s my theory. All his hatred, that was just love in disguise. I should know. But the other parents, they see this thing growing after Sam Cole got hit by that truck, and they think that you people are responsible. You know how people talk. You know what they say.”

“Responsible? Wait a minute. What do they say?”

“Come on, Matt,” Anne McPhee called out. “Hey, what’s your baby boy’s name gonna be?”

“Theo,” Patsy said. “What do they say, Anne? Tell me.”

“They say you’re cursed. Outcasts of God. Now that’s small-minded. No kidding, Patsy, I’d go talk to Brenda Bagley if I were you. You got some unfinished business over there.”

Driving to Brenda Bagley’s house, Patsy had the disagreeable sensation that Gordy Himmelman was sitting in the backseat, ruminating over his life and the stray impulse that had ended it — just there, slumped beside Emmy, making a minor ectoplasmic pest of himself, unseatbelted, more alive now that he was dead than he had been when he happened to be living. That was his way, his particular posthumous style. She thought she smelled for a fraction of a second the characteristic Gordy scent of pickles and wet dog. Okay, so he was back there. He was like a dog: he always enjoyed riding in cars, hanging around on the front lawn, waiting for a project.

Waiting for a head-pat. As a ghost he was probably harmless. Funny: weeks and weeks ago, after she and Saul had made love, Saul had abruptly said that he wanted to have a dog, but Patsy wasn’t going to get one, not with Emmy around and a new baby coming. Maybe having Gordy would satisfy Saul. Maybe not.

Coming to an unfamiliar street corner, she recognized that she was lost. Because of the city’s loose zoning laws, low property taxes, and the we-won’t-enforce-anything environmental understandings, Five Oaks’s industrial area had grown rapidly on the south side of the city in the early 1980s, and then, with the move to globalization, had declined just as rapidly. The streets were laid out in rosette and slipknot patterns. Boom and bust cycles happened so fast in the city these days that factories were closed months after they had opened; only the chemical plants were still holding their own down by the river, still profitable, still toxic. Now as Patsy tried to figure out where she was, she spotted the Hawkeye plant for school-bus frames to her right — the frames piled like steel skeletal remains near a loading dock. New as it was, the plant was about to close and move to Mexico. Or Honduras. Some damn place where they would work for ten cents an hour. Negotiations were still continuing. The closing of the factory had been major news in the papers, and as a bank officer, Patsy had to keep up with the latest statistics concerning the city’s economic infrastructure and indebtedness. Workers were losing their pensions and their savings and were being advised to move to the South-west. The whole neighborhood had a clammy out-of-work dinge to it. Sooty warehouses that had gone from youth to old age without anything in between were located here, next to parking lots and solitary clapboardexterior bars named The Wooden Keg and The Shipwreck, with their quietly slumped clientele visible through the front windows.

The Chevy advanced under a sequence of darkened streetlights, and Patsy found herself in a blind alley. As she backed up and turned around, her headlights caught sight of three kids out on the sidewalk, three Himmel middle schoolers fooling around in the early dusk: bleached skin, bleached faces. Just like albinos, Patsy thought, putting the car into drive and accelerating. She shouldn’t have brought Emmy along on this errand, she thought, but after all, it was an emergency.

The street ahead of her extended and contracted in a kind of daze, prolonging itself and then foreshortening in a visual pattern associated with the vertigo that accompanies anxiety, but then, maybe what she was seeing and feeling was just a side effect of the Dorylaeum she was taking, those strange red-and-blue pills that came accompanied with the long sheet of warnings. The car accelerated into a pool of buttery light.

She drove past a parked car with a cracked windshield and a wire coat-hanger in place of the radio antenna. On the car’s bumper was a small sticker whose words had been printed with purple ink:

I’m so gothic

I’m already dead.

After she had found her way back to Strewwelpeter Street, she made quick progress to Brenda Bagley’s manufactured house. Saul had taken her past here twice during one of his obsessive weeks following Gordy’s death, and the house had a strange unmistakable individualized dreariness, easy to locate. You could spot it in a crowd of manufactured homes. Most of them were cheerful and simple, but an air of indescribable gloom hung over Brenda Bagley’s. It appeared to have been constructed out of stale, brittle candy left over from an unsuccessful birthday party: its exterior white vinyl siding looked like hardened cake frosting decorated with tiny highlighted splotches of chocolate mud. Moths threw themselves toward the exterior door light and then fell, burned and wounded, to the pavement. At the same time, the two front windows, facing the street, with their half-lowered windowshades, had the momentary appearance of hooded eyes examining her as she approached them. It was like the House of Usher in a trailer park.

She drew Emmy out of her child seat in the back, leaving Gordy Himmelman’s spirit-remains still there — if he wanted to follow her in, he would, but she doubted it — and, a few moments later, with her daughter in her arms, Patsy rang the bell of Brenda Bagley’s house. From inside she heard the happy cries of a singing television commercial. The doorbell tolled out in three tones, and its song was followed by a rumpus-like clatter of dishes and silverware. The door opened, and Brenda Bagley peered out through the gap.

“Brenda,” Patsy said. “It’s me. Patricia Bernstein. Patsy. You know, Saul’s wife.”

“Sure,” Brenda muttered, exhaling cigarette smoke as she nodded. Her florid face examined Patsy and Mary Esther. Brenda’s eyes were still red-rimmed. “Of course. What brings you here, Patsy?”

“May I come in for a minute? I have to talk to you. It’ll only take a second. I just couldn’t do it over the phone.”

“Yeah, I guess so,” Brenda Bagley said. “But it’s kind of a mess in here. So it’s not a good time for visiting impromptu like you’re doing. Well, come in anyway.”

She opened the door, and Patsy followed her, carrying Emmy inside her left arm. Her daughter seemed to be getting heavier by the minute and reactively cried out with grief or shock, once she was inside, from the effect of the stale cigarette smoke and the squalor. On the other side of the living area, a gigantic television set facing the doorway enjoyed a regal presence, except that a dinner plate with crusted food rested on its uppermost flat surface, reducing its dignity. The TV had a screen that was too large for the home’s interior, and its volume had been set so high that it was hard to hear or even to see anything else in proximity to it. The chairs and side tables and lamps appeared to be dwarfed by the huge electronic apparatus. Patsy wondered how they had managed to get the TV in here. Its size seemed so gargantuan that it could not have been squeezed through the doorway — the enormous television set in the tiny living room had the visual effect of a clipper ship assembled piece by piece inside a glass bottle. Patsy had the momentary feeling that the smoky room was airless, or the air so thoroughly consumed that it would not sustain life. The television set had used up most of the oxygen, and the remaining air had acquired a blue smoky tint from Brenda Bagley’s cigarettes. It was positively industrial. Bunched-up pieces of facial tissue littered the floor. Had the woman been crying, alone, in the evenings, with the TV set on, thinking of Gordy Himmelman?

Just to the left of the door was a sofa on whose cushion a white cat slept nestled against a plain plastic box.

“I’ll turn that off,” Brenda Bagley said, reaching for the remote. She pressed a button, and the screen at once went dark with an angry static crackling, as if the beast had been told to start hibernating or had been hit with a stun gun. “I can tell what you’re thinking — you think it’s a big TV. That’s what everyone thinks. And you’re right. It is big. I won it at the State Fair, is why.”

“You won it?”

“I guessed at the number of marbles in a jar. They had this little booth for an appliance store, and I’ve always been good at guessing things like that ever since I was a girl. I’ve won staplers and telephones. This time, the prize was that thing. They couldn’t downscale it, they said. That was the one they had to give away because they advertised that particular model. They had to take the door frame off my house to get it in here.” She seemed to lose her train of thought. “I should’ve traded it for a smaller one. It’s a mess in here,” she said, glancing up in a vague manner. What appeared to be coffee stains dotted the ceiling tile. Perhaps the coffee had spilled upward. Perhaps the laws of gravity did not operate successfully here.

“It isn’t a mess in here at all,” Patsy said evasively, to be polite. She looked toward the television set and saw herself reflected in its dark, blank, sleeping screen.

“Nice of you to say,” Brenda noted. “Please sit down, won’t you? You must be tired out carrying that little one around.”

Patsy lowered herself and the still-crying Emmy onto the sofa on the opposite side from the white cat and the box. The cat, annoyed by the child’s noise, jumped off and away toward the kitchen. Emmy needed a diaper change and was being fussy. Patsy plugged her mouth with a pacifier.

Patsy could feel the words she wished to say making their way up her throat, but they seemed to stop before they could quite get out. While she waited, she studied a picture on the wall near the doorway to the kitchen where the cat had retreated, and she bounced Emmy in her lap. The photograph was a studio portrait of some man and Gordy: sitting in the man’s lap, Gordy was much younger, just a toddler in the picture, not that much older than Emmy was now, and he smiled a toothy, dimwitted smile. Emmy continued to fuss and to reach for Patsy’s breast, but Patsy had stopped breastfeeding and, in any case, wouldn’t have opened her bra to Emmy’s mouth in front of Brenda Bagley if the world had depended on it. Some free-floating malice in this room wouldn’t permit that physical openness, some starveling bitterness that permeated the walls and the air.

“Brenda,” Patsy said. “I just talked to somebody I know. Knew. Well, it doesn’t matter when I knew her. She said that people — you know, parents — are starting to blame Saul and me for Gordy’s death, and they’re blaming us for Sam Cole’s death, too, and now this Himmel craze that the middle schoolers have taken up.”

“Oh, yeah. Everybody’s trying to look like Gordy. Isn’t that something? He’s a star.”

“That’s right. And she said I should talk to you.”

“Why?”

“She said people are blaming us. Saul and me.”

“Oh, are they? For what?”

“I don’t know. That’s the thing. For Gordy? For Sam? Why would they blame us?”

“You’re asking me? What would I have to do with it?”

“Well,” Patsy said, “she said I should ask you. She said we had unfinished business with you. She said I should come here right away.”

“I just go to work, and then I come home, Patsy. I’m a waitress, you know, at the Fleetwood. It’s not like I circulate.”

“I know.”

“All I do is sometimes talk to the customers. Look at him over there,” Brenda Bagley said, aiming her face at the photograph. “There he is, Gordy, with his dad. Only picture the two of them ever took together.”

“It must have been hard, trying to be his mother and dad, just you alone with him here.”

“Yeah, well,” Brenda Bagley said.

“What was his name?” Patsy asked. “The father?”

“Rufus. Rufus Himmelman. I thought you knew. People called him Rowdy for a while. Then they called him Ray. He had aliases. Names didn’t stick to him. Ray, Rick, Rob — he went through a lot of the R names. He could have been anything, I guess.” She waited. “But what he really was, was a con,” she said quickly. “He needed different names in his lines of work.”

“How come you took over the care of Gordy?” Patsy asked.

“It’s a long story. With the mother dead in that fire, somebody had to do it.”

“It doesn’t make sense,” Patsy said suddenly. “His father leaving and not coming back or asking about him. Disappearing like that. Then you, being Gordy’s guardian.”

“Oh, you think it doesn’t make sense?” Brenda Bagley stubbed out her cigarette in the ashtray and promptly lit another one. She gave Patsy a broad and very angry smile. Patsy waited for the Big Speech that usually follows the angry smile in the movies. But often there is no Big Speech and no explanation, just the angry smile, which then subsides as the cigarette rises to the mouth, and smoke is inhaled and exhaled. Not everyone had the resources of instant articulation. Once again, Patsy saw herself and her daughter and Brenda Bagley reflected on the blank TV screen, though they didn’t look like people on TV but like themselves: a toddler needing a diaper change, a frazzled woman with a cigarette, and an anxious and pregnant young mother. Then Brenda Bagley said, “Men leave their children all the time for parts unknown, you know, and they don’t come back for years, if they come back. Well, I don’t care. Maybe it don’t make any sense, but I took over the boy’s raising anyway. Nobody and nothing was offering to marry me. Didn’t have a boyfriend back then, or now either, and no children of my own to attend to, so I thought: he’s the only one I’ll ever get. Gordy will be mine. You see this face?”

She meant her own. Of course Patsy saw it. It was right in front of her, staring at her like a peeled tangerine with eyes. She nodded.

“I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking: With a face like that, no man would marry her. You know, nobody in my life ever called me ‘pretty.’ That’s a word I only heard about. I heard it applied to the other girls and then to the women I knew, but I sure never heard it applied to me. Bad skin all my life, and nothing the doctors could do. Dermatologists! Everybody said, ‘Oh, Brenda, she’s so polite and kindly,’ and then they’d go off behind my back and say that my face looked like the craters of the moon. Soon as somebody’s down, they start kicking at her just for the fun of it. And now here you come around, asking this and that, as if you got the right.”

Patsy sat silent while Emmy continued to squirm, arching her back. She was crying quietly. Gathering her wits, Patsy said, “That wasn’t what I wanted to inquire about. It was all these children, trying to look like Gordy. And the blame for what happened to Sam Cole.”

“What do you think I have to do with them?” Brenda asked. “You think I’m giving them orders? You can’t give a child orders. Well, you can, but it’s a joke.”

“No. It’s just. . have you been saying things about Saul and me? Anne McPhee said we were outcasts of God.”

“Are you? Didn’t know that God cared that much. Well, that’s just her opinion. I don’t know as I’ve said that.”

“People listen to you.”

“People certainly don’t listen to me.”

“Oh, I’m sure they do.”

“They never have. You think I have any influence with anybody? Where’d you get that idea?”

“Anne McPhee,” Patsy repeated.

“What does she know about outcasts of God?”

“I don’t know what she knows,” Patsy said, feeling as if her time was up.

“I’m the expert on outcasts of God,” Brenda Bagley said huffily, and with an odd touch of snobbery. “I’ve got everyone beat on that score.”

“Would you do me a favor, then?” Patsy asked. “Would you please tell people that Saul and I had nothing to do with Gordy’s death? We didn’t do it, we didn’t influence it, we’re sorry it happened, we’re miserable about it — can you say that, please, if people start asking?” She did not mention that Gordy’s ghost was, at this very moment, sitting in the car, waiting. The time was not right for a revelation of that sort.

“I guess I could say that if you want me to,” Brenda Bagley muttered, as if she was thinking about something else. “If anyone cares to know. I might mention it. But I want you to come see something first.”

“What?”

“Gordy’s bedroom.” She stood up without warning, then clumped down the narrow hallway in the opposite direction from the kitchen. After a pause, she made a windmilling motion for Patsy to follow her. Patsy picked up Mary Esther, who seemed to be watching something floating invisibly in the air in front of her, and carried her into Gordy’s bedroom.

The room smelled of boy-mildew and had one overhead light. On the north wall Gordy had cut out and pasted up, with adhesive tape, magazine photos of soldiers in camouflage clothing, holding their guns. They were walking through jungles. They were crawling through rice paddies and marshes. They had determined and brave killer expressions on their faces. In other pictures they were firing their guns or shouting the war shout as they plunged into battle. Movie stars dressed as soldiers were among them. It was standard stuff. So were the cartoons of superheroes cut out and pasted next to them. Near these pictures was a small poster of Wolverine, the superhero, the X-man, with his razor fingers, and another one of the same guy, in rage-against-the-world mode, beast mode. Patsy wondered why, if Gordy couldn’t read, he had all these comic-book figures pasted onto his bedroom wall.

“He loved Wolverine,” Brenda Bagley said.

Patsy felt herself indeliberately startle. In the midst of all this warfare and welter was a photo of Mary Esther as a small baby, the one with her leaning against the back of the sofa, her stuffed gnome in her lap. It was the picture that Saul had handed out in class. She rested there, an illustration of a baby, among the soldiers and superheroes and archvillains.

Patsy was finding it difficult to breathe.

“People said he couldn’t read,” Brenda Bagley was saying, “but he sat in here with those comic books of his, and the other magazines, X-men and so on, and I sure thought he was doing something, and if it wasn’t reading, I don’t know what it was.”

Also on the wall above the headboard was a picture of a beehive. Good Christ, the sadness of things.

“He was a strange boy,” Brenda Bagley said.

Patsy changed Mary Esther’s diaper in the car, in the front seat, throwing the old diaper into a baggie and tying it closed. Then she put her daughter into the child seat in the back, and after starting the car, she turned on the radio and headed home. Because the radio was broken, no sounds came out of it.

How was it? You weren’t in there for very long.

Well, Patsy thought, under her breath, you know how it was, you have your nerve, you lived there.

I was just kinda wondering what you thought of it.

It bothered me, Patsy thought. I couldn’t breathe in there, the big TV and the cigarette smoke and everything.

I couldn’t breathe in there, either. How’d you like the

walls? Didja like the pictures I put up?

They were okay. You must’ve read a lot of comic books. But I was surprised: no computers. No computer games. I guess your aunt could never afford one. Gordy, why did you kill yourself with that gun? In our yard? While we were looking? Would you just please explain that to me? I really, really need to know the answers to those questions. If you’re going to hang around with us, you could at least do me the favor of telling me why you did all that. To yourself. And to us.

But no new words descended into her brain, emerging from the backseat, where it was now very quiet, with Mary Esther sleeping. The car advanced through pool after pool of buttery light cast from the lamp posts, and Patsy took a route circling the downtown area. She felt a vague movement in her uterus and also noticed that she was feeling distinct emotions, as if they were hands slipping out of the gloves that usually held them. She passed by a green sign on the outskirts announcing Five Oaks as a sister city of Nikone, Japan, and of Tübingen, Germany. But those cities were ancient and historically identifiable, and this one had almost no history at all and very few identifying marks. It was on the map, but in no other respect was it on the map. Patsy tightened her hold on the steering wheel. The local pride in anonymity ate away at everything. It devoured lives and turned the inhabitants into ghosts both before and then after their deaths. Resignation was the great local spiritual specialty, resignation and a fleeting recklessness, a feverishly hypnotic and prideful death-in-life. All the Himmel kids were acute cultural critics, she decided. They had a point. If the city of Five Oaks had any true siblings, they wouldn’t have names like Rheims or Pisa. They would be the close relatives with names like Terre Haute or Duluth or Flint or Grand Forks or Davenport or Burlington or Scranton or Kenosha — cities you had heard of but couldn’t quite picture, cities that called nothing in particular to mind except for an eagerness to be larger and more prosperous than they were, and an all-consuming late-stage boosterism that was mostly insecurity and worry masked by bluster. The wolves were never far from the door in cities like these, and sometimes the wolves got in. The churches tried, with varying success, to keep people calm when the members of the congregation felt like screaming. Five Oaks would always be the sort of place you had to apologize for whenever visitors from out of town — from larger towns, real cities — arrived at the airport on their little turboprop commuter planes, shaken up and curious about what had brought them there.

Or else: you lived here for years and you found you liked it, and you stopped apologizing, and visitors noticed that, too.

They had to get out before they were destroyed. She would not let her son be born in a place like this. Plans were being hatched to turn Saul into a scapegoat. She would get Theo and Emmy out of here before desperation took hold of them, desperation and alligator malice, meanness and the liquefaction of the soul.

Sooner or later, wandering is done.

When she arrived at the house, she carried the sleeping Emmy over one shoulder and the diaper-bag over the other into the foyer. She noticed a black BMW parked in front. What was it doing here? Her arms and shoulders were getting muscular and her biceps in particular were swelling from the effort of carrying Emmy and the stroller around. The minute she came inside, she said, “Saul! The scapegoating has started! We have to move! We have to move out of this place!” She smiled at herself as she prepared herself to sing — what was it? — the Animals, a tragically hip band before it was tragically hip to be tragically hip, but softly, so as not to wake Emmy. “We gotta get out of this place! If it’s the last thing we ever do!”

From the kitchen came Saul, accompanied by the most handsome man she had ever seen in real life, Saul’s brother, Howie, who gave Patsy a raised-eyebrow greeting and an all-purpose wave that was more a shrug than a genuine wave. Being beautiful, he could be a minimalist in his gestures. Big hugs were too much trouble, too much strain on the equipment, and were uncool, besides, especially with a lady carrying a toddler. A surprise visit! Well, that was Howie’s style, to appear without an invitation and to leave at about the time you had become used to him and felt a bit of warmth toward him. You fell for him, and he’d be out of there. He had had a ban on intimacy — well, maybe he had changed. But this was his way of enforcing the ban, these surprises, as if he lived across town and could drop in for coffee now and then.

Howie was wearing a perfectly tailored shirt and trousers, rather colorless, so that he appeared to mimic the monotextured heroes in 1940s films — the young John Garfield, only better-looking in the post-humanist style. He had left his shoes at the door, and for some reason Patsy noticed the high arch of his foot inside the sock.

The brothers walked together in a similar style of locomotion, and though Howie was the handsome one with jaw-dropping good looks, Saul was the more lovable, the man with whom you’d want to spend your life. For Howie’s beauty you would pay the price of a lifetime of sorrow, and all the varieties of rage. Eventually you would have to go to church to get rid of him.

“Oh, Howie,” she said, and kissed him. “So that was your BMW. What a nice surprise. Sorry you caught me singing.”

“Patsy.” He kissed her back. Cool professional lips. A slight, low-voltage tingling. “Love, you can sing anytime.”

Sixteen

Saul had been working at his desk, correcting student assignments and watching the sky for signs of the four horsemen of the apocalypse when a black BMW pulled into the driveway. Its headlights went dark; the smooth, muffled engine quieted. Saul did not move, and the driver did not get out of the car. Observing the bug-spattered headlights and grille, and the stationary, immobilized driver, half-hidden behind the tinted windows in the gathering dusk, Saul made a mental checklist:

The unannounced visitor was certainly Howie, his brother. In one of his previous phone calls, Howie had proudly mentioned his black BMW, which he called “The Avenger.” No one around here had a car like that, and certainly not with (Saul now noticed) California plates.

Howie hadn’t called ahead, nor had he in any way intimated that he would be dropping in. He had always favored surprise visits. For this one, he would have had to drive about 1,700 miles, give or take a few hundred here or there, from Palo Alto to Five Oaks. Such a trip was a feat of determination and willpower in the service of a strange, perhaps insanely prolonged, spontaneity. The distance and the effort involved in crossing it did not mean that Howie’s stay would be a lengthy one. He might be gone by tomorrow afternoon.

He would, no doubt, surprise in other ways as well. Howie always had multiple astonishments ready for whatever audience he could command. He liked lifting people up and then keeping them off balance, using his charm as a weapon, part of his latter-day Gatsbyish acrobat approach to things.

How had he found Saul and Patsy’s new residence? He just had. Bystanders tended to give information willingly, greedily, to Howie. The charm, the charisma, did the trick every time.

First Gordy Himmelman’s death this past summer, and now this.

No, that was wrong: he loved his brother.

Nevertheless.

Saul still wasn’t moving. He wouldn’t budge. No budging, not a bit of it. He wasn’t going to move until Howie did. As the guest, Howie was supposed to get out of the car and ring the doorbell before the noises of greeting fell on him like so much rain.

They hadn’t said a word to each other, and already they had a standoff. Because Halloween was three nights away, Saul half-expected Howie to remove himself from the BMW dressed in a costume — that of an ordinary man, a role he had never successfully played. But no: he probably wouldn’t get out of his trophy car until Saul came running downstairs, came charging out the front door, his arms wide, his face joyously radiant with the startled welcome, the glee, the sheer human pleasure of being in his brother’s company again after so long an absence, now that Howie had deigned to visit without warning.

Maybe he, Saul, should dress up in a costume himself, the Gordy Himmelman clothes piled on the floor in his closet. That would surprise Howie.

But no. That, Saul thought, was what he — Saul — would not do. He would not rush downstairs. He would not dress up, or down. He wouldn’t give his brother the satisfaction.

Half of any manipulative strategy had to do with how you arrived and how you departed.

The German motor ticked quietly as it cooled. This standoff was like several others the two brothers had had. Howie wasn’t passive so much as immobile, a Don Juan of stillness: he liked everyone to come to him so that he might gain the advantage of not making the first move. This was the dubious legacy of a childhood marked by illness and indisposition and the death of a parent. He had been born one month premature, a blue baby — incubated — and as an infant he was jaundiced and scrawny and tearful. One of Saul’s first memories was of his mother carrying the misbegotten Howie around the house on a pale-blue goosedown pillow, as if any sudden move might break him. Soon after his birth, Howie had proved to be allergic to breast milk — the metaphoric implications of this were not lost on him as an adult — and he continued to be lactose intolerant. He had suffered from anemia, earaches, uncommon food and substance allergies (carpeting made him sneeze, cats made him choke, he might die if he ate a peanut, and he could not mow a lawn), and repeated bouts of childhood flu and bronchial troubles had kept him in bed for weeks. He had had multiple strep infections and one incidence in middle school of rheumatic fever. In high school he came down with pneumonia and missed classes for a month.

“Be careful of Howie,” his mother always used to say to Saul. “He’s very fragile.”

After their father’s death — Howie said he could hardly remember him (Saul doubted this) and would never speak of him — Delia seemed to direct the few motherly concerns she had toward Howie in the furtherance of his well-being. Saul she left alone. With Saul, it was hands-off anarcho-laissez-faire parenting all the way. She treated Saul like a wonderful, charming guest or a performer in a rather dull show. But with Howie, the slightest sign of postnasal drip could mean another desperate search of The Merck Manual for symptoms, along with worried consulations with the long-suffering pediatrician, Dr. Greene. Howie had really made his illnesses work. Every time Howie got sick, he somehow came out, personally, in the profit column.

Sickly children with distant or absent parents have a tendency to become unattractive adolescents, Saul believed: bent-over, whining selfpitiers, autoerotic virtuosi of hypochondria. Unable to make conversation, they give themselves the attention and care they receive from no one else. But something had turned the other way with Howie. Saul watched with disbelief as his little brother gradually acquired a glow from some mysterious source, a light in his eyes that was somehow related to the animal kingdom. The growth hormones that in other boys produced acne, simian proportions, quick tempers, and cantaloupe-shaped heads, produced in Howie an eerie grace and beauty. From his years of illness he also acquired an inner quiet and watchfulness and a finely honed skill at manipulation.

He had large, liquid eyes — now like a doe, now like an owl.

In high school, Howie had led around a long trail of girlfriends, not to mention a host of bewildered guys who were friends of his but who also seemed to have fallen under his spell. Saul suspected that his brother would sleep with anything as long as it was beautiful. Howie had become a beauty snob, though he practiced secrecy about his love interests and never explained where he was going or whom he was seeing in his nocturnal prowlings. But he had also become rugged, given to endurance sports like rock climbing and marathon racing and soccer. He fought his sickliness with everything he had, and in the process had evolved into a man in whom contradictory male and female traits were mixed equally, producing a sleek, androgynous charm. He had a weakness for mirrors and stood before them for long periods when he thought no one else was observing him, studying the tough, beautiful mystery of himself.

Watching Howie grow into manhood was like reading two biographies, one of Teddy Roosevelt and the other of Greta Garbo, going back and forth between the two, getting the personalities mixed up.

Their father had died of a heart attack while driving to work the year when Howie was eight years old and Saul ten. In the Baltimore funeral home, following the memorial service, there transpired a scene that Saul would always remember whenever he thought of Howie. Howie had been seated on a metal folding chair in the corner, behind a table where the two Bunn-o-Matic coffeemakers were positioned, along with the cream, the sugar, and the Styrofoam cups. Friends and acquaintances of their father milled around the room, bending down to Delia and Saul to offer consolation. Howie refused to talk to anyone. With a manly and stoical expression on his face, Howie sat quietly there in the corner, the tears streaming down his cheeks, unsociable in his grief. He had loved his father, whose death was, Saul thought, a permanent injury for which Howie would never have words. The luster had simply gone out of everything. Later, in the house, when more friends of their parents dropped by, Howie found another corner to sit in, where he would cry inconsolably, then wipe his eyes and stand up and make brave conversation and eat cookies, before sitting down in his corner to cry, inconsolably, again.

Delia never remarried — out of loyalty, Saul thought, not to her late husband but to Howie.

Saul and Howie had tried some brother-to-brother male bonding once a few years ago on a long-distance bicycle trip. They had set off from Baltimore and had made it as far as Chicago. They did not speak much about personal matters during their evenings together: each had brought several books to ward off that possibility. They discussed the route, their provisions, the locations where they would camp or the motels where they would stay. Or they would confer about the bicycles, the condition of the gears and the tires.

Saul had been in charge of the maps, because he claimed he was good at maps. Howie was apathetic about their route. They stayed on back roads day after day and, after three weeks had passed, made their way carefully past the tangle of outlying Chicago neighborhoods toward Lake Michigan, which Howie had never seen. They had been bicycling in the northwest side of the city, avoiding traffic in the early morning, weaving their way through Greektown and heading for Lincoln Park, when Howie braked too suddenly, swerved, and hit the curb in front of a Greek restaurant, the Acropolis. He went flying over the handlebars and landed on the sidewalk, his belongings — which had broken loose from his pack — scattered around him.

Saul was horrified. Be careful of Howie. He’s very fragile.

Howie stood up quickly, seemingly unhurt, and out of relief at seeing that his brother was still in one piece, Saul began to laugh. His laughter provoked Howie to fury. Enraged, he danced a little dance of humiliation and wrath on the sidewalk before he stomped a plastic water container, his baseball cap, his Robocop wraparound sunglasses, and his uncapped tube of sunblock, which squirted orgasmically over the pavement. Saul only laughed harder, knowing he shouldn’t but unable to stop. As he did, Howie walked over to Saul and waited for him to control himself. Howie’s face was bright red.

“Someday in the future we can laugh about this,” Howie said, “but right now I swear to God that if you keep laughing, I’m going to fucking kill you.”

Saul composed himself, wiped the tears off his face, and helped Howie collect his things. From the experience he learned two facts about his brother and himself: first, that Howie feared being the object of ridicule — lethally — especially in moments of vulnerability; and, second, that he himself feared Howie’s ire at such moments, not for himself but for his brother’s sake. He had seen a pool of bitter sediment in Howie’s eyes, which spoke of old grievances and all the memories of illnesses that had brought forth both welcome and unwelcome responses.

They found an old hotel near Lincoln Park to stay in — they would be flying home in two days and would ship the bicycles back — and after taking showers they walked around the Loop, making their way down to the Art Institute to see the Seurats. That evening, when the weather was still humid and unsettled, they strolled through Lincoln Park. There were crowds of other young people like themselves, walking and talking and eyeing one another. Within sight of the lake, they were standing near a water fountain when an attractive young woman wearing jeans and a Chicago Cubs T-shirt and holding a sketch pad began speaking to Howie. Howie carried with him a wounded look that women apparently found irresistible. Addressing the sky in a tone of cool, hip indifference, she remarked on the weather, and Saul’s brother said something in return, equally cool and hip, speaking of the clouds in a way that suggested that he, too, was indifferent to the weather, being from out of town and not subject to these particular clouds. She asked where he lived and he told her. Baltimore! she said, with admiration, touching Howie’s arm. He had bicycled here? Amazing. She had never been to Baltimore. No? Well, the row houses, he said, came right down to the water in the harbor. Where are you staying? she asked. Howie named the hotel. They introduced themselves: Howie, Voltaine. Yes, the name: her parents had been hippies in Vancouver; she herself was a Canadian citizen, and when she was a girl her mother had sung “Mellow Yellow” to her and her sister Saffron night after night, year after year, as a lullaby. Now she was a student here in Chicago at the Art Institute. Howie didn’t say anything about his occupations or his age; it didn’t seem necessary. Nor did he bother to introduce his brother. Saul was standing a few feet away, lost in bemusement and pride in his brother’s social skills, though feeling like an encumbrance himself. In disbelief, from his safe distance, Saul detected Chanel No. 5 emanating from Voltaine, an expensive scent his mother sometimes wore when she hadn’t applied the mustard gas. Voltaine, for some reason, hadn’t noticed him. Girls didn’t turn their heads when Saul walked past. Howie was the one who got them riled up and confused. Instead of introducing himself, Saul just watched his brother and this woman, and he took deep breaths of Voltaine’s perfume. Howie had given Saul a semidetached look, as if something was on the tip of his tongue that he would not say. Voltaine and Howie proceeded to sit down on a bench quite close to each other, and as the light faded, she removed the cover of her sketch pad and outlined his face on paper using pencil and charcoal, including in her drawing the scrapes on his forehead from his bicycle accident. After ten minutes of small talk between the two, Howie finally got around to pointing toward Saul, who smiled, nodded, and belatedly shook hands with Voltaine. He hadn’t been able to decide whether he should return to the hotel or lurk in the middle distance. Voltaine continued to pencil in details of Howie on her sketch pad, but by then it was getting so dark that Saul couldn’t make out what his brother looked like in Voltaine’s version of him.

Out of politeness, she asked Saul if he would like her to sketch him, and, out of politeness, he said no.

When she finished the portrait of Howie, she showed him what she had done, kissed him on the cheek, and wished them both good night. The brothers asked her if she would like to go somewhere for a beer, but she said she couldn’t, she had to get back home. Saul was relieved that he would be seeing no more of this scented hippies’ child.

At two in the morning, the phone in the hotel room rang. Saul answered. Voltaine, of course, and she wanted to speak to Howie, she said, just a small matter of business, nothing important. Saul passed the receiver over to his brother in the other bed. Howie sat up, alert. He then turned off the light and crawled under his sheet and blanket to talk. His voice, from under the covers, was muffled and laughing and flirtatious and thickly sexual. Well, they were kids, after all, though Howie was only two years younger than Saul himself, the designated adult. Saul went into the bathroom to piss, and when he returned, Howie was still on the phone there under the covers, very quietly attending to business. “Do you want me to leave the room?” Saul asked his brother. Receiving no answer, and knowing he had been heard, he tucked himself back into bed and tried to sleep. He counted sheep in the dark to the background of his brother’s unintelligible rumbling, and he imagined long, dull historical accounts of the Treaty of Versailles to help himself doze off. None of it worked. He went down the names of the states alphabetically, trying to remember each state capital. That didn’t work either, though he did get as far as Helena. His brother talked for what seemed like an hour. In the dark, after hanging up, Howie said only six words: “This sure is a friendly town.”

The next day, no mention was made of the phone call. As far as Saul knew, his brother never saw or heard from Voltaine again.

Where was Patsy? She had been delayed getting her refill of Dorylaeum, it seemed, and now Saul would have to start their dinner. He clomped downstairs, feeling muddy and doomstruck as he always did whenever Patsy arrived home late.

He peered in the refrigerator. Baby food — ground lamb, sweet potatoes, mashed peas, and leftover oatmeal (leftover oatmeal? whose idea was that? perhaps Patsy would eat it herself, late at night, watching the paid commercial programming) — resided in recesses of the refrigerator close to a package of hamburger, salad fixings, and a jar of nameless forgotten food cobwebbed with mold. Saul and Patsy were busy parents and sometimes for days or even weeks forgot certain sectors of the refrigerator. Terrible neglected substances, green and gray and almost alive again inside their Tupperware containers, were visible in the back of the lower shelf. He threw the jar, unopened, into the garbage.

Howie still waiting, waiting, waiting in the car. .

Saul removed the fresh greens and made a salad for Patsy and himself. He contemplated what ingredients they had on hand and decided to make an omelette. Therefore: he opened a bottle of white wine (“the white whine” Patsy sometimes called it, and sometimes called him under its influence), helped himself to a glass, and pulled out a mixing bowl from the cupboard and a cutting board for the vegetables. After chopping the onions and the mushrooms and the tomatoes, he dropped them into the bowl, and he—

He couldn’t stand it any longer. Howie’s furious apathy was larger than his own. Saul’s love for his brother couldn’t be much clearer if it were out of the water in the well.

Take care of Howie. He’s very fragile.

Saul washed his hands and put on his shoes before strolling out to Howie’s car. The suspense was killing him. Actually, he adored his brother for no particular reason. His brother being his brother was reason enough. Why should he pretend otherwise? Why should he feign this indifference? If Howie wanted to be indifferent to him, to Saul, fine. Howie was his little brother, always had been, even now, multimillionaire though Howie might be, the money couldn’t protect him from everything. Howie required looking after. Everyone did. Of course, Howie liked suspense — a seducer’s trait — and could handle much more of it than Saul could. By the time he had reached the Avenger, Saul was almost running, desperate to hug his brother, desperate to love him again in person.

There, behind the wheel, was Howie, fast asleep, a tiny trail of drool declining from his mouth. Slumbering though he was, Howie had the appearance of a bleary, worn-out man, a former hobbyist-seducer whose charm, through overuse, had faded on him. He had a piteous gray streak in his beard. Saul knocked on the driver’s-side window, and when Howie awoke, he stared at Saul for a moment in nonrecognition, as if in his sleep he had been inoculated with amnesia.

“Howie,” Saul called to his brother through the glass. “Wake up.”

Howie continued to look blankly at Saul.

“Howie!” Saul cried out. “Buddy. Pal. It’s Saul. Your brother. What’s going on? Get out of the car! Come inside.”

Howie rolled down the window. Speaking like a man coming back to consciousness after general anesthetic, Howie said, “Hey, Saul. I’ve been driving for seventeen hours straight. I got here, and I thought no one was home.” He smiled wanly. “I guess I fell asleep.”

“Come inside,” Saul repeated. “Please.”

Howie opened the car door. When he tried to stand, his knees appeared to give way before Saul grabbed his elbow, and then his arm, helping him back up. Saul hugged his brother fiercely. Howie gave off a smell of exhaustion and breath mints and fast food. Saul supported him by holding him around the shoulders in a brotherly clasp as they proceeded up the front walkway, through the front door, past the foyer, into the kitchen, where he sat his brother down at the dinette table.

“New house,” Howie said, looking around and shaking his head. “New baby, new furniture, new house. New everything.”

“Yeah,” Saul said. “I guess so. Though Emmy isn’t that new. She’s over a year old. And Patsy is pregnant again. You knew that, right?”

“Could I have a glass of water?” Howie asked. “I’m beat.”

“Sure.” After placing the water down in front of Howie, Saul sat beside him and waited while his brother drank. Slowly, his face began to take on its customary qualities, and Howie’s character reappeared in his eyes. “So. Howard. To what do we owe the honor of this visit?” Saul asked.

“I wanted to give you and Patsy and Mary Esther. . do you call her Mary Esther or Emmy? I’ve heard you say both.”

“Well, Emmy, usually,” Saul said.

“I have an announcement. And I wanted to see my little niece, and you, and Patsy, and the new house, and actually the truth is that I wanted to give you some money.”

“Give us? Money? For what? We don’t need any money.” He waited. Perhaps he was being ungracious. “How much money?”

“I’ll tell you later. It’s sort of a bundle. I need to get rid of it. You’d be doing me a favor. By the way, where is Patsy?”

“Getting a prescription filled. She’ll be back anytime.” Saul touched his brother’s arm. “It’s so good to see you, Howie.”

“Well, yeah.” Howie twisted his head back and forth, loosening the neck muscles. “You, too.” He gazed toward the ceiling. “That was one long drive. I did like Colorado, the Rocky Mountains, but of course everyone does, though I think those mountains are too big, somehow. I like smaller mountains, softer ones, more on the human scale. When I got to Five Oaks, I wasn’t sure I’d find your house, but then I saw some white-haired kids, palely loitering in their front yards, and I thought, ‘This must be where Saul and Patsy live, somewhere around here,’ and I asked, and they directed me to you. Hey. Could you give me some towels? For a shower?”

“Oh, sure,” Saul said. “By the way, how did you like what you saw of our very wonderful city?”

“Five Oaks?” Howie appeared to consider this question, then gave his head a shake. “Five Oaks is the Tübingen of the Midwest, wouldn’t you say?” Saul had forgotten Howie’s habit of rhetorical traps, delivered with a thin smile.

“I might, or I might not.” Saul felt dismayed by how quickly the two of them became quarrelsome. They had skipped the stage when they would both be pleasant and agreeable.

“Those towels, Saul? I’ve got to take a shower.”

“Okay, okay. I’ll go get them.”

Waiting in the kitchen, while the hot water ran in the shower upstairs, Saul thrummed his fingers on the table. He stood up and gazed out the window to see if there were any signs of Patsy. Far in the distance down the subdivision’s main street, out in the semidark, were two bleached-haired kids, two Himmels, yes, palely loitering (that was the phrase), bent over a bag of some kind, conferring. Then they straightened up and stared at his house.

During the past few months, the middle school and high school outsiders and losers and dropouts and freaks and disaffiliated and disinclined and unmotivated and semi-destroyed and embittered kids — it was quite a sizable group — had all turned their hair a sickly blond or white and created a semi-secret cult of the undead with Gordy at its center as inspiration and centerpiece, and Sam Cole associated with him for the beauty part. Saul had heard that they considered Gordy to be still among them, apparitional, and all these albino-haired, blank-eyed kids had taken a particular interest in Saul himself as a focus of their undead attention.

There was, Saul had heard, a dispute among the Himmels about himself. Some considered him an enabler, someone who had made Gordy possible. For others, he was the one who had hastened Gordy’s end. In any case, whether as John the Baptist or as Judas, Saul was on their minds.

When Howie finally came downstairs, wearing a clean shirt and fresh trousers and clean socks, Saul hugged him again and in the living room poured him a glass of wine. They clicked glasses, and out of nowhere, Howie said, “I’m going to get married, Saul. I wanted to tell you in person.”

Saul tried not to act surprised. This was, after all, standard practice for Howie, to say nothing about the person or persons he had been seeing or what he had been doing and then to announce big decisions as done deals. He avoided advice, consultations, and unwanted intimacies this way. He loved to ambush with surprise news, then watch the reaction. Or maybe he just didn’t want to deliver big news over the phone. “Hey, congratulations,” Saul said, trying to think of an alternative way of saying what he was about to say in a non-clichéd form. But the cliché was there in front of him like a roadblock. “So. Who’s,” he asked, “the lucky girl?”

“Her name?” Howie seemed briefly taken aback, stunned by the question. He shut his eyes twice, as if he had been plunged into profound thought. “Her name is Phyllis.”

“Phyllis?” Saul asked, his voice carrying a small current of disbelief. “That’s a name for old people. Nobody is named Phyllis. Not anymore.”

“Well, she is. I guess nobody told her parents. She goes by ‘Lis.’”

“Lis,” Saul repeated.

“Yeah. Or ‘Phyl’—whatever.” Howie glanced at Saul, then glanced around the living room. “You’ll be my best man?”

“Of course. Where’d you meet her? What’s she like? Do you have a picture? When’s the wedding?”

“Naturally I have a picture.” Howie took a sip of his wine. He gave Saul his trickster smile.

“Well, may I see it?”

“Oh. Okay.” Howie reached for his wallet and pulled out a photograph, which he handed to Saul. It showed a pretty young woman standing on the seashore in the Bay Area — Ocean Beach, Saul guessed — whose auburn-colored hair was shoulder length, and with a display of short bangs and delicate hands raised in a double wave. She wore a thin blue jacket. In the photograph the wind was apparently blowing from left to right, causing several strands of her hair to press themselves against her cheek. The hair against her cheek attracted Saul to her. He was moved by how she stood in the wind. Her smile was lovely and warm. She had the appearance of amiability and sweetness and strength, though her eyes were slightly recessed and did not quite participate in the smile she was smiling. She looked like Patsy. She looked like Patsy’s sister, if Patsy actually had a sister. She looked like Patsy. She looked like Patsy. She looked like Patsy’s sister. Saul felt a mild shock before he recovered himself.

Howie might have said, “So. What d’you think?” but then he wouldn’t have been Howie.

“She’s very pretty,” Saul told his brother. “Is she Jewish?”

“Yes,” Howie said noncommittally. He glanced straight up at the ceiling. “Why do you ask?”

“Just thinking about Mom. Not that she cares one way or another. Well, that’s another story. She’s very pretty,” Saul repeated, suddenly and unpleasantly aware that he had accidentally left his pronoun referent vague — the unconscious at work, always busy, always looking for opportunities to make Saul slip up.

“Thanks,” Howie said, as if he were responsible for his fiancée’s good looks. “You know, I can’t wait to see Emmy.” He said this without enthusiasm, the phrase oiled with politeness.

“She and Patsy will be home any minute now,” Saul said. “Any minute.” Then he blurted out, “You know, this Phyllis of yours looks a lot like Patsy.”

Howie coughed angrily. Then he said, “That’s a strange thing to observe. She doesn’t look at all like Patsy. They’re completely different. You’re hallucinating.”

“Of course she looks like Patsy. They could be sisters.”

“Saul, what makes you say that?”

“Look at her hair. Look at her smile. That expression on her face.” Look at her benevolence, he wanted to say, but didn’t, because no one ever said things like that, except sentimentalists.

“Are you telling me that I searched around until I found someone like your wife?”

“No,” Saul backpedaled, “I’m not telling you that.”

“Because she doesn’t look like Patsy at all.” Howie sat up like a guard who has heard an alarm go off. “She looks completely like herself.”

“Sure. Of course.”

“I know,” Howie said, “we’ll ask Patsy, once she gets home.” He stood up and stretched, as if he had reached the inevitable crossroad and had made the correct turn. “Let Patsy decide whether Lis looks like her.” He leaned backward. “You asked what she’s like.”

“Yes,” Saul said. “I did.”

“She works with me. . with us. At eFlea.” In one of his phone calls, Howie had informed Saul that he currently was one of the partners in an online flea market, positioned to compete with eBay. “She’s smart and beautiful.” Then, after a long beat, Howie said, “She reads the encyclopedia to relax. On New Year’s Eve we both made resolutions, and I made her resolve to go on exactly as she had been in the past. And she did. She resolved to go on being the way she was. We met when. . well, she came to me when I was coking up and drinking too much and screwing everything in sight, and she sort of fixed me up with herself. I was a mess, all glue and shards.” Howie waited. “The Great Chain of Misbehavior, with me at the bottom, buried in all that cash I had made and was losing. There are a lot of me’s out there,” he said, apparently meaning the West Coast. “You know,” Howie said, warming to the subject, “my character doesn’t exactly fill me up. My character only goes out partway to my edges. But Lis’s character goes out all the way to her fingertips. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“Yes,” Saul said, because he himself could have said it about Patsy.

“Anyway,” Howie said, “I had to come out here and ask you to be my best man, and also, before Lis and I are married, to give you what I want to give you.”

“What’s that?”

“About two million dollars,” Howie said.

“That’s a lot of money,” Saul said, in a blank, not registering at all what his brother had said.

“Well, it’s in equities from various companies out there I’ve bought into, and you can’t sell them, as I’ll explain to you tomorrow, because that would be illegal. It’s all paper wealth. Is there any more wine in there, in the kitchen?”

“Yes,” Saul said, so numb that he felt that he might have had a stroke. “Come with me.”

When they were in the kitchen, the front door opened, and Patsy came in the house with a noisy bustle, and she sang out, “Saul! The scapegoating has started! We have to move! We have to move out of this place.” Then she began singing. “We gotta get out of this place! If it’s the last thing we ever do!”

He and Howie came out of the kitchen, and when Patsy saw Saul’s brother, she said, “Oh, Howie.” She kissed him. “So that was your BMW. What a nice surprise. Sorry you caught me singing.” They gave each other brotherly-sisterly kisses — Saul watched them do it.

“Love,” Howie said, unwrapping his charm before her, smiling. “You can sing anytime.”

Howie picked up Emmy, and he made kissing noises as he looked in her brown eyes. He kissed his niece on the cheek, and in return she smiled at him broadly, which she had never done so rapidly with a stranger before.

“She’s very solid,” said Howie, once so fragile himself.

Seventeen

“What a beautiful woman,” Patsy said, holding Howie’s photograph of his fiancée. She and Saul, tag-teaming, had taken Emmy upstairs, changed her into a fresh diaper and her pink pajamas, sung to her, and watched her fall asleep. Now they were together in the living room, the three of them drinking white wine and examining the picture of Howie’s Lis.

“Saul thinks she looks like you,” Howie said, glancing at Patsy. He was slurring his words a bit. “I said she didn’t.”

“She doesn’t look at all like me. Her hair is different from mine, for one thing.”

“She certainly does look like you,” Saul muttered crossly, staring at his wife, as if he were the final authority on all questions of resemblance.

“You guys. No, she’s not a bit like me. The only female in the world who looks a lot like me,” Patsy said, “is my daughter. Howie, you’re a lucky man. When’s the wedding date?”

“Next summer.” He then lowered himself from his chair onto the floor. There, on the floor, he continued his side of the conversation as he performed stretch exercises. He said he was stiff from the day’s drive. “We’re going to be married in Golden Gate Park. Lis wants to honeymoon in Hawaii, and she’s found a place on Maui where you can walk and go on excursions if you want to, or you can just stay right there, and it’s still Paradise. There are plans, and more plans, and more plans after that, about this wedding. You don’t even want to know about all these plans. I can’t keep track of them all. I never knew getting married was so complicated. It’s like managing a merger. Strategy and paperwork.”

Patsy and Saul glanced at each other.

“But the main thing is, Saul, you have to be my best man, and the other main thing is how beautiful Emmy is.” As if under silent orders for a fixed routine, he then sat down and did a runner’s stretch on the other side of the coffee table, with one leg behind him and one in front. “What a beautiful daughter. You two are so lucky. Except for living in Five Oaks.”

“Well, there’s another one coming,” Patsy said, patting herself, ignoring his remark about their very wonderful city. She explained to Howie that this one was a boy and that the due date was May thirteenth.

Howie stood up, holding his arms entangled with each other in front and then behind him, wrenching them from side to side for flexibility.

“Hey, congratulations. Or do you withhold congratulations until the baby is born? Patsy,” he said, “there’s one thing I have to ask about. When you came home, you said the scapegoating had started. What did you mean?”

He lowered himself to the floor. While he did several push-ups, Patsy told him about Gordy Himmelman’s suicide. Saul sat in his chair, watching his brother’s exercises without commenting on them or on the Gordy Himmelman story that Patsy was telling. Public calesthenics had seemingly turned into acceptable social behavior. The only time Saul allowed himself a reaction occurred when Patsy reported that she had talked to Anne McPhee and then had driven over to Brenda Bagley’s house. Saul’s face took on a raised-eyebrow attentiveness. Howie’s reaction was minimal, though he had a peevish expression as he listened and exercised, as if the story were a mind pollutant.

“You do have to get out of this place,” Howie told them tonelessly, finishing his last push-up and taking a breather in a sitting position, his hands on his hips.

“Nothing doing,” Saul said. “I’m staying. I have to. I’m on a mission. We are.”

“And what would that mission be?” He took on an expression of petulance.

“I don’t know,” Saul explained. “In due time, the mission will reveal itself.”

“Your mission is to get out of the Midwest, Saul, before something here balls up its fist and hits you. Come out to the Bay Area. We’ll go into business together.”

“Well,” Saul said, “I’m going to bed. See you in the morning, maybe.”

“I made up the guest room,” Patsy told Howie, yawning. “Uh, Howie, could you tell me one thing, before you go to bed?”

“What’s that?”

“Well, Saul told me when we were upstairs that you were going to give us some money.”

“I already have given you some money. Well, not money, but equities. That is, I’ve bought some stocks and put them in Saul’s name. You’re my family, you see. Anyone would do this. And I thought it was time to spread the wealth around. There’s money to spare. I won’t miss it.”

“How much is this?”

“About two million dollars,” Howie said. “But it’s not in blue chips. They’re kind of risky little companies, what I bought you. Lots of marginal enterprises. Techno stocks, things like that, e-commerce stuff. That’s how I. . well, never mind. The thing is, you shouldn’t sell them. You should hold on to them for years. If you sell them, you’ll be sorry. You can just go on right here with your lit — your life now as it is. Pretend all this money doesn’t exist.”

“You’re kidding! We can’t take this!” Patsy said. “You have to be joking! You can’t give us two million dollars! You can’t. That’s crazy. We’ll be ruined.”

“Yes, I can,” he said, heading toward the stairs, his hand already on the newel post.

“I’m not taking any of this. . largesse,” Patsy said. “I’m giving it all back to you.”

“Actually,” Howie said, just before he turned around, “the stocks are already in Saul’s name. If you want to give them away, it’s his decision, to tell you the honest truth.”

“What would we do with two million dollars?” Patsy cried out in agony.

“Anything you want.”

In the middle of the sleepless night (to her surprise and dismay, Saul had fallen asleep immediately — a very aggressive thing for him to have done), on one of her several trips to the bathroom to pee, Patsy heard a spattering sound like that of a bird flying into a window, and then another: two impacts. Whack — pause — wham. They came from downstairs, and Patsy could feel the hair on the back of her neck stand up. One blow was an accident; but two were deliberate. Two meant intention and human volition. Two meant harm.

The floor, as she ran down to the living room, felt unclean and unwelcoming to her bare feet, no longer hers, provisional: the carpeting was gritty and the wood slats squeaked. In the living room Patsy stood in darkness, studying the front window, where two egg yolks and the raw white of the egg surrounding them dribbled down the glass windowpane. Far in the distance she saw the white bleached albino hairs as the Himmel-perpetrators disappeared into the night.

So it had started. Somewhere, out there in the dark, someone had thrown two raw eggs at the house, and then, in all probability, had run off, sick with laughter or righteousness. Gordy, with his visits, was gone physically but now his substitutes were doing their methodical retributive work. Perhaps there would be escalation: rotten tomatoes, toilet paper, followed by firecrackers, then arson, then, finally, gunshots. Or painted swastikas. Of the punishing of good deeds there would be no discernible end. All at once the idea of owning a handgun made perfect sense to her. Staring out through the window, she crossed her arms over her chest. But she didn’t feel like herself; her body was always surprising her nowadays. Her breasts were so big, she still wasn’t used to them. Her feet were swollen, and her arms were getting thick and muscular.

Her mouth had gone instantly dry and she could hear what remained of her saliva as she swallowed.

It wasn’t her own safety she worried about so much as that of her children. Emmy and Theo didn’t deserve encirclement, to be brought up as the stigmatized children of God’s outcasts, or, even worse, as the children of millionaires.

When she returned to the upstairs hallway, Howie was standing there in his pajamas. Even in the dark he had an aura about him, attractive at the surface level but not quite to her taste at any particular depth. Getting up from bed, he would still be perfectly groomed, forever unmussed, his hair in order, his odors still concealed by soap and cologne. The stink of humanity was absent from him.

“What happened?” he whispered. He was studying her nightgown gnomishly, but in the dark there was precious little to see. “I heard something.”

“Weren’t you sleeping?”

“I never sleep,” he said, with a trace of pride. His face in the near-dark had a perfect symmetry, the eyes like gentle X-rays. Patsy noticed his chest and thought: Hmm, family resemblance.

“Well, we got egged.”

Mary Esther muttered quietly in her sleep from one room, and Saul groaned in his sleep from another. They were alike in that respect: they both vocalized in their dreams.

“You got what? Egged?” He leaned forward toward her.

“It’s complicated. The kids around here think we’re responsible for that boy, Gordy’s, suicide. They’ve formed a Gordy cult. It’s called Himmelism. Goth stuff. Come down and see for yourself,” she said. She took his hand and led him across the hallway toward the stairs, where she let go of him and reached out for the sticky bannister, grubby from child-and-baby productions.

On the first floor, she led him to the front room and showed him the egg yolks on the window.

“Ah,” Howie said, crossing his arms on his chest. “Golems.”

“What?”

“Golems. Jewish mythology from three or four centuries ago. They’re automatons made out of clay by rabbis. They’re created to be servants— but they always run amuck and the rabbi has to destroy them.” He gazed at the window. “So now I guess they’re running amuck. Did Saul make them in his spare time?”

“Nice theory,” Patsy said. “But I think these kids are all-Americans. How come you know about golems? That’s not Delia’s line. Or yours either.”

Howie shrugged. “Mom took Saul and me to the Jewish Cultural Center when we were kids. That’s about the only Jewish thing we ever did. And all I remember from those sessions were the myths and stories. The first time I saw the marching broomsticks in Fantasia, I thought: Yeah, golems.” He smiled at her in the dark.

“Hey,” she said, “let’s go into the kitchen. If you can’t sleep, and I can’t sleep, we might as well sit up together. Come on.” She inclined her head. “We’ll wait for the sun to come up if we have to.”

After they had arranged themselves in the lightless kitchen, Patsy on a chair near the refrigerator and Howie close enough to the counter so that he could lean his head against it, they sat drinking tap water from glasses Patsy had purchased, years ago, at the hardware store. They had no elegance; she liked the sense of commonality, of plain making-do, when she served drinks in these glasses to guests like Howie. If you were going to be elegant, the true note would have to come from somewhere else. The digital clocks on the stove and the microwave gave off sufficient illumination so that she could see where Howie was sitting, but she could not quite tell what expression was on his face, which suited her. There was an aspect to Howie that was not quite domesticated, that was unsafe, and dangerous to look upon. He could be oddly arousing.

“Tell me more about Emmy,” Howie asked, and Patsy was touched that he would ask about Emmy even if he might not be interested in children generally — single men usually weren’t — a curiosity evoked for the sake of the appearances that Howie spent so much of his time trying to keep up. “Tell me what she’s like,” he suggested companionably, though the request contained a hint of his business side, his wish to issue commands.

“Oh,” Patsy said, “she’s already an individual. They’re individuals the minute they come out of the womb. Emmy’s very sensitive to sounds. She first turned her head in the crib when she heard the singing of a bird outside the window. She’s demanding, you know, like most kids — she likes to have the same things happen in the same way all the time — and she’s still learning that she can’t always get what she wants, but that’s a stage. That’s how infants turn into children. She’s going to have a good sense of humor as a little girl and as a woman, I can tell. She’s very curious about everything. Her first word was ‘Wzzat?’”

“I was wondering,” Howie said from his dark corner, “if you like her. I mean, I know you’re her mother, of course, so you love her, but I was wondering if you liked her, too.”

“What a question!” She waited, trying to unpack Howie’s subtext. Failing at it, she said, “Of course I like her. Mothers always like their children.”

“No,” Howie said. “I don’t think so. Nice to say so, but no. I don’t think my mother ever liked me very much. She protected me because I was sickly, but that’s different. Loved—sure, of course. But it’s a weird scene when your parents don’t like you, don’t feel that friendly affinity, and I don’t think my mother ever did. We were sort of peripheral to her concerns.”

“You know, she had an affair with her yard boy last summer.”

“Yes. She finally told me.” He sounded bored by the subject.

“What did you think of that?”

“I didn’t care for it,” Howie said. “I think she should act her age. She’s a predator.”

“Well, I kind of liked it, myself,” Patsy said, careful not to reveal that Howie’s mother had also told her that she had loved the kid, at least a little. “I give her credit. I take off my hat to her.”

“For what?” Howie asked.

“For guts. For nerve. For being an older woman who can still take steps.”

“Steps. Ha. She’s not your mother,” Howie observed. “When it’s your mother, it gets. . strange.”

“Howie,” Patsy said in the dark, using her flattest voice, “we can’t take your charity. We just can’t.”

“It’s not charity. It’s an investment in you two. Did you talk to Saul?”

“No,” Patsy said, “I didn’t. I just can’t stand the idea of being a millionaire. It would turn Saul and me into. . I don’t know—villains.”

“Then give it away to someone else,” Howie said with equanimity. “Give it to charity. Give it to your children.”

“It’ll turn them into villains.” She shifted in her chair. She had an odd, fugitive idea that Howie liked talking to women in total darkness, that it answered some early-childhood need of his.

At that moment another flying egg hit the outside of the kitchen window. Patsy glanced at it, decided to ignore it, and because she ignored it, so did Howie. What the hell. They were being egged. It wasn’t the end of the world. You could always clean it up.

“Give it to them,” Howie said.

“Who?”

“The Himmels. The golems. The kids who’re throwing those eggs at your house.”

“That’s impossible,” Patsy said.

“Why?”

They looked at each other in the dark, but Patsy couldn’t quite see him — his eyes, the entryway into his soul, were masked and invisible to her.

Another egg hit the house.

“Tell me more about Lis,” Patsy said. She needed to keep asking questions. If she didn’t, he might try to kiss her. She felt his anarchic erotic charges bombarding her. He seemed to be leaning forward in her direction.

“Who?”

“Lis — your fiancée. The girl in the picture.”

“Oh, Lis.” And for the next half-hour, until they both felt sleepy again and went upstairs, Howie told Patsy about the woman he loved: her hobbies (tennis and photography and cooking), her favorite reading (the encyclopedia, and British novels, mostly Murdoch and Winterson), and her work at eFlea, where her training as a lawyer had helped them establish the business and keep it running, free of litigation. Patsy leaned back in the dark and felt relaxed and happy over her brother-in-law’s happiness. His voice went on, rhapsodic, washing over her. She could not remember another time when a man had felt so trusting in her company that he could describe in full-throated detail a woman he loved, both the inner and outer qualities that had attracted him to her.

“May you live in joy forever,” Patsy said finally, and Howie thanked her for the blessing.

Eighteen

The next morning, after his brother and sister-in-law and niece had costumed themselves for the day, had had their meager cereal breakfasts and then were utterly gone, leaving him alone in the silent breathing despoiled storybook house, Howie found a bucket and a clean sponge in the basement under the laundry tubs. He located a spray bottle of glass cleaner and a roll of paper towels in the kitchen pantry, and after mixing soap and a household cleanser in warm water, he took a scrubbing brush and scoured off the disfigurements on the north side of the exterior wall facing the driveway. Vinyl siding! His brother lived in a house with white vinyl siding! Very poisonous, very up-to-date. Human beings would go far to disguise themselves so that they were invisible to other human beings. Using the glass cleaner and the paper towels, he wiped off the windows, making sure that the sticky raw eggs left no residual trace. By the time he was finished, the glass was perfect, immaculate, and he himself had worked up a small sweat. But no smell. His sweat had no smell and never had had one. His perspiration was as pure as distilled water. This feature he shared with the gods.

Having finished with the windows, he extended the ladder, climbed up to the roof line, and emptied the gutters of their leaves. October, days until Halloween, autumn days, the days of the harvest and of uncurable sadness. Before going up the ladder’s rungs, he’d been unable to find a pair of work gloves in the garage or the basement or the pantry. Perhaps no one here really worked. Therefore, he would have to do the job bare-handed. The leaves gave to the flesh of his hands a smell of vegetative mold — Madagascar. His hands smelled the way Madagascar would certainly smell when you arrived on the cruise ship into the harbor of Madagascar’s seaport. . Toamasina. He made fists of both hands and brought them to his nostrils and inhaled the smell of that harbor, of the men and women working there, beads of their sweat falling onto the docks of that island kingdom. He felt transported. He would stay in Toamasina as long as he wished.

At the bottom of the ladder were the used paper towels scattered here and there. He gathered them up one by one and went inside, wiping his shoes first, before he dropped the towels into the garbage bag in the kitchen, the little perfect garbage can in the little perfect kitchen.

He washed the dishes in the kitchen sink. The light seemed to be everywhere.

His brother and sister-in-law had no idea how the world worked. They had no idea what people could do to you. And did do to you. One small misstep, one stumble, and the jackals were upon you. Protected and insular in their storybook house, his brother and sister-in-law eased themselves from day to day with no glimmer at all of the steady-state diminishments of everyday life — until the jackals had picked the body down to the bone and you were no longer able to cry out.

He found the vacuum cleaner in a closet off the laundry room and did a quick once-over of the living-room carpet. Then he went upstairs. In the guest room, he stripped the bed. He took off his clothes and masturbated into a wad of Kleenex. The relief lasted for ten seconds, fifteen at the most. He clothed himself again. After folding the sheets and pillowcases into perfect squares, he bent down to where his suitcase was. He took out his wallet and stared at the picture of the woman — Lis — he had said he was engaged to.

He didn’t know who this woman was. He could imagine, but that wasn’t quite the same thing. He had found the photograph in a camera store in San Francisco, just off the J Church line, which he would ride when he got tired of riding on BART. It had been inside a frame on sale for $17.99. The cost of the frame wasn’t too much to pay for a woman to be engaged to, even if you were broke. Standing there in the store, Howie had conjured up for himself the pleasantly surprised expressions that would appear on Saul and Patsy’s faces when he told them that he would be married within a matter of months. He had thought the pictured woman pretty, so he bought the frame, with her inside it. In this way, he had captured her. The clerk said that if he wished, he could keep the photograph, which was of a former employee of the shop.

Howie looked around for a piece of paper. A pencil, a pen, the necessities.

Dear Saul & Patsy,

I made a call back home this morning and it turns out that I must return immediately. I know this seems terribly strange but it’s just the way things have developed. At least you now know about my engagement, and at least I got to see the beautiful Emmy. I’ll talk to you about the $2 mil later.

Love, Howie

ps: I did the dishes and cleaned your gutters and the windows.

Howie put the note on Saul and Patsy’s bed. Outside he noticed that the sun had not moved for a couple of hours, nailed to its quadrant. A violent stillness inhabited the air, punctuated by an occasional striking sound of jug corks popping. He had had the strangest feeling last night that Saul and Patsy and Emmy were shadows on the wall, their shadow-voices echoing inside his own voices. Their shadows somehow exceeded his own and were stronger than his. They knew so little about what the world was coming to that they had become stronger than he was, thriving, as it were, on their own ignorance, the powerful bullying force of their innocence.

He touched the quilt on his brother and sister-in-law’s bed and shouted quickly.

The sound of his shouting roiled through the empty upstairs rooms. What you did alone, what you did by yourself when no one was looking or listening, was acceptable, because whatever you did unobserved. . well, it hadn’t really happened, except to you, and was consequently unimaginable and meaningless to others, and would never be spoken of.

He returned to the bedroom in which he had slept, closed up his suitcase, and started down the stairs. The lie about the two million dollars was harmless and beautiful, in its way, as some lies could be, fragrant and radiant: he had wanted to see their reactions — to be in charge of their reactions — and to make his brother and sister-in-law happy for a few days. What was the harm in that? Saul and Patsy, innocent and happy, like a married couple in a sentimental MGM Technicolor musical from the late 1940s directed by Vincente Minnelli, echoing his happiness for a few months, for a year or two, before all the money flew away again, like a great flock of migratory birds, and the happiness dispersed with it too, and the euphoria, as ephemeral in their departures as they had been in their arrivals. The money, utterly magical, half-imaginary, until you no longer had it, first congealed and then evaporated.

There are a lot of me’s out there, he had said, and meant it.

Strange, that Patsy hadn’t wanted what he had offered her. The money. Well, now she wouldn’t get it.

He took his car keys from a table in the front hallway, put them into his right hand, holding his suitcase handle in his left hand. He thought of going through Saul and Patsy’s things — their drawers, their secret places — then thought better of it. They wouldn’t have any secret places, no corners, no crimes, no disfigurements, no open wounds, no abscesses. Secret places and open wounds — well, that was what he himself had. Secret places were his stock-in-trade, the living stash. He lived in them. But here, in Five Oaks, everything was out in the open under the admonitory glare of the sun.

He carried the suitcase to the car and loaded it into the trunk. After getting in behind the wheel, he started the engine, which roared satisfyingly to life. He wondered where he would drive, how long his available money would hold out, and then the credit, how long the credit would hold out, how long people would believe him. Perhaps he would go back home, to bankruptcy court and the dates they had set, the settlements, the agreements, etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc. He tightened his hand on the steering wheel and thought of how he would call his brother in a month or so to announce, ever so sadly, the cancellation of his engagement to the beautiful Phyllis. Phyllis! Jesus, people were easy to fool, at least in the short term. Phyllis! It was a name like “Petunia” or “Esmeralda.” It stank of the whimsical-imaginary. Maybe Saul would ask about the two million, and then again maybe he wouldn’t. The subject just wouldn’t come up. Perhaps, instead, he would see the trees leafing out, see the flowers blooming and wilting in his front yard, and the grass growing and mowed down, growing and mowed down in his plot of ground, his little patch of American real estate. The great pageant of life here in the Midwest in its cycles of growth leading to the harvest, waxing and waning just like the moon, would present themselves to Saul and to his storybook family, and Saul would read those cycles as students of the classics might read an epic. In the distance Saul’s family might see Howie himself on the horizon waxing and waning like the moon. They might see the colossal mysteries of success and failure, and they would observe human beings, in passing, squashed by the marketplace, like bugs. More likely, however, they would see none of that. They would just trudge to work, to school, to day care, to the job, to retirement, to the cemetery, like little imaginary people on a little imaginary stage.

Howie pulled out of the driveway, looked at himself in the rearview mirror, nodded, snapped on the radio, and turned onto the first available road heading west.

Nineteen

Gina had been thinking for weeks of what her costume would be on Halloween, even if she didn’t wear it from door to door, even if she was too old for trick-or-treating per se. As you got older, Halloween night was for other, more complicated, mischief. After sneaking out the back, she would walk over the railroad tracks to the mall in full regalia and meet her friends. They would go out prowling together, kick-ass their way to a party somewhere, get wasted, have fun. Having almost drowned this past summer when Gordy Himmelman, the ghoul, had wanted to pull her under with him, the first of many such local sightings by sharp-eyed Five Oaks youth, she wasn’t going to dress up as Madonna or Britney Spears or the good fairy or Vampyra or Cinderella or Tinker Bell or Marilyn Monroe or any such girl-shit as that. That scene was all over with. She had her hair cut short a week ago (her mother had a total fit — rage and tears — but: the hair was her own hair, not her mom’s), had found a pair of cool dark glasses, a baseball cap that she wore with the visor in back, a FEAR THIS T-shirt, a pair of Doc Martens, raggedy blue jeans without a belt, and over the T-shirt a black leather jacket she had borrowed from Eddie Loquasto, her on-again boyfriend, who this week had a thing for her, and who had gotten it, the jacket, from somewhere else. It fit Eddie Loquasto and it fit her, too, since she and Eddie were about the same size, though he was way stronger, a muscular little dude. She had promised promised promised to give it back the next day.

As she was dressing, Eddie called her to say that he had obtained his dad’s car and would pick her up in thirty minutes. He’d be wearing something, too, but wouldn’t tell her what. She wouldn’t recognize him. Cool. They would go somewhere. Maybe they would find weapons of minor destruction. They would be dangerous. If they were too dangerous, they would end up in the dungeon together. Which wouldn’t be so bad, being dungeon-mates.

She looked down at her fingernails, bitten to the quick.

Unsatisfied by the appearance of her fingernails, she gazed into the mirror through her dark glasses. A totally fucked-up boy looked back at her. That was so perfect that it was scary. The boy kind of turned her on. Gina could feel her motor humming.

On this earth nothing was scarier than boys. And, as long as she could sneak out of the house, evading the unwatchful eyes of her exhausted, half-asleep, sorrow-drowned-in-beer mom and her little brother, Bertie, the original game boy who never paid attention, anyway, to the world, tonight she would be that creature she had always wanted to be — a boygirl, on a rampage.

Twenty

All day, the thirty-first of October, Saul remained preoccupied with his brother’s appearance and disappearance two days before, but more than that, more than his brother or his imminent wedding to Lis, the beautiful woman with the strange photographic resemblance to Patsy, he was preoccupied with the promissory two million dollars. All right: it hadn’t actually appeared. All right: once he did have it, he still couldn’t spend it. All right: the money was invested in techno stocks, Howie claimed, and even now might be worthless. All right: maybe this wealth didn’t exist at all and had disappeared as quickly and as inexplicably as Howie had— called back to its origin, on business.

Still, real or not, whatever its status, the sum of two million dollars was an intoxicant. During homeroom period, talking to his sophomore students about Halloween safety, he mentally bought a boat (and a trailer, and, for good measure, a lake to put it in). During second-period American history — they were studying Federalism — he sold the boat and bought real estate, a place in the mountains. What mountains? The Rockies? No, in Vermont, near a ski resort of some sort close to Stowe. He had rarely been so distracted or had taught so absentmindedly, not even after Emmy was born. Saul forgot Ben Weber’s name, and he liked Ben Weber.

The trouble was, he didn’t ski, and neither did Patsy, so that particular fantasy was in the trash can by third period.

During third period, in the teacher’s lounge, he drank coffee and corrected quizzes and devoted the money to better causes, to altruism, which led to the construction of a teen recreational center in Five Oaks, the Bernstein Center for Youth, which would help stamp out Himmelism. Ten minutes later, he gave all the money to the Environmental Defense Fund. He was about to go into his next class, a modern European history AP class for seniors, when the cell phone in his sportcoat pocket rang. Saul thought he had turned off the ringer. He disapproved of cell phones but had one anyway, for emergencies.

“It’s me,” Patsy said. “I’m at the office. There’s something I have to tell you.”

“What?”

“Well, it’s your brother. Something about him gave me the willies this time. More than usual, I mean. So I called your mother this morning. Delia was home — it’s not one of her workdays.”

Saul waited. “Yes?”

“Saul, she never heard about this fiancée. She’d like to, but she hasn’t. She has her doubts.”

“Oh, Howie’s always been shy and secretive about his girlfriends.”

“Girlfriends. Yeah, right. There’s something else.”

“What?”

“It’s about the money.”

“What about the money?”

“Delia didn’t want to tell me. She put it off. She hemmed and she hawed.”

“Patsy, just say it.”

“Howie’s been borrowing money from her. From your mother.”

“Borrowing? From my mother? How much?”

“It took a long time for me to squeeze that one out of her,” Patsy said.

“But she finally admitted it — and, after all, I do work for a bank. This is my bread and butter. She was sniffling as she told me. He borrowed about twenty thousand dollars from her, Saul. Delia’s been trying to keep all this news from us, of course, because she doesn’t want to seem to be playing favorites with her cash reserves. But, as I say, she’s been lending him money because he’s in such trouble.”

“Why?”

Her voice came out thickened with exasperation. “Well, obviously he didn’t tell us what’s going on with him. Obviously he couldn’t tell us. He declared bankruptcy four weeks ago. Hellhounds are on his trail.”

“Aw, jeez,” Saul said. “Aw, jeez.”

“Your brother has gone a little crazy, Saul.”

Saul made a noise, of outrage, and surprise, and sadness.

“I know,” she agreed. “Well, at least he didn’t ask us for money. Listen, on your way home, would you pick up a pumpkin? We need to carve up one of those babies for tonight. I’ll buy some candy after I’ve gotten Emmy. This is her first real Halloween, darling. And I have a feeling the trick-or-treaters are going to mainly be trickers this time, with us. If we got egged last night, they’ll have more in mind for tonight. Watch your step. We’re going to have every single damn light on in that house, to keep the monstrosities away.”

The last working farm that Saul knew about on the outskirts of Five Oaks, a place where they actually sold pumpkins, was on County Highway 6—the Czarnieckis’ place, north of the river on a hill overlooking the WaldChem plant in the distance, and though Saul would have preferred to get a pumpkin at the supermarket, the only ones they had left at the SuperSaver were small and rotten and mean, the size of coffee cups and bowling balls. He craved ownership over something larger, a gargoyle object, a monument that would scare the hobgoblins and hexies away. When he drove up to the Czarnieckis’ roadside stand, no one was in attendance. Underneath a coffee can with a plastic lid and a slot for money, someone had left a small handmade sign:

Take the one you want and

put the money in the can.

Cleerance: $5.00 or best offer

Saul dutifully put a five-dollar bill in the coffee can (it was the only money there) and carried away the biggest pumpkin he could find from the pile of misshapen castoffs behind the stand. The one he chose was so large he could barely lift it, and when he tried to load it into the Chevy’s trunk, he was unable to turn the key in the keyhole and hold the pumpkin at the same time. After unlocking the trunk, he picked up his pumpkin from the gravel driveway and hoisted it inside. When he did, he heard an unpleasant sound from his back — he had lifted the huge pumpkin incorrectly, throwing out his spine somehow. The lid of the trunk would just barely close over the gigantic thing, and he was able to get the pumpkin in snugly only by flattening the stem down under the trunk lid.

Driving home, he listened to the Fifth Symphony of Joachim Raff on the NPR station — in the last movement, the devil-horses took the protagonist clip-clopping down into hellfire — and tried to pretend that Halloween, this Halloween, was a night like all other nights. The Czarniecki pumpkin muttered and rumbled from in back.

At home, he first removed his texts and classroom materials from the car to the house and deposited them on the floor of the upstairs study. Then he returned to the car and opened the trunk. The pumpkin looked at him and Saul looked back at the pumpkin. Once again he bent over, once again he heard popping noises from the region of his back, and with groans and grunts Saul wrested the outsized squash from its resting place into his arms, whereupon he staggered across the garage through the back door (he had remembered to leave the door open and the storm door propped), and, still holding the pumpkin in his embrace, he weaved his unsteady way through the mud room, past the hanging jackets and overshoes, into the kitchen. He was sweating now, his arms and his back ached, but he was not about to be defeated. He left the yellow-orange beast on the floor, retrieved some newspapers from the back hallway, and spread them around underneath it to catch the glop and the seeds.

He would need trash clothes for the next job. Saul went upstairs to his closet.

Gordy Himmelman’s shirts and trousers were there on the floor where he had left them. They were his physical, material legacy from the boy, and he had been unable to decide what to do with them. They didn’t seem to be the right size, and he didn’t imagine that they would fit him. Or that they could ever have fit him. Nevertheless, he took off the shirt that he had worn to school and tried on one of Gordy’s, a dingy red flannel imprinted with stinks and stains that fit Saul rather well, even though his arms went far past the cuffs. At least this shirt wasn’t the particular one Gordy had been wearing when he shot himself — that shirt went into the fire with Gordy at the crematory. Saul loosened his belt, took off his pants, and put on a pair of Gordy’s jeans. They were much too snug, but with some strategic breathing-in and struggles with the zipper, and with his shirts — his undershirt and the flannel shirt — hanging out, Gordy-style, rather than tucked in, Saul could manage it.

Saul looked at himself in the full-length mirror attached to the inside of Patsy’s closet door. There he was, his bearded affable face attempting to smile above the clothes smelling of dog and defeat (what dog? Gordy didn’t have a dog). As he was looking at him, he felt his mind cloud over, and Saul closed his eyes, lowered his head, and said a prayer for his brother. Whoever You are, preserve my little brother from his demons. Save him from himself and from this world. Save him, please. What can I give You in trade? What do I have that You want? Tell me.

Saul heard no answer coming back. Just then his wife and daughter pulled up in the driveway, and he had the abrupt impression that he had somehow found himself on the wrong side of the mirror.

He ran downstairs to greet them and managed to get into the kitchen before Patsy and Emmy entered. He heard Patsy call out, “Saaaauuul! We’re home!” as she carried Emmy to the front hallway and took off her daughter’s jacket and then took off her own. Saul could hear the noise of the coat hangers.

“In here!” Saul shouted, standing next to his pumpkin. “Ladies, we’re in here!”

Patsy had taken hold of Emmy’s hand. Emmy wanted to walk, apparently, and was doing so next to her mother when they both came into the kitchen. Saul stood proudly next to his pumpkin.

“Hi, honey. How d’you like it? We’re ready to carve,” he said, and they both screamed, his wife and daughter, together. Emmy was staring at the pumpkin and Patsy was staring at Saul.

“What is this?” she finally managed to say, above her daughter’s sobs.

“Carving clothes,” Saul told her.

“But those are his clothes,” Patsy said, approaching Saul, the way she usually did every evening after they came home from work and saw each other, for a kiss, but then she seemed to think better of it and drew away from him. “That boy’s. I thought you had gotten rid of them. What that Bagley woman gave you.”

“No, I didn’t. They were in my closet. On the floor. Where I put them,” he added.

“I should go into your closet sometimes,” Patsy said. “Hush, sweetie,” she crooned, leaning over to pick up Emmy, who had been clutching her mother’s legs. Now Patsy kissed her on the cheeks, tranquilizing kisses. Calming in slow stages, Emmy then looked up at her father and began screaming again, truly hysterical, very much unlike herself.

“Maybe you should take her,” Patsy said.

“Okay.”

But Emmy squirmed out of Saul’s grasp, retreating back into her mother’s arms. She screamed louder when Saul put the knife into the top of the pumpkin, continued screaming as he carved around the stem, her screams growing shrill, all-purpose screams, until finally Patsy carried Emmy into the living room, where she sat down in the rocking chair with Emmy in her lap. Saul could hear Patsy talking quietly, singing to Mary Esther, calming her. After a few minutes, he heard Patsy carrying Mary Esther upstairs, not for a diaper change — Patsy would have changed her by now anyway — but to get her her music bear, a wind-up music box inside a teddy bear whose head swayed back and forth as the music played. Saul knew Patsy’s moves, as she knew his. He didn’t have to ask. Someone should start dinner, he thought. Someone should heat up food for Emmy.

Alone in the kitchen, Saul went to work on the pumpkin, clearing out its innards, dropping them on the sheets of newspaper he had spread around himself on the floor, before beginning on the face. He carved the eye holes, the nose, the mouth. How simple. He lit a candle and positioned it inside on a dish. He closed the lid back over the jack-o-lantern and carried it to the front door and out onto the front stoop. From inside, the flame continued to burn.

He switched on the front light.

Let them come.

Twenty-one

From her upstairs room, Gina heard the distant sound of a car honking, so far away that if your ears weren’t perfectly tuned to it, you wouldn’t have heard it, but she did, she heard it, the way a bird hears the cry of its mate from clear across the bright green rainforest, its bright cry, its shrill distant mating call. Her mother was in the back den watching TV. She hadn’t put the front porch light on: no treat-or-tricksters for her, she didn’t do that scene anymore. Her little brother was somewhere in the house, not eligible for Halloween this year, thanks to his misbehavior.

“I’m going out for a while,” Gina called from the front door in her lowest voice, her boygirl voice, and her mother called back, “Going where?” but Gina was gone, was out, by the time an answer would have been expressed or implied, and both of them, her mother and her brother, would be into their after-dinner thing by now, anyway, her mother parental but glazed and half-asleep and not meaning to be indifferent but indifferent nevertheless, and smoking dazedly, and watching whatever show was on now, in the company of Bertie, their four eyes glued to the screen, unless Bertie was lost in the Game Boy. What could her mother do if Gina was going to go out? Gina’s mother was helpless against Gina, age against feckless youth, especially after dinner, when her mother was exhausted from work and from making dinner and from the full menu of life. That’s what she sometimes said when she was grim. I’m helpless against the full menu of life. Maybe if Gina’s dad still lived over here instead of over there he would be laying down the law, but he wasn’t here, this wasn’t his day for custody. Her mother, half-asleep and single-parenting tonight, was glued to the TV, attached to it bodily. Gina felt a trace of love for her hapless mother. How she tried! She just wasn’t up to it. Where were the mothers with hap? Nowhere. They were all hapless. Closing the front door behind her, Gina saw a TV screen in her mind’s eye with eyeballs glued to it.

Eddie Loquasto’s father’s Plymouth pulled up in front of the house. Another vehicle trailed it. Gina ran over to the passenger-side door of the first vehicle and climbed in. The driver kept the engine running. A crow was behind the wheel.

“Hey,” the crow said. The crow had Eddie Loquasto’s voice, but that was about it.

“Hey,” Gina said.

“You look sort of extremely weird,” the crow said, shaking its head.

“Thanks. You, too.” Gina twisted around. There was a garbage can with legs sitting in the backseat. The garbage can had two eye holes but no arms. Its lid was attached to the can with duct tape. “Who’re you?” Gina asked.

“I’m garbage,” the garbage can informed her. She couldn’t tell who it was: the can did strange things to the voice of who or whatever was inside. “Who’re you?” the garbage can asked irritably.

“I’m a boy. I’m fucked up,” Gina told it.

“You said it,” the garbage can muttered. It was very ill-tempered. “That’s the royal truth.”

Gina was not liking the garbage can, but she said, “Cool,” to mollify it. She wanted to say, “You’re just a goddamn garbage can, who’re you to be telling me anything?” but it was one of those nights when you didn’t want to insult anybody or anything too quickly. You could be hurt in strange ways. Curses and shit could fall like rain over you. Soon your life would be worth nothing. It would enter the zero column and stay there. She settled into the front seat and put her hands in the pockets of the leather jacket. Little demons ran around on the sidewalk, holding their bags of worthless candy. Her nail-bitten boygirl fingers touched some gum inside the jacket pocket, fresh bubble gum, and she unwrapped it and put it into her mouth and started chewing. “Where’re we goin’?”

“Hey, that’s my gum. We’re going to that Mr. Bernstein’s house,” the crow said. “Us and that truck behind us.” The crow nodded at the rearview mirror to indicate a Ford pickup behind them. “We’ve got something for him.”

“What?”

“Wait and see. Tricks instead of treats.”

“Yeah,” the garbage can said, affirming the crow’s position. “Fucking A.”

Gina saw that next to the garbage can on the backseat were some rolls of toilet paper, firecrackers, a paint can and a paintbrush, a few rocks, a box of matches, a can of gasoline, and an odd assortment of rotting vegetables. She wondered if somebody had also brought a gun.

“Are we going to use those?” the boygirl asked.

“If we have to,” the crow informed her. “Are you in? Or not?”

“Blow me,” the boygirl said belligerently, as if she ever wasn’t, because, after all, she was on a rampage and would do rampage-things.

“You wish,” said the garbage can.

Twenty-two

Saul discovered, as he dispensed candy to the goblins and fairies and Jedi knights and Osama bin Ladens and little ghosts in their white-sheet outfits, that he really had done something to his back picking up that damnable oversized pumpkin: he could not straighten himself but instead stood half bent over in a crouching position, his face in a clouded grimace. He groaned inwardly. Everyone who came to his door seemed to assume that the bent-over posture and the facial expression were part of his costume, and if he only would stuff a loaf of bread inside his shirt, right behind the shoulders, he would be doing a fair Quasimodo.

“An ogre!” one precocious little girl said, catching her first glimpse of Saul. She was dressed up as a pizza, with sponges glued to cardboard to look like cheese. “Where’s your teeth?”

Saul exposed his teeth, and the pizza screamed and retreated.

But the posture, and the huge glowering jack-o-lantern on the stoop, and the music — Saul had put Bernard Herrmann’s soundtrack for The Day the Earth Stood Still on the audio system and was pumping it out onto the street — had, so far, kept away the worst trouble that the night might offer. Herrmann’s theremins were charms against violence, Saul figured — Eine kleine Walpurgisnachtmusik. While Patsy had calmed Mary Esther with songs and her music, an opposing sort of nocturne — nursery rhymes — Saul had made them dinner, a quick spaghetti and a salad. They had all eaten in haste, Mary Esther calmer now but still wary of her father. Then Patsy and Emmy had gone upstairs and shut the bedroom door.

Standing just inside the foyer, Saul was counting the candy bars left in the bowl when an old Plymouth pulled up in front of his house, followed by a truck that parked directly behind it. The motors in both vehicles were kept running as the drivers’-side doors opened at the curb. The truck’s radio was playing AC/DC, full blast. From the car came, first, a crow, who had been behind the wheel, and then, after the crow, an androgynous boy blowing bubble gum, and, from the backseat rear door, and with some apparent difficulty in movement, a garbage can on legs. From their height, Saul guessed that they were high schoolers. He saw that inside the car they had packed tools of destruction, including a gasoline can. The truck disgorged a wolf, a hanged woman with a noose around her neck, and a girl or a boy — it was sometimes impossible to discern genders here — dressed up as a caterpillar. A Himmel, looking like Kurt Cobain, jumped down from the truck bed and sauntered across the lawn. Saul did a quick count: seven in all. So this was it. He brought the bowl of candy bars out front and closed the front door of his house behind him.

“Good evening,” Saul said, holding out the bowl. He knew candy was no good with these characters, or good manners either. A hanged woman with a broken neck does not want a candy bar. Anyone knows that.

“Yeah,” the crow said, nodding its head. From the bed of the truck another character appeared — it jumped out and joined the group. It walked like a man. This one was particularly unsettling: he was the size of a football player, with wide shoulders and thick muscles, and was wearing a football helmet with a plastic shield over the eyes so that you couldn’t see the face. The words LITTLE HANS were written with Magic Marker on the helmet just above the shielded eyes. The same words were written in amateurish gothic script in back. Eight of them in all. Little Hans was probably the enforcer. His large, meaty hands were in fists.

“Want some candy?” Saul asked.

“Shut up,” the crow said. “Just shut the fuck up.” He walked away from Saul, and the others followed him like soldiers, regimented somehow, all of them directed toward the front door of the house. The largest one, Little Hans, served as the rear guard. Saul began to run, hoping to reach the door before they did — he couldn’t remember whether the lock had snapped when he’d shut it — but before he had passed the wolf and the Himmel, something tripped him, and he fell to the lawn, and the bowl of candy fell with him, scattering its contents across the grass.

He heard several of them laughing, a scratching infernal sound. They were probably drunk, these creatures. They were keeping one another company, and that gave them courage, the courage of the mob — that, and the alcohol. And now they had had their first success.

Saul had fallen so that his nose bumped into the ground; he would have been able to break the fall better if he hadn’t been holding the bowl of treats. His hands had freed themselves too late; he felt suddenly that his accidents tonight would not be lucky ones. Lifting himself up quickly, he made an effort to run toward the front of his house again, but hands, or paws, held him back. The exterior light to his house seemed suddenly a fragile and ineffective guard against these adolescents. It was more like a lighthouse that invited the storm. Saul, struggling against what he could see now was the caterpillar, and who, judging from his strength, was a young man, had forgotten how strong high schoolers could sometimes be, how implacable. In a fury to match his own, their sweat had a rancid animal odor, and their sounds of struggle emerged from them in bestial grunts. At the same time, he heard, from behind him, two of the party of creatures scuttling around in the truck bed, and he turned in time to see them — it was Little Hans and the hanged woman — pulling out another can of gasoline, along with a box of kitchen matches.

With all the strength he had, Saul fought off the caterpillar arms holding him. The wolf and the crow picked up the pumpkin easily, and then, as if all this had been rehearsed, carried it around to the side of the house.

Saul continued to fight, jabbing and kicking, as he watched the wolf and the crow swing the pumpkin to get some momentum before throwing it at a window. The arc of the pumpkin’s flight reached the glass and broke it, but the pumpkin was too large, too sizable, too generous, to make its way inside the house. The window was just too small. But the sound of glass breaking would at least alert Patsy. The pumpkin fell back to the ground but did not shatter. Behind him, he heard the characteristic glug of gasoline being poured from a fuel container. He turned, desperately, in time to see Little Hans setting fire to the rosebush that he and Patsy had planted. The gasoline caught with a satisfied whooshing sound, a broken in-suck of breath.

Now, in front of him, he saw the wolf and the crow picking up the pumpkin again and moving toward another window. Little bush-league terrorists in training: all they wanted to do was break the damn windows. Or maybe that was for starters. The sound of breaking glass pleased them, gave them a rush. They were from that timeless sector of the disadvantaged that broke windows wherever they found them. This was all that was left of the revolutions of 1848. Hapless, still Saul fought, and he had almost freed himself when he felt himself being taken in hand by Little Hans, whose giant arms pinned Saul’s arms behind his back and who put a thick pillar of a leg in front of him; it was as if, physically, there would be no more argumentation. The wolf and the crow were about to heave the pumpkin at the second window when Saul shouted. “Stop. He’s here.”

The crow turned its beak toward him, and the pumpkin dropped to the ground.

“Who’s here?” he asked.

Saul heard the bush burning behind him. Little Hans smelled of gasoline, as the god Vulcan probably did. He himself had the characteristic Gordy-odor, of dog.

“Gordy,” Saul said. “Isn’t he what you came for?” There would be no fighting them off physically; they were too strong, and they were legion. He would have to try something else. He looked up quickly and saw Patsy pulling the curtains and then lowering the shades. He didn’t think the other creatures had seen her.

“The fucker’s dead,” the crow said, apparently the spokesperson for the group. “You killed him.”

“He shot himself,” Saul yelled. “Let go of me, Henry,” Saul said, guessing that the kid inside the Little Hans suit was probably Henry Olschanski, a guard on the football team. As if by magic, the arms released him. No — tonight’s accidents might in fact be lucky ones.

The wolf turned in Saul’s direction. “Where is he h-h-h-h-here?”

“You want Gordy?” Saul asked. “I’ll go get him.”

The creatures appeared to be stunned.

“But you have to promise,” Saul said, gathering his wits, “to stay where you are. Otherwise you get nothing.”

“He’s just going inside to hide,” the garbage can said. “He’s afraid.”

“Who the hell are you?” Saul asked the garbage can. Some of these beings had to have been his students. Perhaps he would recognize their voices.

“I’m garbage!” the garbage can announced angrily.

“Well, listen, garbage,” Saul said. “One thing I’m not, is afraid. And if you wait right there, I’ll go get what you want.”

“He’ll call the police,” the boygirl said. “That’s what he’s going to do.” Still, behind him, the bush continued to burn. When he turned to see it momentarily, it looked like someone’s backside, with a crease down the middle.

“If I did that,” Saul said, “all of you would come back here, and do this again. I know you,” he said, gaining his advantage. “I know all of you.”

“W-w-w-w-what do you know?” the wolf asked.

“I know what you want,” Saul said. “I know everything you want. I know your thoughts before you have them. You want to see him again. Don’t you want to see him?” His nose felt as if it had been broken in his fall — it was screaming with pain, but Saul felt suddenly calm. He recognized that, indeed, he was not afraid of them, and that his hatred of them was tempered, illogically, with curiosity. He had made up his mind that they were all children, and, within limits, he was going to give them what they wanted. Or needed, maybe without knowing. So far, they were amateurs at destruction and terror. Looking at them, he decided to adopt them as his own, such as they were, monsters of neglect and loneliness. It made more sense than being afraid of them. Somebody had to be a parent around here; someone had to have some feeling for what was hidden under the disguises. He, too, was disguised: he was wearing Gordy’s clothes. The creatures walked toward Saul, surrounding him. All their movements seemed ironical.

“How come you’re bent over like that?” the Himmel asked, evading Saul’s question.

“Threw my back out picking up that pumpkin,” Saul said, nodding toward his jack-o-lantern, now on the lawn. All of them — bubble gum, the crow, Little Hans, the caterpillar, the wolf, the Himmel, and the garbage can — turned to look.

“That’s a r-r-r-r-righteous pumpkin,” the wolf said. He had a stammer that involved swallowing and spitting up both vowels and consonants.

The wolf’s stammer appeared to silence the crowd of creatures. Bubble gum looked through his/her dark glasses at the night sky. It was cold enough so that you could see everyone’s breath, but no one was shivering yet, though they would be shivering soon. The hanged woman moaned. How odd it was, that he should find himself in the company of these castoffs!

“Everyone talks about you,” the crow said. “Everyone says you’re the one. They say it all the time.”

“The one what?” Saul asked.

“The one who started all this,” the hanged woman said. The garbage can nodded by shaking back and forth. Saul could not see through the eye holes to who or whatever was inside — he was more curious about the garbage can than he was about any of the others. “All this trouble with Gordy Himmelman and Sam Cole and things going wrong all the time!” The bush was mostly burnt by now, cracking down to ash, making sounds of expiration. “Everything going to shit. It’s your fault.”

“It wouldn’t have happened if that kid hadn’t shot himself on your front lawn,” the Himmel said. “We need some payback.” The last phrase sounded like a sentence an adult would say, and the Himmel said it without enthusiasm or conviction.

“And the sightings,” the crow said. “There wouldn’t be sightings if it wasn’t for you.”

“Sightings?” Saul asked. “You kids have your nerve to talk about sightings.”

“You know,” the crow said. He was not going to pronounce Gordy Himmelman’s name, either. The mothball-stinking crow obviously thought it brought on bad luck. God, what a hotbed of superstition, and gossip, and malice, and Dark Age reasoning these kids were — these middle schoolers and high schoolers, at least the outcasts among them. Magical thinking was all they had. The other kind had failed them.

“So I bet you came here to throw things at the house, and scare us, and do all that, the pranks and troublemaking with the toilet paper and the eggs and the rocks and the slogans and the fire. Is that because I’m Jewish?” There was a long silence, and none of the creatures moved. “I bet it is.”

“People say that you know th-th-th-th-things,” the wolf finally managed to say.

“What do you want me to do?” Saul said. “With the things I know?”

“Bring him back,” the crow announced to the crowd. He was a tough little crow. But he was improvising and not very clever. “Like you said you could.”

“All right,” Saul said. “I’ll go get him.”

The creatures stared at him. Saul had made of himself a master of resurrection. That was what Jews could do. All of them, including Little Hans, stepped away from him.

“You can do that?” the Himmel asked.

“Just watch,” Saul said.

Five minutes later Saul came back, still bent over, with a small cardboard box. Inside the cardboard box was a cloisonné jar, and inside the jar— Saul showed the creatures this in the dark — were some ashes. The creatures drew back.

“That’s him?” one of them asked.

“That’s him,” Saul said. In his other hand, he held a shovel. “All of you, come on,” he said. He led them around the side of the house to the backyard, and then through the yard to a terrain of undergrowth and scrub and weeds beyond the lawn. Finally, reaching a small patch of ground between two bushes, he stopped. The trees and the night gave to the area a thick, profound darkness in which details — and the passage of time — were not discernible.

“Have we got everybody?” he asked. Quickly he counted the small pillars of darkness. There were seven. “Where’s the bubble-gum boy?” Saul asked. Of course she was a girl, but he would call her a “boy” tonight.

“She got cold,” the crow said. “I think she went back to the car.”

“She was scared, man,” the garbage can said. “That’s all it was.”

“She was crying, too,” the caterpillar told them. “I’m pretty sure. What a wuss.”

“Well, anyway,” Saul said. He held out the shovel. “All right. Here’s the deal. These are Gordy’s ashes. We have to bury him. He’s been undead. When the ashes aren’t buried, you get the undead thing happening. You get the hauntings. So who among you wants to dig?”

“I can’t,” the garbage can said. “I don’t have arms.”

“Give me that.” Little Hans had finally spoken up. He didn’t sound like a high school student, but maybe he was; maybe he was really Henry Olschanski. He might have been anything. Saul handed him the shovel, and Little Hans began digging with it, his motions reflecting strength and fury. He was obviously practiced with shovels and knew how to use them. He was wearing heavy black leather boots, and he pitched the sharp blade of the shovel into the topsoil, which he lifted and cast off into the distance — the creatures were standing behind him — before arriving at the dirt beneath it, and then the clay. He hit a rock, and he scraped the shovel head around it, then threw the shovel onto the ground and dropped down on his hands and knees and scrabbled with his fingers around until he had a grasp of it, whereupon he lifted it out and heaved it on the dirt pile in front of him.

“I’m glad we brought him along,” the Himmel said. “He’s a force.”

Little Hans picked up the shovel again and resumed digging. “Anyone else want to do this?” he asked in a deep bass voice, between breaths, while he dug, but none of the creatures replied.

“Mr. Bernstein,” the crow asked. “It’s your turn.”

“It’s okay,” Saul told him. “Little Hans is doing a fine job.” Standing there, amid the creatures, Saul reached up and touched his nose, confirming that it was, in fact, broken.

Working in what still seemed to be a total, life-defining rage, Little Hans continued to shovel until the hole was large enough for the jar, and then spacious enough for the box, and then, five minutes later, much larger than it needed to be for their purposes, as if he had been unable to stop, as if the shoveling was a kind of maniacal nightmare gravedigger assignment, tunneling down to the dark he met up with every night, not just this one. Finally, with the smell of sweat in the cold air drifting off of him, he rested.

“Is that deep enough?” he asked. He glanced around.

“Deeper than it needs to be,” Saul said. “Deep enough for everybody.”

“This is creepy,” the crow said with distinct pleasure in his voice.

“Who wants to lower him in?” Saul asked, glancing around at where the group appeared to be, all of them half-unseeable, obscure. He held the box out. None of the creatures took it.

“You need to do it,” the caterpillar said. “Where’s your wife? Maybe she should, too.”

“She’s not here,” Saul said. “She’s not here.” He waited. “Anyone want to touch the box before I put it into the ground?” The caterpillar reached out, and then the crow raised a wing, and the Himmel touched it, but the rest drew back. It was just too much for them.

“How come you didn’t bury it sooner?” the wolf asked.

“You don’t always bury the ashes,” Saul said. “Sometimes you keep them around. That was my mistake. That’s how come we had zombies around town.” With as much tenderness as he could summon, Saul, still bent over, carried the box to the hole that Little Hans had dug, and he lowered it until it rested there, on its deep layer of clay. He stood up again, as straight as he could make himself go with his back out, and he waited, looking at the pitch-black assembly. There was an expressive air pocket of silence. Off in the distance, very faintly, he could hear a jet in the night sky, and, also in the background, freeway noise. The music from The Day the Earth Stood Still was no longer audible, but the truck was still playing AC/DC.

“We need a blessing,” Saul said.

“What the fuck. What blessing?” the crow asked. “What kinda shit is that? He was a total loser. An asshole. Besides, he’s dead.”

“He won’t leave you alone unless you give him a blessing,” Saul said. “That’s why you’re here.”

The creatures were silent.

“This isn’t going to work unless someone says a blessing over him. That’s how it’s done. Either bless him or leave. That’s how it’s done.” His back was causing him excruciating pain now.

“This is America,” the garbage can said. “We don’t do that here.”

“Bullshit,” Saul said, and the creatures seemed surprised that he knew the word.

“You have to do it,” the wolf said. “You were his teacher.”

“I can’t,” Saul said. “I never went to services. My mother never took me to a temple or a synagogue. She didn’t believe in that. She still doesn’t. Nobody taught me blessings. And I don’t do them either, except for this, this time, now.” Saul tried to look at them all, but it was so dark he couldn’t quite see them. They had to do it; he could not. “Doesn’t anyone here know a blessing? Doesn’t anyone here know how to be human? Somebody here must. Doesn’t anyone here go to church? Or a temple? Or to an anything where they do blessings?”

“We do,” the wolf said. “Me and my sister and our parents.” The other creatures nodded. “I just wish we had a flashlight.”

“Well, say something,” Saul told him. “Say what they say. We don’t need a flashlight for that. This is what you all came for. I swear to you, if the wolf comes up with something. .” He left the sentence unfinished, and the darkness around him seemed to shift inwardly.

“L-l-l-l-l-l-lord, help help help hellllllp,” the wolf said, before giving up.

“That’s okay,” Saul told him. “Try some more.”

“Amen amen amen amen,” the wolf stuttered. “Please thou please thou let-t-t-t-t-t us depart in please. Peas.” There was a long silence. “I c-c-c-c-c-can’t do it,” the wolf admitted.

“Yes, you can,” Saul said.

“A-a-a-a-awake and mourn, ye heirs of h-h-h-hell,” the wolf said.

“No, that’s a curse,” Saul said. “Try again.”

The wolf began again tentatively, as if by rote, and then seemed to find his voice. “Many many many many. M-m-m-may the Lord may the Lord may the Lord may the Lord bless you and k-k-k-k-keep you,” he said, giving the foreign-sounding words a hallucinated, studied attention, as if he were dredging them up from his memory, and then, because he was half-singing, his voice rose in conviction, its pitch deepening with intensity. “May the Lord be g-g-g-g-g-gracious unto you,” he said, no longer intimidated by the words, since he wasn’t stumbling over them so badly now. “May the Lord lift up the light of his countenance upon you and give you peace both this day and forevermore,” the wolf concluded, reciting the final phrase in a high, steady, clear voice, as if the meaning of the words had come home to him and he was now their bearer. The hanged woman started to say “Amen,” then stopped herself. The crow appeared to be angrily agitated and shifted his weight from one claw to another. A fragment of the moon appeared from behind a cloud, and Saul saw the crow more clearly, saw how agitated he had become, how he hated the blessing: he was nearly in a fighter’s stance.

“There,” Saul said, keeping his voice authoritative and steady. “That was good.” He handed the shovel to the caterpillar. “Here,” he said. “You have to drop some dirt down there.”

Slowly and reluctantly, the caterpillar took the shovel and flung dirt into the hole. The shovel went around the group, all except for the malign, armless garbage can, until the hole was nearly covered up. At last the shovel returned to Saul, and he filled in the rest of the dirt. He tried to straighten up, could not, but at least knew what he wanted to say.

“Go home, children,” he instructed them. “Go home.”

The group of creatures trudged back across his backyard, around the house, into the front yard, one of them, the Himmel, picking up the gasoline can and the matches, and then they made their way toward the truck and the car. Among them, only Little Hans stood up perfectly straight. The others walked with the errant slouch of defeat.

“See ya,” the crow said, making the words sound like a threat. The garbage can had already positioned itself in the backseat. The crow got in behind the wheel of the Plymouth, next to the bubble-gum boygirl, put the car into gear, and with a spinning of wheels and a screeching, drove away, followed by the truck, whose radio was now playing Rush.

Carrying his shovel, with a last glance at the burning rosebush, now sputtering out, Saul, his own face burning with pain, limped toward the house, with its one broken window, its wife and child still safe inside, upstairs, for the moment, this one night.

Twenty-three

“You thought you were so tough,” the crow said to the boygirl. “You just chickened out. Just like a little girl.” He cackled. “The girl came out all over you. You have to have balls to be a boy, didn’t anyone tell you? Maybe you should have dressed yourself up as a chicken.” The crow was thinking that the evening was now totally and completely whacked: he had been planning on doing some serious hilarious damage and asking the boygirl to give him a blowjob later, when the fun was almost over, when the house was burning. Not that she’d do it, but it would be worth asking her just to see the look on her face lit by the flames. Now he didn’t feel like drinking, or fucking, or fighting — he didn’t feel like doing anything enjoyable. He was completely bummed out, and the feeling was conclusive.

“The air was cold,” the boygirl said. “Besides, I chickened out? What’s all that stuff in the backseat? Rocks, paint, paintbrushes, gasoline, dynamite? You could’ve, like, just set fire to his house if you had the nerve, like you were planning to.”

“Oh, right. Like you weren’t scared. Anyway, I didn’t go running and crying back to the car when he brought those ashes outside,” the crow said.

“Okay, then what are you going to do with all that?” The boygirl pointed to the paraphernalia of pranksterism and terror on the backseat next to the garbage can.

“I don’t know,” the crow muttered. “Keep it for later.”

“What later? This is later. To use on who?”

“There’s always people to use it on.” The crow laughed and reached under the seat and opened another can of beer. “Innocent bystanders and people like that.”

“That’s not very nice,” the boygirl said. “Opening a beer and not offering me any. Where’d you steal it from?”

“Sorrrrrry, bitch,” the crow said. “You want a beer?”

“Don’t you call me that. Don’t you call me a bitch.”

“Oh yeah?” the crow asked. He shook the beer can with his finger plugged over the opening and then aimed the spray at the passenger side, wetting down her face and her shirt and the leather jacket. Then he laughed. “There’s your beer.”

“You dickhead,” the boygirl said. “Take me home, you piece of shit. At least it’s your leather jacket you’re ruining.” The boygirl put her hands on the wheel to turn it. The car weaved unsteadily down the residential street, narrowly missing a parked car.

“Children, children,” the garbage can said, laughing.

The crow’s mood had changed. Now he would have to clean the car, thanks to what she had made him do. He would have to deodorize the Plymouth’s interior. His jacket could smell of beer just fine. Thinking about all this work in store for him, the crow recognized that his rage was her fault. Now he did feel like doing something: taking the boygirl by force if he had to, the bitch, with the garbage can watching — and the image of how he would do it settled down on him the way the robin settles down on the worm. He would take her out there into the dirt and the dark and pull her apart if he had to, just open her up and brute-fuck her to death. And when he was finished with her, he would leave her out in the middle of nowhere to find her own way home, that is, if she could still walk, bloody and seeping. He drank down the rest of the beer. At last: here it was: some serious damage.

The car accelerated, and the night, kept at bay till now by the neighborhood streetlights, gradually enveloped them as they hurried on toward the outskirts of the city and the fields of farmland beyond it.

Twenty-four

“It won’t work,” Patsy said. “You can’t import religion and ritual like that, not as a local anesthetic. It only works when the whole community believes in it. A ritual engaged in by part of the community is just schmaltz, just window dressing. If they’re going to make us outcasts of God, Saul, that’s it. We’re going to be outcasts of God forever.”

“Hmmm.” He was falling asleep. “I love you, Patsy,” he said. “It did work.”

“You’re going to have to go see a doctor tomorrow about your nose and your back, Saul.”

“Hmm.” He was lying in bed in a fetal position.

“Not that I don’t admire you, Saul, for trying to help those kids out.”

“Hmmm. Love you.”

“The baby’s been moving a little tonight. Guess I can’t blame him,” Patsy said.

“Hmm.” He was almost asleep by now.

“As for you, I love you more than you will ever know. By the way, Saul, what did you bury back there? What did you use for those ashes? The ones you said were Gordy’s? What were they?”