The Anarchist's Convention and Other Stories

Bad Dogs

RIAN WAS MIXING Pest Killer for the dogs when Serena scratched on the cage door.

"Hello in there."

It was weird seeing her at the kennel, it was like the one time his mother had come to high school with the news about the old man. His mother in her old coat standing next to Jimmy Mahon's locker. It made him uneasy.

"I came to see the puppies."

"Right." Brian put the bucket aside and came out of the grooming cage. Serena stood back beneath the new sign Mr. Pettit had sprung for.

BAD DOGS

it said, above a black silhouette of a bad-looking Doberman wearing a spiked collar -

ATTACK DOGS FOR RENT

PUPPIES FOR SALE

STUD SERVICE

"BAD DOGS MAKE GOOD BUSINESS"

Brian didn't feel right kissing her, not in public and all, and he'd just seen her seventh period. He stuck his hands in his pockets and smiled and nodded toward the whelping cage.

"Over this way."

He walked close by her, though, in case Lovell was watching.

"Oh look at them!"

Women were like that with the puppies. Brian liked to watch them squatting down and making faces and laughing.

"They're only two weeks," he said. "They'll get even fatter."

"She looks exhausted."

use lay on her side, dully watching two puppies tugging at her nipples while the others bumped and tumbled over each other at the water dish.

"She's a little old for it. Pettit's thinking of getting a new brood bitch."

"And what will happen to her?"

Pettit and Lovell were always making fun of people who were sentimental about the animals. Brian looked around, shrugged.

"Maybe somebody will want her for a pet."

The puppies were like fat sausages, ears uncropped, flopping.

"They don't look like Dobermans at all," said Serena. "It's a shame they'll be taught to be mean."

"Oh they aren't mean. High-strung, you know, but not — well, a few of them." Brian pointed to the cage where Wotan sat, neck stiff, ears erect, staring out through the mesh. "Him."

Serena gave a little shiver.

"Pettit uses him for the downtown merchants. The guys who keep a twelve-gauge under the counter."

use yipped and pushed a little one away from her.

"They're such nice puppies."

"Yeah," said Lovell, appearing to stare at Serena's chest and wink to Brian, "they sure is." He gave her his big, dim. ply smile.

"Lovell Keyes," said Brian. "This is Serena."

"You're real pretty, Serena."

Wham! He could just do that, Lovell, come right out with those and not sound ridiculous. Black guys could get away with it. Serena blushed.

"You Brian's old lady, huh?"

Serena uhmmed for a moment, not knowing what Brian wanted her to say -

"Yeah," said Brian.

Lovell shook his head, smiled. "What a waste."

Serena watched the puppies for a little while longer, then Brian showed her the guard dogs, showed her Loki and Siegfried and Gunther and Hagen, showed her the different cages and the exercise chute and the quarters where Thor lay sleeping after his second meal. As soon as she left, Lovell was next to him.

"Not bad, McNeil."

Brian shrugged.

"You gettin any?"

"No."

"Why not?"

Brian shrugged.

"Fine little bitch like that," Lovell shook his head sadly, "what a waste."

Brian had looked through Serena DiLallo for the first month of school. Looked through her and two other kids in the row to Mrs. Peletier at the board going over their vocabu- laire. She would have stayed that way, the back of a head, out of focus, if Brian hadn't heard Russ Palumbo talking about her in study hall.

Palumbo was a fat kid who played football — tackle or guard or something dull like that — who was always flipping his wallet open to flash the foil-wrapped Trojan at you and saying he was from the FBI.

"Federal Bureau of Intercourse," he would say, and then try to goose you. A major asshole.

In junior high Palumbo had a vague but widespread reputation, having to do with an incident Brian had only heard the punch line of. "But it's stuck, Russ, it's stuck!" That one line, squeaked from the back of a classroom, had done in more substitute teachers than any combination of pen dropping, barnyard noises and pretended coughing fits.

Palumbo sat behind Brian in study hall, where Brian usually put his head in his arms and tried to sleep. Sometimes he actually could, but usually Palumbo kept him awake, telling dumb jokes to the kid across the aisle. Brian didn't know the name of the kid across the aisle, the kid didn't play any sport. Brian never saw him anywhere else in school, not in the halls or in gym or in wood shop or even at assemblies where everybody had to go. Brian sometimes wondered if they just kept him in study hall all day, sitting by the window laughing soundlessly at a new dumb-joker each period. He never had a gym bag or a book or even a pencil with him, he just traced the sayings and pictures scratched on his desk over and over with his finger, as if practicing for the time when he'd be given something to write with.

And when Mr. Crozier was deep in reading or out of the room, the kid across the aisle would pull the old heavy curtain away from the window and blow his nose in it.

"Debbie Moffat," Palumbo would say to the kid across the aisle.

"Really?"

"Really," Palumbo would nod solemnly. "I know the guy. „

"Just one?"

"Hey, she's not a pig. She's been had, but she's not hooked on it. Not like some of them. Jo-Ann Testa."

"Really?"

(I Yup. 9)

"But she's a cheerleader."

Palumbo would sigh patiently. "Don't make no never mind. You know those flying splits they do?"

"Yeah?"

"Well that breaks it. Once it's broken, they figure no guy's gonna believe em anyway, so why not?"

"Jeez. Who else?"

"Serena DiLallo."

"You're kidding."

Brian shifted his head in his arms. It was a rotten way to sleep, always with your nose in your armpits. Palumbo must be bullshitting, she wasn't the type at all.

"I'm not saying she has, I'm just saying she would. It wouldn't be hard."

"It would be hard," said the kid across the aisle, "but she would be easy."

Palumbo didn't laugh. He didn't like it when the kid across the aisle tried to make jokes.

"This is true," Palumbo would say and nod solemnly again. "I'd say her pants could be gotten into without much effort at all."

"How can you tell?"

Yeah, thought Brian, how can you tell? With his eyes closed Palumbo and the kid across the aisle were like a radio show, one of those insomniac call-in things he'd got when reception was bad for the Knicks' game.

"You just watch her, watch the way she acts. I wouldn't mind gettin into those pants myself." Palumbo would lean back and smack his belly. "Mmmm-mmmmmnh!" he'd say. "Finger-lickin good."

Serena DiLallo and her pants stayed in Brian's mind. He had never thought of her. Every year at the beginning of school there seemed to be dozens of girls he liked in his classes, but after the first week all the good ones were snapped up. It was like that Oklahoma land rush thing in History class, he suspected the guys who got girls of some kind of cheating, some gun-jumping or secret knowledge. He'd never even considered Serena DiLallo and now it was probably already too late. He'd see her tomorrow in the halls with some jerkoff and word would circulate that her pants had been gotten into.

He had never thought of that expression before. It made him think of actually being in them with her, two legs through each leg, bellies touching, the nylon stretched to bust -

When the bell rang Brian had to do a Groucho Marx walk to get out the door without looking like a hat rack.

In French the next day he could no longer look through her to the board. He watched her hair brushing against her bare arms. When she bent to look in her book he could see how thin her neck was. He wondered about what Palumbo had said — she seemed awful quiet. She seemed like she probably took books home from the library and read them, books that weren't assigned. She didn't have a bunch of girlfriends she hung with or turn and laugh too hard when somebody made a crack like a lot of them did.

But once she had smiled at Brian in the hall and asked if he was getting ready for basketball season. Girls didn't come up and ask you questions for no reason.

Brian sat half listening to the class rdpeter, moving his lips, and imagined that he was reaching forward and stroking Serena's thin neck, rubbing his hand softly against the down on her cheek. Or kissing the backs of her legs. He did that sometimes, imagined with different girls. It alternated with his other favorite daydream, the execution. Sitting at the very back of Humanities class he'd give himself ten shots. He'd figure out what order to get them in — who might try to rush him, who was close to the door and might run, Mr. Wojicki, and always three or four left for the prettiest, most stuck-up girls in the class. He would stare at the backs of their heads and think, "You first, then you, then you, and then you just as you turn around-" Serena had never figured in either daydream before.

If he was Lovell Keyes he could just come out with it, straight on and sugary — "Hey, sweet thang," Lovell would say, "I gots my eye on you."

If he was Danny Naccaratto and could dance like they did on TV he could ask her to a dance.

If he was Tim Dougherty he could offer her a ride home in his GTO with the rabbit-fur dashboard.

Even if he was Russ Palumbo he could flash his rubber and see if she knew what it was.

Out of the fog he heard Mrs. Peletier ask if anybody knew what Bouviers des Flandres were. There was the half-minute of silence that followed any of Mrs. Peletier's questions.

"Ils sont un type de chien," said Brian. He felt Serena turn to look at him. "Un type tres feroce."

It was Mr. Pettit's dream to have nothing but Bouviers, to cater to the country-estate crowd. If only their name were different.

"It sounds kind of faggy. People hear Doberman pinscher, German shepherd, they think Nazis, right, black leather and spike collars. Bouviers could eat them other two for breakfast, but people think French, they think poodle. It's an educational problem."

"Eh bien," cooed Mrs. Peletier, "as-tu un Bouvier?"

"Non," said Brian, "mais je travail avec les chiens. Avec les chiens feroces."

Mrs. Peletier said it was tres interessant and then the bell rang.

"You're really lucky." It was Serena, talking to him.

"Huh?"

"To get a job working with animals."

"Oh. Yeah. I guess I am."

"I like dogs best."

Brian said yeah, meaning so did he, though he could take them or leave them. The old man had hated dogs, so Brian never had one as a little kid. He was allowed to have a turtle once, but all it did was sleep.

"I have a dog named Spencer," she said. Brian didn't know where they were walking, but they were doing it next to each other, down the hall. "He's a fox terrier."

"They're nice."

"He's got a really fantastic personality."

She stopped in front of a Home Ec room, girls hurrying in with dress patterns. She had her back to the wall, books held to her chest, smiling up at him. Brian asked her if she'd like to go to a football game with him sometime. She said she would. She said she'd like to visit where he worked sometime. He said she could. The bell rang and released them. He took his time getting downstairs and stared coolly at Mr. Crozier as he walked in late to study hall. It was something he had been working on.

They went to the football game together and held hands and he put his arm around her. It was so cold and their clothes were so bulky. He explained the game.

He started walking to school with her in the morning and in the halls during lunch period. They did a lot of walking. They talked some, but afterward Brian could never remember what it had been about. They necked through a movie on a Saturday. That was nice, Brian discovered they really did get excited just like guys, the way he had always heard but never really believed. Serena seemed very — very understanding. That was it, that was why they never talked much, because they understood all they had to about each other. Or maybe they were both just quiet.

Work was a drag now that he had Serena to be with instead. It was cold and the dogs weren't getting enough exer cise and were all on edge. And Brian had the worst jobs because he was low man. Lovell did a little feeding and the exercising and helped run Discipline Class and took care of Thor. He spent most of his time with Thor, brushing the stud dog over and over, talking to it, feeding it his special meals of beef and liver and eggs and cottage cheese. Mr. Pettit just sat in his little carpeted office with his feet up on his desk, taking phone calls. He wore white shoes.

"These shoes," Mr. Pettit would often say, "are the symbol of my success. I started out where you are, McNeil, but those days are long gone. I have stepped," he would say, "in my last pile of dogshit."

The worst job was caring for Wotan. Wotan was old and scarred and mean, a holdover from Mr. Pettit's shitkicker days. One eye was blind, the lid torn off in a fight, the white ball staring at you even when the dog was asleep. Sometimes Wotan would ignore his meal, sniffing haughtily, walking to the rear of his cage to sulk. Brian would put the bowl in the next cage, in front of Loki, and then Wotan would roar and leap at the wire mesh till Brian gave it back. He'd gulp the food down without a chew, his good eye darting warily from Brian to Loki and back.

"That one," Mr. Pettit always said, "that one you never turn your back on."

Brian had to plant Wotan at the switchyard at night. After his old man had died the railroad went to dogs to patrol the yard, over heavy union flak. Dogs were cheaper, and though they might fall asleep they'd never drink on the job. Brian would wear the gloves and keep Wotan muzzled till he was tied to his post. The voice, the deep, steady, authoritative voice Mr. Pettit taught him had little effect on Wotan. You muscled him into place, hooked him up, slipped the muzzle off and got away quick. Brian was glad it was Lovell who had to collect Wotan in the morning.

"I never like it in the morning anyhow," Lovell would say. "You got to give him a couple hours, recharge the batteries."

Lovell was crazy for women, of any size, shape or age, and would talk for hours about the stable of them he was going to put together someday.

"This here's my trainin grounds," he would say. "This where I learn the fundamentals. Watch old Thor, watch the bitches, and I know the principle of the whole thang, y'dig?"

Brian had been walking around with Serena for a couple weeks before she came to look at the puppies.

"You gettin any?"

Lovell asked so abruptly, before Serena was even out of sight, that Brian didn't think to lie.

"Why not?"

The way Lovell said it made it sound like an oversight, like it had slipped his mind when the chance came along. Why not? Why wasn't he getting any? He shrugged, not knowing.

When he asked Serena she didn't seem to know either. They were down a block from her house pressing together just out of range of the streetlight. Serena had her arms under Brian's sweatshirt and he had his under her parka and their breathing frosted the air like a freight train chuffing into the station.

"I don't know. I never really thought about it."

"Don't you think we should?"

"I, uhm, 1 — "

"I'd really like to." Brian looked her straight in the eye the way he'd seen Lovell do it with the ladies in Discipline Class. The way Mr. Pettit taught him to look at the puppies when they were messing up, staring till they curled their tails under and flattened their ears and whined for forgiveness. Serena avoided his eyes, looking around at the street as if to say, "But where?" and Brian tightened his hold on her.

"It would be nice," he said. "Someplace warm, where we could be alone."

"Okay," said Serena. She didn't sound too ecstatic.

"When?" Brian pressed against her harder.

"Uhm — Saturday. My parents will be out Saturday."

Brian gave her the look again and Serena looked back, one of those solemn-faced ones he figured were looks of understanding and then she just about sprinted to her house. She'd agreed. She'd said yes, out loud and right to him. It was all set. It was all he could do when he got home to keep from calling and telling her not to forget.

Brian went to the Hibernian to stock up. Lovell probably could have gotten him some but he was embarrassed to ask, just as he was embarrassed to ask in a drugstore. He remembered the machine in the men's room at the Hibernian from when he used to collect the old man there. The machine sold combs and Kleenex and latex spiders and the last slot on the left gave you rubbers, even though the little window was empty. He got through the bar, pockets bulging with five dollars' worth of quarters, without any of the old man's cronies noticing him. But he was still feeding the dispenser when Slim Teeter sloshed in. Slim only had one kidney left and was a beer drinker from way back, so the men's room was his second home.

"Calm yourself, boy," he said, "calm yourself. It isn't a slot machine."

Then he peed for three full minutes.

Discipline Class was held Friday nights in the second tier of a five-tier parking garage. Wind whipped and whistled through the hollow concrete shell, the women wore their heavy coats. They were all women except for the little man with the big Alsatian who screamed his commands no matter how many times Mr. Pettit advised him not to. Mr. Pettit sat at one end of the tier in a director's chair, loudspeaker in his hand, while Brian and Lovell ran around assisting the women with their dogs. Mr. Pettit would give a command and then women would repeat it to their dogs and the dogs would look up at them in confusion and the women would look at Brian and Lovell for help. They did the Stay Command and the Recall on Leash, Heeling on Leash, the Long Sit on Leash, the Long Down on Leash and shaking hands. Mr. Pettit hated the idea of the dogs shaking hands but the women all insisted so he included it. There were poodles and Afghans and terriers and schnauzers and Samoyeds and a really stupid Irish setter and a pair of golden-retriever puppies and the Alsatian, which skulked and hung its head even when the guy who owned it wasn't screaming.

I think she's confused, they would say, or I think Harlan feels intimidated, or whoops, they would say, we've had another little accident. There was even one lady who kept complaining that her Afghan was bored.

"That again?" she would moan. "But Mitzi's beyond that, she needs a challenge."

Brian wanted to tell the lady that Mitzi would need six weeks' training to learn to lift her leg, much less anything challenging, but the lady was under forty and had all her teeth so Lovell never let him near her.

"What they want most in the world," Lovell would say, looking the woman deep in the eyes, "is someone to obey. They got someone they can look up to, they can count on, they can perform for, then they be in harmony with their natural state. You give em too much leash, make them think for theirselfs, they'll be just miserable."

Brian figured half the women were impressed by Lovell and half couldn't stand him, but since both groups just tightened up and listened when he'd come over and guide their hands it was hard to tell which felt what.

For the attack session Mr. Pettit would come out of his chair and join him. He'd trot out his command voice, his firm, controlled voice that left no doubts or questions. It would get stronger as the night went on, as Brian put on the gloves and padding and the dogs took running, snarling leaps at his throat. Lovell would stand back listening to Mr. Pettit and shake his head slowly.

"I know that tone," he would mutter to Brian, a sad smile on his face. "Every nigger in America heard that tone sometime. Make you feel just like a whupped dog."

Afterward, everyone else gone, it was Brian's job to clean up. Part of the deal with the parking garage. He would scoop and squeegee under the yellow fluorescent lights, the night wind howling through the ramps, and sing at the top of his lungs to keep the heebie-jeebies away. But they always got to him, the feeling that the wind outside was blowing everything into space, that when he stepped out there would be nothing left but black and cold and not a living soul who knew or cared that he existed. They got Brian just before midnight and not even thinking about Serena and her promise could warm him up.

On Saturday afternoon Serena said her parents weren't going to be away after all.

"We'll find someplace else."

"My mother is home on Saturdays," said Brian. "Even when she's not, there's Mrs. Casilli downstairs, and her we could use for guard duty at Bad Dogs. No way." Brian shook his head and looked at Serena accusingly.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I'll try to think of something."

They went to a movie and she let him feel her breasts even though there were junior high kids all around snickering and lobbing popcorn at them. When he lost interest in those she put his hand between her legs. This was a new wrinkle. Brian got excited about the whole deal again and whispered to her that they'd find a place. The movie was almost over before his wrist got too tired.

They held hands and walked around the downtown. They looked in store windows, at Laundromats and diners, beauty parlors and real-state offices as if one of them would offer a place to lie down. They didn't talk except if Brian would ask her more questions.

"You have any friends who have cars?"

"No. Do you?"

"Do you have any cousins or anything whose families are out-of town?"

"No. Do you?"

They went through the park but it was cold and the trees were too bare to hide them from view. It was nicknamed Saltand-Pepper Park because all the interracial couples met there. A couple times Brian thought he saw Lovell in a parked car, talking up some woman.

"One time," said Brian, "our class went to the World's Fair for a field trip on this old bus without a bathroom on it and we drove back so late all the comfort stations were closed. Everybody had been eating all kinds of junk all day long and they had to sit and squirm for over two hundred miles."

"What it reminds me of," said Serena as they walked past the reptile house, boarded up till spring, "is Mary and Joseph in Bethlehem. No room at the inn."

"Yuh." He wished she would keep religion out of it.

They walked all the way down to the river, watched the birds bobbing for garbage awhile, then turned back. Serena seemed to have given up thinking and was a lot cheerier.

"I'm really sorry," she said, "I really thought they'd be away. Maybe some other time."

"Yuh."

"Are you mad at me?"

"Nope."

He didn't say another word to her till they had walked to within a block of her house.

"Can you get out after dinner?"

"I think so. Why?"

"I know a place we can go to."

"Oh," said Serena. "Good."

Their eyes were used to the dark by the time they reached the yard. Brian went ahead, talking firmly in the voice till the growling stopped. It was Loki, wagging his tail and jumping with delight when he recognized Brian. Brian had the dog sniff Serena thoroughly and she gave it some brownies she had made. The door to the watch shack came open with a kick.

There was a small black wood-stove, a hot plate, a cot and some rough blankets, a few canvas folding chairs. The yard workers used it to warm up between shunts in the winter. The cot was left over from the old man.

Brian unfolded the cot and dusted everything off and shook the blankets out while Serena sat and watched him with her hands clamped between her knees. It was freezing inside. Serena undressed beneath the blankets, the cot creaking and rattling, while Brian turned his back and tried to think himself stiff so he could get the damn thing on.

It went okay. Nothing got stuck. There wasn't room to lie side by side on the cot so Brian pulled up a chair and sat holding Serena's hand. He wasn't sure he remembered what any of it felt like. From time to time he lifted the blanket and looked under at Serena's body and they'd smile at each other. Understanding smiles. She was all goose-pimply from the cold and her breasts weren't half the size of Knockers Nieman's, who everybody laughed at in the showers after gym. Of course, Knockers was all fat, he even had fat toes and fingers. Serena's ribs and hipbones showed.

"Will you come in again?" she said. "I'm cold."

This time Brian did what he could to make it last, he took note of how everything felt, how it smelled and sounded and tasted, so he wouldn't wake the next day and feel like he was still a virgin.

The woman who owned Boo decided he would come along quicker if he were boarded at Bad Dogs and trained daily. He became Brian's main responsibility.

"If you can't teach him to attack," said Mr. Pettit, "at least get him to quit wagging his damn tail at everybody."

The idea was that Brian would train the dog to obey him and that obedience would then be transferred to his owner. It was the lady's idea, not Mr. Pettit's.

"Sit," Brian would say, and rap the dog on the croup. Boo would sit.

"Good dog, Boo," Brian would say, and Boo would jump up and wag his tail with pleasure.

"No, sit, Boo," he would say, and rap again, and Boo would sit again, looking up at Brian with his head slightly lowered, yawning nervously. "That's right, Boo, good dog."

Boo would whuff and jump up against him.

"No, Boo, sit. Sit."

They went to the shack together on nights when there was a football game or dance Serena could tell her parents she was going to. They liked to know where she was.

"I'm going out, Ma," Brian would say halfway down the stairs to the front door, and she would say okay from wherever she was and when he got home she would make noises from her bedroom so he'd know she heard him come in.

They'd meet in front of old St. Patrick's school. The only hassle was if they were using Wotan on guard that night. Brian would have to lay the voice on him full force and if necessary threaten to hit him. The dog would stand aside, anger humming deep in its chest.

Serena would hurry her clothes off and get under the covers and shiver till Brian was ready. They didn't talk much in between, Brian could never think of anything that didn't sound obvious or cornball. If he didn't feel a certain way about her he wouldn't be there, would he? She understood that, he could tell.

They tried a couple different ways he had heard of but the cot was too small and too shaky so mostly it was the regular way. It always got them warm. Once he asked if he was big enough for her and she said she would fit whatever size he was, that's how women were. Brian wondered if it was true or if it was just Serena.

When basketball tryouts started he cut Boo down to one hour a day, after practice. It was a drag, but the insurance for the old man was still hung up and they needed the money. The railroad and the insurance company were claiming it was suicide, that passing out drunk in a boxcar headed for Michigan and freezing to death could be nothing but an intentional act. The caseworker said they were just trying to bully his mother into accepting a lower, out-of-court settlement. They were doing a pretty good job of it.

It was Barry Feingold, the manager, who clued Brian in. Brian was always the last one out of the locker room, and Feingold would sit by him while he dressed to talk about the team and things. Brian figured it was cause he didn't throw towels at Barry or call him names or because he was afraid to sit by the black kids on the team.

Feingold could never sit still on the locker bench, he rocked and squirmed and straddled, checked his watch to make sure it was still ticking and his wallet to make sure it was still there, pushed his glasses higher on the bridge of his nose and ran his hand through his curly yellow hair. He looked like a third-base coach giving steal signals.

"Do you know what I saw," Barry would say kicking his pile of wet towels, "in Coach's practice book?"

"What?" Brian would say in the disinterested style he was working on.

"I saw the first cut list," Barry would say and pause a second. "You're all right. You made it."

Brian would grunt and pull on a sock.

"Do you know," Barry would say playing with his clipboard, "what I heard Coach tell Mr. Fuqua today?"

"Nope."

"He told him you'd probably be one of his starters."

Brian would grunt and tuck in his shirt.,

"Do you know," said Barry, staring at the ceiling because Brian was powdering his balls with Desenex, "what I heard in homeroom today?"

"Nope."

"I heard that Ditty Stack likes you."

Brian grunted. He slipped on his underpants. He shook some powder under his arms.

"Who said that?"

Barry got up and spun the dial on a combination lock. "Barbara Fazzone and this other girl were talking about who liked who and they said it. They said she likes you. And Barbara is her best friend, just about."

Brian grunted and pulled his pants on.

Brian didn't know Ditty Stack or any of her friends. She was one of the ones who planned the dances and pep rallies, who were cheerleaders, who had parties at their homes, who rode down Central Avenue honking horns after football victories, who sat at the showcase table for lunch, the first table at the bottom of the cafeteria stairs, where nobody coming or going could miss them. Ditty had straight blond hair and real grown-up woman's breasts that swung and bounced and bobbled when she led the "Let's Go Offense" cheer.

"No cotton there," Russ Palumbo would say to the kid across the aisle in study hall, "those babies are the real McCoy. McCoys."

Russ Palumbo said a lot of other things about her, but with somebody as popular and hard to get close to as Ditty Stack you knew it was just guessing.

The last Brian had heard she was going with this guy who played fullback and who was an All-State wrestler. Though wrestling wasn't a popular sport.

In the cafeteria one day he heard giggling as he passed the showcase, and a voice whispered, "That's him. That's the one."

In study hall Russ Palumbo said, "McNeil, I heard Ditty Stack has the hots for you. You fart."

In the hall one day she passed him with some of her friends and smiled and said hi.

He had only been to the shack with Serena twice since basketball had started. There wasn't any football or dances for an excuse to get out and he was tired. Practice tired him out, and work. It was too cold to walk to school together, they caught different buses.

He wished he was Russ Palumbo and knew which girls would do what without having to go with them to find out.

Barbara Fazzone casually, almost accidentally fell into step beside Brian on his way to second-period class.

"I saw your name in the paper."

"Yuh."

There had been a preseason roundup article in the sports section the night before, and Coach had listed Brian as one of his starting five.

"Do you think we'll be good this year?"

"We'll be okay."

He knew Barbara a little, they had been in the same catechism Confirmation class.

"I can't wait till the season starts. I like it a lot better than football. You get to see everybody's face and it's not so hard to follow the ball."

"Yeah. I suppose it is."

"And then cheerleading is much better inside. You're much closer to the people."

"Uh-huh."

"Listen," she said, smiling and letting her arm brush his, teasing a little, "can I ask you a personal question?"

Brian shrugged. "I guess so," he said, then tried to think how he should answer it.

"What do you think of Ditty Stack?"

There were several things he thought of her, but he didn't know which one was right to say.

"I don't know her very well."

Barbara nodded seriously, filing it away. "I wonder if we'll win the league," she said.

"But," said Brian, "I'd probably like to get to know her better."

Barbara smiled. "Listen, don't tell anybody I said this, she'd kill me if she found out, but I think Ditty really likes you a lot."

"Oh."

"It's hard on her because she's so shy," said Barbara, "but she's really very friendly."

Brian had never thought of her as being shy. She did an awful good job covering it up.

"Uh-huh."

"And you know, if I were you, I wouldn't be afraid to just go right up to her and say that you'd like to get to know her."

Brian considered this.

"I bet that's all she's waiting for," said Barbara Fazzone. "And she's such a friendly girl.".

When they were ten weeks old the. Doberman puppies had their ears cropped. Mr. Pettit did it himself, examining each dog's head and then cutting a pair of cardboard patterns for each.

"You got to have an artistic sense," he told them. "You don't fit the right ears to the right dog they look like hell."

Brian held the puppies while Lovell gave them a shot of Nembutal in the abdomen. They wobbled around for ten or fifteen minutes, bumping into each other, while Brian prepared a strychnine solution as an antidote in case any didn't come up from the dose. When they fell out Mr. Pettit started cutting. He'd lay the cardboard pattern next to a floppy ear and clamp it on so the major blood vessels were shut off. He used a pair of serrated scissors for the cropping, drawing surprisingly little blood, and Lovell followed him up sewing the tips with catgut and a curved needle. Then Brian would take the clamps off and rig the ears up with tape and cardboard so they were held erect. Mr. Pettit had him do the cutting on the last one.

"What you got to be is definite," said Mr. Pettit. "You don't want to worry the blades through and leave the tip all mangled. Just straight and clean and definite. Snip-snip, same as with anything else."

If the clamp hadn't slipped on the left one it would have gone fine.

Brian had the phone cord twisted around his free hand till the knuckles throbbed white.

"So anyways," he said, "I don't think we should see each other anymore."

She didn't live far away but the connection was lousy. Brian had to unwrap his hand and plug a finger in his ear to hear her.

"I don't understand," she said.

"It wouldn't be fair."

"What wouldn't be fair? Is something wrong?"

"I uhm — I'm going to be spending so much time with basketball, it wouldn't be fair to you."

"That doesn't bother me. Is that all?"

"I'd feel — uhm — I'd feel like I was losing you."

"What? I can't hear, there's something wrong with the phone — "

"I'd just be using you."

"I don't understand."

"I need more privacy."

"I won't call you up anymore if that's what you mean."

"Look, I really can't explain it, I just don't think we should see each other anymore."

"I don't understand."

"I'm sorry. It's my fault."

"Why? What's wrong, Brian?"

"It's just how I am. You know."

"I don't know. I never know what you're thinking."

It was as bad as he thought it would be. It was true though, he really didn't want to see her anymore. He didn't feel guilty either, which surprised him.

He spoke to her then in a firm, controlled voice, a voice that left no doubts or questions. And she did what she wanted, she said good-bye and hung up.

Lately he had noticed it — one of those things you overlook time after time, but the minute you see it you can't see anything else. Like the picture of Christ Russ Palumbo had that if you looked at it a certain way what you saw was a naked girl. Once you saw the girl it was hard to make out Christ in the picture again. Serena was mousy.

She was so small and skinny and she had mouse-brown hair and even her face reminded him a little of a mouse. And she burrowed. Whenever he looked at her undressing under the blankets in the watch shack he thought of a mouse burrowing. She was so timid with other people, so quiet and squeaky. He wondered why he hadn't noticed before they got together.

And she really didn't understand much of anything.

Brian was amazed at how easily it was to talk with Ditty Stack. It seemed like all you had to do was listen.

"Are you going to the dance after the game?" she'd say, and he would know she'd say yes if he asked her.

"I hate coming to school alone in the morning," she'd say, and he'd ask her where she lived, then offer to walk with her.

"I think that math homework is going to kill me," she would say, and he would suggest she copy his at lunch hour. He copied Barry Feingold's during first period, careful always to make a few mistakes.

"Where'd you get so smooth with girls?" she'd say, and he didn't know if he should laugh or not.

At times he had a hard time believing he was with her. He'd look over at her, sometimes touch her hair if she was in the mood where she wanted or would let him touch her in public. He liked to walk her past the huge trophy case by the gym, liked to see himself next to her in the reflection off the glass. Even then, at times, he would look and wonder, "What's she doing with him?"

"Hear you traded in for a new model," said Lovell at work. "You gettin the hang of it, McNeil. Got to change the menu if you gonna keep an appetite. Like m'man Thor."

Mr. Pettit made the dates but Lovell was in total control of Thor's mating. Once or twice a week he'd work over somebody's brood bitch to prepare her, checking for fleas and lice, checking that her discharge was clear enough and her parts soft enough to make it all worthwhile.

"M'man Thor is got the life," he would say. "Eat an fuck, eat an fuck, even got his own personal nigger waitin on him."

Lovell put together two extrarich meals a day for Thor, supplementing them with wheat germ oil for vitamin E, and egg whites "to give his spritz a little body."

Lovell didn't think much of the stock that was offered to Thor, but Mr. Pettit wanted the cash. When another cowhocked, fish-mouthed, pig-eyed bitch would be brought in Lovell would sigh and drag Brian over to look at what they'd sunk to.

"What kind of litter you spect him to pump through that?" he would say, and dig out his favorite passage in the breeding book Mr. Pettit had given him.

"'It is difficult enough, with all one's skill,"' he would read, " 'to breed superior puppies from even a first-rate bitch. But to clutter the world with inferior animals out of just any old bitch is inexcusable.' " He would look to Pettit's office and call, knowing he couldn't hear, "In-ex-cusable."

The mating was painful to watch, but Lovell insisted that Brian join him when Thor was getting it on. The nipping and yelping and nervous tension of the dogs was bad enough, but more often than not they'd end in a lock, turning this way and that till Thor was facing one direction and the bitch the opposite, joined at the organs, whimpering.

"First she snarl to keep him away, then she won't let go," Lovell would say. "That's bitches all over."

The day before he was shot Lovell posed in the advertising picture Mr. Pettit arranged. Mr. Pettit stood in the center in his leisure suit and white shoes, hands folded awkwardly be fore him, flanked by Lovell and Brian on one knee, each holding a dog. Lovell was with Loki and Brian was with Wotan, holding him so his good eye was to the camera. The ad was in the paper the next day, on the same page where it said how Lovell had been shot by a Mr. Carter E. Green of Seventh Street. The article failed to mention Mrs. Cleo Green of the same address running into the street wrapped in a bedsheet, or the anatomical location of Lovell's wound. Mr. Pettit scraped dogshit from his work shoes and muttered that it was a typical nigger stunt to pull. Brian thought of visiting Lovell in the hospital but never got around to it.

Ditty Stack ran Brian ragged. She reminded him of Mr. Ricci, the JV coach. Mr. Ricci didn't believe in stopping to catch a breath between drills.

"You get your rest in bed," he would say. "Basketball is movement, basketball is action, you got to make it happen. You stand on your heels and they'll blow right over you."

Ditty lived like there was something chasing her, no sooner finishing one thing than she was thinking about the next. If Brian took her to the movies it was like a meal to her, down the hatch and forget about it. Sometimes she couldn't remember what they'd seen, couldn't tell you anything about it but maybe who the lead actress was. Ditty made plans for what they'd do, they did it, and she'd forget about it immediately. When Brian asked things about her before they'd started going together she said it was too far back to remember and not important anyways. Brian told her about himself and Serena one night, including personal things he hadn't meant to say. It made him feel funny. When he finished she told him she knew someone who could get tickets to see the Dead.

When they did it she seemed in a hurry to get her clothes back on. They went to the shack only once, a freezing night when Wotan was on duty. The dog crept out from a dark corner and stood blocking their way. A deep growl rumbled inside him, his black coat glistened in the moonlight.

"Wotan, sitl"

He held his head up and to the side to fix them with his good eye. He pulled his lip back to show his teeth.

"Sit!" Brian took a step forward and raised his hand. If he was alone he would have gone to get a board or a piece of iron. Ditty stood behind him, waiting.

Wotan didn't sit, but he moved slightly to the side, enough to let them slide by.

Ditty liked doing it well enough when they were inside but said the shack gave her the creeps. Brian hadn't even told her about the old man. He tried to explain how safe it was there, how no one would ever bother them, but she said the shack was out, it gave her the creeps. So the shack was out.

They didn't get to do it much. When the time and place were right she wasn't in the mood. When she was in the mood the time and place weren't right. He took her to parties she told him they had been invited to and introduced him to her friends. They did it in the bathroom at a party in Barbara Fazzone's house while Barbara's mother rattled the doorknob and asked if whoever was inside was all right. He took Ditty on double and triple movie dates she arranged. They did it in the back row of the Palace Theater during the eight o'clock show and got everything tucked back in just as the lights came up and the audience came streaming by. He took her out on joyriding double and triple dates in cars she borrowed from her girlfriends or from the boyfriends of her girlfriends. They did it in somebody's Falcon, sitting where she told him to park in front of an all-night Laundromat, where Brian could hear snow crunching under tires and feet of late-night laundry-doers. He went to dinner at her house and said thank you every time her parents moved and explained in detail why he hadn't yet applied to college though he himself didn't know the reason. And though Ditty had refused to use her house when her family was away or his place when his mother was out and Mrs. Casilli was at the chiropractor, refused because she said she'd feel guilty, although she wouldn't go to Brian's safe, cozy shack, she did it with him on her living-room couch a few minutes after she said be right up, Mom, and a few minutes before Brian called good night Mrs. Stack, Mr. Stack, slammed the door behind him and zipped his fly. That was the first time she ever made noises doing it.

Ditty cheered extra loud when Brian made one of his few, careful baskets, her straight blond hair flying, her real-McCoy breasts swaying and bouncing and bobbling. Once when they were horsing around in the shack Serena had pretended to be a cheerleader. Gimme an F, she yelled in a whisper, jumping up with Brian's undershirt over her little flat body. Brian gave her an F, gave her the U-C-K she asked for and they laughed and did it again. They had done it on the cot for hours with only an occasional lonely whine from Loki outside to hurry them.

"Sometimes it's too big," Ditty told Brian. "Not that it's that big, I mean you're not — you know. But sometimes the way I am and the way you are, it's too big. It hurts. Then other times, for some reason I'm all loose and it's too small. I mean it seems too small. I think it has to do with my period. That kind of thing usually does."

Brian wondered if people made do with whoever came along first or if they kept shopping around for a perfect fit. Or if there were other girls like Serena who would adjust to any size.

Brian spent French class trying not to look at the back of Serena's head. It meant staring at the ceiling a lot and Mrs. Peletier got on his case for daydreaming. Serena had made a friend, a heavy, red-haired girl who Brian remembered vaguely from junior high. She had been good at making fart noises with her hands. Serena and the red-haired girl were always together, in the halls, in the cafeteria, up in the bleachers at basketball games. He heard them talking and laughing together. Serena wasn't so quiet. He wasn't jealous exactly, it wasn't like she had found another guy and was doing it. It was just that she seemed to be having such a good time without him.

One lunch period Ditty whispered to Brian that she really wanted to do it and led him out to the parking lot. She picked a customized Chevy Impala, the old kind with the huge manta-ray fins. Though there were roomier cars and cars parked farther away from the windows of the school Brian didn't argue. Ditty Stack wanted it in the parking lot during lunch hour — Russ Palumbo on his best day never dreamed up anything close to that. Brian had never felt bigger, he hoped it wasn't one of Ditty's tight days.

He had her panties off and was trying to twist around to get his fly untangled when he saw someone coming, a boy with car keys jingling in his fingers.

"What is it?" asked Ditty, on her back. Her head was crammed down by the armrest, her legs bent and splayed apart like a dog waiting to have its belly scratched.

The boy saw Brian, saw Ditty's feet sticking up in the air, and stopped. The boy was an All-State wrestler, though wrestling was not a popular sport. He had been fullback on the football team. Brian remembered now that the boy owned a customized Chevy Impala.

"What is it?"

"Nothing," said Brian. "Just a guy I know."

The boy turned and went back inside the school.

"Who is it?"

"Carter E. Green," said Brian.

"Carter who?"

Brian zipped up and reminded her there was only a few minutes till fifth-period bell. He left the door open when he hopped out, Ditty gaping in confusion between her legs.

In the team picture for the yearbook, Brian's left arm is in a heavy bandage. He had just done the trick with Wotan's food dish, pretending to give it to Loki, and was reaching it back into Wotan's cage when the dog clamped ahold of his wrist. No snarl, no display, just a quick, silent pounce that brought Brian to his knees. Brian tried to command him to stop, but the voice wouldn't come, he couldn't work a sound past his throat. He banged on the cage with his free hand till Mr. Pettit came out. Wotan held on like a bulldog, blood running down his clamped jaws, looking Brian in the eye. He didn't listen to Mr. Pettit, not even when he shouted, and he chomped even harder when Pettit kicked him in the ribs. It took a double dose of Nembutal to put him out.

"You'd been inside the cage," said Mr. Pettit as he poured antiseptic on Brian's puncture wounds, "it would of been your throat."

Sometime later in the year, when Brian hadn't had a girl for months, Russ Palumbo approached him in metal shop.

"Wanna buy a balloon, kid?" he said, and flashed his wallet rubber. Brian ignored him.

"Listen, McNeil," said Russ Palumbo, "I hear that Ditty Stack is strictly a cockteaser."

Brian ignored him.

"That so? McNeil?"

"No, Russ," said Brian in the dry, disinterested style he had almost perfected, "she's not a cockteaser at all."

Palumbo's face brightened. "Yeah?"

"She's a cliff-hanger."

Thoroughly confused, Russ Palumbo walked away with a knowing laugh.

Hoop

ULE NUMBER ONE," Jockey would only have to bend a little to line up his shots, "Never Show Your Speed." Five-seven-two, corner pocket. Jockey liked to punctuate his lectures with combination shots. Anybody at the Hibernian could tell you Jockey Conn would pass up a half-dozen straight chippies for a three-ball combination.

"You show your speed and they got you pegged. They know just what you can do and what you can't do. They know where to hurt you, Sport. Am I right?"

Brian liked the way jockey would always call him Sport. The old man always called him "boy," or, if he was really gassed, "sonny."

"You pay attention to the jockey now, boy," the old man would call from the bar. "There's many a thing worth learning they don't teach at that school." And Slim Teeter would say A-men. The old man and Slim would be trying to get in as many cold ones as possible before five o'clock when the prices went up. The bartender would usually be Sweeny, sitting over a racing form circling his picks. Sweeny never played, he just picked and followed the results.

"I've saved a fortune in my time," he'd say when the regulars prodded him. "If I was a gamblin man I'd been a pauper years ago." Sometimes Sweeny would help Brian remind the old man that supper was ready. "The boy's been here a halfhour, McNeil," he would say, "and Hell hath no fury like a woman with a cold pot roast on her hands."

On game days, days when there wasn't practice. Brian's mother would send him over. She started sending him after the time the old man got pinched for taking a leak in public. She never started dinner till five. When the old man got up to leave Slim would wink and toast him with a beer glass.

"Until tomorrow, Hugh."

"Until tomorrow."

The men who sat at tables still told stories about the old man. Stories about the fights he'd won, the tricks he'd played, the witty things he'd said at just the right time. About the devil he was as a young man. They still told stories about the old man and dragged him over to verify that the truth had been told and bought him a drink and then tucked him back into his slot at the bar.

"You see that shot I just made, Sport? What would you say the odds against were? Hundred to one? Am I right? But when she fell in the pocket, did you see me whoop an holler? When I missed that gimme, that five in the side, did you see me piss an moan? Nosir, you did not." The felt was always covered with smudges from the jockey's cigar droppings. The light was off center so that when your back was to the bar you threw shadows on the table. The cue sticks on the wall rack were all crooked. Jockey said you'd be better off using a baseball bat. Jockey packed his own stick, three sections that screwed together.

"Nosir, I didn't bat an eyelash either time. The less you let them know about you, the better off you are. Keep em guessing and you're one step ahead of the game." Seven-five combination, opposite corner. Jockey would have the stogie in his mouth and he never blinked. Brian had never seen jockey blink.

The old man's eyes ran, he blinked all the time. Slim Teeter played hide-and-seek, avoiding his own eyes in the mirror behind the bar.

"The best face, Sport, is no face at all."

"A-men."

"He burned your ass, man. Burned your ass! And you had the turkey, had him nailed to the floor."

Brian sat in front of his locker and almost smiled at the sound of Lucius Foster ragging Preston in the next row.

"Where's yours?" said Preston. Too tired to yell.

"My what?"

"Your money. We went halfs, remember? Win or lose. That's two-fifty."

"Shit, man."

"You're the one upped it to five dollars. Don't you go tellin me `shit.' " Preston and Lucius both came out of the Children's Home and went for brothers. Scratch one and the other would bleed.

"Here."

"All you got is change?"

Brian considered yelling over the locker that they could pay him tomorrow but he decided not to. One of jockey's rules, Never Rub It In.

"Man think I'm made of money."

"Forget it. Pay me when we get back."

Brian waited till he saw Preston's feet before he looked up. Preston had red-and-white checkered laces which Coach let him wear for practice. For games he had to use plain white like everybody else. Coach said appearance was important for the proper mental attitude. Coach wouldn't let you wear a kneepad unless you could show him the bruise.

Preston laid five dollars next to Brian on the wooden bench. "There you go."

"Right. Nice game."

"Yuh."

Preston was a light-colored one, the kind the others called Chinaman. The kind the old man said made the best pimps. Preston wore a religious medal that sometimes hopped up and stung you when you played him.

"You almost took me," said Brian, but Preston was already gone around the corner. Five bucks was no little thing at the Children's Home.

"Not only do they ask for it, they beg for it." Three-seveneleven, off the cushion and in. "And who are you to disappoint them?"

The word had gotten out about Brian and Condredge Holloway, the one from 13th Street Park that everybody called Boots. The word of how he had bet Boots on a one-onone game and Boots had swallowed it. Everybody knew Boots was crazy, the white boy was on the varsity at school and, blood or not, Boots didn't even start for the Boys' Club. But Boots only lost it by three, he was close all the way and the white boy only came back to take it at the end. The word got out that maybe McNeil was only good as a team player, a passan-pick dude. One of Coach's boys.

"Hey! McNeil! Brianl" Practice had just broken up and he was heading down to the showers. Lucius pulled at his jersey from behind. "I hear you a gamblin man."

"Huh?"

"You an ole Boots. One-on-one game."

"Oh. Yuh. I almost blew it." He'd really have to work hard to make it look good with Lucius. Lucius gave away four or five inches and had almost missed the last cut.

"You want to try your luck again?"

"Against you?"

"Naw! Think I'm crazy like Boots?" Lucius had a chipped tooth up front that made him look like he was smiling more than he was. "You an my man Preston."

He could see Preston waiting beneath the far basket, dribbling a ball idly. "Preston's pretty good."

"You're a starter. He's only sixth man."

"He's taller than me."

"By a hair."

Brian sighed. It was a pretty fair nibble. "Okay. Fifty cents." Back into it easy, jockey would say, never let them know you smell blood.

"Aw, man, make it a dollar. I mean Coach must think you better. He got you startin."

He sighed again and frowned. "Okay. A dollar."

Lucius smiled and gave a little laugh. Preston nodded to Brian and they started. Game to twenty-one, winner's outs.

Brian drove past but blew his first two shots. Just barely blew them. He only drove to the right. He got himself behind by four and settled there, matching points with Preston. There was only the three of them left in the gym, squeaking soles amplified, ball thumping back hollow from the empty bleachers. Echoes. It was nice, Brian calmed and played with Preston. He was down 16–12 when Lucius started laughing out loud.

"You are done, McNeil, kiss it good-bye."

Brian was on the outside, dribbling. "Game's not over yet."

"It is for you, man. Aint no way you win this one. No way. You done for, Jim."

Brian backed away from Preston a little, still bouncing the ball, and looked over to Lucius. "Done my ass."

"Oh-ho! Listen to him! Care to put some more coin on it?"

Brian made an elaborate thinking frown. "Yeah. Okay."

Preston waited with his hands on his hips, looking from Lucius to the white boy and back.

"Five dollars, Brian. Make it five. See what kind of balls you got."

He sighed and said okay and saw Preston cross himself. Preston had his right knee taped.

Lucius cracked up and did a little dance. "McNeil, buddy, your mouth just sign a check your ass can't cash." Lucius already had his money spent.

Brian shot from where he stood, shot easily as if throwing the ball away, and didn't blink when it swished.

"Sport, if God didn't want them gaffed, he wouldn't of made them fish. You don't take it, somebody else will." Jockey always ignored the sign on the wall and tried masse shots that barely missed. "Five hundred to one against. Anyhow, what I mean is, if you're gonna play for keeps you use everything you've got. An the most important thing you got is a sense of timing. Got to know when to coast and when to turn it on. Am I right? Got to hear Opportunity when she knocks."

"You listen to the jockey," the old man would say, "that's very sound advice he's giving you. Opportunity will rise up but you have to take advantage of it. I missed my main chance and I'll regret it as long as I live." The old man would have his work jacket on, the one he had worn when he ran the day crew at the switching yard. He still wore it to keep the night watch over the deserted tracks.

"Op-por-tunity," Slim Teeter would declare from the pinball machine. "A-men." The pinball machine in the Hibernian was called the Riverboat Minstrel. Blackfaced jigdancers goggled and grinned pink smiles full of watermelon seeds. Slim was a terrible machine player but liked the lights and the balls and the exercise. Slim said a man could drink all day as long as he got his exercise.

"You keep your eyes open, boy, opportunity is everywhere. Everywhere." The old man never turned, but talked to Brian by way of the mirror over the bar. "Twenty years on the railroad and never once did I ask myself where those loads, those trains, were heading. That's where it was, and I never went after it. Right under my nose and there I was, too blind to smell it."

"What your father means, Sport, is you go where the action is. You settle for what you got and life passes you by." Seventen combination, side pocket. "Right under your nose."

"Wasted my youth on a dead-end job. And youth, youth you never get back. Never."

"You were never wrong, McNeil," Slim would say, opening his eyes wide to signal a joke, "you were born with one foot on that rail and a beer bottle in your chubby little hand."

The old man would nod. "There's truth in that," he would say, and motion Sweeny for another cold one.

Brian shot from where he stood, shot easily as if throwing the ball away, and didn't blink when it swished.

Time was when he'd have called out "Goodwood!" or "Doosh!" or slapped himself five. Asphalt and chain-net days, pre-Coach days, when Hoop was the language you spoke, the language you thought in. When if. you popped the chain it was a word on your tongue and you gave it voice.

Brian shot from where he stood and his tongue ached to call the swish in midair, ached for the days of Rudy and Fatback and Waterbug, for the games they put on. Rudy got rabbit legs, it would start. From his balls up he's all Rudy, but those pins got to come off some bunny. Brian would start it, Hoop-talking, Hoop-thinking, all of them would start it, playing their stories on tongue and asphalt. Rudy got rabbit legs, all thick an bulgy above the knee and stringy-like below it. And he pump the mothers mile-a-minute, hippity-hop, zippin round you ankles (Rudy short) and pushin that roundball up front, ball's a rabbit too. Rudy hop after it, fastest thing going cept maybe Humminbird White from down 13th Street Park and of course Waterbug. I mean Waterbug is Waterbug, you don't get faster. Rudy come bumpin and slidin up the middle, then jump out from the brier patch an lay it over the edge. Rudy go up. Little bit of a thing, no biggern a minute, up pawin round the rim. It was Rit, Big Wop, that got burned so he got to get back when his side gots the ball. Rudy start it back of the line and flip to Ernie. Ernie turns ass to the board and throw up that worthless hook he does, ball get lucky an hit high off the board stead of clearing the fence and go rolling down the street. Preston bring it down, throwin out his skinny arms and butt like somethin big gonna fall on him. Gets it back to Waterbug and we into it. Bug begins to work his show, hundred moves a second, talking to the asphalt with the ball, playin sounds down there and dancing to em. Brian flash open for a second but Waterbug busy, still working, he pass off when he get good an ready. Sees you when even you don't know you're open, got to be ready. The Bug he got eyes in his ears, back his head, man see you when you sleepin an know when you awake. Bug come down the right side till he throw one on a bounce to Rit, Big Wop put his underhand shitshot in. Ghinny is all ass and a yard wide, don't nobody get front of him when he's cuttin hard.

Screamin Winnie Wills starts in, his old high voice is always being coach and spectators, "Move the baw, move the baw, move the bawl" he go on like some old farm bird. Just a thing he does, like Preston wear that cross. Waterbug throw it to Winnie, shut him up for a second. Man can't talk with his mouth an the ball at the same time, he dribble hisself caught in the corner an heave it back out to Brian. Brian go left on Fatback, Back gives him that first step (Back like to rest on defense). B. push hard down the left baseline, slow a bit where it's sandy so he don't slide out, go up switch it to the right an let it go — Ching! "Goodwood!" Old rusty-red net singin his song. Preston got it now, start in with his old back-up basketball, closin in slow, lookin back over his shoulder at the rim nown then, oh them nuns is done a number on this child's style. There's FUCK You in blue spray paint on the backboard from last Halloween, you puts the ball gainst the Y for a right-hand hook and gainst the c for lefty. Press put a right-hander smack on that Y but too hard, bound gets kicked out to Ernie at his spot, left corner the foul circle and it's in. Can't let the fat boy shoot from his spot, turn into a machine there. Rudy get halfway through the middle but Bug is tight with him so he dump it back to Fatback coolin his heels at the center line (Back like to get his rest on offense, too). That round middle-age gut bouncin once every two dribbles, he commence to workin on Brian. Stares at the ground under the man's feet, plays by the landmarks the ants leaves him. Halfway through a dribble he throw it up, straight up. Back's shot always got to make its mind whether to come down or go into orbit. Falls through the net without a sound. Shit a pickle. "Nice," he says. Back always say that when he hits one, nice. Ernie dribble in slow, the only speed he got, when Waterbug cop it right from under his legs. Man steal the pennies off a dead man's eyes he needed two cents. Bug zigs and zags till he got Rudy goin one way an hisself goin the other to ram in a jumper. But Winnie Wills fall down and cut hisself on the bottle glass, aint no big thing and he want to run home for surgery or somethin, can't but touch the dude an he fall apart. So Dukey Holcolmb come over from where he been foolin by the eight-foot basket an it starts up again, playin our show -

Rudy — Hoppin to the ball, rock forward then back then forward then ba- then shoot forward pickin Bug off to lay up a scoop but -

Rit — "Void l" say the Big Wop, waitin all along to cram that Wilson sandwich down the man's throat -

Bug — Work a lightnin show past three men, offer Preston a stuff but dump it back to Rit on a lay-up, good.

Rudy — Swipe the inbound pass, sees Ernie where Ernie should be -

Ernie — Spotshot, good.

Back — No move, no dribble, just look at Brian's laces for a second then let loose a skyball, freezes with his arm pointin up -

Ball — Check out the stratosphere, gets lonely an come down like a mortar shell off the rim, climb again, come down to Brian -

Brian — Got the floor now, dribble an look around for where to put in his two points' worth, walkin, talkin, signifying in Hoop -

Brian shot and didn't blink when it swished. "Thirteensixteen, my ball." He could see every step to his winning. Businesslike, just push where Preston was weak and execute. Execution, that was Coach's favorite word.

"Five of us there were, and only my poor brokenhearted mother to take charge." The old man would be on his fifth or sixth beer. It was usually somewhere in there that he'd get sentimental and start being Irish.

"We were so poor I had to wear my brother's shoes for a year when they were a full size too big for me. Stuffed with newspaper."

Slim would wait a moment for the bells to quiet, for the steel ball to run off the table. "We were so poor we had to patch the soles of our shoes with cardboard."

"Shoes," Jockey Conn would say, squinting over the cue bridge. "Who had shoes?"

Brian peeled his practice uniform off and tucked the money in his Converse. Coach had given everybody who made the team a free pair. They were always called Converse instead of sneaker, the same way Theopolis Ruffin always said his father would pick him up in the Cadillac instead of the car. If you weren't on the team you wore Keds or Red Balls or the kind that were two bucks a pair mix'n'match from a bin in the supermarket. But if you made Coach's team you wore Converse All-Stars and nobody would steal them even if you didn't Magic Marker your name on the insteps. They were that easy to trace.

The others were already done with their showers and getting dressed. Brian listened to them yelling and snapping towels and shouting the dozens at each other over the locker rows. Trench warfare.

"Hey Dukey! Du-key!"

"Hey what?"

"Is it true what they say bout your mama?"

"Aw shit, man, don't start."

"It true she got some new furniture? Three beds and a cash register?" Laughter was invisible, scattered through the locker room.

"Man, you mama like a birthday cake. Everybody gets a piece."

"Yeah? You mama an me got one thing in common."

"What's that?"

"You!"

"Shit, Gregory's mama got the only pussy in town that makes change."

"So who wants change for a nickel?"

Brian ducked as somebody's jockstrap flew over the locker top. Wire-stiff with old sweat, it skittered along the floor like an elastic tarantula.

"You mama like a cup of coffee, man. Hot, black, an waitin for the cream."

"Black? Who you callin black? Listen to the shit call the dog smelly. Your mama so black she got to drink buttermilk so she don't pee ink."

"Yeah, you mama, she lays for 'fays an screws with Jews."

"Ha. Hey Preston! Press-tone, you there?"

Preston usually played. Preston could cut with the best of them.

"Yeah. I'm here."

"Why aint we heard from you?"

"I don't have a mama. Remember?"

"A wasted youth. Only got as far as the tenth grade at St. Paddy's."

"A-men. St. Paddy's."

"It was a shame to see it fold."

"A-men."

"True, it was going down when the Eye-talians started moving in, but where else in fifty miles was there a high school half as good? And now that it's gone where can you send your boy for a Catholic education?" The old man would address the bar as if it was full, though there was only Teeter beside him, Sweeny at his horses, jockey and Brian.

"Where, I ask you? Couldn't raise the money, they said. The people of the diocese just couldn't dig deep enough. But they'll pay for it in the end, they will. They'll pay through their teeth."

"Public school is free."

"Sweeny, you pay nothin, you get nothin. Public schooll My boy here is at public school. A basketball player. Tell him, boy, on the starting five. How many white?" The old man's finger would jab at him from the mirror.

"Just me."

"There's your public school! Only one white boy on the floor. Oh, they'll pray they had St. Paddy's back, now that it's too late."

"You'll always have your coons in basketball." The eight ball would roll ever so slowly to thunk in the corner pocket. "Basketball is the coons' game."

The score reached 1g-18, Preston's lead, Preston's ball. Lucius had gotten quiet. Preston drove and stopped to put up a short jumper. Brian had watched the same shot pass under his nose unmolested the whole game, but this time he slapped it from the air and recovered it back behind the line. When Preston came out to guard him he went left for the first time, hard and straight and fast. Preston could only turn to watch. 19 all.

The move was a drawn-out version of The Rocker, Waterbug's favorite. Waterbug had played ahead of Brian on the varsity for a while. Bug was Coach's playmaker, his hand on the floor. Bring the ball down the court, glance to the bench, raise his hand in fingers or call out a color to set the pattern. Coach had them playing the post-and-pick pattern basketball he had played when he was a student at the high school, back when there was no three-second rule and you had a center jump after each score. "The year they cut the bottom out the peach-basket" was the way Bug put it whenever they'd pass the trophy-case picture of Coach and his beefy Irish teammates. "Man was a star the year they made the ball round." It was a drag-ass, ham-and-eggs kind of basketball but if you wanted to play for Coach that's what you played. And playing for Coach was the price for all the other things, for the names in the paper and the girls jumping round cheering your name, for satiny uniforms and Cons on your feet. For a chance to show your game off to the college recruiters. So Waterbug set up Coach's patterns, called Number Two or Green Play and watched the team be run ragged by the runand-gun pro style everyone else was using. Waterbug played ahead of Brian on the varsity, shooting four or five times a game and never from more than fifteen feet. For a while.

They'd lost the first three games of the year and were well on the way to losing the fourth. Brian had only seen action late in lost causes. Though he sat next to Coach, there was little chance he'd be called in before the outcome was decided. A minute man.

The other team knew all Coach's patterns by heart, Waterbug would get the first pass off and it would bog down. Late in the first half he called Number Four. But somewhere between the calling and the pass-off Bug saw an opening, the kind of half-step you thought about twice unless you were very fast. A risk. He faked and drove through for a lay-up. The next time down he interrupted the flow of the Green Play to throw in a thirty-footer. Coach wouldn't even allow them beyond twenty feet in practice. The others smelled it, felt something was up with Bug and took it off his hands. Theopolis Ruffin peeled back to steal the inbound pass, Perry Blaydes put a move on his man and threw in a double-pump hook shot. Waterbug led an improvised full-court press, zipping all over the floor giving instructions, pushing them on. "Stop an popl" he yelled, "Run an gun! Shake your tailfeathers, children, let's get on the case here!" They were running loose and grinning, grinning on the basketball floor as if they were playing a game. They went into the locker room at halftime with a two-point lead.

Coach kicked chairs over. Coach threw chalk. Coach told them they weren't a bunch of sandlot kids anymore, they were a disciplined team and should act it. He told them not to let a few lucky buckets go to their heads, if he had to make substitutions he wouldn't hesitate. Waterbug sat through it all without speaking or looking up, sat and rubbed his legs with the baby oil they used so their legs wouldn't look all smoky. Jumpin juice they called it.

"You've got to keep them under control," Coach said to Brian as they walked out for the second half. "They've got no self-discipline. That's why they're the sprinters and never the long-distance runners. Get yourself good and ready, son."

Waterbug went back to the patterns and tried to stick with them. He was poker-faced down the floor, raising fingers and passing off, dropping back to face the inevitable fast break from the other team. The game slowed, the crowd grew quiet. They went down by six points. It was Lucius who started.

"Hey Bug," he called out from the end of the bench, "lemme ast you a question. What ever happen to run an gun?"

"That's right, that's right." Dukey Holcolmb picked it up. "What ever became of stop an pop?"

"Scoot an shoot?"

"Jump an pump? Shake an bake?"

Most of the bench had picked it up, calling out as Waterbug dribbled the ball down the floor.

"Hey Bug," they called, "what ever become of slip an slide?"

"Float and flutter?"

"Style and pride?"

Waterbug stopped a good thirty-five feet out and picked up the ball. The crowded gym was still as everyone waited for him to raise a finger or call out a color. "Say now," one of them yelled into the silence, "what ever happened to Waterbug?"

They hardly saw the shot. That's how it was when he had a notion and he took it — like a snakebite. The ball swished and Brian felt Coach's hand on his neck.

"You go in there, son," he said, "and settle the boys down. Show me what you can do."

Brian crouched by the scorer's table, waiting for a whistle that would allow his substitution, and for a moment caught Waterbug's eye. Bug smiled and shook his head slowly.

Bug took the ball down the court and felt the ball alive in his hands. Felt the eyes of all the players and all the spectators on that ball and knew for now he had control of the game. He took the game and ran with it, feeling the pressure of Coach, the pressure of Brian, the pressure of all his careful, defensive games driving him forward through the snatching hands, felt it chasing him desperately around the floor. Bug listened hard for the rhythm of it, listened to the hard rubber kissing of sneaker soles on the floor, saw everything clearly written in feet, the distribution of weight, the leanings and balances, feints and retreats, and he was a half-step ahead of them all. He snaked through the other nine bodies to the basket, then left the crowd-roar hanging and dribbled past it and on out to open floor again. He teased the players with his ball, played the growing cheers and whoops of his audience in and out, in and out, handling the ball with breathless speed, offering it out for a dozen near-steals and snapping it back from the brink. He heard the crowd-sound building to a payoff and the tension for release building inside him and cut hard for the far corner, whipping away, back to the basket using up every bit of old asphalt flash-and-dazzle left to him, then jumping, turning, lofted a soft, slow, impudent shot as he flew out of bounds, a shot that said there's nothing you can do, there's nothing any of you can do about the Bug but watch and wait as it floated to be swallowed by the hoop.

People were laughing and clapping and slapping five in the stands and at first when he heard the buzzer Brian didn't want to move. But he trotted on and tapped Waterbug on the shoulder. "Have fun," said the Bug, "it's all yours."

Brian took the ball back and went hard left again on Preston, then switched right for another lay-up. Preston's bandaged leg didn't plant when he had to change directions. 20-1 g. Brian faked right, went two long strides and stopped dead. Preston tried to dig in but the knee buckled. He knelt on the floor and saw the last point go in. 21, game.

"They'll always figure that it was luck, or cheating, or anything but the simple fact that you're better than they are and always will be." Thirteen-two-nine, off the cushion to kiss the five ball in. "Let em. Let em believe anything their hearts desire if it makes em feel better and keep coming back for more. But you've won, Sport, and that's the name of the game."

Brian was alone in the showers until Lucius and Preston came in and walked past him to the far end. Preston wore his medal in the shower. Preston had won the medal for getting a hundred on a test in Confirmation class. Brian and Preston and Lucius had played wall-ball against the chapel at St. Thomas after class every Wednesday, played until the nun from the Children's Home came and honked.

There wasn't much warm water left but Brian stayed under till the two had finished and walked past again. When he heard their locker doors slam he turned the shower off. He liked to be alone in the locker room sometimes, he liked the echoes he made. Like being in a church after everybody had gone. Brian dried himself on the way back to his locker. The five dollars were crumpled and sitting on his pants. His Con verse All-Stars were gone. No idea who it could be, he would say. What can you expect from them, Coach would say, and order him a new pair.

"That's the way it is, Sport. The way to be a winner. You and me both know there's only one place that matters, and that's First Place. Am I right?"

At about quarter to five Sweeny would start clearing his throat and looking over to the pool table and making little dusting motions on the bar-top. Jockey would pay no attention. But at exactly five, without looking up at the clock, Jockey would sweep the balls into the pockets with his hand. He'd unscrew his cue into sections and put them in their leather sheath. He'd pull the green cap with the Hibernian insignia from his back pocket and jam it on his head. Sweeny would pass the push broom and the dustpan over the bar to him.

"Another day," Jockey would sigh, "another dollar."

Buffalo

UFFALO.

Cleveland and Toledo.

On to Chicago. Gangsters sprawl, twitch and die, gunshot on the sidewalks. Cattle end their long western exodus and hang bleeding from hooks. Wind comes cutting off the Lake.

The country lay on the kitchen table, riddled with pinprick fissures, cake crumbs dwarfing the Rockies. As a boy Brian used the map for a dart board, closing his eyes, flicking. Wherever it hits is where I'll live. Flick — Vermillion, South Dakota. Maybe the best two out of five.

Peoria, Hannibal, Kansas City. Mail-order towns, jumpingoff towns. Stock up the wagon and kiss the safe life good-bye. Brian was trying to write his mother a good-bye note. Nothing much to say, nothing that he really believed or that didn't sound sappy. Good-bye, I'm going west. Lighting out.

He had been as far west as Buffalo once, on a basketball trip. As far south as Jamestown on one school field trip, and to New York City after the World's Fair on another.

La Crosse, Albert Lea, Sioux Falls. Poor, one-blanket Indians building fires to survive till morning and the woolly black herds pushed back off the land they had covered like a robe. Sometimes it was hard to believe.

It had to be a note, not a letter. A last small word, something final. Like the boy in the Mexican War who drew a black bean — "Mother, in one half hour my doom will be finished on this earth." This wasn't a trip, a vacation, he wasn't off to CYO summer camp with her waving at the depot and name tags sewn on his underwear. He was leaving for good.

Dear Ma. Or better, just Ma. He wondered if there was still such a thing as Western Union. Like in the movies. As a boy he always thought of famous sayings coming by Western Union telegram.

DEAR SIRS STOP HAVE NOT YET BEGUN TO FIGHT STOP JPJ

He wondered if he should go north along the Lakes and through the Badlands or slide down south first. Roanoke, Knoxville, Chattanooga.

MA STOP KILLED ME A BAR TODAY AT THIS TREE STOP D BOONE

He heard creakings down the hall, his mother's insomnia. He tried not to rustle the country. She could never leave him alone if he stayed up late, she'd toss and turn and go to the bathroom and finally come out squinting and shivering and say oh, are you up?

They had never talked much, but only since the old man was gone was it so obvious. What had ever possessed them, at their age? His third-grade teacher on Open House night, complimenting them on their grandson's imagination.

He would leave her a note.

Ma — I wrote to school, the refund should be in the mail. I'm not going back.

He heard the toilet flush down the hall. The bathroom held her odors, he used to wait to use the ones at school in the morning.

Fort Scott, Wichita, Dodge City. Drunken cattlemen, crooked marshals, mannish whores. Kit Carson, Pueblo, Durango.

I am taking off and will send you postcards. Have enough money for now so don't worry.

Brian

He thought to mention he was heading west, but then where else was there for him to go? He thought to do his signature, the one he'd been working on, but then just printed it out like the rest of the message.

The light in the hall flicked on. He heard one of her sighs and pocketed the note.

Amarillo, Tucumcari -

"Oh, are you up?"

Her voice was moany with sleep. She squinted in the yellow kitchen-light and hugged herself with her arms. Thin blood, she always said, it ran in her family.

Santa Fe. Pony Express, stagecoaches, silver mines.

"You're reading the map?" It wasn't a question, she wasn't looking at him. She padded among the kitchen utensils as if she had come out searching for something lost, pushing at dishes and forks with one finger the way she always did.

"Would you like some hot cocoa? Help you sleep?"

"No thanks, Ma."

She got a pot and milk as if she hadn't heard. She never drank cocoa herself, it made her sick.

Your mama like a cup of coffee, he thought. Hot, black, and waitin for the cream. How safe the dozens had been for him to play, how far removed his mother was from cheatings and beatings. His mama never did anything. He watched her face over the stove and for an instant he felt bad.

"Think you could get some things at the market for me tomorrow?"

He had gone over every item, packing only what he couldn't survive without. The sleeping bag he'd bought cheap from a guy at school was out on the landing, along with the old man's boots. They had shared the same foot size.

"I don't think I'll be around tomorrow."

"You going somewhere?"

"I'm going away, sort of." He swiped cake crumbs off the map as he said it.

"Oh. Whereabouts?"

She stirred the milk a little. He could smell it now. Her spoon scraped gently against the sides of the saucepan and Brian held his head in his hands.

"I'm not really sure. I'll be gone awhile."

"You have enough money?" She frowned into the boiling milk.

"Yeah. Yeah, I've got plenty. No sweat for money."

"Will you be back before you're due at school?"

"I'm not going-back."

The Coach would be the most upset about that. He was building his backcourt.

"Oh," said his mother, then, "We ought to talk about it."

"Yeah. We should. But I'm not going back."

She was silent for a while but for her kitchen sounds.

El Paso, Tucson, Yuma. Copper-colored desert. Old men with brown-paper skin, baking like lizards on rocks.

She slid a cup of hot cocoa in front of him, covering New Orleans and most of the Gulf.

"Help you sleep."

She washed the pot out as he wondered where he would hit the Coast. Where else was there to go?

She yawned and stared into the dish-filled sink. He could hear her mind working, trying to think of something else to say, to ask. He wondered if he should say the words to her now. Say good-bye. He kept his eyes on the map, elbows propped wide on either side of the country. She poked at a few things in the sink as if testing them for signs of life. The cocoa smoked and grew a skin.

Sacramento. Eureka -

She started as if from a dream, stared for a moment at the cup of warm milk that lay between them, and began to shuffle toward her bedroom.

"Well. Have a nice trip, Brian."

The hall light flicked off.

"Good night, Ma."

"Night."

It was hard to believe, sometimes. But at one time they had been right there. Along the Hudson. Up and down the valley. Syracuse, Elmira, Binghamton were the western frontier. They had been right there.

Buffalo.

Fission

WO PUDDLES OF FLAB lifting and flopping down again. Feet. The toes were tiny and round, baby peas pushed into a mound of mashed potato. Mary Beth drove her old standard Chevy barefoot, shifting through the traffic flow on Interstate 8o. They were surrounded by miles of flat, after-harvest cornfield. Mary Beth's cat, a huge, white female named Justine, slept on top of Brian's duffel bag in the backseat. The sun was nearly straight overhead.

"Not much to see out here, is there?" said Brian.

"Nope. Not a hell of a lot."

Mary Beth had picked him up just outside of Iowa City, going west. He had tried sleeping out the night before but it was too cold, mid-October, and he had shivered in his bag. till daybreak. He hadn't eaten for two days, his stomach kept doing little fluttering things when he thought of it. He hadn't seen a mirror for a while and figured he must look pretty scruffy. He didn't get a single bite on the road till around ten o'clock when Mary Beth pulled up, two-hundredplus pounds of her packed into an apricot-colored shift. "Hop in, honey," she said, "I'm goin your way."

There wasn't all that much room in the front seat. Mary Beth had to spraddle her legs apart so her thighs didn't jam the steering wheel, and the squashed buttock closest to Brian spread out toward him, flowed against his hip. She felt like some thick, slow liquid sitting there, like warm molasses in a cloth sack. Brian got the impression, not so subtle, that she was coming on to him.

"Listen, honey," she said, "You're going to the West Coast, I can get you there in one ride." She had already told him she lived in San Francisco. "I got to stop down in Kansas City two-three days, then, to Denver a little bit, but the people I know there can put you up no trouble and I'll be. going straight on through to the Golden Gate. How bout it?"

He considered, then shrugged. "I think I'll take my chances on the road. You get back up on 8o, maybe I'll still be out there, you can give me another ride. Thanks for the offer though."

"Well you just watch out for those Nebraska staties. They'll have your ass, honey."

"You hitched out here?"

She had a pretty face, Mary Beth, kind of Indian-looking. A pretty face floating on three chins.

"Honey," she said, "I used to live here."

"You're kidding."

"Daddy had a little place up the road a ways. Corn and hogs."

"You don't seem like you're from the Midwest."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

They passed a panel truck with a red, dripping steak painted on it and Brian's stomach did a triple-gainer. He wished he was sitting down to lunch somewhere. Or in the back getting some sleep with Justine. But he liked Mary Beth all right, she was the first woman who'd ever picked him up hitching. In fact she was the first woman he'd said more than hold-the-pickles-hold-the-lettuce to since he started hitching in New York.

"I just meant that I thought you were brought up in San Francisco," he said.

"People who don't understand make fun of farmers." Mary Beth braked a little to let a semi pass, her foot-flab spreading on the pedal. "Farmers aren't stupid. People who make fun don't know what goes into the life. Farmers, they got a lot of strange ideas about the rest of the world and from a distance it looks like they're just small-minded and dull but it's not like that."

"I don't suppose it is."

"The farm belonged to my grandfather and his father before that. He handed down a debt with the farm and it got a little bigger every year. You don't live so bad and you've got good to eat and a lot of money goes through your hands every year but none sticks. Mostly small farmers never clear out of debt. There's this big hole of loans and mortgages and federal land deals that you fall into and never get out of. My daddy worked the fields six days a week. On the seventh he fixed machinery.

"And it's just natural that from down in that hole a farmer can't see clear what's going on in the outside world. He thinks he's at the heart of the country and everybody should be watching him. He goes under and they don't eat. He can't be done without. That's where that farmer ego comes from, all that redneck pride. He's the backbone of the whole fucking nation, he thinks, with all the politicians and welfare chiselers feeding off his work just cause they outnumber him. Like locusts. So he trusts only himself and hard work and his fields. But they're not stupid, farmers. No way."

Brian nodded. "Then you liked it, even though it was hard?"

Mary Beth laughed. She had a great laugh, strong and throaty, that sent shock waves of flesh rippling all over her. "I hated it, honey. Every damn second of it."

She put her hand on his knee, still laughing, and squeezed. It was nice.

"You ever been out here in the summer? When the corn is still up?"

"No. But they got corn in the East."

"Not like here they don't. Our house is — was — a good quarter-mile in from the main road. I had to walk out for the school bus every morning. Through all this corn. It was worst when the corn was high, way over my head when I was a little girl."

She paused and grinned a little to herself. "Young and short," she said. "I really wasn't ever what you'd call little.

"Anyhow, the corn was planted so the rows opened up to our quarter-mile of driveway. You know how from a distance, from the highway, you come at a cornfield from a certain angle and it's this solid block of stalks, then suddenly you're alongside and zing! those rows open up to you one after another, riffling by till the angle changes enough and it's all solid again?"

"Yeah," said Brian. "It's kind of neat."

"Well up close, right next to it, it's not so neat. The angle never changes. They just keep swinging open, one after another, and you're lost in them, under the tops of them, and you can't see the end of the road. Made me dizzy. Made me sick to my stomach sometimes, I'd stop and hang my head down toward my knees till it passed and then tried to walk with my eyes shut. But I knew they were still out there, I could see them behind my eyelids and it wasn't any better. Every morning before school, every evening after, to and from Bible class on Sundays. I still see those rows in my nightmares sometimes."

"Sounds like it's got a hold on you."

"Honey, my ears still perk up when the weather report comes over the news. There's a thunderstorm at night and I can't sleep. Mission and Fourth Street, nothing but peep shows and pawnshops, but some part of me is still worried about how the damn crop is doing."

Mary Beth wore at least a half-dozen rings, mostly turquoise and ivory. They gave the only hint that there were joints in her breakfast-sausage fingers. She wasn't wearing a bra. Brian could see her nipples standing out under her shift, the circle around them soaking through with sweat. His stomach started flipping when he looked at her breasts, he tried to avoid it. She was wet under her arms and in all her creases and the inside of the car had her sweet flesh smell. Brian could almost see the warmth coming off her, thick mammal waves of it wrapping him round the shoulders and neck, making him pleasantly sleepy, pleasantly horny.

Horny. It surprised him. Even with all the hitchhiker stories he'd been told, all the stuff Russ Palumbo used to whisper in study hall, it surprised him. About all the women out cruising for action. They pick you up, see, cause they know they'll never see you again. So they can do anything they want and not feel guilty. Palumbo was an asshole and full of it but he wasn't the only one with stories. Brian felt a little ashamed, a little left out, seventeen years old and he'd never been approached by a woman. No bored housewives, no nymphomaniacs, no sex-starved librarians. And here it was happening and he was surprised that he was a little excited. She was so big.

And she talked. In the road stories and in his daydreams the women never talked much. Mostly they clutched. They clutched and they clung and they pleaded and whimpered and moaned and panted and were ever so grateful afterward. Mary Beth had talked almost nonstop since he'd gotten into the car, mostly about personal things, things that made him uncomfortable. About her mother's funeral. About her hemorrhoids. She'd showed him the bruises on her arm and hip where her last boyfriend, a biker who did too much speed, had hit her in their parting fight. She was like an open wound, Mary Beth, all her hurt just kept pouring out and there always seemed to be more.

"Daddy wanted a boy," she said. "Wanted boys. He got me and that was it. Oh, Mama tried, Mama tried against doctor's orders and dropped a couple of things that would have been boys if they lasted a few more months. Little monsters. They had to take her works out then and I think she was relieved. It all went into me. Twelve pounds at birth and I just shot out from there.

"I always had to follow Daddy around after school and on weekends. It was like my punishment for being a girl. He didn't talk to me except to ask for the wrench I was holding or whatever and he didn't show me how to do anything. Didn't teach me the work. He just wanted me there. And I was so damn eager to please and afraid I'd do something wrong it makes me sick. When I remember my Daddy I mostly don't think of his face, I see the back of that sunburned neck bent over some tractor or patch of crop. Don't be in my light, he'd always say when I came close for a look. Girl, you block out the sun."

It wasn't the talking alone that made Brian uneasy. People who picked you up usually wanted you to either entertain or to provide an audience. He was used to that. He got the feeling Mary Beth wanted more, and he didn't know if he had it to give.

"Mama, she went the other way. Just poured all her femininity into me. She was at her sewing machine every spare minute so's she could keep me dressed like a little storybook girl. Of course, I'd already busted out of the junior Chubette department and was destined for bigger things. You can imagine how I looked. A heifer in organdy. I got a little older and she put me out on the block with the rest of the young girls, all groomed and curried at the school dances and the grange dances and the damn church dances. She'd drop me off in the car, happier than a pig in shit, and I'd just want to crawl under the sidewalk. All I remember about those dances is one or another of my string of first cousins slouching over with his hands in his pockets, mumbling, 'Let's go, Mary. It's my turn.' to

She belted out her laugh then, and Brian didn't know if he should join or not. He tried to smile sympathetically.

"Is your father still alive?"

"Yeah. He's a soil tester for the state. Lives up in Fort Dodge."

"He sold the farm, then."

"Lost it. Phagocytosis."

"Pardon?"

"It's a biological process, honey." Mary Beth swerved to avoid a woodchuck crossing the highway. "You've got a cell, right, and it reaches out with these arms of cytoplasm to surround a smaller cell or a solid particle. And once it's surrounded, inside the cell's membrane, it can be broken down by enzymes. It's a kind of eating."

"Oh."

"Daddy had a pretty small operation and he never really understood that if you didn't get bigger you didn't survive. So this big agribusiness outfit, the company that makes Justine's cat food but they own all kinds of stuff, they start buying out all the small farmers that surround Daddy. He's the only one who won't sell. Redneck pride. So once they're all around him they lay siege. For three years he sets a price for his crop, very small margin of profit, and they undersell him. They can afford to take a loss for a while, they've got the capital behind them, they've got the cat food and the dog chow and turkeys at Thanksgiving and who knows what else. They starve him out and the farm goes back to the bank. They'll wait till the price drops down some before they buy it from the bank. Phagocytosis."

"Where'd you get all that?" said Brian. "The cell stuff."

"You're looking at a former biology major. Parents sent me up to the Ag School in Ames, got me started in animal husbandry. I guess they didn't know what else to do with me since the marriage proposals hadn't exactly come flying in."

"You graduate?"

"Fraid not. Me and this girl who was my best friend transferred to the University of Iowa our junior year. Thought there had to be more to life than the good earth. The University already had a shady reputation in certain quarters, and while I was there it finally started to deserve it."

"When was that?"

"'Sixty-nine. The campus action wasn't all that much compared to some places, but for Iowa it was a regular Sodom and Gomorrah."

"And your parents?"

"Daddy came to visit after I'd been there a month. Looked around and said come home with me now or don't come back at all. Maybe some kids were living together. Maybe there was a political slogan scratched on a wall. I don't know just what it was. But I wouldn't leave and he cut off the funds. Had to drop my classes but I stayed on in Iowa City. Got involved in some things." Mary Beth smiled. "You might say I switched from biology to chemistry."

"They disown you?"

"You got it. Complete with a we-shall-not-be-held-responsible notice in the local paper. Mama snuck a letter and some cookie-jar money past him once in a while, but that was when she'd already took sick. All I ever got from Daddy was the word through the grapevine that he thought I was just a big slut who'd never amount to a thing." Mary Beth shook her head and smiled. "Imagine that. A girl who's more popular on campus than the goddam homecoming queen. If only he could see me now."

"What do you do now?" asked Brian. "For a living?"

She had been hinting around at it for a while, talking about all the business she'd done in Iowa City and all she had to do ahead of her. He'd been wanting to ask.

"I sell drugs, honey," said Mary Beth. "You're riding with the one and only Midwestern Connection." And laughed so loud the cat woke up.

The farmhouse was not nearly so run-down as he had imagined. Some high weeds around the porch, board windows, dust in the kitchen sink. Most of the furniture was still inside. The real decay was in the cornfields, the stalks bent and broken, tangling with each other. The rows that Mary Beth had talked about were overgrown into a solid jumble of vegetation.

"They can afford to plow it under and let the soil recover fora year or two," said Mary Beth. "Daddy couldn't."

She had brought a candle in from the car and found some more over the kitchen sink. It was a little spooky in the house, so unnaturally dark for the time of day, everything fuzzy with a layer of dust.

"Haven't been here since I was a sophomore in college. Seven-eight years. Surprised the bank hasn't changed the lock." Mary Beth handed Brian one of the candles she had lit. "Listen, honey, I think I want to poke around here a little bit. If you don't mind? I won't be too long, and then I can get you another hundred miles down the road. That okay?"

"No sweat."

"And what I thought was, since you said how you been up so long, it would be a chance for you to cop some z's. I'm sure they didn't move my bed from upstairs. Give you a chance to stretch out."

Mary Beth directed him to the bedroom then and headed off through the house. He could hear her bare feet, flap, flap, flap as she padded across the parlor.

The room was upstairs. Justine was already curled in the middle of the bed when he found it. He tossed her on the floor and lay down. There was a canopy over the bed and pictures of kittens with huge tear-shaped eyes on the wall. Brian kicked off his sneakers. The cat jumped beside him, was thrown off, jumped up again. Brian let her stay. He closed his eyes.

He felt like he was still moving, traveling over the highway at sixty. He flashed onto glimpses of whiteline zipping under, his stomach clenched for curves that never came. He started down a long slope, the back of his head floating, started coasting, coasting…

A twitch in his stomach brought him near to waking. The candle had gone out. Justine had left the bed. He thought he heard someone else in the room, breathing. He kept his eyes shut. He was lying on his belly with one hand across his heart and the other guarding his crotch. Flap, flap, flap. Mary Beth was standing by the bed watching him, he could smell her, feel her warmth. He waited. He felt his buttocks tighten automatically but managed to keep his breathing regular.

The bedsprings strained as she eased herself down beside him. She was stroking his hair, lightly, on the very edge of sensation. Allowing him to play possum if he wanted to. It was a road story coming true, she wanted him to make love to her. She wanted more than that, he figured, but she would settle for a roll in the dark and a wave good-bye on the highway. He breathed in her warmth and he got hard, knowing it would happen if he wanted it to. That he would be in control, she had come to him. He was set to open his eyes, to wake fully and roll over when a voice inside held him down. It reminded. him of the way her feet flopped when she walked, remembered the rolls and puckers and dimples of her, remembered the way she looked sweating buckets through her thin shift. It was a Russ Palumbo voice, an after-school sneer in the hallway. Anybody want to fuck that, it said, hafta be deaf, dumb and blind. Woman escaped from the Humane Society. The voice was as strong in him as the warnings from priests and nuns had once been, stronger. His cock backed down a bit, softened. Half-and-half, the kind he woke up with in the morning.

"Honey?" she whispered.

"Brian?"

He made his decision, let the voice make it, and stuck with it. Stuck with it even when she stroked his hair hard enough to make it an open question. He held himself still and the bed gave a mournful groan as it tilted back level and he heard her flap out of the room.

Brian's ass relaxed and he shifted onto his side. His erection nodded off like a man falling asleep.

There was Wheat Woman and then there was the Corn Queen. No talking, just vision and texture, knowing their names without hearing them. No tension or flirting, just a silent understanding of what was to happen.

Wheat Woman was first. She was dry. Her hair was cropped close to her skull, a tight-packed wool of small kernels that rasped when he brushed it against the grain with his hand. Her eyes were an unsettling flat gold with a large, black pupil. Staring, sunflower eyes. Her lips cracked as she opened her mouth, her tongue was sandpaper like a cat's when they kissed. She kept her eyes wide open. Her kiss stung him, no saliva or softness in it. Her breasts were hard kernels, the husks thick as fingernails. She moved loser. They clinched, both naked, her skin like burlap against his. She pulled him on top of her, gazing steadily out over his shoulder. He pushed himself in when she split her legs apart and she was dry and tight, like forcing his cock through a straw hat. She had his ass clutched in her stalky fingers and was jerking him hard in and out, pumping for moisture that never came, little puffs of fine chaff rising each time their hips clapped together. She was strong, a brittle strength that made him afraid to pull away lest he snap something. But his cock was scraped raw and she was still thrusting, threshing under him in a mechanical rhythm and he broke loose with a sound like falling through branches and she kept on bucking, eyes soulless as a shark's, with her knobby butt rapping the floor and her smile cracking to show a mouthful of brambles.

The Corn Queen came to soothe him. Her skin was taut and had a waxy yellow sheen. Her hair hung to her waist, albino corn silk that was cool as it slipped over his chest and belly. Her eyes were light green and when she bent to kiss him her lips stretched back over tiny white kernels of babycorn teeth. Her tongue flowed down to comfort his dry throat while his own lolled in corn syrup, a long, drinking kiss of it. Her breasts hung down swollen, he squeezed one lightly and a honey-colored cream oozed from the tip. She smiled gently and straddled him. He reached between her legs and folded soft, green shucks back against her thighs, opening her, parted a tuft of corn silk and then she slipped herself down around him. She was wet, she was warm and more than slick. She rolled on him like oil, like there wasn't a hard bone in her body. His cock was swimming thickly, he couldn't feel the walls of her, the shape of her insides, only the warm syrup that poured out to butter their thighs and bellies, that flowed down and greased the floor beneath his cheeks till they were fucking in a puddle of her. It was too thick, too flowing, he didn't know if he was still hard in her and he was pressed helpless under her liquid weight, drowning in her and maybe he came but it was like spitting at the bottom of the ocean.

Honey.

Something about honey.

She was calling him, Mary Beth, calling up the stairs to see if he wanted to get up. Get up and eat.

Brian made some noise to tell her he was coming and rolled on his back. He had shot off in his pants. Wasted one, Russ Palumbo used to say. Got to dreaming pretty hot and heavy last night and I wasted one. Lot of nice pieces round here could of used it. Brian hadn't had a wet dream since he was sixteen and a virgin. He thought maybe they were supposed to stop once you'd joined the club.

He undressed and wiped himself off with his B.V.D.'s and put his pants back on. He threw the underwear beneath the bed. Give the movers a laugh when the bank sent them.

Mary Beth had found some canned food and had it going on the range, hash and baked beans and some cream-ofmushroom soup. She had brought bread in from the car and gotten an old toaster to work.

"They didn't bother to turn off all the juice," she said. "Just unscrewed the fuses."

She had changed from her shift into a bulky denim coverall. She was wearing work shoes. It was like her flesh itself had hardened while he was asleep. She sat him down and dished him out a plate and a bowl and spoke softly to him, almost like she was apologizing for something. It was all Brian could do to keep his stomach from climbing up his throat to meet the food halfway.

"You just chew on that for a while, honey, and then I got something special for our dessert," she said. "You let old Moby take care of you."

"Moby?"

She shrugged. "Mary Beth Dickson. The kids on the campuses where I do my, you know, business deals, they call me Moby Dickson. Had it since I was a girl. Sort of followed me around."

"Oh."

"Boys yelling `Thar she blows!' in the hallways. What you call a literary allusion."

Justine yowled loudly from the front of the house and Mary Beth clonked off to see what was wrong. The toast popped up and Brian went and made himself a hash sandwich. He didn't know if there was anything he could say to Mary Beth, anything that wouldn't make her feel worse. It's not that I don't find you attractive but — but what? Everything he could think of sounded like the line Angela Rizzo used to give him when he made any serious move on her. Sounded just as slight and just as false. He swallowed his food in big bites and felt each drop distinctly into his stomach.

"I slept like a rock," he said when she came back holding Justine. Maybe it would be better if she could think that he really hadn't known she was there. "Like a zombie. How long was I out for?"

"Couple hours," she said. "You've got plenty of daylight left for hitching." She crossed to the counter by the toaster and frowned. She dropped the cat.

"Oh shit."

"What's wrong?"

"Our dessert. The acid."

"What?"

"I had a couple squares of windowpane acid sitting here. I figured we both had a lot of flat country ahead of us, might be nice to put some wrinkles in it."

"Acid."

"Yeah. You know."

"I know. But what happened to it?"

"Justine must have gotten it, she's acting a little weird. But Christ, I figured the two of us would do a half-pane each and she ate four times that. It must have been her. You weren't over here were you?"

Brian looked at her. "I got the toast. I put it down on the counter to make a sandwich."

"Oh Christ. You think you might have picked it up on the toast?"

"I don't know, what's it do to you?"

"You never done it?"

Brian shook his head. It was one of those things that had passed him by in school, like the Hong Kong flu had in the fifth grade.

"Oh, honey," said Mary Beth and took his hand, "I'm sorry."

He didn't know that they still made the stuff, there hadn't been anything on the news in years. "So it's me or Justine."

"Gonna be hard to tell right off if it's her. Cats are so spacy anyways. I don't really know what to do."

The idea kind of appealed to him. He wouldn't be responsible for anything, just stick his thumb out and let it carry him. "I think I should finish the beans," he said. "If I'm going places at least I'll have a full stomach."

Justine sat over the dash and stared at Brian for an hour and a half in the car. He stared back at her. Mary Beth drove and kept asking him how he felt. He didn't feel much different. A little nervous maybe. Still hungry. That was a strange one, still hungry.

"Some of it will hit you real quick," Mary Beth told him, "and then sometimes you get a batch that kind of sneaks up on you. You ate all that food, takes a while to digest — who knows? And then maybe it's just some weak stuff, I haven't tried any yet. How you feeling, honey?"

She drove him to the far side of Des Moines and turned south. She tried to talk him into coming with her to Kansas City. He got out of the Chevy and Justine hopped down into his seat.

"I'll be all right," he said, "you just watch your cat."

Mary Beth gave him an embarrassed smile.

"I'm sorry," he said.

"Honey," she said, "you got nothin at all to be sorry about. Nothin at all."

A careening, high-speed ride in the open back of a pickup truck got Brian past Omaha and well into Nebraska farm land, where he bogged down. There was a little confusion between the energy of the wind roaring around him and his own roaring energy, but he decided it was the food and the sleep. There was no sitar music, no psychedelic colors. A lot of road and a lot of harvested cornfields, but no surprising warps or wrinkles.

There was the pointilism though. He remembered the word from art class. The sky and the fields seemed to be made of millions of little separate dots of all different shades. Maybe it was the time of day, the purple dusk, or maybe there was pollen in the air. But field stayed field and sky stayed sky and the horizon line between them held steady. He felt the same, tired and dirty and impatient with the thinning traffic. It was twilight, more purple than he remembered, and he didn't feel like hitching anymore. He decided to bag it for the night.

There was a rise to the left of the road up ahead, he started for it planning to be well sheltered from the road's view. The field had been closely mown within the last day or so, it was jagged with stubble. Every few steps another field creature would unfreeze. Albino toads, tiny mice, snakes like shoestrings, dry-rasping grasshoppers, all scattering ahead of his path. They were a luminous violet in the twilight, they seemed confused by their recent uncovering. Brian skated his feet forward and went slowly. He eased down the far slope of the rise till he came to a patch of well-kept grass.

Green grass in the middle of a cornfield.

It was a level rectangle about the size of a large house foundation, cropped short as a putting green. It was a little strange but Brian was glad for a flat spot to lie.

He paused at the edge of the plot to watch what looked like a cross between a toad and a doormat hop away. Its back was scabbed from mower blades and half of one of its hind legs was missing. When it hopped it flew sideward and almost tipped on impact. It was trying to get away from Brian but could only flop in ever-widening circles around him. He was fascinated by the thing. Had never seen anything like it. He could watch it forever. The toad struggled through three revolutions before it became too dark to see and Brian moved to set up on the grass. He sat and unlaced his sneakers.

"WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN?"

A voice, deep and hollow, booming up out of the ground. Brian rolled into a crouch and strained to see which way he should take off.

"DON'T YOU PLAY GAMES WITH ME, YOUNG LADY."

Oh shit, thought Brian. It's taking hold. Taking hold with a vengeance.

"DERRY? IS THAT YOU? WHO IS THAT?"

A bank of light flicked on at ground level to his rear, soft blue lights like they used for outdoor Nativity scenes. Brian whirled to face them but could see nothing beyond.

"SPEAK TO THE LIGHT."

"What do you want me to say?" He felt a little ridiculous, talking alone in the middle of nowhere. "Listen, I'll leave if I'm trespassing or something."

"WHAT DO YOU WANT?"

"Nothing." He began to back off the grass, kicking his duffel bag behind him. "I don't want a thing."

"FREEZEI"

Brian froze.

"COME TO THE LIGHT."

Things were getting a little too Biblical for his comfort. There was no mistaking the authority behind the Voice, it meant business. He slowly approached the bank of blue lighting.

"WHAT IS YOUR NAME?"

"Brian McNeil."

"SPEAK DOWN."

"What?"

"SPEAK DOWN. INTO THE LIGHT."

"Brian McNeil."

"DO I KNOW YOU?"

"Jesus, I hope not." He could feel vibrations through his feet when the Voice spoke.

"WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE?"

"I was hitchhiking. This looked like a good flat place to sleep out. I'll go somewhere else. I'm sorry, whoever you are."

It was silent for a while and Brian heard a faint crackling, like static. Bugs had discovered the lighting and were swarming around him.

"DO YOU LIKE CHINESE FOOD?'

Oh yes, it had taken hold all right. Brian had talked with more than a few acid dabblers and none had mentioned sound-and-light Christmas spectaculars. "Sure," he said, "but I haven't had any in a while."

"TAKE TWO STEPS FORWARD."

He stepped.

"NOW ONE TO THE LEFT."

Do the Hokey-Pokey, he thought. What is this?

"SEE THE ROPE"

A short length of rope seemed to grow out of the ground.

`PULL IT."

Brian yanked and a yard-square flap of turf came up, the covering to a manhole shaft. A string of blue Christmas-tree bulbs lit the way down a bolted ladder. Brian couldn't see bottom.

to PULL THE LID BACK SHUT WHEN YOU COME DOWN," said the Voice, "AND TRY NOT TO LET ALL THE BUGS IN."

Brian considered a moment until the same feeling he'd had often on the road before swept him, the oh-well-what-the-hell feeling of being too tired and too bummed out to resist much of anything. He tied his laces and started down, thunking the cover over his head.

He heard metal sliding and a little more light filtered up the shaft. Several rungs down he saw that an airlock had opened and the hole widened into a small cement-walled room. There was nothing in the room but a steel vault-door beyond which Brian could hear an electrical cricketing. A bolt shot and the door pushed open. A hand clamped around Brian's arm.

"C'moan in."

The hand and the Voice's lack of volume startled him.

"Don't be skittish, I don't bite. I retreat."

' What?"

"Name's Ira Treat." Brian was pulled inside by a short man who looked to be around fifty. The man held his nose up in the air like a dog searching for a scent on the wind. He aimed his head at Brian when he spoke but it was clear that he couldn't see. "Welcome to the safest residential structure in the entire U.S. of A."

Everything inside seemed to be of shiny, metal. Banks of fluorescent lights buzzed overhead and Brian had to shield his eyes.

"It's a bomb shelter?"

"It's my home, son. Where you headed?"

"California."

"Got people there?"

"Nope."

"You might want to reconsider. The Baja isn't so bad, and up toward Oregon, but the rest you're a sitting duck. They got that Vandenburg A.F.B. there and Fort Ord and the Presidio. Nope, California will go in the opening rounds. You hungry?"

Treat's eyeballs were barely visible under thick folds of flesh, as if they had burrowed deep to avoid the light. He wrinkled his nose when he spoke.

"A little," said Brian.

"Well you come right in and make yourself comfortable. This here is about as cozy as you're ever likely to get." He cocked an ear to the beeping and whining of the instruments farther into the room, frowning to concentrate. Didn't see a little girl up there dawdlin around the road, did you? My Derry is sposed to be back about now."

"Didn't see anyone."

"Choir practice or some such. Girl has got one sort of nonsense or the other keepin her at school all hours just about every night of the week. Sits down to dinner, grunts hello and she's off to bed. I just wave to her in passing. You go to school?"

"I used to."

"Drifter, huh? Sound pretty young, what are you, seventeen, eighteen? Good age to be a drifter, long as you stay clear of the primary strike areas."

Brian smiled at the word. "Drifter" was something they used to say on Gunsmoke on TV.

"You'll be staying for the night then. Gonna get cold."

"Oh. Uh, I left my bag and all up there. And if it's — "

"No trouble, no trouble. Not gonna rain, just get cold. Your bags are fine. C'moan, have a seat."

The room was a long tube, everything built in flush to the wall. All of it was gleaming metal, coppers and silvers and bronzes and golds, one entire wall of chrome-knobbed drawers opposite a wall of dials and instruments. Each instrument gave off its own steady sound reading. There was an electric-blue carpet and tubular frame furniture, each piece bolted to the floor. Treat sat Brian down on one of the couches.

"Looks like the inside of an atomic sub or something."

Treat snorted happily. "This isn't just any hole in the ground filled with gadgets," he said. "Oh no. This is part of me." He waved his arms to include the whole room. "Electronics, sonar, radar, all that technology is only an extension of the man who controls them. Shelter is what marks and protects the extremities of your body."

He waved at the wall of instruments. "My ears are twenty miles long. My temperature is fifty-eight degrees and falling exterior, a steady seventy-five interior. My skull can withstand a direct hit from any prenuclear warhead. My lungs can filter the bulkiest industrial waste or the tiniest subatomic particle. My stomach holds twenty years' supply of food and water. My excretions are solid cubes suitable for landfill or road construction. My skin will hold up against fire and ice. All I have to do is stay inside it. Chicken chow mein sound all right?"

"Fine."

Treat crossed to a panel of switches. He counted over and down and flicked one.

"At the sound of the tone," said a woman's voice, "the time will be eight twenty-seven — and ten seconds BOOP! At the sound of — "

He flicked it off. "Girl should be here any minute now. They got an activities bus drops them home. Might's well put the beans on."

Brian was having problems with the fluorescent lights. He seemed to be able to see the suspended gas molecules, to see the stream of electrons bolting through. He knew it was too small and too fast but he saw it just the same. He didn't even want to think about the dots on the carpet.

"At one time," said Treat, making his way to the wall of pullouts and appliances, "this area was lowest priority in the whole shootin match. All you had to worry about was the fallout and wind drift and all the secondary effects. So I sunk my money into a farm and built me a little civil-defense root cellar like the other folks around here had. The eyes were just beginning to dim a bit, doctors hadn't put the final word on them yet." He squatted and pulled out a huge drawer from the wall. Like a drawer in a morgue, filled with canned goods in compartments. Treat counted back and over, lifted one can, up and over and lifted another. He pushed the drawer shut with his foot.

"Then came the ironical part. The fellas in charge of dispersal at the Defense Department looked at a map and saw the same thing I did. Nothing here the other side would be interested in. So they laid in a slew of missile silos three miles down the road. Biological-testing station, it says on the fence, but I talked with some of the truckers bringing material in and it's nothing of the sort. Figured wherever I moved it'd be the same story, some damn thing drawing fire, so I made my stand here. Dug in."

The electric can-opener and stove were recessed into the wall, the empty cans went down a chute.

"Took three years to build and by the time they got around to the inside work my eyes were pert near gone, so I provided for it in the design. Everything fixed in its place. Not bad, huh? Made my bundle in aerospace after the War, circuitry design. Before all the federal money dried up. They'll be sorry though, the other side starts taking potshots from outer space and they'll wish they stayed behind the Program. Shortsighted sonsabitches." Treat groped in a utensil drawer for a spatula.

"Can I help with anything?" Brian wanted something to keep his mind off the dots. The mottles on the carpet were fluttering around like a cloud of moths.

"You just sit tight, young fella. Got everything I need at my fingertips." He pushed a pot against a lever and water streamed down to fill it. He laid it on a burner to boil.

"Talk to the people down to the school, up to town, you hear them laugh about the Mad Mole. That's what they've hung on me, 'the Mad Mole.' But when she finally hits the fan, and she's gonna one of these days, you'll see them swarming up top like locusts. Let us in, Mr. Treat, they'll say, save us. Save us. And I'll just flip on the loudspeaker and laugh my head off. You heard the story bout the grasshopper and the ant?"

"I think so. Yeah, the grasshopper never plans ahead or something."

"Right. Well I'm the ant." He opened a smaller drawer and pulled out a box of powdered milk. "I worked my tail off and I saved and I saved and I bought a hunk of security for myself and my little girl. Long as an ant stays in his network in the ground he's all set, can't be touched. I worry about the daughter when she's outside all day."

"They probably got drills and all," said Brian. "You know, civil defense." It seemed very important to act straight with Treat, to make a good impression. The weirder the old man got the more important it seemed.

Treat snorted and palmed the excess from the top of a cup of powdered milk.

"We used to have to face the wall and put our heads between our legs," said Brian, "close our eyes and cover our ears." He wanted to do it right then and there. His legs felt like they were tubular steel, bolted to the floor. He didn't dare try to lift a foot for fear he wouldn't be able to. "When I was little, first grade or so. A teacher would come by and tap us when it was through. They tried ringing the bell but some of the kids held their ears too tight to hear."

Treat shook his head. "That's all fine and dandy if you're far enough away from the contact point and if you're warned way in advance. See, first you've got your fireball flash, blinding light. Three seconds later is your primary heat flash, a little temperature rise and if you're lucky it won't fry you or burn up all your oxygen. Then comes a shock wave tearing buildings down and then is your radiation heat flash. You survive everything else and that radiation will still get you in a couple of hard weeks if you're not far enough from the blast. Don't tell me about drills, young fella. When she's out there at school it's like she's being held for ransom and every new morning there's another kidnapping. Don't tell me about drills."

Brian was silent. He touched things. He was really there.

Treat was stirring the milk powder into a pitcher of water. He held his hand steady and his face composed, it was clear he hadn't been born blind. "You drink milk?"

"Not much. Sometimes."

"Real milk?"

"Yeah, I guess so. You know, homogenized."

"Ever hear of strontium go?"

"Yeah. It was on a chemistry test."

"Got to be careful what you let into your body, son, what your let into your shelter. The enemy within is as dangerous as the fire from the sky."

"Yuh." The guy was a certified whacko. Brian noticed a full-length poster on a door at the end of the room. An adolescent rock star in a white leather jumpsuit.

"You're a pretty quiet young fella, aren't you? Got a lot on your mind I suppose."

"Yuh," said Brian. It felt now like blood was running from his left leg into pipes under the floor, through a complicated filter system and then pumped back up into his right leg. "I suppose."

"You kids, you don't talk so much, but you're deep thinkers. Maybe that's good, but it's hard to be around when you depend on your hearing. My little girl, my Derry, she's another deep thinker. Can't get two sentences out of her. But the gears are always turning in that head of hers, I can tell."

Treat perked his nose up as there was a short, deep note from the instrument panel.

"Must be her now."

There was another note, slightly higher.

"It's all done with pressure plates," he said. "You step in my periphery up there and I get a tone. The warmer you get, the closer to the trapdoor, the higher the tone gets."

The panel was working up toward a high C. Treat flipped a switch, went to the vault door and wrestled it open.

"C'moan in, honey, we got company."

The girl was a half-foot shorter than her father. She was small but not so young.

"Derry, this here is uh — Brian? Brian. Young fella this is my little girl."

She stepped into the room, wiggling her arm free of her father's grip and squinting against the bright. "Hey."

Hey.

She was cute, maybe ninth-grade age, and wore a lot of makeup. Deep purple over her eyes, heavy on the liner.

"Choir practice get out late?"

"Yuh," she said and gave Brian an impy grin.

"Have a pretty good day in school?"

"Okay."

"Have any tests?"

"Nope."

"You have much homework?"

"Nope."

"You hungry?"

She peeked over to what was heating on the stove. "A little."

"Brian here is a drifter. He's headed for California."

"Oh."

"Well why don't you wash up for dinner, honey, and we'll get this show on the road."

"Sure."

"These kids," he said to Brian as she sauntered past him with a little smirk, "they don't talk. Deep thinkers, the lot of them, worriers and planners. You got to make allowances for it, hold up both ends of a conversation, pull teeth. And Derry," he shouted across the room, "how's about you clean that bedroom of yours a bit? Almost fell and broke my skull in there today, all them damn stuffed animals lyin around. You hear me?"

The deep thinker turned at her door and gave her father the finger.

Derry changed into gym shorts and a sleeveless T-shirt for dinner. There were wells in the table where the plates and glasses fit. Treat managed to dole out the chow mein and Minute Rice with a minimum of groping. He hooked his thumb over the lip of each glass as he poured the waterylooking milk and when the level reached it he stopped. He squeezed into his bolted seat, bowed his head and folded his hands for grace.

Brian copied the motion but averted his eyes from his plate. He couldn't handle it. Every grain of rice was a separate entity, he felt an urge to count them. Derry ignored her father and scooped Bosco into her milk.

"For the food on our table," he said, "and the roof over our head, we thank Thee, Lord."

Brian was very hungry but the food wouldn't stay quiet. The rice squeaked on his teeth like rubber boots over hardpacked snow, the water chestnuts were like splitting rails and the bamboo slivers were deafening. The food wouldn't stay quiet and wouldn't stay still and Derry's foot kept nudging his. Her legs weren't that long, it had to be intentional.

"They picked the Marines cause the Marines always had to go first, always got chewed up liberating the beachfront. Didn't tell us much, that's their way, let you rumor yourself so scared that the real thing isn't so bad when you finally come up against it. Hell, all we knew was what we'd heard the Haberdasher say on the radio, wasn't nobody knew the first thing about hydrogen bombs or what effect radiation would have on folks. Not even the scientists were so sure. Half the guys expected the islands to be run over with atomic Jap monsters, things with X-ray eyes that would glow in the dark. They gave us a hurry-up lesson in how to use the special equipment right there on the ship, kept warning us whatever you do, don't get contaminated. S'what they said, 'contaminated.' Same word the chaplains always used in their VD lectures.

"So the orders get passed down and they say Nagasaki, on Kyushu island, and-be prepared for anything. Surrender was official already but who expects some Nip has just been Hbombed to listen to the news?"

A hunk of chicken plopped off Treat's fork and he bit down on bare metal. Derry giggled. A bean sprout whimpered as it slid down Brian's throat. Derry's foot brushed his ankle. He could feel her toes grasping to hold his pants-leg.

"It wasn't anything out of the usual," said Treat, "not at first. A big river valley and a port that had been bombed. A lot of the damage to the buildings was from conventional attacks before. Wasn't much left at the bottom of the valley, but as you rose up the sides vegetation went from black to brown to yellow to green. The burns on people were in that pattern too, mostly on one side of the body, darker and deeper the further down into the valley you went. Of course, the worst weren't even there to be seen. Pretty much vaporized, maybe their shadow burnt into the side of a building. Remember this one woman, she had been nursing her baby when the blast came. About halfway up the valley wall she was. One of her breasts was tanned a deep dark brown, the other white from where her baby's head soaked up most of the radiation."

Brian gagged on his milk and got some up his nose. Derry handed him the Bosco. Treat worked on his plate in a counterclockwise direction, tapping it lightly with fork tip to be sure he missed nothing.

"It was the weeks after, when we were administrating the island and classifying the doomed that it got rough. People's hair fell out. Women's — that long, black, beautiful hair pulled out by the handful, you'd see little girls like Derry here, barely high-school age, all bald and scabby-headed. Kids' teeth crumbled like candy. Men grew breasts. People died of nosebleeds that wouldn't stop. People just starting to feel the poisoning would sit in the hospital waiting and see all the stages they were headed for sitting around them, meet relatives who they couldn't recognize but by voice. A lot of them blinded in the first flash got their sight back and wished they hadn't. Quite a few recovered and never let on, preferred to grope and bump and cry in the dark though there was nothing physically wrong with their eyes. Who knows, maybe they didn't see. And then the babies that were born — God. It was like Nature decided to review all the false starts and bad experiments she made on her way to evolving man. Things without arms, things without legs, two-headed things, legs or arms without anything else. One woman delivered up this big ball of teeth fused together, looked like a sea urchin. The ones who got vaporized, they were the lucky ones, them and the blind ones who didn't have to see it."

Treat almost tipped his glass putting it back into its tablewell. He had a clot of rice on his neck. "You want to get the dessert, Derry?"

"Mnph.

"I feh I wuh." Chicken juice dribbled down her chin and she had to snake it with her tongue.

"You go get it and try waiting till you're done chewing before you speak. There's things you can get away with in front of me that you can't do in front of company."

She stuck her little red tongue out in front of both of them and went to the refrigerator.

"It's a chore raising her myself," whispered Treat to Brian. "Trying to keep her safe, teach her the right way. The wife passed on in 'sixty-four, Derry was only two. That's her on the door down there, back when we lived in Houston. I gave Derry a picture to send and have it blown up, so's she'd remember what her mother looked like."

Derry returned with three plastic tubs of Whip and Chill pudding and some spoons and she blushed a little. Treat was pointing to the poster of the rock singer.

"I took that when we put the down payment on our first house. My first big NASA check signed right over to the realtors. But she was in seventh heaven."

Brian managed to say that she was a nice-looking woman.

"That was before the cancer got her. Thing called chronic granulocytic leukemia caught hold of her and wore her down for two hard years before she give up the ghost. Course it's a thin line between what was caused by the cancer and what was caused by the radiation therapy, but for the person in pain it don't matter which is the culprit. She was sick to her stomach every morning, upchucked two meals out of three, didn't have a spark of energy."

Derry vacantly spooned pudding into her mouth. Treat's voice had taken on a detached tone, like a senile parish priest reciting the financial report.

"Cancer," he said, "is when cells begin to divide out of control. In my wife's case it was too many white corpuscles being produced in her blood. It spreads, cancer does, with out-of-control cells affecting the neighboring cells and making them go crazy too.

"Nuclear fission is cancer on the level of the atom. Unstable elements are bombarded by free neutrons that cause the atoms to split into smaller atoms. The bonding energy of the original atom is released along with more free neutrons that make neighboring heavy atoms go crazy in a chain reaction. Out of control. So more energy is released. Seismic energy and heat energy and nuclear radiation. Buildings falling and fires and radiation sickness."

Derry sighed and closed her eyes.

"They gave her X-ray treatments. We can control it, they said, it kills off white corpuscles. She'd eat a sandwich and her gums would stain the bread pink. They took her female business out. There were hairs grew on her chest.

"We can control it, they say, we've harnessed the Dragon. Keep things.even with the other side and nobody will dare make the first move. Or if they do it'll be a limited war. Limited.

"We've got the cancer under control, they told me, and then her bone marrow went wrong from all the X-ray exposure and they tried to draw it all out and replace it but her heart just quit. Had to keep it under control, they told me, it was her only hope."

Ira Treat laid his fork down on an empty plate.

Brian didn't know what he was expected to say. He had his own problems. His attention was drifting, not so much on to other subjects as out into the room in a very physical way. It was as if his mind were matter and that matter was diffusing into the air like some trace element, some gas. He was losing his bonding energy. He squeezed his head with his hands to push it all back in but the effect was a distant pressure, as if a light truck had driven over the shelter on the land's surface. Brian was grateful for the lead lining, the steel-reinforced concrete that surrounded him, that kept him from mingling with soil and sky.

Derry asked could she finish his Whip and Chill if he wasn't interested.

They sat in the living-room section of the main chamber. The fewer walls there were, the easier for Treat to keep an ear on his instruments. Derry rinsed what dishes there were and put them in the washer, then sprawled on a couch across from them to read a fan magazine while her father talked. Brian took to reciting Hail Marys and Our Fathers to try to keep an anchor on his mind.

"Do you know what 'BM' stands for?"

"Huh?"

"Ballistic missile. A big bullet. Didn't have such things till the very end of the Big One, when Germany got their V-i's and V-2's mailing out. We had bombers. Fat Man and Little Boy were delivered by manned crews, Nips had had a few Zeros in the right place and it would have been a different story on Hiroshima. But it wasn't long before both the Reds and us had BM's and push-button war was upon us. We had the real goods in the payload department to ourselves for a couple years, but Mrs. Rosenberg helped bring a speedy end to that situation."

Brian had only a vague idea of what the man was talking about. It all made him think of mushrooms. Mushrooms were the last thing he wanted to think about.

"Now, a ballistic missile is a quick draw, greased lightning compared to one of the old B-52's or the Tupelev-2o Bears the other side had. And there's no pilot error, a BM is a mechanical kamikaze. But in the early fifties it ran on liquid fuel that had to be mixed just before firing, it had to be launched from the surface. What we in the trade call a soft zone. Made folks think their own hardware could be totaled by a strike and they wouldn't get a shot off. So it was itchytrigger-finger days, days of the Golfer and Dulles and brinksmanship. Everyone obsessed with getting their rockets into the air first, thought that would decide the whole ball game."

Liz & Diclat blared the cover of Derry's magazine. Sonny & Cher & Jackie & Burt & Dean & Frank & Elvis & Lucy & Liza & The Lennon Sisters. Derry lay on her stomach and slowly kicked her feet to the time of her loud gum-chewing. She munched and sucked and smacked and smiled over to Brian every now and then.

Our Father who art in Heaven, thought Brian, hallowed be Thy name -

"Then the boys in the lab come up with solid fuel. So all those missiles could be hardened, dug down into silos or onto submarines. Our Minuteman silos can take, oh, three hundred-pounds-per-square-inch overpressure. This place can handle four hundred. Need an awful good shot with some heavy yield to crack that.

"Anyhow, the name of the game turned into something called 'assured destruction.' Say they launch a first strike against our missile sites, a counterforce strike. Assured destruction means we still have enough throw power and warheads left to inflict what they call 'unacceptable damage.' Now this is with both sides playing by the rules — no spasm war, where its countervalue strikes against cities instead of missiles. We can control it, they say, like always."

… blessed art Thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of Thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary…

"Well, all this boiled down to the theory of mutual vulnerability. Neither group would fire first cause it was a sure thing both would be wiped out. That was supposed to be a comfort. Course it isn't the rocket boys down in their mountain bunkers who are mutually vulnerable, no, it's you and me and Ivan Doe over there on the other side. We're mutually vulnerable as you can get. Was about then, under the Harvard Man, that I planned this place."

There was a hole in the seat of Derry's too-tight gym shorts; a round, pink berry of flesh peeped through. Brian had started to smile back at her through the pu#plish fog that had come up in front of him. She would sigh and roll her eyes when her father started up again and Brian would answer with what he thought was a mildly sympathetic smile. He couldn't feel exactly what it was doing on his face though, it tended to get away from him.

"Nowadays things aren't so simple. You've got your antiballistic-missile system and your multiple warheads and better homing systems and you got computers speeding the whole thing up. There's still some conventional stuff, though. Our B-52's and F-i i i's shoot a missile called a Hounddog and the other side still has Bears and Mya Bisons that fire something called a Kangaroo and the yellow-peril folks there have even got a thing to deliver, an old TU-16 Badger, and the whole menagerie is there waiting to come down like a rain of toads."

Treat was up and pacing now, talking faster than ever, building for some kind of climax. The words were making less sense than ever to Brian; it sounded like a sin-blasting Bible sermon in some foreign but familiar language.

"Don't matter what delivers it, you set off your standard twenty-megaton payload and millions of people are going to feel it. That's a thousand times the force of the Fat Man we hit the Japs with. These days you got your thermonuclear reaction, fission-fusion-fission, where the fission generates the heat to set off the hydrogen isotope and deuterium fuses to form helium and enough destructive energy to parboil the state of Nebraska."

The fog was thicker now, it seemed to be falling down from the fluorescent lights, falling like snow in a paperweight. Treat was hoarse, his movements jerky. He was totally mind-fucked, thought Brian, but he seemed to know his stuff.

"And it's not just the two of us anymore. Britain and France, they got it and the yellow-peril folks are making great leaps forward. And the lab boys come up with a synthetic, plutonium. P-239, cheaper to make than U-235 and just about as effective. So we got the nuclear equivalent of the Saturday-night special and before you know it any youngpunk nation looking to build a reputation will have their own bomb. It spreads, it excites the neighboring cells and you can't control it. And us mere people are left out in the rain. People aren't but a fart in a fire storm to them. They'll jacket a warhead with U-238 or cobalt to make it extra dirty, to really set those gamma rays whizzing. They've done studies on how long it would take the country to recover to a certain level after a full-scale war. They've decided what acceptable damage is and I don't accept it."

Treat slumped into a chair.

"The hell with them all."

Derry gathered her magazines and left the room. Brian switched to the Act of Contrition. The fog cleared a bit and he heard the instrument panel plainly again. Treat's head lolled back a little as if he were resting, breathing widemouthed like a fighter between rounds. He was very pale, his hair a thin white. The Mad Mole.

And I detest all my sins, thought Brian, because of the loss of Heaven and the pain of Hell. But most of all

Derry scuffed back into the room. She was in a pink short nightgown and fuzzy slippers that had bunny faces on the toes and cottontails at the heel. She was trying hard to stick out what she had to stick. She looked like a sexy Easter duckling wiggling her tufted butt and breasts. She bounced over and plopped in her father's lap, never taking her eyes off Brian. It was like a toddler showing off a new lollipop, proud and possessive and more than a little taunting. Look what I've got and don't you wish you could get some? Treat kissed the top of her head.

"Night honey. Mr. McNeil is going to be out here on the couch so don't be too noisy in the morning. Gimme kiss."

She rolled her eyes and held her nose and gave him a peck on the cheek. Brian wanted to swat her.

"Night Daddy."

The girl hopped off her father's lap and tiptoed to Brian and kissed him. It was more like a meal than a kiss and he fought to keep his tongue rooted. She skipped away before he could react with much more than a gasp for air. Derry disappeared into her bedroom.

"The light of my life, that one," said Treat. "Worth her weight in gold."

He went on for a bit, running down like a tired phonograph, about the difficulty of judging superiority in the arms race, the relative merits of the Sentinel and Safeguard defense systems, the fallacy of deterrence. He tired and Brian drifted. Finally he pulled the couch out into a bed and showed Brian where the bathroom was.

"Have a safe night," he said, and retired to his room.

A loud fan clicked on with the bathroom light, a highpitched hummer. The toilet bowl looked funny. Brian sat and saw directions pasted on the wall across from him. Close lid, pull lever and waste material will be thermally disposed. The other writing was even stranger. It was on the toilet paper, roughly three letters per sheet in red Magic Marker. See you tonight, it said, Derry. The message and Brian's waste material went out in a thermal hiss.

The pullout bed was comfortable enough but sleep was out of the question. There was the instrument panel noise to contend with, thoughts of what Derry was up to and a new wave of cellular dissipation. Brian remembered from his few real high-school drunks what a tricky business lying down was, that the ceiling tended to revolve in one direction and his stomach in another. But the concepts of stomach and ceiling weren't so definite, the action now wasn't revolution or rotation but Brownian movement. His molecules scattered softly outward till they met dense lead-and-steel molecules that bounced them back in. Sound was included in the deal now, the bleeping and whirrings of the instruments were solid particles pinging in the air-mix with him. Welcome to the oneness of being, thought Brian, and rolled on his front to try and hold some of himself in.

This went on for quite a while. He had a sense of being the room and everything in it. Not a good feeling. It occurred to him that maybe his thermally disposed wastes were vapor now and had dispersed to remingle with him. He felt himself, the room, tilt very slightly. He smelled, no, collided with odor molecules, of grape bubble gum. Derry was sitting on the edge of the bed.

Twice in the same day. Seventeen years of drought and then twice in the same day.

This time when his hair was brushed he turned and opened his eyes. She was a little brat. She was probably underage. But he felt a pressure to respond, felt it like the holiest Commandment. Thou shalt not turn it down. He tried to collect himself, to think himself hard, and wondered why it hadn't already happened. Compared to Mary Beth Derry was sex itself and yet he wasn't tingling down there. He tried to think dirty thoughts. He had to keep the Commandment, he couldn't waste another one.

Derry stuck her gum on the couch and began to nibble at his neck, she slid her warm, chubby hand slowly down his chest, across his belly and stroked the underside of his balls and all the wandering molecules of his consciousness came charging back like the Seventh Cavalry to an Indian massacre. She was re-forming all his boundaries with her mouth and fingers, showing him his edges.

"Urn," she said, and "Nnnnhl" and all kinds of little skinsucking noises. Derry made love like she ate dinner, fast and loud. She knew what she was doing, sort of, and did it with almost frantic enthusiasm. Her nightie was off and she slid under Brian's spread blankets and emerged squirming on top of him. His eyes had adjusted some to the dark now and he saw how brown her nipples were pointing out from her single-scoop breasts, chocolate-kiss nipples swollen hard in his palms and lips. Her tongue darted over him and he smelled the saccharine grape wherever it had been. She locked her legs around his thigh like a vise and humped and squirmed till it was slick with her wetness. Then she was down flattonguing the head of him, slow, tasting licks. All the molecules galloped to where the action was and it felt hard as steel, dense as lead and she bit it at the middle, gentle with her teeth. She was up and spraddled and aiming it, holding it with two hands, rubbing the head against her greased lips making excited little-girl sounds and he wanted to ask her to keep it a little quiet but she plunged down around him hot and tight, tight as white on rice and she bounced, bounced like a kid testing her new summer-camp mattress for spring and the bed crunched and Brian clutched at her little buns, squeezing to keep her from flying off. She was doing it by the book and it was a cheap drugstore-paperback and it came to him that she was more excited over some red-underlined passage she was imagining than about him, it came to him that she was making an awful lot of unnecessary noise and Treat might hear. But all that was a little distant. What was immediate was that the molecules in his cock were getting awfully crowded, more and more of them, denser and denser and fast neutrons were beginning to act up and he was approaching his critical mass which was scary and exciting at once, Derry bouncing, bouncing, smacking damp against his belly and thighs and if it blew now he didn't think it would ever stop, just keep coming and coming till he and Derry were a cloud of charged zygotes drifting in the atmosphere and it was pulling on him now, making wet-munching sounds and Derry was making a high giggle and Treat was bellowing.

"Derry!" he was bellowing, "Stay still Derry, I'll come and help you!"

Help her what? Derry lurched off and was away from the bed, still giggling hysterically. Brian rolled out on the floor onto his hands and knees. He strained to see through the dark. He heard rustling from the kitchen area and then saw Treat, saw him coming crouched and wary with a big iron skillet in his hand.

"Derry! You get clear of him Derry. I'll fix him."

"It wasn't me, Daddy," she sniffled from the door to the bathroom, "honest. It wasn't me."

"You go to your room, Derry. I'll take care of this."

Brian tried to crawl silently but his thighs made sticky sounds as they brushed, coated with Derry's goo. Treat made a rush and swung but slipped in mid-stroke on a bunny slipper and went down on his side. Brian leapfrogged the bed and grabbed his pants and sneakers. Treat growled and scrambled back into the darkness to block the vault door.

"Just you try, boy," he snarled, "just you try to get by me."

Brian felt something clinging at the back of his head. It was Derry's gum, tangled in his hair. He slipped quickly into his pants and heard Treat take a few steps forward in, the long tube of darkness. He found the other bunny slipper with his foot and tossed it off to the left. Treat made a move, then stopped.

"Can't fool me, boy. I hear you breathe. I hear your heart beat. There's no way you can hide, I hear everything."

Brian felt no desire to explain. It was beyond explaining, out of control. He tied his sneakers together and looped them over his shoulder. He eased sideways on tiptoe, reached the storage wall and began to yank the morgue drawers out, tossing handfuls of canned goods onto the floor between him and the father. Treat came forward a bit and Brian scooted to the other wall, groped to turn on the water and the can opener and the solid-waste compacter and the electric blender, and trotted back to the bed. He could see Treat dimly now. The old man had his nose up in the air and his arms spread wide, listening for all he was worth and slowly backing out of sight to the vault door again.

"I'll wait you out, boyl" he shouted over the sound of the appliances. "I can wait a day or a week if I have to, but you better give up the idea of ever seeing sky again. You walked into your own grave, boy, and there won't be no rising again."

Brian picked up the blankets and spread them in his arms. If he could net Treat and wrap him he'd have a shot at that door. He heard Derry come out behind him and stand by the instrument panel. He crept forward with the blankets held ready, probing with his toes for food cans. He could hear Treat nervously tapping the skillet on the metal door. He crept within ten feet of the exit.

"I can smell you, young fella," hissed Treat. "I'm onna kill you.,

Brian brought the blankets up high and collected his breath for his pounce and then everything cut dead. The water, the opener, the compacter, the blender, all the instruments peeping from the rear cut off stone silent and were replaced by a single high-piercing whistle. Treat's mouth popped wide open and the skillet clanged to the floor. Brian ducked and covered his head, the instinct of a hundred Hollywood war movies, but the bomb never fell. The whistle didn't deepen in pitch and Brian turned to see Derry giggling by the instrument panel, her hand on a lever and red light flashing over her face. Treat was running, falling on canned goods and smacking thigh and chest into the open morgue drawers and screaming something about spasms and the other side and the Dragon breaking loose. Brian was through the vault door and digging barefoot up the ladder with the bomb-whine chasing him, the airlock whanging shut beneath nearly chopping his legs and up, butting the trapdoor with head and shoulder to scramble to his duffel bag with the sneaker laces strangling him and Treat's voice roaring over the loudspeaker:

"YOU'LL FRY! YOU STAY UP THERE AND YOU BURN, BOY, YOU'LL LIGHT UP LIKE A MOTH IN A THOUSAND SUNS! YOU'LL BURN, BRIAN MC NEIL, YOUR EYES WILL MELT AND YOUR BRAIN WILL SIZZLE AND YOU'LL BURN IN HELL ON EARTH!"

Brian shouldered his bag and sprinted barefoot into the cold, purple night.

Breed

RIAN WOKE on the lee side of a hill with a buffalo licking his face. At first he was only aware of the tongue, sticky and thick as a baby's arm, lapping down to sample his ears and cheeks. He had laid his sleeping bag out in the dark, snuggling it at the foot of what he took to be a drift fence, to have at least some shelter from the grit-blasting Wyoming wind. If it was still Wyoming; he hadn't been awake enough during the last part of the ride to look out for signs.

As he squirmed away from whatever the big thing mopping at his face was he glimpsed through half-sleep that each of the posts in the fence was painted a different color. Cherry red, lime green, lemon yellow. He was in a carny-colored corral with a live bull bison.

No.

He tried to go back under, thinking it was only the effects of the three-day power-hitch across the country from New Jersey, all that coffee and all those miles talking with strangers. But then the rich brown smell dawned on him and he knew. He knew. He had never seen a live buffalo before but he was sure this was what they smelled like. It smelled like The West.

The buffalo retreated a few steps when Brian sat up, fixing him with swimming brown walleyes. There were bare patches worn in the wool of its flanks and hump, shiny black leather showing through. Its beard was sugared with dust and meal of some kind, and Brian could hear the flop of its tail chasing flies.

"Morning, Buffalo."

The animal snorted through its flat nose for an answer, made munching quivers with its jaw. Brian fingered matter from his eyes and peered out over the fence to where he remembered the road. There were cutout letters hung from a crossbar like the ranches he'd seen in southern Wyoming had. Brian read them backward. CODY SPRAGUE'S WILD WEST BUCKIN' BISON RIDE, it said, FOOD — GAS — SOUVENIRS. Brian didn't understand how he could have missed the sign and the flapping pennants strung from it, even in the dark. The buffalo licked its nose.

Brian pulled on his sweat-funky road clothes and packed his sleeping bag away. The buffalo had lowered its eyelids to half-mast, no longer interested. Brian stood and walked around it. A shifting cloud of tiny black flies shadowed its ass, an ass cracked and black as old inner-tube rubber. There was something not quite real about the thing, Brian felt as if stuffing or springs would pop out of the seams any moment. He eased his hands into the hump wool. Coarse and greasy, like a mat for scuffing your feet clean on. The buffalo didn't move but for the twitching of its rump skin as insects lit on it. Brian gave it a couple of gentle, open-palmed thumps on the side, feeling the solid weight like a great warm tree stump.

"Reach for the sky!"

Brian nearly jumped on the animal's back as a cold cylinder pressed the base of his neck.

"Take your mitts off my buffalo and turn around."

Brian turned himself around slowly and there was a little chicken-necked man pointing an empty Coke bottle level with his heart. "One false move and I'll fizz you to pieces." The little man cackled, showing chipped brown teeth and goosing Brian with the bottle. "Scared the piss outta you, young fella. I seen you there this morning, laid out. Didn't figure I should bother to wake you till you woke yourself, but Ishmael, he thought you was a bag a meal. He's kind of slow, Ishmael."

The buffalo swung its head around to give the man a tentative whiff, then swung back. The man was wearing a fringed buckskin jacket so stained it looked freshly ripped off the buck. He had a wrinkle-ring every other inch of his long neck, a crooked beak of a nose, and dirty white hair that shot out in little clumps. Of the three of them the buffalo seemed to have had the best sleep.

Brian introduced himself and stated his business, which was to make his way to whatever passed for a major highway out here on the lone prairie. Thumbing from East Orange to the West Coast. He had gotten a bum steer from a drunken oil-rigger the other night and was dumped out here.

"Cody Sprague," said the little man, extending his hand. "I offer my condolences and the use of my privy. Usually don't open till nine or ten," he said, "but it don't seem to make a difference either whichway."

He led Brian across the road to where there was a metal outhouse and an orange-and-black painted shack about the size of a Tastee-Freeze.

"People don't want to come," he said, "they don't want to come. Just blow by on that Interstate. That's what you'll be wantin to get to, isn't but five miles or so down the way. They finished that last stretch a couple years back and made me obsolete. That's what they want me. Obsolete."

Sprague clucked away at Brian's elbow, trotting a little to stay close as if his visitor would bolt for freedom any second. He called through the door of the little Sani-Port as Brian went in to pee and change to fresh clothes.

"You got any idee what it costs to keep a full-grown Amer ican bison in top running condition? Not just a matter of set im loose to graze, oh no, not when you've got a herd of one. Got to protect your investment, the same with any small businessman. Dropping like flies they are. That's an endangered species, the small businessman. Anyhow, you don't let him out there to graze. Don't know what he might pick up. You got five hundred head, you can afford to lose a few to poisnin, a few to varmint holes, a few to snakes and whatnot. Don't make a dent. But me, I got everything I own riding on Ishmael. He don't dine on nothin but the highest-protein feed. He's eaten up all my savings and most of the last bank loan I'm likely to get. You ever ridden a buffalo?"

"No," said Brian over the flushing inside, "I've never even been on a horse."

"Then you got a treat coming, free a charge. You'll be my icebreaker for the weekend, bring me luck. I'd offer you breakfast, but confidentially speakin, the grill over here is out of commission. They turned off my lectricity. You might of noticed the lamp in there don't work. How they expect a buffalo to keep up its health without lectricity I'll never understand. It's that kind of thinking put the species on the brink of extinction."

Brian came out with fresh clothes and his teeth fingerbrushed, and Cody Sprague hustled him back into the corral with Ishmael.

"Is there a saddle or anything? Or do I just get on?"

"Well, I got a blanket I use for the little girls with bare legs if it makes them nervous, but no, you don't need a thing. Like sitting on a rug. Just don't climb up too high on the hump is all, kind of unsteady there. Attaboy, hop aboard."

The buffalo didn't seem to mind, didn't seem to notice Brian crawling up on its back. Instead it lifted its head toward a bucket nailed to a post on the far side of the corral.

"How do I make him go?" asked Brian. There was no natural seat on a buffalo's back, he dug his fingers deep in the wool and pressed his knees to its flanks.

"That's my job, making him go, you just sit tight." Sprague scooted out of the corral, then returned with a halfempty sack of meal. He poured some in the far bucket, then clanged it with a stone. Ishmael began to move. He was in no hurry.

"Ridem cowboyl" yelled Sprague.

Brian felt some movement under him, distantly, a vague roll of muscle and bone. He tried to imagine himself as an eight-year-old kid instead of seventeen, and that helped a little. He tried to look pleased as the animal reached the bucket and buried its nose in the feed.

"This part of the ride," said Cody apologetically, "is where I usually give them my little educational spiel about the history of the buffalo and how the Indians depended on it and all. Got it from the library up to Rapid. Got to have something to keep them entertained at the halfway point while he's cleaning out that bucket. You know the Indian used every part of the beast. Meat for food, hide for clothes and blankets, bone for tools, even the waste product, dried into buffalo chips, they used that for fuel. There was a real — real affinity between the buffalo and the Plains Indian. Their souls were tied together." He looked to Brian and waited.

"He sure is big." Brian threw a little extra enthusiasm into it. "I didn't realize they were this big."

Sprague spat on the ground, sighing, then looked up to see what was left in the bucket. "Pretty sorry attraction, that's what you mean, isn't it?"

"Well, I wouldn't say — "

"I mean isn't it? If he don't eat he don't move." Cody shook his head. "The kids, well, they pick up on it right away. Least they used to before that Interstate swept them all off. What kind of ride is it where the animal stops and chows down for five minutes at a time? Got so bad he'd commence to drool every time he seen a human under twelve years of age. Feed, that's all they understand. Won't mind kindness and he won't mind cruelty but you talk straight to his belly and oh Lord will he listen. That's how they got extincted in the first place, they seen their colleagues droppin all around them but they were too involved with feeding their faces to put two and two together. They'd rather be shot and scalped than miss the next mouthful. Plain stupid is all." He gave Ishmael a thump in the side. "You'd just as soon name a rock or a lump of clay as give a title to this old pile of gristle." He squatted slightly to look the buffalo in the face. "A damn sorry attraction, aren't you? A damn sorry fleabag of an attraction."

He straightened and hefted the meal. "Might as well be stuffed, I figure. Put him on wheels. The few people I get anymore all want to snip a tuft of wool offen him for a souvenir. I had to put a stop to it, wouldn't of been a thing left. Cody Sprague's Bald Buckin' Bison."

Ishmael lifted his head and flapped his tongue in the air a couple of times.

"Got to fill the other bucket now. He expects it. Took me the longest time to figure the right distance, long enough so it's two bits' worth of ride but not so long that the thoroughbred here thinks it's not worth the hike. The kids can tell though. I never been able to fool them. They feel left out of it, feel gypped. Um, if you don't mind, would you stay on him for the rest of the ride?" Cody was hustling across the corral toward another hanging bucket, with Ishmael swinging a liquid eye after him. "He needs the exercise."

Brian sat out the slow plod across the corral and slid off when it reached the bucket. He brushed his pants and got a stick to scrape his sneakers clean of the buffalo stool he'd stepped in. The rich brown smell was losing its charm.

"You'll be going now, I suppose," said Sprague coming up behind him.

"Uh, yeah. Guess so." It was a little creepy, the multicolored corral in the middle of all that open range. "Thanks for the ride, though."

"Nothing to keep you here, Lord knows." He was forcing a smile. "S'almost nine now, business should pick up. Ought to build a fire, case anybody stops for a hot dog." He gave a weak cackle. "I could use it for part of my pitch — frankfurters cowboy style. Call em prairie dogs."

"Yuh."

"You'll be wantin that Interstate I suppose, get you out of here. Five miles or so north on the road and you'll smack right into it."

"Thanks." Brian shouldered his duffel bag. "Hope the trade improves for you."

"Oh, no worry, no worry. I'll make out. Oh, and here, take one of these." He fished an aluminum star from his pocket and presented it to Brian. "Souvenir for you and good advertising for me."

Deputy Sheriff, said the badge, Issued at Cody Sprague's Wild West Buckin' Bison Ride. There was a picture of a cowboy tossed high off the back of an angrily kicking buffalo. Brian pinned it on his shirt and Cody brightened a bit.

"Who knows," he said, "maybe today's the day. Maybe we'll get discovered by the tourist office today and be written up. You get your attraction in one of those guidebooks and you got a gold mine. Wall-to-wall customers, turn em away at the gate. I could save up an maybe afford an opposite number for Ishmael. Don't know if or what buffalo feel but I suppose everything gets lonely for its own kind, don't you?"

"I suppose."

"Say, I wasn't kidding about that fire. If you're hungry I could whip us up a late breakfast in no time. There's stock I got to use before it goes bad so it'd be on the house."

"I really got to get going. Sorry."

"Well, maybe you brought me luck. Yessir, maybe today will be the day."

Brian left him waving from the middle of the corral, buckskin fringes blowing in the quickening breeze. When he was out of sight around the bend he unpinned the aluminum star and tossed it away, it dug into his chest too much. Then the signs appeared, the backs of them first, then the messages as he passed by and looked behind. Every thousand yards there was another, starting with WHOA! HERE IT Isl and progressing to more distant warnings. When Brian got to FOR THE RIDE OF YOUR LIFE, STOP AT CODY SPRAGUE'S he couldn't hold out anymore, he dropped his bag and trotted back to where he'd chucked the star. He found it without too much trouble and put it in his back pocket.

He went through the land of blue-green sage clumps, leaning into the wind whipping over low hills, walking alone. There weren't any cars or people. More sage, more hills, more wind, but no human trace but the road beneath him like a main street of some vanished civilization. Open range, there were no fences or water tanks. He looked at his Road Atlas and guessed that he was a little ways up into South Dakota, a little below the Bear in the Lodge River with the Rosebud Indian Reservation to the east and the Pine Ridge to the north. He tried to remember who it was he'd seen in the same situation. Randolph Scott? Audie Murphy? Brian checked the sun's position to reassure himself that he was heading in the right direction. There was nothing else to tell by. A patch of hill suddenly broke free into a butternut cluster of high-rumped antelope, springing away from him. He was in The West.

He had been walking on the road for over an hour when an old Ford pickup clattered to a halt next to him. A swarthy, smooth-faced man wearing a green John Deere cap stuck his head out.

"Who you workin for?" he called.

"Huh?"

"Who you workin for? Whose place you headed?"

"I'm not working for anybody," said Brian. "I'm trying to hitch west."

"Oh. I thought you were a hand. S'gonna give you a ride over to whatever outfit you're headed for."

Brian tried not to look too pleased. Thought he was a hand. "No, I'm just hitching. I was walking up to the Interstate."

"You got a hell of a walk. That's twenty miles up."

"But the guy said it was only five."

"What guy?"

"The old guy back there. He's got a buffalo."

"Sprague? You can't listen to him, son. A nice fella, but he's a little bit touched. Got a sign up on go, says it's only five miles to his place. Figured nobody's gonna bother, they know the real story, and he's right. Guess he's started to believe his own publicity." -

"Oh."

"But you hop in anyway. I'm goin up that area in a while." Brian tossed his duffel bag in the back and got in with the man. "J.C. Shangreau," he said, offering his hand. "I'll get you north surer than most anything else you're likely to catch on this road. If you don't mind a few side trips."

Brian had to kick a shotgun wrapped in burlap under the seat to make room for his legs. "Don't mind at all."

"Got to pick up some hands to help me work my horses." Shangreau had quite a few gold teeth in his mouth and very bloodshot eyes. "Got me a couple sections up there, I run seventy-five head. Gonna have ourselves a cuttin bee if I can roust out enough of these boys."

They turned off left on one of the access roads and began to pass clusters of small trailer houses propped on cinder block. Shangreau stopped at one, went to the door and talked a bit, then came back alone.

"Hasn't recovered from last night yet. Can't say as I have either. There was nothin to celebrate, cept it being another Friday, but I did a job of it. You know when your teeth feel rubbery in the morning?"

Brian wasn't used to adults asking him hangover questions. "Yeah."

"That's the kind of bag I got on. Rubber-toothed."

He stopped at another trailer with no luck. This one hadn't come home overnight.

"Hope he's feelin good now, cause there's an ambush waitin at home for him. I had a big one like that in the kitchen I'd think twice about carryin on. She'll just squeeze all the good time right out of that man."

"Many of these people around here Indian?" Brian asked it noncommittally, fishing. The drill-rigger the night before had gone on and on about how the Indians and the coyotes should have been wiped out long ago.

"Oh sure," said Shangreau, "most of em. Not many purebred though, things being what they are. Most of these boys I'm after is at least half or more Indian. You got your Ogalala around here, your Hunkpapa and the rest. I'm a good quarter Sioux myself. Old Jim Crow who we're headin after now is maybe seven-eighths, fifteen-sixteenths, something like that. It's hard to keep count. Jim has got three or four tribes to start with, his mother was part Flathead as I recall, and then he's got white and I wouldn't be surprised if one of them buffalo soldiers didn't slip in a little black blood way back when. But you won't see too many purebred, less we catch Bad Heart at home, and he's another story altogether. What are you?"

"Irish."

"Me too, a good quarter. Monaghans."

They came to a pair of trailer houses that had been butted up together. A dozen fat little children wearing glasses ran barefoot out front. An older fat boy with extrathick glasses and a silver-sprayed cowboy hat chased them, tossing a lasso at their legs. Brian got out of the pickup with Shangreau and a round, sad-looking man met them at the door to the first trailer.

"I see you're bright-eyed an bushy-tailed as everone else is this mornin," said J.C. "Them horses don't have much competition today, it looks like. Jim Crow, this here's Brian."

"Hey."

Jim Crow nodded. He was wearing nothing but flannel pajama bottoms and his belly hung over. His slant eyes and mournful expression made him kind of Mongoloid-looking.

"You know anyone else could join us? Couple of my possibilities crapped out on me."

"My brother-law's here from over the Rosebud. Sam. I'll ask him. And Raymond could come along. Raymond!"

The boy in the silver cowboy hat turned from where he had just cut a little sister out from the herd.

"You're coming along with us to work J.C.'s horses. Go tell your ma."

Raymond left the little sister to untie herself and ran off looking happy.

Sam was a little older and a little heavier than Jim Crow and had blue eyes. Brian sat in front between J.C. and Crow while Raymond and Sam were open in the back. Raymond's hat blew off almost immediately and they had to stop for him to run get it. His father told him to sit on it till they got to J.C.'s.

They stopped next at a lone trailer still on its wheels to pick up a young man called Jackson Blackroot. All the men got out and went to the door to try and catch a glimpse of Blackroot's new wife, who was supposed to be a looker. She obliged by coming out to say Hello boys and offer to make coffee. They turned it down, suddenly shy. She was dark and thin and reasonably pretty though Brian didn't see anything outstanding. Jackson was a friendly young guy with a big white smile who looked like an Italian. He shook Brian's hand and said he was pleased to meet him.

Bad Heart's trailer was alone too, a little box of a thing sitting on a hill. J.C. stopped out front and honked once.

"Be surprised if he's there," whispered Crow.

"If he is I be surprised if he shows himself."

They waited for a few minutes with the motor running and Shangreau had the pickup in gear when a short, pockscarred man emerged from the trailer and hopped in the rear without a greeting.

It was a long bumpy way up to Shangreau's ranch and he did most of what little talking went on. The other men seemed to know each other and about each other but weren't particularly comfortable riding together.

"Brian," asked J.C., "you in any big hurry to get up there?"

Brian shrugged.

"I mean if you're not you might's well stop for lunch with us, look on when we work the horses. Hell, you can join the party if you're careful, can always use an extra hand when we're cutting."

"Sure." Brian was willing to follow just about anything at this point if there was food in it. He hadn't eaten since yesterday morning. He wondered exactly what cutting was going to be.

The J.C. Ranch wasn't much. A side-listing barn surrounded by a wood-and-wire corral and a medium-sized unpainted shack in a couple of thousand acres of dry-looking open range. The shack squatted on a wood platform, there was a gas tank and a hot water heater on the front porch. J.C. explained that this was the working house, they had another aluminum-sided place farther west on the property. There were wide cracks in the floorboard inside, blankets hung to separate the rooms. Shangreau's broad-faced wife grunted a hello and went back to pouring cornstarch into her stewpot. She had the biggest arms Brian had ever seen on a woman.

The men took turns washing their hands in a pail and sat around the kitchen table. Lunch was a tasteless boiled-beefand-potato stew that the men loaded with salt and shoveled down. There was little talk at the table.

"Well now," said J.C., pushing back in his chair when everyone seemed finished, "let's get at them horses."

The men broke free into work. They readied their ropes and other gear while Brian and Raymond collected wood, old shack boards, and dead scrub for the branding fire. They built up the fire in a far corner of the corral, Jim Crow nursing it with a scuffed old hand-bellows. When there were bright orange coals at the bottom and the irons were all laid out, the men spread with ropes in hand, forming a rough circle around the narrow chute that led into the corral from the barn, what Shangreau called the squeezer.

"And now, pilgrim," he said waving Brian back a little, 49 you gonna see some masculatin."

Raymond went up and started the first horse out through the squeezer and things began to happen fast, Brian struggling to keep up. The horse was not so huge, its back about chin-high to Brian, but it was thick and barrel-chested, its mottled gray sides working fast with suspicion. Raymond flapped his hat and clucked along the chute rail beside it till it was in the open and the men were swinging rope at its hooves, not picture-book lassoing but dropping open nooses on the ground and jerking up when it stepped in or near them. It took a while, plenty of near-misses and times when the horse kicked free or the rope just slipped away, and Bad Heart was closest to Brian cursing a constant chant low on his breath, fuckin horse, goddam horse, hold im, bust the fucker, and Raymond was in the corral trying to get his rope untangled and join the fun and Brian was hustling not to be trampled or roped.

"Bust iml Bust im!" J.C. was yelling and the stocky horse wheeled and crow-hopped but was met in every direction by another snapping rope. Finally Sam forefooted him cleanly and Jim jumped in quick to slip one over the head and jumped back to be clear as they hauled the animal crashing down onto its side.

"Choke im down! Choke im down!" yelled J.C. and they held its head into the ground with the rope while Bad Heart, cursing louder now and grimacing, wrestled its hind legs bent, one at a time, and strapped them back against its belly. They held it on its back now, writhing and lathered, eyes bugged hugely and nostrils wide, the men adding a rope here and there to help them muscle it still. Shangreau motioned Brian up with his head and handed him a rope end.

"Choke im," he said, "don't let him jerk. You let him jerk he's gonna hurt himself."

J.C. went to where the tools were laid out on a tarp and returned with a long, mean-looking jackknifey thing. The horse rested between spurts of resistance now, its huge chest heaving, playing out in flurries like a hooked fish. The men used the pauses to dig in their heels and get a stronger grip. J.C. waved the blade through the branding fire a few times, then knelt between the stallion's pinioned legs.

"Hold him tight, boys, they're comin off!"

The horse farted and screamed and shot a wad of snot into the blanket Bad Heart held its head with all at once, its spine arched clear off the ground and whumped back down, but J.C. had them in his fist and wouldn't be shook. He aimed and he hacked and blood covered his wrists till they cut free in his hands, a loose, sticky mess that he heaved into the far corner of the corral. He wasn't through. The horse rested quivering and Brian shifted the rope from where it had scored its image in his palms and J.C. brought what he had pointed out before as the masculator, a pair of hedge clippers that gripped at the end instead of cut.

"Ready?" he called, and when they were straining against the horse he worked the masculator inside and grabbed it onto what he wanted and yanked. There was blood spurting then, flecking the horse and the men and staining solid one leg of J.C.'s work pants. The rest was relatively easy, the branding and the tail-bobbing, the horse too drained to do much more than try to wave its head under Bad Heart's knee. With the smell of burnt flesh and fear around them, the men shortened their holds, worked in toward the horse, quiet now, Bad Heart's stream of abuse almost soothing. Each man grabbed a rope at some strategic point on the horse, J.C. taking over for Brian, and when each nodded that he was ready, they unlooped and jumped back in one quick motion. The horse lay still on its back for a moment, as if it had fallen asleep or died, then slowly rolled to its side and worked its legs underneath. It stood woozily at first, snorted and shook its head a few times, groin dripping thinly into the dirt, and then Raymond opened the corral gate to the range beyond and hat-flapped it out. It trotted a hundred yards off and began to graze.

"Forget he ever had em in a couple minutes," said J.C. He thumped Brian on the back, his hand sticking for a moment. "Gonna make a cowboy out of you in no time."

The men sat near each other, leaning on the corral slats, resting.

"What's it for?" Brian decided there was no cause to try to seem to know any more than he did. "Why can't you leave them like they are?"

"It's a matter of breed." J.C. was working a little piece of horse from the masculator jaws. "You leave them stallions be, they don't want a thing but fight and fuck all day long. You don't want your herd to inbreed. Let them inbreed and whatever it is strange in them comes to the surface, gets to be the rule rather than the exception."

Bad Heart sat alone across the corral from them, over by where the genitals had been thrown. Raymond tried to do tricks with his rope.

"Don't want em too wild," said Jackson Blackroot.

"Or too stunted and mean," said Sam. "Or too highstrung."

"And you don't want any candy-assed little lap ponies. Like I said, it's a matter of breed. We keep one, maybe two stallions isolated, and trade them between outfits to crossbreed. You stud my herd, I'll stud yours. What we want is what you call your hybrid vigor. Like all the different stock I've got in me. Irish and Indian and whatnot. Keeps one strain from takin over and going bad."

"But you do keep a stud horse?"

"Oh yeah. Now I know what you're thinking, these sodpounders up here haven't heard of artificial insemination. We know all right, it's a matter of choice. I been up to county fairs and whatnot, seen the machines they got. The mechanical jack-off machine and the dock syringe and all that. If that's your modern rancher, well you can have him. If God meant beasts to fuck machines he would of given em batteries. It's like that ASPCA bunch, always on our backs about the modern rancher and the proper way to masculate. Now there isn't but one way to do it. Ours. Horses know they been cut."

Cutting and branding and bobbing took about a half-hour per horse. It was tense, hard work and Brian got numbed to where only the burnt-hair smell when the brand was seared on bothered him. He liked the shouting and sweating and the physical pull against the animals, and supposed the rest, the cutting and all, was necessary. They didn't seem to mind much after it was done.

The men seemed to loosen and touch more often as they got deeper into work, breaks between cuttings grew longer and more frequent. They sat on a little rise to the side of the corral passing dripping ice-chest beers and a bottle of Johnnie Walker J.C. had provided, gazing over at the string of fresh-cut geldings. Gimme a hit a that coffin varnish, they would say, and the bottle would be passed down, bloody hand to bloody hand, all of them half-shot with liquor but soon to work it off on the next horse.

"Must be some connection with their minds," said Sam. "Once you lop their balls off, whatever part of their mind that takes care of thinkin on the fillies must turn off too. So they don't even remember, don't even think like a stallion anymore. They forget the old ways."

"They turn into cows, is what. Just strong and dumb."

"But you got to do it," said J.C. "Otherwise you might's well let them run wild, run and fuck whenever they want, tear down all the fences and keep territory all to themselves. Nosir, it's got to be done."

The afternoon wore on in tugs and whinnies. Raymond forefooted a big roan all by himself and Brian caught a stray hoof in his thigh that spun him around. One of the horses, a little scab-colored animal, turned out to be a real bad one, kicking all red-eyed and salty, running at the men instead of away until Bad Heart up with a branding iron, swinging at its head and spitting oaths but only managing to herd it right on out of the half-open corral door. It scampered up the rise with the others, kicking its heels and snorting.

"Raymond, dammit!" yelled Jim Crow. "You sposed to latch that damn gate shut!"

"I did!" Raymond had the look of the falsely accused; he took his silver hat off to plead his innocence. "I closed it right after that last one."

"Then how'd it get open?"

"It wasn't me."

"Don't worry about it," said J.C. "We'll have to go catch him tomorra. He's a tricky sumbitch to bring in. Just a wrong-headed animal, is all. That's the one you give me," he said to Bad Heart, "pay back that loan."

Bad Heart grunted.

It was turning to evening when they finished. A cloud of fat black flies gloated over the heap of testicles in the corner. Brian had a charley-horse limp where he'd been kicked. They sprawled on the rise and pulled their boots off, wiggled red, sick-looking toes in the air, and sucked down beer in gasping pulls. Still-warm sweat came tangy through their denim, they knocked shoulders and knees, compared injuries, and debated over who would be sorest in the morning. Bad Heart coiled the rope he had brought and lay down alone in the back of the pickup. They pondered on what they should do next.

"The way I see it," said Jim Crow, "it's a choice between more of Minnie's cooking and goin out for some serious drinking."

They were silent then, it was up to J.C. to pass the verdict on his wife's cooking.

"Sheeit," he said, "if that's all that's keepin us here let's roll. What's open?"

"Not much. Not much legal, anyways. There is that what- sisname's place, up to Interior."

"Then let's get on the stick. Brian, you a drinkin man?"

"I suppose."

"Well you will be after tonight. Interior, what's that, fifty mile or so? Should be able to get there afore dark and then it's every man for himself. No need to change but we'll have to go round and tell the women. Let's ride, fellas."

In the pickup they talked about horses and farm machinery and who used to be a bad hat when they were young and who was still capable of some orneriness on a full tank and about drunks they'd had and horses they'd owned and about poor old Roger DuPree whose woman had the roving eye. They passed liquor front seat to truck-bed, taking careful, fair pulls of the remaining Johnnie Walker and the halfbottle of Mogen David J.C. had stashed under the barn floor. Brian closed one eye the way he did when he drank so they wouldn't cross and Bad Heart carefully wiped the neck when it was his turn. They banged over the yellow-brown land in the long plains twilight, holding the bottles below sight-line as they stopped at each trailer to say they wouldn't be out too late. Raymond started to protest when it was time for him to be left off, but Jim Crow said a few growling words and his mournful face darkened even sadder — it would just kill him if he had to smack the boy. Raymond didn't want a scene in front of the guys and scooted off flapping the rump of an imaginary mount with his silver hat. The liquor ran out and Sam's belly began to rumble so they turned out of their way to hunt some food.

They reached a little kitchen emporium just before it closed up and J.C. sprang for a loaf of Wonder Bread and some deviled-ham spread. The old woman in the store wore a crucifix nearly half her size and wouldn't sell alcoholic beverages. FOR PEACE OF MIND, said a faded sign over the door, INVESTIGATE THE CATHOLIC FAITH.

"Sonsabitches damnwell ought to be investigated," said Jim Crow. "Gotten so I can't but give a little peep of colorful language around the house and she's off in the bedroom on her knees mumbling an hour's worth of nonsense to save my soul. What makes her think I'd trust that bunch with my soul escapes me"

"Now they mean well enough, Jim, it's just they don't understand Indian ways. Think they dealin with a bunch of savages up here that haven't ever heard of religion. Think that somebody's got to get theirselves nailed to a tree before you got a religion."

"Fuck religion!" shouted Bad Heart from the back, and that ended the conversation.

A sudden rain hit them with a loud furious slap, drenching the men in the back instantly and smearing the windshield so thick that J.C. lost sight and the pickup sloughed sideways into the shoulder ditch. It only added to their spirits, rain soothing them where the sweat had caked itchy, not cold enough to soak through their layer of alcohol. It gave them a chance to show they didn't give a fart in a windstorm how the weather blew, to pile out and hunker down in the mud and slog and heave and be splattered by the tires when the pickup finally scrambled up onto the road. The flash downpour cut dead almost the moment the truck was free, just to make its point clear. J.C. spread a blanket over the hood and the men stood together at the side of the road waiting for Jackson Blackroot to slap them down a sandwich with his brand-new Bowie knife. The ham spread was a bit watery but nobody kicked, they hurried to stuff a little wadding down to soak up more liquor. They pulled wet jeans away from their skin and stomped their boots free of mud on the road pavement. J.C. came over to Brian.

"Don't you worry about the delay, son. We'll show you a real cowboy drunk soon enough."

"No rush."

"Damn right there's no rush. Got time to bum out here. Time grows on trees. Well, bushes anyway, we're a little short on trees. There isn't a picture show or a place with live music in some hundred miles, the Roman Church is about the only organization has regular meetings and you can have that. Isn't much cause for people to get together. Workin horses like we done is something though. A little excitement, even if it is work. Hell, it's better that it is work, you feel good about it even after it's over, not like a drunk where it takes a couple years of selective memory to make it into something you like to talk about."

"Doesn't seem so bad."

"Oh, there's worse, I'm sure. But I see you're passing through, not staying. Nobody lives here unless they were born here and can't hack it anywhere else. It's why most of the land around here was made into reservation, nobody else wanted it. Oh, the Badlands, up by Interior, they're striking to look at so the Park Service took them for the tourists, but the rest — hell, even the migrating birds don't come back anymore."

"Where you traveling to, Brian?" It was old Sam that asked.

"California."

He frowned. "You best be careful. That California is wild. Had a brother was killed there."

"I'll watch myself."

"I'd steer clear of it if it was me. They say it's wild."

J.C. laughed. "When was this brother killed, Sam?"

"Just around the start of the war. Got himself caught in something called the Zoot Suit Riots and that was all she wrote. Just plain wild."

"You know where I found Brian?" said J.C. "He was walkin up Six-Hat Road there by Petrie's, sayin he's gonna walk to the Innerstate. Seems he got his directions from old Cody Sprague there."

The men laughed. "Be better off gettin em from the buffalo," said Jackson Blackroot, "at least he's a native."

"Sprague isn't from around here?"

"He come out from some city back east, what was it, Philadelphia — ?"

"Pittsburgh."

"Right. He come out from Pittsburgh on his vacation one summer and he sees all these roadside attractions up there on go, the prairie-dog village, reptile farms, Wall Drug Store, all that, and he thinks he's found his calling. He worked in some factory all his life and always had something about bein' his own boss, owning his own business. So he takes his savings, which couldn't of been much, and buys himself two acres down on Six-Hat, the most worthless two acres in the whole state probly, and somewhere he gets ahold of that animal. Gonna build a dude ranch with the money he makes selling rides. Well it's been six, seven years now and I don't know how the hell he survives but he still hasn't got but them two acres and that animal."

"He's a nice old guy though," said J.C. "Talk your ear off, a little crazy, but a nice old guy."

"He's a character all right," said Jackson.

"He's an asshole." Bad Heart climbed into the rear of the pickup.

They had eaten all the bread and were talking about Sam's brother getting killed in Los Angeles when Jackson remembered something.

"Hey," he said, "what we gonna do about that wake they're having over there for Honda Joe? Suppose we ought to go?"

"Just slipped my mind," said J.C. "Live just five mile away from us, no way I can't make an appearance, and it slipped my mind. Listen, as long as there's all of us together and we got the truck — "

"I suppose we ought to go."

"Damn shame it is, young kid like that. Goes through all that Vietnam business with hardly a scratch, gets himself a Silver Star, then comes back to smash hisself up on a goddam motorsickle. Young kids like that seem bent on it. I remember I couldn't talk my brother out of his plan for all the world, nosir, he had to have his California."

"It wasn't this it would have been some other," said Jackson.

"If it wasn't the bike maybe he would of drunk himself to death like some others around here."

"No, I don't think so. Honda Joe was always in a hurry to get there."

"Well he got there all right. In a couple pieces maybe, but he got there."

"We ought to go look in on him, for his mother's sake. What say, fellas?"

"I never liked Honda Joe," said Bad Heart.

"Well then, dammit, you can stay in the truck."

"If there's one thing I can't stand," said Jim Crow very quietly when they were on their way to Honda Joe's wake, "it's a sulky Indian."

It was still twilight when they passed by the access road to J.C.'s place again. He didn't offer to drop Bad Heart home before they went on. They crossed Six-Hat Road, Brian was just able to make out one of Cody Sprague's signs to the right, and then a half-mile farther along they were stopped by a horse standing in the middle of the road, facing them.

J.C. turned on the headlights and they saw it was the scabcolored one that had escaped in the afternoon.

"The hell's he doin out here?" said J.C. He turned the engine off and got out quietly. He left the door open and walked slowly toward the horse, talking soft. "Good horse," he said, "nice horse. Come to papa. Attaboy."

The horse stood for a moment, nostrils wide open, then bolted off the road and out of sight. J.C. slammed back into the truck. Only Bad Heart dared laugh.

The trailer was alone and far away from the blacktops, far even from the oiled road that serviced most of the other places around. It sat as if run aground next to the dry streambed that cut through a gently sloping basin. Young men's cars, Pintos and Mavericks, Mustangs and Broncos, surrounded it, parked every which way. To the rear was an orderly block where the family men had pulled in their jeeps and pickups. J.C. slipped in among these and the men eased out. They had sobered, what with the food and the surprise rain and the knowledge of the work cut out ahead of them. They shuffled and stuffed their hands in their pockets, waiting for J.C. to lead. The mud and blood had stiffened again on their clothes, they tried to get all their scratching done before they had to go in. Bad Heart stretched out in the rear, glaring out into space. J.C. sighed and fished under the seat, behind the shotgun, and came out with a pint of gin. "I was saving this for an emergency," he said, and tossed it to Bad Heart. "Entertain yourself."

They were met at the door by two dark old Indians wearing VFW hats. Evening, gentlemen, glad you could come. There was a visitor's book to sign and no place to sit, the trailer was crammed to its aluminum gills. There were nods and hullos from the men already inside, crop and stock and weather conversations to drift into, and woman-noise coming from back in the bedrooms. Drink was offered and declined, for the moment anyway. A knot of angry-looking young men leaned together against one wall, planning to make yet another wine run up to Interior and back. Suspicious eyes lingered on Brian, coming hardest and hairiest from the young men. Brian felt extra uncomfortable in his sunlightened hair and three-day road stubble in the midst of all the smooth, dark people. He was glad for the stains of horsecutting left on him, as if having shared that gave him some right of entry.

Mrs. Pierce was on them before they could get their bearings. She smelled of tears and Four Roses and clutched at their elbows like she was drowning.

"J.C.," she said, "you come, I knew you would. And Jim. Boys. I knew you'd all come, I knew everybody'd come for my Joey."

She closed one eye when she had to focus on somebody. She squinted up to Brian. "Do I know you?"

"This is Brian, Mrs. Pierce," said J.C. "He's been workin horses over to my place."

"Well Brian," she said sober-faced, talking slow as if explaining house rules to a new kid in the neighborhood, "you just make yourself at home. Joey had him a lot of white friends, he was in the Army."

The woman had straight black hair with streaks of iron gray, she stood up to Brian's shoulders, her face flat and unwrinkled. She could have been anywhere from thirty-five to fifty. She was beautiful. Brian told her not to worry about him.

"You come to stay a while, J.C.? You have something to drink? We got plenty, everybody brang for my Joey. We'll go right through the night into tomorrow with him. Will you stay, J.C.?"

"Well, now, Mrs. Pierce, we'd really like to, we all thought high of young Joseph there, but like I said we been workin horses all day and these boys are just all in. I promised their women I'd get them home early and in one piece. You know how it is."

The woman gave a little laugh. "Oh, I do, I surely do. We'll get him home in one piece, that's what the recruiters said, come onto Rosebud when we were over there. Make a man of him and send him back in better shape than when he left. Well, he's back, I suppose. Least I know where he is, not like some that are missing or buried over there. Don't figure anyone'll want to borrow him anymore." She stopped a moment and turned something over in her mind with great effort, then looked to J.C. again. "We're havin a service Tuesday over to the Roman. Appreciate it if you all could be there."

"We'll make every effort, Ma'am. And if there's anything you need help with in the coming weeks — "

"Oh no, J.C., save your help. Won't need it. After the service I'll just hitch up and drive on out of here. Go up north, I got people. I put two husbands and four sons in this country now and I'll be damned if it gets a drop more outen me. No, I'm to go up north."

"It's hard livin up there, Mrs. Pierce."

"Well it aint no bed a goddam roses down here neither, is it?"

The men hung on in the main room a bit more for courtesy, swapping small talk and trying to remember which of the wild Pierce boys had been responsible for which piece of mischief, trying to keep out of the way of the women, who seemed to know what they were there for. Mrs. Pierce weaved her way through the somber crowd assuring and being assured that her poor Joey was a good boy and would be sorely missed by all. Brian noticed she was wearing the boy's Silver Star on a chain around her neck.

It took a good hour to get through the crowd, the people didn't seem to see much of each other and there was a lot of catching up to do, but they were herded steadily, inevitably, toward the bedroom where they knew Honda Joe would be laid out. They shied and shuffled at the doorway a little, but there was no avoiding it. A steady, humming moan came from within, surrounded by other, soothing sounds. J.C. took a deep breath and led the way.

Whoever did the postmortem on Honda Joe must have learned the trade by mail. The corpse, tucked to the chin under an American flag, looked more like it should have been leaning against a stuffed pony at the Wall Drug Store than like something that had lived and breathed. The skin had a thick look to it and a sheen like new leather, and even under the flag you could tell everything hadn't been put back where it belonged. The men went past the Murphy bed on both sides, up on their toes as if someone was sleeping. They clasped their hands in front of them and tried to look properly mournful. Jackson Blackroot muttered a few words to the corpse. Brian took his turn and concentrated on a spot on the boy's hairline till he felt he'd put in his time. He was moving away when he heard the whooping from outside.

"Yee-haaaaa!" somebody was yelling. "Yipyip-yeeeeee I "

There was the sound of hooves then, and the whooping grew distant. The men emptied out into the night range to see what it was.

"Yeow! Yeow! Yeow!" called a voice over to the left. Someone was riding a horse out there in the pitch black, someone pretty loaded from the sound of him.

"Goddam Indians," grumbled one of the old men wearing a VFW hat. "Got no sense a dignity."

"Yee-hahaaaaa!" called the rider as a gray shape galloped by on the right.

"Sounds a bit like Bad Heart," said J.C. "Sounds a whole lot like him."

They went to J.C.'s pickup and Bad Heart was gone. There was some gear missing too, some rope, a bridle. They checked in the front. J.C.'s shotgun was still there but Jackson's Bowie knife was gone.

"He loses it I'll wring his goddam neck," said Jackson.

The men all got in their cars and pickups then and put their headlights on. The beams crisscrossed out across the little basin, making eerie pockets of dark and light.

"Yah-haaaaa!"

A horse and rider appeared at the far. edge of the light, disappeared into shadow, then came into view again. It was Bad Heart, bareback on the little scab-colored stallion. It strained forward as if it were trying to race right out from under him. There was something tied with rope to its tail, dragging and flopping behind, kicking up dust that hung in the headlights' arc. Bad Heart whacked its ribs and kneed it straight for the dry streambed. It gathered and leaped, stretching out in the air, and landed in perfect stride on the far bank.

"Fucker can ride," said Jim Crow.

"Fucker could always ride," said J.C. "Nobody ever denied that. Like he's born on horseback."

Bad Heart lay close to the line of the stallion's back, seemed to flow with its every muscle. With the day's blood staining his old tan Levi's and the scabby red-brown of the horse it was hard to tell where one began and the other left off.

"Yee-yeeheeeeeeeel"

Bad Heart circled the trailer a few more times before a couple of the young men commandeered jeeps and lit out after him. It was a good chase for a while, the jeeps having more speed but the little stallion being able to cut and turn quicker. They honked and flicked their lights and kept Bad Heart pinned in view of the trailer but couldn't land him till he tried to make the horse jump the streambed one time too many. It just pulled up short and ducked its head, sending him flying over, tumbling through the air till he hit halfway up the opposite bank.

The horse trotted off out of all the lights and Bad Heart lay wailing.

He was pretty scraped up when they got to him, one side of his face all skinned and his left leg bent crooked from midway up the thigh. He cursed as they made a splint from a rake handle, cursed as they carried him in on a blanket, cursed when they laid him out on the Murphy bed next to Honda Joe.

"Wait'll the fucker wakes up in the mornin," he kept saying while they tried to calm him down. "Gonna have a big surprise. Wait'll he wakes up. Big fuckin surprise."

Jackson found his Bowie knife tucked in Bad Heart's boot when they pulled it off. The knife was bloody up to the hilt.

Brian went out with J.C. and Jackson to see about the horse. Everyone had turned their headlights off so J.C. got his flashlight from the pickup. They walked out in the dark a bit and then they heard whuffing up ahead and J.C. shined at it.

The stallion held its head up high, eyes shining back amber in the beam, bridle dangling, chest and sides lathered and heaving. It stood and looked at them as Jackson whispered his way up and took the bridle.

J.C. came up and took the Bowie knife from Jackson. He cut the rope free from the stallion's tail. Brian went back with him to see what had been dragging behind.

It was a blood-sticky hide. The hair coarse and greasy, like something you'd scuff your feet clean on. It had a sad, lonely smell. It smelled like The West.

J.C. played the light off away from it. "I suppose we best take this thing over, break the news to old Sprague. You wanna come along for the ride?"

"Sure."

"Spose we'll call it a night after that. Get you up to go in the morning." He turned the flashlight on the stallion limping a bit as it followed Jackson toward the trailer. "There isn't all that much to do in Interior anyways."

Golden State

HE MEXICANS TOOK Brian across the desert and over the mountains to the Coast in the black night. They sat in the front seat and spoke to each other in their language for the entire ride. Brian was relieved not to feel obligated to talk or to listen. Only the violent shaking of the old Comet kept him awake.

The Mexicans turned south when they hit ioi and Brian got out. The road was halfway down the western slope of a string of mountains. Trees blocked the view but he could hear the ocean in the distance. The Pacific. It was the warmest night he'd had on the trip; it would be easier to sleep out now and find his way to the water when it got light.

Brian started down through the woods, looking for a flat spot to lie, and stopped when he saw the word. It was barely visible over the treetops, glaring in blue neon. HAMBU. Brian spread his bag out and lay down. He had hitched a hard three thousand miles and in the morning he would be there. The hours of Spanish in the dark car, the steady ocean sound, the strange word in the sky — all made him feel like he was in a foreign country, an island in the South Seas maybe, or the coast of Africa.

"You can gain more knowledge in one crossing of the map," Brian's father used to say, eyes swimming in an earlyevening buzz, "than in four years at one of your so-called institutes of higher learning. Travel, travel is the greatest educator." The old man had missed the war, had made it over to Scranton once for a railworkers' convention and down to Atlantic City a few summers with the family. He did the rest of his traveling in front of the TV at the bar in the Hibernian. "When I was young I should have listened to my itchy feet," he'd say, "instead of another certain part of my anatomy. I chased the girls till your mother put salt on my tail, and then I wasn't a young man anymore."

Brian slept well, waking only to shift position in the bag, and whenever he sat up he could see the word shining in the night.

HAMBU.

The mountain blocked the rising sun but he woke automatically before dawn. It was cold; he hurried to dress and to get moving. The word was gone but the ocean sound was still there. He started down.

He saw telephone lines first, then broke into the open on a road. There was a drive-in hamburger stand under a huge sign. End of the word must have burned out.

The sun was up and casting long westward shadows by the time Brian walked down into the town. The streets were deserted, not even a delivery truck out, and the paper scattered everywhere made it even more forlorn. Election posters and handouts. Brian remembered that it was the day after. The faces of smiling candidates flapped around his sneakers as he walked. It was a small town with low, Spanishy architecture and all kinds of spiny green plants he had never seen before.

He came to a circular plaza and stopped to rest. There was a fountain statue in the center of it, surrounded by a highwalled moat. A pair of bronze-and-birdshit forty-niners panning for gold. The water wasn't running.

The moat walls came up to Brian's chest, the water still and clear. He could see coins shining up at him from the bottom, could see quarters and half-dollars among the pennies. He had a little over four dollars and one cinnamon doughnut left from his trip. There was no one around.

Brian took his jacket off and rolled up his sleeves. He pushed himself up and balanced at the pelvis on the edge of the wall, like he was on the parallel bars in gym. He bent down and dipped in as far as his arm would reach. The water was freezing cold, his hand didn't touch bottom.

He tied the strap of his duffel bag around his left leg for ballast, then swung his right over so that he was straddling the wall. He took his shirt off and leaned over sideways. Farther. The duffel bag was lifted clear off the ground and the water was up over his armpit and he still couldn't reach. The coins looked so near, looked like they were only a few feet below the surface. He gave one more effort and began to slip in, stopping himself only by digging in his nails and flailing with his wet arm. He managed to shift his balance back and flopped panting onto the street.

Brian put his shirt and jacket back on. He tossed a penny into the water and watched how long it took to hit bottom. The bottom of the moat went below the street level, the water was probably over his head inside. It was an illusion, the water magnified the coins so they looked closer. ETERNAL HOPE, said the plaque that lay at the forty-niners' feet.

The Pacific Ocean was green. He realized it was cold, late in the year and early in the day, but he had expected blues from the Pacific, pastel blues and turquoises and aquamarines like in the surfing movies or the picture of Balboa and the soldiers in his American History book.

"It's like nothing you've seen in your life," the old man used to say to Brian, shaking his head in wonder. "None of the freezing garbage-and-oil-fouled puddle you've got here, none of your miserable boardwalk rinky-tink. It's pure and clear and just slightly cool to the skin, breaking over the white-sand beaches of the Golden State. The mere sight of it could stop your heart with beauty," he'd say. "And the sun they've got, filling up the sky, toasting the air about you, that sun sets into it, warming your face as you look out over the water."

There were plastic benches behind a low stone wall, with steps leading down to the beach every hundred yards or so. There was a plain of sand strewn with a kind of seaweed Brian had never seen. Giant brown peapods, as long as Brian was tall. The beach was alive with reddish brown squirrels that twitched from spot to spot. Brian squatted at the edge of the water and waited for a wave to reach his hands. Up the beach a ways an old wooden pier stretched out into the ocean a good quarter-mile. Brian patted his face with seawater and returned to sit behind the wall. He watched the waves and ate his doughnut.

Two men were walking along the wall toward him. They were too far off to see any detail of their faces. One was a lot taller than the other. They came closer. Older men, both wearing canvas sneakers. Kind of rummy-looking.

"Mind if we siddown, young fella?"

Brian didn't see how he could refuse. They weren't going to shake any change out of him, though, and once they realized that they'd probably leave. He nodded to them. The tall one sat at the other end of the bench and the stocky one, a Chicano with an amazing crop of thick, black, wino hair, offered his hand.

"Pleasetomeeyou pleasetomeeyou berry please," he said and pumped Brian's hand like he was shaking an aerosol can. "You know Misser Horse? He own tot big buildin by the school, berryberry weltymon, I use to work por him ohyes tot not ri' Donnydonny?"

"Slow down, Cervantes," said the tall one. "Take your time."

"Ohyes, Donnydonny. Slowdown." He sat next to Brian, smiling with a set of beautiful white teeth.

"Don't think I recognize you," said the tall one. He had a small blue Navy bag that he was fishing his hand through. "You just get into town?"

"Yuh."

"My name is Daniel Boone," he said, "and the fella next to you is Cervantes. He don't make much sense no more but he's a helluva good man. What's your handle?"

There was no way he could top them, even if he made one up. "Brian McNeil."

"And where do you hail from?"

"East Orange."

"Oh yeah. I been there." He winked at Brian. "You thumbin?"

"Yuh."

"Thought so. I went on the road a while, I was your age. Till the war come."

Daniel Boone's white hair was still wet, combed sideways across his head. It looked like he had pressed his pants by folding them into a square and putting them under something heavy, they were covered with checkerboard creases. He wore a red flannel shirt and had metal teeth. They were aluminum or something, whenever he opened his mouth there was a flash.

"Say, Jersey," he said, "you haven't seen an old fella down here this morning, big old fighter's ears and a green overcoat? Can't really talk, just kind of grunts and gurgles?"

"Tot Stofey he grung he groang he is so bar to unnerston ohyesohyes."

Brian said that he hadn't seen anyone.

"Funny, he's usually down here by now." Daniel frowned and pulled a quart bottle of Thunderbird from his bag. "Maybe he decided to take his breakfast in bed. Care for a pull, young fella?"

It couldn't have been much after seven and Brian didn't like wine, but it was an occasion. He had just seen the Pacific for the first time, he had made it to California, and here was an alky offering instead of asking. He took a modest gulp.

His father never touched wine. "It's a sneaky, back-door way to drink," he'd say. "If you're going to bend an elbow don't be diddling around with any of your glorified fruit juice. Give me an honest glass of beer or some Irish whiskey, something to keep the fire going inside." The old man drank flat beer at breakfast, sheltered from the evening's chill at the Hibernian, and carried a pint bottle of fuel for his night watch at the freight yard. He had a difficult time staying warm.

"Speakin of bed," said Daniel, "where'd you put up for the night? Mountains?"

"Yuh."

"That's good. Town cops'1l bust your ass you try to lay out on the beach. Me and Cervantes have been setting up in the dead-car pile back of the Earl Scheib body shop there. Had me a Cadillac last night. Best sleep I had in months."

Cervantes took a hit and passed the bottle back to Daniel. Both of them lipped the neck. Brian had tried to pour his directly to the back of his throat without touching glass.

"You wouldn't know I just come out of the hospital, would you?"

Daniel looked like his best move would be to check right back in, but Brian let it ride. "Nope."

"I mean, do I look like a dyin man? I just been in intensive care three months, fell down the stairs over to the Hotel Sutter and fractured my hip. Lost forty pounds up to the VA, drippin chemicals into my veins from a bottle. You believe it? Lemme tell you, New York, it was pretty much touch-and go. Thought my number was up. They called my next of kin, my sister-in-law, and explained how I shouldn't never drink again or it'd kill me." He snuggled the bottle in his lap. "So here I am trying to commit hairy Carey. Don't have the guts to jump off that pier, so I'm taking the slow boat." Daniel Boone smiled his metal smile.

"You know Misser Carey Misser Carey, he ron a boosher chop? Many many meats ohyesohyes."

"Not that Carey, Cervantes. Take it easy."

Brian could feel the sun on the back of his head now. It gave a golden edge to the wheeling gulls. Cervantes grinned next to him. For a wino he didn't smell bad at all, probably better than Brian with his road-funk. The ocean breeze, maybe.

"It blows through the palm trees," the old man used to say, swaying gently over a stein of beer or sitting in a booth as far from the jukebox as possible, "blows warm, so warm, and you can smell the fruit trees of the Polynesian islands in it. Sweet and warm." The old man smelled thickly sweet, smelled of oranges gone to mash. The watch shack he manned each night at the freight yard had originally been the stall where they held all the fruit that shipped in, in the days before the trucks took it over. The smell was part of the wood, it had gotten into the work jacket the old man always wore. When he walked into the Hibernian the regulars would wince and shake their heads. "Good Lord if it isn't McNeil," they used to say, "with our daily dose of vitamin C."

"You vote, young fella?" asked Daniel.

Brian shook his head. "Not old enough. I'm eighteen next month."

"Well, you didn't miss much. It's a bitch, Election Day, always has been. For starters, they don't let the liquor stores open till the polls close. So unless you scored a lot on Monday you got to go dry most of the day. And you can forget pan- handlin, there's so many jokers out with pamphlets and flyers and buttons, vote this, vote that, send some thief to the statehouse. Everybody just fixes their eyes straight ahead and clamps their hands shut in their pockets and won't stop for nothin. Poor scufflin wino don't have a chance, all that competition. Took us all day to make this little quart here and if Cervantes hadn't walked off with a six-pack of beer from the campaign headquarters in the Sutter it would have been an awful cold night."

Daniel sent the bottle down again. They seemed to be taking smaller pulls to stretch out the little that was left. Brian didn't like what it did to the roof of his mouth. Cervantes took out a round tobacco tin and some papers and began to roll a cigarette. His fingers were the same color as the tobacco. He worked quickly and didn't spill a flake.

A patrol car cruised up on the street behind them and stopped a couple hundred feet away. Daniel hid the Thunderbird between his legs.

"You see who that is, Cervantes? That Price? I can't make him out with the sun off the windshield there."

"Doan know Donnydonny, the sun he big doan see."

"Price works mornings, usual. He'll pinch you for havin an open bottle in view. We shouldn't of thrown the bag away."

The car started up again, eased past and out of sight.

"Last time they had me up on the hill they were talking about Price. Man almost blasted him away with a shotgun. Fellas in the station said it wasn't for a bum shell we'd have a new bull rainin on our parade every morning."

Cervantes handed Daniel a cigarette and began to roll another.

"You do beautiful work, buddy. Just as neat as a tailormade and twice as deadly."

"Tonkyou, Donnydonny, tonkyou."

Daniel turned to face Brian only when he had a question. The rest of the time he talked staring out over the ocean.

"I never messed with no shotgun," he said. "I'm a knife fighter. Killed three men with a knife, one at Iwo, two at Tarawa. Demolition. I'd go in before the beach assaults. You believe it?"

Daniel Boone looked down to Brian and he had to nod. It was possible, just barely possible.

"Brooklyn, my friend, I detect an air of misbelief. Well lookit here."

Daniel rose and pulled up his pants-leg. There was a round, reddish mark on his pale calf. "Punji stick," he said. He pulled up the front of his shirt. There were puckered scars on either side of his sagging belly. "Jap round," he said. "Got me from the side, went in here, came out there. Lots of blood but it didn't puncture my stomach." He turned to show another souvenir over his kidney. "Shrapnel. A short round from our own artillery. I called in the coordinates and some greenhorn laid one in behind me." Daniel tucked in his shirt and sat back down.

"We'd swim in, all you could carry was demolition equipment and a knife. Cut their throats, all three of em, didn't think a thing of it. Wouldn't figure I'd be such a long time doing away with myself, would you? Hairy carey."

"He got steaks an bacongs an sosage an rose-biff an — "

"Settle down, Cervantes, you'll drop your smoke all over."

an homborger Donnydonny."

"I can still outswim anybody in this town," said Daniel Boone. "I had asthma when I was a kid."

It was too obvious a setup, there was no way he'd ask what the connection was. Hitching across the country had left Brian tired of playing straight man.

Daniel leaned back and dragged reflectively on his cigarette. He sighed. He crossed his legs. He picked at his nose hair.

Cervantes smiled steadily, like a sideman in a countrywestern band. From time to time he would run his hand through his hair, still holding the lighted cigarette, and leave a streak of ash in it.

"So this fella from the neighborhood," said Daniel finally, "was like an uncle to me, he said he'd give me a five-dollar — " he screwed his eyes shut to think hard "scholarship? To the Y?"

"Membership."

"Membership. See what the booze'll do to you? Give me a five-dollar membership to the Y if I'd promise to swim underwater every day, as far as I could go. Cured the asthma. God, I could swim. Still can, I bet."

Daniel looked like he'd drown in a footbath. Brian smiled. "Could you swim out to the end of that pier?"

"No sweat, Manhattan, no sweat."

"Ohyes Donnydonny, you con swim ober honrid, tree honrid bee-yon feets, m'hmn m'hmn Donnydonny yes you con."

"Three hundred billion feet is a lot of water, buddy. Don't get me in over my head." Daniel turned to Brian. "Say, Philly, you know what ESP is?"

Brian groaned inwardly. He had ridden with a half-dozen astrology freaks on the way out, including one guy who was convinced he was the reincarnation of Stephen Foster. Sang spirituals the entire Indiana Turnpike.

"I guess," said Brian. "Mind waves and all that stuff?"

"You believe it?"

He shrugged.

"I do," said Daniel Boone. "I got it."

Brian had figured as much. "What's it do to you?"

"Well, you see, most people only got three dimensions. You got ESP, then you got four dimensions. Brain power is your fourth dimension."

Daniel got up to spit over the wall. He looked out on the beach.

"Sumnabitch. Lookit all the squirrels."

"Yuh."

"No shit, Philly, there's thousands of em, see for yourself. This aint no DT's. DT's I get lizards. Never seen so many squirrels, not even in the park. Beach is just covered with em. Wonder what they're eatin?"

Daniel watched for another moment, then shook his head. "Shouldn't think about food. Haven't put nothin in the stomach for some time now. Hairy Carey."

"Pork shop an chickens an libber an — "

"That's what the booze'll do to you, right there." Daniel turned to point at Cervantes, who grinned.

"Donnydonny, my gooboddy. We take care take care."

"Slow down, Cervantes. But he's the best goddam sumbitch around. Aintcha buddy?"

"Ohyes, Donnydonny."

Daniel sat back down. "Man I served with, was lost when we took a shell off Tarawa. Went overboard. He's been callin me ever since, callin from the dead. He's out there in the fourth dimension." Daniel dropped his head forward into his hands and sighed. "Jeez, I'm burnin up with a fever."

"Take a dreeng, Donnydonny. You torsty, yes?"

Daniel ignored his friend. "See, usually he comes in loud and clear, his voice callin to me from out there. But this mornin I can't seem to make him out, it's like he's callin from underwater. Gurgles."

"He drowned, didn't he?"

"I suppose. But he always talked clear before. I can't understand it." He rubbed his eyes and pulled a paperback book out of his bag.

"Say, Philly, you look this here over and then tell me if you believe it." He passed it across Cervantes to Brian. Beyond the Mind, by Dr. Milton Shopenhauer. Case histories and commentary. "Look it over and then tell me what you think." He eased his head back into his hands.

When he got really liquid, Brian's father heard freight trains. Steam-driven freights rolling across the plains, rolling through small towns thousands of miles away. "At first it's not even a sound," he'd say, chin lifted, eyes closed in concentration, "it's a slight movement, a thickening in the night air about your ears. Stronger then, a wind blowing far off, then deeper, and there's a tingling up your legs and it turns to water, streams of water gathering into a rushing river, cascading down and suddenly all around you, shaking you, like the engine is driving the blood through your veins and it's shaking you, taking you, taking you along with it wherever it's going and Lord God you want to go, you want to but you're rooted to the ground and the power rattles down through your body into your feet again, out of you, and the train tears off, tears away with that long, moaning wail and it's water, and it's wind, and it's a slight thickness in the air and then it's gone and left you, stranded in the still, cold night." It always gave Brian a shudder when the old man heard his trains. He'd keep his eyes closed for a long while, as if still listening, and sometimes he'd fall asleep like that, sitting chin up at the bar, listening.

Brian opened to the middle of the book. The usual amazing feats and astonished friends. A story about a shopkeeper in Belgium who had ESP and was examined by a lot of scientists and made the papers once or twice and then died, still minding the store. He was psychic but not too bright.

Daniel sighed and passed the Thunderbird down for last hits. When it came back to him he took care of the last drops and arced it over the wall.

"Wonder if I hit them squirrels."

"Hey, Daniel Boone." Brian figured he might as well get it over with.

"Huh?"

"I believe it."

"Huh?"

"The ESP. I believe it. But what good does it do you?"

Daniel smiled. "Pittsburgh, it's our link with the next world. I was an atheist till I tumbled onto the fact that I had it. I believe that when you die you go into the fourth dimension. Only a few people can use their brain power to break into it while they're still alive. Pioneers."

"Oh." It didn't exactly answer his question, but it would do.

"Hey," said Cervantes to Brian, "you know Misser Horse? Misser Horse he lib oberdere, berry big mon you know, lib in a cossle, noosepaper, berry big. I lob him berry much, he gib me chob ohyesohyes."

"Say, Cleveland," called Daniel, "you ever fight? You got a nice little built on you, fella your size."

"Nope. Not in a ring or anything."

Daniel shook his head. "That's why the game is finished, can't get a white kid to put on the gloves."

"Did you fight when you were a kid?"

"Sure. I had a couple bouts when I first come out here. Saw some pretty good people come up. I dropped Blinky DiPersio in the second round once, left hook and down he goes. I was heavyweight then, you believe it? S'what the sauce will make of you. Blinky, he gone on to fight some of the great ones. Those were hungry days, hungry fighters. But now, you can get by on welfare, why beat your brains out? It's dead." He shook his head as if his dog or grandmother had passed away. "Dead." He began a yawn that ended as a minor dry-heave.

"Cleveland," he said, "you wouldn't happen to have fortythree cents would you? We need forty-three cents to make us another quart."

It seemed like the sociable thing to do. Brian counted out his change and added it to what Daniel had given to Cervantes.

"That's real Christian of you, son. Any preferences?"

Brian said no and Cervantes headed off into town.

"Mostly I was a sparrin partner," said Daniel. "Worked with that fella I was lookin for earlier, Stuffy. He was California light-heavy champ, way back when, could have gone all the way if they'd known how to handle him. The drink done him in. Tradin too many punches might have softened his head some, but it was the drink, the drink that finished Stuffy." Daniel started coughing, his eyes bugging and the veins standing out on his forehead. He bent forward to catch his breath.

"Committin suicide."

"Maybe you ought to hang the bottle up for a while."

Daniel ignored the advice. "What you want to do, Cleveland, is thumb on down the road to Ventura. Gonna have a big fight card there Friday night. The fella that operates the concession will be hiring lots of people, you could get on easy. Tell him Daniel Boone sent you. They got Windmill White headlining the card, they'll need some extra hands."

Cervantes came back with another bottle of Thunderbird in a paper sack. Daniel opened it and passed it down. Brian swallowed hard. He wanted some of his forty-three cents out of it.

"If you're going to drink," the old man always used to say, nodding into life between the regulars who steered him home, "you might as well do the full job of it. Keep the edges off, keep the fire going inside. Put a few under the belt and it's a warm current I'm riding on, warms the blood, sets it traveling. Your blood sits still and you're a dead man." The old man put more and more drink between himself and the cold, slept later and later into the day, until in dead of winter he stumbled out from the watch shack to answer the siren moan of the midnight freight that always slowed as it rolled through the yard. They found him outside Chicago, stiff in the corner of an empty boxcar. It was the farthest west he'd ever been.

"Hey there."

Two men were standing behind the bench, grinning. Both had wiry, nervous bodies, bodies like TV bowlers. One had a big gap in his front teeth and a brush cut, complete with butch wax.

"Name's Pete," he said to Brian, winking and offering his hand.

The other man's grin ticked on and off his face. In fact his whole self was caught up in quivers and shakes. Both men wore short-sleeved cotton shirts and looked like they had slept in beds the night before.

"Mind if we join you?"

"Pete an Misser Miles Misser Miles!" Cervantes was beaming, excited to have more company. "Seedown goomorning seedown!"

They sat by Daniel at the other end. It was a four-man bench and things were a little cozy with five. Daniel made the formal introductions.

"This here is Sneaky Pete and Mr. Miles. That young fella on the other side of the bench is — what was it?"

"Oklahoma."

"Right. Oklahoma."

Brian traded nods with them.

"Hate to be b-blunt with you, Dan'l — " said Mr. Miles, his voice rattling inside him and escaping like the bleat of a cartoon lamb, "but you w-wunt have sumn to drink would you? I swear I'monna shake to pieces I don't get sumn under my belt."

Daniel upped with the quart. "Just one whiff in the air and they gather like sharks."

"Ah, you're my man." Mr. Miles closed his eyes and took it like medicine. "Gah-dam I needed that. Evy mornin this week I had these f-fuckin shakes. Chriseawmighty."

Sneaky Pete wasn't drinking.

"Misser Miles Misser Miles you nee a shabe you know you know, you goolookin honsome mon you use a shabe."

"I need more'n a shave, Cervantes. Christ, two tickets for driving while impaired this month, they tell me on the hill I get one m-more, drunk or no, it's my license." A shudder hit him in the breastbone. "Oh shit, I got em bad."

"Give him your makins, Cervantes," said Daniel. "A smoke'll calm him down. Roll yourself one, Miles."

"Hahl I couldn't roll down a hill this mornin, Dan'! much less no cigarette."

"Roll one for Mr. Miles, buddy."

"Misser Miles? You lib up on the moanton, m'hmn ohyes, you got tot big ronch yes?"

"Hardly, Cervantes."

"Ohyes. Ri' nex to me, I got big ronch too m'hmn. I got seben-honrid-bee-yon heads of cottles."

Pete remarked that that was a lot of bull and Mr. Miles made the mistake of giggling, starting shudders through his body. The bag traveled up and down the bench once, skipping Pete. Cervantes gave Miles a cigarette. He had a hard time holding still for a light from Daniel and had to concentrate to keep it from slipping through his fingers. He choked on the first drag.

"Say, Oklahoma," called Daniel, "this your first time to the Coast?"

of "Yuh.

"How you like it?"

"So far so good," said Brian.

Daniel laughed. "I remember when I first come out here, come for fame and fortune. I was gonna be the next Tarzan. Johnny Weissmuller had just turned in his water wings and I was all set to fill his moccasins."

"Give us your yell," asked Pete. "Your Tarzan yell."

"It's too early. I'd have the vice squad down on us. Yeah, I had all the qualifications. Big, good-lookin, could swim like a fish-"

"Didn't your teeth tend to rust?"

"I had my originals then, Pete, had my ivories. I had everything but the breaks."

"Then you switched to boxing," said Pete, "and you got em. Break your nose, break your jaw, break your — "

"One phone call, one photograph in the right hands and Maureen O'Sullivan would've been washin out my leopardskin B.V.D.'s down by the river. Would've hit it big."

"Could you play-act, Dan'!?"

"Act, hell. For what? Me Tarzan, you Jane?"

"With me," said Sneaky Pete, "it was oranges. My older brother and me, we worked at this filling station, and he'd always be sending off for brochures about business opportunities out here. Used to hide from the boss down in the grease pit, read about our future. I remember the one that hooked us, can still see the picture in my head. Pretty girl standing under this tree just drippin with big fat oranges. 'Money does grow on trees,' it said, 'in the Golden State.' " Pete laughed and scratched his scalp.

"So what happened?"

"What ever happens? We came, we saw, we got nowhere. My brother's been in and out of Folsom, if he takes another jolt it'll be a long one. To this day he can't stand anything to do with oranges. He'd get whattayoucallit, scurvy, before he'd even look at one.

"Yeah, it was oranges brung me out here."

They looked to Mr. Miles.

"I was born here," he said. "Just a little after my family come from Arkansas. My mother was eight months and counting when they piled everything on the Ford and started west. Nineteen thirty-one.

"Somebody told em they could eat in California."

Mr. Miles shivered as if the recollection chilled him.

"And how bout you, young fella?" called Daniel. "What's your excuse?"

Brian shrugged. "Where else is there to go?"

The men all laughed, Cervantes the hardest though he had no idea of what they were talking about.

"Sometimes," said Daniel Boone staring out over the water, "I get the feeling that if I concentrated, I could just drift on west, out across the ocean, past all the limits, into another dimension."

"More p-power to you, Dan'l. When you leavin?"

"Who could concentrate with a bunch of beach rummies around him? Sides, I got to take a piss."

"Well you better walk back to the bus station," said Pete, "cause I think that's Cramer in the squad car parked behind us and he'll bust you for exposure if you whizz over the wall. Mean bastard, that one."

"I tell you," said Daniel, creaking to his feet, "they wear a man down." He shook his head to clear it and headed into town.

"Old Dan'l," said Miles when he was out of earshot. "Man wasn't born, he was fermented."

"Bet he's got the happiest body lice in town, though. Only fella I know can match him for alcoholic content is that old Stuffy."

"Stofey, he can no be fine," blurted Cervantes. "He no be here no there no anywhere this morning. He disappear tot Stofey."

"Oklahoma," said Pete, "you haven't seen an old wreck, looks like he used his head for a croquet mallet, big old green overcoat, smell'd gag a maggot? Talks like water going down a drain?"

"Nope. Who is he, anyways? Daniel asked after him too."

"Well, he's usually down here by now, this is his bench. Just an old fighter gone to the bottle. He's sort of an institution down here."

"How'd he lose his speech?"

"It's sort of like what happened to our Mexican friend here, only in reverse. They both started out talkin normal, 45 rpm, and then when they burnt out their fuses Cervantes pushed up to 78 while Stuffy dropped to gg. If you could listen slow enough and deep enough you might be able to make out words when he talks. Mostly people just give him a nickel and pass on by. Or hold on to the nickel and cross the street."

"Man is all w-wino and a yard wide. Three generations of k-kids've had Stuffy pointed out to them for a bad example. Don't know what the town would do without him."

"Maybe they'd start pointin at you, Miles."

"Shit. Wouldn't be surprised, things keep up the way they been."

The patrol car screeched away.

"Bye-bye, Cramer. You going to work today?"

"Maybe yes maybe no. Got a h-half-hour to think about it. What about you?"

"Didn't you hear? I been laid off. Got daylight to bum."

"Any idea when they'll call you back?"

"Maybe Daniel can predict it for us. He hit you with that brain-wave stuff, Oklahoma?"

"Yuh. Said somebody was calling him from the dead."

Pete giggled. "He's probably picking up radio stations on those metal choppers of his."

"Things give me the h-heebie-jeebies."

Daniel came back, wearing a white apron and a broad grin.

"What he do over there, give you a job washin dishes?"

"Nah. I didn't quite make it to the facilities. And Sam, he wouldn't hold still for a hamburger, but I got him to give me this apron. Pissed all over my front." Daniel frowned. "And it's all your fault, Cervantes, you hadn't got that beer last night. It's the beer makes you piss."

"Ohyes Donnydonny ohyes m'hmn. Beers."

"Cramer went, huh?"

"He got tired of waiting for you to flash your ID there, Dan'l. Took off up the hill in a big hurry. Maybe he got an emergency call."

"Good riddance. I get bad brain waves from that cop."

"You still on that kick?"

"Pete, if you could concentrate — " Daniel closed his eyes and held his head with his fingertips "I could put you in a deep trance."

"You hand him that b-bottle he can put himself in a deep trance."

Daniel's head slumped into his hands. "Six thousand comedians out of work."

"Just kiddin, Dan'l, there's sumn to it I bet. Weirdest thing ever happened to me was when I called up Roy Elrod and the phone didn't even ring, just old R-Roy started talking to me. Gimme the creeps."

Mr. Miles's shakes had calmed a bit but his eyes were still blinking like crazy.

"Will you look at that." Daniel stared at something between his feet. "Ant carryin a big boulder like that."

They all looked. Brian could just barely see a crumb of his cinnamon doughnut inching toward Cervantes.

"Ant can lift seven hundred pounds his weight."

"Seven hunnert times, you mean."

"S'what I said. A man was as strong as an ant he could lift that pier."

"You used to be a muscleman, Dan'l, what could you lift? Two hunnert, three hunnert pound?"

"Don't remind me. Move your foot, Cervantes, let'm go straight through. Jesus, don't step on him, he's got enough troubles."

"Dan'l, I hate to say this, but I don't see no ant."

Pete winked down to Brian. "I think you're out in the whatchamacallit," he said. "Fifth dimension."

"Fourth dimension. And this aint no DT. DT's I get cockaroaches, not ants."

Daniel paled suddenly, he covered his eyes with his palms. "Jesus Christ, I'm a dead duck."

"You know Misser Horse? He own tot big buildin in the moanton, he berry big mon, I lob to work por him, lob him berry much."

"Cervantes, Hearst has been dead what — twenty years now? It don't really matter to him that you peddled newspapers once."

"Ohyes, noosepaper, berry big m'hmn m'hmn."

"A dead duck," said Daniel. "Aint gone near pussy in a year. A whole year."

"Maybe it's like me," said Pete. "I aint quit drinkin, I just laid off for a while."

"Nope. It's done with."

"Say Dan'! whatever happened to the one they called Fat Lou? Haven't seen him round for ages."

"He's dead. They're all dead."

"I member that guy," said Pete. They were trying to change the subject, to get Daniel's mind off himself. "I member one night seeing him and Sparky, you know, the one with the neck brace, him and Sparky right here on these stairs goin down to the beach. Somehow they scraped enough together for a whole gallon of wine. Goin down these very steps, Sparky was holding it, when the bag tore and smash that gallon to smithereens. Whole gallon, didn't get a drop before it's broke. I seen Fat Lou just sit down and blubber like a baby."

"Never hold your wine by the bag, you got to keep your h-hand under it."

"No shit."

A man and a woman dressed in matching denim suits strolled self-consciously behind the bench. They turned to go down to the beach.

"Ought to put a sign up," muttered Pete. "No Trespassing — Winos Only."

"Aaaaaaaaaaugh!" Daniel clapped his hands over his ears and squeezed his eyes shut.

"What is it, Dan'l?"

"The gurgling," he said. "The voice. It won't stop."

Miles handed him the Thunderbird. "Relief is just a swallow away."

Daniel drank deeply, then threw his head back and stared up at the gulls.

"Yeah, I remember somethin like that happened to this b-buddy of mine." Miles exchanged a concerned look with Sneaky Pete. "Way back when. Vodka days, none a this wine shit, and my buddy had just turned twenty-one. Only liquor store in town was the old gray-bearded J-Jew, who even if you was toothless and wrinkled wanted to see ID. So my buddy goes in there and gets a fifth, slaps his card on the table and orders up like a man, and what does he d-do for his twentyfirst birthday but drop it the minute he hits the sidewalk. His first legal bottle spread out on the pavement. He was strange in the head, this buddy, and he takes it for a sign from the Lord. N-never touched another drop."

"Hell of a note. And I thought my brother was crazy with his oranges."

"I'm a dead duck."

"I'll drink to that. Hand her over, Dan'l."

"Breakfast of Champions."

"No shit."

Cervantes fumbled the bag but recovered, giving Miles a big grin.

"You drop that wine an I'll drop you, Cervantes. Into the ocean with a rock tied around your neck."

"Ohyes m'hmn ohyes."

"Oh yes."

The bag moved from Mr. Miles to Daniel to Miles to Cervantes to Brian. Brian finished it.

"Don't chuck it, Nevada. Them squirrels."

Brian slid it under the bench, still in the bag.

"Tell you one thing," Pete cackled. "Now you can say, 'D. Boone killed him a bottle at this bench.' We'll put up a plaque."

"I'm finished. Hairy Carey."

"You know Misser Carey? He got a boosher — "

"Shut up, Cervantes. I'monna lay out on the beach, get my strenth back." Daniel tried to get up but seemed tied to the bench. He fell back. He made it up on his third try; Pete and Mr. Miles tensed to catch him, but he straightened and swayed gently. Cervantes stood and grabbed the Navy bag.

Brian stuck the ESP paperback in it. "There's your book, Daniel. Thanks."

He looked down at Brian. "You believe it?"

"Sure, Daniel."

"I'll believe it, Dan'! when you get down them steps in one piece."

Daniel got to the steps in a controlled lurch, with Cervantes wagging behind. He paused, took a deep breath, declared himself a dead duck, and started down.

"I'm worried about old Dan'!."

"Oh, he'll be all right."

"The thing is, Pete, I got this theory. You know how there always seems to be the same number of winos around? Like there's a steady figure? But you know they have to die, everybody dies. So my theory is that every time one taps out, that makes room for a new one. Somebody's got to fill the space."

"Now don't you worry, Miles. You're not as bad off as you think and Daniel's gonna perk up. He kept his mind out of that damn fifth dimension he'd feel a lot better."

Mr. Miles was shaking again, almost in tears. "I think I'm gonna lose my job," he said.

"Now come on, buddy, pull it together. Lookit there, he made.it down to the beach as good as new. Now if your theory is right, there just isn't any room for a newcomer, is there? Daniel's gonna outlive us all. We can keep him up nights calling from the next world."

They were quiet then and Brian sat for a while, watching the waves and the gulls, enjoying his slight wine buzz. Now that he'd arrived he didn't know what to do. He was hungry. He asked the men about the fight in Ventura and they said yes, he'd probably be able to get on with the concession.

"Horace Greeley had the ticket," the old man used to say, winking through one of his playful periods. "Of course history tells us that he stayed home and sold it to somebody else. I don't believe the man ever saw the far side of the Mississippi. Oh, but I'm sure he told a fine story over a shot of rye, all full of nostalgia for what he'd never seen. Probably drummed up a great deal of business for the Union Pacific, too." The old man would peek at himself in the bar mirror then, and snort a little laugh. "They also serve who only sit and bullshit."

When Brian left, Sneaky Pete was dozing and Miles was shivering in the sun. He could see Daniel and Cervantes stretched out down on the beach. It was warm and nice and he liked the idea of getting a job with a fight card.

Brian walked back through town toward ioi. It would be the quickest way down to Ventura. There was some kind of commotion in the center plaza when he got to it, dozens of people crowded around the forty-niners fountain. The water was on, cascading over bronzed boulders, streaming on down a sluice into the miners' pans, sparkling golden in the sun. There was a cop standing on the edge of the moat wall, hands supporting him from the crowd behind. He was fishing something from the water with a gaff, something very heavy hooked by wet, green cloth.

It was just getting warm when Brian reached the highway, only a little after eight. He had daylight to burn.