The Centaurus

VII

CALDWELL turns and shuts the door behind him. Another day, another dollar. He is weary but does not sigh. The hour is late, after five. He has stayed in his room bringing the basketball books up to date and trying to unravel the tickets; there is a block of tickets missing and in rummaging through his drawers he came across Zimmerman’s report and reread it. It depressed him out of all proportion. It was on blue paper and looking at it was like falling up wards into the sky. Also he has corrected the exams he gave the fourth section today. Poor Judy Lengel: she doesn’t have it. She tries too hard and maybe that has been his trouble all his life. As he walks toward the stairwell the ache low in his body revives and enwraps him like a folded wing. Some have the five talents, some have the two, some have the one. But whether you’ve worked in the vineyard all day or just an hour, when they call you in your pay is the same. He hears his father’s voice in the memory of these parables and this depresses him further.

“George.” A shadow is in the corner of his eye.

“Huh? Oh. You. What are you doing here so late?”

“Fussing. That’s what old maids do. Fuss.” Hester Appleton stands, arms folded across the ruffles of her virginal blouse, outside her doorway; her room is 202, just down the hall from Room 204. “Harry mentioned that you came to see him yesterday.”

“I’m ashamed to admit I did. Did he say anything else? We’re waiting for the X-rays to come through or some damn thing.”

“Don’t be worried.” The little step forward in her voice as she blurts this makes Caldwell tilt his long head.

“Why not?”

“It doesn’t do any good. Peter’s very worried, I could tell today in class.”

“The poor kid, he didn’t get much sleep last night. Our car broke down in Alton.”

Hester tucks a strand of her hair back and with an elegant touch of her middle finger pushes her pencil deeper into her bun. Her hair is glossy and not at all gray in the half-light. She is short, bosomy, broad in the beam and, seen from the front, dumpily thick-waisted. But seen sideways her waist is strikingly small, tucked in by her doughty upright posture; she seems from her stance to be always in the act of inhaling. Her blouse wears a gold clasp shaped like an arrow. “He wasn’t,” she says, after considering once more in her life the face of the man hulking above her in the gloom of the hall, a strange knobbed face whose mystery, in relation to herself, is permanent, “his usual self.”

“He’s gonna come down with a cold before I’m through with him,” Caldwell says. “I know it and I can’t help it. I’m gonna get the kid sick and I can’t stop myself.”

“He’s not such a fragile boy, George.” She pauses. “In some ways he’s tougher than his father.”

Caldwell hears this slightly, enough to bend a bit what he was going to say anyway. “When I was a kid back in Passaic,” he says, “I never remember being laid up with a cold. You wiped your nose on-a sleeve and if your throat itched you coughed. The first time in my life I went to bed with anything was with the flu in 1918; if that wasn’t a mess. Brrough!”

Hester feels the pain in the man and she presses her fingers against the gold arrow to hush the disconcerting flutter that has erupted in her chest. She has been in the classroom adjacent to this man for so many years that in her heart it is as if she had often slept with him. It is as if they had been lovers when younger and for reasons never sufficiently examined they had long ago ceased to be.

Caldwell feels this to the extent of being, in her presence, a shade more relaxed than anywhere else. They are both exactly fifty, a trick of birthdays that in their unthinking deeps does oddly matter. He is reluctant to leave her and go down the stairs; his illness, his son, his debts, the painful burden of land his wife has saddled him with-all these problems itch in his brain for expression. Hester wants him; she wants him to tell her everything. Her frame of manners strains to accommodate this desire; as if to empty herself of decades of lonely habit she exhales: sighs. Then says, “Peter’s like Cassie. He has that way of getting what he wants.”

“I should have put her on the Burly-cue stage, she would have been happier there,” Caldwell tells Miss Appleton in a loud earnest rush. “I shouldn’t have married her, I should have just been her manager. But I didn’t have the guts. I was brought up so that as soon as you saw a woman you half-way liked the only thing you could think of to do was ask her to marry you.” This is to say, I should have married a woman like you. You.

Though Hester has sought this, now that it arrives it disgusts and alarms her. The man’s shadow before her seems about to dilate with anxiety and to overwhelm her physically. It is too late; she is insufficiently elastic now. She laughs as if what he has said were meaningless. The sound of her laughter afflicts the diminishing perspective of green lockers with a look of terror. Their air-slits seem aghast at what they see on the opposite wall: framed pictures of vanished baseball and track teams.

Hester straightens up, inhales, retucks the pencil into her bun, and asks, “What thought have you given to Peter’s education?”

“No thought. My only thought is that it’s going to take more money than I’ve got.”

“Is he going to attend an art school or a liberal arts college?”

“That’s up to him and his mother. They discuss this sort of thing between them; it scares the living daylights out of me. As far as I can tell, the kid knows even less than I did at his age what the score is. If I were to kick off now, he and his mother would sit out there in the sticks and try to eat the flowers off the wallpaper. I can’t afford to die.”

“It is a luxury,” Hester says. The Appleton ill-humor has

in her taken the form of an occasional unexpected tartness, or irony. She once again examines the mysterious face above her, frowns at the disease-like murmur in her breast, and moves to turn, dismissing not so much Caldwell as her own secret.

“Hester.”

“What, George?” Her head with its taut round hairdo is caught like a crescent moon half in the light from her room. An unimpassioned observer would conclude, from the light, glad, regretful way she smiles up, that he had once been her lover.

“Thanks for letting me rave on,” he says. He adds, “I want to confess something. Tomorrow it may be too late. There’ve been times in my years here when the kids have got me so down I’ve stepped out of the classroom and come here by the drinking fountain just to hear you in there pronouncing French. It’s been better than a drink of water for me, to hear you pronouncing French. It’s never failed to pick me up.”

Delicately she asks, “Are you down now?”

“Yep. I’m down. I’m in Old Man Winter’s belly.”

“Shall I pronounce something?”

“To tell you God’s honest truth, Hester, I’d appreciate it.”

Her face goes into its Gallic animation-apple-cheeked, prune-lipped-and she pronounces, word by word, savoring the opening diphthong and closing nasal like two liqueurs, “Dieu est tres fin.”

A second of silence hovers.

“Say it again,” Caldwell asks.

“Dieu -est -tres -fin. It’s the sentence I’ve lived by.”

“God is very-very fine?”

“Qui. Very fine, very elegant, very slender, very exquisite. Dieu est tres fin.”

“That’s right. He certainly is. He’s a wonderful old gentle man. I don’t know where the hell we’d be without Him.”

As if by stated consent, both turn away.

Caldwell turns back in time to check her. “You were good enough to recite for me,” he says, “I’d like to recite something for you. I don’t think I’ve thought of this for thirty years. It’s a poem we used to have to recite back in Passaic; I think I can still do the beginning. Shall I try it?”

“Try it.”

“I don’t know why the hell I’m bedevilling you like this.” Like a schoolchild Caldwell stands to attention, makes fists of concentration at his sides, squints to remember, and announces, “ ‘Song of the Passaic,’ By John Alleyne MacNab.” He clears his throat.

“The great Jehovah wisely planned

All things of Earth, divinely grand;

And, in His way, all nature tends

To laws divine, to serve His ends.

“The rivers run, and none shall know

How long their waters yet may flow;

We read the record of the past,

While time withholds the future cast.”

He thinks, slumps, and smiles. “That’s all the further we go. I thought I’d remember more.”

“Very few men would have remembered as much. It’s not a very happy poem, is it?”

“It is for me, isn’t that funny? I guess you have to have been brought up beside the river.”

“Mm. I suppose that is the way things are. Thank you, George, for reciting it.” And now she does turn back into her room. The gold arrow on her blouse seems for an instant to press against her larynx, threatening to smother her. She brushes vaguely at her brow, swallows, and the sensation passes.

Caldwell heads for the stairs groggy with woes. Peter. His education is a riddle to which however it’s posed the answer is money of which there is not enough. Also his skin and his health. By correcting the exams now Caldwell can give the kid another ten minutes sleep in the morning tomorrow. He hates to pull the kid out of bed. It will be eleven before they get home tonight after the basketball game and this combined with that weird night in the flea-bag last night will ripen him up for another cold. A cold a month like clockwork, they say the skin doesn’t have anything to do with it but Caldwell doubts this. Everything interconnects. With Cassie, he had never noticed until they were married, just one spot on her belly, but with the kid it was a plague: arms, legs, chest, even on his face more than he realized, bits of crust in the ears like dried soap and the poor kid didn’t know it. Ignorance is bliss. In the Depression when he used to push the kid along on his Kiddy Kar with the forked stick, he had been frightened, he had come to the world’s cliff-edge, and his son’s small face turning around to look back, the freckles solid under his eyes, made the world seem solid. Now his son’s face, dappled, feminine in the lips and eyelashes, narrow like a hatchet, anxious and sneering, gnaws at Caldwell’s heart like a piece of un finished business.

If he had had any character he would have put on baggy pants and taken her onto the vaudeville stage. But then vaudeville folded just like the telephone company. All things fold. Who would have thought the Buick would give out like that just when they needed it to take them home? Things never, fail to fail. On his deathbed his father’s religion: “eternally forgotten?”

Nos. 18001 to 18145: these are the basketball tickets missing. Through his closets and his drawers and his papers and the only thing he had found the blue slip of Zimmerman’s report, slip of sky, making his stomach bind like a finger in a slammed door. Biff. Bang. Well, he hadn’t buried his talent in the ground; he had lifted the bushel from his light and showed everybody what a burnt-out candle looks like.

A thought he had run his mind through in the last minute had pleased him. But what? He picks his way back through the brown pebbles of his brain to locate this jewel. There. Bliss. Ignorance is bliss. Amen.

The steel mullions of the window of the landing halfway down the stairs, with their little black drifts of dirt by now as solid as steel itself, strike him strangely. As if the wall, in becoming a window, speaks in a loud voice a word of a foreign language. Since, five days ago, Caldwell grasped the possibility that he might die, took it into himself as you might swallow a butterfly, a curiously variable gravity has entered the fabric of things, that now makes all surfaces leadenly thick with heedless permanence and the next instant makes them dance with inconsequence, giddy as scarves. Nevertheless, among disintegrating surfaces he tries to hold his steadfast course.

This is his program:

– Hummel.

– Call Cassie.

– Go to the dentist.

– Be here for game by 6:15.

– Get in the car and take Peter home.

He bucks the door of reinforced glass and walks down the empty corridor. See Hummel, call Cassie. At noon Hummel still hadn’t found a second-hand driveshaft to replace the one that snapped in the little odd-shaped lot between the cough-drop plant and the railroad tracks; he was searching by telephone through the junk yards and auto body shops of Alton and West Alton. He had estimated the bill would come to between $20-25, he would tell Cassie and she would somehow make this amount of money matter less, it was just a drop in the bucket as far as she was concerned, just one more drop more or less to pour into that thankless land of hers, eighty acres on his shoulders, land, dead cold land, his blood sunk like rain into that thankless land. And Pop Kramer can stick a whole slice of bread into his mouth at one swoop. Call Cassie. She would be worried; he foresees their worries inter twining over the phone like two spliced cables. Was Peter all right? Has Pop Kramer fallen down the stairs yet? What did the X-rays show? He doesn’t know. He has thought off and on all day of calling Doc Appleton but something in him resists giving the old braggart the satisfaction. Ignorance is bliss. Anyway he has to go to the dentist. Thinking of it makes him suck the tender tooth. By searching through his body he can uncover any color and shape of pain he wants: the saccharine needle of the toothache, the dull comfortable pinch of his truss, the restless poison shredding in his bowels, the remote irritation of a turned toenail gnawing the toe squeezed beside it in the shoe, the little throb above his nose from having used his eyes too hard in the last hour, and the associated but different ache along the top of his skull, like the soreness left by his old leather football helmet after a battering scrimmage down in the Lake Stadium. Cassie, Peter, Pop Kramer, Judy Lengel, Deifendorf: he has them all on his mind. See Hummel, call Cassie, go the dentist, be here by 6:15. He foresees himself skinned of chores, purified. One thing he loved in his life: in splicing cables, the sight of the copper strands, naked and raw and gleaming and fanning when suddenly stripped of the dirty old rubber. The cable’s conductive heart. It used to frighten him to bury something so alive down in the ground. The shadow of the wing tightens so that his intestines wince: a spider lives there. Brrough. In the shuffle of his thoughts his own death keeps coming to the top. His face burns. His legs go watery, his heart and head become enormous with fear. Death that white width for him? His face is drenched with warmth; a blindness seizes his body; he silently begs a face to appear in the air. The long varnished hall, lit by spaced globes of sealed-in light, shimmers in tints of honey, amber, tallow. So familiar, so familiar it is surprising that his footsteps in fifteen years have not worn a path down these boards, yet it seems freshly strange, as strange as on the day when, a young husband and new father still with that soft New Jersey twang and blur in his voice, he had come in the heat of an Olinger summer afternoon for his first interview with Zimmerman. He had liked him. Caldwell had instantly liked Zimmerman, whose heavy uneasy allusive ways reminded him of a cryptic school friend, a seminary roommate, of his father’s who used to come visiting now and then on a Sunday and who always remembered to bring a little bag of licorice for “young Caldwell.” Licorice for George, and a hair ribbon for Alma. Always. So that in time the little stenciled casket Alma kept on her bureau overflowed with hair ribbons. He had liked Zimmerman and had felt liked in turn. They had shared a joke about Pop Kramer. He cannot remember the joke but smiles to remember that one was made, fifteen years ago. Caldwell walks with strengthening strides. Like an unpredictable eddy in the weather, a small breeze arises and cools his cheeks with the thought that a dying man would not have it in him to walk so upright.

Cattycorner across from the trophy case with its hundred highlights, Zimmerman’s door is shut. As Caldwell strides by, it pops open and Mrs. Herzog steps out at a slant under his nose. She is as startled as he; her eyes widen behind her cockeyed butterscotch hornrims and her peacock-feathered hat sits crooked as if with shock. She is, from Caldwell’s height of age, a young woman; her oldest child has just reached the seventh grade. Already, ripples of protective agitation are spreading upwards from this child through the faculty. She got herself elected to the school board to guarantee personally her children’s education. From his professional heart, Caldwell despises these meddling mothers; they haven’t a clue as to what education is: a jungle, an unholy mess. Arrogantly her mouth in its blurred purplish lipstick refuses to frame a smile of confessed surprise, instead remaining ajar in frank amazement, like a stuck letter slot.

Caldwell breaks the silence. An urchin’s impudence, revived from deep in his childhood by the forgotten sensation of nearly having his nose socked, dimples his face as he tells her, Mrs. Herzog of the school board, “Boy, the way you came out of that door reminded me of a cuckoo clock!”

Her air of interrupted dignity, ridiculous in one not yet out of her thirties and leaning her weight on a doorknob, freezes the harder at this greeting. With glassied eyes he resumes his walk to the end of the hall. Not until he has bucked open the wire-reinforced double doors and started down the steps under the yellow wall where since yesterday the word fuck has been scrubbed away, does the fist sink “into his stomach. His goose, cooked. What in hell had the pushy bitch been doing in there? He had felt Zimmerman’s presence behind her in his office, a dark cloud; he could feel Zimmerman’s atmosphere through a keyhole. She had shoved open the door like a woman making a point at her back and not dreaming her front was exposed. Caldwell in his present state cannot afford another enemy. Tickets 18001 to 18145, Zimmerman’s report saying in black and blue that he hit the kid in class, and now this: bumping into Mim Herzog with her lipstick smeared. A bubble expands in his throat and, stepping into the open, he takes in fresh air with a gasp as sharp as a sob. Blurred crimped clouds have been lowered tangent to the town’s slate roofs. The roofs seem greasily lustrous with sullen inner knowledge. The atmosphere feels pregnant with a hastening fate. Lifting his head and sniffing, Caldwell experiences a vivid urge to walk on faster, to canter right past Hummel’s, to romp neighing through the front door and out the back door of any house in Olinger that stood in his way, to gallop up the brushy brown winter-burned flank of Shale Hill and on, on, over hills that grow smoother and bluer with distance, on and on on a southeast course cutting diagonally across highways and rivers frozen solid as highways until at last he drops, his head in death extended toward Baltimore.

The herd has deserted Minor’s. Only three persons in habit the luncheonette: Minor himself, Johnny Dedman, and that atrocious ego Peter Caldwell, the science teacher’s son. All but the shiftless and homeless are at their own tables at this hour. Five-forty. Next door, the post office has closed. Mrs. Passify, moving tenderly on worn legs, lowers the grates on the windows and eases shut the drawers colorful with stamps and inserts the counted money into the mock-Corinthian safe. Behind her, the back room seems a battle field hospital where gray mail sacks lie unconscious, steeped in an anesthesia of shadows, prone, misshapen, and disembowelled. She sighs and goes to the window. To a passerby on the pavement her great -round face would seem the face of a grotesquely swollen child straining to peek out of a tiny port-hole, the goldleaf O at the zenith of the arc of letters spelling post office.

Beside her, Minor methodically twists his coarse white cloth into the steaming throat of each Coca-Cola glass before he sets it down on the towel he has spread beside his sink. Each glass continues to give off a few wisps of mist as the cool air licks it. Through his window, which is beginning to fog, the pike is ripe with cars hurrying home-a laden branch whose fruit glows. The luncheonette behind him is all but empty, like a stage. It has been supporting a debate. Within, Minor is a cauldron of rage; his hairy nostrils seem seething vents.

“Minor,” Peter calls from his booth, “you’re old-fashioned. There’s nothing wrong with Communism. In twenty years we’ll have it in this country and you’ll be happy as a clam.”

Minor turns from the window, dome flashing, brain raging. “If old FDR had lived we’d have it,” he says, and laughs angrily, so that his nostrils spread under the burst of pressure. “But he went and killed himself, or else he died of syphilis. God’s judgement: mark my words.”

“Minor, you don’t believe that. You couldn’t be sane and believe that.”

“I believe it,” Minor says. “He was rotten in the head when he went to Yalta or we wouldn’t be in the fix we are now.”

“What fix? What fix, Minor? This country is sitting on top of the world. We got the big bomb and we got the big bombers.”

“Arrrhh.” Minor turns away.

“What fix? What fix, Minor? What fix?”

He turns back and says, “The Ruskies’ll be in France and Italy before the year’s over.”

“So what? So what, Minor? Communism has to come, one way or another; it’s the only way to beat poverty.”

Johnny Dedman in a separate booth is smoking his eighth Camel of the hour and is trying to blow one smoke ring through another. Now he cries, without warning, the word “War!” and with his finger rat-tat-tats the big brown button knotted onto the end of the light cord above his head.

Minor comes back in his narrow runway behind the counter the better to address the boys in their dim booths. “We should’ve kept marching when we hit the Elbe and taken Moscow when we had the chance. They were rotten and ready for us, the Russian soldier is the most cowardly in the world. The peasants would have risen up to greet us. That’s what old Churchill wanted us to do, and he was right. He was a crook but clever, clever. He didn’t love Old Joe. Nobody, in the world loved Old Joe but King Franklin.”.Peter says, “Minor, you really are insane. What about Leningrad? They weren’t cowardly then.”

“They didn’t win it. They did not win it. Our equipment won it. Our tanks. Our guns. Sent courtesy free parcel post by your good friend FDR; he robbed the American people to save the Russians who then turn right around and are ready to march this minute over the Alps into Italy.”

“He was trying to beat Hitler, Minor. Don’t you remember? Adolf H-I-T-L-E-R.”

“I love Hitler,” Johnny Dedman announces. “He’s alive in Argentina.”

“Minor loved him too,” Peter says, reedy-voiced with fury and hot in all his limbs. “Didn’t you, Minor? Didn’t you think Hitler was a nice man?”

“I never did,” Minor says. “But I’ll tell you this. I’d rather have Hitler alive than old Joe Stalin. There is the Devil Incarnate. You mark my words.”

“Minor, what do you have against Communism? They wouldn’t make you go to work. You’re too old. You’re too sick.”

“Bam. Bam” Johnny Dedman cries. “We should’ve dropped an atom bomb on Moscow, Berlin, Paris, France, Italy, Mexico City, and Africa. Ka-Pow. I love that mushroom-shaped cloud.”

“Minor,” Peter says. “Minor. Why do you exploit us poor teenagers so ruthlessly? Why are you so brutal? You’ve got the board of the pinball machine tilted so steeply nobody except Dedman can get any free games out of it and he’s a genius.”

“I am a genius,” Dedman says. “They don’t even believe in a Divine Creator,” Minor states.

“Well, my God, who does?” Peter exclaims, blushing for himself but unable to halt, so anxious is he to pin this man who with his black Republican stupidity and stubborn animal vigor embodies everything in the world that is killing Peter’s father; he has to keep Minor from turning his back, he has to hold, as it were, the world open. “You don’t. I don’t. Nobody does. Really.” Yet in this boast, now that it is issued, Peter perceives an abysmal betrayal of his father. In his mind he sees his father slip into a pit stunned. He waits, so hungrily his mouth feels parched, for Minor’s rejoinder, whatever it might be, so that in the twists and detours of argument he can find a way to retract. So much of Peter’s energy is spent in wishing he could take back things he has said. “I believe you,” Minor says simply, turning. The way out is sealed.

“In two years,” Johnny Dedman estimates aloud, “there’ll be a war. I’ll be a major. Minor will be a first sergeant. Peter will be peeling potatoes in the back of the kitchen, behind the garbage pails.” He softly blows one swelling smoke ring and then, the miracle, makes his mouth as tiny and tight as a keyhole and puffs out a smaller ring which, spinning quickly, passes through the larger. At the moment of interpenetration both blur, and a loose cloud of smoke lengthens like an arm reaching for the light-cord. Dedman sighs, a bored creator.

“Rotten in the head at Yalta,” Minor calls from far up the counter, “and Truman at Potsdam as dumb as they come. That man was so dumb his haberdashery store went bankrupt and the next minute he’s running the United States of America.”

The door bucks open, and the darkness on the porch materializes into a hard figure in a bullet cap. “Peter here?” it asks.

“Mr. Caldwell,” Minor says in that basso he reserves for greeting adults. “Yes he is. He was just telling me he’s an atheistic Communist.”

“He just does that to kid you. You know that. There isn’t a man in town he thinks more of than Minor Kretz. You’re a father to that boy, and don’t think his mother and I don’t appreciate it.”

“Hey Daddy,” Peter calls, embarrassed for him.

Caldwell comes back toward the booths, blinking; he seems unable to find his son. He stops at Dedman’s booth. “Who’s this? Oh. Dedman. Haven’t they got you graduated yet?”

“Hi there George,” Dedman says. Caldwell does not expect much from his students but he does expect the dignity of formal address. Of course they sense this. Cruelty is clever where goodness is imbecile. “I hear your swimming team lost again. What does that make it? Eighty in a row?”

“They tried,” Caldwell tells him. “If you don’t have the cards, you can’t manufacture ‘em.”

“Hey, I got some cards,” Dedman says, his cheeks glowing ripely, his long lashes curled. “Look at my cards, George.” He reaches into the pocket of his forest-green shirt for the pornographic deck.

“Put them away,” Minor calls from far up in his runway. Electric light bleaches his skull and strikes cool sparks from the dried Coke glasses.

Caldwell does not seem to hear. He walks on to the booth where his son sits smoking a Kool. Giving no sign of seeing the cigarette, he slides in opposite Peter and says, “Jesus, a funny thing happened to me just now.”

“What? How is the car?”

“The car, believe it or not, is fixed. I don’t know how Hummel does it; he’s what you call a master of his trade.

He’s treated me swell all my life.” A new thought pricks him and he turns his head. “Dedman? You still here?”

Dedman has been holding his cards in his lip and fanning through them. He looks up, eyes bright. “Yeah?”

“Why don’t you quit school and get a job with Hummel? As I remember, you’re a natural mechanic.”

The boy shrugs uncomfortably under this unexpected thrust of concern. He says, “I’m waiting for the war.”

“You’ll wait until Doomsday, kid,” the teacher calls to him.

“Don’t bury your talent in the ground. Let your light shine. If I had your mechanical talent, this poor kid here would be eating caviar.”

“I got a police record.”

“So did Bing Crosby. So did St. Paul. They didn’t let that stop ‘em. Don’t use it as a crutch. You talk to Al Hummel. I never had a better friend in this town, and I was in worse shape than you are. You’re just eighteen; I was thirty-five.”

Agitated, Peter takes a puff made hopelessly awkward by his father’s presence and stubs out his Kool half-smoked. He yearns to divert his father from this conversation, which he knows Dedman in retelling will make into a joke. “Daddy, what was the funny thing?” He is overswept, as the smoke soaks his lungs with its mild poison, by a wave of distaste for all this mediocre, fruitless, cloying involvement. Somewhere there is a city where he will be free.

His father speaks so only he can hear. “I was walking through the hall ten minutes ago and Zimmerman’s door bumps open and who the hell pops out but Mrs. Herzog.”

“Well what’s so funny about that? She’s on the school board.”

“I don’t know if I should tell you this, but I guess you’re old enough now; she looked loved up.”

Peter giggles in surprise. “Loved up?” He laughs again and regrets having stubbed out his cigarette, which now seems priggish.

“There’s a look women get. In their faces. She had it, until she saw me.”

“But how? Was she wearing all her clothes?”

“Sure, but her hat looked crooked. And her lipstick had been smeared.”

“Uh-oh.”

“Uh-oh is right. It’s something I wasn’t meant to see.”

“Well it’s not your fault, you were just walking down the hall.”

“That doesn’t matter, it wasn’t my fault; if that was the rule nothing is ever anybody’s fault. The fact is, kid, I walked right into a nest of trouble, Zimmerman’s been playing cat-and-mouse with me for fifteen years and this is the end of the line.”

“Oh, Daddy. Your imagination is so fertile. She was probably in there consulting about something, you know Zim erman makes appointments for all hours.”

“You didn’t see the look in her eyes when she saw me.”

“Well what did you do?”

“I just give her the old sweet smile and keep going. But the cat is out of the bag and she knows it.”

“Daddy, now let’s be rational. Would she be capable of anything with Zimmerman? She’s a middle-aged woman, isn’t she?”

Peter wonders why his father smiles. Caldwell says, “She has a kind of name around town. She’s a good ten years younger than Herzog; she didn’t marry him until he’d made his pot.”

“But Daddy, she has a child in the seventh grade.” Peter is exasperated at his father’s inability to see the obvious, that women who run for the school board are beyond sex, that sex is for adolescents. He does not know how to put this to his father delicately. Indeed, the juxtaposition of his father and this subject is so stressful that his tongue feels locked in the bind.

His father kneads his brown-spotted hands together so hard that the knuckles turn yellow. He moans, “I could feel Zimmerman sitting in there like a big heavy raincloud; I can feel him on my chest right now.”

“Oh, Daddy,” Peter snaps. “You’re ridiculous. Why do you make such a mountain out of a molehill? Zimmerman doesn’t even exist in the way you see him. He’s just a slippery old fathead who likes to pat the girls.”

His father looks up, cheeks slack, startled. “I wish I had your self-confidence, Peter,” he says. “If I had your self-confidence I would’ve taken your mother onto the Burly-cue stage and you never would have been born.” This is as close to a rebuke of his son as he ever came. The boy’s cheeks burn. Caldwell says, “I better call her,” and heaves himself up out of the booth. “I can’t get it out of my head that Pop Kramer is going to fall down those stairs. If I live I’m determined to put up a bannister.”

Peter follows him to the front of the luncheonette. “Minor,” Caldwell asks, “would it break your heart if I asked you to break a ten-dollar ‘bill?” As Minor takes the bill, Caldwell asks him, “When do you think the Russians will reach Olinger? They’re probably getting on the trolley up at Ely now.”

“Like son, like father, huh Minor?” Johnny Dedman calls from his booth. “Is there any special way you want this?” Minor asks, displeased.

“A five, four ones, three quarters, two dimes, and a nickel.” Caldwell goes on, “I hope they do come. It would be the best thing that happened to this town since the Indians left. They’d line us up against the wall of the post office and put us out of our misery, old bucks like you and me.”

Minor doesn’t want to hear it. He snorts so angrily that Caldwell asks in a high pained voice, his searching voice, “Well what do you think the answer is? We’re all too dumb to die by ourselves.”

As usual, he receives no answer. He accepts the change in silence and gives Peter the five.

“What’s this for?”

“To eat on. Man is a mammal that must eat. We can’t ask Minor to feed you for free, though he’s gentleman enough to do it, I know he is.”

“But where did you get it?”

“It’s O. K.”

By this Peter understands that his father has again borrowed from the school athletic funds that are placed in his trust. Peter understands nothing of his father’s financial involvements except that they are confused and dangerous.

Once as a child, four years ago, he had a dream in which his father was called to account. Face ashen, his father, clad in only a cardboard grocery box beneath which his naked legs showed spindly and yellowish, staggered down the steps of the town hall while a crowd of Olingerites cursed and laughed and threw pulpy dark objects that struck the box with a deadened thump. In that way we have in dreams, where we are both author and character, God and Adam, Peter understood that inside the town hall there had been a trial. His father had been found guilty, stripped of everything he owned, flogged, and sent forth into the world lower than the hoboes. From his pallor plainly the disgrace would kill him. In his dream Peter shouted, “No! You don’t understand! Wait!” The words came out in a child’s voice. He tried to explain aloud to the angry townspeople how innocent his father was, how overworked, worried, conscientious, and anxious; but the legs of the crowd shoved and smothered him and he could not make his voice heard. He woke up with nothing explained. So now, in the luncheonette, it feels to him as if he is accepting a piece of his father’s flayed skin and inserting it into his wallet to be spent on hamburgers, lemon Pepsis, the pinball machine, and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups whose chocolate is terrible for his psoriasis.

The pay phone is attached to the wall behind the comic book rack. With a nickel and a dime Caldwell places the call to Firetown. “Cassie? We’re in the luncheonette…It’s fixed. It was the driveshaft…He thinks about twenty bucks, he hadn’t figured out the labor yet. Tell Pop Al asked about him. Pop hasn’t fallen down the stairs yet, has he?…You know I didn’t mean that, I hope he doesn’t too…No, no I haven’t, I haven’t had a second, I gotta be at the dentist in five minutes…To tell the truth, Cassie, I’m scared to hear what he has to say…I know that…I know that…I’d guess around eleven. Have you run out of bread? I bought you an Italian sandwich last night and it’s still sitting in the car…Hugh? He looks O. K., I just gave him five bucks so he can eat… I’ll put him on.”

Caldwell holds the receiver out to Peter. “Your mother wants to talk to you.”

Peter resents that she should invade this way the luncheonette that was the center of his life apart from her. Her voice sounds tiny and stern, as if, in pinching her into this metal box, the telephone company has offended her feelings. The magnetic pull she exerts over him is transmitted through the wires, so that he too feels reduced in size.

“Hi,” he says.

“How does he look to you, Peter?”

“Who?”

“Who? Why Daddy. Who else?”

“Kind of tired and excited, I can’t tell. You know what a puzzle he is.”

“Are you as worried as I am?”

“I guess so, sure.”

“Why hasn’t he called Doc Appleton back?”

“Maybe he doesn’t think the X-rays are developed yet.”

Peter looks toward his father as if to be confirmed. The man is engaging in some elaborate apologetic exchange with Minor: “…didn’t mean to be sarcastic a minute ago about the Communists, I hate ‘em as much as you do, Minor…”

The telephone overhears and asks, “Who’s he talking to?”

“Minor Kretz.”

“He’s just fascinated by that kind of man, isn’t he?” the miniature female voice bitterly remarks in Peter’s ear..”They’re talking about the Russians.”

A kind of cough ticks in the receiver and Peter knows his mother has started crying. His stomach sinks. He casts about for something to say, and his eye like a fly lights on one of the trick turds of painted plaster among the novelties. “How’s the dog?” he asks.

His mother’s breathing struggles for self-control. In the intervals of her crying jags her voice becomes oddly composed and stony. “She was in the house all this morning and I finally let her run after lunch. When she came back she had been after another skunk. Pop’s so mad at me he won’t come out of his room. With no bread in the house, his temper is running short.”

“Do you think Lady killed the skunk?”

“I think so. She was laughing.”

“Daddy says he’s going to the dentist.”

“Yes. Now that it’s too late.” Another wave of silent tears spreads into Peter’s ear; his brain is flooded with the image of how his mother’s eyes would be, red-rimmed and ponderous with water. A faint grainy smell, of grass or corn, affects his nose.

“I don’t think it’s necessarily too late,”, he says. It is pompous and insincere but he is compelled to say something. All the telephone numbers teenagers have penciled on the wall

above the phone begin to swap and swirl under his eyes. His mother sighs. “Yes, I suppose. Peter.”

“Yeah?”

“Take care of your father now.”

“I’ll try. It’s hard though.”

“Isn’t it? But he loves you so.”

“O.K., I’ll try. Do you want him back?”

“No.” She pauses, and then, with that theatrical talent for holding the stage that perhaps is the germ of sense in his father’s fantasy about putting her in vaudeville, she repeats with tremulous import, “No.”

“O.K., we’ll see you around eleven then.” His mother’s mind, shorn of her comforting body, is keenly exhausting to Peter. She senses this, and sounds even more hurt, more re mote, more miniature and stony. “The weatherman wants snow.”

“Yeah, the air kind of feels like it.”

“All right. All right, Peter. Hang up on your poor old mother. You’re a good boy. Don’t worry about anything.”

“O.K., don’t you either. You’re a good woman.” What a thing to say to your own mother! He hangs up, amazed at himself. It makes his scabs itch, the peculiarity of talking to her over the phone, where she becomes, incestuously, a simply female voice with whom he has shared secrets.

“Did she sound upset?” his father asks him.

“A little. I think Pop’s throwing an atmosphere.”

“That man can throw ‘em, too.” Caldwell turns and explains to Minor. “This is my father-in-law. He’s eighty-four and he can throw an atmosphere that knocks you out of your shoes. He can throw an atmosphere right through a key hole in a door. That man has more power in his little finger than you and I have from our bellies up.”

“Arrh,” Minor grunts softly, setting on the counter a suds-topped glass of milk. Caldwell drains it in two gulps, puts it down, winces, turns a shade paler, and bites back a belch. “Boy,” he said, “that milk took a wrong turn down there somewhere.” He still tends to pronounce “milk” “melk,” New Jersey style. He runs his tongue back and forth across his front teeth as if to clean them. “Now I’m off to Dr. Yankem.”

Peter asks, “Shall I go with you?” The dentist’s real name is Kenneth Schreuer and his office is two blocks down the pike, beyond the high school on the other side, opposite the tennis courts. Schreuer always has a soap opera going on the radio, from nine in the morning to six at night. On Wednesdays and Sundays from spring to fall he walks across the, trolley tracks in white ducks and becomes one of the county’s better tennis players. He is a better tennis player than he is a dentist. His mother works in the school cafeteria.

“No, hell,” Caldwell says. “What can you do, Peter? The damage is done. Don’t worry about this old heap of junk. Stay here where it’s warm and you have friends.”

So Peter’s first piece of work in carrying out his mother’s injunction to take care of his father is to watch the suffering man, his coat unbuttoned and too short and his knit bullet cap pulled down over his ears, head out the dark door alone into one more doom.

Johnny Dedman calls from his booth, sincerely, “Hey Peter. With you and your father standing up there against the light for a second I couldn’t tell which was which.”

“He’s taller,” Peter says curtly. Dedman as a sincere good boy doesn’t interest him. He feels in himself with the coming of night great sweet stores of wickedness ripen. He turns, pivoting on the weight of the five dollars at his hip, and tells Minor triumphantly, “Two hamburgers. No ketchup. And a glass of your watered milk and five nickels for your rigged pinball machine.” He goes back to his booth and relights the Kool he had stubbed out half-smoked. Polar ice thrills his proud throat; he preens on the empty stage of Minor’s place positive that all the eyes in the world are watching. The stretch of necessarily idle time ahead of him, a child’s dream of freedom, so exalts his heart it beats twice as fast and threatens to burst, tinting the dim air rose. Forgive me.

“Darling. Wait?”

“Mm?”

“Isn’t there some better place than your office?”

“No. Not in winter.”

“But we’ve been seen.”

“You’ve been seen.”

“But he knew. I could tell by his face that he knew. He looked as frightened as I felt.”

“Caldwell knows and yet he doesn’t know.”

“But do you trust him?”

“The matter of trust has never come up between us.”

“But now?”

“I trust him.”

“I don’t think you should. Couldn’t we fire him?”

He laughs richly, disconcerting her. She is customarily slow to see her own humor. He says, “You overestimate my omnipotence. This man has been teaching for fifteen years. He has friends. He has tenure.”

“But he really is incompetent, isn’t he?”

It disagrees with him, makes an uncongenial texture, when she turns argumentative and inquisitive in his embrace. The stupidity of women has a wonderfully fresh power to disappoint him.

“Is he? Competence is not so easy to define. He stays in the room with them, which is the most important thing. Furthermore, he’s faithful to me. He’s faithful.”

“Why are you sticking up for him? He could destroy us both now.”

He laughs again. “Come, come, my little bird. Human beings are harder to destroy than that.” Though her turns of anxiety are sometimes disagreeable, her physical presence profoundly relaxes him, and in his condition of innermost rest words seem to slip from him without trouble of thought, as liquid slips from high to low, as gas spins into the void.

She becomes vehement and angular in his arms. “I don’t like that man. I don’t like his smirky childish look.”

“His face makes you feel guilty.”

This surprising remark turns her inquisitiveness tender. “Should we feel guilty?” The question is actually shy.

“Absolutely. Afterwards.”

This makes her smile, and her smiling makes her mouth soft, and in kissing her he feels he is coming at last to a small sip after an interminable thirst. That the kissing does not quench the thirst, but quickens it, so that each kiss demands a more intense successor and involves him thereby in a vortex of mounting and widening appetite-that such is the case does not seem to him a cruel but, rather, a typically generous and compelling providence of Nature.

A tree of pain takes root in his jaw. Wait, wait! Kenny should have waited a few minutes more on the Novocain. But this is the end of the day, the boy is tired and hurried. Kenny \ had been one of Caldwell’s first students, back in the Thirties. Now this same boy, badly balding, braces one knee against the arm of the chair to win more leverage for the pliers which are grinding around the tooth and crushing it like chalk even as they try to twist it free. Caldwell’s fear is that the tooth will crumble between the pliers and remain in his head as a stripped and scraped nerve. Truly, the pain is unprecedented: an entire tree, rich with bloom, each bloom showering into the livid blue air a coruscation of lucid lime-green sparks. He opens his eyes in disbelief that this could go on and on, and his horizon is filled with the dim pink of the dentist’s determined mouth, odorous of cloves, the lips pressed together a bit lopsidedly: a weak mouth. The kid had tried to become an M.D. but hadn’t had the I.Q. so he had settled on being a butcher. Caldwell recognizes the pain branching in his head as a consequence of some failing in his own teaching, a failure somewhere to inculcate in this struggling soul consideration and patience; and accepts it as such. The tree becomes ideally dense; its branches and blooms compound into one silver plume, cone, column of pain, a column whose height towers heavenward from a base in which Caldwell’s skull is embedded. It is pure shrill silver with not a breath, not a jot, speck, fleck of alloy in it.

“There.” Kenneth Schreuer exhales with relief. His hands are trembling, his back is damp. He displays to Caldwell their prize in his pliers. As if emerging swollen from a dream, Caldwell with difficulty focuses. It is a little dull crumb of ivory, dappled brown and black, mounted on soft pink bow legs. It seems preposterously trivial to have resisted removal so furiously.

“Spit,” the dentist says.

Obediently Caldwell bends his face to the yellow basin, and a gush of blood joins the filmy swirl of clear water spinning there. The blood seems orangish and muddied with spittle. The sense of his head being pure silver yields to an airy giddiness. Fright and pressure flee through the gap in his gum. Abruptly he feels absurdly grateful for all created things, for the clean gleaming rounded lip of the circular enamel basin, for the bright little bent pipe shooting water into it, for the little comet-tail-shaped smear of rust this miniature Charybdis had worn down the section of the vortex where its momentum expires; grateful for the delicate dental smells, for the sounds of Kenny restoring his tools to the sterilizer bath, for the radio on the shelf filtering a shudder of organ music through its static. The announcer intones”, “I-Love-a-Mystery!” and the organ swirls forward again, ecstatic.

“It’s a shame,” Kenny says, “the caps of your teeth aren’t as strong as the roots.”

“That’s the story of my life,” Caldwell says. “Big feet, weak head.” His tongue in enunciating encounters a bubbly softness. He spits again. Strange to say, he finds the sight of his blood cheering.

With a steel tool Kenny picks at the pulled tooth, now severed forever from its earthly connection and somewhat starlike held high above the floor. Kenny gouges out a chip of black filling and puts the pick to his nostrils and sniffs. “Mm,” he says, “yes. Hopeless. This must have been giving you a good deal of pain.”

“Only when I noticed it.”

On the radio, the announcer explains, “We last left Doc and Reggie trapped in the great subterranean metropolis of monkeys [sound of monkeys chattering, yipping, cooing sadly] and now Doc turns to [fade] Reggie and says…”

Doc: “We gotta get out of here! The Princess is waiting!”

Cheepy cheep. Birrup, birrrooo.

Kenny gives Caldwell two tablets of Anacin in a cellophane jacket. “There may be some discomfort,” he says, “when the Novocain wears off.” It never wore on, Caldwell thinks. Preparing to leave, he spits for the last time into the basin. Already the flow of his blood is slowing and thinning and yellowing. He timidly touches his tongue to the place where a slippery crater now is. A vague numb sense of loss afflicts him. Another day, another molar. (He should be writing Valentines.)

Here comes Heller down the annex hall! Twiddle, piddle; piddle, pat!! How the man does love his own broad broom!!!

Past the girl’s lavatory he painstakingly goes, strewing red wax and sweeping up the same in the shimmer of varnish, past Room 113 where Art the visible mirror of God’s in visible glory is held up by Miss Schrack, past 111 where typewriters lurk under tattered black shrouds through which here and there a space bar thrusts an eerie silver hand, past 109 with its great brittle ochre map of the old trade routes whereby spice, amber, fur, and slaves were transported across Carolingian Europe, past 107 smelling of sulphur dioxide and hydrogen sulphide, 105, 103, doors all shut, glass frosted, facing green lockers that dwindle to an insane perspective of zero, Heller goes, gathering under the methodical push of his broom buttons, fluff, pennies, lint, tinfoil, hairpins, cellophane, hair, thread, tangerine seeds, comb teeth, Peter Caldwell’s psoriasis scratchings, and all the undignifiable flecks and flakes and bits and motes and whatnot dust that go to make up a universe: he harvests these. He hums inaudibly an old tune to himself. He is happy. The school is his. Clocks all over the wooden acres tick in unison 6:10. In its subterranean mansion one of the vast boilers makes an irrevocable decision and swallows in a single draft a quarter-ton of hard pea coal: Pennsylvania anthracite, old Lepidodendra, pure compressed time. The furnace heart burns with a white heat that must be viewed through a mica peephole.

Heller hugs to his rusty heart the underside of this high school. It was the promotion of his life when he was lifted from the custodial staff of the elementary building, where the little children, ticklish-tummied as lambs, daily made a puddle or two of rancid vomit to wipe up and perfume with sal ammoniac. Here there was no such indignity; only the words on the walls and now and then a malicious excremental mess in one of the male lavatories.

The memory of people and people’s clothes touches the halls with a dry perfume. The drinking fountains wait to spurt. The radiators purr. The side door slams; a member of the JV basketball team has entered with his gym bag and gone down to the locker room. At the front entrance, Mr. Caldwell and Mr. Phillips meet on the steps and enact, one tall and one short, an Alphonse and Gaston routine as to who is to go in the door first. Heller stoops and sweeps into his broad pan his gray mountain of dust and fluff, enlivened by a few paper scraps. He transfers this dirt to the great cardboard can waiting at this corner. Then, setting himself behind the broom, he pushes off and disappears behind the corner, piddle, pat.

There he goes!!!!

“George, I hear you haven’t been feeling too well,” Phillips says to the other teacher. In the light of the hall in front of the trophy case he is startled to observe a trickle of blood leaking from the corner of Caldwell’s mouth. There is usually some imperfection or oversight of grooming about the other man that secretly distresses him.

“Sometimes up, sometimes down,” Caldwell says. “Phil, a strip of missing tickets has been preying on my mind. Numbers 18001 to 18145.”

Phillips thinks and as he thinks takes-his habit-a jerky sidestep, as if smoothing the infield. “Well, it’s just paper,” he says.

“So’s money,” Caldwell says.

He looks so sick in saying it that Phillips asks, “Have you been taking anything?”

Caldwell makes his pinched stoic mouth. “I’ll be O.K., Phil. I went to the doctor yesterday and an X-ray’s been taken.”

Phillips sidesteps the other way. “Show anything?” he asks, looking at his shoes, as if to check the laces.

As if to drown out the implications of Phillips’ extraordinary softness of voice, Caldwell virtually bellows, “I haven’t found out yet. I’ve been on the go steadily.”

“George. May I speak as a friend?”

“Go ahead, I’ve never heard you speak any other way.”

“There’s one thing you haven’t learned, and that’s how to take care of yourself. You know now, we’re not as young as we were before the war; we mustn’t act like young men.”

“Phil, I don’t know any other way to act. I’ll have to act childish until they put the half-dollars over my eyes.”

Phillips’ laugh is a shade nervous. He had been a year on the faculty when Caldwell joined it, and though they have been through much together Phillips has never quite shaken his sense of being the other man’s senior and guide. At the same time he cannot rid himself of an obscure expectation that Caldwell out of his more chaotic and mischievous resources would produce a marvel, or at least say the strange thing that had to be said. He asks, “Did you hear about Ache?”-pronounced Ockey. A bright and respectful and athletic and handsome student from the late Thirties, the kind that does a teacher’s heart good, a kind once plentiful in Olinger but in the universal decay of virtue growing rare.

“Killed,” Caldwell says. “But I don’t understand how.”

“Over Nevada,” Phillips tells him, shifting his armload of papers and books to the other arm. “He was a flight instructor, and his student made a mistake. Both killed.”

“Isn’t that funny? To go all through the war without a scratch and then get nailed in peacetime.”

Phillips’ eyes have a morbid trick-little men are more emotional-of going red in the middle of a conversation if the subject were even remotely melancholy. “I hate it when they die young,” he blurts. He loves the well-coordinated among his students like sons, his own son being clumsy and stubborn.

Caldwell becomes interested; his friend’s neat centrally parted cap of hair suddenly seems the lid of a casket in which might be locked the nugget of information he so needs. He asks earnestly, “Do you think it makes a difference? Are they less ready? Do you feel ready?”

Phillips tries to direct his mind to the question but it is like trying to press the like poles of two magnets together. They push away. “I don’t know,” he admits. “They say there’s a time for everything,” he adds.

“Not for me,” Caldwell says. “I’m not ready and it scares the hell out of me. What’s the answer?”

There is silence between the two men while Heller passes with his broom. The janitor nods and smiles and passes them by this time.

Again, Phillips cannot bring his mind to touch the issue squarely; it keeps shying gratefully into side issues. He stares intently at the center of Caldwell’s chest, as if a curious transition is taking place here. “Have you spoken to Zim merman?” he asks. “Perhaps a sabbatical is the answer.”

“I can’t afford a sabbatical. What would the kid do? He couldn’t even get to high school. He’d have to go to school in the sticks with a lot of clodhoppers on the bus.”

“He’d survive, George.”

“I doubt it like hell. He needs me to keep him going, the poor kid doesn’t have a clue yet. I can’t fade out before he has the clue. You’re lucky, your kid has the clue.”

This is a sad piece of flattery that makes Phillips shake his head. The rims of his eyes deepen in tint. Ronnie Phillips, now a freshman at Penn State, is brilliant in electronics. But even while in the high school he openly ridiculed his father’s love of baseball. He bitterly felt that too many of the precious hours of his childhood had been wasted playing cat and three-stops-or-a-catch under his father’s urging.

Phillips says weakly, “Ronnie seems to know what he wants.”

“More power to him,” Caldwell shouts. “My poor kid, what he wants is the whole world in a candy box.”

“I thought he wanted to paint.”

“Ooh.” Caldwell grunts; the poison has wormed an inch deeper into his bowels. Sons are a heavy subject for these two.

Caldwell changes the subject. “Coming out of my room today I had a kind of revelation; it’s taken me fifteen years of teaching to see it.”

Phillips asks quickly “What?” eager to know, for all the times he has been fooled.

“Ignorance is bliss,” Caldwell states. Seeing no light of welcome dawn on his friend’s hopefully wrinkled face, he repeats it louder, so it echoes down the empty diminishing hall. “Ignorance is bliss. That’s the lesson I’ve gotten out of life.”

“God help us, you may be right,” Phillips fussily exclaims, and makes as if to move toward his room. But for a minute longer the two teachers stand together in the hall, finding a measure of repose in familiar company, and some ambiguous warmth in the sense of having failed each other without blaming each other. So two steeds in the same pen huddle through a storm. If men were horses, Caldwell would have been the drudging dappled type, somewhat anonymous but not necessarily ill-bred, known as a “big gray,” and Phillips a gallant little Morgan, chestnut, with a prissy tail and nicely polished hooves-practically a pony.

Caldwell has a last thought. “My old man went and died before he was my age,” he says, “and I didn’t want to double-cross my own kid like that.” With a yank that makes the legs chatter and screech, he pulls a small oak table, much gnawed, from its place against the wall; from off this table basketball tickets are to be sold.

A panicked shout wells in the auditorium and lifts dust in the most remote rooms of the extensive school even while paying customers still stream through the entrance and down the glaring hall. Adolescent boys as hideous and various as gargoyles, the lobes of their ears purple with the cold, press, eyes popping, mouths flapping, under the glowing overhead globes. Girls, rosy-cheeked, glad, motley and mostly ill-made, like vases turned by a preoccupied potter, are embedded, plaid-swaddled, in the hot push. Menacing, odorous, blind, the throng gives off a muted shuffling thunder, a flickeringly articulate tinkle: the voices of the young.

“So I said, That’s your tough luck, buddy boy.’ “

“♪ I hear you knockin’ but you can’t come in ♪”

“I thought it was real doggy.”

“The bitch rolled over and, no shit, said, ‘Again.’ “

“Use common sense. How can one infinity be larger than another?”

“Who says he says, that’s what I’d like to know.”

“You can tell with her, because there’s this little birthmark on the side of her neck that gets red.”

“He’s his own best lover if you ask me.”

“Box lunch-sluurrp!”

“I’ll put it this way to you: infinity equals infinity. Right?”

“So then I heard that she said, so I said to him, ‘I don’t know what’s going on, I guess.’”

“If he can’t stop it, he shouldn’t have started it.”

“His mouth just dropped. Literally dropped.”

“When did it all happen, ages ago?”

“But if you take only every odd number that exists and add them up, you still get infinity, don’t you? Do you follow that much?”

“Was this at the one in Pottsville?”

“♪ I’m in my nightie and it’s awful thi-in ♪ ”

“ Tough luck?” he said, and I said, ‘Yes. Yours.’”

“Finally,” Peter calls to Penny as she comes down the auditorium aisle and sees him. She is alone, he has a girl, she is alone, his girl has come to him alone: through the circuit of such simple thoughts his heart spins. He calls to her, “I saved you a seat.” He sits in the middle of the row; the seat he has saved for her is piled high with other students’ coats and scarves. Herolike, she swims the strait between them, pursing her complacent mouth impatiently, making others rise from their seats to let her by, laughing as she nearly tumbles on an obtruded foot. While the coats are removed from her seat, Peter and Penny are pressed together, he having half-risen. Their knees interlock awkwardly; he playfully blows and the hair above her ears lifts. She seems, the skin of her face and throat a luminous stillness in the midst of hubbub and thumping, delicious to him, edible, succulent. Her smallness makes this succulence. She is small enough for him to lift: this thought makes him himself lift, in secrecy. The last coat is removed and they settle side by side in the happy heat and chaos.

The players, exulting in all the space reserved for them, gallop back and forth on their plain of varnished boards. The ball arches high but not so high as the caged bulbs burning on the auditorium ceiling. A whistle blows. The clock stops. The cheerleaders rush out, the maroon O’s on their yellow sweaters bobbling, and form a locomotive. “O,” they call, seven brazen sirens, their linked forearms forming a single piston.

“Ohh,” moans back Echo, stricken.

“L.”

“Hell,” is the answer, deliberately aitched, a school tradition.

“I.”

“Aaiii,” a cry from the depths. Peter’s scalp goes cold and under the cover of a certain actual ecstasy he grips his girl’s arm.

“Hi,” she says, pleased, her skin still chilly from the outof-doors.

“N.”

The response comes faster, “Enn,” and the cheer whirls faster and faster, a vortex between the crowd and the cheerleaders, until at its climax it seems they are all sucked down into another kingdom, “Olinger! Olinger! OLINGER!” The girls scamper back, play resumes, and the auditorium, big as it is, subsides into a living-room where everybody knows everybody else. Peter and Penny chat.

“I’m so glad you came,” he says. “It surprises me, how glad I am.”

“Why thank you,” Penny says dryly. “How’s your father?”

“Frantic. We didn’t even get home last night. The car broke down.”

“Poor Peter.”

“No, I kind of enjoyed it.”

“Do you shave?”

“No. Should I? Am I ready?”

“No; but it looks like a bit of dried shaving cream in your ear.”

“You know what that is?”

“What? Is it something?”

“It’s my secret. You didn’t know I had a secret.”

“Everybody has secrets.”

“But mine is very special.”

“What is it?”

“I can’t tell you. I’ll have to show you.”

“Peter, aren’t you funny?”

“Would you rather I didn’t? Are you frightened?”

“No. You don’t frighten me.”

“Good. You don’t frighten me, either.”

She laughs. “Nobody frightens you.”

“Now there you’re wrong. Everybody frightens me.”

“Your father even?”

“Oh, he’s very frightening.”

“When will you show me your secret?”

“Maybe I won’t. It’s too horrible.”

“Peter, please do. Please.”

“Listen.”

“What?”

“I like you.” He cannot quite say “love”; it might prove unfair.

“I like you.”

“You won’t.”

“Yes I will. Are you just being silly?”

“Partly. I’ll show you at the half. If I keep my nerve.”

“You do frighten me now.”

“Don’t let me. Hey. You have such beautiful skin.”

“You always say that. Why? It’s just skin.” He can’t answer and she pulls her arm away from being stroked. “Let’s watch the game. Who’s ahead?”

He looks up at the new combination clock and electric Scoreboard, Gift of the Class of 1936. “They are.”

She shouts, a regular lipsticked little fury suddenly, “Come on” The JVs, five in Olinger’s maroon and gold and five in West Alton’s blue and white, looked dazed and alert at once, glued by the soles of their sneakers to tinted echoes of themselves inverted in floorshine. Every shoelace, every hair, every grimace of concentration, seems unnaturally sharp, like the details of stuffed animals in a large lit case. Indeed there is a psychological pane of glass between the basketball floor and the ramp of seats; though a player can look up and spot in the crowd a girl he entered last night (her whimper, the dryness in the mouth afterwards), she is infinitely remote from him, and the event in the parked car quite possibly was imagined. Mark Youngerman with his fuzzy forearm blots sweat from his eyebrows, sees the ball sailing toward him, lifts cupped hands and cushions the tense seamed globe against his chest, flicks his head deceptively, drives in past the West Alton de fender, and in a rapt moment of flight drops the peeper. The score is tied. Such a shout goes up as suggests every soul here hangs on the edge of terror.

Caldwell is tidying up the ticket receipts as Phillips tiptoes to him and says, “George. You mentioned a missing strip.”

“One eight oh oh one to eight one four five.”

“I think I’ve placed their whereabouts.”

“Jesus, that would be a load off my mind if you had.”

“I believe Louis has them.”

“Zimmerman? What in hell is he stealing tickets for?”

“Shh.” Phillips glances with an eloquent twist of his mouth in the direction of the supervising principal’s office. In him, conspiracy becomes a species of dandyism. “You know he’s the older boys’ teacher up at the Reformed Sunday School.”

“Sure. They swear by him up there.”

“And did you notice Reverend March coming in tonight?”

“Yeah, I waved him through. I wouldn’t take his money.”

“That was right. The reason he’s here, about forty of the Sunday School were given free tickets and came to the game in a group. I went up to him and suggested he sit on the stage, but he said no he thought he’d be better off standing at the rear of the auditorium and keep an eye out; about half the boys come from up in Ely, where they don’t have a Re formed Church.”

Vera Hummel, hey, comes through the entrance. Her long yellow coat swings unbuttoned, her bun of red hair is breaking loose from its pins; has she been running? She smiles at Caldwell and nods at Phillips; Phillips is one little biddy she could never warm to. Caldwell is another matter; he brings out what might be, for all she knows, her maternal instinct. Any tall man is automatically on her good side; she is that simple. Contrariwise a man shorter than herself seems to her to be offensive. Caldwell amiably lifts one of his wart-freckled hands in greeting; the sight of her does him no harm. As long as Mrs. Hummel is on the premises he feels the school is not entirely given over to animals. She has a mature tom boy’s figure: shallow-breasted, long-legged^ with something expressive and even anxious about the narrow length of her freckled wrists and forearms. The primeval female massiveness is limited to her hips and thighs; these thighs, swinging oval and alabaster from a blue gym-suit, show to fair advantage among her girls. There is a bloom that succeeds the first bloom, and then a bloom upon that. Hainan biology, up to a point, is not impatient. Still she remains childless. The small triangular forehead framed between two copper wings seems vexed; her nose is a fraction long and a touch pointed; there is a bit of the ferret about her face, and when she grins, gums engagingly slip into sight.

Caldwell calls to her, “Did you have a game today?” She coaches the girls’ basketball team.

“Just got back,” she says, not entirely halting. “We were humiliated. I just gave Al his supper and I thought I’d come see what the boys could do.”

She is gone up the hall, toward the rear of the auditorium.

“That woman certainly loves basketball,” Caldwell says.

“Al works too long hours,” Phillips says, more darkly. “She gets bored.”

“She’s cheerful-looking, though, and when you get to my state, that’s all that matters.”

“George, your health worries me.”

“The Lord loves a cheerful corpse,” Caldwell says, rudely exuberant, and asks boldly, “Now what’s the secret about these tickets?”

“It’s not an actual secret. Reverend March told me that Louis suggested that as an incentive to regular Sunday-school attendance a half-way prize be given, for perfect attendance up to the first of the year.”

“So he sneaks in and swipes my basketball tickets.”

“Not so loud. They’re not your tickets, George. They’re the school’s tickets.”

“Well I’m the poor horse’s neck who has to account for them.”

“It’s just paper, look at it that way. Mark it ‘Charity’ in your books. I’ll back you up if it’s ever questioned.”

“Did you ask Zimmerman what happened to the other hundred? You said forty kids came. He can’t give away the other hundred, next thing every four-year-old m the Reformed nursery will come crawling through that door with a free ticket.”

“George, I know you’re upset. But there’s nothing to be gained in exaggeration. I haven’t spoken to him and I don’t see that anything would be gained. Make a note for charity and we’ll consider the matter closed. Louis tends to be high handed, I know; but it’s for a good cause.”

Secure in his knowledge that his friend’s prudent advice must be taken, Caldwell indulges in a final verbal expenditure. “Those tickets represent ninety dollars of theoretical money; I resent like hell handing them over to the dear old Reformed Sunday School.” He means it. Olinger is, except for a few marginal sects like the Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Baptists and the Roman Catholics, divided in friendly rivalry between the Lutherans and the Reformeds, the Lutherans having an advantage of numbers and the Reformeds an advantage of wealth. Born a Presbyterian, Caldwell became in the Depression a Lutheran like his wife, and, surprisingly in one so tolerant, sincerely distrusts the Reformeds, whom he associates with Zimmerman and Calvin, whom he associates with everything murky and oppressive and arbitrary in the universal kingdom.

Vera enters the back of the auditorium by one of the broad doors that are propped open on little rubber-footed legs which unhinge at a kick from snug brass fittings. She sees that Reverend March is over toward the corner, leaning against the stack of folding chairs that for assemblies and stage plays and P.T.A. meetings are unfolded and arranged on the flat area which is now the basketball court. Several boys, legs dangling in dungarees, perch illegally on top of this stack, and through this back area men and boys and one or two girls are standing, craning to see over one another’s shoulders, some standing on chairs set between the open doors. Two men in their middle twenties greet Vera shyly and stand aside to make room for her. She is known to them but they are forgotten by her. They are ex-heroes of the type who, for many years, until a wife or ritual drunkenness or distant employment carries them off, continue to appear at high school athletic events, like dogs tormented by a site where they imagine they have buried something precious. Increasingly old and slack, the apparition of them persists, conjured by that phantasmal procession-indoors and outdoors, fall, winter, and spring-of increasingly young and unknown high school athletes who themselves, imperceptibly, filter in behind them to watch also. Their bearing, hushed and hurt, contrasts decisively with that of the students in the slope of seats; here skins and hair and ribbons and flashy clothes make a single fabric, a billowing, twinkling human pennant. Vera squints and the crowd dissolves into oscillating atoms of color. Apparently polarized by the jiggling event before them, in fact these dots agitate sideways, toward one another, aimed by secret arrow-shaped seeds. Sensing this makes Vera proud and serene and competent. For a long time she does not deign a hint of a sideways glance in the direction of Reverend March, who for his part has been rendered rapt by the gold and copper bits of her that glitter through the intervening jostle of bodies and arrive, chinking, at his eyes.

This minister is a tall and handsome man with a bony brown face and a crisp black mustache fastidiously shaped. The war made him. In 1939 he was a tender, small-boned graduate, not quite twenty-five, of a coal regions seminary. He felt effeminate and enfeebled by doubts. Theology had given his doubts shape and depth. In retrospect the religiosity that had prompted his vocation seemed, insofar as it was not sheerly his mother’s will, a sickly phosphorescence exuded by sexual uncertainty. His tinny voice mocked his prevaricating sermons with squeakings. He feared his deacons and despised his message. In 1941 war rescued him. He enlisted, not as a chaplain but as a fighting man. By this path he hoped to escape questions he could not answer. So it proved. He crossed water and the furies could not follow. They made him a lieutenant. In North Africa he kept himself and five others alive on three canteens of water for seven days. At Anzio a shell blasted a crater eight feet wide on the spot he had darted from thirty seconds before. In the hills above Rome, they made him a captain. Peace found him unscratched. His voice alone had resisted tempering. He returned, absurdly, to his mild vocation. Was it absurd? No! He discovered, scraping away the rubble, his mother’s faith, baked by the heat to an enduring hardness, strange of shape but undeniable, like a splash of cooled slag. He was alive. Life is a hell but a glorious hell. Give God this glory. Though March’s voice is still small his silences are grand. His eyes are black as coals set in the sharp brown cheekbones; he carries like a scar the mustache which he left of the beard of battle. With his sense of uniform he retains the Roman collar whenever he appears in public. To Vera, approaching secretly through the hall beyond the open doors, his backwards collar seems so romantic her breath is suspended: a knife of pure white, a slice of the absolute is dangerously poised at his throat.

“Your prayers were not with me this afternoon,” she breathes, breathless.

“Hello! Were your girls beaten?”

“Mm.” Already she pretends, and indeed slightly feels, some boredom. She gazes toward the game and makes the golden leaves of her coat swirl with her hands in the pockets.

“Do you always attend boys’ games?”

“Shouldn’t I? To learn things? Did you play basketball?”

“No, I was extremely inept as an adolescent. I was always picked last.”

“It’s hard to believe.”

“That’s the mark of a great truth.” She winces at this edge of evangelism in him, and sighs heavily, explaining, as if in response to an impatient insistence of his, “the fact is, if you teach here a while you get so you can’t stay out of the building. It’s an occupational disease. If the school is lit, you wander over.”

“You live so close.”

“Mm.” His voice disappoints her. She wonders if it is a natural law, that men the proper size must have inadequate voices. Must she always, in some tiny facet of every encounter, be disappointed? In revenge, she teases him with, “You’ve changed since you were always picked last.”

He laughs curtly, baring his quick tobaccoish teeth in an instant, as if a longer laugh would betray his position: a captain’s laugh. “The last shall be first,” he says.

This a little bewilders her, ignorant of the allusion yet aware, from the satisfied tension of his tan chiseled lips, that it is one. She gazes past his shoulder and, as always when threatened by the possibility that she is stupid, lets her eyes go out of focus, knowing that this renders more profound their sable beauty. “Why-?” She stops her lips. “I won’t ask.”

“Ask what?”

“Never mind. I forgot who I was talking to.”

“No, please. Ask, and ye shall receive.” He hopes that by sprinkling the salt of blasphemy on her tail he can hold her here, this golden dove, this sandy sparrow. He suspects she was going to ask him why he had not married. A difficult question; he has sometimes searched for the answer. Perhaps it was that war displays women unflatteringly. Their price goes down, and it is discovered that they will sell for any price-a candy bar, a night’s sleep. Their value is not pres ent to themselves, but is given to them by men. Having been forced to perceive this makes one slow to buy. But this would not be an answer that could be spoken.

In truth this was the question on her mind. Was he some kind of nance? She distrusts all ministers and men too well groomed. He is both. She asks, “Why are you here tonight? I’ve never seen you at a game before, you only ever come here to bless an assembly.”

“I came,” he answers, “to shepherd forty pagan brutes from my Sunday school. For some reason I never understood, Zimmerman showered basketball tickets like manna all over them last Sunday.”

She laughs. “But why?” Anything that diminishes Zimmerman makes her heart gush gratefully.

“Why?” His raven eyebrows lift in two shapely arcs above his rounded eyes whose irises, full in the light, are not black but a fleckish dark gray, as if the jelly were veiling gun powder. This sense of danger, of dreadful things he has seen, excites her. Her breasts seem to float on her ribs warmly; she suppresses an instinct to bring her hands to them. Her wet lips are framed to release laughter even before his jokes, indignant questions, are out. “Why does anything like this happen to me?” he sternly asks, slightly pop-eyed. “Why do all the ladies of my parish bake cupcakes once a month and sell them to each other? Why does the town drunk keep calling me on the telephone? Why do these people keep showing up in fancy hats on Sunday morning to hear me prattle about an old book?” Successful beyond his expectations, the warm swirl of her laughter lifting him deliciously, he goes on and on in this vein, much as a foolhardy full-blooded Sioux in his outfit used to war-dance around the spot where a land mine had been marked as buried. Though his faith is intact and as infrangible as metal, it is also like metal dead. Though he can go and pick it up and test its weight whenever he wishes, it has no arms with which to reach and restrain him. He mocks it.

And Vera for her part is delighted to have elicited this; it seems like an accelerated sequence in an old silent movie, this sketch he draws of the church as an empty house where people keep calling and nodding politely and saying “Thank you” as if the host were there. The bubbles tumble from her stomach to her lungs and explode, iridescent, in her glad throat; truly, this is all she asks of a man, all she requires, that he have the power to make her laugh. In laughter her girlhood, her virginity is reborn. Her mouth, outlined in the cerise rim of lipstick that has not rubbed off, stretches to let her gladness out; her gums show, her face, flushed, becomes numbingly vivid, a Gorgon’s head of beauty, of life. A dungareed boy on top of the stack, riding on this rickety raft the ocean of tumult, looks over the edge to find the source of this new noise. He sees below him a head of red hair like a monstrous orange fish sink with a loose twist of one shimmering coil against the horizontal slats of stained wood. Weak with laughter, Vera has lurched and leans her limp weight back. The minister’s flecked eyes melt and his crisp lips pucker bashfully, puzzled. He leans back to join her; an ir regularity in the stack makes a ledge the height of a mantel where with a remnant of his captain’s composure he props his elbows. His body thus shields her from the mass of the crowd; a bower has been made.

…and he upon thy lap oft flings himself back, conquered by the eternal wound of love; and then pillowing his shapely neck (tereti cervice) upon thee and looking up he feeds with love his greedy eyes, gazing wistfully towards thee (inhians in te, dea), while, as he lies back, his breath hangs upon thy lips.

The JV game is over. Though Mark Youngerman’s face is purple, his panting painful, and his body as slippery as an amphibian’s, Olinger lost. The buzz of the crowd changes pitch. Many leave their seats. Those who step outside discover that it is snowing. This discovery is ever surprising, that Heaven can so prettily condescend. Snow puts us with Jupiter Pluvius among the clouds. What a crowd! What a crowd of tiny flakes sputters downward in the sallow realm of the light above the entrance door! Atoms and atoms and atoms and atoms. A furry inch already carpets the steps. The cars on the pike travel slower, windshield wipers flapping, headlight beams nipped and spangled in the ceaseless flurry. The snow seems only to exist where light strikes it. A trolley car gliding toward Alton appears to trail behind it a following of slowly falling fireflies. What an eloquent silence reigns! Olinger under the vast violet dome of the stormstruck night sky becomes yet one more Bethlehem. Behind a glowing window the infant God squalls. Out of zero all has come to birth. The panes, tinted by the straw of the crib within, hush its cries. The world goes on unhearing. The town of white roofs seems a colony of deserted temples; they feather together with distance and go gray, melt. Shale Hill is invisible. A yellowness broods low in the sky; above Alton in the west a ruby glow seeps upward. From the zenith a lavender luminosity hangs pulseless, as if the particular brilliance of the moon and stars had been dissolved and the solution shot through with a low electric voltage. The effect, of tenuous weight, of menace, is exhilarating. The air presses downward with an unstressed sibilance, a pedal note, the base C of the universal storm. The streetlights strung along the pike make a forestage of brightness where the snowfall, compressed and expanded by the faintest of winds, like an actor postures- pausing, plunging. Upward countercurrents suspend snow which then with the haste of love flies downward to gravity’s embrace; the alternations of density conjure an impression of striding legs stretching upward into infinity. The storm walks. The storm walks but does not move on.

Those who remain inside the school are ignorant of the weather and yet like fish taken up by a swifter ocean current they sense some change. The atmosphere of the auditorium accelerates. Things are not merely seen but burst into vision.

Voices carry further. Hearts wax bold. Peter leads Penny back up the aisle and into the hall. His head pounds with the promise he has made but she seems to have forgotten it. He is too young to know those points, those invisible intersections, on a woman’s face wherein expectation and permission may be detected. He buys her a Coke and himself a lemon-lime at the bin which the Student Council operates in the main hall. Its vicinity is busy; the couple is pushed to the wall. Here hang framed photographs of bygone track teams in a long chronological row. Penny tips the bottle with her little finger extended and licks her lips, in the wake of the sip and looks at him with eyes whose green seems newly minted.

Secret knowledge of his spots obsesses him; should he tell her? Would it, by making her share the shame, wed them inextricably; make her, by bondage of pity, his slave? Can he, so young, afford a slave? On fire with such cruel calculations, he turns his red back on the crowd shoving and sluggishly interweaving around the soft-drink bin. When an iron hand seizes his arm above the elbow and brutally squeezes, it might be one of a hundred idiots.

But it is Mr. Zimmerman, the Supervising Principal. Simultaneously he has seized Penny’s arm, and he stands there smiling between them, not letting go. “Two prize students,” he says, as if of two netted birds.

Peter angrily tugs his arm away from the grip. The grip tightens. “He begins to look like his father’s son,” Zimmer man says to Penny, and to Peter’s horror Penny echoes the principal’s smirk. Zimmerman is shorter than Peter but taller than Penny. Up close, his head, asymmetric, half-bald, and nodding, seems immense. His nose is bulbous, his eyes watery. An absolute rage against this fool wells up in the boy.

“Mr. Zimmerman,” he says, “I’ve been meaning to ask you something.”

“Full of questions like his father,” Zimmerman says to Penny, and drops his hold on Peter’s arm but not hers. She is wearing a pink angora sweater from whose very short sleeves her bare arms thrust like legs out of underpants. The old man’s broad fingers indent the cool fat; his thumb wanders back and forth across an inch of flesh.

“I wanted to ask you,” Peter says, “what are the humanist values implicit in the sciences?” Penny titters nervously, her face gone purely stupid. Zimmerman asks, “Where did you hear such a phrase?” Peter has overreached. He blushes in consciousness of betrayal but in the momentum of pride cannot stop. “I saw it in a report you wrote on my father.”

“He shows you those? Do you think he should?”

“I don’t know. What affects him affects me.”

“I am wondering if it doesn’t place too great a responsibility on you. Peter, I value your father enormously. But he does have, as of course you can see-you’re an intelligent boy- a tendency to be irresponsible.”

Of all possible charges this seems to Peter the least applicable. His father, that blind blanched figure staggering down the steps in a debtor’s cardboard box…

“It places,” Zimmerman goes on gently, “a greater responsibility on those around him.”

“I think he’s awfully responsible,” Peter says, hypnotized by the meditative caressing action of Zimmerman’s thumb on Penny’s arm. She submits to it; this is a revelation. To think he was about to confide in this whore, this doll, his precious spots.

Zimmerman’s smile stretches. “Of course, you see him from a different angle than I do. I saw my own father in the same way.”

They see many things the same way, these two; they both see other people as an arena for self-assertion. There is a ground of kinship which makes their grappling possible. Peter feels this, feels a comradeship intertwined with antagonism and a confidence in the midst of his fear. The principal has blundered in seeking intimacy; distance and silence are always most powerful. Peter stares him in the face and, an instant short of irrevocable rudeness, glances away. He feels the side of his neck blushing in the manner of his mother. “He’s terribly responsible,” he says of his father. “He’s just had to have stomach X-rays but what he’s more worried about is a little strip of basketball tickets he can’t find.”

Zimmerman quickly blurts, “Tickets?” To Peter’s surprise this seems to have scored. The principal’s wrinkles are shadowed forth at the new tilt of his head; he seems old. Triumphantly Peter feels descend upon him, his father’s avenger, this advantage over the antagonist: he has more years to live. Ignorant and impotent here and now, in the dimension of the future he is mighty. Zimmerman murmurs, seems in his mind to stumble. “I’ll have to speak to him about this,” he says, half to himself.

Overreached. The possibility of a truly disastrous betrayal makes Peter’s stomach grovel as it used to when he was a child and running tardy down the pike to elementary school. “Must you?” His voice thins in pleading, becomes infantile. “I mean, I don’t want to have gotten him into any trouble.”

Again, the strengths have shifted. Zimmerman’s hand leaves Penny’s arm and, finger braced against the thumb to flick, comes toward Peter’s eye. It is a nightmare second; Peter blinks, his mind blank. He feels the breath being crushed from him. The hand glides past his face and softly snaps a face in the framed picture by Peter’s shoulder on the wall. “This is me,” Zimmerman says.

It is a photograph of the O.H.S. track team in 1919. They are all wearing old-fashioned black undershirts and the manager wears white ducks and a straw hat. Even the trees in the background-which are the trees of the Poorhouse Lane, only smaller than they are now-look old-fashioned, like pressed flowers. A brownness hangs unsteadily beneath the surface of the photograph. Zimmerman’s finger, which with its glazed nail and crinkled knuckle is solid and luminous in the now, holds firm under the tiny face of then. Peter and Penny have to look. Though as a trackman he was slimmer and had a full head of black hair, Zimmerman is curiously recognizable. The heavy nose set at an uneasy angle to the gently twisted mouth whose plane is not strictly parallel to the line of the eyebrows gave his young face that air of muddled weight, of unfathomable expectation and reluctant cruelty, which renders him in his prime of age so irresistible a disciplinarian even to those who think they have found it within themselves to be defiant and mock. “It is you,” Peter says weakly.

“We never lost a meet.” The finger, dense with existence, everpresent, drops away. Without another word to the young couple Zimmerman moves off down the hall, huge-backed. Students jostle to clear him a path.

The hall is emptying, the varsity game beginning. The pressure of Zimmerman’s fingers have left yellow ovals in Penny’s naked arm. She rubs the arm briskly and grimaces in disgust. “I feel I should take a bath,” she says. Peter realizes he does love her really. They had been equally helpless in Zimmerman’s grip. He takes her down the hall, as if to return to the auditorium; but at the hall’s end he bucks the double doors and leads her up the dark stairs. This is forbidden. Often at night functions a padlock is placed on these doors but this time the janitors forgot. Peter glances behind them nervously; all who might cry “Halt” have hastened to see the game commence.

On the halfway landing they are out of sight. The bulb burning over the girls’ entrance below the steel-mullioned window here casts upward in distorted rhomboids enough light to see by. There must be light enough for her to see. Her naked arms seem silver, her crimson lips black. His own shirt seems black. He unbuttons one sleeve. “Now this is a very sad secret,” he says. “But because I love you you should know it.”

“Wait.”

“What?” He listens to learn if she has heard someone coming. “Do you know what you’re saying? What do you love about me?”

Into the hush the roar of the crowd penetrates like an en circling ocean. Here on this landing he feels dry and cool. He shivers, afraid, now, of what he has begun to do. “I love you,” he tells her, “because in the dream I told you about when you turned into a tree I wanted to cry and pray.”

“Maybe you just love me in dreams.”

“When is that?” He touches her face. Silver. Her mouth and eyes are black and still and terrible like the holes of a mask.

She says gently, “You think I’m stupid.”

“I’ve thought so. But you don’t seem so now.”

“I’m not beautiful.”

“You are now.”

“Don’t kiss me. The lipstick will smear.”

“I’ll kiss your hand.” He does, and then slips her hand inside his open sleeve. “Does my arm feel funny?”

“It feels warm.”

“No. Rough in spots. Concentrate.”

“Yes…a little. What is it?”

“It’s this.” Peter pulls back the sleeve and shows her the underside of his arm; the spots look lavender in the cold diffused light. There are less of them than he had expected.

Penny asks, “What is it? Hives?”

“It’s a thing called psoriasis I’ve had all my life. It’s horrible, I hate it.”

“Peter!” Her hands lift up his head from the gesture of sobbing. His eyes are dry and yet the gesture did release something real. “It’s on my arms and legs and it’s worst on my chest. Do you want to see it there?”

“I don’t care.”

“You hate me now, don’t you? You’re disgusted. I’m worse than Zimmerman grabbing you.”

“Peter, don’t just say things to hear me contradict them. Show me your chest.”

“Must I?”

“Yes. Come on. I’m curious.”

He lifts his shirt and T-shirt underneath and stands in the half-light half-skinned. He feels like a slave ready for flogging, or like that statue of the Dying Captive which Michelangelo did not fully release from the stone. Penny bends to look. Her fingers brush his chilled skin. “Isn’t that strange?” she says. “They go in little groups.”

“In the summer it pretty well goes away,” he tells her, pulling down his shirts. “When I grow up I’m going to spend the winters in Florida and then I won’t have it.”

“Is this what your secret was?”

“Yes. I’m sorry.”

“I expected something much worse.”

“What could be worse? In a full light it’s really ugly, and I can’t do a thing about it except apologize.”

She laughs, a glimpse of silver in his ears. “Aren’t you silly? I knew you had a skin thing. It shows on your face.”

“My God, does it? Badly?”

“No. It’s not noticeable at all.”

He knows she is lying, yet does not attempt to make her tell the truth. Instead he asks, “Then you don’t mind it?”

“Of course not. You can’t help it. It’s part of you.”

“Is that really how you feel?”

“If you knew what love was, you wouldn’t even ask.”

“Aren’t you good?” In accepting her forgiveness he sinks to his knees, there in the corner of the halfway landing, and presses his face against her cloth belly. His knees ache in a minute; in relieving them of pressure his face slides lower. And his hands of themselves slide up silver and confirm what his face has found through the cloth of her skirt, a fact monstrous and lovely: where her legs meet there is nothing. Nothing but silk and a faint dampness and a curve. This then is the secret the world holds at its center, this innocence, this absence, this intimate curve subtly springy in its sheath of silk. Through the wool of her skirt he kisses his own finger tips. “No, please,” Penny says, her hand seeking to pull him up by his hair. He hides from her in her, fitting his face tighter against that concave calm; yet even here, his face held in the final privacy, the blunt probing thought of his father’s” death visits him. Thus he betrays her. When Penny, pinned off balance, repeats “Please,” the honest fear in her voice gives him an excuse to relent. Rising, he looks away from her through the window beside them and observes, wonder following wonder, “It’s snowing.”

In the lavatory Caldwell is puzzled by the word book gouged in square capitals in the wall above the urinal. Close examination reveals that this word has been laid over another; the F had been extended and closed to make a B, the U and C closed into O’s, the K left as was. Willing to learn, even by the last flash of light before annihilation, he absorbs the fact, totally new to him, that every FUCK could be made into a book. But who would do such a thing? The psychology of the boy (it must have been a boy) who altered the original word, who desecrated the desecration, is a mystery to him. The mystery depresses him; leaving the lavatory, he tries to enter that mind, to picture that hand, and as he walks down the hall the heaviest weight yet seems laid upon his heart by that unimaginable boy’s hand. Could his son have done it?

Zimmerman apparently has been waiting for him. The hall is all but empty; Zimmerman sidles from the stage entrance to the auditorium. “George.”

He knows.

“George, have you been worried about some tickets?”

“I’m not worried, it’s been explained to me. I marked them Charity in the books.”

“I thought I had spoken to you about it. Apparently I was wrong.”

“I shouldn’t have gotten the wind up. Mental confusion, is what they call it.”

“I’ve had an interesting talk with your son Peter.”

“Huh? What did the kid tell you?”

“He told me many things.”

Mim Herzog, he knows I know, the goose is cooked, it’s out in the open and can never be put back. Never ever, it’s a one-way street we’re on, ignorance is bliss. The tall teacher feels whiteness fill his body from his toes to his scalp. A weariness, a hollowness and conviction of futility beyond anything he has known before seizes him. A film too thick to be sweat makes pasty his palms and brow as his skin struggles to reject this seizure. “He didn’t mean to cause me any trouble, the poor kid doesn’t have a clue,” Caldwell tells the principal. The pain, the tireless pain, itself seems weary.

Zimmerman sees as if through a rift in clouds that Caldwell’s glimpse of Mrs. Herzog is at the bottom of his fear and his mind exults, fairly dances in the security of being on top and able to maneuver. Expertly he skims, like a butterfly teasing a field, above the surface of the dread in the knobbed drained face opposite him. “I was struck,” he says glidingly, “by Peter’s concern for you. I think he believes that teaching is too great a strain on your health.”

Here comes the ax, praise be to God for little blessings, the suspense is over. Caldwell wonders if the dismissal slip will be yellow, as it was with the telephone company. “Is that what the kid thinks, huh?”

“He may be right. He’s a perceptive boy.”

“He gets that from his mother. I wish to hell he had inherited my weak head and her beautiful body.”

“George, I’d like to speak to you frankly.”

“Shoot. That’s your job.” A wave of dizziness simultaneous with an immense restlessness overtakes the teacher; he yearns to swing his arms, twirl around, collapse on the floor and have a nap, anything but stand here and take it, take it from this smug bastard who knows it all.

Zimmerman has risen to his most masterly professional self. His sympathy, his cadences of tact, his comprehensive consideration are exquisite. His body almost aromatically exudes his right and competence to supervise. “If at any time,” he says in gentle measured syllables, “you feel unable to go on, please come to me and tell me. It would be a disservice to yourself and to your students to continue. A sabbatical could be arranged easily. You think of it as a disgrace; you shouldn’t. A year of thought and study is a very common thing for a teacher in the middle of his career. Remember, you are only fifty. The school would survive; with so many of these veterans returning, the teacher shortage is not what it was during the war.”

Dust, lint, spittle, poverty, stuck-together stuff in gutters- all the trash and chaos behind the made world pours through the rent opened by this last subtle prick. Caldwell says, “Christ, the only place I can go if I leave this school is the junkyard. I’m no good for anything else. I never was. I never studied. I never thought. I’ve always been scared to. My father studied and thought and on his deathbed he lost his religion.”

Zimmerman lifts a benevolent palm. “If my last visitation report is bothering you, remember that it is my duty to tell the truth. But I tell the truth, to quote St. Paul, in love.”

“I know that. You’ve been damn good to me these years; I don’t know why you’ve babied me along, but you have.” He bites back the urge to tell a lie, to blurt out that he didn’t see Mim Herzog coming out of his office mussed. But that would be nonsense. He did see her. He’d be God-damned if he’d beg. The least you can do is walk in front of the firing squad on your own two legs.

“You’ve received no favors,” Zimmerman says. “You’re a good teacher.” On this amazing statement Zimmerman turns and walks away, with not a word about Mim or dismissal. Caldwell can’t believe his ears. Did he miss something? He wonders if the ax fell and was so sharp he didn’t feel it, if the bullets just passed right through him like a ghost. What had Zimmerman, underneath it all, said?

The man turns back. “Oh, and George.”

Now here it comes. Cat and mouse.

“About the tickets.”

“Yeah.”

“You needn’t mention it to Phillips.” Zimmerman crookedly winks. “You know how fussy he is.”

“O.K. I got your meaning.”

Zimmerman’s office door closes, the frosted glass opaque.

Caldwell doesn’t know if it is relief or a symptom of disease that is making his kneecaps tingle and his hands feel numb. The time has arrived for him to use his legs again and they are slow to obey. His torso swims down the hall. Rounding the corner, the teacher surprises Gloria Davis the hopped-up bitch leaning against the wall allowing young Kegerise to rub his knee between her legs. With his I.Q. he ought to know better. Caldwell ignores them and pushes into the auditorium past some Olinger High grads, Jackson is one of them and he can’t recall the other’s name, standing there with their mouths open looking down at the game. Living corpses, they didn’t even have the sense to stay out once they got out. He remembers Jackson always coming to him after class whining about special projects and his love of astronomy and making his own telescope out of mailing tubes and magnifying glass lenses and now the poor bohunk was a plumber’s apprentice at 75¢ an hour and sopping it up in beer. What in hell are you supposed to do to keep them from ending like that? He shies away from these his old students, the hunch in their shoulders reminds him of the great whole skinned carcasses hung on hooks in the freezer of a big Atlantic City hotel he once worked for. Dead meat. In veering away Caldwell comes face to face with old Kenny Klagle the auxiliary cop with his white brushed hair and baffled pale eyes and tender grandmotherly smile, solemnly tricked out in a blue uniform and paid five dollars a night to be on the premises; he stands beside a bronze fire extinguisher and they are two of a kind, in an emergency both would probably just sputter. Klagle’s wife left him years ago and he never knew what hit him. Never even knew enough to drop dead.

Waste, rot, hollowness, noise, stench, death: in fleeing the many visages which this central thing wears Caldwell as if by God’s grace comes upon, over in the corner, leaning against the stacked folding chairs beside Vera Hummel, Reverend March in his clerical black and backwards collar.

“I don’t know if you know me,” Caldwell says. “My name is George Caldwell and I teach general science here in the school.”

March has to leave off laughing with Vera to take the offered hand and say, his smile pointedly patient under the curt mustache, “I don’t believe we have met, but of course I’ve heard of you and know you by sight.”

“I’m a Lutheran so I guess I’m out of your flock,” Caldwell explains. “I hope I’m not interrupting you and Vera here; the fact is I’m badly troubled in my mind.”

With a nervous glance at Vera, who has turned her head and might slip from his side, March asks, “Oh. What about?”

“Everything. The works. I can’t make it add up and I’d be grateful for your viewpoint.”

Now March’s glance travels everywhere but into the face opposite him as he looks through the crowd for some rescue from this tousled tall maniac. “Our viewpoint does not essentially differ from the Lutheran,” he says. “It’s my hope that someday all the children of the Reformation will be reunited.”

“Correct me if I’m wrong, Reverend,” Caldwell says, “but as I understand it the difference is the Lutherans say Jesus Christ is the only answer and the Calvinists say whatever hap pens to you, happens to you, is the answer.”

In his anxiety and anger and embarrassment March reaches sideways and almost seizes Vera bodily to keep her with him during this preposterous interruption. “That’s ridiculous,” he says. “Orthodox Calvinism-and I count myself more orthodox than not-is fully as Christocentric as the Lutheran doctrines. Perhaps more so, since we exclude the saints and any substantive Eucharistic transformation.”

“I’m a minister’s son,” Caldwell explains. “My old man was a Presbyterian, and as I understand it from him there are the elect and the non-elect, the ones that have it and the ones that don’t, and the ones that don’t have it are never going to get it. What I could never ram through my thick skull was why the ones that don’t have it were created in the first place. The only reason I could figure out was that God had to have somebody to fry down in Hell.”

The Olinger High basketball team forges into the lead and March has to raise his voice furiously to make himself heard. “The doctrine of predestination,” he shouts, “must be un derstood as counterbalanced by the doctrine of God’s infinite mercy.” The crowd noise subsides.

“That’s my problem, I guess,” Caldwell says. “I can’t see how it’s infinite if it never changes anything at all. Maybe it’s infinite but at an infinite distance-that’s the only way I can picture it.”

March’s gray eyes are exploding with pain and irritation as the danger of Vera’s leaving him grows. “This is burlesque!” he shouts. “A basketball game is no place to discuss such matters. Why don’t you come and visit me in my study sometime, Mr.-?”

“Caldwell. George Caldwell. Vera here knows me.”

Vera turns back with a wide smile. “Somebody invoke my name? I don’t understand a thing about theology.”

“Our discussion of it has just been concluded,” Reverend March tells her. “Your friend Mr. Caldwell has some very singular adverse notions about poor abused John Calvin.”

“I don’t know a thing about him,” Caldwell protests, his voice becoming plaintive and high and unpleasant. “I’m trying to learn.”

“Come to my study any morning but Wednesdays,” March tells him. “I’ll lend you some excellent books.” He firmly restores his attention to Vera, presenting to Caldwell a profile as handsome and final as if stamped onto an imperial coin.

Make Nero look tame, small town aristocrats, Caldwell thinks, retreating. Heavy and giddy with his own death, sluggish and diaphanous like some transparent predator who trails his poisoned tentacles through the adamantine pressures of the oceanic depths, he moves along behind the backs of spectators and searches the crowd for the sight of his son. At last he spots Peter’s narrow head in a row on the right near the front. Poor kid, needs a haircut. Caldwell’s work tonight is done and he wants to go down and get Peter and go home. Humanity, which has so long entranced him, disgusts him packed and tangled like germs in this overheated auditorium. Even Cassie’s empty land by contrast would look good. And the snow is piling up outside. And the kid could use the sleep.

But beside Peter’s head there is a small round blondness. Caldwell recognizes the ninth-grade Fogleman girl. He had had her brother two years ago, the Foglemans were the kind who would eat your heart and then wash the rest down the sink. Brutal Germans, brrr. It dawns upon him that she and Peter are not sitting next to each other by accident. With that kid’s brains, can it be? Now Caldwell remembers seeing Peter and Penny paired here and there in the halls. By the drinking fountain giggling. Against the annex lockers leaning broodily. Framed, blotted together into one silhouette, against the milky light of a far doorway. He had seen these things but they hadn’t sunk in before. Now they do. The sadness of the abandoned wells up. A great shout arises as Olinger’s lead expands, and the powerful panic of it licks with four hundred tongues the lining of the teacher’s strained innards.

Olinger wins.

Peter rarely takes his eyes from the game but hardly sees it, so possessed is his inner eye by the remembrance of pressing his face into the poignant absence between Penny’s thighs. Who would have thought even an instant’s access would be granted him, so young? Who would have thought thunder would not peal and punishing spirits flap awake? Who of all those pressed into this bright auditorium would dream what brimming darkness he had, kiss-lipped, sipped? The memory of it is a warm mask upon his face, and he does not dare turn his face to his love for fear she will see herself there, a ghostly beard, and cry out in horror and shame, every pore on her nose vivid.

And when he and his lather at last leave the school and go into the snow the multitude of flakes seems to have been released by his profanation. In the pervasive descent an eddy of air now and then angrily flings a tinkling icy handful upward into his warm face. Peter had forgotten what snow is. It is an immense whispering whose throat seems to be now here, now there. He looks at the sky and it answers his eyes with a mauve, a lilac, a muffled yellow-pearl. Only after some moments of focusing does the downflow visually materialize for him, as an edge of a wing, and then an entire broadening wing of infinitesimal feathers, broadening into the realization that this wing is all about them and crowds the air to four hidden horizons and beyond. Wherever he looks, now that his eyes are attuned to its frequency, there is this vibration. The town and all its houses are besieged by a murmuring multitude.

Peter pauses under the high light that guards the near corner of the parking lot. What he sees at his feet puzzles him. On the whiteness that has already fallen small dark spots are swarming like gnats. They dart this way and that and then vanish. There seems to be a center where they vanish. As his eyes travel outward he sees dots speeding toward this center; the further away they are, the faster they speed inward. He traces a few: all vanish. The phenomenon seems totally ghostly. Then the constriction of his heart eases as the rational explanation comes to him. These are the shadows of snowflakes cast by the light above him. Directly under the light, the wavering fall of the particles is projected as an erratic oscillation, but away from the center, where the light rays strike obliquely, the projection parabolically magnifies the speed of the shadow as it hastens forward to meet its flake. The shadows stream out of infinity, slow, and, each darkly sharp in its last instant, vanish as their originals kiss the white plane. It fascinates him; he feels the universe in all its plastic and endlessly variable beauty pinned, stretched, crucified like a butterfly upon a frame of unvarying geometrical truth. As the hypotenuse approaches the vertical the lateral leg diminishes less and less rapidly: always. The busy snowflake shadows seem ants scurrying on the floor of a high castle made all of stone. He turns scientist and dispassionately tries to locate in the cosmography his father has taught him an analogy between the phenomenon he has observed and the “red shift” whereby the stars appear to be retreating at a speed proportional to their distance from us. Perhaps this is a kindred illusion, perhaps-he struggles to picture it-the stars are in fact falling gently through a cone of observation of which our earthly telescopes are the apex. In truth everything hangs like dust in a forsaken attic. Passing on a few yards, to where the lamplight merges with the general agitated dimness, Peter does seem to arrive at a kind of edge where the speed of the shadows is infinite and a small universe both ends and does not end. His feet begin to hurt with being cold and wet and cosmic thoughts turn sickly in his mind. As if leaving a cramped room he restores his focus to the breadth of the town, where large travelling eddies sway and stride from the sky with a sort of ultimate health.

He crawls into the cave of the car with his father and slips off his soaked loafers and tucks his damp stockinged feet under him. Hurriedly his father backs out of the lot and heads up the alley toward Buchanan Road. At first he over-accelerates, so that on the slightest rise the back tires spin. “Boy,” Caldwell says, “this is duck soup.”

Revelations have skinned Peter’s nerves and left him highly irritable. “Well why didn’t we start for home two hours ago?” he asks. “We’ll never get up Coughdrop Hill.

What were you doing at the game so long after the tickets were taken?”

“I talked to Zimmerman tonight,” Caldwell tells his son slowly, wondering how not to seem to scold the boy. “He said he’d had a talk with you.”

Guilt makes Peter’s voice shrill. “I had to, he grabbed me in the hall.”

“You told him about the missing tickets.”

“I just mentioned it. I didn’t tell him anything.”

“Jesus kid, I don’t want to cramp your freedom, but I wish you hadn’t told him.”

“What harm did it do?-it’s the truth. Don’t you want me to tell the truth? Do you want me to lie all my life?”

“Did you-now it doesn’t matter, but did you tell him about my seeing Mrs. Herzog come out of his office?”

“Of course not. I’ve forgotten all about it. Everybody’s forgotten about it except you. You seem to think the whole world’s some sort of conspiracy.”

“I’ve never gotten to the bottom of Zimmerman, is I guess my trouble.”

“There’s no bottom to get to! He’s just a befuddled old lech who doesn’t know what he’s doing. Everybody sees that except you. Daddy, why are you so-” He was going to say “stupid” but a vestige of the fourth commandment checks his tongue. “-superstitious? You make everything mean something it isn’t. Why? Why can’t you relax? It’s so exhaustingl” In his fury the boy kicks one foot against the dashboard, making the glove compartment tingle. His father’s head is a considering shadow pinched into the pinheaded cap that is for Peter the essence of everything obsequious and absurd, careless and stubborn about his father.

The man sighs and says, “I don’t know, Peter. I guess it’s part heredity, part environment.” From the weariness of his voice, it seems his final effort of explanation.

I’m killing my father, Peter thinks, amazed.

The snow thickens around them. As it dashes into their headlights it flares like a spatter of sparks, swoops upward, vanishes, and is replaced by another spatter of sparks. The onrush is continuously abundant. They meet few other cars on the road now. The lights of homes, thinning beyond the poorhouse, are blurred in the blizzard. The heater comes on and its warmth serves to emphasize their isolation. The arc of the windshield wipers narrows with every swipe, until they stare into the storm through two mottled slits of cleared glass. The purr of the motor is drawing them forward into a closing trap.

Going down the hill beside the Jewish Cemetery, where Abe Cohn, Alton’s famous Prohibition gangster, lies buried, they skid. Caldwell fights the wheel as the chassis slithers. They slip safely to the bottom, where Buchanan Road ends at Route 122. On their right, Coughdrop Hill dissolves up wards. A trailer truck like a fleeing house pours down past them and on into Alton, the rapidfire clunk of its chains panicked. When its taillights wink out of sight they are alone on the highway.

The gradient of the hill increases toward the top. Caldwell pulls out in first and remains in this gear until the wheels begin to spin, and then shifts into second. The car plows upward some more dozens of yards; when the wheels start spinning again he shifts desperately into third. The motor stalls. Caldwell yanks out the emergency brake to hold them here on the hill. They are more than half-way up. The storm sinks sighing into the silence of the motor. The motor restarts but the rear tires cannot grip the snow; rather, the weighty old Buick tends to slip backwards toward the low cable fence that guards the edge of the highway embankment. In the end there is nothing for Caldwell to do but to open his door and, leaning out, using the pink glow of his taillights as his only guide, to back all the way down. He backs beyond the Olinger turnoff onto the flat straightaway between Coughdrop Hill and the next little rise on the road to Alton. Yet, though the momentum gathered here carries them more briskly into the lower part of the hill, they spin to a halt a little short of where they were stopped the first time. Their previous tracks are dark ruts in their headlights.

Suddenly their heads cast shadows forward. A car behind them is coming up the hill. Its lights dilate, blaze like a shout, and sway outward around them; it is a green Dodge, a ‘47. Its chains slogging, it continues past them, takes the steepest part of the hill, and, gathering speed, vanishes over the crest. Their own stalled headlights pick out the stamp of the cross links in its tracks. The sparkle of the falling snow is steady.

“We’ll have to put on chains like that guy,” Peter tells his father. “If we can just get up the next twenty yards we can make it to our road. Fire Hill isn’t so steep.”

“Did you notice the way that bastard didn’t offer to give us a push?”

“How could you expect him to? He just about made it himself.”

“I would have, in his shoes.”

“But there’s nobody else like you, Daddy. There’s nobody else like you in the world.” He is shouting because his father has clenched his fists on the steering wheel and is resting his forehead on their backs. It frightens Peter to see his father’s silhouette go out of shape this way. He wishes to call him to himself but the syllable sticks in his throat, unknown. At last he asks shyly, “Do we have chains?”

His father straightens up and says, “One thing, we can’t put ‘em on here, the car’s likely to slip off the jack. We gotta get down on the level again.”

A second time, then, he opens his door and leans out and guides the car backwards down the hill, the snow dyed rose by his taillights. A few flakes swirl in through the open door and prick Peter on the face and hands. He thrusts his hands into the pockets of his pea jacket.

Back at the bottom of the hill, they both get out. They open the trunk and try to jack up the rear of the car. They have no flashlight and nothing is easy. The snow at the side of the road is six inches deep and in trying to lift their tires clear of it they jack the rear too high and the car topples sideways and throws the jack upright, with shocking velocity, into the center of the road. “Jesus,” Caldwell says, “this is a way to get killed.” He makes no motion to retrieve the upright so Peter goes and gets it. Holding the notched bar in one hand, he looks along the side of the road for a rock to block the front tires but the snow conceals all such details of earth. His father stands staring at the tops of pines that hover like dark angels high above them in the storm. Caldwell’s thought seems to his son to be describing wide circles, like a scouting buzzard, in the opaque mauve of the heaven above them. Now his thought returns to the problem underfoot and together the father and son prop the jack under the bumper and this time it holds. They discover then that they are unable to fasten the chains. In the dark and cold it is too late for their blind eyes and numb fingers to learn how. For many minutes Peter watches his father squat and grovel in the snow around the tire. In this time no car passes. Route 122 has ceased to bear traffic. His father seems on the verge of clip ping the chain fast when it all slips forward into his hands. With a sob or curse blurred by the sound of the storm Caldwell stands erect and with both hands hurls the tangled web of iron links into the soft snow. The hole it makes suggests a fallen bird.

“You should fasten the catch on the inside of the wheel first,” Peter says. He digs up the chains and goes onto his knees and crawls underneath the car. He imagines his father telling his mother, “I was at my wits’ end and the kid just takes the chains and gets under the car and fastens ‘em neat as a pin. I don’t know where the kid gets his mechanical ability from.” The wheel slips. Several times as he drapes the cumbersome jacket of links around the tire, the tire lazily turns and shucks its coat of mail like a girl undressing. His father holds the wheel still and Peter tries once more. In the underworld beneath the car the muted stink of rubber and the parched smells of rust and gas and grease seem breathed syllables of menace. Peter remembers how the car toppled from the jack, imagines how the springs and axle would crush his skull. One comfort, there is no wind or snowfall here.

There is a little catch that holds the clue to fastening the chains. He finds this catch and, reading with his fingertips, deduces how it operates. Almost he succeeds in snapping it. Only a tiny gap remains to close. He applies a pressure that makes the prostrate length of his body tremble; his kidneys ache sweetly; the metal bites deep into his fingers. He prays; and is appalled to discover that, even when a microscopic concession would involve no apparent sacrifice of principle, matter is obdurate. The catch does not close. He squeals in agony, “No!”

His father calls to him, “The hell with it. Get out from under.”

Peter obeys, stands, shakes the snow from his jacket. He and his father stare at each other in disbelief. “I can’t do it,” he says, as if it could be denied.

His father says, “You did a damn sight better than I did. Get into the car, we’ll go into Alton for the night. Once a loser, twice a loser.”

They put the chains into the trunk and try to lower the car on the jack. But even this piece of retreat proves impossible. The small lever supposed to reverse the jack’s direction swings loose and useless. Each shove on the handle lifts the car a notch higher. The fluttering snow pesters their faces; the whine of wind distends their eardrums; the burden on their tempers becomes unendurable. The whole soughing shifting weight of the storm seems hinged on this minute mechanical refusal.

“I’ll fix the bastard,” Caldwell announces. “Stand clear, kid.” He climbs into the car, starts the motor, and drives forward. For a moment the jack upright is caught in the tension of a bow and Peter expects to see it go flying like an arrow into the storm. But the metal of the bumper itself yields under this instant of stress, and the next instant drops the car onto its springs with a sound like icicles snapping. A lip-shaped dent along the lower edge of the rear bumper will always remember this night. Peter gathers up the jack parts and throws them into the trunk and gets into the front seat beside his father.

Aided by the tendency of the rear wheels to slither, Caldwell turns the Buick around and points it toward Alton. But in the hour since they came onto this road another inch of snow has fallen and the packing action of traffic has utterly ceased. The little rise that takes the road out of the trough at the bottom of Coughdrop Hill, a rise so slight that on a fair day it whips by beneath the wheels unnoticed, proves too steep to negotiate. The rear tires never cease slithering. The slits of vision in their windshield go furry and close; the heavenly bin from which the snow has been sifted now bursts its sides. Three times the Buick sloughs forward up the shallow slant to have its motion smothered. The third time, Caldwell grinds his foot into the accelerator and the crying tires swing the rear of the car into the untouched snow at the side of the road. There is a small depression just off the shoulder. Caldwell shifts down to first gear and tries to lift out, but the snow holds them fast in its phantom grip. His lips make a quick silver bubble. Crazed, he shoves the shift into reverse and rams the car backwards so they are hopelessly stuck. He switches off the motor.

A certain peace settles upon their predicament. A delicate friction, like sand being swept up, moves across the top of the car. The overheated motor ticks tranquilly under the hood.

“We’ll have to walk,” Caldwell says. “We’ll walk back to Olinger and stay the night at the Hummels’. It’s less than three miles, can you make it?”

“I’ll have to,” Peter says.

“Jesus, you don’t have any galoshes on or anything.”

“Well neither do you.”

“Yeah, but I’m all shot anyway.” After a pause, he explains, “We can’t stay here.”

“Gah-dammit,” Peter says, “I know it. I know it, stop telling me. Stop telling me things all the time. Let’s go.”

“A father who was half a man would have gotten you up that hill.”

“Then we’d have got stuck someplace else. It’s not your fault. It’s nobody’s fault; it’s God’s fault. Please. Let’s stop talking.”

Peter gets out of the car and for a time, of the two, is the leader. They walk in their own ruts up the Jewish Cemetery hill. Peter finds it difficult to put one foot directly ahead of the other, as the Indians were said to have done. The wind keeps tipping him. There is a screen of pines here and though the wind is not powerful it yet has an insistence that penetrates the hair on his head and fingers the bone underneath. The cemetery land is held back from the road by a retaining wall of gray stone; each protruding stone wears a beard of white. Somewhere deep in the opaque smoke Abe Cohn lies snug in his pillared mausoleum. Peter draws comfort from this knowledge. He glimpses an analogy with the way his own ego is sheltered under the mineral dome of his skull. On the flat beyond the cemetery the pines fade away and the wind blows as if minded to pierce his body through and through. He becomes transparent: a skeleton of thoughts. Detached, amused, he watches his feet like blinded cattle slog dutifully through the drifted snow; the disparity between the length of their strides and the immense distance to Olinger is so great that a kind of infinity seems posited in which he enjoys enormous leisure. He employs this leisure to meditate upon the phenomenon of extreme physical discomfort. There is an excising simplicity in it. First, all thoughts of past and future are eliminated, and then any extension via the senses of yourself into the created world. Then, as further conservation, the extremities of the body are disposed of-the feet, the legs, the fingers. If the discomfort persists, if a nagging memory of some more desirable condition lingers, then the tip of the nose, the chin, and the scalp itself are removed from consideration, not entirely anesthetized but deported, as it were, to a realm foreign to the very limited concerns of the irreducible locus, remarkably compact and aloof, which alone remains of the once farflung and ambitious kingdoms of the self. The sensations seem to arrive from a great distance outside himself when his father, now walking beside him and using his body as a shield against the wind for his son, pulls down upon Peter’s freezing head the knitted wool cap he has taken from his own head.