Things You Should Know

ROCKETS ROUND THE MOON

We were the boys of summer vacation, Henry Heffilfinger and me. It was my fifth summer at my father’s house, six years after my parents divorced, three years after my mother remarried, the summer of ’79, the summer I was twelve, the summer the world almost stopped spinning round.

Henry’s mother picked me up at the airport. “Hello! Hello!” she called from the far end of the terminal, waving her arms through air, as if simultaneously fanning herself and guiding me in for landing.

“Oh, you look tall,” she said, trying to wrestle away my carry-on bag. “Your father was busy; he asked me to come. So, that’s why I’m here.” She stopped for a minute, combed the hair out of my face with her fingernails. “We’re so glad you’ve arrived; we’re going to have a fine summer.”

For that moment, while her pink frosted nails were tickling my skull, I believed her.

Luggage spun on a wide stainless-steel rack; suitcases slid up, down, sideways, crashing into each other with the painless thud of bumper cars. We stood watching until everything had come and gone, until there was nothing left except a couple of old bags that probably belonged to someone who’d died in a plane crash, who’d left their luggage forever going round and round.

“Where’s Henry?” I asked.

Maybe Henry was my hero, maybe just my friend, I don’t know. He had a mother, a father, and a little sister, all together, on one street, in one city. He had no secrets.

“Guarding the car. I’m parked in a terrible place.”

While I stood by the carousel, hoping my suitcases would home in and find me, Mrs. Henry took my luggage checks and went off in search of information.

If you’re wondering what the point is calling Henry by his own name and then calling his mother Mrs. Henry, well what can I say, all the Heffilfingers were Henrys to me. Mr., Mrs., baby June, and Henry himself.

I rolled my eyes in a full circle counting the brown-and-yellow spots that made up the tortoiseshell rims of my glasses. They were new glasses, my first glasses. No one in Philly had seen them yet except Mrs. Henry, and she was sharp enough not to say anything.

A couple of months ago my school borrowed vision machines from the motor vehicle department and lined us all up. I looked into the viewfinder and said to the school nurse, “I can’t see anything, it’s pure blackness.”

“Press your head to the bar, wise guy,” she said.

I pressed my forehead against the machine and the screen lit up, but all that light still didn’t do much good. The nurse sent me home with a note for my mother who simply said, “You’re not getting contacts; you’re too young and too irresponsible.”

I thought of not taking the glasses to Philly, of going through one more blind, blurry summer, but the fact was they made a real difference, so I wore them, and kept the unbreakable case and a thousand specially treated cleaning sheets jammed into my carry-on bag.

Four-eyed, but alone in the Philadelphia airport, I may as well have been a boy without a brain. Like a sugar doughnut, I was glazed. Stiff.

It was the day after school ended. My mother had put me on the plane with a list of instructions/directions for my father, written out longhand on three sheets of legal paper, stuffed into one of Dr. Frankle’s embossed envelopes. I was to be returned on or by the twenty-first of August, in good time for the usual back-to-school alterations: haircut, fresh jeans, new sneakers, book bag. I was only just becoming aware of how much everything was the product of a negotiation or a fight.

“Let’s find Henry,” Mrs. Henry suggested.

Let’s not, I thought.

We were at the age where just showing up was frightening. You never knew who or what you might meet, a twelve-foot giant with a voice like a tuba, or Howdy Doody himself. Without warning, a body could go into spasm, it could stretch itself out to a railroad tie, it could take someone familiar and make them a stranger. A whole other person could claim the name, address, phone number, and fingerprints of a friend. There was the possibility that in those ten missing months a new life had been created, one that intentionally bore no relation to the past.

“Don’t worry, they’ll find your luggage,” Mrs. Henry said. “They’ll check the airport in Boston and the next plane coming in, and when they’ve got it, they’ll deliver it out to the house. You’ll have it by suppertime. Let’s go,” she said. “Makes no sense to wait here.”

The automatic doors popped open. Henry stood there, arms open, exasperated.

“What the hell is going on?” he screamed. “They’re about to tow our car. They asked me for my license!”

Mrs. Henry turned red. She tugged on the strap of my shoulder bag. We ran forward.

“I’ve never heard of anything taking so long,” Henry said when we got outside.

There was no tow truck. There was nothing except a long line of cars dropping off people, and men in red caps going back and forth from the cars to the terminal wheeling suitcases that weren’t lost yet. There wasn’t even a ticket on the Henrys’ windshield.

And Henry wasn’t a giant. He wasn’t six feet tall, either. He was skinny, with shoulders that stuck straight out of him like the top of a T square.

“What happened?” he asked.

“The airline has misplaced your friend’s luggage.”

He turned to me, finally noticing I was there, I existed. “Why’d you get glasses?”

“Blind,” I said.

Five years ago, before I ever met him, Henry was offered to me by my father as a kind of bribe.

“Philadelphia will be fun,” my father had said. “We bought this house especially for you. There’s a boy your age living next door; you can be best friends.”

My first day there I stood three-foot-something, waiting smack in the middle of the treeless, flowerless, nearly grassless front yard as nonchalantly as a seven-year-old could. I knew no other way of announcing myself. When the sun had crossed well over its midday mark, when what seemed like years had passed, a station wagon pulled into the driveway just past me and the promised boy jumped out and without stopping ran toward the kitchen door of his house. The screen door opened, but instead of admitting him, a yellow-rubber-gloved hand pushed the boy out again. The body attached to the hand followed and Mrs. led Henry to the edge of their yard and nodded in my direction.

“Henry, this is your new friend. He’s here for the whole summer,” she said.

“Bye,” Henry said, taking off again in the direction of the kitchen door, whipping open the screen, and vanishing into the house.

“You can’t stand outside all summer, you’ll be a regular Raisinette, go on, after him,” Mrs. Henry said, clapping her hands.

The geography of the Henrys’ house was the exact same as my father’s house, but theirs was more developed. The top floor had blue carpet; the middle level, yellow; and the lower level was green. The sky, the sun, the lawn. It made perfect sense. It was beautiful. Everywhere I’d ever lived the floors were wooden or carpeted a neat and dull beige or gray. Here I had the sensation of floating, skimming through the rooms like a hovercraft. I went through the house, stunned by the strangeness of being alone among the lives of others.

I found Henry on the lower level setting up a Parcheesi board.

“Do you know how to play or do I have to teach you?”

“I know how,” I said.

“That’s a relief. You don’t look like you know anything.”

I didn’t answer.

“Can you swim?”

I nodded.

“Tomorrow we’ll go to the pool.”

He hurled a series of questions at me like rockets, little hand grenades. I ducked and bobbed; I answered as best I could. It was a test, an application for friendship.

“I’m allowed to go off the diving board but I don’t like it,” he said. “But I don’t tell anyone that. If someone is going, I go too, but it’s nothing I’m in a rush to do. You first,” he said, dropping the dice into my hand. I started to shake them. He immediately stopped me.

“We don’t play that way,” he said. “You go like this.” Between his thumb and forefinger, he held one up in the air then dropped it with a whirling twist. Before the first one stopped spinning, he dropped the second one the same way. The dice splashed down onto the board, knocking over my marker, giving me a six and a four. “See,” he said, moving my marker for me. “It’s better that way.”

“I should go home,” I said when the game was over, when he’d played the whole thing for both of us, when I’d never touched the marker or the dice.

“Are you sure you wouldn’t like to have a snack?” Mrs. asked me as I headed for the screen door. “I made cream-filled cupcakes.”

“The ones with white stuff inside,” Henry said.

“You can make cupcakes like that?”

“Yes.” She smiled at me.

Every year just as I started to have a sense of how things were laid out, of where Philadelphia started and stopped, it was time for me to leave. The Henrys’ car wound down the streets with me pressed to the window, wondering where the hell we were.

“Where’s baby June?” I asked, my twelve-year-old voice cracking with what I thought was middle age or Parkinson’s disease.

“Day camp,” Mrs. Henry said.

Baby June’s real name was Constance, but since her mission in life appeared to be a well-studied imitation of Mrs., everyone except Mrs. and Mr. called her baby June.

Henry and I were quiet. There was the familiar awkwardness of beginning again, of seeing a body once more after months away. In between, we’d talked a couple of times, signed our names to birthday cards picked out by mothers in a hurry, we’d given the okay to a present we knew would be perfect only because we wanted it so bad for ourselves. But that was about it.

“You’d better check in,” Mrs. said when we pulled into the driveway. “Then come over for lunch. We’ll be waiting.”

“You’ll be waiting,” Henry said, slamming the car door. “I’m eating now.”

Except for the hum of the air-conditioning, which was running even though it was only seventy-some degrees out, my father’s house was without signs of life.

I left my carry-on in the hall and called my mother. Dr. Frankle answered the phone. I didn’t tell him his luggage was missing.

“Is my mother there?”

“She’s on the Lifecycle,” he said, and then there was silence.

“Could I talk to her please?”

“I’ll have to get the cordless.”

“Thank you,” I said. There was the longest silence, as though Dr. F. thought if he waited long enough to get my mother, I’d grow up and be gone.

“You’re there,” my mother said, out of breath.

“I’m here.”

“That was fast.”

“They can’t find my suitcase.”

“Don’t worry, they will,” she said. “They have to. Did your father pick you up?”

“No. Mrs. Henry did it.”

“What the hell’s wrong with him. That’s part of our agreement.”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Have you spoken to him?”

“I called you first.”

“When you talk to him, tell him to call me right away. That’s all. I’ll deal with him. I don’t want to drag you into this.”

“What if my stuff doesn’t show up?”

“Your father will take care of it,” she said.

According to all reports — except my own — by marrying Dr. Frankle, my mother had done well for herself. On the other hand, my father seemed to have taken a small financial slide. Even though Dr. F. could more than cover the world with money, my father still sent my mother a check every month, supposedly for me.

“Did they leave you lunch?” my mother asked.

“I’ve been invited out.”

“Well, have fun. I’ll talk to you Saturday morning before my hair appointment. If you need anything just call.” I could hear air rushing through the sprockets of the Lifecycle.

My father answered his own phone at the office. “Hi ya, sport. Get in okay?”

“My suitcase is temporarily dislocated.”

“Happens all the time.”

“Mom wants you to call her.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know,” I said, lying.

“Well, I gotta get to work,” he said. “There should be something there for lunch if you’re hungry.”

“I’m invited to the Henrys’.”

“Oh, that’s good. Well, run along. Don’t keep people waiting. And don’t forget, Cindy’s making dinner tonight.”

“Great.”

Every year Cindy made dinner my first night in town. “A real dinner,” she called it: sitting down, plates, glasses, a meatlike item, strange salad — one year with flower petals in it — doctored brown rice, and herbal iced tea. After that, for the rest of the summer, eating was pretty much something I took care of at the Henrys’, where they seemed to have a firmer grasp of what was food and what was indigenous vegetation, animal habitat, something to be seen, perhaps cut and put in a vase, but certainly not eaten. Sometimes, I’d ride to the grocery store with Mrs. and buy real food, making sure to get enough for my father and Cindy, who ultimately ate more crap than anyone.

Cindy was ten years younger than my dad, and all they’d talked about when they bought this place was how great it was for kids. For these five years, I’d felt the burden of making that seem true.

“He shops,” I once overheard Cindy tell someone. “And he’s such a pleasure to have around.”

A pleasure because I was hardly around. Plus, I was household-oriented. I liked things clean and neat. I found comfort in order. I was also used to being around people I didn’t know, living with people I wasn’t related to. I kept my own secrets. I’d taught myself to be a little less than human. I’d taught myself to be a person whom people like to have around, half boy, half butler: half, just half — no one wanted the whole thing, that was one of the tricks, if you wanna call it that.

I pulled the box of chocolate I’d brought for Mrs. H. out of my carry-on. I’d picked liquor-filled, thinking it was safer than milk chocolate in terms of keeping it from Henry and baby June. Liquor-filled tasted so foul that only an adult would eat it. I washed my hands and face and set out for the Henrys’.

Lunch was like something out of a commercial or a dream, although I suppose there was nothing unusual about it. Baloney-and-cheese sandwiches on white bread — mayo on one side, mustard on the other, and pale pink meat and yellow cheese in the middle. Heaven. In Dr. Frankle’s house the only baloney was verbal, and in my father’s the only meat was a soy-based pseudohamburger mix called bean-burger.

“Chips?” Mrs. Henry asked.

“Yes, please.” Real chips, not extra crispy, gourmet deep-bake-fried, slightly, lightly not salted. Normal American chips out of a big old bag-o’-chips. I was glowing. Orange drink. Not orange juice, but drink. It may as well have been a birthday party. Henry didn’t notice, he didn’t care, he didn’t appreciate anything.

Mrs. H. topped off my glass. My tongue would be orange all day; if I sucked on it hard, I’d be able to pull out little flashes of flavor for hours to come.

“I’m so glad to be here,” I said, meaning it completely.

“We’ve missed you,” Mrs. said.

“I haven’t,” Henry said. “I’ve been busy.”

“Oh, Henry, you sit in the house, whining all the time, ‘I’m bored. There’s nothing to do.’”

“TV is your best friend,” I said.

“No, yours,” Henry said.

“No,” I said. “Yours. We don’t have a TV.”

“God, how depressing,” Henry said.

There was a moment of silence while everyone — even Mrs. H. — reflected on the idea of life without television.

“That was great, thank you,” I said to Mrs. when we were finished.

“It was baloney,” Henry said.

I carried the plates to the sink.

“You’re so considerate,” Mrs. said, staring Henry down.

I try, I said to myself. I try so hard.

“Come on,” Henry said. “Hurry up.” He pushed me out the screen door.

From the edge of their backyard, if I listened hard, I could hear the deceiving rush that five years ago I thought was water. From the end of this block that went nowhere — dead-ended three houses away into a thick wood — I’d heard a clean whooshing sound that I thought was a lot of water. A waterfall maybe. A paradise on the other side of something. An escape from the starkness of this street. Before I knew better, I went charging off into fifteen feet of thick woods, the kind of woods bogeymen come from, woods where little kids playing find a human hand poking through the leaves, the nails long from the inattentions of the not-so-recently dead, the kind of place where animals crawl off to die. I punched my way through only to find that what whooshed and roared was an eight-lane highway where a hundred thousand cars sliding by in both directions had the nerve to sound like a waterfall. Hearing it again on this first afternoon depressed me.

“Give me your glasses,” Henry said, kneeling down.

I handed them over, imagining Henry slipping the frames under the ball of his foot, and then leaning full forward, laughing at the snap-crackle-pop sound of two hundred and fifty dollars shattering.

“They’re very expensive,” I said.

“I’m not buying them.”

He used the glasses to catch the sun and burn holes through an old dead leaf.

“Handy,” he said, giving them back to me. “I guess you can keep them.” He stopped for a second, then looked at me. “So, what’s wrong with you, how come you’re not talking? Brain go blind, too?”

“Trip,” I said. “I don’t like to fly.”

“Wouldn’t know,” Henry said. “Pool’s open. We can go tomorrow.”

In Philadelphia there was a community pool, long and wide. All you had to do was show up and sign in. Henry and I ruled it in the summer. We never took showers before entering. We stepped over the vat of milky green below the sign ALL BATHERS MUST IMMERSE FEET BEFORE ENTERING WATER. Whatever disease we might have had, we thought it better than the lack of disease we saw around us, we wanted to infect everyone, anyone, we wanted everything about ourselves to be contagious, we were dying for someone to be just like us. We were the boys who only got out of the water when the guard blew his whistle fifteen minutes before the hour — every hour — and announced, “Adult swim. Eighteen and under out of the pool.” Those words were mystical, almost magical. We’d crawl out and sit by the edge watching, as if adult swim meant that the pool would become pornographic for those fifteen very adult minutes just before the hour. But nothing ever happened. The only pornography were the old women with breasts big enough to feed a nation and old men with personal business hanging so far down that it sometimes fell out the end of their bathing suits.

Every day we stayed at the pool until Henry’s mother called the office and had us paged and ordered home. Then waterlogged, bloody-eyed, bellies bloated from the ingestion of too much chlorinated water, cheap snack-bar pizza, and too many Milky Ways, we walked home, wet towels around our necks, our little generals shriveled, clammy, and chafing under our cutoffs. We bore it all proudly, as though it were the most modern medical treatment, the prescription guarantee for a better life, a bright manhood. Our flip-flops slippery wet, heels sliding off and into the dirt, strange evening bugs and twigs snapping at our ankles, we wound down the long hill onto the road, and then across the road, through some yards, through the short woods between developments toward the light in the Henrys’ kitchen window.

As the days stretched out to full length, Mrs. Henry always started talking about where she wanted to spend her summer vacation, two golden weeks she’d suffered the year for. She’d talk about going to Rome to see the pope or to Venice to ride in a gondola or even off to Australia to see koala bears, but in the end the Henrys always ended up going somewhere like the nearest beach, toting me along because it was easier to bring an extra kid to entertain Henry than to try to do it themselves.

In the evenings, after dinner, Mrs. Henry went out onto the new wooden deck that Mr. had built over the old slab-o’-concrete porch. While baby June played with her dolls, Mrs. Henry sat back on a lounger holding a tall glass of diet soda, filled with ice cubes melted down into hailstones. Every now and then, she’d shake the drink, mix it up, and say, “Brings the carbonation to life.”

As soon as the weather got warm and everyone started running in and out of the new sliding glass door, Mrs. Henry went to the hardware store, bought a roll of glow-in-the-dark orange tape, and made a huge safety star on the glass door, top to bottom, to remind everyone not to go charging through.

“I don’t want anyone ending up with a face full of glass, stitches, scars, and disfigurement. I’d feel terrible.”

It worked. We all felt careful and safe. Mrs. H. sat out there resting with baby June while Henry and I played badminton in the yard. Shuttlecock. We loved that word. We said it loudly and brightly a thousand times a day for absolutely no reason. We’d go down to Woolworth’s and loudly ask each other, “You don’t think they’d have shuttlecocks here, do you?” The shuttlecock would go up high in the air, its red rubber end obscene, wonderful, and probably the only reason we played the game. The cock would rise into the last moment of light and then sink into the darkness of the Pennsylvania backyard, dropping softly onto the grass.

Deep at the farthest end of the yard, round, multicolored plastic lights bobbed up and down on the back fence. The lights had been up every one of my Philadelphia years, as though the Henrys’ life were a never-ending tropical party, as if they were the happiest people in the world. Sometimes the lights were like buoys. Henry and I would lie out on the deck pretending we were at sea. Depending on our mood, the lights were beacons, telling us how to steer, how to avoid dangerous straits and shipwrecks of summers past. Other times they were other yachts filled with wonderful and famous people. We’d stand on the bow, waving. We’d look through Henry’s binoculars into the dead black of night and pretend we were seeing all manner of decadent behavior. In detail, we’d describe it to each other.

One afternoon, later that summer, Mrs. Henry started gliding around the kitchen in a definite rhythm — one-two-three: refrigerator-sink-stove — as though cooking were dancing, as though she could waltz with hamburgers.

Tiny grease balls spattered and popped in the frying pan, shooting off into the gas flames where they exploded into miniature blue-and-orange fireballs of fat, cheap summer sparklers. The hamburgers were almost done. I usually didn’t pay this much attention to the state of dinner, especially dinner that wasn’t really my own, but I happened to be in the middle of a growth spurt or something and was on the verge of starvation. My stomach was puffing out, and I was having difficulty concentrating on anything other than the six hockey pucks of beef sizzling not a body’s length away, wondering how the six pucks would be divided among four, hopefully five, people.

Voluntarily, I set the table, pretending not to be anything other than a good neighbor, a nice boy.

Mrs. turned from the stove to a dying head of lettuce.

“Where is he?” she said, referring to Mr. Henry. “I hate it when he does this. Dinner’s almost ready. We’re going to have to eat.”

She raised the frying pan up off the fire. The phone rang and rang again. She answered it. “I’m sorry, what?” she said, using her chin to pull the phone closer to her ear. She held the pan above the stove, slightly tilted. The hamburgers stopped sizzling. “No,” she said. “No, I don’t think that’s right.”

Without realizing what she was doing, she pushed the frying pan forward, threw it down in the sink, which was more than six inches deep with dirty water, dead lettuce, and mixed vegetable scraps.

Henry screamed, “No.”

The burgers landed with one great searing hiss, immediately sank, and neither Henry nor I could figure a rescue plan fast enough.

Six burgers a goner was all I could think. I could tell Henry was furious. His top lip had disappeared into a thin white line of pure Henry fury.

“I’m going to give you ten dollars to keep an eye on Constance for a couple of hours. Don’t use the stove or the oven. You can microwave.” She turned off the gas, picked up her purse, and went out the door. “That’s our dinner,” Henry said, pointing to the handle of the frying pan poking up. A single burger had risen and was somehow skimming the surface of the muck looking less like food than the final result of eating. “It’s gross, I’m not touching it.”

We went through the cabinets, found a box of macaroni-and-cheese mix, bright orange and gooey. Later, it made my stomach turn.

“I’m hungry,” Henry said after the neon glop was gone.

“Would you like me to make you something?” baby June said, dragging her Easy-Bake out of the kitchen closet.

“Oh, I wanna cake baked by a lightbulb,” Henry said. “That sounds wonderful, a gourmet treat.”

“You do?” She lit up like she was the electricity that would power the bulb. “Isn’t it wonderful,” she said, patting the oven. “What kind do you want? Yellow or black?”

“It’s yellow or chocolate,” I said.

Baby June shrugged. She didn’t care. She baked us each a cake and then delivered them as though waiting on us was the greatest thing in the world. We thought she was nuts.

“You want a real toy?” Henry asked her. Baby June nodded. He went deep into his closet and pulled out an old toy machine gun. “It still works,” he said.

Baby June took the gun, raised the barrel to her eye, looked inside, and simultaneously pulled the trigger, shooting herself in the face, no joke.

“I don’t get it,” she said. “It doesn’t do anything except make noise.”

“It kills people,” Henry said.

“Oh.”

Mrs. arrived home hours later, white as rice. She locked the sliding glass door, the front door, and turned out the lights while Henry, baby June, and I sat silenced by her strangeness in the sudden dark of their living room. We watched her go wordlessly up the stairs and heard the bedroom door shut.

“The hamburgers are still in the sink,” I said to Henry, who didn’t get it. “Your mother has never gone to bed leaving the kitchen dirty. She doesn’t do that. She always wipes a damp sponge across the counters, turns off the light over the stove, and wraps her dishrag through the refrigerator handle before going upstairs.”

“What are you?” Henry asked. “A pervert?”

I didn’t answer.

“Six burgers are drowned,” I said, emphasizing the sinking sensation of the word drowned.

Henry went up the stairs, stood outside the door of his parents’ room, and said in a loud, demanding voice, “When’s Dad coming home?”

“Sometime tomorrow” was the muffled answer.

The fact that she’d answered at all compelled Henry to push the questioning further.

“Are you getting a divorce?” he asked in a loud booming word-by-word voice you’d use to speak in the face of a tidal wave.

From the bottom of the steps, I saw Mrs. open the door in her robe.

“This isn’t about Daddy and me,” she said. “Your father had a problem with the car. He’s trying to straighten things out.”

“There are dishes in the sink — it’s gross.”

Mrs. adjusted her hair, pulled her robe tighter, put one fuzzy pink slipper in front of the other, and marched into the kitchen. She snapped on her rubber gloves, reached deep into the muck, pulled out the macaroni dishes, the frying pan, and, one by one, with the expression of a woman changing diapers, plucked hamburger after hamburger out of the water, held each up in the air for a few seconds to drain, and then dropped the remains into a trash can. She brushed her hair back with her elbow, shook Comet over everything, and went to work under hot water. The steam and Comet mixed to form a delicious noxious cloud-o’-cleanliness that drifted through the house. Whatever had happened hours earlier, the moment that caused dinner to drown, had been a kind of lapse, a seizure of sorts, but now with the green cellulose sponge in hand, everything was all right.

Mrs. Henry turned on the floodlight by the kitchen door, so I could see my way home. A three-foot path of white light cut through the darkness and lit up the grass green and bright.

There was a hill between the houses. A five-foot bump of dirt that changed things. The adults in either house didn’t know each other well; it was too much work. To say hello they had to go around the long way, out the front door, down the flagstone blocks to the sidewalk, up the next driveway, up the flagstone blocks to the three steps, to the front door, and ring the doorbell, ring, ring. Hi, just thought I’d stop over. It didn’t happen. If the land had been flat, if geography had been on their side, everything would have been easier. But the way it was, the Henrys were trapped. On the right edge of their property was a high homemade fence and on the left was this grass-covered tumor-o’-land that may as well have been Mount Baldy.

“Good night,” I said and ran up the mountain toward the house on top of the hill. Mrs. turned the floodlight out behind me.

Using my key I opened the door to the house that would never be my own. The clock in the front hall banged out ten chimes.

My father and Cindy were sitting at the dining-room table, gnawing like rabbits on the remains of a huge salad — my father’s evening grazing, as always, supplemented by a microwaved Lean Eating entrée, parked by his plate like someone’s morning vitamin pill. Every night after their evening meal my father and Cindy disappeared into the “master bedroom suite.” I could hear the click of the door locking. Buried in the “suite” was a custom-crafted tub big enough for six people, a cross-country ski machine, an exercise bike, VCR, twenty-six-inch TV, king-size bed, and even a small fridge. In case of nuclear attack, close bedroom door and wait for the next generation to save you.

What annoyed me the most was the locking of the door. Who did it? Cindy or my father? And how could they think that I, Mr. Privacy himself, was going to come busting in on them? It was infuriating. The other possibility was that they were really doing something in there, something I couldn’t even begin to imagine, although I did imagine.

Alone, I did the dishes, mine and theirs, flipped through the mail, pretended to read the paper, and then, suffocating in boredom and frustration, turned on the eleven o’clock news.

“Early this afternoon, a Philadelphia boy was struck and killed by a car as he was crossing the street on his way home from a program for gifted and talented youth at Herbert Hoover Junior High. Thomas Stanton the Third, who had just turned thirteen earlier this week, was taken to University Hospital where he was pronounced dead. According to police reports, the car was traveling at substantial speed. The driver, forty-three-year-old John Heffilfinger, also of Philadelphia, was arrested at the scene.” A picture of Mr. Henry flashed on the screen — Heffilfinger, no wonder I called them all Henrys — I truly almost didn’t know who it was. I’d never seen him as anything other than Mr. Henry until that moment, when he was plucked out, taken from the Henrys, and put in a whole new category, John “Henry” Heffilfinger, Killer.

When Mr. Henry seemed to be late getting home, I didn’t even think twice about it. Sometimes when fathers are late it’s a good thing. Sometimes they’re buying things, surprises you’d asked for but never thought you’d get — snorkel mask, fins, a better bike.

At thirteen, Thomas Stanton III had enough names and numbers behind his name to sound old enough and scary enough to run a bank. Poor Mr. H., was all I could think. Poor all the Hs. Did Henry even know? After turning out the floodlight behind me, did Mrs. call him into the kitchen for a long sit-down? Or was he alone up in his room, discovering this for himself on his private thirteen-inch Sony?

“Early this afternoon,” the newscaster had said. It hadn’t even happened at night, or at twilight when darkness and light mix together like spit in a kiss. It didn’t happen at some forgivable moment when Mr. Henry could claim the sun at the horizon line blotted out everything, and he and the boy had dipped into darkness. In the middle of a perfectly good afternoon in the end of June, with a breeze that tickled the air like fingertips, he’d become a killer.

News travels fast. “Stay home today,” my father said, ducking his head into my room before he left for the office. “Mr. Heffilfinger has a problem and should be left alone.”

I didn’t say anything. After he and Cindy were gone, I got up, got dressed, ate breakfast, and sat looking out the front window at all the houses just like my father’s, every single one pressed out of the same red brick Play-Doh mold. The ones across the street didn’t come face to face, eye to eye, with ours, they looked into a small half court of their own. I saw those neighbors only in profile, coming and going, carrying bags of groceries up the sidewalk, watering the lawn, pounding a rug, or tending a failing barbecue. They were all Flat Stanleys. Human Colorforms, flat slices of bright, shiny, plastic laid down on a prepainted cardboard world — they could be peeled up and put down again and again, in any order or combination.

With nothing better to do and no options, I started putting wood-grain contact paper in all my dresser drawers. Halfway through, Henry rang the doorbell.

“Can I come in?”

I nodded and stepped back. Henry followed me upstairs to my room.

“I’m just gonna sit here,” he said, patting the edge of my bed.

I didn’t say anything. It was one of those times when clearly no one should talk. I finished cutting, peeling, laying the paper in the drawers, and then put my clean clothing back into the dresser much more slowly, more carefully than a normal person would. When I finished, and Henry still hadn’t talked, I started cleaning, dusting, polishing, rearranging. I was on the verge of remodeling the whole house before he said anything.

“I guess you found out why dinner got wrecked,” he said.

“Yeah.”

“My father killed a kid,” he said and then stopped. “I guess you know that,” he said.

I nodded.

“That’s why dinner got wrecked.”

I nodded again and thought I’d never be able to eat hamburger again, macaroni and cheese, either. I’d end up becoming a vegetarian like my father and Cindy, eating rabbit-food dinners at midnight, then locking myself in my room.

“He’s coming home this afternoon,” Henry said. “Why? Why are they letting him out?”

He looked up at me; I looked away.

I shrugged and shrugged and shrugged, and Henry shrugged, and then finally we went downstairs, ate all the decent things we could find, and sat looking out the front window, waiting for Mr. Henry to be brought back.

I can’t say Mr. Henry came home from the police station a different man. He was exactly the same the day after as he was the day before. There were no signs of him having snapped out of himself for the instant it took to kill, no indication that all the badness, the frustration, the lifetime buildup of a man’s anger, had risen up through his gut, through his blood like a whirling dervish, like the man out of the Mr. Clean bottle, and that all the swirling whirlingness had forced his foot to the floor and hurled the car forward over Thomas Stanton III. I looked for that but saw nothing except dull gray around the eyes from too little sleep, too much fear, and stubble from a day’s missed shaving.

“I’m being used,” Henry said two days later as he was putting on the clothes his mother had laid out for him: gray pants, striped shirt, tie, blue jacket, hard shoes. The Henrys were going to court. A skinny lawyer with teeth so rotten they smelled bad had shown up the night before and explained to all the Henrys that they had to “dress up and put on a show, featuring Mr. Heffilfinger as father, provider, and protector.”

In the hall all the Henrys went by, ducking in and out of the bedrooms, the bathroom. There was the hiss of aerosol spray, the dull whir of the hair dryer. All the running around and good clothes would have been festive if it wasn’t ten A.M. on a weekday, liable to be the hottest day of the year so far, and if the destination weren’t the county courthouse.

As soon as the lawyer pulled into the driveway, Mr. Henry went out, got into the back seat of his car, and closed the door. The rest of the Henrys were all downstairs, ready to go, except for Henry himself.

Mrs. Henry came upstairs. “We’re ready to leave,” she said.

Henry was lying down on the bed. He didn’t move.

“Henry, we can’t be late. Come on now.”

Still nothing. His mother took his arm and began to pull. Henry pulled in the opposite direction.

“I don’t want to fight with you,” she said, leaning back, using her weight and position to good advantage. “It’s for your father. Do this for your father.”

Henry stopped resisting and was pulled off the bed and onto the floor.

“Stand up or you’ll get dusty.”

The lawyer came into his room. “Get up. We have to go.”

Henry lay flat on the floor in his coat and tie. The back of the blue blazer picking up lint balls like it was designed to do that.

“I’m not going,” Henry finally said.

“Oh yes you are,” the lawyer said.

Together, the lawyer and Henry’s mother lifted him to standing. I was sitting in the corner, in the old green corduroy chair that used to be in the living room. For the first time ever I felt like I didn’t belong there, I felt like I was seeing something I shouldn’t, something too private.

“Unless you plan on dragging me the whole way, leave me alone,” Henry said to the lawyer.

The lawyer pushed him back onto the bed. “Do you want me to tell you something?”

Henry shook his head.

“If you don’t sit in that courtroom and act right and if your daddy gets sent to jail, I don’t want you to ever forget that it might be your fault. Just because you felt like being a bogey little brat. Think on that,” the lawyer said, checking his watch.

Henry looked at me, then stood and dusted himself off. Mrs. turned and went out of the room. Henry tipped his head toward the lawyer and said, “You’re the biggest fucking asshole in the world.”

The lawyer didn’t respond except to look down at Henry like he wanted to kill him.

“And your fly is open, fuckwad,” Henry said and then marched out of the room on his mother’s heels, not staying to see the lawyer’s face flush red, his hands grab at his crotch.

From Henry’s bedroom window I watched the rest of them get into the lawyer’s Lincoln. You could tell it was going to be the kind of day where the heat would raise people’s tempers past the point of reconciliation. After they left, I left, pulling the door closed behind me and crossing the grass to wait in the air-conditioned silence of the house next door.

Later that afternoon, when I was back at the Henrys’, their phone began to ring. It started slowly and then rang more and more, faster and faster, until it seemed to be ringing nonstop. Strangers, reporters, maniacs, guys Mr. had gone to junior high school with, lawyers offering to consider the case for a fee, someone from a TV show in New York City.

“You really should call the TV people back,” Henry said to his parents.

“Stay away from it,” Mrs. Henry said when the ringing started again. She held her arms down and out like airplane wings. “Don’t touch.”

“Are you going to work tomorrow?” Mrs. asked Mr.

“I don’t know.”

“Have you spoken to your office?”

“No,” he said.

“You don’t have to be afraid. Accidents happen,” Mrs. said.

“You shouldn’t say that,” Mr. said.

Mrs. pointed her finger at Mr. “You have to stop acting like a guilty man,” she said. “Did you wake up that morning and say to yourself, ‘I’m going to kill a little boy today’?”

“I have blood on my shoes,” Mr. shouted, “I feel like my feet are dripping in blood.”

“It’s your imagination,” Mrs. said.

“I killed someone,” he said, pushing his face close into Mrs.’s.

She pushed him away. “Stop acting insane.”

Henry sat on baby June’s swing set in the backyard, waiting for time to pass, for everything to return to normal, but Thomas Stanton III was ahead of Henry, six months ahead. He was already across the border of thirteen when he died, and he stayed there like a roadblock, a ton-o’-bricks, like all the weight in the world. Without seeming to know what he was doing, Henry started combing his hair that same certain way that Stanton’s was in the newspaper photo. He started wearing clothes a gifted and talented type would wear: button-down shirts with a plastic pen protector in the pocket, pants a size too small. He started trying to look like a genius and ended up looking like a clown, like someone permanently dressed up for Halloween.

“Henry,” I said, sitting facing him on the double horse swing. “It has to stop. You don’t know what you’re doing.”

He brushed his hair back with a whole new gesture, just the way the dead kid would do it.

“Henry, you’re making me hate you.”

“Go home. Get your own life. Leave me alone,” he said.

And so, with nothing else to do, with no other options, I did exactly that. I went to the pool alone.

Without Henry I was too intimidated to step over the pool of muck by the door. I dipped my feet in, and in a split second the milky white wash cauterized the summer’s worth of cuts and scratches and I was sanitized for sure.

I unrolled my towel down on a lounger just at the edge of the tetherball court and next to a group of kids my own age. I watched a boy smack the ball so hard I could feel the stinging in my palms. The ball spun fast, its rope winding quick and high over the head of the other boy. I saw the smacker jump up and hit it again. The ball spun harder, faster, in tighter circles, until all the rope was wound and the stem of the ball itself smacked the pole, froze a second, and then slowly started to unwind.

“Thomas was my boyfriend,” I overheard a skinny girl with blond hair hanging down the sides of her face like wet noodles say. “No one was supposed to know, but since he died, the secret came out. It was the single most horrifying experience of my life.” She adjusted and readjusted the empty pink-and-white top of her bikini, pulling on the bottoms where they would have latched onto her butt if she’d had a butt. “The car stopped only after Thomas was sucked under and came out the other side, with grease smears down his body.” She took a breath. “My mother tried to hold me back, but I touched him. ‘Thomas,’ I said. ‘Thomas, can you hear me?’ He lifted himself off the street and walked himself over to the grass, then crumpled like when you pull the middle out of a stack of things and it all falls down. He opened his mouth and a brown nutty thing they said later was his tongue fell out. ‘Thomas,’ my mother said. ‘Thomas, everything is going to be all right. You’ve been in a little accident. These things can happen to anyone.’”

“What about the guy who did it?” the girl she was talking to asked.

“He sat in his car until the police came, and then jumped out and started to run. They chased after him and dragged him back so we could identify him.”

“I don’t think so,” I said, interrupting, without even knowing what I was doing.

“What does that mean?” the girl asked.

“It was on TV,” I said. “I don’t think he tried to get away.”

“So what if he didn’t, what do you care,” she said. “He wasn’t your boyfriend. And you’re not even from around here anyway.”

I shrugged and looked evenly at her. Without a word, I got up. As I walked, the rough cement around the pool sanded the soles of my feet. At the edge of the water, I threw myself forward, hoping that when the water caught me, it would not be hard, it would not be icy cold, it would be enveloping like Jell-O. I broke the surface for air and went under again. Without Henry, with nothing to do, I swam laps, back and forth a thousand times.

Henry and I made up. We didn’t talk about anything. He just came over to my house with new Ping-Pong paddles and said, “My mother bought me these, wanna play?” and I said, “Why not.”

Two weeks to the day after the accident, while Mrs., Henry, and I were eating lunch — reheated tuna noodle casserole, with fresh chips crumbled on top, and green Gatorade — someone rang the doorbell and, without waiting for an answer, tried the knob.

Mrs. went to the kitchen door, cracked it open, and called, “Can I help you?” around the corner of the house.

“I’ve come about my son,” the woman said. She stepped into the kitchen, opened her purse, pulled out a stack of papers, and with the palm of her hand spread them out into a messy fan on the kitchen table. Henry and I moved our plates back to give her more room. We held our napkins up to our mouths to hide our expressions.

“These are his report cards. He mostly got straight As except in spelling and music; he wasn’t very good at music, couldn’t carry a tune. This is his first school picture,” she said, digging out a photo with three rows of kids, twenty-six young scrubbed faces, one kid holding a black sign with white lettering, HITHER HILLS ELEMENTARY SCHOOL, KINDERGARTEN. “We didn’t buy his school picture this year. He said he didn’t like it. He thought his hair looked funny. Why didn’t I just buy it anyway?” She was talking to herself. “Maybe if I’d taken the photo this wouldn’t have happened. Why do I have these?” she asked, looking at Mrs. “What are they for? The insurance company wants me to calculate what he would have been worth if he’d had a life. I have to give them a figure. It’s like playing The Price Is Right.” She stopped for a minute, drew in a breath, and pressed the back of her hand against her eyes, blotting them. “You want to see how it feels, you want me to take one of yours?” She put her hand on Henry. “Christmas is coming,” she said, even though it was July. “What will I do?”

The dead boy’s mother stood crying in the Henrys’ kitchen and when Henry’s mother tried again to touch her, to comfort her, she wailed. Then, without a word, without a sound other than the swallowing of great gulps of air, she turned and walked out the kitchen door.

Henry’s mother scooped up all the dead boy’s report cards, prize certificates, letters from the governor for being on the honor roll, and handed them to me. “Go on, get her before she goes,” she said.

I charged out the door, got to the lady before she got into her car, and said, “You forgot these.”

“I didn’t forget them,” she said, again blotting her eyes with the back of her hand.

“Well, I’ll put them in your car,” I said. I went over to the passenger side, opened the door, and left them there on the seat.

“You’re a good boy,” she said.

I fought the urge to tell her, I’m not one of them. I’m not his son. I’m just the boy who lives next door, part-time. I’m no one, nothing. Instead I said, “I hope you feel better soon,” and walked back toward the house.

Henry came out and on the ground where the lady’s car had been, there was a photo, it must have fallen out of her purse, my hands, the car. It must have just slipped away and landed face up next to an oil stain.

“That’s him,” Henry said, picking up the photo, wiping it against his shirt, rubbing the boy’s face over his heart.

“We should give it back to her.”

“No,” Henry said. “He’s mine.”

One afternoon while Mrs., baby June, and Henry were somewhere else, I watched Mr. digging a shallow trough through the yard. He was bent over a shovel, flipping clods of grass and dirt off to the side. He pulled a wilted piece of notebook paper from the back pocket of his shorts and consulted a diagram. Then, with his fingers as rulers, his feet as yardsticks, he began measuring his work. By the time I got from my bedroom window, across the tumor-o’-land, and into the Henrys’ backyard, Mr. was sprinkling the floor of the trough with lima beans.

“What are you doing?” I asked as he opened a third bag of beans and dropped them one at a time into the trough. He didn’t answer. “Planting?”

As soon as the beans were gone, he hauled over two large bags of charcoal briquettes and started laying the charcoal out over the beans.

“It looks like something out of Gourmet magazine,” I said. “A new kind of barbecue recipe.”

When he finished laying out all the charcoal, he sat down on a deck chair, took off his shoes and socks, pulled his shirt over his head, wiped his face and chest, dropped it down in a ball, and sighed a big one.

“They’re not home yet?” he asked.

“Not yet,” I said.

Mr. got up off the deck chair, picked up a can of starter fluid and went down the length of the trough, holding the can at crotch level, squeezing it so the fluid arced up like piss then softly splashed down onto the coals. In seconds the coals went from matte black to shiny wet and then back to matte black, as the stuff soaked in. He put down the can and picked up a box of those long fireplace matches.

“What’s this supposed to be?” I asked. I thought it was probably another one of those things some people did that I just didn’t know anything about.

Mr. Henry stood at the end of his trough, his runway of coal, lit three matches at once, held them in a tight fist, bowed his head, then dropped them in one by one. A line of flame spread the length of the ditch, sometimes golden, sometimes blue, sometimes spitting on itself. The coals shifted. Mr. stood at the end of the line looking down at his feet. He stepped out off the grass into the fire. In a split second he had both feet in the fire and was doing his best not to run. You could see it in his legs, in the muscles twitching.

“Don’t,” I shouted, going toward him.

He put both arms up in front of him, like someone sleepwalking, and the fluid that had splashed back on his hands ignited and his hands turned into ten fingers of flame, like a special effect, like something that would happen to a cartoon character. I stepped back and watched the flames jump three feet high, the hair on his arms and legs melt away, the edges of his shorts turn black, the flames at first just kissing him then starting to eat him alive. Mr. was silent until halfway down when he began to howl, to cry, and wail.

Mrs. came flying out the kitchen door, her purse over her arm, bag of groceries still in hand, screaming, “Don’t just stand there, do something.” She dropped the groceries and charged toward Mr. I ran into the Henrys’ house and called the fire department. From the kitchen window, I could see Mrs. chasing Mr. around the yard, tackling him at the edge of the woods. The fire had reached out of the trough, chewed through the empty briquette bags, and was gnawing on the porch. I saw Henry and baby June standing off to the side, watching their mother in her Bermuda shorts lying on top of their father.

I went to the front door and waited for help.

Two days later, while Mr., all red and black, charred, swollen, bandaged, blotchy, with his arms and legs tied down, was still in intensive care, two men came and took away the remains of the new deck.

“He wants to be punished,” Mrs. told the men. “Even though this was an accident, he’s convinced it was his fault.”

When they were gone Mrs. took the garden hose, a ladder, her trusty Playtex gloves and scrub brush, and with an industrial-sized bottle of lemon-lime Palmolive she washed the side of the house, the patio, and even the grass. “Go on down to the basement and bring up the beach things,” she told Henry and me when she finished. “We’re taking a few days off.”

Henry and I plunged into the clammy cool of the basement, into the history packed away on deep wooden shelves Mr. had put up a few summers before. We took out all of Henry’s old toys, played with them again, and lived our lives over. We did the memory quiz — do you remember when? — testing to see if we agreed on history, making sure we’d gotten everything right. We pulled out the beach chairs, inflatable rafts, and the Styrofoam cooler, and loaded them all into the back of Mrs.’s station wagon.

While Mrs. and baby June stayed at the foamy edge of the ocean, Henry and I danced in the waves, hurling ourselves toward them, daring the ocean to knock us out, to carry us away.

Despite our being coated with layers and layers of thick white sunblock, by the time the lifeguard pulled his station far back on the sand and walked off with the life preserver, we were red-hot like steamed lobsters.

We walked back to the motel dragging the beach chairs, the Styrofoam cooler, and all the extra sand our bathing suits would hold. To save time and hot water, Henry and I showered together and then turned the bathroom over to Mrs. and baby June. On our way out of the bathroom, Mrs. grabbed Henry by the head and recombed his hair the normal Henry way. He didn’t stop her. He didn’t rearrange it Stanton style.

Scrubbed and desalted, we sat at the four stations of the dinette set, eating two large and wonderful pizzas, drinking orange soda from cans, and simultaneously watching television. After dinner we all walked down the boardwalk watching seagulls plucking free food out of the sand and the sky and disappearing into darkness. Mrs. bought each of us a warm puffy ball of fried dough dipped in powdered sugar, and as we walked, baby June fell asleep in her mother’s arms.

It was eight-thirty when we got back to the room. Mrs. lay down on the bed with baby June. Henry and I writhed around, pillow fighting, changing TV channels, and generally spinning on the edge until finally Mrs. had enough, took a twenty-dollar bill out of the nightstand, and told us to put on sweatshirts and long pants, to go out, and blow off some steam. “Be careful and have fun.”

We raced out of the motel and back onto the boardwalk. Immediately, Henry bought a bucket of french fries and a Coke. We ate our way down the wooden planks, stopping to play darts and balloons, frog flip, and Skee-Ball, stuffing our pockets with cheap plush prizes. We bought vanilla-and-chocolate soft-swirl ice-cream cones, and fresh-made caramel corn. We sat on a bench eating while a summer’s night parade of all human possibility swept by: deformed people, big families, small families, orphans, kids on first dates, guys in sawed-off leather jackets, old people. My skin was so hot from the sunburn that it felt cold. Shivery goose bumps covered my arms, legs, and the back of my neck. I was sugar-intoxicated. Music came out of every store, arcade, and refreshment stand, a thousand radios all tuned to a different station.

As we got closer to the amusement park at the end of the boardwalk, the music got louder, each little radio competing with the next, and all of them competing with the mechanical oom pah pah of the giant carousel that cut through the night. At the gates where the boardwalk met the park, everything melted into a multicolored, multiflavored, sensomatic, dizzying, swirly whirl. We had to run one way or the other, but couldn’t stay there in the black hole of sensation. We charged toward the amusement park, toward the ticket booth. Henry slammed down what was left of the twenty and got two fistfuls of tickets. We ran from ride to ride watching each one for a few seconds, deciding which were the best investments: Roller Coaster, Haunted House, Swiss Avalanche.

“That one definitely,” Henry said, pointing across the park to spaceships taking off into the sky, trailing red-and-white afterglow. “Come on.” We ran to the far edge of the park, to this last ride, sandwiched in the corner that touched the ocean. Rockets Round the Moon. There was a plot of grass, a metal chain-link fence and then barnacle-covered rocks, railroad tie shoring, and the water evenly slapping against the edge of the world.

Henry gave the man our tickets and we slid past him and ran toward the space octopus, climbing into our own personal rocket ship, pulling the chrome safety bar down in front of us. We took off smoothly, the giant mechanical arms swinging us high into the air, shifting, then throwing us out toward the sea, where we hung over the water for a second before being snapped back. We were pitching and swaying, more like a bucking bronco or something with transmission trouble than your typical flying machine. Henry threw himself to the left and then to the right, slamming against me, getting the ship rocking in a rhythm all its own. The huge groaning arms flew us up, down, round and round. When we landed, Henry was absolutely sparkling. He pounded the side of our rocket, the hollow metal echoed. “Again, again,” he shouted. The ride emptied and refilled. The ticket taker came by and Henry dropped too many tickets into his hand. The man counted them but didn’t give any back. “More,” Henry screamed. “More.”

The ride started again and we were up, up, and away. Whirling, twirling. I closed my eyes and held on. I was being pulled in a thousand different directions. I was struggling to stay in one place. I could feel the force of being whipped through the air again and again starting to bend my face. I saw the picture from Life magazine of a man in a wind tunnel, his mouth stretched out, blown back, teeth and gums exposed. I was that man.

We landed smooth and safe, two feet above the ground. All there was to do was push the safety bar forward and step down and out.

“Once more, just once more,” Henry said, digging into his pockets, dropping the last of the tickets into the man’s hands.

We were airborne, we were flying, Rockets Round the Moon. I focused on the taillights of the ship in front of us, up and down, it went before us, side to side. Looking at it, I knew what would come next, I had a second to prepare. Up and away. Pushing off my knee, Henry stood. He rose up, steadied himself, then raised his arms up and open. His legs pressed against the safety bar. All of his weight was there. I pulled back on the bar hoping it would hold. I pulled back hoping Henry wouldn’t take flight, fall free, roll out over the nose and into the sea. He stood in a trance, face taut, hair blowing, arms extended, scarecrow of the universe. Then his face dissolved into a colorless puddle of flesh. His jaw fell open, raw sewage spilled out and was whipped into the wind behind us. I slid down under the safety bar, onto the floor. I wrapped my arms around his legs, pressed my cheek to his knee, and pulled down. I looked up to see Henry still standing, his face covered with his own chunky blue. From the floor I could smell the noxiousness of its mixture, hot and rich, like some hearty soup a grandmother would serve on a winter night.

When we landed, the ticket man came running over with a bucket I thought was for Henry, but instead he flipped the safety bar back, pulled us out, and dumped a bucketful of sudsy water into the belly of our ship. “You fool,” he yelled at Henry, who was unsteady on his feet, searching his pockets for more ride tickets, wiping his mouth with the sleeve of his sweatshirt. “Go back where you belong. Go home.”