Äîêóìåíò âçÿò èç êýøà ïîèñêîâîé ìàøèíû. Àäðåñ îðèãèíàëüíîãî äîêóìåíòà : http://www.philol.msu.ru/~discours/images/stories/Documents/Hillis_Miller/the_secret_eng.doc Äàòà èçìåíåíèÿ: Thu Apr 20 00:37:06 2006 Äàòà èíäåêñèðîâàíèÿ: Sat Dec 22 21:41:39 2007 Êîäèðîâêà: Ïîèñêîâûå ñëîâà: lightning

THE SECRET INTEGRATION

Outside it was raining, the first rain of October, end of haying season
and of the fall's brilliance, purity of light, a certain soundness to
weather that had brought New Yorkers flooding up through the Berkshires not
too many weekends ago to see the trees changing in that sun. Today, by
contrast, it was Saturday and raining, a lousy combination. Inside at the
moment was Tim Santora, waiting for ten o'clock and wondering how he was
going to get out past his mother. Grover wanted to see him at ten this
morning, so he had to go. He sat curled in an old washing machine that lay
on its side in a back room of the house; he listened to rain going down a
drainpipe and looked at a wart that was on his finger. The wart had been
there for two weeks and wasn't going to go away. The other day his mother
had taken him over to Doctor Slothrop, who painted some red stuff on it,
turned out the lights and said, "Now, when I switch on my magic purple
lamp, watch what happens to the wart." It wasn't a very magic-looking lamp,
but when the doctor turned it on, the wart glowed a bright green.
"Ah, good," said Doctor Slothrop. "Green. That means the wart will go
away, Tim. It hasn't got a chance." But as they were going out, the doctor
said to Tim's mother, in a lowered voice Tim had learned how to listen in
on, "Suggestion therapy works about half the time. If this doesn't clear up
now spontaneously, bring him back and we'll try liquid nitrogen." Soon as
he got home, Tim ran over to ask Grover what "suggestion therapy" meant. He
found him down in the cellar, working on another invention.
Grover Snodd was a little older than Tim, and a boy genius. Within limits,
anyway. A boy genius with flaws. His inventions, for example, didn't always
work. And last year he'd had this racket, doing everybody's homework for
them at a dime an assignment. But he'd given himself away too often. They
knew somehow (they had a "curve," according to Grover, that told them how
well everybody was supposed to do) that it was him behind all the 90s and
100s kids started getting. "You can't fight the law of averages," Grover
said, "you can't fight the curve." So they went to work earnestly on his
parents to talk them into transferring him. Someplace. Anyplace. Expert
though he might be on every school topic from igneous rocks to Indian
raids, Grover was still too dumb, as Tim saw it, to cover up how smart he
was. Whenever he had a chance to show it, he'd always weaken. In a problem
like somebody's yard's a triangle, find the area, Grover couldn't resist
bringing in a little trigonometry, which half the class couldn't even
pronounce, or calculus, a word they saw from time to time in the outer-
space comics and was only a word. But Tim and others were tolerant about
it. Why shouldn't Grover show off? He had a hard time sometimes. It wasn't
any use talking to people his own age about higher mathematics or higher
anything else. He used to discuss foreign policy with his father, Grover
confided to Tim, until one night they'd had a serious division of views
over Berlin. "I know what they ought to do," Grover yelled (he always
yelled - at walls, at anything else solid that happened to be around -to
let you know it wasn't you he was mad at but something else, something to
do with the scaled-up world adults made, remade and lived in without him,
some inertia and stubbornness he was too small, except inside himself, to
overcome), "exactly what they should do." But when Tim asked what, Grover
only said, "Never mind. The thing we argued about isn't important. But now
we don't talk; that is important. When I'm home now they let me alone and I
let them alone." This year he was only home on weekends and Wednesdays.
Other days he commuted twenty miles to college, a Berkshire men's college
patterned on Williams but smaller, to take courses and talk to people about
higher everything. The public school had won, had banished him. They didn't
have time for him, and wanted everybody doing their own homework. It was
apparently OK with Grover's father too, because of that estrangement over
Berlin. "It isn't that he's stupid, or mean," Grover yelled at his family's
oil burner. "He isn't. It's worse than that. He understands things that I
don't care about. And I care about things he'll never understand."
"I don't get it," said Tim. "Hey, Grover, what's 'suggestion therapy'
mean?"
"Like faith healing," said Grover. "That how they're trying to get rid of
that wart?"
"Yeah." He told about the red stuff that glowed green, and the lamp.
"Ultraviolet fluorescence," Grover said, having obvious fun with the
words, "has no effect on the wart. They're trying to talk it away, but I
just messed that up for them," and he started laughing, rolling around on
the floor of the cellar, as if somebody was tickling him. "It won't work.
When it wants to go away, it will, that's all. Warts have a mind of their
own."
It tickled Grover any time he could interfere with the scheming of
grownups. It never occurred to Tim to want to figure out why this was so.
Grover himself cared only slightly about his own motives. "They think I'm
smarter than I am," he hazarded once. "They have this idea about a 'boy
genius,' I think-what one is supposed to be, you know. They see them on
television or something, and that's what they want me to be like." He'd
been very mad that day, Tim remembered, because a new invention hadn't
worked out. A sodium grenade: two compartments, sodium and water, separated
by a burst-diaphragm. When the sodium came in contact with the water, it
would go off with a tremendous bang. But the diaphragm was too strong or
something, and it wouldn't break. To make things worse, Grover had been
reading Tom Swift and His Wizard Camera, by Victor Appleton. He kept coming
across these Tom Swift books by apparent accident, though he had developed
the theory lately that it was by design; that the books were coming across
him, and that his parents and/or the school were deeply involved. Tom Swift
books were a direct affront to him, as if he were expected to compete, to
build even better inventions and make even more money on them and invest it
more wisely than Tom Swift.
"I hate Tom Swift!" he yelled.
"Quit reading those books, then," Tim suggested.
But Grover couldn't; he tried, but he couldn't stop. Every time one of
them popped up, as if from an invisible, malevolent toaster, he'd devour
it. It was an addiction; he was haunted by Aerial Warships, Electric
Rifles. "It's awful," he said, "the guy's a show-off, he talks funny, and
he's a snob, and" - hitting his head to remember the word -"a racist."
"A what?"
"You know this colored servant Tom Swift has, remember, named Eradicate
Sampson? Rad for short. The way he treats that guy, it's disgusting. Do
they want me to read that stuff so I'll be like that?"
"Maybe that's how," said Tim, excited, having figured it out all at once,
"how they want you to be with Carl." He meant Carl Barrington, a colored
kid they knew. His family had moved here from Pittsfield not so long ago.
The Barringtons lived in Northumberland Estates, a new development out
across an abandoned quarry and a couple of rye fields from the older part
of Mingeborough that Grover and Tim lived in. Like them, and Etienne
Cherdlu, Carl was a nut for practical jokes, not just watching and
laughing, but for actually playing them and thinking up new ones, this
being one reason the four of them hung around together. The suggestion that
Rad, a character in a book, had anything to do with Carl puzzled Grover.
"Don't they like Carl, or what?" he said.
"I don't think it's him. It's his mother and father."
"What did they do?"
Tim made a don't-ask-me face. "Pittsfield is a city," he said. "I guess
you can do almost anything in a city. Maybe they ran a numbers game."
"You got that from watching television," Grover accused, and Tim said yeah
and laughed. Grover said, "Does your mother know that you and me and Carl
go out - you know - fool around?"
"I didn't tell her," Tim said. "She didn't say not to."
"Don't tell her," said Grover. Tim didn't. It wasn't that Grover ever gave
orders, but there was an understanding among all of them that even though
sometimes he was wrong about things, he still knew more than any of the
rest of them and they ought to listen to him. If he told you that a wart
wasn't going to go away, that it had a mind of its own, all the purple
lights and green fluorescence in Massachusetts would not prevail. The wart
would stay.
Tim looked at the wart, a little leery about it, as if it did have a
separate intelligence. If he'd been a few years younger, he would have
given the wart a name, but he was beginning to realize only little kids
named things. Now he sat inside the washing machine he'd used last year for
a space capsule, listened to the rain, began to think of getting old, and
then older and older without bound, cut the thought off before it modulated
to the matter of dying, decided to ask Grover today if he'd learned
anything new about the other thing, the liquid nitrogen. "Nitrogen is a
gas," Grover had told him, "I never heard of it being a liquid." That was
all. But he might have something today. You never knew what he was going to
come back from college with. Once he'd brought a multicolored model of a
protein molecule, which was now in the hideout, along with the Japanese TV
and the sodium stockpile, a bunch of old transmission parts from Etienne
Cherdlu's father's junkyard, concrete bust of Alf Landon stolen in one of
the weekly raids on Mingeborough Park, busted Mies van der Rohe chair
salvaged from another of the old estates, not to mention assorted
chandelier pieces, fragments of tapestries, teak newels, one fur overcoat
they could hang around the neck of the bust and hide under sometimes, like
in a tent.
Tim rolled out of the machine and went as quietly as he could into the
kitchen to check the clock. It was a little past ten. Grover was never on
time himself, but he always wanted other people to be. "Punctuality," he
would declaim, rolling the word at you like an invincible purey, "is not
one of your salient virtues." All you had to say to him then was "Huh?" and
he'd forget it and get down to business. One of the reasons Tim liked him.
Tim's mother wasn't in the living room, the television was off, and at
first he thought she might have gone out. He pulled his raincoat down off
the hanger in the hall closet and started for the back door. Then he heard
her dialing. He came around a corner, and there she was under the back
stairs, holding the blue Princess telephone between her jaw and shoulder.
She'd been dialing with one hand and holding the other in front of her in a
tight, pale fist. There was a look on her face Tim had never seen before. A
little - what do you call it, nervous? scared? -he didn't know. If she saw
him there she gave no sign, though he'd made noise enough. The receiver
stopped buzzing, and somebody answered.
"You niggers," his mother spat out suddenly, "dirty niggers, get out of
this town, go back to Pittsfield. Get out before you get in real trouble."
Then she hung up fast. The hand that was in a fist had been shaking, and
now her other hand, once it let go of the receiver, started shaking a
little too. She turned swiftly, as if she'd smelled him like a deer; caught
Tim looking at her in astonishment.
"Oh, you," she said, beginning to smile, except for her eyes.
"What were you doing?" Tim said, which wasn't what he'd meant to ask.
"Oh, playing a joke, Tim," she said, "a practical joke."
Tim shrugged and went on out the back door. "I'm going out," he told her,
without looking back. He knew she wouldn't give him any trouble now about
it, because he'd caught her.
He ran out into the rain and past two wet lilac bushes, down a slope into
long grass turned to hay, his sneakers soaked after only a couple-three
steps. Grover Snodd's house, an older one than Tim's with a gambrel roof,
edged out from behind a big maple to greet him. When he'd been younger Tim
used to think of the house as a person, and say hello to it each time he
came over, as if it actually were peeking around the maple at him,
friendly, in a kind of game between friends. He still was not at the point
where he could give this up completely; it would be cruel to the house to
stop believing in it. So: "Hi, house," he said, as usual. The house had a
face on the end, a pleasant old face, windows for eyes and nose, a face
that always seemed to be smiling. Tim ran on by it, for just a moment only
a shadow, dwarfed against the towering, benevolent face. The rain was
coming down pretty hard. He skidded around a corner and up to another maple
with pieces of board nailed to the side of the trunk. Up, slipping once,
and out a long limb to Grover's window. Whistling, electronic sounds came
from inside. "Grovie," Tim said, banging on the window. "Hey."
Grover opened the window and announced to Tim that he had a lamentable
tendency to dilatoriness.
"Wha?" said Tim.
"I just heard a kid in New York," Grover told him as Tim climbed into the
room. "There's something funny with the sky today, because - you know - I
have trouble most of the time just getting Springfield." Grover was a radio
ham. He put together his own transceiver rigs and test equipment. Not only
the sky but these mountains, too, made incoming signals capricious.
Grover's room, certain nights when Tim stayed over, filled as the hour grew
late with disembodied voices, sometimes even from as far away as the sea.
Grover liked to listen but he seldom transmitted to anybody. He had road
maps stuck up on the wall and each time he heard a new voice he'd mark it
on the map, along with the frequency. Tim had never seen him sleep. He'd
still be up no matter what time Tim turned in, fooling with dials, pressing
a huge pair of rubber earphones to his head. There was a speaker too;
sometimes he had that on. Drifting in and out of sleep, Tim would hear,
mixed with dreams, cops being called to investigate car wrecks or just
noises or shadows that moved where everything should have been still,
cabbies out to meet the night's trains and grouching mostly about coffee or
cracking dry jokes with their dispatcher, some half of a chess game, tugs
across the Dutch Hills taking a string of gravel barges down the Hudson,
road workers in the autumn and winter working late getting out snow fence
or plowing, a merchantman at sea now and then when the thing in the sky,
the Heaviside layer, was right for it - all these coming down, filtering
through to populate his dreams, so that in the morning he'd never know
which had been real, which he'd hallucinated. Grover never was any help.
Waking up, before he was fully out of dreams, Tim would say, "Grovie, what
about the lost raccoon? The cops find him?" or, "What about that Canadian
logger in the houseboat up the river?" And Grover would always answer, "I
don't remember that." When Etienne Cherdlu stayed over too, he'd remember
different things than Tim did: singing, or badger-watchers reporting in to
some kind of headquarters, or bitter arguments, half in Italian, about pro
football.
ètienne was supposed to be here today too. It was a regular Saturday-
morning briefing session. Probably his father had kept him late again
working over at the junkyard. He was a very fat kid who wrote his name
"8oN," usually on telephone poles with "ha, ha" after it, in crayon, yellow
keel swiped from road crews. Like Tim and Grover and Carl, ètienne loved to
play practical jokes, only with him it was an obsession. Grover was a
genius, Tim wanted someday to become a basketball coach, Carl might star on
one of his teams, but Etienne, all he could see was a career somehow
playing jokes. "That's crazy," kids would tell him. "A career? You mean a
comedian or something on TV, a clown, what?" And Etienne, putting his arm
around your shoulders (which, if you were alert enough, you realized he was
doing not out of friendship but to Scotch-tape a sign to you reading My
Mother Wears Combat Boots, or Kick Here, with an arrow), would tell you,
"My father says everything's going to be machines when we grow up. He says
the only jobs open will be in junkyards for busted machines. The only thing
a machine can't do is play jokes. That's all they'll use people for, is
jokes."
The kids might have been right: maybe he was a little crazy. He took
chances nobody else would, letting air out of tires on cop cars, putting on
skin-diving gear to stir up silt in the creek the paper mill used (which
once stopped production for nearly a week), leaving silly and almost
meaningless notes signed "The Phantom" on the principal's desk while she
was out of her office teaching eighth grade - stuff like that. He hated
institutions. His great enemies, his jokes' perpetual targets, were the
school, the railroad, the PTA. He had gathered around him a discontented
bunch the principal, when she was yelling at them, never failed to call
"uneducable," a word none of them understood and which Grover wouldn't
explain to them because it made him mad, it was like calling somebody a
wop, or a nigger. Etienne's friends included the Mostly brothers, Arnold
and Kermit, who sniffed airplane glue and stole mousetraps from the store,
which for fun they would then cock, stand out in the middle of some empty
field and throw at each other; Kim Dufay, a slender, exotic-looking sixth-
grader with a blond pigtail that hung to her waist and was usually blue on
the end from being dunked in inkwells, who had a thing about explosive
chemical reactions and was responsible for replenishing the cache of sodium
up at the hideout, smuggling the stuff out of the Mingeborough High School
lab with the connivance of her boyfriend Gaylord, an infatuated sophomore
shot-putter who just liked them young; Hogan Slothrop, the doctor's kid,
who at the age of eight had taken to serious after-bedtime beer-drinking
and at the age of nine got religion, swore off beer and joined the
Alcoholics Anonymous, a step his father, who was what is known as
permissive, gave his blessing to and which the local A.A. group tolerated
because they thought having a kid around would be inspirational; Nunzi
Passarella, who had begun his career in second grade by bringing somehow a
full-grown pig in to Show-and-Tell Time, a quarter-ton Poland China sow, in
the school bus and everything, and had gone on to found a Crazy Sue Dunham
cult, in honor of that legendary and beautiful drifter who last century had
roamed all this hilltop country exchanging babies and setting fires and
who, in a way, was the patron saint of all these kids.
"Where's Carl?" Tim said after drying his head on one of Grover's sweat
shirts.
"Down cellar," Grover said, "fooling with the rhinoceros feet." Which you
could wear like shoes and which would be worn so come the first snowfall.
"What's the matter?"
"My mother's been" - he had a hard time saying it because you were not
supposed to tell on your mother - "bothering people. Again."
"Bothering Carl's folks?"
Tim nodded.
Grover frowned. "My mother has, too. I hear them talking about it, you
know" - making a thumb at a pair of earphones running in a direct line off
a bug he'd had planted for a year in his parents' bedroom-"it's called the
race issue. For a long time I thought they meant a real race, cars or
something."
"And she used that word again," Tim said. At which point Carl came in,
without the rhinoceros feet, smiling and quiet, as if he'd had some kind of
a bug on Grover's room too and knew what they'd been talking about.
"You want to listen?" Grover said, nodding at the ham equipment. "I had
New York for a minute."
Carl said yeah, went over and put on the earphones and started tuning.
"Here's Etienne," said Tim. The fat boy hovered at the window like a slick
balloon. He had grease on his face and was making cross-eyes. They let him
in. "I got something you'll get a real bang out of," ètienne said.
"What?" said Tim, who was still half thinking about his mother and was not
too alert.
"This," said Etienne, and socked him with a paper bag full of rain water
he'd been hiding in his shirt. Tim grabbed him and they wrestled around,
Grover yelling at them to be careful of the radio gear, Carl lifting his
feet and laughing whenever they rolled close. When they quit, Carl took off
the earphones and hit the power switch and Grovie went to sit cross-legged
on the bed, which meant the Inner Junta was in session.
"Progress reports first, I think," said Grover. "What have you got this
week, ètienne?" He had this clipboard he always would snap the clip of
rhythmically whenever he was thinking hard.
ètienne took out some papers he had folded in his back pocket and read,
"Railroad. One new lantern, two torpedoes added to the arsenic."
"Arsenal," muttered Grover, writing on the clipboard.
"Yeah. Me and Kermie went out and did another count on cars at points
Foxtrot and Quebec. Foxtrot showed seventeen cars, three trucks between
four-thirty and - "
"I'll take the figures later," Grover said. "Can we do anything in that
cut, on that stretch of track, then, or do too many cars come by up on the
road? - that's the point."
"Oh," said ètienne. "Well, it was pretty heavy traffic, Grovie." He stuck
his teeth out and did slant-eyes at Carl and Tim, who started laughing.
"Can you get out any later?" Grover said irritably. "Later at night, say
about nine?"
"I don't know," said ètienne. "I'd have to sneak out and-"
"Well, sneak out," Grover said. "We need figures for the night, too."
"But he-he worries about me," ètienne said, "he really does."
Grover frowned at his clipboard, snapped the clip a couple of times, and
said, "Well, how about the school? Anything on that?"
"I have a couple of more little kids lined up," ètienne said, "first-
graders. They're always getting yelled at. They throw chalk. They throw
anything. One of them has a real good arm, Grovie. We'd have to drill them
a little with the sodium. That might be a problem."
Grover looked up. "Problem?"
"They might try to eat it or something. One of them" - giggling - "chews
chalk. He says it tastes good."
"Well," said Grover, "keep looking. We need somebody, ètienne. It's a very
vital area. We're going to have to demolish that boys' latrine. It's
symmetry we're after."
"Cemetery?" said Tim, squinting his eyes and wrinkling his nose. "What do
you want the cemetery for, Grovie?"
Grover explained the word to him. Sketched a rough plan view of the school
building with chalk on his green-board on the wall. "Symmetry and timing,"
he yelled, "coordination."
"That's on my report card," said ètienne, "that word."
"Right," said Grover. "It means your arms and legs and head all work
together in gym, and it's the same for us, in this thing, for a gang like
ours, as it is for the parts of your body," but they'd quit listening.
ètienne was pulling his mouth wide; Tim and Carl were taking turns socking
each other in the arm. Grover snapped his clipboard real loud at them and
they quit fooling around. "Etienne, anything more?"
"That's all. Oh, the PTA meeting Tuesday. I think I'll send Hogan again."
"You remember last time," Grover said with an effort, "what he did." The
original idea had been that Hogan Slothrop would make a better infiltrator
into the PTA meetings because of his experience with Alcoholics Anonymous,
Grover's assumption being that Hogan knew most about the kinds of meetings
grownups had. It was another miscalculation. It bothered Grover for a week
that he'd judged things so wrong. What Hogan had tried to do, instead of
just sit quiet, out of sight, taking notes, was horn in on one meeting. "I
mean," said Hogan, "I didn't see any harm in raising my hand, you know, and
saying, 'My name is Hogan Slothrop, I am a school kid,' and then telling
them what it was like."
"They don't want to know," said Grover.
"My mother does," Hogan said. "She asks me every day what I did in school,
and I tell her."
"She doesn't listen," said Grover. They had thrown Hogan Slothrop out of
the PTA meeting about the time he started up front to the podium to see if
they'd let him recite the A.A.'s Twelve Steps. Literally threw him out - he
was light and easy to lift.
"Why?" Grover screamed.
"There are meetings," Hogan tried to explain, "and meetings. The PTA does
it all different. They have these rules, or something, and everybody is
more, more ..."
"Formal," suggested Grover. "Official."
"Like they're playing some game, a new one I never heard of before," Hogan
said. "At the A.A. we just talk."
Next PTA meeting Kim Dufay put on lipstick, did her hair in a French
twist, dolled up in her most sophisticated clothes and a size 28A padded
bra she'd conned her mother into buying her, and went in and did a pretty
good job of passing. So she'd become the new infiltrator.
"And now," Etienne summarized, "Hogan feels bad about being replaced by a
girl."
"I like Hogan," Grover said, "don't get me wrong, fellas. But can he
function well in a highly structured situation, that's what I - "
"Wha?" said Tim and Carl in unison. It was a bit they'd worked up between
them and it never failed to confound Grover. Grover shrugged, admitted
there might be a morale problem and told Etienne OK, Hogan could try it
again. Tim's report was next. His area of concern was money and drilling.
At the moment everybody was occupied with the yearly dry run coming up. The
code name for it was Operation Spartacus, which Grover had taken from the
movie of the same name, having gone all the way over to Stockbridge one
time to see it and been so impressed that for the month following he
couldn't go by a mirror without making a Kirk Douglas face at himself in
it. This would be the third year for Spartacus, the third dry run for the
real uprising of the slaves, referred to only as Operation A. "What's the A
for?" Tim had asked once. "Abattoir," Grover answered with a funny look.
"Armageddon." "Show-off," Tim said, and forgot it. You didn't have to know
what initials meant to drill kids.
"How's it shaping up, Tim?" asked Grover.
Tim wasn't too enthusiastic. "Without a good mock-up, Grovie, it just
won't be worth much."
"Just to recap for the others now, Tim," Grover said, writing on the
clipboard, "we're handling it more or less the same as last year, right?"
"Right. Using Fazzo's Field again and laying it down" -pointing at the
sketch on the greenboard - "full size. But we're using the little stakes
and red flags that ètienne got from the road crew this year instead of the
lime." Last year too many little kids had been doing just great up until
they got to the white outline of the school building, then they'd stopped
short and stood around scuffing it into the grass with their shoes. In the
critique held later Grover advanced the theory that the line figure in the
grass might have reminded the little kids of chalk lines on a greenboard.
With the lime there'd also been the problem of getting the thing erased
when Spartacus was over. But stakes, them you could just pull up. Stakes
were better.
"But not," said Tim, "still not as good as real walls. Even beaver board
ones. Running across a line, making believe it's a door, that's one thing.
But you need the door itself. You need real stairs, and real toilets to
throw the sodium in, you know?"
"But two years ago you didn't feel that way," Grover pointed out.
Tim shrugged. "It just isn't that real anymore. For me. How do we know,
when it's time, zero hour, that they'll do it the same way? Especially the
little kids?"
"We don't," said Grover. "But we can't afford to build any real elaborate
mock-up."
"We have about twenty-five bucks," Tim said. "They're really starting to
come through with their milk money now, even some of the ones who, it isn't
their turn, you know?"
Grover gave him a lidded look. "You been strong-arming them, Tim? I don't
need any of that."
"No, Grovie, I swear, they're all doing it on their own. They say - a
couple kids did - that they believe in us. Some of them don't like milk
anyway, so they don't mind passing it up."
"Just see that they don't get too enthusiastic," Grover said. "The
teachers might catch on. The idea is to have a more or less constant milk
count every day, to rotate it, very gradually, very quietly. The daily take
may be small that way but it's steady. You start getting these wild
fluctuations, everybody handing you nickels at once, they'll get
suspicious. Go easy. How's the other income? How's our fence in
Pittsfield?"
"He wants furniture now," Tim said. "That's a problem. We can get
furniture, from the Velour estate, from the Rosenzweig place, from two or
three others. But how do we carry it to Pittsfield? We can't. And he's also
quit accepting collect calls."
"Gah," said Grover, "then we might as well cross him off" too. See? You
can't trust them. They start going cheap on you and that means they don't
want you around anymore."
"Uh, how about," Tim put in, trying to keep Grover from getting started,
"you know, that mock-up?"
"No, no," Grover said. "We need that money for other things." Tim flopped
back on the rug and looked at the ceiling. "That's all, Tim? OK, Carl now.
How's it going up the development?"
Carl was their organizer for all Northumberland Estates, the new part of
Mingeborough. The old town would be easy enough to handle when it was time,
but this development shopping center with its supermarket and bright new
drugstore that sold Halloween masks, and parking lot always full of cars,
even late into the night, bothered them. While it was being put up, the
summer before last, Tim and ètienne used to go there evenings and play king-
of-the-mountain on the piles of fill till it was dark; then they'd steal
lumber, drain the gas tanks of graders and bulldozers, even bust a few
windows if the peepers and frogs in Corrody's Swamp down the hill were
singing loud enough. The kids didn't like the development much, didn't like
it being called "estates" when each lot was only fifty by a hundred feet,
nowhere near the size of the old Gilded Age estates, real ones, that
surrounded the old town the way creatures in dreams surround your bed,
higher and hidden but always there. Like Grover's house, the Big Houses of
the estates also had faces, but without such plain, gambreled honesty:
Instead there were mysterious deep eyes fringed in gimcrackery and wrought-
iron masks, cheeks tattooed in flowered tiles, great port-cullised mouths
with rows of dead palm trees for teeth, and to visit one of them was like
reentering sleep, and the loot you came away with did not ever seem that
real; whether you kept it to furnish the hideout with, or sold it to a
fence like this antique shop in Pittsfield, it was the spoils of dream. But
there was nothing about the little, low-rambling, more or less identical
homes of Northumberland Estates to interest or to haunt, no chance of loot
that would be any more than the ordinary, waking-world kind the cops hauled
you in for taking; no small immunities, no possibilities for hidden life or
otherworldly presence; no trees, secret routes, shortcuts, culverts,
thickets that could be made hollow in the middle - everything in the place
was out in the open, everything could be seen at a glance; and behind it,
under it, around the corners of its houses and down the safe, gentle curves
of its streets, you came back, you kept coming back, to nothing; nothing
but the cheerless earth. Carl was one of the few kids who lived there that
the old-town kids could get along with. It was his job to drum up support,
to win new converts, to scout out any strategic importance there might be
to crossroads, stores, things like that. It wasn't a job the others envied
him.
"There've been these phone calls," Carl mentioned, after he'd given a
rundown on how his week had gone. "Practical jokers." He told some of the
things they'd said.
"Jokes," ètienne said. "What's so funny? Call somebody up, call them
names, that isn't a joke. It doesn't make any sense at all."
"What about it, Carl?" Grover wanted to know. "Think they suspect
anything? Think they caught on what we're up to?"
Carl smiled and so they knew what he was going to say. "No, it's safe.
Still safe."
"Then why the phone calls?" Grover said. "If not Operation A, then what?"
Carl shrugged and sat watching them, as if he knew what, knew everything,
secrets none of them had even guessed at. As if there were after all some
heart-in-hiding, some crypt to Northumberland Estates that had so far
managed to elude the rest of them, and which Carl would only someday tell
them about, as reward for their having been more ingenious in their
scheming, or braver in facing up to their parents, or smarter in school, or
maybe better in some way they hadn't yet considered but which Carl would
let them know about when he was ready, through hints, funny stories,
apparently casual changes of subject.
"End of the meeting," Grover announced. "Let's go over to the hideout."

The rain had fallen away to a sort of drifting mist. The four of them
scrambled down the tree and ran out of Grover's yard, down the block, into
and across a field among rain-flattened holidays of hay. Somewhere en route
thev nicked un a fat basset hound named Pierre.
who on sunny days slept in the middle of the state highway that briefly
became Chickadee Street as it passed through Mingeborough. But rain did
something to him, invigorated him. He romped around them like a puppy,
yapping and trying, it looked like, to catch raindrops on his tongue. The
sun would set tonight without anyone's seeing it - there was that kind of
bleakness to the afternoon. You couldn't see any mountains because the
clouds trailed too low. Tim, Grover, ètienne, Carl and Pierre went
flickering over the field like shadows, out to a dirt road whose ruts were
filled with rain now. The road wound down a little ridge into King YrjÆ's
woods, named after a European pretender who'd fled the eclipse then falling
over Europe and his own hardly real shadow-state sometime back in the
middle Thirties, trading a bucketful of jewels, the yarn went, for all this
property. Why it had to be a bucketful, which sounded like an impractical
way to carry jewels around, nobody ever explained. There were also supposed
to have been three (some said four) wives, one official and the others
morganatic, and a fiercely loyal aide, a cavalry officer seven feet tall
with a full beard, spurred boots, gold epaulets and a shotgun he always
carried with him and would not hesitate to use on anybody, especially a
kid, caught trespassing. It was he who haunted the grounds. He still lived
there though his king had long gone - at least, everybody believed he did -
though no one had ever seen him outright, only heard his heavy boots
crashing after you through the dead leaves, among the tree trunks and
briers, as you ran in panic. You always got away. The king's exile, kids
could sense, was something their parents were in on but was effectively cut
off from the kids: There had been the falling dark, yes, and general
flight, and a large war -all this without names and dates, pieced together
out of talk overheard from parents, television documentaries, social-
studies class if you happened to be listening, marines-in-action comics,
but none of it that sharp, that specific; all of it in a kind of code,
twilit, forever unexplained. King YrjÆ's estate was the only real
connection the kids had with whatever the cataclysmic thing was that had
happened, and it helped for the caretaker, the pursuer, to have been a
soldier.
Yet he had not bothered the Inner Junta at all. Years ago, somehow, it had
become clear to only them that he never would. They'd since been all over
the place and had seen no definite trace of him, though plenty of ambiguous
ones. Which didn't disprove his existence, but did mean that they'd found
the perfect place for a hideout. Real or make-believe, the giant cavalryman
became their protector.
The road passed through a stand of pines, high in whose branches
partridges whirred. Water dripped; shoes squished in the mud. After the
trees came a sweep of what had once been smooth lawn, smooth as the back of
a long wave out at sea, but now was full of weeds, rabbit holes, tall rye.
According to Tim's father, years ago peacocks had come running downhill
across the great lawn whenever a carriage had entered this stretch of the
road, spreading out their brilliant tails. "Oh, yeah," Tim said, "like just
before a program comes on in color. When are we getting a color TV, Dad?"
"Black and white's good enough," his father had said, and that was that.
Tim had asked Carl once whether he had a color TV at home. "Why should I?"
said Carl, and then almost immediately, "Oh! yeah." And bust out laughing.
Tim knew as well as ètienne, the professional comic, when your listener had
guessed your next line, so he didn't say anything else. He wondered why
Carl laughed so hard. It wasn't that funny and even had a kind of logic to
it. He did think of Carl as not onlv "colored" himself, but somehow more
deeply involved with all color. When Tim thought about Carl he always saw
him against blazing reds and ochres of this early fall, only last month,
when Carl had just come to Minge-borough and they were still getting to be
friends, and he thought that Carl must somehow carry around with him a
perpetual Berkshire autumn, a Wonderful World of Color. Even in the
grayness of this afternoon and this district they had entered (which, it
seemed, was deprived of its just measure of light because part of it
belonged to the past), Carl brought a kind of illumination, a brightening,
a compensation for whatever it was about the light that was missing.
They left the road and plunged down through azalea bushes to the banks of
an ornamental canal, part of a system of waterways and islands laid out
toward the end of the last century, perhaps with some idea of a
miniaturized or toy Venice for the New York candy magnate Ellsworth Baffy,
who had caused this place to be built originally. Like many who put castles
up among these inland hills, he was a contemporary of Jay Gould and his
partner, the jolly Berkshire peddler Jubilee Jim Fisk. Once, right around
this time of year, Baffy had held a masquerade ball in honor of the
presidential candidate James G. Blaine, from which Blaine had been absent
due to a storm and a mix-up in rail schedules. No one missed him. All the
moneyed of Berkshire County congregated in the great ballroom of Baffys
spun-sugar manor house; the party lasted three days and the countryside was
visited by the drunken wanderings of Pierrots pale in the light of the
moon, hideous Borneo apes toting jugs of the local white lightning, lush
and cherry-lipped actresses imported from New York, in silk capes, red
corsets, long hose; wild Indians, princes of the Renaissance, characters
from Dickens, paisley bulls, bears with nosegays; allegorical, garlanded
girls named Free Enterprise, Progress, Enlightenment; a giant Maine lobster
that never got to extend its claw to the candidate. It snowed, and the last
morning of the party a pretty ballet girl dressed as Columbine was found in
a quarry nearly dead; the toes of one foot were frostbitten so badly they
had to be amputated. She never danced again, and in November Blaine lost
the election and was also forgotten. After Baffy died the estate was bought
by a retired train robber from Kansas and in 1932 was sold dirt cheap to a
chain of hotels which couldn't afford to convert the place and eventually
decided that King YrjÆ's bucketful of jewels was better than paying the
taxes on a white elephant. And now the King too was gone, and the house was
empty again, except for the Junta, and one possible cavalry officer.
Hidden among reeds was a flat-bottomed boat they'd found, patched up, and
christened the S. S. Leak. They piled aboard, and Tim and Etienne rowed.
Pierre sat with his paws up on the front end, like a figurehead. Downstream
a frog jumped, and falling rain stippled the dark surface of the water.
They splashed along under phony-Venetian bridges, some without floorboards
so that you could look up and see the gray sky through them; past little
landings whose untarred pilings had rotted and collected green slime; an
open summerhouse with screening rusted through, which swayed even in soft
winds; corroded statues of straight-nosed, fig-leaved youths and maidens,
holding horns of plenty, crossbows, impossible Panpipes and stringed
instruments, pomegranates, curling scrolls, and one another. Soon, over the
tops of leafless willows, the Big House appeared, growing taller the closer
they came - more turrets, crenellations, flying buttresses coming into
sight at each stroke of the oars. The outside was in fairly lousy shape: a
lot of shingling was off, paint had peeled, roof slates lay broken in piles
where they'd slid and fallen. Windows had been mostly busted after years of
forays by nervous kids double-dared to go in against the cavalry officer
and his shotgun. And everywhere the smell of old-eighty-year-old - wood.
They tied the boat to an iron rung sunk in a kind of promenade, went
ashore, and trooped around to a side entrance of the Big House. No matter
how often they came to the hideout there was a feeling of ceremony, more
than any of trespass, about going into the house: It took an effort to step
from outside to inside. The inside was full of a pressure, an odor, that
resisted intrusions, that kept them conscious of itself until they left
again. None of them would go so far as to call it by any name, but they all
knew it was there. Part of the ceremony was to look at one another and
grin, embarrassed, before pushing on into the twilight that waited for
them.
They skirted the edges of the room they'd entered, because hung right in
the middle of the ceiling was a cobwebbed, flint-glass chandelier with dust
piled in thick stalagmites on its upper facets, and they knew what would
happen if you walked under it. The house was full of such mute injunctions:
blind places you could be jumped out at from; stretches of warped floor
that might suddenly open downward into dungeons or simple darknesses with
nothing nearby to grab onto; doors that would not stay open behind you but
were balanced to close quietly, unless you watched them. These places it
was better to stay away from. The route to the hideout was thus like the
way into reefed and perilous harbor. If there had been more than four going
in, there would have been no danger at all; it would have been just a mob
of kids running through an old house. If there had been fewer, it would
have been impossible to get beyond the first room.
Creaking, or echoing, or left as dark-ribbed sneaker-prints in a fine
layer of damp, the footsteps of the Junta carried them on into King YrjÆ's
house, past pier glasses that gave them back their images dark and faded,
as if some part were being kept as the price of admission; through doorways
where old velvet hung whose pile was worn away into maplike patterns, seas
and land masses taught in no geography their schools knew; through the
scullery, where they'd found a decades-old case of Moxie, of which there
were still nine bottles left, Kim Dufay having busted one over the prow of
the 5. S. Leak at its christening, the other two drunk solemnly to
celebrate last year's more or less successful Spartacus maneuvers and
recently Carl Barrington's membership in the gang; then downstairs, between
rows of empty wine racks, into empty utility rooms with empty workbenches
and dead electric outlets dangling from overhead in the dark like armless
spiders; at last to the house's most secret core, the room behind the
ancient coal furnace that they'd found and fixed up and Etienne had spent a
week booby-trapping. This is where they met and drew up the timetables;
this is where they kept the sodium under kerosene in a five-gallon can; and
the maps with the objectives marked on them, in an old roll-top desk they'd
found empty; and the list of public enemies, which no one but Grover had
access to.
So the afternoon got darker, the rain came and went in gusts, sometimes
thickening to a downpour, then easing off to a drizzle, and deep in the
house, in the dry, cold room, the Junta plotted. Their plot had been going
on now for three years, and it reminded Tim sometimes of dreams you got
when you were sick and feverish, where there was something you had been
told to do - find somebody important in an endless strange city full of
faces and clues; struggle down the long, inexhaustible network of some
arithmetic problem where each step led to a dozen new ones. Nothing ever
seemed to change; no "objectives" were taken that didn't create a need to
start thinking about new ones, so that soon the old ones were forgotten and
let slip by default back into the hands of grownups or into a public no
man's land again, and you would be back where you'd started. So what if
Etienne (to take a major example) had managed to stop the paper mill last
year for almost a week by messing up the water it used? Other things kept
on, as if there were something basically wrong and self-defeating with the
plot itself. Hogan Slothrop was supposed to have planted a smoke bomb in a
PTA meeting the same evening, smoke them out and make off with all their
minutes and financial statements, but he'd got a sudden call to go sit with
another A.A. member, a stranger in town who had called the local chapter
because he was in trouble and afraid.
"What's he afraid of?" Tim had wanted to know.

It had been a year before, in the early fall, a little past the opening of
school. Hogan had come over to Tim's house right after supper, and the sky
was still light, though the sun was down, and they had been out in Tim's
back yard shooting baskets. Or Tim was: Hogan had had this conflict of
commitments on his mind.
"Afraid he'll start drinking again," Hogan said, answering Tim's question.
"I'm taking this along" - holding up a carton of milk. "If he wants to
drink, he can drink this instead."
"Gah," said Tim, who didn't think much of milk.
"Listen," said Hogan, "you never outgrow your need for milk. Let me tell
you about milk. How great it is."
'Tell me about beer," Tim said. Being lately fascinated with the idea of
getting drunk.
Hogan took offense. "Don't make fun," he said. "I'm lucky I went through
that when I did, that's what my father says. Look at this guy I got to go
sit with. He's thirty-seven years old. Look at what a head start I got on
him."
"You're supposed to plant that smoke bomb tonight," Tim said.
"Come on, Tim, you can do it for me, can't you?"
"Me and Grovie were going to go throw sodium," Tim said. "Remember? It's
all got to come off at the same time."
"Well, then, tell Grovie I can't make it," Hogan said. "I'm sorry, Tim, I
just can't." At about which point - wouldn't you know? - Grover showed up.
They explained to him as diplomatically as they could - which, as usual,
wasn't good enough, because Grover flew into a full-scale snit, called them
both an assortment of names and stalked off into the darkness which had
crept down off the mountains so slow and shifty they hadn't noticed.
"Looks like no sodium-throwing," ventured Hogan, after a while, "huh,
Tim?"
"Yeah," said Tim. That's how it always was. Things never went off the way
they should've; nothing progressed. ètienne had played frogman that day for
nothing, nothing but laughs. The paper mill would start up again, people
would go back to work, the insecurity and discontent Grover needed and had
counted on for dark reasons he never confided would vanish, and everything
would be the way it was.
"Uh come on, Tim," Hogan suggested in his Yogi Bear voice, which he used
for cheering people up, "uh why don't you ride down to the hotel, uh and
help me sit with this guy?"
"That where he is?" Tim said. Hoge said yeah, the guy was just passing
through, and for some reason nobody else wanted to go. Nancy, the secretary
at the central A.A. office, had telephoned Hogan as a last resort. When he
said OK, she said, "He'll go," to somebody in the office with her, and
Hogan heard what sounded like a couple of people laughing.
Tim got his bike, yelled into the house that he'd be back, and they
pedaled downhill through the gathering evening and then coasted into the
town. It was good fall weather, a borderline time when some trees have
jumped the gun and started to change color, and the insects get louder as
the days pass, and some mornings, when the wind is out of the Northwest,
you can look over, on the way to school, at the higher mountains and make
out a few lonely hawks beginning to drift on South, following the crests of
the ridges. In spite of all that day's pointless-ness, Tim could still
enjoy the feeling of coasting down toward the yellow clusters of lights,
leaving behind two pages of arithmetic homework and a chapter of science he
was supposed to read, not to mention a lousy movie, some romantic comedy
dating from the 1940's which was on the only channel you could get up here.
As Tim and Hogan zoomed by houses with doors and windows still open for the
dark's first coolness they could glimpse the bluish fluorescence of
screens, all tuned to the same movie, and pick up snatches of dialogue:
"... Private, have you gone completely out of your ..."; "... I mean, there
was a girl back home ...";"... (splash, comical yell) Oh, sorry, sir,
thought you were a Jap infiltrator . . ."; "How can I be a Jap infiltrator
when we're five thousand . . ."; "I'll wait, Bill, I'll wait for you as
long as ..." and on down, past the firehouse, where a few big kids were
sitting around on the old La France engine, telling jokes and smoking, and
by the candy store, which neither Tim nor Hogan felt like stopping in
tonight, and all of a sudden there were parking meters and several blocks
of diagonal parking, which meant you had to put on your brakes and keep an
eye out for the traffic, By the time they got to the hotel the night had
completely come, had set down on Mingeborough like a lid on a pot, and the
stores had begun to close up.
They parked their bikes and went into the lobby. The night clerk, who'd
just come on, gave them the fishy eye. "Alcoholics Anonymous?" he said.
"You're kidding."
"I swear," said Hogan, showing him the carton of milk. "Call him up. Mr.
McAfee, room 217." The clerk, who had the empty night facing him, rang the
room and talked to Mr. McAfee. He had a funny look when he hung up.
"Well, it sounds like it's a nigger up there," he informed them.
"Can we go up?" Hogan asked.
The clerk shrugged. "He says he's expecting you. If you have any - you
know - trouble, just knock his phone off the hook. See, it'll buzz down
here."
"Sure," said Hogan. They went through the empty lobby, between facing rows
of armchairs, and got in the elevator. Mr. McAfee was on the second floor.
Tim and Hogan looked at each other on the way up but didn't say anything.
At his door they knocked for a while before he'd answer. He wasn't much
taller than they were. He was a Negro with a small mustache, wearing a gray
cardigan and smoking.
"I thought he was kidding," said Mr. McAfee. "You guys really from the
A.A. ?"
"He is," Tim said.
Then something seemed to happen to Mr. McAfee's face. "Oh," he said.
"Well, that's pretty funny. They almost as funny up here as they are in
Mississippi. OK, you done your bit now? You can go."
"I thought you wanted help," Hogan said, looking puzzled.
Mr. McAfee stood aside. "You're right about that. Yeah. You really want to
come in?" He looked like he didn't care. They went in, and Hogan put his
milk on the little writing desk in the corner. It was the first time either
of them had been in any of the hotel's rooms or spoken to anybody colored.
Mr. McAfee was a bass player, but without his instrument. He'd been over
in Lenox at some music festival. He had no idea how he'd got over here.
"It happens sometimes," he said. "I get these blank periods. One minute I
was in Lenox. Next thing I know, I show up in - what do you call it? -
Mingeborough. That ever happen to you?"
"No," said Hoge. "The worst I ever got was sick."
"You off it now. Alcohol."
"Forever," Hogan said. "Now it's strictly milk."
"Well, that makes you a milko, man," said Mr. McAfee, with a wan smile.
"What am I supposed to do," said Hogan, "exactly?"
"Oh, talk," said Mr. McAfee. "Or I'll talk. Till I can get to sleep. Or
somebody - Jill - can get here, come get me, you know?"
"Is that your wife?" Tim said.
"That's who went up the hill with Jack," Mr. McAfee said, and he laughed a
little. "No, no kidding, that really happened."
"You want to talk about that?" Hogan said.
"No. I guess not."
So, instead, Tim and Hogan told Mr. McAfee about things like school, and
the town, and what their parents did for a living; but soon, because they
trusted him, they were also telling him the more secret things - ètienne
messing up the paper mill, and the hideout, and the sodium stockpile.
"Yeah," cried Mr. McAfee, "that sodium. I remember.
I threw some in a toilet once - flushed the handle first, you know, then
dropped in that sodium. Soon as it hit the water down there, wham! That was
in Beaumount, Texas, where I used to live. School principal comes walking
in the room, very straight face, holding a busted piece of a toilet bowl,
like this, and he says, 'Which one of you gentlemen - is responsible - for
this outrage?"
Hogan and Tim, giggling, told him about the time Etienne had sat up in a
tree with a slingshot, shooting little pea-size sodium balls into the
swimming pool at one of the estates during a cocktail party, and the way
people scattered at the first explosions.
"Very fancy crowd you run with, there," said Mr. McAfee. "Estates and
everything."
"Not us," Tim said. "We just sneak in at night, and swim in the pools
then. The one up at Lovelace's estate is the nicest. You want to go there?
It's warm enough."
"Yeah," said Hoge. "We could go there now. Come on."
"Well, you know," Mr. McAfee said. He looked embarrassed.
"Why not?" Hoge said.
"Well, you guys should be old enough to know why not," Mr. McAfee said,
starting to get mad. He looked at their faces and then shook his head and
said, even angrier, "I get caught and that's it, baby. I mean that's all."
"Nobody ever gets caught," Hogan said, trying to reassure him.
Mr. McAfee lay down on the bed and looked at the ceiling. "If they're the
right color, nobody gets caught," he said quietly, but the kids heard him.
"So you're a better color than we are," Tim said, "for getting away at
night. You're bigger and faster. If we can do it you can, Mr. McAfee, no
kidding."
Mr. McAfee looked over at them. He lit another cigarette from the butt of
the one he was smoking, never taking his eyes off the two kids. It was hard
to tell what he was thinking. "Maybe later," he said after he'd squashed
out the old cigarette. "Tell you why I'm nervous about that. It's the water
in that pool, see. If you any kind of an alky, it can have a funny effect
on you. Ever have that happen, Hogan?" Hogan shook his head no. "Well, I
did once, while I was in the army."
"Were you in during World War II ?" Tim asked. "Fighting the Japanese or
anything?"
"No, I missed that," Mr. McAfee said. "I was too young."
"We missed it too," Hogan told him.
"No, I was in during Korea. Only I stayed Stateside all through it. I was
in this band - army band, you know -at Fort Ord, California. All around
there, up in the hills around Monterey, you have these little bars; anybody
can just walk in, if they want to, and start playing. You have a lot of
union guys, used to play around L.A. - you know - they get drafted and sent
to Ord. Guys been in studio bands, most of them, so you're sitting in with
some fine talent, a lot of times. One night we're in this kind of a
roadhouse, four of us, and we're playing, and it's sounding pretty good.
We're all juiced a little, drinking wine, there's a lot of wine - you know
- from over in that valley there, whatever you call it. We just drinking
wine and doing some - oh, some blues or something -and this lady comes in.
White lady. Kind that sits out by the swimming pool and drinks cocktails at
cocktail parties - right? - yeah. You got it. She's a very stout lady, not
big fat, just stout, and she says she wants us to come play at a party
she's having. So it's like a Tuesday or a Wednesday and we all kind of
curious as to how come she's having a party such a funny time of the week,
well she says it's been going on since the weekend - nonstop, you know -
and we come to find out when we get there she's not putting nobody on, man.
There it is - whooping, hollering, you can hear it for a mile. This
baritone sax, some Italian kid, Sheldon somebody, he not halfway in the
door there's two or three little chicks all over him, telling him - well,
never mind about that - but we set up and get going, and the juice keeps
coming on like a bucket brigade, people keep handing it up to you. You know
what it is? Champagne. Solid champagne. All night long we drink this stuff,
and about the time the sun comes up everybody's passed out, and we quit
playing. I lay down next to the drums and go to sleep. Next thing I know I
hear this girl, and she's laughing. I get up, the sun's in my eyes, it's
only about nine or ten in the morning. I ought to feel horrible, man, but I
feel great. I go walking out on this kind of little terrace, it's cold and
outside there's fog, not all the way down to the ground, just hiding the
tops of the trees, pine trees I guess, the trunks are these - you know -
very straight. There's this white fog and downhill there's the ocean.
Pacific Ocean, and from up the coast you can even hear that artillery
practice back at Ord, wrapped up in the fog, whoomp, whoomp. That's how
quiet it is. I go on out by the swimming pool, still wondering about this
chick I heard laughing, all of a sudden here comes old Sheldon, running out
around a corner, with this girl chasing him, and he slams into me, and the
girl can't stop in time neither, and we all three of us fall in the pool
with all our clothes on. And all I had to do was swallow a little bit of
that water and you know what? I'm high all over again, just as high as I
was during the night, on all that champagne. How about that?"
"It sounds great," Hogan said. "Except for the alcohol part of it, I
mean."
"Yeah, it was great," said Mr. McAfee. "It's the only morning I remember
that ever was." He didn't say anything for a while. Then the telephone
rang. It was for Tim.
"Hey," said Grover on the other end, "can we come over there? Etienne
needs a place to hide tonight." Having, it seems, got second thoughts about
his attack on the paper mill earlier that day. It was dawning on him that
he'd done something serious, and that the cops, if they got hold of him,
would find out about other jobs he'd pulled, and be merciless. Grover's
house would be the first place they'd think of to look. It would have to be
someplace like the hotel if he wanted to stand a chance of escaping the
dragnet. Tim asked Mr. McAfee, who said he guessed so, but reluctant.
"Don't worry," Hogan said. "Etienne's just scared. Like you are."
"Don't you ever get scared?" said Mr. McAfee. His voice had gone funny.
"Not about alcohol," said Hogan. "I guess I was never really that bad."
"Oh, you just passing. I see." He lay still on the bed, his face very
black against the pillow. Tim realized that Mr. McAfee had been sweating a
lot. It was running off the sides of his neck and soaking into the
pillowcase. He looked sick.
"Can I get you anything?" Tim asked, a little worried. When the man didn't
answer, he repeated it.
"Just a drink," Mr. McAfee stage-whispered, pointing at Hogan. "See if you
can talk your buddy there into letting me have something to relax with. No
kidding, I really need something now."
"You can't," Hogan said. "That's the whole point. That's what I'm here
for."
"You think that's what you're here for? You wrong." He stood up slowly, as
if his stomach or something hurt, and picked up the telephone. "Can you
send up a bottle, a fifth, of Jim Beam," he said, "and" - making an
elaborate count of the people in the room -"three glasses? Oh.
Right. OK, only one glass. Oh, there is one glass already here." He hung
up. "Cat don't miss a trick," he said. "They right on the ball in
Mingeborough, Mass."
"Listen, what did you call us up for?" Hogan said. He was talking in an
obstinate, rhythmic way that meant he was going to bust out crying any
minute. "Why did you get in touch with the A.A. at all, if you were just
going to get drunk anyway?"
"I needed help," explained Mr. McAfee, "and I thought they would help me.
And they really helped, didn't they? Look at what they sent me."
"Hey," said Tim, and Hogan started to cry.
"OK," said Mr. McAfee. "Out, you guys. Go on home."
Hogan quit crying and got stubborn. "I'm staying."
"The hell you are. Go on. You're the big jokers in town, now you ought to
know a joke when you see one. Go back to the A.A. and tell them they really
put one over on you, man. Show them you can be - you know - just a gracious
loser." Then they all stood looking at each other in the tiny room, with
its four-color print of a bowl of chrysanthemums on the wall, its framed
list of rules next to the door, its empty, dusty water pitcher and glass,
its one armchair, its three-quarter beige-covered bed and its disinfectant
smell, and it began to look as if none of them would ever go anyplace, just
stand and turn into a kind of wax-museum scene; but then Grover and Etienne
showed up, and the other kids let them in. Mr. McAfee made fists at his
sides and went to the telephone again. "Get these kids out of here for me,"
he said, "would you? Please."
ètienne looked as if he were in a state of shock, and about twice as fat
as usual. "I think the cops saw us," he kept saying. "Grovie, didn't they?"
He was carrying all his skin-diving equipment, which he had an idea would
be damning evidence if it were found at his house.
"He's nervous," Grover said. "What's wrong here - you having trouble?"
"We're trying to keep him from starting drinking," Hogan said. "He called
A.A. for help, and now he says get out."
"I assume you are aware," Grover addressed the man, "of the positive
correlation that exists between alcoholism and heart disease, chronic upper
respiratory infection, cirrhosis of the liver - "
"There he is," said Mr. McAfee. In the door, which had been ajar, now
appeared Beto Cufifo, the bellboy and town rum-dum, who would have been
retired and living on Social Security except that he was Mexican and wanted
back there for something like smuggling or auto theft - the charge varied
depending on who he was telling it to. How he had first found his way into
Berkshire County nobody would ever know. People were always mistaking him
for the only kinds of probable outlander -French Canadian or Italian - and
you felt he enjoyed that easy ambiguity and that's why he stuck around
Mingeborough.
"One bottle of booze," Beto announced. "That's six-fifty."
"What is it, six-fifty, imported from someplace?" Mr. McAfee said. He had
out his wallet and snuck a quick look inside. Tim could only see one bill,
a single.
"Tell them at the desk," Beto said. "I just carry."
"Look, put it on my room bill, right?" Mr. McAfee said, reaching for the
bottle.
Beto put the bottle behind his back. "He says you got to pay now." There
were so many lines in his face you couldn't make out the expression too
well, but Tim thought he was smiling; a nasty smile. Mr. McAfee took out
the dollar and held it up to Beto.
"Come on. Just put it on my tab." Tim could see sweat pouring off him,
though nobody else in the room even looked warm.
Beto took the dollar and said, "Now that's five-fifty. I'm sorry. You talk
to him down at the desk, sir."
"Hey, you guys," Mr. McAfee said, "any you kids got any bread? I mean I
need five and a half- you think you could lend that to me?"
"Not for whiskey," said Hogan, "not even if I had it." The rest of them
took out their loose change and held it in their hands and looked to see,
but it only came to maybe a dollar and a quarter.
"That still leaves four-twenty-five," announced Beto.
"Oh, you a regular adding machine," yelled Mr. McAfee. "Come on, boy, come
on, let's see that bottle."
"You don't believe me," said Beto, gesturing at the telephone, "they'll
tell you. Ask them."
For a second it looked like Mr. McAfee might call down. But finally he
said, "Look, I'll split it with you, OK? Half that fifth. You must be
pretty dry, all that work you do."
"I don't drink this stuff," said Beto. "I'm a wine man. Good night, sir."
He started to close the door. Mr. McAfee jumped at him and made a grab for
the bottle. Beto, taken by surprise, dropped it. It fell on the rug and
rolled a foot or two. Mr. McAfee and Beto had hold of each other's arms and
were struggling around, both very clumsy. Hogan picked up the bottle and
ran out the door with it and Mr. McAfee saw him and said something like "Oh
my God" and tried to get untangled from the bellboy. But by the time he
could get to the door, Hogan had too good a head start, and Mr. McAfee must
have known that. He just stood with his head on the doorjamb. Beto took out
a comb and combed what there was of his hair. Then, hitching up his belt
and glaring at Mr. McAfee, he walked around him and out into the hall, and
backward all the way to the elevator, watching the colored man as if daring
him to try it again.
Grover, Tim and ètienne stood around without knowing exactly what to do.
Mr. McAfee had started making a noise in his throat, a sound none of them
had heard come from a man before, though Norman, a stray, red kind of puppy
who hung around with Pierre times when the hound wasn't sleeping, had once
got hold of some chicken bones, which had stuck someplace inside him and
Norman had lain out in the dark and made a sound something like it until
Grover's father put the dog in his car and drove away with him. Mr. McAfee
stood with his head resting on the side of the door, making the same sound.
"Hey," Grover said finally, and went over and took the man's hand, which
was only a little bigger than Grover's own but dark-colored, and pulled,
and Tim said, yeah, come on, and little by little they pulled him away from
the door, while ètienne turned down the beige spread on the bed, and they
got him to lie down, and put the cover back over him. All of a sudden there
was a siren outside. "Cops!" ètienne yelled, and took off for the bathroom.
The siren went by the hotel, and Tim looked out and saw it was a fire
engine heading out north, and by the time it was quiet in the room again
they could hear water running in the bathtub, and Mr. McAfee crying. He'd
rolled over on his stomach and was holding the pillow with both hands on
either side of his head and crying, the way a little kid cries, sucking air
in in a croak, then letting it out in a wail, over and over as if he was
never going to stop.
Tim closed the door and sat on the desk chair. Grover sat in the armchair
next to the bed, and that was how their night's vigil began. First there
was the crying: all they could do for that was sit and listen. Once the
telephone rang. It was the clerk wanting to know if they were having any
trouble, and Grover said, "No, he's all right. He'll be all right." Tim had
to go in once to the bathroom, and there he found ètienne cowering
submerged in a full tub, dressed in his frogman suit, looking like a black
watermelon with arms and legs. Tim tapped him on the shoulder and Etienne
started to thrash around, trying to go deeper. "No cops," Tim yelled as
loud as he could. "It's Tim."
ètienne surfaced and took off his snorkel mask. "I'm hiding," he
explained. "I tried to make soapsuds on top but there was only this real
little bar of soap, and I guess it all wore off."
"Come on in and help us," Tim said. So Etienne came back in, trailing
pools of water all over the place, and sat on the floor; and then the three
of them just sat, listening to the man cry. He cried for a long time, and
then dozed off. Sometimes he would wake up and talk for long stretches,
then sleep again. Now and then one of the kids would drop off too. For Tim
it was a little like staying over at Grovie's house and hearing all those
cops and merchant captains and barge tenders over the radio, all those
voices bouncing off the invisible dome in the sky and down to Graver's
antenna and into Tim's dreams. It was as if Mr. McAfee too were
broadcasting from somewhere quite distant, telling about things Tim would
not be sure of in the daylight: a brother who'd left home one morning
during the depression and got on a freight and disappeared, later sending
them this one postcard from Los Angeles, and Mr. McAfee, just a boy,
deciding to follow him there the same way, only that first time he got no
further than Houston; a Mexican girl he'd been with for a while, and she
used to drink some stuff all the time, a word Tim couldn't make out, and
she had a baby boy who'd died from a rattlesnake bite (Tim saw the snake,
headed for him, and bounced up out of the dream in terror, yelling), and so
one morning she'd just gone away, like his brother vanished into the same
deserted morning, before the sun was even up; and nights when he would sit
by himself down around the docks and look off into the black Gulf, where
the lights ended, just cut off and left you this giant nothing; and gang
scuffles, day after day, up and down the neighborhood streets, or fights
out on the beach in the summer's harsh sun; and gigs in New York, L.A., bad
gigs with tenor-sax bands it was better to forget only how do you?; cops
who'd picked him up, tanks he had known, tankmates with names like Big
Knife, Paco-from-the-Moon, one Francis X. Fauntleroy (who'd taken his last
wrinkled half a Pall Mall as he slept one evil morning after mixing pot and
wine with a projectionist buddy down under a drive-in movie screen outside
Kansas City, a big curving thing, while a John Wayne picture exploded
overhead).
"Blood Alley," Tim said, gentle. "Yeah, I saw it. I saw it too."
Mr. McAfee slept a little then, and came awake remembering aloud another
girl he'd met on a bus who played tenor and had just left a white musician
she'd been with - this was out of Chicago going west. The two of them sat
in the back seat over the motor, singing scat choruses of different things
back and forth at each other, and later on in the night she slept on his
shoulder and her hair was shiny and sweet, and around Cheyenne she got off
and said she guessed she'd go down to Denver, so he never saw her again
after that last glimpse of her little figure wandering around the old brick
railroad depot across the street from the bus station, among all these
ancient cowboy-movie-looking baggage carts, carrying her sax case and
waving once at him when the bus pulled out. And he remembered then how he'd
left Jill once the same way, only then it had been Lake Charles, Louisiana,
back then when Camp Polk was still going strong, and the streets were full
of drunken soldiers singing:

Mine eyes have seen the misery of the coming of the draft, And the day I
got the letter was the day I got the shaft.
They said, "My son, we need you, 'cause the army's understaffed."
And I'm in the F.T.A.

"The what?" said Grover.
"Future Teachers of America," said Mr. McAfee, "very clean-cut
organization." And Jill was going on north, to St. Louis or someplace, and
he was going back home, back to Beaumont, because his mother was sick. He
and Jill had been living in Algiers, across the river from New Orleans, and
that time it had been going on two months, not as long as their time in New
York, not as short or disastrous as the time in L.A., and this time it had
come only to a nostalgic, joint admission that there must be this good-bye
at the junction point full of drunks out in the middle of a swamp in the
middle of the night. "Hey, Jill," he said. "Hey, baby."
"Who do you want?" Grover said.
"His wife," said Tim.
"Jill?" the man on the bed said. His eyes were closed and he looked as if
he were struggling to open them. "Is Jill here?"
"You said she was coming to get you," Tim said.
"No, no, she not coming, man, who told you that?" His eyes flew open
suddenly, startling-white. "You got to call her. Hey? Hogan? Call her for
me?"
"Tim," Tim said. "What's her number?"
"In my wallet." He took out the wallet, an old brown cowhide one that was
bulging apart with papers and stuff. "Here." He looked through it, his
fingers scattering things, pulling out old business cards from employment
agencies and car dealers and restaurants all across the country, and a
calendar from two years ago with dates for University of Texas football
games printed on one side, and a four-for-a-quarter photograph of him in
his army uniform and smiling, holding a girl in a white coat who was
looking down and smiling a little too, and a spare shoelace, and somebody's
lock of hair folded into an envelope with part of some hospital's name up
in the corner, an old army driver's license that wasn't any good anymore,
and a couple of pine needles, a piece of saxophone reed, all kinds of
scraps of paper, different colors and shapes. One blue one said "Jill," and
had an address in New York, and a telephone number.
"Here." He gave it to Tim. "Call her collect, You know how to make one of
them?" Tim nodded. "You got to ask for an outside line. Person-to-person to
Miss Jill" - snapping his fingers to call the name back-"ah, Jill Pattison.
Yeah."
"It's late," Tim said. "Will she still be up?" Mr. McAfee didn't say
anything. Tim got the line, and the long-distance operator, and placed the
call. "You don't want me to give them my name."
"No, no, tell them Carl McAfee." Then the line seemed to go dead. When it
came back on she was ringing. It rang a long time and then a man answered.
"No," he said, "no, she went out the Coast a week ago."
"Do you have another number where she can be reached?" said the operator.
"There's an address someplace." He went away. Silence fell on the line and
it was right around then that Tim's foot felt the edge of a certain abyss
which he had been walking close to - for who knew how long? - without
knowing. He looked over it, got afraid, and shied away, but not before
learning something unpleasant about the night: that it was night here, and
in New York, and probably on whatever coast the man was talking about, one
single night over the entire land, making people, already so tiny in it,
invisible too in the dark; and how hard it would be, how hopeless, to
really find a person you needed suddenly, unless you lived all your life in
a house like he did, with a mother and father. He turned around to look at
the man on the bed and there came to him a hint then of how lost Mr. McAfee
really was. What would he do if they couldn't find this girl? And then the
man came back and read an address, which Tim copied, and the operator
wanted to know if she should try Los Angeles information.
"Yeah," said Mr. McAfee.
"But she can't come get you if she's in Los Angeles."
"But I got to talk to her."
So Tim listened while more clicks and whirs went out like heard fingers,
groping across the whole country in the dark, trying to touch one person
out of all the millions that lived in it. Finally a girl answered and said
she was Jill Pattison. The operator told her she had a collect call from a
Carl McAfee.
"Who?" she said.
Somebody knocked on the door, and Grover went and got it. The operator
repeated Mr. McAfee's name, and the girl said "Who?" again. There were two
policemen at the door. ètienne, who'd been sitting behind the bed, gave a
yelp and scuttled away into the bathroom and jumped back in the tub with a
great splash.
"Leon, down at the desk, thought we ought to look in," one of the cops
said. "Did this man bring you kids up here?"
"The clerk knows he didn't," Grover said.
"What should I - " Tim said, waving the phone.
"Hang up," said Mr. McAfee. "Forget it." He tightened his hands into fists
and lay looking at the cops.
"Fella," said the other cop, "bellboy says you didn't have the price of a
bottle of whiskey a while ago."
"That's right," said Mr. McAfee.
"Room here's seven dollars a night. How were you going to pay for that?"
"I wasn't," said Mr. McAfee. "I'm a vagrant."
"Come on," said the first cop.
"Hey," Tim said, "you can't. He's sick. Call the A.A. -they know about
him."
"Cool off, son," said the other cop. "He's going to get a nice free room
tonight."
"Call Doctor Slothrop," Tim said. The cops had taken Mr. McAfee off the
bed and were moving him toward the door.
"My things?" he said.
"Somebody'll take care of them. Come on. You kids too. It's time you were
getting home."
Tim and Grover followed them down the hall, into the elevator, out through
the lobby past the clerk and into the empty street, where the cops put Mr.
McAfee into a patrol car. Tim wondered if either of their voices had ever
come over the radio rig at Grover's, had ever figured in any of his dreams.
"Be careful," he yelled at them. "He's real sick. You got to take care of
him."
"Oh, we'll take care of him," said the cop who wasn't driving. "He knows
it too, don't he? Look at him." Tim looked. All he could see were the
whites of eyes, and cheekbones highlighted in sweat. Then the car took off,
leaving the odor of rubber and a long screech hanging at the curb. That was
the last they saw of him. They went down to the station house next day, but
the cops said he'd been taken to Pittsfield, and there was no way at all of
knowing whether they were telling the truth.
A few days later the paper mill started up again, and then there was that
year's Operation Spartacus to worry about, and then the idea Nunzi
Passarella came up with of getting car batteries from Etienne's father's
junkyard, and a couple of old surplus spotlights and some sickly green
cellophane, and rigging the lights up by the railroad cut just outside
Mingeborough where the train had to slow down for a curve, getting at least
fifty kids to put on rubber monster masks of various kinds, and capes and
homemade bat outfits and such, then sit around on the slopes of the cut
until the train came, switching on the sickly green spotlights just as it
appeared around the curve, and see what happened. Only half the expected
number of kids showed up but it was still a success, the train coming to a
horrible grinding halt, ladies screaming, conductors yelling, ètienne
cutting the lights and the kids fleeing away up the sides of the cut and
into the fields. Grover, who'd been sporting a zombie mask of his own
design, had afterward said something curious: "I feel different now and
better for having been green, even sickly green, even for a minute." Though
they never talked about it, Tim felt the same way.
In the spring he and ètienne hopped a freight train for the first time in
their lives, and rode to Pittsfield to see a merchant name of Artie
Cognomen, a stout, poker-faced, onetime Bostonian who looked like a
selectman and smoked a pipe with a bowl carved in the shape of Winston
Churchill's head, complete with cigar. Artie sold practical jokes. "Have a
very nice dribble glass in with the spring consignment," he informed them.
"Also a wide selection in whoopee cushions, exploding cigars - " "No," said
ètienne. "What kind of disguises you got?" Artie showed them all he had -
wigs, fake noses, glasses with bug eyes on them - but what they finally
settled for was a couple of mustaches you could clip to your nose and two
little tins of blackface makeup. "You guys must be reactionaries or
something," Mr. Cognomen told them. "This stuff has been sitting around for
years. It may even have turned white. You trying to resurrect vaudeville or
something?" "We're trying to resurrect a friend," ètienne answered right
back without thinking, and then he and Tim looked at each other in
surprise, as if some fourth person in the room had said it.
Then this summer the Barringtons had moved into Northumberland Estates,
and the kids, as usual, had advance word on it. Their parents suddenly
seemed to spend more time talking about the coming of the Barringtons than
anything else. They began to use words like "blockbusting" and
"integration."
"What's integration mean?" Tim asked Grover.
"The opposite of differentiation," Grover said, drawing an x-axis, y-axis
and curve on his greenboard. "Call this function of x. Consider values of
the curve at tiny little increments of x" - drawing straight vertical lines
from the curve down to the x-axis, like the bars of a jail cell -"you can
have as many of these as you want, see, as close together as you want."
"Till it's all solid," Tim said.
"No, it never gets solid. If this was a jail cell, and those lives were
bars, and whoever was behind it could make himself any size he wanted to
be, he could always make himself skinny enough to get free. No matter how
close together the bars were."
"This is integration," said Tim.
"The only kind I ever heard of," said Grover. Late that night they tuned
in on Grover's parents' bedroom, to see if they could find out any thing
new about the Negro family that was coming.
"They're worried up there," Mr. Snodd said. "They don't know whether to
start selling now or try and stick it out. All it takes is one to panic."
"Well," said Grover's mother, "thank God they don't have any children, or
there'd be a panic in the PTA, too."
Intrigued, they sent Hogan in to the next PTA meeting to see what was up.
Hogan reported back the same thing: "They say there's no kids this time,
but they ought to be looking ahead and making plans in case it ever does
happen."
It was hard to see what their parents were all so scared of. As it turned
out, not only scared but also misinformed. The day after the Barringtons
finally did move in, Tim, Grover and ètienne went up to their house after
school just to look around. They found the house no different from any
others in the development; but then, leaning against a steel street light,
watching them, they saw the kid. He was kind of rangy and dark, and he was
wearing a sweater, even though it was warm out. The others introduced
themselves and said they were going up to the overpass to drop water
balloons on cars, and would he like to come along?
"What's your name?" ètienne said.
"Well," said the kid, snapping his fingers for it, "it's Carl. Yeah, Carl
Barrington." Turned out he had a perfect eye for getting water balloons to
splat right on a guy's windshield. They went over to the junkyard later and
fooled around with ball bearings and busted automatic-transmission units,
and then walked Carl home. The next day he was in school, and every day
after that. He sat quietly in a seat in the corner that had been empty, and
the teacher never called on him, though he was as smart as Grover on some
things. A week or so later Grover learned the other meaning for
integration, from watching Huntley and Brinkley, the only television show
he ever looked at.
"It means white kids and colored kids in the same school," Grover said.
"Then we're integrated," Tim said. "Hey." "Yeah. They don't know it, but
we're integrated." Then Tim's and Grover's folks, and even, according to
Hogan, the progressive Doctor Slothrop, started in with the telephone
calls, and the name-calling, and the dirty words they got so angry with
kids for using. The only parent who was keeping out of it seemed to be
ètienne's father. "He says why don't people stop worrying about Negroes and
start worrying about automation," ètienne reported. "What's automation,
Grovie?"
"I start studying it next week," said Grover. "I'll tell you then." But he
didn't, because by that time they were all involved again with the
arrangements for this year's Spartacus maneuvers. They began to spend more
and more time up at the hideout at King YrjÆ's, plotting. They knew by now,
their third year at it, that the reality would turn out to be considerably
less than the plot, that something inert and invisible, something they
could not be cruel to or betray (though who would have gone so far as to
call it love?) would always be between them and any clear or irreversible
step, as much as the powdery fiction of the school's outline on Fazzo's
Field had stopped the little kids last year. Because everybody on the
school board, and the railroad, and the PTA and paper mill had to be
somebody's mother or father, whether really or as a member of a category;
and there was a point at which the reflex to their covering warmth,
protection, effectiveness against bad dreams, bruised heads and simple
loneliness took over and made worthwhile anger with them impossible.

Still, the four of them sat now in the secret room, which had grown cold
with the approach of night, while Pierre, the basset hound, nosed
restlessly in the corners. They agreed that Carl would run a time-motion
study on letting air out of tires in the shopping center's parking lot, and
Etienne would make more of an effort to obtain parts for the gigantic
sodium catapult Grover had designed; and that Tim could begin each run-
through of Operation Spartacus with a few more limbering-up exercises,
taking the Royal Canadian Air Force plan as a point of departure. Grover
allotted them the personnel they felt they would need, and then at last
they adjourned. In single file they reran the house's gauntlet of shadows,
resonances and dread possibilities, came out into the rain which had not
stopped, and re-embarked on the S. S. Leak.
They rowed her as far as the culvert under the state highway, then walked
through that, and skirted around a piece of the swamp to Fazzo's Field, to
check out the maneuver site. Then they went over to the stretch of track
beyond the point designated Foxtrot, and crouched among barren shadbushes
whose berries they had eaten earlier in the year, and lobbed rocks down on
the tracks to see how the angle of fire was. They couldn't tell too much
because there was hardly any light left to the sky. So they walked the
tracks back almost to the Minge-borough station, then cut over into town,
where they little tired, sat in a row at the empty counter and ordered four
lemon-limes with water. "Four?" said the lady behind the fountain. "Four,"
said Grover, and as usual she gave them a funny look. For a while they hung
around the revolving wire racks, looking through comics; then they walked
Carl home, through the quickening rain.
Even before they reached the Barringtons' block they felt something was
wrong. Two cars and a pickup truck trailing garbage came tearing by from
that direction, windshield wipers batting furiously, tires sending up wings
of water that splashed the kids even though they jumped up on one of the
lawns. Tim looked over at Carl, but Carl didn't say anything.
When they got to Carl's house they found the front lawn littered with
garbage. For a while they only stood; then, as if compelled to do so, began
kicking through it, looking for clues. The garbage was shin-deep all over
the lawn, neatly spread right up to the property line. They must have
brought it all in the pickup. Tim found the familiar A&P shopping bags his
mother always brought home, and the skins of some big yellow oranges an
aunt had sent them as a gift from Florida, and the pint box of pineapple
sherbet Tim himself had bought two nights ago, and all the intimacy of the
throwaway part, the shadow-half of his family's life for all the week
preceding, the crumpled envelopes addressed to his father and mother, the
stubs of the black De Nobili cigars his father liked to smoke after supper,
the folded beer cans, always with the point coming in between the two e's
of the word "beer," exactly the way his father did and had taught him how
to do -ten square yards of irrefutable evidence. Grover was going around
unfolding papers and turning over things and finding out that his garbage
was there too. "And Slothrops' and Mostlys'," ètienne reported, "and I
guess a lot of people from around the development here, too."
They'd been picking up garbage for about five minutes, throwing it in cans
they found by the carport, when the front door opened and Mrs. Barrington
started yelling at them.
"But we're cleaning it up," Tim said. "We're on your side."
"We don't need your help," the woman said. "We don't need any of you on
our side. I thank our heavenly Father every day of my life that we don't
have any children to be corrupted by the likes of you trash. Now get out,
go on now." She started to cry.
Tim shrugged and threw away an orange peel he was holding. He considered
getting a beer can to confront his father with, but then figured all that
would get him was spanked, and hard, so he forgot about it. The three of
them walked away, slowly, looking back now and then at the woman, who was
still standing in her doorway. They'd gone two blocks before they realized
that Carl was still with them.
"She didn't mean it," he said. "She just - you know -mad."
"Yeah," said Tim and Grover.
"I don't know" - the boy, now almost faded into the rain, gestured back at
the house - "if I should go in now, or what. What should I do?"
Grover, Tim and Etienne looked at one another. Grover, as spokesman, said,
"Why don't you lay low for a while?"
"Yeah," Carl said. They walked down to the shopping center and across the
slick black parking lot that reflected greenish mercury-vapor lights, and a
red supermarket sign, and a blue gas-station sign, and many yellow lights.
They walked among these colors on the wide black pavement that seemed to
stretch to the mountains.
"I guess I'll - you know - go up to the hideout, then," Carl said, "up to
King YrjÆ's place."
"At night?" ètienne said. "What about the calvary officer?"
"Cavalry," said Grover.
"He won't bother me," said Carl. "You know "
"We know," said Tim. Sure they did: Everything Carl said, they knew. It
had to be that way: He was what grownups, if they'd known, would have
called an "imaginary playmate." His words were the kids' own words; his
gestures too, the faces he made, the times he had to cry, the way he shot
baskets; all given by them an amplification or grace they expected to grow
into presently. Carl had been put together out of phrases, images,
possibilities that grownups had somehow turned away from, repudiated, left
out at the edges of towns, as if they were auto parts in ètienne's father's
junkyard - things they could or did not want to live with but which the
kids, on the other hand, could spend endless hours with, piecing together,
rearranging, feeding, programming, refining. He was entirely theirs, their
friend and robot, to cherish, buy undrunk sodas for, or send into danger,
or even, as now, at last, to banish from their sight.
"If I like it," Carl said, "I might stay there awhile too." The others
nodded, and then Carl broke loose and took off at a jogging run across the
lot, waving his hand without looking back. When he'd vanished in the rain,
the three kids put their hands in their pockets and started back for
Grover's house.
"Grovie," said ètienne, "are we still integrated? If he doesn't come back?
Hops a freight somewhere or something?"
"Ask your father," said Grover. "I don't know anything." ètienne picked up
a handful of wet leaves and stuffed them down Grover's back. Grover kicked
water at him but missed and splashed Tim. Tim jumped up and shook a branch,
showering Grover and ètienne. ètienne tried to push Tim over Grover, who'd
got down on all fours, but Tim caught on and pushed Grover's face in the
mud. That was how they left the lights of the shopping center and took
leave of Carl Barrington, abandoning him to the old estate's other
attenuated ghosts and its precarious shelter; and rollicked away into that
night's rain, each finally to his own house, hot shower, dry towel, before-
bed television, good night kiss, and dreams that could never again be
entirely safe.