2

Peter walked out of his homeroom when the bell rang and went down the corridor to his locker. While the rest of the school pushed past to various parts of the building and most of his class filed into Miller's room for history, he pretended to search for a book. Tony Drexler, a friend of his, loitered beside him for unbearable seconds and finally asked, "Heard from Jim Hardie yet?"

"No," Peter said, burying himself deeper in his locker.

"I bet he's in Greenwich Village already."

"Yeah."

"Time to get to History. You read the chapter?"

"No."

"Bullshit," Drexler laughed. "See you there."

Peter nodded. Not long after he was alone. Leaving his books in his locker but taking his coat, he slammed the metal panel shut and ran down the hall to the bathroom. He shut himself in a toilet and waited for the first period bell to ring.

Ten minutes later he peeked out of the bathroom door. The hallway was empty, and he raced down the corridor. Then he continued unseen down the stairs and out the door.

A hundred yards off to the side, a first-period gym class sweated over calisthenics on the muddy field; two girls were already doing punishment laps around the track. Nobody saw him: school was already deep in its round of self-enclosed activity, marching to the sound of bells.

A block away on School Road, Peter turned off into a sidestreet and from there zigzagged through town, avoiding the square and the shopping district, until he reached Underhill Road, which led to Route 17. He jogged down Underhill Road for half a mile, by now well out of town and in sight only of bare fields ending in stands of trees.

When the highway came in sight, he walked across a squelchy knoll and climbed over a double strip of thick aluminum nailed to a series of white posts. Peter ran across the lanes to the median, climbed another aluminum fence, waited for a break in the traffic and then ran across to the other side of the highway. Then he held out his arm, thumb extended, and began to walk backward down the highway.

He had to see Lewis: he had to talk to Lewis about his mother.

From the bottom of his mind floated the image of himself leaping on Lewis, swinging at him with his fists, battering at the handsome face…

But then came the opposite image of Lewis laughing, Lewis telling him not to worry about anything, that he had not come back from Spain to have affairs with people's mothers.

If Lewis said that, he could tell him about Jim Hardie.

Peter had been hitchhiking for fifteen minutes when a blue car finally pulled over to the side of the road. The middle-aged man behind the wheel leaned sideways and opened the passenger door. "Where you going, son?" He was a tubby man in a wrinkled gray suit with a green necktie knotted too tightly. Advertising leaflets of some kind littered the back seat. "Just down the road six or seven miles," Peter said. "I'll tell you when we get close." He got in.

"This is against my principles," the man said, rolling away.

"Pardon?"

"Against my principles. Hitchhiking is pretty dangerous, especially for good-looking kids like you. I don't think you should do it."

Peter laughed out loud, startling both the driver and himself.

The man stopped at the end of Lewis's drive, but would not leave without giving him more advice. "Listen, son. You never know who you're going to meet out on these roads. Could be any kind of pervert." He grabbed Peter's arm just as the boy was opening the door.

"Promise me you won't do it again. Promise me, son."

"Okay, I promise," Peter said.

"The Lord knows you made that promise." The man released Peter's arm, and the boy scrambled out of the car. "Hold on, son, wait up. Just a sec." Peter fidgeted by the side of the car, shifting on his feet, while the man leaned over and picked up one of the leaflets on the back seat. "This will help you, son. Read it and keep it. It's got an answer in it."

"An answer?"

"That's right. Show it to your friends." He handed Peter a cheaply printed pamphlet: The Watchtower.

The driver picked up speed on the highway; Peter shoved the little magazine in his pocket and turned around to go up Lewis's drive.

The drive had been pointed out to him, but he had never seen Lewis's house-never seen more of it than the gray peaks which could be glimpsed from the highway. As he began to walk up the drive, these peaks disappeared. The drifted snow had melted, and the drive shone, catching the sun at a hundred mirrorlike points. Seeing the top of the house from the road, Peter had never recognized how far the house sat from the highway, how enclosed it was by trees. When he reached the first curve of the drive, he was able partially to see the house between their trunks, and for the first time he began to question what he was doing.

He came closer. A smaller extension of the drive curved off to the front of the house, which looked as long as a city block. Faceted windows threw back the light. The major section of the drive trailed around the side of the house and ended at a brick courtyard flanked by what looked to Peter like stables-he saw only a corner of these. He could not imagine himself entering such an imposing place: it looked like you could wander a week in it without finding your way out. This evidence of Lewis's separateness, his otherness, put all of Peter's plans in doubt.

Going in there seemed ominously like going into the silent house on Montgomery Street.

Peter walked around to the rear of the building, trying to relate this massive grandeur to what he thought of Lewis. For Peter, who knew nothing of the house's history, it seemed regal: it demanded a different conception of its owner. Still, the rear of the house was better: a door on a brick court, the homely wooden fronts of the stables, this was at a level with which he was more comfortable. He had just noticed the paths leading into the woods when he heard a voice speaking in his mind.

Imagine Lewis in bed with your mother, Peter. Imagine him lying on top of her.

"No," he whispered.

Imagine how she looks moving under him naked, Peter. Imagine-

Peter froze and the voice ceased simultaneously. A car had turned into the drive from the highway. Lewis had come home. Peter thought for a second if he should wait exposed in the courtyard for Lewis to see him as he drove in, and then the car shifted up and was too near the house and he could not bear to see Lewis while the echo of the voice still hung in his mind, and he ran to the side of the stables and crouched down. His mother's station wagon rolled into the courtyard behind the house.

Peter groaned softly, and heard laughter whispering along the painted boards of the old stables.

He flattened himself out on the snow and looked through the gnarled stalks of a rosebush as his mother got out of the station wagon. Her face was drawn, pale with concentrated feeling-a taut angry expression he had never seen. As he watched from beside the stables, she leaned back into the car and tapped the horn twice. Then she straightened up, walked around the front of the car, skirted the puddles on the flat red bricks and went up to the little door in the rear of the house. He thought she would knock, but she dug in her bag for a moment, took out a key and let herself in. He heard her call Lewis's name.