(5)

Willie Duchamps knew not to walk directly up to the Woodsons’ porch. He had been shouted at several times by both Vaire and Walter for his meaningless cruelties and pranks. He had tied cats’ tails together, put a firecracker under a dog’s collar, told Anne some words with which she had innocently horrified her mother’s friends, and worst of all from Walter’s viewpoint, had in a random fit of rage chopped the Woodson garden hose into thirty-eight nearly equal pieces with Walter’s own hatchet. Surveying his front yard full of what looked like red macaroni one Sunday morning, Walter had stomped back into the living room and said, “The Duchamps boy does not ever set foot on this property again.”

The problem was made nearly insoluble by Willie’s father, who, it was rumored, was a whoremaster besides being a late-shift bartender at the George Washington Tavern in downtown Cassius. He had the look of a shaved gorilla, when he shaved, and had got rid of his long suffering wife by beating her so badly that she was forbidden by the court to return to him and left forever to live somewhere in Colorado with her widowed sister. Bart Duchamps was not a neighbor one approached angrily or holding Bart’s rascal boy by the scruff of the neck and uttering threats. Bart often beat Willie until he could not stand up or go to school for days, but he would, so he claimed, kill anyone who harmed a hair of his boy’s head. All of this was neighborhood gossip and easily picked up from any of the many children in the two- or three-block area of the outlying district of Cassius the Woodsons lived in. Willie was nine and too old for either Anne or Robert to play with anyway, Vaire would say, and she had no idea why he hung around instead of playing with boys his own age.

It seemed pretty obvious to Anne that the reason he hung around was that he liked to bully and play tricks on the littler ones, and besides, she said to Robert as they sat in the porch swing and watched Willie throwing rocks at a cat he had trapped under his front porch, Shirley was his girlfriend. Shirley was a skinny black-haired girl of about six or so who lived two houses up the street from the Woodsons. She had no real mother or father, Anne told Robert, but lived with her grandmother and a middle-aged couple who said they were her aunt and uncle but who were not at home much. Anne made a lot of the fact that Shirley was almost a year older than she and yet was not in school and would not begin until fall when Anne did. She was sickly with some sort of recurrent weakness that put her in bed for a week at a time, and in Anne’s opinion was not as smart as she seemed to think she was. Shirley was Willie’s special friend, which meant she not only shared in the interesting games a resourceful nine-year-old could think up but also received second hand the overflow of the beatings he got from his father. She was a surly child with a pale face and dark circled eyes that most often looked at the world with ready rejection, since she had experienced more of that response herself, evidently, than any other. Her grandmother was of some foreign extraction and looked a lot like the witch in Anne’s Hansel and Gretel book with drooping nose and hairy moles distributed in unlikely places on her face. She was not an unkind woman, Robert thought after she had given him half an apple one afternoon, but she did look terribly witchy in that black dress and with her gray hair hanging down like moss around her face.

Willie had spotted Robert immediately as a prime mark, as he was almost wholly innocent, small for his age, pliable and gullible enough to believe the wildest tale Willie could think up. The fact was, Robert was intensely curious about Willie, for he had had no experience of such gratuitous meanness and found it both exciting and repulsive. After a chat over the back fence one morning, Robert managed to slip away from Anne and walked down the alley with Willie and Shirley to the river bank where the old storm drain emptied into the channel. Some ways back in the storm drain, which was over six feet square at the opening, they had a secret hideout. A large chunk of masonry had fallen out of the wall forming a cave that had obviously been used by tramps now and then. Willie had found a blanket for the floor and some candles, and he and Shirley had set up housekeeping in the musty but properly secret hideway. As for Robert, he found the situation so different, dirty, and forbidden that he instantly adopted Willie as his leader.

The three of them sat in the dark burrow off the storm drain eating an orange Willie had stolen from Capp’s fruit stand. Robert could have brought some from the Woodsons’, but it was more like bandits this way.

“Don’t eat the white part,” Shirley. said in her squeaky voice. “G’ma says it’ll give you worms.”

“That’s crap, Shirley.” Willie said, tearing off a big piece of the white and eating it. “It’s raw p’taters that gives you worms. Any dummy knows that.” He split off a section and handed it to Robert who sat on the concrete edge of the cave opening. “Here, Robert, you’re part of our gang now.”

“Thank you,” Robert said, taking the orange slice. “It’s a great cave you got here. We can play robbers and nobody can ever find us.”

“We do more than playin’ robbers, don’t we, Shirley?” Willie said, finishing the orange and rubbing his mouth on his sleeve. Shirley giggled and rolled her little dark eyes up so the whites showed, nodding her head so her black hair that looked like it needed washing flopped over her forehead. Robert hadn’t the slightest idea what they were talking about.

“Do you want to be part of our gang and never tell anybody, not even your dad and ma, where the hideout is and what we do?” Willie said, holding Robert by his shoulders and looking into his eyes.

Robert looked back into the greenish dark eyes in Willie’s narrow face and nodded his head. “You got to swear on the bones of your ancestors,” Willie said, digging his fingers into Robert’s shoulders so that it hurt.

“Ow. I swear, I mean how do you swear?”

“You just did. You just say, ‘I swear.’”

“I swear. And you’re hurting me, Willie.”

“Okay. It’s just a little hurt so you’ll remember that anybody in the gang who tells any of our secrets get hurt real bad.”

“I won’t tell.”

“Okay. Now you’re part of the gang. But we got to do the initiating stuff to make you a member.” He began unbuttoning Robert’s shirt.

“Do you have to take your clothes off?” Robert asked.

“Yeah, we got to do a doctor’s examination to make sure you’re okay.”

Willie helped Robert take off his shirt, pants, and underpants. They were always barefoot, so this left Robert naked, sitting on the blanket in the cave.

“Now lie down here so we can examine you,” Willie said.

Robert lay down on the blanket and Shirley squatted down to watch as Willie began to poke various parts of Robert’s body with his forefinger. Robert was interested, ticklish, and excited by this process, and it brought me to awareness also as his excitement mounted. Willie tickled and rubbed, talking all the time in a doctorish way as if he were checking things out. After a bit, Shirley, who was being his nurse, joined in by taking his pulse and looking in Robert’s mouth so she could count his teeth.

“Now that you’re all examined,” Willie said, standing up and shucking off his clothes, “we’ll do the sandwich game.”

Shirley also undressed and Willie directed them so that he and Shirley faced each other and Robert stood behind Shirley facing her back. Then they all clutched each other and began a silly, laughing little dance, hugging each other and jumping up and down and squealing. After a bit they did it lying on the blanket, rolling over each other and tickling and slapping each other with loud smacks. They kept it up until all three were red-faced and panting and hardly able to move. All lay on the blanket in the now sweltering cave, breathing hard and looking at the scratches they had picked up in the struggle. Robert thought he had never done anything that was so much fun, and he lay on the blanket looking up at the clay ceiling blackened with the smoke of many candles and thought it was the best time ever in his life, he felt so good and relaxed, like a little pond of water that has come through a giant storm with white caps and whirlpools and now was relaxing out into little ripples that spread slowly into the evening surface until it was all smooth again and calm. I had been aware of the process, since Robert’s excitement brought me to the surface for a time, and although I enjoyed the sensations, the game seemed peculiarly pointless, so I thought no more about it.

Robert did indeed feel like one of the gang now, but the good times in the cave took their place in his daily life as another new thing to do, another bit of wonder to be explored along with hikes with Willie to the bluff to drop stones on the tops of cars as they sped by beneath, or chasing the farmer’s cows with Willie and Shirley and laughing at their stampeding with tails in the air and udders banging between their hind legs, or having an intricate game of hop-scotch with Anne and Shirley on the walk in front of the house. But the cave and the gang and the sandwich game did become something of a shadow side in Robert’s life, as he began to realize that the reason he had not told Anne about it was that she was closer to the adult world, that she was intimate with her mother and father, and that the cave and the gang and their games were not things you told adults about, since they would probably find it dangerous and in some adult way would make it impossible. It formed a bond between the three that seemed for a time unbreakable and unshareable. Willie would tell them about making babies sometimes out of his wealth of knowledge gained from being with his father nights in the bar.

“You have to get some white pee called chissom from a man and some from a woman,” he said one time as they lay in the dark cave. “And you take and put it in a corn shuck so it mixes together, and then you wrap up the shuck and put it in a dark place, like under the porch, and after a long time a baby grows out of it.”

“Out of the corn shuck?” Robert asked, his eyes wide.

“Yep.”

This never failed to make Shirley vaguely angry, since she thought there was more to it than that. She had seen her aunt with a big stomach before her little cousin was born, but she would not dispute with Willie. He was bigger and meaner than she was, and anyway, she didn’t really care at the moment because the faintness in her stomach was hurting her again.

Robert, on the other hand, spent several times at the toilet in the Woodson house watching his urine to see if it was white. He thought it would be interesting to have a baby if he could catch some of his white pee in a corn shuck sometime. But here again, he was not interested enough to pursue the game very far. It was intriguing at the moment, but there were so many other things to do and think about that he could not often be bothered trying to make a baby.

The gang would probably have continued their fun through the end of summer if an accident of Shirley’s health had not removed her from the gang. Robert learned one morning at breakfast that the little Stillings girl had been taken to the hospital and that they thought she had a liver condition. Robert did not grasp the significance of this until several days had passed and he and Willie had not visited the hideout. To his questions, Willie was vicious, cuffing him hard on the ear and calling him “queer” for suggesting they go and do the sandwich game by themselves. Robert was more emotionally wounded than physically, for he was used to Willie’s rages and umnotivated blows.

“But I like to do it, Willie,” Robert said, his ear burning red.

“We can’t do it without a girl, stupid.”

Robert thought about that and slipped away to look for Anne. There was more than one girl in the world, he was thinking, and it would be twice as much fun with Anne because she was nicer than Shirley, and he liked her more. He ran about the neighborhood until he found her riding her tricycle in front of the house. Breathlessly he told her that he knew a game that was more fun than anything they ever did, and he would show her how to play it, and Willie would too if she wanted him to play. Anne said she hated Willie because he was mean, but she would play a game with Robert if it didn’t get her dress dirty. He said it certainly would not, but didn’t mention the fact that they would have to take their clothes off, since that detail didn’t seem important. They decided to do the game in the garage with the doors shut. Robert did his best to show Anne how the game went, but it was not the same. The garage was not close and secret as the cave was, the ceiling was too high, so they seemed to be at the bottom of a well instead of inside a cozy place, and he wanted to do it, but it didn’t feel right. Anne did not obiect to taking her clothes off, but she thought the rest of it was kind of silly. She liked the tickling and running around the garage naked, but then she wanted to put her clothes back on and go in for lunch. Robert decided it was not the right place to play the game and that he would have to take her to the cave hideout and make her a part of the gang.

***

August waned in heat. The nights were sultry after the usual late afternoon thunderstorms, and then would come the baking afternoons that broke records all over the midwest. In the hot nights I sulk about, seldom hunting, although the game is torpid with heat and easy to catch, my mind seemingly preoccupied with internal processes, uncomfortable longings that I cannot identify and have never felt before. I spend some nights idiotically lying full length in the river shallows, content just to lie and let the water run over my body, smoothing my pelt into fine bronze runnels of fur in the moonlight. One night I actually catch fish that way, lying in the shallows of the river with my ears submerged listening for the delicate swish of fins as they search the bottom for food. I grab three that night, two of them only carp, but good enough for a few choice bites.

This night, waiting for the Woodsons to retire so I can slip out again, I hear something of that catastrophic morning a month and a half ago and perk up my hearing.

“They sentenced that Prokoff fellow to thirty years,” Walter says around the stem of his pipe.

“Just a boy,” Vaire says, sounding preoccupied.

“That guy Rustum will never walk again, it says. He’s going to have to wear a brace, like the President,” Walter says and chuckles.

There is no answer from Vaire, so he goes on. “The old man died last week, it says, and that big fellow, Hamner, they found out he had a family right near here, over in Grand Valley somewhere, wife and four kids.”

“Walter.” Vaire sounds as if she is about to cry.

“What? Oh, I’m sorry, dear.” Walter has taken the pipe out and now sounds more normal. “That’s stupid of me. I don’t know what I was thinking of. Not thinking at all, I guess.”

“Oh it’s not that. It’s Mother.”

“Drinking?”

“Yes, that too. But mostly that strange person she’s been seeing in Grand Rapids. I’m afraid she’s going to get cheated some way or lose the farm or something. There are so many cheats and swindlers around. You read about them every day, that one in Chicago that took everybody’s money.”

“Sam Insull?”

“Yes, like him.”

“What sort of person? First I’d heard about her consulting someone.” Walter sounded stiff. “I had always thought if she needed advice, I could help. After all, in my line of business I ...”

“It’s not that kind of person, Walter. It’s, well, he’s, he seems to be some kind of ...”

“Oh what, for heaven’s sake, Vaire?” Walter sounded irritated.

“A medium.”

“A what? A medium? A medium what?” Now he was laughing.

“It’s not a joke.” Vaire’s voice had a dangerous edge to it.

“Now dear, I’m not making a joke, but what do you mean?”

I “A medium! A spiritual medium. A person who talks with dead people.”

“Oh no.”

“Well she’s not crazy. She loved Dad very much, and it was all so, so unexpected and useless and wrong, and she’s just gone off the deep end for awhile, but she’s not crazy, and Walter, I won’t have you thinking she is. She’s my mother and she’s the finest woman in the world, and ...” Vaire is crying now and Walter has rustled his paper, put it down beside his chair. He is making scraping noises, his pipe.

“I didn’t say she was crazy, dear. I suspect she will get cheated, since there are no such things as spirits that people can contact, and all that sort of thing. Of course it makes her feel better and helps ease the transition.”

“Walter!” Vaire is standing up. I can tell by the closeness of her voice. “Damn it, Walter! Damn it! Damn it! Damn it!”

“Vaire! What in the world?” Now he is standing.

“Transition to what? She’s not transitioning to anything! Her life is broken up, Walter, can’t you understand how terribly this has changed her?”

“Now wait a minute,” Walter begins.

“No I won’t.” Vaire is moving back and forth below me. “All I want to know is, will you help me get her away from a person I think is going to cheat her? That’s all I want to know.” I have not heard Vaire who is usually so calm and sweet talk so violently before. Walter is obviously shocked. Pause.

“Yes, of course I will, sweetheart. Of course I will.”

There is silence below me as they embrace. Then they both sit down again.

“She’s going to a medium to get in touch with your father?”

“Oh I don’t know, really. She goes to see him a couple of times a week and tells me she feels so much better afterwards and that he’s going to show everything in its true reality. I don’t know what she means by that, but I’m afraid for Little Robert.”

Listening to this, I wonder what a medium can be, what it can do.

“For Robert?” Walter has apparently forgotten the episode of a couple of weeks ago when his mother-in-law was drunk and accused the boy of being a demon. I begin to think about that.

“Walter, I do want to help mother, but I don’t know how to handle it. What can we do?”

Walter’s voice takes on an authoritative edge. “Well, we need to meet this person, to make some estimate of his character and his motive before we try to take any action. Then perhaps even legal action would be in order.”

The rest of the conversation does not interest me, and I content myself later that night with a long cool swim across the river to tip over a late fisherman in the muddy shallows. I have not been much for tricks up to this time, but I feel this itchiness inside that seems to have no outlet, and it makes me do strange things. I find myself chuckling, lying on my back in the water, dark and invisible as an otter in midstream, listening to the curses and splashings of the fisherman as he wades ashore towing his boat. But then it may have been simple revenge, since the fisherman was running a nightline that I ran afoul of some time back, catching one of the hooks in my right hind foot. I do feel good watching and listening to him weltering in the dark water. The last thing I think before shifting back up in Robert’s bedroom is that it is the boy’s affair, not mine, and that distinction seems a new one also.

Trading Anne for Shirley turned out to be more complicated than Robert had thought it would be. Anne liked playing doctor with him in the garage, but it never got to be as much fun as the three gang members playing sandwich in the hideout, and Robert wanted that again. The trouble was that Anne hated Willie, and Willie was forbidden to come into the Woodsons’ yard. Willie would not go to the hideout without Shirley, and he became increasingly vicious when she did not return from the hospital by the end of the week. Robert felt there must be some way to convince Anne that gang life was fun, that Willie was really an exciting person, and that it was worthwhile to have some secrets from one’s family, since Anne was notorious even among other tattle-tales for telling her mother everything that happened. Finally it happened the day of the big hail.

Robert, in the relative security of his male sex, was allowed to play with Willie, even though Anne was not. He was at Willie’s house right after lunch time playing with Willie in his large unkempt sandbox in the back yard, the house being too sweltering hot to enter, although Willie’s father was sprawled in there somewhere asleep. He worked nights and slept most of the day until mid afternoon. Robert kept bringing up the subject:

“Why can’t Anne be one of the gang?”

“She’s a tattle, that’s why.”

“She won’t if we swear her not to, I bet.”

“She tells her ma everything.”

“I bet she won’t this time because she does things for me, and I’ll ask her not to.”

Willie thought about it for a moment. Apparently Shirley was in the hospital for a long stay, and the hideout was going to waste. School would be starting in two weeks. Two weeks! “Well, I don’t know. She don’t like me, and I don’t like her neither.”

The boys hardly noticed how dark it was getting until Willie looked up and said, “Geezus, look at that black cloud.”

Robert looked up at the huge thunderhead, purple-black on the underside, moving silently over them so that the sun had been blocked out and now the whole sky was being overspread with the black-purple pall. The wind had stopped so that every leaf and grass blade held perfectly still as if the transparent summer air had quietly and completely solidified into glass. Robert felt the stillness in his throat and for a moment he held his breath. There would be a big storm, and he felt goosepimples at the thought, since he had only recently begun to appreciate the awesomeness of nature and liked to watch the lightning and be scared by the thunder. Far off came the deep, husky rumble of the approaching storm.

“It’s going to be a big rain, isn’t it?” said Robert.

“Hey, you little farts get on in the house,” Mr. Duchamps called from the back porch. “Goin’ to rain like a cow pissin’ on a flat rock here pretty quick.”

Willie and Robert dawdled until the first huge drops came splatting down like little bombs, smacking into the sand like birdshot. The boys squealed and ducked as if rocks were being thrown at them. Then the wind hit, bending the trees over as if they had all been suddenly knocked to their knees, and the rain crashed down like a waterfall. They were both screaming, giggling wet before they could get across the back yard.

“Getcher asses in here,” Mr. Duchamps hollered from the porch.

They made it to the porch wetter than if they had both been dumped into the river, and Mr. Duchamps agreed they couldn’t get any wetter and let them play in the rain like a couple of skinny little satyrs, their clothes and hair plastered to them so they looked like stick figures prancing in the gray sheets of rain. Then it began to get cold all of a sudden and they ran for the house. It was like ice suddenly, and the hot air trapped inside the house was turning to steam as it flowed outward into the cooling rain. The ground, the sidewalks, the streets, automobiles, everything steamed as if the world were smoldering as the rain turned cold and hit the overheated August land. The rain began to slack back, and as yet there had not been much lightning or thunder, but now it began with a close hit: CRACK-BAMMM! and continued in a cannonade. The lightning flashed like a battery of 105’s on the Duchamp’s roof firing at will, the thundercrashes overlapping so you could, not tell which flash went with which boom. It was deafening. The boys kept pretending to talk to each other, working their mouths in imitation speech while the barrage of sound blocked out everything. The rain and wind increased so that they fell silent, looking out across the humped tar street swept again and again by heavy sheets of rain. Mr. Duchamps continued to drink his breakfast beer and gaze out placidly at the storm. As the rain slacked again, and the thunder began to recede, the crashes further apart, Robert drew in a deep breath as if he had been living on sips of air for the past few minutes. The storm had been exciting, and he was sorry it was about over. The steam was disappearing as the land grew cooler, and it seemed to be getting lighter outside. At that point the paper boy rode by, tossing the afternoon paper into the grass beside the walk. Mr. Duchamps cursed and drained the can of beer.

“Little shit,” he said. “Throw it in the wet grass.” He opened the screen and clumped heavily down off the front porch and into the wet front yard. And it was as if the rain gods had been waiting for Bart Duchamps to get out from under his roof, waiting for his lumpy bald head and heavy round shoulders to appear in his front yard, flanked by protecting elm trees but open to the sky directly overhead, waiting and being deceptive about the storm being over. Mr. Duchamps had just bent over with great effort to pick up the folded paper from the wet grass when a great booming rattling crashing sound began so suddenly that both boys jumped as if they had been burned. It was not thunder, and for a second they could not believe ears or eyes, as what appeared to be baseballs came flying down through the air, hitting the house, smashing into the tops of cars parked at the curb, splitting off branches from the trees, making a mad dance of bouncing, splitting ice balls in the street and on the sidewalks, driving dogs under porches, people screaming into any shelter, booming on roofs, and on the other side of town destroying every pane of glass in three long greenhouses and every plant inside of them.

Out in the mad, bouncing, careening flurry of ice chunks, Mr. Duchamps lay full length, full width in his front yard, the prey of the worst hail storm in the history of that area since there had been a history. The first ice ball had been right over the plate, hitting Mr. Duchamps directly on the crown of his head, knocking him senseless and flat on top of the paper he had gone out to pick up. The rest of the brief flurry of huge hail had pummeled his body and head, even ankles, as he would find out when he awoke with bruises everywhere, but did no more damage than that first pitch.

When they had recovered their wits, the boys found the hailstorm over, the ground covered with unseasonable ice that was even now melting from record size to less than golf ball dimensions. Willie and Robert ran into the yard to the prone Duchamps who had a bloody laceration on the top of his head and several lesser scratches visible on his baldness.

“Dad! Dad!” Willie screamed, as if his father were the best parent in the world.

The skinny older boy knelt by his father just as the man regained consciousness and got to hands and knees. The heavy man shook his head, shaking blood on Willie’s face as the boy tried to help his father to his feet.

“Oh, God,” the elder Duchamps said, rolling to a sitting position and feeling around on his head tenderly. “What the hell?” He looked up at the sky, down at the scatter of melting hail amid which he sat like an old sea lion on a deserted rocky beach.

“Dad, are you okay?” Willie said, wiping his father’s blood from his face.

“What d’ya think? Hell yes,” said Duchamps, heaving himself up to his feet. “Get off yer knees, you dumb shit.”

Willie got up, not yet restored to his usual sanity. “I saw you get clonked and I thought you was dead,” he said, about to cry.

Robert was standing a few feet behind Willie, but when Mr. Duchamps slapped Willie in the face, Robert felt as if the huge hand had hit his own face. The smacking sound carried out into the street, as an auto accident is heard by a whole block of houses. Willie went down in the melting hail, put his arms over his head and curled up his body. He had found reality again very quickly.

Duchamps staggered back into the house, muttering about the boy wishing he was dead, and that he would teach his son better. Across the street a woman standing behind a porch trellis screamed at the departing figure, “Duchamps, God will punish you, you rotten terrible thing,” and she would have gone on if an arm had not emerged from her front door and drawn her back to silence.

Robert stood beside Willie’s curled up form until it uncurled and got to its feet. The large ruddy mark of the father’s hand covered the left cheek giving Willie a birthmarked appearance. He squinted up his left eye in pain and then smeared the tears away with a quick wipe.

“I’ll meet you at the hideout if you bring Anne,” Willie said out of his squinted up face. “And if you don’t bring her, you’re not part of the gang anymore.”

“Aw, Willie,” Robert began. But he stopped as Willie turned to walk around to the back of his house. He felt now the whole thing was broken, but he didn’t know. Maybe it would be all right. He would talk Anne into doing it, and she would like the game, and Willie would have a good time, and it would all be right again. He turned and ran out of the yard, sliding in the almost melted hail, and ran for home.

But it wasn’t all right. Anne had been reluctant, but she liked Robert more than even he supposed, and she went with him, marveling at the old storm drain that was still running knee deep that afternoon with the runoff from the cloudburst. They walked barefooted into the darkness of the drain, listening to the hollow splashing of little waterfalls back in the blackness where the drain tiles and storm sewers from all over town emptied into the main tunnel. Anne was frightened and held to Robert’s shirt with both hands, making it twice as hard to get to the cave, but also giving the little boy his first taste of being a leader and protector. He liked it. When they arrived at the broken out place, they saw candles burning. Willie had got there before them and had set up four candles, one at each corner of the little cave. Robert thought he had never seen it look so cosy and secret, although the storm had raised all sorts of decay and old rotting things from the drains, and the smell in the tunnel was rank enough to turn an adult stomach.

“Here it is. See, Willie’s got candles,” Robert said, helping Anne with a boost to climb up over the broken places into the cave.

Willie looked sourly at both of the smaller children, his face dark purple under the left eye. “You can’t tell anybody about our hideout,” he said harshly to Anne, “or a terrible thing will happen to you.”

Anne looked at the larger boy with fearful eyes, but she was not going to be cowed. “I promised Robert I wouldn’t tell as long as you act nice.”

“See,” Robert said excitedly, “this is our gang hideout, and we make raids and steal from the rich so we can have it in our cave.” And he went on telling how they would be outlaws like on the radio until Willie stopped him.

“Time for the initiating,” he said.

But this time it was not the same. They took off their clothes and examined Anne much as they had Robert, but Robert felt that Willie was being more rough than he had to, and a couple of times he pinched instead of tickling so so that Anne got tears in her eyes, but she held her lips tight and did not say anything. Then she got to laughing, and Robert thought it would be all right again. But when he wanted to sandwich game and dance as they had before, Willie seemed reluctant. He wanted to lie down first. Finally Robert got his way, and they sandwiched and danced, hugging each other and laughing and slapping and tickling until one very hard slap caught Robert squarely in the nose and made stars go off in his eyes. He felt gone for a moment and sat down on the floor. Willie, who had hit him, stepped back from the game, and Anne turned to look at him in horror.

“Oh, Robert,” she said. “You’re bleeding a lot.”

Robert put his hand to his stinging nose and drew it away with a large streak of blood. He looked at it in disbelief. It felt bad, but it didn’t feel that bad. It looked as if in a few minutes he would run out of blood if it kept coming out like that. Willie handed him a rag from the floor and told him to sit down a minute while they finished the game. Robert sat and watched, holding the dirty bit of blanket over his nose and snuffing up great quantities of blood which he partly spat out, partly swallowed.

Anne was more concerned with Robert than she was with finishing the game, but Willie was holding on to her tightly and doing something she didn’t like. He panted a lot and kept doing it, holding her down while she wiggled, and Robert was just going to say, “Don’t,” when Anne screamed as if she had been stabbed. Willie drew back quickly and got his clothes in his hand.

“You’re not part of the gang, you little bitch,” he snarled, and stepping into his pants, he stuffed his shirt in his back pocket and leaped out of the cave into the drain water.

Anne was crying and holding her legs together. Robert waited until she stopped to look at herself, between her legs, and he looked too.

“Hey, Anne,” Robert said in awe. “You’re bleeding too.”

Anne looked at herself and then began to gather up her clothes. She stopped crying, but her lips were thin with pain, and her face was white. Robert’s nose had stopped bleeding but two large clots and smears made his face look much worse than it was. Anne got her clothes on, and her white pants showed a blood mark when they looked later, but then it stopped bleeding before they got home.

They were walking down the alley toward their backyard when Robert thought about the “swearing” they had done.

“I don’t like Willie anymore,” Robert said. “And he hurt both of us, so I don’t think the swearing counts now.”

“I’m not going to tell,” Anne said.

“It’s all right,” Robert said as they paused at the gate. “But I’m sorry anyway, and if you want to tell, it’s all right.”

Robert felt downcast, and his nose hurt, and he looked at Anne, wondering if between her legs felt like his nose. He felt at that moment that he wanted to be as big as Willie because he wanted to hit Willie, hard.

Perhaps if it had been a different night that Mr. Sangrom had come with Aunt Cat to visit, Vaire would have noticed the bloody little white pants at once. As it was, the family had been engaged in a tight discussion that had everyone on edge, Walter having come home from work early on that Friday, Vaire and her mother looking at each other from distances they had not known before, and the suave, undertakerish Mr. Sangrom in the midst of it all with his fixed, thin smile and his narrow dark eyes and the black smooth hair that Robert thought looked like a polished car fender. The situation was such that Anne and Robert were told to go upstairs immediately and get washed and dressed in clean clothes. Robert’s nose was given a perfunctory look by Walter who pronounced it nothing more than a boyish accident, after which he gave it a tweak that made Robert wince.

Having dinner with a spiritualistic medium, as Mr. Sangrom called himself, was not Walter’s idea of an enjoyable evening. The man seemed to have nothing to his face but that damnable smile, and he obviously had insinuated himself into Mrs. Nordmeyer’s good opinion by some sort of chicanery. Such things always made Walter clench his teeth, for he could not abide people who tried to do business with spirits and ghosts and all that jiggery-pokery. Mr. Sangrom seemed quite comfortable, but his eyes would move often to fix on Little Robert who sat across the table and ate what he could with his nose hurting every time he chewed. He noticed the adults seemed more than usually interested in him that night. Aunt Cat and the stranger especially looked at him when they didn’t think he saw them. It began to make him uncomfortable so that before the others were finished, he asked to be excused. Walter excused him and said almost as it it didn’t really matter, “Stay around after supper, kids.”

Vaire served coffee after the children had gone upstairs to play in Anne’s room, and it seemed as if they had been waiting for the coffee to begin the real business of the evening.

“You have to know, Mr. Sangrom,” said Walter stiffly, “that I don’t believe in your work, and I don’t particularly like what you are proposing to do with the child.”

“Mr. Woodson, if everyone believed in what I do,” Mr. Sangrom said sadly, “this world would be a paradise.” And he dropped his gaze to his coffee. “A paradise,” he repeated in a lower tone.

“Did you feel anything during supper?” Aunt Cat said.

“It is difficult with so many contradictory vibrations at the same table,” the medium said in a low voice. “Butt I detected certain emanations, and once I saw a strange glow in the little boy’s aura that was not a natural one. Yes, Mrs. N., I think I can say that this will be a fruitful experiment.”

Walter turned away in disgust, lifting his eyebrows at his wife.

“Mr. Sangrom,” Vaire began in a nervous voice, “just what is it you are planning to do in your experiment? We really can’t allow the little boy to be frightened to death because of some, well ...” She looked at her mother in embarrassment.

“Vaire, you can’t insult me this evening,” Mrs. Nordmeyer said. “Tonight we’re going to see the proof of what I know is true.” Her long, homely face was thinner than her daughter had ever seen it, and her lips did not smile at all, although they turned up at the corners. It was as if her mother had renounced the living, Vaire thought, feeling a chill in the hot, humid August twilight.

“There is no danger to the child,” Mr. Sangrom said with his fixed smile. “I am only proposing that Mrs. N. and I be allowed to ask him a few questions about the terrible incident that culminated in Mr. Nordmeyer’s murder.”

“I think Walter and I should be here,” Vaire began.

“Of course, Mrs. Woodson,” said Mr. Sangrom. “Your presence is essential. After all, it is your skepticism we are seeking to allay.”

Vaire felt relieved, but thought that if he got to calling her Mrs. W., she would throw a coffee cup at him. She looked at Walter who was being stern and realistic and thought that at least none of this had touched his calm strength, but then he had not seen ... anything. And she felt her reserves of strength and love for Little Robert melting away.

It was around eight, the children’s bedtime, when Mr. Sangrom stood up and announced that he was ready to begin the questioning. After putting Anne to bed hastily, Vaire brought Robert downstairs in his nightshirt and asked him to sit at the table with Aunt Cat and Mr. Sangrom. Robert said hello to Aunt Cat and looked at the thin dark haired man with the smile printed on his face who got up as he entered and moved to the other side of the table so that he faced the boy directly.

“If you will turn off the overhead lights, Mr. Woodson,” Sangrom said softly, watching Robert as if he might disappear. “We will have just the one light, that one on the sideboard, if you please,” he said, indicating an ornamental lamp behind him so that from Robert’s point of view the only light in the room was behind Mr. Sangrom’s head.

“Now, young man,” the dark man said in a thin but kindly voice, “you mustn’t be afraid, for we are only going to ask some questions about the day the bad men came to your house.”

Robert sat on top of the big medical encyclopedia which made him feel tall, his eyes widening in the dimness of the dining room. Yes, he could bring back very clearly that day in the farm dining room when he had sat at the table and waited while the men were mean to the family, and waited for what he was not sure, but waiting all the same. He looked across at the face of the black haired man whose smile did not change and whose upper lip remained stiff when he talked. This man seemed dangerous too, but not in the same way, so that the scene began to seem mysterious, interesting, like an adventure. Robert almost smiled as he thought that, and the familiar thrill of goosepimples raised up on his skin. No one could hurt him with Vaire and Aunt Cat and Walter there, so it was going to be all right.

“That’s fine, Robert,” Mr. Sangrom said, stretching his arms out so that his two long, white hands rested directly in front of Robert. “I’d like it if you would put your hands on top of mine, Robert,” he said. “You see, I am able to feel the magnetic currents in your body, and I will be able to understand your answers better this way.”

Robert put his hands on the backs of the long, white fleshed hands that rested before him like plaster casts. They felt soft and wrinkledy and cool, like a toad’s back. He heard Walter make some sort of coughing sound from his chair in the corner of the room, and looked at the window seat where he could see Vaire’s silhouette against the bow windows still gray with twilight. She was sitting sideways with her hands in her lap, and it made Robert feel brave to see her sitting there. He looked at Aunt Cat, but she was in a shadow and was only a tall, angular form like a black paper cutout sitting at the other end of the table.

“Now, Robert,” Mr. Sangrom began in a very steady voice that seemed to be speaking only to Robert so that only he could hear it. “You are very comfortable here with your family, and you are safe here, and it is getting late in the evening, so I would not be surprised if you were to get a little bit sleepy sitting here in this dark dining room.”

Robert felt that he was a little bit sleepy, even though his nose still hurt and he worried about Anne. He did feel safe here, and he was not afraid of the man with the polished hair, and so he listened to what the man was saying. It seemed to be making him more sleepy all the time, but he wasn’t going to sleep really. It was more like he was thinking himself into a dream, maybe letting the words make a dream for him, since that was easier, and then he was really dreaming, but he was still listening to the man’s words which seemed to be taking his hands and leading him along somewhere in the dark.

“You remember that morning when it rained, don’t you. And you remember coming downstairs that morning and the man that grabbed you and made you sit at the table, don’t you, and that there were bad men in the house who were going to hurt your Uncle Martin and Aunt Cat, and then Aunt Vaire was there too and the men were going to hurt her too. You remember it all, don’t you. And you didn’t like those bad men.”

Robert, listening, felt being led back into the farm kitchen, as if he could see the scene again, being grabbed by the chicken faced young man and sitting at the table. Now Vaire was there, holding his hand, and the tramp in the torn coat was making her red in the face, and his blood was pumping hard in all of his body. He wanted something very large and strong and vicious to come and help Vaire because the man was going to hurt her. It was coming, but he was afraid. It was coming and he wouldn’t stop it anymore. But if it came, he would not be able to stay, and Martin would be killed. Robert fought the power for a time, watching the red haired man hurting Vaire. And then all motion slowed as he felt his wanting torn in two directions. He would not let the bad man hurt Vaire. But he couldn’t let the great power come out because then Uncle Martin would get shot. So it all had to stop. But he couldn’t know about that. That didn’t happen yet. So it was all right and he couldn’t help it anyway. The power pushed against his will to stop everything. A voice said, “That’s it. Let it come! Let it come!” And time began to move again. The red haired man pushed Vaire against the table. Things moved faster now, his hesitation gone like a still movie frame lost into the past as the projector started again. Time was moving, and the red haired man was taking Vaire away to hurt her. Someone said, “She needs help! Robert! Help her! Help her!” And now the man is pushing Vaire past his chair. It is really happening. I have to save her. I will bite....

I wake at the shift, feeling disoriented and outside myself as I have never felt before, the room emerging into existence unexpectedly as if I had been wakened from hibernation too soon. Strange people in the room, dangerous people. I cannot be here. I push against the table, where is it? The kitchen of the farmhouse where Rusty, no, the dining room of the Woodson house, who is that dark man with his mouth stretched wide as if he will scream? I push back hard on the chair and forward on the table and think hard, Robert!

Aunt Cat and Vaire screamed in the same key harmonically, the older woman standing up so that her chair smacked backward onto the floor, at the other end of the room Vaire standing at the window seat with her hands over her mouth, Walter knocking his head back against the wall behind his chair and uttering some curse. Now the man with the polished hair pulls his hands out from under something on the table and screams falsetto as the table moves screeching across the polished floor, Robert’s chair crashes over with the weight of something much larger than he.

Mr. Sangrom fell as he pulled away from the table, hitting the sideboard hard enough to knock the ornamental lamp off onto the floor where it smashed and the electric filament went out in a blue glare, leaving the room dark.

“Get the lights!”

“Help! Help! Help me,” cried an unfamiliar voice from the floor beside the table. Mr. Sangrom was on the floor.

The lights went on as Walter got to the overhead light switch. The dining room flooded starkly with light. The two women stopped screaming. Mr. Sangrom lay tangled on the floor with his chair and the shattered lamp. He was wringing his hands tenderly. The two women stood at opposite ends of the table looking at Little Robert who stared across the table blankly as if still in a dream.

“My hands,” Mr. Sangrom said in a pitiful voice, holding his hands up for the women to see. “It has clawed me, the demon has clawed me,” he whined.

His hands were bloody with several long, deep scratches on the back of each one. Walter walked to the table. His face looked stunned as he took Mr. Sangrom’s hands and looked at them wonderingly.

“Jesus,” Walter said stupidly, holding both of Mr. Sangrom’s hands as if he and the other man were preparing to dance. “Look at this.”

Robert sat down weakly on the floor. He was just waking up. What had happened? I too am dazed, wondering if I shifted or not. I have been asleep, and I have shifted in my sleep? I have never done that, and I think it is impossible, but something has startled me into full awareness while Robert is still present. Robert felt light, as if he could drift away on a breath of air. He stood up, looking at the adults in the room. They were all looking at him with horror on their faces, and the dark haired man was waving his bloody hands at him.

“Now will you believe me?” Aunt Cat said, standing very straight at the end of the table. “Now that you’ve seen with you own eyes?”

“Look what the demon did to me,” Mr. Sangrom wailed, his smile turned upside down, his polished hair in sticky disarray over his forehead. “This is not work for a spiritualist,” he said in his high, hurt voice. “You need a wild animal trainer, Frank Buck, a cage.” He kept walking back and forth, holding his wounded hands up for everyone to see while Walter turned back and forth mechanically, like a tin, target in a shooting gallery.

“Here, Mr. Sangrom,” Vaire said, coming back from the kitchen where no one had seen her go. “Wrap your hands in this wet towel. I have some mercurochrome upstairs. I’ll get it.”

But Mr. Sangrom wrapped his hands and did not want to stay in the house. He walked unsteadily to the front door, making a wide detour around Little Robert who stood beside his fallen chair in his nightshirt which had a long tear down the front.

“No. No, thank you, Mrs. Woodson,” Mr. Sangrom said. “I am finished with this case. Mrs. N., I am afraid I am not the one you want. I am a spiritualist and a worker with hypnotism. I am not an exorcist, I am not a dealer with such things as I have seen and felt tonight. I am not accustomed to dealing with such physical, such awful things.” He continued to stand at the door, aware that Mrs. Nordmeyer’s car was his only hope for quick escape, and yet wanting to bolt away from the house as if it were on fire.

Robert was awake now, looking from Aunt Cat to Vaire to the discouraged Mr. Sangrom, now so different from the suave, dark man who had put his white hands on the table for Robert’s own hands to rest on. He felt sad, looking at these people, at beautiful Vaire who looked sideways at him but not directly, at Walter, whose head was cocked on one side with his face drooping as if he were still stunned and who did not look at Robert at all; and at Aunt Cat who looked him in the eyes with a hard, impenetrable stare, as if she were trying to hate him. He understood what had happened and also that he could not stay here, perhaps could not stay himself, understood that perhaps this was the same as his last night on earth, for only with these people could he be himself. And he had done something unforgivable to these people. He wanted to cry, but he could not. He stood there watching the people wake up to themselves, begin to be their own personalities again after such a shock as he had accidentally given them. Walter’s eyes came back into focus, and he began to speak in the old way, the confident, masculine way he had, of mass hypnosis, and how Sangrom had put them all under, and Aunt Cat began to shout at him, cursing as Robert had never heard her do, and Vaire speaking comforting words to Mr. Sangrom who was still standing in the doorway, wanting to get away and looking with fear at Robert. And Robert listened to all of this, his fingers feeling down the long rip in the front of his nightshirt, a rip he could not have made with both little hands, knowing how that rip had happened, and knowing it was not his fault. He began to be angry, very angry at these grownup people who would now do something terrible to him when he had only wanted to live among them and love them and learn about what it was to be a little boy growing up with other children, wanting to be a little boy and be loved. He grew angrier so that his face suffused with blood, and he thought about Mr. Duchamps getting hit with the hail and about Willie crying over him and the big shouldered man getting up in the icy grass and hitting Willie and knocking him down on the ground and Willie hurting Anne, and Martin’s face with the rain streaking his gray hair across his dying eyes, and Aunt Cat staring at him in horror, and the need he felt to come back to them all, to his beautiful Vaire and brave Anne, and how he wanted to love them if he knew how, if only he could know how to do it, and now he would not ever be able to do it, and he must run away in the night and hide again, and he thought about the dirty men under the railroad bridge and their sickness and cruelty, and about the dogs on the farm and the snakes in the chickenhouse and being in the cowbarn with Martin and the cats getting squirted with milk and now it was all gone, and about Rusty and the smell of him and his cold hatred that smelled like rotting fish, and remembered what it was like in the cold rain dancing with Willie and the sandwich game and Anne reading to him from the book about Happy, and now he had to run away again, be something else, someone else, forever, because they had made him do something he didn’t want to do, and that Mr. Sangrom, he was glad of the claws that had sprung out by accident, because there was no way now to get back into the family again, no way for them to know him, Little Robert, because they had pushed him into something else, no way for it not to be; there was no way to go back even to this afternoon and not go to the hideout and not want ever again to play the game with Willie, and not even come in to supper but run and hide under the porch so Mr. Sangrom would go away and it all would not have happened, no way for it to be anything but right now with all these suddenly strange people hating him, afraid of him, no way for it to be anything but now, NOW!

Little Robert screamed and ran directly at Mr. Sangrom who shrank back so Robert slipped past, through the screen door and down the porch steps into the warm darkness. As he ran down the black tar street toward the hanging light at the far corner, his tears making the light all glittery and bouncing, he heard a woman’s voice calling his name.