' 'Is that so?' Patrolman Cooley asked. 'Yeah. One of the neighbours called in, too. Guy named Castonmeyer. He thought it was Parkette himself. Maybe it was, Cooley. Maybe it was.' 'Sir?' 'Crazy with the heat,' Lieutenant Goodwin said gravely, and tapped his 'Schizofuckingphrenia.' 'Yes, sir,' Cooley said respectfully. 'Where's the rest of him?' one of the whitecoats asked. 'The birdbath,' Goodwin said. He looked profoundly up at the sky. 'Did you say the birdbath?' the whitecoat asked. 'Indeed I did,' Lieutenant Goodwin agreed. Patrolman Cooley looked at the birdbath and suddenly lost most of his tan. 'Sex maniac,' Lieutenant Goodwin said. 'Must have been.' 'Prints?' Cooley asked thickly. 'You might as well ask for footprints,' Goodwin said. He gestured at the newly cut grass. Patrolman Cooley made a strangled noise in his throat. Lieutenant Goodwin stuffed his hands into his pockets and rocked back on his heels. 'The world,' he said gravely, 'is full of nuts. Never forget that, Cooley, Schizos. Lab boys says somebody chased Parkette through his own living room with a lawnmower. Can you imagine that?' 'No sir,' Cooley said. Goodwin looked out over Harold Parkette's neatly manicured lawn. 'Well, like the man said when he saw the blackhaired Swede, it surely is a Norse of the different colour.' Goodwin strolled around the house and Cooley followed him. Behind them, the scent of newly mown grass hung pleasantly in the air. QUITTERS, INC. Morrison was waiting for someone who was hung up in the air traffic jam over Kennedy International when he saw a familiar face at the end of the bar and walked down. 'Jimmy? Jimmy McCann?' It was. A little heavier than when Morrison had seen him at the Atlanta Exhibition the year before, but otherwise he looked awesomely fit. In college he had been a thin, pallid chain smoker buried behind huge hornrimmed glasses. He had apparently switched to contact lenses. 'Dick Morrison?' 'Yeah. You look great.' He extended his hand and they shook. 'So do you,' McCann said, but Morrison knew it was a lie. He had been overworking, overeating, and smoking too much. 'What are you drinking?' 'Bourbon and bitters,' Morrison said. He hooked his feet around a bar stool and lighted a cigarette. 'Meeting someone, Jimmy?' 'No. Going to Miami for a conference. A heavy client. Bills six million. I'm supposed to hold his hand because we lost out on a big special next spring.' 'Are you still with Crager and Barton?' 'Executive veep now.' 'Fantastic! Congratulations! When did all this happen?' He tried to tell himself that the little worm of jealousy in his stomach was just acid indigestion. He pulled out a roll of antacid pills and crunched one in his mouth. 'Last August. Something happened that changed my life.' He looked speculatively at Morrison and sipped his drink. 'You might be interested.' My God, Morrison thought with an inner wince. Jimmy McCann's got religion. 'Sure,' he said, and gulped at his drink when it came. 'I wasn't in very good shape,' McCann said. 'Personal problems with Sharon, my.dad died  heart attack  and I'd developed this hacking cough. Bobby Crager dropped by my office one day and gave me a fatherly little pep talk. Do you remember what those are like?' 'Yeah.' He had worked at Crager and Barton for eighteen months before joining the Morton Agency. 'Get your butt in gear or get your butt out.' McCann laughed. 'You know it. Well, to put the capper on it, the doc told me I had an incipient ulcer. He told me to quit smoking.' McCann grimaced. 'Might as well tell me to quit breathing.' Morrison nodded in perfect understanding. Nonsmokers could afford to be smug. He looked at his own cigarette with distaste and stubbed it out, knowing he would be lighting another in five minutes. 'Did you quit?' He asked. 'Yes, I did. At first I didn't think I'd be able to  I was cheating like hell. Then I met a guy who told me about an outfit over on Fortysixth Street. Specialists. I said what do I have to lose and went over. I haven't smoked since.' Morrison's eyes widened. 'What did they do? Fill you full of some drug?' 'No.' He had taken out his wallet and was rummaging through it. 'Here it is. I knew I had one kicking around.' He laid a plain white business card on the bar between them. QUITTERS, INC. Stop Going Up in Smoke! 237 East 46th Street Treatments by Appointment 'Keep it, if you want,' McCann said. 'They'll cure you. Guaranteed.' 'How?' 'I can't tell you,' McCann said. 'Huh? Why not?' 'It's part of the contract they make you sign. Anyway, they tell you how it works when they interview you.' 'You signed a contract?' McCann nodded. 'And on the basis of that ' 'Yep.' He smiled at Morrison, who thought Well, it's happened. Jim McCann has joined the smug bastards. 'Why the great secrecy if this outfit is so fantastic? How come I've never seen any spots on TV, billboards, magazine ads ' 'They get all the clients they can handle by word of mouth.' 'You're an advertising man, Jimmy. You can't believe that.' 'I do,' McCann said. 'They have a ninetyeight per cent cure rate.' 'Wait a second,' Morrison said. He motioned for another drink and lit a cigarette. 'Do these guys strap you down and make you smoke until you throw up?' 'No.' 'Give you something so that you get sick every time you light ' 'No, it's nothing like that. Go and see for yourself.' He gestured at Morrison's cigarette. 'You don't really like that, do you?' 'Nooo, but ' 'Stopping really changed things for me,' McCann said. 'I don't suppose it's the same for everyone, but with me it was just like dominoes falling over. I felt better and my relationship with Sharon improved. I had more energy, and my job performance picked up.' 'Look, you've got my curiosity aroused. Can't you just ' 'I'm sorry, Dick. I really can't talk about it.' His voice was firm. 'Did you put on any weight?' For a moment he thought Jimmy McCann looked almost grim. 'Yes. A little too much, in fact. But I took it off again. I'm about right now. I was skinny before.' 'Flight 206 now boarding at Gate 9,' the loudspeaker announced. 'That's me,' McCann said, getting up. He tossed a five on the bar. 'Have another, if you like. And think about what I said, Dick. Really.' And then he was gone, making his way through the crowd to the escalators. Morrison picked up the card, looked at it thoughtfully, then tucked it away in his wallet and forgot it. The card fell out of his wallet and on to another bar a month later. He had left the office early and had come here to drink the afternoon away. Things had not been going so well at the Morton Agency. In fact, things were bloody horrible. He gave Henry a ten to pay for his drink, then picked up the small card and reread it  237 East Fortysixth Street was only two blocks over; it was a cool, sunny October day outside, and maybe, just for chuckles When Henry brought his change, he finished his drink and then went for a walk. Quitters, Inc., was in a new building where the monthly rent on office space was probably close to Morrison's yearly salary. From the directory in the lobby, it looked to him like their offices took up one whole floor, and that spelled money. Lots of it. He took the elevator up and stepped off into a lushly carpeted foyer and from there into a gracefully appointed reception room with a wide window that looked out on the scurrying bugs below. Three men and one woman sat in the chairs along the walls, reading magazines. Business types, all of them. Morrison went to the desk. 'A friend gave me this,' he said, passing the card to the receptionist. 'I guess you'd say he's an alumnus.' She smiled and rolled a form into her typewriter. 'What is your name, sir?' 'Richard Morrison.' Clackclacketyclack. But very muted clacks; the typewriter was an IBM. 'Your address?' 'Twentynine Maple Lane, Clinton, New York.' 'Married?' 'Yes.' 'Children?' 'One.' He thought of Alvin and frowned slightly. 'One' was the wrong word. 'A half' might be better. His son was mentally retarded and lived at a special school in New Jersey. 'Who recommended us to you, Mr Morrison?' 'An old school friend. James McCann.' 'Very good. Will you have a seat? It's been a very busy day.' 'All right.' He sat between the woman, who was wearing a severe blue suit, and a young executive type wearing a herringbone jacket and modish sideburns. He took out his pack of cigarettes, looked around, and saw there were no ashtrays. He put the pack away again. That was all right. He would see this little game through and then light up while he was leaving. He might even tap some ashes on their maroon shag rug if they made him wait long enough. He picked up a copy of Time and began to leaf through it. He was called a quarter of an hour later, after the woman in the blue suit. His nicotine centre was speaking quite loudly now. A man who had come in after him took out a cigarette case, snapped it open, saw there were no ashtrays, and put it away looking a little guilty, Morrison thought. It made him feel better. At last the receptionist gave him a sunny smile and said, 'Go right in, Mr Morrison.' Morrison walked through the door beyond her desk and found himself in an indirectly lit hallway. A heavyset man with white hair that looked phoney shook his hand, smiled affably, and said, 'Follow me, Mr Morrison.' He led Morrison past a number of closed, unmarked doors and then opened one of them about halfway down the hall with a key. Beyond the door was an austere little room walled with drilled white cork panels. The only furnishings were a desk with a chair on either side. There was what appeared to be a small oblong window in the wall behind the desk, but it was covered with a short green curtain. There was a picture on the wall to Morrison's left a tall man with irongrey hair. He was holding a sheet of paper in one hand. He looked vaguely familiar. 'I'm Vic Donatti,' the heavyset man said. 'If you decide to go ahead with our programme, I'll be in charge of your case.' 'Pleased to know you,' Morrison said. He wanted a cigarette very badly. 'Have a seat.' Donatti put the receptionist's form on the desk, and then drew another form from the desk drawer. He looked directly into Morrison's eyes. 'Do you want to quit smoking?' Morrison cleared his throat, crossed his legs, and tried to think of a way to equivocate. He couldn't. 'Yes,' he said. 'Will you sign this?' He gave Morrison the form. He scanned it quickly. The undersigned agrees not to divulge the methods or techniques or et cetera, et cetera. 'Sure,' he said, and Donatti put a pen in his hand. He scratched his name, and Donatti signed below it. A moment later the paper disappeared back into the desk drawer. Well, he thought ironically, I've taken the pledge. He had taken it before. Once it had lasted for two whole days. 'Good,' Donatti said. 'We don't bother with propaganda here, Mr Morrison. Questions of health or expense or social grace. We have no interest in why you want to stop smoking. We are pragmatists.' 'Good,' Morrison said blankly. 'We employ no drugs. We employ no Dale Carnegie people to sermonize you. We recommend no special diet. And we accept no payment until you have stopped smoking for one year.' 'My God,' Morrison said. 'Mr McCann didn't tell you that?' 'No.' 'How is Mr McCann, by the way? Is he well?' 'He's fine.' 'Wonderful. Excellent. Now just a few questions, Mr Morrison. These are somewhat personal, but I assure you that your answers will be held in strictest confidence.' 'Yes?' Morrison asked noncommittally. 'What is your wife's name?' 'Lucinda Morrison. Her maiden name was Ramsey.' 'Do you love her?' Morrison looked up sharply, but Donatti was looking at him blandly. 'Yes, of course,' he said. 'Have you ever had marital problems? A separation, perhaps?' 'What has that got to do with kicking the habit?' Morrison asked. He sounded a little angrier than he had intended, but he wanted  hell, he needed  a cigarette. 'A great deal,' Donatti said. 'Just bear with me.' 'No. Nothing like that.' Although things had been a little tense just lately. 'You just have the one child?' 'Yes. Alvin. He's in a private school.' 'And which school is it?' 'That,' Morrison said grimly, 'I'm not going to tell you.' 'All right,' Donatti said agreeably. He smiled disarmingly at Morrison. 'All your qestions will be answered tomorrow at your first treatment.' 'How nice,' Morrison said, and stood. 'One final question,' Donatti said. 'You haven't had a cigarette for over an hour. How do you feel?' 'Fine,' Morrison lied. 'Just fine.' 'Good for you!' Donatti exclaimed. He stepped around the desk and opened the door. 'Enjoy them tonight. After tomorrow, you'll never smoke again.' 'Is that right?' 'Mr Morrison,' Donatti said solemnly, 'we guarantee it.' He was sitting in the outer office of Quitters, Inc.,the next day promptly at three. He had spent most of the day swinging between skipping the appointment the receptionist had made for him on the way out and going in a spirit of mulish cooperation  Throw your best pitch at me, buster. In the end, something Jimmy McCann had said convinced him to keep the appointment  It changed my whole fife. God knew his own life could do with some changing. And then there was his own curiosity. Before going up in the elevator, he smoked a cigarette down to the filter. Too damn bad if it's the last one, he thought. It tasted horrible. The wait in the outer office was shorter this time. When the receptionist told him to go in, Donatti was waiting. He offered his hand and smiled, and to Morrison the smile looked almost predatory. He began to feel a little tense, and that made him wat a cigarette. 'Come with me,' Donatti said, and led the way down to the small room. He sat behind the desk again, and Morrison took the other chair. 'I'm very glad you came,' Donatti said. 'A great many prospective clients never show up again after the initial interview. They discover they don't want to quit as badly as they thought. It's going to be a pleasure to work with you on this.' 'When does the treatment start?' Hypnosis, he was thinking. It must be hypnosis. 'Oh, it already has. It started when we shook hands in the hall. Do you have cigarettes with you, Mr Morrison?' 'Yes.' 'May I have them, please?' Shrugging, Morrison handed Donatti his pack. There were only two or three left in it, anyway. Donatti put the pack on the desk. Then, smiling into Morrison's eyes, he curled his right hand into a fist and began to hammer it down on the pack of cigarettes, which twisted and flattened. A broken cigarette end flew out. Tobacco crumbs spilled. The sound of Donatti's fist was very loud in the closed room. The smile remained on his face in spite of the force of the blows, and Morrison was chilled by it. Probably just the effect they want to inspire, he thought. At last Donatti ceased pounding. He picked up the pack, a twisted and battered ruin. 'You wouldn't believe the pleasure that gives me,' he said, and dropped the pack into the wastebasket. 'Even after three years in the business, it still pleases me.' 'As a treatment, it leaves something to be desired. Morrison said mildly. 'There's a newsstand in the lobby of this very building. And they sell all brands.' 'As you say,' Donatti said. He folded his hands. 'Your son, Alvin Dawes Morrison, is in the Paterson School for Handicapped Children. Born with cranial brain damage. Tested IQ of 46. Not quite in the educable retarded category. Your wife , 'How did you find that out?' Morrison barked. He was startled and angry. 'You've got no goddamn right to go poking around my ' 'We know a lot about you,' Donatti said smoothly. 'But, as I said, it will all be held in strictest confidence.' 'I'm getting out of here,' Morrison said thinly. He stood up. 'Stay a bit longer.' Morrison looked at him closely. Donatti wasn't upset. In fact, he looked a little amused. The face of a man who has seen this reaction scores of times  maybe hundreds. 'All right. But it better be good.' 'Oh, it is.' Donatti leaned back. 'I told you we were pragmatists here. As pragmatists, we have to start by realizing how difficult it is to cure an addiction to tobacco. The relapse rate is almost eightfive per cent. The relapse rate for heroin addicts is lower than that. It is an extraordinary problem. Extraordinary.' Morrison glanced into the wastebasket. One of the cigarettes, although twisted, still looked smokeable. Donatti laughed goodnaturedly, reached into the wastebasket, and broke it between his fingers. 'State legislatures sometimes hear a request that the prison systems do away with the weekly cigarette ration. Such proposals are invariably defeated. In a few cases where they have passed, there have been fierce prison riots. Riots, Mr Morrison. Imagine it.' 'I,' Morrison said, 'am not surprised.' 'But consider the implications. When you put a man in prison you take away any normal sex life, you take away his liquor, his politics, his freedom of movement. No riots  or few in comparison to the number of prisons. But when you take away his cigarettes  wham! bam!' He slammed his fist on the desk for emphasis. 'During World War I, when no one on the German home front could get cigarettes, the sight of German aristocrats picking butts out of the gutter was a common one. During World War II, many American women turned to pipes when they were unable to obtain cigarettes. A fascinating problem for the true pragmatist, Mr Morrison.' 'Could we get to the treatment?' 'Momentarily. Step over here, please.' Donatti had risen and was standing by the green curtains Morrison had noticed yesterday. Donatti drew the curtains, discovering a rectangular window that looked into a bare room. No, not quite bare. There was a rabbit on the floor, eating pellets out of a dish. 'Pretty bunny,' Morrison commented. 'Indeed. Watch him.' Donatti pressed a button by the windowsill. The rabbit stopped eating and began to hop about crazily. It seemed to leap higher each time its feet struck the floor. Its fur stood out spikily in all directions. Its eyes were wild. 'Stop that! You're electrocuting him!' Donatti released the button. 'Far from it. There's a very lowyield charge in the floor. Watch the rabbit, Mr Morrison!' The rabbit was crouched about ten feet away from the dish of pellets. His nose wriggled. All at once he hopped away into a corner. 'If the rabbit gets a jolt often enough while he's eating,' Donatti said, 'he makes the association very quickly. Eating causes pain. Therefore, he won't eat. A few more shocks, and the rabbit will starve to death in front of his food. It's called aversion training.' Light dawned in Morrison's head. 'No, thanks.' He started for the door. 'Wait, please, Morrison.' Morrison didn't pause. He grasped the doorknob. and felt it slip solidly through his hand. 'Unlock this.' 'Mr Morrison, if you'll just sit down ' 'Unlock this door or I'll have the cops on you before you can say Marlboro Man.' 'Sit down.' The voice was as cold as shaved ice. Morrison looked at Donatti. His brown eyes were muddy and frightening. My God, he thought, I'm locked in here with a psycho. He licked his lips. He wanted a cigarette more than he ever had in his life. 'Let me explain the treatment in more detail,' Donatti said. 'You don't understand,' Morrison said with counterfeit patience. 'I don't want the treatment. I've decided against it.' 'No, Mr Morrison. You're the one who doesn't understand. You don't have any choice. When I told you the treatment had already begun, I was speaking the literal truth. I would have thought you'd tipped to that by now.' 'You're crazy,' Morrison said wonderingly. 'No. Only a pragmatist. Let me tell you all about the treatment.' 'Sure,' Morrison said. 'As long as you understand that as soon as I get out of here I'm going to buy five packs of cigarettes and smoke them all on the way to the police station.' He suddenly realized he was biting his thumbnail, sucking on it, and made himself stop. 'As you wish. But I think you'll change your mind when you see the whole picture.' Morrison said nothing. He sat down again and folded his hands. 'For the first month of the treatment, our operatives will have you under constant supervision,' Donatti said. 'You'll be able to spot some of them. Not all. But they'll always be with you. Always. If they see you smoke a cigarette, I get a call.' 'And I suppose you bring me here and do the old rabbit trick,' Morrison said. He tried to sound cold and sarcastic, but he suddenly felt horribly frightened. This was a nightmare. 'Oh, no,' Donatti said. 'Your wife gets the rabbit trick, not you.' Morrison looked at him dumbly. Donatti smiled. 'You,' he said, 'get to watch.' After Donatti let him out, Morrison walked for over two hours in a complete daze. It was another fine day, but he didn't notice. The monstrousness of Donatti's smiling face blotted out all else. 'You see,' he had said, 'a pragmatic problem demands pragmatic solutions. You must realize we have your best interests at heart. Quitters, Inc., according to Donatti, was a sort of foundation  a nonprofit organization begun by the man in the wall portrait. The gentleman had been extremely successful in several family businesses  including slot machines, massage parlours, numbers, and a brisk (although clandestine) trade between New York and Turkey. Mort 'ThreeFingers' Minelli had been a heavy smoker  up in the threepackaday range. The paper he was holding in the picture was a doctor's diagnosis lung cancer. Mort had died in 1970, after endowing Quitters, Inc., with family funds. 'We try to keep as close to breaking even as possible,' Donatti had said. 'But we're more interested in helping our fellow man. And of course, it's a great tax angle.' The treatment was chillingly simple. A first offence and Cindy would be brought to what Donatti called 'the rabbit room'. A second offence, and Morrison would get the dose. On a third offence, both of them would be brought in together. A fourth offence would show grave cooperation problems and would require sterner measures. An operative would be sent to Alvin's school to work the boy over. 'Imagine,' Donatti said, smiling, 'how horrible it will be for the boy. He wouldn't understand it even jf someone explained. He'll only know someone is hurting him because Daddy was bad. He'll be very frightened.' 'You bastard,' Morrison said helplessly. He felt close to tears. 'You dirty, filthy bastard.' 'Don't misunderstand,' Donatti said. He was smiling sympathetically. 'I'm sure it won't happen. Forty per cent of our clients never have to be disciplined at all  and only ten per cent have more than three falls from grace. Those are reassuring figures, aren't they?' Morrison didn't find them reassuring. He found them terrifying. 'Of course, if you transgress a fifth time ' 'What do you mean?' Donatti beamed. 'The room for you and your wife, a second beating for your son, and a beating for your wife.' Morrison, driven beyond the point of rational consideration, lunged over the desk at Donatti. Donatti moved with amazing speed for a man who had apparently been completely relaxed. He shoved the chair backwards and drove both of his feet over the desk and into Morrison's belly. Gagging and coughing, Morrison staggered backward. 'Sit down, Mr Morrison,' Donatti said benignly. 'Let's talk this over like rational men.' When he could get his breath, Morrison did as he was told. Nightmares had to end some time, didn't they? Quitters, Inc., Donatti had explained further, operated on a tenstep punishment scale. Steps six, seven, and eight consisted of further trips to the rabbit room (and increased voltage) and more serious beatings. The ninth step would be the breaking of his son's arms. 'And the tenth?' Morrison asked, his mouth dry. Donatti shook his head sadly. 'Then we give up, Mr Morrison. You become part of the unregenerate two per cent.' 'You really give up?' 'In a manner of speaking.' He opened one of the desk drawers and laid a silenced.45 on the desk. He smiled into Morrison's eyes. 'But even the unregenerate two per cent never smoke again. We guarantee it.' The Friday Night Movie was Bullitt, one of Cindy's favourites, but after an hour of Morrison's mutterings and fidgetings, her concentration was broken. 'What's the matter with you?' she asked during station identification. 'Nothing everything,' he growled. 'I'm giving up smoking.' She laughed. 'Since when? Five minutes ago?' 'Since three o'clock this afternoon.' 'You really haven't had a cigarette since then?' 'No,' he said, and began to gnaw his thumbnail. It was ragged, down to the quick. 'That's wonderful! What ever made you decide to quit?' 'You,' he said. 'And and Alvin.' Her eyes widened, and when the movie came back on, she didn't notice. Dick rarely mentioned their retarded son. She came over, looked at the empty ashtray by his right hand, and then into his eyes 'Are you really trying to quit, Dick?' 'Really.' And if I go to the cops, he added mentally, the local goon squad will be around to rearrange your face, Cindy. 'I'm glad. Even if you don't make it, we both thank you for the thought, Dick.' 'Oh, I think I'll make it,' he said, thinking of the muddy, homicidal look that had come into Donatti's eyes when he kicked him in the stomach. He slept badly that night, dozing in and out of sleep. Around three o'clock he woke up completely. His craving for a cigarette was like a lowgrade fever. He went downstairs and to his study. The room was in the middle of the house. No windows. He slid open the top drawer of his desk and looked in, fascinated by the cigarette box. He looked around and licked his lips. Constant supervision during the first month, Donatti had said. Eighteen hours a day during the next two  but he would never know which eighteen. During the fourth month, the month when most clients backslid, the 'service' would return to twentyfour hours a day. Then twelve hours of broken surveillance each day for the rest of the year. After that? Random surveillance for the rest of the client's life. For the rest of his life. 'We may audit you every other month,' Donatti said. 'Or every other day. Or constantly for one week two years from now. The point is, you won't know. If you smoke, you'll be gambling with loaded dice. Are they watching? Are they picking up my wife or sending a man after my son right now? Beautiful, isn't it? And if you do sneak a smoke, it'll taste awful. It will taste like your son's blood.' But they couldn't be watching now, in the dead of night, in his own study. The house was gravequiet. He looked at the cigarettes in the box for almost two minutes, unable to tear his gaze away. Then he went to the study door, peered out into the empty hall, and went back to look at the cigarettes some more. A horrible picture came his life stretching before him and not a cigarette to be found. How in the name of God was he ever going to be able to make another tough presentation to a wary client, without that cigarette burning nonchalantly between his fingers as he approached the charts and layouts? How would he be able to endure Cindy's endless garden shows without a cigarette? How could he even get up in the morning and face the day without a cigarette to smoke as he drank his coffee and read the paper? He cursed himself for getting into this. He cursed Donatti. And most of all, he cursed Jimmy McCann. How could he have done it? The son of a bitch had known. His hands trembled in their desire to get hold of Jimmy Judas McCann. Stealthily, he glanced around the study again. He reached into the drawer and brought out a cigarette. He caressed it, fondled it. What was that old slogan? So round, so firm, so fully packed. Truer words had never been spoken. He put the cigarette in his mouth and then paused, cocking his head. Had there been the slightest noise from the closet? A faint shifting? Surely not. But Another mental image  that rabbit hopping crazily in the grip of electricity. The thought of Cindy in that room He listened desperately and heard nothing. He told himself that all he had to do was go to the closet door and yank it open. But he was too afraid of what he might find. He went back to bed but didn't sleep for a long time. In spite of how lousy he felt in the morning, breakfast tasted good. After a moment's hesitation, he followed his customary bowl of cornflakes with scrambled eggs. He was grumpily washing out the pan when Cindy came downstairs in her robe. 'Richard Morrison! You haven't eaten an egg for breakfast since Hector was a pup. Morrison grunted. He considered since Hector was a pup to be one of Cindy's stupider sayings, on a par with I should smile and kiss a pig. 'Have you smoked yet?' she asked, pouring orange juice. 'No.' 'You'll be back on them by noon,' she proclaimed airily. 'Lot of goddamn help you are!' he rasped, rounding on her. 'You and anyone else who doesn't smoke, you all think ah, never mind.' He expected her to be angry, but she was looking at him F with something like wonder. 'You're really serious,' she said. 'You really are.' 'You bet I am.' You'll never know how serious. I hope. 'Poor baby,' she said, going to him. 'You look like death warmed over. But I'm very proud.' Morrison held her tightly. Scenes from the life of Richard Morrison, OctoberNovember Morrison and a crony from Larkin Studios at Jack Dempsey's bar. Crony offers a cigarette. Morrison grips his glass a little more tightly and says I'm quitting. Crony laughs and says I give you a week. Morrison waiting for the morning train, looking over the top of the Times at a young man in a blue suit. He sees the young man almost every morning now, and sometimes at other places. At Onde's, where he is meeting a client. Looking at 45s in Sam Goody's, where Morrison is looking for a Sam Cooke album. Once in a foursome behind Morrison's group at the local golf course. Morrison getting drunk at a party, wanting a cigarette but not quite drunk enough to take one. Morrison visiting his son, bringing him a large ball that squeaked when you squeezed it. His son's slobbering, delighted kiss. Somehow not as repulsive as before. Hugging his son tightly, realizing what Donatti and his colleagues had so cynically realized before him love is the most pernicious drug of all. Let the romantics debate its existence. Pragmatists accept it and use it. Morrison losing the physical compulsion to smoke little by little, but never quite losing the psychological craving, or the need to have something in his mouth  cough drops, Life Savers, a toothpick. Poor substitutes, all of them. And finally, Morrison hung up in a colossal traffic jam in the Midtown Tunnel. Darkness. Horns blaring. Air stinking. Traffic hopelessly snarled. And suddenly, thumbing open the glove compartment and seeing the halfopen pack of cigarettes in there. He looked at them for a moment, then snatched one and lit it with the dashboard lighter. If anything happens, it's Cindy's fault, he told himself defiantly. I told her to get rid of all the damn cigarettes. The first drag made him cough smoke out furiously. The second made his eyes water. The third made him feel lightheaded and swoony. It tastes awful, he thought. And on the heels of that My God, what am I doing? Horns blatted impatiently behind him. Ahead, the traffic had begun to move again. He stubbed the cigarette out in the ashtray, opened both front windows, opened the vents, and then fanned the air helplessly like a kid who has just flushed his first butt down the john. He joined the traffic flow jerkily and. drove home. 'Cindy?' he called. 'I'm home.' No answer. 'Cindy? Where are you, hon?' The phone rang, and he pounced on it. 'Hello? Cindy?' 'Hello, Mr Morrison,' Donatti said. He sounded pleasantly brisk and businesslike. 'It seems we have a small business matter to attend to. Would five o'clock be convenient?' 'Have you got my wife?' 'Yes, indeed.


' Donatti chuckled indulgently. 'Look, let her go,' Morrison babbled. 'It won't happen again. It was a slip, just a slip, that's all. I only had three drags and for God's sake it didn't even taste good!' 'That's a shame. I'll count on you for five then, shall I?' 'Please,' Morrison said, close to tears. 'Please He was speaking to a dead line. At 5p.m. the reception room was empty except for the secretary, who gave him a twinkly smile that ignored Morrison's pallor and dishevelled appearance. 'Mr Donatti?' she said into the intercom. 'Mr Morrison to see you.' She nodded to Morrison. 'Go right in.' Donatti was waiting outside the unmarked room with a man who was wearing a SMILE sweatshirt and carrying a.38. He was built like an ape. 'Listen,' Morrison said to Donatti. 'We can work something out, can't we? I'll pay you. I'll' 'Shaddap,' the man in the SMILE sweatshirt said. 'It's good to see you,' Donatti said. 'Sorry it has to be under such adverse circumstances. Will you come with me? We'll make this as brief as possible. I can assure you your wife won't be hurt this time.' Morrison tensed himself to leap at Donatti. 'Come, come,' Donatti said, looking annoyed. 'If you do that, Junk here is going to pistolwhip you and your wife is still going to get it. Now where's the percentage in that?' 'I hope you rot in hell,' he told Donatti. Donatti sighed. 'If I had a nickel for every time someone expressed a similar sentiment, I could retire. Let it be a lesson to you, Mr Morrison. When a romantic tries to do a good thing and fails, they give him a medal. When a pragmatist succeeds, they wish him in hell. Shall we go?' Junk motioned with the pistol. Morrison preceded them into the room. He felt numb. The small green curtain had been pulled. Junk prodded him with the gun. This is what being a witness at the gas chamber must have been like, he thought. He looked in. Cindy was there, looking around bewilderedly. 'Cindy!' Morrison called miserably. 'Cindy, they ' 'She can't hear or see you,' Donatti said. 'Oneway glass. Well, let's get it over with. It really was a very small slip. I believe thirty seconds should be enough. Junk?' Junk pressed the button with one hand and kept the pistol jammed firmly into Morrison's back with the other. It was the longest thirty seconds of his life. When it was over, Donatti put a hand on Morrison's shoulder and said, 'Are you going to throw up?' 'No,' Morrison said weakly. His forehead was against the glass. His legs were jelly. 'I don't think so.' He turned around and saw that Junk was gone. 'Come with me,' Donatti said. 'Where?' Morrison asked apathetically. 'I think you have a few things to explain, don't you?' 'How can I face her? How can I tell her that I I.. 'I think you're going to be surprised,' Donatti said. The room was empty except for a sofa. Cindy was on it, sobbing helplessly. 'Cindy?' he said gently. She looked up, her eyes magnified by tears. 'Dick?' she whispered. 'Dick? Oh Oh God ' He held her tightly. 'Two men,' she said against his chest. 'In the house and at first I thought they were burglars and then I thought they were going to rape me and then they took me someplace with a blindfold over my eyes and and oh it was hhorrible ' 'Shhh,' he said. 'Shhh.' 'But why?' she asked, looking up at him. 'Why would they ' 'Because of me,' he said 'I have to tell you a story, Cindy ' When he had finished he was silent a moment and then said, 'I suppose you hate me. I wouldn't blame you.' He was looking at the floor, and she took his face in both hands and turned it to hers. 'No,' she said. 'I don't hate you.' He looked at her in mute surprise. 'It was worth it,' she said. 'God bless these people. They've let you out of prison.' 'Do you mean that?' 'Yes,' she said, and kissed him. 'Can we go home now? I feel much better. Ever so much.' The phone rang one evening a week later, and when Morrison recognized Donatti's voice, he said, 'Your boys have got it wrong. I haven't even been near a cigarette.' 'We know that. We have a final matter to talk over. Can you stop by tomorrow afternoon?' 'Is it , 'No, nothing serious. Bookkeeping really. By the way, congratulations on your promotion.' 'How did you know about that?' 'We're keeping tabs,' Donatti said noncommittally, and hungup. When they entered the small room, Donatti said, 'Don't look so nervous. No one's going to bite you. Step over here, please.' Morrison saw an ordinary bathroom scale. 'Listen, I've gained a little weight, but ' 'Yes, seventythree per cent of our clients do. Step up, please.' Morrison did, and tipped the scales at one seventyfour. 'Okay, fine. You can step off. How tall are you, Mr Morrison?' 'Fiveeleven.' 'Okay, let's see.' He pulled a small card laminated in plastic from his breast pocket. 'Well, that's not too bad. I'm going to write you a prescrip for some highly illegal diet pills. Use them sparingly and according to directions. And I'm going to set your maximum weight at let's see.. He consulted the card again. 'One eightytwo, how does that sound? And since this is December first, I'll expect you the first of every month for a weighin. No problem if you can't make it, as long as you call in advance.' 'And what happens if I go over oneeightytwo?' Donatti smiled. 'We'll send someone out to your house to cut off your wife's little finger,' he said. 'You can leave through this door, Mr Morrison. Have a nice day.' Eight months later Morrison runs into the crony from the Larkin Studios at Dempsey's bar. Morrison is down to what Cindy proudly calls his fighting weight one sixtyseven. He works out three times a week and looks as fit as whipcord. The crony from Larkin, by comparison, looks like something the cat dragged in. Crony Lord, how'd you ever stop? I'm locked into this damn habit tighter than Tillie. The crony stubs his cigarette out with real revulsion and drains his scotch. Morrison looks at him speculatively and then takes a small white business card out of his wallet. He puts it on the bar between them. You know, he says, these guys changed my life. Twelve months later Morrison receives a bill in the mail. The bill says QUITTERS,INC. 237 East 46th Street New York, N.Y. 10017 1 Treatment 2500.00 Counsellor (Victor Donatti) 2500.00 Electricity .50 TOTAL (Please pay this amount) 5000.50 Those sons of bitches! he explodes. They charged me for the electricity they used to to Just pay it, she says, and kisses him. Twenty months later Quite by accident, Morrison and his wife meet the Jimmy McCanns at the Helen Hayes Theatre. Introductions are made all around. Jimmy looks as good, if not better than he did on that day in the airport terminal so long ago. Morrison has never met his wife. She is pretty in the radiant way plain girls sometimes have when they are very, very happy. She offers her hand and Morrison shakes it. There is something odd about her grip, and halfway through the second act, he realizes what it was. The little finger on her right hand is missing. I KNOW WHAT YOU NEED 'I know what you need.' Elizabeth looked up from her sociology text, startled, and saw a rather nondescript young man in a green fatigue jacket. For a moment she thought he looked familiar, as if she had known him before; the feeling was close to deja vu. Then it was gone. He was about her height, skinny, and. twitchy. That was the word. He wasn't moving, but he seemed to be twitching inside his skin, just out of sight. His hair was black and unkempt. He wore thick hornrimmed glasses that magnified his dark brown eyes, and the lenses looked dirty. No, she was quite sure she had never seen him before. 'You know,' she said, 'I doubt that.' 'You need a strawberry doubledip cone. Right?' She blinked at him, frankly startled. Somewhere in the back of her mind she had been thinking about breaking for an ice cream. She was studying for finals in one of the thirdfloor carrels of the Student Union, and there was still a woefully long way to go. 'Right?' he persisted, and smiled. It transformed his face from something overintense and nearly ugly into something else that was oddly appealing. The word 'cute' occurred to her, and that wasn't a good word to afflict a boy with, but this one was when he smiled. She smiled back before she could roadblock it behind her lips. This she didn't need, to have to waste time brushing off some weirdo who had decided to pick the worst time of the year to try to make an impression. She still had sixteen chapters of Introduction to Sociology to wade through. 'No thanks,' she said. 'Come on, if you hit them any harder you'll give yourself a headache. You've been at it two hours without a break.' 'How would you know that?' 'I've been watching you,' he said promptly, but this time his gamin grin was lost on her. She already had a headache. 'Well, you can stop,' she said, more sharply than she had intended. 'I don't like people staring at me.' 'I'm sorry.' She felt a little sorry for him, the way she sometimes felt sorry for stray dogs. He seemed to float in the green fatigue jacket and yes, he had on mismatched socks. One black, one brown. She felt herself getting ready to smile again and held it back. 'I've got these finals,' she said gently. 'Sure,' he said. 'Okay.' She looked after him for a moment pensively. Then she lowered her gaze to her book, but an afterimage of the encounter remained strawberry doubledip. When she got back to the dorm it was 11.15p.m. and Alice was stretched out on her bed, listening to Neil Diamond and reading The Story of 0. 'I didn't know they assigned that in Eh17,' Elizabeth said. Alice sat up. 'Broadening my horizons, darling. Spreading my intellectual winds. Raising my Liz?' 'Hmmm?' 'Did you hear what I said?' 'No, sorry, I' 'You look like somebody conked you one, kid.' 'I met a guy tonight. Sort of a funny guy, at that.' 'Oh? He must be something if he can separate the great Rogan from her beloved texts.' 'His name is Edward Jackson Hamner. Junior, no less. Short. Skinny. Looks like he washed his hair around Washington's birthday. Oh, and mismatched socks. One black, one brown.' 'I thought you were more the fraternity type.' 'It's nothing like that, Alice. I was studying at the Union on the third floor the Think Tank  and he invited me down to the Grinder for an icecream cone. I told him no and he sort of slunk off. But once he started me thinking about icecream, I couldn't stop. I'd just decided to give up and take a break and there he was, holding a big, dnppy strawberry, doubledip in each hand.' 'I tremble to hear the denouement.' Elizabeth snorted. 'Well, I couldn't really say no. So he sat down, and it turns out he had sociology with Professor Branner last year.' 'Will wonders never cease, lawd a mercy. Goshen to Christmas , 'Listen, this is really amazing. You know the way I've been sweating that course?' 'Yes. You talk about it in your sleep, practically.' 'I've got a seventyeight average. I've got to have an eighty to keep my scholarship, and that means I need at least an eightyfour on the final. Well, this Ed Hamner says Branner uses almost the same final every year. And Ed's eidetic.' 'You mean he's got a whatzit photographic memory?' 'Yes. Look at this.' She opened her sociology book and took out three sheets of notebook paper covered with writing. Alice took them. 'This looks like multiplechoice stuff.' 'It is. Ed says it's Branner's last year's final word for word.' Alice said flatly, 'I don't believe it.' 'But it covers all the material!' 'Still don't believe it.' She handed the sheets back. 'Just because this spook ' 'He isn't a spook. Don't call him that.' 'Okay. This little guy hasn't got you bamboozled into just memorizing this and not studying at all, has he?' 'Of course not,' she said uneasily. 'And even if this is like the exam, do you think it's exactly ethical?' Anger surprised her and ran away with her tongue before she could hold it. 'That's great for you, sure. Dean's List every semester and your folks paying your way. You aren't Hey, I'm sorry. There was no call for that.' Alice shrugged and opened 0 again, her face carefully neutral. 'No, you're right. Not my business. But why don't you study the book, too just to be safe?' 'Of course I will.' But mostly she studied the exam notes provided by Edward Jackson Hamner, Jr. When she came out of the lecture hall after the exam he was sitting in the lobby, floating in his green army fatigue coat. He smiled tentatively at her and stood up. 'How'd it go?' Impulsively, she kissed his cheek. She could not remember such a blessed feeling of relief. 'I think I aced it., 'Really? That's great. Like a burger?' 'Love one,' she said absently. Her mind was still on the exam. It was the one Ed had given her, almost word for word, and she had sailed through. Over hamburgers, she asked him how his own finals were going. 'Don't have any. I'm in Honours, and you don't take them unless you want to. I was doing okay, so I didn't.' 'Then why are you still here?' 'I had to see how you did, didn't I?' 'Ed, you didn't. That's sweet, but , The naked look in his eyes troubled her. She had seen it before. She was a pretty girl. 'Yes,' he said softly. 'Yes, I did.' 'Ed, I'm grateful. I think you saved my scholarship. I really do. But I have a boy4riend, you know.' 'Serious?' he asked, with a poor attempt to speak lightly. 'Very,' she said, matching his tone. 'Almost engaged.' 'Does he know he's lucky? Does he know how lucky?' 'I'm lucky, too,' she said, thinking of Tony Lombard. 'Beth,' he said suddenly. 'What?' she asked, startled. 'Nobody calls you that, do they?' 'Why no. No, they don't.' 'Not even this guy?' 'No ' Tony called her Liz. Sometimes Lizzie, which was even worse. He leaned forward. 'But Beth is what you like best, isn't it?' She laughed to cover her confusion. 'Whatever in the world ' 'Never mind.' He grinned his gamin grin. 'I'll call you Beth. That's better. Now eat your hamburger.' Then her junior year was over, and she was saying goodbye to Alice. They were a little stiff together, and Elizabeth was sorry. She supposed it was her own fault; she had crowed a little loudly about her sociology final when grades were posted. She had scored a ninetyseven  highest in the division. Well, she told herself as she waited at the airport for her flight to be called, it wasn't any more unethical than the cramming she had been resigned to in that thirdfloor carrel. Cramming wasn't real studying at all; just rote memorization that faded away to nothing as soon as the exam was over. She fingered the envelope that poked out of her purse. Notice of her scholarshiploan package for her senior yeartwo thousand dollars. She and Tony would be working together in Boothbay, Maine, this summer, and the money she would earn there would put her over the top. And thanks to Ed Hamner, it was going to be a beautiful summer. Clear sailing all the way. But it was the most miserable summer of her life. June was rainy, the gas shortage depressed the tourist trade, and her tips at the Boothbay Inn were mediocre. Even worse, Tony was pressing her on the subject of marriage. He could get a job on or near campus, he said, and with her Student Aid grant, she could get her degree in style. She was surprised to find that the idea scared rather than pleased her. Something was wrong. She didn't know what, but something was missing, out of whack, out of kilter. One night late in July she frightened herself by going on a hysterical crying jag in her apartment. The only good thing about it was that her roommate, a mousy little girl named Sandra Ackerman, was out on a date. The nightmare came in early August. She was lying in the bottom of an open grave, unable to move. Rain fell from a white sky on to her upturned face. Then Tony was standing over her, wearing his yellow highimpact construction helmet. 'Marry me, Liz,' he said, looking down at her expressionlessly. 'Marry me or else.' She tried to speak, to agree; she would do anything if only he would take her out of this dreadful muddy hole. But she was paralyzed. 'All right,' he said. 'It's or else, then.' He went away. She struggled to break out of her paralysis and couldn't. Then she heard the bulldozer. A moment later she saw it, a high yellow monster, pushing a mound of wet earth in front of the blade. Tony's merciless face looked down from the open cab. He was going to bury her alive. Trapped in her motionless, voiceless body, she could only watch in dumb horror. Trickles of dirt began to run down the sides of the hole A familiar voice cried, 'Go! Leave her now! Go!' Tony stumbled down from the bulldozer and ran. Huge relief swept her. She would have cried had she been able. And her saviour appeared, standing at the foot of the open grave like a sexton. It was Ed Hamner, floating in his green fatigue jacket, his hair awry, his hornrims slipped down to the small bulge at the end of his nose. He held his hand out to her. 'Get up,' he said gently. 'I know what you need. Get up, Beth.' And she could get up. She sobbed with relief. She tried to thank him; her words spilled out on top of each other. And Ed only smiled gently and nodded. She took his hand and looked down to see her footing. And when she looked up again, she was holding the paw of a huge, slavering timber wolf with red hurricanelantern eyes and thick, spiked teeth open to bite. She woke up sitting bolt upright in bed, her nightgown drenched with sweat. Her body was shaking uncontrollably. And even after a warm shower and a glass of milk, she could not reconcile herself to the dark. She slept with the light on. A week later Tony was dead. She opened the door in her robe, expecting to see Tony, but it was Danny Kilmer, one of the fellows he worked with. Danny was a fun guy; she and Tony had doubled with him and his girl a couple of times. But standing in the doorway of her secondfloor apartment, Danny looked not only serious but ill. 'Danny?' she said. 'What ' 'Liz,' he said. 'Liz, you've got to hold on to yourself. You've ah, God!' He pounded the jamb of the door with one bigknuckled, dirty hand, and she saw he was crying. 'Danny, is it Tony? Is something.' 'Tony's dead,' Danny said. 'He was ' But he was talking to air. She had fainted. The next week passed in a kind of dream. The story pieced itself together from the woefully brief newspaper account and from what Danny told her over a beer in the Harbor Inn. They had been repairing drainage culverts on Route 16. Part of the road was torn up, and Tony was flagging traffic. A kid driving a red Fiat had been coming down the hill. Tony had flagged him, but the kid never even slowed. Tony had been standing next to a dump truck, and there was no place to jump back. The kid in the Fiat had sustained head lacerations and a broken arm; he was hysterical and also cold sober. The police found several holes in his brake lines, as if they had overheated and then melted through. His driving record was A1; he had simply been unable to stop. Her Tony had been a victim of that rarest of automobile mishaps an honest accident. Her shock and depression were increased by guilt. The fates had taken out of her hands the decision on what to do about Tony. And a sick, secret part of her was glad it was so. Because she hadn't wanted to marry Tony not since the night of her dream. She broke down the day before she went home. She was sitting on a rock outcropping by herself, and after an hour or so the tears came. They surprised her with their fury. She cried until her stomach hurt and her head ached, and when the tears passed she felt not better but at least drained and empty. And that was when Ed Hamner said, 'Beth?' She jerked around, her mouth filled with the copper taste of fear, half expecting to see the snarling wolf of her dream. But it was only Ed Hamner, looking sunburned and strangely defenceless without his fatigue jacket and blue jeans. He was wearing red shorts that stopped just ahead of his bony knees, a white Tshirt that billowed on his thin chest like a loose sail in the ocean breeze, and rubber thongs. He wasn't smiling and the fierce sun glitter on his glasses made it impossible to see his eyes. 'Ed?' she said tentatively, half convinced that this was some griefinduced hallucination. 'Is that really ' 'Yes, it's me.' 'How ' 'I've been working at the Lakewood Theatre in Skowhegan. I ran into your roommate Alice, is that her name?' 'Yes.' 'She told me what happened. I came right away. Poor Beth.' He moved his head, only a degree or so, but the sun glare slid off his glasses and she saw nothing wolfish, nothing predatory, but only a calm, warm sympathy. She began to weep again, and staggered a little with the unexpected force of it. Then he was holding her and then it was all right. They had dinner at the Silent Woman in Waterville, which was twentyfive miles away; maybe exactly the distance she needed. They went in Ed's car, a new Corvette, and he drove well  neither showily nor fussily, as she guessed he might. She didn't want to talk and she didn't want to be cheered up. He seemed to know it, and played quiet music on the radio. And he ordered without consulting her  seafood. She thought she wasn't hungry, but when the food came she fell to ravenously. When she looked up again her plate was empty and she laughed nervously. Ed was smoking a cigarette and watching her. 'The grieving damosel ate a hearty meal,' she said. 'You must think I'm awful.' 'No,' he said. 'You've been through a lot and you need to get your strength back. It's like being sick, isn't it?' 'Yes. Just like that.' He took her hand across the table, squeezed it briefly, then let it go. 'But now it's recuperation time, Beth.' 'Is it? Is it really?' 'Yes,' he said. 'So tell me. What are your plans?' 'I'm going home tomorrow. After that, I don't know.' 'You're going back to school, aren't you?' 'I just don't know. After this, it seems so.. so trivial. A lot of the purpose seems to have gone out of it. And all the fun.' 'It'll come back. That's hard for you to believe now, but it's true. Try it for six weeks and see. You've got nothing better to do.' The last seemed a question. 'That's true, I guess. But Can I have a cigarette?' 'Sure. They're menthol, though. Sorry.' She took one. 'How did you know I didn't like menthol cigarettes?' He shrugged. 'You just don't look like one of those, I guess.' She smiled. 'You're funny, do you know that?' He smiled neutrally. 'No, really. For you of all people to turn up I thought I didn't want to see anyone. But I'm really glad it was you, Ed.' 'Sometimes it's nice to be with someone you're not involved with.' 'That's it, I guess.' She paused. 'Who are you, Ed, besides my fairy godfather? Who are you really?' It was suddenly important to her that she know. He shrugged. 'Nobody much. Just one of the sort of funnylooking guys you see creeping around campus with a load of books under one arm 'Ed, you're not funnylooking.' 'Sure I am,' he said, and smiled. 'Never grew all the way out of my highschool acne, never got rushed by a big frat, never made any kind of splash in the social whirl. Just a dorm rat making grades, that's all. When the big corporations interview on campus next spring, I'll probably sign on with one of them and Ed Hamner will disappear for ever.' 'That would be a great shame,' she said softly. He smiled, and it was a very peculiar smile. Almost bitter. 'What about your folks?' she asked. 'Where you live, what you like to do ' 'Another time,' he said. 'I want to get you back. You've got a long plane ride tomorrow, and a lot of hassles.' The evening left her relaxed for the first time since Tony's death, without that feeling that somewhere inside a mainspring was being wound and wound to the breaking point. She thought sleep would come easily, but it did not. Little questions nagged. Alice told me poor Beth. But Alice was summering in Kittery, eighty miles from Skowhegan. She must have been at Lakewood for a play. The Corvette, this year's model. Expensive. A backstage job at Lakewood hadn't paid for that. Were his parents rich? He had ordered just what she would have ordered herself. Maybe the only thing on the menu she would have eaten enough of to discover that she was hungry. The menthol cigarettes, the way he had kissed her good night, exactly as she had wanted to be kissed. And You've gota long plane ride tomorrow. He knew she was going home because she had told him. But how had he known she was going by plane? Or that it was a long ride? It bothered her. It bothered her because she was halfway to being in love with Ed Hamner. I know what you need. Like the voice of a submarine captain tolling off fathoms, the words he had greeted her with followed her down to sleep. He didn't come to the tiny Augusta airport to see her off, and waiting for the plane, she was surprised by her own disappointment. She was thinking about how quietly you could grow to depend on a person, almost like a junkie with a habit. The hype fools himself that he can take this stuff or leave it, when really 'Elizabeth Rogan,' the PA blared. 'Please pick up the white courtesy phone.' She hurried to it. And Ed's voice said, 'Beth?' 'Ed! It's good to hear you. I thought maybe. 'That I'd meet you?' He laughed. 'You don't need me for that. You're a big strong girl. Beautiful, too. You can handle this. Will I see you at school?' 'I yes, I think so.' 'Good.' There was a moment of silence. Then he said, 'Because I love you. I have from the first time I saw you.' Her tongue was locked. She couldn't speak. A thousand thoughts whirled through her mind. He laughed again, gently. 'No, don't say anything. Not now. I'll see you. There'll be time then. All the time in the world. Good trip, Beth. Goodbye.' And he was gone, leaving her with a white phone in her hand and her own chaotic thoughts and questions. September. Elizabeth picked up the old pattern of school and classes like a woman who has been interrupted at knitting. She was rooming with Alice again, of course; they had been roomies since freshman year, when they had been thrown together by the housingdepartment computer. They had always got along well, despite differing interests and personalities. Alice was the studious one, a chemistry major with a 3.6 average. Elizabeth was more social, less bookish, with a split major in education and math. They still got on well, but a faint coolness seemed to have grown up between them over the summer. Elizabeth chalked it up to the difference of opinion over the sociology final, and didn't mention it. The events of the summer began to seem dreamlike. In a funny way it sometimes seemed that Tony might have been a boy she had known in high school. It still hurt to think about him, and she avoided the subject with Alice, but the hurt was an oldbruise throb and not the bright pain of an open wound. What hurt more was Ed Hamner's failure to call. A week passed, then two, then it was October. She got a student directory from the Union and looked up his name. It was no help; after his name were only the words 'Mill St'. And Mill was a very long street indeed. And so she waited, and when she was called for dates  which was often  she turned them down. Alice raised her eyebrows but said nothing; she was buried alive in a sixweek biochem project and spent most of her evenings at the library. Elizabeth noticed the long white envelopes that her roommate was receiving once or twice a week in the mail  since she was usually back from class first but thought nothing of them. The private detective agency was discreet; it did not print its return address on its envelopes. When the intercom buzzed, Alice was studying. 'You get it, Liz. Probably for you anyway.' Elizabeth went to the intercom. 'Yes?' 'Gentleman doorcaller, Liz.' Oh, Lord. 'Who is it?' she asked, annoyed, and ran through her tattered stack of excuses. Migraine headache. She hadn't used that one this week. The desk girl said, amused, 'His name is Edward Jackson Hamner. Junior, no less.' Her voice lowered. 'His socks don't match.' Elizabeth's hand flew to the collar of her robe. 'Oh, God. Tell him I'll be right down. No, tell him it will be just a minute. No, a couple of minutes, okay?' 'Sure,' the voice said dubiously. 'Don't have a haemorrhage.' Elizabeth took a pair of slacks out of her closet. Took out a short denim skirt. Felt the curlers in her hair and groaned. Began to yank them out. Alice watched all this calmly, without speaking, but she looked speculatively at the door for a long time after Elizabeth had left. He looked just the same; he hadn't changed at all. He was wearing his green fatigue jacket, and it still looked at least two sizes too big. One of the bows of his hornrimmed glasses had been mended with electrician's tape. His jeans looked new and stiff, miles from the soft and faded 'in' look that Tony had achieved effortlessly. He was wearing one green sock, one brown sock. And she knew she loved him. 'Why didn't you call before?' she asked, going to him. He stuck his hands in the pockets of his jacket and grinned shyly. 'I thought I'd give you some time to date around. Meet some guys. Figure out what you want. 'I think I know that.' 'Good. Would you like to go to a movie?' 'Anything,' she said. 'Anything at all.' As the days passed it occurred to her that she had never met anyone, male or female, that seemed to understand her moods and needs so completely or so wordlessly. Their tastes coincided. While Tony had enjoyed violent movies of the Godfather type, Ed seemed more into comedy or nonviolent dramas. He took her to the circus one night when she was feeling low and they had a hilariously wonderful time. Study dates were real study dates, not just an excuse to grope on the third floor of the Union. He took her to dances and seemed especially good at the old ones, which she loved. They won a fifties Stroll trophy at a Homecoming Nostalgia Dance. More important, he seemed to understand when she wanted to be passionate. He didn't force her or hurry her; she never got the feeling that she had with some of the other boys she had gone out with  that there was an inner timetable for sex, beginning with a kiss good night on Date 1 and ending with a night in some friend's borrowed apartment on Date 10. The Mill Street apartment was Ed's exclusively, a thirdfloor walkup. They went there often, and Elizabeth went without the feeling that she was walking into some minorleague Don Juan's passion pit. He didn't push. He honestly seemed to want what she wanted, when she wanted it. And things progressed. When school reconvened following the semester break, Alice seemed strangely preoccupied. Several times that afternoon before Ed came to pick her up  they were going out to dinner  Elizabeth looked up to see her roommate frowning down at a large manila envelope on her desk. Once Elizabeth almost asked about it, then decided not to. Some new project probably. It was snowing hard when Ed brought her back to the dorm. 'Tomorrow?' he asked. 'My place?' 'Sure. I'll make some popcorn.' 'Great,' he said, and kissed her. 'I love you, Beth.' 'Love you, too.' 'Would you like to stay over?' Ed asked evenly. 'Tomorrow night?' 'All right, Ed.' She looked into his eyes. 'Whatever you want.' 'Good,' he said quietly. 'Sleep well, kid.' 'You, too.' She expected that Alice would be asleep and entered the room quietly, but Alice was up and sitting at her desk. 'Alice, are you okay?' 'I have to talk to you, Liz. About Ed.' 'What about him?' Alice said carefully, 'I think that when I finish talking to you we're not going to be friends any mpre. For me, that's giving up a lot. So I want you to listen carefully.' 'Then maybe you better not say anything.' 'I have to try.' Elizabeth felt her initial curiosity kindle into anger. 'Have you been snooping around Ed?' Alice only looked at her. 'Were you jealous of us?' 'No.


If I'd been jealous of you and your dates, I would have moved out two years ago.' Elizabeth looked at her, perplexed. She knew what Alice said was the truth. And she suddenly felt afraid. 'Two things made me wonder about Ed Hamner,' Alice said. 'First, you wrote me about Tony's death and said how lucky it was that I'd seen Ed at the Lakewood Theatre. How he came right over to Boothbay and really helped you out. But I never saw him, Liz. I was never near the Lakewood Theatre last summer.' 'But 'But how did he know Tony was dead? I have no idea. I only know he didn't get it from me. The other thing was that eideticmemory business. My God, Liz, he can't even remember which socks he's got on!' 'That's a different thing altogether,' Liz said stiffly. 'It ' 'Ed Hamner was in Las Vegas last summer,' Alice said softly. 'He came back in midJuly and took a motel room in Pemaquid. That's just across the Boothbay Harbour town line. Almost as if he were waiting for you to need him.' 'That's crazy!' And how would you know Ed was in Las Vegas?' 'I ran into Shirley D'Antonio just before school started. She worked in the Pines Restaurant, which is just across from the playhouse. She said she never saw anybody who looked like Ed Hamner. So I've known he's been lying to you about several things. And so I went to my father and laid it out and he gave me the goahead.' 'To do what?' Elizabeth asked, bewildered. 'To hire a private detective agency.' Elizabeth was on her feet. 'No more, Alice. That's it.' She would catch the bus into town, spend tonight at Ed's apartment. She had only been waiting for him to ask her, anyway. 'At least know,' Alice said. 'Then make your own decision.' 'I don't have to know anything except he's kind and good and ' 'Love is blind, huh?' Alice said, and smiled bitterly. 'Well, maybe I happen to love you a little, Liz. Have you ever thought of that?' Elizabeth turned and looked at her for a long moment. 'If you do, you've got a funny way of showing it,' she said. 'Go on, then. Maybe you're right. Maybe I owe you that much. Goon.' 'You knew him a long time ago,' Alice said quietly. 'I what?' 'P.S. 119, Bridgeport, Connecticut.' Elizabeth was struck dumb. She and her parents had lived in Bridgeport for six years, moving to their present home the year after she had finished the second grade. She had gone to P.S. 119, but 'Alice, are you sure?' 'Do you remember him?' 'No, of course not!' But she did remember the feeling she'd had the first time she had seen Ed  the feeling of deja' vu. 'The pretty ones never remember the ugly ducklings, I guess. Maybe he had a crush on you. You were in the first grade with him. Liz. Maybe he sat in the back of the room and just watched you. Or on the playground. Just a little nothing kid who already wore glasses and probably braces and you couldn't even remember him, but I'll bet he remembers you.' Elizabeth said, 'What else?' 'The agency traced him from school fingerprints. After that it was just a matter of finding people and talking to them. The operative assigned to the case said he couldn't understand some of what he was getting. Neither do I. Some of it's scary.' 'It better be,' Elizabeth said primly. 'Ed Hammer, Sr., was a compulsive gambler. He worked for a topline advertising agency in New York and then moved to Bridgeport sort of on the run. The operative says that almost every bigmoney poker game and highpriced book in the city was holding his markers.' Elizabeth closed her eyes. 'These people really saw you got a full measure of dirt for your dollar, didn't they?' 'Maybe. Anyway, Ed's father got in another jam in Bridgeport. It was gambling again, but this time he got mixed up with a bigtime loan shark. He got a broken leg and a broken arm somehow. The operative says he doubts it was an accident.' 'Anything else?' Elizabeth asked. 'Child beating? Embezzlement?' 'He landed a job with a twobit Los Angeles ad agency in 1961. That was a little too close to Las Vegas. He started to spend his weekends there, gambling heavily and losing. Then he started taking Ed Junior with him. And he started to win.' 'You're making all of this up. You must be.' Alice tapped the report in front of her. 'It's all here, Liz. Some of it wouldn't stand up in court, but the operative says none of the people he talked with would have a reason to lie. Ed's father called Ed his "good luck charm". At first, nobody objected to the boy even though it was illegal for him to be in the casinos. His father was a prize fish. But then the father started sticking just to roulette, playing only oddeven and redblack. By the end of the year the boy was offlimits in every casino on the strip. And his father took up a new kind of gambling.' 'What?' 'The stock market. When the Hamners moved to L.A. in the middle of 1961, they were living in a ninetydollaramonth cheese box and Mr Hamner was driving a '52 Chevrolet. At the end of 1962, just sixteen months later, he had quit his job and they were living in their own home in San Jose. Mr Hamner was driving a brandnew Thunderbird and Mrs Hamner had a Volkswagen. You see, it's against the law for a small boy to be in the Nevada casinos, but no one could take the stockmarket page away from him.' 'Are you implying that Ed that he could Alice, you're crazy!' 'I'm not implying anything. Unless maybe just that he knew what his daddy needed.' I know what you need. It was almost as if the words had been spoken into her ear, and she shuddered. 'Mrs Hamner spent the next six years in and out of various mental institutions. Supposedly for nervous disorders, but the operative talked to an orderly who said she was pretty close to psychotic. She claimed her son was the devil's henchman. She stabbed him with a pair of scissors in 1964. Tried to kill him. She Liz? Liz, what is it?' 'The scar,' she muttered. 'We went swimming at the University pool on an open night about a month ago. He's got a deep, dimpled scar on his shoulder here.' She put her hand just above her left breast. 'He said ' A wave of nausea tried to climb up her throat and she had to wait for it to recede before she could go on. 'He said he fell on a picket fence when he was a little boy.' 'Shall I go on?' 'Finish, why not? What can it hurt now?' 'His mother was released from a very plush mental institution in the San Joaquin Valley in 1968. The three of them went on a vacation. They stopped at a picnic spot on Route 101. The boy was collecting firewood when she drove the car right over the edge of the dropoff above the ocean with both her and her husband in it. It might have been an attempt to run Ed down. By then he was nearly eighteen. His father left him a milliondollar stock portfolio. Ed came east a year and a half later and enrolled here. And that's the end.' 'No more skeletons in the closet?' 'Liz, aren't there enough?' She got up. 'No wonder he never wants to mention his family. But you had to dig up the corpse, didn't you?' 'You're blind,' Alice said. Elizabeth was putting on her coat. 'I suppose you're going to him.' 'Right.' 'Because you love him.' 'Right.' Alice crossed the room and grabbed her arm. 'Will you get that sulky, petulant look off your face for a second and think! Ed Hamner is able to do things the rest of us only dream about. He got his father a stake at roulette and made him rich playing the stock market. He seems to be able to will winning. Maybe he's some kind of lowgrade psychic. Maybe he's got precognition. I don't know. There are people who seem to have a dose of that. Liz, hasn't it ever occurred to you that he's forced you to love him?' Liz turned to her slowly. 'I've never heard anything so ridicul6us in my life.' 'Is it? He gave you that sociology test the same way he gave his father the right side of the roulette board! He was never enrolled in any sociology course! I checked. He did it because it was the only way he could make you take him seriously!' 'Stop it!' Liz cried. She clapped her hands over her ears. 'He knew the test, and he knew when Tony was killed, and he knew you were going home on a plane! He even knew just the right psychological moment to step back into your life last October.' Elizabeth pulled away from her and opened the door. 'Please,' Alice said. 'Please, Liz, listen. I don't know how he can do those things. I doubt if even he knows for sure. He might not mean to do you any harm, but he already has. He's made you love him by knowing every secret thing you want and need, and that's not love at all. That's rape. Elizabeth slammed the door and ran down the stairs. She caught the last bus of the evening into town. It was snowing more heavily than ever, and the bus lumbered through the drifts that had blown across the road like a crippled beetle. Elizabeth sat in the back, one of only six or seven passengers, a thousand thoughts in her mind. Menthol cigarettes. The stock exchange. The way he had known her mother's nickname was Deedee. A little boy sitting at the back of a firstgrade classroom, making sheep's eyes at a vivacious little girl too young to understand that  I know what you need. No. No. No. I do love him! Did she? Or was she simply delighted at being with someone who always ordered the right thing, took her to the right movie, and did not want to go anywhere or do anything she didn't? Was he just a kind of psychic mirror, showing her only what she wanted to see? The presents he gave her were always the right presents. When the weather had turned suddenly cold and she had been longing for a hair dryer, who gave her one? Ed Hamner, of course. Just happened to see one on sale in Day's, he had said. She, of course, had been delighted. That's not love at all That's rape. The wind clawed at her face as she stepped out on the corner of Main and Mill, and she winced against it as the bus drew away with a smooth diesel growl. Its taillights twinkled briefly in the snowy night for a moment and were gone. She had never felt so lonely in her life. He wasn't home. She stood outside his door after five minutes of knocking, nonplussed. It occurred to her that she had no idea what Ed did or whom he saw when he wasn't with her. The subject had never come up. Maybe he's raising the price of another hair dryer in a poker game. With sudden decision she stood on her toes and felt along the top of the doorjamb for the spare key she knew he kept there. Her fingers stumbled over it and it fell to the hall floor with a clink. She picked it up and used it in the lock. The apartment looked different with Ed gone  artificial, like a stage set. It had often amused her that someone who cared so little about his personal appearance should have such a neat, picturebook domicile. Almost as if he had decorated it for her and not himself. But of course that was crazy. Wasn't it? It occurred to her again, as if for the first time, how much she liked the chair she sat in when they studied or watched TV. It was just right, the way Baby Bear's chair had been for Goldilocks. Not too hard, not too soft. Just right. Like everything else she associated with Ed. There were two doors opening off the living room. One went to the kitchenette, the other to his bedroom. The wind whistled outside, making the old apartment building creak and settle. In the bedroom, she stared at the brass bed. It looked neither too hard nor too soft, but just right. An insidious voice smirked It's almost too perfect, isn't it? She went to the bookcase and ran her eye aimlessly over the titles. One jumped at her eyes and she pulled it out Dance Crazes of the Fifties. The book opened cleanly to a point some threequarters through. A section titled 'The Stroll' had been circled heavily in red grease pencil and in the margin the word BETH had been written in large, almost accusatory letters. I ought to go now, she told herself. I can still save something. If he came back now I could never look him in the face again and Alice would win. Then she'd really get her money's worth. But she couldn't stop, and knew it. Things had gone too far. She went to the closet and turned the knob, but it didn't give. Locked. On the off chance, she stood on tiptoe again and felt along the top of the door. And her fingers felt a key. She took it down and somewhere inside a voice said very clearly Don't do this. She thought of Bluebeard's wife and what she had found when she opened the wrong door. But it was indeed too late; if she didn't proceed now she would always wonder. She opened the closet. And had the strangest feeling that this was where the real Ed Hamner, Jr. had been hiding all the time. The closet was a mess  a jumbled rickrack of clothes, books, an unstrung tennis racket, a pair of tattered tennis shoes, old prelims and reports tossed helterskelter, a spilled pouch of Borkum Riff pipe tobacco. His green fatigue jacket had been flung in the far corner. She picked up one of the books and blinkedat the title. The Golden Bough. Another. Ancient Rites, Modern Mysteries. Another. Haitian Voodoo. And a last one, bound in old, cracked leather, the title almost rubbed off the binding by much handling, smelling vaguely like rotted fish Necronomicon. She opened it at random, gasped, and flung it away, the obscenity still hanging before her eyes.  More to regain her composure than anything else, she reached for the green fatigue jacket, not admitting to herself that she meant to go through its pockets. But as she lifted it she saw something else. A small tin box.. Curiously, she picked it up and turned it over in her hands, hearing things rattle inside. It was the kind of box a young boy might choose to keep his treasures in. Stamped in raised letters on the tin bottom were the words 'Bridgeport Candy Co.' She opened it. The doll was on top. The Elizabeth doll. She looked at it and began to shudder. The doll was dressed in a scrap of red nylon, part of a scarf she had lost two or three months back. At a movie with Ed. The arms were pipe cleaners that had been draped in stuff that looked like blue moss.  Graveyard moss, perhaps. There was hair on the doll's head, but that was wrong. It was fine white  flax, taped to the doll's pink gumeraser head. Her own hair was sandy blonde and coarser than this. This was more the way her hair had been When she had been a little girl. She swallowed and there was a clicking in her throat. Hadn't they all been issued scissors in the first grade, tiny scissors with rounded blade, just right for a child's hand? Had that longago little boy crept up behind her, perhaps at nap time, and Elizabeth put the doll aside and looked in the box again. There was a blue poker chip with a strange sixsided pattern drawn on it in red ink. A tattered newspaper obituary  Mr and Mrs Edward Hamner. The two of them smiled meaninglessly out of the accompanying photo, and she saw that the same sixsided pattern had been drawn across their faces, this time in black ink, like a pall. Two more dolls, one male, one female. The similarity to the faces in the obituary photograph was hideous, unmistakable. And something else. She fumbled it out, and her fingers shook so badly she almost dropped it. A tiny sound escaped her. It was a model car, the sort small boys buy in drugstores and hobby shops and then assemble with airplane glue. This one was a Fiat. It had been painted red. And a piece of what looked like one of Tony's shirts had been taped to the front. She turned the model car upside down. Someone had hammered the underside to fragments. 'So you found it, you ungrateful bitch.' She screamed and dropped the car and the box. His foul treasures sprayed across the floor. He was standing in the doorway, looking at her. She had never seen such a look of hate on a human face. She said, 'You killed Tony.' He grinned unpleasantly. 'Do you think you could prove it?' 'It doesn't matter,' she said, surprised at the steadiness of her own voice. 'I know. And I never want to see you again. Ever. And if you do anything to anyone else, I'll know. And I'll fix you. Somehow.' His face twisted. 'That's the thanks I get. I gave you everything you ever wanted. Things no other man could have. Admit it. I made you perfectly happy.' 'You killed Tony!, She screamed it at him. He took another step into the room. 'Yes, and I did it for you. And what are you, Beth? You don't know what love is. I loved you from the first time I saw you, over seventeen years ago. Could Tony say that? It's never been hard for you. You're pretty. You never had to think about wanting or needing or about being lonely. You never had to find. other ways to get the things you had to have. There was always a Tony to give them to you. All you ever had to do was smile and say please.' His voice rose a note. 'I could never get what I wanted that way. Don't you think I tried? It didn't work with my father. He just wanted more and more. He never even kissed me good night or gave me a hug until I made him rich. And my mother was the same way. I gave her her marriage back, but was that enough for her? She hated me! She wouldn't come near me! She said I was unnatural! I gave her nice things but Beth, don't do that! Don't dooon't ' She stepped on the Elizabeth doll and crushed it, turning her heel on it. Something inside her flared in agony, and then was gone. She wasn't afraid of him now. He was just a small, shrunken boy in a young man's body. And his socks didn't match. 'I don't think you can do anything to me now, Ed,' she told him. 'Not now. Am I wrong?' He turned from her. 'Go on,' he said weakly. 'Get out. But leave my box. At least do that.' 'I'll leave the box. But not the things in it.' She walked past him. His shoulders twitched, as if he might turn and try to grab her, but then they slumped. As she reached the secondfloor landing, he came to the top of the stairs and called shrilly after her 'Go on then! But you'll never be satisfied with any man after me! And when your looks go and men stop trying to give you anything you want, you'll wish for me! You'll think of what you threw away!' She went down the stairs and out into the snow. Its coldness felt good against her face. It was a twomile walk back to the campus, but she didn't care. She wanted the walk, wanted the cold. She wanted it to make her clean. In a queer, twisted way she felt sorry for him a little boy with a huge power crammed inside a dwarfed spirit. A little boy who tried to make humans behave like toy soldiers and then stamped on them in a fit of temper when they wouldn't or when they found out. And what was she? Blessed with all the things he was not, through no fault of his or effort of her own? She remembered the way she had reacted to Alice, trying blindly and jealously to hold on to something that was easy rather than good, not caring, not caring. When your looks go and men strop trying to give you anything you want, you'll wish for me! I know what you need. But was she so small that she actually needed so little? Please, dear God, no. On the bridge between the campus and town she paused and threw Ed Hamner's scraps of magic over the side, piece by piece. The redpainted model Fiat went last, falling end over end into the driven snow until it was lost from sight. Then she walked on. CHILDREN OF THE CORN Burt turned the radio on too loud and didn't turn it down because they were on the verge of another argument and he didn't want it to happen. He was desperate for it not to happen. Vicky said something. 'What?' he shouted. 'Turn it down! Do you want to break my eardrums?' He bit down hard on what might have come through his mouth and turned it down. Vicky was fanning herself with her scarf even though the TBird was airconditioned. 'Where are we, anyway?' 'Nebraska.' She gave him a cold, neutral look. 'Yes, Burt. I know we're in Nebraska, Burt. But where the hell are we?' 'You've got the road atlas. Look it up. Or can't you read?' 'Such wit. This is why we got off the turnpike. So we could look at three hundred miles of corn. And enjoy the wit and wisdom of Burt Robeson.' He was gripping the steering wheel so hard his knuckles were white. He decided he was holding it that tightly because if he loosened up, why, one of those hands might just fly off and hit the exProm Queen beside him right in the chops. We 're saving our marriage, he told himself. Yes. We're doing it the same way us grunts went about saving villages in the war. 'Vicky,' he said carefully. 'I have driven fifteen hundred miles on turnpikes since we left Boston. I did all that driving myself because you refused to drive. Then ' 'I did not refuse!' Vicky said hotly. 'Just because I get migraines when I drive for a long time 'Then when I asked you if you'd navigate for me on some of the secondary roads, you said sure, Burt. Those were your exact words. Sure, Burt. Then 'Sometimes I wonder how I ever wound up married to you.' 'By saying two little words.' She stared at him for a moment, whitelipped, and then picked up the road atlas. She turned the pages savagely. It had been a mistake leaving the turnpike, Burt thought morosely. It was a shame, too, because up until then they had been doing pretty well, treating each other almost like human beings. It had sometimes seemed that this trip to the coast, ostensibly to see Vicky's brother and his wife but actually a lastditch attempt to patch up their own marriage, was going to work. But since they left the pike, it had been bad again. How bad? Well, terrible, actually. 'We left the turnpike at Hamburg, right?' 'Right.' 'There's nothing more until Gatlin,' she said. 'Twenty miles. Wide place in the road. Do you suppose we could stop there and get something to eat? Or does your almighty schedule say we have to go until two o'clock like we did yesterday?' He took his eyes off the road to look at her. 'I've about had it, Vicky. As far as I'm concerned, we can turn right here and go home and see that lawyer you wanted to talk to. Because this isn't working at ' She had faced forward again, her expression stonily set. It suddenly turned to surprise and fear. 'Burt look out you're going to ' He turned his attention back to the road just in time to see something vanish under the TBird's bumper. A moment later, while he was only beginning to switch from gas to brake, he felt something thump sickeningly under the front and then the back wheels. They were thrown forward as the car braked along the centre line, decelerating from fifty to zero along black skidmarks. 'A dog,' he said. 'Tell me it was a dog, Vicky.' Her face was a pallid, cottagecheese colour. 'A boy. A little boy. He just ran out of the corn and congratulations, tiger.' She fumbled the car door open, leaned out, threw up. Burt sat straight behind the TBird's wheel, hands still gripping it loosely. He was aware of nothing for a long time but the rich, dark smell of fertilizer. Then he saw that Vicky was gone and when he looked in the outside mirror he saw her stumbling clumsily back towards a heaped bundle that looked like a pile of rags. She was ordinarily a graceful woman but now her grace was gone, robbed. It's manslaughter. That's what they call it. I took my eyes off the road. He turned the ignition off and got out. The wind rustled softly through the growing manhigh corn, making a weird sound like respiration. Vicky was standing over the bundle of rags now, and he could hear her sobbing. He was halfway between the car and where she stood and something caught his eye on the left, a gaudy splash of red amid all the green, as bright as barn paint. He stopped, looking directly into the corn. He found himself thinking (anything to untrack from those rags that were not rags) that it must have been a fantastically good growing season for corn. It grew close together, almost ready to bear. You could plunge into those neat, shaded rows and spend a day trying to find your way out again. But the neatness was broken here. Several tall cornstalks had been broken and leaned askew. And what was that further back in the shadows? 'Burt!' Vicky screamed at him. 'Don't you want to come see? So you can tell all your poker buddies what you bagged in Nebraska? Don't you ' But the rest was lost in fresh sobs. Her shadow was puddled starkly around her feet. It was almost noon. Shade closed over him as he entered the corn. The red barn paint was blood. There was a low, somnolent buzz as flies lit, tasted, and buzzed off again maybe to tell others. There was more blood on the leaves further in. Surely it couldn't have splattered this far? And then he was standing over the object he had seen from the road. He picked it up. The neatness of the rows was disturbed here. Several stalks were canted drunkenly, two of them had been broken clean off. The earth had been gouged. There was blood. The corn rustled. With a little shiver, he walked back to the road. Vicky was having hysterics, screaming unintelligible words at him, crying, laughing. Who would have thought it could end in such a melodramatic way? He looked at her and saw he wasn't having an identity crisis or a difficult life transition or any of those trendy things. He hated her. He gave her a hard slap across the face. She stopped short and put a hand against the reddening impression of his fingers. 'You'll go to jail, Burt,' she said solemnly. 'I don't think so,' he said, and put the suitcase he had found in the corn at her feet. 'What ?' 'I don't know. I guess it belonged to him.' He pointed to the sprawled, facedown body that lay in the road. No more than thirteen, from the look of him. The suitcase was old. The brown leather was battered and scuffed. Two hanks of clothesline had been wrapped around it and tied in large, clownish grannies. Vicky bent to undo one of them, saw, the blood greased into the knot, and withdrew. Burt knelt and turned the body over gently. 'I don't want to look,' Vicky said, staring down helplessly anyway. And when the staring, sightless face flopped up to regard them, she screamed again. The boy's face was dirty, his expression a grimace of terror. His throat had been cut. Burt got up and put his arms around Vicky as she began to sway. 'Don't faint,' he said very quietly. 'Do you hear me, Vicky? Don't faint.' He repeated it over and over and at last she began to recover and held him tight. They might have been dancing, there on the noonstruck road with the boy's corpse at their feet. 'Vicky?' 'What?' Muffled against his shirt. 'Go back to the car and put the keys in your pocket. Get the blanket out of the back seat, and my rifle. Bring them here.' 'The rifle?' 'Someone cut his throat. Maybe whoever is watching us.' Her head jerked up and her wide eyes considered the corn. It marched away as far as the eye could see, undulating up and down small dips and rises of land. 'I imagine he's gone. But why take chances? Go on. Do it.' She walked stiltedly back to the car, her shadow following, a dark mascot who stuck close at this hour of the day. When she leaned into the back seat, Burt squatted beside the boy. White male, no distinguishing marks. Run over, yes, but the TBird hadn't cut the kid's throat. It had been cut raggedly and inefficiently  no army sergeant had shown the killer the finer points of handtohand assassination but the final effect had been deadly. He had either run or been pushed through the last thirty feet of corn, dead or mortally wounded. And Burt Robeson had run him down. If the boy had still been alive when the car hit him, his life had been cut short by thirty seconds at most. Vicky tapped him on the shoulder and he jumped. She was standing with the brown army blanket over her left arm, the cased pump shotgun in her right hand, her face averted. He took the blanket and spread it on the road. He rolled the body on to it. Vicky uttered a desperate little moan. 'You okay?' He looked up at her. 'Vicky?' 'Okay,' she said in a strangled voice. He flipped the sides of the blanket over the body and scooped it up, hating the thick, dead weight of it. It tried to make a U in his arms and slither through his grasp. He clutched it tighter and they walked back to the TBird. 'Open the trunk,' he grunted. The trunk was full of travel stuff, suitcases and souvenirs. Vicky shifted most of it into the back seat and Burt slipped the body into the made space and slammed the trunk lid down. A sigh of relief escaped him. Vicky was standing by the driver's side door, still holding the cased rifle. 'Just put it in the back and get in.' He looked at his watch and saw only fifteen minutes had passed. It seemed like hours. 'What about the suitcase?' she asked. He trotted back down the road to where it stood on the white line, like the focal point in an Impressionist painting. He picked it up by its tattered handle and paused for a moment. He had a strong sensation of being watched. It was a feeling he had read about in books, mostly cheap fiction, and he had always doubted its reality. Now he didn't. It was as if there were people in the corn, maybe a lot of them, coldly estimating whether the woman could get the gun out of the case and use it before they could grab him, drag him into the shady rows, cut his throat Heart beating thickly, he ran back to the car, pulled the keys out of the trunk lock, and got in. Vicky was crying again. Burt got them moving, and before a minute had passed, he could no longer pick out the spot where it had happened in the rearview mirror. 'What did you say the next town was?' he asked. 'Oh.' She bent over the road atlas again. 'Gatlin. We should be there in ten minutes.' 'Does it look big enough to have a police station?' 'No. It's just a dot.' 'Maybe there's a constable.' They drove in silence for a while. They passed a silo on the left. Nothing else but corn. Nothing passed them going the other way, not even a farm truck. 'Have we passed anything since we got off the turnpike, Vicky?' She thought about it. 'A car and a tractor. At that intersection.' 'No, since we got on this road, Route 17.' 'No.I don't think we have.' Earlier this might have been the preface to some cutting remark. Now she only stared out of her half of the windshield at the unrolling road and the endless dotted line. 'Vicky? Could you open the suitcase?' 'Do you think it might matter?' 'Don't know. It might.' While she picked at the knots (her face was set in a peculiar way  expressionless but tightmouthed  that Burt remembered his mother wearing when she pulled the innards out of the Sunday chicken), Burt turned on the radio again. The pop station they had been listening to was almost obliterated in static and Burt switched, running the red marker slowly down the dial. Farm reports. Buck Owens. Tammy Wynette. All distant, nearly distorted into babble. Then, near the end of the dial, one single word blared out of the speaker, so loud and clear that the lips which uttered it might have been directly beneath the grill of the dashboard speaker. 'ATONEMENT!' this voice bellowed. Burt made a surprised grunting sound. Vicky jumped. 'ONLY BY THE BLOOD OF THE LAMB ARE WE SAVED' the voice roared, and Burt hurriedly turned the sound down. This station was close, all right. So close that yes, there it was. Poking out of the corn at the horizon, a spidery red tripod against the blue. The radio tower. 'Atonement is the word, brothers 'n' sisters,' the voice told them, dropping to a more conversational pitch. In the background, offmike, voices murmured amen. 'There's some that thinks it's okay to get out in the world, as if you could work and walk in the world without being smirched by the world.