with them to keep Jane from teaching too much and overexerting herself, though only with partial success because she didn't like just sitting down, even in the rocking chair. Although Janet and Sarah kept doing things for her, she did others herself. When Hey! found excuses to take the Ford, she found better ones to keep it. Only when she reached the point where Quincy said, "Any time now," did she let Hey! take it every day and, sure enough, he got a call from her early one afternoon. He drove as fast as he dared to Ingraham Street, took Jane down the stairs, ignored the stop signs and the stop lights all the way to the hospital, carried her inside and refused to put her down until they had a bed ready for him to put her on. Everybody, including Jane, was trying to hold his laughter back, but Hey! couldn't understand what was so funny.

When I visited Jane in the hospital, she was as pretty as the baby was ugly, if you understand what I mean. Janet and Sarah cajoled me into agreeing with them on how cute James was, but I noticed that Hey! was being polite too. He was trying to reconcile himself with a little piece of wriggling flesh that had somehow come from him. How could that thing ever become a real human being? James didn't help very much with a scowl and a scratchy bawl that left little opportunity for the smiles and giggles sollicited by his grandmothers. I wondered whether the scent exuded by a big pot of narcissus made Hey! yearn for an excuse to leave as ardently as I did. There were so many flowers on the window sill that I had to put my cyclamen on the floor. I hope Jane liked them as much as I did. I was about to excuse myself for a meeting I had to attend (an hour later!) when she pleaded with me to arbitrate a debate between her mother and her mother-in-law over whether James looked like Harvey (Sarah's opinion) or Jeff (Janet's opinion). Unable to find a recognizable trait in that tiny scowl, I affected an earnest tone of voice and confirmed Jane's expectation that James would resemble Hey! Hey! managed a smile almost as exuberant as the ladies expected. Once I had left, I scolded myself for casting shadows over a necessarily happy occasion. James was healthy, so was Jane, the couple had realized their ambition, they had become a family, Hey! would take the usual pride in his son, he had all the virtues of fatherhood, what was I so worried about?

Sometimes it's better to be wrong than right. Hey! took fatherhood as seriously as everything else. He insisted on changing James' diapers, even when it was Jane's turn, and on getting up at the slightest screech in the middle of the night. James did a lot of screeching, in fact more than most that I have heard, and he would screech when Jane handed him to Hey! so she could run his bath or do something in the kitchen. When Hey! came home from work, he would hug Jane at the front door and then they would go to James' room, but the baby

would scowl and screech as soon as he saw Hey!. They laughed it off at first and Hey! made a point of taking him in his arms, bouncing him up and down, carrying him around the apartment, as Jane told him everything exciting and not so exciting that had happened that day. Even when James stopped crying, however, he would reach for his mother, so Jane, without saying anything to Hey, took him to Milt Garcia whom Quincy had recommended. Garcia was not a whole lot older than Hey! and he treated James somewhat as Hey! did, yet James, after initial perplexity, began to smile and giggle. Since Garcia's examination revealed no pathological reason for James' aversion to his father, he suggested a few ploys that usually worked. "Notice how he pulled on my mustache," he told Jane. "They usually do, that's why I have one, although my wife took a while to get used to it. If you didn't mind too much, you could ask your husband to grow one too."

When Hey! hugged her that evening, she informed him that he was going to grow a mustache.

"Me? A mustache?"

"I don't like mustaches."

"Then why do I have to grow one?"

"So you took him to Garcia?"

"Buzzard will say, 'See, my daddy look like me!' Pete will chuckle again."

He slapped her on the fanny and she reminded him, once again, never to do that in front of anybody else, not even James. I don't know whether he had made a habit of it because he enjoyed the sound of her voice or the feel of her fanny, but the target had become easier to hit.

You want to know whether the mustache worked? James liked it all right, but he only put up with the man it grew on and he yanked so hard that his father's lip was sore. Pete didn't chuckle, but Buzzard did say: "See my daddy? He look like me!" Winter had as usual reduced construction mostly to work that could continue under a roof. In addition to the toilet, the heat attracted the men to the trailer and, while Pete and Hey! could spend more time on the phone and on paper work, there were more interruptions. Hey! adopted Pete's tactics for terminating conversations that had lasted long enough: the peremptory conclusion, the definitive gesture, the return to the worktable or the telephone and, if the phone rang in the middle of a sentence, so much the better! As

the weather warmed and the mud dried, however, the pace quickened so that crises began to occur once a day again instead of once a week. Even more than the year before, Hey! confronted the dilemma of an urgent need for his presence both in the trailer and out on the site, sometimes in several different places on the site, and all at the same time. Pete had warned him that ordering such priorities would always be a challenge.

One morning, a truck driver delivered a one-story staircase to #53, which required two half-story staircases at a right angle to each other, and left in a hurry. A carpenter named Brad burst into the trailer with the bad news and Pete, who was on the phone with a complicated order of plumbing supplies, threw his keys on Hey's desk. Checking the records, Hey! saw that #63 needed a straight staircase: maybe the driver had delivered the two half-story staircases over there. As he and Brad were leaving, Pete hollered: "Measure it before you move it." They drove to #53 and found the staircase six inches too short for #63. "We aren't building any ceilings that low," Hey! complained. "They are building affordables over in Ettinger Orchard," suggested Brad. Since Pete was probably still on the phone, they drove to #63, but there wasn't any staircase there. "We could try #73," said Brad. It was only a hole in the ground, but Hey! was going to look anyway when they passed in front of #35 which had been completed and occupied last summer. Two shrink wrapped staircases were lying on the lawn where Shirly Adamovitch was knitting his (yes: his) bushy brows over them: "Where's the son of a bitch who threw these staircases on my lawn? I'm going to break his neck." Unlike most homeowners, Shirly looked like he could do that. Nobody kidded him about his name, his lawn or anything else.

"If I had the slightest idea, Mr. Adamovitch, I would be the first to tell you," said Hey! "Would you mind if we took them away?"

"Several hundred," replied Pete unperturbed.

"So far!" Shay warned.

"So far!" Pete insisted.

On the other hand, Kruger and Wrinks were hiring inexperienced electricians and rushing them so that they were leaving faulty wiring behind them. Pete and Hey! just didn't have the time to detect all the potential short circuits before dry wall covered them up and fires could start when the owners moved in and cut everything on. Seeing that Shay had yielded to discussion of a more useful subject, Mad chuckled: "I let Phil Wrinks pine away in high school, he will listen to me."

"He listens to me too," objected Shay, "but he doesn't do anything."

"Tell him to send Al Qadeem to check his electricians," said Pete.

Pete was out of the hospital in a few days, but his doctor told him to stay home for a few weeks and Annabelle turned the pickup over to Hey! so Pete wouldn't be tempted. She refused to let anybody see him without a solemn promise to say nothing, absolutely nothing about Silver Hill except how nice it looked. Pete suspected something when everybody kept saying just exactly that and especially when Shay himself said so. Hey! learned to master his new responsibilities only gradually despite the good will he encountered almost

everywhere he turned and despite the interim secretary Shay hired to help him. He was coming home late and going to bed early. Although he fell asleep almost as soon as his head hit the pillow, James woke him up a few hours later and, once he had changed his son's diapers, he would lie awake for hours, worrying over the same problems that had tormented him on the job. When he finally fell asleep, soft rock from the alarm radio seemed to wake him up again almost immediately and, as he struggled to get ready for still another day, he could tell from the way Jane looked at him that she felt more pity than affection. He tried to mend that fence on weekends and so did she, but they needed more time together.

He was beginning to wonder: although nothing terrible happened on any one day, something terrible could still happen over a period of days or weeks. His greatest challenge was getting the right amount of concrete poured in the right places at the right times. Greenglass and the Peggs did all they could to help. He knew the math, but he soon discovered that it took more than math and you could learn the extra skill only by trial and error. How much error would Shay tolerate? While Shay himself was the only one who could help him with this skill, Hey! knew better than to ask him. He was overestimating or underestimating the amount of concrete needed by as much as a half ton and wasting hundreds of dollars. Apparently Shay had resigned himself to overruns during a preliminary period so Hey! could refine his ability to estimate the amount of concrete needed. The first meeting without Pete went so smoothly that he came home sooner than Jane expected and she was pleased. At the second one, however, Shay confronted him with a total of $4378.23 wasted on concrete since he had replaced Pete and broke it down into its daily components, exposing his awkward efforts to compensate for his misestimates. Each figure introduced a series of questions: Did he measure carefully? Did he combine the right foundation walls, slabs and driveways? Did he schedule deliveries when the forms were ready? Why were there almost as many underestimates as overestimates? Didn't he realize that an underestimate necessitated an extra truck with only a partial load? Why didn't he make sure that he was ordering too much rather than too little? Why didn't he call Shay as Shay had urged? Did he think he was too experienced to ask for help? Did he think he had learned everything he had to know at ZTech? Was he too big for his breeches since he took over from Pete? Shay had intended to keep this reprimand dispassionate, but his own questions fanned his fire and excited his tenor to higher pitch. His voice resonated in Hey's ear like a mosquito in the night. Nor did he let him say more than "Yes, Sir!" "No, Sir!" "I don't know, Sir!" before resuming his relentless interrogation. Since the lust to satisfy his anger overrode the desire to improve his employee's performance, he fell silent

only when he had exhausted the possibilities of his subject. Still unsatisfied, nonetheless, he gave him a final lash of his tongue: "I will give you one more week. Just one. If you can't learn how much concrete to pour, I will get somebody else who can." Hey! felt so humiliated that he couldn't even follow the discussion during the rest of the meeting. When Shay or Mad asked him a question, they had to repeat it, much to Shay's irritation. That half hour seemed twice as long as usual to Hey!

When Jane opened the door for him, he was staring right through her as if she weren't there. He looked so discouraged, so exhausted and so sick that she gasped. She grabbed his arm, pulled him inside and closed the door. Then she pushed him into the bedroom, helped him undress, laid him down on the bed and cut the light out. Neither of them had uttered a word. At first, she stood beside him not knowing what to do next. Then she sank down on her knees, threw her arms around him and said: "I'm not going to let you kill yourself." A drop on his check turned him on his back and he hugged her. That night, she changed James' diapers before he could wake him up. Shay entered the trailer a quarter of an hour after Hey! the next morning and treated him almost as if he were pleased with his performance. Although he wanted to help with the concrete, he had forgotten how to make estimates, except for the precaution of ordering a little too much and the expedient of dumping the excess in the bottom of the ditches around the foundation walls. This very recommendation eased the tension that troubled Hey's decisions so that, by the end of the week, he was managing the operation almost as well as Pete. Greenglass, the Peggs and Shay himself said so. When he went over to Mad's office for the latest orders, she closed the door furtively behind him and asked: "Is Shay behaving himself?"

Hey! laughed: "Yes, what did you tell him?"

"My eggs aren't golden."

Sarah had asked to take care of the baby so they could spend a weekend in the mountains. They left Friday and, after two nights in the same room in the same motel, they were sure that it would be a girl this time. And a girl it was. Although everybody expected Alice to resemble Jane, she was looking more like Hey! with every day, while James was looking more like Jane. Hey's joke, "The devil crossed the wires," echoed to the grandparents and beyond. Jealousy worsened James' bad temper to the extent that Jane kept Alice away from him. When Hey! played with Alice, James would scream with rage, but, if he put Alice down and picked James up, he would scream just as angrily and flail at him with his arms and legs, writhing to get away from him. This behavior

prompted desperate looks between mother and father until, reluctantly, he surrendered the little boy to her and the violence stopped. Although James learned to crawl, stand and run precociously, the greater his mobility, the more destructive his impulses. His parents had expected him to run and grab everything he could reach, and even to reach demandingly for things beyond his grasp, yet James was unusually aggressive and imperious. The first word he learned was mine and he used it not only for things that concerned him in one way or another, but also for anything else that struck his fancy. Hey! found that he could hardly hold anything in his hands without screams of "mine! mine!" and sometimes James would run at him and beat his knees with his fists. Once, on such an occasion, Hey! tried picking him up, but James beat him in the face until he put him back down again. When he gave his attention to Alice, James reacted and sometimes attacked him in the same way. Once, when Jane had left Alice for a few minutes, James ran up to the baby and beat her with his fists. Jane slapped him so hard he fell on the floor, yet, after a good wail, he got up and behaved as if he had completely forgotten. Hey! let Jane put James to bed, always a delicate operation, then they sat on the bench together wondering what to do. Leaving James to Jane, they realized, would hardly improve the boy's attitude towards his father. They also worried about his belated inability to control his bladder and his bowels, especially in a tantrum. Now they had to change both children in the middle of the night, but they did it together. Whenever they looked at each other, they saw that having children had altered their appearance and each saw it in the other's eyes as well. They looked and felt as if they had lept into their thirties.

They decided to make an appointment for all four of them with Garcia. The doctor kidded Hey! about his mustache and Hey! explained that James liked it better than him. The adults laughed nervously as James stood staring at Garcia like any child confronted with a stranger. Then the doctor examined him, skillfully overcoming his resistance, and reassured his parents that, physically, he was as healthy as any child he had seen. It was too early to worry about incontinence, so all he could recommend was patience and perhaps changing him only when they were ready. He had to understand that it was wrong to wet or load his pants. They should deal firmly but patiently with his jealousy of his little sister. They had to show him that he was receiving as much attention as her and discourage any attempt to attract more than his share. As for his hostility to his father, his further development allowed new measures. Hey! could try different clothes with different colors and textures. Bright colors and rough textures fascinated children. Garcia showed them his knit tie: "They love to pull on these, so I buy them by the dozen." Hey! could also try various

soaps, after shave lotions and mouth washes because children were sensitive to scents. Mrs. Willowby should let Mr. Willowby feed James and do anything else that would demonstrate the child's dependence on his father. These measures might take time and determination, in fact they might even prove ineffective, but only in this case would he recommend a child psychologist.

They drove straight to Miller Run Mall and shopped the teenage fashions trying to elicit "mine!" from James, yet the environment bewildered him even more than Garcia's office. The salespeople pinched the smile that flitted across the mouths of the other shoppers who, although they were only ten years younger, wondered why the Willowbys were trespassing on their territory. Jane and Hey! scouted all the clothes stores they could find, then returned to Sedgwick and Crompton, "founded 1907." After much hesitation, discussion and laughter, Hey! tried an orange corduroy shirt, a pair of jeans with faded spots in unexpected places and a wide leather belt studded with metal stars. Though very embarrassed, he obeyed Jane's orders, displaying himself to James, whose eyes were bigger and bigger. Meanwhile, Alice was having the time of her life in Jane's arms. The saleslady, who looked left of everything she saw, treated them as if she had customers like them all the time. She leaned over James with her hands on her knees: "Don't you think your daddy needs something on his head too?" The question only diverted James attention from his father to her, but the answer, as she had expected, came from Jane: "Yes, let's see your hats." Swallowing his pride, Hey! followed the parade from the fitting room mirror to hat racks hung with imports from the Outback as the feathers demonstrated. Jane hesitated between an orange that varied the color of Hey's shirt and a blue that contrasted with it. The corners of his eyes detected teenagers staring and laughing on all sides. Finally Jane gave Alice to him and coaxed a choice out of James. She assured Hey! that his son had chosen orange because of the more subtle harmony with his shirt. Miss O'Hara, who wanted them to remember her, asked, almost as if she meant it, whether they would like their purchases wrapped. Jane said no and Hey! protested, much to the ladies' delight, while James looked as if he were in a trance.

I forgot to tell you about the boots. All the aficionados who told Hey! how comfortable they were couldn't convince him that they didn't hurt his ankles. He hated after shave lotion and put it off on the excuse of trying one thing at a time to see what worked. Jane spent a lot of energy talking him into the bath tub to shrink his jeans down to a tight fit and even more keeping him there because he kept standing up to get out and "do something useful." It was harder yet to persuade him to wear his new outfit to work and return in it so that James

would see him wearing it. She made a little headway with an economic argument: the clothes would be a waste unless he wore them more than a few hours in the evening. Hey! finally agreed to expose himself to derision on the site, provided he left the boots and the hat in the pickup. Nor did this expedient work, because Buzzard immediately hooted: "Where's your hat? Where's your boots?" Hey! must have explained why he was wearing these silly clothes twenty times and more than once to some of the same men, especially those who pretended to take him seriously. The hilarity at Silver Hill and Pete's second chuckle drove him to smuggle his usual clothes into the trailer where he changed after arrival in the morning and before departure in the afternoon. This tactic didn't keep Buzzard from laying ambushes for him: "Look at my daddy! He's an Australian cowboy!" Unfortunately, Hey! suffered to little avail since his outfit had the same effect on James as his mustache. After a few triumphant departures and returns, the same old hostility began to errode his son's fascination.

Having persuaded the kids to go to sleep, Jane and Hey! sat down on the bench together.

"Maybe you could take him to Sedgwick and Crompton's."

"You could buy him some interesting clothes to wear."

"He has to understand that you are doing it."

"Miss O'Hara will help you."

"I will call her and explain."

"What team do you root for?" she asked Hey!

She adjusted her gray bun: "Well, where did you go to high school or college?"

whoever they play. While waiting for a huddle to break up or for a timeout to end, sportscasters fondly remind their listeners that the black is steel and the orange, fire. You may have guessed that the school song features a "choo-choo" refrain, but diesel has replaced steam and airlines have eclipsed railroads, so anachronism drives the Locos to ingenious compromises that only engineers could imagine. If Hey! and James decided in favor of ZTech, they had a choice between orange letters on black or black letters on orange, but, under the black letters, there was a black steam engine with white smoke pouring out of its stack and, under the orange letters, there was an orange diesel-electric with streaks to show that it was going just as fast as the steam engine. The ZU Zenos play their games in light blue and white to music borrowed from the opening measures of Beethoven's Fifth. The band tries to play them just before a touchdown or a change in the lead, but these anticipations sometimes backfire. You are going to ask me what a Zeno is: I don't know, neither does anybody else, so everybody has his own definition. Students and professors in the history of philosophy department insist that it has nothing to do with the ancient Greek philosopher. Most opinions concur on a gold flying figure wearing a figleaf, except when drunks snatch it away. Although it suspiciously resembles Apollo or Mercury, nobody dares to claim such an identity and yet many take secret pride in the resemblance. ZU sweatshirts come, you guessed it, with white letters on light blue or light blue letters on white, but a Zeno flies above them on both and, when sized for little boys and girls, you can't tell whether it is a man or a woman. Intelligence reigns over Concordia, fanaticism infests Mountain Ridge. Over there, however, a contrary certainty prevails. The nearby mountains inspire a lofty disdain for the effet snobs a few hours down the road and determination is a noble virtue.

Miss O'Hara knew better than to rely on this folklore, because the ritual drumbeat didn't stir every pulse. The ZTech orange and black reminded Hey!, in particular, of brothers and alumni who identified with them as a pretext for alcohol, tobacco, marajuana, sex and vandalism. They reminded him of unruly crowds, loud laughter, pushing and shoving, urinating and vomiting. Although he wanted James to choose, he hoped he would not choose the predominantly orange sweatshirt because of the attention it would attract. The ZU sweatshirts, on the other hand, would confront him and Jane with a request to explain the Zeno. Although he would welcome an opportunity to explain the steam engine, he decided, by process of elimination, that the predominantly black sweatshirt would be the safest choice. If James discovered his preference, however, he

might ignore it deliberately. Miss O'Hara knew that the decision would come from the son and not the father anyway. After a few minutes of tense indecision, James reached for the predominantly orange sweatshirt with the black steam engine, but at least he didn't say "mine" as Hey! had feared. Miss O'Hara helped him put it on and, with his chin on his chest, he let his father negotiate a pair of pants, a belt and socks. He agreed with her that khaki would be the right color. Once James understood that her offer to wrap his new clothes implied removing them, he shook his head vehemently. On the way home, Hey! tried to get him to say whether the strange machine (as he hoped) or the bright color (as he suspected) had determined his choice. James did say that it was the locomotive, but he didn't sound sincere and, when Jane let them in, she found that the orange recalled the color of Hey's shirt and the feather in his hat.

James kept his chin on his chest for a few days and he listened to Hey's explanation of the steam engine, but without sharing his enthusiasm. First indifference set in and then the old hostility rekindled, against his sister as well as his father. When Hey! took Alice in his arms, James no longer attacked him; instead he overturned a standing lamp or yanked the books off of a shelf. Jane gave him the slap he deserved, more than he deserved in Hey's opinion, and made him stand in a corner where she could watch him. He continued to wet his pants and worse, though less often. Since Alice was a normal baby -- I make no excuses for this adjective -- and seemed to respond to both parents' affection, Jane and Hey! struggled against the temptation to prefer one child to the other. The difficulty kept them close to each other, yet it displaced mutual affection, which Hey! regretted. Such thoughts preoccupied him as he commuted to work in the old white pickup, which he had inherited when Shay bought Pete a new blue one. Pete had completely recovered from his heart attack, his return made Hey's work easier and they continued to enjoy collaborating with each other. They had as many crises and these were as challenging as ever, but they overcame them skillfully. Hey! felt at ease with the workmen, the subcontractors, the professionals, the homeowners, the voices at the other end of the telephone line. The thought that he was happy occurred to him at unexpected times, but another always followed: how long would that last? Shay let Pete and Mad talk him into a raise for Hey, which came when he needed it for his children. Hey! inspired so much confidence in employees, they reminded Shay, that no one had quit and no one had been fired since Lob. Meetings had become so congenial that they teased Shay about concrete.

Journalists are always trying to persuade us that, when anything good happens, nobody cares. One crisis resulted in so good a solution that it made the Mapleton Vigilant and Channel Eight. Mad purred over the publicity. No sooner had Hey! arrived at the trailer one morning than Smoke Pegg, who had been waiting in his pickup, ran over to tell him that some kids had messed up the slab they had poured yesterday. Hey! followed him over to #103 where his brother Spark and their men were walking around gazing at the slab. The words and figures gouged in the concrete might have raised their enthusiasm if they hadn't ruined a few thousand dollars of concrete work. There were houses with smoke coming out of the stacks, cars and pickups parked out front, airplanes flying over them and a sun in the sky. There was even a cloud off to one side. The spectators discovered a man mowing his lawn, a woman hanging clothes on her line, a mailman leaning out of his jeep to put letters in a box, a dog barking at him, a cat peering around a corner at the dog. Trees and, if you can believe me, a cactus stretching its arms and bristling its spines. Captions identified most of these objects: "Fred's Housse", "Mister Mack Bride" (mowing his lawn), "Ted's Momma" (hanging the clothes), "Dammit" (the dog), "Letter for Jess Sister," "Fernandez" (the cat) and... A heart with an arrow through it in a corner: "Margy love Brian."

"Your kids' age," said Smoke.

"Seven or eight," agreed Spark.

"Kids go that way every afternoon," confirmed one of the men.

Spark pointed the other way: "back from school over there."

Smoke scratched his bald head: "This was their playground."

A whistle startled them. No one had seen Buzzard approach: "When Shay see this!"

"They won't be the ones these kids live in," warned Smoke.

Buzzard: "When I find them, I take this lady to see them. Right?"

Mad: "Right!"

Pete: "We shouldn't try to make them pay for it."

Smoke: "They could give us a lot more trouble than this."

Spark: "They probably couldn't afford it anyway."

"You could go and talk to their classes," Mad told the Peggs. "They could make a field trip over here to see how you lay concrete."

Smoke: "Sure, we could do that."

Spark: "They would like that."

Mad: "When they see it on TV and in the newspapers"

Buzzard: "When they see themselves!"

"But you got to handle Shay," Smoke warned Pete.

Once Shay had scorched his ears, once he had shouted himself silent, Pete made a series of suggestions, explaining how each would help to solve the problem. After each suggestion, Shay would demand at a higher pitch: "How about the $3729.64?" That was how much he had calculated it would cost to saw the slab into pieces, remove them with a crane, haul them away and pour a new slab. When Pete had finished making his proposals, Shay asked the question once again and, this time, his voice hit its highest pitch. Pete pointed at the excavation in progress at #105 and at #107 where another would soon began: "Those slabs would cost you more than $3729.64. #105 will have extra garage space and #107 will have a patio. It would take that much to hire a night watchman for several months. Wouldn't it be better to absorb the loss than alienate the kids and their parents?" Shay began to mutter, a symptom of grudging acquiescence. Pete let him convince himself, which always took a while.

For once, the plan worked nearly as well as the planners had hoped and everybody was delighted except Shay, who nonetheless took some satisfaction in his "insurance policy." The work of art appeared in the Vigilant and on Channel Eight together with the artists assembled for both occasions. The interviews with them so enchanted Greater Mapleton that everybody was talking about them and, consequently, about Silver Hill as Mad reminded Shay. Hey! persuaded Shay to hire a different one every afternoon to run errands and

do odd jobs around the site. At the next meeting, Shay admitted that they might even be worth the money. Nobody smiled.

The better things went on the site, the worse they went at home. Hey! began to dread the moment when Jane opened the door in the evening. Her relief reflected the anxiety that had preceded it and, although she hesitated to burden him with her troubles, he felt obligated to share them. Parents usually delight in the growth of their children, but it only enabled James to do worse mischief. Once, he had grabbed a knife on the edge of the kitchen counter, run with it to the dining table and gouged the seat of a chair before Jane could take it away from him. He had even cut her hand by struggling with her to keep it. Though only in the thick of her palm, the wound had been hard to dress and had complicated everything she had to do. The band aid had come off while she was changing Alice's diapers, so she tried to get James to put another one on for her, but he ran away with the box. Since Jane had no trouble catching and spanking him when her hands were free, he saved his worst mischief for the times when Alice occupied her. Hey! learned of the knife incident only by insisting on an explanation for the band aid on her hand. He examined the wound, dressed it and put a new band aid on it: "Did you spank him?"

She gestured her frustration: "With my left hand?"

Scared, James stared at him.

James nodded.

Tears began to flow.

...

James pointed at the undamaged chair.

James squirmed.

The tears were flowing fast.

"Does it feel good?"

James shook his head.

James tried to run away.

James nodded.

James looked at his mother as if he had never seen her before.

...

James nodded.

James was shaking.

James nodded.

"It's in that cabinet," said Jane who had followed them.

"A knife."

"Cut."

James looked bewildered.

Jane opened the door to the Frigidaire.

James nodded.

Jane showed him a piece of cheese.

He nodded.

James shook his head.

James shook his head. His teeth were chattering.

James screamed.

"No!"

James shook his head.

He ran to her and hid his face in her knees.

She hesitated, then stroked his hair. Minutes passed as his back heaved with sobs.

"My little boy got the devil in him too," said Spark. "Ain't nothing you can do but whup'em and lov'em and hope they turns out all right."

"Nothing but pray."

"I don't know," said Spark rolling his eyes. "I don't want no trouble with him."

He clenched his jaws -- like Hey! Jane noticed -- and stared at the floor.

James continued to wail, but he was not going to be nice.

Jane took him to the corner and there he stood through supper. Although he turned around once to see what they were eating, he turned back as soon as he saw they had noticed. He would have spoiled their supper if they didn't have Alice to feed: they took turns trying to dart a spoon into her mouth before she turned her head. They enjoyed this game, but they wondered whether she was playing it on purpose. Suddenly Jane sniffed and gave Hey! a desperate look. He grabbed James under his shoulders and rushed him into the bathroom. For once, he noticed, his son didn't resist and the ease with which he changed him came as a surprise. To his consternation, he saw a look of triumph on his face.

They tried everything. They enlisted their parents who tried everything too. In their discussions, they all agreed that they should never let themselves be trapped in a series of increasingly severe punishments. Unfortunately, James saw that they were avoiding such a showdown. Hey's vow to whip him if Jane complained inspired continuous attempts to harrass her without going far enough to justify such a complaint. It was another game. Parents and grandparents collaborated on schemes to civilize him: some succeeded, though only for a few days, and some backfired. They arranged for James to meet and play with other children his age, only to discover that, once he had overcome his initial timidity, he would attack them, shoving them, flailing at them with his fists and chasing them around the room or the yard. Fascinated by little girls' hair, he would yank on it and, the louder their screams, the greater his pleasure. Mortified, the parents or grandparents who accompanied him grabbed him, slapped him, apologized and left. They were rarely able to stay longer than ten minutes. When James entered a sand box for the first time, in Amos Fletcher Park, he grabbed fistfulls of sand and watched fascinated as it slipped through his fingers. Then, he began to throw it at the other children and a grain stuck in a little girl's eye. Jane had to leave Alice alone in the baby carriage while she chased James, who ran her out of breath. After slapping him, she dragged him back to the sand box where the girl's mother was trying to extract the grain with the corner of a handkerchief. Standing around in various degrees of alarm and outrage, the other women ignored Jane and James. Finally, the mother succeeded in extracting the grain, but, even though she showed it to her, the girl continued to cry and insist that she could still feel it in her eye. Forcing James to face the mother and the child, Jane told him to apologize. Bewildered at first by the hostile faces, he soon clenched his jaws and stared back at them. Humiliation drove Jane to initiate a series of more and more violent slaps that only reinforced James' determination. Overcome with tears, she took him back to the baby carriage and left the park. Despite James' red cheeks, she saw the same triumph in his face as Hey! had.

As soon as Hey! learned what had happened, he cornered James in the big bedroom, jerked his belt out of his trousers, threw him face down on the bed and yanked his trousers off. James tried to scramble across the bed, but Hey! grabbed him by the feet with one hand and raised the belt over him with the other. James' buttocks, which quivered with terror, looked so small and vulnerable that Hey! wondered how such a child could torment his parents. When the blows began to fall, the sobs became screams and each one somehow infuriated his father so that he he hit harder and faster. How many times? He had no idea. Suddenly he stopped without knowing why and only then did he notice the red welts he had raised on his son's buttocks and legs. He felt guilty and discouraged: "Put your pants back on," he heard himself telling him with a voice that crackled like a log fire. Terrified, his son scrambled across the bed and down on the floor on the other side, where Hey! threw him his trousers and his belt. Once they were on, James thought, the whipping couldn't start again. Hey! was despairing over this miniature of himself that he had wanted so badly to engender without the slighest apprehension that he might be creating a rebel capable of ruining his life. He took James by the arm and led him to Jane who was waiting tearfully in the kitchen: "Tell your mother you are sorry." James tore away from him and buried his face in her knees, but the look his parents gave each other conveyed the suspicion that he merely felt safer with her than with him.

That look also reminded Hey! that, while his wife had the stamina to resist and survive this ordeal, it had hardened and toughened her. Where was the pretty, sweet girl he had married only a few years ago? When he looked at her and listened to her, it took an effort to recognize her. Giving birth to two children in her early twenties had distorted her body like a sack in which the potatoes had shifted. Could shouting at James have put that harsh ring in her voice? Had her preoccupation with their children coarsened her love for Hey! into a mere reliance on him for help and cooperation? She seemed already to have lost her capacity for an affection that he continued to crave. Sheer anxiety stimulated the conversation between them after they had coaxed the children to sleep. Not very long ago, they had spent their evenings laughing together on that same bench. Now they were commiserating over James and racking each other's brain trying to imagine ways to bring him around. The situation had been desperate enough without a new tendency that each had detected independently of the other. Increasingly aware of their efforts to win his affection and reconcile him with his father, James had begun to provoke them in order to extort more favors and divert their attention from Alice.

Jane raised the window to ventilate the room after changing Alice and took her

to the living room to put her in her playpen. Seeing that James hadn't followed her, she returned and found him standing on a chair that he had pushed up to the window. He had stuck his head outside and was looking down. She gasped, grabbed his belt with one hand, raised the window with the other and pulled him inside, then she put him down on the floor. Pushing the chair aside, she leaned out of the window and saw, sprawled on the concrete down below, a doll baby that Sarah had given them for Alice when she was old enough. Sarah had inherited it from her mother. It had real human hair and features that distinguished it from manufactured dolls and gave it an ideal human identity. When Sarah showed it to Jane, Hey! said: "It's a work of art."

"The artist must have been trying to make a perfect baby," said Jane.

"I imagine he made each one different from the others," Sarah remarked.

When Hey! came home from work, the look on her face shocked him. As soon as he heard what had happened, he ran downstairs, started to pick up the pieces, then hesitated. On a clipboard from his pickup, he sketched the pattern of the smashed doll on the concrete and put the pieces in a plastic bag. Back in the apartment, he laid newspapers on the floor and taped them together. On the left side, he began to reconstitute the doll as he had found it, while Jane and then James watched. First Jane and then James guessed where pieces should go. When they had finished this work, Hey! began to reconstruct, on the right side, the doll as it had been before it fell. James surprized them by his ability to identify pieces that puzzled them, such as the tip of an elbow, but they were

careful not to let on. Hey! glued and taped the pieces together, hiding a smashed thigh with a piece of wood covered by a bandage. Evidently, however, most of the damage was beyond repair. Hey! hung the doll high on the wall over James' bed so that it looked down on him as he lay there. That Saturday, they visited all the stores they could find that might have such a doll for sale, yet none of those they visited satisfied them. When I heard what had happened, I remembered that Murma had admired a doll baby that Yummy Yamaguchi had shown her. Yummy, whose son had taken one of my courses, helped the young Willowbys order a similar one from Japan and everybody, including Sarah, was delighted with it. In fact, its eyes were downright bewitching.

I have neglected Alice because she was behaving like any child her age. She had learned to walk and talk, her parents and grand parents found her adorable, and our spontaneous enthusiasm confirmed their conviction. Awed by the strangers we were to him, James did nothing disagreeable during our visit, so we were able to compliment his parents on his behavior. I limited our compliment to the time of our visit and gave his father the credit. The expression on James' face suggested that he not only understood my remarks, but also their implications.

"James," I asked him, "what is that on your shirt?"

"A steam engine! What does it do?"

"Have you ever seen one?"

"The museum! Who took you there?"

"Why don't steam engines pull trains any more?"

"Are diesels better?"

"Is that the only reason?"

"Who told you all that?"

"He must know a lot about trains."

Everybody laughed except James.

"James is not like other little boys."

She sighed: "We would have to warn her."

"And you as well?"

She laughed and gave him a shove.

"How long has it been since you did that?"

She jumped up straight: "I could substitute."

Hey! and Buzzard were finishing a brick facade on a house otherwise ready for walkthrough.

"Buzzard?"

"How come you can lay bricks faster than me?"

"Did you already know how to lay bricks?"

"Then how did you learn?"

'Hey, man! What you laying bricks for?'

Rip say: 'Can you lay them faster?'

'Hey, man! You ain't so fast, that one's crooked and you got two arms.'"

"You never told me how you lost your arm."

She turn around, she look pretty good in front too." He grinned and gave Hey! another shove. "'What's wrong with you soldier?'

She look sort of scared, but a guy started laughing down at the end of the ward, and soon everybody was laughing. She was laughing too: 'I'll go look in lost and found.'"

"You weren't in a very funny place."

'I heard your name is Buzzard.'

'That must have been his wing we ate for Thanksgiving,' he tell that nurse.

'They roasted it so good we couldn't tell the difference,' she say.

'What were the trimmings?' hollered the guy down at the end.

She answered: 'Cranberry sauce and sweet potatoes with marshmellows.'

The bird make a face: 'Roast buzzard and sweet potatoes with marshmellows!'

Jane called Miranda "the linebacker." The mistress of Laugh Giraffe Kindergarten might have been one if girls played football and if she didn't think it was stupid and dangerous. She welcomed the challenge of teaching James, but he had to wait six months before she had room for him. She urged Jane to bring him from time to time for a visit and let her know when they were coming. When he arrived with his mother, the children greeted him with an enthusiasm

that first startled him, then captivated him. As Miranda supervised and prompted, they showed him around, explained what they were doing and told him they were looking forward to playing with him. He misbehaved only when it was time to leave: Jane had agreed with Miranda that these visits shouldn't last too long. She kept his bad humor in check by setting the next visit sooner or later depending on how well he behaved. He soon realized that he had an interest in leaving gracefully, but he took his revenge by subtle acts of mischief calculated to appear unrelated to the kindergarten. Jane, who saw what he was up to, punished him as he deserved and achieved relative peace by buying him a Laugh Giraffe T-shirt, which tranquillized him even more effectively than the ZTech sweatshirt had. Designed by Miranda, this T-shirt, which he wore all day and tried to wear all night, displayed, over the letters LGK, the head and neck of a giraffe whose laugh suggested, as Hey! remarked, that he had had one too many. Miss O'Hara told him that kids who didn't even know what LGK stood for were dying to have one. He taught James how to write "Laugh Giraffe Kindergarten" and the boy learned so quickly that they had to run after him to keep him from writing it in the wrong places.

No sooner had James' mischief declined to a tolerable level than Alice began to make a nuisance of herself. She would exaggerate her affection for Hey! and Jane in front of James, he would lose his temper and she would laugh at him while holding on to her mother's skirt or her father's pants. She would also steal one of his toys, such as the truck the Benchfords had given him for Christmas, and run laughing with it to Hey! or Jane. She would time these thefts so that she could reach a parent before he could catch her. Since they began to slap her for this behavior, she invented other tactics, such as sneaking up behind him and screaming at the top of her lungs. The first few times, they assumed that he was hurting her, but, once they had caught her trying to deceive them, they would question James, who usually told the truth when he was angry. Once, she tattled on him for going to the bathroom in his pants and he kicked a bruise in her buttock as soon as he caught her alone. That time, she had to scream louder and longer than usual before her mother intervened. After the children had gone to sleep that evening, the parents staid up later than usual trying to decide whether their daughter's bruise was the moral equivalent of their son's humiliation. The war was escalating. James was taunting Alice because she was a little girl and Alice was taunting James because he was a big boy. He set a spider loose on her bed and she ambushed him between his pajamas and his underpants: "What's that thing?" she asked contemptuously, pointing at it. Imagine the parents' reaction when their daughter came running into the kitchen with their naked son in hot pursuit! Alice was laughing so hard she lost her breath. Hey! stared at James and pointed down the hall: "Get dressed!" When he discussed the incident with Jane that evening, they kept trying to define Alice's offence and

never succeeded. Finally, Jane laughed and patted him: "What's that thing?" Hey! chased her around the dining table.

They were tired of waging peace when Miranda told them she could take James in two weeks. She had graduated third in her class at ZU with a double major in Astrophysics and Preschool Education. "What is she going to do next?" President Softact wondered as he handed her diploma to her and the crowd laughed. "What I did next," she told prospective parents, "was to forget everything I had learned in the School of Education." From the outset, she realized that she had to keep the kids busy, so she relied on a judicious blend of collaboration and competition. If she had played linebacker, she would have made tackles all over the field. She invited me for a visit and, when I arrived, she had them seated at little tables, three to a table, facing a large window that overlooked a beech tree which they were drawing with crayons. The school had been converted from servants' quarters on the second floor of a six-car garage behind a big house divided into apartments. The yard where the beech stood served as a playground and as an alternative work space when the weather permitted. The view of the neighborhood provided subjects for the artists, as the drawings on the walls demonstrated. The tree was a step up the ladder of difficulty from the eccentric roof of a nearby house with steep gables and lightning rods. The artists at each table shared a common supply of crayons which they kept in a box in the middle of the table. As Miranda moved from table to table, she not only asked questions, made comments and offered suggestions, but also ensured that each artist kept only the crayon he was using and returned it as soon as he had finished with it. She encouraged neighbors to consult each other on the problems she raised and discuss conflicts between different perspectives.

James tried to keep more than one crayon at a time and even snatched one from his neighbor. Miranda made him give it back and apologize, but she had trouble persuading him to consult the two girls on either side of him. He had drawn the most accurate representation of the tree in the class. The shape, the colors, the detail of the leaves and the orientation of the branches conveyed an impression of depth, as Miranda showed the girls. She remarked, however, that he hadn't drawn any birds in his tree like Karen and, when he objected that there weren't any in the tree outside, Karen showed him two and Rachel, a third one.

"Your tree is just a perch for birds," he told Karen.

"What's yours good for?" said Rachel. "We can see it out there."

Disconcerted, he pointed at Rachel's tree: "What's that?"

Karen leaned over the table: "It's a dog barking up the tree."

He looked out the window: "There isn't any dog barking up the tree."

"How do you know there wasn't one on Sunday?"

James was exasperated: "What's he barking at?"

Karen pointed: "A squirrel."

Everything seemed to be going so well that the young Willowbys began to worry about what might go wrong. Miranda followed a bi-weekly schedule of calls to the parents of the children in her school. Having reviewed her notes on James, she called Jane and told her that, while he was a constant challenge, she had him under control. She found him to be the most intelligent child in her school, but also the most rebellious and she couldn't tell how he would evolve: "So far, so good!" Meanwhile, Jane was substituting for absent elementary school teachers and, while teaching somone else's class was not easy, especially when the teacher was absent because he had lost control of his class, she was learning how to subdue unruly classes. She harmonized severity of principles with flexibility of means so that a majority cooperated and rebels felt isolated. Principals were competing with each other to hire her full time, but the Mapleton School Administration was considering the possibility of making her a full-time substitute teacher. Despite this perspective, Jane wanted to wait until James was in the first grade and Alice, in Laugh Giraffe. Health itself has its side effects, for the ring in her voice and her air of authority bothered Hey! While he continued to enjoy his job, working with Pete, who had recovered from his heart attack, gave him less opportunity to exploit the lessons he had learned and deprived him of a promotion. Pete told him he should look for a senior foremanship with another builder even though he and everybody else would hate to see him go. Shay reluctantly agreed and inquired, but there were no openings in Mapleton.

Don't worry: I haven't forgotten Alice. Though warned of her pranks, her grandparents discovered that she learned from their precautions and devised more subtle ones to catch them off guard. The one that made them all laugh loudest, once they had gotten over it, was her assurance that "It won't hurt," which she had learned from the dentist, followed by the pinprick she gave "Ma Will" while she was loading the washing machine. Sarah shrieked, more from outrage than pain, and Jeff came running. He found his wife holding her

buttock and glaring at Alice, who looked surprised. She saw that "Dad Bench" always turned first to the page in the newspaper with the pictures. One morning, he turned and found this page missing: "Janet?... Janet?"

"Yes?" she answered from the kitchen.

"... Alice? Why didn't you use yesterday's paper?"

Since the children were spending less time together, Jane and Hey! could restrain the fighting, yet Alice continued to provoke her brother and James, to retaliate. They drove somewhere every weekend with the men in front and the women in back, with James in the right front seat and Alice in the left rear seat. When they visited the zoo, the couple walked in the middle with the children on either end, comparing each other to the less attractive animals they saw. Alice laughed when she saw a rhinoceras: It's eyes looked just like James' when he was mad and he had the same thing in back. Jane scolded her, but James laughed and said that Alice was jealous because she didn't have one herself, so Hey! scolded him.

That evening, the couple would take their turn laughing.

Hey! would tell Jane that he preferred her legs and she would reply that his were better felt than seen. Then he would chase her around the dining table.

Jane would remark that James hadn't had an accident since he had started attending Laugh Giraffe.

"He seems to have an innate conviction that I am his enemy," Hey! would complain.

Buzzard was helping Hey! connect a humidifier, which a customer had ordered late, to a heating and cooling system. He had taped the wiring chart to the fan housing so he could tell him where to connect the wires: "That white one go there."

Hey! was tightening the screw: "Buzzard?"

"When you woke up in that hospital, you must have felt some pain."

"How come you didn't tell me anything about that?"

"What do you mean, pain don't... doesn't make a good story?"

"... I see what you mean."

"... Where does the orange one go?"

The blade of Hey's screwdriver slipped out of the groove in the head of the screw.

Hey! started screwing again. "A kind of thud?"

"It might have been your body."

"And you wouldn't be here talking to me right now."

"Did he just happen to be right there beside you?"

"You didn't like him? How come he was your buddy?"

"What was wrong with him?"

"You never shot yours off?"

"... You were sorry you didn't have to listen to him any more?"

"The black one?"

"And he asked you to finish him off?"

"... This must be the last wire."

"Maybe that was where he went."

"Air, clouds, gas, dust, rocks..." Hey! started to screw the panel back on.

"What's that?"

"It sure ain't... Now, is this humidifier going to work?" He cut the furnace on and they went downstairs where he took a humidity guage out of his pocket.

"Nothing but bones and survivor memory."

"How about you?"

"How old are you?"

"It will be a while before my kids have any of their own."

"When you say 'having kids', do you mean loving kids or making love?"

"... My little boy doesn't like me."

"Maybe something is wrong with me."

"Don't you think he's a little young for that?"

"Maybe I ought to let Jane tell him. She's the schoolteacher."

"... There! The humidity is 45%."

a face when he saw his father rather than his mother, but, otherwise, he behaved. When Hey! told him they were going to Amos Fletcher Park to feed the ducks, the geese and the swans, he was almost enthusiastic. As soon as they approached the edge of the pond, the fowl gathered expectantly and, after James had thrown them some crumbs, Hey! pointed at the mallards: "Why is there a brown one with every green one?"

"... The brown ones are boys and the green ones are girls?"

"... I guess they have more fun that way."

James pointed at a family of ducks parading around the edge of the crowd: "They have little ducks together."

"..."

James hesitated, then shook his head.

"... Where did the others go?"

"What happens to ducks when they die?"

"They were dead?"

"... Where did their lives go?"

James rolled anxious eyes up at his father.

"Why do ducks have eggs and people have babies?"

"They do?"

Hopefully: "Then moms have babies all by themselves!"

"What do dads do?"

"How did he do that?"

"Why does he have to chase her? Does it hurt?"

"Do people chase each other?"

"... So you and mom decided to have me."

"... Where would I be if you hadn't decided to have me?"

"I would have to be somewhere, wouldn't I?"

James' face was white, he began to tremble and, suddenly, he was wailing. Hey! picked him up and, as James buried his face in his shoulder, he carried him back to the pickup.

Jane had given Alice the same kind of instruction while bathing her, except that she had emphasized their wish to have two children, a boy and a girl. They were disappointed, she said, when they saw that their children weren't nice to each other. This instruction resulted in good behavior for a while, but it also distressed the children so that they wept over the slightest mishap. While peace was better than war, it wasn't a happy peace and it worried Jane and Hey! A few months later, Alice stuffed a sheet of newspaper into the toe of one of James' shoes and laughed when it stuck on the end of his foot. He jerked the newspaper out, put the shoe on and ignored her, clenching his jaws tightly. He no longer grimaced when he heard or saw that he would be alone with Hey,

but he did have a wooden expression on his face. Hey! and Jane hoped that the children's behavior would at least get no worse and, for a while, it didn't. Then, one day, Jane was dusting behind the drawers in James' chest and she found an assortment of crayons, the kind Miranda supplied her pupils. She felt so weak that she sat down on the chair James had stood on to throw the doll baby out of the window. She called Hey! and they decided what she would do as soon as he came home from work. They took James to his chest and she told him to pull the drawer out. He began to cry, but she told him to put the crayons in a small box and, the box in his pocket. They drove to Miranda's house and James gave her the box. Sobbing for shame, he said he was sorry as Jane prompted him. A few days later, Alice affected an innocent tone of voice while requesting a padlock for the cabinet she kept her toys in. Scolding by both parents only seemed to satisfy her, so they made her stand in the corner while they ate desert. James was very quiet.

Miranda declared a holiday on a Friday when she wanted to attend a meeting of the Preschool Education Society in Concordia. Hey! took advantage of the opportunity to take James to work with him. He had given everybody on the site instructions about how to treat his little boy: "Don't flatter him, don't admire his dad, don't give him anything to eat or drink, no chewing gum, no profanity and no obscenity. Teach him something useful."

"What's his name."

"Is he as smart as you?"

Everybody laughed.

had cut his arm off himself because it kept getting in the way. He had given it to a friend who needed three of them to pat all of his dogs at the same time. Buzzard was patting imaginary dogs all around him. When his friend only patted two of his dogs, the other one was jealous. Where had they put the extra arm? On the friend's back, just below his neck, so it would be on the same level as the other two. How could he see what he was doing with it? He looked over his shoulder, said Buzzard demonstrating. It took the friend a while to get used to that. Did he cut a hole in his clothes? His wife did that for him, but she kept complaining about people staring at them, until the lady next door wished her husband had three arms so he could spank all of their kids at the same time. Those kids was always getting into the same trouble. Buzzard's friend's wife began to think of all the things he could do for her with his three arms so she didn't mind so much no more. No, she didn't mind the three dogs as long as he kept them outside. Needless to say, James didn't want to leave Buzzard when Hey! told him to do something else and, while doing something else, he kept asking when he could go back to Buzzard. They had become such good friends that Hey! begin to wonder whether Buzzard had followed all of his rules.

James had a ride in nearly every kind of vehicle on the site, including Buzzard's car, the climax of a very exciting day. He rode in a cement truck, a dump truck, a forklift, a bulldozer, various pickups and vans. Sitting on laps, he operated a backhoe and blew a tractor-trailer horn. He helped to lower a roof truss with a crane and tilt the body of a dump truck. He rode an elevator up and down on the back of a truck. Brad helped him cut a piece of wood with a power saw, drive a nail with a pnematic hammer and use his level to check the alignment of a staircase. The Peggs let him smooth the corner of a driveway and write "J. W." small enough so that nobody would mind. Sam Skyrock took him up on a roof and helped him lay a shingle. A plasterer let him smear some plaster on a wall and a painter let him roll part of another wall. He handed tools up to an electrician on his stepladder, who explained how the current would reach the light he was installing. He cut the water on and off for the landscapers before they lowered a shrub into the hole they had dug. To nobody's surprise, he preferred the toilet in the trailer to the port-a-johns located in strategic places around the site.

Mad took him with her as she escorted some customers around the model homes and, when they had left, she showed him a model of the finished development and explaind the progress they had made. Then she served him a coca-cola while she had a cup of coffee. Shay appeared earlier than expected

and drove James around with him in his Buick, telling him everything he had on his mind as if he were an adult, including praise for his father. James surprised him by everything he already knew about concrete, but Shay's preoccupation with the subject dissuaded the boy from mentioning the initials in the corner of the driveway on lot 173. From Shay James heard what he had heard from nobody else because nobody else thought a little boy would be interested in finances. Shay couldn't say anything without mentioning how many dollars and cents it cost and nobody, not even Pete, could remember an exception to this rule that had occurred during the last thirteen years. The joke nearly everybody on the site wanted to tell newcomers older than James concerned the value of the time Shay spent making love to his wife and especially the ratio between expectation and satisfaction in exact figures. It varied according to the number of minutes and the rate per minute based on this ratio. Mad told it as eagerly as the others after her habitual sweep of the eyes and Pete must have been the only one who didn't tell it. Pete had made a profound impression on James without even trying.

Despite James' enthusiasm, thanking his father didn't even occur to him until Jane hinted and prompted him to a minimum acknowledgement of gratitude. Sincere gratitude he had, but towards Buzzard, Pete and the others rather than his father, as if they had lavished their kindness on him spontaneously and without any significant wish to cooperate with Hey. James wanted to go back on Monday instead of returning to Laugh Giraffe, but Hey! told him that everybody had given him special attention at Silver Hill. They couldn't do that again if he went back so soon because they had work to do. Jane reminded him that he had always enjoyed Laugh Giraffe and was learning a lot of things that would help him when he entered elementary school in the fall. James nonetheless asked when he was going to see Buzzard and Pete again, so Hey! said he would think about it.

"You will see them again soon if you keep on behaving," said Jane.

"And not steal anything," Alice added.

Jane grabbed her and shook her: "Alice! You ought to be ashamed of yourself."

"I'm sorry... Daddy, when are you going to take me to Silver Hill?"

"Little girls are not usually interested in things like that."

"It's not fair unless you take me too."

"And if you are nice to James."

Alice sighed and shrugged: what was the use in being nice to James?

to be called "Jamesy". No, she wanted him to be called "James" and she particularly disliked "Jamesy". Hey! laughed and reminded her how he had acquired his nickname, but she didn't think it was funny. When he conveyed her complaint to Buzzard, he laughed and reminded him that he had told him not to call him Jim or Jimmy. Baptism by Buzzard would prove as permanent as baptism by Pete. "Jamesy" had told Rachel Weiss to call him that so she would know he didn't mind her befriending him. She disagreed with the other children who thought he was stuck-up. Seeing that he didn't feel a need for friends like other children, Miranda tried to instill in him a sense of duty that would replace the virtues of friendship. During recreation one morning, the children were playing in the yard and she went upstairs to get her whistle which she had forgotten. She was about to go back down again when a little girl screamed and she ran to the window on the side where she heard it. Some shrubs hid a Sears and Roebuck shed in that corner of the yard. James had backed Rachel up against the side of the shed and was reaching under her dress as she tried to hold his hands away and struggled to free herself. I already told you that Miranda could move pretty fast. As soon as she approached, Rachel ran up to her sobbing. Miranda took her up in her arms and confronted James, who looked thwarted and unrepentent. "Upstairs!" said Miranda pointing and up he went.

He spent the rest of the day at a table by himself and, when Jane came to get him, Miranda asked her to wait with him in her office until the other children had left. She had asked Rachel to ask her mother to call as soon as they got home. When the call came, Becky Weiss' voice was as tense as Miranda had expected, so she let her talk, while Jane glared at James, who stared out of the window. Then Miranda told Becky what she had heard, seen and done. James and Jane Willowby were right there in her office, she said, she was going to discuss the matter with them and she would call back as soon as they had something to say. When she hung up, Jane was shaking with consternation and anger, while James began to cry. Again, Miranda waited until Jane had finished talking. James had to understand, said Miranda, that he had done something wrong, why it was wrong and that he should never do it again. If he was going to keep on attending Laugh Giraffe, he would have to reassure Rachel and her parents that she had nothing further to fear from him. He deserved severe punishment, but his parents would have to decide how to punish him. The sooner the better. Maybe he should also stay home until next week, so Rachel would have time to get over what had happened. "James!"

He raised tearful eyes.

"Did you understand everything I said?"

He nodded.

James nodded.

James shook his head.

"... Tell her I'm sorry."

"... Yes, Sir."

"Playing hide and go seek. We were hiding."

"Hers."

"Yes, Sir."

"... Yes, Sir."

"She went into the corner between the shed and the fence."

"I stood beside her. She pushed me and giggled... She kept pushing and giggling."

"Yes, Sir."

Dave laughed. "We have the same problem. One solution will be better than two."

"Tell me James' and I will tell you Rachel's."

"Rachel is only four and I wonder whether she doesn't already know as much as James. She asks a lot of questions, Becky tells her she has to wait until she grows up, then she comes and asks me." Dave looked Hey! in the eyes: "I tell her. I think she should know."

"Rachel told me the same thing James told you except for the giggles. But I'm sure James is right about that, she's a great giggler. I like to hear her giggle and I bet James does too. You know, Hey!, things could be a lot worse: what if Rachel liked girls and James liked boys?" Dave had a contagious laugh.

"I was a bad little boy and I had a few of those whippings you never forget."

heavily influenced by his, Jamesy's hommage pleased Rachel and their friendship resumed, yet she continued to contribute more than he did.

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