Robert M Green, Jr - Apology to Inky

Walton Ulster, between sleep and waking, heard a car horn go "ah-ooga," and thought: that's a sound that's getting to be passé. Even the boop-boop-a-doop horn, in spite of the teen-age sports with their roadsters, was getting to be passe, along with the biplane-Walton snapped awake.

It was a wrenching brain-battering awakening. He had not been deeply asleep, if he had been asleep at all, but he had been more than thirty years back, or down, in time, and to rocket in an instant from 1931 to 1965 was enough to give anyone a case of psychological bends.

Walton looked out the window of the bus and studied the highway traffic. There was not a car in sight older than 1950. Some humorist could have installed an "ah-ooga" horn from a junkyard Model T, but Walton wouldn't have heard it here in the back of the bus, with the wheels singing directly under his feet and the cold-air jet humming and burbling into his ear.

An "ah-ooga" horn would be charming really. Very much in. Like vintage cars. Walton weighed the idea of buying one and writing a concerto for it. It would have to be one of those gimmicky, show-off pieces that struts its hour on the stage shouting, "Hey, look at me! What a brash, outrageous piece of affrontery am I!"

Walton remembered the time when he would have sneered at such blatant self-advertisement passing itself off as music, but that was when he was so full of music himself that it vibrated at his very fingertips, when he could say "to hell with the orchestration; let them play it on jew's-harps and frisco slide whistles and it will come out good; set it up for trained seals with bicycle horns; I don't care."

All right. But that was before the dreams—the waking dreams and sleeping dreams—and the shrill rising voices within him that cried out his guilt and left no room for music. His talent was barren now and he knew it, but a man who had been famous for his pride—arrogance, gall, conceit; what you will—could not turn humble all at once and bow meekly to denigrating truth.

If all he had left was a bag of tricks with which to titillate the novelty seekers, the tricks were good tricks—duet for garden hose and bagpipe, sonata for piano with tissue paper over the strings, "Bor-borygmy in Harmony" with taped sounds of authentic belches and belly rumbles, "Alley Cat Chorale" featuring tapes of honest-to-God alley cats yowling over a percussion base consisting of shoes being thrown against a sheet of galvanized steel—arresting though sterile manipulations of sound that enraged just about everybody and kept Walton's name in the newspapers.

That sort of thing would have to suffice for the present. Somehow someday, soon God willing, he would surely find a way to recharge his talent. Then he would go back to filling the air with glory, and he would damn well sue any conductor who presumed to perform even a part of any single smart-aleck opus from this interlude of bleakness. The talent-recharging trick, he was certain, was to put his finger on the specific moments of past time into which he seemed to be slipping in his waking dreams—the times which seemed to invoke at least the aura of the guilt for which as yet he could find no name—and then to find a link or common denominator for these fragments of time. The moments he was groping for, he was just about certain by now, were in the spring of 1931 and the winter of 1944.

Therefore, of course, Moira Hendricks had to be the common denominator. The more he thought about Moira these days—after twenty years of dogged effort not to think about her at all—the stronger became the pull of his dreams. He would hear a plane overhead and look up wondering whether it was a monoplane or a biplane, or, by a marvelous stroke of luck, a Ford Trimotor. He would find himself searching magazine racks for Ballyhoo, or Judge, or College Humor. He would twiddle the dial on the radio until his exasperated wife asked him what in the world he was looking for, and would realize with an embarrassed start that he was idly hoping to catch Ruth Etting singing "Shine on, Harvest Moon." Those were the 1931 moments.

Then he would put his hand to his shirt collar and think, Oh my God, I've forgotten to put on my collar insignia! He would automatically reach for nonexistent crutches before getting up from his chair. He would hear—actually hear—Frank Sinatra singing "I'm gonna buy a paper doll that I can call my own." He would say to his wife, "Hey, you didn't throw away Dick Tracy, did you? How am I ever going to know whether Flat Top sizzled him with that flame thrower?" He would hear, from far-off jukeboxes, the bossy right hand, saucy left hand and mocking voice of Fats Waller, and catch himself thinking, boozily, sentimentally, See? See? He didn't die after all.

But most significantly, the more he thought about Moira, the more he brooded about guilt, and the surer he became that whatever it was he was guilty of, she was the victim of it. If so, she was the one who could tell him. That was why he was making this trip. It wasn't going to be easy. He couldn't come out flatly and ask her if he had done anything to her about which he ought to feel guilty. Old friends, old loves could alter drastically in twenty years, but he doubted that Moira would ever lose her knack for puncturing tension with a gay little crack and making him feel like a self-dramatizing, rather pompous fake. Oddly, though he had had occasion to resent this knack of Moira's, it was part of her charm. It had kept him on his toes, and she had never punctured him except when he deserved puncturing. He had indeed lapsed on occasion into pomposity. It was still a bad habit of his, particularly with no Moira in his life to keep him in check, and he was going to have to guard against it when he met her.

It had been Walton's plan to take the bus clear down into Cincinnati, then pick up a Hamilton bus that would take him up to Glen-dale, some fourteen miles north of the city. Now as he looked out the window and saw the gateway to Sharon Park, he realized that his bus was coming into Sharonville, which is also some fourteen miles north of Cincinnati, but only about three miles east of Glendale. It struck him as ridiculous to ride twenty-eight miles in a bus just to go three miles. It was an easy walk from Sharonville to Glendale. He had done it hundreds of times when he was a kid.

He got off the bus at Sharon Avenue, which leads to Glendale. A few other people were getting off at the same place, so he had time to change his mind and jump back aboard, back to the gentle, phony zephyrs of the air conditioner, as the 114-degree July heat slapped him in the face. But what the heck; he had no luggage; he'd walked farther than three miles on hotter days, back in the 1931 he was seeking to rediscover, and besides he could stand to lose a few pounds around the midriff.

First of all, he went into a drugstore telephone booth to call Moira at her mother's home.

"Well, you told me you would if you didn't hear from me." The voice of the beloved, as though twenty years had never been. It was as crisply cool as ever. No nonsense. Walton's hands were shaking. "I was expecting you, Walton."

"But when Aunt Jane told me you were Mrs. Moira Buntline, I sort of wondered—"

"Boy, you really are out of touch. I married Billy seventeen years ago. I'm sure you were on the invitation list."

"Not if your mother had anything to do with it. Billy Buntline. I'll be damned. I never would have matched you two."

"Neither would Mother. After a while Billy came to see it her way. It was as simple as that. No children. No settlement. He's married to Gladys Mallon now."

"No! Well, look, Moira, I'd better hang up. I've got a little walk ahead of me."

"And the belts are shorter these days too. Your Aunt Jane tells me you're fat as a pig. Look, don't come here. Mother is still Mother, only more so. Call me from Igler's when you get to Glendale, and I'll meet you there."

Her hair was long, her foot was light

And her eyes were wild.

And her tongue was tart as ever. "Fat as a pig." As he hung up, Walton felt that sweet, long-forgotten throbbing ache within his rib cage that Tin Pan Alley still ascribed to the heart, though it was more likely an endocrine reaction. Moira forever. How liltingly she put you in your place. How he had ranted at it, how he had hoity-toitied at it, and how he had needed it. He had really brimmed over in those days—the days of Moira. He had brimmed over with music, with love, with inchoate philosophy, with hair-trigger perceptions. That was fine so long as it was on the level; Moira was with him, encouraging him, occasionally pruning the rank overgrowth. He was full of glory in those days, and Moira was involved in the glory. It was only when he was overweening and pretentious that she cut him down to size, but an arrogant young man with notions of being an artist can't always know when he is pretentious.

That was why twenty years ago he had fled from Moira and all his glory. But he was not so simpleminded as to think that he could flee back and recapture Moira and glory. There was more to it than that. Somehow he must also recapture himself—a scared kid with a dog-no, two dogs—an angry Army captain with crutches and shards of phonograph records. He didn't know how, or, really, why this was to be accomplished.

Walton wasn't wearing a summer suit. He didn't own one, to begin with, and wouldn't have worn one anyway, since it had been damp and windy in New York when he left there yesterday. He had forgotten about those southern Ohio summers.

He took off his suit coat, draped it over his arm, and began walking west on Sharon Avenue. Whether or not they really made the miles longer these days, they certainly did make the highways narrower. He remembered Sharon as a fine, wide road, with plenty of room on both sides for boys and dogs to ramble and for cars to park. Cars to park. Right up there on the left, just this side of the railroad tracks and in front of the locomotive roundhouse was where the Model A Ford was parked with a flat tire. The guilty Model A. The murderer of Inky. With a flat tire. Served it right.

No. There was no Model A there now. You couldn't even park a bicycle there without tying up traffic all the way to Glendale. Traffic was pretty nearly jammed up anyway. The road was wide enough for a comfortable flow of two-way traffic, but it didn't seem to be. Everything seemed hemmed in, squeezed together by some invisible pressure; Walton was bucking this pressure by sheer physical effort in order to stay out of the way of the laboring, monoxide-fuming cars. The heat pressed him down from above. Claustrophobia qualms fluttered through him, but he soothed himself with the assurance that he would soon be out of Sharonville and in wide-open farm country. Maybe if he tried Boy Scout pace—fifty steps walking, fifty running —he would be out of this unseen dungeon before the walls closed in and crushed him.

A silly notion. He was barely past the old Sharonville roundhouse, and already his shirt was drenched in sweat; his feet, as in a dream, seemed to be dragging through thick gelatin. It was still early in the afternoon, but the mixture of haze, heat waves, exhaust fumes, diesel smoke, and sweat streaks on the lenses of his glasses distorted and darkened everything around him. Suddenly, above the sounds of automobile tires and motors, he heard the voice of a boy, across the street and behind him, calling: "Here, Slimmy! Here, Slimmy!"

Walton looked over his shoulder. He couldn't have heard properly, over the highway noises. Possibly, without being fully aware of it, he had seen the liver-colored Chesapeake Bay retriever out of the corner of his eye, and the name "Slimmy" had merely leaped to his mind. The kid in the green sweater, kneeling by the absurdly right-angled high-bottomed Model A Ford, might have been calling "Here, Spot," or "Here, Rover." Besides, there was only one Slimmy, as Walton had found out after a number of experiences with other Chesapeake Bay retrievers.

Or possibly it was the setting, the background, because he had seen it in dream after dream. The old roundhouse was out of true, just as it was in the dreams, and might easily, as in some of the dreams, turn into a Rhenish castle which you entered to find everything upholstered in green and be waited upon by smiling servants dressed as Pullman porters.

The Model A Ford with the flat front tire was also out of the dreams. The boy in the green sweater, with Slimmy (Spot? Rover?) at his elbow, was squatting by the tire. He was doing something to it, but Walton couldn't see what. Spot-Rover was sniffing at the tire just as Slimmy sniffed it in the dreams, sniffing Inky's blood, still bright red and gleaming in the April sunlight, though Inky had been dead since St. Patrick's Day.

Whatever it was that the boy and dog were doing, it was damned dangerous. They were on the left side, the highway side of the car. With all that hemmed-in traffic.

Walton shouted a warning, then turned to cross the street in order to give the boy some avuncular advice. Just then, a parade of three monster diesel trucks blocked him and cut off his view of boy, dog, and Model A Ford.

Walton shrugged and resumed his walk. It would have been out of character for him to butt in. He was an inveterate minder of his own business; the kid undoubtedly would have suggested to him that he continue as such.

He noticed that he was weaving slightly. Damned carbon monoxide. Plus heat waves. Plus too vivid a recollection of a recurrent dream.

That was it! The dream! His motives had not been avuncular after all. He had simply wanted to see what crucial thing the boy was doing to that automobile tire, and the diesel trucks had forbidden him, just as blurring of focus or sudden awakening always forbade him in his dreams to see what was being done to the tire. Good Lord, had it come now to hallucinations in broad daylight?

He looked back toward the roundhouse. He knew the rule about hallucination. You merely had to utter, or even think "hallucination," and it would vanish. No. The boy and the dog and the Model A were still there. But from where he stood, the car looked too rounded and sloping to be a Model A, the boy's sweater looked more brown than green, and the dog looked more like a collie than a Chesapeake Bay. Damned glasses. Walton had nothing to wipe them with, except a dirty, sweat-sopping handkerchief.

Hallucination or not, the thing to do was to present it to Moira as such. He had been wondering how, in the face of her inevitable scorn, he was going to broach the subject of the dreams. One of Moira's most engaging traits had been the trace of witch in her. Her crisp and merry practicality, her brusque impatience with emotional flatulence had been an acquired camouflage for an occult spirit sensitive to ghosts, bodiless voices in the dark, and nasty, vengeful pre-Olympian demigods. There had been madness in that big, creaky old house of the Hendrickses. You saw it staring bleakly out of stiff ancestral portraits.

Walton supposed that she had inherited from her father—certainly not her savage vampire mother—the mother wit that gave her the arms and armor that had saved her and probably would always save her from being drawn wholly into her shadowy interior world—her witch world. She had succeeded in keeping everyone but Walton himself from seeing inside this armor. Maybe she had, through wishful thinking, seen some nonexistent quality in Walton, but inevitably he had failed her in the role of demon lover. He had gradually become enraptured with her voices in long unlit corridors, her deals with black powers. He had become, in fact, hooked.

I set her on my prancing steed,

And nothing else saw all day long,

For sidelong would she bend, and sing

A faery's song.

But he could come only as far as the gates of her world. No ghosts ever talked to him. He could only deal with her world in a poetic sense, and Moira's ghosts were not poetry; they were Tom, Dick and Harry. Poetry was dangerous to Walton; it led him to excesses, to the verge of utter sappiness. But only to the verge. At the crucial moment Moira's needle of matter-of-fact would pop the balloon. Damned witch.

Anyway, Inky wasn't in this handily contrived "hallucination," as he so often—implausibly—was, in the dreams. He wouldn't have to mention Inky, which was a blessing. Moira might be venomous about Inky.

No, that was unfair. It wasn't Moira, but Moira's mother who had destroyed Inky with the Model A Ford. Inky, pointless, clumsy black mongrel, always subordinate to Slimmy, had been a member of his inviolate boy's world, had been one of the components of love that glued that world together, and without Inky there had been nothing left for a boy to do but kick his way through the shatterable dome of someone else's world. Not to destroy. Just to get in there and perhaps to find new components of love. But the very entry into another world was and had to be an act of destruction. Moira's mother had been the shatterable dome, and he had shattered this dome by doing some secret thing to a punctured tire with bloodstains still on it. But Moira had been the component of love inside the dome, and he had found her. And what secret thing had he done to her? And why the fingers pointing at him?

Outside of Sharonville, where the open fields had been, Walton found himself more hemmed in than before—by factories and by concrete overpasses and underpasses for highways he remembered as bucolic lovers' lanes. One bridge, once reasonably broad, had now become too narrow to accommodate both foot and vehicular traffic. Maybe it didn't matter. Maybe no one walked any more—not out this way to be sure.

It seemed that the only way for a man on foot to cross this bridge was to wait for a hiatus in the traffic and then run like hell. As Walton was standing there in woozy befuddlement, a slow rattletrap truck approached the bridge, heading in the direction of Glen-dale. The tailgate was down, and Walton, forgetting the dignity fitting to his age and increasing portliness, leaped aboard. No doubt the driver would see him soon enough through his rear-view mirror, but he surely wouldn't stop on the bridge, and Walton had no intention of staying on the truck after the bridge was crossed. His conscience would be clear. He would still have walked from Sharonville to Glendale; no one would count a tiny ferry trip across an otherwise unfordable obstacle.

He was sitting on the tailgate, facing to the rear, when the cold came. Suddenly he was struggling to put on his suit jacket and huddle in it, whistling breathily over a shivering jaw. The tune he was whistling was "Mairzy Doats and Doazy Doats and Little Lamzy Divey; a Kiddly Divey Too; Wouldn't You?" That was a tune he hadn't heard for twenty years or so. He wouldn't have remembered all the words yesterday, but he did at this moment.

Walton knew it wasn't as cold as it seemed to be. These broiling humid days could trick you sometimes. A change of wind, a sudden downdraft of high cool air might lower the temperature no more than five degrees and yet feel positively wintry against your sweat-soaked body.

Right behind the truck was a big black old car. Walton was no good at guessing makes or vintages of cars, but he guessed that this was a pre-World War II model—1939 or '40—and a Packard. In truth, Walton could barely tell a Packard from a jeep. Moreover his eyes, unpampered by spectacles, watered and blurred in the sudden drop of temperature.

But in the dream—the other dream—it was always a Packard, only he was inside it. The car behind him then was no hallucination, but the Packardness of it surely was, and for the first time Walton began to wonder if his coming back here for the first time after so many years to the scene of his crimes (?) was not going to make things worse instead of better.

Walton could see clearly the flashing black eyes and tight angry lips of the young woman who was driving; he could see her blue-black hair, set in a long, barbaric version of a page-boy bob and spreading out onto her shoulders from under a pale blue babushka to lend splendor to a pathetic old dyed squirrel coat. Next to her he could see the gesticulating Army captain, bundled up in his greatcoat, his crutches propped up beside him against the back of the seat.

Once again the dream was taking the place of objective vision. Walton proved it. He closed his eyes and still saw the Packard, the young woman and the gesticulating captain. He would palm this one off on Moira too as a hallucination. She would take it seriously and perhaps revel in it, but Walton didn't dare take it seriously, and far from revelling in it he steeled himself to fight it. This sort of thing was nothing to him but a cold grey warning—an intimation of creeping psychosis.

He blinked several times and pounded his forehead with the heel of his hand; his objective eyesight gradually got the better of his psychic eyesight, and what he saw in the car back there was the figures of two people only vaguely discernible through the blur of his drenched eyes and the glint of afternoon sunlight on the car's windshield. The person driving appeared to be a woman all right, but surely not in babushka and dyed squirrel coat, at this time of year, despite the sudden illusion of chill. The man might or might not be a soldier. He seemed to be wearing some kind of visored hat (did they wear those in today's Army?), but it could be a sports cap or boating cap.

The man was indeed gesticulating. Goddamn it, he was breaking phonograph records. Goddamn it, he was nothing of the sort. That was the goddamn dream again. The hell it was. You could see the labels clearly. Harry James, Bunny Berigan, Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, Count Basie, Jimmy Lunceford, Duke Ellington. That, of course, proved it was all a crock, because even without blur or glint, even with good glasses or 20/20 vision, you couldn't read those labels from this distance, and under the present circumstances, Walton couldn't even have made out the silhouette of an uplifted phonograph record.

The records weren't all that important. Except for some of the Basies and Ellingtons, they weren't records he would spend money on today, but there was a time when they had been to him what Chapman's Homer had been to Keats.

It hadn't been only the music. Those records had been a bond between him and Moira. They were a background for long summer evenings of chaste necking on moonlit lawns, of spinning moonlit plans for a—then conceivable—wildly romantic and interminable future. Therefore at a certain insane yet perfectly lucid moment in a frosty-windowed Packard which was burning up its OPA gas coupons for a week, it had become necessary for a flaming Army captain to smash some records he had loved in order to break a bond he had loved. But no Waller records. Fats was scarcely cold in his grave. And this was the reason for the grab of an out-of-focus dream that now no longer needed to wait on sleep.

Suddenly the man (?) in the car made some sort of violent gesture. There seemed to be some movement of the crutches, if they were crutches, which they damn well had better not be or ding, ding, here comes the wagon. The big car went into a skid and hit the side of the bridge, not hard enough to do more than crumple a fender, but hard enough to stop the car. Since he was now across the bridge, he jumped off the tailgate of the truck and started back to see if anyone was hurt.

The car suddenly backed away from the guard rail and shot ahead so quickly that Walton had to straddle the rail to keep from being grazed. As it passed him he had a quick glimpse of the fortyish woman at the wheel. She was wearing a sleeveless lavender summer dress. The car had tail fins. It was probably a Cadillac of mid-50s vintage; certainly not a pre-World War II Packard. The surprise zephyr had passed, and heat waves thrummed again on Walton's temples.

He took his coat off again and tied the sleeves loosely around his waist. Forward march. Hut-two. That was the ticket. Head up, shoulders back, chest out, belly in. Hut-hoo-hreep-hope. My head is bloody but unbowed.

He could still feel the rage of the Army captain who wasn't there. He always woke up still trembling with it after the dream. But what was it all about?

Walton remembered his days of brooding at the Army hospital, while he was waiting for the retirement board to meet and turn him loose.

Before the war he had somehow acquired a Macedonian bagpipe, softer and more sweetly plaintive in tone than the Scottish Highland pipe, and he had seized on the idea of using it as instrumental accompaniment for a choral setting of Keats's "Grecian Urn." Therefore, ye soft pipes, play on. He had worked out a simple ground melody for the bagpipe, but Army life had swallowed him up before he could put down the bagpipe variations or any of the voice parts. In North Africa, a shell fragment in the kneecap set him free again.

For three months after his first hospitalization he was able to do nothing but torture his original ground melody into labored, wooden variations, and drudge away at the architecture of chord progressions. Finally, in October, when he was about to be retired from an Army general hospital in Texas, the muse began to take grudging pity on him; little by little the melodies started to come back.

Clumping around the hospital ward on his crutches, he pieced together a jigsaw picture of the future that would be thrust upon him if he went with the drift of things. In a few days he would be out of the Army. In a few months he would be free of his crutches, limping up and down the city streets looking for a job. In a year or so he would be married to Moira, and within five years he would have children, pediatricians, mortgages, commutation tickets, crab grass —and no melodies, ever again.

This was unthinkable; this was suicide. The only alternative was to stand up to the dismay and anger of his mother and father and uncles and aunts, and renounce the world for his melodies. Renouncing the world might mean the renunciation of Moira, but this was not up to him; it was up to Moira. He would live in the modern equivalent of a city garret, and he would earn rent and grocery money by teaching harmony and counterpoint or by playing piano in a cocktail lounge. If Moira loved him enough to live this life with him, wholly with him, undeviatingly on his side, his renunciation would be sweet. If not, it would be agony, at least at first, but a necessary agony.

Moira had gotten out the old puncturing needle just once too often. She had made him look and feel like an overdramatic egoist. She had laughed gaily at his garret. It was a bright and lilting laugh that pretended not to be what it really was—a sneer at the melodies that spangled the dome of his world—a sneer, somehow, at Inky.

The shards of the phonograph records were Inky's broken body. He had picked up a whole disk—Artie Shaw's "Begin the Beguine," Moira's favorite—and seen blood on it, on hub and spokes and tire.

But if this was the way it had really happened, then he, Walton, was in the right and Moira in the wrong. Why, then, the voices and pointing fingers in the dark?

Walton marched bravely up a gradual hill where, at this time of year, fields of corn and wheat once purred with joy in green and gold under the heat, and cottonwood fringes blinked from green to silver at the hint of a breeze. Now, on both sides of Sharon Avenue, there were rows of small homes and desperate lawns clinging to bare survival through the mercy of whirling sprinklers.

At the edge of Glendale, completely obliterating a monstrous field through which he, Caesar, and Inky, Labienus, had once pursued Slimmy, the noble Vercingetorix, in a forest of weeds, was a vast, functional high school.

Ahead of Walton, the land sloped gradually down to Albion Creek, which ran perpendicular to Sharon Avenue, then gradually up. Most of Glendale, including the village center, was on the far slope, though from where Walton stood it looked more like a woods than a village. Home was more than home; it was an oasis, and thank God the skyline was unchanged. Farthest to the left was the pointed spire of the Presbyterian church; next, looking taller because it was at the top of the slope, was the flat-topped, English Gothic steeple of the Episcopal church; then, looming like a mystic druid stronghold, the cone-topped cylinder of the old stone and concrete water tower, all covered with ivy.

Covered with ivy! How in hell could he see, with or without his glasses, ivy more than a mile away? How, for that matter, could he see a water tower that had been torn down more than thirty years ago?

He blinked his eyes and punched his temple, and the tower, properly, vanished. Got to keep making these little corrections. Got to ward off the little guys in the white suits.

Up ahead of him to the right, on this side of Albion Creek, was the new (new in 1930) water tower, functional and ivyless: a giant kettle perched on daddy-long-legs. He saw a boy with a green sweater turn off the highway and stroll toward the tower, through the trees. The boy was followed by a liver-colored dog. Possibly a Chesapeake Bay retriever. Slimmy. And a black, ungainly, huge-pawed—Oh no, oh no. Pound the old temple. Blink the old eyes. Correct every last little detail.

Walton wondered if there was anything nowadays to attract a kid and a dog to the water tower. There used to be a lovely dump, with rusted old auto bodies to climb into and bottles and jugs to throw at rats and sometimes a treasure to take home—a chair, for example, with only one leg broken, which would help furnish that always projected but somehow never built secret clubhouse.

Walton knew that if he followed the boy he would come to no dump at all but to trim lawns, and probably to neat walks or drives, with, no doubt, flowers planted along the borders. He hadn't been near the new water tower in over thirty years, and he had no intention of going near it now, but there were respectable, landscaped, tree-shadowed homes with two-car garages along this part of Sharon Avenue today, possibly inhabited by some of the same guys with whom he had bottled rats to death in the old days, and it stood to reason that the presence of a lovely dump would be intolerable.

He wondered if anyone was looking out a window at him, saying: "Why that looks like little Walton Ulster." It was more likely, since he had not been able to shave today and since dust had glued itself to his sweat-drenched shirt, that anyone seeing him out here on the highway would say, "Who is that fat bum waddling along out there?"

Knotty skirted the dump, trying not to make himself conspicuous. Maybe there would be some kids with 22s, shooting at tin cans, or, with luck, rats, and if they didn't see him they might shoot in his direction. He knew he would be too yellow to stand up in front of a firing squad, but it would be kind of nice to be hit by a stray bullet if you didn't really expect it but just sort of idly hoped for it.

There just wasn't any other way out of the mess he was in, except maybe a disease like tuberculosis which would get him off to a sanitarium somewhere so he could start all over again. People would be sorry for him, and they would forgive him for some of the things they were bound to find out about pretty soon. They would never find out the whole thing about Mrs. Hendricks. Maybe she wouldn't be killed instantly. Maybe she would five long enough to talk, and Moira Hendricks would rat and tell somebody everything she knew, but everybody knew there was insanity in the Hendricks family, and it would be Moira's word against the word of a poor sick kid wasting away in a sanitarium.

There was a guy he knew in high school in Cincinnati who had TB. His family was too poor to send him to a sanitarium, and he was probably at home or in the General Hospital. Knotty's freshman class at Walnut Hills, or anyway the kids in Knotty's home room, had all chipped in to help pay for the guy's doctor's bills or medicine or something like that. His sister was a senior, and maybe Knotty could get her to take him to visit her brother. It would look very sweet and thoughtful, and Knotty could make some kind of deal with the guy. Suppose, say, the guy had a bowl by his bed to spit in, and Knotty could take it home and rub the glop all over a lot of needle pricks on the back of his hand. Or he could—ik—drink it.

Aw, but heck, you couldn't get tuberculosis in two weeks. Or maybe you could get the germ, but you couldn't get anything that showed enough on the outside so you could get your mother to take you to a doctor for an examination. In two weeks the jig would be up. The April report card would be out, and it wouldn't be a good idea to forge his father's signature again. He had done an expert job on the March report card and his father had been too busy to notice what time of month it was, but just the other day he had said, "Isn't it a pretty long time between marking periods? It seems to me there was snow on the ground the last time I signed one of yours." Knotty had squeaked through that one by reminding his father of a freak snowstorm that had come a few days after St. Patrick's Day. Naturally, his father hadn't marked it on his calendar, and it could just as easily have occurred March 21 as March 19 or 20, but he had frowned and shrugged and said, "Well, time can fool you. Particularly when you're on the road a lot. I'll have to write something on my memo pad for April 30th."

Boy, that was really going to be a report card. Knotty was going to have to go some to explain the "incomplete" in Math and Latin. He just couldn't tell the truth: that he had been cutting those classes for two solid months.

A guy could get into one of these things without meaning any harm, but it was just about impossible to get out. He only meant to cut that one class in Math the day he was supposed to bring in three homework make-up assignments or get sent to the principal's office. He didn't know why he was still afraid to be sent to the principal's office, but he was. Well, it was a simple enough matter to go to the nurse just before class and groan a little. His sinuses were always pretty badly congested at this time of year anyway, and if he didn't really have a headache, he had a perfect right to one; it wasn't hard to persuade the nurse to give him some aspirin and make him lie down for an hour or so. The only trouble was that he had met another guy in the nurse's office—a sophomore Knotty knew in the orchestra—who had a pretty good idea for a hit tune, but just couldn't get anywhere with the verse or the release; so by the time he and Knotty had something worked out that really sounded smoo-oo-ooth, two hours had gone by, and Knotty had cut Latin class too. The Math teacher was a sour-faced fat woman, all covered with chalk dust. She just looked down her nose at the guys like Knotty who couldn't get Math. But the Latin was a nice old maidy auntie sort of lady who was always being disappointed in Knotty, which was worse than having someone look down her nose at him. Well, naturally, Knotty had planned to catch up on his Latin and Math that night, but, naturally, he had some more work to do on this song, and—well—by the third or fourth day of this sort of thing he was just plain scared to go face his Latin and Math teachers. What's more, the homework kept piling up until there was more than he could make up in a hundred years. About the middle of March he had thought maybe if he went up to somebody and made a clean breast of everything, he would get yelled at a little and then things would get worked out some way, but he kept putting it off and putting it off, and when he finally forged his father's signature to the report card he was too deep in crime to figure a way out.

Well, there weren't going to be any stray bullets for Knotty today, because there was nobody out shooting in the dump. Knotty picked up an armload of bottles of different sizes: tough blue milk-of-magnesia bottles, elegant green mineral-water bottles, brown cod-liver-oil bottles, pop bottles, castor-oil bottles. With Slimmy cavorting wildly around him, tail flagrantly up and thrashing, Knotty walked through the line of trees that fringed Albion Creek, into a foliage-vaulted otherworld. He lined up his bottles beside the creek. This time of year there was plenty of water in the creek, and the stink of sewage was not as bad as it would be by July or August. He sat down and began experimenting with various levels of water in his bottles, blowing across the mouths of the bottles, pouring out or adding a little water, then blowing again, until he had, for each bottle, the precise tone he wanted. Slimmy sat down beside him and whined each time he produced a tone. It was probably true that the musical notes bothered the dog's ears, but they didn't drive him away.

When he was satisfied with the tone of each bottle, Knotty placed them in a row in front of him, the deepest-toned bottle farthest to the left, the next deepest-toned beside it, and so on up, from left to right, to the little shrill medicine bottles.

"That's right, Slimmer. You were the best, but we always loved old Inker, didn't we? We used to make fun of him because he was clumsy and couldn't do half the things you did, but we loved old Inker. Didn't we, Slimmy boy? This is gonna be an ode to tell old Inker we're sorry for all the times we teased him, 'cause we never had a chance to tell him when he was alive. Did we, Slimmy boy?"

The "ode" was in reality a dirge. For mechanical reasons it had to be. In order to go from one note to another, you had to put a different bottle to your lips at the same time you put down the last bottle you had blown and groped for the next one you would need. Knotty was dextrous, but not dextrous enough to produce a trill or a grace note or a liquid arpeggio; however, by overblowing the deep-toned bottles, he could produce a sudden jump from a solemn moan to a wild shrill wail. All in all, the music he forced from his bottles was majestic, and fitting to the green-willow, bird-twittering cathedral in which it was played. Assuredly Inky got the message.

After a few minutes the constant blowing made Knotty dizzy, and he stopped for a rest. Once more he went back in his mind to his unsolvable problems, and found himself, to his surprise, chuckling. People were always saying, "Someday you'll look back on this and laugh," and now, unaccountably, it was "someday" and he was looking back and laughing, with some scorn, at the pathetic molehills a damfool thirteen-year-old kid seemed to think were mountains.

Well, what he was doing to Mrs. Hendricks' flat tire wasn't any molehill, but the grownups who were watching him do it as they drove by in their cars, they didn't know what he was doing, and they never would. Some things were all right if they were necessary and you didn't get caught.

He knew what all those grownups were thinking. "Golly, what I wouldn't give to be a boy again and wander along the highway with a good old dog like that."

And what he, Knotty, was thinking about the grownups, here and now in his green-willow April cathedral, was "I've got something you haven't got." This was true, for all of a sudden he knew exactly what new turn of melody to blow on his bottles in memory of Inky.

That was the trick. You had to know exactly what the next note had to be. If you had to force it or puzzle it out, it was no good, and you might as well quit playing till it came to you. It was like the chicken laying the egg; the chicken didn't plan on it or work at it; when the egg was there to be laid, what else could the chicken do with it but lay it?

Knotty blew a long-drawn-out steamboat whistle hoot on his biggest bottle, a half-gallon jug that had contained something vile-smelling. He wished he had a gallon jug; his melody line was sweetening now, and he felt it needed the seasoning of a really full-bellied bass. But unbroken gallon jugs were almost impossible to find in this dump. They were too tempting as targets for boys with rocks, air rifles or 22s.

After finishing the tune, he smashed each bottle, one at a time, starting with the littlest bottle, going from right to left. He didn't know why he did this, but it seemed to be a necessary part of the ritual.

He stood up and turned to leave his arcade. Sitting on the stump of a lightning-struck willow tree was an old old man, maybe eighty or even ninety—a jowly old man, almost bald, with a writing pad in his lap and a funny-looking pencil in his hand.

"Golly," said Knotty. "You mean you were writing down that stuff I was playing?"

"Oh yes. Good old Inky. Tell me: does it invoke Inky? I mean, does it bring him back? Do you see him?"

"Oh, heck no. It's just sort of a memory—well—like an apology to Inky. I mean—well—Slimmy and me—that is, when Inky was alive, we never—"

"I know, I know. Nobody ever does. That's the guilt that makes the world go round. Don't wallow in it though. Guilt is really another form of pride, but you won't understand this until you're a great deal older, and I won't try to explain it to you. 'Apology to Inky.' Don't you think that's a better title than 'Ode'?"

"Well, golly, I never— Well, sure, I guess so. I just never thought about it as a real composition—like written down and all that."

"Retslu Notlaw. That's my nom de plume, sort of. We used to have a gang a couple of years ago, and all the guys did their names that way. Mine was the only one that stuck." Knotty looked over the old man's shoulder as he wrote in his pad. "Say, gee, what kind of an Eversharp is that you got there? The writing looks like ink."

"It's called a ball-point pen," said the old man, quickly pocketing it. "I don't think I ought to show it to you. You're getting too far ahead of yourself."

"I don't get it," said Knotty. "Say, how come you found this place? How come Slimmy didn't let me know you were here?"

"Slimmy knows me," said the old man. "I think I would have liked it if he had jumped up and licked my face."

"In any event, this place is no stranger to me. I can almost see the trees that used to be here. The alameda of willows. The glorious tin cans and rusty axles. And the rats."

"For your sake, I hope not. Forgive a moderately insane old man. And accept my humble gratitude for 'Apology to Inky.'"

"You were worse mixed up before you saw me. Remember that. Now, I really can't stay. I have an engagement with my hair shirt."

The old man had already stepped out of sight through the fringe of willows. Knotty ran after him, out into the open dump, but could see no sign of anyone.

"Oh, shoot," he said. "I did the Inky tune better than ever. I wish I could see it the way he wrote it down. I never told him I just make it up as I go along, and it won't be anywheres near as good tomorrow."

Walton Ulster gasped with pleasure as the cool air of Igler's Drug Store embraced him and caressed his sopping shirt. He looked around, wondering if he would see a familiar face behind one of the counters, when he heard her voice.

There she was, sitting at one of the tables, sipping Coke through a straw. Beware! Beware! Her flashing eyes, her floating hair! Impossible that she should have aged not a single day in twenty years. It must be a miracle of make-up, he thought, but it was certainly invisible to the naked eye. Witchcraft?

He strode toward her, with both hands outstretched, and she looked up at him with startled hostility.

He spun around. She was sitting at the counter, sipping hot black coffee. She had aged some, but not much. There were little lines at the corners of her eyes and on her neck, her lips were a trifle thinner than they had been, and her hair, still long but not barbarian, was salted attractively with gray. She had made no attempt to hide behind heavy make-up, lipstick or dye. Her figure was youthful, and Walton would have bet she wasn't wearing a girdle.

"My God, Moira, you're a damned handsome woman. If I didn't know better I wouldn't believe you were over thirty."

"I guess I could lose a few pounds. The doctor says I'm not dangerously overweight."

He put his lips to hers, intending nothing more serious than a kissing-cousin's peck, but the surprisingly soft responsiveness of her lips, enhanced by a sudden, rather embarrassing vision of the girl with the wild black hair drinking Coke at the table just behind him, made him, momentarily, drunk. He pressed Moira to him.

"You'd better watch it. You'll get picked up as a dirty old man. What's with the hot number at the table back there?"

"You won't believe it, Moira. She was the first person I saw when I came in here, and I thought she was you. Do you have a dry handkerchief I can clean my glasses with?"

"It's a good thing you didn't accost her. She's jumpy about something. I saw her pour something out of a flask into her Coke. Here, will a Kleenex do?"

"Let's go over to Bob Heine's. I can unbutton a few more buttons on my shirt and put my feet on the table. Or is that too disreputable for you?"

"It isn't Heine's any more. It's very reputable now. Very in. Lots of decor, fine cuisine, waiters with uniforms, early American hitching posts, steel engravings…"

"The best. It's called the Iron Horse, if that gives you any kind of a picture."

"Oh, I don't know, Walton. I suppose they'd be too nice to refuse to serve you, but I won't go there with you. Not until you've had a shower and put on a clean shirt with a tie."

"Progress, old boy. Oh, the village itself hasn't changed much. Same old winding roads and trees and lawns. But we're surrounded by industry now, and that means bright young executives putting the best foot forward. If you were a bright young executive, would you take a customer to lunch in a place like Heine's?"

"We had lovely afternoons there. I wish they'd suspend progress long enough for people like me to catch up with ourselves." He put on his glasses and turned to look at the girl at the table.

"I had a squirrel coat like that once, but I wouldn't have dreamed of wearing it out on the hottest day of summer."

Being a normal male, Walton had not noticed what Moira was wearing until just this moment. Her sleeveless lavender summer dress was just right for her and just right for the weather.

"A '54 Cadillac. It's a souvenir of my pointless liaison with the Buntline money. Billy let me have it after the divorce, which was unnecessary, but sweet."

"I didn't know you had claws under those darling pink paddies of yours, Walton. It really was sweet. I couldn't afford another car, and I can get another five years out of this one with judicious replacement of withering parts here and there."

"Looking for you, you vaunting ass. When you told me you were going to walk all the way from Sharonville in this heat—and at your age too—my first thought was 'let him learn the hard way.' Then I had a picture of you lying lobster-red by the highway; so I told Mother some cock-and-bull story and came out to find you."

"I drove by a portly, sweaty hobo lurching along in the curb. I saw no connection between Mm and Walton Ulster, distinguished New York music critic and enfant terrible of the concert hall. For heaven's sake, join me in something. Cherry Coke?"

"My favorite used to be vanilla phosphate. On second thought, I think I'll have a lime Coke. Do you suppose that girl would let us look at her flask for a few rapturous seconds."

The boy in the green sweater came in. The liver-colored dog sat patiently on the sidewalk just outside the door.

"Good heavens, Walton," Moira whispered. "That boy looks just like you when you were thirteen or fourteen."

The boy came up to the counter and ordered a vanilla phosphate. Walton ordered his lime Coke. It suddenly occurred to him that the people behind the counters astonishingly resembled the people of 1931. He knew that if they were still alive, Mr. Igler and Miss Katie would be over a hundred now, Miss Tillie and Miss Frances would be in their sixties or seventies, and Wilbur at least in his late fifties. I'm not hallucinating, he thought. I'm only seeing imaginary resemblances my subconscious wants to see. Be Nonchalant. Light a Murad. Were there Murads any more? Just for fun he asked the one who looked like Wilbur to bring him a Murad, and Wilbur did. He took one out and lit it—nonchalantly. It was too strong for a taste long since cravenly conditioned to filter cigarettes.

Some other boys came in and joined the kid with the green sweater. They ordered phosphates of various flavors and sat down by the window to flip through the movie magazines. There had been a time when Mr. Igler endured this sort of imposition.

"That's a heck of a note. Hey. Did you know Edward G. Robinson is really a nice guy in real life?"

"You must have super-ears. I can't hear a word from here. Look, Walton, I really do love seeing you, but I have a tyrannical invalid for a mother and she expects me home. What is it you wanted to talk to me about?"

"Well, for one thing, your mother. After all these years you had to tell her a cock-and-bull story just to meet me for a few minutes in Igler's?"

"You know she hasn't been rational since the accident. She has always held you to blame. You and that black mutt."

"Moira, I ought to tell you; after more than thirty years, my temples still throb at the sound of the word 'mutt.'"

"I apologize, Walton. We don't need to drag that business out into the light of day again."

"Yes we do. That's just it. I'm fouled up, Moira, and I'm trying to grope my way into the past to find some answers that might help. You're the key, Moira. What happened to us?"

"What could be simpler. 'Us' was lovely, but 'us' was out of the question. You were a pretty far-out boy. You were dedicated, determined on poverty, and all in all, a lovable—God, how lovable-sap. I was a bird-brained debutante dreaming of an escape from my mother, a Cadillac, and a rich husband—in that order. Well, I got the Cadillac and the rich husband, and I still have the Cadillac. Next question."

"That's not the way it was at all," he said. "I was an arrogant, pompous cad. I treated you like dirt. Why? How?"

"You were all of that when you wanted to be. I didn't mind much. You always got over it pretty quickly. So. Now. You've had a successful career. You have a charming wife and lovely children. Aunt Jane keeps me posted. But you say you're fouled up."

Four girls in their early teens came in, wearing the green and white uniforms of Hillsdale School for young ladies. They walked haughtily past the boys, hiding their secret smiles, and went to the corner where, Walton knew, the Hit-of-the-Week records were on display. The boys ambled over to join them, some swaggering, some slouching, all projecting huge indifference.

Girl: "The one I liked best was 'The moon and you appear to be/ so near and yet so far from me.'"

Another girl: "I'm through with love; I'll never fall again/said adieu to love; don't ever call again.' That's my theme song."

Boy in green sweater: "Ooooogh! So does mine. You wanta know who my favorite is? My favorite is Elmer Zilch."

Walton tensed, waiting for the phone of doom to ring. He was almost relieved when it did. The one who looked like Mr. Igler answered it and went to the teen-age girl with the wildest, longest, blackest hair of all to tell her the call was for her.

Just then, an Army captain, his greatcoat buttoned to his throat, came in on crutches, looked around almost timidly, then walked over to the young lady with the dyed squirrel-fur coat. She glowered at her empty Coke glass, refusing to look at him, but he sat down anyway.

The young lady spoke through her teeth, still refusing to look at him. "Did you have a good time at Bob Heine's? Did you search your soul, or did you just get loaded?"

"I just had a couple of slow, slo-o-ow beers. Give me a break, Mo. To err is human; to forgive, divine."

Teen-age girl (in background): "I have a divine idea. Let's go to my place and play Truth'n'Consequences."

Boy in green sweater: "Swell. Wait till Moira gets off the phone and we'll all go."

The young lady with the dyed squirrel-fur coat deigned now to look at the captain. "I'm not divine," she said. "I'm not the one to do the forgiving anyway. You behaved like a brat, but I might have known you would when the message finally seeped through the rock wall of your ego. You simply can't take a hint unless it's delivered with a baseball bat."

"How can an intelligent man be so dense? Even before you went into the Army, I tried to tell you in as nice a way as possible. What did you do with the letters I sent you? Just glance at them and throw them away? Didn't you ever try to read between the lines? I didn't want to hurt you but you've been making it difficult for both of us. You have your plans; fine! Well, I have mine too, and they don't include you. I can't make it any blunter than that. I'm sorry, Wall. I'm really very fond of you."

Walton wished he could stop up his ears without making a spectacle of himself. He hated overhearing this conversation. It was all wrong—cockeyed—out of true. The man should be the one to strike, not the girl.

The captain said, almost whining, "Oh, Mo. Mo. It can't be like this. I swear to God, I've really got it inside of me now. We could be great together. I've got it."

Walton took another sip of his cherry Coke. "The truth is, Moira," he said, "I just haven't got it. I haven't had it for I don't know how many years. I make a fair living teaching and writing reviews, and I attract attention with my outrageous bag of instrumental tricks, but tap me with a rubber mallet and all you'll get is a hollow boing."

"That's all over, Moira. It's been over for a long time, but now that the kids are in college we're ready to make it legal. Everything will be civilized. I haven't any right to be bitter. My God, it wasn't her fault she was loaded with dough. It wasn't her fault I turned out to be a hollow man, and a damned resentful, boorish hollow man at that. She's been more than patient."

"You don't have to tell me," said Moira. "I know the combination. So you married money too?"

"More than that. She was—still is—a very sexy broad. She believed in me. We had our moments of romance. But you're right. It was a lousy combination. We should have known it at the start."

"It hasn't come to that. I suppose if it does, they'll stand up for their mother. But they're good, level-headed kids. They won't be estranged from either of us. Fact, they'll probably be relieved. Divorce solves a lot of unacknowledged problems. Not that it will really solve mine."

"I told you, Moira. I've got to catch up with myself, recapture my past. I have the feeling I once did something dreadful, too dreadful to be carried in my memory—something having to do with you and me. I've got to work my way back to it. With your help. I've got to find a name for it, and, please God, purge myself of it."

"All right, Walton, I want you to listen to me, and, damn it, take me seriously, or I'll bounce something off your head. To begin with, forget all that jazz about Hell having no fury like a woman scorned. I've had plenty of experience in swallowing my pride. I've even come to find it rather nutritious. For Pete's sake, Walton Ulster, why don't we undo all this silly damn nonsense and get married to each other?"

Walton looked at her in amazement. "You know, it's the funniest darn thing, but I was just about to say the same thing. It hadn't occurred to me till just now. But—hadn't there ought to be a courtship? Flowers? Candy? Serenades?"

There was a commotion among the teenagers. The girl with the long black hair was weeping and ranting.

"It's all your fault, Knotty. You killed her. You and that—that damn mutt of yours."

Walton strode over to the group of youngsters. He gripped the green-sweatered boy by the upper arms and said through his teeth, "What did you have to do with it?"

Mr. Igler came up, tapped Walton on the shoulder and beckoned him to a private corner of the store.

"I don't know why you're making this your business, mister, but I'd better set you straight. Something very serious has—"

"Well, you're right. She's not dead, and Doc Allen thinks she'll probably pull through. The shame of it is, her brain will probably be affected some, and—do you know Mrs. Hendricks?"

"But it doesn't have a blessed thing to do with Knotty over there. I don't know what little Moira was fussing about. Upset, I guess. Well, it's only natural. But Knotty didn't do anything."

"Well, plenty of people saw the accident. She was in her old Model T, and her brother was driving."

"That's right. The soft-headed one. If they had drivers' licenses in Ohio, he wouldn't be allowed to drive. Well, what's done—"

"Nope. The tin lizzie. The new Ford had a flat tire out on Sharon Avenue. She came in here and phoned for Ducky to come pick her up in the old Ford and drive out to change the tire. They weren't far from here when it happened. A big black dog ran out in the road and Mrs. Hendricks grabbed the steering wheel to swerve the car away from it. Smashed right into an iron street-light pole. Ducky was killed right away. In some ways, I guess that's a blessing."

Mr. Igler and Walton hurried over to the cluster of youngsters. Mr. Igler was scolding, "That's enough of that, young man. This is nothing to joke about."

"Aw, go on," said one of the boys. "You wouldn't even know how to fix a wheel. What did you do?"

"All right, I'll tell you," said Knotty. "1 don't care. I wrote the Lord's Prayer backwards all around the tire. All of it."

"All right," said Knotty, his voice trembling. "You wouldn't like it if I wrote the Lord's Prayer backwards on something of yours. It's not funny. 'Nema. Reve dna reverof, yrolg eht—'"

Walton wondered if he ought to run after the boy and tell him about the Model T. He couldn't ask Moira for advice.

"Kid's probably one of my second cousins. I had an impulse to go over and introduce myself and find out what he was mixed up in. I'm glad I didn't, now that I think of it. I love my relatives, but I don't dare let any one of them know I'm in town. I'd be stuck for the next two days paying duty calls on uncles and aunts and cousins and friends, and I've got a deadline to meet in New York."

"I'd love it, Walton, but there's always Mother. Damn! For one wild, delirious moment there I actually forgot Mother. We can't get married, Walton. We can't even have an affair."

"Moira, look. One of the reasons I married Nancy was that I wasn't cut out to be a monk. I took the soft, fat way out, and if I wasn't hollow to begin with, that did the job. I need a hair shirt, Moira—something to beat me down from time to time, to force humility on me. Come to New York with your mother, Moira. All three of us will do the town."

"Isn't it wonderful, Walton, that we can sit here like this without a drop of dutch courage between us and be honest with each other. It's a new kick for me. God, how I've needed it."

"This isn't a build-up to one of those histrionic abnegation scenes? Wringing of the hands. 'No, Walton; I must bear alone the burden of my mother. I cannot allow you to make this sacrifice.'"

"All right, Walton. You needn't pitch so hard. I've had my own share of sacrifice until it's coming out my ears; so maybe it is your turn. Marriage is still an open question then. But not New York. That's out of the question. Mother can't leave the house, and I can't leave her alone in it for very long. Oh, she's not so far gone that she doesn't know who she is and where she is—And, by the way, that's the answer to your next question: Why don't I put her in an institution?"

"That wasn't going to be my next question. I don't condone torture. I'll accept your mother as she is. I'll turn the other cheek a hundred times a day. I know it won't be idyllic, but I'm old enough not to believe in idylls, and maybe someday she'll come to accept me, if not as a member of the family, at least as a useful and familiar accessory around the house."

There was a crash behind them. The captain was on his feet, his chair lying on the floor behind him, shouting: "You don't fool me for a minute. Your damn mother has poisoned your mind against me. You want to know what I think? She's just putting on an act. She was a run-of-the-mill neurotic until she killed my dog, and ever since then she's been hiding behind this phony brain injury. She's been loading all her guilt onto me! She's got you right where she wants you."

"Don't get on your high horse. If she's really as nutty as everyone says she is, why don't you have her put away?"

"I'll beat you to it. I'm going over to Bob Heine's and really tie one on this time. See you around one of these years."

He marched out, turning up the collar of his greatcoat as the door closed behind him.

"I didn't hear the words. I heard an angry voice; that's all. My God, Walton, you've got sharp ears. Does that go with having perfect pitch?"

"It goes with being hollow. Like a little pitcher. Look, Moira, a little while ago I heard the little girl who was over in the corner telling the little boy in the green sweater it was all his fault that her mother was in an accident. Just now, I heard our stiff-necked friend, the captain, telling his lady friend that her mother was unloading her own guilt on him. Do you want to marry a man who hallucinates in broad daylight?"

"Don't be silly, Walton. You're in some kind of a crisis, and you're reading your own memories into everything you hear. Your little dramas aren't unique. Neither are mine."

"That was your black mongrel, wasn't it. You don't think Mother ran over it on purpose?"

"I wish you could make her realize that, but of course it's too late. She's not very—uh—reachable. I never knew myself what you really thought, and I didn't dare ask. You were too young to know what you were doing, and I was too young to understand what the death of one mongrel dog can mean to a little boy. I did forgive you though for standing there that horrible day shouting 'murderer' at Mother. I even stopped having dreams about it. But Mother didn't."

"You were beside yourself, Walton. You were standing there looking at the dead dog in the street, and Mother and I were in the car, both of us trying to think of something kind to say. I didn't realize it then, but Mother had been—well—eccentric ever since Daddy died. She couldn't stand to be upset. I know she meant to be kind, but any kind of emotional crisis just brought out the poison in her. What she said was true enough, but—"

"She said Inky was a mutt. She said I ought to be grateful I still had a fine thoroughbred like Slimmy, and she hoped I wouldn't waste time grieving over a no-good mutt."

"I know. It was terrible. She was beside herself too, and she had no control over her words. She could see how unhappy you were, and it tore her to pieces. All she was trying to say was 'damn you, child, don't stand there being unhappy in front of me and making me unhappy. I've got enough to be unhappy about.'"

"I know, I know. So I called her a murderer. I didn't remember that. I do remember thinking it."

"Why is it that when we're old enough not to be able to hurt anyone very much, we finally learn how to refrain?"

The young lady behind them stood up and put on her dyed squirrel-fur coat. She said to Miss Frances, "Charge it to me," and walked out. An old man, jowly and almost bald, bowed to her outside on the sidewalk.

"Might as well be today. I ought to buy a clean shirt somewhere first. Can you sneak me in the back door to shave and change before the ordeal?"

"We'll work something out. Then afterwards it's drinks and duck à l'orange at the Iron Horse. Deal?"

Outside, the young lady was saying to the jowly old man, "Well, the windshield was frosted, and when I saw you there on the side of the bridge I had an illusion that there was an extra traffic lane on the right side of the bridge. It's the funniest thing, I had this idea you were someone I knew, someone who had something to tell me. Something important. I pulled over to the right, and then—bang!"

The old man chuckled. "I can't either. A man my age gives out a lot of advice, but it's hardly ever solicited and it never does any good. Well, it's been a pleasure, ma'am."

As the young lady was getting into her car, Walton said to the old man, "I know a piece of advice you could have given her. You could have told her to march right over to Bob Heine's and join a certain captain in about twenty salubrious belts of bourbon."

"Good Lord, Walton. Bob Heine's?" said Moira. "And what an old buttinsky you've turned into."

"Perfectly all right, ma'am," said the old man. "Mr. Ulster and I are acquainted."

The old man looked reflectively in the direction of the Iron Horse, cat-cornered across the village square.

"Bob Heine's," he said. "Oh yes, of course. You'd hardly recognize the village now."

"Oh, I don't know," said Walton. "The outskirts have changed a lot, but once you're in the village everything looks pretty much the same. A little remodeling here and there, but—"

"That's right," said the old man. "Pardon the senility of an octogenarian. 'Play it cool.' That's the expression, isn't it?"

"Not too easy in weather like this," said Walton, wiping his forehead with the sleeve of his shirt.

"As for the advice you were talking about," said the old man. "It would be an act of cruelty. Those young people would destroy each other in about two years."

"Oh, not you two. Not you two," said the old man. "You've both been through the purifier's flame. If benedictions are in order, please accept mine."

A gun-metal-blue sports car that looked like a water bug pulled up to the curb and a hollow-cheeked, deep-eyed, but still strangely beautiful old lady put her head out the window.

"I've been looking all over for you, Wally. Mother is worried about you. Where on earth have you been?"

"Oh, alone and palely loitering," said the old man. "The sedge is withered from the lake, and no birds sing."

"Don't mind him," she said. "He would like me to be the Belle Dame Sans Merci. There's a bit of witch in me, but I'm not that."

"Okay, okay," said the old man, opening the car door on her side. "Take me to your elfin grot."

"Can you imagine?" he said to Walton. "Here I am eighty-five years old and ought to be lounging in slippered ease, but I've got a mother-in-law a hundred and five years old and I spend my days pushing her around in a wheelchair like a dutiful son."

"Of course," said the old man, winking at Walton. "It's the freemasonry of the mad. She fusses at me and pampers me and depends upon me. I fuss at her and pamper her and depend upon her. We're both of us making something up to each other, something that happened so long ago we ought to have made it up by now. But you see, every day is yesterday all over again. By the way, you didn't happen to see a boy in a green sweater trailed by a liver-colored dog?"

"Oh well," said the old man, "I know where he lives. Maybe I can catch him before he reaches home."

"You and that boy," said the old lady. "One of these days I'm going to turn you in for child molestation. That is, if you ever find him."

"Oh, I found him. This afternoon." The old man laughed, put the palm of his hand on the old lady's face and gave it a gentle shove.

"Be happy, you two," the old man called to Walton and Moira. "Be patient. You'll find it. You'll find it." He drove away. "Good Lord, what was that all about?" asked Moira.

Knotty dragged his feet along the sidewalk leading to home. He started to worry a little stone with his foot, intending halfheartedly to see if he could kick it all the way home, but he lost interest after the fourth kick. Well, he knew what Mom was going to say. "Where have you been and what did you do, darling?"

"Well, Mom, I just happened to hike to Sharonville and I just happened to see Mrs. Hendricks' car by the side of the road with a flat tire and I just happened to—"

This screwy little cart that looked just like a waterbug came to a stop beside him, and there was this same old old man he had seen earlier by the dump. There was an old old woman with him.

"Look, Knotty," said the old man. "I've done a lot of thinking about this score. Does the instrumentation really matter? I mean, does it have to be bottles?"

"Well, it doesn't haf to, I guess, but you'd have to make it different if you played it on an accordion or a piano, say. I mean, you'd want to put in some fast notes and stuff. And on a harmonica, you'd want to blow in some chords."

"I'm glad you called my attention to that," said the old man. "Stupid of me not to have thought of it myself. All right. Bottles it is. I did think though that some kind of bass harmony—"

"Yeh, yeah," said Knotty, enthusiastic now. "Cellos would be swell, don't you think? Just a bunch of cellos."

"You'll get to hear it, Knotty. Be patient. Don't hold your breath. And, say, Knotty—"

APOLOGY TO INKY

Robert M. Green, Jr.