look at worthless stuff like that. Take-well-take Lowmanigh here. He was up there only yesterday-' 'Yesterday?' My lifted brows underlined my question as I looked across the table. It was one of the fellows I hadn't noticed before. His name had probably been thrown at me with the rest of them by Old Charlie on my first night there, but I had lost all the names except Old Charlie and Severeid Swanson, which was the name attached to a wavery fragile-looking Mexicano, with no English at all, who seemed to subsist mostly on garlic and vino and who always blinked four times when I smiled at him. 'Yes.' Lowmanigh looked across the table at me, no smile softening his single word. My heart caught as I saw across his cheek the familiar pale quietness of chill-of-soul. I knew the look well. It had been on my own face that morning before I had made my truce with the day. He must have read something in my eyes, because his face shuttered itself quickly into a noncommittal expression and, with a visible effort, he added, 'I watched the sunset from there.' 'Oh?' My hand went thoughtfully to my nose. 'Sunsets!' Marie was back with the semiliquid she called coffee. 'More crazy stuff. Why waste good time?' 'What do you spend your time on?' Lowmanigh's voice was very soft. Marie's mind leaped like a startled bird. 'Waiting to die!' it cried. 'Beer,' she said aloud, half of her face smiling. 'Four beers equal one sunset.' She dropped the coffeepot on the table and went back to the kitchen, leaving a clean sharp, almost visible pain behind her as she went. 'You two oughta get together,' Old Charlie boomed. 'Liking the same things like you do. Low here knows more junk heaps and rubbish dumps than anybody else in the county. He collects ghost towns.' 'I like ghost towns,' I said to Charlie, trying to fill a vast conversational vacancy. 'I have quite a collection of them myself.' 'See, Low!' he boomed. 'Here's your chance to squire a pretty schoolmarm around. Together you two oughta he able to collect up a storm!' He choked on his pleasantry and his last gulp of coffee and left the room, whooping loudly into a blue bandanna. We were all alone in the big dining room. The early-morning sun skidded across the polished hardwood floor, stumbled against the battered kitchen chairs, careened into the huge ornate mirror above the buffet and sprayed brightly from it over the cracked oilcloth table covering on the enormous oak table. The silence grew and grew until I put my fork down, afraid to click it against my plate any more. I sat for half a minute, suspended in astonishment, feeling the deep throbbing of a pulse that slowly welled up into almost audibility, questioning, 'Together? Together? Together?' The beat broke on the sharp edge of a wave of desolation, and I stumbled blindly out of the room. 'No!' I breathed as I leaned against the newel post at the bottom of the stairs. 'Not involuntarily! Not so early in the day!' With an effort I pulled myself together. 'Cut out this cotton-pickin' nonsense!' I told myself. 'You're enough to drive anybody crazy!' Resolutely I started up the steps, only to pause, foot suspended, halfway up. 'That wasn't my desolation,' I cried silently. 'It was his!' 'How odd,' I thought when I wakened at two o'clock in the morning, remembering the desolation. 'How odd!' I thought when I wakened at three, remembering the pulsing 'Together?' 'How very odd,' I thought when I wakened at seven and did heavy-eyed out of bed-having forgotten completely what Lowmanigh looked like, but holding wonderingly in my consciousness a better-than-three- dimensional memory of him. School kept me busy all the next week, busy enough that the old familiar ache was buried almost deep enough to be forgotten. The smoothness of the week was unruffled until Friday, when the week's restlessness erupted on the playground twice. The first time I had to go out and peel Esperanza off Joseph and pry her fingers out of his hair so he could get his snub nose up out of the gravel. Esperanza had none of her Uncle Severeid's fragility and waveriness as she defiantly slapped the dust from her heavy dark braid. ''He calls me Mexican!' she cried. 'So what? I'm Mexican. I'm proud to be Mexican. I hit him some more if he calls me Mexican like a bad word again. I'm proud to be-' 'Of course you're proud,' I said, helping her dust herself off. 'God made us all. What do different names matter?' 'Joseph!' I startled him by swinging around to him suddenly. 'Are you a girl?' 'Huh?' He blinked blankly with dusty lashes, then, indignantly: 'Course not! I'm a boy!' 'Joseph's a boy! Joseph's a boy!' I taunted. Then I laughed. 'See how silly that sounds? We are what we are. How silly to tease about something like that. Both of you go wash the dirt off.' I spatted both of them off toward the schoolhouse and sighed as I watched them go. The second time the calm was interrupted when the ancient malicious chanting sound of teasing pulled me out on the playground again. 'Lu-cine is crazy! Lu-cine is crazy! Lu-cine is crazy!' The dancing taunting group circled twelve-year-old Lucine where she stood backed against the one drooping tree that still survived on our playground. Her eyes were flat and shallow above her gaping mouth, but smoky flames were beginning to flicker in the shallowness and her muscles were tightening. 'Lucine!' I cried, fear winging my feet. 'Lucine!' I sent me ahead of myself and caught at the ponderous murderous massiveness of her mind. Barely I slowed her until I could get to her. 'Stop it!' I shrieked at the children. 'Get away, quick!' My voice pierced through the mob-mind, and the group dissolved into frightened individuals. I caught both of Lucine's hands and for a tense moment had them secure. Then she bellowed, a peculiarly animallike bellow, and with one flip of her arm sent me flying. In a wild flurry I was swept up almost bodily, it seemed, into the irrational delirium of her anger and bewilderment. I was lost in the mazes of unreasoning thoughts and frightening dead ends, and to this day I can't remember what happened physically. When the red tide ebbed and the bleak gray click-off period came I was hunched against the old tree with Lucine's head on my lap, her mouth lax and wet against my hand, her flooding quiet tears staining my skirt, the length of her body very young and very tired. Her lips moved. 'Ain't crazy.' 'No,' I said, smoothing her ruffled hair, wondering at the angry oozing scratch on the hack of my hand. 'No, Lucine. I know.' 'He does, too,' Lucine muttered. 'He makes it almost straight but it bends again.' 'Oh?' I said soothingly, hunching my shoulder to cover its bareness with my torn blouse sleeve. ''Who does?' Her head tensed under my hand, and her withdrawal was as tangible as the throb of a rabbit trying to escape restricting hands. 'He said don't tell.' I let the pressure of my hand soothe her and I looked down at her ravaged face. 'Me,' I thought. 'Me with the outside peeled off. I'm crippled inside in my way as surely as she is in hers, only my crippling passes for normal. I wish I could click off sometimes and not dream of living without a limp-sweet impossible dream.' There was a long moist intake of breath, and Lucine sat up. She looked at me with her flat incurious eyes. 'Your face is dirty,' she said. ''Teachers don't got dirty faces.' 'That's right.' I got up stiffly, shifting the zipper of my skirt: around to the side where it belonged. 'I'd better go wash. Here comes Mrs. Kanz.' Across the play field the classes were lined up to go back inside. The usual scuffling horseplay was going on, but no one even bothered to glance our way. If they only knew, I thought, how close some of them had been to death . . . 'I been bad,' Lucine whimpered. 'I got in a fight again.' 'Lucine, you bad girl!' Mrs. Kanz cried as soon as she got within earshot. 'You've been fighting again. You go right in the office and sit there the rest of the day. Shame on you!' And Lucine blubbered off toward the school building.
