seventeen.”
“True,” Jesse said.
They were both quiet for a time. Michelle kept looking at Jesse as covertly as she could.
“My sister says she sees you sometimes down the Gray Gull having drinks,“ she said.
“Un huh.”
“
“So how come that’s okay and smoking dope isn’t?”
“It’s legal and smoking dope is
illegal.”
“So that makes it fight?” Michelle said.
“Nope, just legal and illegal.”
Mich?lle opened her mouth and then closed it. She was trying to think. Finally she said, “Well, that sucks.”
Jesse nodded.
“Lot of things suck,” he said.
“After a while you sort of settle for trying not to suck yourself, I guess.”
“By pushing kids around?” Micbelle said.
Jesse turned his head slowly and held her gaz for a moment.
“Am I pushing you around, Michelle?”
She shrugged and looked absently at the white meeting house across the street.
“What do you think you’ll be doing in ten years?” Jesse said.
“Who cares?” Michelle said.
“Me,” Jesse said. “You ever sec
any thirty-year-old people sitting on the wall here, smoking dope?”
Michelle gave a big sigh.
“Oh please,” she said, drawing out the
second word.
Again Jesse nodded.
“Yeah,” he said. ‘,I know.
Lectures suck too.“
She almost smiled for a moment, and then looked even more sullen to compensate. The boys by the shopping center had fired of watching them and drifted off. On the front porch of the town library, across the common, a young woman with a small child clinging to her skirt, and another on her hip, was sliding books into the library return slot.
Jesse wondered briefly when she got time to read.
“You think I’m going to end up like
her?” Michelle said, nodding at the woman.
“No,” Jesse said.
“Well, I’m not,” Michelle said.
Jesse was quiet.
“So what about right and wrong?” Michelle said after a time.
“Right and wrong?”
“Yeah. You said stuff was just legal or illegal.
Well, what about it being fight or wrong? !oesn’t that matter?”
“Well, I’m not in the right or wrong
business,” Jesse said. “I’m in the legal and illegal business.”
“Oh, that’s a cop-out,” she
said. “You just don’t want to answer.”
“No, I don’t mind answering,”
Jesse said. “That was part of my answer. There’s something to be said for trying to do what‘ you’re paid to do, well.”
He was aware that she was suddenly looking at him directly.
“And sometimes that’s the best you can do.
The other thing is that most people don’t have much trouble seeing what’s fight or wrong. Doing it is
