'What did I do wrong?'
'Vagrancy.'
'I hitched a ride on Twenty-seven,' the vagrant said. 'I asked this guy to stop the car so I could take a piss and as soon as I got out of the car he drove away. Why would he do a thing like that?' The lieutenant coughed. 'Well you don't have long for this world,' the vagrant said. 'You don't have long for this world with a cough like that. Ha. Ha. A doctor told me that twenty-eight years ago and you know where the doctor is now? Six feet under. Pushing up daisies. He died a year later. The secret of keeping young is to read children's books. You read the books they write for little children and you'll keep young. You read novels, philosophy, stuff like that and it makes you feel old. You fish in the river?'
'Some,' said the lieutenant, putting as much disinterest into the sound as he could. The vagrant offended his nose, his sight and his sense of the fitness of things, not because of his manifest eccentricity but because he had heard the story so many times. They were all alike, the roadside vagrants, they suffered a sameness greater than the intellectual and sumptuary sameness of the businessmen who rode the 6:32. They all had theories, travels, diets, colorful pasts, studied conversational openings, and they usually wore some piece of soiled finery like the white silk scarf.
'Well, I hope you don't eat the fish,' the vagrant said. 'That river's nothing but an open toilet. All the shit from New York City comes up the river twice a day on the tides. You wouldn't eat the fish you found in a toilet, would you? Would you?'
Then he turned to Tony and asked: 'What you here for, Sonny.'
'Don't tell him,' said the lieutenant. 'He's not here to ask questions.'
'Well, can't I be friendly,' the vagrant asked. 'Perhaps if we had a little conversation we might discover that we have some interests in common. For instance I've made a study of the customs and history of the Cherokee Indians and a great many people find this interesting. I once lived with them on a reservation in Oklahoma for three months. I wore their clothes, observed their customs and ate their food. They eat dogs, you know. Dogs are their favorite food. They boil them mostly although sometimes they roast them. They…'
'Shut up,' said the lieutenant.
At quarter to seven they called Nailles, who answered and said that he would be right over. When he strode into the station and found his son there his first impulse was to embrace the young man but he restrained himself. 'You can take him home,' the lieutenant said. 'I don't think anything much will come of this. He'll tell you what happened. The complainant seems to have been a little hysterical.'
Tony told his father what had happened as they drove home. Nailles had no counsel, advice, censure, experience or any other paternal qualities to bring to that crazy hour. He understood the boy's deep feelings about being dropped from the squad and he seemed to have shared in his son's felonious threatening of Miss Hoe. A little wind was blowing and as they drove, leaves of all colors-but mostly yellow-blew through the shaft of their headlights and what he said was: 'I love to see leaves blowing through the headlights. I don't know why. I mean they're just dead leaves, no good for anything, but I love to see them blowing through the light'
VII
It was an autumn afternoon. Saturday.
Below the house, near the grove of dead elms, there was a swamp where a flock of red-winged blackbirds nested each spring. According to the law of their species they should have turned south in the autumn but the number of bird-feeding appliances in the neighborhood, overflowing with provender, had rattled their migratory instincts and they now spent the autumn and winter in Bullet Park in utter confusion. Their song-two ascending notes and a harsh trill like a cicada-was inalienably associated with the first long nights of summer but now one heard it in the autumn, one heard it in the snow. To hear this summery music on one of the last clement days of the year was like some operatic reprise where the heroine, condemned to death, hears in her dark cell (Orrido Carcere) the lilting love music that was first sung at the beginning of Act II. The wind that day was westerly and after lunch one heard the thump-thump-thump of a bass drum from the football field where the band was warming up for a home game.
Tony, after having been dropped from the squad, did not, of course, spend his spare time studying irregular verbs. Instead he read poetry as if he shared, with the poets, the mysterious and painful experience of being forced into the role of a bystander. He had not read poetry before. Nailles was not so obtuse as to protest but he was uneasy. He might say that poetry was one of the most exalted of the arts but he could not cure himself of the conviction that poetry was the demesne of homely women and morbidly sensitive men.
As soon as Tony heard the bass drum that afternoon he went upstairs and lay down on his bed. Nailles was worried and called up the stairs: 'Tony, hey Tony, let's do something, shall we? Let's go for a ride or something.'
'No thank you, Daddy,' Tony said. 'What I think I'll do is to go into New York if you don't mind. I'll go to a movie or maybe see the basketball game.'
'That's fine,' Nailles said. 'I'll drive you to the train.'
At three the next morning Nailles woke. He got out of bed and started down the hall towards Tony's room. He felt very old, as if while he slept he had put down the dreams of a strong man- snow-covered mountains and beautiful women-in exchange for the anxieties of some decrepit octogenarian who feared that he had lost his false teeth. He felt frail, wizened, a shade of himself. Tony's bed was empty. 'Oh, my God,' he said loudly. 'Oh, my God.' His only and dearly beloved son had been set upon by thieves, perverts, prostitutes, murderers and dope addicts. He was, in fact, not so much afraid of the pain his son might know as of the fact that should his son endure any uncommon pain he, Nailles, would have no resources to protect him from the terror of seeing his beloved world- his kingdom-destroyed. Without his son he could not live. He was afraid of his own death.
He went back down the hall, closed the door to the room where Nellie slept and went downstairs, where he telephoned the New York City bureau of missing persons. There was no answer. He then called the central police office but they had no record of anyone like Tony. He gave them his number and asked them to call if there was any news. He drank half a glass of whiskey and then walked around the living room saying, 'Oh, God, oh, God, oh, God.' Then he went upstairs, took a Nembutal, got into bed and lost consciousness a few minutes later.
Nailles woke at half past seven and went back to Tony's room, which was empty. He then woke Nellie and told her the boy was missing. He telephoned the missing persons bureau but there was still no answer and when he telephoned the police they had no news. The next train from New York was the 8:10 and having absolutely nothing else to go on he settled for a kind of specious, single-minded hopefulness. Tony would be on that train. He felt that if he hoped strenuously enough for the boy's return the boy would appear. He drove to the station and when the train came in Tony appeared, surrounded by that mysterious company of men and women who travel on Sunday mornings and who invariably carry paper bags. Nailles embraced his son, embraced him until his bones cracked, and asked: 'Oh my God, why didn't you telephone, why didn't you tell us.'
'It was too late, Daddy. I didn't want to wake you up.'
'What happened?'
'Well, I was feeling blue about football and I thought I'd buy a book of poetry so I went into a bookstore and there was this nice lady-Mrs. Hubbard-and we talked and then I asked her if she'd have dinner with me and she said why didn't I come to her apartment-she called it her flat-and she'd cook me dinner and so I did.'
'Did you spend the night with her?'
'Yes.'
Nailles knew that his son was a mature male and he had no reason to protest that the boy had acted as one; but what sort of a woman would pick up a young man in a bookstore and hustle him home to bed?
'Was she a slut?'
'Oh, no, Daddy, she's very nice. She's a widow. She graduated from Smith. Her husband was killed in the war.'
This irritated Nailles. She had given her husband to her country and thus he must give his son to her. He somehow thought it the responsibility of war widows to remarry hastily and not to parade their forlornness throughout society, stressing the inequities of warfare. If she was attractive, intelligent and clean why hadn't she
