'Good. This might take a few days, you know. I'm retired now.'

'You sound just the same.'

'Ah, but if you could see me!' He chuckled, 'D'you still like a good piece of pie a' la mode, Jimmy?'

'Sure,' Jim said. It was a lie. He hated pie a la mode.

'I'm glad to hear that. Well, if there's nothing else, I'll -' 'There is one more thing. Is there a Milford High in Stratford?'

'Not that I know of.'

'That's what I -'

'Only thing name of Milford around here is Milford Cemetery out on the Ash Heights Road. And no one ever graduated from there.' He chuckled dryly, and to Jim's ears it sounded like the sudden rattle of bones in a pit.

'Thank you,' he heard himself saying. 'Goodbye.'

Mr Nell was gone. The operator asked him to deposit sixty cents, and he put it in automatically. He turned, and stared into a horrid, squashed face plastered up against the gla.s.s, framed in two spread hands, the splayed fingers flattened white against the gla.s.s, as was the tip of the nose.

It was Vinnie, grinning at him.

Jim screamed.

Cla.s.s again.

Living with Lit was doing a composition, and most of them were bent sweatily over their papers, putting their thoughts grimly down on the page, as if chopping wood. All but three. Robert Lawson, sitting in Billy Steam's seat, David Garcia in Kathy Slavin's, Vinnie Corey in Chip Osway's. They sat with their blank papers in front of them, watching him.

A moment before the bell, Jim said softly, 'I want to talk to you for a minute after cla.s.s, Mr Corey.'

'Sure, Norm.'

Lawson and Garcia t.i.ttered noisily, but the rest of the cla.s.s did not. When the bell rang, they pa.s.sed in their papers and fairly bolted through the door.

Lawson and Garcia lingered, and Jim felt his belly tighten.

Is it going to be now?

Then Lawson nodded at Vinnie. 'See you later.'

'Yeah.'

They left. Lawson closed the door, and from behind the frosted gla.s.s, David Garcia suddenly yelled hoa.r.s.ely, 'Norm eats it!' Vinnie looked at the door, then back at Jim. He smiled.

He said, 'I was wondering if you'd ever get down to it.'

'Really?' Jim said.

'Scared you the other night in the phone booth, right, dad?'

'No one says dad any more, Vinnie. It's not cool. Like cool's not cool. It's as dead as Buddy Holly.'

'I talk the way I want,' Vinnie said.

'Where's the other one? The guy with the funny red hair.'

'Split, man.' But under his studied unconcern, Jim sensed a wariness.

'He's alive, isn't he? That's why he's not here. He's alive and he's thirty-two or three, the way you would be if -'

'Bleach was always a drag. He's nothing'.' Vinnie sat up behind his desk and put his hands down flat on the old graffiti. His eyes glittered. 'Man, I remember you at that lineup. You looked ready to p.i.s.s your little old corduroy pants. I seen you lookin' at me and Davie. I put the hex on you.'

'I suppose you did,' Jim said. 'You gave me sixteen years of bad dreams. Wasn't that enough? Why now? Why me?'

Vinnie looked puzzled, and then smiled again. 'Because you're unfinished business, man. You got to be cleaned up.'

'Where were you?' Jim asked. 'Before.'

Vinnie's lips thinned. 'We ain't talkin' about that. Dig?'

'They dug you a hole, didn't they, Vinnie? Six feet deep. Right in the Milford Cemetery. Six feet of -'

'You shut up!'

He was on his feet. The desk fell over in the aisle. 'It's not going to be easy,' Jim said. 'I'm not going to make it easy for you.'

'We're gonna kill you, dad. You'll find out about that hole.'

'Get out of here.'

'Maybe that little wifey of yours, too.

'You G.o.dd.a.m.n punk, if you touch her -' He started forward blindly, feeling violated and terrified by the mention of Sally.

Vinnie grinned and started for the door. 'Just be cool. Cool as a fool.' He t.i.ttered.

'If you touch my wife, I'll kill you.'

Vinnie's grin widened. 'Kill me? Man, I thought you knew, I'm already dead.'

He left. His footfalls echoed in the corridor for a long time.

'What are you reading, hon?'

Jim held the binding of the book, Raising Demons, out for her to read.

'Yuck.' She turned back to the mirror to check her hair.

'Will you take a taxi home?' he asked.

'It's only four blocks. Besides, the walk is good for my figure.'

'Someone grabbed one of my girls over on Summer Street,' he lied. 'She thinks the object was rape.'

'Really? Who?'

'Dianna Snow,' he said, making a name up at random. 'She's a level-headed girl.

Treat yourself to a taxi, okay?'

'Okay,' she said. She stopped at his chair, knelt, put her hands on his cheeks and looked into his eyes. 'What's the matter, Jim?'

'Nothing.'

'Yes. Something is.'

'Nothing I can't handle.'

'Is it something. . . about your brother?'

A draught of terror blew over him, as if an inner door had been opened. 'Why do you say that?'

'You were moaning his name in your sleep last night. Wayne, Wayne, you were saying. Run, Wayne.'

'It's nothing.'

But it wasn't. They both knew it. He watched her go. Mr Nell called quarter past eight. 'You don't have to worry about those guys,' he said. 'They're all dead.'

'Is that so?' He was holding his place in Raising Demons with his index finger as he talked.

'Car smash. Six months after your brother was killed. A cop was chasing them.

Frank Simon was the cop, as a matter of fact. He works out at Sikorsky now.

Probably makes a lot more money.'

'And they crashed.'

'The car left the road at more than a hundred miles an hour and hit a main power pole. When they finally got the power shut off and sc.r.a.ped them out, they were cooked medium rare.'

Jim closed his eyes. 'You saw the report?'

'Looked at it myself.'

'Anything on the car?'

'It was a hot rod.'

'Any description?'

'Black 1954 Ford sedan with "Snake Eyes" written on the side. Fitting enough.

They really c.r.a.pped out.'

'They had a sidekick, Mr Nell. I don't know his name, but his nickname was Bleach.'

'That would be Charlie Sponder,' Mr Nell said without hesitation. 'He bleached his hair with Clorox one time. I remember that. It went streaky-white, and he tried todye it back. The streaks went orange.'

'Do you know what he's doing now?'

'Career army man. Joined up in fifty-eight or nine, after he got a local girl pregnant.'

'Could I get in touch with him?'

'His mother lives in Stratford. She'd know.'

'Can you giye me her address?'

'I won't, Jimmy. Not until you tell me what's eating you.' 'I can't, Mr Nell.

You'd think I was crazy.'.

'Try me.'

'I can't.'

'All right, son.'

'Will you -' But the line was dead.

'You b.a.s.t.a.r.d,' Jim said, and put the phone in the cradle. It rang under his hand and he jerked away from it as if it had suddenly burned him. He looked at it, breathing heavily. It rang three times, four. He picked it up. Listened. Closed his eyes.

A cop pulled him over on his way to the hospital, then went ahead of him, siren screaming. There was a young doctor with a toothbrush moustache in the emergency room. He looked at Jim with dark, emotionless eyes.

'Excuse me, I'm James Norman and -'

'I'm sorry, Mr Norman. She died at 9.04p.m.'

He was going to faint. The world went far away and swimmy, and there was a high buzzing in his ears. His eyes wandered without purpose, seeing green tiled walls, a wheeled stretcher glittering under the overhead fluorescents, a nurse with her cap on crooked. Time to freshen up, honey. An orderly was leaning against the wall outside Emergency Room No.1. Wearing dirty whites with a few drops of drying blood splattered across the front. Cleaning his fingernails with a knife. The orderly looked up and grinned into Jim's eyes. The orderly was David Garcia.

Jim fainted.

Funeral. Like a dance in three acts. The house. The funeral parlour. The graveyard. Faces coming out of nowhere, whirling close, whirling off into the darkness again. Sally's mother, her eyes streaming tears behind a black veil.

Her father, looking shocked and old. Simmons. Others. They introduced themselves and shook his hand. He nodded, not remembering their names. Some of the women brought food, and one lady brought an apple pie and someone ate a piece and when he went out in the kitchen he saw it sitting on the counter, cut wide open and drooling juice into the pie plate like amber blood and he thought: Should have a big scoop of vanilla ice cream right on top.

He felt his hands and legs trembling, wanting to go across to the counter and throw the pie against the wall.

And then they were going and he was watching himself, the way you watch yourself in a home movie, as he shook hands and nodded and said: Thank you. . . Yes, I will.