CHEAP TRICKS - An excerpt

Lenny did not believe in death or insanity, even though death came to the dinner table for his grandfather Fritz when Lenny was a small child.

For the first years of his life, the boy, who would become L. Rothe, and his parents lived with Fritz and his grandmother Catherine in a two-story, wooden house in a large city on the eastern seaboard. The home was painted white and set on top of stacks of old red bricks. Under the house it was damp and dark where Lenny hid when his grandfather had the stroke.

On a Saturday two weeks after his grandfather's funeral, Lenny's parents went into New York City for the day. They took in a musical, then ate dinner at their favorite Italian restaurant, a romantic place for them. Over glasses of red wine, they were still freshly enough married to gaze at each with glowing eyes and make toasts to love eternal.

Young Lenny, somewhere between four and five years old, was left with his grandmother. In the afternoon Catherine was knitting in Pop's chair by the aromatic pipe rack, while Lenny soared around the house like an airplane.

Zooming, making sounds he equated with an airplane's descent, arms extended like a plane's wings, he was running from room to room, looping from the kitchen, smashing into the flopping, swinging door. Machine-gun sounds erupted from his lips while he passed around the polished dinner table of dark wood, firing through the living room where Catherine knitted in the soft chair. He rushed loudly up the steps clomp clomp clomp, then descended the steps in a series of rushed footsteps, and returned into the kitchen, booming through the rattled swinging door.

At this moment, filled with a kind of grace that made him feel he could even fly if he wanted to, soar around the large lamp hanging over the dining room table, or levitate up the stairs weightless, Lenny ignored his grandmother, as he repeatedly traveled the same annoying path.

Ascending and descending sounds, the hum of a crashing aircraft, all loud, continuing to burst from his mouth, gurgling up from his throat, whining out his nose.

Mindless joy, ecstatic rush of dizziness, gurgle of laughter and enjoyment, and disobedience, total disobedience; around and around continued young Lenny, aware only of life and not yet convinced of death. A careening kid, loud and full of himself, having a good time while driving his grandmother crazy.

"Lenny, you stop that this minute or I am going away, and you will never see me again," said Catherine.

She was a woman whose oldest daughter died, the joy of her life, a good part of her, and she raised two boys and three girls to adulthood, even the one who died, and now this alien she was helping raise and never bore or asked for was zipping about her house like he had four cups of coffee in him, and he refused to obey her, even acknowledge her. She had seen her husband fall ill, had listened to his death rattle, had just in fact buried him, had sat in her room for days weeping, but this new child, to whom she had given so much, spun like a loud top through what should have been the tranquillity of her home.

"I am telling you, Lenny, if you do not stop acting like a brat this very instant, I am going to leave you and never see you again."

Lenny scarcely heard her, certainly didn't listen to her, while he enjoyed the flexibility of new muscles. Lithe and prancing, his annoyance became even greater to Catherine.

It was true. He had fallen and hurt himself. He had smashed his head into the end of the table once, requiring stitches. He had fallen down the steps once, requiring more stitches. A young girl had hit him in the head really hard, not with her hand but with an iron ring on a playground, blood spurting and running into his eyes, hurting him, the first of many blows from women, the easier ones requiring stitches. For that matter, he had a lot of stitches in his head, and would have more. Yes, it was true he might hurt himself, but it didn't matter, for at this moment he was invincible.

And while he was running, spiraling, twisting, and rotating like a top, passing through the kitchen doors again bang bang bang, and up and down the steps thump thump thump, he became gradually aware of stillness in the house and the absence of his knitting grandmother from her chair. She left so quietly he had not heard the door close.

He thought she probably was not really going anywhere and would return soon. Maybe she was hiding outside around the corner or in the back yard.

stopped, sort of like a run-down, mechanical alarm clock, the hands uncertain what hour and minute to point toward. Time arrested.

Lenny went to the windows and looked outside to the front street. Cars continued down Stuveysant Avenue in both directions. Sunshine poured down from a cloudless sky. There was no sign of his grandmother in her gray-check dress with her hair in the gray bun.

Through the back windows he looked into the small fenced yard where vegetables grew in three well-kept rows. A mockingbird perched on the scarecrow. Butterflies drifted over the garden.

For one thing, he would feel tremendously guilty if his grandmother really left home because of him and was never seen again. That would be awful. He would go to Hell, wouldn't he?

Then there was what his parents would do. Where was Mom? they would ask. What if he told them he had driven her away by being bad? Or what if he didn't tell them, then she came back and told them she had left because of Lenny? Or if months went by and his parents got a letter from Mom that Lenny had driven her away by being so bad?

Clocks were ticking, making the only sounds in the house. A large, grandfather clock was running in the dining room. This clock had a bird that flew out every hour and crowed. The clock chimed every quarter hour. Other clocks were ticking in the kitchen and upstairs, wind-up alarm clocks, some run down. More time running out, more stoppage.

His grandfather died in a manner resembling the cuckoo coming out of the clock. He stood at the dinner table, throwing his body forward onto his meal and the table. His eyes were strange; incoherent sounds came from his throat; he flailed with one arm and could not move the other. Lenny's grandmother screamed. His father cried out, "Pop!" Lenny's mother Bernice called the doctor, while Big Len carried his father from the table to the couch, and Catherine wiped the food off his grandfather's fine Sunday clothes. For two days, he muttered from the bedroom, then with a horrible sound issuing from his throat, he died.

That was how Catherine found him, crying under the table, when she returned after spending an hour visiting Mr. and Mrs. Krause, the neighbors next door who grew tomatoes.

Lenny hugged her and held onto her and said he was sorry over and over. Then Lenny got it. This was a trick. It was like with his grandfather. Pop was not really dead. He was not in the ground. There wasn't any death. How could there be something so horrible in a good world anyway? His grandfather was hiding somewhere and would be home soon just like his grandmother. Lenny felt better.

He had his first vision of The Kissing Game, which he later called The Doubles, in the cold country when Lenny was a mere boy of five years.

Four kids marched fearlessly into brown, winter woods. The oldest, Arthur with his long legs, strode ahead, this hike a piece of cake to Art, who will someday be called Arty or Artie and drive a purple convertible.

Behind Arthur were teenage twin girls, who have hiked with the older boy before. The twins also possessed long legs, making greater strides than the small boy, Lenny, who was tagging along.

Behind everyone, Lenny panted and rushed to keep up. Although L. Rothe would become many things, he would not become a mother, like the twins, or ever be called Arty, and would never own a convertible. He would forever be Lenny.

On this day in his youth, Lenny was excited to be following the other children, although they seemed to be running away from him. He was headed to mystical lands in the woods and did not mind being winded, but did mind falling behind.

These pilgrims started about mid-morning, when the ice and frost was melting, on a sunny day that grew warmer. A picnic basket and a blanket were in the hands of the boy who will someday be Arty.

The four were well dressed for cold, none better than Lenny, whose mother provided a wool hat that rolls down over his ears, a shirt, a sweater, a heavy jacket, and long, itchy underwear. The twins, of course, were in identical coats, will be dressed in identical clothes until they cannot stand it any longer, and will in their teenage years, after various promiscuous acts, dress like boys and pretend to be lesbians.

But back then, they were loudly going through the woods, startling away wildlife. Arthur and the twins talked, not at all out of breath like the trailing boy. The three older kids laughed and giggled, while telling each other somewhat dirty jokes, having a most merry time. They didn't talk to Lenny, other than to say, "Hey, catch up," just looked back on him once in a while to make sure they had not lost him, so they will not be blamed for losing him. They can't believe the bad luck of being stuck with him. They didn't want Lenny along at all, but he was foisted on them by his mother, Bernice, who found Lenny searching the house for an imaginary sister and decided he needed friends. Lenny was sure the sister was real, a girl in diapers with sparkling blond hair, her name Leah. He searched the house frantically for her, even looking into closets where his father's uniform hung from World War Two and there were dozens of pairs of lady's shoes. Lenny was fun for the kids sometimes, but here he was just someone they had to watch out for, while the twins and Arthur had each other.

It is perhaps a mile to the place where they had a picnic. A long mile for a boy who was not yet six, no matter how excited. Lenny found himself slipping farther behind, and at one point he couldn't see Arthur swinging the picnic basket or the skipping twins because they crossed over a hill Lenny still climbed. But up the hill Lenny went and completed the hike to the picnic area and was not lost.

Where they picnicked was on the elevated edge of a substantial washout. The erosion had caused short white cliffs. The picnic spot overlooked other more vast woods with several slate-blue lakes in the distance. The four kids sat on a small blanket and ate pieces of fried chicken and drank Coke. There was too much chicken and not enough Coke.

When they finished eating, Arthur told Lenny to scamper down the slope and look for arrowheads.

Minnie said, "You can't play the kissing game with us. You're too young for The Doubles."

"Come on, get up," Arthur said, "and I'll show you where you can find the arrowheads. I'll give you a nickel each for each one you find."

"You have to find arrowheads first, then we'll let you play with us," Arthur said.

Arthur and Lenny stood, and the teenager led the young boy to the edge of the cliff.

"Look down. Are you scared?" Arthur said and pushed Lenny from behind. "I can throw you off."

"Are you scared of falling?" Arthur gave Lenny a shove, then grabbed him back in the nick-of-time. "What happened to Lenny? I don't know. He got too close to the cliff and fell."

"Go down the cliff over there." Arthur indicated the way. "You'll find arrowheads in the soft dirt at the bottom. I'll give you a nickel for each of them. Get five and come back up and we'll play."

Lenny made his way slowly down the incline. He was scared when Arthur was pushing him off the cliff. Lenny sifted through the lose earth for arrowheads. He found several, many more than the five Arthur asked for. Some of the arrowheads were pretty neat - chipped and shiny, brownish flint, hammered to a point more than a century before. Lenny scaled up the slope to where he left the threesome, but they were not immediately in sight. Hidden from him, Lenny found them on an opposite down slope, reclined on the picnic blanket beneath two small trees, Arthur supine beneath the weight of the two young girls, whose coats were removed and their tops unbuttoned, small pinkish breasts exposed, a color of flesh Lenny did not recall seeing before. The girls lay on their sides facing the young man. Arthur kissed Minnie, the prettier one, then he kissed Millie, whose face was more pinched. The young women's eyes were closed. They twins took turns kissing the young man, while Arthur's hands roamed across their bodies and caressed and kneaded portions of the twin's flesh, especially the breasts.

The three teenagers were unaware of the boy standing above them, so Lenny was able to watch for what seemed to him a long time. It was different from when the twins had wrestled him down on the wet grass to keep Lenny from wandering into the woods. Lenny watched, trying to decipher the riddle of the kissing game, but it did not come to him and he did not want to watch any longer. He did not understand The Doubles, and he wrongly thought perhaps he never would. Arthur and the twins were right: he was not interested in being in the kissing game, he was too young, and not teenagers like them. Nonetheless, it was fascinating for Lenny to watch, and it made him feel vaguely disturbed, the cherry-topped nipples, Arthur's hands slipping into the girls pants. In the end, Lenny fled, but the vision of the three entwined children was burned into his dreams.

These were the times of his birth. It was the middle of the twentieth century, and children were suffering. Just a few years before in Europe, German children burned to death in fire bombings, in cities like Dresden, and countless more Jewish children went up in smoke in death camps. In Japan, children were vaporized by atomic bombs, burned by firestorms, and poisoned by radiation. In China, Japanese soldiers impaled babies on bayonets. Later in Korea, children froze to death during that war, solid as ice cubes, run out of their homes by Chinese, Americans, and Koreans alike. Fire, explosions, sharp instruments, and ice, while in other portions of Asia, girl babies were put out to starve and older girls sold into slavery and prostitution; wails of the starving, moans of the ill-loved. In Africa, a young man named Amin practiced his baseball bat swing while famine tore at Ethiopia and the Sudan, starving countless little ones - distended stomachs, rib cage bones. In a county that used to be Palestine, Jewish settlers and Arabs fought and children died. Protestant children were killed by Catholics in Ireland, and Irish Protestants slew Catholic kids. In Birmingham, USA, innocent black girls were blown up by remorseless Ku Klux Klan members. It seemed fair season on children, their blood or ashes or frozen remains were everywhere. Each of those children, the millions dead, wanted to be loved and safe. It was a vision of Hell; but the middle-class children of America were safe and happy in the center of that fat century, or so they were told, and so they believed. They were safe from everyone, they thought, except maybe themselves, the elders of the great American tribe, and sudden storms, like the unusual hurricane. A powerful storm ripped in from the Atlantic and struck late at night into the heart of the cold country's coast, a surprise storm with high winds. It carried little rain or snow but there was a tremendous howling sound rattling at Lenny's bedroom windows.

A tree collapsed onto the roof over Lenny's bedroom. The spruce tore a rent in the roof and busted out one bedroom window. These shattering events, like a suddenly exploded bomb, caused Lenny to briefly stir. He saw the shadow of the moving branch on the wall. He felt the cold wind roaring around him. Unafraid, he went back to sleep, submerging like a submarine into the warm depths of his blanket and mattress. Thus his parents found him when they responded to the crash, sound asleep in the maelstrom, and his father picked him up, carried him to their bedroom, where Lenny slept beside his Jap-shooting father, safe in America, a lad yet without nightmares, although he had now seen passion, one cause of nightmares and madness.

"I don't want to go," Lenny pleaded. "I don't want to leave Millie and Minnie." The twins were forgiven for wrestling him to the ground when he wanted to wander across the railroad tracks into the beckoning woods and for leaving him for Arthur's kissing game. Lenny fondly remembered the twins placing pennies, nickels, and quarters onto the railroad track to be squashed into elongated, smoldering metal by locomotives for the amusement of Lenny.

"Don't be silly, Lenny. You're going to Florida," his mother Bernice said. She was awake accomplishing final packing all night while lights remained on.

Except for one fit young man, the movers were big and tall men with protruding bellies and bulging biceps, who came at 8:00 a.m. to carry into the moving van the furniture and the round drums his parents stuffed with items from the house. The house was quickly emptied into a place so hollow that spoken words echoed off the walls. The movers smelled of sweat, they grunted when moving something heavy, but otherwise didn't speak except for occasional instructions and acknowledgments.

Lenny rushed from his house, away from his mother, letting the door slam, and went through the back door into Minnie and Millie's house. He crashed open the door, and it slammed hard too, an offense that once resulted in Walt, the father of the twins, smacking Lenny's backside, causing a neighborhood dispute, during which Len Rothe told Walt Fortnoy that no one would ever lay a hand on his son save Len himself.

"We don't want Lenny to go," they told their parents, pretty much in unison. "Can't Lenny stay with us?"

For a minute Lenny saw some hope, although staying with Walt would be more difficult than being with his own father, but then his father Len settled this nonsense. He came through the back door, said "Hello" to Walt and Wanda, and just picked Lenny up under one shoulder, carrying him out the twins' house to the family car.

The twins followed jumping, waving, screaming, yelling over and over, "Bye, Lenny," and "Write us, Lenny," and Lenny saying, "I will," but he never did, and waving good-bye said, "I'll come back," which he never did, and "We'll come visit," which his family never did.

Lenny, once settled into temporary quarters in Chapacola, Florida, put pen and paper on his small child's desk to write Millie and Minnie. He wrote "Dear Millie & Minnie" and paused. He went to the bottom of the letter and wrote, "Sincerely, Lenny." In between he wanted to write words asking about the kissing game. The Doubles involved tricks Lenny would have to master. Perhaps the twins could write him with pointers for when Lenny played the kissing game. He considered that writing the twins about The Doubles might get his friends into trouble with their parents. It certainly would get Arthur in trouble, a possibility that pleased Lenny. Nonetheless, Lenny threw away the letter and never thought again about writing the two twins, although he truly never stopped thinking of them and The Doubles.

Chapacola might mean sweet people in the language of the Apalachee, but it was doubtful if "sweet" applied to the children around one of Chapacola's newest children, transplanted Yankee, Lenny Rothe. For a small boy with no brothers or sisters, the children of Chapacola, strangers every one, were intimidating. It truly was no wonder why that stupid old mummy in black-and-white films on Shock Theater did nothing to frighten Lenny when he had these children to contend with. After all, The Mummy, wrapped in bandages, barely creeping along, dragging a foot, was going so slow that Lenny could have outrun The Mummy any time he wanted if The Mummy had been real. Stupid people in black-and-white movies saw The Mummy and screamed and stood still so The Mummy could catch them. Lenny could have thumbed his nose in the direction of the dirty bandages as he zipped past.

The school, however, swarmed with children as active as popping corn, and he could not outrun, outfight, although he could outthink them. Much more frightening than The Mummy were the high-pitched squeals of the young girls rising in unison to unnerve Lenny. Such loud and strange shrieks were far more terrifying than the combination of The Mummy or the Wolf Man or even the dim-wit Frankenstein monster. Perhaps to their parents, these young girls were beauties in bright ribbons who played gently with their dolls, but on the playground during recess they were as hyenas to Lenny, and perhaps to some of the teachers. The young ladies, with their sharp teeth, were like wild animals hunting in a pack, ready to swoop down, taunting and teasing, descending upon the unsuspecting prey, perhaps Lenny, certainly Lenny's first Chapacola friend, Bishop Foggarty.

Chapacola's hunting pack of sadistic young boys did not make such squeals, since the boys were stealth assailants, surprising prey before beating it. In the Chapacola world of competing children, especially male children, innocence could not last, and even at six the boys were a pugilistic, feuding group. Boys in Chapacola were supposed to fight and feud and beat each other at competition to the point of being bloodied or hurt, to cruelly make fun of one another, to be crude in language and to spit well, to hunt and shoot things to death, to make someone cry. Above all, Chapacola boys were to be tough and not shed tears themselves, brave and not cowardly, or else other boys or fathers would go about the business of making them real men. Chapacola boys did not dance around May poles with bright ribbons but became warriors and captains of industry and fishermen, defenders of Christianity, progress, capitalism, and the superiority of the white race. In the 1950s, they were expected to be skilled fighters, ready to defend these values for any imagined slight.

It was understood among these white children that black people, most of whom lived across the river in Westpoint, were inferior. The rules were that the white Chapacola boys were not allowed to actually hurt black people, unless they were really bad black people, those who opposed segregation or who wanted to sleep with white women, or those who had "forgotten their place." Usually, the few blacks in Chapacola and the majority in Westpoint were to be treated by the sweet people as mentally-deficient children, as silly aunts, or lazy uncles, as natty-haired simpletons and cute, smiley children, and in the worst case, as uppity. Blacks were to be the recipients of charity, usually hand-me-downs from whites who employed them. In Chapacola, the black children were confined to separate schools along Redwood Avenue, and Lenny never met them, and they never met Lenny, who imagined they had to be nicer children than the wild animals he went to school with. When the boys of Chapacola dreamed, they were supposed to dream of war, of killing Indians and communists, knocking down strident Negroes, winning the gunfight with the bad men, scoring a touchdown in the football game, while never losing, and capturing the heart of a beautiful white heroine and virgin of unquestionable great purity. The Chapacola boys truly believed this, yes they did, at least until the world around them slowly separated them from all those unhealthy notions.

His conduct grades were always unsatisfactory, graded as U on little cards he took home to have signed. His class grades varied from A to F. He was always exuberant, running, spinning, carrying-on, joking, although never cruel like the other boys in his school. He was a nuisance to the teachers, for he would not be quiet or still, something that in time they must beat out of him. So it was that from one class he was sent to the principal's office, where a young man carefully explained why it was that the wood was to put to Lenny's ass. Lenny bent over, dropped his pants, and exposed his meager pink behind while the young principle delivered three painful whacks with a flat paddle. "Now," the young man said, "I hope you've learned your lesson." He had not. Future paddling would stretch up to five, seven, and ten strokes of a hard, wooden paddle with three holes drilled into it - a handle to fit a manly hand belonging to one of Chapacola's sweet people.

His first Chapacola friend, Bish Foggarty, was very much a poor southerner's son, a big, big boy, with a lumbering walk and a lack of grace. Bishop was closer to sweet people than anyone else Lenny would meet in Chapacola. Always awkward, given to fat, a child who stumbled when he tried to run, portly, always last in a group of running children, Bish was a big boy who tripped, flopped, fell, who would never hit a home run or leap gracefully into the air to snare a baseball. His two older sisters were equally gigantic and uncoordinated. The three Foggarty kids, when they accompanied their mother to church, were said to fill a pew with their girth.

Bishop had a voice that was best described as whiny-southern. No one would ever call Bishop cool. This did not keep Lenny from liking him. Lenny met Bish in their first school year. They played games, rode bicycles together, and visited Bishop's father's workshop, where there was hung on a nail in the wall a calendar of a topless woman who was smiling broadly. All the months had previously been ripped from the calendar, while the semi-nude woman remained.

The topless woman on the calendar was a redhead with very large breasts and lively green eyes. The calendar girl's bare skin was lightly creamy, her pink nipples pointed, one breast held slightly up in a hand with finely polished red nails. Lenny did not understand what she was smiling about. Lenny later thought he spent most of his life trying to find this woman, a vision of desire imprinted upon an unformed brain in the workshop of Bishop Foggarty's uncouth dad. The woman looked something like his future girlfriend, June, except for the breasts.

Always, Bishop took his new friends to see the calendar, as if this special favor would bind them. The calendar was the highlight of Lenny's visits, for it created feelings in his groin with which he was unfamiliar. Among many of the boys in Lenny's first grade, the calendar in the workshop was a shared experience.

Despite his height and great bulk, Bishop lacked the will to use his size. He packed no wallop. If there were boyish fights, instead of fighting, Bishop took punishment or tried to escape. He covered up and cowered while much smaller kids hit him. Although he would in time reach the size of a fullback or a linebacker, he was too sensitive, both physically and mentally, for fight games, and when hurt, he cried, and children made fun of the cry baby.

When Lenny first saw another child beating Bish, hitting him hard, Lenny asked, "Why don't you defend yourself? You're a big guy." Bishop could not or would not answer, and his cow-like eyes merely welled with tears. Bishop was better than the children around him, but Lenny was too young to realize it.

The two boys explored abandoned old settler homes that would be torn down or burned to the ground to make room for modern houses. The boys searched deserted Cracker homes, mere shacks, some lacking screens and plumbing. White paint was peeling on walls of wood, not block, no sheet rock used either. The walls themselves were disintegrating from rot and termites. The boys found various abandoned items, including old, rusting canned goods they sometimes ate with the carelessness of youth, bullets of various kinds and caliber, rotting books with tattered pages they studied with great interest as if they might contain the secret of the Templars.

Ugly things were said to Bishop to taunt him in school. Allegedly disgusting habits were described, but Bish never replied to the mean talk.

"Cry baby," was an epithet that the first-grade girls enjoyed hurling at Bishop, even cute Dorothea (Dot) Staley.

It was not clear to Lenny what import the vengeance of the innocent young woman held or why Bish received it.

If Dot was a pint of a girl, Babs was a gallon. Her face worked up into anger - why? - so that she was crimson and tight-lipped beneath her bowl-cut black hair. Dot's blue eyes, located under pixie-cut hair, narrowed in anger, encouraged by Barbara Wadell, wrathful.

Indeed, Bishop did have about him an aroma, of ham perhaps from breakfast, maybe just sweat, for he was ahead of his age in perspiration. There were different smells in his poor settler family house, greens and chitlins, turnips and cracklings. Dot came from a more citified home, and she, of course, would never sweat or smell, never stink, be forever the essence of summer glades.

"Bish picks his nose," Barbara shrieked to amused playmates during recess, another frequent hurtful comment from this young girl, whose own olfactory senses were located in a nose that was a mere tiny button, into which one of her chubby fingers would never extend or even fit.

Yes, Bishop did pick his nose, as disgustingly as the block masons who had built Lenny's house (and worked for his father) blew their noses onto the ground, plugging one nostril with a finger and blowing mightily out the other. Of course, all the children in the class picked their noses, all thirty of them in first grade, all sixty nostrils, a regular field of perpetual nose picking, and maybe the teacher too, Mrs. Dawson, gray and prim with her hair in a bun like his grandmother Catherine. Only the dead don't pick their noses, Lenny thought.

"And he's a farter," said one young button of a maid. Big Len was a farter too. In fact, farting and farts were a source of childhood amusement for the boys who beat up Bish until he cried and for the girls who insulted Bish into tears. And indeed Bishop was not only a farter but a cry baby. They were all cry babies at one time or another. Wouldn't beloved, red-haired June say to Lenny in about a dozen years that he cried too easily?

Except Dorothea, of course, whose charmed life brought no tears and whose tender virgin tears, should they ever come, could make flowers bloom. Or Barbara Wadell, whose blessed tears could melt the hardened heart of a sinner and were especially watched over by God and the Baby Jesus since she was Preacher "Iron Mitch" Wadell's first and only born.

Of Judas and the first steps of Judas, there was no guilt, and Lenny did not miss his friend. He missed the calendar from time to time, the topless, smiling, redheaded woman he would seek the rest of his life.

Of Judas and the guilt of Judas, he felt none. When Lenny did notice Bishop, if he felt guilty at all, it was for not defending him, not being manly. Lenny Judas Rothe never helped. He removed himself from Bishop's life.

Troubled souls beseech their powerless or uncaring gods for forgiveness. They repent for they have not lived the correct life. Just one more chance, God. Frail and broken, or just plain worried humans pray to be healthy again or in love again or to be financially secure for once or not to be addicted or not to be unfaithful or dishonest any more. Or they just wish to be filled up and not empty vessels, to be hot or cold again but not lukewarm. If they could only undo what they have done or do what they cannot. If they could only go back in time. If they could only stop yearning for what they do not have or have not done and likely never will. If they could only not be Judas.

In the year Lenny was in second grade, cute little Ellen Melvin replaced Bishop Foggarty as his playmate, and she consumed hours of his time, as did ducking both her older brothers who wanted to pound Lenny for doting on someone as disgusting as their little sister. She was a precious child, full of life, and agile, so that Lenny, following her about, felt awkward and ungraceful.

Lenny liked girls at that stage of life when boys are not supposed to like girls; he would always like girls. He liked Ellen especially, for she was not a shrieker, not part of the hunting girl pack, and she did not pick on Bishop. She stood aloof and friendly, an innocent in an age of innocence. At seven years of age, Lenny kissed a redheaded girl with green eyes, Ellen, who giggled and kissed him back. True it was not much of a kiss, just a peck, the purest of baby kisses, so full of light innocence it might have risen on its own heavenward.

They rode bicycles about the neighborhood; they cooled in small plastic pools; they sat in front of televisions; their families took them to the beaches; they read comic books together; they watched each other pee; and they drew with crayons in coloring books.

Ellen's father was a writer, a paperback writer, who was compact and about whom hung a cloud of tobacco smoke. He had been a Marine in the war, a brave tough thing to be a Marine. Among a prolific pile of popular and entertaining books, he wrote short stories that appeared in science fiction magazines.

"Are you really really a writer?" Lenny asked, although he knew Mr. Melvin was a writer.

"Ah," in anguish was the reply Vic gave about his profession. Slate-gray eyes looked at Lenny with amusement.

Already in love with books, Lenny considered writers the superiors of priests and jet pilots. Writers wrote books, which Lenny loved, just the holding of them, and as the creators of the books, writers were gods who held the secrets of life and happiness. At four, Lenny had taught himself to read - upside down - it took Bernice to show him how to read right-side up. Bernice had found her son reading Call of the Wild with the book turned backwards.

Lenny didn't understand yet that writing was for many people a compulsion, something they could not help, like mental illness, not something necessarily to be proud about, but something a little shameful, like having ESP or a club foot. Vic Melvin wasn't that kind of writer.

Vic Melvin once said that writers cut their heads open and instead of blood pouring out it was words words words, and people judged those words and some said they were bad words, and others said they were good words, still others didn't care what the words were, and some would like to murder the writer for the words, and others loved the writer for the words, but some writers continued to write not because they were gifted or brave or gods, but because they had no choice.

"I really like writers. I've read Jack London and Ernest Hemingway and Sinclair Lewis," persisted Lenny.

"I've read them and also Mark Twain and Pearl Buck," Lenny continued, naming writers whose books were on his mother's bookshelf.

And at seven, Lenny had indeed read one book by Jack London and a book by Mark Twain. He had tried some of the other books he named, but stuck them back in the bookshelf in the family living room. It was true he did not understand much of what he read yet.

Sometimes Vic didn't shave, which made him look sad. Watching Vic made Lenny want to smoke and not shave and grow a beard as soon as he was old enough, so Lenny could be a writer too.

"I think its neat your dad's a writer," Lenny told Ellen. "Have you ever read anything he wrote?"

Ellen had to admit she had not. His books and magazines were not even on the shelves in the house but securely locked in a drawer of his desk.

Lenny asked his father if he would buy him some of Vic Melvin's books. His father said he would but never did produce a single book. Many years later, Lenny came across Nick Nelson's (a pen name for Vic) mysteries in a used bookstore. They were thin books, short books, really no more than novelettes in small paperbacks that originally sold for a dime or a quarter, but now were collector items at three dollars, despite their yellowed pages. A determined, smoking, unshaven detective packing a gun leered from each cover. Between the front and the back cover were twenty-five thousand words more or less.

The mysteries had one hero, a man named Mac Canon, and Mac Canon always drove fast cars hard. There were frequent adult sexual encounters between Mac and his female suspects and female clients. Mac was nothing like Bishop Foggarty. No softness or weakness, Mac was a hero, like Lenny's dad or Vic. In one of the books, perhaps the final one, maybe the first, Mac Canon was captured by some criminals who beat him with baseball bats and left him for dead. Mac Canon fooled the crooks, survived, hunted the thugs down, and killed them all brutally.

Vic Melvin also wrote science fiction books under another pen name, Sid Silver. These novels were half of Ace double paperbacks and sold for thirty-five cents then and up to sixteen dollars in modern times. Lenny actually read these books when he was a kid but didn't know Vic was Sid Silver. The covers of the double paperbacks were always blue on one side, red on the other, each novel upside down from the other. The aliens were either like men, only blue or green with antennae sprouting from their heads, or like octopus, having tentacles and squirting ink.

There was one hero in Vic's science fiction series also, Spike Blaster, who always flew solo and faster than the speed of light. In the first book in the series, or maybe the last, it was hard to tell, Spike, too, was left for dead just like Mac Canon, by aliens not criminals, and beaten with blaster bats. Spike, too, took violent bloody revenge, only on a far-off planet where the blood that flowed was green.

The writing that was most important to Vic was probably never published. It was likely in manuscript boxes somewhere. There would be gems in the real writing. The real writing was likely to have been more like words bleeding from the brain and perhaps a tad too personal and radical. That real writing was hidden, but if he had published it, the essence of Vic, he would have done so under his own name and no one would have been left for dead in these books, except maybe Vic.

Watching through the window as Ellen undressed, Lenny saw her suddenly as pink, innocent, and vulnerable. Lenny wanted to rush into her house and shatter all the clocks so that time could not move forward to when she would be hurt. He felt as if large, hungry lions were running across fields to rip her to shreds, eight-hundred-pound male tigers perhaps, with heads as large as a big TV and bone-splintering, teeth-studded jaws. The full harvest moon in the sky was shattering, breaking into giant crushing shards, which would fall on her from the heights of space. Lenny was going to save her, he was going to be tough like Mac Cannon or Spike Blaster, a hero like his father or Vic had been in the war. Lenny was going to be a writer.

From standing in the bushes watching her undress, Lenny broke out in a rash. The bushes were oleanders. There was a lesson here, only Lenny couldn't grasp it.

Vic Nelson died a very young man. Lenny's father told him of the death. Before Lenny knew she was leaving, Ellen was gone, he never saw her again, or traded another baby kiss, since the mother and daughter and her two brothers had moved somewhere else, where Lenny never knew.

Lenny went to the Melvin's house to see for himself, and it was locked. No one answered the bell. No car was in the driveway. A for-rent sign was in the front yard. The Melvin family had rented the house and were gone. Lenny asked his father what had happened and was told the family moved. She was gone. He could not protect his innocent friend from the deadly jaws of giant felines or the sharp pieces of falling lunar mountains. Gone, no further explanation, and in Lenny's dreams there was a vision of the dead writer with the hole in his head out of which leaked words.

Lenny was with Bernice in a store that sold junk: old furniture, used clothing, rusted nuts and bolts and nails and screws, mirrors, canned goods rusted at the seams, bedding, walkers and canes and wheel chairs, towels worn thin, guns and ammunition, stuffed animals, old hats and ties, lampshades and lights. Bernice stopped at the store to find a bargain, after Lenny had the family dentist drill and fill teeth, and he had a numb mouth.

In one corner on the floor, Lenny found a massive stack of used science fiction magazines with bright, gaudy covers of aliens and spacecraft and ray-gun beams. The names of the magazines were unfamiliar but called to him. There was Astounding, Galaxy, If, Worlds of Tomorrow, Fantastic Stories, Thrilling Wonder Stories. He had not known there was such a wonderful profusion of magazines, having seen only an occasional garish cover of Amazing Stories at the newsstands. The magazines mostly were from the 1940s, but a few were older and in large pulp format.

The price was a nickel a magazine. It turned out that at this very time, Lenny had in his possession a crisp five-dollar bill which was a birthday present from family friend Colonel Cargill, as well as one dollar and sixty-five cents from lunch money he had not spent, and a quarter that he had not placed in the collection plate when it passed at church. Using this comparative fortune, combined with begging Bernice to please help him buy more, Lenny managed to carry off ten dollars worth of magazines, two hundred of them, but he still wanted the ones left behind, and pleaded with his mother daily to take him to buy the rest. "You have enough to read now," she said. She didn't understand that he wanted to possess these magazines, to collect them, as well as to read them. In a few weeks, she relented, took him back to the store after another dental appointment where cavities were filled, his mouth made unfeeling, but by then the stash of magazines was gone, sold to some other fortunate person.

As he read the stories in the magazines, Lenny thought he could write better than that, so he moved the old Royal typewriter into his room, rolled in bond paper, and quickly finished a story of eight pages. Later that same day he wrote ten pages of his planned novel, Lord of the Entire Universe, Part I. He put the papers into the small desk in his room, a piece of furniture slated in time to move to where the telephone sat. In the back of the drawer where his manuscripts went was a metal ruler with the name Nessbaum printed on it and an assortment of pens and pencils.

In the evening, Lenny found his manuscripts on top of his desk. When the Sunnydales came to visit, Bernice said, "You should see what Lenny's written," in a way that it was clear the Sunnydales would get a hoot from these writing efforts. Lenny was now the proud author of four stories and fifty pages of a novel. The name on the typed manuscripts was L. Rothe.

Bernice and Mrs. Sunnydale proceeded into Lenny's room, removed the pages from his desk containing his favorite short story, Mrs. Cooper and the Worm Salesman. Laughing and giggling, Bernice made fun of the names of the characters and the plot. Mrs. Sunnydale chuckled at Lenny's concept of a worm salesman.

Mrs. Cooper bought some special worms from the worm salesman, a man who drove a horse-driven cart, who told her to treat the worms right and the garden would grow, and never to treat the worms badly. One day, annoyed by aphids, Mrs. Cooper sprayed insecticide on her garden, poisoning the young worms. In revenge, the adult worms ate Mrs. Cooper while she slept one night. Lenny was an environmentalist ahead of his time.

Later that evening, after the Sunnydales and his parents played cards at the kitchen table, after Alice Sunnydale and her brothers ran out of energy and were asleep in various corners of the living room, Lenny destroyed the four short stories and fifty pages of Lord of the Entire Universe, Part I and put them in the trash.

In their newly-built home, Lenny Rothe heard his parents whispering in a late night conference in the dark surrounding their bed. Off times they whispered about him, particularly his behavior in school, which was constantly unsatisfactory.

One night, Lenny overheard his father's loud whisper asking if he had made a mistake, and he heard his mother's soothingly reply that things will soon get better. His father wondering if and when he can ever repay Catherine for the money he has borrowed and concern over meeting the mortgage.

There had come a slump, a deadness in the business air akin to a sailing ship at sea without wind, something called a recession, which struck their new city, Chapacola, Florida, making Len sit home day after day. No customers called for block-laying quotes. Jobs not finished were canceled as financing dried up. Houses half built dotted the most recently platted subdivisions. The block-laying crews had no work, men were idle, and they went fishing and hunting. Len's partner, Bernie Slick, was idle too, so he began driving to the faraway dog and horse tracks.

One day in summer, Len put Lenny in the car, and drove to Bernie's house, where their unemployed crews were assembled. The masons drove in three cars to the unemployment office, which was located on a Chapacola side street, so those entering were not easily seen.

Bernie Slick sat on one side of Lenny in the front seat of the car that Len Rothe drove to the unemployment office. There was often concrete stuck on Bernie's hair, eyelashes, nose, and ear hair. Thick, tangled hair sprouted from his nose. The white work clothes he wore, despite being washed, had spots of hard mortar, and when Bernie's work clothes hung on the line, they were weighted toward the earth as if they had fishing sinkers in the cuffs. Bernie joked with Len that the good thing about not working for a while was removing remnant concrete from his body, hair, and fingernails.

The two partners led their crews into the unemployment office, while Lenny waited in his father's car, uncertain why he was brought along. Although it was because his mother was doing volunteer work at the local mental health association, Lenny thought the purpose was to witness the humiliation of men of capitalism and industry, former war veterans now unemployed potential failures struggling with their VA mortgages.

One by one over a period of several hours, the men came back to the cars, holding papers in their hands. Checks would come later in the mail. Len came from the unemployment office last, looking nervous and embarrassed. Bernie Slick and Len Rothe shook their hung heads sadly. Both men looked ill, as if they had swallowed bad food.

"Bernie," Len said, "someday, when things are up and running again, I want you to buy me out, and I'll go start a Chapacola block supply business. I'll sell to you at a lower rate than you're paying now."

Len Rothe was a man who, in Lenny's imagination, strode across the bloody battlefields of Europe during World War Two, sometimes following in the tracks of leading tanks, greeted as a hero in France and with shy acceptance in Germany. Of his role in the war, Big Len never spoke. Lenny assumed his dad had been like Sergeant Rock or GI Joe of the comics. Had Len been at D-day? Lenny didn't know. Had he been with Patton or at the Battle of the Bulge? Lenny was unsure where his father served or how, just gained by osmosis the idea his father was a hero. The war hero was now unemployed, collecting from the government a dole, which was vastly insufficient to help pay the bills.

Also fighting for his country, Len's partner Bernie Slick had run, fought, dug, and crawled his way across many Pacific islands, fighting entrenched Japanese, who died liked brave lunatics, sometimes screaming and immolated from flame-throwers when they hid in caves and pillboxes.

Apparently Lenny's father disliked the Japanese because when his father farted, and he farted often and loudly ("Len, stop that," the constant refrain of Bernice), Len would proclaim happily, indeed gleefully, that he had shot a Jap. For his first seven years of life, Lenny thought the word Jap meant fart. His father, who did not fight in the Pacific or occupy Japan, had served in Europe during World War II, and later in life had Japanese friends. He was a man of contradictions, and this thing about the Japanese and farts was one. Many years later, Lenny realized that Japanese in Japan were likely saying they shot a Yank when they farted. So were Germans in Germany. In fact, all around the world people farting might be saying they shot a capitalist Yank. There were probably more people saying they had shot a democratic Yank when they farted than there were Americans. Lenny thought of this many years later when he was on the ground with tracer rounds going over his head and flares in the sky and mortar rounds incoming. The Vietnamese too would be saying they shot a yank.

Bernie Slick was one of the few from his infantry platoon who survived island assaults. His dress uniform that hung still in Bernie's closet had four rows of medals on it. A true hero, Sergeant Slick had been a young Jewish boy of nineteen when he went to the Pacific, a city kid from the same area on the eastern seaboard that the Rothe family came from.

The Great War and coming from the same state were things the two partners had in common, besides a belief that they could succeed in the masonry business, no matter what, because of hard work and honest bids - and now they were unemployed.

An older Lenny, war-experienced Lenny wondered did Bernie, while on R&R, despite his marriage to Ethel, perhaps take solace with a native girl on an atoll somewhere in Polynesia? Lenny, when wondering this, was not a stranger to relations with native girls.

Or, for that matter, did Len, despite his love for Bernice, be less than faithful with a French girl welcoming her liberator, or even

a shy, blond fraulein during the occupation? Len spoke very fondly of Paris and Versailles and Rome and Stuttgart, as if he had a wonderful time there, like he was not at war but on a sort of protracted vacation.

If either man made love to women on other continents, only they knew it, however. These two were either honorable men, who kept it in their pants, or protectors of illusions of honor, so if they had taken comfort and enjoyed an afternoon or evening with a pretty woman on another continent, they would never talk about it except obliquely with each other over a glass of cold, piss-yellow beer at the one smoky tavern in Chapacola, a place where they might let down their guard after a day full of mortar and block. With their families, the men might share the great-war joys of hitchhiking over Oregon and Washington, the times they stood up to priggish officers or overly regulation-obedient sergeants, how much money they won at cards or craps, or their many promotions, allowable things within their code of being the smartest and most able fellow.

Slick-Rothe Block Masons, the partners said, meant good work at fair prices. Each man thought himself the best businessman alive, just a little better than his partner. Both felt that if they could just get the right break, if whatever it was that was holding them down could just be removed, they could be rich. They were shrewd enough, this was America in boom, the land of opportunity, and they were in the booming state, in an expanding city - or had been. They were both unemployed, their business in shambles, and these captains of industry talked instead of taking jobs. It was as if, Bernie said, God was toying with them. But it had not been like that when the Rothe family moved to the city by the Gulf of Mexico.

Once a sleepy, ignored speck of a city with vistas of pristine beaches, Chapacola, Florida, had become a town of great excitation by the time the family arrived. It was as if a turbine revved through the very molecules and atoms of the earth the city sat on, the air above it, and the sea beside it. This great excitation was caused by the prospect of wealth. There was good money to be made by hard-working men smart enough to seize the day, and Len Rothe, Lenny's father, was among the hardest working and smartest who came intending to wrest - not a living - but a family fortune and legacy from prosperous times.

A Rothe family legend had it that a chance meeting in the checkout line at an A&P resulted in this bold move away the northeastern United States, to unsurpassed opportunities far away from Lenny's beloved twins next-door, Millie and Minnie. Bernice Rothe had met a local relative of a man who needed a partner in Florida. The man needing the partner was Jewish, and he was having trouble with sales, perhaps because of attitudes toward Jews in backward little Chapacola, perhaps because Bernie Slick was more of a doer and less of a salesman.

The salesman partner would be Len Rothe, a role for which he was perfectly suited. Len Rothe was loosely and pragmatically Christian, acceptable in a land of prejudice. He was also a natural-born salesperson, a man people liked and trusted, a man who was welcome when he came through the door of your house or business or church, even if he had never been there before. Lenny's father never discussed his motives for the move, of which there were many, some known, some not, but later in life Lenny often thought how it was a very brave thing, as brave as being a war hero, for a man to give up a secure government job and move a thousand miles to buy into a partnership in a block-laying business from a man he had barely met, whose sister-in-law Bernice encountered in the A&P, an enemy place within the household whose recently-deceased butcher patriarch lost his business to food-chain competition.

Three exploratory trips were made to Chapacola, one by the entire family, two by Lenny and his father. The family stayed at a ramshackle beach motel shaded by Australian pines, a place from which Lenny ran daily through sand spurs into the Gulf of Mexico. When Lenny and his father made the trips alone, Lenny stayed with the Slick family, whose blond daughter was raised a Christian like her mother. Lenny liked the Slick family almost as much as his own. It was like having a second mother and father, as well as a sister.

It was not only newcomers making money off the expansive development. Old and wealthy settler families, like the Feeneys, to whom Lenny would have a lifetime connection, were on the verge of vaster wealth due to startling and seemingly foolish prices being paid by northern land speculators for family holdings once considered a curse. Poor local tradesmen proud to be called Crackers, lovers of the Confederate flag and hunting, were vaulted into newfound wealth as houses sprouted everywhere. A man named Scott came from where no one knew (it was Kentucky, but he had reasons not to say) and made a fortune installing air-conditioning units that hummed from the windows of wooden settler homes. The units sent blasts of odorous hot air into the street, from which Lenny could tell whether a house belonged to a smoker or if mullet was eaten in the evening. A family arrived from Lebanon; its members, fueled by great ambitions, quickly found their way into the local development business and politics, often inseparable and formerly incestuous. The newly-selected Rothe family doctor ("Old" Doc Bennett) was planning a great hospital for the coming pregnant, ill, and injured masses brought by future growth. Georgia Walton, whose son would become Lenny's lifelong friend and future editor, was transplanted from Chicago and starting a title company, since the nearest one was in the county seat miles away. Georgia's beau, one of the boldest of the northern land developers, Dave Allen, was once a golf player with Bobby Jones during the Depression and knew Mafioso and Jewish gangsters. He had grand plans for subdivisions on islands, dredged land, and former flatwoods.

Len Rothe felt he had nothing to fear in making such a move, for he was always accepted; life had never thus far defeated him. Industrious and employed since childhood, he did not foresee unemployment in his life, nor death, nor defeat. Len knew only welcome and victory. If Len, tall and handsome, joined a group, he soon became the leader, usually without seeking the position, maybe because of his open, friendly smile and joviality. If Len took a job, no matter how lowly, he was soon promoted up the ranks until he was the manager, if not the boss. Unlike Lenny, the father made friends easily, including morticians, realtors, car salesmen, businessmen, insurance agents, lawyers, carpenters, teachers, electricians, gas station attendants, plumbers, professionals, block masons, fishing boat captains, and in time various club members (never, however, politicians). Len was beloved by his friend's wives and their children, and even family pets. Over a number of years, Len became president of this or that civic organization, despite being a new resident of Chapacola. He was high what-you-may-call-it of many fraternal organizations. As a parent pursuing Lenny into scouting, Len became troop leader, and at school, Len was PTA president, even though Lenny would rather he had not been either.

It was not the same with Bernice Rothe, a root of her husband's tree, who basked in the shadow of Len's popularity and his protective shade. She was not outgoing, but self-restrained, yet in her quietude she was a perfect partner in the friendships created by her husband. She was necessary. Without her, Len would be a man alone. She took phone messages for their business, helped to entertain, she cooked and hosted, cards were played at which she was adequate if not spectacular, guests were given libations by Len, and she joined the merriment. Bernie and Ethel Slick were the first of many friends bonded for life, bonded not just to Len, but to his Southern wife, a woman whose first home was not electrified until she was fifteen. Len and Bernice Rothe made an effective social team; in their years in Chapacola, they rarely lost a friend, and when they did, both puzzled over it, wondering what caused such a rare event, never assuming blame.

A handsome couple too. He, tall and powerful, a captain of industry, was attractive to women. She, with long brown hair almost reaching her waist, had a shapely figure at the beach, looking something like a movie star, perhaps Myrna Loy or Jean Simmons.

Until their house was built, the Rothe family lived in the sole Chapacola apartments for white citizens. Len worked days at the block business while building his house in the evenings. His days lasted from sunrise past sunset, and he was always exhausted before he slept.

Chapacola was a segregated Southern community; blacks (then only called Negroes or colored) occupying different parts of town, with buildings Lenny was forbidden to enter; people of color were objects of mystery, loathing, and fear. Although the North was not segregated, Lenny was too young to take much notice when he lived in the cold country, thus he slid into the land of barriers without realizing they were there, but for Len Rothe a legalized separation of the races was different from the cold country, where the separation was maintained by custom and wealth, not law. There were Chapacola water fountains from which Lenny was not allowed to drink cold water on a hot summer day, no matter how thirsty, and water fountains from which blacks were not allowed to drink. Every business had three bathrooms, one labeled colored. There was one day a week when Lenny could not go to the library, no matter how much he might want a book, because that was the day the blacks were allowed to use the library - Friday - and there were five days of the week when blacks could not enter the library (no one entered it on Sunday, for the Lord did not want the library open on His day). There was one night a week when the family could not go to the drive-in, even if they wanted to see the movie, because it was the night the blacks were allowed into the drive-in - Thursday night. The Gulf beaches were entirely forbidden to black Chapacolans, who instead swam along the Chapacola Bridge in rock-strewn waters. The economic boom of the 1950s missed the African-American residents who remained in their rundown part of town.

Like segregation, the apartments were a sharp change from the Northern household life of the sheltered Rothes. The apartments smelled of cooking meat, beer, ammonia, and cigarettes. The small units lacked air-conditioning and thus the privacy of closed windows. More than half the year, sleeping was a tossing experience drenched in sweat while a fan droned on. The people living in the apartments were poor, dressed shabbily, drove beat-up cars if they had cars, were often unemployed, drank, and squabbled. Twice while the Rothes lived there, a gun fired in the middle of the night.

Voices of domestic disputes and happiness, sounds from radios, men pissing loud streams into toilet bowls, the flushing of toilets, the crying of babies, the screaming of mothers and cats, groans of orgasm, the barking of dogs, loud sneezes, crying women, shouts from nightmares, bottles breaking, farting, retching, exhaust backfires, cars peeling out of the asphalt parking lot, laughter - all floated on the late night Gulf breeze, piercing what otherwise were quiet nights. Voices were murmuring with a southern accent, whispering secrets rich as this loamy earth, distanced by a mile from the sea. When all the televisions in the many apartments were on in the evening, there were a few brief hours of harmony, as if television were an instrument of universal peace, for Chapacola had only one ultra-high frequency television station, and all the sets had the same sounds.

The one solitary acquaintance Lenny made in the apartments was a tough older kid named George Varnes - blond, tall, and pimpled - who smacked Lenny in the arm with a hard fist in greeting whenever they met. Not a bright boy, large for his age, sometimes in need of a shower or the passage of a toothbrush across his yellow teeth, George was the son of a man who owned a barbecue restaurant, one of only five restaurants in town.

It was a place of sunshine, where for six successful years men like Len were not rained out of work. The Chapacola Sun guaranteed the sun would shine. The sun was cooperating with capitalist expansion in Chapacola. If the burning star Sol was hidden for a whole day by clouds, the newspaper made good on its promise with a free newspaper in the morning. The paper, published since before the Civil War by descendants of town founder, Paul "Puppy" Feeney, was derided in town by its nickname, "the mullet wrapper," as Chapacola Bay was full of mullet, which leaped into the air, were captured in cast nets, and provided plentiful catch for such a use.

At the chamber of commerce, there was a free glass of cold orange juice awaiting the visitor or any local who stopped by, as well as brochures on deep-sea fishing and the newest subdivisions. Brochures lined a wall rack, each brochure advertising a different tour destination, including Webb City and The Million Dollar Pier in St. Petersburg, Gatorland, and fishing in the Keys.

Apalachee Indians were said to have named the area Chapacola, a term some, who were not linguists, said meant "sweet people." There were no Apalachees around to ask, slaughtered by Protestant Englishmen, with the assistance of other Native Americans, for welcoming Catholic missions. Len laid block for the new home on a land that once belonged to and was trod on by the Apalachee. He made sales calls in the morning and laid blocks at other homes with his partner Bernie Slick during the afternoon for an income, and he prepared quotes at night before he slept. Some evenings one or two of the employees helped Len lay blocks on the new Rothe house in exchange for some bottles of cold beer and some hard cash off the books. To cut costs, Lenny's father also partially framed the new family home. The house had Len's sweat in it, some of his blood, claimed several hammer-struck fingernails, usually thumbnails. The floor in Lenny's room was smooth wood nailed down by his father, something like the wood that decorated the basement walls of their home in the cold country, sanded and varnished and shiny. The walls patterned with plaster were partially applied and sculpted by his father's hand. Lenny himself carried concrete blocks and mortar and brought cold water to the block masons, thus the house had some of his lesser, younger sweat in it too, but no blood. His father labored on their home while fighting off mosquitoes as twilight came, covering himself with the same oily repellent used at the drive-in. Len Rothe nailed up the roof beams and also nailed down the wood sheets that kept the sky out of their future home. He worked hard, for hard work was the road to success.

Where it was built, the family home sat in a fine neighborhood, a new subdivision where many of the aspiring arrivals to Chapacola lived. The family home was not far from the bay, not more than a quarter mile. On his bike, Lenny could then ride down to the bay or across Chapacola Causeway to Chapacola Beach and the Gulf. Or he could ride northwest to Chapacola Heights, where from a hill he might gaze out to Puppy Island.

Before his first school year began, they left the apartment, which Lenny considered awful and where he was terrorized by George Varnes, who had threatened to kill the family cat. The Rothe family moved into their home as rapidly as they had emptied out the old home in the cold country, the tabby now safe. Bernice and Len seemed to know where every piece of furniture would go, what its precise rightful position might be, whether it was in their living room, their bedroom, or the bedrooms belonging to Catherine and Lenny. The cat proceeded outdoors at night and brought back mice and moles and quail in the morning. Two paintings of snow-covered mountains hung above the couch, and while couches changed, were thrown away, repaired, or new ones purchased, the paintings remained. The paintings were created by the hand of an artist with whom Len served during World War II, making them both eligible to be veterans with a VA mortgages. It was the American dream fulfilled, their own house, and prosperity.

Night was peaceful and quiet in the new house, the sounds of crickets and cicadas filling the night with their songs and silent pauses. Sleeping was easy except for the heat, for Len had not bought air-conditioning from the mysterious Mr. Scott. Summer storms lighted the night and blew gusts of cool air through open windows. Rainfall caused the Rothes to scamper to the windows to close out heavy Florida rainwater. In the winter with the smell of coal oil, there was the same type of grumbling oil furnace Lenny heard up north. In such security, there were no nightmares, no brain lightning to disturb sleep. Although as surely as anything in life, the early hour of despair will come to Lenny, but it had not yet come to any of his family, except perhaps Catherine, whose days were shortest.

Lenny's room was decorated with the things of protective magic that mattered most to him and kept away despair: shells, driftwood, a metal dog, a metal cat, rows and rows of books. He had his own closet, in which his clothes hung neatly, including a white robe he never wore, preferring to run about the house half clothed or naked.

A hot humid night at the drive-in, and the car windows were rolled down to allow breezes to blow through, but the only thing coming through the windows were the bugs. Humming mosquitoes buzzed in as well as silent, invisible gnats and great moths. The Rothe family members rubbed an oily liquid repellent onto exposed flesh to protect themselves from the biting flies. Len, unemployed, had time for movies now.

Popcorn from home overflowed both a large yellow bowl and an equally large green bowl. The yellow bowl was passed from Lenny and Len in the front seat to Catherine and Bernice in the back, eaten with fingers sticky from repellent. When the first bowl emptied, Lenny had the second green bowl to himself.

Cold sodas were in the cooler, also brought from home, cooled by ice from the family freezer. Home-popped corn was much better than drive-in corn, Bernice said, and sodas were too expensive at the movies; besides, the cheaper sodas tasted better; what was it always with Lenny and Cokes? The road to wealth was paved over the bodies of small coins saved on Cokes and popcorn.

In the coming attractions, a young woman with long brown hair was riding on the bow of a speed boat. You could not see the front of her, but her back was bare. "Disgusting," Catherine said, while Lenny felt a vague stirring. A bare-backed woman in a movie was burned into his brain in the same area where the twins kissing Arthur was stored alongside the calendar of Bish Foggarty's dad.

Then the cartoon came, Tom and Jerry, Lenny's favorite, and the long movie about prisoners of war in Korea, a war Ike ended. "I will go to Korea," Ike said. Before Ike got there, an American prisoner of war had a bucket of cold water thrown on him and was left outside to freeze in a harsh Korean winter by sadistic communists.

During the movie, Lenny fell asleep, perhaps fatigued from consuming all that popcorn, his head resting on his father's knee. Later, Lenny felt himself carried into his home, laid on his small bed, safe in America, but dreaming of freezing in Korea.

Bernice rolled on the blanket and onto her side to look for Lenny in the Gulf where she had last seen and heard him. She could not find him at all among the specks of floating pelicans. She sat up and looked more intently, seeing the small shapes of vessels on the horizon. Seconds seem to tick off on her wrist watch while she fumbled absentmindedly with the tanning lotion.

Bernice was dressed in a modest, one-piece, white bathing suit, while Len, on his stomach on the blanket beside her, wore only plaid trunks. Catherine, on her own blanket, was dressed in a black bathing suit that was more like a dress, stretching from her neck to below her knees. Lenny, when Bernice last seen him, was attired in a plaid suit in imitation of Len, only the boy had green flippers on his feet and a cheap, green goggle mask over his face.

Lazily sunning himself, Len did not answer. But not to worry, Bernice, for your son Lenny was seeing how long he could hold his breath, so that later in life, when he is trapped in a submarine sunken by communist enemies, he will be practiced at holding his breath, thus escaping to fight bravely another day. While you worried, Bernice, he searched the sand bottom for sand dollars, crabs, shells, and other marvels of nature, which he was contemplating harvesting and selling. Still, Bernice, you persisted in worrying aloud until Len stirred from his half-asleep state, which he achieved within minutes of reclining anywhere. As the tall, powerfully-built father stood to rescue his drowning errant son, Lenny's blond head popped out of the water over a sandbar fifty yards or so from shore.

Under the sun, Lenny's blond lightened, his green eyes ran slightly into a void of black-green. He plunged into the Gulf of Mexico, diving into oncoming waves, saltwater rushing up his nostrils, a common cure for the cold in Chapacola. Lenny swam and kicked spray high into the air, towers flung from his feet from exuberance. From the Gulf, Lenny was hard to retrieve, disregarding calls from Bernice or Len to come out. His disobeyed them, pretended not to hear their calls. He imagined fighting off large sharks with his bare hands. Lying on old, rough blankets, now designated as beach blankets, he grew tan, he burned, he peeled, but when away from or forgotten by his accompanying parents, he stayed in the water until his skin wrinkled.

Sitting on the edge of the Gulf, he dug up coquinas from the wet sand at the water's edge. When the tide rushed out, he watched these tiny shellfish dig frantically to regain a foothold before the tide could rush back in again. If coquinas thought, they must have wondered if an evil god was tormenting them from above, but it was just a fascinated boy.

It could fairly be said that Lenny was fond of Len's unemployment. See Lenny then baiting his hook with frozen shrimp, his favorite bait. The Rothes owned cheap (but new) spinning and open-spooled reels for lightweight poles, and a plastic tackle box full of extra line and compartments containing hooks, sinkers, bobbers, and a few lures (on which no one ever catches a fish). Many nights Lenny went to piers and bridges with his father where they dredged from the dark bottoms into the harsh spotlights all manner of marvels. The son and father had also gone deep-sea fishing on party boats in better times to catch giant grouper. Lenny caught groupers that weighed more than he, while often his father caught nothing.

Late at night, fishermen on piers dragged gigantic sharks from the Gulf and bay. Photos of many sharks, giants hanging from massive hooks next to puny men, were proudly published in The Chapacola Sun without fear of driving away northern tourists. On occasion there were photos with large alligators strung up in substitution for the sharks.

The newspaper also had a weekly fishing page, detailing the latest catches, that week's most successful captain, including secret fish recipes of Chapacola's few chefs and many homemakers. Lenny kept hoping to see his name in the fishing columns but never did. There was some secret to it, perhaps catching fish on the boat of one of the local advertisers.

Whenever his family went to eat in one of the five restaurants in Chapacola, something they did rarely enough, Lenny ordered clams, fish, shrimp, or scallops. The food came deep-fried and crisp, like his previous favorite food, fried chicken, the specialty of his Southern grandmother who lived in Waycross.

The Rothes, once prospering, were now swimming, watching Communist defeat at the drive-in, fishing, and eating shellfish and seafood, while savings dwindled and unemployment compensation ran out.

It paid, Len Rothe said, to belong to lodges and clubs, to entertain lodge brothers at one's house.

His lodge brother, Steve Hardee, even in the days when he founded Chapacola Savings and Loan, was tall, portly, and outgoing. He made it a point to know every new arrival in Chapacola who came to his bank, no matter how small an account they might open. Thus, he knew Catherine Rothe's meager bank account, almost entirely the result of social security. Slick and Rothe Block Masons had a business account, once swelled and now dwindled to next to nothing. Len and Bernice Rothe wrote their checks from his bank on small blue paper bearing their names and address. Steve made loans on cars and houses, often to people who did not qualify, lodge brothers at times, largely based on a hunch and the approval of the "board," which consisted of himself, a successful local lawyer, and the newest Feeney scion. During times of expansion, Steve showed a keen knack for which developments to favor with limited loans. He was a good banker, and of course it paid to be a lodge brother, for there was, of course, salvation for Len Rothe and his family, for someone so beloved as Len would get a second chance. Len Rothe's dream of a building supply company in Chapacola would come true, for come the second economic boom, it was a good idea whose time had come. Len was once again a captain of industry, certain of success, and the American dream had a second chance - at the rate of six percent and secured by contents and property of Rothe Building Supply.

Fried chicken was the talent of Bernice Rothe's mother, who lived in a red-brick house in downtown Waycross. She kept chickens (for fryers and eggs) enclosed in a fence in a portion of her back yard behind the pecan and peach trees. The coop was built into the garage. Located beside the unused garage, which was full of accumulations of many years, the back yard smelled strongly of chicken shit and the legacy of decades of chicken shit, a smell which sickened her grandson, the dandified L. Rothe.

The chickens were loud in the morning and squawked loudest when a neck was wrung by his grandmother. Young Lenny never went to watch the racket, too afraid that running around like a chicken with its head cut off might be more than a phrase. A gentle and loving woman, yet his Southern grandmother wrung the chicken necks, plucked and cleaned fresh chickens, cut apart the bloody body, cooked almost everything, including the feet, and did so just as casually as she picked pecans or peaches that she cracked or peeled to bake fresh pies.

Both Bernice and his grandmother had survived scarlet fever, rheumatic fever, mumps, measles, and the pox. Two other children had not survived diseases. Another was stillborn. Grandma also survived a husband she cast out, perhaps the hardest thing to survive.

A pink-faced woman, whose hair was thin and black, she was slightly stout. His grandmother maintained a three-story house, supported herself with work as a servant, and took in boarders. She did without help from her husband, Nellis, who had gone God knows where, last heard of in Baltimore, Cleveland, Raleigh, Columbus, and Cincinnati.

In addition to the fried chicken and icebox full of Cokes, Grandma was lenient and staying with her was such great fun, Lenny looked forward to summer trips to Georgia. There he had no heavy mower to push through plush, Florida summer grass, or piles of leaves to rake in the winter, or flower beds to weed, or palms to trim. There was no criticism of him as lazy for sleeping late. No complaints about his nose stuck constantly into books which were not schoolbooks. When he wanted money, his grandmother just gave it to him, always doling out more than he needed, an event that never occurred in the Rothe household. The constantly wound-up boy did not grate on the nerves of his Southern grandmother, who was happy to have the child in her house, a son for her daughter and a grandchild for her, so happy her daughter had a child.

Lenny's favorite piece of chicken was the wishbone, which he always broke after making a wish, just as his Nana taught him. What he wished for is not remembered, although surely it was always a lot.

There was a boy next door to his grandmother's house in Waycross who had a ham radio and was an amateur radio operator. In the boy's house, Lenny listened to talk on the radio from all around the world. Tommy talked on the ham radio to people in Africa and once helped in a rescue after an air crash. Reporters wrote about Tommy in the newspaper, a local hero. A photo ran of a smiling boy sitting in his bedroom before an enormous wall of radio equipment, partially erected by his folksy, country father. Tommy wanted to be an officer in the Marines, wanted to serve his country.

An older boy, Tommy was more solid in build and taller than Lenny. Tommy liked the same things, including science fiction books and magazines bought at the corner newsstand. Tommy liked to fish, and he especially liked to hunt, a passion Lenny never shared. They drank cold Cokes in the sweltering summer and swam in the large, chlorine-scented, community pool. A few nights, Lenny stayed over at Tommy's house with Maybel and Joe, the finest people on the planet, according to Len.

During his final trip from Waycross by bus, Bernice suggested that Lenny take apart an alarm clock and put it back together. This was like calculus and geometry and trigonometry were later to be, easy at the start, harder at the end. Perhaps this clock project was suggested to occupy Lenny, but he took it as a challenge. This project didn't seem at all strange to him. Aided by a box to hold the parts and armed with several sizes of screw drivers, Lenny easily disassembled the old gray windup alarm clock. He marveled at the logic of the springs and gears and levers and thought he mastered it and the secret of time. There was no doubt in his mind that he could put time back together again just like new. Half way to Chapacola, however, he resumed reading his science-fiction book, and the box of former clock parts went into the garbage at the Chapacola Greyhound Terminal, for it was terminally hard to figure out the intricacies of time.

A black-and-white photo of his Southern grandmother, her head raised to a seemingly holy light, sat for years on the large stereo, which would in time collect dust and photographs. In her heavenly photo, his grandmother seemed at peace, content, looking off at a wondrous horizon or a distant constellation or perhaps Heaven itself. Perhaps she saw, if not a chariot of fire, peaceful green fields. A photo, in fact, much like the ones Bernice had taken by herself and with Len Rothe, the ones she wanted used at their funerals and with their obituaries.

Bernice took Grandma to Florida on a train in the midst of a cold winter. A chill wind was blowing when they loaded the bed with his grandmother aboard. In the frigid, small room, Bernice sat upright in a chair, reading or dozing, feeding her mother by spoon or fork, one bite or spoonful at a time. She brought her mother sodas and juice and water. The train took a circuitous route, never quite reaching Florida, but stopping across the border in Alabama. Somewhere near two state borders, Bernice helped her mother move her bowels and washed the woman as well as she could.

It was as if someone else was moved inside his grandmother's skull, her brain sucked out, an invasion of the body snatchers. This new, alien person did not look tranquilly into angelic light. This person was baffled and afraid, terrorized because everything around her was unfamiliar.

There were no more trips to Grandma's three-story house for fried chicken; the house was sold, the chickens with it. Bernice cleaned the house, sold the furniture, cleared the long neglected garage, shipping home some treasured mementos. Her mother was expected to decline into a state from which she could never improve.

Although Len Rothe made the arrangements perfectly with a friend who was a mortician, the hearse was late. The two women waited in the empty train station for several hours while Bernice made frantic calls to her husband.

Catherine cooked hash with plentiful cooking oil in a black skillet. Lenny smothered the hash in ketchup in imitation of his father. He ate in great gulping spoonfuls, an additional imitation of his father.

Lenny was told that tomorrow night he would have to move into his parents' bedroom and that his grandmother needed his room. His father explained the woman was terminally ill. Lenny went to school and when he come home, his bed was in a corner of his parents' room. A crazy woman was moved into his bedroom, Lenny's privacy ended for the duration of her stay. When Lenny saw his grandma, she lay in a hospital bed occupying the center of his room. Her dark pupils were large and liquid in her eyes and rolled frantically in panic.

The grandmother in Lenny's room was a bedridden woman cared for by Bernice. Grandma's living space was the hospital bed, raised and lowered by cranks with great squealing. She could not leave it to walk, eat, or go to the bathroom.

Lenny prayed for his grandmother to be well. That was what Bernice asked him to do.

Beginning with the very first Sunday following the Rothe family arrival in Chapacola, a search began for just the right church. The search was not frantic, but deliberate, and took place every Sunday morning for two seasons. "Just the right church" was a phrase spoken over and over by his mother and father, but Lenny was never sure what that phrase meant, what made a church the right one.

After attending a service on Sunday, Len might ask matriarch Catherine what she thought. She was most likely to speak of the temperature in the church. For her, just the right church was warm in the winter and not so powerfully air-conditioned in the summer that it hurt her bones. Whether this input made any difference in selecting just the right church wasn't clear, nor was it clear to Lenny who actually in the end made the choice.

When Big Len gave his opinion over dinner about the church most recently visited, it might concern other businessmen in the church who might aid his business, or the range of activities where social events and church merged. Bernice, who may have made the decision on which church was "just right," never spoke her feelings, unless she strongly disliked a church. If Bernice disliked a church, that church was not the right one. Lenny's opinion was never asked nor sought. His idea of the right church was one he didn't have to attend.

In the cold country, they were nominal Methodists, but here they could start afresh if they so decided. Of course, they would remain Protestants. They were Methodists in the cold country because Len liked the sermons and the preacher at a nearby church that happened to be Methodist. For Len, making a conversion from his father's German Lutheranism to Wesley's Methodism was not a giant leap, just a trip of an inch or so.

For a while, the family teetered toward becoming Baptists, the largest congregations in Chapacola being Baptists; the Feeneys were Baptists, all the mayors, rulers, and subalterns too. Chapacola Baptist was located beside a private golf course. Out the stained-glass windows, through panels red, blue, green, and yellow, one saw green grass, sand traps, and distorted figures swinging clubs. This Baptist church had a marquee on which each Sunday's sermon topic was announced. These topics were often humorously titled by Pastor Ireland with a cleverness Len appreciated, like Reaching the Eighteenth Tee of Life or Why Jesus Is Not a Handicap Golfer. Len was a duffer who hooked his drives so badly they landed in the next fairway. He often needed help to find errant golf balls, but he liked Reverend Ireland's quips; they amused him, although in the end the family did not chose Ireland's church. (Once, Big Len shanked a golf ball so badly it landed in the road, bounced high, and took out the windshield of an approaching garbage truck.)

In Chapacola on Sunday mornings, bells rang hourly at one church or another, a regular Sunday of bells and chimes from the 8 a.m. Catholic Mass until noon. The Rothe family sat below various bells and chimes listening for the right ones.

Bibles were read both aloud and silently. The Rothe family was not there to read the Bibles. The adults preferred to listen rather than read.

Heads were submersed. This was too much for the Rothe family dignity, their heads remained dry. In some cases whole bodies were sunk in the outdoor baptismal along Main Street at First Baptist, a poorer congregation than the one by the golf course. Submersion was far too extreme for the Rothe family.

Communions were taken and masses were said, but the Germanic Rothe family feared papists.

A small religious college helped fill the halls of worship of several denominations of fundamentalists with polite, clean, properly-dressed, young people. Obtaining a good seat was hard for the Rothe family in those congregations, for going to church was akin to dating in those congregations, earnest-faced boys walking young women in long dresses to church while their hands were joined.

The Lord God is a God who loves resistance, bellowed Iron Mitch Wadell. You have to resist and resist and resist. You resist sin, then you resist dying. If you resist hard, the Lord loves you, but if you give in at all, and especially if you give in too easily, the Lord will count it against you on Judgment Day. The only think you don't resist is the Lord. Resistance will make you stronger for the time when you face the Lord.

Lenny thinking of himself as a resistor or a capacitor, something the holy electric current zapped through, told himself that he would be a resistor, not giving in.

People sang hymns loudly, staring at pages in hymnals, after deep and joyous intonations from their ministers. "Brothers and sisters, now go to page 346 and sing with me 'He With Faith Shall Abide.'" The Rothe family liked singing. Churches without singing were the wrong ones. Churches without singing would not do for the Rothes.

In some churches, worshippers sang without organs or pianos because instruments were not allowed. The Rothes liked instruments with their hymns. Not tubas or drums or trombones, but the Rothe family approved of an organ, a piano, an occasional violin.

In just the right church, there was an organ, and people sang, there was temperature control, and no one had their head (or any other part of their body) submerged.

Proper Catholics confessed properly in private confessionals and did penance, while in some of the more lively Baptist churches confession was public and was a penance in and of itself. It displeased the Rothe family that folks should shame themselves so publicly over the weaknesses of the flesh and alcohol. Lenny and his family didn't confess to anything. They were guiltless. It was others who were guilty.

During the Christmas season, Lenny and other children in the Christian churches about town went on hay rides and sang carols to those considered shut-ins. This was a good act. Christians were expected to do good acts. Lenny was expected to do good acts. A church with good acts was important. Lenny was not quite sure what a shut-in was or a good act, but decided a shut-in was an elderly person without a car who was living alone, and a good act was singing to them.

Canned goods and food were also collected for the poor. That was a good act too. Where those cans went, Lenny wasn't sure, since he either never knew the poor or was never introduced to them. There were surely poor out there, but they were likely too embarrassed to admit it as failures of capitalism. People who were poor had wasteful sons who didn't eat their meals or left lights on at night. There were no poor people in just the right church.

Certainly his mother and father did good acts, only their good acts were much more sophisticated, so that Lenny did not understand them.

It was long past the time of Moses giving The Ten Commandments, although most citizens of Chapacola, Florida, knew the first top ten and broke quite a few. A long time also since the crucifixion, although it was witnessed by Lenny Rothe at the Chapacola Drive-in, was it Jeff Chandler cast as Christ? It was not the age of faith, or anywhere near the age of faith, more like an era on the verge of losing faith, and in the booms of Chapacola it was also the dawning of the age of the material. In Chapacola, impressive large churches sprang up, all white and brick, with pillars worthy of ancient Rome; the church building fueled by an influx of northerners and a splintering of religious groups over many issues, including segregation and the perceived need, or lack thereof, for a social gospel. It was a time when it was considered necessary for a family to belong to one of the churches and attend. Otherwise Chapacola's Christian citizens would find the family aberrant, unfit to be Chapacolans, a blessed race, or to be given money in commerce, a necessity. Neighbors would talk if the family stayed home Sunday morning to read the paper or sleep late in bed, and Len Rothe's scruples as a businessman, his credentials as a member of various clubs, would be called into doubt. There must be no doubt, as doubt was forbidden, and church attendance was more than just sermons delivered by men of the cloth; it also meant Sunday schools for adults and children and pledged contributions. It meant on Sundays one did not work, or do so much as mow the lawn, or play golf until after noon. Sober church attendance was so important that liquor, wine, and beer were not served after midnight on Saturday, or sold on Sunday at all, sending certain Chapacolans, who had not laid in provisions, on long drives into the city after worship.

There were many church social groups that met during the week for evening dinners, to which everyone brought a dish, covered to keep the contents warm. In meeting halls at great tables, church members gathered, while missionaries and retired clergy spoke, telling stories of soul saving in China and Africa, among people they called yellow and brown, people who would not be allowed to live in the Heights after their souls were saved or into that very church. Ladies auxiliaries met for luncheons and were further educated and uplifted.

Frequent in those 1950 Chapacola days were fiery revivals, held in great circus tents by traveling preachers with powerful voices and dramatic words. Almost like the carnival or county fair, the great tents arrived with men in trucks, who erected the enormous canopies, filled them with folding chairs, carried in portable altars, and waited not long for earnest or needful Christians to arrive. Curiously, the revivals were not segregated, both whites and blacks came, although there were separate sections, the blacks relegated to the farthest rows from the front, a place where Lenny liked to sit to soak in the excitement.

Within the family, he was taught to pray from the distant beginnings of memory, to thank God for Daddy, Mommy, grandmothers and grandfathers, to know the Lord's Prayer by rote without comprehension, to be able to say a grace at the Christmas table or at the Thanksgiving dinner. He was baptized twice, once at a Methodist Church in the cold country, a scary ceremony involving cold water from a bowl, and again in Chapacola when a new church was selected, two baptisms apparently better than one. He was also to read the Bible, nightly before going to bed, for wisdom, and it was some years before he realized he was the only one in his family reading the great book.

Long before he learned the word karma, Lenny wondered if the suffering of his grandmother was punishment for her wringing the necks of the chickens. Some sinful act must have caused the smiting of his grandmother. It was like the death of his grandfather Fritz, or Vic Melvin, with words leaking out his head. It was as baffling as the plagues put on the Egyptians in Exodus, a mystery clarified when Charlton Heston played Moses in The Ten Commandments, first born dying, locusts descending, blood raining from the sky.

Lenny prayed, "Our father," the Lord's Prayer first, then said a special prayer for his grandmother. He prayed she be forgiven for wringing the chickens' necks. He offered never to personally wring a chicken's head off.

He heard divorce was sinful and knew his grandmother was divorced, a whispered word. He offered a prayer for the forgiveness of her sin of divorce. He personally promised never to be divorced himself.

He prayed that if it was anything he did which resulted in his grandmother being smote, from swiping a quarter to taking the Lord's name in vain or misbehaving in school badly enough to be paddled again and again, these sins too be forgiven. No more stealing, no more powerful swearing or horseplay in the classroom.

The way the sick woman's large, dark eyes swept everyone with her paranoid gaze created his first powerful nightmares. Nana's eyes, lacking motor control, rolled. Her eyes recognized no one within her sweeping, scanning vision. Frantic eyes darting. She called from uncomfortable sleep for people who were not there, her mind lost in fantasies and nightmares. She called names Lenny had never heard, and asked for her long dead mother and father.

"I don't have a grandson," she would say to Lenny when he tried to explain who was bringing her cold orange juice.

Nana did not know her own daughter Bernice. "Who are you? Why are you pretending to be my daughter? Why are you keeping me here?" her mother asked her sole surviving and precious child. "Why don't you let me go home to my family?"

"But you are home with us, mother," Bernice said in useless explanation. "We are your family."

The room where grandma stayed, which had been Lenny's, faced the street. The old woman could watch the street from the hospital bed when it was raised and the blinds opened. Sometimes she was amazed by cars going by because her mind was locked in the times before the automobile.

She was a little girl of six or eight or ten, living on the family farm with her father and mother, brothers and sisters, cattle and pigs, and tobacco and corn were growing in the field. She had a big, mean dog loyal to her who had run away, and a friendly cat that got sick and died. She lamented and cried for the lost pets, wanted to do chores on her farm when the sun rose, needed to get outside to walk to the schoolhouse. The television playing in the adjacent living room puzzled her; she wanted to know who were those talking people and where was that music coming from.

"But you are home, mother," Bernice said. "You are staying with us. We are your family."

Reality only baffled his grandmother, who protested angrily, saying she was being lied to. Where were her parents? Had they killed them? Or just kidnapped them? She would get away, she said. She would sneak away when they weren't watching. She would bring the sheriff back with her.

Bernice, who had formerly been of a happy if subdued disposition, gradually moved slower, had fewer smiles, began developing unexplained pains and aches. Once as shapely as a model of those times, she now gained weight; the shapeliness other women admired and men stared at was disappearing. Bernice began to stay up late into the night, hardly sleeping. From this period, Lenny retained a vision of his mother ironing wearily at night during summer heat, sweat running down her reddened forehead while the television played and her mother called for her. Formerly possessed of long brown hair reaching her thin waist, she had her hair cut short; long hair was too much trouble, too hot to have such hair when wrestling her mother about the hospital bed in Chapacola's summer heat.

Their family doctor (one of four doctors in Chapacola then, three white and one black) was tall and self-assured, with a friendly, humorous manner and a Southern voice. A man who removed Lenny's tonsils and warts, washed his ears with a sort of pump, stuck him with numerous needles, and once recommended a psychiatrist, Doc Bennett said he had seen life and death come, sometimes within minutes of each other, many times in his life. Doc Bennett said neither life or death bothered him much, he considered it two sides of one coin, but he would do what he could to keep people alive and out of pain without promising miracles. He visited Grandma once a month, changing medications, checking vital signs. Always optimistic and seemingly jovial in face of any suffering, Bennett did not promise hope.

"There's not much to be done," he said, "but we'll keep trying." He explained that no one could be sure if Nana had a series of small strokes or was suffering from dementia. The damage to her brain probably could never be reversed. "But she is retaining water, a lot of water, and we have to keep using the diuretic while trying other medicines. And they keep developing new things for the mind all the time, and we'll keep trying them as they come up with them." A pragmatic doctor.

Bennett had an office on Avenue D in an old house. While the waiting room had only open windows, the examining rooms were air-conditioned. The woman who greeted you was Doc Bennett's wife, Candy. She too had a lazy Southern accent that spoke of the Mississippi River. A lot of magazines were on tables in the front waiting room, where white citizens came to be healed. On the back porch of the old house, African Americans awaited healing.

Len Rothe, Senior, took no part in caring for Nana. He worked, he came home, he ate, slept, went to church, watched TV, out to fraternal club meetings, and sometimes he hired someone to watch Nana so the family could go somewhere together. He hired black scrub women to help Bernice around the house, for Catherine was old and arthritic and could not help.

In rare hours, Bernice might trust Lenny and Catherine with Nana when the husband and wife went for an evening with friends. But Catherine tried to ignore the old woman calling from her hospital bed in Lenny's old room. Care then passed to Lenny who was too young to be of much use, although he held and emptied bedpans, brought juice or water.

Unexplained pains pursued Lenny's mother, adding a psychic bulk like the weight creeping on her body. Some nights Bernice, sitting in her chair in the living room, would scream out a startled "Oh!" as a pain seared through her. Bernice saw Doc Bennett about those pains, but he could find no cause. At these pains and the startled exclamations coming from his mother, Lenny felt helpless, but regarding his Nana, he knew what he could do to help because his mother had told him several times - he could pray and pray and pray.

Lenny prayed, and one evening his grandfather Nellis O'Hara arrived, a tall white-haired man, thin and natty in old clothes, his shiny skin like brown leather. Nellis dressed in a dark-brown suit and wore a brown tie on top of a stiffly, starched, white shirt through which he never seemed to sweat, even in sweltering summer Chapacola. The creases were sharp in his suit, even if the suit looked in places worn to a shine. When Nellis took off the old coat, colorful yellow-and-red suspenders were revealed - the silver tips were rusted.

His grandmother was suddenly well, at least in the mind of Lenny Rothe, who had prayed. It was a miracle, for his Nana had been sentenced beyond hope to a lifetime bedridden.

Nellis wore powerful after-shave lotion on his skin, which was smooth as plastic, yet his face had a weathered texture, with wild tangles of blood-filled veins just below the surface. Nellis smoked Pall Malls, long and unfiltered cigarettes, almost one right after the other, smoked them down to nubs that burned his yellow fingers. He carried with him, wherever he went, the aromatic sweetness of tobacco. The red pack of cigarettes shown through the thin white pocket in his starched shirt.

How long Nellis stayed, Lenny did not recall, but it was not long, a week or two. While Lenny never saw Nellis in a change of clothes, it seemed Nellis was always fresh. Nellis did not stay in the house with the Rothe family, and where he stayed Lenny did not know. Those were not the only mysteries. Nellis drove a brown Nash that seemed decades older than it was, a car he did not own, but it was clean and ran. Not only did it have a back seat, the car was so old it had a rumble seat. It wasn't certain where Nellis had driven from or even how far he had driven. It was something like magic. The old man had money too. Nellis had a beaten, leather wallet full of bills, mostly twenties. Maybe the adults knew the answers, but they didn't give them to Lenny, to whom the visit was an astonishing surprise, an event like a party, a time to be happy. It took many years before Lenny wondered if his mother planned this trip with her father. Were there phone calls or letters of invitation from her to the wayward Nellis? Or was it a spontaneous gesture on her errant father's part, a final lunge to be happy with his family while he still walked the earth, a last chance to make peace? No one told Lenny, and he never thought to ask.

Playing cards close to his vest, a man who had played many poker games, Nellis wasn't telling much either, just having a good time and making everyone have a good time with him. He was a laugh bringer; he had that quality. He was like Len Rothe in that way, except for the distinct Southern accent and a weakness for bourbon.

His Grandma was well, and Nellis seemed to have made her well, assisted by Lenny's prayers.

Lenny saw his grandfather before somewhere, on their vacations for sure, perhaps before that in baby-haze memories, but he had never known Nellis and barely remembered him. A farmer, who over time owned a pool hall and a liquor store and worked for the tobacco companies, he had been a turpentiner and tree cutter and made whiskey in a still, and now apparently did not work on a regular basis but had a wallet full of cash and a Nash automobile. There was a vague recollection of visiting Nellis in a rundown, very hot apartment during one of the summer vacations, perhaps in Cincinnati.

There were tales Lenny heard from Bernice about Nellis. The pulling of a tooth Grand-dad ordered yanked because it hurt, only to find out there was just a bit of toothpick wedged under a perfectly good molar. The car wreck, when the car rolled over three times, Nellis escaping without a scratch, sliding out the floorboards (what were floorboards?), an accident that hurt Bernice's spine and put a terrible gash, a dent really, in Nana's head. Later the normal head shape restored itself. Had Nellis been drinking? How Bernice was cared for by her father while she had scarlet fever; of the cat he had brought her when she was bedridden and everyone thought Bernice would die like her two sisters; the cat wandering off, coming back sick, to die itself, perhaps in Bernice's place, an offering to the gods, a balance on the ying-and-yang scale of death.

Len Rothe told his son of Nellis' failed business attempts, told him not all at once but over time, called Nellis another drunk cracker, all said in bits and pieces, slowly over years following. And Len said there were binges until that week's earnings were all spent. Lenny's father said Nellis couldn't hold a job for long, couldn't keep two nickels in his pocket, couldn't stay sober. Always said by his father to Lenny in confidential whispers when Bernice was not present and could not hear. Another drunk cracker. A man you might find in a flophouse or the gutter. A man who might sit with bloodshot eyes at a bar from morning to night, staggering off to piss, dancing with the fat drunk wife of a friend to Nashville music, waking in the morning in unfamiliar places with a head about to split in half.

Whether it was true or not, it seemed to Lenny that he prayed, and then Nellis declared he had come to see his Betty, the love of his life, his wife of forty-two years. Nellis was reunited with his daughter, the triad of his family restored. Once this visit occurred, his Nana, who was Betty O'Hara, and Nellis' wife, rose from her bed and was healed.

Many years later, Lenny asked his father about Nana's sudden improvement. There was a new medicine Doc Bennett tried that finally worked, although not for long. In all likelihood, his grandmother had improved from the medicine, and Nellis was called to come visit by Bernice. Lenny's prayers, no matter how sincere or innocent, had nothing to do with the recovery.

Maybe a miracle had happened. Perhaps prayer worked.A prayer perhaps had been answered. An eternal maybe, an enduring lack of certitude.

Although his grandparents held hands and talked gently to each other, a certain immeasurable tension lie between them, like a drawn bow. They laughed about old times together at country fairs and homestead frolics, but they laughed softly as if the words carried both happiness and hurt. They had danced Saturday nights at the VFW, for Nellis had a small part in World War I. They talked about the birth of their surviving daughter at home in a remote area of Georgia and the death of their other two children.

Nellis said things softly into his wife's ear, including that he was sorry, and once or twice he apologized to everyone, saying he was sorry. The happiness dropped from his face. Tears welled in his eyes, and he almost cried, a few tears leaking down both cheeks, where the tangled blood-filled veins beneath the skin looked like red wire. He was sorry, he was truly sorry,

so sorry for the wasted years and the wreck of their marriage, years sunk in countless bottles of bourbon, but glad they still had each other, and there was still a family, however tenuously connected.

The family of six mentally-alert humans, all knowing where they were and grounded in the present time, ate dinner together around the extended family dinner table.

Grand-dad also took the six mentally-alert humans out to eat at a restaurant, picked up the tab, insisting on buying Lenny his first T-bone steak. The meal might have cost forty dollars, a huge sum in those days for a dinner out, but Grand-Dad spent it as if he were the king of a province, leaving a generous tip for the pretty young waitress in pink.

The family of six mentally-alert individuals went to the beach and took a walk at sunset, where Grand-dad put his arm around his wife and walked her gallantly, humming old songs, love songs mingling with the sounds of the waves.

His grandfather took Lenny aside by the shore on Chapacola Beach. The old man was quite tall, so he had to kneel on the beach to place his hands on Lenny's shoulders. He said over the sound of surf, while looking the boy in the eye, "Son, I don't have long, and I'm leaving in the morning, and I may never see you again, but I want to tell you just one thing. You have to have a purpose in life, and when you find that purpose, you have to never let go of it. Understand?"

The wind from an approaching evening thunderstorm blew wildly; thundering and flashing bolts to the south over the turbulent sea. Half the days in Chapacola had violent storms.

"Please don't go," Lenny said. He shook his head like he understood what Nellis meant, although he had misheard the word purpose as porpoise, and it would be some years before it straightened itself out in his mind, so that he was not to find a porpoise in life, but a purpose. When it did straighten itself out, Lenny wasn't sure what it meant anyway, although he thought of those words frequently. Coincidentally, it made him smile and think of his grandfather whenever he saw a porpoise.

Lenny continued begging Nellis not to go. Bernice had asked Nellis to stay, too. But Nana, Grand-dad's wife, Betty O'Hara, said, "No, Nellis had better go." The arrow in the bow had been shot.

If Len or Catherine played any role in Nellis' departure, Lenny never knew of it either. Lenny did not understand Nana's reasons for wanting her husband to go. Perhaps she wanted him to go before good memories were spoiled by the next binge. Perhaps she had never forgiven him and never would. Or perhaps it was precautionary, for she might have sensed what was coming.

Nellis left and Nana went back into her bed and did not know who she was any more. His coming had saved her; his going destroyed her. Perhaps not such a confusing lesson for a boy, that love can make you well, and the lack or possession of love can drive you insane. This, in fact, should have been a forewarning for L. Rothe.

Nellis was gone to the cold country and would never come back - he would die there.

A nursing home was selected across the bay in Westpoint, and Nana was moved, Lenny restored to his bedroom. He now had trouble sleeping because of heart-pounding nightmares that his grandmother was back in his room and wanted his bed. He would go to the couch to sleep, where his parents found him in the morning.

In the dream, Nana was not his kind grandma, but a crazed woman with flashlights shining out of her eyes, a horrible distorted leer on her face. She was like the witch from The Wizard of Oz.

Once Lenny went with his mother across the old Chapacola Bridge to visit the distraught and disoriented woman in the Westpoint Nursing Home. His grandmother's large, dark pupils moved suspiciously from side-to-side, rolled out of control. She did not know Lenny or Bernice and claimed again she was a little girl kidnapped from her parents. There was no air-conditioning in the facility; the air was rich with the stenches of human sickness; it was exceptionally hot. The old and hopeless, the sick and broken, those lost in the walls of their own skull, laid quietly or begged for water or called for attention. Even sadder were the women and men who just sat motionless, all interest in the world sucked out of them. Those who ate together sometimes bickered. Imaginations out of control filled days with hallucinations and delusions. Human wreckage, his grandmother was no longer pink in the face, but white, sheet white like a skeleton. She would look dead if not for those eyes flicking about in fear. Lenny never returned to the nursing home, although Bernice went almost daily.

After Nana was in the nursing home several months, she died, from what cause Lenny also never knew, another mystery of his Southern youth, maybe from the failure of prayer. There was something called a viewing, where the dead woman was laid in her finest, dark clothes in a brown, wood casket, a hat placed on her head, a net-like black veil across her face, her eyes closed as if she were gently asleep and in peace, the rolling paranoid eyes stilled at last. The Rothe family met with friends who came to visit, but not Nellis, who either wouldn't come or couldn't be found.

Before the viewing, Bernice found Lenny dancing in the living room. He was wearing the first of his series of solid black suits, tailored for him by Mr. David of Mr. David's, the sole suit maker of Chapacola, a small Jewish tailor who came to the viewing, but not the funeral. The evening of the viewing, Lenny was dancing about the living room, waltzing with an invisible partner. He had just started the dancing classes at the Art Center where he was afraid to dance with Dorothea Staley or Betty Sue Worley, but continued dancing with Alice Sunnydale, on whom he was developing a crush.

The boy, who thought about this before risking dancing, answered, "But shouldn't we all be happy when somebody goes to Heaven?" This precocious and coy answer seemed to satisfy Lenny, who stopped dancing, but it did nothing to satisfy his mother.

And Lenny, when his mother left the room, continued to dance a fine waltz, not sure if his prayers were answered, or if they had, why they were answered only in a way that would soon fall apart.

Chapacola, Florida, in the 1950s had but one ultra-high frequency television station, hard to receive at times, requiring constant adjustments of the oval-shaped antenna. While twisting the hoop of metal, ghost stations from distant parts of Florida and Alabama flashed tantalizingly into view, especially on windy days, only to vanish too soon. The viewing options were limited, cable and satellite television were but dreams, the forming networks had not yet reached Chapacola, but among the beloved shows was Science Fiction Theater and You Were There and strange local programming, including Shock Theater on Friday and Saturday nights.

At five every weekday evening, the popular local television show for children was Major Noel's Adventure Hour, hosted by Major Noel himself, a man in his sixties with a faint British accent, who wore a pith helmet, carried a swagger stick, and wore striped shirts as if he were a first mate. In person, Lenny learned that Major Noel smelled of cigarettes and sweat, and possessed exceptionally bad yellow teeth, as well as a tattoo of a mermaid on his right biceps; still his black-and-white television show was the hit of childhood Chapacola.

Lenny and Todd Walton watched this show on television every night. Featured on The Adventure Hour were serials once shown in movie houses. Flash Gordon battled Ming on Mongo and saved Dale Arden from being cut to pieces or eaten by a shark or who-knows-what from a cyclops and a giant octopus, all of which Flash wrestled to a standstill. Tarzan actors fought with apes who carried off humans, while natives furiously rowed enormous long canoes, which Tarzan could always catch by swimming. Crocodiles as big as buses could never eat Jane or Boy or Tarzan, but instead they gobbled down Africans like hors d'oeuvres, after which Tarzan wrestled the giant crocs to a standstill. Gene Autrey, the singing cowboy, rode into the center of the earth and sang and yodeled - saved his woman too - while the bad guys melted like plastic under a flame. Soon Superman and Rocky and Bullwinkle and Batman would replace The Adventure Hour, then the local news, but Major Noel was in every youthful eye when Chapacola had one television station.

Children appeared on The Adventure Hour on their birthdays, celebrating with hot dogs, Cokes, and a cake of flaming candles they blew out. The sponsor of the show was a Florida meat-packing company, which produced cold cuts and made the hot dogs that went down the gullets of the birthday children on TV.

It was arranged that Lenny would appear on the show for his eighth birthday and be accompanied by his new best friend, Todd Walton - a friendship that would last Lenny's whole life. How it came about the boys went together to the tv station, Lenny wasn't sure, but he probably wrote Major Noel himself or talked his parents into writing.

Todd Walton was a tall, intelligent, slender boy, with dark hair and a dark complexion, and the rumor in Chapacola was that the Waltons were secret Jews; probably Walinksi was their family name. Lenny didn't know what a Jew was and didn't care, and when he did know, he would have been Jewish himself if given the chance.

Over the years, Todd's home became like a second one for Lenny. Todd's mother was like his other mother, a much more tolerant one, expressive and ready to listen, if not particularly more affectionate, and it became more like a surrogate, second family when developer Dave Allen married Georgia.

Georgia's given name was Rhonda, but every one called her Georgia, why Lenny never was sure. She was an intelligent, sensitive woman, who always seemed mildly amused by the doings of Lenny and other children in the neighborhood, never shocked. Her own son amused and bemused her to no end.

The two boys were telecast on the night of Lenny's eighth birthday sitting in a warm room about the size of Lenny's bedroom. The room looked much bigger on TV and was cramped in reality. Wires ran about the floor, some thick cables, which Lenny and Todd tripped over on the way to their seats. Hot bright lights shown, sweat ran down their faces from the emanating heat, and they were blinded to everything behind the camera. As instructed, they kept looking at the red lights when the camera was running, until the food came, and then Lenny did not look at the whirling camera any longer.

Television was all another trick being played on Lenny, an illusion creating the artificial vastness of a small TV set. How much was real or not real was difficult to determine, even in those un-sophisticated times. Dimensions and import were greatly exaggerated or completely lost on Major Noel's Adventure Hour, which became a half-hour telecast before it was taken from the air, overcome and surpassed by network shows.

Major Noel announced Lenny's name and birthday in his fake English accent. Televised images of boys gulping hot dogs and guzzling Cokes travel on light waves beyond Alpha Centauri, puzzling all aliens intercepting the signal. But perhaps not the most puzzling images from earth.

At 4:00 a.m., desperate dreamers may come awake screaming, tormented by nightmare-clotted brains. He may wonder, she may wonder, if something is wrong with the wiring of the brain to have such horrible dreams. For some dreamers, the nightmares may be so horrific they dare not discuss them with loved ones for fear they will not be loved any longer. How could a good person conjure horrors such as he or she may dream? What happened to the pleasant dreams of youth when sleep was refuge, not feared for images it spewed forth from tossing neurons?

On any given morning, but not in the Rothe household, lights were burning in the houses of the forlorn at 4:00 a.m., the peak hour of the emotional wasteland. Forlorness had not yet reached the Rothes, but its tendrils touched others. Across America, at 4:00 a.m. in any year, forlorn walk, jog, try to burn away anxiety on pavements, in gyms, on stationery bicycles, on sidewalks, at tracks near schools. Or they may pace like caged ocelots in their small rooms. Some drink themselves to sleep. Others take sedatives.

Lenny had not yet met a prostitute, but he will. He does not know yet that 4:00 a.m. is the hour when prostitutes give up for the night. He has not yet met priests who doubt their faith and call on God at 4:00 a.m. for a sign that doesn't come, but he will. The only drugs Lenny knew about were the ones Doc Bennett gave him. He did not yet know addicts who will find the stash empty at 4:00 a.m. and plot their next robbery. Beer had not yet been guzzled down his throat, but it will. He did not know bar drunks, who pass into oblivion at 4:00 a.m., sleeping in places they will not recognize when they awaken bewildered in the painful sick morning.

4:00 a.m. is an hour without hope, without music, without song, except perhaps the blues. It is a time when a father strikes his daughter, a wife curses the man she loved, perhaps her husband, and children hate their parents intensely. It is the peak hour of the lost. It is an hour when thieves count what they have stolen and find they have come-up short.

It is the time - 4:00 a.m. - when a siren from an accident or a crime bestirs the brain stem.

It is the hour when the adult in the bed beside you moans terribly and you wonder who it is you are sleeping with. Or if they will harm you.

It is the time when husbands or wives roll over and beg their spouses, even if they are tired of them or hate them or are in love with someone else or are secretly gay, to make love in order to calm jumping, twitching neurons.

At this hour on highways, living things are struck by souped-up truck drivers barreling their rigs in darkness, the wheels singing a loud humming song on asphalt highways, echoing across the vast void to where the hopeless toss and turn, imprisoned in torturous beds. Hot and cold, sweaty and clammy, covered and uncovered, the bedeviled toss while trains cross tracks in America, making up lost time, their lonely whistles coming and going, rattling wheels at crossings, humming on the rails. And jets are ripping through the air, roaring ascent, whistling downward to destinations. Electricity crackles on high tension lines, and distant transformers explode in the stillness. While on suburban streets it is quiet, except for the tap tap tap trotting of a lone dog or the shriek of something caught.

But in the late 1950s, in a suburb in Florida at the edge of the sea, on any given night at 4:00 a.m., the blameless were unaware of reasons not to be asleep at 4:00 a.m.

Summer fireflies lighted the nights. Winds blew cool air through the screens. Enormous full moons came and went.

A solitary bark from the wandering lone dog pierced sleep, perhaps, as did the sound of a car turning onto the street, likely a police car on patrol. All was well, suburbia. All was well, Florida. All was well, America.

Deep in the nights of the mid-1950s, most children of Chapacola, Florida, slept well in their beds, pure sweet dreams of the very young, but no longer Lenny Rothe, for fear his grandmother, who was likely not truly dead, would visit him. Falling asleep when first sent to bed was not too difficult, although he tossed with fantasies. Later, while little heads of most Chapacola kids were resting on fluffy pillows, Lenny woke unsettled between 2:00 and 4:00 a.m., unable to return to sleep. His insane grandmother with the rolling eyes might come back to demand her room. He was not certain about death, yet, but he was sure about insanity.

First he slept on the couch, where he could fall asleep outside the evil bedroom once occupied by his brain-robbed grandmother. When his parents found him there uncovered in the morning, they forbade this.

For some weeks, Lenny tried to return into his parents' room where it was safe to curl securely against the warmth of his father. He was too old for this, his father declared, and he was cast out. It was true that he had lain on the floor besides his parents' bed and listened. As an inadvertent spy he heard their throes of love, but it was not clear to him what he was hearing.

Cast out into the darkness, he walked the house alone in the light quietude of early morning. The only sounds were his father's snoring, the ticking of clocks, the occasional ringing of bells on the cat's collar when the cat scratched itself, the rising of his grandmother Catherine and her treading unsteadily along the hallway, touching the walls the entire trip, for one of her many nightly, unproductive trips to the bathroom.

Sometimes he spent hours weaving great fantasies in the breezeway, until he was so tired he could return to sleep in his bed. He fought wars and Native Americans, led cattle drives, and saved souls while others slept. He visited other planets. These fantasies he acted out standing, like a player in a great play.

Then he began wandering outside the house into the midst of night. First he wandered to his friend Todd's house on Chapacola Bay, strolling the expansive, well-manicured, vacant yard, listening to wind singing through tall bamboo, bending and cracking the trees, loosing tree sighs and groans. Then he began longer walks, out to the Heights and into Chapacola proper, along the roads and on sidewalks where they existed.

There were a great many loose dogs on Chapacola streets in the late night, but Lenny was too young to have fear of mere dogs, although some that were large and fierce lunged at him. Friendly dogs came to him to be petted, sometimes wagging their tails and licking his face when he bent over. Hunting dogs went by him in twos or threes, stopping to peer at him, curious but never threatening.

Raccoons ate from trash cans. Portions of trash put out early (unwisely) at night were strewn about. Raccoons wandered in twos and larger groups, while possums ambled across roads.

He left the house unlocked, for he had no key, returning undetected before sunrise. He never needed a key because there was always someone to let him in when he came home from school, or the door was unlocked. The door to the family home was locked by a single push button, not a series of dead bolts. The door was usually locked by his fearful grandmother Catherine at her bedtime, otherwise it remained unlocked. Lenny left the home open and unguarded when he wandered about at night.

The Chapacola Diner, replaced since by a twenty-four hour drug store, was then the only thing open twenty-four hours a day within fifty miles. It never closed, not even for Christmas. At the police station, lights were turned-off around midnight, the lone dispatcher sleeping on a cot, awakened only by emergency calls on the radio or the ringing phone carrying weird complaints from nutty folks of prowlers, peeping Toms, UFOs, the volume of the neighbor's music, too much laughter at parties, reckless drivers - while the lights of the diner glowed on through rain and fog and clear hot nights like a lighthouse at sea.

Tunes from the diner's jukebox wafted through nearby portions of empty downtown, while the diner's gaudy lights shown into the regional Chapacola General Hospital across the street, where the sick and operated upon lived or died. In heavy fogs, the diner stood out like a beacon, bright enough to guide slow drivers across the rickety wooden Chapacola Bridge from Westpoint. Sounds of The Tennessee Waltz, Patti Page, The Platters, and Fats Domino floated into the night from the juke box, while the aroma of foods, particularly of bacon, came through the front glass door when it opened.

In summer and most of winter, the rear door of the diner was open to let out the heat. In the back kitchen, Lenny saw the large, barrel-shaped, black fry cook, always dressed in dirty khaki pants and a white T-shirt, his black and massive belly partially exposed. Sweat dripped from the fry cook's forehead and seeped through his clothing. The dishwasher, a skinny black man, likewise dressed in khaki pants and a white undershirt, smoked cigarettes between batches of plates, silverware, pots, cups, glasses, and trays. The two men bickered.

Besides the bacon, Lenny smelled sausage, eggs, fried steak, the smell of sweet things, fish, and rich gravies. Omelets could be made with scallops or shrimp, ham and cheese, or with everything. There were grits, toast, hash-browns, ham, and pancakes with syrup, consumed by hungry truck drivers passing through. All these smells and the smell of coffee filled the night, while the putrefying remains in the dumpster gave off a more awful odor.

In his lifetime, Lenny ate at the diner no more than ten times, usually after late night dates with June in high school. He always ate breakfast and coffee heavily sweetened with sugar, sometimes to sober up.

Those in need of early morning coffee or company gathered inside the diner, some taking breakfast. If Lenny had money, he would have sought shelter inside the warm and aromatic diner with his hands around a steaming cup of coffee filled with sugar. For a summer and a fall, Lenny's path to and from the diner became a routine nightly circular loop.

During rare periods when the windows were clear, he might recognize Doc Bennett sitting inside the diner on a stool, holding forth to those who would listen. On operating mornings, three healers gathered at the diner, drinking steaming cups of coffee sweetened with sugar and whitened with cream, although Doc Bennett sometimes drank strong, hot tea as if he were English. Doc Bennett also put honey in his tea or coffee, tupelo honey, if they had it. The doctors talked of their patients' chances, told medical jokes, complained about patients who could not pay, and talked about wives. Lenny at times listened to their conversations.

The truck drivers having breakfast read newspapers and studied maps before they drove to western or eastern obscurity along the highway. Truckers played the juke box and talked road conditions and highway patrol with each other. They came and they left, and, before the sun rose, Lenny walked back home.

Patrolling policeman took Lenny home. They were lazy pudgy men with Southern accents like his Grand-dad Nellis, who had died after contracting pneumonia in a gutter in Cincinnati. One Chapacola deputy, Eddie Taylor, a friend of his father, told Len Rothe that his son was wandering loose on the streets at night. For months, Lenny was forced to stay in portions of the Estates closer to home.

The dripping faucet in the bathroom became a locomotive roaring down on his house. The sound changed from a locomotive into the swirling wind of a tornado. The tornado came and blew apart the house and carried Lenny up into the sky. Where he landed was not Oz, but a cold, dark place with no exit.

Doc Bennett, made aware of Lenny's nocturnal wanderings, mused to concerned parents that the boy was simply very intelligent, restless, imaginative, and sensitive.

"Of course we could take him to a psychiatrist, costs a pretty penny, and you'd probably have to go to Pensacola, but it wouldn't do much good. The boy will grow out of it," the healer declared; instead, Bennett advised a simpler solution.

When Lenny was called to dinner, Bernice rang a cowbell so she didn't have to shout. The cowbell could be heard clearly as far away as Todd's house. Doc Bennett advised attaching cowbells to the three household doors. When, one morning before operating, he spied Lenny walking the streets by the diner, he assumed the Rothes did not hang the cowbells. He was wrong. The windows had easily removed screens.

It was a much more altered, different Chapacola world late nights than any Lenny had ever imagined. Most weeknights were quiet, little happened. Then, as if a bloom of madness had enveloped Chapacola, on weekends the night came alive with what many would consider sin. Not only did Flora Hemmings, intoxicated, drive her car topless to be stopped by Eddie Taylor, the friendly deputy, but men also met men, woman met woman, and the night was filled with adultery and violence. The barber's son, Frankie Angel, wandered the streets in search of young black men.

Even on weekdays, however, there were signs of the disturbed. Within the first-floor living room of his family home, settler descendant Paul Feeney sat in a blue, television haze, while drinking bourbon and playing with a pistol. From time to time, Lenny saw the oily pistol going into his mouth.

The light was on where Pastor Mitch Wadell prayed in a sanctuary above his house. The gym opened early to admit Ron, the Catholic priest, who beat on a bag in the city's only integrated facility.

A young girl named Bethany Smith smoked cigarettes on her back porch, a burning coal moving with her invisible hand, and the glow from inhaling lighting her face. Lenny watched her from a safe distance, for she was his age, and in time would be his.

While Eisenhower was running for President, Ike came to Chapacola in search of votes, as the future of the world hinged on how Chapacola voted. Lenny and Todd saw Ike waving at the crowds assembled at the courthouse, a balding man with a big smile, wearing a conservative suit and tie, so normal in size he was barely discernible behind the wall of politicians on the podium hoping to benefit from his popularity. The future president and former war general made a speech, and the crowd roared when roaring was called for, laughed when jokes were cracked, cheered when the man came and left.

Lenny screamed "I like Ike" with the others; so did Todd, so did the chanting crowd, everyone liking Ike. A beaming Ike waved vigorously back to the crowd that liked him. Lenny had gone to see Ike with Todd and his mother Georgia.

Ike had won World War II, his dad said. Ike, like Bradley, was a soldier's general, Len said.

Len Rothe had seen Ike in Europe. He had saluted Ike who was seated in a jeep as he drove by. The front of the jeep had a plate with stars on it. Some of the ribbons on his father's uniform, which hung in the closet, had stars on them too.

Truman, the man who ordered two atom bombs dropped on Japan, decided not to run again for President. Richard Nixon, born of pacifists, would be Vice President under Eisenhower. Democratic Adlai Stevenson would run against the war hero Ike and overwhelmingly no one would care. Lenny listened to Nixon on television talking about his dog, Checkers. Lenny later had a book called Six Crises written by Nixon, which he had read from cover to cover, then loaned to Todd.

Ike's day was D-day. Ike was a modern conqueror, leading troops of liberation into Europe to expel the devil.

There were black-and-white documentaries televised about the atom bombs dropped on Japan. Blasted black landscapes where fires burned, where human flesh melted, and people were sickened with radiation. A shadow on the wall made by the flash of a man who walked by shortly before being vaporized. A frenzied narrating voice told of shock waves, blast, heat, fires, and radiation poisoning. A black ashy rain fell from the sky.

Nuclear bombs would be tested, ever larger ones, often on Pacific atolls which vanished, or in chunks of Siberia in Russia, sending large amounts of Strontium 90 skyward to settle onto the grasses of America, to be consumed by its cows, to end up in children's milk and hamburgers, in Todd and Lenny's milk and hamburgers.

Lenny slept with thoughts of atomic wars, communist invasions of America, and how brave he and Todd would be when the Reds came and forced the boys to sleep in beds with pretty girls. The science fiction books he read were filled with mutants from the Third World War, the atomic war that destroyed most of the world. Creatures in science fiction movies mutated too. Perhaps Lenny, who was conceived about the time the first bomb exploded, was a mutant.

Lenny could not tell the communists and the Nazis apart yet; they all merged in a blur of enveloping evil about to settle on America, if you believed TV. There were enemies within, it was claimed, people who wanted communists to triumph over America, people duped by the commies, fellow travelers in the same evil orbit, who didn't like Ike. As badly as Lenny wanted to find these people and report them to the FBI, he could not find them in Chapacola - although he and Todd looked.

Todd and Lenny, future defenders of Western Civilization, pitched a tent and lay on air mattresses on a hot night in the Rothes' back yard. They did not sleep. They tossed and grew anxious. The ground hurt. There was no television. Mosquitoes buzzed about them and bit them. It was sweaty on the inflated mattresses. They became afraid of snakes. They decided instead to spend the night inside Lenny's house; then Todd decided to go home. Someone else would have to defend Western Civilization.

One Saturday night when he was eleven, sitting on the floor before a new color television, Lenny saw the movie Rhapsody in Blue. The rhapsody, when played, tingled within his brain stem and set off flights of fantasy. These were passionate sounds, beginning with the soaring clarinet.

A hi-fi or high-fidelity record player was at that time the most grand and sophisticated of music-playing devices. A copy of Rhapsody in Blue on a long-play, vinyl record was purchased at the incessant demands of Lenny, who played it and the Fourth Symphony of Brahms almost every night until he knew both pieces by heart.

He at first played the grand music on a tiny portable player with poor sound and scratchy reproduction, filling in missing sounds with imagination. In the Brahms' symphony, Lenny felt a tug and pull of life that was well beyond his meager years and life experience to comprehend, but in Rhapsody he found something missing - emotional fire. Lenny, on the cusp of puberty, needed emotional fire.

Music improved through his friend, Todd Walton, who lived down the road in the house overlooking the bay. Georgia Walton made sure her son always had the latest innovations, so that Todd had the first color television in the Estates and the first stereo. The difference between the new stereo sound and the small portable hi-fi was clear to Lenny, who now wanted a stereo too, but obtaining one was not so easy.

Often his father said "no" to many of Lenny's requests, including the stereo, but when he said "yes," the results were sometimes unpredictable. When Lenny persuaded his father to buy a telescope, it was one that you built at home, not the one Lenny wanted. For many anxious hours, Lenny and his dad put the scope together, reading the directions and following them, while hoping to get a glimpse of Venus in the early morning sky. Venus was selected by Lenny because of the popular song, "Venus, Goddess of Love That You Are," otherwise "Oh, Venus." But after hours of assembly, punctuated by numerous incantations under Len's breath of "son of a bitch" and "damn" and "bastard," the telescope did not work. All that could be seen was absolute blackness. The scope was sent back by mail just as it was purchased. Todd, on the other hand, received an expensive telescope that required no assembly and that worked so well you could see the rings of Saturn and the dark spot on Jupiter, said to be a storm.

Even though Lenny was instructed to be satisfied with the portable record player, one that had cost good money, he pestered his father and mother for a stereo on which he could listen to a Rhapsody in Blue. Unhappy with the limitations of their first stereo, which stood upon four brass-colored legs under an imitation mahogany cover, Todd's mother decided to buy a more grand stereo for Todd, thus the Rothes purchased at a bargain price the first stereo Todd had owned for Lenny. It would last him through high school. The stereo was placed in Lenny's bedroom where music loudly erupted after school, nightly, and on weekends. This was a great gift, not like the mail-order telescope, because on this stereo Lenny would in time learn hundreds of pieces of classical music, music that he liked along with his rock-and-roll.

Acquiring records and the magic of music, like acquiring books, meant spending money or hoping for gifts. The gifts were unpredictable, as some were records Lenny wanted, while others on sale were of poorer quality or by lesser artists. Lenny had virtually no money to buy records or books save what he was given by his parents or earned cutting lawns. He had to be crafty.

Since other children in Chapacola Estates either had allowances or plenty of money, like Todd, Lenny asked his father for an allowance, like his friends had, but Len Rothe had simply said, "no," in a gentle voice, shaking his head, and making a joke of it. "What do you need an allowance for?" he said. When Lenny started to explain what he needed an allowance for, Len said, "You don't need all those things." Lenny did not need them, but he wanted them.

Not having a set allowance forced Lenny to ask for money whenever he needed it, whether it was a Coke or a book, a magazine or a record, or a movie. Actually, he didn't get Cokes at home. The family bought its sodas from a local bottling company that had its own flavors sold at a price half that of a Coke.

Len Rothe thought he was particularly shrewd in the handling of money, and likely he was. He double-checked every bill, and took as many bids as possible for all manner of work. In restaurants, he carefully added each bill after it arrived, frequently calling a waitress over to question the bill, sometimes for amounts adding up to cents. His tip was precisely computed to ten percent. Nobody was going to get over on Len Rothe. Bernice matched Len in such vigilance, and Lenny's mother made sure no grocery store clerk cheated her, whether intentionally or by error. She was known to drive right back to a grocery store over a quarter. His parents were children of the Depression, times were hard, money was tight.

Lenny earned some income from cutting grass. He had cut the Rothe's household grass unpaid since he was six. On hot summer days, he pushed heavy lawnmowers, none self-propelled, through thick grass that grew unabated during the rainy season, which in Chapacola lasted every warm month of the year, unless there was drought. The summer rains often postponed mowing after school until the grass became high and brutal to push the mower through.

Colonel Milligan's yard was cut for a dollar and a quarter, including the gas. Milligan, a thin, old man with a British accent, reeked of gin from morning to night, and his wife, who almost never got out of bed, did too. Milligan had fought in Burma, and he chain smoked, lighting the new cigarette from the old one. His hands trembled like those of Lenny's grandfather Nellis, and when Milligan lit a new cigarette it was an adventure placing one burning butt to the next one.

Mrs. Milligan smoked constantly too, but lit her cigarettes from one of dozens of ornate lighters set about inside the house. She was a heavy-set woman who lived in nightgowns, whom Lenny never saw once in a dress, only twice in shorts, an unpleasant sight because of the massive blue veins winding around her legs. Sometimes she called Lenny into her bedroom to discuss his life, often reclining on the bed while she listened to him. This always made Lenny uncomfortable for she was usually in her negligee with large breasts partially revealed and the outline of underwear beneath her bottom, sweat stains beneath her arms. Gin fumes floated on the air before her, but she wanted to know all about Lenny and was very kind to him, giving him books and Cokes and magazines.

Discovering Lenny's love of music, the Milligans gave Lenny some records, but they were old seventy-eights, and he could not play them. In time, the seventy-eights were discarded with the trash. He took them out of politeness, thanking the Milligans, who thought they had done him a great service.

Lenny also cut the lots on both sides of his home, often for three dollars. Those houses were owned at various times by elderly couples, widows, a great grandmother whose family visited once a year, a millionaire from Pennsylvania, and families that used them as summer homes. He milked those jobs when he needed money, doing weeding and trimming also, until the millionaire complained over a twenty-two dollar bill for July, and Lenny was chastised by his parents. Then Lenny did no weeding or trimming, just cut the grass, so the millionaire would not complain over these tiny bills.

When Len Rothe decided Milligan had to pay three dollars like everyone else, Colonel Milligan said he could afford only one dollar and a quarter. So at the urging of his father Lenny raised the cost to three dollars anyway, and Milligan stopped using Lenny. This loss cut heavily into Lenny's music money. Milligan instead let the lawn go uncut for up to a month in summer, then called in a black man who worked nearby as a gardener for Georgia Walton, and the black man cut it for two dollars and twenty-five cents.

A few other lawn jobs came and went, but only the ones next door continued through high school. Lenny was a lawn boy, and when cutting a lawn he did a conscientious job, hoping young women were watching and admiring him. Yet the cutting next door was examined closely by Bernice, who found fault frequently, and sent him out to cut small sections a second time.

Len never bought new lawnmowers until Lenny was in the army, then perversely he purchased an expensive riding mower. The used mowers were purchased and repaired at Chapacola Shell where a black mechanic named Eddie Hotch examined them, pronounced their faults, and at least once a year a decision was made whether to repair the old one or buy another junky lawn mower. Len pointed out to his son how much it was costing to keep him in mowers to make a livelihood. Sometimes Lenny failed to put oil into hated mowers, hastening their demise.

To make money for music, Lenny also answered a magazine ad, receiving mail-order a "salesman's kit" of greeting cards, which he lugged about Chapacola Estates and Heights, selling Christmas, Valentine, anniversary, and birthday cards door to door. The cards became all shuffled and creased from being carried in their "kit," a heavy cardboard case. In the end, Lenny kept a few dollars he had made, and his father mailed the case back. The case was sold on a thirty-day trial period like the telescope.

For a time, Lenny made pot holders as his grandmother had taught him, first for use within the house, then for sale. These pot holders, made of various colored strings, he also attempted to peddle door to door for his music money throughout the Estates and Heights, most successfully to lonely widows who took the boy inside to talk and sometimes feed him, believing, despite an over-healthy appearance, that a boy of such poverty did not get square meals. Some of the widows gave him books and records when he told them of his love for the printed word and for music. If there was any embarrassment over his son going door to door to sell homemade pot holders, Len Rothe never mentioned it.

Such efforts to raise money being grossly ineffective - there truly being no work for a boy in Chapacola - Lenny took to more effective but less honest methods. He might pass his hand over the collection plate at church without putting his quarter in, surely a sin. This was the start of his criminal period, which would last until he was sixteen. He asked for small amounts of money when he didn't need it, just to have enough when he did. If a wallet was unattended, this criminal might liberate a quarter or a dime, or if truly bold, two quarters. Instead of buying a magazine or book at the corner store, he would swipe it, shoplift, this crime more than once noticed and reported to his parents who punished him, then paid for the books he had stolen. When given lunch money in junior high and high school, he would do without lunch in order to buy the things he wanted, including cigarettes when he began to smoke. To his later shame, he even pinched some of his grandmother Catherine's limited stash of Social Security cash. To obtain music and books, he took to joining book and record clubs by mail, then turning the bills over to his father, who usually paid them while canceling the membership.

In time, his father was to buy him an inexpensive reel-to-reel tape player. With this, it was presumed, Lenny could record from the television speakers the symphony orchestra concerts and Boston Pops and not need as many records. It was neat to record from the television, but not terribly effective. Lenny recorded from the television a few times, attaching alligator clips to the speakers, inserting the other end of the wire in holes on the tape machine, resulting in recordings, but always of poor quality, including scrapes and squeals, and loss of sound in unexplained gaps.

Once he had the tape player, Lenny joined a tape club by mail, obtaining reel-to-reel classical music, which was tolerated for a while, until it was clear Lenny could not earn or steal enough to pay the bills. Membership was paid in full and canceled again by Len Rothe.

Len Rothe bought tape for use on Lenny's reel-to-reel in huge re-wound quantities. He said it was from the space program which was just beginning at Cape Canaveral. This tape might actually have been from the space program, for once re-wound, it did not record, but made strange sounds like a satellite might make in outer space.

Lenny wanted to bang on piano keys, to jump up and down and be carried away. In his house, he was never allowed to jump up and down or be carried away, such pagan misbehavior would not be tolerated. Still, he wanted to build a bonfire.

Gershwin in the movie on TV was loved, and Lenny wanted to be loved. Gershwin was loved passionately by a woman and a brother and a proud family. Didn't George's father commend him after the first rhapsody was played? George's crime of playing jazz was exonerated. At long last, wasn't George's father proud of the prodigy? Perhaps Lenny's father would be proud of him if he played the piano like George Gershwin. Maybe Lenny could be a prodigy too.

A biography of Gershwin was found by a perusing Lenny at the used bookstore, Your Book Place, source of most of his books, when Lenny was not subscribing to book clubs or pilfering them from the corner grocery. Lenny read the three-hundred-page biography in one night. While the composer Gershwin was loved by one woman in the movie, a woman devastated when a brain tumor took the young genius, the biography explained that George was a sexual libertine, who slept with two women at once. This sounded way cool to Lenny.

(A mere thought. The tumor. Had the tumor played a part in the music? Were the rhapsodies and Concerto in F products of malignant brain cells?)

Under the child's constant urging, his parents purchased a piano. Lenny, however, dreamed of a grand, something like Todd had, one like George Gershwin had played, and when the upright arrived, a rebuilt, re-tuned church piano, one so heavy he could not move it, not even budge it by himself, Lenny was both happy to have a piano and disappointed it was not the kind he wanted. How could he be passionate, jump up and down, or beat on this boulder, this monolith of a piano, this rock? It was like the chemistry set. He wanted the 288-compound set with the twelve beakers and received instead the 24-compound set with one beaker. Not that he couldn't still set potassium permanganate on fire or grow radishes with liquid nitrogen.

Deciding that if he could learn to play well on this monstrosity of a piano, take lessons, and move rapidly through all assignments and practices, he might be rewarded with the baby grand he longed for, Lenny worked hard at his assignments, practicing almost all his free time. When his accomplishments, however, were not rewarded with a better piano, and when his piano teacher wanted him to play Humoresque in recital with a number of children half his age, Lenny stopped lessons. By the time he quit playing on the upright, Lenny was light-years ahead of Humoresque and zeroing in on Gershwin's Rhapsody.

Once Lenny abandoned this large and not elegant piano, it served as a place where various plants and photographs were put on display. The piano dominated (along with his father's desk) the room known as a breezeway. The piano remained there in large part because no one could move it once it had been set down (by two very large men using a variety of special devices for moving pianos, who struggled like wrestlers with the monster piano up the front steps and through the front door).

Unable to constrain his desire to move with the music, Lenny practiced conducting, standing before his mirror. When this behavior was discovered by his parents, they made fun of it, told visiting Sunnydales, who laughed from amusement, and immediately Lenny stopped imaginary conducting.

Neighbors complained of his loud playing of the stereo, perhaps more after he discovered Stravinsky and Ravel. Bolero fortissimo was often followed by a pounding Rites of Spring, Petroushka, and Firebird. Hours of pounding, thumping, passionate music, often atonal, some symbolic of mating virgins who danced themselves to death to bring forth spring, assaulted the neighbors.

In the summer between fifth and sixth grade, a girl-child was born to demons. Her name was Ashley Parr, and both her parents were guilty as sin. She came into the world as blank a slate as anyone might be, except that her mother was a Feeney, Gail, a sister of Margaret, mother of Mary, friend of Lenny. Being a relative of the Feeneys meant she would be saved from the he and she-devils who gave her life. Because her parents were such monsters, Ashley did not learn to like music or people. This was because her parents, through abusive actions, wrote horrible things on her blank slate. She was not one of the children born safe in America in the middle of the fat century, or century of fat. It would be about eighteen years before Lenny provided her musical instruction. Of Ashley's coming, Lenny was, of course, unaware, for he was about to be turned into a captive of music.

In sixth grade, it was determined that Lenny would become a member of the junior high school band, a band that marched playing military tunes and gave concerts. Lenny never wanted to be a band member, wished instead to read books and daydream, safely in his room, or enjoy nocturnal wanderings inside the complexity of his brain. He also wanted to date girls and had decided that being in the band would take up lots of the good free time needed for that. He didn't think being in a marching school band was cool at all. He was a piano player too, already knew how, and if he had to play an instrument, it seemed logical to put him in the chorus or orchestra. But he didn't want to be in those either. Yet he was going into the band. He was hoodwinked by adults and tricked again.

One day in sixth grade, a man named Tommy Jeffreys came to the school and evaluated the children for their musical aptitude. He saw hundreds of kids and surprisingly found some musical gift in almost every child - or not so surprisingly, for he owned the only music store in Chapacola and Westpoint.

Todd was to play violin and be in the orchestra, it was decided, and Todd wasted hours doing something he had no desire to do, producing prodigious ear-shattering scrapes. At least Todd escaped without having to be in the orchestra, just told his mother "no," and she said "OK," but Lenny could not do that because when he tried it, money had already been spent for an instrument. Len told his son he was in the band, that was it, no further discussions.

The evaluation of a child's musical abilities consisted of the evaluator, Tommy Jeffreys, looking at a child's hands or mouth and then thrusting various instruments at the child to try to beat on, strum, or blow. Children took turns blowing on clarinet reeds, banging on drums, and scraping bows across strings, while others tooted on trumpets, blew into trombones and tubas.

"Mr. Jeffreys, I play the piano, I can read sheet music," Lenny said, but all Mr. Jeffreys said was, "Uh hun," while the man's hands pried at Lenny's jaws, forcing his lips into various shapes and onto various mouthpieces. Tommy Jeffreys did not sell pianos.

Just as his friend Todd had been proclaimed a violinist, Lenny was deemed the ideal trumpet player.

"Perfect," Tommy Jeffreys said, holding Lenny's mouth between his left hand, a hand that possessed a goodly amount of black hair on the knuckles and perhaps a little slide oil under the heavy nails. Black hair sprouted from the small opening above the white shirt and undershirt beneath Tommy Jeffreys' neck.

A large hairy man who could play every instrument and instructed Lenny, "Form your lips like this and blow into the mouth piece," and so it was that Lenny blew.

Lenny tasted valve oil and spit when he first blew into the mouthpiece and produced an elephantine noise. Who had blown on this mouthpiece before and would Lenny get a cold? In the morning, indeed, he imagined a sore throat.

"You'll be a great trumpet player," Tommy Jeffreys then pronounced happily, adding needed reassurance, "It's the perfect instrument for you."

A solid slab of beef, a tall man, with a bald spot on his head, Tommy Jeffreys had played with a big band once. Maybe it was Gene Krupa or Benny Goodman. Maybe it wasn't either one. Maybe it wasn't even a big band. That's what people said, though. No matter what instrument he played, it looked small and puny in front of the massive Tommy Jeffreys. And Tommy still played in a small band at the yacht club and country clubs at weddings. His group never played the high school prom though, because the only current music the Tommy Jeffreys' Five played was that of Johnny Mathis. The music the trio performed was from the Second World War or older. And they did not play modern jazz.

Once Tommy Jeffreys decided that Lenny was to be a trumpet player, a decision in which Lenny himself never participated, Lenny's parents, by some unknown arrangement with Tommy, took their son to a music store owned by Tommy Jeffreys, where Len drove a bargain. After some negotiations, Lenny's father purchased a used trumpet, grudgingly paid for sheet music, and talked down the lesson costs with his son's instructor, Tommy Jeffreys.

Lenny may have dreamed about playing the piano like a young Gershwin while adoring females gazed at him, alien creatures possessing breasts, but his first appearance on a stage was something like the time he was televised on The Adventure Hour and gulped down hot dogs instead of speaking.

In and around Chapacola, music was being made by twelve-year-old children. Those equally responsible were Tommy Jeffreys, the radio, and Dick Clark's American Bandstand. A performance was in demand.

Young Joe Lester, the blond-haired, athletic son of the local lumberyard owner, was banging on the drums, learning to set the pace and strike snare drums and cymbals without being struck back. Julius Rosini (hair slicked back with greasy hair cream and neatly formed into a duck's ass, or DA - his stockbroker father one of the few Italians residing in Chapacola) was learning the guitar and dealing with strings, a pick, and a slide, making chords while looking into the mirror as if he were Elvis, swiveling his hips while no one screamed or cheered. Tall and soon-to-be-bullied Tommy Jeffreys Junior had been playing the saxophone with accuracy, skill, and inspiration from a tender age because he was the son of Tommy Jeffreys, Senior, the owner of Chapacola Music and Instruments. Ham Taylor, a robust, overweight boy, almost giant in his proportions, the likable son from a family of attorneys, a boy friendly to all, had taken to the trombone and imagined himself wowing crowds of festive virgins with his pursed lips. And to this group, we add a trumpet player named Lenny Rothe, who never wanted to play the trumpet, did not practice, and only vaguely knew how.

It was proposed by Joe Lester, a ringleader, that these boys form a band for the purpose of having a party to which they would bring girls. Joe Lester had, in fact, asked his mother Millicent if this was acceptable, and for one reason or another she said yes, so the party to which the girls would come to hear the boys play would be in Joe Lester's house where Joe Lester would hit the drums and sing. The ringleader had drawn a perfect circle for himself, and everyone involved in the coming crime believed Joe had the right to do this, for at this stage of his life, the young girls of Chapacola adored Joe Lester, and Joe adored them. He was lean and handsome, with a winsome smile, his hair crewcut like a marine, and he was a regular monkey on the parallel bars. He could do more chin-ups than anyone, more sit-ups, more pushups, maybe even more cartwheels. Everyone liked Joe Lester, especially the girls, so if Joe had a party, and the girls were invited, they would come, which was more than they would do for Ham Taylor, Julius Rosini, Tommy Jeffreys, and probably Lenny Rothe, although he could not imagine having a party in a house without Coke.

Practice also took place at the Lester household, a nexus of sixth-grade music and social events. After school, boys and young women were constantly passing in and out of Joe's house, some lingering in alcoves for a kiss and a feel. It was the time of "making out," when couples "made out" by kissing and pawing and touching forbidden zones, something like The Doubles Lenny once witnessed, only not in the woods, or so fully unclothed.

In a smoky study, the five boys attempted to play three pieces of popular music, everyone bringing sheet music except Lenny Rothe, who kept the money, and instead of playing melody, kind of kept time with toots on his trumpet. It never occurred to Lenny that anyone would really care about this group of boys playing, or attempting to play, rock-and-roll. He did not practice the trumpet at home, unless he wanted to be annoying, but just carried it to school on certain days when Tommy Jeffreys came to examine his students' progress, which in Lenny's case was close to zero.

The boys in this small band smoked cigarettes with impunity in the Lester household, Lenny included. He had taken up smoking cigarettes with his cousin Henry during summer vacations. The smell of smoke on him had started diatribes from both parents about stunting his growth, dying of lung cancer, and wasting money.

Millicent Lester, when home, was a smoker too, so unless she burst into the room (which she would never do because of a notion that such behavior was unseemly and beneath her), she would be uncertain if the boys were smoking, or indeed which of them was smoking, and probably wouldn't care anyway as long as no one blamed her. Millicent, descended from an old settler family, a relative of the Feeney clan, had two older girls to deal with who were much more trouble than her son Joe would ever be. The behavior of her rock-and-roll daughters, who both wore green eye shade and tight sweaters, apparently necked and stayed out all night, was a worry to her husband Leon. Millicent was blamed for being lackadaisical. ("They'll both end-up pregnant, Millie, unless you watch them like a hawk.")

Before Lenny really was prepared for the event, the Saturday night party was only a matter of days away. Not only did he need to obtain transportation from his parents, he needed a date with a young girl, the first date of his very young life.

One evening, a few days before the party, after checking with the other members of the tiny would-be rock-and-roll band to see who they had asked, Lenny phoned up a dark-haired, shapely young girl of twelve, who actually already had breasts, albeit small ones. Availability caused this girl to be selected. Actual breasts were not really a factor in asking this girl whose name was Anna Santiago, a lady of Spanish descent with olive skin and brown eyes. Breasts were tantalizing mysteries to Lenny, their function among mammals barely perceived, size and shape only a matter of comment, the knowledge of bras and straps and hooks as distant and difficult as calculus.

After asking Anna how she was and if she remembered him at all, he asked her to the party, and she said "Yes."

Lenny went on, however, explaining how all his friends were playing in this band at Joe Lester's, and he was a member of the band, and all the band members had dates, and if he didn't have a date, he could not play in the band, and he would not be a band member, and, and, and...

Len and Bernice Rothe conceded, calling Mrs. Santiago to make absolutely sure that her daughter was allowed to go with their son to this hop, a term derived from how young people in pre-adolescent mating rituals hopped about to allegedly Satanic rock-and-roll like bunnies.

On Saturday evening of the party at Joe Lester's, Lenny was dressed by Bernice in what she believed he should look like in a rock-and-roll band, or at least what he should look like from what he already owned, except for the cap she bought for twenty-nine cents at the Dollar General Store. What she selected for him to wear, Lenny disliked. He felt the clothes made him look like the discarded jester from the decks of cards when he played canasta with his grandmother Catherine. The joker wore blue-suede shoes with white strings, or rather brown shoes turned blue by Bernice's dye, and Bermuda shorts descending over his knees, with a checked pattern of blue and yellow. His long socks were scarlet red, reaching almost up the knee to disappear into the long shorts, and his shirt was a solid color that he couldn't remember later, probably from embarrassment. It might have been neon purple for the song Purple People Eater, which the band attempted to play at the party, Joe Lester and Julius Rosini singing. On Lenny's freshly barbered head, covering a haircut called a short palm tree, administered with buzzing shears by barber Marvin Angle, was a sort of floppy beret with red-and-yellow checks, Bernice's twenty-nine cent cap.

When Lenny looked at himself in the mirror, he did not want to leave the safety of his house. He would, instead, like to skip the party and stay home playing canasta or go fish or gin rummy with his grandmother or read a book all night in the living room or watch Shock Theater at eleven thirty where The Mummy, or the Wolfman, or Dracula, or Frankenstein would be murdering someone. Maybe tonight would be Bride of Frankenstein, his personal favorite, or something with vampires turning into dust when exposed to the cross or at sunrise too, maybe both. He couldn't remember the rules of vampirism. Lenny voiced his desire to stay home ("Please don't make me go there like this"), but his parents would not allow retreat, as there was the social arrangement with the Santiagos and their little girl, Anna, whose feelings were now at stake. It would take a real fit for Lenny to avoid this party, so he conceded. Bernice would not change his clothes either, saying they were perfectly fine, and he didn't like that Peter Pan outfit she had made for Halloween either, but it won the contest (Peter Pan also was someone Lenny never wanted to be).

He led the good life, yet this fortunate son was beginning to feel like an alien of sorts. He was always wanting things, according to his family, that he shouldn't have. The things he liked to do were regarded as frivolous, perhaps wrong. He had empathy for the role of mutant, like the boy in Van Vogt's science fiction book Slan who had tendrils and could read minds. Yes, Lenny was a stranger in this family, a freak who liked classical music and books beyond his years. Like Jommy the Slan he was bossed about by Granny and would soon be pursued.

What effect viewing his son (the potential Eagle Scout so bedecked by Bernice) had on Len is unknown. Perhaps there were moments when the father wondered what he had brought on himself by marrying this country girl from Waycross and becoming the father of this strange boy child.

Trumpet encased and loaded into the trunk, his chattering parents drove the silent boy to the Santiago home, where Lenny walked from the car to the front door alone, his heart pounding in his ears. He rang the doorbell as if he has not already been watched by Anna's father and mother, asking Mr. Santiago when he opened the door with formality, if Anna was ready, hoping nothing had changed so that Anna really was coming so he would not be embarrassed. Mr. Santiago with great dignity, and without inviting the intruding, weirdly-dressed boy into his house, or doing much to acknowledge the little squirt other than a limp and damp handshake, stepped aside, and a smiling Anna appeared looking happy and splendid. For Mr. Santiago, a retired, conservative army colonel, a nightmare was occurring as his little Anna was going somewhere with a boy, an event he had not planned on for a number of years, but now could not control, and with a strangely attired little boy to boot, from so-so parents whose status in the community was uncertain.

Anna, wearing flashy earrings and a brown-and-green dress, took Lenny's hand. If she was staggered by Lenny's clownish appearance, the rainbow of absurd clothes, she did not reveal it. She continued to beam smiles at him, happy to be going to the party. A newcomer to Chapacola, she never expected to be asked to the party; she even liked Lenny and positively swooned over Joe Lester.

Anna Santiago was a beautiful girl, who would grow more beautiful (muy linda, muy bonita), and for whom Lenny opened the back door (por favor) of the car so she and he could sit beside each other in the family Chevrolet (te amo). They sat hips touching, Lenny wondering if he would have his first kiss (como puedo tenerte in mis brazos) when he took Anna home. It was his understanding from his classmates that many were now necking, which meant lots of kissing often with tongue, and one or two claimed to have petted (or felt girls up). Lenny had not forgotten the calendar seen with his betrayed-buddy Bishop in years past. Although Lenny had reached the point in life when there were constant, embarrassing erections, sometimes in class or church, he was not quite sure what to do, lacking any understanding of sex.

If only Lenny picked this first girl in his life, dated her continuously though various grades, been her faithful beau, grown with her through teenage years onto college, worshipped her as she deserved, life indeed might have been different, for Anna Santiago was a charming girl who would become an intelligent person of character, a mother to children, a woman of accomplishments, but Lenny would, of course, do everything the hard way, perhaps because of how weirdly he felt dressed that night. Lenny would not be her beau, would never take the simple or straight road in life, for the straight road was about to be lost in a maze of curves. Arriving at the Lester's house, Lenny went around the car to open the door for Anna, with whom he had danced once or twice at the Arts Center of Chapacola Estates, but not rock-and-roll, only fox trots, waltzes, and tangos.

Lenny's dad opened the trunk, took the trumpet case out, told his son he'd be back at ten.

The youths performed three songs before turning the party over to the record player. They were aided by a piano-playing sister trapped at the last moment by Joe Lester. The songs were Purple People Eater, At the Hop, and Dream by the Everly Brothers.

Joe Lester's drumming was loud and enthusiastic, but his flat voice was lost in the volume of his banging drumsticks and Julius Rosini's thumping guitar. Julius sang also, and was not only heard but seen in his Elvis hip-swinging imitation. Watching and listening, the children knew that everyone was playing, but what they were playing was not clear. The piano added and played by Joe's sister Julia, a grown, painted woman who had a hot date after playing the piano for the kids, brought slight order to the chaos. Julia and Tommy Jeffreys Junior were competent players who created the order around which a cacophony was proudly created by the other participating children.

Ham Bone Taylor was uninspired and had forgotten the music when it came time to play before the festive virgins. Lenny leaped up from time to time. Stunned (there was Betty Sue Worley and Dorothea Staley looking at him!) by appearing in front of so many classmates, Lenny blew one note over and over in attempted rhythm to the piano, which he could follow. Lenny was light-years ahead of The One Note Samba because he had created the one note rock-and-roll on the trumpet. Eyes were constantly on him to display some extraordinary trumpet skills, a sound like an elephant perhaps, or a burst of rhythm, a flourish. No child there knew the music of Miles Davis or Dizzy Gillespie, but they hoped for something like Miles or Diz could play. All Lenny produced was this same note in all three songs, only occasionally remembering to depress a valve and change its sound. When a watching classmate looked at Lenny expectantly, Lenny quickly glanced away in another direction, until it was all over in about ten long minutes, never hopefully to be repeated, and he was free of the trumpet, about to put it into the case. Still he had to display talent. When all the music stopped, Lenny blew a ear-splitting reveille to an astonished crowd just to prove he knew how to play.

When dancing, because he liked it so much, no one could get him to leave the dance floor. With all of the girls, Lenny was something of a whirling dervish, pausing only for a cold Coke which leaked almost instantly out of him as sweat. On fast songs, he swung his partner, looped her under his arm, flung her out at a distance, then jerked her back in close. On slow songs, he moved at about three times the pace of the music.

It was mercilessly hot in the study where this dancing took place, so the couples strolled outside in the darkness of Chapacola nights. They smoked cigarettes and held hands. A few couples kissed and touched. Lenny's shirt stuck to him, soaked from exertion. Anna, whose parents were not smokers, was astonished by the streams of smoke from Lenny's nostrils, the great clouds erupting from his mouth.

Lenny's parents retrieved the youngsters at the appointed hour. They drove to Anna's home where a bright, outside porch light was left on. Lenny opened the car door for Anna. The couple walked to the front door where Anna kissed Lenny to the gut-busting amusement of Len and Bernice as virgin-tight lips met virgin-tight lips.