CHAPTER 1

He had delivered seventeen dollars’ worth of groceries to Mrs. Wertham from the supermarket and Mrs. Wertham had invited him to have a cup of coffee. Mr. Wertham worked in Mr. Kraler’s bottling plant and that, Wesley thought, bridged the social and sexual gap in Mrs. Wertham’s mind between a comfortably well-off housewife and a sixteen-year-old delivery boy. He had accepted the coffee. It was the last call of the day and he never was served coffee at the Kralers’.

After the coffee, Mrs. Wertham, coyly, with a certain amount of giggling, told him he was a very handsome young man and invited him into her bed. Coffee was not the only thing he wasn’t being served at the Kralers’ and Mrs. Wertham was a generously built, dyed-blond lady. He accepted that invitation, too.

The coffee had been good, but the sex better. He had to perform quickly, because the store bike, with the delivery box between the two front wheels, was parked outside, and it was a neighborhood with a lot of kids who could be counted upon to steal anything they could lay their hands on, even a bike with U.M. Supermarket painted in big letters on the box.

That had been just a month ago. He had made ten deliveries to Mrs. Wertham since then. The orders for groceries in the Wertham household depended upon the fluctuations in Mrs. Wertham’s libido.

This time, as he was getting dressed, Mrs. Wertham put on a housecoat and sat smiling at him as though she had just had a big, creamy dessert. “You sure are a strong-built young man,” she said admiringly. “You could lift up my husband with one hand.”

“Thanks, ma’am,” Wesley said, getting into his sweater. He had no desire to lift Mr. Wertham with one hand.

“I don’t usually do things like this,” Mrs. Wertham said, perhaps forgetting that Wesley knew how to count, “but …” She sighed. “It makes a nice break in the day, doesn’t it?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Wesley said.

“It would be a sweet gesture on your part,” Mrs. Wertham said, “if the next time you have to make a delivery here, you just kind of slipped a little present into the package. Half a ham, something like that. I’m always home between three and five.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Wesley said ambiguously. That was the last time Mrs. Wertham was going to get him into her bed. “I have to go now. My bike’s outside.…”

“I understand,” Mrs. Wertham said. “You’ll remember about the ham, won’t you?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Wesley said.

The bike was still downstairs. He swung on it and pedaled, disgusted with himself, toward the post office. Half a ham. She thought he came at bargain prices. It was degrading. He felt he had reached a turning point in his life. From now on he wasn’t going to accept anything just because it was offered. America was full of wonderful girls. The nice, shy one in the Time office in New York, for example, old as she was. He wasn’t going to settle for trash anymore. Outside of Indianapolis there must be a girl somewhere whom he could talk to, admire, laugh with, explain about his father and himself, a girl he could love and feel proud of, a girl who wouldn’t make him feel like a pig after he left her bed. Meanwhile, he decided, he could just wait.

At the post office there were two letters for him at General Delivery, one from Bunny, the other from Uncle Rudolph. Since he had used Uncle Rudolph’s idea and picked up his mail at General Delivery, he had received letters from Bunny and Kate regularly. They made life in Indianapolis almost bearable. He stuffed the letters in his pocket, unread, because Mr. Citron, the manager of the U.M., always looked at him sharply if Wesley took even five minutes more than Mr. Citron thought was absolutely necessary, and Mrs. Wertham had already put him slightly behind schedule. Mr. Citron, Wesley thought, smiling innocently at the manager when he got back to the store, must have a time clock in his head. Try always to be your own boss, his father had said, it’s the only way of beating the bastards.

In the stockroom behind the market he took the letters out of his pocket. He opened Bunny’s letter first. His strong, clear handwriting looked as though it were written by a man who weighed over two hundred pounds.

Dear Wesley,

The news is that the Clothilde’s been sold for a hundred and ten thousand dollars. More dough for you and Kate and Kate’s kid. Congratulations. Now I can finally tell you that the real owner wasn’t Johnny Heath, as it says in the ship’s papers, but your Uncle Rudolph. He had his reasons for hiding it, I suppose. I was beginning to think that we’d never sell it. I tried to talk your uncle into letting me change the name, but he wouldn’t hear of it. He’s got principles. Maybe too many principles. The new owners are German, very nice people; they knew about what happened, but it didn’t seem to bother them. I guess Germans aren’t superstitious. They fell in love with the Clothilde at first sight, the lady told me. They wanted me to stay on as captain, but I decided against it. There’re a lot of reasons and I don’t think I have to tell you what they are.

I got to know an American couple with two boys aged around 11 and 9 hanging around St. Tropez who have a 43-foot Chris-Craft and they asked me to work it. I’m the only one in crew, but the kids can help clean up and the wife says she don’t mind doing the cooking. The father says he can read a chart and handle the wheel. We’ll see. So I’m still on the good old Mediterranean. It should be ok. It’s nice having two kids on board.

Heard from Kate. She’s got a job as barmaid in a pub not far from where she lives, so she gets to see a lot of her kid. I guess you know she named him Thomas Jordache.

Sorry you fell into a pile of shit in Indianapolis. According to your uncle when you’re eighteen you can split. It’s not so far off and time goes fast, so sweat it out and don’t do anything crazy.

The name of my new ship is the Dolores—that’s the lady’s first name and her home port is St. Tropez, so you can keep writing me here care of the Captain of the Port.

Well, that’s the news, friend. If you find yourself along the coast, drop in and see me.

Au revoir,

Bunny

Wesley folded the letter carefully and put it back in the envelope. He’d written Bunny twice asking him if he’d heard anything about Danovic, but Bunny never mentioned him. Time goes fast, Bunny had written. Maybe on the Mediterranean. Not in Indianapolis. There were few things he liked in Indianapolis. One was the big old market building, with its high ceiling and stalls heaped with fruit and vegetables and the smell of baked bread over everything. He went there as often as he could, because it reminded him of the market near the port in Antibes.

When he opened his uncle’s letter two twenty-dollar bills fell out. He picked them up and put them in his pocket. He hadn’t asked for money—ever—but he was grateful when it came. His uncle had a habit of coming through at odd times for everybody. It was nice, if you could afford it. And Uncle Rudolph obviously could. Don’t rap it. The letter began,

Dear Wesley,

Note the address on top of the page. I finally moved out of New York. Since the robbery, the city has lost much of its charm for me and I began to worry, exaggeratedly, I’m sure, for Enid’s safety. I’ve rented this house here in Bridgehampton out on Long Island for a year for a trial run. It’s a quiet, charming community, except in the summer months, when it’s enlivened by artistic and literary folk, and my house is near the beach and just about fifteen minutes’ drive from my ex-wife’s house. Enid stays with her during the school week and visits me on the weekends and with that arrangement no longer needs a nurse to look after her. She is happy in the country and even if it were only for her sake the move would be a good one.

I’ve fully recovered from the two operations on my face, and although I snort like an old war-horse when I jog along the beach, due to certain rearrangements made on my nasal passages after my accident, I feel fine. The doctors wanted to operate on my nose once more for cosmetic reasons, but I said enough is enough. Gretchen says I look more like your father now, with my flattened nose.

Gretchen, incidentally, is off on a new career. She finishes with the movie she is cutting with Mr. Kinsella this next week and is launching out as a director, having bought a screenplay that she likes and that I’ve read and liked very much myself. In fact, not knowing just what to do with my money, I am investing in it and counseling Gretchen as tactfully as possible on the business end of the venture. Be careful the next time you see her. She thinks you would have a great success in one of the roles in the movie. We have had almost everything in the family by now, but never a movie star and I’m not sure how that would reflect on the family name.

I’m afraid that in the to-do after I got beaten up I forgot to keep my promise about sending you the names of some of the people you wanted to know about who might give you information about your father. There’s Johnny Heath, of course, who chartered the Clothilde with his wife. I don’t remember if you were already on board at that time or not. Then there’re Mr. and Mrs. Goodhart, who also chartered the ship in different seasons. I’m writing the addresses on the enclosed sheet of paper. If you want to go as far back as when your father was the age that you are now, there was a boy—now a man, of course—called Claude Tinker, in Port Philip, who was a partner of your father in some of his escapades. The Tinker family, I have heard, is still in Port Philip. Then there’s a man named Theodore Boylan, who must be quite old by now, but who had intimate ties with our family.

I only saw your father fight professionally once—against a colored boy named Virgil Walters, and perhaps he would have something to remember. Your father had a manager called Schultz and I found him once through Ring Magazine when I wanted to get in touch with your father.

If other names occur to me I’ll send them along to you. I’m sorry you couldn’t come to visit me this summer and hope you can manage it another time.

I’m enclosing a little gift to start the new school year with. If by any chance you need more, don’t hesitate to let me know.

Fondly,

Rudolph

Wesley folded the letter and put it back into the envelope, as he had with Bunny’s letter. He writes with an anchor up his ass, Wesley thought. He isn’t like that, there’s just a wall between what he is and what he sounds like. Wesley wished he could like Uncle Rudolph more than he did.

He gave the two letters to Jimmy when Jimmy came in to help sweep up. Jimmy was the other delivery boy. He was a black, the same age as Wesley. Jimmy kept the photograph of his father in boxing trunks that the lady from Time had given him and whatever letters Wesley got, because Wesley’s mother went through everything in his room at least twice a week looking for signs of sin and whatever else she could find. Letters from his uncle and Kate and Bunny would be incriminating evidence of a giant conspiracy by everybody to rob her of her son’s love, an emotion she spoke about often. Her occasional outbursts of affection were hard to bear. She insisted upon kissing him and hugging him and calling him her sweet baby boy and telling him that if he only got a haircut he would be a beautiful young man and if he would accept the joys of religion he would make his mother blissfully happy and there wasn’t anything she and Mr. Kraler wouldn’t do for him. It wasn’t an act and Wesley knew his mother did love him and want him to be happy—but in her way, not his. Her demonstrativeness left him uneasy and embarrassed. He thought of Kate with longing.

He never spoke about his mother or Mr. Kraler to Jimmy, although Jimmy was the only friend Wesley had in town. He had avoided all other overtures, except that of Mrs. Wertham, and that didn’t really count. He didn’t want to feel sorry at leaving anything behind when he departed from Indianapolis.

He didn’t feel like going home for dinner, first of all because he knew the meal would be lousy and second because the house, which had been bad enough before, had been as gloomy as the grave since Mr. Kraler had gotten the telegram saying his son Max had been killed in Vietnam. They were expecting the body home for burial any day now and the time of waiting for it had been like one long funeral.

He invited Jimmy to have dinner with him. “I can splurge tonight,” he told Jimmy. “My rich uncle came through again.”

They ate in a little restaurant near the supermarket where you could get a steak dinner for one fifty and where the owner didn’t ask for proof you were of age when you ordered a beer.

Jimmy wanted to be a rock musician and sometimes he took Wesley over to his house and played his clarinet for him with one of his sisters who played the piano, while his other sister brought in the beers. Jimmy’s sisters treated Jimmy as though he were a precious object, and anybody Jimmy liked they couldn’t do enough for. There was no question of anybody’s robbing them of Jimmy’s love or theirs for him. Jimmy’s crowded warm house, filled with the presence of the two pretty, laughing girls, was another place in Indianapolis that Wesley liked. Indianapolis, with its factories and pale tides of workmen morning and night and its flat expanses of identical houses and its littered streets, made Antibes seem like a suburb of a city in heaven.

Wesley didn’t tell his mother about Jimmy. She was polite with blacks, but she believed in their keeping their distance, she said. It had something to do with being a Mormon.

After dinner, he remembered to tell Jimmy that from now on he’d appreciate it if Jimmy would make the deliveries to Mrs. Wertham’s house. He didn’t say why and Jimmy didn’t ask him. That was another good thing about Jimmy—he didn’t ask foolish questions.

He walked home slowly. There was an unspoken rule that if he got home by nine o’clock there wouldn’t be any hysterical scenes about his tomcatting around town, disgracing his family, like his father. The usual routine was bad enough, but the scenes, especially late at night, tore at his nerves and made it almost impossible for him to get to sleep after them. He had thought again and again of just taking off, but he wanted to give his mother every chance possible. There had to be something there. Once, his father had loved her.

When he got home, Mr. Kraler was sobbing in the living room and holding his son’s framed photograph. The picture had been taken with Max Kraler in a private’s uniform. He was a thin-faced, sad-eyed boy, who looked as though he knew he was going to be killed before he was twenty-one. Wesley’s mother took him into the hallway and whispered that Mr. Kraler had received notice that Max’s body was going to arrive in two days and had spent the afternoon making funeral arrangements. “Be nice to him, please,” she said. “He loved his boy. He wants you to get a haircut tomorrow and go with me to buy a new dark suit for the funeral.”

“My hair’s okay, Ma,” Wesley said. “I’m not going to cut it.”

“At a time like this,” his mother said, still whispering. “You might just this once—to show respect for the dead.”

“I can show as much respect for the dead with my hair the way it is.”

“You won’t even do a little thing like this to please your mother?” She began to cry, too.

“I like the way my hair is,” Wesley said. “Nobody but you and him …” he gestured toward the living room, “ever bothers me about it.”

“You’re a stubborn, hard boy,” she said, letting the tears course down her cheeks. “You never give an inch, do you?”

“I do when it makes sense,” he said.

“Mr. Kraler won’t let me buy you a new suit with that hair.”

“So I’ll go to the funeral in my old suit,” Wesley said. “Max won’t care.”

“That’s a sick joke,” she wept.

“I didn’t mean it as a joke.”

“That old suit and that wild-Indian hair will make us all ashamed in church.”

“Okay. I won’t go to church. And I won’t go to the cemetery. I never even met Max. What difference does it make?”

“Mother,” Mr. Kraler called from the living room, “can you come in here for a minute?”

“Coming, dear,” Teresa called. She glared harshly at Wesley, then slapped him, hard.

Wesley didn’t react, but merely stood there in the hallway. His mother went into the living room and he went upstairs to his room.

They left it at that. When Max Kraler was buried, Wesley was delivering groceries.

Corporal Healey, who had also served in Vietnam but had not known Mr. Kraler’s son, accompanied the body of the boy to Indianapolis. Mr. Kraler, who was a veteran of the Korean War, invited the corporal as a comrade in arms to stay in the house instead of going to a hotel. The night after the funeral Wesley had to share his bed with Healey, because Mr. Kraler’s married daughter, Doris, who lived in Chicago, was using the guest room across the hall. Doris was a small, mousy young woman who looked, Wesley thought, like Mr. Kraler.

Healey was a short, likable man, about twenty-three, who had a Purple Heart with two clusters on his blouse. Mr. Kraler, who had been a clerk in the quartermaster’s in Tokyo during the Korean War, had talked Healey’s ear off all day about his experiences as a soldier, and Healey had been polite, but had signaled to Wesley that he would like to break away. In a pause in Mr. Kraler’s conversation Healey had stood up and said he’d like to take a little walk and asked if they’d mind letting Wesley go with him so he wouldn’t get lost. Mr. Kraler, one soldier to another, said, “Of course, Corporal,” and Teresa had nodded. She hadn’t said a word to Wesley since the scene in the hallway and Wesley was grateful to Healey for getting him out of the house.

“Phew!” Healey said as they walked down the street, “that’s heavy duty in there. What’s that sister like, that Doris?”

“I don’t know,” Wesley said. “I met her for the first time yesterday.”

“She keeps giving me the eye,” Healey said. “Do you think she means it?”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“Sometimes those plain-looking little dolls are powerhouses when it comes to putting out,” Healey said. “You wouldn’t object if I gave it a try, would you?”

“Why should I?” Wesley asked. “Just be careful. My mother patrols the house like a watchdog.”

“We’ll see how the situation develops,” Healey said. He was from Virginia and his speech was soft and drawled. “That Mr. Kraler is something. The way he talks it was hand-to-hand combat every day in Tokyo. And he kept eating up all the gory details about how I was wounded. One thing for sure, I’m not joining the American Legion. I had my war and I don’t want to hear word one about that war or anybody else’s war. Where can we get a couple of beers?”

“It’s not far from here,” Wesley said. “I guessed you could use a drink.”

“You’d think that if a fella came along with the body,” Healey complained, “there’d be a little nip of something to cheer everybody up a bit. Not even a cup of coffee, for Christ’s sake.”

“They’re Mormons.”

“That must be some sorrowful religion,” Healey said. “I go to Mass every Sunday I can, but I don’t spit in the face of Creation. After all, God made whiskey, beer, wine—Christ, He even made coffee and tea. What do they think He made them for?”

“Ask Mr. Kraler.”

“Yeah,” Healey said mournfully.

They sat in a booth at the restaurant where Wesley had eaten dinner with Jimmy and drank beer. Wesley had explained to Healey that was the one place he was sure he wouldn’t be called on being under eighteen.

“You’re a big kid,” Healey said. “It must be a nice feeling, being big, nobody picks on you much. I tell you something, a guy my size sure gets his share of shit.”

“There’re a lot of ways of getting picked on,” Wesley said, “that got nothing to do with size.”

“Yeah,” Healey said. “I noticed Mr. Kraler and your mother aren’t all warm loving-kindness with you.”

Wesley shrugged. “I grin and bear it.”

“How old are you, anyway?”

“Sixteen.”

“You could pass for twenty-one.”

“If necessary,” Wesley said.

“What’re you going to do about the draft when you’re eighteen?”

“I haven’t decided yet,” Wesley said.

“You want some advice from someone who’s been there and almost didn’t make it back?” Healey said. “No matter what you do, don’t give ’em your name and let them give you a number. It ain’t fun, Wesley, it ain’t fun at all.”

“What can you do?”

“Anything. You just don’t want to let them get you in the army. You never saw such a lot of hopeless, disgusted men in your life, getting shot at, getting blown up on mines, coming down with every kind of disease and jungle rot you can think of, and nobody knowing what he’s doing there.… Believe it or not, Wesley, I enlisted. Enlisted, for God’s sake!”

“My father told me once,” Wesley said, “don’t ever volunteer for any wars.”

“Your father knew what he was talking about,” Healey said. “The army sure knows how to take the patriotism out of a man and it wasn’t enemy action that did it for me, either, boy. The final cherry on the whipped cream was when a pal of mine and myself got off the plane in San Francisco, all gussied up in parade dress, with our ribbons and all. There were two pretty chicks walking in front of us at the airport and we hurried a little and caught up with them and I said, ‘What’re you girls doing tonight?’ They stopped and looked at me as though I was a snake. They didn’t say nary a word, but the girl nearest me spit at me, right in the face, just as calm as could be. Imagine that. Spit! Then they turned around and walked away from us.” Healey shook his head. “We were home from the wars just ten minutes, with our Purple Hearts, and that was the welcome we got. Hail the conquering hero!” He laughed sourly. “You don’t want to put your ass on the line for people like that, Wesley. Just keep on the move, float around, so they can’t put their hands on you. The best place to get lost, the guys say, is Europe. Paris is the number one spot. Even if you have to register at the embassy, they don’t take the trouble to smoke you out.”

Talk around the campfire, Wesley thought. Old battles and loving thoughts of home. “I’ve been in Europe,” he said. “I can speak French pretty good.”

“I wouldn’t wait too long if I was you, Wesley. You just make sure you’re in gay Paree on your eighteenth birthday, pal,” Healey said and waved for two more beers. The coffin he had accompanied to Indianapolis had been draped with the flag at the church and at the graveside. Mr. Kraler had the flag and had said at dinner that he was going to hang it in Max’s room, which was Wesley’s now.

The house was dark when they reached it, so there was something to be thankful for. If his mother had been up and smelled the beer on them, there would have been tears and a scene.

They went upstairs quietly and were just starting to get undressed when there was a little knock on the door and the door opened and Doris came in. She was barefooted and was wearing a nightgown that you could see through. She smiled at them and put her finger to her lips as she carefully closed the door behind her. “I heard you boys come in and I thought it might be nice to have a little gabfest. To get better acquainted, so to speak,” she said. “Do either of you have a cigarette by any chance?” She talked in a mincing, self-conscious way, as though she had used baby talk until she was through with high school. She had droopy breasts, Wesley saw, though he tried not to keep looking, and a fat, low-slung ass. If I looked like that, he thought, I wouldn’t go around dressed like that, except in total darkness. But Healey was smiling widely and there was a new gleam in his eye. He had already taken his shirt off and was naked from the waist up. He didn’t have much of a build, either, Wesley noted.

“Here you are, dear lady,” Healey said, courtly Virginia gentleman, “I have a pack right here in the pocket.” He crossed the room to where his shirt was hanging over the back of a chair. He took out the cigarettes and matches, then started to take the shirt off the chair.

“You don’t need to get dressed for Doris,” Doris said. She wiggled her thin shoulders and smiled girlishly at Healey. “I’m a married woman. I know what men look like.”

She did mean it, Wesley thought, when she gave Healey the signal during the day.

Healey gallantly lit Doris’s cigarette. He offered one to Wesley. Wesley didn’t like cigarettes but he took one because he was in Mr. Kraler’s house.

“God,” Doris said as she puffed at her cigarette and blew smoke rings, “I’m back in the land of the living. Poor Max. He wasn’t much when he was alive, and he turned up dead for his one moment of glory. Boy, the bishop had a hard time making poor Max sound like something in his speech.” She shook her head commiseratingly, then looked hard at Wesley. “Are you as bad as they say you are?”

“Evil,” Wesley said.

“I bet,” Doris said. “With your looks. They say you’re a terror with married women.”

“What?” Wesley asked, surprised.

“Just for your information,” Doris said, “and because I think you’re a nice boy, you better tell a certain Mrs. W. that she’d better get to the mailbox every morning before her husband.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Wesley asked, although he could guess. Some neighborhood gossip must have noticed the U.M. bike parked in front of Mrs. Wertham’s house more than once and blabbed to his mother.

“While you were out you were the subject of discussion,” Doris said. “First of all that you were so different from Max and not different better, I can tell you that.”

“I can guess,” Wesley said.

“Your mother did not have many kind words for your father, either,” Doris said. “He must have been something, if half of what she said was true. And you’re following in his footsteps, she said, arrested and all in France for nearly killing a man in a drunken brawl.”

“Hey,” Healey said, “good for you, pal.”

“And,” Doris went on, “a virtual sex maniac like the old man. What with that disgusting Mrs. W., who’s old enough to be your mother, and God knows how many other houses you go to and deliver more than the groceries.” She giggled, her droopy breasts quivering under the transparent nightgown.

“Hey, I have a good idea,” Wesley said. He felt he was being choked in the small room, with the loops of cigarette smoke and the coquetting, almost-naked malicious girl and the leering soldier. “You two obviously have a lot to talk to each other about …”

“You can say that again, Wesley,” said Healey.

“I’m not sleepy,” Wesley said, “and I could use another breath of air. I’ll probably be an hour or so,” he said warningly. He didn’t want to come back to the room and find the two of them in his bed.

“I may just stay for another cigarette,” Doris said. “I’m not sleepy yet either.”

“That makes three of us,” said Healey.

Wesley started to stub out his cigarette, when the door was flung open. His mother was standing there, her eyes stony. Nobody said anything for a moment as Teresa stared first at him, then at Healey, then, for what seemed minutes, at Doris. Doris giggled.

“Wesley,” his mother said, “I’m not responsible for the conduct of Mr. Healey or Mr. Kraler’s daughter, who is a married woman. But I am responsible for your conduct.” She spoke in a harsh whisper. “I don’t want to wake up Mr. Kraler, so I’d appreciate it if whatever you do or say you do it quietly. And, Wesley, would you be good enough to come downstairs with me?”

When she was formal, as she was now, she was worse than when she was hysterical. He followed her downstairs through the darkened house to the living room. The flag from the coffin was folded on a table.

She turned on him, her face working. “Let me tell you something, Wesley,” she said in that harsh whisper, “I’ve just seen the worst thing in my whole life. That little whore. Who got her in there—you? Who was going to lay her first, you or the soldier?” In her passion her vocabulary lost is pious euphemisms. “To do that on the very night that a son of the family was laid to rest after giving his life for his country.… If I told Mr. Kraler what’s been going on in his house, he’d take a baseball bat to you.”

“I’m not going to explain anything, Ma,” Wesley said. “But you can tell Mr. Kraler that if he as much as tries to lift a finger to me, I’ll kill him.”

She fell back as though he had bit her. “I heard what you said. You said kill, didn’t you?”

“I sure did,” Wesley said.

“You’ve got the soul of a murderer. I should have let you rot in that French jail. That’s where you belong.”

“Get your facts straight,” Wesley said roughly. “You had nothing to do with getting me out of jail. My uncle did it.”

“Let your uncle take the consequences.” She leaned forward, her face contorted. “I’ve done my best and I’ve failed.” Suddenly she bent over and grabbed his penis through his trousers and pulled savagely at it. “I’d like to cut it off,” she said.

He seized her wrist and roughly pulled her arm away. “You’re crazy, Ma,” he said. “You know that?”

“From this moment on,” she said, “I want you to get out of this house. For good.”

“That’s a good idea,” he said. “It’s about time.”

“And I warn you,” she said, “my lawyer will do everything possible to make sure you don’t get a penny of your father’s dirty money. With your record it won’t be too hard to convince a judge that it doesn’t make any sense to put a fortune into the hands of a desperate murderer. Go, get out of here, go to your whores and hoodlums. Your father will be proud of you.”

“Stuff the money,” Wesley said.

“Is that your final word to your mother?” she said melodramatically.

“Yeah. My final word.” He left her in the middle of the living room, breathing raucously, as though she were on the verge of a heart attack. He went into his room without knocking. Doris was gone, but Healey was lying propped up on the bed, smoking, still bare from the waist up, but with his pants on.

“Holy shit,” Healey said, “that lady sure barged in at the wrong moment, didn’t she?”

“Yeah.” Wesley began throwing things into a small bag.

Healey watched him curiously. “Where you going, pal?”

“Out of here. Somewhere,” Wesley said. He looked into his wallet to make sure he had the list of names he had been adding to ever since he got out of jail. He never left his wallet anywhere that his mother could find it.

“In the middle of the night?” Healey said.

“This minute.”

“I guess I don’t blame you,” Healey said. “Breakfast is going to be a happy meal here.” He laughed. “The next time the army sends me out with a coffin I’m going to tell them they got to give me a complete rundown on the family. If you ever get to Alexandria, look me up.”

“Yeah,” Wesley said. He looked around him to see if he had forgotten anything important in the room. Nothing. “So long, Healey,” he said.

“So long, pal.” Healey flicked ashes on the floor. “Remember what I said about Paris.”

“I’ll remember.” Silently, his old windbreaker zipped up against the night’s cold, he went out of the room, down the dark stairs and out of the house.

He remembered, too, as he walked along the windy dark street, carrying the small bag, that his father had told him that it had been one of the best days in his life when he realized he didn’t hate his mother anymore. It had taken time, his father had said.

It would take time for the son, too, Wesley thought.

A day later he was in Chicago. He had gone into an all-night diner on the outskirts of Indianapolis when a truck driver came in who told the girl behind the counter that he was on the way to Chicago. Chicago, Wesley thought, was just as good a place to start whatever he was going to do as anyplace else and he asked the driver if he could come along. The driver said he’d be glad for the company and the trip had been comfortable and friendly and aside from having to listen to the driver talk about the troubles he was having with his seventeen-year-old daughter back in New Jersey, he had enjoyed it.

The driver had dropped him off near Wrigley Field and he’d looked at his list of addresses and seen William Abbott’s address. Might as well start somewhere, he’d thought, and had gone to the address. It was about noon, but Abbott was still in pajamas and a rumpled bathrobe, in a beat-up, one-room studio littered with bottles, newspapers and coffee containers and crumpled pieces of paper near the typewriter.

He had not been favorably impressed with William Abbott, who pretended to know a lot more about Thomas Jordache than he really knew, and Wesley left as soon as he could.

The next two days he tried to get a job at two or three supermarkets, but they weren’t hiring people at supermarkets that week in Chicago and people kept asking him for his union card. He was low in funds and he decided Chicago was not for him. He called his Uncle Rudolph in Bridgehampton, collect, to warn him he was coming there, because he didn’t know where else to go.

Rudolph sounded funny on the phone, uneasy, as though he were afraid somebody who shouldn’t be listening in was listening in.

“What’s the matter?” Wesley said. “If you don’t want me out there, I don’t have to come.”

“It’s not that,” Rudolph said, his voice troubled over the wire. “It’s just that your mother called two days ago to find out if you were with me. She has a warrant out for your arrest.”

“What?”

“For your arrest,” Rudolph repeated. “She thinks I’m hiding you someplace.”

“Arrest? What for?”

“She says you stole a hundred and fifty dollars from her household money, the money she kept in a pitcher over the stove in the kitchen, the night you left. She says she’s going to teach you a lesson. Did you take the money?”

“I wish I had,” Wesley said bitterly. That goddamn Healey, he thought. The army had taught him how to live off the land. Or even more likely, that cheese-faced Doris.

“I’ll straighten it out,” Rudolph said soothingly, “somehow. But for the time being I don’t think it would be wise to come here. Do you need money? Let me know where you are and I’ll send you a money order.”

“I’m okay,” Wesley said. “If I get to New York I’ll call you.” He hung up before Rudolph could say anything else.

That’s all I need, he thought, the jug in Indianapolis.

Then he decided he’d go to New York. Rudolph wasn’t the only person he knew in New York. He remembered the nice girl at Time saying that if he needed help to come to her. Nobody would think of looking for him at Time Magazine.

He was on the road the next morning.

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