Now Berry-berry had revealed to him many secret matters. But still, almost as if he, Clinton, were thirteen again, he had to reach over with his fingertips and touch his brother’s nose—to make sure he was really there.

He wondered, if the choice were put to him, whether he would go traveling with Berry-berry or stay around Cleveland to be where Echo was. His last thoughts before falling asleep were of this sudden confusion of riches in his life.

But when Berry-berry awakened him at dawn, Clinton’s mouth was bitter from cigarettes and brandy, and his thoughts were black.

The morning itself was decent enough: the sky was blue, birds were singing, the country air had in it the scent of apples and earth. Berry-berry had bathed and shaved himself. He had put on fresh khaki trousers and a clean white shirt, open at the throat, the sleeves rolled up; and out of this linen whiteness, the flesh of his arms and hands, of his neck and face, retained that faint patina of green-blue that Clinton had seen there yesterday, the puzzling color of some remote, unheard-of race, sad and beautiful, and so subtle that only the eye of love, or hatred, could ever perceive its presence.

But the fine morning, and Berry-berry himself, had no power to bring him pleasure. Because some dream that he could not even remember lingered heavily in him. He felt that while he slept, and as the earth had completed another turn, some mysterious event of the night had blighted his good fortune. His whole body ached with the disquiet these thoughts brought with them and, at length, he determined to stop their progress, if he could, by an act of will.

Berry-berry said: “Come on, wake up, Clint. I got to drive you home, for godsake.” He led the way downstairs to the bathroom, where Clinton splashed cold water over his face and rinsed his mouth. Then they went out the kitchen door, and into the rich morning of the orchard. They gathered up many of the good apples that had fallen from the trees and filled a bushel basket with them.

“You might as well take these with you,” Berry-berry said. They placed the basket in the back of the truck.

Berry-berry drove fast, but not with the reckless speed of the night before. He frowned slightly, looked straight ahead; and kept both hands on the wheel. He did not speak.

Clinton also stared straight ahead, seeing nothing. He lighted a cigarette but it tasted as if someone had stuffed it with poison; so he stepped on it with his heel and threw it out the window onto the highway. He could feel, without even looking at it, the nearness of Cleveland. In a way it seemed that they were standing still and Cleveland was coming at them at sixty miles an hour.