Now he hunched over while a flock of sparrows wheeled and flapped and screeched around his shaggy mane and landed trustingly at his feet. He leaned back in his chair, a grungy Saint Francis, and I approached, deferentially clearing my throat. I hawked two or three times before he favored me with a disgruntled glance.

“Mr. Chatterton…?”

He nodded abstractedly, his eye still on the sparrows. He reached into the pocket of his robe and came up with a handful of peanuts. Carefully, bending forward once more, he planted the peanuts between the toes of his mother-bare feet and, with superb self-satisfaction, watched his flock dig them out and hoard them away.

“Yes…?” he said finally. It was a moment before I realized he wasn’t talking to the birds.

“I’m Judd Breslau. I…”

“Who?” Again he reached into a pocket.

“I talked with you this morning about Thomas Chatterton…”

“Oh,” he grunted, perception dawning. He held out a hand, cupping a dozen peanuts. They were oily, with bits of grayish fluff sticking to them. Altogether they looked like rat shit.

“Peanuts?” he asked.

“No thanks.”

He popped them into his mouth. The birds screeched with deprivation.

“Beat it,” he snarled at them, throwing a bedroom slipper. “Kitchen’s closed.” He turned back to me. “Goddam gluttons,” he said. He got to his feet, chewing, wiping his palms on the buttocks of his bathrobe. “I got some of his papers,” he said. “I’ll get ’em from the attic.” He shuffled into a side door and I stood there, my heart pounding, thinking, Good Christ! Papers. What a break, what a windfall, there was something new and undiscovered under a scholar’s sun, socked away in that unpropitious old house. Maybe I hadn’t wasted my life after all.

A voice roused me from my delirium—that girl again.

“Balls!” it bellowed, mellifluously.

I was snared on that voice like a hooked catfish. At the back of the house was a bosky dell, another unrefreshing eyesore. A wooden table, black and pitted with age. A couple of benches ready to collapse if a field mouse danced across them. An abandoned refrigerator with stains like rusty tears running down the chipped enamel. A hibachi under a coat of grease held a few disintegrating lumps of charcoal, like thousand-year-old eggs in a sooty nest. Everything considered, a nice place for a picnic.