There’s more rain in the air. The soldiers are mustering by Hicks’s Garage. In the back lot is a greasy dump, a pit, full of ball-bearings, clutch plates, and pieces of transmission. In the parking lot below—shared with the green-trimmed candy store, where he waited for the first slice of very yellow schoolbus to appear each 3:15 around the corner, and knew which high-school kids were easy marks for pennies—are six or seven old Cord automobiles, in different stages of dustiness and breakdown. Souvenirs of young empire, they shine like hearses now in the premonition of rain. Work details are already putting up barricades, and a scavenging party has invaded the gray clapboards of Pizzini’s Store, standing big as a barn on the corner. Kids hanging around the loading platform, eating sunflower seeds out of burlap sacks, listen to the soldiers liberating sides of beef from Pizzini’s freezer. If Slothrop wants to get home from here, he has to slide into a pathway next to the two-story brick wall of Hicks’s Garage, a green path whose entrance is concealed behind the trash-fire of the store, and the frame shed where Pizzini keeps his delivery truck. You cut through two lots which aren’t platted exactly back to back, so that actually you’re skirting one fence and using a driveway. They are both amber and black old ladies’ houses, full of cats alive or stuffed, stained lampshades, antimacassars and doilies on all the chairs and tables, and a terminal gloom. You have to cross a street then, go down Mrs. Snodd’s driveway beside the hollyhocks, through a wire gate and Santora’s back yard, over the rail fence where the hedge stops, across your own street, and home….

But there is the occupation. They may already have interdicted the kids’ short cuts along with the grown-up routes. It may be too late to get home.

BACK IN DER PLATZ

Gustav and André, back from Cuxhaven, have unscrewed the reed-holder and reed from André’s kazoo and replaced them with tinfoil—punched holes in the tinfoil, and are now smoking hashish out of the kazoo, finger-valving the small end pa-pa-pah to carburete the smoke—turns out sly Säure has had ex-Peenemünde engineers, propulsion-group people, working on a long-term study of optimum hashpipe design, and guess what—in terms of flow rate, heat-transfer, control of air-to-smoke ratio, the perfect shape turns out to be that of the classical kazoo!