It was ironic, though, that Mousy should be the one to fulfill the old man’s fantasy. Right in front of our house. The Big One. The accident, I figured from the fragments of hearsay I collected at the wake and S.R.O. funeral, was a “momentarily lost control and slammed into a telephone pole” type of bang-up. Adults speculated in their cars about drugs and booze. When the oinkers arrived at the scene, Mousy was already dead. They said he never felt a thing. He’d hit the pole so hard that the tire had flown off the car. Bunny Cote was with him, which surprised me more than anything. She was in shock (although hardly hurt at all) and had been unable to give any further details.

The night after Mousy was buried, DeCenz and I stood in front of the bruised wooden pole. Lighting the sprinkled windshield into worthless diamonds was one of those streetlights that you only find in cities or near Cumberland Farms stores, a brutally bright, almost fluorescent, white light with a blue halo around it. We smoked a bone and stared at the diamonds.

“Hey, Dunph, when someone says they slept like a baby, does that mean they slept good or bad?”

“Good.”

“That’s what I thought, but it don’t make no sense. I mean babies shit their pants and end up crying at four in the morning.”

I thought about this. “I guess they’re talking about how babies get rocked to sleep by their mothers and how they don’t really have a worry in the world.”

“I see what you mean.”

This seemed to remind DeCenz where we were.

“Fuck,” he said. “Fuck.”

For over an hour we threw rocks at the streetlight, trying to break its gruesome glare. It was useless; the cover must’ve been made of some kind of unbreakable plastic. I considered using the old man’s .45, but I didn’t want to touch it. Then the clouds that had hung low and pregnant throughout the day burst, and the two of us ran from the streetlight toward our fading shadows to the Dunphy front porch.

PART Four

Back at school I tried to forget. Which was impossible. I couldn’t read more than a paragraph before my mind would drift and I’d catch myself smiling about something Mousy had said. I’d remember that the good feeling was only in my mind and get depressed. I sighed a lot. Usually I’d bag the books and end up bullshitting the night away with the guys on my hall.