“Cop-out? Please Dave, this isn’t ‘The Trial of Billy Jack.’ Listen, I was born a hundred years after my time. I’m sorry, but I hate plastic. I hate anything to do with modernization. Are you thrilled about the prospect of nuclear war? Well, it’s gonna happen. Unless you’re lucky enough to be killed in a car crash or something, someday you’re gonna find hydrogen and neutron bombs flying all around you. I ain’t happy about that. And I’m not too tickled over the prospect of cobalt salt bombs, either.”

“What are they?”

“I think that’s what they’re called. A friend of mine named Mousy Town told me about them. It’s a bomb—”

“Mao-tse-Tung?”

“No, Mousy—as in rodent—Town—as in city. He told me that cobalt salt bombs are these bombs that could actually destroy the universe. I don’t think they’ve made any yet, but the way they figure on paper is they’d cause a never-ending chain reaction of explosions. It’d blow the shit out of everything.”

Dave’s eyes widened, impressed; he kept nodding as if I was saying something he expected to hear. Then he said, “Be up front with me, Dunph. Do you hate your father?”

“No, I don’t hate my father,” I said, “and you’re starting to sound like Billy Jack again. Be up front with me.”

“Don’t you feel guilty about not working harder at Cornwall after all he did to get you in here?”

I thought about Mort’s broken arm and almost laughed.

“What are you complaining about?” I said. “I’m getting all As in your class.”

“You can’t tell me that you’ve tried in any of your others.”

“Maybe not, but I don’t care about the others.” I was getting a little cocked and felt argumentative. “You really want to know what I feel guilty about, Dave? I feel guilty about my little brother being paralyzed. I feel guilty because he’ll always be my little brother. I feel guilty because I get chills up my spine and a sick, shrinking feeling in my grapes every time I see him with no clothes on. I’ve tried to get over it, but I still can’t look at his flabby legs or his bloated, old man’s belly. And maybe I’m fucked-up for even thinking about it, but I feel sick to my stomach that he can’t get a hard-on.”

Dave lit up a smoke and again offered me one. I declined.

“What happened to your brother?”

I reached down and took a butt without thinking. I didn’t intend to be so fickle.

“Twentieth century casualty,” I said. “Fell from a power line when he was ten.”

“Broke his neck?”

“Well he ain’t Gumby.”

Dave flipped his lower lip inside out.