He told of the night that the steering rod on his car had dropped off when we were returning from a movie in Margaretville, and how he had forced me to call Ben Benton to come for us, and how we all crowded into the cab of Ben’s truck, the girls sitting on our laps, and how Ben had splashed the cab with aftershave lotion to kill the odor of the garbage.

It was a story that Amy remembered with delight. “My mother was waiting up because we were late,” she said. “She wanted to know why I smelled so bad. She thought it was from Bobo. I had to tell her that I bumped into a girl in the rest room as she was closing a bottle of cologne, and some of it spilled on me.”

“I don’t remember that at all,” I protested, but I was lying. I did remember it. I remembered holding Amy in Ben’s truck and Ben trying to be a clown about it. It was after that night that Ben began to offer me his truck to hide on some isolated road with Amy. “She loves my truck,” he had teased. “I could tell.”

Carter remembered the day that I left Pine Hill to return to Georgia. “We stopped traffic from both ways,” he said. “And Ben Benton put Bobo in his truck and started at the top of the mountain and roared through town, taking him to his brother’s house in Shandaken. Everybody was out on the sidewalks, yelling, ‘Go to hell, Rebel!’ and Bobo was waving out of the window, looking pitiful, as usual. The only thing missing was Amy.”

“I heard about that,” Amy said. “I’m sorry I wasn’t there.”

“And what about the night Eddie Grimes almost drowned, trying to save my life?” hooted Carter. “I know damn well you remember that, Bobo. You helped set it up.”

I laughed and nodded and waited for Carter to tell the story.

Carter combed his fingers casually through Libby’s hair. “Honey,” he said, “that was a masterpiece, a work of art.”

He told about Eddie Grimes from Queens in New York, a busboy who was lazy and irritating, and who invented outrageous stories about heroic acts that he had performed—children he had rescued from burning buildings, dogs he had pulled from the paths of speeding taxi cabs, fights he had had with armed street gangs because his mother had been insulted.

But Eddie’s bragging was mild compared to his childish tricks. He put shaving cream on Carter’s pillow, short-sheeted Joey Li’s bed, shaved Ex-Lax into the morning hot chocolate of Walter Asher, who was an old and gracious guest. He sewed the sleeves of my waiter’s jacket together, overspiked the fresh fruit cocktail with cognac, stuck chewing gum over the coin slot of Arch’s jukebox.