In many ways, Henry Dean’s great love affair—which ended when Sylvia Goldover stole ninety bucks out of his wallet, left a note saying I’m sorry, Henry in its place, and took off for points unknown with her old boyfriend—was a relief to Eddie. He’d sit on the sofa in the living room, put on the tapes of John Gielgud reading Tolkien’s Rings trilogy, skin-pop along the inside of his right arm, and nod off to the Forests of Mirkwood or the Mines of Moria along with Frodo and Sam.

He’d loved the hobbits, thought he could have cheerfully spent the rest of his life in Hobbiton, where the worst drug going was tobacco and big brothers did not spend entire days ragging on little brothers, and John Cullum’s little cottage in the woods returned him to those days and that dark-toned story with surprising force. Because the cottage had a hobbit-hole feel about it. The furniture in the living room was small but perfect: a sofa and two overstuffed chairs with those white doilies on the arms and where the back of your head would rest. The gold-framed black-and-white photograph on one wall had to be Cullum’s folks, and the one opposite it had to be his grandparents. There was a framed Certificate of Thanks from the East Stoneham Volunteer Fire Department. There was a parakeet in a cage, twittering amiably, and a cat on the hearth. She raised her head when they came in, gazed greenly at the strangers for a moment, then appeared to go back to sleep. There was a standing ashtray beside what had to be Cullum’s easy chair, and in it were two pipes, one a corncob and the other a briar. There was an old-fashioned Emerson record-player/radio (the radio of the type featuring a multi-band dial and a large knurled tuning knob) but no television. The room smelled pleasantly of tobacco and potpourri. As fabulously neat as it was, a single glance was enough to tell you that the man who lived here wasn’t married. John Cullum’s parlor was a modest ode to the joys of bachelorhood.

“How’s your leg?” John asked. “’Pears to have stopped bleeding, at least, but you got a pretty good hitch in your gitalong.”

Eddie laughed. “It hurts like a son of a bitch, but I can walk on it, so I guess that makes me lucky.”

“Bathroom’s in there, if you want to wash up,” Cullum said, and pointed.

“Think I better,” Eddie said.

The washing-up was painful but also a relief. The wound in his leg was deep, but seemed to have totally missed the bone. The one in his arm was even less of a problem; the bullet had gone right through, praise God, and there was hydrogen peroxide in Cullum’s medicine cabinet. Eddie poured it into the hole, teeth bared at the pain, and then went ahead and used the stuff on both his leg and the laceration in his scalp before he could lose his courage. He tried to remember if Frodo and Sam had had to face anything even close to the horrors of hydrogen peroxide, and couldn’t come up with anything. Well, of course they’d had elves to heal them, hadn’t they?