“Sure,” Eddie said.

“No one saw anyone leaving the building, so it went down as an accident. My mother said she thought it had been, but I think she was lying. She didn’t even bother trying to tell me what my father thought. They were both still smarting over how the cab-driver had taken one look at us and driven off. It was that more than anything else that made them believe someone had been up there, just looking out, and saw us coming, and decided to drop a brick on the niggers.

“Will your lobster-creatures come out soon?”

“No,” Eddie said. “Not until dusk. So one of your ideas is that all of this is a coma-dream like the ones you had when you got bopped by the brick. Only this time you think it was a billy-club or something.”

“Yes.”

“What’s the other one?”

Odetta’s face and voice were calm enough, but her head was filled with an ugly skein of images which all added up to Oxford Town, Oxford Town. How did the song go? Two men killed by the light of the moon,/ Somebody better investigate soon. Not quite right, but it was close. Close.

“I may have gone insane,” she said.

7

The first words which came into Eddie’s mind were If you think you’ve gone insane, Odetta, you’re nuts.

Brief consideration, however, made this seem an unprofitable line of argument to take.

Instead he remained silent for a time, sitting by her wheelchair, his knees drawn up, his hands holding his wrists.

“Were you really a heroin addict?”

“Am,” he said. “It’s like being an alcoholic, or ’basing. It’s not a thing you ever get over. I used to hear that and go ‘Yeah, yeah, right, right,’ in my head, you know, but now I understand. I still want it, and I guess part of me will always want it, but the physical part has passed.”

“What’s ’basing?” she asked.

“Something that hasn’t been invented yet in your when. It’s something you do with cocaine, only it’s like turning TNT into an A-bomb.”

“You did it?”

“Christ, no. Heroin was my thing. I told you.”

“You don’t seem like an addict,” she said.

Eddie actually was fairly spiffy . . . if, that was, one ignored the gamy smell arising from his body and clothes (he could rinse himself and did, could rinse his clothes and did, but lacking soap, he could not really wash either). His hair had been short when Roland stepped into his life (the better to sail through customs, my dear, and what a great big joke that had turned out to be), and was still a respectable length. He shaved every morning, using the keen edge of Roland’s knife, gingerly at first, but with increasing confidence. He’d been too young for shaving to be part of his life when Henry left for ’Nam, and it hadn’t been any big deal to Henry back then, either; he never grew a beard, but sometimes went three or four days before Mom nagged him into “mowing the stubble.” When he came back, however, Henry was a maniac on the subject (as he was on a few others—foot-powder after showering; teeth to be brushed three or four times a day and followed by a chaser of mouthwash; clothes always hung up) and he turned Eddie into a fanatic as well. The stubble was mowed every morning and every evening. Now this habit was deep in his grain, like the others Henry had taught him. Including, of course, the one you took care of with a needle.