He sat back against the kitchen door, holding the tangle to his cheek. For a moment, his thoughts were filled with a velvet nothingness.

Then it came. His head thumped against the door and he wept quietly, not wanting his father to hear, finally covering up by switching the vacuum on again. With his mother's hair removed, it ran smoothly and loudly.

Warren, Ohio, lay acquiescent under an old blanket of snow, some of it still clean, some pushed up in dirty brown and black-spotted ridges by the roadways. Skeletal trees stood out against the yellowing dusk, and gusts of sharp cold wind leaped around him like invisible dogs, glad to see you, happy to have you here. Reuben clutched the two library books under his arm, one on how to pass the civil service exam for the Postal Service, another containing the short stories of Paul Bowles. Reuben, who had fancied himself a Muslim in his early teens—to his mother's horror—had steeped himself in the lore of Africa and the Middle East. Bowles intrigued him even more than Doughty or T. E. Lawrence.

Reuben had quit high school the year before to work. His formal education had been fitful, but his intelligence, when focused, was a devouring and almost frightening thing. When Reuben Bordes latched on to a question or a book or a subject that interested him, his short, broad face tightened with an intent, fixed expression and his eyes enlarged until it seemed they might fall out of his head.

He was tall and strong and feared nobody. His route through the darkening streets, between the dirty brick buildings and along narrow service alleys behind businesses, was not chosen for its shortness or logic. Reuben needed to delay. Getting back to his father was necessary, but he did not relish the intensity of pain he felt at home.

Halfway there, pacing through slush puddles behind a liquor store, he saw a silvery glint in the shadows beside a dumpster. He walked on, turning his head, thinking it was nothing more than a broken bottle. But the glint persisted. He returned to the dumpster and peered into the shadows. A glittering toylike thing, perhaps a kid's broken robot, rested on a dark brown and nondescript lump. He peered closer.

The toy sat on a dead mouse or a small rat. Very slowly, the toy lifted one of six jointed shiny legs, and then brought it down again. The leg pierced the rodent's skin.

Reuben stood up and backed away. Night was almost on him.

The way the spider or whatever it was had raised its leg—with a clockwork precision, an oily smoothness—scared him. It was not a toy. It was not an insect. It was something spider-shaped and made of metal and it had caught and killed a mouse.